Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced AWS Supply Chain, a new application that helps companies increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions. It also reduces risk, lowers costs, and improves customer experiences.
Announced during the annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week by CEO Adam Celebski, AWS Supply Chain automatically integrates and analyzes data across multiple supply chain systems. This allows companies to monitor their operations in real time, find trends more quickly, and create more accurate demand forecasts that ensure sufficient inventory to meet customer expectations.
“To get a complete view of the inventory in your supply chain, you need to create custom integrations,” Selipsky said. “This can result in expensive consulting engagements. Long term development cycles, complex ongoing maintenance, and increasing data complexity make it really difficult to analyze issues in real time for someone to make decisions on outdated or inaccurate information.
“Even when you identify the most impactful issues, you still need to know the best course of action to take to resolve issues like rebalancing your inventory. For example, you might spot a potential inventory facility without a complete picture of your supply chain network. You have no idea what facilities might Be able to move inventory Over the past 25 years, Amazon has addressed many of these issues and answered many of these questions ourselves Many AWS customers have asked us if we can take advantage of Amazon’s supply chain technology, AWS infrastructure, and machine learning to help them with their supply chain.”
The result is AWS Supply Chain. Building on nearly 30 years of Amazon.com logistics network experience, AWS Supply Chain improves supply chain resilience by providing a unified data lake, machine learning-powered insights, recommended actions, and collaboration capabilities.
In recent years, supply chains have experienced unprecedented fluctuations in supply and demand accelerated by widespread resource shortages, geopolitics, and natural events. These disruptions put pressure on companies to plan for potential supply chain uncertainties, respond quickly to changes in customer demand, and keep costs down.
When companies inadequately forecast supply chain risks—such as component shortages, shipping port congestion, unexpected demand spikes, or weather disruptions—they face excess inventory costs, or stockouts that cause poor customer experiences. To gain visibility into their supply chain network, companies must build custom integrations that can access and process data across a combination of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management systems.
Offering expensive third-party engagements and long-term development cycles, these projects struggle to spot patterns that reveal supply chain problems as they occur. Without real-time context, companies rely on outdated information or best guesses that make it difficult to respond effectively to unexpected issues.
Even when a company identifies the most impactful issues and decides what to do next, supply chain teams often coordinate a solution via multiple phone calls and emails—without all the information required to solve the problem. As a result, companies are less prepared to respond to supply chain risks that affect customer promises and operational costs.
AWS Supply Chain is an application that improves supply chain visibility and provides actionable insights to help companies improve supply chain operations and improve service levels. Customers can create a unified supply chain data lake with built-in AWS Supply Chain Connectors, which use pre-trained machine learning models based on nearly 30 years of Amazon.com supply chain experience, to understand, extract, and aggregate data from ERP and supply chain management systems .
AWS Supply Chain then contextualizes that information in a real-time visual map that highlights the current inventory selection and quantity at each location. Inventory managers, demand planners, and supply chain leaders can view insights generated by machine learning for potential inventory shortages or delays, and create watchlists to receive alerts to take action when risks arise.
Once a risk is identified, AWS Supply Chain automatically offers recommended actions, such as moving inventory between locations, based on the percentage of the risk resolved, distance between facilities, and sustainability impact. Teams can solve problems and collaborate using built-in chat and messaging functions. With AWS Supply Chain, companies can more accurately anticipate supply chain risks and quickly take inventory rebalancing actions to save costs and meet customer expectations.
“Customers tell us that the undifferentiated heavy lifting required in connecting data between different supply chain solutions has hindered their ability to quickly see and respond to potential supply chain disruptions,” said Diego Pantoja-Navagas, Vice President of Supply Chain at AWS.
“AWS Supply Chain aggregates this data and provides visual, interactive dashboards that provide the insights and recommendations customers need to take action 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.”
Originally posted 2022-12-01 10:39:09.