How Incorta uses AI to address supply-chain issues Posted on : Jan 05 - 2022

Prior to this pandemic year of 2021, the term “supply chain” didn’t raise many red flags for most consumers, frankly because they didn’t have to think about it. Everything just happened. Buyers were so accustomed to getting things on schedule that it rarely became a regular topic of conversation.

That all changed in the second half of 2021. With the pandemic slowing down production lines and transportation in faraway places, the term “supply chain” is now regularly in headlines. This has been the greatest shock to global supply chains in modern history. Buyers often have to wait months for raw materials, durable goods, building materials, electronic devices, apparel, toys, and numerous other items. At the end of the calendar year, this remains a nagging problem that may continue well into 2022 – or even 2023.

As a result, supply-chain managers now are placing bets that may determine, in large measure, the fate of their companies. They’re desperate for visibility into all links in the chain – using portals many have never had before – but a number of them are flying blind with little or no control over the flow of their goods.

Supply chain managers struggle with how to best view and control logistics to get goods trapped in millions of 40×8-foot containers on ships waiting off ports in Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach, the eastern seaboard, and the Suez Canal onto trucks and trains and out to retailers. Solutions for this include those from companies such as SAP, Cin7, Oracle NetSuite, InfoPlus, and Anvyl. These suppliers make complex collections of point products that include controls for demand forecasting and management of import/export, inventory, shipping, suppliers, transportation, and warehousing.

These mostly legacy applications can be difficult to use, and they weren’t designed with optimal usability in mind. The good news is that there’s innovation happening in this market.

Welcome unified data analytics

Relative newcomer Incorta, which makes a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based unified data analytics platform that includes the above functions, comes at the supply chain from a different perspective. Its single-screen platform puts all a company’s data into a single system, replacing various separate tools, to move data from source locations into a form that both line-of-business staff members and data scientists can use more effectively. This is the data analysis that’s used to project and/or identify supply-chain snags and find ways to solve them, similar to the way GPS routes drivers around traffic snarls. View more