ThroughPut adds geospatial data to logistics module

  • October 31, 2022
  • Steve Rogerson

Californian AI supply-chain company ThroughPut has added geospatial capabilities to its logistics and distribution module.

This should help businesses examine material flows overlaid on geo maps and identify choke points across their supply networks. Organisations can rapidly identify distribution routes that do not meet Otif metrics, are congested or are simply unprofitable, not only at the supplier level but also at the product and store level.

This in turn helps uncover network optimisation opportunities, sense demand at the local level, and proactively audit material flow down to the individual SKUs.

“Currently, there is nothing available on the market that can dynamically reassess your demand priorities, as well as your true execution capabilities as a business or organisation,” said Alla Anashenkova, head of product at ThroughPut. “We call this dynamic supply-chain rationalisation. With our new geospatial capabilities, you effectively get a prioritised plan of action that helps you accomplish more with less to free-up precious capital and physical room for smoother material flow and better inventory turns of what actually sells well at the most profitable levels.”

She said the technology was designed to monitor variability constantly on both the demand and the supply side, and leverage that knowledge to inform the focused prioritisation of improvements to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Bhaskar Ballapragda, CTO of ThroughPut, added: “Most of the solutions in today’s market are aimed at fixing either demand or operational inefficiencies, not both. Such isolated approaches effectively fail to address the heavy interdependency of the sales and operations functions. Both these traditionally siloed functions that need to work together and share dynamic underlying processes can now be regularly analysed, sensed, forecast and factored with ThroughPut for creating optimised plans of action.”

Geospatial maps enable faster decision-making at micro and macro levels with a deeper insight of the links and interactions among suppliers, plants, warehouses and point-of-sale locations as goods and materials are shipped from origin to destination. This helps businesses analyse insights at the individual SKU, product group, region or KPI level across the entire organisation. They can streamline route effectiveness via dynamically updated insights-on-demand, throughput and contribution-per-unit trends, Otif percentages, and optimal product mixes.

With the ability to pinpoint areas where material flow is disrupted or choked, organisations gain the ability to ease bottlenecks proactively, and analyse where improvements will yield the best results for the bottom line.

This lets companies establish inventory requirements at regular time intervals, along with associated cost values attached to procurement, transportation and production flows. They can visually assess effectiveness-of-delivery performance against market demand via multiple paths within the network at various hierarchy and grouping levels.

Customised forecasts can be accurately generated for demand, near-term Otif potential and product mix optimisation to improve profit margins and other factors. Users can review network volume distribution through the lenses of various measurement units such as space occupied, weight and product value to guide appropriate regional capacity requirements for individual location and point-to-point requirements.

They can gauge the impact of many variables by leveraging unhindered flow visualisations for SKUs all the way from suppliers to distribution centres, and further to point-of-sale destinations. This makes it easier for organisations to manage the impact of product mix and operational variances on final sales and revenue, and quickly identify which products require better operations support to avoid lost revenues. They can audit supply-chain network performance with guided improvement plans to remedy missed opportunities.

Businesses can review the impact of logistics performance on Otif fulfilment of orders and associated logistics spend, which in turn aids holistic visualisation and laser-focused operational decisions. Businesses and organisations can also prioritise orders based on account value or other parameters.

They can prioritise customers by demand and order-value for improved profitability, and visualise performance against a business’s priority KPIs such as lead-time-to-customer versus product expiry thresholds and product criticality.

ThroughPut.ai is a Silicon Valley supply-chain AI company that puts industrial material flow on autopilot by leveraging existing enterprise data to achieve better business, operations, financial and sustainability results. Its AI-powered supply-chain software predicts demand, reorients production capacity, reassigns warehouse space, and reorders materials, so businesses reduce overpromising and under-delivering, and increase desired outcomes.