Blog Post
Managing a supply chain comes with distinct challenges. On Time In Full delivery (OTIF) depends on close coordination between internal teams and external partners to meet customer demands. However, market volatility and global uncertainties make it a constant battle to keep operations running efficiently.
Advanced supply chain automation tackles these difficulties by digitizing workflows across the supply chain. Projections show that the warehouse automation market is expected to reach $69 billion by 2025, highlighting the enormous benefits of automation for businesses.
Read on to learn how to assess and choose the best supply chain automation solutions tailored to your business needs.
What Is Supply Chain Automation?
Supply chain automation boils down to the use of technology to simplify and optimize processes like procurement, inventory management, and shipping. Automating routine tasks helps reduce errors, speed up operations, and improve coordination throughout the supply chain. The goal of automation is to make the supply chain more efficient and responsive without adding work for anyone.
The Top 8 Benefits of Supply Chain Automation
Overall, automating supply chain tasks helps you overcome bottlenecks, improve order accuracy, have better visibility, and it makes the entire process more reliable. Let’s take a more detailed look at how automation can optimize your supply chain:
- Strengthened Operational Efficiency: By simplifying processes, reducing manual tasks, and increasing workforce throughput, automation maximizes productivity across your supply chain.
- Improved Customer Experience: AI technologies, such as Conexiom, substantially reduce human errors in data entry, inventory management, and order fulfillment, ensuring customers receive accurate, timely service.
- Real-Time Visibility: Automated systems with up-to-date data give you an instant view of your supply chain so you can track orders, manage inventory, and catch issues as they happen. This helps you make quick, informed decisions to keep everything moving smoothly.
- Cost Reduction: Automation lowers labor expenses and minimizes waste by improving processes and reducing manual work. It frees up teams to focus on critical tasks, leading to more efficient allocation of resources throughout the supply chain.
- Increased Scalability: As you expand, automation empowers your business to handle ever more orders without needing to add more staff or overhead.
- Better Inventory Management: Automation provides a clear, exact, up-to-date view of stock levels, helping you avoid both shortages and overstock, allowing you to respond to demand with greater speed and without adding inventory costs.
- Enhanced Supplier Relationships: Automation keeps suppliers in the loop with updates on orders, inventory needs, and delivery schedules. This serves to build trust, mitigate delays, and make collaboration smoother, strengthening partnerships over time.
- Faster Order Fulfillment: Automation accelerates order processing, from receiving orders to packing and shipping. Orders reach customers sooner, keeping them satisfied and encouraging loyalty.
Gems Setra provides a successful example of automation rollout in the supply chain. This global supplier of sensing and control solutions partnered with Conexiom to implement AI-powered order automation and transformed their operations. Using Conexiom means 36% of orders are now handled without human intervention, allowing the team to focus on more complex tasks. The platform also reduced order processing time by 65%, from 7 hours down to just 2.45.
Key Areas for Supply Chain Automation
With supply chain management becoming more complex, businesses are adopting automation to enhance efficiency and competitiveness and deliver better value to customers. Here’s an in-depth breakdown of how automation is transforming ten key areas of supply chain operations:
- Procurement and Sourcing: Automation can evaluate sourcing opportunities by matching quality requirements with costs, making procurement decisions easier.
- Inventory Management: Live tracking systems keep stock levels balanced by reordering materials automatically, preventing stockouts and overstock, and ensuring just-in-time inventory management.
- Warehouse Operations: Robots and automated conveyors speed up tasks like picking, packing, and sorting items. Also, automation systems can intelligently prioritize shipments based on urgency, making the entire warehouse more efficient.
- Order Processing and Fulfillment: Automated order processing can manage any volume of data without requiring extra resources. It also checks orders for accuracy, and applies any custom requirements, reducing order handling times and improving on-time delivery rates.
- Transportation and Logistics: Automation helps keep deliveries on track, lowers transportation costs, and minimizes delays. For example, route optimization software finds the fastest and most cost-effective delivery paths by analyzing traffic information, weather data, and delivery windows.
- Demand Forecasting: With predictive analytics, you can use historical data, seasonal trends, and market changes to generate demand forecasts, allowing you to adjust production and inventory to reduce the risks of overproduction or stockouts.
- Supplier Relationship Management: Digital systems effortlessly and intelligently track supplier performance, manage order updates, and help everyone communicate clearly.
