Saurabh Kumar, CEO – FMCG Retail, Kaleesuwari Group, defines a smart supply chain by its ability to drastically reduce reliance on human guesswork and subjective decision-making. At its core, lies absolute repeatability and reliability of response, turning unpredictable logistics into a highly consistent and automated system.
Data prepares industries to react better, not predict
Saurabh Kumar, CEO – FMCG Retail, Kaleesuwari Group, defines a smart supply chain by its ability to drastically reduce reliance on human guesswork and subjective decision-making. At its core, lies absolute repeatability and reliability of response, turning unpredictable logistics into a highly consistent and automated system.
Visibility That Adds Value
Real-time visibility, he explains, enables stakeholders to add value for customers and end consumers. It improves prediction, contingency planning, capacity utilisation of transport mediums, store costs and delivery timelines, while catering to hyper-personalisation across consumer goods. Over the next five years, data-driven supply chains will achieve real-time visibility, predictive autonomy and hyper-personalised execution.
Where Data Still Struggles
The struggle runs across the value chain. The key pain is the lack of seamless integration and interoperability between different ERPs and processes, which leads to vast amounts of paper and manual work, sub-optimal use of resources and scope for error at every interface.
Preparing to React Better
“Let us be clear”, he says: “data alone cannot help industries anticipate disruptions”, because outcomes depend on several variables beyond the control of stakeholders. Data’s contribution has been to help industries “better react”. Having sourced raw material from several countries embroiled in global conflicts, he says one can surely diversify, build a robust Plan-B, improve stock availability and earn a higher trading spread, with data helping in all these optimisations.
Readiness and Trust
The wider logistics ecosystem is not ready, he states plainly, though the question is more economic than one of need or expectation. Better data brings transparency and “mostly” trust, since trust also depends on customers being ready to accept the facts data presents. Multimodal connectivity will improve once stakeholders integrate at many levels and recognise the value enough to pay for it; the benefits then flow on their own.
Retiring Gut Feel
The industry sees the data and is happy about it, but uses it to its comfort and convenience and runs on it only in small patches. It will be a few more years before phone calls and WhatsApp groups disappear, and perhaps another one or two decades before gut feel retires.
