10 Ways A Data Gateway Improves Time to Value Across Your End-to-End Supply Chain

Supply chain practitioners seeking the best way to speed decision intelligence, unify supply chain data, and increase operational efficiency can benefit from a supply chain data gateway. A data gateway is essentially a connective tissue across your supply chain, providing unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities.

Here are 10 ways a supply chain data gateway can improve your performance across the end-to-end supply chain.

1.Enables You to Identify Inefficiencies and Make Better and Informed Decisions

A unified view of your data accelerates informed decision making and provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your supply chain. For example, with a data gateway, a supply planner gains accelerated access to customer orders, inventory levels, and transportation schedules, all in one place, to increase the user experience of making the right choice to identify inefficiencies and make better, more informed decisions.

2. Reduces Implementation Times

Enterprises and supply chain software providers strive to reduce application implementation times. A data gateway can serve as a front-end for a range of supply chain software applications, speeding and simplifying data ingestion, integration, and staging processes, significantly reducing application implementation times, lowering operational costs, and accelerating time to value.

3. Provides the Right Data for the Right Users

Making it easier to provide the right data for the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format reduces dependency on IT resources. This can be achieved through low-code and self-service access, making formerly siloed data accessible to business users and data stewards, faster and with less overhead, eliminating reliance on developers.

4. Allows for Growth

Long-term growth and relevance for your organization depends on your ability to adapt to changing business needs and data requirements. As an organization grows, and its data requirements expand, a supply chain data gateway’s performance should not suffer when demand increases. Instead, a high level of performance is expected even when dealing with a significantly large volume of users, data, and requests.

5. Automates Data Operations

Managing data operations can require a lot of human capital and operational costs. With a data gateway you can automate data operations, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving overall efficiency. This includes automated data processing, transformation, and management tasks, which help streamline data operations, reduce errors, and lower operational costs.

6. Provides Flexibility to Connect with a Wide Range of Data Sources

Flexibility is crucial for organizations that need to connect with a wide range of data sources and applications. With a data gateway you have the flexibility to support open data access and enable seamless integration with other systems and applications. It should be easy to connect to new data sources as the need arises, such as ESG or SNEW (social, news, events, weather) data.

A data gateway gives you the flexibility to support supply chain data unification and exchange with an extensible canonical supply chain data model, ensuring that data is stored and managed in a consistent and structured manner, and allowing for easy integration and growth. It also feeds downstream applications including BI, reporting, and supply chain applications, with the right data sets, in the formats the applications expect, and at the right time the data is needed.

7. Improves Supply Chain Visibility and Efficiency

Identifying bottlenecks, optimizing inventory levels, and improving overall efficiency are goals for all supply chain practitioners. Achieving these goals requires visibility into the entire supply chain. This visibility, a comprehensive view of data across the entire supply chain, is made faster and easier with a data gateway. A manufacturing company, for example, can monitor real-time data from its suppliers, production lines, and distribution centers. By analyzing this data, the company can identify areas for improvement and implement changes to improve operational efficiency.

8. Accelerates Decision-Making and Strategic Planning

The ability to access and analyze timely, accurate, and consistent data is essential for effective decision-making and strategic planning. A data gateway provides users with real-time data to make accelerated, informed decisions, based on data from the entire supply chain. This enables companies to react faster to disruptions and exceptions and know that you are making the most informed decision possible.

9. Ensures High Security and Reliability

A cloud-based approach allows an organization to focus on core business activities by reducing the need for in-house IT management. With a data gateway that is fully managed and hosted in major cloud providers, organizations can be ensured high security and reliability so you can focus on making sense of the data.

10. Facilitates Sustainability Reporting and Environmental Compliance Goals

ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting and compliance are growing in importance and yet many organizations are struggling to collect and connect data from some of these new sources. A data gateway provides a unified and harmonized view of supply chain data, which is essential for generating accurate and reliable ESG reports. By integrating data from various sources, including IoT devices and third-party systems, organizations can monitor and manage their environmental impact more effectively. In manufacturing, companies can track and report on carbon emissions, water usage, and waste generation, reducing their environmental footprint and improving sustainability performance.

