Tony Winters, Chief Technology Officer of Rygen Technologies, discusses the importance of implementing advanced technology in supply chains to integrate disparate systems.
Supply chain management can be complex. The process of sourcing raw materials to a manufacturing facility and delivering to an end user involves many stakeholders, multiple modes of transportation, and a litany of customer service requirements.
Historically integrations have been heavily developer-driven, with tools that were complex and costly. Integrations would take weeks, months, or years in the most extreme cases. Changing requirements, technology shifts, and resources were all contributing factors.
Technology plays an increasingly large role in today’s supply chains. The challenge is that disparate platforms often do not communicate with each other, making end-to-end visibility hard, if not impossible. That is why many companies are looking for ways to integrate their systems, whether internally or externally.
Fortunately, new technologies in the Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) space are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Integrations move from being a developer problem to a business problem, where they belong. Augmented and enhanced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the speed at which integrations can happen today does not compare to the bloated processes of the past.
Supply chain managers are focused on controlling costs, so this is a factor to consider when determining how to integrate systems. Generally speaking, there is some overhead to running any level of integration. That overhead might be related to compute cost when it comes to running an iPaaS in the cloud, a paid license fee for an on-premise integration software, or simply paying third-party vendors to manage the integration(s).
It is important to compare the cost and benefits of adding integration tools with the alternative, which is having systems and technologies that don't communicate with each other. If that is the case, users end up with a multitude of disparate systems. While that isn't inherently bad, this can result in duplicate, dirty, and/or orphaned data. In other words, there isn't a single source of truth for any data flowing through these systems. Each transactional system manages its own data in its own way. Asking questions and receiving answers from that data becomes a daunting task due to the analysis that now has to be customized per system.
If companies select an integration platform that is easy to use, they may be able to handle the process with existing staff. While some level of investment is normally required, it does not have to be excessive.
There are numerous benefits to having integrated systems in today’s day and age, such as clarity, consistency, and accuracy of data. Ensuring these systems are well notified and remain in sync allows users to ask questions about their data and get consistent answers, no matter what system they’re looking at. Users receive a clear picture of what is happening in their supply chain and are able to truly manage genuine exceptions instead of false positives. This results in an ecosystem where each system compliments the other and runs in beautiful, tech harmony.