- Quality Control and Compliance: Automated quality checks catch issues early, reducing defects and ensuring consistency across shipments. This helps guarantee customer satisfaction and compliance with industry standards.
- Returns and Reverse Logistics: Automated return systems can process items quickly, issue refunds, and track reasons for returns. Analytics also provide new perspectives into return trends.
- Analytics and Reporting: Automated reporting systems continuously collect data on costs, timelines, and overall process performance. These insights help teams spot delays, identify inefficiencies, and make adjustments that maintain streamlined and cost-effective operations.
9 Key Steps to Implementing Supply Chain Automation
Implementing automation successfully requires careful planning and execution. The following nine steps provide a comprehensive guide to effectively integrating automation into your supply chain, ensuring a smooth transition and maximizing the benefits of this technological advancement:
- Assess Current Supply Chain Processes
Start by thoroughly reviewing each stage of your supply chain to identify any inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and tasks created by human input. This assessment helps you pinpoint opportunities for automation. It is also important to involve key stakeholders from each process, as they can provide the best insight into their challenges. This ensures all perspectives are taken into consideration. By establishing a baseline, you can set clear goals for improvements and measure progress as automation is rolled out. - Define Clear Automation Objectives
Determine the specific objectives for your automation project. These goals might include reducing processing time, minimizing manual work, or improving order accuracy. By defining what success looks like at each stage, you create a roadmap that helps align all stakeholders. - Liaise with Partners
Bring key suppliers, logistics providers, and other partners into a discussion on how automation can affect your shared processes. Clear communication serves to align expectations, address potential concerns, and help external stakeholders understand any new systems or requirements. - Prioritize Automation Initiatives
After identifying areas for automation, rank them based on impact, feasibility, and alignment with business goals. Focus first on high-impact areas that will deliver the most immediate value, such as order processing or inventory management. By prioritizing initiatives, you can allocate resources effectively and verify that the automation rollout delivers results at each stage. - Select Appropriate Technologies
Choose automation solutions matching your specific needs and existing technology infrastructure. Conduct thorough demonstrations and trials to assess performance capabilities and integration requirements. - Develop a Phased Implementation Plan
Rollout your automation gradually with pilot programs. By using a phased approach, you can integrate changes easily while learning, and improving implementation with each step. - Ensure Data Quality and Integration
It is vitally important that your data is accurate, complete, and current. Key strategies include defining clear data quality standards, establishing data governance policies, conducting data profiling and cleansing, and ensuring proper data integration and validation. - Train and Upskill Workforce
Prepare your employees for new roles and responsibilities by delivering training on the tools and technologies they will be using. It's also essential to address any concerns they might have early, to ensure cooperation and make the transition to the new systems as painless as possible. - Monitor and Optimize Performance
Track key performance indicators against your established objectives. Continuously use data insights and employee feedback to refine the automated processes.
Transform Your Supply Chain Operations with Conexiom
Automating the supply chain through Conexiom's platform helps you build seamless and more precise workflows. The platform tightly integrates with your existing systems to optimize order processing, efficiency, document management, and customer service.
Leverage Conexiom to enjoy the following benefits and features:
- AI-Powered Touchless Automation: Conexiom's advanced AI accurately extracts, validates, and processes information from different document formats, rapidly transforming them into accurate digital transactions, saving your business time on manual data entry and validation.
- High-Order Accuracy: The system helps eliminate costly errors caused by manual order processing. Its AI validates and corrects over 85% of common mistakes from both your customers and your team.
- Double Your Team's Capacity: Automating with Conexiom frees up approximately 50% of your employees' time. As a result, they can focus on high-value activities like customer service, sourcing, and sales.
- Rapid Implementation: The platform supports swift deployment with minimal interruption to ongoing operations. With its quick setup, your business can start realizing automation benefits quickly.
- Scalability: As order volumes increase for your growing business, Conexiom can handle the higher workloads without hiring additional staff.
- Custom Business Rules: With configurable rules, Conexiom operates according to custom logic that fits your company’s specific needs.
- Real-Time Visibility: Conexiom provides immediate updates on order status, improving communication throughout your supply chain.
- Continuous Learning: Machine learning helps Conexiom improve with each transaction, better adapting to your needs over time.
- Stronger Partner Relationships: Faster order handling and acknowledgment increases efficiency and strengthens connections with customers and suppliers.
Learn more about how Conexiom can benefit your operations by booking a personalized demonstration today.