Gartner: The top eight supply chain technology trends are...
Supply chain executives intend to invest in growth through new technology investments.
A new Gartner Inc. survey of 499 supply chain leaders in North America, Latin America, Western Europe and the Asia/Pacific region reveals that 65% of respondents said they anticipate it will be easier to fund new technology investments in 2023. On average, 73% of supply chain IT budgets this year will be allocated to growth and performance enhancements, on average.
[Read more: Supply chain executives are meeting these challenges with innovation]
According to Gartner findings, the 2023 top supply chain technology trends are:
Actionable AI
Actionable artificial intelligence (AI) learns patterns based off past decisions and experiences to adapt to changing, real world circumstances. Solutions continuously retrain models and learn based on new data, which supply chain executives can use to augment decision-making.
Smart operations
Smart operations involve the orchestration of different and distributed processes and the underlying systems and data that support them. While smart manufacturing is an established practice, logistics organizations are starting to use this practice to transform their businesses.
Mobile asset optimization
Mobile asset optimization combines business process software, sensory technologies and operational research techniques for optimization and business intelligence. At the warehouse level, it includes smart robots.
Beyond the warehouse, transportation visibility platforms can show carrier activity and capacity, which improves collaboration among shippers, carriers and logistics providers.
Industry cloud platforms
Industry cloud platforms combine software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with specific functionality for vertical industry use cases, including supply chain workflows.
Employee engagement
Employee engagement is broadly a set of tools and applications used to help companies improve frontline worker performance, satisfaction and retention. This trend can span mixed reality and mobile devices to provide content that augments the job, wearables for safety and location management, and collaboration tools.
Gartner advises that these technology investments have to be anchored in a broader workforce strategy that spans knowledge curation, skills development, and training.
Composable application architecture
Composable business applications are designed to follow the core design principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery, with a specific business use case, including supply chain use cases.
Cyber resilient supply chains
As supply chains implement more advanced technologies, they digitally add supply chain partners, vendors and service providers. However, each addition of an external entity to the digital enterprise represents additional digital connectivity and increased cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks. Cybersecurity represents the tools, processes and governance methods needed to mitigate cybersecurity risks caused by increasing numbers of supply chain ecosystem participants.
Supply chain integration services
Supply chain integration services encompass technology platforms, integration teams, and strategic decision-making, as well as cloud services to manage these integrations. Supply chain integration services elevate the role of integration from tactical execution to strategic interconnection.