Three Ways Tech Can Make Supply Chain Solutions More Agile

The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain, and now scarcity and increased demand are driving up prices. Analysts have blamed everything from just-in-time inventory replenishment practices to labor shortages, shutdowns, woefully wrong shipping predictions, outdated infrastructure, and consumer behavior. Meanwhile, consumers have higher expectations than ever — in terms of speed and accuracy and the overall customer experience. Brian Otten, Digital Transformation Catalyst, Axway shares how companies can leverage technology to bring agility to their supply chain solutions.

Regardless of its cause, the supply chain crunch has been challenging for many companies. Still, one bright spot is how much better equipped we are to respond to shifts and increases in workflow thanks to technology improvements made over the last several years. We technologists are sometimes accused of believing technology will save the world, but can you imagine what 2020 and 2021 would have been like without cloud computing or Zoom?

Some factors are more challenging to control than others. However, those who were further along on their digital transformation journey have had an advantage in weathering the storm — without needing a sudden workforce surge.

For example, AmerisourceBergen, helps deliver vital medical products on time to retailers and healthcare providers across the country. The pharmaceutical company has been called on to step up in unprecedented times, supporting the delivery of more than 75 million COVID-19 vaccines across 30 plus countries this year. They explained:

“Our supply chains have a huge impact on patients’ lives, and it’s crucial that we can track every order and every piece of inventory with pinpoint accuracy. We can deliver dependable EDI services to businesses even as our trading partner volumes grow.  Our enterprise EDI platform launched first in 2017 and we have been, over time, consolidating EDI processing across the entire company to centralize on our new system.  We face continued challenges to handle the natural organic growth of EDI processing year-over-year while absorbing many disparate systems into our platform. We have managed to not increase staff levels and cost through automation and using high quality products that can accommodate increases in workflow.” 

— Scott Marshall, Director, Application Delivery Services – EDI Technology, AmerisourceBergen

See More: API Complexity: How Can Enterprises Tackle It

1. Harnessing the Power of APIs To Enable Automation 

So how can we become more agile in an unpredictable market? Technology cannot magically make workers appear at an understaffed port, but automation can help ensure the people there are freed up to solve the most pressing problems.

We can see the ability to package up business capabilities with APIs as the first step to automation. We often preach API-first ecosystems because they are intrinsically linked to digital strategy and the means to ensure that you merge your business model with the technology. Creating a digital platform where you can take your world-class products and services and make them consumable and reusable means you can extend your products and services and make them all easier to work in new ways. APIs enable business process automation through a combination of machine-to-machine interactions and a broader ecosystem of developers who can build better experiences for human actors. Additionally, the increased opportunities provided by APIs for connected devices (i.e., the IoT) will make it possible to achieve more intelligent automation through the automation of sensor-controlled devices, vehicles, and a variety of manufacturing and industrial equipment. Smart connectivity is critical, and APIs are ideally suited to unlock these capabilities.

We learned this early in the pandemic: When a port city gets locked down, workers cannot go to plants and truck drivers cannot go into manufacturing facilities to pick up parts, severely disrupting your supply chain. APIs cannot change the size of a shipping container to fit into a small port, but an API-first organization is ready to pivot its sourcing to another location quickly. 

Being able to quickly build and open up APIs to these new suppliers to communicate and share design documents or quickly create a reliable and secure interface to exchange demand planning forecasts and purchase order information is a game-changer.

If any point in the supply chain goes down, you typically have to deal with manual processes, which take much longer and slow down the entire chain. If you can encapsulate each element as APIs, though, you have a more composable ecosystem, allowing you to recombine APIs and build new flows and processes. There’s a fallacy where organizations assume that existing processes can be automated through a lift-and-shift approach. But automation at a bigger scale across the whole supply chain means encapsulating each element to be more agile.

See More: How to Protect Enterprises Against the Growing Menace of Supply Chain Attacks 

2. Leveraging Intelligent Automation

As my friend and colleague Joe Vernon of software engineering firm EPAM recently shared, intelligent automation (IA) will also be vital in helping leading retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands become more accurate and agile to overcome supply chain challenges.

Good data — that is accessible and usable — helps teams make the right decisions and predictions consistently so they can react quickly to strange or even unplanned events. 

“Many experts believe that IA is the future of CPG because it helps these companies keep pace with the fast and often uncontrollable market by providing a fully controllable platform that comprehends any unforeseen challenge and presents the best solution to the end-user. Similarly, IA can help retailers and CPGs understand shoppers’ habits on a store-by-store basis, enhance availability across supply chains and simplify the manufacturing process. Furthermore, it enables supply chains to improve inventory allocation, distribution and order placement to avoid profit loss,” Vernon says.

Taking machine learning models and AI processing components and simply plugging them into a workflow allows you to free up teams from manually doing hefty, data-intensive work. If you have a weather API, you can leverage it for new insights on optimizing your transportation for the next week. You gain a data diversity advantage.

3. Freeing up your teams with API-enabled systems

People today expect real-time experiences. They want to see inventory to get the pricing right, and they want that information in the hands of sales and marketing people. Consumers want to track the truck that’s bringing them their packages. And we’re learning that just throwing more people at the problem won’t work because it will dramatically slow down your processes. 

In unpredictable times, a solid API strategy helps us automate what we can so people are freed up to solve the problems where humans are required. We’re not obsolete yet! A set of APIs and workflows can help integrate and reuse the data you already have, drawing from third parties where new insights or data sets are needed. Making sure your organization is fully digital, and API-enabled will allow companies to move much faster and automate as much as possible to solve the most pressing problems of 2022.

What other supply chain pain points do you see technology resolving in the coming years? Tell us what you think on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!