Introduction
Since COVID-19 has taken over the world, business trends are witnessing a new era of change. Companies are in the process of shifting supply chain to meet the new normal while retaining quality for their customers. There has been a reasonable spike in supply chain innovation post COVID. Location-based intelligence is one such technology that has been helping supply chain resiliency in 2021. Supply chain demands understanding the customer needs and planning accordingly. In the same regard, location-based intelligence can help provide extended vision to contribute towards supply chain innovation post COVID. Let’s take a look at five ways to enhance supply chain performance using location- based intelligence –
Get to know the right “WHERE” for supply demand
In order to design a near perfect supply plan, you need to understand the demand plan (which includes the places and stores with a high demand). With the help of location- based intelligence systems, you can spot the shops with high traffic. Once you know the demand region, you can further plan on how to meet customer needs in the coming weeks and months based on the analysis. This gives a fair idea of inventory alignment by providing advanced insights.
Get to know your customer’s requirements
For Enhancing supply chain innovation post COVID, it is a priority to understand your customers. If implemented, location-based intelligence plays a key role in determining the likes and dislikes of your customers. With the help of location-based intelligence, you can track the movement of your customers and collect the required customer data such as – where your customer visits more or less frequently? Which counter has a greater number of foot tracks? How long do they stay at your store? etc. This will give supply chain management a fair idea of what is the exact nature and requirement of their customer.
Get to know the “accurate inventory”
Location-based intelligence comes with benefits beyond just understanding customers and places. It will help you with your database management as well. Along with tracking traffic for a place or store, one can also track a traffic for a particular product or counter. This will help know the products that are in high demand and eventually suggest supply chain managers to ensure that the product quantity is stocked up.
Enhance your Supply Chain Analytics
Supply chain analytics include risk analysis, risk management, enhancing planning accuracy, waste reduction etc. There are supply chain tools already available that provide study of a number of factors such as transportation, logistics, demand and risk analysis. Here, location-based intelligence comes as an additional tool which gives a deeper analysis by collecting information for queries like – which locations are high in demand and which are not? Which areas are facing delivery issues? Are the delivery vehicles sufficient to meet the needs? And so on.
Enhance Predictions and Accuracy
Majority of location-based intelligence integration with supply chain is done baselining AI and machine learning. Based on the consumer data collected using location-based intelligence, predictive modelling can be performed and worked upon to enhance the accuracy. These can be anomaly detection, enhancement prediction, root cause analysis etc.
Conclusion
For supply chain innovation post COVID, location-based intelligence can be of huge
impact which will help businesses enhance themselves and to be a step ahead always.