Bart Smelley

At the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in Denver, Scott Luton sat down with Nari Viswanathan, a veteran innovator in the planning and procurement technology space and a key leader at Coupa. The two reconnected after several recent collaborations—including webinars, industry sessions, and conversations in Dallas—and discussed the new realities of supply chain planning and how organizations are embracing technology like never before.   Coupa and Autonomous Spend Management For those less familiar with Coupa, Viswanathan explained the company as the global leader in autonomous spend management—a framework that brings together direct and indirect spending to help organizations manage total spend more intelligently. Direct spend, of course, is where supply chain operations come into focus, making planning, design, and cost optimization central to the value Coupa delivers. Viswanathan leads Coupa’s global supply chain strategy, shaping how the company positions and scales its solutions across the market. After years spent in supply chain planning technology, he now sits at the intersection of procurement, supply chain, and advanced analytics—an area he believes has never been more exciting or more critical.   Old Problems, New Pressures—and a Greater Willingness to Innovate When asked about the biggest challenges facing planners today, Viswanathan emphasized a…

Special Guest Blog Post written by Mark Holmes with InterSystems   Top 10 Ways a Data Gateway Improves Time to Value Across End-to-End Supply Chains Supply chain practitioners seeking the best way to speed decision intelligence, unify supply chain data, increase operational efficiency, and improve supply chain resilience can benefit from a supply chain data gateway. A data gateway provides unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, supply chain applications, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities. Here are the top 10 ways a supply chain data gateway can improve your supply chain performance. Enables You to Identify Inefficiencies and Make Better and Informed Decisions A unified view of your data accelerates informed decision making and provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your supply chain. For example, a supply planner gains accelerated access to customer orders, inventory levels, and transportation schedules, all in one place, to identify inefficiencies and make better informed decisions. Reduces Implementation Times Enterprises and supply chain software providers strive to reduce application implementation times. A data gateway can serve as a front-end for a range of supply chain software applications, speeding and simplifying data ingestion, integration,…