BY JACOB STOLLER
THE TRANSPARENT SUPPLY CHAIN
MANY ORGANIZATIONS ARE SEEKING TO GAIN VISIBILITY OF EVENTS INVOLVING TIER-TWO AND TIER-THREE PARTNERS One of the many lessons from recent supply chain upheavals is that the delayed arrival of a component costing only pennies can trigger the shutdown of an entire manufacturing line. This heightened vulnerability is causing many companies to extend the visibility in their supply chains to tier-two and tier-three suppliers and customers. Gaining such visibility, however, is more easily said than done. According to a recent Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) – sponsored study titled “The Resilient Supply Chain Benchmark,” most companies are not ready for this new environment. “In just over half the companies benchmarked, the view of supply chains is based on internal data, or relies on siloed or outdated data sets,” reads the study. “This limits their ability to detect emerging threats or calculate how a disruption will unfold across supply chains and business units.” Closing this gap will require new data capabilities on the part of many supply-chain 16 JUNE 2022
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partners. “One of the challenges that has really plagued supply chains is that there’s a lot of inconsistency in data collection, or lack thereof,” says Suzanne Livingston, vice-president of development for IBM’s asset and supply chain offerings. “Even when the data is being collected, it’s not necessarily collected in a way that makes it easy to understand how the products, the raw materials, the processes, and the manufacturing steps all connect.” Consumer demand for sustainable products has raised the bar for transparency even further, with companies increasingly being called upon to share information about raw materials, production processes, and transportation methods with consumers. “Some companies are going so far as to share waste generated through the process of manufacture with the consumer,” says Livingston, “so the consumer has a better view of the sustainability of the product and its overall impact on the environment.”
THE INTEGRATION CHALLENGE The diversity of data input from dozens or even hundreds of partners forces supply chain operators to contend with one of the thorniest issues in IT – the chore of bringing data from multiple sources into a common end-user platform. The problem is that data stored by different IT systems can vary in structure, protocols, and formats. “If you’re working with different companies, languages and parts of the world, making the information readily available and being able to rely on it is probably the biggest thing,” says Gavin Davidson, product marketing director at Oracle NetSuite. To extend supply chain visibility to multiple tiers, a company’s suppliers must acquire that visibility as well – a company needs to have the data in order to share it. Newer technology is helping smaller players acquire that capability. “The larger players almost always had Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or other tools for building custom integrations,” says SUPPLY PROFESSIONAL
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