This week, Google Cloud is launching a new partnership with Craft that will help more supply chain leaders uncover the supplier intelligence they need to make better decisions.
“We’re extremely excited for the opportunity to partner with Google Cloud and its launch of the Supply Chain Twin, and be able to help power this amazing tool with Craft’s Supplier Intelligence,” says Ilya Levtov, founder and CEO of Craft.
Craft understands that supply chain visibility is crucial for strategic, agile decision-making. Yet lack of visibility into the supply chain remains a challenge for a majority of companies. Siloed, stale, or incomplete data create blind spots that often lead to poor decision making, which can impact business at every level-from stockouts at retailers to aging inventory at manufacturers and even weather-related disruptions.
That’s where Google Cloud comes in.
Supported by Craft, Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin brings together data from a variety of systems, both internal and external to the customer environment, enabling customers to digitally map their physical supply chain in order to improve planning and decision making.
Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin gives customers:
- End-to-end visibility of their supply chain.
- Comprehensive data that enables better analytics (e.g. KPI monitoring and alerts)
- Enhanced collaboration and data sharing between companies through platform capabilities such as Analytics Hub.
Craft delivers the data foundation
Craft provides accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date supplier data by aggregating millions of data points through proprietary machine learning, manual human review, and validated sources, including Dun & Bradstreet and SecurityScorecard. That data is then structured and made available in Craft’s Enterprise Portal and API.
With Craft, customers can quickly discover new suppliers, conduct deep supplier evaluation analyzing over 350 data points, and automatically monitor suppliers with real-time, customizable alerts.
Google Cloud brings it all together
With the launch of the Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin, Craft has made its supplier data available through BigQuery and connected it into the Supply Chain Twin data model-making it easy to join and gather insights from Craft, ERP, PLM, and other supply chain signals, and then surface powerful insights.
“Most supply chain and procurement leaders are making crucial decisions every day with unreliable and incomplete supplier data,” says Levtov. “Craft utilizes artificial intelligence to create a complete, holistic view of suppliers that helps power Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin to better empower supply chain and procurement professionals to predict risk and identify opportunity.”
What might this look like in the real world? Let’s say you are viewing a demand forecasting pane in Looker (a data analytics platform that integrates with Google BigQuery) related to one of the commodities you manage.
You notice a crucial commodity is highlighted red because of a new product introduction, as well as some demand shaping signals. You see the there will be a 50% increase in demand in the next six months. This outstrips the current delivery SLA with the supplier, and based on some risk signals from Craft, it’s apparent the supplier can’t support any increased future orders.
To investigate, you move to Craft and start digging deeper into the supplier.
The holistic supplier data in Craft provides better context on the red flags. Your supplier has had high executive turnover and their financial health scores have dropped over the past year. It also appears their CSR ratings are below your corporate standards, so you determine the best course of action is looking for an alternate supplier.
You click the “compare” button in Craft and are immediately shown several alternate suppliers. You can compare crucial metrics side-by-side, and see there are several suppliers that can not only meet your increased demand but also have better CSR metrics.
After making your selections, you can easily navigate to ServiceNow to search for the supplier. Craft’s integration with supplier lifecycle solutions like ServiceNow makes it easy to find the supplier, import the appropriate information, submit to procurement for approval, and automatically sync with SAP Ariba. As a result, you’re able to mitigate and prevent disruption long before it has a negative impact.
Craft’s comprehensive supplier intelligence helps supply chain leaders gain a deeper understanding of both existing and potential suppliers. And with the launch of Google Cloud’s Supply Chain Twin, the ability to bring together multiple data sources and gain deeper insight into supply chain visibility, demand forecasting, and risk mitigation, is easier than ever before.