A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

Q L I K . C O M

Over the past 24 months we’ve seen a perfect storm blowing through supply chains across the world.

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

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Freezing temperatures and fires have shut down semiconductor factories in the US and Japan – adding to an already chronic global shortage. The impacts have been felt from consumer electronics to car production and beyond.

The pandemic caused havoc to global trade, container costs soared as demand rose, and one-o� incidents like the March 2021 Ever Given container ship grounding in the Suez Canal compounded the issue.

The ripple e�ects of the war in Ukraine have impacted prices across the board, created wide-reaching inflationary pressures and, once again, highlighted issues of today’s interdependent economics and global supply chains.

According to a recent survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit, these disruptions have incurred substantial financial costs, averaging up to 10% of annual revenues for large companies, as well as reputational costs – in terms of customer complaints and damage to brand reputation1.

Managing disruption of any kind has become the #1 priority in supply chain operations. But, as leaders know, adapting to change is rarely a simple task and requires a fresh look at existing processes in planning and sourcing, inventory management, warehousing and distribution and more.

Let’s examine how a new approach to data and analytics can help supply chain leaders take informed action ‘in the moment’ as you look to as you look to create resilience and optimize operations.

Introduction

1 “The Business Costs of Supply Chain Disruption,” The Economist Unitelligence Unit sponsored by GEP. Copyright (c) 2021. https://impact.econ-asia.com/perspectives/sites/default/files/the_business_costs_of_supply_chain_disruption_gep_1.pdf

Supply chain leaders are playing a central role in business strategy in promoting growth, innovation and driving competitive advantage. What happens in the supply chain has a direct impact on revenue, margin, time to market and customer retention, as well as impacting corporate social responsibility and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESC) goals.

Avoiding breaks in the chain

Being accountable for the end-to-end supply chain is a huge task that starts with the reliable and cost-e�ective delivery of raw materials, components and products. Of course, it doesn’t stop there.

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A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

The visibility issue The need to know – to understand and have visibility of all the moving parts across the supply chain – is critical in supply chain operations. Whether that’s gaining visibility across the supply chain to drive operational e�iciencies and reduce cost, to avoid shortages or overstocking or to react to potential threats and disruptions, data is the premier currency of today’s supply chain. Organizations have invested considerable human and financial resources in a range of digital and analytics tools to do optimize operations.

The challenge is that data takes many forms and is in many di�erent formats: master data to enable business processes such as material and product specs; transactional data including purchasing inventory records and sales figures; unstructured data from IoT sensors and more2.

There’s a lot of it, and it’s rarely in one place. Data sits in a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications,

in warehouse management systems (WMS) and a variety of other back o�ice and factory floor repositories.

Typically, these systems are siloed. They don’t talk to one another. Which means bringing everything together to operationalize it and achieve end-to-end visibility is challenging. And that’s before you begin your analysis. The bigger the organization, the bigger the challenge. So when it comes to getting insights, your teams are o�en looking for a needle in a haystack.

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2 Drowning in data, but starting for insights, Deloitte, 2021

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

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A passive approach to insight While it is certainly true that most organizations will have a range of analytics engines and dashboards, these tend to be relatively passive. Which is to say that these are report-centric tools based on historical data.

Such systems use pre-configured data sets and o�en require manual data manipulation in spreadsheets from the users who need to know what they are looking for.

Even the more reactive visual discovery tools available tend to be based on limited, curated data. They will only query a limited number of datasets, while most won’t allow natural conversations with the data. Which means they are di�icult to use outside the data science teams, and the insights (such as they are) are unavailable to the majority of business users.

In short, conventional approaches simply don’t o�er simple access to the kind of in-depth, real-time picture that today’s supply chain leaders and their teams need.

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

Eliminating points of friction and coping with the continual disruptions in today’s supply chains demands a di�erent approach: one that eliminates the silos, improves visibility in all areas and delivers real-time data dynamically for users to make immediate decisions in the business moment. More particularly, it requires that the data enables accurate predictions and based on these, compel clear and informed actions.

The art of predictive

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The answer lies in implementing an end-to-end analytics data pipeline that allows organizations to manage data from end-to-end, focusing on the entire pipeline as a strategy.

It begins with data integration to bring all the disparate sources together. The raw data is then transformed as it moves through the pipeline to deliver up-to-date information. That insight is then used to trigger immediate actions, in the moment. Here at Qlik® we call this Active Intelligence™, and it’s this ability to drive real-time alerting and decision making that sets this approach apart.

