eccenca is Gartner Sample Vendor for Digital Supply Chain Twins 2020

• According to Gartner, Digital Supply Chain Twins are at the heart of any supply chain digitalization.
• eccenca moves companies from application-centric to data-centric digitalization strategy
• Digital Supply Chain Twins accelerate and improve decision-making processes in supply chain management

For the second time in a row, Gartner names eccenca as a sample vendor for Digital Supply Chain Twins in its current analysis report Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Strategy, 2020. In 2019 Gartner had already listed the German company as a sample vendor. In its annually published Hype Cycle analyses, the leading experts of the analyst firm evaluate the status of relevant technologies and strategy trends. The Digital Supply Chain Twins (DSCT for short) play a special role in the analyses. As Gartner Research Vice President Tim Payne states, they are at the heart of every digitalization effort in the supply chain. The DSCT allows the far-reaching automation of decisions and the scalable integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence into supply chain processes.

The impact of the DSCT is transformational as it enables end-to-end decision making by being in lockstep with the real-world supply chain, Tim Payne explains in his analysis. It creates end-to-end visibility and supports end-to-end decision making by being in lockstep with the real-world supply chain. ... It is through this twin that a company can drive the alignment of its decisions both horizontally and vertically throughout its supply chain. According to Payne, companies can significantly improve decision-making processes and risk management because the DSCT, which is linked to the real world, provides the necessary real-time understanding of the situation. It ensures balance across the supply chain and the execution of strategy down through the organization by mapping the relationships between the different data objects (e.g. events, attributes, orders) and entities (e.g. products, customers, suppliers, locations, assets). Tim Payne advises companies to use DSCT to reduce the number of data models in their supply chain. This is where the approaches of Gartner and eccenca differ fundamentally, though.

The Path To Supply Chain Digitalization

eccenca helps companies like Bosch, Nokia and Siemens to master the complexity of their data landscape. Its DSCT solution enables companies to automate their supply chain processes based on trustworthy and consistent data. In 2018, Gartner therefore had named eccenca as Cool Vendor for Supply Chain Execution Technologies. The core of the eccenca DSCT is the Knowledge Graph based software Corporate Memory. It creates the basis for building a fully integrated information infrastructure and data transparency over the entire life cycle. In contrast to Tim Payne's suggestion, the existing IT does not have to be changed.

For a successful digital transformation of the supply chain, companies need the capability to use their data flexibly, agile and reliably, eccenca CEO Hans-Christian Brockmann elaborates. Incidentally, this applies not only to supply chain management, but also to any digitalization efforts. Up to now, DSCT projects have suffered from the multitude of systems, data schemas, languages and data definitions within each system. However, instead of the proposed strategy of reducing the number of data models through high-risk system consolidation we recommend a more cost-efficient, low-risk alternative. eccenca employs a semantic DSCT platform based on the supply chain ontology APICS-SCOR, among others. Our goal is an end-to-end decision process in the supply chain that does not disrupt a company's running systems.

The eccenca-based Digital Supply-Chain Twin approach focuses on three paradigm shifts in data management:

• a global instead of local identification of data,
• globally explicit semantics instead of local schemas, and
• elimination of long-term and high-risk system consolidation through virtual integration of the data in the DSCT.

With the Digital Supply Chain Twin, companies have a maximum degree agility and transparency in an ever faster and more complex supply chain.

For information on the eccenca DSCT solution, visit: https://eccenca.com/solutions/data-automation/digital-supply-networks