Surfacing Critical Information: Why react when you can monitor?

The ability for supply chains to provide critical information is increasingly becoming a key requirement for enterprises.  However, addressing modern business challenges like recall, certifications, and carbon footprint requires access to data that can be extremely difficult to extract from existing supply chains.

The paradigm for acquiring this data is what a system architect would call ‘request / response’.  A question is posed, such as, “what were the carbon emissions due to the manufacture of this product?”, or “how do I track down the source of this foodborne illness?”.  The system is intended to respond to the question accordingly and does so by interrogating the supply chain for the relevant data.  Naturally, the veracity of the response depends on the fidelity and accessibility of that data.  

In a supply chain context, questions like this have traditionally been very hard to answer, thus getting those answers can take days or even weeks, an unacceptable amount of time in most circumstances.  Naturally, everyone wants to speed this up, but even with the best of intentions, we are at the mercy of the supply chain infrastructure.

But imagine if the responses were nearly instantaneous.  Moreover, what if the cost of generating the responses was effectively zero?  This would give us an opportunity to shift the paradigm from request / response to a subscription. In the subscription model, I simply register my interest in a given set of information and receive a notification whenever that data meets a specified criteria.  For example, if I set a carbon emission threshold for the products I buy and the threshold is exceeded by virtue of an upstream change in the supply chain, I’ll simply be notified of that condition.  Notifications could be integrated into business dashboards, or in more urgent cases, distributed to key personnel for immediate action.

What’s keeping us from achieving this today is the architecture of existing supply chains, which are typically implemented as closed gardens where sharing data with anyone in a different garden is an unnatural act and therefore a rare occurrence.  When it does happen, it’s through point to point integrations that are expensive, brittle, and hard to scale.

The only way to move forward toward a subscription model is to build supply chains on open standards where data sharing is built into the architecture.  Once this level of interoperability is achieved, we can deploy monitoring software that will surface critical information almost instantly.

We now have the standards to make this dream a reality.  They are called Digital Link and EPCIS 2.0 from GS1, the global standards organization.  When supply chains are built with these standards, we will move out of our closed gardens and into a world where accessing critical information is as natural as, well, a walk in the park.