The DNA of a Digital Supply Chain
by Shariq Mansoor, CTO and Founder of Aera Technology
Over the past decade, in an effort to keep up with an accelerating pace of business, manufacturing companies have invested billions of dollars into optimizing and automating their supply chain. But despite incredible leaps forward, the legacy systems at the heart of the supply chain — the core DNA that actually makes them move — have remained largely unchanged. Every action is reactive and cumbersome: gather data from a multitude of systems, use BI tools to understand the data, collaborate with key stakeholders and then make decisions. Despite business leaders best efforts, digital transformation has remained elusive.
Aera launched earlier this year to deliver real-time cognitive automation to enterprise organizations and help them transform into ‘self-driving’ entities. A big part of realizing this vision for the future of business is helping our customers to digitize that core business artery — the supply chain. This is why we’re excited to be releasing the first in a set of high impact Cognitive Skills that enable supply chain digitization and transformation.
But what do we mean when we talk about digitizing a supply chain and what does the process look like?
Well, it all begins with data.
Today, we tend to manage and optimize businesses in silos. Decisions are made retrospectively on incomplete, inaccurate and old data wrangled from siloed transactional systems, like SAP, JDA or Salesforce.com. We often lack the basic cross-business visibility we need to address the core challenges of reducing inventory, trimming costs and improving service level.
The first step towards digital transformation is breaking down these silos and harmonizing data across your organization to gain a real-time view of your operations end-to-end. Aera’s core technology goes further and enriches your internal data with external factors, like weather, regulatory and customer data, ensuring you end up with a unified dataset that is connected to both your business and the outside world.
The benefits of having a single harmonized dataset are enormous and for many businesses getting to this very first step is a goal in and of itself as companies have tremendous amounts of data to sift through. Having a set of standardized metrics that are accurate and in real-time can deliver tangible benefits across entire organizations in terms of inventory reduction, service level improvement and agility. But when we’re talking about digital transformation in your supply chain, it’s actually just the beginning.
Once data is harmonized and real-time, the next step is to embed machine learning and AI into your supply chain processes and decision-making. This builds on the real-time understanding of end-to-end performance by layering predictive and prescriptive analytics that can find opportunities to improve financial and operational performance or identify and mitigate risk. The use cases for AI in the supply chain are almost endless and companies are just now beginning to understand how they can make algorithms the backbone of their supply chain.
The last step in the transformation journey is using your data to enable your supply chain to become self-driving. By combining AI-powered predictions and recommendations with the ability to take action either autonomously or with assistance, your supply chain can continuously drive business outcomes and adjust course automatically.
Today we’re launching three new Cognitive Skills — Cognitive Demand Management, Cognitive Manufacturing Performance and Supply Chain 360 — that will power our customers’ transformation journey. Leveraging AI, these Skills understand your business, are able to make recommendations, predict outcomes and act autonomously. They also to map back to specific business needs so you can target those areas of the supply chain that need the most attention.
Now, with Cognitive Skills, you can ask Aera questions like “What’s the variance between my consensus and predictive forecast?”, “What are my opportunities to optimize inventory?”, “Which products will run into SLA issues?”, and Aera will provide a real-time answer and even take action, such as autonomously adjusting your forecast.
The self-driving supply chain is a growth driver for businesses, it drastically reduces time to market for new innovations while managing inventory, cost, speed and quality of service. It is something radically new and finally possible thanks to new technologies like ours.
This is the future. And you can start your journey here, today.
Read more about our Cognitive Skills here.
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Shariq Mansoor is the CTO and Founder of Aera Technology
A visionary technologist, Shariq founded FusionOps in 2005, building the core data technology that powers Aera today. He received several patents in the fields of data analysis, cloud computing and enterprise applications. Prior to FusionOps, Shariq was the Principal Architect of ADAC Information Systems (acquired by Cerner Corporation).
