How can supply chain resiliency and visibility improve through a move to digital?

The right technology can take supply chain operations further by helping leaders key data more clearly.

In brief

• By identifying opportunities to operationalize automation and AI, leaders can pave the way for progress while preparing their organizations for the future.
• Supply chain resilience is largely a result of developments in digitization and tech integration, which can result in organizational cost reduction.
• Digitization is paramount, and leaders play a key role in understanding and accelerating it across their organization and its supply chain.

The rapid emergence of opportunities created by AI and emerging technologies are driving an increased demand for digitization and tech integration across the enterprise. Organizations that harness this will be able gain business advantages, while slow-movers or those reticent to recalibrating supply chains around tech may be impeded by slower growth.

For businesses that make the move integrate the latest technologies into supply chain operations, there’s tremendous value to be had. 

Tech and digitization can enhance supply chain resilience, a topic covered in Supply chain resiliency in every link. Better decision-making comes by focusing on the right data, not just adding more of it. Harnessing automation and AI — new territories for many — are fertile ground for enhancing operations while preparing for tomorrow’s challenges. Woven throughout all these benefits is procurement’s pervasive driver: cost reduction.

Building supply chain resilience with zeroes and ones

Digitization and tech integration help drive supply chain resilience through the benefits of increased efficiency, communication and collaboration. The nimble nature of a digital framework can help businesses weather disruptions and infusing digitally enhanced operations into your supply chain operations can help to streamline them. Processes that were once manual and cumbersome become automated and agile. This helps mitigates risk while building resilience and reducing costs.

Increased efficiencies translates into streamlined processes, saved time, accelerated work pace, and improved collaboration and communication.

Revealing insights through data-driven decision-making

Perhaps the greatest advantage that digitization and tech integration offers to supply chains is increased visibility of data throughout your organization. Improved data visibility across business operations and the entire supply chain informs data-driven decision-making. And of course, better-informed decisions lead to better outcomes.

The proliferation of AI has created a greater urgency to address data-related supply chain challenges such as data siloes and the need to integrate information seamlessly among suppliers. By beginning to rely more on data — and machine learning — to make certain decisions, leaders are also able to free up talent to take on higher-level, more strategic tasks. This applies to the work of standardizing unstandardized data, developing commodity classifications and more.

Noteworthy is how digitization also goes hand-in-hand with technologies like Blockchain, for instance, which can further enhance and secure supply chain operations, while analytics advances supply chain visibility into the future.