< Back to Blogs
Share:

Top 10 Ways a Data Gateway Improves Time to Value Across End-to-End Supply Chains

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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, and staging processes. This significantly reduces application implementation times, lowers operational costs, and accelerates time to value.

According to Balaraj Pudota, VP and Global Head of SAP Practice at UST, “our partnership with InterSystems has allowed us to speed and simplify data ingestion and unification for our supply chain planning application providers. Customer implementation is now one-third the time, lowering operational costs and accelerating time to revenue.”

  1. Provides the Right Data for the Right Users

Making it easier to provide the right supply chain data for the right consuming users and applications at the right time and in the proper format reduces dependency on IT resources. This can be achieved through low-code and self-service access, making formerly siloed supply chain data accessible to business users and data stewards, faster and with less overhead, eliminating reliance on developers. The right data, used by the right user, helps to build resilient supply chains.

  1. Allows for Growth

Long-term growth and relevance for your organization depends on your ability to adapt to changing business needs and data requirements. As an organization grows, and its data demands increase, a supply chain data gateway’s performance should not suffer.

  1. Automates Data Operations

Managing supply chain processes and data operations can require a lot of human capital and operational costs. With a data gateway, you can automate data operations, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving overall efficiency.

  1. Provides Flexibility to Connect with a Wide Range of Data Sources

With a data gateway you have the flexibility to support open data access and enable seamless integration with other systems and applications. It should be easy to connect to new data sources as the need arises, such as ESG or SNEW (social, news, events, weather) data. A data gateway gives you the flexibility to support supply chain data unification and exchange with an extensible canonical supply chain data model, ensuring that data is stored and managed in a consistent and structured manner, and allowing for easy integration and growth.

  1. Improves Supply Chain Visibility and Efficiency

Identifying bottlenecks, optimizing inventory levels, and improving overall efficiency are goals for all supply chain managers. Achieving these goals requires visibility into the entire supply chain. This visibility, a comprehensive view of data across the global supply chain, is made faster and easier with a data gateway.

  1. Accelerates Decision-Making and Strategic Planning

A data gateway provides users with real-time data to make accelerated, informed decisions, based on data from the global supply chain. This enables companies to react faster to disruptions and exceptions and know that they are making the most informed decision possible for a competitive advantage.

  1. Ensures High Security and Reliability

A cloud-based approach allows an organization to focus on core business activities by reducing the need for in-house IT management. With a data gateway that is fully managed and hosted in major cloud providers, organizations can be ensured high security and reliability so you can focus on making sense of the data.

  1. Facilitates Sustainability Reporting and Environmental Compliance Goals

A data gateway provides a unified and harmonized view of supply chain data, which is essential for generating accurate and reliable ESG reports. By integrating data from various sources, including IoT devices and third-party systems, organizations can monitor and manage their environmental impact more effectively.

Read the full blog here.

 

InterSystems Can Help

For over 45 years, InterSystems has helped businesses unlock value from data – quickly, safely, and at scale. Our AI-enabled supply chain decision intelligence platform predicts disruptions before they occur, and optimally handles them when they do, so you will be ready to manage the unexpected with confidence. It includes a real-time data gateway that unifies disparate data sources, and a set of next-generation supply chain solutions that complement your existing technology infrastructure to accelerate decision-making and time to value, driving efficiencies throughout your entire supply chain. Learn more at InterSystems.com/SupplyChain.

 

Mark Holmes is the Head of Global Supply Chain Market Strategy at InterSystems. Mark brings more than 25 years of experience in consulting, manufacturing operations, and software development from such organizations as Dow Chemical, GS1 (Brussels), Aspen Technology, and GSI. He specializes in working with manufacturers and retailers/CPG to solve their most difficult supply chain issues through digital transformation with a modern data fabric architecture. Breaking down data silos and leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive actionable insights throughout an organization’s global supply chain, Mark has delivered value to companies like Tyson Foods, Ferrero Roche, TJX Companies, Hard Rock Café, and Albertsons. Mark joined InterSystems in 2021 to broaden InterSystems global market in supply chain. Holmes has been a board member for the Association for Supply Chain Management and is APICS certificated in Transportation, Logistics and Distribution (CTLD) from the same organization. He earned a BS degree in business administration from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and an MBA from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

More Blogs

travel
Blogs
August 28, 2025

Why a “Perfect Fit” TMS Beats Feature-Packed Systems

The right match unlocks efficiency, visibility, and cost control—without drowning in unused features Special Guest Blog Post written by e2open   When picking a Transportation Management System (TMS), shiny features, slick dashboards, and buzzwords can be distracting. But here’s the truth: real ROI doesn’t come from having the most bells and whistles. It comes from finding a TMS that fits your transportation complexity like a glove.   Too simple, and you’ll outgrow it before the ink is dry. Too complex, and you’ll be paying for tools you don’t use. Nail the fit, though, and other KPIs like cost savings, faster execution, and happier customers will slide into place.   How to pick a TMS that fits your freight   Carriers and LSPs running on legacy systems miss out on the real-time visibility and cost control a modern TMS delivers, leaving them slower, less efficient, and easier to undercut. Let’s unpack how to look beyond flashy features and choose a TMS that works for your business:   Match complexity first. The biggest ROI driver is aligning your TMS with your transportation complexity. Get that right, and everything else follows.   Consider adaptability and scalability. Your TMS should grow with you. Look…
agentic AI
Blogs
January 19, 2026

Kinaxis’ Fred Baumann on Continuous Disruption, Adaptive Planning, and Turning Turbulence into Opportunity

At the 2025 Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in Denver, Scott Luton sat down with Fred Baumann, Senior Industry Principal at Kinaxis, one of the world’s most recognized leaders in supply chain planning and orchestration. Kinaxis has spent over four decades shaping the planning landscape and has been named to the Gartner Leaders Quadrant an extraordinary 11 consecutive times—a testament to its execution strength and long-term vision. Baumann’s role at Kinaxis centers on helping chief supply chain officers and senior leaders shape their strategic transformation roadmaps, quantify value, and build the business cases necessary to achieve breakthrough outcomes.   From Episodic Disruptions to Continuous Turbulence When asked about old and new challenges facing supply chain planning teams, Baumann observed a major shift: disruption is no longer episodic—it’s continuous. Historically, companies faced major disruptions every few years. Today, volatility and constraint-related challenges—whether driven by tariffs, sourcing changes, geopolitical shifts, or supply shortages—are unfolding weekly or even daily. This environment demands a new way of working. The speed of global business is accelerating, and uncertainty is at historic highs. As Baumann noted, organizations must now adjust their supply chains “much faster than they had to even last year.” The shift isn’t only…