Supplier Relationship Management in ERPNow

A CNC fabrication estimator utilized a scatter plot dashboard to visualize the monthly co-movement of price changes between iron and steel and steel mill products. The visualization revealed a strong positive linear relationship with a correlation of 0.89, highlighting severe single-month price jumps reaching up to 16 percent. By accurately quantifying this extreme material cost volatility, the estimator successfully justified shorter quote validity windows and material-indexed pricing clauses to protect job margins during the supplier relationship management process.

What it shows:

Quantifying commodity price volatility enables better contract negotiations and margin protection.

A retail supply chain analyst built an inventory performance framework to track actual metrics against empirical benchmarks across five product categories. The horizontal bar charts revealed that actual turnover vastly exceeded target markers, with actuals near 3,600 versus targets near 750, while days on hand remained well below the target of 0.5 at just 0.1. By visualizing these specific category-level targets, operations teams could instantly identify strong inventory velocity and make data-driven procurement decisions to enhance supplier collaboration for the upcoming quarterly planning cycle.

What it shows:

Visualizing category-level inventory targets enables data-driven procurement and better supply chain planning.