The OpsVeda Platform

To be competitive, or even stay relevant, many business enterprises across a range of industries are embarking on their digital transformation journeys. In doing so, they seek to improve revenue numbers, save costs or deliver better user experiences – or, perhaps some combination of these factors. Achieving these goals requires addressing core fundamentals of the business which are found in action every day within the processes that serve all the vital functions within it. How we handle these processes and how we manage the data that is their lifeblood makes all the difference.

Technology advancements combined with the need to keep up with an increasingly digital world have created massive amounts of data. Data proliferation can quickly overwhelm business owners if it is not controlled and put to work. Disruptions in the business world and beyond, such as a global pandemic add a wild range of uncertainty.

How do businesses become more resilient to these external uncontrollable disruptions? How do they take advantage of unprecedented quantity of data within a business and from beyond? How keenly do they need to watch every transaction and every event that their business is a part of?

One approach is to monitor your business using continuous intelligence. Gartner describes continuous intelligence as “a kind of real-time analytics being applied to operational and executional decisions.” It is about being always on, and ensuring that decision making can be as dynamic as possible.

This means we need to go beyond the traditional boundaries of business intelligence (BI). For decades now, BI has been the primary strategy for decision making and action. However, BI has its limitations and companies using BI alone will not be able to retain their competitive edge. BI defines more of a macro view on a business’ data sets, and is often a “snap-shot” of a point in time. Often report driven, this intelligence is based on occurrences that have happened in the past to better assist decision making aspects for the future. Operational intelligence (OI), on the other hand can provide detailed and dynamic decision-making with a more in-depth view of the operations that make up any process in an organization. Almost by definition, it embraces the notion of “continuous intelligence.” Monitoring events relevant to your business, it ought to provide ongoing business insight that leads to actionable recommendations and optimized decisions. OI is most meaningful if it is also real-time such that the most relevant and up to date solutions and optimized strategies may be applied.

Challenges

Business owners and their enterprises are faced with a myriad of challenges every day. A CEO may want to solve massive margin leakage on a large order, customer service may want to apply customer specific rules to a production order, a planner notices their company’s supply does not match customer demand, a buyer is faced with delayed communication with his suppliers, inventory management is losing track of expiring products and logistics managers disagree on how to decide when to ship via air crate and when to ship via sea container. These are all difficulties that many have sought to address with traditional ERP systems and BI but with limited success. Combine all this with the lack of accurate or current data and you can see why many businesses that have previously seen success are now struggling in this new competitive environment where business models may have to change significantly in a very short period of time or where external disruptions might upend their supply chains and other key aspects of doing business.

According to McKinsey & Company, an average end user (of data) spends 40% time searching, 40% coordinating and only 20% of available time in value added output. The use of software such as the OpsVeda platform is no longer a nice-to-have. In fact, many are moving away from the static and limited means of the past. Gartner, Inc. reports that by 2022, more than half of major new business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence that uses real-time or near-real-time context data to improve decisions.

Solution

The OpsVeda platform is an AI and automation enabled real-time process focused platform that allows wide ranging flexibility to the enterprise to optimize decisions pertaining to some of the most critical issues it might encounter. It helps sales, planners and customer service departments to address manufacturing and distribution exceptions in a highly proactive, efficient and scalable manner. The solution provides visibility across process steps, leading to reduced lead times, increased savings and improved customer satisfaction. A real-time view of backlogs, unconfirmed orders and the ability to draw on filtered and prioritized task lists provide quick relief.

The OpsVeda platform is a foundational aspect of a range of solutions from OpsVeda that when implemented, can solve an enterprise’s processes, procedures and data problems. The platform is designed to meet the needs of teams running operations in large enterprises. It monitors business events in real-time and alerts users to risks and opportunities in the context of client relationships and financial outcomes. Acting as the hub for information from diverse sources, OpsVeda provides an intuitive, easily customizable interface for consumption of its insights. Automating select optimized decisions follows naturally.

Process Mapping and Information Hub

OpsVeda uses an open data model built with Process Agnostic Data Store (PADS)* and Process Agnostic Measure Store (PAMS) technology to easily compile all data. By allowing the integration of multiple operations into process chains, OpsVeda makes it possible to monitor a transaction end-to-end without manually piecing together spreadsheets, or using multiple applications. *patent no: US 9,639,595

Real-Time Processing

The platforms data connectors transmit changes to transactions to the Information Hub immediately. The fast, highly-optimized, in-memory computation engine is capable of processing hundreds of millions of rows of data in seconds, ensuring that the user learns the business implication of a change immediately.

