Why is data sharing between trading partners so hard?

As we discussed in our previous post today's supply chains are often implemented as ad hoc constructions of proprietary data silos where trading partners build point-to-point integrations in order to share information with each other.

In the many-to-many relationships that are common across industry, these precarious arrangements are risky and expensive.  They are typically implemented via big system integration projects which don’t scale, are hard to maintain, and are prone to inaccuracies.  A failure of data integrity can be disastrous in both economic and reputational terms.

Moreover, the heterogeneous manner in which data is stored and shared means that one of the parties on one ‘end of the wire’ must normalize all of the supply chain event data before it can be ingested into their ERP systems.  Placed in a different context, imagine if every company who operated a website required web browsers to use their own proprietary protocol to display their content.  Thankfully, the designers of the World Wide Web agreed to a set of standards that promised interoperability from the start.

Standards are the answer for supply chains as well, and the best one to use is GS1 EPCIS 2.0 as the method of data capture, storage, and exchange.  This approach shifts the burden of normalization to the standard itself, eliminating the need for costly system integration and greatly reducing the risk of error.  Once two - or two thousand - parties agree to share data using the EPCIS 2.0 standard, it’s a simple matter of setting up the connection and pushing Go.  

Exchanging supply chain data should be just as simple as visiting a web site.

To learn more about this important topic, I invite you to watch this short video.