AI will be the driving factor for supply chain management in the post COVID world

Can COVID-19 be the black swan event that forces many companies to rethink and transform their supply chain model? It has already exposed the vulnerabilities of many organizations, especially those who have a high dependence on their logistics and supply chain to fulfil their raw materials needed or finished goods.
As the world grapples with the human and economic crisis unravelling before us, supply chains are finding themselves squarely within the public eye and experiencing unique challenges of their own with the pandemic crisis deepening and nations have been insinuating lockdowns with enterprises ditching their legacy software and have come down to intuition.
Firstly, lets’ take a step back on how we learnt to keep our hands away from hot stoves? Maybe, you hurt yourself on a stovetop when you were more juvenile? You now use that experience gained to predict what will happen if you accidentally touch a burner. On a more sophisticated level, Artificial intelligence does the same thing but for your business. It considers numerous portions that affect your business, even factors such as lockdowns in pandemics such as COVID-19.
Iterating to the speed of demand has become a key priority for various companies. With the rise of industry 4.0 driving digital transformation, enterprises have collected a ton of data points that can be used qualitatively in demand planning as a whole especially for FMCG/CPG, Pharmaceutical and even retail companies.
Therefore, forcing enterprises to revise their supply chain strategies.
LMA can be used to tackle the issue of model accuracy and the speed which you can rapidly prototype. Thus, allowing enterprises to develop quickly and put it into production. While keeping in mind significant supply chain obstacles during COVID and the various factors that affect them, such as:
– Logistics Cut downs
– Man Power Shortage
– Raw Material procurement
One of our customers, A leading F500 FMCG/CPG company with a 3 billion dollar revenue went from a scrabbling 20 percent accuracy to 65 percent accuracy using LMA and AI. Enterprises can predict the demand at the lowest granularity (Store-Level) with even area pincode level forecasting aiding to meet the needs of every citizen. They can also be used for divesified distributions centre.
The AI can also assist in planning raw material consumption and procurement from the Tier1 and Tier2 suppliers while also having a robust understanding of where demand is coming from at the lowest granularity. While we do understand that enterprises are facing a workforce shortage due to social distancing. They can move towards automation of redundant tasks to keep up with the speed of consumer demand needs.
LMA can aid in instantly iterating and has tools that can help reduce your operating cost by at least 35 percent. It assists companies in creating models for various use-cases such as Network optimization, Sales Operation Optimization, Demand Forecasting and much more depending on the kind of data an organization has collected. While attaining the most formidable accuracies varying from 65-85 percent in the lowest possible time -frame for multiple use cases while helping organizations meet volatile demand needs. And that’s all due to the technological prowess that AI brings to the table.