Reducing Cost Through Supply Chain Optimization

Global Current Challenges

Economic

• COVID-19 pandemic's long-term effects on supply chain industry
• Congestion in ports, shipping, and routes due to uneven demand recovery
• Political instability, trade disputes, and Brexit impacting supply chain routes
• Changing customer demands for faster delivery and sustainable/ethical products

Environmental

• Stricter environmental regulations, such as the EU Green Deal
• Carbon pricing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Sustainability pressures for end-to-end supply chain visibility

Operational

• Scattered data across various systems, leading to lack of visibility and inefficient decision-making
• Time and resource-intensive efforts to consolidate data for a comprehensive overview

Supply Chain Trends Across Industries

Healthcare

• Explosion of remote healthcare and decentralized clinical trials
• Complexity in temperature-sensitive and urgent product shipments
• Difficulty in tracking expired or recalled products

Retail

• Growing return rates, leading to significant losses for fashion industry
• Retailers trying to manage returns through charges and data analysis

Manufacturing and Automotive

• High complexity due to large number of parts (30,000+ for car makers)
• Difficulty in tracking individual parts
• Trend towards near-shoring to reduce dependency on distant suppliers

Strategies for Reducing Cost Through Supply Chain Optimization

Visibility

• Real-time visibility into logistics, warehouses, and operations to monitor performance and track inventory

Improved Demand Accuracy

• Accurate demand forecasting to avoid excess inventory or stockouts

Optimizing Inventory Levels

• Managing inventory to meet customer demands, especially during peak seasons

AWS Supply Chain

Key Features

• Dashboarding and analytics for real-time visibility
• ML-powered insights to identify supply chain issues
• Connects to existing ERP systems and ingests data into a supply chain data lake

AWS Supply Chain Insights

• Alerts on the risk of overstocking or understocking specific products
• Provides resolution recommendations, considering factors like distance, efficiency, sustainability, and shipping cost
• Enables collaboration with teammates on rebalancing options

Amazon Q Integration

• AI-powered assistant within the AWS Supply Chain console
• Helps answer questions and provide guidance on supply chain operations

Case Study: Bauer Hockey

• Faced supply chain challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Leveraged AWS Supply Chain to improve forecasting models by 10-15%
• Benefited from increased supply chain visibility and planning capabilities