Value Chain Solutions

Value Chain Solutions was founded to bring together the often disconnected worlds of sourcing, making, and selling using data-driven insights and an extensive skillset. The business has a proven track record of various use cases delivered across consumer-driven value chains within retail, manufacturing and the supplier base — focused on areas of enterprise-wide efficiency improvement such as pricing strategy and gross margin improvement, continuous improvement across manufacturing, and leveraging strategic procurement and planning across product categories.

Most entities in the value chain decentralise data collection and management, with each business function often storing its own operational data in a separate database or source system. There is a persistent lack of visibility throughout extended value chains and often transactional engagement is limited to immediate buy-sell relationships. Limited visibility of product cost and price drivers exposes all partners in the value chain — as well as the consumer — to disruption and variability, without the ability to respond with the speed and agility required.

Manufacturers face a pressing need for improved value chain visibility and ongoing management. They typically lack insights backward into the raw material supply and commodity market dynamics, hindering their ability to anticipate challenges through effective hedging strategies. Retailers, meanwhile, find themselves trapped in traditional buy/sell procurement interfaces with product suppliers, limiting their visibility into cost elements such as raw material costs, manufacturing wastage, labour costs and overhead costs. VCS needed a technology partner to help productise their deep consulting expertise into a scalable platform.

Vulcan Labs partnered with Value Chain Solutions to design and develop the ECO+ Platform — a revolutionary data-driven platform that facilitates the breakdown of data silos across the value chain and delivers end-to-end price visibility and continuous optimisation to product value chains for retailers and manufacturers.

ECO+ integrates data from diverse value chain sources, including operational flat files, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point of sale (POS) systems across organisations. Advanced algorithms and price models transform and enrich formerly disconnected data, enabling ongoing monitoring, measurement and strategic optimisation throughout the value chain, all supported by a suite of front-end accessible operational tools.

The platform is built around three core pillars. The Enrich pillar seamlessly integrates with existing source systems or databases, while the innovative Data Creation Module standardises data collection, upload and management via a convenient front-end workflow interface. The Collaborate pillar digitally connects users to a shared, visible fact base — whether they belong to the same business or different value chain partners — enabling seamless fact-based collaboration. The Optimise pillar drives continuous value chain re-engineering, delivering comprehensive end-to-end visibility and a unified fact base for cost element benchmarking, raw material footprint analysis, manufacturing loss detection and dynamic price modelling.

With ECO+, the end-to-end value chain is digitised, equipping value chain partners with a shared fact base. The platform stands on partnerships with global leaders in cloud computing, offering versatile infrastructure hosting on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with data security powered by Cloudflare and cybersecurity managed through CrowdStrike — all within a meticulously segmented tenant structure with client-centric regional flexibility.