The holiday season is a time of opportunity and immense pressure, especially for businesses. With sales increasing by at least 30%, impatient consumers expect minimal wait time, partners look at filling immediate service requests, and burdened transportation and logistics cause delays. To top it all off, the employees need a vacation too!

The stakes are immense, with supply chains under stress due to surging demand, material shortages, and global disruptions. From warehouse operations to supply chain system management, skills gaps are affecting efficiency, causing delays, and ultimately impacting the bottom line. A recent survey by MHI revealed that 57% of supply chain executives cite hiring and retaining qualified workers as their biggest challenge—even surpassing material shortages and disruptions.

While technology can fill some of these gaps, it cannot do so alone. Combining innovative solutions and proactive workforce development is essential to alleviating holiday supply chain stress. That’s where PartnerLinQ comes in—a platform designed to transform your supply chain by integrating technology with your team’s capabilities.

Here are some serious facts:

What’s causing the holiday chaos?

1. Labor Shortages Across the Continuum

   • A U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis found that even if every unemployed person with experience in durable goods manufacturing was employed, only 75% of vacant jobs could be filled.
   • Shortages in critical areas like logistics, warehouse management, and trucking exacerbate delays and inefficiencies.

2. Increased Pressure from Demand Spikes

   • The holiday season amplifies demand across industries, with retail, manufacturing, and distribution hit hardest.
   • Delays in port loading/unloading, stockouts, and shipping bottlenecks cascade downstream to retailers and customers.

3. Manual Processes

   • Despite increasing investment in automation, 70% of supply chain leaders still rely on manual processes, according to Capgemini. This reliance creates inefficiencies and hampers scalability.

Who helps clear the chaos?

PartnerLinQ streamlines supply chain operations, helping businesses like yours tackle holiday season challenges with ease. By simplifying the partner onboarding process through its Common Processing Workflow and exclusive "white glove" onboarding service, PartnerLinQ ensures rapid integration at the speed of business. With its intuitive Business Rule Manager, the platform facilitated the migration of over 1,000 partners and customers in just 12 weeks, demonstrating its swift and efficient integration capability.

Built on a scalable Azure-based hybrid cloud architecture, PartnerLinQ handles transaction volumes that ensure clients like a leading American transport and logistics company can process nearly 800,000 daily transactions—double their current requirements. This scalability empowers the company’s expanding carrier network without compromising performance. 

PartnerLinQ simplifies IT infrastructure by seamlessly integrating with legacy systems and new TMS platforms. It eliminates extra licensing and enables greater operational efficiency through real-time updates and actionable insights.

Enhanced visibility enables clients to deliver consistent customer value at every touchpoint. Armed with service-level improvements, accelerated onboarding, and a better customer experience, our clients confidently continue to meet their service-level commitments, ensuring a smooth and stress-free holiday supply chain operation.

This is what PartnerLinQ does:

• Mitigate Labor Shortages: Automate 60-80% of repetitive supply chain tasks to maximize workforce productivity.
• Improve Efficiency: Reduce operational delays by up to 30% with AI-driven optimization.
• Scalability: Handle surges in demand during the holiday season without compromising speed or quality.
• Resiliency: Proactively address disruptions, minimizing their impact on downstream operations.

Time to Enjoy: Include PartnerLinQ as Your Holiday Lifeline

The holiday season doesn’t have to be synonymous with supply chain headaches. PartnerLinQ offers a comprehensive solution to navigate labor shortages, demand spikes, and operational bottlenecks by combining advanced automation with workforce enablement.

As the MHI report highlights, 74% of supply chain executives are increasing technology investments, and PartnerLinQ ensures that every dollar spent delivers measurable ROI.

Have I got your attention yet? If not, see how we do it.

Highly configurable technology platforms help companies achieve their visibility goals, collaborate with business partners, and eliminate manual work.  

Most legacy supply chain management platforms currently in place were installed decades ago. These monolithic systems served their purpose, but they haven’t kept up with the demands of the modern supply chain. They’re not configurable, they can’t integrate with third-party applications, and they require a lot of manual intervention. 

