AWS Supply Chain update: Three brand-new modules

AWS Supply Chain update

Today, AWS are introducing three new AWS Supply Chain modules. With the aim of assisting you in maintaining ideal inventory levels at each location along the chain, these modules are made to assist you in working together with your suppliers at every stage of the supply chain. This is a synopsis:

Supply Planning: With the aid of this module, you can precisely project and schedule the acquisition of components, finished goods, and raw materials. It generates supply plans with purchase orders and inventory transfer requirements using a variety of algorithms.

N-Tier Visibility: This module expands visibility and cooperation to numerous external trading partner tiers from within your company’s internal systems.

Sustainability: With the help of this module, you can request, gather, and review carbon emission data and reports on hazardous materials used in the procurement, production, transportation, and disposal of goods in a more efficient and safe manner. Sending data requests to several trading partner tiers is now possible, along with tracking responses, reminding absentees to come in, and offering a central location to view and store responses.

Let’s examine each one individually.

Planning of Supplies

AWS Supply Chain already comes with a Demand Planning module that forecasts demand and creates a demand plan based on two or more years of historical order line data using proprietary machine learning algorithms. Retail stores and distribution centers are included in the detailed and precise projections.

The demand plan is an input used by the new Supply Planning module. It examines the current inventory, takes uncertainty into account, and supports additional business input, such as stocking strategies. In the end, it generates purchase orders for raw materials and components that are prepared for approval and review.

Manufacturing plans and auto replenishment are also supported by this module. The Bill of Materials (BoM), which is disassembled into separate parts that are sourced from several direct and indirect upstream sources, serves as the foundation for the manufacturing plans, which operate backward.

Supply planning is carried out on a plan schedule and within a planning horizon, both of which are specified in the organization profile:

Additionally, the settings of this module enable customization of the approval and review of purchase orders:

N-Tier Visibility

This module facilitates cooperative working with your suppliers, suppliers to your suppliers, and so on. Vendors are automatically identified and prepared for AWS Supply Chain onboarding. The module facilitates manual and EDI-powered purchase order collaboration. It also aids in risk and discrepancy identification, as well as the search for alternative vendors when needed.

The module’s home page lists all of my trading partners in summary form.

Some of these partners have already been on boarded, some have been invited (one partner let the invitation expire), and some have not been invited yet, according to the Portal status column. You can send invitations by clicking Invite partners. You choose the partners (most of which have been found automatically using data from the Supply Chain Data Lake) and click Proceed.

After that, you can click Send invites after entering each partner’s contact details.

An email invitation is sent to the contact, who can accept it at that point. Upon acceptance, they will be able to electronically receive and reply to purchase orders and supply plans (via EDI or email).

Sustainability

You can request, receive, and review compliance and sustainability data from your partners with the aid of the Sustainability module. It expands upon the partner network you previously outlined and monitors data requests.

You can choose the kind of data you need and the partners from whom you need it, then click Continue to make my request.

Then fill in the specifics of my request, like a deadline. You can request a file response or a text response from the selected partners.

Each partner provides files and responses, which are written to the Supply Chain Data Lake and have the option to be exported to an Amazon S3 bucket.