The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the instability of global supply chains which resulted in crisis across industries. Supply chains everywhere are still facing pressures in changing consumer demand. Consumption patterns have shifted as well – leading to higher shipping volumes and freight costs.

Today, it is important that organizations understand the factors that get in the way of supply chain recovery. They can then take the right measures to ensure not only the survival but also the success of their business.

What Hinders Supply Chain Recovery?

Supply chain recovery is a fundamental aspect of supply chain resilience and disaster management. According to a study published in the engineering management review, supply chains usually take longer to overcome more demanding challenges such as pandemics. This makes identifying challenges vital so that organizations can plan and create apt and effective strategies to carry on with their business.

One such challenge has been longstanding bottlenecks in supply chains. They have not only raised costs but also shortages in labor. As of December 2021, theUS Bureau of Labor estimated that there were only 11 million job openings in the country. The drastic decrease in job openings has slowed down overall growth and contributed to inflation, which at one point, sat at a 29-year high.

Due to such high inflation, most companies are passing the costs along, damaging supply chains even more due to rising input costs. A survey of 52 items, including forest products, agricultural products, energy, metals, and more, has shown how this impact is far wider than commonly believed. The survey showed that the average input increase has been 95% when compared to pre-pandemic levels.

There’s Light at the End of the Tunnel

By most estimates, this disruption is likely to persist throughout 2022 at the very least, with 2023 touted as a more likely possibility by some business leaders. This situation may be somewhat normalized in the long run. To understand the state of change that global businesses are going through, it is important to consider real-life examples to see how global enterprises are reacting to the crisis.

For General Electric Co., issues in its supply chains were present across all its business units. However, its healthcare unit especially faced more problems than any other part of its business. As a result, GE drove up its expenses for transportation and raw materials which, in turn, affected its onshore wind business. This is why the company raised prices and tried to suppress costs while looking for new suppliers, sourcing alternative parts, and redesigning product configurations. Such a period of transition saw GE’s Q4 2021 revenue take a hit.

According to S&P Global, however, many non-financial corporations worldwide have found it easy to absorb or cancel out cost inflation. They have been able to do so via demand shifts and offsets, hedging, product mix adjustments, cost pass-throughs, positive operational gearing, and a low rate of pay growth. But they still expect profit margin pressure to rise in 2022.

The Answer

One study has recommended a framework for supply chain management and operations during the pandemic across six distinct perspectives— digitalization, preparedness, adaptation, recovery, causality, and sustainability.

In the middle of present uncertainty, such a wide outlook can help organizations recover from supply chain issues quickly and efficiently. Today, solutions need to account for evolving requirements of enterprises, concerning supply chain integrations and all-around visibility. Only then can a solution help them overcome this situation with ease.

Explore PartnerLinQ:

A Supply chain visibility app ecosystem, with Native Applications that offer rapid interoperability and next-generation monitoring.

Some of the native apps in the PartnerLinQ app ecosystem include:

1. Order to Cash
2. Procure to Pay
3. Ecommerce Order Management
4. Return Verification & Management
5. Intelligent Invoice Matching
6. Web EDI
7. Cross Dock, DTC & Drop Shipments
8. Freight Integrations
   
    

Step into the next frontier of supply chain resilience. Contact us for a demo today!

Exploring PartnerLinQ’s Extensible Platform with Native Applications

The post disruption New Normal brings with it valuable lessons as we begin the new year. The importance of flexibility, visibility, velocity, and resilience are among those lessons and while many faced a fluid and unexpected path, most did emerge with a clearer understanding of what to expect over the next few years and how to overcome obstacles.

At PartnerLinQ we believe that resilience is a key to continued success in the New Normal. Flexibility, visibility, and velocity are the pieces that combine to build that resilience.

Before the disruptions of the last few years, flexibility, visibility, and velocity in supply chain was treated as optional, often provided by way of ‘add-on’ or ‘value- add’ services which is not quite good enough anymore.

