How To Avoid Creating The Next Bottleneck

With all the current geopolitical events and changing trade policies that can impact supply chains, companies need increased visibility to anticipate disruptions that may significantly impact operations. More importantly, they need a clearly communicated strategy on how front-line workers will address and mitigate those disruptions when they arrive.

Below are a few key ways you can increase front-line worker productivity and decision-making with AI technology.​

Supply Chain Success Driven By Workforce Productivity

Developing supply chain resilience capabilities has its roots in acquiring the right data across supplier networks, analyzing that data quickly for disruptions and having plans in place for imminent disruptions. Yet supply chain efficiency is really measured by the productivity and decision-making of the people within the supply chain system itself.

For instance, although technology can optimize processes, it’s the people who still determine the outcomes. Even the most advanced systems still rely on human judgment to work effectively. If workers can’t interpret real-time data, respond to impending issues or maintain workflows, then slowdowns and roadblocks happen at the human level, not the digital.

Similarly, you can have all the perfect upstream visibility, extensive analytics and automated alerts in the world, but if your front-line workers feel overwhelmed in the warehouse due to labor shortages and inefficient manual processes, then the supply chain comes to a grinding halt.

Resilience and responsiveness depend on how confidently workers can reroute shipments, adjust schedules and solve unexpected problems. Done right, productivity requires output surrounded by adaptability and creativity.

If front-line workers aren’t supported in their decision-making, trained on both equipment and protocols, and equipped with the right tools and technology, no amount of data or dashboards can transform inefficient processes. So how can you make sure that your front line is ready?​

How To Build An Empowered, Resilient Workforce

Front-line workers believe that the most important benefit their organization will get from AI and automation will be increased workforce productivity, according to our report. Another recent study found that 73% of workers also said AI increased their productivity.

In a positive shift in perception, workers no longer see AI or automation as something that will replace them, but rather as tools that will help them make decisions faster, increase clarity into what’s required and speed up both the manual and digital processes they’re part of every day. And these changes don’t exist in a vacuum: When workers become more productive, the entire supply chain becomes more resilient.

Here are some steps you can take today to increase workforce productivity using technology:

1. Give them the information they need, when they need it. Your workers should spend their time moving production forward, not searching for order details, shipment statuses or supplier updates. AI tools can securely serve up role-specific insights in a single dashboard, reducing friction while facilitating faster decision-making.

2. Guide key actions through AI recommendations. Let AI classify and prioritize issues based on severity, impact and operational constraints, making it easy for workers to manage immediate next steps. You can even add AI-suggested “next actions” based on organizational guidelines, best practices and historical data.

3. Provide predictive insights to address issues before they happen. With AI, workers don’t have to wait for a major shutdown or logistics failure to alert them to problems. Instead, they can gather data from across the warehouse and supply networks to give a “heads up” on upcoming machine maintenance or failure, low inventory levels, or supplier instability.

4. Automate manual tasks to free up higher-value efforts. Repetitive processes like data entry, status updates, scheduling and scanning are necessary for operational flow, but can drain time and energy from your workers. By automating these processes, you give employees the space and time for high-value decision-making, coordination and oversight. Automation can also help alleviate labor shortage constraints, especially important considering that 90% of organizations say a lack of talent is holding back their supply chain transformation efforts.

5. Provide AI tools with intuitive interfaces to speed up adoption. Empowering workers with AI tools or dashboards with intuitive controls and interfaces—similar to the smart tech they use every day—can increase ease of adoption, lowering or even eliminating the need for additional AI instruction. Our report found that despite a lack of training, workers in many companies were still using AI and realizing significant cost savings and operational benefits. When you build learning moments into your AI tools, you make it easy for workers to upskill while on the job.​

Building Resilience By Empowering People

If a company’s supply chain is only as resilient as the tools given to those operating it, then take steps to help your workforce get the most from your AI solutions. Implement intuitive, easy-to-use AI initiatives that inform fast but thorough decision-making processes, provide insights to preemptively address potential problems and automate time-consuming tasks. When your people are thriving, your supply chain operations will, too.​

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