LAS VEGAS — While data in supply chains is plentiful, synthesizing information from separate sources for better decision making remains a hurdle, executives said at Manifest 2025 this month.
"The root of most supply chain challenges is a four letter word — it's data," said Jodi Larson, Microsoft's VP of cloud supply chain strategy and transformation, during a panel on supply chain connectivity and transparency.
Larson's team builds engineering and IT systems, relying on roughly 200 direct suppliers including Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Micron and Samsung. While Microsoft may want order information in a particular format with specific data capture methods, other customers might request something different. That presents added complexity for a supplier like Samsung, which has to field customer requests from a variety of industries, Larson said.
Supply chain stakeholders and governments working together to develop standards could help companies get on the same page, Larson said. Standards should address how to identify suppliers and record their information, which data formatting methods are approved and how long data should be stored for, she added.
"There's a lot of these standards, and today we don't have alignment between the governments, and some of the legislation is actually in conflict between [the] U.S. and the EU," Larson said. "If we're fully compliant with one, we could be violating something in another space."
Not everyone sees standards in data as the best path to ease companies' supply chain issues. Part of the challenge is training new suppliers on those standards, according to Dave Clark, a former Amazon leader who is now CEO of supply chain tech startup Auger. Supplier changes can happen frequently, particularly for fast-growing companies or those adjusting in the wake of disruptions like new tariffs.
"My point of view on this is I think it's time to move beyond standards, because I just don't think they will ever work," Clark said in a separate session at Manifest 2025.
Data is typically cleanest within a company's "financial infrastructure," Clark noted, but it becomes less structured the closer it gets to the physical side of the operations like sourcing, production and delivery. Usually, this means the data comes in a less digestible format like an email, a PDF or a Slack message.
Clark said Auger's focus is to take a company's data, clean or not, and turn it into information that leads to faster decisions and improved supply chain outcomes.
"We're basically building a data infrastructure to extract everything out of existing systems to be the garbage disposal of a company's data," Clark said.
On Larson's panel, Dollar General executive Chelsea Morris said data transparency among supply chain players could lead to better decision making overall, such as determining which ports have the most capacity to handle inbound volume.
Morris, VP of global inbound transportation for the retailer, specifically pointed to capacity challenges at ocean ports during the pandemic that supply chains didn't account for or respond to until major backlogs developed.
"Wouldn't it have been wonderful if we had enough transparency within the market to have data that would show us what was happening before we got to that critical point, so that I'm able to solve for those things in advance and I know where my additional areas of capacity are?" Morris said.