Today’s emergent iPaaS and SaaS solutions are designed to meet evolving integration needs by providing API connections and transformations in easy to consume, point and click modules that connect one system to another in a SaaS environment. In short, this enables interoperability between systems quickly.

PartnerLinQ is not unlike many of the iPaaS, Cloud, and SaaS solutions built for the cloud and ease of use; but it is the Native Apps built to provide the key supply chain context to these integrations that takes this to the next level where the solution not only connects to your supply chain but also provides the visibility and velocity of implementation required to ensure that your supply chain is resilient as well.

PartnerLinQ’s App Extensible Platform

While many of our competitors1 continue to sell the “competitive advantage” of value-added networks, the concept of the network has shifted significantly. With PartnerLinQ, YOU own your network.

PartnerLinQ’s App extensible platform helps you connect with your supply chain quickly and easily, which translates into a significantly better ROI and a real competitive advantage.2

PartnerLinQ’s apps can be added to your PartnerLinQ subscription by a simple click of a button delivering instant value to your existing connection.

Here are some of the key Business Process Apps that are available:

Business Process Apps

• Order to Cash
• Procure to Pay
• E-commerce Order Management
• Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and Drop Shipments
• Return Verification & Management
• Freight Integration & Shipment Status Messaging
• Returns Management

Order to Cash

The Order to Cash App provides visibility into the Order to Cash process for both B2B and D2C business. This app gives you real time insights into your business in terms of value delivered and bottlenecks, allowing you to optimize the experience for your customers.

Procure to Pay

Procure to Pay works the same way through the PartnerLinQ Platform App, integrating your system and ensuring that your business, systems, and team are resilient, and now have a digitized, automated procure-to-pay process. Installed, configured, and activated within minutes by our team or yours, your team can easily manage buys, approvals, payments, suppliers and supply chain visibility and compliance on a global scale and in real time.

We’ve made processing inbound invoices simple with prebuilt integrations to more than 70 ERP, TMS, WMS systems. Robotic Process Automation also ensures that your team can convert your manual invoice processes into electronic transactions at the “Speed of Business.”

E-commerce – Order Management

PartnerLinQ’s extensible platform with native applications E-commerce – Order Management app unlocks real-time interactive shopping experiences by allowing seamless visibility to your products and inventory to boost online sales and increase customer engagement. Run your eCommerce business from the desktop, delivered your way, according to your schedule, providing flexibility, visibility, and velocity in a nimble, scalable platform

Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and Drop Shipments

Drop Shipment through the PartnerLinQ Platform App provides a seamless experience for Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and/or drop-ship environments.

The PartnerLinQ Drop Shipment App provides for the ability to onboard and connect with your drop ship partners and work with their catalogs in a seamless way, providing express distribution and or delivery requirements for your location and for your partners. The app includes detailed specifications for electronics, food service, and drug supply chains with precise traceability requirements without the need for yet another project.

Freight Integration & Shipment Status Messaging

The PartnerLinQ App makes freight integration effortless by connecting with the Top TL, LTL, Intermodal, logistics and Third-Party operators through the Platform. Tenders and responses are the lifeblood of the supply chain. Ensuring the right goods reach the right place at the right time is critical to supply chains in the New Normal. When it comes to deep freight integration, PartnerLinQ is ready and connects with more than 1,000 Land, Sea, and Air freight operators, handlers, and carriers, all available through our extensible platform with native applications.

Instant Ocean makes Land, Sea, and Air Visibility possible, and PartnerLinQ makes it happen. Your Port – Your Container, Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific and everywhere in between. Our support team will be there, if needed, to ensure that 100% of your freight shipments are tracked from your ERP to destination with shipment status updates by way of email messages or infinitely scalable reporting.

Return Verification & Management

Returns Management, a feature often overlooked by our competitors, is also available. The PartnerLinQ Platform App provides a seamless experience for managing any type of returns including the Returns ASN for the cosmetics industry (RASN).

Drug supply chains are also enabled through the PartnerLinQ App whether you are ready to leverage EPCIS or not, and the GS1 Verification Messaging Standard is available from within PartnerLinQ.

