Agility and resilience are essential traits of any supply chain operation, regardless of the type of products you sell or the geographies your company serves. Successfully managing destination operations, optimizing inventory, improving the overall customer experience, and other supply chain activities rely on accurate, up-to-date data.
This increased need for adaptability and flexibility means that businesses can’t rely on the same supply chain operating models that they used in the past. When modernizing and making supply chain improvements, consider these essential factors.
By focusing on these areas, you can achieve the outcomes your organization needs to thrive. This post covers how UnitySCM’s customers use our platform to do just that.
Siloed information makes it extremely difficult for organizations to understand their supply chain operations, especially when some data sources are incomplete or poorly structured.
Today’s teams require real-time visibility into supply chain data across the entire organization — and this data can’t just go into a repository. It should be readily accessible to align people, processes, strategies, and insights. Getting the right data points to key stakeholders in real-time is crucial for helping everyone understand how the supply chain affects the business, identify potential threats and challenges, and improve future outcomes.
Unity SCM helps accomplish this by seamlessly integrating with a wide range of data sources — even when dealing with incomplete supply chain data. Streamlined data ingestion and enrichment with third-party services ensures you don’t waste time on data normalization projects. Instead, you can configure data based on KPIs with crucial context, such as carrier capacity allocation and performance, destination operations, and accessorial fees.
With this information, Unity SCM can provide out-of-the-box insights so teams can implement improved planning for their supply chain, such as average lead times for each potential route and clear performance metrics for each potential transportation supplier on their network.
Several stakeholders depend on supply chain data for their processes, so cross-team visibility is essential: your team, partners, and customers.
When your team has access to the same data — that “single pane of glass” — you can eliminate departmental discrepancies that cause confusion and inefficiencies. Keeping everyone on the same page is crucial for developing a unified response to supply chain challenges.
The ability to access and share pertinent supply chain data with partners creates a more efficient workflow. Improved communication can strengthen collaborative efforts to address supply chain issues.
The Unity SCM platform also tracks shipments and orders in real-time. Visualizing actionable insights through maps, charts, and tables makes it easy for all users to quickly understand information on critical data points such as detention and demurrage incidents, port congestions, shipment status, and more.
Quality information gives each stakeholder full autonomy as they evaluate and address various supply chain needs, which, in turn, increases trust and helps you improve retention.
To further address this need, Unity SCM’s integrations allow teams to use its data from and inside their own systems. Unity SCM sends the data using outbound integrations to the systems that stakeholders already use—email attachments, Excel, CSV, and NetSuite—helping enrich data in each user’s internal systems without signing in to Unity SCM.
All supply chain data should ultimately serve a single fundamental purpose: giving departments within your organization the ability to make decisions quickly to save time, money, and other essential resources.
Transportation network managers have historically dealt with a lot of imperfect data and information, forcing them to make gut decisions based on their experience and mindset. Unfortunately, the level of guesswork involved means such choices don’t always pay out.
With Unity SCM, on the other hand, you can take guesswork out of the equation for faster and more accurate decision-making. The combination of accurate real-time information and historical data (such as how well a specific carrier has performed on certain routes) is vital to making the right decisions in a timely manner.
Frequent notifications on essential supply chain metrics such as delays, purchase orders, and containers available for pickup lend themselves to this process – and you can even set email updates as frequently as you want for these notifications.
Data-driven decision-making results in vastly improved decision quality — especially compared to decisions based on incomplete, inaccurate, and out-of-date data. Quality data can help organizations reduce accessorial fees, reduce stockouts, better manage relationships with logistics partners, and more.
Real-world data and historical insights can also enable better planning for the future. Using the supply chain information readily available to your organization can help you identify ways to future-proof your supply chain to prevent future disruptions, such as identifying alternate carriers and routes. Faster identification of disruptions thanks to real-time information tracking can be a true game-changer.
With the right systems in place, you can align all aspects of your supply chain operations, delivering the visibility and transparency needed to drive decision-making while also having confidence that you are leveraging accurate and timely data. Today’s supply chain operations depend on promptly getting accurate information to the right people to power agile and flexible decision-making.
With Unity SCM’s end-to-end solutions, you can make the most of your data to solve supply chain problems and achieve better outcomes for your business.
