Our Solutions
Uniting Supply Chain Communities
Drive network visibility and collaboration to reduce lead times, improve efficiency, and ensure consistent quality across your supplier network.
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Purpose-built software for co-packers, 3PLs, and contract manufacturers to manage production, labor, and inventory in real time.
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Unleash agility and responsiveness with cloud-based, self-serve data analytics that simplifies complex data at scale.
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Unlock seamless connectivity with low-code/no-code solutions for connecting into your customers’ and suppliers’ technologies.
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Panelists:
David Freed
Chief Information Officer
MSI Express
Rosemary deAragon
Global Head of Industry, Retail & CPG
Snowflake
Jake Barr
CEO and Principal
BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting LLC
Christine Barnhart
VP of Product Marketing and Go To Market
Nulogy
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Solutions
Data Solution Self-Serve Data Analytics
Unleash agility and responsiveness with cloud-based, self-serve data analytics that simplifies complex data at scale.
Nulogy’s Data Solution provides a cloud-based, self-serve data analytics offering that enables customers to explore complex data at scale for data-driven decision making.
Data is crucial to responding to the world in which we live today. In an increasingly complex world, with increasingly complex product requirements, we need to know what is happening–when and where.
For enterprises both large and small, more than ever there, is a critical need for technology that can keep up with the speed of the current market–including technology that can analyze and harness real-time operational data. Data is correspondingly increasing in importance as an untapped resource for enterprise longevity and growth.
Customer Success Story: MSI Express
Learn how the Nulogy Data Solution helps MSI Express identify waste, increase quality, and improve customer service.
Access the Case StudyNulogy Data Solution
Enhance business performance with data analytics
Dashboards
Create near-real time data dashboards
Create dashboards powered by near-real time analytics. Provide a 360-degree view of your business, tracking production operations from start to finish.
Data Sharing
Break down data silos between partners
Query and export data to your own data warehouse for analytics and reporting.
Data Analysis
Analyze complex data for business insights
Feed machine learning models for predictive and prescriptive analytics. Conduct root cause analyses of operational issues. Track changes in data over time for trend analysis, and variance analysis – comparing estimated versus actual values.
Leverage Robust & Seamless Connectivity
Stay in sync and collaborate better with your customers
Key features
- Create dashboards powered by real-time analytics
- Query and export data to an organization’s own data warehouse for analytics and reporting
- Feed machine learning models for predictive and prescriptive analytics
- Conduct root cause analyses of operational issues
- Track changes in data over time for trend analysis, and variance analysis – comparing estimated versus actual values
Create Visibility
Leverage data from across your organization to gain valuable insights into end-to-end supply chain operations and your organizational metrics—breaking down silos and eliminating data latency.
Optimize Efficiencies and Increase Revenue
Build insights to optimize processes, gain operational efficiencies, reduce waste, and manage costs to drive revenue and maximize opportunities.
Enable Data-driven Decision-making
Empower internal teams to make data-driven decisions.
Improve Agility
Facilitate real-time analysis and decisions to increase flexibility and resilience to accommodate changing demands.
Ensure Competitive Edge
Use data to drive descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics—promoting supply chain maturing—and surpassing the competition.
Create Visibility
Leverage data from across your organization to gain valuable insights into end-to-end supply chain operations and your organizational metrics—breaking down silos and eliminating data latency.
Optimize Efficiencies and Increase Revenue
Build insights to optimize processes, gain operational efficiencies, reduce waste, and manage costs to drive revenue and maximize opportunities.
Enable Data-driven Decision-making
Empower internal teams to make data-driven decisions.
Improve Agility
Facilitate real-time analysis and decisions to increase flexibility and resilience to accommodate changing demands.
Ensure Competitive Edge
Use data to drive descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics—promoting supply chain maturing—and surpassing the competition.
Next Step
Get in touch with our team to schedule a personalized demo or learn how we can help resolve your specific challenges.
Contact Us 
What do supply chains and music have in common? More than you might think. For my keynote presentation at Nulogy xChange 2023, which was hosted in Nashville (aka Music City), I wanted to use music to illustrate the value and need for collaboration in consumer brand supply chain networks.
Let’s take a look at some surprising parallels between these two seemingly unrelated practices. Some shared principles between the two include:
- Connect with people
- Synchronize with partners
- Anticipate variability
Connect with people
By itself, a single musical note is barely recognizable or noteworthy. But, string together a series of notes and ultimately you can create a song. Hum a tune or play a track, and it will generate a response from listeners.
