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Logistics Congestion, Geopolitical Tensions, Labour Shortages, and Increasing Operational Costs

May 09, 2023 | By Mark Holmes, Senior Advisor of Supply Chain

Supply Chain

Supply chain management is a complex task that involves coordinating multiple processes and stakeholders across the entire supply chain. This disruptive environment requires a more holistic view of the supply chain — one that leverages predictive and prescriptive insights, addresses risk across 40,000+ touchpoints, and captures millions to billions of data points to create a “risk chain.”

According to Gartner, enabled customers are 2x as likely to repurchase, but only 23% of supply chains focus on enabling their customers.

With increased volatility and uncertainty in the global market, it's become crucial for companies to have a robust supply chain orchestration system in place to predict and mitigate disruptions in real-time.

InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator™ transforms traditional supply chain management

InterSystems state-of-the-art technology enables supply chains to differentiate the customer experience and improve resilience. InterSystems Supply Chain OrchestratorTM offers three capabilities to supply chain customers that include:

  1. Enhanced orchestration for end-to-end visibility and improved insights
  2. Embedded AI/ML techniques that improve demand sensing and forecasting through near-real-time detection of supply chain trends
  3. Prescriptive insights that optimise fulfilment through adapting to order changes, supplier availability issues, and demand spikes

Supply Chain Orchestrator offers out-of-the-box functionality that allows for fast proof-of-value, helping organisations achieve significant value in just six to eight weeks. The data platform can be used as the foundation for a smart data fabric to allow organisations to quickly adapt to supply chain dynamics and continuously changing scenarios -- optimising productivity, forecast accuracy, on-shelf availability (OSA), and near-perfect on-time-in-full (OTIF) performance.

Features addressing the dynamic and evolving needs of supply chain environments:

  • Enhanced supply chain orchestration: The growing amount of data generated from various sources demands a system that can process and analyse the data in real-time. Supply Chain Orchestrator integrates and analyses data from disparate sources to provide a consolidated view of the supply chain, enabling faster decision-making.

  • Improved demand sensing and forecasting: Embedded AI/ML techniques optimise demand sensing and forecasting by detecting current short-term supply chain trends in near real time with data that's harmonised and normalised. Applications can be quickly optimised for improved inventory allocation and on-shelf availability, and increased forecast accuracy. A single source of data improves the accuracy and reliability of insights derived from data and information culled across different sources. 

  • Optimised fulfilment: With intelligent automation and early warning systems, the solution can detect disruptions before they occur and provide prescriptive insights to help businesses adapt to order changes, supplier availability issues, and demand spikes for competitive advantage.

UST Achieves Faster Development and Time to Production with Supply Chain Optimisation as a Service

UST, a leading digital transformation solutions company, has integrated Optum with Supply Chain Orchestrator to achieve enhanced supply chain orchestration and gain end-to-end visibility. By leveraging InterSystems technology, UST simplifies and standardizes the core platform while driving innovation at the edges, enabling the digital enterprise.

The use of industry-standard optimisation solutions on an advanced data platform enables UST to develop and deploy faster while achieving implementation and maintenance costs at a fraction of the cost. With UST Optum's integration of Supply Chain Orchestrator and the SAP ERP backend via SAP Business Technology Platform, customers can benefit from outcome-based Optimisation as-a-Service.

Outcome-based Optimisation as-a-Service ensures high service levels at lower costs:

  • Informed decision-making with simulation-based modeling and analytics – Supply chain leaders can make informed decisions with greater certainty and clarity based on improved accuracy and reliability of output from UST Optum, achieved through simulation-based modeling and advanced analytics. 

  • Optimised fulfilment by ensuring the right fulfilment at the right time -- UST Optum ensures that service levels are exceeded at lower costs, removing hesitations with reducing inventory that can impact customer service and turnover. 

  • Improved inventory turns by 28% on average* -- Multi-echelon optimization can improve inventory turns by 28% on average* by optimising individual nodes, expecting local optima to be sufficient for realising gains.

  • Real time modeling of scenarios – The UST Optum optimisation engine ensures scenarios are modelled in real time, removing computationally intensive barriers created by basic tools. 

Supply Chain Orchestrator can manage supply chain constraints with prescriptive insights from “first mile” through “last mile” by providing early warning to disruptions with intelligent automation that enables real-time execution of decisions across the operational landscape.

Learn more about InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator.


*Source: Multiple benchmark studies and industry reports

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