Over the past few decades, tech innovations have been at the forefront of the development of almost every industry, with different solutions enabling businesses to have a competitive advantage over each other. Faced with globalization, increased customer demand, and product complexity, enterprises had to do everything they could to survive the perfect competition.
The supply chain is an area that’s seen a lot of interest lately. Even though blockchain is usually associated with cryptocurrencies, it also ranks high on the list of technologies able to bring improved transparency and visibility to supply chain processes, benefiting them. It’s about more than just checking the ETH price in USD; it holds great promise in supply chain management.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or want to ensure your business keeps bringing in revenue, delivering high-quality products and satisfying customers are among the top priorities. However, understanding other industries might help broaden your knowledge and give powerful insights into how supply chain technologies can help your business gain a competitive advantage.
Blockchain
Blockchain has the potential to significantly enhance supply chains by enabling more cost-effective product delivery, increasing product traceability, facilitating access to financing, and improving coordination between partners.
Led by companies like Protect & Gamble and Walmart, significant supply chain data sharing advancements have occurred since the ‘90s, owing to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, visibility is a constant issue in large supply chains involving sophisticated transactions.
To illustrate the limitations of ERP systems and financial-ledger entries and blockchain’s potential advantages, let’s imagine the following scenario: a simple transaction in which a retailer obtains a product from a supplier, and a bank provides the working capital required by the supplier to fill the order. The transaction involves inventory, information, and cash flows. Note that state-of-the-art ERP systems, inspections, and manual audits can’t reliably connect the three flows, making it hard to minimize execution errors, resolve supply chain conflicts, and improve decision-making.
However, when blockchain record keeping is used, assets like orders, loans, bills of lading, and inventory units are given unique identifiers, serving as digital tokens. Plus, players on the blockchain are given unique identifiers which they use to sign the blocks added to the blockchain. Every transaction stage is then recorded on the blockchain as a token transfer from one participant to another.
See? The benefits are clear. When your business discovers a faulty product, the blockchain helps you trace it, identify the suppliers involved, track production and shipment batches associated with it, and recall it quickly. If the product is perishable, the blockchain lets participating companies monitor quality automatically.
The internet of things (IoT)
Products equipped with smart sensors can help manufacturers track purchase trends and meet consumer demand by adjusting production volume in real-time. Similarly, wireless sensing devices can collect data on product usage, allowing manufacturers to take advantage of product innovation opportunities faster.
If you’re catering to your customers’ needs, know that customer care is changing in the IoT age. As a manufacturer, you can adjust existing product features according to customer use, thanks to new analytics capabilities and data collection, and then market those improvements for competitive advantage.
IoT can also help to prevent expensive and inconvenient product service recalls if updates can be done wirelessly. Additionally, recommended maintenance schedules can be adjusted based on the equipment’s performance, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
Attention! Connected gadgets are only helpful if they are operational. Not all sensors are made equally, and they have different cybersecurity capabilities that the product security teams must understand. Say a patient’s device is hacked. In that case, the medical device manufacturer might face privacy risks. Plus, physical dangers are another issue to be considered.
3D printing
3D printers can create many complex designs for products that you can sell. If your design has moving parts, you can make them individually and connect them. Consumers’ appetite for customized products, along with a drive for made-to-order and localized production, is drawing attention to this industry. Supply chain participants ramp up investment in technologies, allowing them to create products and parts in local assembly hubs, thanks to less expensive hardware, metal additive manufacturing technologies, and new materials.
By making products closer to where there is demand, transportation and logistics costs can be minimized, geopolitical risks can be avoided, the carbon footprint and taxes associated with overseas outsourcing can be reduced, and products can be sent to customers faster, which is a competitive advantage in today’s instant-gratification society.
The ability for on-demand production of parts, or even total products, appeals to many participants in the supply chain, from original equipment manufacturers to dealers. Furthermore, with improvements in materials, new AI-driven software design tools, and cheaper hardware, companies can produce completely functional parts that are lighter with less material waste compared to using traditional technologies.
Robots and automation
Human-robot collaboration is driving large-scale deployments across the supply chain. Used to move materials and goods throughout a warehouse, robots have long played a significant role in the supply chain, whether as part of the fulfillment process or during transport. But as AI technologies advance, robots will slowly be assigned more manual tasks now performed by humans. From automating heavy lifting tasks to picking and packing orders, you may also take advantage of robots and automation in your company.
AI, IoT connectivity, and machine learning are helping to enhance industrial robots’ mobility and precision while assisting in safety, allowing for a new generation of collaborative robots (cobots) to work alongside supply chain workers instead of being cordoned off in a special safety zone. Cobots are innovations that can improve working environments thanks to robotic patterns, allowing employees to forego repetitive, laborious, and even dangerous tasks to reduce risks and enhance productivity.
While there’s still a huge learning curve with some advanced technologies, there’s no doubt that the supply chain is undergoing a high-stakes transformation. And change, although beneficial, always comes with risks, so you must understand them before jumping on any new technology, take preventive measures, and go in with your eyes open.
