Optimizing the Global Supply Chain with The Win-Win WAN
Quick. I want to buy a new camera, where should I get it from?
Amazon? I thought so.
Once a staid business, logistics and supply-chain management is now the face of a tectonic shift that’s taking place everywhere from Russia to China to Europe and the United States —largely thanks to Amazon.
A rare commodity manufactured in remote Asia sells at a steep price in the most exclusive markets of North America. All praises to the supply-chain management working tirelessly to make both ends meet.
On-demand time slots, predictable delivery speeds, same-day delivery — what was once the stuff of science fiction is now reduced to a mere act of pressing a button.
When You Want It, Where You Want It
There is a lot more than what meets the eyes that go into providing a cushy logistical user experience.
Picture this: Amazon has over 850 facilities in 22 countries, sprawled over 220 million sqft, the equivalent of almost 8 square miles — that is the size of a small nation.
From tracking the correct product location, maintaining accurate stock visibility, to deciding whether the right product is on the right vehicle in the right quantity — what kind of precision do you think goes into keeping this warship afloat?
What makes the challenges more perplexing is their unpredictable and dynamic nature. From storing items in the warehouse, picking up the correct order, selecting a suitable carrier to handling last-minute changes — a single point of failure can disrupt the entire supply chain.
CargoWise: Optimizing Supply-Chains Globally
Supply chains and logistics are a cacophony of people, processes, information, activities, and resources. As one can imagine, this model runs on petabytes of analytical data. This is where tools such as CargoWise come in.
Available in 30 languages and licensed across 160 countries, CargoWise is an end-to-end logistics execution platform that enables its users to simplify highly complex transactions and manage their operations on a single database across multiple users, functions, countries, languages, and currencies.
The popularity of the powerhouse solution can be gauged from the fact that it is trusted and used by more than 7,000 organizations worldwide.
The Missing Ingredients
Tools such as CargoWise run intricate transactions and facilitate data to users spread across the globe — often instantaneously and simultaneously.
To ensure faster data uploads and application synchronization, while making it centrally available to all the stakeholders instantaneously, one needs a lightning-fast network for moving data between the central repository and the remote corners of the world.
A prerequisite that traditional networks barely meet.
For instance, MPLS was a powerhouse network for the obsolete hub-and-spoke topology as depicted above but failed to meet the dynamic and on-the-go connectivity requirements of applications such as CargoWise.
Realizing the mobile nature of data entry points, the public internet seems like a quick fix. However, the mishmash nature of global ISPs makes it a very unreliable option to run mission-critical data.
Secondly, when every inch of movement and every second of time needs to be fed into the system to unlock the next steps, even a second of downtime can create an irreversible point of failure. SLAs (another missing ingredient in the public internet) are a must.
Lastly, neither of these solutions provides any sort of optimization benefits to SaaS applications. The successful implementation of cloud-based applications demands an exit from integrating legacy technology siloes and the transition to an SD-WAN as-a-Service for simplified network connectivity and application delivery.
Aryaka and Supply-Chains: Better Together
Both CargoWise users and supply chain management need a complete end-to-end fully-managed cloud-first network solution that binds the people, process, information, activities, and resources into one thread — right from the time the consignment is loaded at the source to the time it’s unloaded at the destination.
A network that can connect, optimize and secure your data, and do all of that in the blink of an eye.
Learn how Aryaka helped JAS Forwarding streamline their logistics management processes using CargoWise One.
You can also read in detail about how we can do the same for your business.
We also helped a global leader in metal-cutting and manufacturing improve their production time by up to 20x.
Want a customized experience? Sign-up for a free demo.
About the author
