4 Supply Chain Trends for 2020
Blog: Appian Insight
Supply chains are dealing with changing demands and new hurdles in 2020. They must scale responsibly to meet growing, global markets while working better with supply chain partners and providing the personalized experience that customers now demand. To achieve success in this evolving climate, organizations are looking toward new approaches to meet their supply chain needs.
As we delve into 2020, discover the supply chain trends that will be prevalent this year.
- Shorter Product Life Cycles and Fulfillment: The demand for faster delivery, created by companies such as Amazon, is pushing organizations to streamline their operations and establish more efficient supply chains. How inventory is managed, orders are fulfilled, and returns are handled is critical to get right. Companies will look toward technology solutions to connect siloed systems, allow for more disciplined processes, and provide more accurate timelines and traceability.
- More Agile Supply Chains: Ever-changing global regulations require companies to be more agile in their supply chain planning and execution. To ensure that supply chains will continue to meet the regulatory climate and mitigate risk, processes must be digitized. This will help to reduce time spent on manual processes around areas such as audit tracking and supplier vetting. Organizations can then ensure compliance and focus on data-driven decisions for better forecasting and transparency within their ecosystem.
- Workflow Automation: Automation across the supply chain will continue to increase to improve process efficiency and decisioning. Organizations will invest in Artificial Intelligence to improve things like demand pattern forecasting, warehouse optimization, inventory ordering, and contracting processes. Robotic Process Automation will be implemented more and more to automate repetitive tasks, accelerate workflow and reduce errors to ultimately lower costs and improve quality.
“Among the industries to benefit most from AI adoption, supply chain management is in the top three.”
- Digital Control Towers: An innovative solution that many organizations are turning to is the “digital control tower”: A virtual hub that provides end-to-end visibility and control of global supply chains. The digital control tower allows supply chain management to oversee goods in transit in real-time and process updates anytime, from anywhere. This allows organizations to collaborate better internally and with supply chain partners, anticipate and remedy bottlenecks, and achieve track and trace intelligence.
The underlying theme across all supply chain trends in 2020 is the need for digitization. Implementing a digital solution will help organizations achieve their goals of efficiency, agility, automation, and visibility.
With a digital foundation in place, companies can capture, analyze, integrate, easily access, and interpret high quality, real-time data — data that fuels process automation, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics, the technologies that will soon take over supply chain management.
Benefits of Low-Code Automation for Supply Chain
Appian’s low-code automation platform provides the ability to unify and extend across existing systems to streamline end-to-end supply chain management.
- Fast: Innovate quickly across the supply chain with Appian’s low-code development, pre-built integration capabilities, and native mobility.
- Unified: Bring together ERP systems and other siloed processes under Appian’s platform. Join disparate data from any source, no matter where it’s stored, to create a single, unified interface.
- Flexible: Address changing market conditions, customer expectations, and regulations, while embracing new technologies with the flexibility to adapt as your business changes
- Impactful: Turn your great ideas into applications using Appian. Automate even the most critical and complex processes, and use easy drag-and-drop tools to deliver innovative apps in as fast as 8 weeks.
To learn more about what Appian can do for supply chain, view our solution experience.
Want to discover how Appian is disrupting supply chain management from our customers? Attend Appian World to hear how customers such as Ryder and General Dynamics are using Appian in their supply chain operations.
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