Podcast recap: The past, present, and future of AWS Supply Chain

In my recent appearance on the Digital Supply Chain podcast, I had the opportunity to discuss how AWS Supply Chain solves customer problems. The conversation begins with the genesis of AWS Supply Chain, our vision for the application, and then shifts to various market trends and the future of supply chain. Below is a summary of the key points covered in the podcast.

• • We developed AWS Supply Chain to address the widespread issue of supply chain data silos. Supply chain data is traditionally scattered across various systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management systems (WMS), and transportation management systems (TMS). Our goal was to create an application that adopts a data-first approach, which integrates fragmented data into a unified, canonical data model and moves it into a supply chain data lake. This foundation enables capabilities that leverage this harmonized data to provide a comprehensive view of the supply chain and enables data-driven intelligence.
  • Many businesses operate with a mix of new and legacy applications. We designed AWS Supply Chain to be seamless, simple to deploy, and able to coexist with legacy systems. AWS Supply Chain can overlay existing systems to facilitate a smoother transition to a unified and more advanced cloud-based solution without the need to re-platform.
  • The future of supply chain management involves generative AI powered by machine learning models. We are transforming our customers’ supply chains with the combination of scalable compute capacity and generative AI to perform complex computations, simulate different scenarios, identify causality, and explain data. Large language models powered by Amazon Bedrock, will give our customers a natural language interface in AWS Supply Chain to query data within the data lake and receive intelligent answers to “what?”, “why?”, and “what if?” questions. This will unlock better and faster decision-making.
  • We launched AWS Supply Chain in November 2022 with inventory visibility and demand planning. By sensing changes in demand in near-real time and providing machine learning powered inventory insights, the application assists customers to re-balance their supply chain network, determining inventory risks at all times, and ensuring the right product is at the right place, at the right time. We’ve also incorporated machine learning models to help our customers better understand their C0₂ emissions impact, transportation time, and transportation costs to provide optimized inventory re-balancing recommendations.
  • Sustainability is a critical aspect of modern supply chain management. We are helping businesses align their operations with sustainability goals by capturing relevant supply chain data. This approach is essential as industry standards and customer expectations evolve.
  • We are excited about the upcoming developments, particularly in upstream processes. The positive reception from energy, retail, CPG, and manufacturing industries highlights our success. These businesses have seen tangible benefits, such as reduced transportation costs, improved inventory management, and enhanced vendor relationships.

We will announce several exciting new features at re:Invent in a few weeks and we look forward to seeing our customers and partners at the event. Please visit the event registration page to register to attend in person or to join us virtually.

You can listen to the podcast on the Digital Supply Chain website, Apple, Spotify, Overcast, or other podcast channels. Simply search for Digital Supply Chain. You can also view the video version on YouTube. Please also visit AWS Supply Chain webpage to learn more about our application.