HFS HIGHLIGHT: Infosys Brings its Live Enterprise AI-driven Solution to the Supply Chain

While retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies around the world have been perpetually challenged with change and disruption, today’s pandemic environment has put a giant spotlight on the inflexible, often broken supply chains due to siloed processes & disparate systems, lack of integration across all internal and external network entities leading to poor visibility and delay in responding to changes.  

To address the above-mentioned issues, Infosys has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven supply chain management solution within its Live Enterprise framework to help retail and CPG companies become more intelligent and dynamic. Core to this capability is the “Digital Brain,” a suite of algorithms aimed at bringing an Amazon-like capability to retailers, which are still dependent on legacy application environments that lack scalability and resiliency.  This capability is focused on re-imagining business processes in the supply chain, bringing intelligence to operations, and making business processes sentient enough to respond to customer demand dynamically. 

An intelligent supply chain thrives on data and algorithms 

Live Enterprise does not demand massive investment or time frame as its architecture is independent of the legacy nature of the underlying SCM platforms but thrives on data and intelligent algorithms. Here is a preview into the Live Enterprise building blocks:  

• SPEED Layer – Connected Data, Users, Network partners, Devices, Real-Time Events, etc: This layer is the network of all entities within and outside (partners) the organization providing a gateway to massive data store from several source systems including large ERP systems to tiny spreadsheets, breaking the silos and enabling a seamless data integration that is ready for real-time analytics. 
• OBSERVABILITY layer – Real-Time Sensing & Actionable Insights: Information Grid with pre-built libraries of Supply Chain KPIs that could provide real-time visibility, detect anomalies, and generate actionable insights. 
• DIGITAL BRAIN – Suite of Intelligent Algorithms: A repository of intelligent algorithms across the entire value chain that could predict disruptions, identify the potential root causes, prescribe intelligent recommendations, and most importantly provide guided action to make the changes in real-time – making the entire supply chain autonomous. 
• SENTIENT layer – Responding to end-user demands in real-time: This involves not just providing visibility to the end-users, but also dynamically responding with actionable insights, automating a large portion of planning & execution functions, thereby eliminating human errors.  

Exhibit 1: Conceptual view of Infosys Live Enterprise for Supply Chain 

Source: Infosys, 2020 

Live SCM aims to break down the siloes of the legacy supply chain 

Based on the above-mentioned principles, Infosys offers both a plug and play real-time predictive analytics solution (8-12 weeks – production implemented) and a customized one that needs an initial consulting phase (2-4 weeks) to diagnose the issues, followed by the development and implementation of the solution. Infosys ‘Live Enterprise’ framework applies a more agile approach rather than a 3-5-year transformation that requires massive investment.   

Infosys Live Enterprise product roadmap for the SCM solutions aims to fill in the white spaces of ERP systems and break down the siloes of legacy supply chains, creating a unified and real-time view of the supply chain and all its components.  Currently, the company has implementations of its Live Enterprise for Supply Chain with over 25 customers and is running proof of concept (POC) projects on other compelling use cases. 

Exhibit 2: Simplified view of Infosys’ Live SCM product roadmap that aims to break down the siloes of legacy supply chains  

Source: Infosys, 2020 

Infosys described its approach in helping a mid-size US retailer to transform within an agile and quick time frame. This client engaged Infosys to identify the SCM systems that need attention in the order of priority and implement the solution rapidly. As a part of the solution, Infosys can create a digital twin of any retail and CPG organization to see what is happening in real-time and test the changes. Pulling together this digital twin visualization and a predictive analytics dashboard, Infosys is helping retailers with connecting various previously disparate interaction points:  orders, stock keeping units (SKU’s), DCs, vendors, and customers, enabling prediction of points of failure and making adjustments in real-time.    

Another example of value creation from the Live SCM solution that is extremely relevant in these COVID19 times is minimizing the sales loss for a leading CPG company by containing the out of stock to less than two days by bringing in autonomous planning capability. This involves real-time integration of Point of Sale (POS) data, channel inventory, promotions and other demand signals to not just improve the demand planning, but also to establish an autonomous closed-loop execution cycle with analytics, intelligent decision making and automated guided action.  

Bottom Line: Infosys’ Digital Brain SCM has the potential to enable retail and CPG companies to be prepared for disruption 

COVID-19 has led to a disruption in the retail ecosystem, as most of the retail and CPG companies are not able to predict the demands in the future. Running with the broken supply chain system will add to the woes of these retail and CPG companies. Hence, these companies need an AI-driven supply chain management solution that can help them optimize their supply chain operations. Infosys’ Digital Brain promises to be a good solution. It remains to be seen how Infosys can innovatively come up with a scalable and resilient solution in the post-COVID-19 era, that not only addresses the classical problems in supply chain management but also caters to the unforeseen issues that could arise due to the pandemic or other major disruptions.