http://srmtoday.makes.news/SRM Today Beyond KPIs RSS feedhttp://www.rssboard.org/rss-specificationenThu, 16 Apr 2026 15:53:19 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/14/blockchain-transforms-manufacturing-traceability-amid-rising-supply-chain-demands<p>As supply chains grow more complex and regulators tighten standards, blockchain technology is emerging as a critical tool for enhancing product traceability, accountability, and authenticity across industries from pharmaceuticals to textiles.</p><p>Manufacturers have spent decades trying to keep control of products through paper files, disconnected systems and supplier reports that rarely line up neatly. That approach is under increasing strain. As supply chains stretch across continents and regulators demand better proof of safety, provenance and compliance, traceability has become a boardroom issue rather than a clerical one.</p> <p>This is the space in which blockchain has gained traction. Better known for its role in cryptocurrencies, the technology is more relevant in manufacturing as a shared record that can be updated by approved participants and is difficult to alter without detection. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has argued that blockchain and related tools can support tamper-evident information sharing across manufacturing supply chains, while earlier NIST work suggested that it can strengthen the digital thread running through smart manufacturing systems.</p> <p>In practice, the appeal is straightforward. Manufacturers need a clearer picture of where materials came from, how they were handled, who certified them and where they ended up. That matters for recalls, quality control, anti-counterfeit measures, sustainability claims and regulatory defence. When a defect appears, or a customer questions a provenance claim, a ledger that links each step in the product journey can make the difference between a swift response and a costly scramble.</p> <p>Traceability itself is not new. Automotive, pharmaceutical, food and aerospace firms have long relied on batch codes, serial numbers and chain-of-custody records. But those systems often break down when production becomes multi-tiered and geographically dispersed. Information can be delayed, duplicated or lost between suppliers, freight operators, factories and warehouses. Data may sit in incompatible software, while paper records and email attachments leave room for error or manipulation.</p> <p>Blockchain offers a different logic. Rather than relying on one company’s internal database, it distributes approved records across a network of participants. Each event is time-stamped and linked to the previous one, creating a sequence that is much harder to tamper with after the fact. That makes it easier to establish a shared version of what happened, when it happened and who handled it.</p> <p>The manufacturing uses are broad. In consumer electronics, blockchain can help trace batteries, circuit boards, casings and final assembly back through multiple supplier layers. If a battery batch is later found to overheat, the company can identify which products are affected and which shipments share the same risk profile. In automotive production, it can track components, software updates and critical materials. In pharmaceuticals, it can help prove that ingredients stayed within the correct temperature range. In food processing, it can support provenance and cold-chain integrity. In aerospace and heavy industry, it can verify certification and the origin of specialist parts.</p> <p>The technology is also gaining attention because it can support accountability in multi-party production networks. Modern manufacturing is rarely confined to one firm. A finished product may pass through design houses, component suppliers, logistics providers, inspectors and contract manufacturers before reaching the customer. When something fails, the question of responsibility can become blurred. A shared ledger does not eliminate disputes, but it does narrow the evidential gap by making each handover visible.</p> <p>That is particularly useful in industries where compliance is non-negotiable. Pharmaceuticals, food, defence, aerospace and automotive sectors all depend on precise records. Blockchain can make those records harder to manipulate and easier to verify, especially when combined with sensors, barcodes, RFID tags and digital signatures that tie the physical item to its digital identity. United Barcode Systems has argued that reliable coding and labelling remain essential to making blockchain-based traceability work in practice, rather than in theory.</p> <p>Counterfeit prevention is another major draw. Fake parts and unauthorised goods can cause safety incidents, machine failure and reputational damage. A blockchain-backed record can make it harder for counterfeit items to enter the chain unnoticed, particularly when physical identifiers are linked to the ledger. If a product appears in the wrong place, or without the right transaction history, the discrepancy becomes easier to spot.</p> <p>Recalls may be the clearest commercial case for adoption. When a fault is discovered, manufacturers need to know exactly which units are affected, where they were shipped and how far the problem spread. Weak traceability tends to widen recalls unnecessarily, increasing costs and disruption. Stronger traceability can support narrower, more targeted withdrawals and faster root-cause analysis, which matters both financially and reputationally.</p> <p>Sustainability is pushing the same logic into sharper focus. Companies are under pressure to prove claims about recycled content, emissions, labour standards and ethical sourcing. That is difficult when inputs come from opaque supplier networks. Blockchain can help record certificates, energy readings, material transformations and recycling events, giving sustainability claims a firmer evidential base. It will not make a product greener by itself, but it can make green claims more credible.</p> <p>Some of the most ambitious applications are emerging in textiles and apparel, where digital product passport initiatives are bringing new attention to fibre origin, manufacturing steps and end-of-life recovery. EcoFabric Trace, a blockchain-based platform aimed at the sector, describes a model in which data from farmers, mills and manufacturers is linked into a single verified record from fibre to finished garment. The broader point is that traceability is no longer only about compliance. It is becoming part of how brands present trust to buyers.</p> <p>Even so, blockchain is not a cure-all. A ledger can preserve records, but it cannot guarantee that the information entered was true in the first place. If bad data goes in, the system may faithfully protect the bad data. That means blockchain has to sit alongside inspections, governance, sensors and certification checks. It strengthens trust, but does not replace it.</p> <p>There are also practical obstacles. Many manufacturers still depend on legacy ERP, MES and supply-chain systems that were never designed to talk to a distributed ledger. Integrating those tools can be expensive and technically awkward. Data standards may not match. Smaller suppliers may lack the resources to participate. Networks can also become slow or cumbersome if they try to record too much information at once.</p> <p>That is why the more successful deployments tend to be targeted. Rather than attempting to digitise every interaction in the factory, companies often start with a high-risk material, a sensitive product line or a compliance-heavy process. Once the value is proven, the network can expand. Industry observers say this phased approach is usually more effective than trying to build a complete system on day one.</p> <p>The deeper challenge is organisational rather than technical. Blockchain traceability only works if suppliers, auditors, logistics partners, regulators and manufacturers are willing to align on data rules and governance. If participants do not see a benefit for themselves, adoption stalls. For that reason, the strongest business cases tend to be in sectors where the cost of failure is high and the value of proof is obvious.</p> <p>The direction of travel, however, is clear. As rules tighten and customers become more sceptical, manufacturers are being asked not just to say what their products are, but to show it. Blockchain is one of the tools now being used to make that possible. Its long-term significance may lie less in the technology itself than in the discipline it imposes: shared records, visible handovers and a more auditable chain of responsibility.</p> <p>In manufacturing, that shift could prove consequential. The industry has always depended on control, but it is increasingly being judged on verifiable control. Blockchain will not solve every supply-chain problem, yet it offers a stronger basis for proving where things came from, how they were handled and who was accountable along the way.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69dc737bee790bed748b5208Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:44:13 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/14/specialist-suppliers-emerge-as-crucial-partners-for-scaling-businesses-seeking-resilience-and-quality<p>As companies grow, partnering with specialised suppliers offers critical advantages in quality, agility, and resilience, transforming sourcing strategies for competitive advantage.