The challenges of using legacy systems don’t end there. Updating these platforms with the latest “bells and whistles” is expensive and, in many cases, not even possible. These solutions were built to do everything, which unfortunately means they don’t do any one thing very well.  

As the name suggests, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems may be good financial and operational management tools across a compant, but they weren’t designed to manage the increased complexities of modern global supply chains. That didn’t stop ERP platform solution providers from adding a range of capabilities or otherwise acquiring other solution sets — from transportation management systems (TMS) to warehouse management systems (WMS) to order management systems (OMS) — to their software suites.  

Customers, wanting all-in-one systems, often adopted those functionalities as they were introduced, never evaluating, or considering other options by assuming simplicity with one platform. However, this approach too often results in rigid IT infrastructures for which changing one requirement requires adjusting everything else, too.  

Breaking Down Supply Chain Visibility Barriers 

While cloud ERP systems in the last couple of years have increased, on-premises solutions are still dominant within many organizations. On-premise legacy systems also weren’t designed for external collaboration — something every company needs but not all have. Where a TMS may have been built to connect with external carriers and transportation providers, on-premise WMS was designed to manage what was happening within the four walls of the warehouse.  

The notion of external business partners being able to “see” one another’s inventory positions, and then use the data to help get customer orders delivered within two or three days, wasn’t available when most ERPs were being developed. This is just one visibility gap companies today deal with daily.  

The good news is that organizations can close these gaps and future-proof their supply chains with a highly configurable technology platform. PartnerLinQ helps companies establish a common data foundation incorporating a semantic layer for every industry (including specific products, hierarchies, and transportation routes).  

Once that foundation is established, we build out the platform with the customer’s unique needs in mind, using the technology already in place and the outside applications needed to get everyone working from the same playbook. By providing that critical connectivity layer, PartnerLinQ helps companies break through the barriers of their monolithic business systems and leverage the power of modern, advanced technology.  

Connectivity barriers don’t exist only within your four walls. For that reason, PartnerLinQ creates strong connections with all third parties you need to communicate and share data with, including your business partners, customers, and software applications. The ability to integrate with these entities is a critical step to gaining full end-to-end supply chain visibility and collaboration.  

Adaptable, Flexible Architecture

PartnerLinQ offers the architecture, tools, and data companies need to connect with all internal and external stakeholders. We also offer a no-code/low-code environment that vastly speeds up implementation times and lets each person within the supply chain configure, maintain, and optimize the connections on their own.  

As a cloud-native application, PartnerLinQ’s platform is vertically and horizontally scalable right out of the gate. The same can’t be said for many other supply chain integration platforms on the market today. With PartnerLinQ, you can scale from hundreds to millions of transactions per month without having to make changes to your system.  

A Supply Chain that Stands the Test of Time 

In this rapidly evolving business landscape, the right digital strategy is no longer a luxury — it’s a must-have. Organizations that fall behind in this area risk losing customers, market share and revenue to competitors investing in their digital strategies.  

Being tied to a monolithic software platform can impede your supply chain visibility, partner collaboration, and long-term growth prospects. With PartnerLinQ in your corner, you can get all your data into one, accessible place. You can adjust on the fly as your company grows. And you can develop a future-proof supply chain that withstands the test of time. 

To learn more about how PartnerLinQ can help you future-proof your B2B enterprise, contact our team today.

Ahmed Samnan Raza, CTO & Co-founder

Ahmed Raza leads a dynamic team dedicated to shaping a robust, next-generation SaaS platform catering to customers across diverse industries. With his firm belief in driving continuous innovation, Ahmed’s team is on a mission team to ensure that PartnerLinQ platform remains at the forefront of business technology evolution. With a wealth of experience, Ahmed previously served as the Vice President of Product Engineering at Visionet Systems, Inc. His journey with the PartnerLinQ began at its inception, and over his 18-year career, Ahmed has played a pivotal role in a wide array of digital transformation projects spanning various segments of the supply chain industry. This includes impactful contributions to sectors such as retail, consumer goods, apparel/footwear, transportation, and food & beverage, among others.