The Key Elements of Making Your Supply Chain Ecosystem More Resilient

Global disruptions have caused supply chains to undergo extensive and unprecedented changes. Since the onset of the pandemic, Gartner’s research shows that only 21 percent of supply network leaders believe their process is highly resilient. In addition, McKinsey & Company found that the majority of companies that experienced issues through the COVID-19 crisis are now ramping up their use of modern digital tools, such as advanced analytics.

From shortages in both products and people, traditional business models are left to face the new challenges spurred on by the pandemic. To combat these issues, businesses must bring their strategies into the digital age where cutting-edge technology and tools are available to streamline operations, create heightened visibility and ignite execution speed.

Through digital advancements, companies have transparency into each link in their supply ecosystem and can minimize risks by analyzing data in real-time. Overall, the modern process allows organizations to gain a holistic view while monitoring each component in the chain. In fact, the modern network is shifting from a supply chain to a supply web of interconnected elements versus a single linear system.

Resilient modern logistics management serves as the driving force of business growth through end-to-end integration, clear visibility, and speed of execution.

Integration

Expanding partnerships is critical for businesses to improve their operations and maximize productivity. Businesses gain a competitive edge through intensified collaboration with suppliers and customers while addressing the disconnect, which is primarily attributed to ineffective or outdated technology. Leveraging partnerships with software solution providers is essential to acquiring up-to-date tools, from hybrid cloud applications to artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

With a tech solution that supports a unified digital supply chain, businesses are set to scale and prepared with better resilience and agility tools to set them up for success in the face of disruptions. Improving integration will lower costs, reduce waste, improve customer experience, and provide a comprehensive view of the business to guide improvements and changes thoughtfully.

Visibility

To remain agile and predictive during network disruptions, businesses must maintain full visibility and move away from outdated legacy operations that do not provide end-to-end visibility. This has become a common top priority, as 70 percent of companies are focusing on improving logistics visibility, and 80 percent strive to be more agile, according to International Data Corporation’s 2020 Global Supply Chain Survey. With intelligence capabilities to assess what is happening in real-time, companies can respond quickly to findings. Achieving complete visibility requires a hyper-automated solution.

PartnerLinQ by Visionet offers a proprietary supply chain solution that allows complete transparency, error handling, automation, and analytics. With a modern day, fully visible digital connectivity solution, companies can reduce costs and streamline operations. When businesses remove the need to make manual transaction adjustments, they can rely on automation that brings ease and visibility to the entire ecosystem.

Speed

Speed of execution is crucial for business leaders to remain agile and adaptive to changing market conditions while upholding sustainable business practices. Investing in the appropriate technologies for a modern-day logistics strategy is key, but it’s vital to implement these updates fast enough to be prepared for disruptions. With supply network disruptions consistently occurring, businesses must make a rapid digital transformation through resilient tools and platforms to ensure efficiencies.

Cross-enterprise digitization is imperative as goods are continually moving along the chain faster than the information on them. From design to manufacturing, data must flow in real time to continue the overall flow of the supply ecosystem. With zero-latency visibility and integrated systems, companies can meet the speed of execution standards. Essentially, each aspect works together to create a successful process.

True digital transformation is necessary to cultivate fully integrated, visible, and quickly executed modern-day supply chains. With a number of disruptive challenges, it’s crucial that businesses rely on third-party, end-to-end cloud solutions to improve integration for long-term success. While the buzzwords of digitization and transformation are becoming commonplace in business logistics discussions, the uniting factor is time. Cracks in supply operations, outdated systems, and recovering from disruptions are all common challenges that cost businesses valuable time.

To discover the latest expertise and practical tips on how top organizations are achieving a more agile, seamlessly integrated system, please watch this insightful session on Building Your Supply Chain Network. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rhrGf7oZEw 

Join Ahmed Raza, Vice President – Head of Product Engineering and Strategy of PartnerLinQ by Visionet, and featured speaker George Lawrie, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Forrester, to learn more about the dynamics of the modern-day network and the related challenges.

