How Brambles Uses CDEs to Govern Its Global Supply-Chain Data

Brambles manages platform pooling across 60 countries with billions of data points spanning 10 data domains and about 323 sub-domains, and traditional governance approaches couldn't keep up. It adopted a "radical prioritization" strategy centered on Critical Data Elements (CDEs) tied to risk reduction, revenue, or compliance, securing executive sponsorship after leadership named data governance a competitive differentiator at a town hall. The team used Alation's CDE Manager to automate discovery and connection of CDEs — connecting their ERP alone brought "300,000 objects flooding in" — with automation expected to save "hours and hours, probably hundreds of hours" of manual work. Accountability now sits with 31 VPs responsible for data stewardship under the Executive Leadership Team.

Alation is a data-catalog and data-intelligence platform that tells a pharma team what data actually exists, who owns it, and whether it is trustworthy enough to support an AI use case.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.