If you think of the visual parallels, a composition in music is a series of notes. Similarly, supply chains are traditionally depicted as a literal chain: a sequence of connected nodes, assets, or individuals that are connected together. And, whether it be colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers, we are personally connecting with people. Connections matter.
Just like the single music note, one business alone cannot create or bring a final product to market. When working together with other partners, however, supply chain providers create some of the most well-known and impactful products that are used and consumed by people everyday.
In both music and supply chain, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Ultimately, visibility between partners is needed to connect the dots. In today’s complex global supply chains, visibility is crucial to effectively manage risks and make informed decisions. Collaborative supply chains leverage technology and data sharing to provide real-time visibility into inventory levels, transportation routes, demand patterns, and other critical information. This enables supply chain partners to proactively identify and mitigate risks, optimize inventory levels, and respond to changing customer demands.
Without visibility, it is very difficult to communicate, let alone collaborate, innovate, or build trust. Visibility enables the connections that make true collaboration happen.
Synchronize with partners
Now that we’ve established that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, let’s talk about the importance of synchronization. Regardless of your musicality or abilities, we can all empathize with that dreaded feeling of singing off-key, or dancing with two left feet.
Synchronization matters in music, regardless of whether you’re the performer or the audience. Everyone is partaking in the same experience – everyone feels the highs of perfect orchestration and the lows of missed beats.
In the world of supply chain, hundreds, if not thousands of businesses, suppliers, and brands all around the world are trying to navigate a climate rife with disruption. A myriad of professionals—supply chain planning, procurement, and IT, among others—are working together around the clock with a shared goal: to continually deliver the everyday products we all need to sustain our quality of life.
And, just as the different layers that comprise a song—such as the baseline, melody and vocals—create a harmonious result, trading partners across multiple echelons in the supply chain need to work together in concert.
The challenge, of course, is synchronization: when multiple parties across the globe are collaborating to plan, execute, and deliver multitudes of product shipments every day, is everyone on the same page? Can their systems keep up with the real-time disruptions, demand shifts, and shortages that have become part and parcel of today’s market?
In other words: are all the above parties reading off the same song sheet? Do they know who is leading the dance? Are they equipped with the tools needed to harmonize together? If not, what are the repercussions of being offbeat and off-key?
In the supply chain, like in music, staying synchronized is the objective. If you have one party out of sync, that creates waste and confusion, and the bullwhip effect can exacerbate the issue. Conversely, investments made in synchronizing partners and processes within complex supply chain networks leads to more accurate data and insights, faster response, and ultimately, more agile supply chains.
Anticipate variability
Another key component to harmonizing music is managing variability. For example, consider a DJ that is playing at a wedding or a party. When he or she is mixing two different songs, the transition must be seamless. Regardless of whether the beat transitions to a lower or higher tempo, there is a shift in variability.
Good DJs can smoothly navigate these shifts in variability, keeping the party going for everyone. Bad DJs, on the other hand, can ruin the vibe and cause disruption and confusion in the audience.
In the world of supply chain, variability stems from a wide range of potential events: natural disasters, shortages of goods, pandemics, or even a ship stuck in a canal. These events can result in delays in production, transportation disruptions, or even damage to inventory or facilities.
And that variability is here to stay. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, disruptions are actually increasing over time.
A more responsive and agile design to supply chains are required. The ability to respond to changes in production and adapt to demand changes is critical.
Brands are also increasingly weighing the ease of doing business including transparency, trust, agility, adaptiveness and communications. This emphasis is underscored further by real-time visibility and cross-company collaboration.
In a recent analysis done by Supply Chain Insights, the gap to improve in the areas of Manufacturing Visibility, Supplier Visibility, Logistics Visibility and Enterprise Visibility is immense.
Across all four elements of visibility, there are massive opportunities–with the gap being most pronounced in Supplier Visibility, including Contract Manufacturing, Packaging & 3PLs. That gap can only be closed through collaboration.
How can businesses take advantage of this gap in visibility? By enabling the data visibility needed in their systems to collaborate more effectively with their customers and trading partners. And only a multi-enterprise collaboration platform such as Nulogy can shine a light into the black box of your network to work together seamlessly.
Fine-tune your collaborative capabilities today
In summary:
Value your connections: Make sure you have the visibility you need to work together effectively both within your organization as well as beyond its four walls.
