Supply chains serve as the backbone of the economy and play a crucial role in the success and failure of organizations. Every business today is part of the global supply grid with direct dependencies and broader infrastructure interdependencies. Any breakdown at one touch point can derail the entire supply chain and its operations. Global supply chains have always remained vulnerable to disruptions, demand-supply imbalances, and evolving customer expectations. Covid-19 has brutally exposed this vulnerability, resulting in revenue leakage, customer churn, and dwindling market value for enterprises.
Covid-19-induced new normal has accelerated the need for building a resilient, future-ready supply chain, leveraging technology as a key enabler. The scourge of the pandemic has left businesses with no option but to introspect their existing supply chain models and initiate adequate steps to drive core elements of risk management, business continuity planning, and technology innovations in their overall supply chain strategies, with the larger objective of improving supply chain efficiency. Organizations, who will ride on the digital transformation wave will survive, thrive, and outpace the competition.
Innover: Bringing Digital to Life
Atlanta-headquartered Innover has carved out an enviable reputation for itself in transforming the sales and service supply chains of Fortune 1000 companies. The company’s cutting-edge solutions are designed to accelerate customer experience that drives measurable business outcomes for its clients.
Innover’s 2,000 + team of experts have an unremitting focus on optimizing supply chain management and draws strength from its five service studios – Digital Experiences, Advanced Analytics, Product Engineering, Data Engineering, and Business Services. Each service studio thrives on the back of a high-powered team, who consistently raise the innovation bar and apply the right technology to address the business problems of its clients.
According to a recent survey of directors, CEOs, and other senior executives, 70% of all Digital Transformation initiatives do not achieve their desired goals. This is where Innover brings to the table strong differentiators and helps enterprises put in place a highly effective Digital Transformation strategy that delivers tangible outcomes.
Amit Gautam, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Innover, puts things in perspective. “Organizations often struggle to translate their growth aspirations into reality owing to a myopic view of Digital Transformation. They simply look at sophisticated technology, fancy tools, and emerging trends as a solution to their complex business challenges. This is a critical fallacy and makes success elusive. At Innover, we adopt a three-pronged, convergent approach leveraging People, Process, and Technology as enablers to solve business problems and deliver ROI-driven outcomes.”
Reinventing Supply Chains
In today’s unprecedented times, enterprises cannot ignore the needs and benefits of digital supply chains. Innover’s best-of-breed solutions are built around its robust products and partnerships ecosystem that helps organizations built a digital supply chain focused on driving visibility & end-toend tracking across all touch points, improved velocity with real-time information flow, and responsiveness to quickly act on the insights presented by the data.
The company does not encourage businesses to go on a data-gathering spree or spend millions on a digital transformation budget, but instead use and extract value from the data they are already sitting on. It leverages various proprietary technologies that combine existing structured & unstructured data, help identify data signals, and apply statistical and predictive models to improve supply chain efficiency.
Rakesh Prasad, Vice President – Digital Services at Innover, dwells on the importance of data reliability. “Our unique data monetization framework is based on two fundamental principles – building data trust as well as ensuring data is highly available i.e. democratized. These principles help accelerate the pace of decision-making, which in turn, leads to business differentiation.”
Innover is assisting organizations to drive transparency across their supply chains by leveraging various emerging technologies. The company’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Advanced Analytics solutions enable enterprises to anticipate demand in advance and provides them with the ability to augment or scale down production accordingly. Vendor optimization, risk assessment, dispatch planning, and optimization – all these areas can benefit from contextbased analytics of organizational data flow.
The company’s IoT solutions address two key aspects of supply chains – real-time shipment tracking and storage condition monitoring that can go a long way in improving the forecast accuracy of shipment delivery and pave the way for increased customer satisfaction, better warehouse planning, and risk mitigation.
Innover also has been quick off the blocks in tapping into the power of various emerging technologies such as blockchain to ensure real-time traceability of load, smart contracts, and fraud detection. Immersive Technologies like AR/VR are being used to minimize asset downtime and increase the effectiveness of field technicians across service supply chains.
The company’s robotics and automation solutions can streamline & accelerate tasks and processes that were once performed manually. This can reduce worker fatigue, increase efficiency, and drive economic benefits.
Accelerating Supply Chain Efficiencies with Analytics-driven Platforms and Frameworks
Innover has gained significant global market acceptance for its best-in-class advanced analytics platform – LEAP – that caters to the supply chain space. LEAP is a highly modular, scalable, technology-agonistic platform that is focused on accelerating the data journey, from when it is captured to the eventual insights that it offers for driving better decision-making.
