Supply chain in Pennsylvania

supply chain managers struggle to establish an end-to-end process to plan for profitable supply
network accounting, especially while being faced daily with increasing globalization, expanding
product portfolios, greater complexity, and fluctuating customer demand. Lack of complete visibility
into existing product portfolios due to unplanned events, plant shutdowns, or transportation
problems makes this task even more convoluted. A typical smart supply chain framework includes
multiple products, spare parts, and critical components, which are responsible for accurate
outcomes. In many supply chain industries, these products or parts can be defined using multiple
characteristics that take a range of values. This can result in a high number of product configurations
and applications. Also, in many cases, products and parts are also phased-in and phased-out
regularly, which can cause proliferation leading to uncertainties and the bullwhip-effects up and
down the supply chain.

By implementing AI in supply chain and logistics, supply chain managers can enhance their decision
making by predicting building-up bottlenecks, unforeseen abnormalities, and solutions in order to
streamline production scheduling that otherwise tends to be highly variable. Furthermore, AI in
supply chain can also lead to accurate predictions and quantification of expected outcomes across
different stages of the schedule enabling the scheduling of more optimal alternatives as and when
such interruptions occur during execution.

INTELLIGENT DECISION-MAKING

AI-lead supply chain optimization software amplifies important decisions by using cognitive
predictions and recommendations on optimal actions. This can help enhance overall supply chain
performance. It also uncovers possible implications across various scenarios in terms of time, cost,
and revenue. Also, by constantly learning over time, it continuously improves on these
recommendations as relative conditions change.

END-TO-END VISIBILITY

With the complex network of supply chains that exist today, it is critical for manufacturers to get
complete visibility of the entire supply value chain, with minimal effort. Having a cognitive AI-driven
automated platform offers a single virtualized data layer to reveal the cause and effect, to eliminate
bottleneck operations, and pick opportunities for improvement. All of this using real-time data
instead of redundant historical data.

Additional Resources: Why Supply Chain Visibility is a Big Deal?

ACTIONABLE ANALYTICAL INSIGHTS

Several companies today lack key actionable insights to drive timely decisions that meet expectations
with speed and agility. Cognitive automation that uses the power of AI has the ability to sift through
large amounts of scattered information to detect patterns and quantify tradeoffs at a scale, much
better than what’s possible with conventional systems.

INVENTORY AND DEMAND MANAGEMENT

One of the biggest challenges faced by supply chain companies is maintaining optimum stock levels
to avoid ‘stock-out’ issues. At the same time overstocking can lead to high storage costs, which on
the contrary, don’t lead to revenue generation either.

Bringing in the perfect balance here is mastering the art of inventory and warehouse management.

When applied to demand forecasting, AI & ML principles create highly accurate predictions of future
demand. For example, forecasting the decline and end-of-life of a product accurately on a sales
channel, along with the growth of the market introduction of a new product, is easily achievable.

Similarly, ML & AI in supply chain forecasting ensures material bills and PO data are structured and
accurate predictions are made on time. This empowers field operators to maintain the optimum
levels required to meet current (and near-term) demand.

BOOSTING OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES

Besides the treasures still largely trapped in disaggregated data system silos at most corporations,
IoT-enabled physical sensors across supply chains now also provide a goldmine of information to
monitor and manipulate supply chain planning processes too. With billions of sensors and devices,
analyzing this pot of gold manually can create huge operational resource wastage and