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Supply chain management is critical for global commerce. A robust supply chain ensures smooth transfer of products from manufacturers to consumers.
Initially, Supply Chain Management relied heavily on manual processes. However, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised supply chain management by bringing unmatched efficiency, accuracy, and insight.
Here’s a short comparison how AI has revolutionarily impacted supply chain management
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Before the advent of AI in supply chain management, traditional forecasting methods and manual decision-making often led to inefficiencies and delays.
AI ensures enhanced forecasting accuracy, real-time insights, and optimised decision-making, resulting in reduced costs, improved efficiency and faster time-to-market.
PROCUREMENT AND MANUFACTURING
In manufacturing, processes were less adaptive, with limited predictive maintenance and resource allocation optimization. As for procurement, manual supplier selection and negotiation very often led to suboptimal decisions.
AI helps with predictive maintenance scheduling and optimised resource allocation, leading to enhanced manufacturing processes, improved efficiency and reduced downtime. Automated supplier evaluation and negotiation based on real-time data analytics makes for efficient procurement.
LOGISTICS
Manual route planning and tracking, would lead to inefficiencies in scheduling and higher transportation costs. Whereas automated route optimization, real-time tracking, and predictive analytics, can result in enhanced efficiency, reduced costs and improved delivery accuracy and speed.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Before AI, customer service heavily relied on human agents to handle inquiries and complaints. This resulted in longer response times and inconsistent service quality. Moreover, the limited ability to analyse customer data real-time made it challenging to provide personalised service and proactively resolve issues.
AI-driven customer service comes handy with chatbots and natural language processing to ensure immediate and personalised responses to customer queries. It also enables real-time data analysis to offer predictive customer insights, enhancing service personalisation, satisfaction, and overall experience.
INTEGRATION AND INFORMATION SHARING
Supply chain integration and information processes would heavily rely on manual inputs and outdated systems. And this would often result in delays, poor decision-making and inability to respond to dynamic market changes.
With the integration of AI, information sharing has become seamless and real-time. This improves collaboration, enhances transparency, and allows for agile responses to demand fluctuations and supply chain disruptions
To summarise, AI-driven supply chain management has brought about a paradigm shift. As businesses continue to embrace AI technologies, the future of supply chain management promises even greater efficiency, resilience, and customer satisfaction.
