How can AI be leveraged to optimize supply chain operations and improve efficiency while also ensuring ethical and sustainable practices are being followed throughout the entire supply chain?
Sort by:
The first step in ensuring ethical and sustainable practices throughout the supply chain is to actually have visibility to your Tier 2-10 suppliers. Who are they? Once you know who those suppliers are, leverage AI to auto-research the internet for any negative news articles about those entities.
This is an important point because predicting supply is just as important as predicting demand.<br><br>AI can help us identify the key milestones of our critical path items in the supply chain. Further, AI can help us establish events for these milestones that can be tracked (IoC, blockchain, etc.) and monitored. Weather, capacity and other factors can augment the model, enabling a control tower to predict material arrival times and determine where/when to intervene. The same AI can be used to update project plans automatically and to alert appropriate parties to any status change.
We were brainstorming on this very topic ... it seems that the users of supply chain services would order things differently if they could ... they would forgo the usual catalog search and/or text description in favor of "just give me the valves we used for the XXXXXX project last year - or their equivalent." Or perhaps they would order by asking which component has been used for similar applications, or if there have been any changes to what was used last time, etc.
This is one way that Ai can be used - to improve the user experience while also increasing robustness and accuracy of their requests.