Regardless of where you operate in the supply chain today—as an FMCG brand, a co-packer, or any other trading partner in the value chain—everyone can agree that the world is moving faster than ever before, and in an increasingly unpredictable fashion. No one is spared from the impacts of a volatile marketplace: according to a study published by McKinsey, supply chain disruptions cost the average organization 45% of one year’s profits over the course of a decade.
Today’s businesses are increasingly adopting new software and technology solutions to help them catch up to the speed of today’s market. In a recent Gartner survey, 61% of respondents stated that technology is a source of competitive advantage.
Further, in a study published by the International Data Corporation, businesses will spend $2.3 trillion on transformation projects as of 2023–an indicator of the growing importance of software solutions to manage internal operations and to connect with teams both inside and outside the organization’s four walls.
Despite the amount of investment in digital transformation projects by businesses, however, the speed and sophistication of how these solutions interface with each other are, quite simply, lacking. Lack of data standardization and real-time flow can create silos even within one’s own organization, leading to communication breakdowns and missed opportunities to better serve customers.
An arguably greater risk is having these same data connectivity issues extend to the organization’s network of trading partners. Many suppliers and customers have not only their own configurations of software solutions, but also preferred data exchange types and most likely they will not match your own.
When the data flow between your organization and your external network becomes disconnected, mismatched, or lags behind, the consequences of inadequately responding to market disruptions can be great. And, in the field of supply chain, the bullwhip effect is a very real force that can cause initially minor issues to spiral into much larger dilemmas.
In the next three to five years, we will see an increase in the adoption of digital supply chain technologies, as well as technologies that improve human decision making.
-Gartner Predicts the Future of Supply Chain Technology
In today’s unpredictable consumer environment, it is critical to mitigate these data connectivity risks to ensure competitive longevity. That means investing in modern, sophisticated yet accessible solutions to ensure smooth cross-enterprise collaboration.
The ability to connect the flow of data in real time between not only your own internal systems, but across the systems of partners’ and customers’, can yield a plethora of business-related benefits.
Here are three ways that smarter, more focused data connectivity can enhance your business:
Increase data visibility for collaboration
In a supply chain executive survey conducted by McKinsey, almost 80% of respondents stated that they “need to improve and to invest in digital planning to increase supply chain visibility.”
As supply chains continue to struggle with disruptions and uncertainty, reinforcing the need for better cross-enterprise visibility and collaboration, connectivity and integration has never been more important. An advanced, low-code solution helps businesses bolster their service levels and speed-to-market by enabling seamless connectivity between their own software solutions and that of their customers and suppliers.
Enhance responsiveness
Enabling the flow of standardized, real-time operational data between trading partners can offer all parties the ability to communicate and respond more quickly to any disruptions or delays that can occur within the value chain. Further, an advanced integration solution can provide greater operational visibility and control by offering capabilities for customized, real-time alerts to specific incidents that require the attention of key personnel.
Improve productivity
Integration solutions don’t have to be costly, cumbersome projects that require significant IT resources and budget. Today’s advanced integration solutions can offer a simple, low-code yet powerful alternative for enabling connectivity between your organization’s teams as well as your external partners. By taking advantage of a solution such as this, your teams are unburdened from repetitive daily tasks and are free to dedicate their time to high-value projects, making your business run more efficiently.
Learn more about Nulogy Connect
In an industry that demands ever increasing sophistication and density in businesses’ IT architectures, it is correspondingly important that businesses quickly and easily connect with their customers and trading partners’ systems to maximize efficiency, profitability, and collaboration.
Nulogy Connect is a robust, scalable solution that leverages advanced low-code, no-code technology to make it simple, easy, and cost-effective for customers to connect with their trading partners. The solution also automates and accelerates the delivery of operational data to ensure that both internal and external teams stay in sync and are making decisions based on accurate, timely data.
To learn more about how Nulogy Connect can enable real-time connectivity within your business network, read the full Nulogy Connect announcement.