The LEAP platform delivers accelerated information value by breaking down data silos, building data trust, turning data into insights, paving the way for data to become actionable, and finally offering business outcomes. Based on the customer business context, Innover’s service teams can apply insights to drive tangible outcomes in the fastest turnaround time.
Innover worked closely with a leading US-based 3PL provider, who was rolling out its fleet of trucks from one particular depot and dropping off loads to multiple customer locations across various geographical locations over a seven-day window. This multi-period, multi-stop transportation route meant that the 3PL provider had to grapple with several constraints such as DOT regulations, maximum stops, customer due dates, weekly offs, loading-unloading time, partial orders, etc.
Innover was engaged by the client to minimize its transportation costs by identifying the shortest paths for its trucks while maximizing truck capacity utilization and meeting customer service-level agreements. Innover leveraged its LEAP’s ready-to-use Transport Network Route Optimization algorithm as well as its Machine Learning-based approach advanced techniques such as dynamic programming, and heuristics (large neighborhood search, simulated annealing), and constrained programming (CP). The solution succeeded in helping the client drive an 11% increase in capacity utilization, an 8% reduction in the number of trucks, and a 5% decrease in total miles driven, thus increasing the client’s bottom line.
Innover’s Analytics-Driven ROI Targeting (ADROIT) framework helps businesses adopt a phase-wise POC development approach that not only ensures projects are more manageable but also proves the value of analytics to enterprises. ADROIT enables the right POC selection based on rigorous Time-ROI-Implementation comparison with other competing use cases. The framework helps businesses to build and run a self-funding POC with guaranteed 5x+ measurable returns in just 8-12 weeks.
Finally, the company’s $TART Solution provides enterprises with an ecosystem of partners and alliances to deliver integrated business solutions and technologies such as back-office operations, cloud-hosting services, robotics process automation (RPA), IoT, blockchain, etc. This framework ensures faster-to-market and real-time visibility.
31% Reduction in Shipment Delays through Supplier Risk 360 Platform
A leading Energy and Utilities company based out of Texas, had its supplier base spread across various states in US. With Covid-19 crisis affecting countrywide supply chains, the customer wanted to get real-time visibility into risk elements associated with their active supplier base. These elements included –business volume, sole provider of certain products, Covid-19 incidences in their location, impact on supplier and supplier’s customer industry, availability of labor, production, ability to ship products etc, Customer was looking for a smart supplier management solution that could help it prepare for material and manufacturing capacity shortages especially during times of crisis.
Innover stepped in and developed an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-powered Supplier Risk 360 platform in just record 8 weeks. As the first step, Innover identified key supplier performance metrics for the customer industry segment and assembled data from both internal and external sources. The next step was to categorize and cluster suppliers to develop Supplier Performance/Risk ratings. Finally, the platform ranked high risk and critical suppliers across geographies based on performance/risk assessment and other critical parameters. The platform helped the client to reduce shipment delays by 31% through proactive supplier communications and interventions.
Conclusion
The company is looking beyond just tomorrow and aligning with technologies that will shape the future. Innover enables organizations to experiment and harness the potential of these technologies and deliver breakthrough solutions. The company brings together customers, design thinkers, technology experts, and niche technology vendors to collaborate, co-innovate to accelerate the solution journey from concepts to full-scale implementation, and reduce setup time, costs, and risks.
The company is focused on investing in the technologies of the future. As mentioned earlier, its industry-tailored solutions drive better demand forecasting, inventory optimization, locate cargos through IoT, enable field technicians to carry out remote troubleshoot with augmented reality, etc.
Innover delivered a big impact with its Blockchain solution recently, where it addressed the medical supply shortage challenges faced by U.S. hospitals during Covid-19 by creating a health care supply procurement platform, powered by the Distributed Ledger technology. This platform provided stakeholders’ visibility into the supply chain, accelerated the procurement process and discovered new ways to route inventory with increased agility.
Amit says the company is committed to delivering tangible business outcomes. “We keep asking ourselves – Did we move the needle? Did we truly improve the demand forecasting or the operations? Did we impact the revenue or customer experience? Our drive to deliver tangible business outcomes has led us to experiment with various technologies in our labs. One recent addition to our repertoire is blockchain which we believe has high relevance across industries, especially logistics and retail, where secure, reliable data are critical drivers of transformation.”
Innover truly lives up to its mission statement ‘Let’s Solve a Problem’.
Amit Gautam, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Innover
