Real-time Supply chain visibility
Digitization is covering the face of the earth in every single aspect. Industries are striving hard to achieve eminent position when it comes to innovation in digitization.
“86% industry executives believe digital industrial transformation is critical for growth and competitiveness”
And that, undoubtedly is the core fact every industry is following to carve its way into the future. It comes as no surprise that supply chains, globally, have joined the digitization movement, in fact it’s in the front line. This graph from SCM World demonstrated that supply chain has already covered a major sub set of innovative technologies in building supply chain solution and are integrating them in everyday supply chain operation
One of the most critical contributors to this supply chain digitization is real-time supply chain visibility.
What’s real-time supply chain visibility?
Simply explained, real time supply chain visibility is getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
In today’s uncertain global landscape, market can be extremely challenging and to stay ahead of the game companies need to gain that competitive edge. Real time supply chain visibility can help them do that. Imagine you know where all your inventory, orders, people and equipment are whenever you need to know. Real-time supply chain visibility gives you the power to monitor, control and optimize your supply chain strategy and operation to achieve the best-case scenario.
Here are five reasons why your company needs to have real-time visibility into your supply chain:
1. Demand Insights
Companies can be quickly alerted to delays, slowdowns or changing trends — and make the necessary changes before it’s too late and their bottom line is affected. And if a product is getting a good response, more orders can be added to take full advantage of the situation
2. Inventory Insights
Having a real-time connection with your inventory assures you’ll never be low on stock or unable to fulfill orders. Moreover, real-time Inbound and outbound inventory tracking enables you to follow where and when your inventory will arrive — and helps you prepare for potential delays.
3. Efficiency of workflows
Time is the real key in any supply chain process. Getting information real-time helps in identifying, preventing and fixing inefficient processes as they’re happening. Thus future-proofing of workflows against delays.
4. Shipping Insights
Real-time information plays a critical role in providing warnings about unanticipated events. It lets you know actual delivery times and dates and gives you information, if you’d need to reroute to avoid potential man-made or natural disasters — and ensure on-time delivery.
5. Excellent Last Mile Experiences
No one wants to lose a customer because of a shipping delay. Real-time insights let your customer service know if a product will arrive late. And this helps them in keeping the customer informed proactively instead of waiting for an unhappy call or email from the customer. Conversely, you can also let customers know that products will arrive early, or as planned.
Once you identify the uses of real-time supply chain visibility, its benefits are very clear — Real-time insights enables quick decision making and creates a more flexible environment in which supply chains can respond quickly to market dynamics and consumer demand.
Companies are taking real-time visibility to the next level with the power of artificial intelligence. It’s no longer limited to where is my product? But has been extended to How is my product?
This business use case can be best explained with an example of a supply chain for fragile goods like Glass –
One of our strategic partners, a multinational company that specializes in glass for the Hi-Tech industry , wanted to achieve real-time supply chain visibility on operational level for better decision making on quality & logistics improvement, by understanding cost drivers and impact on quality during product transition across the supply network.
Their logistics and operations team was facing challenges like –
- Tracking semi-finished goods location on Land, Ocean & Rail
- Tracking real time product condition like temperature, humidity & shock
- The Strategic need to reduce product loss & improve TAT with predictive transport mode selection
- Determining where in the supply chain and understanding how is the product impacted the maximum in internal transit, loading, transit or unloading?
Bristlecone in partnership with Tag Box provide an AI powered IoT enabled Asset Visibility SaaS App on the Bristlecone NEO® Supply Chain Platform. The app provides intelligence to avoid losses due to product delay & damages across the supply network.
The AI & IoT powered app consisted of two major components:
• A Product Tracking module (IoT)– Logistics, Quality & operations team can create shipment and start real time tracking of product location & conditions over land, Ocean, rail and air routes.
• Logistics & Quality Recommendation Engine(AI) — users guide to choosing right mode of transport, packaging density, predictive ETA of delivery, load efficiency, Fast QA, Damage correlation, Alert summary and trip insights.
Our app delivered substantial value to the company by real time product location and condition tracking. The IoT enabled connected devices and the artificial intelligence engine to churn the data from these devices led to quality & logistics improvement
Qualitative Benefits derived from the AI & IoT powered app -
It’s no wonder, when all aspects of a supply chain will be viewed on a global level in real time, businesses will become more efficient which will directly lead to cost savings while increasing flexibility and adaptability.
So, are you already a part of this huge supply chain digitization game? Or a bystander? Or looking for a way in?
We’ll be sending out more information your way. Stay tuned…
If you have other reasons, that we might have missed, why companies need to have real-time supply chain visibility, please mention them in the comments below.
