While supply and demand have had massive disruptions in the past few years, it is more evident now in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has caused a lot of unpredictability in business plans, operational plans, and demand and supply plans — making it difficult for organizations to operate. This goes both ways, as some products had a surge of demand with less supply and some items practically went obsolete overnight.
In the final week of the NetSuite Now On Air virtual conference, guest Laura Maready, a vertical product manager for retail, apparel, footwear & accessories, and health & beauty said, “It’s difficult in today’s environment to keep good customers supplied, optimize both inventory and supply chains and identify alternate routes, vendors and sources of supply without a strong system that provides the insights that businesses need.” She also stressed the importance of working seamlessly with all those involved.
The autonomous supply chain applies to moving goods that require very minimal human intervention in attaining accuracy. In theory, an autonomous operation is self-sufficient. Autonomous supply chains can make decisions automatically without human intervention. This, in a way, empowers businesses to act and react intelligently. Maready emphasized three key components of the autonomous supply chain.
- Unified Planning – NetSuite’s supply planning tool has been re-engineered to support modern product companies. The addition of materials requirement planning to the supply planning platform aids the client to react to situations that disrupt supply chain in real-time.
- Smart Inventory Management – The automation that NetSuite provides improved supply chain efficiencies and customer satisfaction. The Advanced Order Management, for instance, enables products to get to the customers at the right time by using configurable business rules to automate the final step. NetSuite also studies and determines key information to automatically carry out the most coherent fulfillment scenario for every order that enters the system.
- Streamline Execution – With NetSuite’s mobile service, users can finish production tasks directly from mobile devices, enabling a more accurate data entry and lowering the time required to produce, pick, pack, and ship items.
NetSuite’s allocation and fulfillment engine aim to continuously become more intelligent over the years. The utilization of machine learning will make the system identify strategies to enhance inventory allocation based on values like sales, profitability, client and customer satisfaction, and tactical time frames like year-end. This will reduce the problem of an imbalanced supply and demand.
Building an autonomous supply chain with NetSuite, however, involves complex systems from investments, implementations, integration, and optimization challenges. dotSolved, a reputable enablement partner for NetSuite can help businesses leverage the advantages of the cloud for business resilience, lower infrastructure expenses, and standardized custom-build legacy applications that are native to NetSuite. dotSolved offers solutions from acquisition, application, execution, and everything in between.
- Process design – With many existing processes, dotSolved provides strategic process consulting and design to help with transformation initiatives.
- Purpose-aligned pilots – With a 90-day sprint, clients can use the maximum advantage of dotSolved’s purpose-aligned pilots to implement a module to have practical contact with the capabilities of NetSuite.
- Contextual scale – By understanding every business’ needs, culture, and goals, dotSolved creates solutions to help clients grasp the NetSuite platform with a contextual scale.
- Process automation – After implementation, dotSolved helps the automation of many processes from finance to order management to warehousing.
- Insight-based decision support – NetSuite offers powerful analytics capabilities across business functions with an interconnected ecosystem. dotSolved helps company executives harness the advantages of an insight-based decision-making capability.
Autonomous supply chain helps businesses manage their supply chain more efficiently. It simplifies inventory and warehouse management and improves demand and supply planning that ultimately reduces costs.
dotSolved gives your business an opportunity to transform through Industry Best Practices. To know more on how dotSolved can help build your autonomous supply chain in NetSuite, visit www.dotsolved.com.
