Data is only as powerful as its weakest link. For many companies, this weakness is the fact that their data is siloed in their different teams and departments. A data silo is isolated raw data that is inaccessible to all departments but one in an organization.  

Data silos make it impossible to gain a 360-degree view of your supply chain, introduce significant inefficiencies, reduce the ability to make effective business decisions and collaborate with internal and external teams. In this article, we share the reasons why you should be pursuing transparent data with your trading partners instead.

5 Reasons to Pursue Transparency with Trading Partners:

Transparency opens up communication and data sharing among partners. By increasing transparency, companies can connect with trading partners, build trust, achieve better visibility into all parts of the supply chain to drive improvements and react faster and more effectively when problems occur. Ultimately, this gives everyone a much higher chance of success.

1. Attain revenue growth  

Siloed data can lead to errors which are extremely costly for any business and the biggest problem is that one mistake can lead to other mistakes, and it takes a tremendous amount of time to identify and fix these errors. When both parties have a single source of truth, you and your trading partners can achieve transparency which fuels strong decision-making and enables you to set-up and measure your deals to drive growth.

With transparent data, both parties can monitor their rebates closely and look at strategies to drive more revenue growth. For example, tiered incentives are a great method to help your company increase revenue. Instead of offering a partner a flat rate rebate, tiered incentives allow you to offer more rebates for more products purchased.

2. Encourage loyalty and trust

Transparency in business relationships comes down to trust. Trust has always been essential to building strong, profitable relationships with customers, suppliers and partners. In a world of escalating rebate complexity and supply chain volatility, the ability to acquire, manage and share trustworthy information across the value chain is more important today than ever before.  

By embracing transparency and honesty with your rebate data, organizations create a foundation of trust that helps everyone achieve their desired outcomes. As organizations build trust with trading partners, vendors might be more forthright with any challenges they’re facing so that together both parties can work out a solution together.

3. Reduce risks

A report commissioned by The Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) claims more than half of companies lack end-to-end visibility in their supply chains. This makes them vulnerable to unexpected risks.  

Data silos often maintain duplicate data when multiple departments track the same information. This presents the risk of someone using data that's not sourced properly or data that no one knows the origin of.  

Real-time data may not identify the cause of a problem. But it can alert people to changed conditions, triggering them to take a closer look and see what’s going wrong. When all parties can access transparent data, it means everyone can come to the table sooner to predict potential issues and resolve problems together before they cause delays.

4. Take advantage of opportunities

When making data-driven decisions; one wrong or missing piece of data could lead you down a rabbit hole. If you’re trying to make a big decisions, this will dramatically affect your rebate strategy. Plus, no one can strike while the iron is hot as long as rebate data remains in separate silos. There will be too much lag time in getting the information from one team’s systems to another, and opportunities will get colder and colder. By pursuing transparency with trading partners, everyone can take advantage of key opportunities driven by real-time data.

5. Deals become mutually beneficial  

As the volume of data flowing into organizations increases, there is a growing need to find ways to identify important information and make it easier to understand and analyze. For trading partners, having a shared view of this data means deals can become mutually beneficial. Proactive, transparent communications will help a trading partner know that you are fulfilling your end of the deal and encourage them to make a similar effort to be transparent about their own data.  

A Transparent Rebate Management Solution

Data silos may seem harmless, but as you can see siloed data constructs barriers to transparency, data sharing, and collaboration across departments. Fortunately, there is a better way to remedy the problem and strengthen your data. Enable offers a truly collaborative rebate management system allowing you to work in a cohesive manner with your trading partners from the same dataset therefore lowering the chances of data silos from forming. Schedule a demo or try for free to see how we can support your data transparency journey.