Final Thought

Quick and easy access to live and historical data is critical for supply chain practitioners, data analysts, stewards, and engineers in any industry. Here are just a few examples of industries that can benefit from a supply chain data gateway:

• Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Consumer Packaged Goods (FMCG and CPG): In FMCG and CPG, the ability to make rapid, data-driven decisions is crucial for staying competitive in a fast-paced market. Companies can optimize their supply chain operations by using a data gateway that provides a unified and harmonized view of data. For instance, a logistics manager can monitor real-time data on inventory levels, customer orders, and transportation schedules to make better informed decisions and reduce lead times and costs while improving customer satisfaction.
• Healthcare: In healthcare, a data gateway can improve supply chain visibility and inventory optimization by providing a unified and harmonized connective tissue of data. This provides a data foundation to optimize medical and supply fulfillment to limit procedure cancellations along with real-time data analytics.
• Third-Party Logistics (3PL): In the 3PL sector, a data gateway can significantly enhance decision making by providing a unified and harmonized view of data. By integrating data from different sources, logistics managers can make more informed decisions about when and how to fulfill orders. Additionally, the real-time data access and analytics capabilities of a data gateway can help in identifying and addressing issues as they arise, such as delays in transportation or shortages in inventory.
• Application and Solution Providers: For application and solution providers, a data gateway can reduce customer implementation times and lower operational costs. By providing a low-code, self-service data gateway front-end, software providers accelerate time to revenue and improve customer satisfaction.
• Wholesale Distribution: In wholesale distribution, a data gateway can help optimize inventory levels and improve supply chain visibility. By providing a unified and harmonized view of data, distributors can gain a comprehensive understanding of their operations, from supplier relationships to customer demand. This can help in identifying inefficiencies and implementing changes to improve operations and customer satisfaction.
• Automotive: Automotive manufacturers face a myriad of challenges, but having access to anticipated supplier disruptions to ensure parts availability is one of the most notable challenges. With a data gateway, you gain visibility across their suppliers, enabling them to provide accurate data for actionable insights through a prescriptive control tower to drive a resilient, agile, and intelligent supply chain.
• Manufacturing: A smart factory relies on IT-OT integration. With a data gateway, you can easily combine data from OT systems and real time signals from the shop floor with enterprise IT and analytics systems to enable manufacturers to improve quality, efficiency, respond faster to events, and predict and avoid problems before they occur.
• Public Sector: Government agencies are engaged with supply chains from multiple perspectives. They monitor food, drug, and public safety, transportation, materials and other sectors for real-time visibility and decision support. They provide supply chain logistics for agencies as they deal with thousands of suppliers and need real-time insights to drive efficiency. And they support maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) for agencies that need to track and maintain assets and infrastructure across multiple sectors of the economy. Access to real-time, unified data makes all of these processes more efficient and compliant.

If it sounds impossible to achieve all the benefits outlined above through one solution, I assure you, it is not. A data gateway makes it faster and simpler to integrate, harmonize, and normalize disparate data and deliver it to the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format to accelerate time to value.

Learn more at InterSystems.com/DataGateway.

Mark Holmes
Head of Supply Chain Market Strategy
InterSystems

Mark Holmes is Head of Global Supply Chain Market Strategy at InterSystems, a creative data technology provider. He brings more than 25 years of experience in consulting, manufacturing operations, and software development from such organizations as Dow Chemical, GS1 (Brussels), Aspen Technology, and CGI. He specializes in working with manufacturers and retailers/CPG to solve their most difficult supply chain issues through digital transformation with a modern data fabric architecture. Breaking down data silos and leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive actionable insights throughout an organization’s global supply chain, Mark has delivered value to companies like Tyson Foods, Ferrero Roche, TJX Companies, Hard Rock Café, and Albertsons.

