Navigating turbulent times with a supply chain control tower

Recently, I’ve gotten briefings from Infor® on its supply chain planning and supply chain collaboration network solutions. Infor, it turns out, is one of the few suppliers that can provide all three of these pillar solutions; in short, it can provide a modern control tower solution where the customer has but one vendor to address if problems arise.

Most of the writing done on the new generation of supply chain control towers has been focused on the need for concurrent planning. But the ability to get data from across the end-to-end supply chain, harmonize it, and use it to make better decisions is equally important. Infor’s end-to-end trading partner data platform is the focus of this article.

The Infor Nexus supply chain collaboration network solution

A supply chain collaboration network (SCCN) is a collaborative solution for supply chain processes built on a public cloud and with a many-to-many architecture, that supports a community of trading partners. Infor Nexus™ is one of the better-known solutions in this market. 65,000 companies use the platform. $1 trillion in trade is managed over the platform and $50 billion in payments is transacted here.

A SCCN allows a company to get data useful for planning, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, returns, supply chain risks, and supply chain finance. Basically, a SCCN that can get data feeds from across the plan, source, make, deliver, risk, and finance categories allows companies to have an end-to-end view of their supply chain. Being able to get these alerts with fewer data exchanges lowers IT complexity and speeds implementations. In Infor’s case, its SCCN also contains a digital twin: an end-to-end model of the supply chain.

Matt Simonsen, Director of Product Management for the Infor Nexus solution, explained that Nexus uses a "knowledge graph" to map parties, places, and products into the digital twin. Every transaction writes to this in-memory digital twin. What does this mean in practice? An in-memory solution allows for big data to be accessed very quickly.

What does a knowledge graph do? A knowledge graph does not start with a model of the supply chain, it creates that model based on what the data shows to be true. Mr. Simonsen said, “we don’t start by having a model that says the ports are here, the suppliers are located here, and so forth. It is a supply chain model built on the fly based on what is really occurring in the network.” A knowledge graph model is more accurate. That is because these types of models are based on what the data shows is really happening versus what a supply chain manager thinks is happening.

But the Nexus model can also provide the kind of data that digital twins that are based on a static planning model struggle to provide: true lead times (and other supply chain throughput/ cycle time metrics). These parameters are critical for the creation of optimum plans. Lead times in planning systems are often measured, input into the system, and assumed to be true from that point forward. The Nexus system can measure the changes that are occurring and keep the lead times up to date.

The changes measured in Nexus can be based just on the data of one company. For example, when my company orders from a certain supplier in Asia to be delivered by a particular carrier, the lead time is 24 days. This kind of data could be provided by a point-to-point data exchange solution.