</p><p>For many growing firms, the weak point is not demand but supply. As businesses scale, the ability to source the right materials, products or services can shape everything from margins to customer satisfaction. In that setting, specialist suppliers often matter more than generic ones because they bring expertise, flexibility and a closer fit with the needs of a particular market.</p> <p>Unlike broadline vendors that prioritise volume and standardisation, speciality suppliers tend to understand the technical demands of a niche. That can make them valuable partners when a business is trying to improve product quality, develop new offerings or differentiate itself from rivals. In some sectors, that might mean access to higher-grade components, unique ingredients or tailored packaging. In others, it could mean expert support in sourcing hard-to-find talent, managing industrial consumables or handling complex inventory needs.</p> <p>Their value is not limited to product knowledge. Speciality suppliers often respond faster to change, which is especially important when market conditions shift or customer expectations become more specific. A smaller, more focused supplier base can sometimes adapt more readily to bespoke requests, tighter deadlines or altered specifications than larger, more rigid operations. For growing companies, that agility can be a commercial advantage in its own right.</p> <p>They can also strengthen resilience. Relying on a narrow group of vendors may keep purchasing simple, but it can leave a business exposed if one link in the chain fails. A diversified supplier strategy can reduce that risk and make it easier to absorb disruption. That matters in retail, where steady access to stock helps prevent lost sales, and in industrial settings, where even short interruptions can create costly downtime.</p> <p>There is also a quality argument. When suppliers specialise in one area, they are often better placed to maintain standards, monitor consistency and spot issues before they become expensive problems. That can protect a brand’s reputation as well as its bottom line. In some cases, the benefit is visible to customers through better finished products; in others, it appears further upstream through fewer defects, lower rejection rates and more reliable fulfilment.</p> <p>Sustainability is another reason more businesses are looking closely at specialist partnerships. Suppliers with deeper knowledge of a category may be better positioned to help firms meet environmental, social and governance targets, whether that means better labour practices, lower waste or more efficient use of resources. For companies under pressure to demonstrate responsible operations, that expertise can be useful rather than optional.</p> <p>The most effective relationships, however, go beyond simply placing orders. The greatest gains usually come when suppliers are treated as collaborators rather than interchangeable contractors. Regular communication, shared planning and product development can unlock value that a price-only approach misses. Businesses that think in terms of total supply cost, rather than just the cheapest unit price, are often better placed to spot those wider benefits.</p> <p>Technology can support that shift. Digital tools make it easier to exchange data in real time, monitor performance and coordinate across the supply chain. In practice, that can improve visibility, speed up decision-making and help both sides respond more quickly to problems or opportunities. Training and knowledge-sharing can deepen the relationship further, particularly when smaller suppliers need support to meet more demanding requirements.</p> <p>A clear supplier strategy is therefore essential. Not every vendor will deserve the same level of attention, and segmenting suppliers by strategic value can help businesses focus effort where it matters most. Key performance indicators such as on-time, in-full delivery and quality rejection rates can provide a simple way to track whether partnerships are improving over time.</p> <p>For businesses in retail, manufacturing, facilities management or even recruitment, the message is similar: growth is not only about selling more, but about building the right network behind the scenes. Speciality suppliers can help companies do that more efficiently, more creatively and with greater resilience.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69de6fcc3c11ab0dad3d70dbTue, 14 Apr 2026 22:43:43 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/14/project44-unveils-ai-driven-solutions-to-revolutionise-supply-chain-decision-making<p>At its Decision44 event in Chicago, Project44 announced new AI agents designed to accelerate decision-making and reduce costs in logistics, marking a new phase in supply chain technology.</p><p>Project44 used its Decision44 customer event in Chicago to argue that the supply chain sector has entered a new phase, one in which artificial intelligence should not just identify problems but help resolve them.</p> <p>Chief executive Jett McCandless opened the event with a sweeping account of logistics history, casting each major leap in trade and transport as a shift in how supply chains function. He said the industry has moved from fragmented, manual coordination towards a model in which systems are expected to act with far greater speed. In his view, the internet transformed retail and finance into real-time businesses years ago, while logistics remained tied to phones, email and legacy systems.</p> <p>Project44 said its response over the past decade has been to build the data infrastructure needed to connect those workflows. The company described a logistics graph that now processes more than a billion customer-generated events a day and ingests roughly 4 petabytes of data each month. McCandless said that effort was intended to give the supply chain sector the connective tissue it lacked, but also acknowledged that greater visibility alone had not solved the industry’s decision-making bottlenecks.</p> <p>That set up the company’s main announcement: a portfolio of AI agents designed to move users from insight to action more quickly. According to Project44, the agents are meant to reduce freight costs, speed up exception handling and improve on-time performance across procurement, planning, execution and settlement. The company said the strategy builds on a decade of data aggregation across what it described as the world’s largest real-time logistics network.</p> <p>Chief strategy officer and chief operating officer Jonathan Scherr said the company’s mission remained to remove friction from global trade, but that the delivery mechanism was changing. He argued that enterprise AI only becomes useful when it is layered with context, meaning the relationships, rules and operational knowledge that sit around raw model output. Project44 says that context, combined with its integrations into warehouse, transport and enterprise systems, is what gives its tools practical value.</p> <p>One of the first products to be highlighted was a freight procurement agent, which Project44 said can run carrier sourcing continuously rather than through slow bidding cycles. The company said early results showed a 4.1% reduction in freight costs, a 75% cut in sourcing cycle times and a 70% reduction in manual coordination. Other agents are aimed at cargo theft, last-mile disruption, stockout risk, yard management and freight recovery.</p> <p>The pitch is also being framed around control, not full autonomy. Project44 executives stressed that the systems are meant to remain explainable, auditable and human-governed, with approval points built in. The company said its goal is to let software handle repetitive work while people retain oversight of key decisions.</p> <p>Several product leaders outlined how that would work in practice. New tools are intended to detect theft risk more quickly, manage disruptions as they happen and help warehouses and yards reduce the time trucks spend waiting. Project44 said some of the capabilities are available now, while others will roll out in June and July. It also said its transcript and multi-agent workflow features are due later in the spring and summer.</p> <p>The event included a customer discussion with Abercrombie &amp; Fitch supply chain leader Kristen Kravitz, who said the retailer has had to adapt to a far more volatile operating environment. She described a shift towards digital-first working, but said the hardest problems were now often process and people issues rather than pure technology gaps. Project44 said that sort of feedback is central to how it is positioning the new tools.</p> <p>The company is also moving into the transport management system market with what it calls an intelligent TMS, designed to use AI-native workflows rather than bolt intelligence onto older software. Project44 said the product is modular and built to cover the shipment lifecycle from procurement and execution through to audit and payment.