There’s no denying it: the pace of the global supply chain is getting quicker every day. Broad increases in connectivity have led to equally broad increases in customer expectations, meaning that when things inevitably diverge from expectations, it’s imperative that supply chain managers react swiftly and decisively. This growing need for lightning fast response times comes with increased pressure to build a value stream that is visible and connected enough to provide planners with the information that they need about existing operational plans and potential plan b’s—including inventory levels, transport routing information, and delivery requirements.

Imagine for a second that you’re an NFL quarterback: you have a plan to throw a forward pass to one of your wide receivers, to whom you’ve dictated a specific pass route. Unfortunately, you’ve neglected to inform any of your other teammates of what you plan to do. Even worse, you haven’t bothered to ask any of your fellow players if they have plans of their own and, if so, how they might conflict with the plan you’ve devised. As a result, when something goes awry, none of your teammates are able to make adjustments on the fly, and your plan has no way of overcoming whatever hurdles crop up. 

In February of 2018, popular fast food brand KFC was in the midst of making some big changes to its UK supply chain. They were in the process of switching from Bidvest Logistics to DHL as their primary distributor, while simultaneously streamlining their warehouse system from six facilities serving the country to only one. Anyone who keeps current with supply chain management likely knows what happened next: the restaurant was forced to temporarily close more than 700 of its 900 locations in Great Britain. The reason? Chicken supplies were not reaching the stores. 

Imagine you’re a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Every morning, you check the prices of the stocks that you’re interested in, and you act on those numbers, not checking them again until the end of the day. Your competition, on the other hand, is using real-time information to inform their trading decisions. Which technique seems more likely to yield a profitable trading strategy? Your knee-jerk reaction is probably that you’re going to lose money virtually every day, because your competition has a more accurate picture of the real financial landscape while you’re using information that’s obsolete virtually as soon as you set foot on the trading floor. 

Imagine a world in which trillions of individual pieces of information are gathered each day to create complex predictions about future supply chain disruptions and events. Extremely granular data on trade markets turns information about the movement of goods and services throughout the globe into cognitive systems with the power to illuminate new possibilities and intelligently predict changes in demand before they occur. While this may sound like science fiction, it’s increasingly becoming a reality as supply chains become more and more integrated with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. By 2020, IDC predicts that 50% of supply chains will utilize advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and the effects on the global supply chain are sure to be widespread. 

According to McKinsey’s estimates, the rise of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) will have more than a $11 trillion economic impact within the next 7 years. Much of this value will come in the rapidly evolving world of connected consumer goods, such as the internet-enabled products that make up the modern smart home, but the impact will also be felt widely in a number of industries, from health care to natural gas production to, of course, automotive manufacturing. We’ve spoken briefly on this blog about the application of IoT devices for tracking inventory usage and traffic patterns, but what impact will this explosion of connected devices have on factory production processes themselves? More to the point, how can you leverage them into meaningful value propositions within your business’ existing workflows. 

Advanced analytics continues to be one of the most talked about new advances in supply chain technology. Also known as big data analytics, this increasingly-important tool can increase the power and accuracy of a given company’s predictive forecasts and suggest prescriptive process improvements by analyzing mountains of information that would be impossible to comprehend if they had to be analyzed by hand. While integrating this new technology remains a significant pain point for many manufacturers, it also represents a unique chance (especially in the early days of its widespread adoption) for businesses to gain a competitive advantage and increase revenue. Here are some surprising facts about it:    

In industrial, shipping, and freight forwarding sectors, equipment breakdowns are simply a fact of life. That said, unplanned machine outages or vehicle breakdowns can have wide-ranging impacts throughout a given company’s entire value stream, negatively impacting production schedules, transport routing, and capacity management. IndustryWeek estimates that across the world of manufacturing, as much as $55 billion is lost annually to unplanned maintenance time, with some businesses losing up to $22 thousand per minute of machine downtime—meaning that any solution that can decrease the number of unplanned outages represents a significant value added proposition with the ability to decrease overall supply chain volatility.

In the past few years, supply chain digitization has evolved from a hypothetical into a reality for many manufacturing businesses. The digital supply chain has become in many ways a key component of the rise of Industry 4.0, pushing businesses to adopt increasingly digitized planning and reporting solutions cross-operationally in order to stay competitive. Going forward, digitization’s importance is likely to continue increasing as companies strive to build more integrated and transparent operations. Here are a few fascinating facts about digitization in the supply chain.

No matter how sophisticated your methods, or how intimate your knowledge of the field, no demand or sales forecast will ever be 100% accurate. Just as supply chain disruptions are simply a fact of life in the world of manufacturing, deviation from a your expected outcomes are unavoidable. Given this state of affairs, you may be wondering if it’s worth expending resources on improving forecast quality. This feeling is understandable, but while there will always be a gap between expectations and reality, the rise of Industry 4.0 has improved our ability to predict future outcomes. With modern IT solutions and business processes, it’s possible to escape the past-oriented planning models of yesteryear (which fail to account for future developments) and drive towards a more future-oriented approach.