How to Achieve Complete Visibility of Your Global Supply Chain

If you feel like your company faces an unending series of supply chain disruptions, you’re not alone. 68% of supply chain executives Gartner surveyed report that they have been constantly responding to high-impact disruptions over the last three years — and most of them did not have time to recover before the next disruptive event hit them.

Achieving end-to-end visibility over your company’s supply chain must be a top priority for 2022. Success requires gaining the ability to capture and analyze data in real-time to execute decisions more quickly and effectively.

Translation: stop running supply chain operations on legacy solutions, disparate siloed systems, and outdated business processes like updating spreadsheets. Ingesting real-time operational data from the supply chain ecosystem will significantly improve planning and decision-making processes and execution and make a company more agile and better able to adapt when the next inevitable disruption strikes.

“In 2022 and beyond, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) must update their vision to account for ongoing and unimagined disruption to global networks, operating models, and stakeholder demands,” says Simon Bailey, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Some of these disruptions are externally driven — such as material shortages, climate-driven disruption, or labor scarcity. Others are driven by the organization’s own digital transformation plans.”

The story of how a $110 million company and secure storage industry leader succeeded in achieving this level of visibility over its complex global supply chain can serve as a lesson to any company striving to improve supply chain resiliency.

The company manufactures a wide range of products from small, portable security cases to large fire and waterproof safes under various brands. A comprehensive analysis of its supply chain revealed that it needed deeper and more automated integration with its trading partners and end-to-end transaction visibility.

Despite operating in a modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, their supply chain solution was not fully integrated with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or with the growing direct-to-consumer delivery business, which had grown significantly since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. This forced reliance on several manual processes for collecting and analyzing data, such as orders, invoices, and advanced ship notices (ASNs). The entire direct-to-consumer business lacked visibility, and the electronic data interchange (EDI) solution could not facilitate real-time data sharing. There was no real-time visibility, control, error handling, automation, or analytical capacity.

The company decided to implement PartnerLinQ by Visionet, a digital supply chain connectivity solution with innovative capabilities, including intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics that seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks and channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity.

A critical factor in selecting PartnerLinQ was that it delivers a proprietary supply chain app ecosystem with EDI, B2B, and API management solution for Dynamics 365 that address the need for visibility, control, error handling, automation, and analytics. The PartnerLinQ platform was able to provide the hyper-automation that the company required, beginning with the direct integration of purchase orders into Dynamics 365. This integration was followed by the implementation of an internet draft security standard (or AS2), which was designed to enable business transactions to move securely over the internet and enable the quick transmission of process data.

PartnerLinQ helped the company achieve complete visibility over its supply chain, significantly reducing costs and streamlining its operations by automating processes, enabling business rules, and the rapid transmission of order-to-cash transaction processing through API and EDI. PartnerLinQ’s innovative, process-centric approach to automation eliminated the need to make transaction adjustments manually. Tracking document counts, invoices, audits, and overall document lifecycles, became much easier and more visible than ever before. To learn more, follow this link to download the complete case study.

Overcoming the many current and emerging supply chain challenges companies worldwide now face will be top of mind for the hundreds of supply chain executives who will gather in Orlando, Fla., June 6-8 for Gartner® Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2022 – the year’s largest event dedicated to helping supply chain executives mitigate risk and navigate uncertainty in an increasingly dynamic and challenging environment.

We will be among these industry leaders attending this important event. We’re excited to meet with you in person at our booth (Booth #109) to brief you on how our exciting new solutions can help you improve supply chain resilience and overcome any future disruptions.

Additionally, two of our senior executives will lead interactive educational sessions during the Gartner event:

Monday, June 6: Ahmed Raza, Vice President – Head of Product Engineering and Strategy at PartnerLinQ by Visionet, will deliver a presentation on identifying and understanding growing supply chain challenges and outline strategies for overcoming them.
Tuesday, June 7: Deepak Das, Senior Vice President – Digital Transformation at Visionet, will lead a special 45-minute roundtable discussion on “Achieving Complete Visibility of a Supply Chain.”

If you do not plan to make the trip to Orlando, follow this link to schedule a demonstration of how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete supply chain visibility on a day and time that works best for you.