How important are visibility and transparency in supply chains? After COVID-19, we’d say, very! Almost 52% of 2020 disruptors in the first nine months of the year led to a “war room” situation for most businesses relying on supply chains. Could it have been avoided with the right data at the right time? Probably. Here’s what the industry leaders think.
In a 2021 survey conducted by Statista, 40% of supply chain industry professionals disclosed that they have integrated cloud computing and storage technologies into company operations. According to most companies, inventory and network optimization tools will have the highest rate of adoption in the next five years.
In a 2022 Statista survey, 60% of organizations from different industries worldwide said that they expect robotic process automation to have a major or moderate impact on supply chains by 2025. If integrated meticulously into the supply chain process, robotic process automation can improve productivity and efficiency.
What most of these responses suggest is that a storm is brewing within global supply chains. With a volatile market and unpredictability of demand, organizations across the world are trying to increase visibility across every part of the supply chain so that real-time or almost real-time data is available to the stakeholders at all times.
However, the question now begets, is supply chain visibility enough? Extended supply chains have greater risks and often, organizations aren’t equipped to manage and resolve exceptions.
What is exception management?
Exceptions are one of the major pain points of companies. Some examples of exceptions are missing customer information, allocating inventory incorrectly, data mismatches, and so on. Exception management, in simple words, involves resolving the data management challenge. Traditionally, exception management has always been a labor-intensive, ad-hoc process with satisfying results but the manual approach is neither sustainable nor cost-effective in the long run.
Since technology always finds a way, exception management has been made easier with the advent of the Business Exception Management Systems (BEMS), a new breed of software application to deal with exception management problems.
A smart solution to all your data problems
A robust platform driven by emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will help you centrally manage all your supply chain data. You’ll get access to accurate, up-to-date information on suppliers, customers, and more to resolve issues quickly and even before they occur.
A technology platform for exception management must include a few important features.
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A smart platform to recognize exceptions
The platform you choose for exception management must be able to recognize the business logic and capture the business rules that are defined to handle exceptions. The defined exception rules must follow and support the organization’s policies and procedures and should resonate with individual partners and trading partner groups.
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Validating transaction data at all levels
Another important feature is validating transaction data at individual levels, capturing supply chain transactions such as advance shipment notifications (ASNs) and confirming them against pre-defined business rules. The system should be able to assess all inbound and outbound digital transactions against documented rules and requirements, highlighting errors and issues with a complete drill-down to root-cause data.
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Notifications and alerts
Exception management capabilities will include simple functions like enabling real-time email alerts that are sent to all stakeholders when problems occur. Your platform should include a flexible workflow engine that supports more intricate exception management processes, including the generation of production issues and alerts for exceptions so that users can take action on time.
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Isolation of bad data
If wrong or bad data enters enterprise systems such as ERP, it can be disastrous both internally and externally through chargebacks caused by sending bad data to a partner. With a reliable exception management platform, you can rest assured that all information passing through your B2B processes is validated. Validated data can be immediately released for delivery while data failing validation can start a workflow through which you can reject or remedy bad data so that costly issues can be prevented on time.
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Generating automated reports and analysis
You should be able to gain visibility into partner performance and key metrics through automated reports generated by the system. The platform should offer the options to customize, share, subscribe to, export, and drill into, making it easy for you to collaborate with partners on issues. Additionally, the platform should display partner and supply chain performance through interactive dashboards.
How can Monitor Pro help?
The intuitive and interactive dashboards powered by Monitor Pro help you get accurate and real-time visibility into B2B transaction lifecycles so you can identify issues even before they occur. The AI-powered platform provides support to your staff responsible for resolving exceptions.
The Monitor Pro system provides exception knowledge that can be easily read by humans as well as machines and can be made available and shared easily. You can get visibility into exception resolution throughout the lifecycle of an exception, with comprehensive visibility into the resolution process itself. With this kind of visibility, you can manage the workload and resources more judiciously.
With Monitor Pro’s security-rich, cloud-based solution, you can reduce the manual work and cut costs effectively while eliminating confusion and risks. The information generated by the platform may be adequate to resolve the exceptions through automation. Otherwise, it can be shared with knowledge workers, thereby easing their tasks.
Need more information about how Monitor Pro can help with exception management? Contact our team today!
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