Not only has the pandemic urged companies to diversify their sourcing strategy, but it has also empowered them to build stronger relationships within their ecosystem — e.g. suppliers, trading partners, customers. According to Aldus von der Burg, our CEO at Meili Robots, “system providers and operators need to find ways to appease” the market’s demand, “which is very difficult to do alone. Hence, there will be a substantial growth in collaborations where companies provide unique solutions to the supply chain machine rather than one giant solution to cover all”. Evidently, ecosystem partnerships are essential to ensure supply chain resilience and better preparedness for market disruptions.
As mentioned before, by providing end-to-end visibility, B2B cloud integration addresses the unpredictability of the supply chain ecosystem. In fact, companies are becoming increasingly aware of the shortcomings of their current solutions. They understand that there is a need for a cloud-based integration solution that not only fulfils today’s need for supply chain agility, but that also enables them to easily automate their processes in response to unpredictable disruptions — e.g. the pandemic — as well as market opportunities — e.g. the e-commerce boost.
Moreover, with its ability to dynamically sense and intelligently respond to change, B2B cloud integration is a great contributor to building trust and confidence among the various partners within a business’ ecosystem — especially as businesses are starting to adopt more and more automation solutions to their operations. Empowering businesses to adopt such emerging technologies to their ecosystem, the cloud can, in fact, reduce the supply chain’s carbon emissions by 5-10%, while also improving resource efficiency, risk mitigation, and regulatory compliance.