Supply Chain Management – Plug and Play

Author : Syed Badsha

Introduction

In today’s interconnected digital landscape, businesses rely on a multitude of applications, platforms, and technologies to support their operations. However, the challenge lies in ensuring that these disparate systems can communicate effectively with each other, share data seamlessly, and work in concert to drive business processes forward. Having an integration layer in this regard is quintessential.

In summary, the integration layer serves as the linchpin of modern enterprise architecture, enabling organizations to unlock the full potential of their digital ecosystems, drive innovation, and stay ahead in today’s competitive supply chain management landscape. 

Supply Chain Management Objectives

1. Data Integration: One of the primary functions of a plug-and-play integration layer is to harmonize data from different structural sources. This layer ensures that information can be seamlessly exchanged and synchronized across the customer applications and Ninjacart core solutions.
2. System Integration: In today’s ecosystem of diverse software applications, achieving interoperability is paramount. The plug-and-play and play layer enables different customer applications to communicate with each other using standard APIs to interact with the core modules of Ninjacart to solve their business problems. This allows for the automation of business processes spanning multiple applications, enhancing efficiency and agility.
3. Event-Driven Architecture: SCM solutions have to be (near) real-time in order to perform better. With the rise of real-time data processing and event-driven applications, the play-and-play (P&P) layer plays a crucial role in enabling event-driven architecture. By capturing, processing, and reacting to events in real-time, customers can gain actionable insights, respond to changing conditions, and deliver personalized experiences to their customers.

Cost benefits

•   Improved Efficiency: By streamlining data exchange and automating processes, the P&P layer reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, and accelerates time-to-market for new initiatives.
•   Enhanced Agility: With a flexible integration infrastructure in place, customers can adapt quickly to changing business requirements, scale their operations, and integrate new technologies seamlessly.

  Better Decision-Making: By providing a unified view of data between the Customer and Ninjacat solutions, the P&P layer empowers decision-makers with timely, accurate, and actionable insights, thus enabling data-driven decision-making.  

Challenges to build a Plug and play layer

Close to 60% solution is in a monolithic architecture that provides core SnD solutions alongside a microservices architecture. These solutions are often tightly coupled, and exposing such functionality to the vendor requires a smart channel for seamless integration. Additionally, there may be bespoke solutions and a few core behaviour changes required to address specific vendor needs. Furthermore, shipping the infrastructure to different cloud providers proved to be a challenging task.

Approach

Every customer has unique needs and likes. Our approach to fulfilling those needs must be tailored and precise. We at Ninjacart achieve this by employing a modular approach. This allows us to adapt our core services to meet individual customer requirements.  Ultimately, our goal is to provide solutions that perfectly align with each customer’s specific situation to succeed in their business goals.

Customers choose the complete Ninjacart SCM stack or handpick only those specific modular Ninjacart core solutions that can be plugged into their existing SCM Systems.

For instance, one of your customers chose to plug in our operations modules, which comprise a web-based control center, an Android application, and the backend core modules. 

The following image depicts all possible combinations that customers can utilize to succeed in their business.

Glimpse of our technical overview

Handling real-time and batch processing using the plug-and-play layer.

The above image represents a sample Customer implementation of Ninjacart solutions 

Conclusion

As a pioneer in solving the supply chain management (SCM) business-to-business (B2B) supply chain, we elevate the solutions that enable other businesses to benefit from our knowledge, cost optimization, and business process expertise.

Furthermore, we ensure that our customers are kept informed and upgraded to our roadmap plans as part of this technology partnership program.