Digital Platforms in Supply Chain and Operations

SPRINGBOARD FOR GROWTHConnect your data, people and processes to enhance the customer experience. Pockets of digital progress must give way to digital transformation. Approximately three in every five Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) are not only investing in digital solutions, but already scaling them.1 And surprisingly, they’re doing so rapidly enough to surpass the sales and marketing functions.2It’s precisely here that our experience with large companies around the globe shows a gap the C-suite needs to bridge. Many are scaling digital in pockets. Leading CSCOs have been particularly good at this, but without more collaboration and planning across their companies and with ecosystem partners, their success will be limited.2 Generating actionable, real-time insights on customers and their operations is fast becoming a necessity. And those are the very insights that fuel the customer centricity and growth expected by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). CSCOs need to move beyond scaling pockets of digital progress, teaming with their peers across the organization in a coordinated effort. It takes no less to become the kind of data-driven company that fuels growth.The numbers say it even more succinctly. Within supply chain and operations leaders, those who deploy digital services platforms, analyzing 360-degree data in real time, enjoy a 27% return on digital investment, compared to 21.8% for those who don’t.3 The executives that have digital platforms are bullish on the future, telling us they expect to secure a 37% return in the near future, versus 28% for the executives who don’t deploy such a platform.4 Such a platform is fast becoming simply the cost of entry—a requirement to compete effectively in the market. The difference a platform makes in return on digital investment:27%21.8%VSwith a platformwithout a platformExecutives that have digital platforms are bullish on the future:37%28%VSexpected return in the near futurewho don’t deploy such a platform3 Data is at the core of enabling a digital enterprise. The right data infrastructure is central to any digital platform. But, data infrastructure cannot be built successfully through disparate initiatives, which only generate pockets of progress. Instead, organizations should use a digital platform to combine data from multiple sources (internal and external), generating new insights that enable a composite understanding of customers and their operations.In less technical terms, an overall data strategy and integrated digital platform ensure all areas of an organization are singing from the same songbook. They lay the groundwork for collaboration, inside and outside the company—the kind of collaboration that fuels growth and operational efficiency.CSCOs must help drive the development of data strategy and platforms to ensure their needs are met in a way that helps them best serve customers. But they’ll need to partner with their Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Digital Officer (CDO) to get to a truly comprehensive and integrated solution that meets the needs of the entire enterprise. Beyond partnering internally, partnering via external ecosystems has become a competitive advantage. To do so with ease, digitally decoupling for better partnering integration across the supply chain becomes essential. For a platform-based ecosystem to work, businesses must rebuild their architecture, creating a lightweight version built on microservices and the cloud. A modern digital platform is a key component of this strategy.4 Mention “digital platform” to some executives and they’ll picture the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms of the past. But the digital platform fit for a truly modern supply chain is far more than that. The foundation of this type of digital platform is a cloud-based infrastructure that houses not only core enterprise functions, but also continuously evolving to enable new capabilities. Think of a data cloud with everything needed to run a business housed within it, comprised of data lakes that make it modular when it needs to be. With a platform like this, the mechanism for building relationships with suppliers and other ecosystem partners is built in via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These platforms need to be able to “plug and play” evolving solutions in the market, versus everything being in a single platform solution. As organizations increasingly harvest data intelligence via algorithms and analytics, a modern digital platform is capable of hosting these algorithms, making them part of the overall business logic. 5 PARTNE R P L ATFO R M S FOR SPEED TO MARKETA global Life Sciences company was experiencing supply chain challenges, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars due to delayed product release. Accenture helped the company improve coordination with partners from end-to-end, giving leaders better control of and visibility into its supply chain operations. We worked with comp