</p> <p>Decision44, which is being staged in Chicago and later in Amsterdam, is intended to showcase that broader shift: from visibility to execution, and from software that reports what is happening to software that helps decide what happens next.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69d8036f6ec91c51d578c606Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:42:27 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/14/motive-launches-ai-driven-analytics-platform-in-mexico-to-streamline-fleet-management-decision-making<p>Motive has introduced a new analytics product in Mexico aimed at transforming operational data into faster, more informed decisions for fleet operators, amidst accelerating telematics adoption and growing data complexity.</p><p>Motive has launched a new analytics product in Mexico that the company says is designed to help fleet operators turn operational data into faster decisions, as telematics adoption in the country accelerates and businesses face growing pressure to manage increasingly complex data sets.</p> <p>The AI platform for physical operations said Motive Analytics is built into its Dashboard and pulls together information from safety, fuel, maintenance, telematics and other sources into a single view. The company said the aim is to reduce reliance on spreadsheets and manual reporting, while giving safety, operations and finance teams quicker access to trends and performance issues.</p> <p>A key part of the offer is AI Answers, a conversational tool that allows users to type questions in plain language and receive responses drawn from the data held in the system. Motive said the feature can be used for queries such as driver idling time or vehicle downtime, with the results presented alongside visualisations.</p> <p>Omar Camacho, Motive’s general manager for Mexico, said the product was intended to help fleets make better use of data that already exists across their operations. He said the company was trying to make the information easier to interpret without requiring teams to spend hours reviewing spreadsheets.</p> <p>Industry coverage of the launch has placed it in the context of a broader push by Motive into Mexico, where the company has also been expanding safety, fleet management and theft-prevention tools. Fleet Owner reported earlier that the business had tailored its platform for Mexican customers as part of a wider regional expansion, while Work Truck Online said Motive had opened a Mexico City office to support that effort.</p> <p>The launch also follows a series of AI-focused additions to Motive’s product set. Fleet Maintenance has reported on the company’s efforts to introduce tools for instant fleet insights and fraud detection, reflecting a wider trend across the fleet technology sector towards natural-language analytics and automated reporting.</p> <p>For Motive, the bet appears to be that Mexican fleets increasingly want a single system capable of linking operational data to cost, safety and productivity outcomes. The company says its latest release is meant to address that demand by allowing teams to ask questions directly rather than waiting for separate analytics work.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69d6597c50400ed7b4926bd6Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:42:26 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/03/real-time-field-visibility-transforms-service-operations-and-cuts-costs<p>As service businesses face operational chaos, the adoption of live tracking and real-time data is revolutionising dispatch, boosting productivity, and reducing costs, if implementation is handled effectively.</p><p>Last week’s scramble in our dispatch office, three simultaneous calls, a stranded technician waiting for a part, another finishing early with no next assignment, and a customer irate at a late arrival, made plain a persistent weakness in many service businesses: office teams are often operating from stale information and limited sight of field activity. That gap does more than raise stress levels; it bleeds productivity and increases operating costs.</p> <p>Traditional approaches, phone calls, paper notes and spreadsheets, leave managers unable to verify who is on site, how long tasks actually take, or which worker is best placed to pick up an urgent job. Industry guides argue this pattern forces firms into reactive modes, increasing repeat visits and unplanned downtime that harm profitability. According to Makula’s analysis, poor visibility is a primary driver of these avoidable costs.</p> <p>The remedy most cited across the sector is live field visibility. Real-time location and status updates give managers a live map of their mobile workforce, enabling quicker, smarter dispatching and routing. Forbes notes that instant operational data transforms scheduling and resource allocation, improves customer communication and can meaningfully reduce inefficiencies and expense. When managers can see who is nearest and qualified for a task, drive time falls and billable time rises.</p> <p>But the shift to continuous tracking is not just a technology install; it is an operational change. Multiple sources warn that successful adoption requires clear training, change management and frontline buy-in. Forbes emphasises that without staff engagement and appropriate training programmes, the potential gains of real-time data will be blunted. Veemo’s field-service overview similarly highlights how communication protocols and documentation practices must evolve alongside new tools to deliver consistent service quality.</p> <p>Beyond dispatch and routing, the data stream from a modern field-service platform enables more robust decision-making. Automated reports on idle time, route efficiency and task completion yield actionable insights for coaching and workforce optimisation. FieldProxy’s guide shows how features like geofencing and integration with work-order systems create timely alerts and reduce customer uncertainty by providing accurate arrival windows.</p> <p>Scalability is another common advantage. Companies that outgrow manual methods find that a configurable mobile app can support diverse trades and complex roles, assigning permissions and skills at scale while preserving oversight. SiteCapture’s guidance stresses that digitisation replaces fragmented workflows with a single source of truth, reducing administrative friction and improving allocation of labour across larger territories.</p> <p>Practical results are already being reported. Case studies from service providers adopting modern platforms show marked improvements in on-time performance and operational consistency. FieldAx’s own materials point to high user satisfaction ratings and examples of teams achieving near-full operational efficiency after implementing live tracking and reporting, though as with any vendor-originated claims, those outcomes should be weighed alongside independent evaluation.</p> <p>There are also device- and infrastructure-level realities to manage. Ensuring apps have the right permissions, monitoring battery status and maintaining reliable mobile connectivity are small technical details that, if neglected, can create false negatives in visibility. Good implementations include alerts and fallbacks so managers can reroute work quickly when a device goes offline or a technician’s status is unclear.</p> <p>For firms intent on closing the disconnect between office and field, the path is straightforward in principle: replace guesswork with live data, pair the technology rollout with training and process redesign, and use metrics to guide continuous improvement. The combination reduces idle time, increases accountability and improves customer experience. The choice of platform and the rigor of implementation will determine whether those benefits materialise in everyday operations.</p> <p>Investing in real-time field visibility is not a panacea,but for businesses that have long suffered the cost of opacity it offers a practicable route to steadier performance and measurable growth.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69cea810b08d573df11e3707Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:17:33 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/03/supply-chain-orchestration-shifts-from-concept-to-critical-operational-driver-in-response-to-increasing-complexity<p>As global supply networks become more complex and disruptive, organisations are rapidly adopting supply chain orchestration to enable real-time decision-making, enhance resilience, and meet sustainability goals, with best practices emphasising governance, human involvement, and pilot-focused scaling.</p><p>Supply chain orchestration is rapidly shifting from an appealing concept to an operational necessity as global networks grow more complex and disruptions multiply. At its heart, orchestration connects disparate streams of information, decision logic and on-the-ground execution so organisations can see what is happening across suppliers, carriers and channels and act faster and more coherently.