Returns can be configured for delivery to your warehouse or a third party and, if needed, verification or validation is available to PartnerLinQ subscribers in just a few clicks.

[1] Are Value-Added Networks the Way to go for B2B Communication?

[2] Value-added networks provide competitive advantage

What’s new this holiday season?

While the Thanksgiving holiday has passed and we remain grateful for another wonderful year, we were treated to a visit from the technology elves on our return. The elves mentioned that they were hard at work finalizing the new release of PartnerLinQ as the holidays approach and were stopping by in order to demonstrate some its advanced features.

The Platform

The platform has been given an upgrade and the dashboard is sleek, smooth and faster than ever before. an ever before.

Recent Activities, located in the center, ensures PartnerLinQ customers remain proactively informed of the latest activities.

Recently Assigned Customers are just to the left, ensuring PartnerLinQ customers actively engaged in onboarding have a front row seat. It’s here that PartnerLinQ customers can visually ascertain the status of any onboarding customer at any point in the onboarding process.

Systems and Tasks alerts are on the right, and subscriptions can be toggled on and off by the user at any time.

Further down and always visible is a Support button that helpfully opens the support window.

With one-click you can search the support FAQ and access email and telephone support. The platform features Google-like search functionality at the top of the page, ensuring that anything a PartnerLinQ customer is looking for is one click away.

We make it easy. We keep it simple. And it is all in one place.

The Evolution

This holiday season, we are reminded that the evolution of PartnerLinQ has been a special process.  From the very beginning, our commitment to “making it easy and keeping it simple and putting everything in one place” has been an inspiration to not only our team and the technology elves, it has also inspired prospects to become customers and strangers to become friends. Now, having been on this path for a few years, the next few years are looking even more promising.

The Extensible Platform

Putting everything in one place is a core tenet of the PartnerLinQ extensible platform. Everything is accessible, from a selection of widgets that can be added to the user’s home screen to a selection of APIs and tools that can be added to your PartnerLinQ subscription. Speaking with some of our customers recently, the reaction to the new extensible platform has been, “I can’t wait for Christmas!”

The Upgrade

The upgrade to the new PartnerLinQ Platform, like everything else we do, is included with the platform. We’re all about making it easy and while the Azure-hosted subscription model has been available for some time, some self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances remain. PartnerLinQ customers keeping it simple today on the self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances will benefit from the ways we are making it easier tomorrow.

The Apps

We think of the apps as the best presents under the tree this year. Instant Ocean and Scan2EDI are the first of many PartnerLinQ solutions moving to the PartnerLinQ “in-app” subscription model. Available exclusively to PartnerLinQ customers, PartnerLinQ apps connect subscribers with Visionet IP products, factories, distributors, 3PL service providers, payment gateways, and more.

Instant Ocean is the newest PartnerLinQ IP and brings real value to PartnerLinQ customers who are also ocean freight participants. Instant Ocean is an “in-app” subscription to complete container visibility delivered to the user dashboard. Imagine integrated, automated, and reliable ocean status at your fingertips. Instant Ocean container updates can be delivered to the PartnerLinQ dashboard or directly to the enterprise. Instant Ocean even makes use of business rules and alerting so you can have it your way. Your port, your container, Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific, and everywhere in between. Instant Ocean removes human intervention from your ocean-going freight and delivers real business insight.

Scan2EDI assembles the best modern technologies in one easy-to-use solution reaching well beyond that of ordinary optical character recognition (OCR). Beginning with OCR, PartnerLinQ makes use of robotic process automation (RPA) for data retrieval and data extraction, OCR for transformation, indexing, and image storage, and document management software in our intuitive PartnerLinQ platform interface.

PartnerLinQ’s business process outsourcing ensures that any transaction not immediately recognized receives an initial review and response so that PartnerLinQ customers have the option to add transactions, integrations, vendors, and customers mid-flow. This can happen because mapping and error handling are fully automated, the function includes business rules that fit our client’s business expectations, and with built-in alerts, no transactions are ever overlooked or missed. Artificial intelligence ensures transactions are sorted, tagging, and routed through processing and should an unexpected transaction be encountered, automated error handling takes care of the alerting your business team.

