Artificial intelligence (AI) for supply chain management

Once thought to be a concept only sci-fi movies could produce, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a topic of our mainstreams and everydays.

The potential of AI enhancing everyday business activities and strategies hasn’t just sparked the interest of people and organizations globally, but has initiated rapid implementation.

AI is intelligence exhibited by machines, or when machines mimic or can replace intelligent human behaviour, such as problem-solving or learning.

In supply chain management it can be applied in two ways:

  1. Automating processes and actions so they can operate without the need for human intervention
  2. Assisting the human decision-making process in day-to-day operations by reducing errors and identifying bias, especially in data analysis

Our Vision

We believe AI can help to make companies to take, better, faster decisions.

We identified among our customers that most potential is seen to anticipate on exceptions ahead of time and automate manual tasks.

Both human effort and traditional software implementations are often not able to pin-point where the bullwhip effect in a supply chain exactly begins. Pattern recognition, in the most abstract sense of the word, has, however, been one of the main fields in which AI has showed to have great potential. We believe that a suitable AI implementation can identify such patterns better than humans or traditional software.

We believe AI can help companies to improve speed and reduce waste by automating tasks and providing actionable insights into risks and possible exceptions.

Our Product

In the Tradecloud One platform we have laid the foundation for AI.

In our product road map we consider the following applications as the most promising for AI usage:

  • AI based exception handling
    • Automatically approve exceptions that have not led to disruptions in the past
    • Automatically approve price differences
    • Automatically approve delivery date differences
    • Automatically approve item changes
  • AI based Risk analysis
    • Provide insights into supplier reliability, will the order be on time?
    • What suppliers are causing problems?

Our Research & Development

At Tradecloud, we have developers in-house that have graduated in AI, have hands-on field experience with AI, or are currently graduating in AI.

We are currently in the phase of researching the potential of AI and what it can bring to Tradecloud and its customers. To check out the latest updates about the development of AI at Tradecloud, stay tuned to our blog, where we periodically share blog posts with background and technical details about the implementation of our Risk Indicator / Exception Prediction algorithm.

Want to know more? contact us.

Blogs and video’s coming soon!