While decision making is moving down the organization, the day to day requirements of company representatives and the breadth of the analysis varies by a user’s position in the corporate hierarchy.

Operational representatives such as warehouse staff and planners regularly use very detailed capabilities such as inquiries and reports or browses and collections to manage their operational tasks.

As we move up through the level of focus from Operational to Strategic, we move from detailed, daily requirements to higher levels of aggregation and a greater need for analysis by various attributes such as product family, product group, customer, or region. Another form of analysis is changes tactically and strategically over time. How have our inventory turns changed by product line or family over the past 6 or 12 months.

Aggregations, attributes, and changes over time are all the domain of Business Intelligence.