Almost every Business Intelligence (BI) solutions provider likes to advertise that their product can be used in any industry, however different, as well as every department therein.

While most organizations tend to operate broadly on the same basis (supply versus demand, profit versus loss etc.), it’s refreshing to see a company that makes very clear where its area of specialization lies.

Halo, a leading provider of data integration and analytics software for supply chain planning, is happy to proclaim that its BI solutions are especially suited to organizations in need of superior supply chain management and monitoring.

Halo also supports an expansive range of business and organizational activities in general, however, with their broad range of available tools. These make Halo suitable for multiple functions, including operations, manufacturing, inventory, procurement, demand planning, finance, and sales & merchandising.

At the heart of Halo’s suite of products is the priority placed on the relationship between sales, inventory, operations, and finance, with particular regard to forecasting, supplier management, and Inventory optimization.

The company’s latest offering, Cloud Customer Profitably (CCP) – an entirely cloud-based solution – will especially appeal to organizations that want to better understand true margin for customers, including cost to serve.

If inventory optimization is important, then Halo’s SkuBrain solution is worth considering. With a back end containing thirty powerful algorithms that automatically selects the best-fit forecast for each inventory item, SkuBrain can intelligently choose apposite information tailored to the recipient’s requirements. The cloud solution connects to market-standard inventory, ERP and e-commerce platforms and even automates, on the fly, processes like the creation of replenishment plans.

As businesses diversify, so do their customer types, and therefore their supply chain management policies need to alter, and in fact, become multi-faceted. Viewing possible demand variations and playing with stock possibilities and trade-offs can be done by the powerful visualization of data Halo provides.

Supplier Management Dashboard

The prebuilt (and customizable) Sales & Operations Planning dashboards, for instance, present visual analytics, key performance indicators, and predictive analysis. The GUI is attractive and easy to use, but belies the power of the analysis and pure data-crunching ‘under-the-hood’.

Halo is available on-premises, hosted from the cloud, and is accessible from any browser. The company also offer free apps for Apple’s iOS and Android devices. This places the solution literally in the hands of end users, rather than, as has been the issue with BI in the past, a series of applications that ‘belonged’ to the IT department.

Data sources across the enterprise will vary significantly, but Halo’s data warehousing tool will centralize all data, creating what the company likes to refer to as a single source of the truth. Among the more common systems, Halo will easily interface with and import from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Sage, and Intuit QuickBooks – anything you don’t see here can be catered for as well.

Data collection is one thing, but data is worthless unless it’s clean and ready for analysis. The built-in data-cleansing tools, therefore, will ease the pressure on DBAs and lower staffing costs.

As one reviewer explains, “Another real benefit we experienced was the ability to import data from multiple sets of systems, […] validate the data, and deliver actionable prebuilt templates for our industry.” (Our emphasis.)

Learn more about Halo’s products and schedule a demo.