Development of supply chain performance measurement tool

• Main Author: Suwamal, Brahamanage Nipuna
• Other Authors: Rajesh Piplani
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::Operations management::Supply chain management; DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Supply chain
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/69438
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In todays fast paced and global business environment, a supply chain plays a major role in the productions of a company. Supply chain management is turning in to a challenging task day by day. A supply chain includes all the process from purchasing raw materials to delivering the final and finished goods to the customer. In this tough environment to manage a supply chain, monitoring the performance of each aspect of a supply chain has become immensely important. Key Performance Indicators or KPIs shortly plays an important and vital role in monitoring the performance and health of a supply chain. They also give important information to the management and support the decision making process. How ever, calculating KPI values manually and plotting charts manually is not ideal for companies. This therefore requires highly capable supply chain KPI dashboards to monitor and track the KPIs of a company. A KPI dashboard has to have good visualization functionality, be user friendly and easy to understand. It should also contain drill down features to pinpoint the jobs or orders that are causing problems in a supply chain. This report documents and presents the development of a standalone supply chain KPI dashboard using C# programming in Microsoft Visual Studio and MySQL database. The graphic based programming capabilities of MS Visual Studio enables easy designing of the dashboard. Queries available in MySQL enables easy categorizing, grouping and counting in order to plot charts and graphs. Many improvements are also made to the dashboard during the course of the project in order to suit customer needs. While this project aims to build an ideal supply chain KPI monitoring dashboard, there are many challenges faced such as the lack of charting libraries with good interactive features and the lack of a real company database to optimize the software. Therefore, it is further recommended that a web-based language such as ASP.net or JavaScript is used due to the availability of interactive charting libraries and the function of a cloud based dashboard for easy access. A few other recommendations would be to work closely with a company and use their database to have real time data and add more KPIs to select from, for the user. Furthermore, the author recommends to add the functionality to link the dashboard with online and offline sources for users to be able to analyse their KPI and compare them with industry standards.