Digital Technologies for Supply Chain

In a recent interview Bill Gates made a very prescient statement- ‘Banking is necessary, banks are not’. A ‘branchless’ bank like www.atombank.co.uk/ is a preview of the way technologies are being leveraged by financial institutions in order to bring about a shift in customer experiences and expectations. These emergent technologies rely on a combination of social media, cloud platforms and advanced analytics aided by cognitive computing.

Being a product manager in the areas of analytics and digital technologies I get a ring side view of these trends in the banking and financial domains. Some of these technologies can also reshape other business processes like supply chains. These Digital technologies can be adopted at different scales — it can be gigantic scale of Amazon or it can be any optimum scale to suit your business. Here I am attempting to share a few use cases of Digital technologies at the supply chain execution level — warehousing and distribution. I have restricted myself to spotlighting the possibilities instead of laying down a solution framework:

Intelligent order fulfilment : Most warehouses sit on tonnes of historic data on orders fulfilled and the metrics around those. All warehouses use some kind of rule based algorithms in order to assign tasks(pick, put away, replenishment etc;) to resources (humans and machines).These algorithms need periodic updates based on new order patterns and products handled. These updates need expensive professional services and consulting fees. What if instead of static algorithms, all the data in the warehouse was used to train a machine learning based WMS? This would shift the capability of WMS from execution and planning to predictive and dynamic.

Virtual assistance in warehouses: Technologies like Voice based picking have been in existence since many decades. These provide benefits like speed, reduced errors, ability to multi-task etc; On the flip side these traditional voice based picking systems have some drawbacks like being locked to proprietary hardware and networking systems and protocols, being unable to scale as rapidly to meet the needs of a supply chain — new geographies, new languages and also not being interactive in a true sense to assist humans in completing their tasks. Enter intelligent virtual assistants which can interact with humans through existing 3G/4G/wifi networks over secure public or private cloud using existing mobile devices- android or iOS.This could be like a Siri or Google now for Warehouses. This can be updated on the go, allows two way communication with workers and constantly guides them by being aware of their intent and context. This combination of voice technologies with off -the- shelf hardware when integrated with a cloud based platform provides a far superior virtual assistant that can scale and meet the requirements of a warehouse now and in the future.

Pattern recognition and recommendation systems: There are blips and signals passing through the supply chain which are embedded in patterns of supplies received and orders processed. Within existing supply chain planning systems these blips and signals are either not recorded or not recognized since most of these systems are not capable of analyzing these signals. With massive availability of data storage over the cloud and advances in cognitive computing capability it is possible to use these signals to train machine learning systems . This training will help in recognizing patterns and trigger predictive or prescriptive recommendations to supply chain planners and strategists. An example of this — predicting disruptions in supply for a raw material and also recommendations on alternate sources.

Supply chain leaders grappling with the complexities of global supply chains have invested in best of breed supply chain planning and execution systems . But these systems are incapable of supporting changes in supply chains brought about by customers’ need for mass customization, perfecting last mile delivery and shortened lead times. There is no technology quick fix available to meet these challenges yet. One of the routes available for supply chain leaders is to “discover” solutions that work for them. They can borrow a lead from the way financial institutions are approaching similar challenges — Axis / SCG