Implementing Next-Generation Supply Chains
In the last three to four years, the supply chain industry has been on a path of disruption, volatility, and exponential change.
Many technologies have emerged to cater to these upcoming challenges and opportunities. New technology will undoubtedly continue to evolve faster than before, creating significant supply chain opportunities for creating resilient, sustainable, futuristic, and autonomized systems.
Achieving Resilient, Sustainable, and Autonomized Supply Chains
In times of great economic and geopolitical uncertainty, an expectation is falling on new tech including cloud, AI, IoT, and blockchain to deliver greater business value with earlier models.
Here are some of the top technological trends and disruptive technology making supply chain systems more resilient, agile, and autonomous:
1. Artificial Intelligence Uses Data to Drive Outcomes
Every supply chain organization needs to implement AI to unleash the full power of data. When combined with external indices, data helps provide end-to-end visibility, ensuring proper forecasting.
Data also has the power to break down silos. Organizations can generate efficiencies when data is integrated across networks and functions — significantly lowering costs. Data can also be utilized to reduce risk, predict issues before they occur, manage inventory, and predict demand.
2. Sustainability Is Not a Goal for the Future, It’s Happening Now
Supply chain organizations utilize manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics resources, often leading to waste production. These organizations must demonstrate social responsibility and lead in environmental accountability.
Cloud, next-gen data and AI technologies propel sustainable initiatives forward. Cloud technologies can help track emissions, create product reports required for compliance policies, analyze sources and compare against compliance values, predict emissions, and prescribe emission reduction.
3. Visibility Is Key
Visibility is crucial to create resilient, agile, and adaptive supply chains. Single-function visibility is no longer helping, and connected-function visibility offers limited help. Visibility across networks, platforms, and enterprises leads to lossless live collaboration.
Circular supply chains leveraging IoT, digital twins, and neural networks provide maximum visibility, identifying weak points in the overall network and actions in response.
4. Cybersecurity Keeps Operations and Data Safe
With next-gen technologies, cloud exposure, and organizational integration comes cybersecurity risk. Risks and vulnerabilities, if exposed at one of the weakest points in the overall network, can pose a serious threat to not only one organization but all the connected parties.
Cybersecurity comes with a set of processes, governance, policies, and set of tools that are needed to reduce or altogether eliminate the risks associated significantly. Automation, authentication, and proactive error detection are some features available to mitigate the dangers of cyber criminals manipulating the connected network ecosystem.
5. Adoption of Blockchain and Composable Architecture Concepts are Increasing
Creating a composable business architecture or application architecture brings in modularity, reducing complexity in how the supply chain works. From the platform and systems perspective, this brings in strategic thinking leveraging the latest technologies. There is a significant reduction of overlap and redundancy, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership for enterprises.
Blockchain brings transparency and compliance to overall supply chain business operations by reducing the risks in operations, digitizing transactions, and increasing transaction security across the whole network. Blockchain is going to be a significant value-add in terms of fraud detection and reduction.
6. SCaaS and HaaS Are Revolutionizing the Ways Supply Chains Are Run
To increase efficiency and gain access to scale and infrastructure, Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS) is becoming a prominent option. SCaaS extends supply chain capacity, maximizes benefits and brings in unparalleled efficiencies.
HaaS (Hardware as a Service) is another way to move towards a service-based model offering outcome-based model benefits for customers. IT assets, hardware assets, robots and AGVs in warehouses and heavy machinery are leveraged as HaaS. This adds to the sustainability aspects for the business in terms of reduction in waste, repairs and equipment failures.
If next-gen, or more accurately, current-gen technologies are leveraged correctly:
- AI and machine learning models will enable 5G & IoT, analytics and predictions across the supply chain.
- Robots, BOTs and remote guided machines will perform operations.
- Intelligent systems will run production planning and scheduling, predict stock out instances, recommend replenishment and inventory strategy, track performance indices and recommend actions.
- Blockchain models will bring in governance and accountability, while the composable business and technical architecture models will make supply chain processes and platforms more modular.
- Servitization models like SCaaS and HaaS will bring in expertise and efficiencies, thereby creating sustainable supply chains that are agile, resilient, sustainable, autonomous and, eventually, live.
—Vinayak Hegde, Vice President and Global Delivery Head, Process Automation and Digital Supply Chain, Infosys
