How to Build A Smarter and More Resilient Supply Chain with AI

Supply chains today are under more pressure than ever.

From cost fluctuations to labor shortages and unpredictable disruptions, your business has to navigate a complex supply chain landscape while ensuring visibility, accountability, and customer satisfaction.

In fact, supply chain disruptions alone cost companies up to 10% of their annual revenue (McKinsey and Co.).

So, how can AI and modern software solutions help? Let’s dive into some of the biggest challenges and explore how you can tackle them with AI-enabled solutions.

The biggest supply chain pain headaches

At the core, supply chain leaders like you are up against three major challenges:

• Seeing the full picture – Without real-time insights into orders, shipments, and invoices, making informed decisions is nearly impossible.
• Owning accountability – Ensuring orders are accurate, shipments arrive on time, and billing is correct is critical to avoiding costly mistakes.
• Keeping customers happy – SLAs are make-or-break commitments. Miss one and you’re looking at penalties, chargebacks, or strained partnerships.

The hard truth is that many companies just accept chargebacks as the cost of doing business—or worse, dedicate entire teams to chasing down SLA disputes. Either way, it’s expensive and inefficient.

Data is power—but only if it’s in the right hands

Different roles within an organization experience these challenges in unique ways:

• Customer service needs quick access to answers for business partners. Too often, they rely on IT to pull reports—causing delays and adding to IT’s workload. A self-service approach is key.
• Accounting requires visibility into at-risk invoices and discrepancies across orders, shipments, and billing. Issues like rejected invoices or quantity mismatches can lead to cash flow problems.
• Vendor compliance is crucial. Suppliers must meet SLAs, but without real-time tracking of ASNs (Advance Ship Notices), businesses may not realize issues until it’s too late.

The problem? Most organizations lean on IT to create ad-hoc reports, which is inefficient and unsustainable. But what if business users had direct access to the data they need?

The power of transactional lifecycle visibility

To build a smarter, more resilient supply chain, you need visibility into every part of the transaction lifecycle: order-to-cash (O2C), procure-to-pay (P2P), warehouse flows (3PL), and transportation flows. Each has its own lifecycle and in many industries, they interact with one another. 

With the right AI-powered tools you can:

• Spot and resolve issues faster across POs, invoices, and shipments—without needing to decipher EDI codes like 850s, 810s, or 856s
• Customize SLA tracking to meet different buyer expectations because not all customers prioritize the same things
• Take a proactive, not reactive, approach to managing supply chain risks

Here’s the bottom line…

Supply chains aren’t getting any easier. Relying on manual processes, siloed data, and reactive decision-making will only hold you back. If you want to stay ahead, AI-driven solutions can help you gain real-time visibility, work smarter, and protect your bottom line.

Want to see how? 

Watch our on-demand webinar here to learn how AI-powered solutions can take your supply chain to the next level!