New Ernst & Young Report: Supply Chain Data “Overwhelms” Businesses, Stunting Automation, Efficiency

A new EY (formerly Ernst & Young) report, Digital supply chain: It's all about that data, explains why exponential data growth is a fundamental problem that is continuing to overwhelm most businesses, it is accelerating and supply chain data is no exception.

The latest EY report explains that new digital business models are increasingly more complex, including an entire ecosystems of data. EY notes that the companies that are able to effectively manage that complexity will clearly maintain a competitive advantage.

According to Dave Padmos, EY Global Technology Sector Leader, Advisory Services, supply chain managers need to seize the full potential of digital, including data better strategies, information and data management discipline by recognizing the following imperatives:

• Managing the data growth dilemma: The growing tsunami of data is both a boon and bane to businesses in the digital age. Limitless oceans of data, often reflecting customer experience as it happens, have the potential to remake supply chains and business models. These models can and should be more efficient, productive, flexible and responsive. But right now, data is a mess. The current period of hyper data growth leaves most companies in a position where their ability to uncover business insights is effectively hidden within an increasingly complex and often unfathomable amount of data.

• Unprecedented data growth: Winners and losers in the big data era will be those best able to rapidly cull relevant insights out of enormously complex and fast-growing datasets. But rising data complexity presents an existential challenge for supply chains.

• Supply chain, disrupted: Out-of-control data growth can obscure, rather than reveal, business insights needed to drive digital-age supply chains — but a growing consensus shows how to avoid that trap and manage growing data.

• Supply chain, advanced: Machine learning can significantly accelerate “time to insight,” but it is no substitute for the hard work of enterprise data management strategy development and data simplification.

• Supply chain, horizon: IoT and blockchain technologies promise benefits potentially greater than the cloud-mobile-social-big data technologies that supply chains are grappling with today.

“Unmanaged, that complexity becomes a barrier to innovation, inhibits its ability to derive meaningful insights and, in fact, becomes a barrier to achieving the automation and efficiency needed to be relevant and competitive in today's market,” says Padmos.

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