Top 10 Ways a Data Gateway Improves Time to Value Across End-to-End Supply Chains

Supply chain practitioners seeking the best way to speed decision intelligence, unify supply chain data, increase operational efficiency, and improve supply chain resilience can benefit from a supply chain data gateway. A data gateway provides unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, supply chain applications, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities. It helps companies meet their supply chain challenges head on and be ready for supply chain disruptions.

A unified view of your data accelerates informed decision making and provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your supply chain. For example, with a data gateway, a supply planner gains accelerated access to customer orders, inventory levels, and transportation schedules, all in one place, to identify inefficiencies and make better informed decisions.

Enterprises and supply chain software providers strive to reduce application implementation times. A data gateway can serve as a front-end for a range of supply chain software applications, speeding and simplifying data ingestion, integration, and staging processes. This significantly reduces application implementation times, lowers operational costs, and accelerates time to value.

According to Balaraj Pudota, VP and Global Head of SAP Practice at UST, “our partnership with InterSystems has allowed us to speed and simplify data ingestion and unification for our supply chain planning application providers. Customer implementation is now one-third the time, lowering operational costs and accelerating time to revenue."

Making it easier to provide the right supply chain data for the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format reduces dependency on IT resources. This can be achieved through low-code and self-service access, making formerly siloed supply chain data accessible to business users and data stewards, faster and with less overhead, eliminating reliance on developers. The right data, used by the right user, helps to build resilient supply chains.

Long-term growth and relevance for your organization depends on your ability to adapt to changing business needs and data requirements. As an organization grows, and its data demands increase, a supply chain data gateway’s performance should not suffer. Instead, a high level of performance is expected even when dealing with a significantly large volume of users, data, and requests.

Managing supply chain processes and data operations can require a lot of human capital and operational costs. With a data gateway for supply chain, you can automate data operations, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving overall efficiency. This includes automated data processing, transformation, and management tasks, which help streamline data operations, reduce errors, and lower operational costs.

Flexibility is crucial for organizations that need to connect with a wide range of supply chain data sources and applications. With a data gateway you have the flexibility to support open data access and enable seamless integration with other systems and applications. It should be easy to connect to new data sources as the need arises, such as ESG or SNEW (social, news, events, weather) data.

A data gateway gives you the flexibility to support supply chain data unification and exchange with an extensible canonical supply chain data model, ensuring that data is stored and managed in a consistent and structured manner, and allowing for easy integration and growth. It also feeds downstream applications including BI, reporting, and supply chain applications with the right data sets, in the formats the applications expect, and at the right time the data is needed.

Identifying bottlenecks, optimizing inventory levels, and improving overall efficiency are goals for all supply chain managers. Achieving these goals requires visibility into the entire supply chain. This visibility, a comprehensive view of data across the global supply chain, is made faster and easier with a data gateway. A manufacturing company, for example, can monitor real-time data from its suppliers, production lines, and distribution centers. By analyzing this supply chain data, the company can identify areas for improvement and implement changes to improve operational efficiency.

The ability to access and analyze timely, accurate, and consistent supply chain data is essential for effective decision-making and strategic planning. A data gateway provides users with real-time data to make accelerated, informed decisions, based on data from the global supply chain. This enables companies to react faster to disruptions and exceptions and know that they are making the most informed decision possible for a competitive advantage. This can be applied to demand management and forecasting to meet customer demand.

A cloud-based approach allows an organization to focus on core business activities by reducing the need for in-house IT management. With a data gateway that is fully managed and hosted in major cloud providers, organizations can be ensured high security and reliability so you can focus on making sense of the data.

ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting and compliance are growing in importance for sustainable supply chains. Yet many organizations are struggling to collect and connect data from some of these new sources. A data gateway provides a unified and harmonized view of supply chain data, which is essential for generating accurate and reliable ESG reports. By integrating data from various sources, including IoT devices and third-party systems, organizations can monitor and manage their environmental impact more effectively. In manufacturing, companies can track and report on carbon emissions, water usage, and waste generation, reducing their environmental footprint. In the end, this helps to enable sustainable supply chains.

Quick and easy access to live and historical data is critical for supply chain managers and practitioners, data analysts, stewards, engineers, and supply chain professionals in any industry. Here are just a few examples of industries that can benefit from a supply chain data gateway:

In FMCG and CPG, the ability to make rapid, data-driven decisions is crucial for staying competitive in a fast-paced market. Companies can optimize their supply chain operations by using a data gateway that provides a unified and harmonized view of data. For instance, a logistics manager can monitor real-time data on inventory levels, customer orders, and transportation schedules to make better informed decisions and reduce lead times and costs while improving customer satisfaction.

In healthcare, a data gateway can improve visibility and inventory optimization by providing a connective tissue between your data sources. This provides a foundation with unified and harmonized data, along with real-time advanced analytics, to optimize medical and supply fulfillment and limit procedure cancellations.

In the 3PL sector, a data gateway can significantly enhance decision making by providing a unified and harmonized view of data. By integrating data from different sources, logistics managers can make more informed decisions about when and how to fulfill orders. Additionally, the real-time data access and analytics capabilities of a data gateway can help in identifying and addressing issues as they arise, such as delays in transportation or shortages in inventory.

For application and solution providers, a data gateway can reduce customer implementation times and lower operational costs. By providing a low-code, self-service data gateway front-end, software providers accelerate time to revenue and improve customer satisfaction.

In wholesale distribution, a data gateway can help optimize inventory levels and improve supply chain visibility. By providing a unified and harmonized view of data, distributors can gain a comprehensive understanding of their operations, from supplier relationships to customer demand. This can help in identifying inefficiencies and implementing changes to improve operations and customer satisfaction.

Automotive manufacturers face a myriad of challenges, but having access to anticipated supplier disruptions to ensure parts availability is one of the most notable challenges. With a data gateway, you gain visibility across your suppliers, enabling you to provide accurate data for actionable insights through a prescriptive control tower to drive a resilient, agile, and intelligent supply chain.

A smart factory relies on IT-OT integration. With a data gateway, you can easily combine data from OT systems and real-time signals from the shop floor with enterprise IT and analytics systems to enable manufacturers to improve quality and efficiency, respond faster to events, and predict and avoid problems before they occur.

Government agencies are engaged with supply chains from multiple perspectives. They monitor food, drug, and public safety, transportation, materials and other sectors for real-time visibility and decision support. They provide supply chain logistics for agencies as they deal with thousands of suppliers and need real-time insights to drive efficiency. And they support maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) for agencies that need to track and maintain assets and infrastructure across multiple sectors of the economy. Access to real-time, unified data makes all of these processes more efficient and compliant.

If it sounds impossible to achieve all the benefits outlined above through one solution, I assure you, it is not. InterSystems® Data Fabric Studio™ with supply chain module offers a new and unprecedented approach to accessing data across the supply chain. Our data gateway makes it faster and simpler to integrate, harmonize, and normalize disparate data and deliver it to the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format to accelerate time to value.
Learn more at InterSystems.com/DataGateway.

Article originally published on Logistics Viewpoints.