In modern supply chain management, data is everything. It fuels visibility, powers decisions, and keeps global operations running smoothly. But as companies scale, their data often becomes scattered across disparate systems, departments, and partners-trapped in silos that force teams into endless manual busywork, delay critical decisions, and increase the risk of costly errors.
This pervasive challenge of data silos was recently at the heart of a discussion during a webinar hosted by Alessandra Barrett of the Journal of Commerce. Industry leaders Adam Hill, CEO of Scarbrough, and Nisarg Mehta, CTO of Raft, joined the conversation to explore how automation offers a powerful solution to bridge these critical data gaps in logistics.
How Data Silos Form in a Growing Supply Chain
As organizations expand, scaling often outpaces the ability of existing tools and manual processes to keep up. This leads to fragmentation and disconnected data points. Systems don’t talk to each other. Spreadsheets multiply uncontrollably. And teams are left manually stitching information together, wasting valuable time.
Adam Hill described the impact firsthand at Scarbrough: "Our company has grown 2.5 times over the last five years... and we have no additional finance staff."
That kind of rapid growth without scalable operations isn’t just rare—it’s a clear warning sign of underlying inefficiencies.
Nisarg Mehta added a crucial perspective from the technology side: "While technologies move forward by leaps and bounds, the global, fragmented nature of the supply chain means everything is still done in spreadsheets, emails, and documents."
In other words, modern tools have potential, but outdated, manual workflows prevent companies from fully leveraging it.
The Hidden Costs of Data Silos
When data is fragmented, it directly impacts your bottom line and operational efficiency. Key costs include:
- Inefficiency: Teams waste countless hours manually re-entering, searching for, and reconciling data across different sources.
- Limited Visibility: Fragmented data makes it nearly impossible to gain a single, comprehensive view of the entire supply chain picture.
- Delayed Decisions: Leaders can't act quickly or confidently without real-time, unified insights, missing opportunities or reacting too late.
- Increased Risk: Manual data handling significantly increases the likelihood of errors, inconsistencies, and compliance issues.
Where Automation Closes the Gaps
Automation acts as the connective tissue for your supply chain data, directly addressing the pain points of silos:
- Data Extraction: Automatically pulls key information trapped within emails, documents, and spreadsheets, eliminating manual data entry.
- Data Integration: Connects disparate systems (TMS, WMS, ERP, etc.) to enable smooth, synchronized data flow across the organization.
- Validation: Automatically checks incoming data for accuracy and flags anomalies, dramatically reducing human error.
Analysis: Frees staff from tedious data wrangling tasks so they can focus on higher-value work like analysis, insights, and strategic planning.
What Happens When You Connect the Dots
Implementing automation to break down data silos yields significant benefits across the supply chain:
- Efficiency Gains: Less time spent on tedious manual tasks means more time for strategic, value-adding work.
- End-to-End Visibility: Real-time access to unified operational and financial data provides a complete supply chain picture.
- Faster, Better Decisions: Unified, accurate data empowers leaders to make confident, timely actions based on comprehensive insights.
- Fewer Errors: Automated checks and standardized processes drastically reduce costly mistakes and rework.
- Scalability: Systems grow with your business volume without the need for proportional headcount increases just to manage data.
Getting Started: Steps to Break Down Silos
Achieving these transformative results requires a strategic approach. Here are the key steps to begin breaking down data silos in your organization:
- Assess your current state: Identify the data silos that exist within your organization, the systems and processes that contribute to these silos, and the impact they have on your supply chain efficiency and decision-making.
- Define your ideal future state: Envision what your supply chain operations would look like without data silos. What information would be readily available? How would teams collaborate and make decisions? What efficiencies could be gained?
- Identify automation opportunities: Determine which processes and data flows can be automated to break down silos and enable real-time visibility and collaboration. Consider solutions like APIs, data integration platforms, and robotic process automation (RPA).
- Start small and scale: Begin with a pilot project to prove the value of automation in breaking down data silos. Choose a specific process or data flow to automate and measure the impact. Once proven successful, scale the solution across your organization.
It's important to remember that breaking down data silos is not just a technical challenge, but also a people challenge. As Adam Hill mentioned in the webinar, "you have to take people along the journey, otherwise it has no hope in hell of working well." This means investing in change management, employee engagement, and fostering a culture of openness and adaptability. It's about opening minds to what's possible with new technology and encouraging teams to think about work differently.
The Future Is Connected
In today’s fast-moving and complex logistics environment, connected data isn’t just a nice-to-have - it's a fundamental competitive advantage. By using automation to eliminate silos and streamline information flow, logistics teams can gain unparalleled visibility, make smarter decisions, move faster, and scale more confidently.
Breaking down silos is more than a systems integration project. It’s a strategic transformation that drives resilience, scalability, and competitive advantage.
And it all starts by rethinking how your organization handles its most valuable asset: data.