Supply chain management has always been analytics and data-intensive, but despite decades of investment, the manual processes and procedures of the industrial revolution era still reign.
Never was this made more obvious than when the pandemic of COVID-19 hit. Organizations all over the world, such as the U.S. Airforce, sent their staff to work from home. In that particular situation, the U.S. Airforce was suddenly straining its supply chains with an unprecedented request for 100,000 secure laptops that were needed immediately. Not in two months, or even one month, but immediately so their workforce could telecommute. The bottom line: the post-COVID supply chain landscape must be designed to be more dynamic, resilient, and scalable than ever before.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and data management breakthroughs can deliver the promise of an adaptive, automated, intelligent supply chain for supply chains of all types from sales to sourcing to logistics to manufacturing to retail. By augmenting the intelligence of your supply chain, you enable a shift from reactive to proactive management of all supply chain areas.
Go from Being Reactive to Proactive
For instance, in oil and gas and utilities field and service support, real-time monitoring of assets in the field with connected sensors, like smart metering, enables proactive management of those assets, resulting in more efficient resource utilization. This allows for a shift from reactive and scheduled maintenance to condition-based and predictive maintenance and real-time anomaly detection.
In retail sales, inventory, and operations, planning is the most data-driven process in the supply chain, using a wide range of inputs from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) planning tools. There is now significant potential to truly redefine the planning process to sense and respond to billions of events a day, in collaboration with suppliers, to make real-time demand and supply adaptation a reality.
In manufacturing, facilities, suppliers, and distributors are more complicated, distributed, and interconnected than ever before. They must increasingly collaborate with all parts of the supply chain to meet customers’ quality expectations and ensure compliance with regulations. To do this, the barriers that have prevented data sharing in the past must be lowered. The manufacturer must be able to access and analyze its supplier’s bill of materials, process conditions, product test results, and shipping conditions, to manage customer expectations and to improve customer experiences.
A Supply Chain that Responds to Current Market Conditions
The supply chain is dealing with more volatility than ever before. By applying AI and digital twins, companies today can predict future system states, anticipate problems, model alternative scenarios, and choose an optimal solution. Furthermore, by enabling humans to better understand the digital fabric and act in real time, supply chains of all types can act more like your body’s nervous system. Such supply chains can sense demand, operations, and volatile conditions to respond to what’s happening in the moment. This technology fabric is like a supply chain nervous system. It can provide operational excellence in supply chain management by improving accuracy, enabling dynamic forecasting, and creating an adaptive ecosystem engagement based on a real-time view of supply chain and external conditions.
The supply chain nervous system roadmap empowers business users with self-service analytics and AI, increases the ability to automate, and curates trusted data as a cultural habit.
Best yet, these technologies are readily available now. To see how TIBCO can help you create a supply chain digital nervous system, download this paper or contact us.
