The advancement in use of technology like artificial intelligence and the supply chain analytics has

transformed the supply chain from a tool to increase efficiency to a mode for competitive advantage
enabling the organizations to adapt for the future while prospering. Supply chain analytics is no more
an IT tool for dashboards but embedded in business model for a more accurate fact based decision
making enabling organizations to turn large stream of data into valuable insights.

Forces like volatile customer demand that poses the challenge of managing large variety of products
with reduced life cycle, changing geopolitical scenarios like changing trade policies and evolving
technology and the digitalization of the supply chain is shaping up the modern supply chain. From
efficient to agile supply chain, the strategy to survive and thrive the challenging environment has
transformed. Supply chain today requires the ability to identify, evaluate and execute all the available
scenarios of the chain for an informed decision that too on a rapidly changing environment. Being
agile is a dramatic shift from being efficient that solely focuses on optimizing cost using traditional
techniques like minimizing procurement cost at the expense of large quantity and longer lead time,
longer manufacturing runs for better utilization, freight with full container load to reduce
transportation cost etc. Supply chain analytics provided end to end visibility, actionable insights,
analytical decision support and execution to make the system more agile and ready for the future
challenges.

Technological advancement like the use of Internet of things provides opportunity to build connected
business solution while generating unprecedented amount of data and expectations to develop
meaningful insights aiding business operations and timely as well as accurate decision support that is
critical to business continuity. The unprecedented volume of raw data changing in real time poses a
serious challenge of transforming them into information restricting omission of a decision critical data
while providing complete supply chain visibility. Hence directing efforts to generate meaningful
information with the goal of increasing consumer value is the key in supply chain analytics. Just the
numbers from the data is not enough, the real challenge is to understand the data, identify trends and
correlation to derive prescriptive actions. The prescriptive actions may be operational, tactical or
strategic in nature guiding the overall business operations.

From descriptive and diagnostic analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics, supply chain
analytics has transformed itself from generating historical data in the past to producing decision and
action targeted to achieve certain outcome in the present thereby embedding itself in the key business
operations. The challenge now lies with defining the objective that the supply chain analytics need to
focus on. Business operations working in silos of different functional area has KPI’s limited to
functional silos and as such can be conflicting on cross functional/ business level. Such KPI are self –
inflicted wound for the supply chain as often the supply chain is the first to feel the heat of misaligned
and conflicting KPI. Thus incentivising KPI and decision making that targets the benefit of the business
as a whole is imperative for the success of supply chain analytics.

With growing competitive environment, supply chain analytics is getting more acceptance in the
mainstream business. While there are challenges like lack of clean & filtered data, segmented
functioning of the departments , complex algorithm which still requires optimization and is sort of
black box for the industry ,short sighted business vision and skill gap that hinders the mainstream use
of analytics. Going forward these challenges must be taken care of to gain widespread acceptance and
reap the potential benefit out of analytics.

For now supply Chain analytics with the premise of answering questions in way that is continuously
adopting to become more intelligent is providing a great promise for the future. Analytics is no longer
a burden or IT expense but an asset to leverage actionable insights for the business to grow, exploit
opportunities and mitigate risk. With the rapid evolution of technology and digitalization, supply chain
needs to be hyper- connected and automated producing insights that promote the business
operations and its continuity.