Visualizing Transparent Supply data with Builder

With the Builder application, you can create custom dashboards and cards to help you gain a deeper understanding of your supply chain from your Transparent Supply data. These visualizations help provide more insights about your products’ lifecycles across your supply chain partners.

Transparent Supply visualizations

Displaying supply chain data in custom cards and dashboards helps users understand supply chain so that they can mitigate supply chain disruptions and reduce risks. These visualizations are useful for many types of users, some of which include Procurement Officers, Warehouse Managers, Production Planners, and Inventory Managers.

With the Supply Chain Intelligence Suite you can visualize your supply chain data in different ways:
Descriptive visualizations
Provides an aggregated and unified view of raw materials, transformed materials, and finished goods and their movement along the supply chain. This view helps companies that have multiple systems in place and lack a single source of truth to gain a clear, unified view of their supply chain.
Exception-based visualizations
Helps organizations proactively identify risks so that they can resolve issues quickly.

Example - Chicken nuggets from farm to fork

Polleria Central Ltd is a manufacturer that produces different varieties of chicken nuggets. Polleria Central Ltd controls two manufacturing plants, with a total of 11 stakeholders in their supply chain.

Figure 1. Supply chain in which Polleria Central Ltd participates.
Polleria Central Ltd supply chain includes 11 stakeholders, specifically, 4 farms, 2 suppliers, 2 Polleria Central Ltd manufacturing plants, 1 distributor, and 2 retailers.

Example cards

The Chief Supply Chain Officer at Polleria Central Ltd is interested in understanding their supply chain, specifically product quality, demand, and shipping anomalies. For example, they want to understand downstream movement of lots across locations, throughput at downstream locations beyond their tier 1 suppliers, and month-over month throughput at a selected location. Similarly, they are interested in identifying differences between the shipped and received product quantity at their location. They also want to understand the lots that are used to create a specific product lot.

Similarly, Supply Chain Managers and Warehouse Managers at Los Pollos Hermanus, Polleria Central Ltd's supply chain partner, are most interested in product quality and shipping anomalies. For example, they want to understand their product's origin, quantity of products received at their location, and differences between the shipped and received product quantity at their location.

The Polleria Central Ltd team creates several cards that provide descriptive and exception-based visualizations of their data:
Descriptive visualizations
Exception-based visualizations
Note: The cards that are included in this example are only samples. Multiple visualizations can be created to gain the same understanding and can be created from the same backend data. These cards can also be filtered based on different factors, like location, product, or date range. For more information, see Extending and creating custom dashboards.

Product origin or movement along the supply chain (Map cards)

This map card helps Polleria Central Ltd's retailers and distributors quickly identify product origin locations, especially when the inbound supply chains are complex. Quickly identifying origin locations helps supply chain partners promptly resolve problems during recalls or other product quality issues. Map with the origin location indicated.

This map card provides Polleria Central Ltd with information about product lot movement from the origin to downstream locations. Quickly determining the origin and locations that a product lot passed through is beneficial during recalls or other issues with product quality. This information is especially helpful for large supply chains with multiple downstream partners, where products have a large outreach. Map with the supply chain locations and path that products were shipped along.

Products created (Table and drill-down page)

This table card provides Polleria Central Ltd with details about the created product lots, including the quantity, date created, and origin location. Clicking a lot code displays the lot details page, which provides more details about the input and output lots.

The products created table includes columns that provide the lot code, product name, quantity, date created, and origin location.

This drill-down page provides details about the specific lot, including more information about lots that were used to produce this lot or were produced from this lot. With the Trace view, users can get a clearer understanding of the product's complete history, from where it was first harvested or created, all the way to where it resides today.

The lot details drill-down page provides information about the lots produced from or used to produce the selected lot. Similarly, information about where lots were shipped is provided.The trace portion of the lot details drill-down page provides context about the product's journey along the supply chain, and which product lots were involved in the supply chain.

Product quantity received by location (Bar chart)

This bar chart provides Polleria Central Ltd with information about the quantity of product that is received at each downstream location. This chart can be filtered by time period. With this chart, Polleria Central Ltd gets more visibility into their supply chain beyond their tier 1 suppliers. In particular, understanding the demand beyond tier 1 helps Polleria Central Ltd identify high demand locations, and adjust their forecasting and distribution strategy.

This bar chart shows three downstream locations that received product.

Throughput at each location (Line chart)

This line chart provides Polleria Central Ltd with the month-over-month throughput of a product at their downstream locations. With this chart, Polleria Central Ltd gets a better understanding of their product demand beyond their tier 1 suppliers, including how demand varies by location and time. Polleria Central Ltd can use this information to guide their forecasting and distribution strategy.

This chart shows the throughput quantity of product at three downstream locations over a week.

Product lots received, shipped, and pending (KPI cards)

These KPI cards provide Polleria Central Ltd with an aggregated view of key metrics that they identified. These cards can also be filtered. With these cards, Polleria Central Ltd gets a quick view of the total product lots that are shipped, received, and pending, which helps them understand their overall performance. Polleria Central Ltd saves time with this aggregated view, instead of searching for data across a large data set.

These three KPI cards show 72 lots were received, 72 lots were shipped, and 0 lots are pending.

Product name and lot filter (Filter card)

This filter card helps Polleria Central Ltd quickly distill information down to a specific set of data that they're most interested in, by identifying specific lot codes, products, locations, or organizations.

This filter card allows users to search for filters, or select lot codes, product names, location names, or organizations.

Product lots shipped and received (Line chart)

This line chart provides Polleria Central Ltd with information about the quantity of product lots that are shipped and received over time. By identifying differences in the shipped and received quantities before invoicing, Polleria Central Ltd is able to handle disputes faster and improve the turnaround time for invoice resolutions.

This line chart shows the quantity of product that was shipped or received over a few months.

Products at risk of expiry (Donut chart)

This donut chart helps Polleria Central Ltd identify direct materials that are at risk of expiry. With this information, Polleria Central Ltd can reduce waste of direct materials, by prioritizing production that uses these products or moving these products to nearby production facilities.

Similarly, Polleria Central's retailers and distributors can use this chart to identify products that are nearing expiry or the end of their shelf life when they are received. Also, users can enable the shelf life risk work queue to proactively identify products at risk of expiry. With this information, retailers and distributors can prioritize selling products at risk of expiry through effective sales strategy or can seek credit for late delivery.

This donut chart shows that of the 6065 products, 30.9% are at risk of expiring.

Next steps for creating visualizations

The examples that are provided are ready-made samples that can be provisioned by contacting IBM Support.

You can also create your own cards and dashboards to cater to your specific business needs. For more information, see Builders.

Note: Payload data can't be visualized with the existing card types. To discuss visualizations for temperature data, documents, or other payload data, contact IBM Support.