</p> <p>Where traditional setups rely on periodic reports and manual reconciliation, orchestration treats every update as a trigger for response. According to the lead analysis on SupplyChain360, event-driven rules can automatically alert commercial teams, open alternative routes with preapproved carriers, reallocate inventory and update delivery commitments within minutes rather than hours. Industry measurements cited there indicate that firms adopting coordinated control towers can cut lead times and decision cycles substantially, with reported lead-time reductions between 10 and 30 percent once cross-functional workflows run on shared, current data.</p> <p>The momentum behind orchestration is visible across vendor offerings and expert commentary. Forbes contributors argue the approach is essential in an era of heightened geopolitical friction, extreme weather, cyber risk and logistics volatility, noting that mere systems integration is no longer enough; enterprises need continuous, predictive awareness and the ability to remediate exceptions in real time. Forbes highlights the growing importance of common data models and AI in moving organisations from reactive firefighting to proactive network management.</p> <p>Technology vendors present complementary perspectives on how to operationalise that ambition. Blume Global positions its cloud solution as a platform for real-time visibility and collaborative exception resolution, emphasising automated playbooks and predictive insights to reduce the manual burden on buyers and logistics teams. Kinaxis markets an AI-driven orchestration product that spans strategic planning through execution, offering scenario simulations and constraint-aware plans to balance service and cost. InterSystems describes its data-first approach as building a connective layer that unifies legacy enterprise systems, partner feeds and device telemetry to deliver prescriptive guidance in minutes rather than days.</p> <p>Successful adoption, however, hinges on more than software. Practitioners caution that treating orchestration as a point technology leads to fragmented pilots and ephemeral dashboards. Sustainable change requires a governance function that owns the data architecture, rule catalogue and performance metrics while embedding local operating knowledge from planners, procurement and logistics leads. The SupplyChain360 piece stresses the need for explicit playbooks and pre-agreed thresholds, who acts, which signals trigger automation and when issues escalate to cross-functional teams, to avoid ad hoc decision-making under pressure.</p> <p>Human factors remain a central barrier. Teams accustomed to siloed tools often resist transparency that exposes trade-offs between service, cost, cash and emissions. Change programmes must train staff to interpret forward-looking signals, to treat AI recommendations as structured inputs rather than automatic directives, and to appreciate how a single routing or allocation choice ripples through capacity and working capital.</p> <p>Sustainability imperatives are accelerating board-level interest in orchestration. End-to-end traceability improves Scope 3 emissions accounting and streamlines the capture of supplier and transport data required by emerging disclosure regimes. Flow optimisation that prioritises consolidation, smarter modal choices and leaner inventory can improve both environmental and financial performance when governed by deliberate rules, industry suppliers argue.</p> <p>As orchestration spreads, best practice is to begin with a tightly scoped use case that delivers visible value, transport exceptions, inbound supplier reliability or last-mile coordination in a specific market, then scale once governance, KPIs and playbooks prove effective. According to the vendor and analyst commentary synthesised here, organisations that combine a rigorous data foundation, clear accountability and iterative change management will realise material gains in resilience, commercial responsiveness and credible sustainability reporting. Those that do not may remain locked in manual coordination and after-the-fact remediation, unable to turn network signals into timely, aligned action.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69cfcb692bf65205b8d2d568Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:15:23 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/03/spendhq-acquires-sligo-ai-to-push-autonomous-procurement-in-regulated-sectors<p>SpendHQ’s full ownership of Sligo AI aims to embed autonomous, execution-capable AI into large-scale procurement operations, particularly in sectors with stringent regulatory and security standards, marking a significant shift towards agentic procurement platforms.</p><p>SpendHQ has taken full ownership of Sligo AI in a deal the companies say will embed autonomous, execution-capable artificial intelligence into large-scale procurement operations, particularly those with stringent regulatory and security demands.</p> <p>According to the report by Pulse2, the transaction pairs SpendHQ’s extensive repository of normalised procurement records , which the company says covers more than $10 trillion of analysed spend , with Sligo AI’s runtime and deployment tooling. The combination is intended to move organisations past AI systems that only surface recommendations, toward systems that can carry out procurement processes end-to-end under enterprise constraints.</p> <p>The combined offering is positioned at complex environments such as financial services, healthcare, defence and critical infrastructure, where data governance, compliance and sovereignty are central concerns. SpendHQ and Sligo AI say the merged platform will be able to run inside a customer’s own cloud, via managed infrastructure, or be embedded into existing enterprise stacks through APIs, and will integrate with ERPs, procurement suites, contract management tools and data warehouses. Those integration paths, the companies add, enable automation across activities including supplier evaluation, sourcing design and contract review.</p> <p>Industry and vendor accounts trace the relationship back to a strategic investment last October, when SpendHQ first backed Sligo AI to develop what the partners called an Agentic Enterprise Procurement platform. According to SpendHQ’s press materials, that initial collaboration established three deployment tracks , Sligo Enterprise, Sligo Cloud and Sligo API , to give buyers choices over security, control and operational model.</p> <p>SpendHQ framed the acquisition as a response to a common barrier to enterprise AI adoption: fragmented or untrustworthy data. “Agentic AI is only as good as the data it operates on. We’ve spent years building a trusted data foundation. Now with Sligo AI, we’re accelerating the path from insight to value, helping teams move faster and deliver even more strategic impact,” Scott Macfee, Chief Executive Officer of SpendHQ, said in a company announcement published by Pulse2.</p> <p>The purchase brings Sligo AI’s founder and chief executive, Matt McCarrick, into SpendHQ’s executive team as chief AI officer while the whole Sligo engineering and services group will join SpendHQ Solutions, the companies said in a joint statement. “We built Sligo AI with a focus on making AI work inside the constraints enterprises actually operate under. Joining SpendHQ gives us the foundation, resources, and scale to bring this capability to more procurement organisations than we could on our own,” McCarrick said in the announcement.</p> <p>Customers and consultants cited in the coverage described tangible shifts in how procurement teams could operate. Tony Brita, Director Strategic Sourcing at Compass Group, told Pulse2: “SpendHQ has been a foundational part of how we manage procurement intelligence. Adding AI that understands our data and workflows directly into the platform changes how quickly we can move.” Michael DeWitt, Chief Procurement Officer at QXO, Inc., said the approach has allowed his team to concentrate on strategy while “AI agents take on analytics and operational activities at scale.”</p> <p>Analysts noted the market implications of bringing agentic capabilities to regulated buyers. “Combining enterprise-ready deployment options with structured procurement data opens up use cases that weren’t previously possible. This acquisition will send shockwaves through the ProcureTech market. It represents an inflection point where the industry moves from co-pilots to platforms,” Dr Elouise Epstein, Partner &amp; Digital Futurist at Kearney, said in remarks reported by Pulse2.</p> <p>Trade and technology publications that covered the deal echoed the same themes: the acquisition aims to tackle enterprise deployment challenges by offering configurable runtimes that align with security and compliance requirements, while leveraging a large, normalised spend dataset to produce higher‑quality automation. Press releases and summaries from SpendHQ and PR Newswire described the intent to automate supplier assessments, sourcing strategy formation and contract analysis as near-term use cases.</p> <p>SpendHQ framed the move as a scale play: combining its data backbone with Sligo’s execution infrastructure to make agentic procurement feasible for organisations unwilling to cede control of sensitive systems or data. While vendors highlight efficiency gains and faster time-to-value, the companies’ materials stress that the options for where and how the agentic software runs are intended to preserve customer control over security posture and regulatory compliance.