The Data Your Supply Chain Can’t Survive Without

What if the most critical data for effective supply chain planning isn’t actually in your supply chain? What if the secret to resilience, agility, and profitability lies in information you’re not looking at? The truth is, relying only on internal data is like trying to predict the weather by only looking out a single window. This limited view misses the bigger picture of how fronts are moving (markets), disruptions (storms) or beyond your view (weather radar). Markets shift, disruptions happen, and consumer demand is unpredictable. If your supply chain doesn’t have external insights, you’re missing the bigger picture.

To remain competitive, companies must embrace external data to enhance supply chain visibility, improve planning, mitigate risks, and optimize operations.

The Value of External Data in Supply Chain Planning Software

Like the weather, your supply chain doesn’t exist in a vacuum. External factors such as disruptions, weather, economic fluctuations, shifting consumer behaviors, and transportation delays all impact your operations. Yet, many organizations still rely solely on their own internal data to drive decisions. This creates blind spots that lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and increased risk.

External data bridges this gap, offering a more holistic view of the market and visibility to changes, enabling real-time, data-driven decision-making.

According to Gartner, “High-performing companies are 2 - 3 times more likely to utilize external data to provide greater context when making decisions.” * 

Advanced supply chain planning software helps companies across industries make smarter decisions faster, with the right insights that reach the right people at the right time allowing you to ingest, cleanse, harmonize and analyze external data alongside internal sources.

It’s key to optimize your supply chain and find unseen relationships across your data by leveraging the power of AI and machine learning across large volumes of data. When external data is fully incorporated, supply chains gain critical benefits, such as:

• Proactive supply chain planning that responds dynamically to changes across your end-to-end supply chain (suppliers, customers, logistics networks, etc.)
• Detect disruptions and improve risk identification before they impact operations
• Enhance demand planning to align demand drivers with consumer demand
• Collapse time to respond to market signals with reduced lag
• Make more informed decisions, reducing uncertainty and improving supply chain agility

Not All External Data is the Same 

There are several types of external data you can leverage. The key is understanding which datasets provide the most value to your supply chain in the context of what you want to achieve and when. Here are some of the most impactful types of external data:

• Transportation Visibility: This includes real-time tracking of shipments across various transportation modes, and insights into potential bottlenecks, delays, and disruptions
• Weather & Environmental Data: Most supply chains can benefit from early warnings to respond quickly to natural disasters, extreme temperatures and other risk factors. These external data sources also provide demand insights beyond seasonal trends (snowfall, hurricanes, etc.) that can impact your business.
• Point-of-Sale (POS) & Consumer Demand Intelligence: Real-time sales data is critical to adjust supply and demand planning, as well as insights into changing consumer behavior and preferences. Point of Sales data aligns consumer purchases with demand drivers and reduces supply chain noise due to order lags, channel or warehouse inventory, order policies, etc.
• Market & Economic Indicators: Critical indicators include discretionary spending, inflation rates and consumer spending trends, or exchange rates affecting global trade, along with commodity price fluctuations impacting raw material costs.
• Risk & Resilience Data: Such as supplier risk assessments and geopolitical insights, alerts for factory shutdowns, labor strikes, or regulatory changes; and alternative sourcing recommendations based on real-time conditions.

Checklist: How to Get Started with External Supply Chain Data

If you’re ready to enhance your supply chain with external data, here’s a checklist to help you get started. 

1. Identify and Prioritize the Data Sources Most Relevant to Your Supply Chain

Start by assessing which types of external data are most valuable to your operations. What data could help explain demand fluctuations? How can external insights improve supply chain response times? Which risks do you need better visibility into?

You want to seamlessly combine diverse datasets to ensure your company gains the most value from external insights.

2. Ensure Data Quality & Contextual Relevance

Not all data is created equal, and not all systems can effectively process and transform diverse data sources. Once you have the data, it’s important to also ensure it is accurate, timely, and contextual.

Some questions to consider: Does your system cleanse and harmonize data? Can your platform intelligently determine when and how data should be used? Are you able to filter out noise and focus on actionable insights?

You’re best to partner with a supply chain planning software vendor that has strong capabilities for data integration to help you connect various data sources, cleanse the data, and use AI to refine insights over time - eliminating friction in the process.

3. Choose a Solution That Supports Seamless Data Connection

To fully leverage external data, you need to remove complexity in data processing and supports multiple data formats and sources.

Think about whether you can easily incorporate external data streams such as IoT, transportation feeds, or economic indicators. Does your solution provide advanced collaboration capabilities with suppliers, partners, and customers?

The Atlas Planning Platform simplifies external data ingestion, supporting real-time insights through strategic partnerships. Just a few of these partners include FourKites for real-time transportation and shipment tracking; Resilinc for advanced supply chain risk monitoring, and PredictHQ for combining forecast-grade event impact that combines with Atlas’ superior AI models for more intelligent planning.

4. Understand the Categories of External Data Sources

Beyond your internal systems, there are multiple sources of external data to consider: 

• Your own data, outside of ERP (e.g., website traffic, online search trends, advertising metrics) 
• Paid services (e.g., subscriptions to industry reports, market data, demand intelligence, risk monitoring tools)  
• Free data sources (e.g., government economic reports, weather forecasts, transportation logs) 
• Customer & supplier data (e.g., POS sell out and on-hand inventory, and vendor stock levels and capacity insights)

Final Thoughts

We live in a hyper-connected business world, yet many supply chains are starving for effective data connection. It is crucial to integrate, analyze, and act on external data to gain a competitive edge, and make smarter decisions based on real-world insights rather than relying on historical trends alone.

Leveraging these datasets in conjunction with AI-driven analytics enables supply chains to move from reactive to proactive decision-making, optimize performance, and build resilience in an unpredictable world.

Now is the time to evaluate your external data strategy and ensure your supply chain is equipped to thrive in an increasingly complex environment.

The question isn’t whether you need external data, but how quickly you can start using it to stay ahead. Let’s talk about it!

*Gartner Research: Use Assumptions to Drive Effective Supply Chain Planning Decisions. Published: 13 November 2024. G00790259