In the face of disruption, GEP powers global supply chain resilience with Azure

Business as unusual

Today’s businesses face continuous change, from technological to sociopolitical to economic to environmental and, more recently, biological changes. Disruption is no longer the edge case—it might even be the norm. The highly integrated and global industry of supply chain and procurement management gets hit particularly hard by widespread challenges like these.

GEP has been helping its customers navigate and operationalize the challenges of change in their supply chains since 1999. As a consulting, software, and managed services company, GEP partners with or takes on significant pieces of its customers’ procurement and supply chain operations, both onshore and offshore, and delivers software as a service (SaaS) solutions that help GEP’s customers build reliability and resiliency into their processes.

The advantage of having your head in the cloud

GEP has always understood the advantage and power that SaaS can bring to procurement and supply chain solutions. It recently set out to reinvent procurement and supply chain software by taking advantage of new, game-changing developments in cloud services, touchscreen capabilities, and UX-driven design. GEP is a global leader in providing cloud-native, AI-powered, single-code procurement and supply chain solutions. It uses the Microsoft Azure platform and services to help its customers meet the challenges of ongoing global supply chain disruption head-on with AI insights, unprecedented levels of supply chain visibility, intelligence, and agility, and cloud-native, well-architected workloads built from the ground up for reliability and resilience.

“By building a resilient, cloud-native architecture on Azure, we get to focus on what we do best: delivering value through the development of applications, new tools, and new ways of working for our customers,” says Paul Blake, Director of Product Marketing at GEP.

A robust, resilient architecture

Procurement and supply chain management is necessarily interconnected and touches many different business and people contexts. Like a moving puzzle, it requires ongoing visibility and understanding of the situation both upstream and downstream.

While designing and building its cloud workloads, GEP applied Azure Well-Architected Framework best practices, which helped it to improve reliability and security and ensure efficient performance and operational excellence.

“Supply chains involve real-time transactions of inventory and goods that create ripple effects on other dependent systems and transactions,” says Nithin Prasad, Senior Principal Engineer at GEP. “These take place in an ever-changing world, so we bake reliability into our day-to-day operations. It’s in our core architecture.”

For GEP, the highest level of reliability means keeping customer applications up and running in the event of a failure, whether a temporary loss of transactional data or a supply chain workflow issue. Delivering this level of reliability and resilience requires a host of dependable solutions and a thoughtful and robust architecture. GEP chose Azure because it supports the instantaneous pivots that GEP customers need in the event of service lags or degradations—and helps them avoid those altogether. For example, GEP uses Azure availability zones to maintain high availability and resiliency for its customers’ business-critical applications and data. Connected via a network with extremely low latency, an availability zone is a physically and logically separated Azure datacenter that has independent power, network, and cooling. GEP can duplicate a customer’s primary environment in multiple regions, such as the eastern and western United States. The company draws on Azure backup and disaster recovery capabilities to help ensure automatic and seamless failover across regions.

“With Azure availability zones, backup, and disaster recovery, we build in resiliency by creating a true replica of each customer’s infrastructure, and then we add reliability by enabling an active sync between the customer’s primary and secondary services,” explains GEP Senior Director Huzaifa Matawala.

GEP places its customers’ business at the center of its well-architected, cloud-native solutions to help ensure that customers always know what is happening in their supply chains at any moment in time. “There’s a real-time sync within our customers’ primary and secondary regions,” says Huzaifa Matawala. “So, there is no downtime for the user—there is no impact to the business at all.”

A core component of GEP’s ability to build resilience into its services and applications is its capacity to deliver at scale. Almost 80 percent of GEP services are built on containers, which means the company can automatically scale clusters and handle multiple loads to accommodate whatever a customer happens to need. GEP uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to increase the availability and reliability of its application components, along with improving agility in terms of its time to market. AKS enhances reliability significantly by spinning up new container instances when any of the existing container instances fail, and it can provide uptime of 99.99 percent when deployed across availability zones. GEP’s use of AKS with cluster autoscaling helps ensure that its application can scale to handle any increase in user load seamlessly.

Blazing-fast time to market

With its new approach to solution architecting, GEP gained valuable competency with rapid development and deployment. The company has adopted a true microservice strategy—from its UI, which provides independently deployable add-in competencies, to its AKS orchestration layer and its customer-specific micro databases.

Accordingly, GEP can now break down and individualize its Azure DevOps pipelines for each particular microservice. This has drastically increased the company’s ability to get a service market-ready for a customer.

“We’re able to achieve a much faster response time for all of the development tests,” Prasad notes. “And we can deploy to production from the moment the code is ready—often within an hour.”

The power of intelligence

GEP further enables its customers to navigate a fast-changing world by using AI capabilities within Azure Cognitive Services to deliver advanced business intelligence. Natural language processing and user recognition help guide users and expedite the creation of purchase orders and contracts by surfacing relevant data that understands who and where the user is, helps locate correct suppliers, or understands whether a clause entered into a contract is legally compliant.

But even more profoundly, GEP uses AI for complex data management. Because its customers’ data tends to come from numerous sources, the company applies AI to conduct rigorous data analysis and make sense of multiple moving pieces at scale. The aggregation and analysis of many different data types from multiple global locations provides up-to-the-minute intelligence. Those insights then appear in context on users’ dashboards to give customers a control-tower perspective that helps them oversee and proactively manage their global supply chains. It puts customers in the driver’s seat whenever and wherever disruptions occur.

”We’re using Azure AI to do things like analyze, parse, and report on news feeds, weather reports, and social media activity, both in and out of the organization’s own data structures,” says Blake. “The role of AI is not to take decisions away from humans but to proactively present problems, potential outcomes, risks, and expected costs, which helps ease and clarify decision making.”

Reliability and usability 

As Blake points out, reliability has multiple sides.

There is the reliability that comes from GEP’s well-architected solutions, plus the immediate reliability factors like system availability, data integrity, and data security. And there is the reliability that comes from a consumer-grade user experience, one that helps users efficiently and intuitively execute their tasks in an environment of continuously changing circumstances.

GEP is having it both ways. Its microservice-driven architecture is both well architected and user focused. “The received wisdom is that you can’t make complex operations easy to use—we beg to differ,” Blake enthuses. “It’s our mission to continue to deliver a best-in-class user experience by hiding the complexity when it doesn’t need to be seen.”

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