A Supply chain management takes control of all supply chain operations and processes centrally to create a more efficient system. These days, all businesses want to make their supply chain process faster, more efficient, and smarter. To do so, they need to rely on advanced technologies and check market trends to get the most out of their supply chain management strategy. When you implement a quality-oriented system in your supply chain, you will be able to cut costs and accelerate delivery to end consumers. This content highlights how you can make your supply chain smart concerning trends and prospects predicted by leading market researchers.
What is a Smarter Supply Chain?
When we talk about a smart supply chain, it flawlessly manages the flow of goods and services at different levels. It involves processes like planning, manufacturing, delivery, sourcing of goods, and returns. In a broader sense, a smart supply chain obtains data from IoT sensors with the help of intelligent technologies to track, monitor, and manage goods.
A smarter supply chain helps you add analysis and alarming capabilities, give end-to-end, real-time visibility and traceability, and increase the level of automation and control. A smart supply chain means having better control over supply chain operations efficiently with the smart use of emerging technologies. It reviews and understands the existence of bottlenecks in the supply chain constantly. It also works to consolidate the weakest links to reduce potential supply chain shocks. It is easy to eliminate supply chain challenges and deliver results efficiently with a smarter supply chain.
Advantages of Smarter Supply Chain
A smart supply chain can help you better visibility into demand and supply patterns. It can let you increase profitability and control costs. Organizations find it hard to keep up with the advancement of supply chains and maintain product and process quality simultaneously. When it comes to overcoming these issues now and in the future, you need to get help from emerging technology experts. Below are the key benefits you can bring with a smarter supply chain.
- Improved and effective planning with real-time data from connected devices
- Improved transparency in the supply chain to prevent disruptions and cater to eco-conscious customers leveraging IoT
- Prediction of operational risks, accurate forecasts of demand, and preventing an operational bottleneck
- Proactive maintenance to avoid downtime, check malfunctioning, and equipment failures
- Smart trend analysis for improved decision-making and greater efficiency
Getting a smart supply chain is one thing, and taking advantage of a smart supply chain is the other one. You simply need to be equipped with the right transportation software development by a professional and custom software development company.
Future of Supply Chain Technology from Gartner’s Perspective
Many supply chain leaders believe emerging technologies as a perfect way to address digital transformation, improve human decision-making, update their legacy systems, and manage assets. According to a recent Gartner survey, about 61% of respondents see technology as a resource of competitive advantage and emerging technologies as critical investment areas.
In a modern volatile and disruptive environment, organizations related to the supply chain need to be more flexible with digitalization. The adoption of digital supply chain technologies is likely to rise at a faster pace to improve human decision-making in the next three to five years.
- About 75% of large enterprises will likely adopt intralogistics smart robots for warehouse operations by 2026
- About 75% of supply chain management app vendors will deliver embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics (AA) commercially by 2026
- About 80% of companies will face severe value loss for not merging control tower initiatives with digital supply chain twin by 2026
- Intelligent edge ecosystems will affect about 25% of supply chain decisions by 2025
- More than 25% of supply chain execution vendors will move to a microservices architecture by 2026
Read Further: Role of Blockchain in Supply Chain Management
Top Trends in Smart Supply Chain
Supply chains are the lifeblood of all businesses today, and running all supply chain components smoothly matters the most for ensuring on-time delivery of products and services. With changing supply chain disruptions and consumer demands, there are many themes like resiliency, sustainability, visibility, and technology that need the attention of business owners involved in the supply chain. The shortfall and risks of global supply chains have been exposed in the last two years. Despite that, supply chains are still pivotal for businesses’ survival, success, and growth. Here are a few trends that will affect the supply chain smartly.
#1 Agility and Better Collaboration
The supply chain pressures have compelled organizations to yearn for agility and respond to change quickly in the post-pandemic world. Manufacturers and their partners can cooperate promptly to solve issues at any point in the supply chain. It is possible with visibility and real-time monitoring of the smart supply.
Agility and better collaboration drive stronger relationships, efficiency, performance, and resilience.
#2 Sustainability
Manufacturing organizations face environmental, social, and economic issues concerning the development of resource-efficient behavior and working with suppliers. When it comes to finding the best ways to make a smart supply chain through sustainability, you can ensure greater traceability through n-tier suppliers
- Ensuring compliance
- Limiting overproduction, waste, and excess inventory
Sustainability helps drive efficiencies, optimize routes, and increase transparency across the supply base.
#3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)
Supply chain organizations can reorganize planning and diminish disruptions caused by capricious events by leveraging the potential of AI. Demand forecasting is one of the prime use cases for AI in the supply chain because resource planners need to assess disparate data sources for making demand predictions. But this way is still full of bottlenecks, inaccuracy, and human errors. Here, AI can do wonders and process data automatically to let you make evidence-based resource planning decisions. There are several use cases for ML and AI across the supply chain.
- Predicting demand and anticipating disruptions
- Optimizing resource planning, transportation routes, and customer fulfillment strategies
AI/ML can help you drive efficiencies and automation and enable greater visibility and integration across the supply chain network.
#4 Digital Twins
A digital twin can make a big difference for supply chain leaders when making the right decisions through an end-to-end supply chain. Companies can form a digital interpretation of the physical supply chain to leverage the digital twin to
- Make local and global decisions
- Increase situational awareness
- Evaluate the impact
- Predict the influence of decisions on tactical business objectives
#5 Demand for Data Scientists
Nowadays, many organizations invest heavily in new technologies across IoT, blockchain, AI/ML, IoT, and robotics. Despite that, the demand for data scientists is still growing. Now, data scientists are collaborating to resolve many challenges
- Modeling data for better supply chain functionality
- Building plans to make the supply chain more sustainable
- Enhancing agility and response times with greater control and visibility
- Automating decision-making processes with AI/ML and big data
Here, data scientists can help companies make smarter and strategic business decisions. When it comes to knowing more about improving and developing a supply chain smartly, a digital backbone, a holistic transformation approach, a supply control tower, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and IoT emerge as the building blocks of a smarter supply chain. Smart supply chains enabled with IoT, AI, and blockchain render you unmatched visibility and insights for making informed decisions and alleviating disruptions for impacting and delivering business results.
Also Read: Top Logistics and Supply Chain Trends
Conclusion
With the advent of emerging technologies, the importance of a smart supply chain has increased manifold in today’s high-paced business landscape. Emerging technologies and cooperation between supply chain network participants are two main ingredients you need to consider to make a supply chain smart. Modern technologies like AI, IoT, ML, blockchain, and data science can help businesses make informed decisions and control supply chain operations efficiently.
Binmile harnesses emerging technologies like AR, IoT, and blockchain to make your supply chain smarter.
