What Supply Lens does
Lesson 1 of 15 6 min read
Supply Lens sits in the middle of your systems and moves business data between them. Here is the idea in plain terms, and why it saves your team work.
Most growing businesses run on several systems that were never designed to talk to each other: a web shop, an ERP or inventory system, an accounting package, a warehouse or 3PL, and perhaps a retailer that sends orders by EDI. Every gap between those systems tends to be filled by someone re-keying orders, exporting CSV files or chasing tracking numbers.
Supply Lens closes those gaps. In this lesson you will learn what the platform does, the shape of every data flow it runs, and the three building blocks you will meet throughout this course.
A hub, not a tangle of cables
Imagine connecting four systems directly to each other. Each pair needs its own link, so the number of links grows quickly, and each one breaks in its own way.
Supply Lens works as a hub. Each of your systems connects once, to Supply Lens. Supply Lens then decides where each piece of data should go next.
Each line in that picture is an Integration: one connection between Supply Lens and one of your systems.
Every flow has the same shape
Whatever the data is (an order, a shipment, a stock level, an invoice), it follows the same three-step journey:
- Source data in. Supply Lens receives the raw data from the system it came from, for example a new order from your web shop.
- A Document in the middle. Supply Lens turns that raw data into a Document: a tidy, standard version of the business record. Every order looks the same as a Document, whichever shop it came from.
- Target data out. Supply Lens produces the data in the format the receiving system expects and sends it, for example a sales order in your ERP.
The rule that says "orders from the web shop go to the ERP" is a Mapping.
You can see every step
Source data, the Document and the target data are all kept and visible in Supply Lens. When someone asks "did that order reach the ERP?", you can look and see exactly what arrived, what Supply Lens made of it and what it sent.
The three building blocks
| Building block | In one sentence | Everyday example |
|---|---|---|
| Integration | A connection to one of your systems. | Your Shopify store, connected to Supply Lens. |
| Mapping | A rule that routes one type of Document from one Integration to another. | "Orders from Shopify go to Unleashed." |
| Document | The standard record of one business transaction as it passes through. | Order #1042, as received from Shopify. |
You will spend Module 3 on each of these. For now, hold on to the picture: Integrations are the connections, Mappings are the routes, and Documents are what travels along them.
Hilltop Coffee
Hilltop Coffee roasts and sells coffee online through Shopify and manages stock and sales orders in Unleashed. Before Supply Lens, their operations lead, Priya, copied every web order into Unleashed by hand each morning and updated Shopify stock levels at the end of the week. Customers sometimes bought coffee that had already sold out.
With Supply Lens, Hilltop has two Integrations (Shopify and Unleashed) and two Mappings:
- Orders flow from Shopify to Unleashed as they are placed.
- Stock levels flow from Unleashed back to Shopify, so the shop shows what is really available.
Priya now spends her mornings checking that everything went through, rather than typing. We will follow Hilltop through the rest of this course.
What Supply Lens connects to
Supply Lens supports hundreds of Integrations across e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, ERP and accounting systems, shipping companies and 3PLs, and standards such as EDI and PEPPOL (a network for exchanging e-invoices and other business documents). You will look at the list properly in Module 4.
Recap
- Supply Lens is a hub: each of your systems connects to it once, and it routes data between them.
- Every flow has the same shape: source data in, a Document in the middle, target data out.
- An Integration is a connection to a system, a Mapping is a routing rule, and a Document is a business record passing through.
- Every step is kept, so you can always see what arrived and what was sent.
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