Supply and demand underwent massive disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic caused a lot of unpredictability in business plans, operational plans, and demand and supply plans — making it difficult for organizations to operate. This went both ways, as some products experienced a surge in demand with less supply and some items went obsolete practically overnight.
It became difficult to keep good customers supplied, optimize both inventory and supply chains, and identify alternate routes, vendors and sources of supply without a robust system that provided the insights that businesses need.
Post the pandemic, enterprises have been relooking at their supply chain strategies for increased resilience, sustainability, and collaboration with stakeholders. Investment in supply chain technologies like AI and analytics and robotic process automation was an outcome toward establishing a digital supply chain.
Enter the idea of an autonomous supply chain that applies to moving goods with very minimal human intervention for attaining increased speed and responsiveness. It is one capable of automating, digitizing, and robotizing all processes, including product design, operation planning, and shipping and delivery of goods to end customers. In theory, an autonomous operation is self-sufficient. Autonomous supply chains can make decisions automatically without human intervention. This, in a way, empowers businesses to act and react intelligently. There are three key components of the autonomous supply chain in NetSuite.
- Unified Planning – NetSuite’s supply planning tool has been re-engineered to support modern product companies. The addition of materials requirement planning to the supply planning platform aids the client to react to situations that disrupt the supply chain in real-time.
- Smart Inventory Management – The automation that NetSuite provides improved supply chain efficiencies and customer satisfaction. The Advanced Order Management, for instance, enables products to get to the customers at the right time by using configurable business rules to automate the final step. NetSuite also studies and determines key information to automatically carry out the most coherent fulfillment scenario for every order that enters the system.
- Streamline Execution – With NetSuite’s mobile service, users can finish production tasks directly from mobile devices, enabling a more accurate data entry and lowering the time required to produce, pick, pack, and ship items.
NetSuite’s allocation and fulfillment engine aims to continually become more intelligent over the years. The utilization of machine learning will enable the system to identify strategies that enhance inventory allocation based on values like sales, profitability, client and customer satisfaction, and tactical time frames like year-end. This will reduce the problem of imbalanced supply and demand.
Building an autonomous supply chain with NetSuite, however, does entail complex systems that come with associated investment, implementation, integration, and optimization challenges. dotSolved, a NetSuite Consulting Partner, can help businesses leverage the advantages of the cloud for supply chain agility through standardized custom-built applications that are native to NetSuite. dotSolved offers solutions from acquisition, application development, execution, and everything in between.
- Process design – For reengineering current processes, dotSolved provides strategic process consulting and design to help with transformation initiatives.
- Purpose-aligned pilots – Through a 90-day sprint, clients can use the maximum advantage of dotSolved’s purpose-aligned pilots to implement a module that integrates with the capabilities of NetSuite.
- Contextual scale – By understanding every business’ needs, culture, and goals, dotSolved creates solutions to help clients leverage the NetSuite platform with contextual scale.
- Process automation – After implementation, dotSolved helps the automation of many processes from finance to order management to warehousing and more.
- Insight-based decision support – NetSuite offers powerful analytics capabilities across business functions with an interconnected ecosystem. dotSolved helps company executives harness the advantages of insight-based decision-making.
To recap, the autonomous supply chain will help businesses manage their supply chain more efficiently. It will simplify inventory and warehouse management and improve demand and supply planning that ultimately reduces costs.
dotSolved can help your business realize the objective toward establishing an autonomous supply chain. To learn more about how dotSolved can help with your supply chain challenges, contact us here.
