IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THE KEY TO RESILIENT SUPPLY CHAINS?

The latest AI news has certainly divided people across society and industries – and supply chains have been no exception. Yet after years of infrastructural instability, AI in supply chain management could be the technology needed to improve supply chain efficiency.

Over the years, the custom of exchanging goods and ideas has blossomed thanks to an ever-evolving supply chain network. Where countries were once siloed, they are now connected through a complex map of transport routes that span the globe. However, this outdated model began showing signs of reaching its limits as the 21st century progressed. The multitudes of paperwork required to manually process every shipment provided no visibility into where goods were, hindering businesses from meeting growing customer demands. The COVID-19 pandemic ultimately exposed these fundamental weaknesses, highlighting the need for enhanced supply chain resiliency. Logistics leaders quickly realised that overcoming these vulnerabilities and adopting more flexible, responsive systems was vital to ensure trade could keep up with the demands of modern life.

Now our sector is at an impasse. We can identify the infrastructural flaws that have caused so much disruption: Customers needed greater supply chain transparency and cost-effective means of stockpiling goods to prevent future shortages. But the real question is: will this be enough?

If we are to transform our supply chains and make them truly resilient to all future challenges, whether it's from war or climate change, or unforeseen disasters,we must develop the ability to look into the future. If we can predict every possible scenario and its impact, we can upgrade our infrastructure accordingly. While this is obviously beyond the realms of human ability, the integration of artificial intelligence in supply chains offers advancements that have not been accessible before, making supply chains more agile, adaptive, and resilient to any disruption.

The Power Of AI in Logistics and Supply Chains

Jonathan Wray, the co-founder of the AI solution company Aible, succinctly outlined the case for AI in supply chain solutions, saying that our current infrastructure can only react to events that have already occurred. While we learn from our mistakes, we’re still not making the right changes because we continue to model trade routes based on past inefficiencies. As a result, we’re unable to truly futureproof ourselves. This means we can’t truly futureproof ourselves. And while history may repeat itself sometimes, it doesn’t do so enough to inform how we shape the future of trade.

AI, however, when implemented correctly, can overcome this barrier. Its ability to learn and improve exponentially while analysing potential scenarios makes it invaluable for supply chain operators across all a variety of industries to create better optimised and resilient supply chains.

At our Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza) in Dubai, we’re already using this to our advantage. Here, our terminal operating system, CARGOES TOS+, deploys AI to digitally track every element of our terminal, from container movements to equipment and vehicles. Over time, it has learned our daily operations and is now identifying the areas causing inefficiencies, such as the delays caused by locating and extracting containers from our storage bays. It’s also using all this data to calculate infinite potential scenarios, providing us with informed modification solutions to streamline and strengthen all our supply chain services and operations.

An example of this in action is our creation of BoxBay, our solar-powered, automated high-bay storage container system. Once AI showed us how much time and money was being lost to manual container storage, we developed this robotic system to stack containers higher and closer together in such a way that we can find and extract them faster too. As a result, we have eliminated 350,000 unproductive moves per year and improved our overall truck servicing time by 20%.

A New Era For Supply Chain Resiliency

The insight of artificial intelligence in logistics and supply chains revolutionises supply chains in less obvious ways, too. CARGOES Rostering, a new program within our flagship AI software suite currently being trialed in Europe and Australia, has the potential to revolutionise employee management.

Every time a vessel is scheduled to arrive at one of our ports or terminals, we must deploy hundreds of staff, each with specialised skills, to process the cargo. As you can imagine, there are many factors to manage during this process: some of our employees are multiskilled labourers and can’t work for too long on the same type of project, while certain countries have different labour laws to abide by.

Until now, managing all these elements has been a manual process, resulting in billions of dollars in HR, staffing, and contractor costs. However, with CARGOES Rostering, AI in supply chain planning can analyse our current workflows and the type of work we perform, generating an algorithm to manage all these moving parts in compliance with regulations.

This is huge. By optimising this complex yet fundamental aspect of our work, we can start to measure how much time people are available for versus how much time people are being effectively utilised. That means we can deploy the correct people faster, give contractors greater work reliability, and even create time to upskill our teams for more specialist work and expedite cargo throughput.

Embracing The Future of AI in Supply Chain

As you can see, AI and supply chain technologies have the potential to transform global supply chains—if we are bold enough to adopt them wisely. Our sector is a complex one, and for the benefits of AI to be realised, we must collaborate across borders, functions, and subfunctions, from procurement and sales to inventory planning and scheduling. In other words, we must also adapt as a sector if we are to reap the full benefits of AI working.

Utilised in this fashion, this technology can enhance our work and empower our workforces to make decisions that will pay off on multiple levels, stabilising world trade for the long term and unlocking a whole lot of previously untapped potential to build more efficient and resilient supply chains.