Amazon Web Services to offer new supply chain capabilities in 2024

Amazon’s will launch several supply chain-related hosted cloud features next year.

The company unveiled the features at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. Available as part of the hosted AWS cloud platform, the new capabilities will expand existing data lake, demand planning and machine learning (ML)-powered insights. 

Highlights of the new features follow:

• AWS Supply Chain Supply Planning  uses the demand forecasts created by AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning, along with data about product, facility, bill of materials (BOM) and inventory. This is designed to help users determine how many units to order, when to place the order, and where to position inventory by recommending actions such as the creation of purchase orders or inventory transfer requests.

• AWS Supply Chain N-Tier Visibility extends users’ visibility and insights to multiple tiers of external trading partners. Users can then automate communication and improve their own forecasts. 

  For example, users can share purchase orders and demand forecasts with their trading partners, and then track the status of those purchase orders or changing inventory levels, all from within AWS Supply Chain N-Tier Visibility. Updated supply plans and purchase orders are exported to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), so customers can integrate them with their ERP systems. The service also enables chat and messaging capabilities.

• AWS Supply Chain Sustainability enables sustainability professionals to request, collect, and export artifacts such as product life cycle assessments, certificates on product safety, or reports on hazardous substances used, at any point in the supply chain. Users can also upload their own data collection form for their suppliers to document any sustainability issue, utilize a standard workflow process to send their suppliers reminders to answer data requests, and communicate necessary changes based on supplier responses. These capabilities will help customers provide compliance information for environmental and social governance (ESG) regulations with a single, auditable record of the data.

• Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain is a generative AI assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS. that provides a natural language interface in the AWS Supply Chain application so that customers can query data within the AWS Supply Chain Data Lake, and receive intelligent answers to “what?” and “why?” and “what if?” questions. 

  Amazon Q can be tailored to a customer’s business and can also visualize outcomes of complex scenarios and the tradeoffs between different supply chain decisions. To read more about Amazon Q, click here.

“Customers are excited that we're making our extensive supply chain experience available to them as a managed service. That, combined with our industry leading analytics and ML means customers can now track and plan for products more predictably, from manufacturing facilities to final points of distribution,” said Diego Pantoja-Navajas, VP of AWS Supply Chain. “With AWS Supply Chain, our customers have been able to increase inventory visibility and execute on insights to mitigate supply chain risks, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction. And thanks to the power of generative AI, customers can ask Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain what is happening across their supply chains and receive intelligent, conversational answers to complex questions.”