Stay in sync with them: Use that visibility to collaborate effectively with trading partners to minimize waste and drive efficiency and accuracy.
Collaborate to manage variability: Variability and disruption is here to stay. Anticipate changes in tempo and ensure you and your trading partners can manage them when they come.
Supply chain collaboration is not just a buzzword, but a critical enabler of business success in today’s dynamic business environment. It fosters innovation, enhances visibility, improves sustainability, and strengthens relationships. It’s time for businesses to embrace a collaborative mindset and work together to unlock the full potential of their supply chains.
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Data integration and connectivity are becoming increasingly important to supply chain providers, and for good reason. As businesses introduce more and more software solutions into their operations to keep up with today’s volatile market, the amount of data being generated within their systems—as well as their partners’—is expanding at a mind-boggling pace. In fact, Okta estimates that large companies deploy as many as 187 apps on average, with smaller companies deploying even as many as 89.
Despite the vast amount of business growth opportunities available to enterprises that are able to harness their data for improved business outcomes, there are continuing challenges with enabling and integrating data into existing business strategies.
For some organizations, ensuring data quality is an ongoing issue. For others, the main challenge lies in converting a vast amount of data into actionable insights. Every business sits in its own data maturity stage, which in turn presents its own unique set of challenges.
To discuss and address these challenges, Nulogy hosted a webinar session with leading experts in data analytics and digital networks within the supply chain:
- David Freed, CIO at MSI Express
- Rosemary DeAragon, Global Head of Industry, Retail & CPG at Snowflake
- Jake Barr, CEO & Principal at BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting LLC
I had the privilege of moderating this discussion amongst these experienced industry leaders, and came away with three key insights that may help you efficiently harness the data within your business:
1. Adopt the “Three Rings” approach
When putting together a plan to integrate data into your business strategy, analysis paralysis often rears its ugly head in the beginning stages. What data should a business focus on and when? How much data is enough to harness for business insights?
To help address this dilemma, Rosemary DeAragon at Snowflake offered a framework for organizing the data that flows through one’s organization. This framework can be described as three concentric rings expanding outwards:
- First-party data: The innermost ring, comprising internal data such as operational and financial data.
- Second-party data: The middle ring, representing shared data between your business and an external party.
- Third-party data: The outermost ring, made up of data generated and driven by external forces.
These three rings, DeAragon says, come with their own respective challenges. For example, in the ring of first-party data, businesses can run into issues regarding data quality or data ownership within the organization. Issues such as these can spiral into larger business challenges such as erosion of trust, as there is reduced buy-in amongst internal stakeholders for leveraging said data.
Challenges encountered within the ring of third-party data are of a different nature entirely. For example, data external to your business and trading partners, such as weather and shipping traffic, can be hugely beneficial for planning and scheduling, but are also immense data sets that require additional resources to parse and act upon.
DeAragon concluded that roadblocks in data strategy are unique to each of these three different types of data. Organizing your data into these three categories can help prioritize where and how to focus your efforts.
2. Crawl, walk, run
Jake Barr of BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting observed that in his experience, enterprises were sometimes tempted to skip steps when integrating data analytics into their operations, with the goal of quickly transitioning to more data-driven business operations at the expense of proven scalability, leading them toward the pitfall of doing too much, too quickly in uncharted territory.
Barr explained that this fast-tracking of strategy development can be dangerous and myopic, and can lead to wasted capital and human effort without a holistic, scalable, tested approach. Instead, he proposed a “crawl-walk-run” approach to incorporating data into business operations.
For example, using this approach, a consumer brand would select one strategic supplier out of its entire network, then focus on a clear, measurable objective for the data integration project. By sharing data and working together toward this objective, both teams can measure the results and leverage their experience to improve and reiterate the process. This cycle of continual improvement, and the efficiencies gained by both parties, can then be rolled out to additional sites.
By adopting a more gradual strategy, a single, focused project at a single site can scale to additional sites using the experience and knowledge gained from previous data integration projects.
3. Align data with your front line staff
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.
As someone who has worked closely to integrate data into business operations, David Freed at MSI Express stressed the importance of aligning data teams with business operations teams. For example, at MSI Express, data teams work closely with production floor staff to align on what the production data is saying and why. This strategy is intended to break down silos between teams, and collaborate with a deeper understanding of how their respective team processes impact each other’s output.