This is also where automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning come in. Not simply to eliminate the painstaking human analysis, but to provide the ability to highlight potential issues before they happen and raise pertinent questions (and answers) that haven’t yet been considered.

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With this approach, intelligence becomes active. The data is executed moment to moment and embedded directly into supply chain and machine-driven processes. Not only do your teams know what is happening right now, they can understand what is likely to happen and they are alerted to take action when specific conditions are met.

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Value of knowing in the supply chain

Anticipate and immediately respond to market trends and

shi�s within the supplier base to manage risk and proactively plan

for disruption

Ensure the availability of raw materials, components and/or

products to increase order fulfilment and revenue

Reshape operations and embed e�iciencies through the chain to lower cost of goods sold (COGS) and achieve high gross margins

Reduce order fulfilment issues to enhance customer satisfaction and

drive brand loyalty

Gain a complete view of the business, uncovering accurate and

actionable insights in real -time planning, sourcing, logistics and

warehousing and a�ermarket

Enhance Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) by unifying data

across enterprise silos to make smarter and more transparent

supplier decisions

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

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Leveraging this end-to-end approach to managing data o�ers an exciting range of opportunities across supply chain processes. These include:

The Active Intelligence advantage

Demand-driven inventory management Predictive analytics and trend analysis using augmented insights allow teams to continually balance cost reduction, shi�s in customer demand, sourcing strategy, and other external dynamics impacting inventory management.

Key benefits include:

• E�icient replenishment planning

• Greater production e�iciencies

• Waste elimination

Fulfilment and warehousing By leveraging automation and establishing proactive alerts, it becomes easier to streamline fulfillment and create a more customer centric and e�icient supply chain – determining trade-o�s in real time between channel availability, safety-stock levels, inventory carrying costs, delivery times and more.

Key benefits include:

• Efficient, omni-channel management

• Creation of a lean warehousing and distribution model

• Greater control of transportation and logistics costs

Mitigating supply chain disruption By ensuring accurate, knowledge- based predictive insights into possible known and unknown supply chain disruptions, teams can get ahead of possible disruptions that threaten to a�ect or delay customer orders. Issues are identified early, and automated alerts will compel action.

Key benefits include:

• Clear understanding of the ‘disruption’ drivers

• Increase on-time in-full (OTIF) orders

• Achieve higher sales revenue

• Improve customer experience, and in turn loyalty

• Improve margins and lower COGS

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

In this era of distributed global supply chains, it is absolutely critical that all stakeholders are tightly coordinated to ensure flexibility, resiliency and rapid product or solution time-to-market.

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Here, end-to-end visibility is key. The analytics data pipeline approach – enabled through the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform® – easily combines disparate data sources in real-time for in-depth multi-source analysis and AI-powered automation.

The result is the ability to identify and resolve supply disruptions farther upstream, monitor supplier performance on delivery, price, and service. And by knowing more, it’s easier to strengthen negotiating positions and select the right partnerships to create a robust and competitive supply chain.

Driving e�iciencies, building reliance

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics

© 2022 QlikTech International AB. All rights reserved. All company and/or product names may be trade names, trademarks and/or registered trademarks of the respective owners with which they are associated.

About Qlik Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. Our cloud-based Qlik Active Intelligence Platform delivers end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics cloud solutions to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelli- gence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik does business in more than 100 countries and serves over 38,000 active customers around the world.

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Taking a step towards building your analytics data pipeline with Qlik Here at Qlik, we’re committed to helping supply chain leaders and their teams close the gap between data and action. This requires a complete Active Intelligence approach – one that addresses the flow and integration throughout the analytics data pipeline.

The good news is that we have done the hard work for you. The Qlik Active Intelligence Platform makes it simpler for organizations to build an end-to-end analytics data pipeline – giving you all the data and analytics services you need to transform raw data into informed action.

On an operational level, we make it simple for your tech teams to integrate and manage – with cloud- agnostic and hybrid deployment options that o�er maximum choice and flexibility in how and where you store and analyze data, across one or multiple clouds.

From the user perspective, the aim is just as straightforward: to free the data from silos, in real- time, and allow everyone in the supply chain team to find it, enrich it and create derivative data from it. Which helps as many people as possible understand and discover the insights they need.

To find out more, visit Qlik.com

A Supply Chain Leader’s Guide: Managing disruption with modern supply chain analytics