Leveraging Amazon’s eCommerce success, AWS Supply Chain launched to help businesses

Following its experience of almost 30 years from Amazon.com logistics network experience, the AWS Supply Chain, a new application that helps businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions that mitigate risks, lower costs, and improve customer experiences, has been launched at this year’s re:Invent conference.

The AWS Supply Chain automatically combines and analyzes data across multiple supply chain systems so businesses can observe their operations in real-time, find trends more quickly, and generate more accurate demand forecasts that ensure adequate inventory to meet customer expectations.

Learning from Amazon.com’s experience, the AWS Supply Chain improves supply chain resiliency by providing a unified data lake, machine-learning-powered insights, recommended actions, and in-application collaboration capabilities.

“Customers tell us that the undifferentiated heavy lifting required in connecting data between different supply chain solutions has inhibited their ability to quickly see and respond to potential supply chain disruptions,” said Diego Pantoja-Navajas, vice president of AWS Supply Chain. “AWS Supply Chain aggregates this data and provides visual, interactive dashboards that provide the insights and recommendations customers need to take actions toward more resilient supply chains. And this is just the beginning—we will continue our investment in AWS Supply Chain to help our customers solve their toughest supply chain problems.”

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In recent years, supply chains have experienced unprecedented supply and demand volatility accelerated by widespread resource shortages, geopolitics, and natural events. These disruptions put pressure on businesses to plan for potential supply chain uncertainty, respond quickly to changes in customer demand, and keep costs low.

When businesses inadequately forecast for supply chain risks—such as component shortages, shipping port congestion, unanticipated demand spikes, or weather disruptions—they face excess inventory costs, or stockouts that cause poor customer experiences.

To gain visibility into their supply chain network, businesses must build custom integrations that can access and process data across an array of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management systems.

AWS Supply Chain, according to the company, improves supply chain visibility and provides actionable insights to help businesses optimize supply chain processes and improve service levels.

Customers can easily set up a unified supply chain data lake using AWS Supply Chain’s built-in connectors, which use pre-trained machine learning models based on Amazon.com’s nearly 30 years of supply chain experience, to understand, extract, and aggregate data from ERP and supply chain management systems. AWS Supply Chain then contextualizes that information in a real-time visual map highlighting current inventory selection and quantity at each location.

Inventory managers, demand planners, and supply chain leaders can view machine learning-generated insights for potential inventory shortages or delays, and create watchlists to receive alerts to take action as risks appear.

Once a risk is identified, AWS Supply Chain will automatically provide recommended actions, such as moving inventory between locations, to take based on the percentage of risk resolved, the distance between facilities, and the sustainability impact. Teams can solve problems and collaborate using built-in chat and messaging functionality.

With AWS Supply Chain, businesses can more accurately anticipate supply chain risks, take inventory rebalancing actions quickly to save costs, and meet customer expectations.

AWS Supply Chain is available in preview today in U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.