Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced AWS Supply Chain, a new application that helps businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions. It also reduces risks, lowers costs, and improves customer experiences.
Announced during its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week by CEO Adam Selipsky, AWS Supply Chain automatically combines and analyses data across multiple supply chain systems. This allows businesses to observe their operations in real-time, find trends more quickly, and generate more accurate demand forecasts that ensure adequate inventory to meet customer expectations.
“To get a complete view of inventory in your supply chain, you need to build custom integrations,” said Selipsky. “This can produce expensive consulting engagements. Long-term development cycles, complex ongoing maintenance and scaling complexity of the data makes it really difficult to analyse problems in real-time for somebody to make decisions on outdated or inaccurate information.
“Even when you have identified the most impactful problems, you still need to figure out the best actions to take to solve issues like rebalancing your inventory. For example, you might discover a potential stock facility without a complete picture of your supply chain network. You have no idea which facilities might be able to transfer inventory. Over the past 25 years, Amazon’s tackled many of these problems and answered a lot of these questions for ourselves. And many AWS customers have asked us whether we can take Amazon supply chain technology and AWS infrastructure and machine learning to help them with their supply chain.”
The result is AWS Supply Chain. Based on nearly 30 years of Amazon.com logistics network experience, AWS Supply Chain improves supply chain resiliency by providing a unified data lake, machine-learning-powered insights, recommended actions, and collaboration capabilities.
In recent years, supply chains have experienced unprecedented supply and demand volatility accelerated by widespread resource shortages, geopolitics, and natural events. These disruptions put pressure on businesses to plan for potential supply chain uncertainty, respond quickly to changes in customer demand, and keep costs low.
When businesses inadequately forecast supply chain risks—such as component shortages, shipping port congestion, unanticipated demand spikes, or weather disruptions—they face excess inventory costs, or stock-outs that cause poor customer experiences. To gain visibility into their supply chain network, businesses must build custom integrations that can access and process data across an array of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management systems.
These projects introduce expensive third-party engagements and long-term development cycles, and they struggle to detect patterns that reveal supply chain problems as they occur. Without real-time context, businesses rely on outdated information or best guesses that make it difficult to respond effectively to unexpected issues.
Even when a business has identified the most impactful problems and decided what to do next, supply chain teams often coordinate the resolution across multiple phone calls and emails—without all the needed information to resolve the issue. As a result, businesses are less prepared to respond to supply chain risks that impact customer promises and operational costs.
AWS Supply Chain is an application that improves supply chain visibility and provides actionable insights to help businesses optimize supply chain processes and improve service levels. Customers can set up a unified supply chain data lake using AWS Supply Chain’s built-in connectors, which use pre-trained machine learning models based on Amazon.com’s nearly 30 years of supply chain experience, to understand, extract, and aggregate data from ERP and supply chain management systems.
AWS Supply Chain then contextualises that information in a real-time visual map highlighting current inventory selection and quantity at each location. Inventory managers, demand planners, and supply chain leaders can view machine learning-generated insights for potential inventory shortages or delays, and create watchlists to receive alerts to take action as risks appear.
Once a risk is identified, AWS Supply Chain automatically provides recommended actions, such as moving inventory between locations, based on the percentage of risk resolved, the distance between facilities, and the sustainability impact. Teams can solve problems and collaborate using built-in chat and messaging functionality. With AWS Supply Chain, businesses can more accurately anticipate supply chain risks, take inventory rebalancing actions quickly to save costs, and meet customer expectations.
Diego Pantoja-Navajas, vice president of AWS Supply Chain, said: “Customers tell us that the undifferentiated heavy lifting required in connecting data between different supply chain solutions has inhibited their ability to quickly see and respond to potential supply chain disruptions.
“AWS Supply Chain aggregates this data and provides visual, interactive dashboards that provide the insights and recommendations customers need to take actions toward more resilient supply chains. And this is just the beginning—we will continue our investment in AWS Supply Chain to help our customers solve their toughest supply chain problems.”
* For more information about AWS Supply Chain, visit aws.amazon.com/aws-supply-chain.
