SONIC MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGIES
Building
the First Autonomous Digital Supply Chain
Much of that is based on transactions . For each transaction in the supply chain , whether it ’ s planning data , creating purchase orders , receiving confirmations , receiving tracking and shipping information , or invoicing , Sonic automates it . ‘ This way , you end up with a digital supply chain that no longer needs human touch ,’ says David . ‘ Those people are then free to move on to higher-value activities while the computer does the routine , repetitive work .’
Suppliers and customers previously used electronic data interchange ( EDI ) as a point-to-point connection . Essentially , EDI allowed companies to send information to each other in a standard digital format . But it was expensive to set up and clunky to communicate . ‘ You ’ d push transactions to each other , but if you faced an exception — any unexpected deviation from the planning data — it was almost impossible to respond ,’ David explains .
That ’ s when the marketplace started to change . ‘ Companies like Amazon or Bank of America could write one API , own the code , and have a million customers download it ,’ David says . ‘ It ’ s no longer point-to-point , and you definitely don ’ t have the problems of scale ’. You could simply download the API in an app and start shopping .
That ’ s when Sonic started to talk to its major suppliers . ‘ We took our clean data , flew around the country , and said , ” This is the way to go ”,’ David tells me . ‘ We were the first API customer for many of our North American distributors .’ To make this work , it was clear that Sonic couldn ’ t use a keyboard to fix a million dynamically-changing records . ‘ We invented a lot of our own scripts and business processes ,’ David says . ‘ And we built it all into the system over a couple of decades .’
106 September 2021