There was a recent news article about how tthirty-six million pounds of soybeans were tagged and sold as “organic,” even though it was treated with pesticides. The news article explains how the soybeans were grown in Ukraine and shipped as non-organic produce – but when they arrived in California, after passing through Turkey, they had remarkably transformed into organic soybeans. Somewhere along the supply chain, someone made millions of dollars of windfall profits, as a result of this magical transformation. This news underscores an important challenge agriculture and metal companies face today - that of supply chain visibility.
Supply chain visibility has been a buzz word for several years and it’s not hard to imagine why. With the advent of globalisation and internet in the 90s, the world became a lot more connected and consequently supply chains became intricately networked and complex. As companies grappled with this complexity, the need for better visibility was felt acutely. It’s been more than two decades since globalisation and the internet has become mainstream now. But it’s harder than ever to maintain visibility over supply chains. A recent survey of 623 supply chain professionals by GEOIDS indicated that visibility is still one of the top three priorities, while only 6% of them confessed having complete visibility over their supply chain. It’s obvious that maintaining supply chain visibility is a very complex challenge facing agriculture and metal companies today.
One way to look at this issue is through the “people, process and technology” lens. Often, teams managing different points of the supply chains operate in siloes. To be fair, a lot of agriculture and mining companies do understand this and have put in place processes that enable better collaboration between teams. But unfortunately, supply chains have a habit of being impacted by unexpected events – what if an important supplier collapsed? Or perhaps there was a political change? Or unexpected weather patterns squeezed supply? etc. The truth is no one can anticipate these events. Even the best teams and the most well designed processes will find it hard to adapt when the “unexpected” happens within a supply chain.
The challenge then, lies with technology – specifically due to the fragmented nature of technology being used. Teams in agriculture or mining companies often use multiple software solutions to manage different activities of their supply chain, such as contract management, logistics, stockpiles/blending/inventory, terminal management, hedging & risk management, automation & task scheduling, etc. While these softwares do make it easy to carry out specific tasks, often they do not talk to each other. So someone has to manually collect information from these systems, put it in a spreadsheet, and apply specific algorithms to analyse data to get some visibility - which often takes days and weeks. This severely affects the company’s ability to respond rapidly to changes in the marketplace.
In today’s connected world, it’s very important for agriculture and mining companies to have a platform that can connect multiple systems to gather and analyse data, using algorithms specific to commodity supply chains. Such a platform would reliably support collaboration between teams and help supply chain executives adapt to unexpected events, providing a distinct advantage to agriculture and mining firms.
Eka's Analytics provides predictive analytics as well as traditional slicing and dicing of historical data available from all sources throughout the supply chain. It offers user-controlled analysis to help manage volatility and the ability to react to market changes before competitors
