Unpredictability and disruption are running high across today’s supply chains. With COVID-19 and now instability in Europe, the resilience and flexibility of supply chains all over the world are being tested, causing an estimated $4 trillion in lost revenues for organizations globally to date.
Single points of failure in the supply chain have been exposed, with 40% of all U.S. imports flowing through just two locations: Los Angeles and Long Beach. Issues are amplified when dealing with single points of failure as highlighted by the Suez Canal blockage, where $9 billion worth of goods was stuck each day, with some companies losing as much as $400 million an hour.
As a manufacturing organization, while you certainly can’t change the industry headwinds, you do have the opportunity to increase your visibility, which will lead to better resilience. With less than 50% of manufacturing respondents to a recent McKinsey survey having knowledge of the location of their Tier 1 suppliers and only 2% having visibility beyond the second tier, there is opportunity for improvement. Here is where data and, more importantly, data collaboration can play a role. Companies are falling short of realizing the potential of data because of the proliferation of data silos within their organization. Legacy modes of sharing data between partners—EDI, FTP, and CSV—no longer keep up with the decisions needing to be made under today’s supply chain complexity.
In the current state, collaborating on data requires costly and inefficient methods that decrease growth opportunities, increase risk, and restrict collaboration. Traditional methods require you to move data across environments: grabbing files from FTP servers, scraping APIs, using ETL tools, or setting up different data marts to grant teams access to data.
Snowflake has taken a very different approach to data sharing. Instead of data moving from one place to another, we enable organizations to share references to the live data set. This translates to faster access to data that is always current and can be revoked, enabling the most secure level of data collaboration.
You can also tap into Snowflake Marketplace to discover third-party data or data services from over 200+ providers, or you can market and deliver your own data products to the Data Cloud.
Resilinc, the world’s leading supply chain risk monitoring and mapping solution, is a data marketplace partner of Snowflake and provides organizations with near real-time alerts for disruptive events that could impact their supply chain. Snowflake customers are able to leverage Resilinc’s EventWatch AI, a 24/7 global event monitoring service that contextualizes and analyzes more than 1.7 billion news feeds about potential and existing supply chain disruptions from approximately 4.7 million sources in 108 languages, including daily news, government regulatory reports, and social media. EventWatch is available immediately for supply chain teams to receive EventWatch alerts in their Snowflake account via Snowflake Data Marketplace, enabling them to monitor for and get ahead of global supply chain disruptions.
Once alerted to a potential supply chain disruption, Snowflake customers can then develop alternative sources by leveraging another Snowflake Data Marketplace partner, Soleadify. Soleadify’s Supplier Discovery and Intelligence offering allows manufacturers to discover new and alternate suppliers to increase supply chain agility. Its comprehensive coverage of 70 million businesses includes coverage of over 3 million manufacturers and over 10 million distributors and wholesalers across 200 countries. Together, these 13 million companies are vital to the supply chains of tens of millions of companies that source products from them. Soleadify identifies commercially active businesses and enriches these company records with over 200 million products and services.
This all comes together in Snowflake, from supply chain alerts from Resilinc to supplier alternatives from Soleadify. Snowflake provides the capabilities to access fundamental supply chain data to answer challenging questions and to increase visibility and data access, and ultimately build your supply chain resilience.