5 key challenges to connect supply chain data

How much manual work is required to ensure data completeness?

It is a reality in our industry that data is incomplete or simply not accessible. If all data is not available and maintained via automatic connections, there is a high level of manual work required to ensure data completeness. Visiting websites, receiving emails, or evaluating separate reports on excel is an additional source of cost and inefficiencies.

For most importers or exporters, the ocean leg is only the middle part of a complex journey that involves a series of logistic providers. Each of them has responsibilities within a specific leg or service and use their own systems and data standards. This gives rise to a highly fragmented digital landscape with multiple data streams that are difficult to integrate with one another. Combining data from all these parties has always been a challenge.

How to combine different reports into one and make it available to all the parts of the organization that need it?

If all information is captured to provide the day-to-day visibility for operations, it’s also needed to evaluate how this data is organized, stored, and retrieved for detailed analysis and scenario work.

This process becomes even more problematic when considering that each logistics service provider may have different types of information to share, an uneven level of technical capability, and use different formats to provide the desired files and data.

Adding more entities to this data capture only exacerbates the issues. While the data provided by ocean carriers follow similar standards, first and last mile extended visibility is a well-known pain point across all company sizes and industries. The data related to rail, trucking, inland gate-in or gate-outs are often unavailable or hard to access, requiring a high level of manual work, where data still might not be available.

How much do I spend on creating and maintaining EDI or API connections?

Allocating resources internally or hiring third parties to manage IT connections have a cost. Understanding exactly what this spend is contributes to the transparency of the overall operational costs.

Even within very sophisticated supply chains systems, there is a strong reliability on customized and costly EDI connections which are still peer-to-peer integrations and create silos. When direct connections are not available, manual input that requires hours of work or other types of reports that must be incorporated into the main system are a common alternative.

All these options have an impact and force companies to allocate resources, time, and investment in non-core activities. They also affect the ability of companies to react to exceptions in a timely manner due to the manual flows created.

How do I share this data to realize true collaborative efficiencies?

Having access to all the data is only the first step. In a journey that includes multiple modalities of transport and services provided by different entities the coordination and timeliness between them is key. Making information available to different partners facilitates their work and the handover between entities, driving gains in timeliness, efficiency and increasing trust.