Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, for example, operates two dozen manufacturing and processing facilities around the world and nearly 2,000 retail stores in America and Australia. To collect underutilized data from its industrial operations and gain greater visibility into its supply chain, the company relies on a combination of cloud technology and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities.
“A digital supply chain connects us from producer to manufacturer, providing visibility across the value chain,” says Adam Lorenz, senior director of 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 determine the location of assets, see where products are moving and determine inventory requirements.
Currently, Nutrien can locate a fertilizer or nutrient reservoir in a grower’s field and determine which Nutrien products are in it. By achieving this “real-time visibility” into a tank’s location and a customer’s immediate needs, Lorenz says the company “can predict where assets are in terms of fill level and plan accordingly.” In turn, Nutrien can respond quickly to emerging customer needs, increasing the company’s revenue while enhancing customer satisfaction, improving inventory management and optimizing supply chain operations.
“For us, it’s about starting with data generation and then adding a layer of artificial intelligence on top to really drive the recommendations,” says Lorenz. In addition to improving product visibility and asset utilization, Lorenz says Nutrien plans to add AI capabilities to its collaboration platforms that will make it easier for less tech-savvy customers to take advantage of the 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 must similarly modernize their supply chain operations. The key to doing this – and increasing organizational resilience and sustainability – will be applying AI/ML to their extensive cloud business data.
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Resilience as business differentiation
Like Nutrien, a wide variety of organizations from various industries are discovering the competitive advantages of modernizing their supply chains. For example, a pharmaceutical company that aggregates supply chain data for greater end-to-end visibility can provide better product tracking for customers with a critical illness condition. A retail startup experiencing meteoric growth can host its workload in the cloud to support sudden spikes in demand while minimizing operational costs. And a transport company can achieve inbound supply chain savings by evaluating the total distance traveled by its fleet to reduce mileage costs and CO2 emissions.
This content was created by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. Not written by the MIT Technology Review editorial staff.