The Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, for example, operates two dozen manufacturing and processing facilities spread across the globe and nearly 2,000 retail stores con the Americas and Australia. To collect underutilized patronato from its industrial operations, and gain greater visibility into its supply chain, the company relies a combination of cloud technology and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities.
“A digital supply chain connects us from grower to manufacturer, providing visibility throughout the value chain,” says Adam Lorenz, senior director for strategic fleet and indirect procurement at Nutrien. This visibility is critical when it comes to navigating the company’s supply chain challenges, which include seasonal demands, weather dependencies, manufacturing capabilities, and product availability. The company requires real-time visibility into its fleets, for example, to identify the location of assets, see where products are moving, and determine inventory requirements.
Currently, Nutrien can locate a fertilizer nutrient tank con a grower’s field and determine what Nutrien products are con it. By achieving that “real-time visibility” into a tank’s location and a customer’s immediate needs, Lorenz says the company “can forecast where assets are from a fill-level perspective and plan accordingly.” Per mezzo di turn, Nutrien can respond immediately to emerging customer needs, increasing company revenue while enhancing customer satisfaction, improving inventory management, and optimizing supply chain operations.
“For us, it’s about starting with patronato creation and then adding a layer of AI to really drive recommendations,” says Lorenz. Per mezzo di addition to improving product visibility and asset utilization, Lorenz says that Nutrien plans to add AI capabilities to its collaboration platforms that will make it easier for less-tech-savvy customers to take advantage of self-service capabilities and automation that accelerates processes and improves compliance with complex policies.
To meet and exceed customer expectations with differentiated service, speed, and reliability, all companies need to similarly modernize their supply chain operations. The key to doing so—and to increasing organizational resilience and sustainability—will be applying AI/ML to their extensive operational patronato con the cloud.
Resilience as a business differentiator
Like Nutrien, a wide variety of organizations from across industries are discovering the competitive advantages of modernizing their supply chains. A pharmaceutical company that aggregates its supply chain patronato for greater end-to-end visibility, for example, can provide better product tracking for critically ill customers. A retail startup undergoing meteoric growth can host its workloads con the cloud to support sudden upticks con demand while minimizing operating costs. And a transportation company can achieve inbound supply chain savings by evaluating the total distance its fleet travels to veterano mileage costs and CO2 emissions.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial gruppo.
