Eliminating Supply Chain Data Silos Through Data Hubs

In the survey responses to SAPinsider July 2022 research report Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud, SAPinsiders highlighted lack of centralized supply chain data as a key obstacle in their quest to build world class supply chain planning capabilities. They also envision that cloud can help address this challenge by helping build that "single-source-of-truth" view. One approach to build robust supply chain planning capability using cloud is through data hubs. Fragmentation of data remains a key obstacle on the path of integrated supply chain planning. Many organizations have invested in point systems for planning various elements of supply chains over the years, have legacy systems, and also have data pertaining to supply chain residing in enterprise systems like ERP, CRM etc. With the advent of Big Data, the number of data sources and opportunities for data fragmentation have also increased. Supply chain data is therefore fragmented in data silos across multiple systems and data sources across the enterprise.

What Is a Data Hub and How Can It Help ?

Common sense dictates that disparate, "multiple sources of truth" approach is not optimal when we think about building analytics driven intelligent enterprise. And that is where data hub comes into play. To simplify it extremely, at the core of it all, a data hub centralizes all the enterprise data, creating a single source of truth. But it does not do it in a legacy way, like some other traditional warehousing technologies (like a data lake, since many data lakes leverage legacy technologies like DAS based storage). A data hub is a centralized data storage that shares and delivers data in near real time. The data hub leverages a hub and spoke model, where most commonly used data is centralized and then exchanged with several nodes on the spokes. Now let us revisit our three analytical approaches to see how this architecture fits there. The illustration below depicts how a data hub collects data from multiple sources, harmonizes it through data operations and makes it available to the nodes. The data generated and collected by these entities is mediated and governed by data hub as it flows across the organization. So some of the key aspects of data hub can be summarized as:

• Consolidate data from multiple sources and multiple formats
• Perform a comprehensive data operations on the data (discover, refine, govern, orchestrate)
• Create a single source of truth for applications and platforms across the enterprise

Imagine the strategic planning exercise of network optimization modeling. The many different types of data points that go into building this model is mind-boggling. And the fact is, a majority of work is done in getting data together, and then harmonizing the data, vs actual model building and model run. But now think about this in the context of a data hub. As you can envision, having a data hub can allow you to build the capability of continuously refreshing your models relatively easily and frequently, thereby significantly enhancing the efficacy and usability of your planning models.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

By now you can tell that data hub provides an essential ingredient towards building a true single-source-of-truth for supply chain planning. Overall as well, organizations are increasingly looking for eliminating data silos across the enterprise and data hubs can be a good architecture model to follow for that. And hence, we are seeing an influx of data hub solutions in the market and the number of such products will increase in the future. SAP has its own data hub product in the form of its business data intelligence data management solution, a key component of the business technology platform. Since BTP plays an key role in the "RISE with SAP" offering, and data hub is an integral data architecture of that platform, it is obvious that data hubs will be playing a key role in the intelligent enterprises of the future. When it comes to SAP partners ecosystem, vendors like APOS Systems, Prospecta provide solutions that can help you eliminate data silos. While APOS does that leveraging tools like SAP Analytics Cloud and ensuring connectivity to a plethora of disparate data sources, modern BI tools like those from Pyramid Analytics can help eliminate data silos as well, as highlighted in this article.