The food and drink sector faces a range of challenges in its supply chains. InterSystems is helping organisations navigate global supply chain challenges
The role of supply chain orchestration tools are vital, helping to integrate data across entire organisations to provide predictive and prescriptive analytics, to enhance visibility and efficiency.
Mark Holmes, Senior Advisor for Global Supply Chain at InterSystems, which offers tool to help businesses face up to this challenges. With a 25-year career spanning supply chain, logistics and software development, Mark shared his expertise on various topics, including the importance of active spend management and supplier optimisation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Please introduce yourself and your role at InterSystems
I’m Mark Holmes, Senior Advisor for global supply chain at InterSystems. InterSystems is a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability and speed problems.
I have a unique 25-year career history in supply chain and logistics, working with or within FMCG and manufacturing companies and in supply chain consultancy. My experience also encompasses 3PL and 4PL logistics where I led integrated business units focused on distribution, transportation and freight forwarding. It was from there that I migrated into software – developing solutions for the supply chain industry and running a supply chain practice for a global systems integrator.
My diverse experience in these sectors led me to InterSystems, where my role has been to influence product development and grow and strengthen our supply chain footprint globally.
Could you tell us more about what InterSystems does and how it operates?
InterSystems has been a key player in the software industry for over 46 years. We have thousands of customers in more than 80 countries around the world in essentially every industry and every sector. Our specialty is helping organisations with disparate, dissimilar data coming from complex systems and different sources inside and outside the organisation to unify the data to optimise business outcomes and accelerate innovation.
Our platform, InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator, is designed to seamlessly integrate with and enhance existing supply chain ecosystems. It is a singular, comprehensive decision intelligence platform that offers four critical technological capabilities, enabling accelerated, cross-functional decision-making.
With our platform, users gain the ability to integrate, visualise, trust and act on data across the entire organisation. This integration provides predictive and prescriptive analytics, significantly boosted by built-in AI capabilities, optimising existing systems and applications. The result is increased end-to-end visibility, reduced operating margins and new opportunities for innovation and business growth.
What is the most important supply chain factor for your clients to consider in the current landscape?
Supply chain businesses simply do not have the visibility they need to remain agile. In F&B in particular, they tend to have limited visibility of inventory. Their applications and systems assume an unconstrained environment for planning optimisation and their processes are simply too manual and not integrated – with some even reliant on spreadsheets.
As a result, they cannot adapt to sudden changes in demand or redirect inventory from multiple locations proactively. This results in costly, sub-optimal production runs and poor levels of quality freshness, operating costs and fulfilment – especially in repackaging. All of this means they must consider automating and optimising production planning processes.
InterSystems is a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability (Credit: InterSystems)
How does InterSystems help its clients navigate global supply chain challenges?
Our recent research found that almost half of supply chain organisations (47%) cited their dependency on manual processes for data collection and analysis as their primary technological hurdle. Poor integration, data silos and legacy technology all combine to impede visibility and act as a barrier to innovation.
We help supply chain organisations to overcome these challenges using InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator which delivers a powerful connective tissue that creates an intelligent decision data platform. The solution allows businesses to integrate disparate data sources to obtain much-needed end-to-end supply chain visibility and sense disruptions, providing actionable, predictive and prescriptive insights in real time to support various applications and scenarios.
The combination of our technology and expertise helps supply chain organisations to see, understand, optimise and act in real-time to create the resilient and agile supply chain model they need to withstand global supply chain challenges and come out on top.
How is InterSystems planning to improve the supply chain?
In my role, I work with organisations across sectors to help them overcome their supply chain challenges and enable them to leverage their data to improve visibility and agility and to optimise supply chain processes. We already work with a wide range of well-known organisations to strengthen their global supply chains.
For instance, our decision intelligence platform has been adopted by SPAR Austria to streamline and optimise end-to-end fulfilment processes and help managers of its more than 600 stores to control their inventory. By adopting ML for real-time sensing of demand shifts, SPAR Austria has been able to optimise replenishment and strengthen its supply chain network. This has significantly improved on shelf availability (OSA), demand forecasting, productivity and time to decision. In turn, it also helped SPAR increase revenue and efficiencies.
Just as we have with SPAR, we aim to continue enabling more resilient, flexible and transparent supply chains, using our technology to optimise everything from demand sensing and forecasting, to fulfilment and repackaging.
How is InterSystems using AI to improve supply chains?
AI implementations hinge on having access to healthy, unified data. Therefore, unlocking the transformative potential of AI and ML requires a smart data strategy that moves beyond manual processes to a seamless integration of robust data collection, analysis and application. This is where InterSystems comes in.
Our smart data fabric technology harmonises and normalises data from disparate sources and enables supply chain organisations to access a single source of truth. This helps supply chain organisations transition from dependence on inaccurate and delayed data to utilising real-time, actionable insights that power AI and ML initiatives.
This strategic shift not only enhances operational efficiency and decision-making but also paves the way for predictive and prescriptive capabilities that dramatically improve demand forecasting, inventory management and overall supply chain responsiveness and agility.
InterSystems is a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability (Credit: InterSystems)
How have InterSystems promoted the use of data systems and what effect can these have on procurement and supply chains?
One of the key ways in which InterSystems has promoted the use of data systems in procurement is by highlighting the benefits of data-driven decision making to the line of business.
By utilising data systems, organisations can gain real-time insights into their procurement activities, track supplier performance and identify opportunities for cost savings and process improvements. This can lead to more informed and strategic procurement decisions, resulting in a more efficient and cost-effective supply chain.
What does the future look like for InterSystems and its clients?
After almost a decade of turbulence caused by Brexit, the global pandemic, mounting geopolitical unrest and rising inflation, uncertainty and change have emerged as the only constants in retail supply chains. This means building resilience and mitigating risk are priority.
Navigating and handling a deluge of data has made smarter, agile, accurate decision-making paramount to robust supply chains for predicting and mitigating disruptions in real time. As we have been throughout the disruption of the last 10 years, we will continue to be by our clients’ sides, helping them to gain these capabilities and empowering them to streamline operations, enhance efficiency and gain a competitive edge.