Mark joined InterSystems in 2021 to broaden InterSystems global market in supply chain. Holmes has been a board member for the Association for Supply Chain Management and is APICS certificated in Transportation, Logistics and Distribution (CTLD) from the same organization. He earned a BS degree in business administration from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and an MBA from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

• • Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Consumer Packaged Goods (FMCG and CPG): In FMCG and CPG, the ability to make rapid, data-driven decisions is crucial for staying competitive in a fast-paced market. Companies can optimize their supply chain operations by using a data gateway that provides a unified and harmonized view of data. For instance, a logistics manager can monitor real-time data on inventory levels, customer orders, and transportation schedules to make better informed decisions and reduce lead times and costs while improving customer satisfaction.
  • Healthcare: In healthcare, a data gateway can improve supply chain visibility and inventory optimization by providing a unified and harmonized connective tissue of data. This provides a data foundation to optimize medical and supply fulfillment to limit procedure cancellations along with real-time data analytics.
  • Third-Party Logistics (3PL): In the 3PL sector, a data gateway can significantly enhance decision making by providing a unified and harmonized view of data. By integrating data from different sources, logistics managers can make more informed decisions about when and how to fulfill orders. Additionally, the real-time data access and analytics capabilities of a data gateway can help in identifying and addressing issues as they arise, such as delays in transportation or shortages in inventory.
  • Application and Solution Providers: For application and solution providers, a data gateway can reduce customer implementation times and lower operational costs. By providing a low-code, self-service data gateway front-end, software providers accelerate time to revenue and improve customer satisfaction.
  • Wholesale Distribution: In wholesale distribution, a data gateway can help optimize inventory levels and improve supply chain visibility. By providing a unified and harmonized view of data, distributors can gain a comprehensive understanding of their operations, from supplier relationships to customer demand. This can help in identifying inefficiencies and implementing changes to improve operations and customer satisfaction.
  • Automotive: Automotive manufacturers face a myriad of challenges, but having access to anticipated supplier disruptions to ensure parts availability is one of the most notable challenges. With a data gateway, you gain visibility across their suppliers, enabling them to provide accurate data for actionable insights through a prescriptive control tower to drive a resilient, agile, and intelligent supply chain.
  • Manufacturing: A smart factory relies on IT-OT integration. With a data gateway, you can easily combine data from OT systems and real time signals from the shop floor with enterprise IT and analytics systems to enable manufacturers to improve quality, efficiency, respond faster to events, and predict and avoid problems before they occur.
  • Public Sector: Government agencies are engaged with supply chains from multiple perspectives. They monitor food, drug, and public safety, transportation, materials and other sectors for real-time visibility and decision support. They provide supply chain logistics for agencies as they deal with thousands of suppliers and need real-time insights to drive efficiency. And they support maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) for agencies that need to track and maintain assets and infrastructure across multiple sectors of the economy. Access to real-time, unified data makes all of these processes more efficient and compliant.

If it sounds impossible to achieve all the benefits outlined above through one solution, I assure you, it is not. A data gateway makes it faster and simpler to integrate, harmonize, and normalize disparate data and deliver it to the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format to accelerate time to value.

Learn more at InterSystems.com/DataGateway.

Mark Holmes
Head of Supply Chain Market Strategy
InterSystems

Mark Holmes is Head of Global Supply Chain Market Strategy at InterSystems, a creative data technology provider. He brings more than 25 years of experience in consulting, manufacturing operations, and software development from such organizations as Dow Chemical, GS1 (Brussels), Aspen Technology, and CGI. He specializes in working with manufacturers and retailers/CPG to solve their most difficult supply chain issues through digital transformation with a modern data fabric architecture. Breaking down data silos and leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive actionable insights throughout an organization’s global supply chain, Mark has delivered value to companies like Tyson Foods, Ferrero Roche, TJX Companies, Hard Rock Café, and Albertsons.

Mark joined InterSystems in 2021 to broaden InterSystems global market in supply chain. Holmes has been a board member for the Association for Supply Chain Management and is APICS certificated in Transportation, Logistics and Distribution (CTLD) from the same organization. He earned a BS degree in business administration from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and an MBA from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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