</p> <p>With Sligo AI integrated and its team onboard, SpendHQ is positioning itself to push beyond analytics and toward platforms that can act autonomously within defined boundaries. Whether that promise translates into broad adoption will depend on customers’ appetite for shifting decision authority to software agents, regulators’ tolerance for automated execution in high‑risk sectors, and the new platform’s ability to demonstrate measurable savings and compliance outcomes in live enterprise settings.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69cfeebf52f1bebc377d0d63Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:13:14 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/01/tribal-casinos-embrace-innovation-and-cultural-integration-at-iga-2026<p>The IGA 2026 showcase reveals how tribal gaming operations are integrating cultural heritage with advanced technology, sustainable practices, and strategic planning to shape the future of Native American gaming experiences.</p><p>Market suppliers aiming to equip tribal casinos for the next decade used the Indian Gaming Tradeshow &amp; Convention in San Diego to introduce new products, services and completed projects that together sketch how design, operations and technology are being reframed across Indian Country.</p> <p>According to the report by IndianGaming, procurement specialist Aurora Procurement Solutions showcased its end-to-end FF&amp;E and OSE services, offering single-source delivery from specification through installation for resort interiors. “Aurora Procurement Solutions is proud to exhibit at IGA 2026, where we’ll showcase our FF&amp;E procurement, delivery, and installation capabilities. We look forward to partnering with tribal nations to support their economic growth and community-driven initiatives.” Catherine Mika, the company’s EVP &amp; GM, pointed to recent large-scale room renovation work with Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures as an example of that capability.</p> <p>Design firms emphasised cultural integration and long-term planning as core differentiators. Bergman Walls &amp; Associates used its presence to stress immersive, place-based casino and resort design and the value of close consultation with tribal leadership. John Hinton, BWA’s Director of Native American Projects, said: “I always look forward to attending the IGA Show. The opportunity to catch up with connections and develop new relationships and attend a forum with its finger on the pulse of the industry is invaluable.” The firm’s Snoqualmie Casino &amp; Hotel expansion, featuring a 10‑storey hotel tower, enlarged casino floor and a 2,000‑seat entertainment centre, was highlighted as a recent transformational project.</p> <p>Cuningham, a national architecture and interiors practice, framed its booth around the industry’s shifting demand drivers: changing demographics, the rise of online gaming and technology-led experiences. According to Cuningham’s public materials, the firm is translating those pressures into designs that marry operational resilience with cultural storytelling, citing projects such as Wildhorse Resort &amp; Casino’s tower expansion and the newly opened Acorn Ridge Casino in California as illustrations.</p> <p>Specialist suppliers pointed to practical product innovation. Gasser Chair Company presented new seating lines from entry-level slot stools to ergonomic high-limit chairs and cited recent installations at properties including Hard Rock Hotel &amp; Casino Tejon and Acorn Ridge Casino as proof points. JCM Global demonstrated transaction and floor‑operations technologies, bill validators, mobile-wallet connectivity, count-room automation and digital signage, positioning those systems as ways to tighten security and lift guest engagement. According to JCM’s materials, its iVizion validators and Fuzion platform have been rolled out at a number of tribal properties across North America.</p> <p>Regulatory and security services also took centre stage. Gaming Laboratories International used the forum to emphasise its compliance and cybersecurity offerings, including the GLI Gaming Security Framework and training through GLI University. “We are honored to work with tribes across the U.S. to help them remain competitive in terms of gaming offerings, compliant in terms of regulation, and vigilant in terms of cybersecurity. There is no other firm who can provide the world-class services GLI provides, and we are excited to be at IGA and talk more about how we can help tribes of all sizes prepare for what’s next.” Kelly Myers, GLI’s Director of Government Affairs, outlined a panel examining modern internal controls and how factors such as IRS reporting thresholds, the decline of low-value coin play, and AI are reshaping audit and control design.</p> <p>Consultancies and systems integrators used the show to pitch strategic, revenue-facing solutions. HBG Design emphasised master planning that anticipates phased growth and multi‑purpose amenity design; the firm pointed to case studies including Ho‑Chunk Gaming Beloit and the Wawyé Oasis expansion at Gun Lake Casino Resort, which HBG says produced a measurable uplift in post‑expansion revenue. Quick Custom Intelligence promoted an agentic platform that embeds AI into daily workflows while keeping data on‑premise, citing a deeper deployment at Tulalip Resort Casino that expanded marketing and guest‑engagement capabilities. Rymax expanded its rewards catalogue at the show, underlining how curated merchandise and a robust fulfilment platform support modern loyalty programmes.</p> <p>Operational and infrastructure vendors outlined solutions aimed at lowering operating cost and enhancing resilience. Tarkett Hospitality emphasised tailored flooring systems and pattern customisation that can reflect tribal art and identity, showing work at 7 Cedars Hotel &amp; Casino as an example. Wipfli used its presence to explain how tribes can monetise recent changes to federal energy incentives and to showcase Salesforce-driven guest‑data platforms designed to deepen personalised service while protecting tribal data. “At the Indian Gaming Tradeshow &amp; Convention, Wipfli looks forward to highlighting solutions that deliver immediate and long-term value for tribal casinos. Our energy tax incentive services help tribal casinos leverage federal programs to offset the cost of clean energy investments like solar, geothermal, and energy storage, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables more personalized, data-driven patron engagement across digital channels.” Grant Eve, Wipfli partner and tribal industry lead, framed those offerings as tools for sustainability and smarter growth.</p> <p>Other exhibitors connected their product stories to regulatory or social needs: KlasRobinson Q.E.D. underscored the role of economic and social impact studies for land‑into‑trust and compact negotiations; TribalHub promoted Tribal‑ISAC and ongoing cybersecurity collaboration following a recent TribalHub Cybersecurity Summit; and TBE Architects highlighted large‑scale hospitality and tower renovations that blend cultural motifs with modern guest amenities.</p> <p>Taken together, the companies on display at IGA 2026 signalled a sector focused on integration, of culture and design, of digital systems with operations, and of sustainability with fiscal strategy. For tribal nations weighing reinvestment or new development, the trade show underlined that choices about materials, seating, payments, analytics and infrastructure are now tightly connected to competitive positioning, regulatory compliance and long‑term community outcomes.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c5bf27bdab41b03c681d9aWed, 01 Apr 2026 08:35:22 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/01/supply-chain-ai-transforms-from-cautious-pilot-to-strategic-driver-amid-emerging-security-risks<p>As procurement leaders shift from scepticism to strategic trust in AI, companies are reaping tangible benefits while navigating new security vulnerabilities, marking a pivotal moment in supply chain innovation.</p><p>Two years ago, many procurement leaders approached artificial intelligence cautiously. Today some are moving from scepticism to selective trust, deploying systems that augment decision-making while they contend with unresolved risks in the wider supply chain ecosystem.</p> <p>At Hexion, the chemicals group that last December completed the acquisition of Smartech, the transformation is tangible. According to the company announcement, the deal was designed to weave AI-driven autonomous manufacturing capabilities into Hexion’s operations and customer offerings in order to lift efficiency, cut waste and improve product quality. The shift in mindset is reflected in comments from Hexion’s chief procurement officer, Gael De Martelaere, who warned that waiting for flawless AI could leave companies behind: "somebody else is way ahead of you."</p> <p>Practical wins are emerging across sectors. Manufacturers, logistics firms and even mattress makers report measurable benefits when AI is focused on narrow, well-defined tasks. Essentia Organic Mattress’s founder Jack Dell’Accio built bespoke tools that plug into his open-source Odoo ERP so sales, purchase orders and freight fluctuations feed procurement forecasts in near real time. The result, he says, is tighter stock control and freed-up cash from abandoning spreadsheet-driven planning. "Like a new employee, eventually trust [in AI] is built," he added.