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Supply Chain AI Series, Part 1 of 5: Leverage AI to Drive Supply Chain Efficiency and Agility

August 10, 2023 in Featured, OpEx, Supply Chain, Technology, Why AMEND?

In today’s competitive business landscape, harnessing the power of AI can provide a significant advantage by enabling data-driven decision making, optimizing processes, and enhancing overall supply chain performance. At AMEND, we partner with organizations like yours to identify opportunities, implement robust AI solutions, and drive rapid and impactful returns on investment (ROI).

If you are in the journey toward a smarter and more efficient supply chain, AMEND is here to support you in unlocking valuable insights and driving improvements through enhanced decision making. Whether you need help implementing data capture solutions, integrating data across data silos, developing trusted data assets, developing a data science solution, gaining visibility into your processes, influencing behaviors and decision-making, or driving results from operational excellence with our experienced operations team, AMEND will use our trusted people, process and systems approach to help.

 

What is AI-driven supply chain and why is it important?

AI-driven supply chain is the application of decision making science toward supply chain data to yield actionable insights that can improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, enhance customer service, and mitigate risks. By leveraging AI techniques, businesses can uncover patterns, trends, and relationships within their supply chain data, empowering them to make informed decisions and optimize their end-to-end supply chain processes. Driving savings and improvements in your supply chain can help increase your cash flow while increasing your current cash on hand allowing you more flexibility with spending.  With the increasing complexity and global nature of supply chains, the application of technologies like AI in supply chain has become essential for organizations aiming to stay competitive and agile in the marketplace.

To leverage the power of AI in driving supply chain improvements, it is crucial to identify the right opportunities within your supply chain by analyzing the People, Process, and Systems inside the organization. Consider the following questions:

  • Where are we experiencing bottlenecks or inefficiencies that are impacting our customer service or overall performance?
  • What internal or external data can we leverage to gain valuable insights and drive strategic decision making?
  • Where can we improve operational efficiencies within our supply chain?

Identifying specific areas within your supply chain that can benefit from AI is the first step toward unlocking the full potential of your supply chain.

By partnering with AMEND, you gain access to our expertise in creating a smarter supply chain and our proven track record of driving tangible business impact utilizing our People, Process and Systems approach. Our AI solutions have helped customers with the following:

  • Supply Chain Network Optimization: Harness AI to optimize routing through analysis of transportation data, available routes, and prospective locations. Reduce costs, improve delivery speed, and enhance customer service.
  • Inventory Optimization: We have simultaneously been able to reduce inventory costs and stock-outs by analyzing demand and lead time data.
  • Distribution Center Picking Improvements: Apply AI tools to optimize the picking process in distribution centers, including route optimization, batch picking strategies, and workload balancing. This results in increased picking efficiency, reduced labor costs, and improved order accuracy.
  • AI Driven Product Recommendations: Utilize machine learning and personalized algorithms to enable real-time product recommendations to enhance the shopping experience for your customers while targeting your highest inventory items. Increase customer engagement, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities, driving higher conversions and revenue while helping your customers to find more items they are interested in.

AMEND consistently helps customers leverage AI to drive their supply chain.  Our data science team works side by side with our operations experts that have domain expertise to allow us to use speed and efficiency to implement and validate AI-powered solutions, ensuring rapid ROI and continuous improvement. By partnering with AMEND, you gain access to our deep technology expertise, industry knowledge, and tailored solutions designed to address your specific supply chain challenges.

Contact Us:

If you’re interested in learning more about how our AI-enabled supply chain capabilities can transform your business and drive significant improvements in your company performance, please request more information. Together, we can unlock the power of AI on your supply chain and propel your organization toward a more efficient and agile future.

Understanding the Value of Microsoft Fabric

July 18, 2023 in Data, Featured, Technology, Why AMEND?

Everyone knows there is immense value in developing insights and making decisions from your data, but anyone who is tasked with making that happen knows that it just isn’t that simple. Extracting data from your systems, storing it, and then analyzing it can require multiple systems each with their own licenses. It gets both complicated and expensive very quickly and that assumes that you have the technical skillsets to navigate these paths. To answer this problem, Microsoft has announced their own end-to-end analytics platform, Fabric.

 

Fabric sounds like a new marketing campaign for a bunch of existing Microsoft software.

