By Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of Edge Platforms, EdgeVerve
When Clive Humby coined the phrase “data is the new oil” back in 2006, he hit the nail on the head about the value of data in our modern world. But when you drill for oil, what you get is crude. It’s raw, unrefined, and honestly, not much use in that state. That’s precisely how suppliers in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Manufacturing industries should view data. We have moved past the state where we didn’t have the oil and were busy mining for it. That data scarcity is no longer a problem. In fact, we have too much data. Every company worth its salt collects and stores data generated by its systems and processes. The problem today is that this data is scattered, fragmented, sitting in outdated systems, and often stuck in silos. Just like crude oil, it’s not consumption-ready to fuel your business engine.
For suppliers, tapping into these data pockets across the value chain can open floodgates to rich, aggregated, and more granular consumer insights beyond sales and performance data. In today’s competitive and fast-moving business environment, you do need deeper insights into consumer baskets, their voice, and their shopping behaviors. Yet, getting these insights together and on time is not an easy feat.
Challenges in Turning ‘Digital Crude’ Into Actionable Insights
Traditionally, supply chain visibility has been limited to tier-one customers. So, a CPG company or a Manufacturer can only see what their immediate customers are doing. And it’s the same the other way around. This means when something changes a few tiers down the value chain, businesses are caught unawares and unprepared. In addition, the inability to access real-time, dynamic data and dashboards limits their ability to act in time to address disruptions like recalls, ESG violations, calamities, etc.
In the last few decades, supply chain collaboration has improved. Especially post-pandemic, the ecosystem has seen value in data sharing. Companies across the supply chain spectrum are opening up their data with cutting-edge platforms. For example, Walmart is using a next-generation data suite, Luminate, to give its suppliers access to valuable data. However, using this data remains a challenge for suppliers for several reasons:
- They lack systems to reconcile the data to their organization’s hierarchies and make it consumption-ready. The result? Inability to derive insights and take action.
- They are unable to match the pace of high-speed data coming in from business partners. As data feeds and reports constantly emerge, frequent restatements can go unnoticed or break data pipelines to the downstream systems and applications. This leads to a lack of on-time and quality data.
- Most CPG and Manufacturing companies need an array of custom KPIs for their internal decision-making. These KPIs may differ greatly from how the source system looks at them. As a result, they spend a lot of resources digging out everything they want.
- They lack the technical infrastructure to consume API feeds and large data volumes, creating issues in data ingestion and integration at speed. Rebuilding systems and data pipelines in line with source data is a lot of work.
How can suppliers overcome these challenges and leverage the power of data to propel business success?
Moving From Data to Decisions with An Integrated Platform
Real-time insights are not just beneficial but essential for supplier success. Interpreting data to identify trends and answer pivotal questions like “Which products are trending?” “Can we optimize transportation routes?” “How can we avoid material shortages?” helps suppliers confidently navigate the competitive terrain. However, to turn these large volumes of data into useful strategic tools, suppliers need an intelligent supply chain platform that can support decisions across the entire value chain.
An intelligent supply chain platform must deliver consistent, comprehensive, and high-quality data to enable granular, near-real-time visibility across the value chain. To do so, it must be capable of creating a peer-to-peer network connecting partners beyond immediate customers and suppliers. Then, it should accelerate the onboarding of data sources with pre-built adapters and rapidly convert this incoming flow of data to organization-specific hierarchies for seamless integration with internal systems. Strong AI-ML and automation capabilities are needed for uninterrupted, harmonized data flows that are available for immediate consumption and analysis with zero non-core manual intervention.
Intelligent platforms can optimize every step in the supply chain, from procurement to delivery. They can help identify bottlenecks, recommend transportation routes that shave hours off delivery times, improve supply and production planning, and enable better business outcomes. Take the case of a Fortune 500 consumer goods company that wanted to improve planning and fulfillment and increase its sales & market reach. However, they found it difficult to get trustworthy and timely demand information from channel partners. To overcome the challenge of manual processes and technology maturity, they adopted a cloud-based data exchange platform to connect channel partners across multiple markets. Seamless data exchange from channel partners enabled actionable insights that improved case fill rates by 8–10% and reduced non-productive inventory by 3-4%.
Data Mastery: The Key to Supplier Success
To stay on top in today’s competitive landscape, CPG and manufacturing players must be nimble – ready to sidestep chaos and seize opportunities. This requires decision and execution agility – a feat only possible if they master data-driven decision-making. Ultimately, companies that adopt and adeptly utilize advanced analytics will be the ones who will consistently deliver the right product at the right time at the right price.
About the Author:
Sateesh Seetharamiah is the CEO of Edge Platforms, EdgeVerve Systems Limited (An Infosys Company), and a board member and Whole-time Director at EdgeVerve. Sateesh is an industry veteran with three decades of rich experience in entrepreneurship, management consulting, IT leadership, and supply chain. Sateesh believes in AI and Automation’s immense potential in transforming future enterprises. With deep-rooted experience in the supply chain, he pioneered the Internet of Things (IoT) in its early days. Sateesh is one of the founding members of EdgeVerve and comes with rich experience in the product and platforms domain. Being a passionate technologist, Sateesh has been instrumental in establishing many
foundational technology capabilities that drive today’s EdgeVerve strategy. In addition, he has been on the board of various start-up firms in the IoT and pervasive computing space.
About EdgeVerve:
EdgeVerve Systems Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys, is a global leader in developing digital platforms, empowering clients to unlock unlimited possibilities in their digital transformation journey. Our purpose is to inspire enterprises with the power of digital platforms, thereby enabling our clients to innovate on business models, drive game-changing efficiency, amplify human potential, and foster a connected ecosystem. Our comprehensive platform portfolio (EdgeVerve’s AI Platform, AssistEdge, XtractEdge, and TradeEdge) across Automation, Document AI, and Supply Chain helps inspire global enterprises to bridge silos in people, processes, data, & technology, discover & automate processes, digitize & structure unstructured data, and unlock the power of the network by integrating value chain partners. With a deep-rooted entrepreneurial culture, EdgeVerve’s innovations are helping global corporations across sectors such as financial services, insurance, retail, consumer and packaged goods, life sciences, manufacturing, telecom, utilities, and more.
EdgeVerve. Possibilities Unlimited.
For further information, please get in touch with contact@edgeverve.com