Machine Learning

OpsVeda ingests operational data and leverages machine learning to analyze and identify patterns. Its self-learning capabilities study prior models, historical influencers, aspects of fine-tuned analyses and updates the system’s Experience Knowledge Database (EKDB).* This allows experience from this analysis to be used to help in future analysis.Thus, over time, the system increasingly automates the detection of exceptions and the prediction of outcomes. Based on factors like the availability of stock, customer priority, and current fill rates for a customer, OpsVeda can make recommendations that assess the potential impact of a decision on client relationships, financial outcomes, and long-term growth.
*patent no: US 10,467,550

Storyboards

Using highly intuitive tools, business users can design storyboards in the OpsVeda platform that represent transactions, exceptions and their status. They provide broader insight into a business’s financial performance and long-term growth trajectory. Storyboards can be personalized for different types of users in your organization, such as sales, customer service, and manufacturing teams. Through the Exception Builder, users can set and alter parameters used to separate transactions that have exceptions from ones that do not. OpsVeda’s platform solution and its fine-grained permissions capability enables everyone to simultaneously take their cues from the same data set.

Collaboration

OpsVeda enables collaboration through in-app messaging and annotation features. Messages and annotations are linked to a distinct transaction or group of transactions, so everyone remains on the same page.

Data Connectivity and Sources

OpsVeda comes with built-in connectors for a number of business systems and technologies. If you have a source of data, chances are that OpsVeda already has a compatible connector.

Security & Scale

The security of enterprise data is of paramount importance. The one-way encryption of passwords, strong password policy enforcement, single sign-on with SAML/Kerberos, SSL encryption for data-in-transit, and three layers of encryption on DR storage, SAS 70 standards, are but a few of the measures OpsVeda’s platform takes to ensure security, confidentiality, and privacy. In terms of scalability, in-memory processing of all data ensures that users get analysis in real-time, regardless of the volume of data.

Your AI assistant

JUNI is an AI-Powered assistant that is a key feature of the OpsVeda platform. It is a domain-aware search query system, capable of Natural language understanding (NLU). It understands business functions and analyzes them, applying rules and data aware queries, to provide actionable intelligence. It is intuitive and possesses drill down, parking, and collaborative capabilities.

Benefits

Several fundamental benefits are realized by those running OpsVeda within their enterprise.

Reduction of working capital

A complete view of the demand, supply and inventory situation at each location enables efficient allocation of stocks resulting in better availability despite lower overall inventory levels.

Service level improvements

The platform acts as a control tower for your supply chain, keeping you abreast of developments at your locations, assets in transit and partner premises. The real-time visibility enables you to make adjustments on the fly.

Productivity improvements

Businesses will be able to move quickly using either an overview of the situation or by drilling all the way down to the transactions that needs their attention. They can even resolve exceptions in source systems without ever leaving the OpsVeda platform.

Better collaboration

The significantly improved visibility provides much needed clarity when your team collaborates with internal and external stakeholders.
All of this allows for work to be done exclusively in the OpsVeda platform and allows your employees to avoid bouncing from one transaction system to another just to gain insight on one particular topic. Optimized margins and total customer satisfaction become more easily attainable goals when the OpsVeda platform monitor gives you clear line of sight into the relevant aspects of the key operations that facilitate your enterprise’s processes. For example, if your focus is the realm of supply chain management, the platform enables a live integrated view of supply, demand, inventory and in-transit materials for optimal execution of sales.

OpsVeda customers have acknowledged that in their respective environments, the platform is central to effective order management and the fulfillment process, helping them improve perfect order rates while reducing cycle times. Since deploying the OpsVeda platform, some have even realized a reduction of nearly 50% in operating expense over a period of 36 months.

The OpsVeda platform is designed to work in a fashion that is completely non-disruptive with respect to existing transaction and BI systems. It is designed for the decision maker irrespective of their responsibility level. It is designed for providing continuous intelligence. It can, in real-time, discover anomalies, deviations and propose optimized decisions, several of which may be automated to enhance your operational ability by injecting an unprecedented degree of agility into your operations. It is the platform for our times.

Having OpsVeda’s solutions can be instrumental in improving the efficiency of a company’s supply chain. The ability to satisfy customer demands more effectively through using this platform can give way to lower operating costs and greater sales capacity for new customers.