The Intelligent supply chain: 4 ways to re-imagine digital transformation

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Supply chain needs to be even more intelligent and dynamic
Let's imagine a new supply chain revolution,which might be fancy termed “phoenix of new supply chain movement” . How would such a supply chain be structured and what could be its salient features. What should be the principal underlying dimensions that the thought leaders and decision-makers need to focus when they engineer the intelligent supply chain architecture. As the anchor point, of my proposal, I would like to point out that there are 4 pillars of the futuristic supply chain model. They should embody the following-

1. Advanced digital models and sustainable ecosystems 
The modern digital supply chain, needs to be primarily characterized by demand-driven pipeline, market-intelligent with a lifecycle value approach, and led by predictive analytics based decision frameworks. It has to be agile and flexible to meet challenges of rapidly changing real time environment. The digital artefacts needs to be characterized by modularity, transparency, distributed location, with well laid out semantics. The digital ecosystem in turn, with its actors and components should encapsulate shared tacit knowledge, reliable governance and participatory culture.  This makes them conductive to principles and values of sustainability. A Restful ecosystem, for example upholds these principles to a great extent. A combination of blockchain technology with physical internet of things could be key to achieve triple bottomline sustainability. On the physical flow level, the transition from linear to circular model needs further emphasis in design of modern supply chain networks.

2. Self-aligning and dynamically adaptive learning mechanisms
 This concept is mostly implicative of a high level integration and responsivity between IoT systems and architectures with big data analytics platforms, creating a seamless customer-centric value chain. The optimized case would extract synergistic effects of advanced digital business models and AI systems based on intelligent multi-agent type ontology, which are context-aware and adaptive. Interoperability, heterogeneity and asynchronous communication are at the heart of these systems. Further, integration and synchronicity within the architecture of any global ecosystem is of crucial relevance.

3.Cyber-secure data architecture
 Supply chain systems featuring industrial-internet-of-things(IIoT) cloud and multi-party platform, endeavour to provide a decentralized architecture yet concrete end to end visibility and transaction credibility through 'single version of truth' paradigm. With advent of IIoT/IOE,  we are cruising towards a “super-connected world”. The features of the IoT may introduce novel vulnerabilities to the ecosystems. A truly open digital ecosystem with standard APIs is necessary to avoid interoperability and reliability problems. Privacy of sensitive data could be ensured by the use of a data-centric access control mechanism. A key development in approaches to ensure cyber resilience is the 'social governance framework', where manufacturers, users and policy makers collaboratively tackle vulnerabilities of IoT. The hierarchical distributed policy management systems(HDPMS) and policy compliant smart devices(PCSD) present promising avenues to implement control measures for cyber-physical systems.

4. Risk-resilient supply chain infrastructure 
If there is one fundamental principle that oversees a robust supply chain, its risk resilience. A global crisis like COVID-19, could disrupt the sourcing and delivery chains, creating massive ripples across world economies. A 'systemic-view' analysis is required to have a proper assessment of these ripple effects. According to Harvard Business Review, reliance on single sourcing has turned out to be detrimental to industries, which rely on Chinese and Italian suppliers (tier 1 and below) and manufacturers. They advocate revenue impact analysis, monitoring and supplier mapping as strategies to counter rapid expansive supply risks. Experts at Gartner argue that effects of the pandemic on customer spending as well as inventory reachability needs to analysed on the short term while in the long term a collaborative and congruent risk management with critical suppliers and stakeholders has to be materialized.

I wrap up here, this short sprint through some of the perspectives to enhance, develop and train the supply chains to embrace the “highly connected world” with due inclusivity to the large scale complexity and randomness that comes along with it. I look forward to discuss some of the models which encapsulate these paradigms into decision making for business environments, in my upcoming blog post.

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