IBM Introduces its Business Transactional Intelligence at Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit

One of the highlights of this week's Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit was the IBM launch of its Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) solution. This is powered by artificial intelligence to offer “anomaly detection and visualization capabilities” for mitigating supply chain disruptions and accelerating data-driven decision making.

As part of IBM's “Supply Chain Business Network,” BTI is designed to enable companies to garner deeper insights into supply chain data to help them better manage, for example, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay interactions. The technology does this, in part, using machine learning to identify volume, velocity and value-pattern anomalies in supply chain documents and transactions. Machine learning is a method used to teach artificial intelligence how to learn from data, spot patterns and make decisions on its own. This enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

More than 140 Watson Supply Chain customers are early adopters, including The Master Lock Company and Whirlpool Corporation.

For The Master Lock Company, fast-paced global growth means onboarding and transacting with more partners each year.

To empower its lean EDI team and manage the rising requirements they migrated its trading partner integration processes to IBM Supply Chain Business Network Premium.

This “security-rich,” cloud-based solution powered by IBM Business Transaction Intelligence reduces manual work for their EDI team, resulting in 50% faster onboarding for acquired trading partners to help support business growth, while 100% availability ensures mission-critical EDI services are always online.

“If one of our EDI transactions fails for any reason, IBM Supply Chain Business Network sends us an alert, which is valuable on a tactical level because it helps us start to pinpoint the underlying cause straight away,” says Connie Rekau, EDI Manager, The Master Lock Company. “With IBM Business Transaction Intelligence, we can dig deeper into our EDI data to identify patterns that wouldn't otherwise be obvious. As well as building a scorecard to track our performance against internal service-level level agreements (SLAs) with the business, we have set up reports that highlight trading partners with higher-than-average error rates.”

Chris Hayes a Senior Product Marketing Manager for B2B Integration at IBM, focusing on B2B and Transformation products, recallls that the IBM Think Conference in San Francisco last February was a starting point for this announcement.

“Since then, we‘ve had a continued roll out of AI, attracting hundreds of clients every month,” he tells SCMR in an interview. “Existing clients become kind evangelists for us on this journey. The business benefits of BTI can be seen in manufacturing, retail, and even in third-party logistics arenas.”

In addition to announcing BTI's availability at Gartner's Supply Chain Executive Summit, IBM also won a 2019 High Tech Manufacturing Chainnovator Award for its use of AI, blockchain and IoT to drive its own supply chain transformation. IBM's Chief Supply Chain Officer, Ron Castro, keynoted on Monday, May 13th for his session titled, IBM's Digital Transformation Journey to a Learning, AI-Enabled Supply Chain Organization.

The session explored IBM's award nomination details that achieved end-to-end supply chain security to gain a competitive business advantage using AI, blockchain, and IoT, while also speaking on how IBM's innovations materialize into client product offerings.

IBM's executives will speak about the combined power of building a smarter supply chain using AI, blockchain and IoT in the following conference sessions:

• “5 Imperatives for Building a Smarter Supply Chain” Tuesday, May 14th from 3 – 3:45 p.m. Inhi Cho Suh, General Manager, IBM Watson Customer Engagement
• “Busting Myths and Capturing Value: AI and Blockchain in the Supply Chain” Wednesday, May 15th 3 – 3:45 p.m. Ron Castro, Chief Supply Chain Officer, IBM

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