LEFTURN PERSPECTIVE
There has never been a better time for finance, supply chain, and business years to lead by using data.
Companies require new ways to identify actionable opportunities to improve their supply chain from the massive amounts of data and systems they manage across their organization - access to actionable insights for finance and supply chain leaders is critical to success.
Yet, the monolithic legacy applications like enterprise resource planning, procure-to-pay, 3rd party, and supplier carrier systems have hampered the enterprise, resulting in decision making that is slowed by heavy customization, inaccessible data, and even unknown data sources.
To remedy this, innovative finance, supply chain leaders, and business leads are working together to organize data and improve cross-functional access to empower the entire ecosystem to focus on critical initiatives.
CLIENT LIMITATIONS
ECOSYSTEM LIMITATIONS
THE NEED
Today, the ability for enterprise clients to analyze, measure, and monitor information about supply chains to achieve cost reduction and operational efficiency is manual, labor intensive, and requires subject matter expertise. Each system and vendor have different acronyms and formats, dozens of networks and hundreds of offerings. Enterprises are challenged to be able to know what information to ask for, decode, and determine the best services to use. The result is that even the most well-trained employees stick to a few options. The majority of clients do nothing as they have limited resources, time, and willingness to tackle supply chain optimization.
Suppliers may not have the resources to provide individualized attention to every client. According to a paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2009, clients often perceive suppliers as a key cause of project failure*. The study also revealed that while the key reason identified for project failure was lack of senior executive leadership, the second through the seventh reasons all focus on shortcomings on the part of the software or services vendor to acculturate into the business of the client.
The solution to solve these limitations begins with leveraging an independent third party to annotate the data toward large language models and generative chat solutions. This effort should be fully managed by the third party initially leveraging the available last mile data with layered sources of record. The solution should enable finance, supply chain, and business team's staff to ask the data questions from each line of businesses' perspective. The discussions should focus on spend management but also the implementation of full capabilities.
*Troublesome Suppliers, Issues, and their Management (pmi.org)