One in five. That's how many partner transactions have at least one error. That is an amazing statistic, particularly given the extraordinary leaps in innovation across the global supply chain during the past two decades. During this time, best-in-class supply chains launched more than a few enterprises to the tops of their categories, as a "flat world" enabled product to be sourced and delivered cheaply and quickly.

But lagging behind these advances is one of the industry's darkest secrets: persistent data quality issues between trading partners continue to trigger claims, delay inventory, drag down margins and lock up working capital.

The impact to a retailer or manufacturer can be dramatic. Defective invoices can have 3-4 times the days sales outstanding (DSO) of a clean invoice. According to Accenture, some companies have 25% of the money owed them tied up in disputes at any given time.

Ultimately, companies are "leaving money on the table" in their supply chain due to problems in partner compliance and forced to tie up working capital to handle the resulting payment lags and inventory buffers. Common approaches to improving trading partner data quality, such as supplier portals and private exchanges, have fallen short as they don't provide a way to monitor and fix transaction quality.

Fortunately, some innovative retailers and manufacturers are solving these problems with a new breed of on-demand supply chain software. These services represent a unique approach by combining lightweight, subscription-based software (eg., salesforce.com) with the depth of real-time transaction monitoring and remediation.

This whitepaper examines the challenges facing retailers and manufacturers in managing trading partner data and introduces the advantages of on-demand supply chain solutions.