A perfect marriage
In my opinion, a business intelligence solution represents the perfect marriage of strategic sourcing and information technology. BI provides the required data to the right decision maker at the correct time. It enables strategic sourcing to identify the critical data elements needed to evaluate strategic suppliers, obtain constantly updated order statuses, and use automated purchases for the majority of its buys. Through the business intelligence module of the ERP, a company's IT organization provides the data stream that is necessary to fulfill each of those requirements. In addition, IT configures and calculates the criteria used in the vendor analyses, validates the veracity of that data, and devises the dashboards used to array and display the performance data.