</p> <p>Healthcare logistics providers describe a similar pattern: limit scope, verify sources and rebuild models from current, authoritative documents to avoid dangerous drift. Mercury’s CEO Josh Medow described how reliability improved only after isolating the chatbot from broader datasets and retraining it on verified, up-to-date material. "We've really limited it," he said, explaining that tighter constraints produced more dependable answers for logistics coordinators. Even so, Medow stopped short of full autonomy for complex, multi-party decisions: "I can't see that in the near future."</p> <p>Beyond task automation, proponents argue the most valuable role for AI in logistics is early warning. Shane Curtis, chief technology officer at defence intelligence firm Artorias, said systems that ingest public feeds, social media, traffic and shipping reports, alongside internal data can flag weak points before disruptions cascade. "It's a manpower multiplier more than anything," he said. Blue Yonder, a supply chain software provider, echoes this emphasis on threat awareness and has been working on published vulnerability frameworks for large language models while red teaming its agents to uncover possible supply-chain exploits.</p> <p>Yet those defensive efforts respond to an accelerating security challenge. Analysis from specialist platforms warns that AI introduces new classes of supply-chain vulnerabilities: model poisoning, compromised shared prompts and third-party toolchains that fall outside conventional cyber defences. According to TraxTech, the pace of AI adoption is outstripping protective measures, creating blind spots across supplier networks. That risk is compounded when organisations bolt generative or agentic systems onto legacy infrastructure without embedding them into core workflows or oversight processes, a weakness highlighted by TechRadarPro.</p> <p>The gulf between potential and peril helps explain why adoption is uneven. A survey cited by IT Pro shows only around 32% of UK firms had integrated AI into supply-chain operations, reflecting barriers such as legacy systems, data quality issues and executive caution. Industry consultants warn that mistakes have direct financial consequences: missed deliveries can trigger penalties that harm top and bottom lines and damage customer trust.</p> <p>For forward-leaning companies the route is disciplined and incremental. Hexion’s roadmap includes a mix of vendor tools and in-house projects; the firm is planning multiple procurement use cases over the next 18 months and is recruiting product leadership to embed AI into procurement and logistics workflows, according to its careers posting. Other firms are prioritising limited, high-adoption pilots over broad but shallow rollouts. As De Martelaere put it, deployment count matters less than use and uptake: he prefers a small number of tools that achieve full adoption over many that sit unused.</p> <p>The immediate imperative for supply-chain executives is therefore twofold: harvest the tangible benefits of narrow, verified AI applications while investing in governance, security testing and integration so more ambitious agentic capabilities do not introduce unacceptable risk. As the technology matures, businesses that balance cautious implementation with proactive defence and workflow integration appear best placed to convert AI’s promise into resilient operational advantage.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c30776902c8d702746d71eWed, 01 Apr 2026 08:35:18 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/01/ai-driven-procurement-platforms-reshape-strategic-sourcing-amid-data-and-implementation-challenges<p>Organisations are increasingly adopting AI-enabled procurement solutions to streamline sourcing, improve decision-making, and elevate procurement to a strategic level, despite facing hurdles like data quality and organisational change.</p><p>Organisations are moving away from manually intensive, fragmented purchasing routines towards procurement platforms that embed artificial intelligence across sourcing, contracting and supplier management. Vendors such as Levelpath present AI-led systems as a way to shorten decision cycles, raise visibility and convert procurement from an administrative overhead into a strategic function.</p> <p>At their core, these solutions combine machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics to automate routine workflows, structure unstandardised requests and surface insights from large volumes of spend and supplier data. In practice that means automating tasks such as purchase-request routing and supplier evaluation, extracting contract clauses and renewal dates, and producing near‑real‑time analytics on spend patterns, supplier performance and compliance obligations. According to the Levelpath commentary, platforms built with AI at their foundation, rather than as add‑ons, enable tighter workflow integration and faster user adoption.</p> <p>The operational gains are tangible. AI can compress cycle times by removing manual handoffs; reveal cost‑saving opportunities through spend analysis; and help procurement teams anticipate supply‑chain disruption by flagging risks earlier. Industry guides from GEP and case summaries collected by TechTarget highlight common use cases: improved spend classification, automated contract intelligence, better risk management and more consistent supplier performance monitoring. These capabilities support a shift from transactional purchasing to longer‑term supplier collaboration and strategic sourcing.</p> <p>Yet the road to transformation is not frictionless. Multiple analyses warn that the technology’s promise depends heavily on an organisation’s data and systems landscape. TechTarget and Procol.ai both identify poor data quality and data silos as leading causes of failed AI procurement projects. SpecLens notes that many initiatives falter because organisations lack data readiness, clean, consistent, tagged records and reliable master data are prerequisites for models to produce useful outputs. Legacy systems and fragmented stacks further complicate integration, a point underscored in reporting on AI in supply chains published by Forbes, which describes how system fragmentation and underutilised data constrain AI’s effectiveness.</p> <p>Beyond technical barriers, human and ethical factors matter. Stakeholder resistance, skills gaps within procurement teams and concerns about algorithmic transparency can slow adoption, according to TechTarget’s overview of implementation challenges. Proactive change management, training users, redefining processes and setting clear governance, is therefore as important as technology selection. Organisations will also need to confront ethical and compliance risks that arise when models make or recommend decisions affecting suppliers and contractual commitments.</p> <p>Successful deployments typically combine several pragmatic steps. Start with a focused use case that offers measurable return, examples include automated spend classification or contract renewal tracking, and pilot it using a limited, high‑quality dataset. Invest in data hygiene and master‑data management before scaling. Ensure integrations are designed to bridge, not replicate, legacy systems so that a central procurement platform becomes the single source of truth. Finally, build governance that explains model behaviour and preserves human oversight for sensitive decisions.</p> <p>Looking ahead, vendors and commentators foresee more agentic AI capabilities: autonomous agents that can manage end‑to‑end sourcing tasks, increasingly sophisticated predictive analytics and tighter collaboration tools for suppliers and internal stakeholders. GEP and Forbes both project that as those features mature, procurement will play a larger role in enterprise resilience and value creation rather than serving solely as a cost‑containment function.</p> <p>Adoption will remain uneven. Organisations with clean, connected data and a disciplined change‑management programme stand to capture the most value; those that neglect foundational data work, integration or governance risk underwhelming results. The strategic opportunity is clear: when organisations pair AI‑native platforms with deliberate implementation practices, procurement can evolve into a faster, more transparent and more strategically influential part of the business.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69ca3fb7dd2b21685ebb852cWed, 01 Apr 2026 08:34:25 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/01/transforming-vehicle-stops-into-strategic-opportunities-for-supply-chain-optimisation<p>As delays at vehicle stops increasingly drain profit, innovative digital solutions are emerging to turn these pauses into opportunities for enhanced control, reduced costs, and improved operational efficiency across the logistics industry.