There is so much involved in overseeing a supply chain operation. You’re responsible for managing inventory and the journey goods take, from raw materials to production to the delivery and sale of finished products.

Paying close attention to how you order, store, organize, and move stock is critical for improving efficiency and increasing profitability, among other benefits. The key is gaining more visibility into inventory and demand.

How do you do this? Technology. These three technologies are making a huge difference in supply chain inventory management.

Photo: Jacques Dilles

Data analytics

There might not be anything more important for improving visibility than data. The more data you collect, the more opportunities you have to extract insights about your inventory that facilitate better visibility into demand.

Collecting data at each step in your supply chain and wherever possible in inventory management will produce huge datasets that must be analyzed. That’s where the challenge lies, in analysis.

Trying to examine large datasets manually is not only time-consuming but mentally taxing. There’s only so much you can sift through. But data analytics tools don’t have these limitations. They can continuously sort through datasets and make insightful conclusions about inventory levels, customer demand, costs, excess inventory and waste, and so forth.

Armed with information like this, you can make informed decisions about how to move forward with your inventory to improve your supply chain’s profitability.

Automation

Inventory management consists of many tasks. For example, you have to create an internal SKU system. You must conduct inventory audits regularly. Receiving inventory shipments, communicating with suppliers, and ordering are on your list of responsibilities as well.

Doing all of these tasks on your own manually is just like data analysis, time-consuming, and mentally taxing, not to mention inefficient. That’s why many managers are relying on automation technology to help.

Automation tools are meant to take repetitive tasks that don’t require much, if any human intervention, off your plate. Automated inventory and supply chain management solutions are available on the market today.

Many companies use a combination of automation tools, like barcode scanners, warehouse management systems, and inventory management software, and connect them to a central system to gain complete visibility into their supply chain’s efficiency.

As a result, they’re able to get more done. And that enables them to meet customer demand and rake in more revenue.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Proper inventory management practices include:

• Controlling costs
• Being accurate and efficient
• Forecasting customer demand
• Establishing practical purchasing procedures
• Using data insights to inform inventory and supply chain planning

Of course, you can attempt all of these things without the help of technology. However, leaning on it, specifically, AI, will make the above practices much more seamless. AI technology emulates human intelligence to perform tasks and cognitive functions that we do.

Voice assistants, chatbots, advanced analytics, and smart warehouses are examples of AI tools that businesses in the supply chain sector take full advantage of. With advanced analytics, you can control costs and forecast customer demand. Voice assistants are an effective way to create purchasing procedures. And smart warehouse technology aids in accuracy and efficiency.

Machine learning is also under the AI umbrella. It’s when a machine learns and improves on its own through experience. The more training data you put in front of a machine learning tool, the more opportunities it has to finetune its decision-making capabilities. Suggestions from these tools can be incredibly helpful in informing inventory and supply chain planning.

Ultimately, using AI, automation, data analytics, and other technology as the foundation of your inventory management process is the wisest move you can make to elevate your supply chain operation.