Supply chain management is an essential part of most businesses and is crucial for company success and customer satisfaction. Supply chain refers to the entire system comprising of individuals, organisations, resources, activities and technology that play their role from the procuring of the raw materials to the final delivery of the product to service.
Each stage of a supply chain is essentially a different industry by itself so it is a very complex chain. With this the factors like rising customer expectations for faster lead times, expanded products and services, and demand for tailored experiences are adding to its complexity.
Supply chain management, or SCM is a diverse business process that involves overseeing the mentioned functions and factors from flow of a good or service, delivery, customer experience and also ensuring profitability. Building end-to-end visibility, collaboration, and optimisation across inventory, order, logistics, and transportation management are important for effective SCM.
Implementing AI in supply-chain management can improve operations and solve key issues like forecasting, risk management, costing, delivery logistics, customer service etc. AI can help create models for demand forecasting, that give fairly accurate estimates of future demand against current stock.
By using historical data with real-time data across multiple layers of the supply chain, it can provide data visualisations and indicate supply chain issues causes and effects, reduce or eliminate bottleneck complications, and identify opportunities.
AI also allows business plans to be integrated across multiple companies and stages of production hence better understand consumer demand trends, predict unexpected events and transportation issues. Through transportation automation and warehouse automation AI can ensure quicker order processing, more efficient inventory management, and timely delivery.
There are startups offering AI-enabled solutions that allows enterprises to have complete visibility over delivery drivers. Through features like auto-order allocation and route optimisation, the platforms efficiently manage drivers to reduce delivery costs, increase customer experiences. Such companies are operating in industries like Food and Beverage, E-commerce, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare etc.
Bert Labs, a Bangalore based startup, focuses on efficiency improvements in energy, production, supply chain planning & logistics, along with reduction in carbon footprint. Similarly, Edgeverve, an Infosys company, has come up with TradeEdge, an intelligent supply chain management platform that enables channel visibility, improve retail execution, reach new markets faster.
There are many startups working in this evolving space of AI based supply chain management. Open Innovator plans to cover these startups in the next few months where we would be discussing their unique offerings and how they are solving the key issues related to this sector.
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