Supply chain systems have been experiencing shortages in current times of disruption. Starbucks, one of the giant coffeehouses of all time, has also fallen prey to shortages of key products and ingredients including cups, flavored syrups, and baked goods.
A recent New York Times caption summed it up best: “How the World Ran Out of Everything.”
As the world continues to recalibrate its approach, we are witnessing unusual strain on supply chains. It’s a perfect storm of consumers beginning to invest again and organizations striving to ramp up to optimum levels.
Ongoing shortages are impacting every industry. The supply chains have become fragile and slow. According to a recent National Retail Federation survey, 98 percent of respondents claimed that they had been impacted by shipping delays. Organizations worldwide are witnessing fluctuating prices and the enormous unavailability of commodities. And the great consumer shift is adding even more uncertainty into the already fragile supply network.
How Can Companies Handle Supply Chain Disruption?
Data is key to managing companies’ supply chains instead of letting it manage them. Visibility into essential analytics is how organizations can navigate these extremely volatile times. But this calls for next-level data integration. Not only can data integration help businesses utilize real-time data including information from internal and external sources but also facilitate better decision-making and experiences.
Modern data integration platforms enable business users with minimal technical expertise to onboard all data, integrate and analyze it to deliver valuable insights. By analyzing data faster, Chief Procurement Officers can identify new cost-saving and risk-mitigation opportunities and ultimately drive decision-making. These methods produce insights that traditional approaches to business intelligence (BI) including, query and reporting are unlikely to discover.
These solutions enable procurement professionals by automating manual data management tasks and unifying analytics via a dashboard. And they accomplish it without hands-on involvement from IT.
Businesses probably have access to all that information already. But, usually, all is lost in a sea of raw data that resides in multiple systems. You need to connect every data source – legacy systems, multi-cloud, and third-party. That way, data can be identified, aggregated, and synchronized in real-time.
When that happens, that large quantity of data becomes the most precious resource in your business. You can integrate data faster, avoid shortages, and ultimately improve companies’ bottom line. You can have a better sense of what’s going on in your business. Ergo, you make better decisions because you finally have the visibility you need.