Data cleanup isn’t a new idea, but with all the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for clean data has really become more important than ever.

Remember the old days when we experienced supply shortages? When inventory balances were sometimes inaccurate, and suppliers shipped short or missed due dates?

This article was submitted by our partners at ServiceMax, a leader in Field Service Management. With our recent whitepaper “Service Supply Chain Prophecy: 2021 & Beyond” discussing the importance of clean data for service planning in 2021, we think this will be quite helpful.

Our subject matter experts often get asked to speak as guest lecturers at universities to share their knowledge about the service supply chain. We thought it might be good to offer a Service Supply Chain 101 here on our blog for students and those new to this, the “other supply chain.”

Historically, Prophet's legacy reporting did a great job providing users with large exports of detailed data. Users had access to all of the details they needed to create their own pivot tables, charts and graphs to analyze data outside of Prophet.

In this final part of our exploration of total cost optimization, we bring these operational and inventory costs together to show that service level is better viewed as an output of an optimization rather than as a goal, as the right service level minimizes the combination of these costs.