The climb of a blockchain multiparty network ecosystems consultant : Mary Ann Holder

The ascent of a supply chain business networks expert : Mary Ann Holder? MaryAnn Holder is Chief Marketing Officer at One Network Enterprises, a provider of the blockchain-enabled network platform, The Real Time Value Network. NEO is your all-knowing supply chain assistant, continuously monitoring, analyzing and resolving problems so you can focus on the important decisions. NEO gathers information from across your entire business network to analyze and optimize business processes and resolve issues. He autonomously performs dozens of different functions, including forecasting, replenishment, sourcing, transportation optimization and much more. He works in the background to constantly find and fix issues. NEO tirelessly monitors execution processes and outcomes, to determine what works. NEO knows, learns, and acts to keep your supply chain and your business network running optimally for highest service levels and product quality at lowest cost.

How many degrees deep do you think your buyer persona is? The same buyer group has multiple. A lot of times they’re at VP level, director level, C-level people. They have the same kind of educational background but do yours vary? For instance, if you’re trying to provide a solution to someone, are you dealing with multiple educational boundaries or any type of boundary like that? Well in a certain sense, yes. The office of the CFO is going to have a different, well, maybe not different educational status, but they’ll certainly have a different bent to their studies. They will have a different focus. We market to the whole organization when we’re looking at the supply chain. What we’re looking at the office of the CFO, the office of the CIO, the office of the CEO and then the office of supply chains. All of those buying units have their own individual needs that they have to balance within the greater organizational structure. When we build out our buyer personas, we look very closely at what are the things that are going to make that person a superstar even down to what are the types of people. I mean we look at the psychographics as well as the basic demographics that you get for a position such as a supply chain director. We might look at an engineering background and the way they make decisions so a lot of that factors into how we message to that.

This year is the first time Gartner has published a report on multienterprise supply chain solutions. The report stated,”Networks are not new, but with companies focusing more on having end-to-end (E2E) processes include their external trading partners, these networks are increasing in importance and value. Collecting data and sensing signals in real time, and then coordinating, executing, and resolving issues quickly, will allow companies to operate their supply chains more effectively.”

Multiparty networks have all the key elements missing from blockchain 1.0, including: Scalability – using a scalable grid architecture, multiparty network support tens of thousands of trading partners and the transaction volume that entails. Confidentiality – because they are built using multiparty permissions frameworks with granular and role-based permissions to ensure secure data access. Functionality – by providing powerful, multiparty apps such as logistics management that run on the network and write to a blockchain. Community Master Data Management (MDM) – that manages and synchronizes data across different systems and parties to ensure data is trusted. Combined, these features enable powerful functionality that can support all parties, including buyers, sellers, fulfillment, and logistics partners via a shared app. This allows all parties to transact while showing only the relevant authorized slice of the data to each partner.

Mary Ann Holder on One Network’s Intelligent Control Tower: One Network’s Intelligent Control Tower is not your typical control tower, that provides visibility to immediate trading partners only. The Intelligent Control Tower monitors, manages, and controls decisions and execution across functions and across companies to optimize the entire network. The Intelligent Control Tower uses AI and serves as a system of engagement across trading partners, and orchestrates companies, people and things to work together in real-time to serve the end consumer. Until recently, supply chain control towers have been all about providing visibility to your immediate trading partners. But with the development of multi-party, consumer-driven networks, advanced control towers now provide real-time visibility, collaboration and powerful AI capabilities to move beyond decision-support to decision-making and autonomous control.

“While many vendors just talk about bringing automation to their supply chain planning and inventory optimization software, One Network has customers that are live and using the capabilities to extract value from the technology,” said Seth Lippincott, lead analyst of the report. “By providing an integrated platform on which customers can run their supply chains end-to-end, the vendor is shortening the distance between planning and execution, providing a holistic view of inventory and the ability to optimize stocking levels. Nucleus expects the value One Network delivers to continue to improve as more customers adopt its automation and intelligent capabilities.” MaryAnn Holder-Browne, Chief Marketing Officer of One Network: “We are thrilled to once again be recognized by Nucleus Research”.