Student Ar cles
AI the next big thing in SCM
As humans became more civilized, they
encountered a bit higher level of data
related problem. For example, how much
food they needed to survive the winter or
how much tax had to be collected and from
whom. Out of this data storage crisis,
Writing was born.
Subsequently with the size of data,
different data solutions have emerged
over 5000 years. But the challenges have
higher stakes this time!
How Big is Data in Supply Chain?
The total amount of data is increasing at a
rate of 60% per year with the data volume
doubling every 2 years. By 2020, more
than 6 GB/person data will be created
every hour. By then, our accumulated
digital universe of data will grow from
4.4 zettabytes today to around 44
zettabytes or 44 trillion gigabytes.
A supply chain which is highly efficient,
responsive and proactive, generates ample
data sets to drive contextual information.
The scale, scope and depth of data that
modern supply chains are producing, is
accelerating.
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Operations & Supply Chain Club, IIM Raipur
With this data growth, most companies
are in a position where their ability to
uncover business insights are hidden
under unfathomable data. Just like the
cavemen, the companies now are
struggling to tame this data volume with
their traditional analytical techniques.
Mining this available data is a struggle
for the companies as they are unable to
use the core data that they have, in a
collaborative way.
As supply chain is an integral part of an
organization, implementing the mined
data effectively can drive the efficiencies
of the organization as well as allow them
to invest in growth of the company. Also
with this skyrocketing volume of
data,companies try and capture every
single data, without evaluating their
data's business utility which leads to
heaps of redundant data. Not only does
this undesired data elevate costs but also
reduced leanness of the supply chain. So,
the organization which can analyse this
huge amount of data and extract
meaningful information based on it, will
be the market leader.
Just like memorization was replaced by
writing, traditional databases with
distributed systems, current data
analytics is being replaced by a more
powerful tool like Artificial
Intelligence.
The Big Step: Artificial Intelligence
AI is no longer a fragment of imagination
from a sci-fi novel. It is a fascinating and
life-changing reality which has the
power to change business and industry
forever. Though the technology is
extremely complex, AI entails using
algorithms to effectively facilitate the
making of critical decisions. AI
combined with big data, can cut through
the white noise of data and come up with
the facts and figures which presents the
companies with viable alternates of a
business problem.The amount of data
that can be processed by a human being
in weeks, AI can process that in days,
error free and of course without getting
tired.Humans lack the ability to analyze
millions of data-sets.