As the IT manager you are often treated like a genie: who grants wishes on demand and solves problems magically behind the scenes. Everyone cares about the outcome but knows little about the process. The supply chain is a complex ecosystem, and the information technology experts are critical to its survival and success. That means staying one step ahead of the constantly evolving landscape of technologies, knowing what to outsource, and using your voice in the boardroom to advocate for change.

Good integration means great collaboration between all trading partners of your supply chain.

Whether you work for a manufacturer (or OEM) or a carrier, you are responsible for bringing interoperability between all trading partners.

Outsource onboarding – Having a dedicated technology partner can ensure that your entire supply chain is digitally mapped, and all trading partners are onboarded and connected with each other.

A dedicated technology partner reduces the go-to market time with the new trading partner and eliminates the need for hiring and training new IT professionals during the implementation phase. They ensure automated and secured data exchange for everyone including the smallest trading partners.

If you work for a carrier or LSP, you don’t have to make multiple connections across all your assets including fleet of trucks or ships, ports, warehouses, and compounds. Sending just one message on VIN (Vinturas Interoperable Network) means you can be reassured that all your asset partners and concerned trading partners have been sufficiently informed.

Collaborate with high-performing supply chain trading partners – You can make decisions to swiftly onboard new partners during crisis or for performance reasons and connect them with other partners of the supply chain ecosystem when you don’t have the hassle of integrating with their systems.

Enable New Technologies – Unchain from siloed software

Private Blockchain – Being hailed as the future of supply chain management, it is the solution to the most burning needs of the industry right now: real-time visibility, interoperability, data security and standardization, and resilience.

Private blockchain technology enables a decentralized interoperable network solution where all your trading partners can flawlessly and safely collaborate with each other and all your data is organized in one place and available in a standardized format on a single digital network. This feature of blockchain technology is called Interoperability.

Private blockchain is NOT another TMS or visibility platform solution.

Enable AI and ML – Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are the technologies behind demand forecasting, predictive analytics, and accurate ETAs. The onus is on you to implement them. But do the executives and the c-suite members truly understand the digital capabilities needed to enable AI?
AI is only as good as the data we feed into it.
To make AI work for your organization, you need data standardization and a single source of truth: real-time data (time stamped and tamper proof) in a single format being fed into an AI engine. Such that AI constantly iterates on live-data and the results are useful.

Supply chain disruptions triggered by geopolitical conflicts, wars, trade restrictions, cyberattacks, and cargo theft are here to stay. You need reactive capabilities to navigate the present and proactive capabilities to ensure you aren’t constantly in firefighting mode.

Achieving Scalable IT Solutions – Adopting information technology that can grow with the business is every IT department’s core goal. There’s vertical scalability and horizontal scalability.

A technology that only scales vertically (increases the capacity of hardware or software by adding resources to a physical system) is expensive and not future proof.

Private block chain, technology scales, both vertically and horizontally where each blockchain node is a server and when you need to scale operations you can expand to more blockchain nodes.

But with scaling the IT infrastructure comes the challenge: is your cyber security strategy ready for change?

Data Security – A supply chain ecosystem runs on a secured data exchange. Data security is mistakenly pursued as just cyber security.

No matter how secure an organization’s internal IT systems are, when communication with trading partners happens over email, traditional point-to-point EDI (electronic data interchange) interfaces in combination with MS-Excel file uploads, or TMS providers and visibility platforms the, the data is prone to a breach. All communication and data exchange needs to be end-to-end encrypted.

Plan B – Work with private blockchain technology to take advantage of a resilient supply chain. When a partner’s system or your own is under attack, logistics operations of the rest of the supply chain ecosystem can continue because all data is still available and protected on the network.

Repay Technical Debt

Take the time to manage and upgrade accumulated technical infrastructure of your organization which is fragmented and don’t communicate with each other.

Conclusion

You are connected to and aware of the challenges of almost every function within the supply chain. You will always be looked upon to herald new technologies for the organization. In order to lead it’s time to partner-up to outsource some of your own challenges such that you can focus on the existing tech stack of your organization.