Getting customers what they need – when and where they need it – has never been more challenging. But it is possible to manage through complexity and preserve business continuity, while leaning in to cost optimization.

As organizations work towards more agile and efficient supply chains, they are contending with another new reality: changing consumer expectations. Today’s supply chains are no longer invisible to the end user. More knowledgeable and socially-conscious customers and employees are demanding transparency and visibility into the products and services they buy or support.

Customer demands driving supply chain change:¹

• 71% of consumers who say traceability is important, will pay up to a 35% premium to have it.
• 60% of consumers are willing to change their shopping habits to reduce environmental impact.
• 57% of consumers are willing to change purchasing habits to reduce environmental impact.

Employees are also affecting change:²

• More than 70% of workers would choose to work at a company with a strong environmental agenda.
• 40% of Millennials said they have chosen a job due to a company’s sustainability practices.
• More than 60% of workers said a strong sustainability plan would affect their decision to stay at a company.

To address consumer expectations while continuing to drive efficiencies and build resilience, businesses are integrating intelligent workflows into their supply chains. Intelligent workflows drive a unified digital solution by strategically applying emerging technologies to supply chain processes. Every step of the value chain becomes an opportunity for transformation – from demand planning to manufacturing execution to order orchestration and fulfillment.

Enable new levels of responsiveness and transparency
Intelligent workflows break down traditional silos between the back, middle and front offices to help supply chains deliver better business outcomes at scale. Uncovering efficiencies across a network of processes and partners and using learnings from vital data in- and outside the supply chain, intelligent workflows can predict future patterns to turn the unanticipated into the anticipated. The result? An agile supply chain that can more proactively respond to disruptions.

Empower your supply chain professionals
Reinventing supply chain processes also means transforming the way your organization is designed and teams are aligned. When manual processes are digitized and low-level administrative tasks are automated, supply chain professionals are recruited, retained and primed to focus on higher-value-add tasks. And, when technologies like AI and blockchain are providing trusted, real-time insights, your teams are able to make better-informed decisions and deliver more effectively and efficiently against strategies and environments that continually change.

More than ever, companies are turning to AI-powered analytics to understand patterns of demand for products and services across geographic and socioeconomic segments.

AI business value will increase 2.5x to
USD 5 trillion by 2025
— Gartner³

Supply chains include multiple parties – all trying to orchestrate the exchange of goods and services through purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices and credit and debit notes. To do this, they rely on a tremendous amount of analog data and point-to-point technologies grounded in traditional EDI. The goal for the future supply chain is to digitally connect all these elements using networks that are demand sensing and offer transparency and visibility from sourcing through fulfillment. That’s a lofty goal, but achievable for supply chains that use AI-enabled solutions to automate end-to-end processes and find the “signal in the noise.”

These innovations give you the power to:

• Identify, assess and address potential disruptions before they occur.
• Mitigate the impact of unpreventable disruption.
• Seize upside demand opportunity before your competitors.
• Simulate process-optimization scenarios for better business and customer outcomes.
• Track inventory for instant visibility into the progress of goods at any point.
• Provide instant shipment quoting capabilities that reflect actual market rates.
• Determine shipment damage and when it occurred to recommend the best corrective action.

IBM embeds AI into many of its supply chain solutions, making it easy for clients to drive innovation while proving out the value of the technology. Hear from Mylene Ortiz at Petco about how the AI in IBM Sterling Business Transaction Intelligence gives her team greater visibility into B2B transactions so they can quickly identify and resolve supply chain issues.

IoT-enabled devices, together with AI (and soon 5G), are helping companies extract more intelligence from assets like products, machines and facilities. These next-level insights allow engineering, IT and supply chain leaders to more confidently identify and take next-best actions.

According to Gartner, “The increased availability of Internet of Things (IoT) data and extended external data sources such as weather or traffic conditions allow organizations to anticipate future scenarios and make better recommendations in areas such as supply chain planning, sourcing and transportation.”

IBM clients are already leveraging the power of IoT and AI with a personalized dashboard that automates the collection of information and analyzes it to provide insights that help them anticipate risks, mitigate disruptions, and see opportunities previously hidden from view. They can:

• Leverage predictive maintenance to stay ahead of machinery repairs in the field to reduce costs by 15% – 20% and extend the lives of assets by years. ⁴
• Remotely monitor the condition of shipments to ensure thresholds are maintained for temperature or humidity, and receive notification if problems occur.
• Identify space-utilization patterns to optimize warehouse occupancy and realize up to 20% savings on total facility operations costs.⁵
• Tap into prescriptive recommendations to anticipate problems and identify an alternate route to avoid shipping delays due to inclement weather.

Moving forward, insights derived from a combination of AI and machine learning, IoT, 5G and edge computing, will allow organizations to uncover opportunities to build more resilient operations and make that intelligence more transparent across the supply chain.

Blockchain documents the history of any transaction or information exchange, creating a foundation of trust and transparency between two or more parties. All blockchain entries are permanent and immutable. The permission-based, controlled, shared view of data allows ecosystem participants to identify and reduce areas of friction, increase agility and resiliency, and strengthen trust and transparency with each interaction.

Blockchain will create USD 3.1 trillion in business value by 2030 through cost reduction and revenue growth.
— Gartner⁶

Enterprise blockchain technology helps supply chain participants increase data integrity, promote smarter data exchange and automate decision-making. Globally-connected and complex supply networks can capitalize on blockchain now to more securely and efficiently procure, source, manufacture and handle logistics across a broad array of players, benefitting organizations of all sizes.

You can use blockchain to document the movement of products and make permanent transaction histories, which reduce costs, delays and human error associated with manual transaction handling. We are already seeing interesting use cases of blockchain in action:

• A global ecosystem of producers, suppliers, manufacturers and retailers makes it possible to trace food items from farm-to-fork in seconds, reducing the impact of food recalls, unlocking new supply chain insights, increasing consumer confidence, and more.
• Exporters, importers, freight forwarders, custom authorities and others are engaging in paperless trade, sharing cross-border shipping information to increase transaction speed, efficiency and transparency and reduce costs.
• Procurement leaders are benefitting from secure, permissioned access to pre-verified supplier information that makes it faster and easier to identify, onboard and manage new vendors.
• Business users are getting deeper B2B transaction insights with an immutable, shared record of real-time, multi-enterprise digital events across the supply chain. The addition of AI and machine learning provides proactive alerts and predicts completion of events to help users get ahead of supply chain disruptions.