Application integration is what PartnerLinQ’s Scan2EDI was designed for and with our enterprise integration framework, Scan2EDI transactions land as expected in the enterprise whether they’re purchase orders (POs), advanced ship notices (ASNs), invoices, shipping documents, or any of the 500-plus available transactions that Scan2EDI was designed to handle out of the box.

Happy Holidays!

Whatever holidays you celebrate, we think that PartnerLinQ’s evolution is a reason for good cheer. With better visibility and flexibility, we’re adding even more resilience to your supply chain, and in these uncertain times as we sort out the “new normal,” resilience is the key to success.

So, enjoy the time off from work, spend time doing the things you love, and we’ll see you in the new year with a new evolution of the PartnerLinQ solution that will keep you singing “Happy Holidays” well into the new year. Talk with our experts to learn more.

By Thomas A Smith Senior EDI Implementation Strategy Consultant  

On a warm morning in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a symposium in 2005 the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made the following statement…

“While the techniques and instruments to absorb fluctuations have improved, there is uncertainty about how they will perform in a serious downturn.”

The speaker was Ragham Rajan and while he was widely ridiculed at the time, his speech would prove to be prophetic. The 2007-08 financial crisis to follow occurred because market changes and advancements were concentrating risk despite appearing to diversify risk.

The Great Disruption

The world is witnessing an unprecedented level of disruption beginning with COVID-19, followed by supply chain issues, and a growing disruption within the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the flight of workers from the hospitality industry in September, with a reported 863,000 leaving their positions, fully 6.6% of the hospitality workforce. Across the world we see acute shortages for commodities, including computer chips, furniture, and mobile devices among them. Fortunately, there are no nationwide shortages of food. Although in some cases we might have certain foods with low inventory, food production and manufacturing are widely dispersed in North America. Global Industrialization is suffering, and many manufacturers in the US are reporting a wait of more than 90 days to procure materials and assemble parts to make their products.

The Disruption Today

Beyond the supply chain shortages and bottlenecks there are multiple causes for disruption. The emerging cause can be attributed to a shortage of labor, especially truck drivers, which has stalled production operations across plants, distribution points, and delivery centers. Despite rising unemployment, the gap between labor and unfilled positions is increasing.

With global production chains divided into specialized links over many decades, different industries have become inextricably connected over a period of time. Supply shocks have spread across unlikely industries, such as automobiles and semiconductors, or food and fertilizer.

Perhaps an even more visible cause for disruption lies in oversea shipping. The port crisis in the US has received global attention over the last year due to the immense buildup of ships and the never-ending influx of cargo. What supply chain professionals initially viewed as temporary is now threatening to change global shipping infrastructures from the size of ships to business practices, which relied on speed rather than on efficiency, availability, or visibility. Container ships are now circling ports and remaining at sea for longer periods increasing costs. Sea containers cost more to ship, resulting in exorbitant prices, and the accumulation of goods at shipyards, rail yards and warehouses, a direct result of the aforementioned labor shortage, dominated by a shortage of truck drivers.

Supply Chain News

Attending a supply chain conference last week for the first time in more than 18 months, I had an opportunity to listen to several speakers. One by one each delivered his or her view of what happens next, after the great disruption.

One speaker stated simply, “Supply chain is sexy again” and that caught my attention, for starters, I would agree. Having been largely automated and then ignored, the supply chain is again making news and having work in the supply chain for many years, there is more than a passing interest from John Q. Public on Supply chain matters. The speaker went on to talk about a financial newspaper with wide distribution. The paper, the speaker continued, published a mere handful of supply chain articles each month while in recent months, that handful had exploded to several articles every day. The articles, looking more critically now, are well beyond a single new outlet and appear to have a wide array of supply chain perspectives. Reflections of the articles range in impact from the DOW to the NASDAQ and from Retail to CPG and from staples to emerging technologies and in the virtual world these articles are boundless, including this one, which brings us to the following observation.