If you’re unable to attend the live webinar, follow this link to schedule a demonstration of how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete visibility.

Identifying and Mitigating Supply Chain Pain Points

Supply chain disruptions are inevitable. Eventually, a problem will arise that threatens to create costly delays and unhappy customers. Fortunately, it is possible to take steps to ensure goods move along even the most complex global supply chains without interruption. Gaining this ability to pre-mitigate issues before they arise requires identifying and constantly monitoring common supply chain pain points for any red flags.

Perfect order rate, a measurement of a company’s ability to fulfill orders on time and free of errors, is one important KPI to consider when measuring the viability of supply chain management. It accounts for variables such as when an order leaves the warehouse, whether it contains the correct quantity and quality of items, whether the customer receives it on time, and if there are any issues involving returns or payment. Although it’s simple math: subtract the failed orders from the perfect orders, but in reality, several factors can make measurement difficult. The customer may not provide feedback, so the company doesn’t learn about a failed order until after the customer files an official complaint or makes a return. Another common challenge is a lack of data sharing among supply chain partners, which hinders supply chain visibility.

Other KPIs to monitor include:

• Cash-to-cash time cycle measures the time between when the company pays its suppliers and when it receives money from its customers. It examines three key factors: days of inventory (DOI), days of payables (DOP), and days of receivables (DOR) to determine the amount of cash the company requires to fund its day-to-day business operations.
• Supply chain cycle time determines how long it will take for a supply chain to fulfill an order if it runs out of stock by measuring the total time to produce, package, and deliver the product. The shorter the time, the more agile, flexible, and resilient the supply chain becomes.
• Inventory turnover is based onhow many times the company sells its entire inventory within a specific period (e.g., per month, quarter, or year). The lower the number, the weaker the sales and revenue generation.

One of the most common factors that negatively affect these and other supply chain health KPIs is a lack of data that companies need to achieve complete real-time visibility over their entire supply chain. Consider the hypothetical example of a single shipment that must pass through more than 2000 interactions with suppliers and partners as it moves from source to final destination because a single blind spot can inevitably lead to unexpected disruptions. These can range from a supplier filing for bankruptcy or a dockworker strike to natural occurrences like weather-related events or, as the world learned the hard way, a global pandemic to geopolitical events.

Data empowers supply chain visibility. Without it, an organization cannot gather accurate insights into its global operations and be proactive in identifying and addressing problems before they turn into  severe disruptions. That’s why ARC Advisory Group predicts rising demand for technologies that enable companies to identify and respond quickly to supply chain issues and foster tighter collaboration with supply chain partners.

Businesses can utilize digital supply chain connectivity with solutions like PartnerLinQ by Visionet to gain full supply chain visibility. PartnerLinQ’s innovative capabilities, including intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks and channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity. To learn more about how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete supply chain visibility, please visit our website.

Keeping a Check on the Growing Complexity of Your Supply Chain

The Coronavirus pandemic is not unique in its ability to severely disrupt the world’s supply chains. The time is now for chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and supply chain executives to prepare for future events like trade disputes, cyberattacks, natural disasters, and global health emergencies. That begins with gaining full visibility over their supply chains, although that’s easier said than done given how complex supply chains have become.

The increasing complexity of supply chains is not a short-lived trend that will disappear once the world recovers from the pandemic. According to Gartner, supply chains have always been complex — with thousands of suppliers, partners, and products spanning a footprint that includes hundreds of sites and markets. Put simply, complexity keeps growing — supply chains add but rarely subtract it. 

Understanding the Future of Supply Chain

More than 50 percent of supply chain leaders Gartner surveyed expect complexity to increase over the next five years in most aspects of the operating model (e.g., equipment, projects changing design, business models, business partners), wreaking havoc on costs, risk, reliability, service level, customer satisfaction, and the ability to implement change. 

