Providing Management Meaningful Data

The basic purpose of logistics cost analysis is to provide managers with reliable information that will enable a better allocation of resources to be achieved. Given that the purpose of logistics and supply chain management, as we have observed, ultimately is concerned to meet customer service requirements in the most cost-effective way, then it is essential that those responsible have the most accurate and meaningful data possible. 

Once a system of measurement has been established, it is much easier to communicate the effectiveness of a program to employees and, just as important, to upper management. Providing meaningful data on injury rates, accident frequencies, and property damage is critical when funding decisions must be made. 

The rapid growth in LC/MS productivity resulted in the production of massive amounts of data. Thus, with the increased productivity experienced with modern analysis systems, the bottleneck quickly shifted to data interpretation and management. Approaches that feature the visualization of data help to provide meaningful information for decision making. 

It should be apparent that the APR is a meaningful compilation of myriad critical data, records, and reports intended to provide quality management with a tool to evaluate the quality status of manufactured products. Handling unexpected trends becomes more manageable when there is a comprehensive APR process fully installed and operational. Evaluating trends might also provide an opportunity for process optimization, particularly when specifications seem to be drifting toward the upper or lower limits. 

To provide a management that is transparent to the upper layers, these alarms have to be collected and analyzed, to pinpoint and solve the problem. Often, only a specific combination of alarms is meaningful. For instance, when simulation data is sent from one tool to another and the data flow stops, information on, e.g., the source host, the source application, the network, the network subsystem of the target host, or some combination of them can be the source of the problem. The process of finding a meaningful combination of alarms is called alarm correlation. Usually, a set of rules is defined that describes dependencies in a complex system and allows for locating the component which causes the problem. 

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