US-based Mercado Labs has launched Mercado DNA, a solution to rebalance the issues businesses face between the systems that manage their supply and demand. Mercado DNA addresses the heart of the problem hurting importers worldwide: the purchase order.

The solution — built around its core benefits: digital, networked, and automated — provides all teams involved in the placing, management, and fulfilment of an order, access to a single source of truth. By simply connecting importers’ supply-side operations with the highly sophisticated tools and systems on the demand side, companies can adopt a reliable and tech-forward solution to manage the millions of dollars at stake every year. Solving pains in the supply chain The recent past has exposed fragilities in the international supply chain, from tariffs and trade wars, to conflicts in Europe, resulting in supply-side frustrations, logistical nightmares, and volatile freight rates, as per the press release.

These ongoing supply chain challenges have required companies to stay nimble and prepare contingency plans to minimise the impact of unforeseen disruptions on the bottom line. Company officials noted that every business that imports has one thing in common: they’re in the business of sales. On average, for every 1,000 containers, an importer spends USD 30 million on product and an additional USD 5 million on shipping, generating around USD 100 million in sales.

Yet virtually every business in this industry today relies on outdated, disconnected tools to manage their orders. The subsequent errors, delays, and costs are inevitable. Mercado’s solution relies on simplicity.

Digital transformation has gripped the world for the past decade, yet the global supply chain has seen little investment aside from on the demand side. As ocean freight visibility becomes increasingly critical in a post-pandemic world, the company wanted to take it a step further and address the part of the supply chain that businesses can make the most impact on: the production of the order itself. Once goods are loaded onto a plane, boat, or train, there’s nothing that can be done to rectify an issue.

Begging from the creation of a product order Centred on a single, hyper-connected platform, Mercado is set to expand capabilities in 2023 with the launch of a series of capabilities to further enhance their market dominance in the first mile — the initial 180 days of an order’s lifecycle, including: Quick-start capabilities to get POs flowing from their ERP into the Mercado platform in as little as a week (compared to months as offered by other market players); Advanced visibility to enable importers to tap into real-time production data on specific business problems to exponentially speed-up time to resolution; End-to-end timeline views to offer a single cohesive and understandable purchase order timeline from point of issue, to delivery, and invoice reconciliation. 2022 also saw the announcement of a number of partnerships to connect Mercado’s proprietary supply-side technology into leading point-solutions to help customers enhance their control over the success of their orders. The company has hinted at a series of further partnerships to grow its marketplace offering, including a new ‘solution-as-a-service’ offering aimed at connecting Mercado DNA with logistics functions.

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