CSCOs face the constant threat of major supply chain disruptions as their companies adjust (or overhaul) their pre-pandemic business models and continue adding new suppliers, intermediaries, and sales channels to their B2B value chains. Achieving full supply chain visibility will enable them to proactively identify and mitigate potential disruptions.

Increasing visibility begins by improving communications among all transportation service and logistics providers (TSLs). For starters, transaction formats vary among partners and transactions; there is a wide array of variations across ocean freight, intermodal rail transportation, 3PL breakbulk operations, truckload and LTL carriers, warehouse operations, and ‘last mile.’ Truckload and LTL may appear similar, but they are far from aligned. Ocean, rail, and intermodal transportation are just as disparate, and there are huge differences between 3PL, 4PL, and direct-to-consumer (D2C), yet they often work together. However, since enterprise-level systems in these transportation service areas are just as specialized, collaboration on a common platform is untenable. 

TSLs who use multiple electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions are particularly vulnerable. Multiple EDI solutions mean more complications, more upgrades, and more interruptions. It also means spending less time concentrating on the tasks that are currently being performed and more time and resources on applications, cross-training, and “backup” planning in order to maintain consistent outcomes and increase productivity. The flow of event information across various partnerships becomes uneven and collaboration is challenging. The result is a tedious and seldom integrated partner-to-partner relationship that is too dependent on human intervention.

Perhaps nowhere is the impact of these issues more evident than on the rows of empty supermarket shelves. The baby formula shortage making news headlines is just the latest example of the many necessities like meat, eggs, dairy, and paper products that have been in short supply for more than two years. Constrained warehousing and severe driver/trucking shortages have manufacturers struggling to meet demand, which drives up costs, particularly for retailers who lack supply chain visibility and resiliency. 

Increased Visibility in Action

For example, a leading American baking company that has provided its signature line of flours to retailers, commercial bakeries, and food service companies, recognized the threat the pandemic represented to its vast network of farmers, millers, and distribution partners. It implemented PartnerLinQ to process transactions faster and more efficiently and gain the ability to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any errors that could disrupt communications and operations.

PartnerLinQ by Visionet is a digital supply chain connectivity solution with a host of innovative capabilities that seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks, channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity for the future. With capabilities for intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics, PartnerLinQ is the epitome of Visionet’s mission to meet the essentiality of connectivity, visibility, transparency, and resilience in today’s supply chains worldwide.

Additionally, PartnerLinQ’s detailed reporting capabilities allow the company to track key performance indicator (KPI) metrics and other data and better understand transaction messages, message types, and performance volumes.

Today, the company can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per day – nearly double the required capacity and is much better positioned to drive even greater efficiencies and adapt to the unexpected with cooperative technologies that provide real-time updates and actionable insights.

Further Insight into Future-Ready Solutions

Next month, CSCOs and supply chain executives from all over the world will convene in Orlando, Fla., for Gartner® Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2022 – the year’s largest event dedicated to helping supply chain leaders prepare for disruption, enable digital transformation and build sustainability as a competitive advantage. On Monday, June 6, Ahmed Raza, Vice President – Head of Product Engineering and Strategy at PartnerLinQ by Visionet, will lead a presentation on how to identify and understand growing supply chain challenges and outline effective and proven strategies that can help any business keep their growing supply chains in check while providing end-to-end visibility and complete control.

Attendees are invited to visit our booth (Booth # 109) and speak with our executive team about exciting new trends and solutions. In addition, we hope you’ll join us for a special 45-minute roundtable discussion on Tuesday, June 7 with Deepak Das, Senior Vice President – Digital Transformation at Visionet, on “Achieving Complete Visibility of a Supply Chain.”

Whether or not you plan to attend the Gartner event, you can follow this link to download our whitepaper, “Supply chain visibility: An imperative for transportation service providers” and contact us to schedule a demonstration of how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve full supply chain visibility.

How to Achieve Complete Visibility of Your Global Supply Chain

If you feel like your company faces an unending series of supply chain disruptions, you’re not alone. 68% of supply chain executives Gartner surveyed report that they have been constantly responding to high-impact disruptions over the last three years — and most of them did not have time to recover before the next disruptive event hit them.

