NRF 2024: Strengthening digital commerce with AWS Supply Chain

The AWS Supply Chain team will be at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show to discuss upcoming retail supply chain focused capabilities and share the latest retail trends and technologies. AWS, Amazon, and AWS Partners enable retailers to accelerate innovation with proven born-from-retail, built-for-retailer technologies so they can meet today’s consumer expectations, optimize operations, and improve business insights. AWS has solutions for smart stores, digital commerce, customer engagement, advanced data insights, demand planning, intelligent supply chain, and IT operations.

We’ve curated these solutions in our booth to showcase how we empower industry leaders to deliver some of the most innovative and exciting experiences at scale, rooted in deep customer intelligence, and focused on improving retail growth while streamlining business operations. We will also host in-booth AWS TechTalks, which are 15-minute presentations showcasing solutions to drive retail transformation, build immersive experiences, and elevate the customer experience.

I will be hosting two Tech Talk sessions on Monday, January 15 to discuss how AWS Supply Chain solves several key supply chain issues. Retail and CPG companies need to support various channels to support end customers. These channels require managing sales, inventory, and logistics across physical stores, online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer websites, and even mobile apps. Each channel has its own set of operational demands and customer expectations that creates significant supply chain challenges, including:

• Channel integration issues: Companies need to ensure that sales and inventory data are synchronized across all channels to provide a consistent customer experience.
• Inventory management issues: Different channels require different inventory levels of various inventory types. Managing and balancing inventory across the different channels to avoid overstocking or stockouts is a complex task.
• Inconsistent customer experience: Consumers expect a seamless experience, whether they are shopping online or in-store. This includes uniformity in product availability, pricing, and customer service.
• Cost management issues: Operating multiple channels increases operational costs, including inventory carrying costs, shipping, and logistics expenses. Companies must find ways to optimize these costs without compromising service quality.
• Channel conflict: There’s a risk of channel conflict, where sales in one channel cannibalize those in another, or where pricing and promotions in one channel undercut those in another. Both scenarios affect inventory levels and can create stockout or overstock issues. This also involves a lack of inventory visibility across channels that can lead to additional conflicts and issues.

AWS Supply Chain leverages the breadth of AWS services and nearly 30 years of Amazon’s experience to empower companies to effectively manage and optimize their multi-channel supply chains, fostering efficiency, sustainability, and resilience in an increasingly complex retail environment. My TechTalk sessions complement our in-booth demos that demonstrate how AWS Supply Chain can:

• Unify siloed and disparate data from various sources into a supply chain data lake, enabling a single control domain for visibility and execution.
• Provide inventory visibility throughout the supply chain.
• Use machine learning (ML) to analyze historical sales data along with demand forecast data, market conditions, changing demand patterns, and any user inputs to generate more accurate customer demand plans.
• Predict inventory needs by location (distribution center or store) and proactively alert the business when inventory doesn’t align with customer demand.
• Utilize ML-powered supplier lead time variance detection to recommend adjustments.
• Provide ML-powered inventory re-balancing recommendations based on carbon impact, costs, and impact on total inventory levels across locations.
• Centralize carbon emissions data collection.
• Provide n-tier visibility, collaboration, and management of trading partners.

Session 1: AWS Supply Chain new releases

Date & Time: Monday, January 15, 11-11:15am EST

AWS Supply Chain helps users connect data from disparate ERP and other supply chain systems to better forecast demand, improve inventory visibility, and gain insights on inventory and lead-time risks. We’re also adding new supply planning, partner collaboration, sustainability, and generative AI capabilities to support upstream supply chain processes, such as supplier orders. Join us to learn about these new capabilities that extend AWS Supply Chain functionality to further improve operations and increase end customer satisfaction.

Session 2: Transforming supply chains with Generative AI

Date & Time: Monday, January 15, 11:30-11:45am EST

Supply chains must be agile and hyperresponsive to changing variables in order to adjust and respond to supplier disruptions, demand fluctuations, or logistics issues. Solutions like machine learning (ML) simplify computational functions and automate parts of processes, but they still require manual involvement to deliver a business result. In this session, learn how Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain introduces a conversational generative AI assistant that intelligently responds to data analysis queries, can summarize key inventory level risks and demand variability, and visualizes the tradeoffs between different possible scenarios.

Past NRF events have remarkably offered a vision of the future of retail. AWS Supply Chain is at the heart of this vision, empowering retailers to innovate, optimize, and grow in an increasingly complex environment. Join us to be part of this transformation.

Please visit AWS Supply Chain to learn more and get started. Also visit the AWS Workshop Studio for a self-paced overview of creating an instance, ingesting data, navigating the user interface, creating insights, mitigating inventory risks, collaborating with other users, and generating demand plans.

If you are attending NRF, please stop by booth 6020 to learn more. See you at NRF 2024!