Stress Testing the Supply Chain

The string of supply chain disruption following the pandemic has resulted in the biggest stress test for supply chain leaders the world over, retail executives in North America anticipate issues to last beyond 2022. What appeared at first to be temporary has now turned into a series of long-lasting setbacks, some perhaps resulting in a permanent state of disruption in some industries. Considering the nearly two years since the onset, when and how these disruptions will end remain a matter of conjecture. The answers are not to be found, not in anyone’s tea leaves, not yet.

The Future of Supply Chain

In order to future-proof, supply chain leaders are facing factors of change that have not been previously considered or discussed, solutions from worker migration to flexible labor practices and the movement of sourcing to new sourcing centers in emerging markets or those which can be more closely controlled or deliver an environmentally neutral position. The solution is in resolving multiple issues in the supply chain as it did way back when plastic hangers seemingly changed to black overnight.

The Solution Approach

Renewing the approach to transparency and visibility across the supply chain is critical in light of the uncertain future in this period of the Great Disruption, now clearly extended, with no end in sight. Increased transparency can better prepare stakeholders to deal with changing regulatory, environmental or compliance requirements while solving supply chain dilemmas. Visibility, through better partner communication, is becoming increasingly important to supply chain leaders that I spoke with at the conference. The importance of end-to-end communication with suppliers and partners across the trading network from their perspective cannot be overstated. Through the right technology, organizations can ensure that the appropriate information is collected, stored, and disseminated, and when partners are onboarded quickly to meet these unexpected scenarios, the results are a positive impact on business and on other concerns.

Supply Chain Advantage

The PartnerLinQ advantage is its hybrid cloud architecture and easy partner onboarding, PartnerLinQ delivers a smarter B2B/B2C Integration platform with automated End-to-End Workflows and includes business rules for omnichannel integration.

PartnerLinQ’s unique approach to supply chain can help your organization communicate with your partners rapidly, ensuring end-to-end digital connectivity across all functional areas and through a centralized visibility platform.

PartnerLinQ zeroes in on issues, tracks them, and provides detailed analysis of all of your partners, including all of their inbound and outbound transactions and can generate alerts for specific partner events, delivering the insight your users need to address supply chain issues immediately.

Scan2EDI converts your manual process into electronic transactions using robotic process automation, optical character recognition, document management software, business process outsourcing, and artificial intelligence. Scan2EDI offers application integration advantages including PartnerLinQ’s ERP Integration Framework.

Instant Ocean Visibility provides container status at your fingertips. Integrated, automated, and reliable, your port – your container, Instant Ocean Visibility removes human intervention from container tracking, eliminates endless web searches, eliminates phone calls & email and eliminates voice messages and call backs.

Take control of your supply chain in the present and forge a new one for the future with PartnerLinQ. Talk with our experts to learn more.

By Kevin Balentine, PartnerLinQ

Building a New Resilient Supply Chain

The global marketplace today can perhaps be described as volatile. Prices are on the rise, shortages are popping up unexpectedly and in unexpected places.  Many major retail grocers are expecting center store sales to increases, an indication of things to come.

While supply chains have become more extensive and interconnected, they have also shown unprecedented instability in the face of disruption. In the wake of COVID-19, the fragile stability of lean supply chains found difficulty in recovering quickly in the face of disruption.  What has emerged is a succession of supply side ripples across multiple industries. The ripples collide until at last they reach the end of the line and, similar to the domino effect, as one chain ends another begins in sequence.  Many of the assumptions upon which the lean manufacturing model was created, were undone by market and environment variables that emerged during the onset of the COVID disruption.

Organizations are beginning to accept a pretense of recovery amid a truly formidable challenge of accelerated customer demand and labor shortages, and while research indicates that retail sales can grow by as much as 10.5% to 13.5% to generate more than USD 4.4 trillion in this year, there are concerns. Having undergone unprecedented and unwelcome change throughout the past year, suppliers require stability and flexibility to tackle the surging demand. Resisting instability forms the key priority for retail suppliers, which brings focus to resilience.

