If the Covid-19 pandemic can be said to have had any positive impact, it would be in the technology advances to address longstanding performance challenges facing supply chains. Research by Adobe in 2020, for example, concluded that e-commerce demand and fulfillment advanced six years in just the first five months of the crisis. In the process, however, the underlying supply chain architecture is feeling the strain. 

Most modern supply chains run on a software patchwork of modular solutions by various providers bolted onto an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform with transportation and warehouse management systems that are, in many cases, little changed from the conventional business-to-business (B2B) and electronic data interchange (EDI) environment of the 1990s when they were written. 

Many of the newer solutions have trouble communicating with one another, as do legacy TMS and WMS programs which were designed to run separate organizational functions in simpler times. None were intended to manage the volumes of data, range of devices — smartphones, internet-of-things  (IoT) sensors and scanners, warehouse robotics — or the granular levels of analytic detail that drive decisions in today’s supply chain. 

As small and mid-sized companies accept the need for digital transformation to compete for future business, and even as leading companies reassess existing capabilities and tool up for new product lines and customers in new markets, they may need to start with a closer look at their TMS and WMS capabilities. Do these capabilities work in sync to provide full upstream and downstream visibility? Can they be updated automatically without extensive testing or downtime? Can they manage discrete modular solutions to present seamless, holistic visibility with user-friendly dashboard visualizations? When something goes wrong, who provides the customer support? 

Read on for a discussion of why a fully integrated, holistic supply chain is a future essential