Modern supply chain operations must be anticipatory and agile; you can no longer rely on reacting to events as they occur. A reactive approach to supply chain management creates opportunities for bottlenecks, slowdowns, stockouts and unhappy customers. Instead, you must cultivate the ability to master supply chain operations and keep your business moving faster than the competition. How? Much of what you need already exists within your organization, but it may not be accessible or actionable. You need a way to empower data-driven decision making.

You can use information about orders, costs, lead times, turnaround times, and more to improve your decisions. The challenge lies in transforming unstructured and structured data into something you can use effectively. With solutions from Tungsten Automation and our partner contributors to the Tungsten Marketplace, driving your operations with data is more manageable. Let’s explore how.

Supply Chain Operations Move to the Forefront

Organizations today face many challenges as they explore how to manage their supply chains better. Changing economic conditions worldwide create uncertainty. Sanctions and tariffs create legal and financial barriers. Add to this the fact that only a finite amount of capacity is available for production, storage and transportation, and the complexity is evident.

More broadly distributed manufacturing bases are also challenging businesses today. Further, global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic revealed clear and severe vulnerability elements within the supply chain. If not anticipated and appropriately managed, disruptions early on in the supply chain can cascade across the entire process until they finally result in unhappy and unsatisfied customers.

All these factors mean that a once largely invisible process is now a central area of focus. Hardening your supply chain is imperative, but so too is exerting better control and improving your understanding of its operations. Obtaining and analyzing the correct data is fundamental to generating success.

Technology Enables Visibility

The problem with adopting a data-driven strategy in your supply chain operations is twofold. First, you need a way to obtain and organize all that data. Second, you must be able to visualize and explore the stories that data contains; every part of your operations produces information.

Further, digital process automation opens the door to gathering, harvesting, and analyzing the needed data. Your systems may have years of historical sales data. Still, there can be so many fields and attributes contained within that information that it’s almost impossible for a human to derive insights in a reasonable period.

That’s where workflow automation tools become most important. With the power of AI and machine learning, you can implement systems that blaze through structured data to extract and organize it. With advanced analytics and reporting dashboards, you can develop new KPIs and see how your operations measure up. The appropriate tools also create other opportunities.

Forecasting: Your Most Powerful Tool Today

Contending with the unexpected is one of the most challenging parts of supply chain management. While there’s no way to truly predict the future with 100% accuracy, the historical data your organization holds can be the key to improved, more robust planning. Historical information is essential for creating forecasts about future scenarios. Such forecasting includes more than simply spotting cyclical trends, such as seasonal fluctuations.

With the right tools, you could create hypothetical scenarios based on changing historical variables. Richer forecasting data lets you make the right moves with your vendors and suppliers ahead of time. An accurate demand forecast could help you avoid a supply chain bottleneck that could lead to stockouts at the wrong time.

The Increasing Role of AI and Machine Learning

Running reports and visualizing data using dashboards and charts are useful strategies. However, additional information is often hidden within your data and challenging to see. There may be potential relationships between two factors that could otherwise seem unrelated and remain unexamined. The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning can change that.

AI and ML have roles to play throughout the process, including at the beginning. These tools are excellent for accelerating data extraction and classification. That effort simplifies obtaining the data necessary for analysis and forecasting. By training your data, you could rely on AI to identify and highlight potential links and trends in your information. Generative AI could allow users to ask specific questions about supply chain data and trends to derive insights within minutes instead of days or weeks.

The Benefits of Effectively Using Your Supply Chain Data

What’s possible with successfully implementing data harvesting and analysis in your supply chain management? With process automation solutions such as TotalAgility, obtaining valuable insights is simpler than ever. In doing so, organizations unlock benefits that include:

• More streamlined operations. Better forecasting and demand anticipation can power automated ordering and replenishment. Analytics can make inefficiencies in supply chain stages more transparent, allowing for improvement opportunities.
• Reduced operational costs due to cutting waste and finding fresh opportunities for savings. Fewer inefficiencies mean enhanced outcomes.
• Improved vendor relationships. Find ways to strengthen your connection with suppliers by offering automated self-service solutions that ultimately provide additional valuable data for analysis.
• Avoid lost profits and missed opportunities due to preventable supply chain issues by anticipating when to rely on alternative vendors.

As economic conditions change and business complexity grows, controlling and understanding your data will become increasingly critical.

Embrace the Future of Digital Supply Chain Management

With artificial intelligence making waves and reshaping work across industries, it is time to explore leveraging its capabilities to remake your supply chain. By incorporating more tools for capturing and analyzing data, you can derive must-have insights that may lead to game-changing improvements in your operations. With Tungsten Automation Marketplace, you can bring data-driven decision processes to your business. Find out about your next steps today.