A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR DATA INTEGRATION AND INTEROPERABILITY IN MODERN SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORKS

The contemporary supply chain networks produce information at a fractured space of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, warehouse and transportation management systems, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and various partner and supplier feeds. The lack of joint structural and semantic base across these sources will result in slow decision-making, reconciliation mistakes and low end-to-end visibility. A five-layer Unified Data Integration and Interoperability Framework (UDIIF) is proposed in this paper that integrates connectivity technologies (EDI, REST/GraphQL APIs, event streaming), a semantic layer of interoperability based on canonical data models and GS1/EPCIS standards, and a governance layer that utilizes distributed-ledger audit trails and identity management. The conceptual architecture is introduced with a comparative simulation with the conventional siloed integration strategies on five performance measures. Findings show significant simulated data latency, error rate, visibility, integration cost and partner-onboarding speed improvements. The results indicate that the overlay of semantic interoperability and governance over more traditional connectivity processes presents a scalable route to robust, transparent and interoperable supply chain data ecosystems. Practitioner implications, future empirical validation and standard-setting organizations are discussed.