Trans.iNFO recently spoke to Shippeo Founder and COO Lucien Besse on a number of topics, namely actionable visibility data, investor markets, the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and the future of the supply chain visibility market. The interview coincided with the announcement of the company’s Transportation Process Automation™ (TPA™) in which their Chief Product Officer Dr. Anand Medepalli played a leading role.
In this second piece covering Shippeo’s announcement and the company’s thoughts on where supply chain visibility is heading, we talked to Dr. Medepalli himself to get a grasp on how developments in technology are changing – and will continue to change – the world of logistics and supply chain.
Before drilling down into the possibilities within Shippeo’s new offering, Medepalli told Trans.iNFO how “supply chain convergence” is becoming a reality, as decisions concerning supply chains are being made at a faster cadence than before:
“It’s no longer a case of just having a great execution system, a great visibility solution, a great planning system, a great supply chain management system, or whatever,” says Medepalli. “There’s been a fundamental shift in supply chains; a significant reduction in cadence between planning and execution. Whatever you’re planning is likely to be disrupted.
Typically, transportation planning is about the next 3-4 weeks on the horizon, organising carriers and their journeys, and understanding the flows on each day of the week. But disruptions can happen anytime, and when they do, organisations need to respond quickly and in some cases, make adjustments to plans in quick order to avoid a repeat of these disruptions.
The question is, how can this be done so quickly, and the information gathered so fast? What is happening in supply chains right now is like repairing an aeroplane engine mid flight. It’s no longer a case of making a decision here, or taking an action there. Everything happens at the same time, at the same place.”
The answer to that question, according to Medepalli and his colleagues, is actionable supply chain visibility data.
As Medepali explains, to act quickly and mitigate disruptions, AI and other technologies can be harnessed by visibility platforms to suggest immediate reactions to supply chain obstacles in near real time:
“When it comes to resilience, there are a couple of things worthy of note. One is a textbook definition from psychology, which basically says that if you have a crisis, first understand the root cause. Then, the second thing is to have access to the tools to get you back to your pre-crisis status.
So let’s probe and understand what the root cause is. Why did this disruption take place? Or why is this plan failing? For this you need high-fidelity visibility on the ground. This tells you what the root cause is.
Then, in order to return to the pre-disruption state, no matter where you are in the supply chain, you need what we call a system of engagement, providing actionable information.
This information can then be used to take quick actions. It could be collaboration with trading partners or updating your digital twin with new data to ensure a resilient plan, for instance.”
However, the use of AI alone is not the way to go, says Medepalli. He maintains that a “human in the loop” is required to make the big calls and help train the active learning systems in the process:
“It’s important to help shippers, suppliers and carriers be efficient. End-to-end supply chain optimisation has become a business necessity and it’s no longer just about your own organisation. That’s why these automated collaborative frameworks, a key use case in TPATM, are super important.
We have customers who leverage our collaborative frameworks today to manage these processes. But the key point about this is that if the disruptions were already seen in the past, somebody could write a system to manage it. AI is now mature enough to do that.
However, the disruptions that you will manage in the future will likely be disruptions you’ve not seen before. That’s why it is vital to have human creativity in the loop; an analyst or a customer service agent supplied with all possible information, and potentially even the next best action to take to improve the situation.
Workflow intelligence must then jump in. For instance, a driver may fill in for a delay because the supplier was not ready with the goods. As soon as there’s a delay, and our mobile app captures this information, we then have the ability to inform a few processes, so that they can be automated in place of manual ones. Examples are rebooking the slot at the arrival site, informing the Invoicing function of the potential additional costs and penalties, etc.
The system should, in turn, be informed about those decisions made by humans, so that the next time a similar disruption occurs, the best course of action is already known.
Why is all this automation important? Why do we need TPATM? The reality is that all of supply chain management is now on the edge. Yes, that’s about IoT and ELD devices, which play an important role in visibility.
But, there’s more to it than that, it’s not just about visibility. If you look at market information, as an example, and take last year’s historical data to predict demand, it’s almost guaranteed you will get it wrong. Someone who bought a product last year may not be able to in the near future because of the continued cost of living crisis. Without this context from the “edge,” any supply chain process will get things wrong, and this is why automation is important – things move fast on the edge, and without a system like TPATM in place, you will never catch up with your decision making.
Finally, Medepalli believes the shift towards actionable data is the next step in the evolution of supply chain visibility, a journey that has progressively seen decisions made more quickly over time as systems become more advanced:
“If you look at the evolution of supply chain management, at the beginning ERPs were the state of the art. They still are if you are thinking of a system of record. But these weren’t agile enough to manage the execution of transportation plans, and this need gave rise to Transportation Management Systems (TMS), which helped organisations plan and execute their “next four weeks” of transportation. But even these were not fit for purpose for what came next: the need for real-time visibility, and companies like Shippeo have fulfilled that need.
But these companies did more than just fulfil that need; they changed the paradigm in supply chain with their event-driven architectures – basically every milestone or event is managed immediately, and asynchronously. So the orientation of supply chain management from database architecture to event-based architecture, started to happen because of companies like us.
In fact, we at Shippeo are disrupting ourselves by saying that visibility for the sake of visibility is no longer enough. You need to be able to act on that data in new innovative ways as I mentioned earlier, and that’s what we have launched.
TPATM is an ecosystem play. It’s a partner play. We offer the ability to integrate others into our application or integrate ourselves into someone else’s application to ensure our customers have the best end to end solution to address their end to end supply chain needs.
This strategy allows a customer to take advantage of the high quality data and information that we provide, as well as our high quality workflow architectures, in a way that fits with their existing solutions and system landscape. Our goal with TPATM is to enhance and unlock the value in their ecosystem, and help them figure out the best way to bring their vision of a more automated supply chain to life. Some of our existing customers are already benefiting from our solution, and we can’t wait to have this be the system of engagement for all the supply chain companies out there.