21% That’s the number of respondents in a recent Gartner survey who affirmed that they have a resilient network at present. Giving context to the figure, resilience implies elevated visibility, persistent velocity in moving product from source to destination while avoiding supply chain constraints. In this current moment of volatility in the market, it is imperative for retail suppliers and retail enterprises to increase their supply chain resilience.

Becoming more resilient is no longer a luxury for supply chain leaders. The long-standing tradition of lean manufacturing and its entrenched philosophy will be the challenge to overcome. Supply chains need to be efficient as well as resilient, and practices such as redundant supply chain operations, alternative factories, and ample safety stock need to be developed in parallel with productivity and performance improvements.  Supply chains also need to maintain compliance substituting lesser performing partners for those more suited following the COVID disruption. The widespread disruptions affected supply chain monitoring and audit and while enforcement may have been relaxed, performance improvements can only be brought about by effective monitoring and accounting. In order to holistically build a resilient supply chain network, retail suppliers need specific data elements to be incorporated into their supply chain and a robust solution methodology which combines five important elements is key.

Connectivity

A surefire approach to building supply chain resilience in retail is ensuring anytime, anyone, anywhere communication, systems need to be ‘access anywhere’ supportive of SSO (Single Sign on) and active directory. Manual partner-to-partner communication requires a lot of paperwork and must be reduced in light of staffing shortages.  Manual communication methodologies lead to errors and errors mean more human intervention. Automatic and secure document flows compatible with multiple enterprise level system and capable of a variety of data interchange formats and in real time delivers resilience.

Flexibility

A significant aspect of resilience is ironing out friction within the network. A resilient supply chain must be flexible and able to fix critical issues with the least amount of effort.  ‘Fix-on-the-fly’ functionality reducing human interaction increases flexibility. An efficient business rule manager is key to incorporate such flexibility. Reusable business rules ensure seamless partner onboarding and transaction integration.  Reusable sets of business rules allow for the conservation of scarce technical resources and ease of use.  The addition of reusable rules to rule sets to overcome existing issues, and proactive alerting based on business rules means time to make a correction where and when necessary. Change, through a business rules engine can be automated and in real time. Audit functions mean changes can be rolled out, and rolled back if that become necessary.

Adaptability

Perhaps the greatest lesson that the past year has taught suppliers in retail has been the importance of adaptation. The transition to digital and the prominence of ecommerce platforms has been well documented in the retail industry. An omnichannel strategy covers all potential channels for distribution and sales. An omnichannel strategy makes sense amid market disruptions such as we’ve seen this past year and a half.  An omnichannel strategy means demand can be met with convenience and speed. While a stand-alone omnichannel strategy as a solution is one way to meet demand, leveraging a common process workflow to bring transactions in or out of the enterprise the same way every time means an increased ability to create multiple trading relationships and do so quickly. By eliminating the need for additional support or maintenance, a common process workflow takes partner on boarding to a new level while increasing the utility of business rules reduces the dependencies on map and mapping activities. Combining centralized B2B communication with such a workflow results in a highly independent system in which transactions and business processes are handled automatically, accounting for connection changes, partner onboarding, acquisitions, mergers and complete enterprise migration without adding disruption.

Accountability

With much of the COVID disruption behind, and planning and change ahead, compliance has never been more important for retail suppliers.  A flexible and effective event notification processor to stay on top of supply chain events and issues in real time becomes a valuable tool. Such rules-based processing must be backed by comprehensive audits, reports, and analytics.  Such tools must be visible across the internal supply chain operation. Transaction transportation, transformation and integration tools must include analytics to ensure consistent business operations, keeping disparate teams in touch with the latest goings-on in the supply chain domain.

The Way Forward

Accepting resilience is just the first step. The path includes overcoming challenges like supply chain and labor shortages and success in resilience is achieved by combining five key elements:

• Centralized communication across multiple methods, formats, and platforms
• Flexible business rules, business rules management, and alerting.
• An adaptive common processing workflow that simplifies onboarding and processing
• Visibility, accountability, and adaptability
• Easy access to these key elements and in one place.

