Demand sensing: Building supply chain resilience with AI

A resilient supply chain offers a much-needed competitive edge to businesses in today’s increasingly complex landscape. The market is highly volatile, and customer preferences change at lightning speed. Hence, product lifecycles are getting shorter, and the buyers are spoiled for choices. AI-powered demand sensing builds supply chain resiliency, and enterprises are fueling strategies with AI and ML technologies.

Challenges impacting supply chain and how can demand sensing help

As mentioned earlier, the supply chain network is becoming more complex, and various disruptions in the network can impact the whole system. Unavailability of data and insights impair decision-making and disable visibility deep down in the demand-supply value chain.

Bottlenecks can arise for multiple reasons; a few of which are described below:

Increasing inflation and decreasing the spending power of buyers are other challenges currently faced by businesses, especially following the disruptive pandemic. The lack of technology adds to the complexities. As per a report by Gartner, over 70% of supply chain leaders stated that their supply chain is facing greater and more frequent business disruptions. Nearly half of them believe a lack of digital competencies limits the ability to transition their supply chain to new business models.

In the absence of data, technology, and existing siloes, achieving supply chain resiliency remains a distant dream. According to a report by IDC, 63% of organizations view a lack of resilience as a key supply chain gap.

A resilient supply chain should be able to see what is happening in real-time by accessing insights and taking action promptly. That can be possible with an AI-powered demand-sensing solution.

Demand sensing solution: Expectations and benefits

Expectations with AI demand sensing are huge, and to a great extent, it has proved worthy of such expectations.

Benefits of AI-powered systems:

A demand sensing solution with advanced analytics can help consumer goods companies (CGs) better prepare for disruption and meet consumer demand

Demand sensing solution provides decision-grade sales analytics, offering a unified view of sales across channels for more effective measurement and deployment of funds and resources. It offers the following benefits:

TradeEdge Demand Sensing: Building supply chain resilience with AI

Experts believe that a connected and cognitive supply chain is possible when enterprises invest in AI/ML and automation technologies like the TradeEdge Demand Sensing solution by EdgeVerve. This enables real-time insights to improve operational performance, optimize demand planning outcomes, and respond and react effectively to changing market demands and other disruptions.

For example, one of our clients, a multi-billion-dollar global CG with operations in 60 countries, faced data-related challenges affecting sales, partner relationships, partner productivity, supply chain efficiency, and the bottom line. TradeEdge Demand Sensing provided real-time insights into secondary sales and inventory, enabling the client to achieve a 4% to 10% improvement in sales and meet 98% data delivery SLA targets.