</p><p>The moment a vehicle comes to rest is increasingly where supply chains lose both time and money. While planning algorithms and GPS tracks give the impression of tight control, execution frequently unravels at pauses: congested docks, unexplained halts between deliveries, or inadvertent breaches of urban restrictions. What dashboards portray as flowing operations can, on the ground, become a cascade of hidden costs and broken promises.</p> <p>Real-world delays compound quickly. A truck queuing at a full dock for an hour and a half generates immediate detention exposure; a vehicle that strays into a restricted zone may trigger fines; a driver who stops for an unrecorded break breaks the audit trail. Industry observers estimate that detention and idle-time losses are substantial: mid-size carriers may face annual hits in the hundreds of thousands, and in extreme cases between $500,000 and $1 million, driven by high per-hour detention rates and a large share of affected loads, according to an analysis by Resultantai. Project44’s industry guidance explains how detention accrues beyond stipulated free time and why carriers seek compensation for the lost utilisation of equipment.</p> <p>These losses are rooted in visibility and control gaps. Many operations still depend on drivers to supply arrival and departure information, introducing delays, omissions, and inaccuracies in records. That manual dependency undermines billing, makes detention claims hard to substantiate and leaves compliance rules, time windows, vehicle limitations and urban prohibitions, unenforced until penalties arrive. Tacto.ai’s logistics lexicon highlights detention as a drag on efficiency, noting that poor coordination and missing paperwork are common causes and that digital scheduling and precise timekeeping can materially reduce such fees.</p> <p>The consequences extend beyond fees. Idle vehicles reduce effective capacity: analyses point to significant capacity wastage when trucks sit unused a large fraction of the time, contributing to shorter-term shortages and raising per-mile costs. Tachyonhub describes how weak fleet visibility degrades control over driving behaviour, idle time and route adherence, while PCSsoft has documented the financial pressure of detention pay for drivers and the operational headaches of delayed reimbursements from shippers or brokers.</p> <p>Addressing the problem requires treating a stop as an event to be measured and managed, not merely a point on a map. Precision geofencing around facilities and retail outlets can replace vague location signals with definitive entry and exit markers. Automated timestamping while a vehicle is on-site creates an auditable trail for detention recovery and for internal performance analysis. Halt-detection logic that flags unscheduled or prolonged stoppages enables immediate intervention; integrating urban compliance constraints prevents breaches before fines are issued. Project44 and FreightAmigo both point to improved dock scheduling and real-time visibility tools as practical measures to avoid detention and demurrage charges.</p> <p>The business impact of closing the stop-related visibility gap is tangible. Recoverable detention charges add directly to revenue realisation; better-managed dwell time increases fleet throughput; and proactive alerts reduce penalties and protect reputation. FreightAmigo’s research suggests that better planning and visibility can cut demurrage and detention exposure substantially, while Tacto.ai indicates that digital systems can lower detention by large margins when paired with clear contractual downtime terms. Resultantai finds automation and optimisation can materially lift fleet productivity and revenue.</p> <p>Operational workflows change when stops are controlled. Instead of dispatch teams spending hours chasing status updates by phone, they can focus on exception management and strategic routing. Companies that adopt end-to-end halt monitoring and enforceable scheduling often see measurable gains: higher on-time performance, lower per-delivery cost and improved customer communication through automated ETA revisions.</p> <p>The remedy is not a single technology but an integrated approach: precise location controls, automated dwell accounting, halt anomaly detection, rules-driven urban compliance and scalable configuration for thousands of sites. Where those elements are combined, stops cease to be a hidden drain and become instead moments of actionable intelligence that protect margins and service levels.</p> <p>The logistics industry’s next efficiency frontier lies not in moving goods faster but in understanding and managing what happens when movement pauses. Converting every halt into a documented, controllable milestone will be essential for operators seeking to reclaim lost revenue, reduce fines and make better use of scarce fleet assets.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69cbf6b242e11f04b1458cfeWed, 01 Apr 2026 08:34:20 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/04/01/how-procurement-analytics-is-transforming-supply-chain-resilience-and-cost-savings<p>As procurement teams shift from manual processes to data-driven insights, industry experts highlight how advanced analytics and AI are unlocking significant savings, risk management, and supplier performance improvements, redefining supply chain resilience.</p><p>Many procurement teams still wrestle with fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes that obscure where money is spent and which suppliers deliver value. The result is wasted time, missed savings and weakened resilience across supply chains. Yet organisations that adopt robust procurement analytics can close those gaps: industry reports and vendor studies consistently show measurable cost reductions and sharper decision-making when data is used as the primary tool for sourcing and supplier management.</p> <p>A data-first approach unifies spend records, supplier performance indicators, contracts and market signals to form a single operational picture. According to Fortune Business Insights, the US procurement analytics market is expanding rapidly and is projected to be worth $1.54 billion in 2026. Mordor Intelligence notes that risk analytics is the fastest-growing sub‑segment as companies prioritise supply‑chain resilience. Meanwhile, McKinsey finds that statistical modelling and advanced analytics typically yield procurement savings in the mid single digits, and other consultancies and vendor reports cite larger reductions when category management and AI-driven capabilities are added.</p> <p>What procurement analytics does, in practical terms, is replace episodic, retrospective reporting with continuous, actionable intelligence. Core capabilities include: - Spend analysis that reconciles invoices, purchase orders and payment records to reveal where cash actually flows. - Supplier performance monitoring that aggregates on‑time delivery, defect rates and lead‑time adherence into comparable metrics. - Contract analytics that surfaces renewal dates, unusual clauses and non‑compliance risks. - Risk and sustainability overlays that combine supplier financial health, geopolitical indicators and ESG metrics into supplier scores.</p> <p>These building blocks support three distinct but intertwined outcomes. First, better decisions: real‑time dashboards and prescriptive recommendations reduce reliance on instinct and enable category managers to prioritise opportunities that will move the needle. A McKinsey analysis highlights how using historical transaction data strengthens negotiation leverage; a Gartner study cited in industry reporting links cognitive procurement tools to improvements in forecast accuracy. Second, cost reduction and efficiency: studies from EY and sector research show that structured category management and centralised sourcing can deliver double‑digit savings on targeted categories and speed up sourcing cycles. Third, improved supplier management and risk control: automated KPI tracking and predictive alerts expose weak links such as single‑source dependencies or suppliers with deteriorating financials, allowing pre‑emptive action.</p> <p>The evolution has been rapid. The analytics stack has progressed from manual spreadsheet reconciliation to platforms that integrate ERP and AP data with external market feeds and apply machine learning for anomaly detection, demand forecasting and contract risk scoring. Industry vendors now offer cloud‑native solutions with embedded AI that can automatically classify transactions, surface price creep and propose consolidation actions. Procurement teams that pilot these tools routinely free analysts from time‑consuming reporting; vendor benchmarks suggest reporting workload can fall dramatically once data is centralised and normalised.</p> <p>Despite the gains, implementation is not frictionless. Data quality and integration remain the most common blockers: supplier names split across systems, siloed contract repositories and stale pricing inputs quickly undermine analytics outputs. An EY survey highlighted material losses tied to flawed AI outputs when upstream data is poor. Organisations that succeed invest first in data governance, cleaning master vendor lists, standardising taxonomies and ensuring contracts are machine‑readable, before layering advanced models on top.