The demand for supply chains has been at unprecedented levels, primarily due to resource shortages, geopolitics, and natural events — all these disruptions put pressure on businesses to plan for potential uncertainty, respond quickly, and keep costs low. Misforecast can mean excess inventory costs or stockouts that lead to poor customer experiences.
What most businesses do to gain visibility into their supply chain network is to build custom integrations to access and process data across a wide array of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems. These kinds of projects, aside from being expensive and requiring long-term development cycles, struggle to detect patterns that reveal supply chain problems as they occur. Business decision-makers often rely on outdated information or best guesses that make it difficult to respond to unexpected issues effectively, since they are not using tools with real-time analysis capabilities.
In the 2022 edition of re:Invent, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) annual learning conference happening this week in Las Vegas, Nevada, no less than the company’s CEO Adam Selipsky announced AWS Supply Chain aimed at helping businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions, improve customer experience, and lower costs.
This new cloud-based application automatically combines and analyzes data across multiple supply chain systems so that business decision-makers can observe operations in real-time, find trends more quickly, and generate more forecasts that are accurate, to ensure adequate inventory to meet customer expectations.
“I am thrilled to announce the preview of AWS Supply Chain, a new cloud application that improves supply chain visibility, delivers actionable insights to help customers mitigate supply chain risks and lower costs. With AWS Supply Chain you get a unified view of your supply chain data, Machine Learning-powered insights, recommended actions, and built-in collaboration capabilities, so you can react quickly to unexpected issues,” according to Selipsky during his keynote in re:Invent 2022.
The technology used in AWS Supply Chain is based on almost thirty (30) years of Amazon.com’s logistics experience, which is used to understand, extract, and aggregate data from ERP and SCM systems. This new application can improve supply chain resiliency by providing a unified data lake, machine learning-powered insights, recommended actions, and in-application collaboration capabilities.
AWS Supply Chain has the capability to contextualize information in a real-time visual map to highlight current inventory selection and quantity at each location. Machine Learning-generated insights for potential inventory shortages or delays can be viewed by inventory managers, demand planners, and supply chain leaders. The new application also lets supply chain players create watchlists to receive alerts to take action as risks appear.
As soon as a risk is identified, AWS Supply Chain will automatically provide recommended actions such as moving inventory between locations, to take based on the percentage of risk resolved, the distance between facilities, and the sustainability impact. Supply chain players in a company can then solve problems and collaborate using the application’s built-in chat and messaging functionality. This system will enable businesses to more accurately anticipate supply chain risks, take inventory rebalancing actions quickly to save costs, and meet customer expectations.
At present, AWS Supply Chain is available in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). Additional AWS Regions will be available soon.