* By Marcelo Spaziani
By 2022, more than 176 million people in Latin America are expected to buy goods and services online, and retail sales in the region will reach US $ 1.35 trillion *. And that need is increasing with COVID-19. Could this be a request for us to transform supply chains? If we look to the future, it is increasingly evident that companies need to work to strengthen supply chains, making them increasingly resilient and helping to supply products.
Globally, supply chains are being subjected to new volatile conditions and are being challenged beyond their limits. While the current focus is on maintaining supply and meeting customer needs, organizations must consider how to respond to these situations, preparing for the next outage, while continuing to add value to end customers. And this is where technology becomes the fundamental ally to help companies follow this path, strengthening the chains with real-time information and decisive action and allowing for a better response capacity on three fronts:
1. Visibility and predictive orientation of events. Imagine a "control tower" that helps supply chain professionals with predictive data and recommendations. This allows them to make faster, smarter decisions in supply chain management.
Artificial intelligence would act as this "control tower". On the one hand, it would give visibility to possible interruptions throughout the chain, including the inventory, the storage phase and everything related to the equipment and its maintenance. And, on the other hand, it would allow to focus on these possible failures in advance, which, in the final analysis, would affect the customer experience and satisfaction.
2. Scanning supply chains. The functioning of world trade, like other industries, depends on efficient exchanges of information, especially documents.
While business and government ecosystems around the world are now digitizing processes and automating bottle bottlenecks; international trade, due to its formality and associated bureaucracy, had a slower process in digitization.
How is technology facilitating this process? The truth is that the development of blockchain technology is freeing the industry from manual processes and legacy systems that hinder transparency, accessibility and visibility of documents. A leadership that seeks hyperconnection, to achieve exponential learning, generates efficiencies in the system.
For example, more than 50 ports and terminals in Latin America are part of the TradeLens network, contributing data to the network and being able to make predictions based on this information.
3. Traceability. Associated with this digitization and greater cooperation between the parties, the blockchain also allows for traceability. In other words, all participants in the system can know the origin, location in real time and the status of their products throughout the chain.
In this way, companies can develop more accurate models for forecasting supply and demand, localize the supply of raw materials and restructure contracts.
An example is the Food Trust network, based on IBM's blockchain, which monitors food and products from the moment they are produced until the consumer's choice in the supermarket. Currently, several retailers around the world, such as Carrefour and Nestlé, as well as producers in our region, are part of the chain to reduce waste and help the food and distribution chains not go bankrupt.
While no one can predict what tomorrow has in store, we can work today to build a smarter and more efficient global supply chain, preparing companies to emerge stronger. Organizations can take advantage of artificial intelligence and blockchain, among other technologies, to help turn the unforeseen into the anticipated and be better prepared for tomorrow.
* Source: Statista
* Marcelo Spaziani, IBM Vice President of Sales for Latin America
Warning: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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