Achieving end-to-end visibility over your company’s supply chain must be a top priority for 2022. Success requires gaining the ability to capture and analyze data in real-time to execute decisions more quickly and effectively.

Translation: stop running supply chain operations on legacy solutions, disparate siloed systems, and outdated business processes like updating spreadsheets. Ingesting real-time operational data from the supply chain ecosystem will significantly improve planning and decision-making processes and execution and make a company more agile and better able to adapt when the next inevitable disruption strikes.

“In 2022 and beyond, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) must update their vision to account for ongoing and unimagined disruption to global networks, operating models, and stakeholder demands,” says Simon Bailey, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Some of these disruptions are externally driven — such as material shortages, climate-driven disruption, or labor scarcity. Others are driven by the organization’s own digital transformation plans.”

The story of how a $110 million company and secure storage industry leader succeeded in achieving this level of visibility over its complex global supply chain can serve as a lesson to any company striving to improve supply chain resiliency.

The company manufactures a wide range of products from small, portable security cases to large fire and waterproof safes under various brands. A comprehensive analysis of its supply chain revealed that it needed deeper and more automated integration with its trading partners and end-to-end transaction visibility.

Despite operating in a modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, their supply chain solution was not fully integrated with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or with the growing direct-to-consumer delivery business, which had grown significantly since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. This forced reliance on several manual processes for collecting and analyzing data, such as orders, invoices, and advanced ship notices (ASNs). The entire direct-to-consumer business lacked visibility, and the electronic data interchange (EDI) solution could not facilitate real-time data sharing. There was no real-time visibility, control, error handling, automation, or analytical capacity.

The company decided to implement PartnerLinQ by Visionet, a digital supply chain connectivity solution with innovative capabilities, including intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics that seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks and channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity.

A critical factor in selecting PartnerLinQ was that it delivers a proprietary supply chain app ecosystem with EDI, B2B, and API management solution for Dynamics 365 that address the need for visibility, control, error handling, automation, and analytics. The PartnerLinQ platform was able to provide the hyper-automation that the company required, beginning with the direct integration of purchase orders into Dynamics 365. This integration was followed by the implementation of an internet draft security standard (or AS2), which was designed to enable business transactions to move securely over the internet and enable the quick transmission of process data.

PartnerLinQ helped the company achieve complete visibility over its supply chain, significantly reducing costs and streamlining its operations by automating processes, enabling business rules, and the rapid transmission of order-to-cash transaction processing through API and EDI.  PartnerLinQ’s innovative, process-centric approach to automation eliminated the need to make transaction adjustments manually. Tracking document counts, invoices, audits, and overall document lifecycles, became much easier and more visible than ever before. To learn more, follow this link to download the complete case study.

Overcoming the many current and emerging supply chain challenges companies worldwide now face will be top of mind for the hundreds of supply chain executives who will gather in Orlando, Fla., June 6-8 for Gartner® Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2022 – the year’s largest event dedicated to helping supply chain executives mitigate risk and navigate uncertainty in an increasingly dynamic and challenging environment.

We will be among these industry leaders attending this important event. We’re excited to meet with you in person at our booth (Booth #109) to brief you on how our exciting new solutions can help you improve supply chain resilience and overcome any future disruptions.

Additionally, two of our senior executives will lead interactive educational sessions during the Gartner event:

• Monday, June 6: Ahmed Raza, Vice President – Head of Product Engineering and Strategy at PartnerLinQ by Visionet, will deliver a presentation on identifying and understanding growing supply chain challenges and outline strategies for overcoming them.
• Tuesday, June 7: Deepak Das, Senior Vice President – Digital Transformation at Visionet, will lead a special 45-minute roundtable discussion on “Achieving Complete Visibility of a Supply Chain.”

If you do not plan to make the trip to Orlando, follow this link to schedule a demonstration of how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete supply chain visibility on a day and time that works best for you.

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