They say a graph is more than a thousand words. I totally agree with it. I would prefer to look at a network graph, rather than reading through lengthy documents or a bunch of excel, to understand a complicated business network/ relationship pattern.
Client come to our office yesterday and would like our help to identify "bad" customers. With 20,000+ customer and 30,000+ suppliers, they are using excel to generate report to identify the relationship. With dynamic business rules and thousands of daily transaction, the excel immediately "outdated" upon print out.
We provide an innovative way to present the business relationship using a visual diagram. The inner circle are all trading partners which had transaction and inter-connect with each other. The outer circle are those not actively trading with others. Using visual diagram, we can compute these 50,000+ nodes in minutes and define different scenarios to identify all these relationship visually.
Our client spend 2 years and many internal human resources and look for an answer but in vain.
"Radical innovation always come from outsider." I concluded.