From Chaos to Control: Unlock Supply Chain 3.0 with Connected Data
From Chaos to Control: Unlock Supply Chain 3.0 with Connected Data
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5 minutes to read
In today's volatile and ever-changing supply chain landscape, great cost management has never been more important, and yet more difficult to achieve. The mass fragmentation and lack of standardization within your network alone is overwhelming. Ensuring performance within your own four walls is hard enough, let alone improving it with suppliers and carriers.
When supply chain disruptions constantly hit, you don't have bandwidth to fix systemic issues because you're always putting out fires. To succeed, you need solutions that allow you to proactively manage your spend, team, carrier, and network.
The harsh reality is, your current way of doing things is costing you money.
The problems: Paper, disconnected data, manual work
J.P. Morgan Payments Innovation team surveyed their portfolio of shippers and found that a staggering 60% of invoices are still paper documents. The root cause of this problem is paper. Paper traps data. Paper traps people. Paper traps profit.
Even worse, 80% of companies manually key invoice data into their finance systems. That's a lot of time spent staring and comparing... and inevitably making human errors. The software of the 1990s and 2000s are rigid. They create data silos and require your teams to click through digitized, but manual workflows.
Your ability to understand your cost-per-lane, cost-per-shipment, and cost-per-product is stuck in filing cabinets or different databases, making it incredibly challenging to understand your total spend. In fact, bad data costs companies over $600 billion annually (TDWI).
There is a better way. Companies no longer need to lose money and miss opportunities due to legacy systems, disconnected data, and manual processes.
The supply chain evolution: where do you stand?
The supply chain has evolved through key maturity phases. Upgrading processes and technology can seem daunting, but understanding where you are on the journey means you can get to the next stage.
Here’s the roadmap:
Supply Chain 1.0: Dark ages - 2000 -Manual processes dependent on humans, pen, and paper.
Supply Chain 2.0: 2000 - 2020 - Digital but disconnected systems and data.
Supply Chain 3.0: 2020 - 2030 - The age of AI, powering visibility and automation to optimize your company's performance.
Supply Chain 4.0: 2030+ - What's coming next? Imagine the possibilities with a connected network of networks.
Most companies are stuck in the 1.0 or 2.0 phases, crippled by inefficiency, reconciliation headaches, and lack of actionable data. But being stuck puts you at risk of being disrupted by competitors.
You might think that AI is just a buzzword, a phase that won't last after the initial hype wears off. But Supply Chain 3.0 is powered by supply chain AI, not ChatGPT's generic models. The complexity of the supply chain requires domain-specific models.
Supply chain data has a major problem: multiple "sources of truth" where data is disconnected by varying systems, structures, standards, formats, terms, quality, etc. This is where logistics-AI comes in. These models can ingest all supply chain information regardless of systems, structures, standards, formats, terms, quality, etc. They are built for the supply chain's domain and language, so they can contextualize, categorize, extract, and standardize each data point.
Logistics-AI constructs a comprehensive but flexible view so you can assess your business at any level (network spend, cost per accessorial per carrier, cost per product, etc). With usable, accurate, and dynamic financial and operational data, you can automate workflows, optimize spend, and uncover growth drivers.
Finally, Supply Chain 4.0 builds on the connectivity and intelligence of 3.0, with AI systems autonomously executing processes across the supply chain's network of networks. But you can't get to 4.0 without first mastering 3.0.
Assess your supply chain maturity
The complexities of evolving from dated 1.0/2.0 processes to an optimized, AI-driven 3.0 supply chain can seem overwhelming. That's why we created a simple self-assessment to identify where your company stands today across key areas like data management, workflows, systems, and collaboration.
Once you understand your current maturity phase, you can map out an actionable roadmap to accelerate into Supply Chain 3.0. Start capturing the benefits of AI-powered visibility, automation, and cost savings for your business.
Take the 3-minute assessment now to discover your supply chain maturity score and get guidance on your next best steps towards true supply chain optimization.
Three ways loop gets you to supply chain 3.0 ASAP
No matter where you're operating today, Supply Chain 3.0 is well within reach with the proper focus and resources.
Download our Supply Chain 3.0 eBook to learn more about the three key levers Loop's logistics-AI accelerates your journey to 3.0:
Centralize and unify supply chain and spend data
Improve cost management and control
Automate workflows to boost team productivity
Great Dane, a truck body and parts manufacturer, implemented Loop and jumped from Supply Chain 1.0 to 3.0 in a matter of months. Now, they can access all of their supply chain and spend data with Loop's self-serve analytics, and 95% of their invoices are audited and approved with no human touch.
Loop propels you to Supply Chain 3.0 in weeks or months, not years, with minimal disruption for your team. Get started today by booking a discovery call with our solutions team, and see how Loop can unlock the power of Supply Chain 3.0 for your business.
