Supply Chain

Today’s Supply Chains

The components of today’s supply chains – raw elements of production, tiers of manufacturing, transportation and warehousing networks, and the people and energy required to keep these components running – have never been more complex. Pure, homogeneous supply chains have been replaced by complex, multi-vendor networks requiring more coordination, adaptability, and detail than ever before. Supply chain management must continue to evolve to address this increasing level of dynamics and complexity.

The Focus of Supply Chain Leaders

As supply chain management has emerged as a critical business function, initial emphasis focused on enterprise-wide optimization. While many companies continue to reap benefits from these efforts, there is a growing need for resilient and, when possible, anticipatory supply chains that can quickly react and compensate for interruptions. Today’s supply chain leaders are striving to build intelligent, dynamic, and anticipatory supply chain networks that monitor, reason, analyze, and assess data in near real-time while also anticipating potential problems.

Our Technology in the Supply Chain

Cognitive computing offers the advanced technological capabilities to enhance automation and reason about the dynamics of the network, build in anticipatory mechanisms, and coordinate supply chain management efforts enterprise wide. From sensors on the factory floor and warehouse shelves, to the material movements throughout today’s supply networks, to the unexpected geopolitical or meteorological events, to the highest levels of enterprise resource management, cognitive computing can provide complex event reasoning, data analytics, situational understanding, and decision making support from end to end across the supply chain. By understanding the situation, anticipating the implications, and recommending options to avoid or mitigate, supply chain managers can leverage the power of cognitive computing to make their supply chain networks more efficient, robust, and dynamic.