Create an integrated supply chain

Srini Rangaswamy (00:06):
My name is Srini Rangaswamy, and I am part of the retail and consumer goods group here at MuleSoft. Creating an integrated supply chain is a critical part of achieving operational success with consumer goods companies. We know that getting a single view of your inventory is critical, but we also know that it is challenging. Not only do we need to know the status of raw materials and finished goods to inform your production teams, but our con teams need accurate, real-time visibility to inform customers of order statuses. All of this with a focus around ensuring greater customer satisfaction to delight consumers at retail.

Srini Rangaswamy (00:40):
Over the next few minutes, I'm going to take you through a demo of how MuleSoft can make it easy to create an integrated supply chain, with real-time inventory visibility, by unlocking data from ERP systems such as SAP and visualizing them in Tableau. Let me start by describing the personas. First we have Sarah, she's a national supply chain manager who is responsible for ensuring on-hand inventory of raw materials. Next we have Michael, who is a production manager at the Denver plant, and is responsible for overseeing production schedule and maintaining adequate power levels for finished goods in his plant.

Srini Rangaswamy (01:20):
Michael is looking at the production schedule for the upcoming week and realizes that he's running short on a vanilla flavoring that's needed to produce the vanilla almond energy bar. Production has fluctuated in the last year, and it has been tough to keep up with raw materials. So Michael reaches out to Sarah to see if she can help divert the ingredients that are coming from the supplier.

Srini Rangaswamy (01:42):
Now, let's see how Sarah is going to respond. Sarah goes to the supply chain dashboard in Tableau and confirms Michael's concern. Right away, she sees the Denver plant is highlighted, which indicates a shortage in vanilla flavoring. But she also sees that the inventory level at other plants are above the threshold level. And by the way, all of this data is coming from SAP in real time. Sarah clicks on the Denver plant to drill down, and when she drills down, she views the inventory level across plants. Plus, the map shows the location of the truck with raw materials coming from the supplier. Sarah notices the truck is bound to Cleveland plant, which already has sufficient inventory, so she decides to reroute the truck to Denver plant, so Michael can maintain his personal schedule.

Srini Rangaswamy (02:32):
Now, before Sarah reroutes the truck in the transportation management system, TMS, let's take a look at the inventory levels in SAP. Let's go log into SAP to view the inventory levels. The vanilla flavoring in the Denver plant is at 100 gallons. Now Sarah goes into TMS to reroute the truck and change the destination from Cleveland to Denver, which in turn automatically updates inventory in SAP. Now, when we refer to the SAP view, we see the Denver plant's inventory level has been increased.

Srini Rangaswamy (03:06):
Now let's go to the dashboard in Tableau, and let's refresh the view by clicking the MuleSoft button. When I click the button, it's going to make a real time call to SAP to display the real-time inventory, and it's going to make a call to TMS to display the routes. We now see the truck has been rerouted from Cleveland to Denver, and the updated inventory level from SAP is now reflected here in the dashboard. Now Sarah is confident that inventory levels in the Denver plant will allow Michael to meet his production schedule without any disruption.

Srini Rangaswamy (03:38):
Now let me show you how we implemented this use case within MuleSoft. We built four APIs. One of them is SAP inventory API, which unlocks material inventory data, and allows others to easily consume and build powerful apps like supply chain visibility. The other API is supply chain management, which uses the SAP inventory API, and the TMS API, to orchestrate routing of inventory from suppliers in real time. Once you have these APIs in place, you can rewire and reuse them for other use cases, for example, feeding inventory availability to an analytics engine.

Srini Rangaswamy (04:16):
You just had a quick glimpse of how MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform can be used for supply chain integration. There's a lot more to see, but no matter what integration use case you have, or how complex it is, you can use the platform to consistently create integration building blocks and accelerate the software development life cycle. That wraps up our demo and I hope you found it useful.