California-based Swarm Engineering’s food supply chain optimisation platform is available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure.

Swarm users can now take advantage of the Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

The platform is for solving problems in the agri-food supply chain, such as load planning in logistics, supply and demand forecasting, pricing, inventory demand plans, and network design decisions, such as where to open the next distribution centre.

Swarm handles complex processes with many elements, a high number of combinations or permutations, frequent disruptions, or a mix of these characteristics. Yet users do not need data science, machine learning knowledge or a degree in maths to use the software.

By using modern algorithms to solve combinatorial problems, and combining these with machine learning, Swarm can optimise across a specific time period, such as a financial quarter or a growing season, and integrate with other aspects of the supply chain to provide a holistic offering.

The containerised application runs on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes, storing data in Microsoft SQL Server, with the capability for both scale-up and scale-out to support organisations of all sizes.

“Our goal is for our customers to have a seamless end-to-end experience,” said Anthony Howcroft, CEO of Swarm Engineering. “Microsoft Azure provides the flexibility and scalability necessary for enterprise-class services in a secure and trusted environment. We are able to use Azure as part of our data pipeline for landing and managing data, as well as to process the advanced AI algorithms at the core or our Swarm engine.”

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud products certified to run on Azure. It helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based products with partners who have developed software that is ready to use.

“We’re pleased to welcome Swarm Engineering to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which gives our partners great exposure to cloud customers around the globe,” said Jake Zborowski, general manager for Microsoft Azure. “Azure Marketplace offers world-class quality experiences from global trusted partners with solutions tested to work seamlessly with Azure.”

Swarm is a software-as-a-service platform that uses cognitive computing to tackle problems in the food supply chain to save costs, reduce waste and deliver sustainable environmental benefits. The platform is structured around a multi-agent approach that uses a curated market of algorithms to optimise key processes such as load planning, inbound and outbound logistics, demand and supply planning, yield maximisation, and pricing optimisation. It provides an easy way for business users to define problems and rapidly match them to solutions without any software coding or knowledge of AI and machine learning.