How UnitySCM Ensures High-Quality Data Across Supply Chains

Chelsea Blaylock
Head of Marketing
July 24, 2024

Why Data Quality is Essential in Supply Chain Management

Global supply chains are intricate networks that depend on the seamless integration of data from myriad sources to ensure a holistic operational view. UnitySCM understands the necessity of centralizing, synchronizing, normalizing, and contextualizing data related to information flows, product flows, and financial flows. This comprehensive integration helps businesses stay ahead by being proactive and responsive to the rapid changes typical in supply chain environments, particularly in managing risks associated with fast-moving product flows from the source to the sale.

UnitySCM D&D Data Quality Dashboard

The Critical Impact of Poor Data Quality

Poor data quality can severely hamper a company’s ability to make informed decisions, leading to increased operational risks and inefficiencies. UnitySCM has identified major repercussions of inadequate data quality, such as decision-making delays, increased costs due to inefficiencies, and heightened employee stress due to constant firefighting. These challenges often compel teams to revert to intuition rather than data-driven strategies, perpetuating outdated practices and potentially leading to significant financial losses.

UnitySCM’s Approach to Proactive Data Quality Management

Modern supply chains involve multiple stakeholders, each with varying levels of technological sophistication and different systems, making data integration challenging. UnitySCM tackles this by creating a unified system that allows all relevant data—whether from a high-tech warehouse management system or a simple spreadsheet on a supplier’s computer—to be efficiently centralized and synchronized. This not only enhances visibility but also ensures that all stakeholders have timely and accurate information to make crucial decisions.

Unity’s Data Versatility platform adopts several critical capabilities allowing customers to leverage high-quality data. This includes:

Flexible Data Sourcing

UnitySCM employs an extremely flexible approach to data sourcing, enabling the extraction and integration of data from sources of varying technological maturity. Whether it's through APIs, SFTP, manual uploads, or even email attachments, Unity ensures that all data, regardless of its original format, is accurately captured and integrated into the system.

UnitySCM Milestone Data Quality Dashboard

Comprehensive Data Tracking and Error Resolution

All data sent to UnitySCM's platform is actively tracked. The system reconciles the data sent with the data loaded, promptly identifying and surfacing any discrepancies or errors for quick resolution. This ensures that the data used in decision-making is always accurate and up-to-date.

Advanced Data Configuration and Association

UnitySCM’s platform features a highly configurable data model that can effectively accommodate complex logic required to associate disparate data sources or types. This includes linking customer and supplier data with order data, connecting order data with shipment information, and associating shipment data with specific carriers and terminals. This flexibility is crucial for addressing the unique quirks and rules common to supply chain operations.

Continuous Improvement and Data Cleaning

To maintain and improve data quality, UnitySCM implements rigorous processes for validating and cleaning data. This includes validating raw carrier milestones in the context of each shipment, consolidating similar milestones, filtering out erroneous data, and translating inconsistent carrier milestone descriptions into a consistent and unified language used across the platform.

Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement

Achieving data quality excellence is a continuous journey. 

UnitySCM ensures the rigorous tracking of data quality through five key performance indicators listed below. These KPIs enable UnitySCM to provide reliable and high-quality data, fostering trust and enabling better decision-making for supply chain stakeholders.

UnitySCM Tracking Quality Dashboard
  1. Data Completeness: Ensures all essential data is present, minimizing gaps that could impair decision-making. For example, missing carrier ETA data can delay the identification of late shipments.
  2. Data Consistency: Maintains uniformity of data across all systems, reducing errors and discrepancies. This includes ensuring that event names, locations, and date formats are consistent across all data providers, such as carriers and Unity partners.
  3. Data Timeliness: Crucial for timely decisions, this KPI focuses on minimizing the lag between data creation and its availability in the system. Understanding both the maximum allowable latency for user value and the actual latency experienced is key to maintaining operational responsiveness.
  4. Data Accuracy: Ensures that data is error-free and accurately represents real-world entities and transactions. Accurate data, such as shipment milestones and contractual terms, is vital for effective management and decision-making.
  5. Data Integrity: Maintains the structure and relationships within the data, ensuring referential integrity across datasets. This involves keeping a consistent linkage between raw data inputs and their processed forms in the system, and between master data elements like customer and supplier IDs.

Additionally, UnitySCM has established robust mechanisms for measuring the success of its data quality initiatives, including comprehensive data dashboards that track milestone completeness, latency, ETA accuracy, and the quality of detention and demurrage data. 

These tools enable Unity and its customers to measure data quality, identify quality gaps, and work collaboratively to drive continuous improvements.

Conclusion

In the fast-evolving world of supply chain management, data quality is not merely a technical requirement but a strategic asset that significantly influences the operational success and competitive edge of businesses. UnitySCM’s dedication to enhancing data quality through innovative solutions and proactive strategies demonstrates its understanding of data's critical role in optimizing supply chain operations. This commitment ensures that UnitySCM’s clients are equipped to meet their operational challenges effectively, making informed decisions that lead to sustained business success.