A resilient path will quickly deliver an elevated level of performance, particularly important as the retail industry begins to leave the COVID disruption behind and starts to engage with the new normal.

While the number and complexity of supply chain initiatives seem to grow season after season, a few remain on the top of such initiatives.  A combined study of supply chain leaders completed by Bain & Company and Microsoft identified digital agility and resilience as top priorities in their choice of supply chain software. The study also indicated that many supply chain senior executives, who once viewed their supply chain as a “cost center,” now see them as a “strategic capability.”

What the study appears to indicate are a number of strategic areas for future-proof investment, the ability to generate granular data sets to enable in-depth visibility and provide actionable insights, and of course, an omnichannel strategy that ensures consistent customer experiences across websites, mobile apps, social media accounts, and brick-and-mortar stores.

Intelligent Technologies to Drive Smart Supply Chains

Granular data, in-depth visibility, and actionable insights naturally come together conversationally when we begin to reconstruct business strategies, post COVID-19. Solutions that store transactional details provide granular data sets, which then provide much needed visibility that generates insights across partners, customers, and channels.

When an omnichannel strategy exists, the combined insight provided by solutions that store transactional details allows for advanced customer segmentation, empowering companies to build more detailed, customized experiences based on the needs of the partner, customer, or channel populations and experiences. No wonder then that the most successful brands are looking to harness intelligent technologies to adapt to fast-evolving consumer demands and market challenges.

While some may believe a lack of resources or investment opportunities are inhibiting the next steps, supply chain leaders have begun to realize they need to proactively seek resources or opportunities, anticipate supply-side change, and be somewhat agile themselves in order to make decisions that increase sales avenues and address customer needs.

Why Customer Insight?

The market is full of options and today’s customers have an abundance of choices, many of which are just a few clicks away. Working from home has greatly reduced travel times to and from work. It follows that the general population can spend more time on experiences that engage them personally and, according to a recent survey, 75% of millennials value experiences over things.

Experience, or more specifically, a positive experience, is derived from the utility offered and a utility that offers easy access to goods and services is more preferable to price. The outcome of this level of business-critical thinking suggests that it has become imperative that brands begin to understand evolving customer desires and delivery experiences that delight, which brings us back to strategic areas for future-proof investment.

Combining strategy and future-proof investment together ensures that the customer is at the center of supply chain planning. Only those organizations that have an in-depth connection with their customers can monitor their behavior, analyze trends, and select the right channel to maximize customer reach and engagement. Sellers must ensure that products and services are available to their targeted buyers and on all channels.

Businesses with an omnichannel presence enjoy 90% higher customer retention over those that do not. Adding availability and convenience by way of an omnichannel strategy ensures consumers can switch between devices and screens to complete a task. Creating digital for targeted buyers on all channels, generating granular data sets to enable in-depth visibility, and providing actionable insights brings it all together.

Integrated Platforms for Data-Driven Supply Chain Transformation 

Cross-channel insight is not likely to be found across multiple integrations or within a
“black box” infrastructure that is several decades old. Modern organizations need modern integrated platforms that work with smart solutions and intelligent interfaces. Many modern organizations are now enhancing their processes with intelligent autonomous systems powered by digital innovations like the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to design a truly customer-centric supply chain.

Modern integrated platforms are AI/ML-enabled, can gather data from touchpoints across channels and partners, and deploy advanced data analytics that help analyze the information to find inefficiencies and potential ways of improvement. Such data-driven approaches help supply chain leaders forecast demand, get real-time updates across the network, and track product movement from factories to the shopping floor.

How AI Enables Channel Discovery and Optimized Delivery

Using the business needs and supply chain challenges described in this paper, we have identified five ways to introduce IoT, AI, and ML into supply chain initiatives to help companies select the most optimized integration channel and ensure uninterrupted delivery to maximize revenue generation:

1. Streamline partner onboarding: AI can automate and streamline the complex processes associated with managing channel partners, particularly if there are a lot of trading partners, a number of repeatable processes, or a large number of paper-based documents. AI helps identify repeatable processes based on a partner’s system configuration and data formats to speed up the partner onboarding process and ensure faster channel deployment.
    
