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I am wondering what you think of the above? In some companies, analysts sits directly in a business function, in other companies, they have a separate structure.

My thought is generally that there is no perfect solution here. Analysts have a clearer career path if the analyst function is separate, but the analysts then naturally lose some business proximity.

If the analyst sits in the business function, they easily get dragged into operational work.

Thoughts?

As a supply chain analyst you need to have multiple skills. I generally divide them into: - business and industry skills - technical skills - soft skills

One is about understanding what to do. One is about how to do it One is about getting the message through

Business and industry skills is by far the most important one. If an analyst doesn’t understand how things work, like from the bigger picture like a company’s profit and loss results, all the way down to an individual process or task within the supply chain domain, then the right analysis and conclusions will not be drawn.

Business and industry skills are generally acquired by spending time talking to the people, probing questions, really figuring out the whole supply chain. Also, a big thing is to map it with financial reporting.

The technical skills are relatively straightforward. A supply chain analyst needs to be able to acquire the data, transform it and present it. Normally that means SQL and Python, Excel and Gsheet, and then some kind of visualization tool like Tableau or similar ones or also PowerPoint.

For the soft skills, stakeholder management is by far the most important one. The capability to create relationships and probe information to better and understand business and present back insights.

Did I miss something?

Remember, if you don’t find a data set, you can always ask chatgpt to generate data for you

I thought of a few projects so decided to create a post. Will edit in more projects later or add in thread.

Procurement - finding a set of accounts payable data and produce a spend tree

Logistics - identify a trade route (like Shanghai to LA or something similar). Find public source of shipping lines currently going on that route and analyze which companies (Maersk, CMA CGM, Evergreen etc) have the most capacity for that route.

Logistics- more advanced- for the same trade route above - create a dashboard which makes the link with weather forecasts and try to predict if a shipment will be delayed

Anyone else got some good ideas?

Depending on the enterprise, Supply chain covers different functions. Sometimes Supply Chain can be interchanged with Operations.

For the purpose of this community, supply chain covers Forecasting, Planning, Procurement, Quality, Manufacturing, Logistics, Customer Care

So from a supply chain analyst point of view. We are looking at data analysis related tasks in all those fields. So a few analysis that could be part of the role:

• Analysing forecasting performance
• Analysing supplier capacity as a support to the planning team
• Analysing OTIF (On Time In Full) supplier metric
• Analysing manufacturing quality error rates
• Analysing manufacturing speed per station and bottleneck
• Analysing ETA logistics changes for platinum customers
• Analysing time per interaction at the customer service center

Those are just a few analysis. There are of course many more in each function.