Will shippers soon be able to Google their way out of a supply chain crisis? New York-listed Dun & Bradstreet, a provider of business decisioning data and analytics, and Google Cloud have announced a 10-year strategic agreement to to co-develop software and services around supply chain visibility and other business issues.
Dun & Bradstreet will become one of the founding data providers for Google Cloud’s Supply Chain Twin solution, which is underpinned by BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless, multicloud data warehouse, and provides supply chain virtualisation for businesses. Dun & Bradstreet helps businesses understand their supplier relationships through its near real-time supplier data set. By integrating Dun & Bradstreet’s supply chain data with Google Cloud Supply Chain Twin, the two companies will develop new solutions that improve end-to-end supply chain visibility for customers and help uncover hidden risks in global supply chains.
“Through this collaboration with Dun & Bradstreet, we are helping companies of all sizes make better decisions through data-driven insights. Dun & Bradstreet’s reputation for business data and delivering innovative capabilities, combined with our leading analytics, artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies, will bring new opportunities to our mutual customers,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud.
“What I like about this idea is that this solution has the potential to be independent and offer at a glance all shipments, no matter the incoterm, shipping line, airline and forwarder. That’s what a true, holistic and fully integrated solution looks like to me,” Christoph Scheithe, the host of the PlanetLogistics platform, told Splash today.
Also commenting via LinkedIn on the tie-up, Splash columnist Kris Kosmala imagined where this Google news could lead to ultimately.
“Imagine being offered a service like Google Maps, whereas you see the current routings between your suppliers (not only Tier 1, but below that too) and your company overlaid by suggested routings that would cut lead-times, sourcing costs, and reduce complexity of your supply chains network,” Kosmala mused. A next possible step, Kosmala suggested, harnessing the Dun & Bradstreet data, could involve supply chain financing and credit trustworthiness of suppliers and buyers.