By working together in a more holistic manner, for example, data teams within supply chain operations can better understand the significance of metrics such as production output numbers, and troubleshoot roadblocks that may be encountered by teams on the shop floor. Conversely, shop floor staff can put their trust into the data that their output is generating, and gain better direction and insight into how to improve their efficiency and productivity.
David Freed added the final point that, similar to Jake Barr’s view, the use of data needs to be focused on a single realistic, measurable area of the business. Instead of initially setting high-level KPIs such as improving capacity or profitability, it is more insightful to narrow down the measured metrics to a specific date or area of focus for the business, such as improving OTIF for a specific customer during a specific time period. By setting focused goals and involving all the staff involved in the project, businesses will be in a much better position to scale up data integration in other areas of the business.
Access the on-demand webinar for more insights
Data-driven strategies offer a wealth of benefits for improving the efficiency and profitability of businesses; however, building and executing these strategies requires focus, direction, and a measured, organized approach.
It was a pleasure to moderate the discussion between our expert panelists, and I invite you to sit in on the on-demand webinar for even more nuggets of wisdom.
For more insights on leveraging data and connectivity in supply chain, watch the full Nulogy webinar, Leveraging data and connectivity for collaborative supply ecosystems.
Some of Our Amazing Attendees
And here’s what came of it…
Enables Nulogy customers to gain valuable insights into end-to-end supply chain operations
CHICAGO, IL, October 25 – Nulogy, a leading provider of supply chain collaboration solutions, today announced the launch of the company’s newest addition to its Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Business Network Platform (MESCBN): the Nulogy Data as a Service (DaaS) Solution. The company is unveiling the new solution today at the PACK EXPO International tradeshow and conference in Chicago, Illinois.
The Nulogy DaaS solution makes available new self-serve analytics options for Nulogy users. Data accessed via DaaS will enable clients to build analytics capabilities to explore complex data at scale and have complete control over the end analytics output for data-driven decision making.
Jason Tham, Nulogy CEO and co-founder, said, “Supply chain leaders are clamoring for access to data of all types, and Nulogy’s focus on upstream suppliers makes this offering especially important for these companies. In many cases, this is the ONLY upstream supplier data they have access to. Combining this data into their existing analytics or AI solutions will provide strong, actionable insights that will translate into hard dollar savings and operational efficiencies.”
With near real-time data from Nulogy systems, Nulogy DaaS users can:
- Create dashboards powered by near-real time analytics, e.g. OTIF, variance to plan, OEE, etc.
- Query and export data to an organization’s own data warehouse for analytics and reporting
- Feed machine learning models for predictive and prescriptive analytics
- Conduct root cause analyses of operational issues
Track changes in data over time for trend analysis, and variance analysis – comparing estimated versus actual values - Provide a 360-degree view of the business, tracking production operations from start to finish
“MSI Express has a vision to use data to drive improvements across all of our operations,” said David Freed, CIO at Nulogy customer MSI Express. “We joined the beta program for Nulogy’s DaaS solution earlier this year and have already started to reap benefits from the solution. The Nulogy DaaS solution provides us with the data we need to identify waste, increase quality, and improve our customer service levels.”
The solution is available immediately for existing Nulogy customers and prospective customers. For more information (including pricing), companies should contact their Nulogy Customer Success Manager or Account Executive.
About Nulogy
Nulogy, a leading supplier of digital supply chain solutions, enables customers and their supplier communities to collaborate on a multi-enterprise platform in order to deliver with excellence to an ever-changing consumer market. The Nulogy Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Business Network Platform optimizes upstream supply ecosystems composed of brand manufacturers, contract manufacturers and packagers, third party logistics providers, raw material and packaging suppliers to accelerate supply chain responsiveness and collaborate at the speed of today’s market.
Nulogy Media Contact
Erin Farrell Talbot
President, Farrell Talbot Consulting Inc.
erin@farrelltalbot.com
Nulogy co-founder and CEO pens a Think Tank piece for Supply Chain Brain
The manufacturing supply chain has been bruised and battered in the last few years, and the hits keep on coming: the pandemic, extreme weather, geopolitical challenges, the Great Resignation, and a wave of retirements – and now, global inflation…
“
Bringing Nulogy to the table to allow us to identify our biggest opportunities around waste in the entire supply chain, and present that to our customers and vendors so we can work together to reduce that waste, is very important. It’s where we’re driving a lot of our pathways to net-zero.
David Freed
CIO, MSI Express
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