Customer experience, or CX, has become the focus of much corporate attention, but it’s still rare to see it directly related to supply chain operations in B2B commerce. It’s critical to keep the customer experience in mind throughout the lifecycle of a customer order transaction. That includes dynamic production scheduling, proactive after-sales support, comprehensive customer feedback mechanisms, enhanced supplier collaboration for parts and components, and advanced data analytics and insights at all stages. But, arguably, the bulk of what goes on is in the hands of supply chain operations and, with the rising predominance of online ordering, B2B customers’ interactions with manufacturers happen largely in the realms of supply chain. AI offers the computational power to handle large data volumes from RFID, internet of things (IoT) and other types of sensors, to enhance visibility and transparency throughout the supply chain.

AI and ML bring powerful predictive capabilities to availability-to-promise and demand-sensing accuracy that wasn’t possible 10 years ago. They have also brought major improvements to other operations such as procurement and service management, even energy management and sustainability metric.

“Every organization is operating with some fundamental value proposition, and this informs what experience they will offer the customer,” says Girish Dhaneshwar, consulting leader, retail, consumer, manufacturing and logistics at Cognizant, the information technology and consulting company that specializes in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to improve business processes. “The question is: How do you make sure that your supply chain is structured to make sure you fulfill that intention?”

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