Supply chain planning teams face an increasingly complex array of technological challenges in today’s quickly-evolving global marketplace. With a high level of merger and acquisition activity, a steady stream of new infrastructure coming online and an increase in corporate alliances, companies must quickly find solutions to support seamless collaboration among changing data systems. The underlying technologies in all of these companies are struggling to maintain their operational effectiveness. Multiple Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) must suddenly work together as one centralized data store. In addition, siloeddata solutions in the form of spreadsheets, proprietary databases and flat files must be incorporated into the overall data set so that planning professionals have full visibility to the global supply chain.
Companies that approach the problem of integrating multiple systems quickly realize that the ideal solution is a technology that can connect all of these data sources together into one centralized location that ensure compatibility with the future direction of the company.
- Must be adaptable to future technologies and additions to the data network
- Must not cause disruption to the business operations –data must flow quickly and error-free between departments without impact to performance
- Must support the required pace of synchronization for all critical data -real-time, near real-time and batch updating must all be supported, depending on the needs of the organization
- Must be able to map, convert, correct, complete, de-duplicate and normalize all data regardless of its source location and format
- Must store the data in one centralized location where it can be accessed by the planning team
- Must support in-depth data analysis and mining of the centralized database
- Must support light maintenance and management of the non-transactional portion of the centralized data, avoiding the need for additional correcting and downloading from original sources
For the last two decades, WAM Systems has delivered solutions that meet these requirements. WAM’s solutions for data connectivity, management, processing and analysis have evolved over this time to accommodate the wide variety of data formats found in today’s complex enterprise networks.
WAM understands that no two companies have the same technology landscape or set of requirements. Some companies have elaborate systems in place to interface with all of their various data storage locations but need a solution to establish and maintain a centralized core. Some companies are simply surviving in a matrix of siloedapplications, often with a significant amount of redundant data, and without the required visibility into the overall supply chain planning operation.
Today, WAM’s data integration solutions are able to address any footprint of technological challenges, and fill the white space and missing functionality with systems that deploy quickly and easily with almost no impact to IT resources.
It is not uncommon to find critical data in a variety of data formats, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases, CSV files, multiple ERP systems and plant systems. When companies need a solution to tie this information together into one system, they turn to WAM Connect™ for the answer. WAM Connect has been designed to interface to these multiple locations and extract the key information necessary to support informed decision making and planning. WAM Connect includes a library of advanced connectors that can seamlessly integrate with many of the leading types of data repositories found in modern technology networks.
Certified interfaces are available for leading ERP systems, CRM systems, manufacturing and execution systems, network applications and more. And for unique cases, customized interfaces have even been designed –which enables WAM to extend the possible list of target data stores almost indefinitely, allowing WAM Connect to communicate with almost every solution. Through its flexible interface technology, WAM Connect can gather data from a wide variety of data sources and transport mechanisms, including ERP systems, CRM systems, data warehouses, legacy business systems, user spreadsheets, plant systems and external data sources.
Added to the challenge of gathering data from multiple sources is the task of cleaning and preparing the data for storage. As anyone who’s ever tried to splice two spreadsheets together can explain, no two data sets are ideally suited for merging. A standard list of data manipulation procedures are put into place to intercept potential data errors, spelling, abbreviations, duplicates, number system conversions, missing information and more. WAM Connect supports the creation of data formatting rules and profiles which allow source data to be refined and fully prepared for optimal integration into the central data store. Routines can cross-check data fields against other sources, perform extensive validation and lookups to ensure that all data that passes through to the centralized database conforms to one standard.
Gathering and formatting the data supports the most ideal outcome—storing the processed data into one centralized location that is free of error, redundancy and extraneous information. WAM Connect is able to deliver the processed data into the WAM Picaso Database in a storage structure that is designed to support enhanced data analysis, filtering and reporting that empowers supply chain executives with the information needed to make critical planning decisions.
When the challenge of collecting and processing your company’s critical planning data from its disparate sources has been met, the goal for supply chain planning teams shifts to obtaining a method of evaluating, mining and analyzing the data for anomalies, trends and urgent issues that can be addressed. WAM’s advanced data management solutions are designed for exactly that purpose—to quickly and easily identify the most significant issues that impact the tactical and strategic decision processes. WAM’s Advanced Data Management™ is a solution that allows users to navigate through both simple data tables and elaborate, virtual data queries across multiple tables to review all of the mission-critical data feeding the supply chain planning system. The tool supports in-line data editing of non-transactional data stored in the WAM centralized database which eliminates the need to perform additional corrections and downloads from the originating data source. The ability to filter and locate target information for review and editing is provided in the form of an intuitive web-based user interface that follows the user’s incremental approach to narrowing search results and presenting the desired record set for review.
WAM’s data management solution has been designed as an integrated suite of modules which allow deployment in a variety of arrangements to fit into each company’s unique footprint of technological strengths and weaknesses. Only those components that are absent from a company’s existing infrastructure are deployed, ensuring a solution which is free of redundant processing. WAM’s experience with the endlessly wide range of technology combinations found in today’s process industry companies has enabled it to develop a solution that can be deployed without the need for a large IT resource commitment from the customer.In addition, WAM continues to refine its capabilities to maintain pace with the continually evolving high-tech landscape of enterprise applications and data transport mechanisms. The result is an open-ended solution which can accommodate nearly all types of data challenges facing supply chain executives today.
advanced data management