CognitOps Insights
Build Resiliency In The Distribution Center.
The economic and social disruption caused by COVID-19 has exposed core weaknesses in our supply chains. The shift from retail to eCommerce at a level never imagined; the exponential demand spike for some products while others fall off the map, and the collapse of the ability to meet delivery commitments have revealed a hidden brittleness.
In the next six weeks, CEO’s will be bringing their trusted leaders together, and demanding a real business continuity plan in the face of this unprecedented disruption. Running an operation based on the pre-baked assumptions built into designs and hyper-local optimization to enable point automation will not work. Modern systems and dynamic operations, however, will allow companies to begin to create supply chain resiliency.
I believe there are three opportunities within the distribution center where leaders can focus on creating resiliency: true real-time end-to-end visibility; empowering dynamic decision making; continuously learning and adapting to these decisions.
1. Creating Meaningful End-to-End Visibility – Supply Chain leadership should have instantly accessible, real time information providing meaningful status information.
Remote, distributed architecture enables the rapid ingestion of massive data into powerful machine learning algorithms.
2. Empowering Dynamic Decision Making – Fixed plans do not apply in a rapidly changing environment.
By leveraging real-time data and building a digital-twin, leadership should be able to make decisions guided by machine learning and complex simulations that focus on the global optimum.
3. Build a Process of Continuous Learning – Operators must leverage every aspect of data available to them.
Modern software and data science can leverage changing trends to build time-series analysis and train models.
At CognitOps, we are building a new form of warehouse software, leveraging continuous data streaming, a digital-twin of the building, and machine learning algorithm to provide extremely adaptable, resilient distribution centers. Having this solution in place is also another great step to increasing your supply chain resiliency and preparing for the next disruption. Reach out if you’d like to learn more at info@cognitops.com.
