The Key to Unlocking Logistics Management Challenges: Decision Intelligence
As companies continue to invest in people and technology to transform logistics management, challenges still remain. Why is that the case?
At Aera Technology, we have seen these challenges firsthand and are enabling logistics professionals to overcome hurdles and drive outcomes — all through Decision Intelligence. In fact, Inbound Logistics magazine recently recognized our technology and capabilities in its ranking of Top Logistics Solution Providers.
Let’s take a closer look at today's logistics management challenges and how Decision Intelligence is enabling better outcomes.
Improving operational flexibility
The biggest question we keep hearing is, “How can I build the operational flexibility and agility to deliver time-to-value for my customers and partners?”
Today’s logistics management challenges aren’t just the result of excessive market and geopolitical volatility, which only amplifies the underlying challenges caused by today’s unprecedented supply chain network complexity. This complexity is driven by a host of factors, including the increase in the number of products on offer; the proliferation of ecommerce channels and fulfillment options; and customer demand for rapid delivery.
Companies are struggling constantly to juggle a host of competing priorities. They have to maintain service levels, but also control the amount of freight being expedited, improve fill rates, ensure they have enough people to run their operations, and deliver the right answer when customers ask, “Where is my order?”
The speed of business requires more and more logistics management decisions to be made, daily – or hourly – just to keep pace. And, growing consumer and regulatory emphasis on sustainability metrics adds an additional layer of complexity and more trade-offs to consider.
Data and analytics alone won’t solve these challenges. Teams are drowning in data. What we’re hearing from customers is, overwhelmingly, that they don’t need more dashboards – they need more at-scale decision-making capacity, at the point of impact.
Decision Intelligence: Transforming Supply Chains with AI
Operational flexibility requires the ability to make decisions more quickly and accurately. With data-driven decision making and the ability to respond in real time to changing circumstances, companies can enable better outcomes.
Decision Intelligence digitizes, augments, and automates decision making – combining data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. Instead of making legacy processes faster, Decision Intelligence can accelerate the digital transformation of large enterprises by focusing not on tasks, but on decisions.
This makes Decision Intelligence a key competency for addressing a host of logistics and inventory challenges: network/freight lane optimization, order prioritization and back order processing, managing STOs, optimizing inventory placement, and stock-out prevention, to name a few.
Decision Intelligence platforms like Aera Decision Cloud™ are making it possible for teams to respond to issues in real time, at the right moment in time – enabling more accurate, faster decision making. It records not only the decision but its context and outcome, building a data model that learns continuously and optimizes future recommendations.
With an AI-enabled Decision Intelligence platform to support their decision-making processes, logistics management teams can manage the disruptions and costs that traditional approaches to logistics are struggling to address. Even as complexity grows, companies can achieve improved agility, greater efficiency, and excellent customer service – and deliver on their sustainability commitments while doing so.
To learn more about how Aera Decision Cloud empowers teams to achieve these outcomes, watch our recent Future Now series webinar, “How to Run a Successful Decision Intelligence Transformation,” for insights to help you start your journey.