While a lot of the functionality already exists, Fabric significantly improves the Microsoft data tech stack in two critical ways. First, it simplifies system administration and setup through automation. This means that the OneLake storage that is part of your Microsoft account is automatically ready and available without any setup. Previously, processing power needed to be manually allocated and warehouses needed to be spun up.  Second, Fabric reduces the technical barriers associated with extracting, storing, and analyzing your data. With low code and no code interfaces, non-technical users will be able to get their data out of source systems and ready for analysis efficiently.

What’s Included?

  • Data Factory: Connect to a wide range of source systems and load data into Fabric
  • Data Engineering: Transform data at scale using advanced, distributed computing
  • Data Science: Explore and enrich data with machine learning models through collaborative notebooks
  • Data Warehouse: Store all of your data in one place using flexible architecture that dynamically scales to meet your needs
  • Real Time Analytics: Consume and analyze high velocity data efficiently, so insights are gained immediately rather than waiting for batch processing
  • Power BI: Present and distribute your data in an interactive format that gets the data to the individuals who need to use it 
  • Data Activator: Monitor what is happening in the data and trigger a wide-range of responses based on established thresholds, including e-mails or other automated processes

 

 

Is Fabric a good fit for me?

Companies that are already using Microsoft’s analytic offerings such as Power BI or Azure storage are going to see benefits from Fabric immediately. Using OneLake to store organizational data allows all users to access the data from one location instead of creating their own copies in multiple locations.  With Fabric, Power BI can query data directly from OneLake without the need to download it. Not sure how you can get your data from your systems to Fabric? There are already over 150 pre-built connectors in Data Factory and many platforms are already working with Microsoft to build dedicated connectors for their software. Examples of dedicated connectors include Salesforce (CRM), Databricks (Data Infrastructure), and Asana (Project Management) and are already available. These are just a few of the exciting features of Fabric and there are dozens more that could be driving value and efficiency for you in the future.

 

 

Let’s get started together!

Whether you’re just starting to think about your data strategy or already have established infrastructure, AMEND is ready to work with you to get to your next milestone. Our team has experience that spans the full technology lifecycle from system selection through deployment. If you’re curious about how Fabric fits into your business, please reach out.

IoT Data Series, Part 5 of 5: Maximize ROI by Investing in the Right IoT Technology

July 17, 2023 in Data, Featured, Technology, Why AMEND?

In our IoT blog series thus far, we have covered the steps from identifying opportunities for IoT technology through implementation. After building an understanding of what IoT is, how it works, and how to implement it, let’s review the investment considerations and how to maximize ROI. 

 

Investment & Maintenance Considerations:

There are a lot of considerations when investing in IoT technologies. We recommend starting simple, understanding how it can work for your business, and expanding where more value can be added. AMEND has experience partnering with businesses to understand the critical factors to get started and build a custom plan to ensure implementation success. Here are some of the main components of an IoT investment to consider:

  • Hardware: Evaluate the cost of IoT devices and sensors based on functionalities and quality. 
  • Connectivity: Consider the cost of connectivity options like Wi-Fi, cellular, or LPWAN. 
  • Network Infrastructure: Assess the investment needed for routers, gateways, and switches. 
  • Cloud Services: Evaluate costs for data storage and computational resources in the cloud. 
  • Software Development: Determine the resources required for custom software development. 
  • Security: Invest in encryption, authentication, and intrusion detection solutions. 
  • Change Management: Develop an implementation plan and ensure internal processes adapt. 

How to Maximize ROI:

Even implementing changes such as a small-scale pilot phase to get started in IoT can lead to many benefits. Understanding your processes and current state are critical to determining where to start as well as quantifying the impact this investment will have for your business. Here are some of the key benefits we have identified while enabling our clients to utilize IoT technology:

  • Operational Efficiency: Automate tasks, optimize processes, and improve resource utilization. 
  • Improve Decision Making: Utilize IoT data for better decision-making and predictive maintenance. 
  • Enhance Customer Experience: Personalize services, enable real-time monitoring, and engage customers. 
  • Revenue Generation: Explore new revenue streams through innovative products, services, or data monetization. 
  • Cost Savings: Reduce expenses through energy management, predictive maintenance, and supply chain optimization. 

Give us a call!

AMEND has a proven track record of being an IoT leader and delivering a competitive advantage by creating a strategy and seeing it through to implementation. With a focus on speed and efficiency, we enable businesses to quickly implement and validate IoT solutions, ensuring rapid returns on investment. If you’re interested in learning more, please request more information below!