2. Use business insights to pick the right channel: Manufacturers use a range of channels to sell products and, as those channels increase in number and in complexity, manufacturers need data to maximize the revenue produced through each channel. Solutions, which store transactional details and provide granular data sets, can be leveraged to deliver visibility. Visibility generates insights across partners, customers, and channels, and contributes to better decisions. Solutions that leverage real-time data from the live environment, and then use AI and advanced analytics, can help pick the right channels in which to invest. At this point, we can probably agree that better decisions lead to better outcomes.
    
3. Customize customer journeys: The world’s most recognizable and successful brands harness intelligent technologies to adapt to fast-evolving consumer demands, market conditions, and market challenges. IoT, AI, ML, big data, and easy-to-use analytics can be used to create in-depth customer profiles based on external data such as demographic models and purchasing behavior. Solutions that store transactional details allow for advanced customer segmentation, empowering companies to build more detailed, customized experiences based on the needs of the partner, customer, or channel population, where delivering a consistent brand experience facilitates customer engagement at the right moment and in the right channel.
    
4. Empower channel partners: Maximizing channel revenue also depends on how effectively supply chain partners like dealers, retailers, and distributors can attract new customers and deliver products via a compelling customer experience. A supply chain platform that provides seamless and timely integration with intelligent technologies will provide partners better tools along with the ability to deliver at the customer touchpoint.  Selecting smart solutions with intelligent interfaces empowers channel partners.
    
5. Measure performance: Leveraging access to data across channels and partners, modern organizations can effectively measure not only partner performance but their own performance in terms of sales, reach, engagement, and the depths of those engagements. Translate those processes into the selection of a new partner. Compare a partner who can process orders and invoices against a partner who can process orders and invoices, contracts, and chargebacks, and also maintain inventories; it’s a new game and works very similarly in the freight and logistics space just as well. For instance, say, you have two transportation service and logistics providers (TSLs) pitted against each other. While the first one can process shipments and invoices, the other can process shipments and invoices plus offer warehouse services such as the ability to pick, pack, and ship automatically, based on your need to supplement your business where and when needed. Selecting solutions with built-in reporting empowers your business by delivering the capacity to measure and display your own performance.
    

Toward an Automated Channel Discovery Process 

Market research has shown that digital tools can automate 80-90% of supply chain planning, and digital technologies such as AI can reduce inventory by up to 75%. In order to achieve a fully AI-powered supply chain, they will need a holistic view of all operations including application integration, along with an understanding of their business goals.

Smart solutions with intelligent interfaces deliver granular data and AI-powered platforms close the gap between channel performance and desired business outcomes. An optimized solution, one without human intervention, produces a self-driving supply chain. Such a supply chain reduces delays, costs, and losses in revenue, and delivers precision to a well-defined channel strategy.

About PartnerLinQ: Enterprise Connectivity at the Speed of Business

PartnerLinQ is an innovative, process-centric, easy-to-use integration platform that enables API-led, cloud-native integrations. It easily handles both standard and proprietary file-based formats, including custom integrations. The solution is well suited for retail, e-commerce, wholesale, transportation, 3PL, as well as distribution, digital, and analog partner extensible platform. It helps your team achieve operational efficiency and gain real-time visibility.

PartnerLinQ was designed and developed by a team with more than 25 years of deep integration experience.  The PartnerLinQ team has been providing industry-focused leadership in technology and consulting and in the development of innovative solutions that drive global supply chain transformation from the factory floor to the consumer’s doorstep. PartnerLinQ integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365, while also providing robust support for more than 70 ERP systems and ecommerce platforms. PartnerLinQ is a completely integrated solution that consigns big VAN and iPaaS solutions to the past. PartnerLinQ is a modern platform with the technology of tomorrow, providing enterprise connectivity at the speed of business today.