Democratizing Supply Chain Intelligence for Better Supply Chain Management

Businesses can get the best out of their supply chains if they can clearly comprehend the interplay between three major components – materials, information and finances.  Typically, they need to be able to answer these questions –

• Are there enough products in the warehouse to last a busy shopping period?
• Will the new inventory arrive in time before stocks run-out?
• Who are our fastest suppliers?
• Who are our best suppliers in terms of efficiency and least defects?
• The payment due date is approaching for which of our customers?
• What is the total amount of outstanding payments and what is the breakup?
• Which are our fastest or slowest moving products?
• Which are the best, worst and outlier suppliers and customers for on-time shipments?
• Can we predict lead times and which orders are going to be delayed?
• Can we see orders, inventory and bottlenecks all the way up and down the supply chain?
• Can we segment inventory to allot custom fulfilment inventories?

Decision makers in the supply chain need answers to these questions to ensure maximum availability at the fastest and lowest cost, but not by sacrificing reliability. They need the most up to date information to meet the real-time challenges they face from the consumption side of the business.

The conventional approach for getting such information is to rely on ERP and supply chain systems. Various in-house as well as external applications from suppliers and customers feed data into these systems to provide up-stream and down-stream visibility. Effectively, these systems record movement of materials, their availability and the cost per unit.

Such transactional data can provide a very detailed picture of the supply chain and can also provide the means to build detailed simulations. Today’s ERP systems are further supplemented with data from a range of Cloud-based applications. While it may seem that information from all these sources should serve to strengthen decision making, it just complicates matters.

The challenge lies in turning information from every system at your disposal into one cohesive data pool where patterns are readily visible to facilitate on the fly decision making.

DataScout is one such system that integrates data from all critical systems and becomes your one single source of insights. No more switching between multiple systems and screens to connect the dots or waiting endlessly for IT to get back to you.

The tool democratizes supply chain intelligence by pushing KPI insights on drillable dashboards. DataScout gives you the power to zero down on inefficiencies by giving high level overview as well as supplier and vehicle level insights.

DataScout’s simple to use interface runs on the back of a powerful big data analytics engine that combines, cleans and contextualizes data from all different sources. Machine learning and NLP algorithms are the main ingredients in DataScout’s secret sauce. We would love for you to get a taste for it.