Introducing the Artificial Intelligence Assistant for Supply Chain: Supply Chain Prescriptions
While artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots might be dominating the news, AI is already integrated into our lives. It assists us while we navigate road trips and new cities. It helps us pick out what movie to watch on a relaxed Friday evening at home. Now, it’s poised to help supply chains become even more effective and agile.
The challenges of the last few years, especially around transportation and logistics, have made the ability to run simulations, revisit supply chain designs and assumptions, and embrace continuous design a supply chain imperative. But supply chains are also enormously complex. Supply chain modelers have to wade through thousands of data points to try to find optimal solutions. That’s no small feat on its own. Combined with increasing pressure and demands from other teams and business units, even the best modeler in the world might miss opportunities that could lead to important savings and value creation across the business.
Yesterday, at Coupa Inspire in Las Vegas, we unveiled a new product that helps solve these challenges: Supply Chain Prescriptions.
What can an AI assistant do for your supply chain?
Just as Netflix and Google Maps take millions (and sometimes billions) of data points to serve up recommendations to improve our entertainment experiences or to find the best route to take us to our destination, our latest supply chain product innovation helps supply chain modelers and decision-makers create better scenarios faster.
Uncover hidden opportunities to reduce costs in your supply chain
The sheer quantity of data and possible combinations of those data points might obscure cost-saving opportunities from the sight of your supply chain modelers. There might be millions of possible combinations for adding lanes, changing modes, or consolidating volume, making it difficult for modelers to identify which scenarios will provide the highest cost savings. This is where AI can make all the difference.
Supply Chain Prescriptions provides insights into cost drivers and proactively identifies potential cost savings through opportunities such as node skipping, mode switching, and volume consolidation. It helps your organization prioritize potential scenarios and helps your modelers and decision-makers focus on the right business priorities.
“Coupa's SC Prescriptions solution has the potential to uncover new transportation spend reduction opportunities while reducing the overall load for the modeler." — Chris Hawke, Director of Supply Chain Analytics / Advanced Analytics at Cardinal Health
Supply Chain Prescriptions helps your modelers and business users achieve more, together
Ensuring models are aligned with business policies from the start is essential for making your teams successful across business functions. Supply Chain Prescriptions creates scenarios that take business policies into account from the ground up and sends them to the modeler, who can then validate these scenarios and ensure business feasibility. This saves time and allows modelers to get ahead of opportunities, rather than feeling like they’re always playing catch-up.
Amplifying human intelligence with AI
The best AI acts as a partner, handling the more mundane, routine work that can often bog modelers down. The best AI frees humans up to embrace their own creativity and focus on solving more complex problems. This kind of AI-driven innovation has been an important part of Coupa’s technology solutions for years, and we’re thrilled by how it’s already driving results for our customers.
AI and Supply Chain Prescriptions in the real world
On average, customers who have used Supply Chain Prescriptions have found significant savings: about 10–25% reduction in transportation expenses.
And this is just the beginning. We can’t wait to see how this latest product innovation helps our supply chain customers become even more successful. As we merge the best of AI and operations research and expand the capabilities of the Coupa platform, we believe our customers will gain an even greater competitive edge.