</p> <p>People and process change are equally critical. Procurement functions report skills gaps and cultural resistance as obstacles to adoption. Practical steps that have worked include small, focused pilots that demonstrate quick wins, role‑based training in BI tools and certification programmes to build internal capability. Celebrating early successes and tying performance metrics to analytics adoption help shift behaviour from sporadic use to continuous improvement.</p> <p>Use cases where analytics delivers clear ROI are numerous: - Strategic sourcing and category management: combining internal spend data with market intelligence reveals where to consolidate suppliers and negotiate volume discounts. - Risk management: predictive models identify suppliers at financial or operational risk, enabling contingency planning. - Source‑to‑pay optimisation: automated PO‑invoice matching and spend controls eliminate duplicate purchases and maverick buying, shortening cycle times and lowering processing costs. - Sustainability and CSR: integrating ESG scores with spend data allows procurement teams to weigh carbon impact and ethical compliance alongside price and quality.</p> <p>Organisations can choose different starting points depending on size and maturity. Smaller teams may adopt cloud platforms designed for rapid setup to address immediate spend visibility problems, while larger enterprises often prioritise ERP integration and advanced AI pilots for complex categories. Across the board, the trend is toward tightly coupled internal and external data: internal invoices and POs show what was spent yesterday, external commodity indices and supplier intelligence indicate what should be paid tomorrow.</p> <p>Emerging capabilities amplify the opportunity. Machine learning accelerates anomaly detection, demand forecasting and contract risk scoring, while generative AI is beginning to be used to draft sourcing strategies and automate routine supplier communications. Surveys of procurement leaders show growing budget allocation to AI and analytics as a strategic priority.</p> <p>For procurement leaders the imperative is simple: start deliberately and build momentum. Begin with a focused use case, spend consolidation in a high‑value category, contract renewal tracking or supplier scorecards, clean and connect the necessary data sources, and measure outcomes. Governance, training and change management must accompany technology choices to realise the promised savings. When those pieces align, procurement analytics becomes not just a reporting capability but a competitive advantage that reduces cost, improves supplier performance and strengthens supply‑chain resilience.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69cb09db7c37210ae7ac05dbWed, 01 Apr 2026 08:34:17 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/26/shifting-procurement-from-the-margins-to-the-centre-of-corporate-nature-strategies<p>Despite corporate pledges, influence over everyday spending remains limited; integrating nature considerations into procurement could drive measurable ecological recovery and better manage risks linked to supply chains.</p><p>Most corporate commitments to protect nature remain peripheral to everyday commercial decision-making. They are visible in sustainability reports, pledges and boardroom risk registers but too often fail to influence where companies actually allocate their spending. That gulf matters because purchased goods and services frequently account for the bulk of a firm’s nature-related impacts and exposures. If businesses are serious about reducing harm to ecosystems or managing nature-linked risks, procurement must move from the margins to the centre of strategy.</p> <p>Understanding how purchases connect to natural systems is the starting point. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures defines nature to include land, water, oceans, air and the ecosystems that sustain economic activity, and highlights how business dependencies and impacts create tangible risks such as supply disruption from water scarcity or regulatory and reputational fallout from deforestation. According to the Natural Capital Coalition, practical decision-making requires visibility into where commodities originate, in what quantities, and how extraction and production interact with local ecosystems so procurement teams can prioritise the most material exposures.</p> <p>A commodity-led approach makes strategic sense because the greatest pressures on nature often occur at the point of extraction. Companies should map sourcing geographies and volumes to assess dependencies on services such as pollination, soil fertility and freshwater availability, and to quantify risks tied to pollution, land conversion and ecosystem decline. Industry guidance from CDP and others stresses that embedding such data at supplier level enables procurement to compare suppliers on nature-related risks and to factor these assessments directly into sourcing decisions.</p> <p>Reducing demand must be treated as a legitimate procurement outcome. Circular economy measures, extending asset lifetimes, repairing rather than replacing equipment, sharing resources across teams or postponing non-essential upgrades, often deliver larger reductions in environmental pressure than supplier switching alone. Global Canopy’s Little Blue Book of Nature Business catalogues many sector-specific options and encourages procurement teams to consider “do not buy” or circular alternatives as proper results of buying processes.</p> <p>At the same time, buyers should invest in their supplier relationships. Many suppliers possess the operational capacity to lower impacts if given clear expectations, data and support. Practical steps include asking suppliers to disclose their nature impacts and mitigation plans, co-developing transition roadmaps, setting measurable targets and tracking progress. According to the Natural Capital Coalition, procurement contracts can reinforce these ambitions by linking supplier performance to environmental outcomes and by offering incentives that do not necessarily raise costs, such as longer contracts, improved payment terms or collaborative technical assistance.</p> <p>Successful examples show how long-term commercial partnerships can change practices at scale. Tesco’s Sustainable Dairy Group, cited by the retailer as a decade-plus collaboration with farmers, pairs guaranteed prices and long contracts with support for animal welfare, carbon reduction and nature recovery. That model demonstrates how an incentive structure built into procurement can enable suppliers to invest in ecological improvements without destabilising their businesses.</p> <p>Where incumbent suppliers cannot meet new standards, procurement must be prepared to reallocate demand to lower-impact providers. This requires integrating robust nature-risk metrics into tendering processes so sourcing teams can favour producers operating in lower-deforestation landscapes or in watersheds with more sustainable water management. CDP and TNFD guidance both emphasise the importance of firm-level data to make such comparisons actionable.</p> <p>Embedding nature into procurement is not a quick compliance exercise but a strategic transformation of daily buying choices. Government disclosure rules and voluntary reporting frameworks are converging on nature-related transparency, which will increase the commercial consequences of inaction. Industry analysis suggests companies that move early will spot exposures sooner, create stronger supplier partnerships, and gain competitive advantage as markets and regulators tighten.</p> <p>Procurement thus represents the frontline of the nature transition. Every tender, contract and sourcing decision influences how natural resources are used across global supply chains, and those decisions will determine whether corporate nature strategies amount to pledges or to measurable recovery of the ecosystems on which business depends.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c2eaf7902c8d702746d0eaThu, 26 Mar 2026 21:59:38 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/24/apteans-logility-builds-its-lead-as-a-supply-chain-ai-pioneer-in-gartners-2026-evaluations<p>Aptean’s Logility has been recognised as a leader in supply chain planning software in two 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, highlighting its focus on AI-driven, decision-centric solutions ahead of industry rivals.</p><p>Aptean’s Logility unit has been placed in the Leaders quadrant in two separate 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant evaluations for supply chain planning software, the company said in a statement issued on 24 March 2026. According to the announcement, Logility was recognised in both the Supply Chain Planning Solutions: Process Industries and the Supply Chain Planning Solutions: Discrete Industries reports and is among four vendors named a Leader in both categories.</p> <p>The firm said its platform moves organisations away from static planning toward “decision centric” operations that combine intelligence, automation and execution in real time. Aptean highlighted Logility’s use of what it calls Agentic AI to enable event-driven autonomous planning and orchestration across the end-to-end supply chain.</p> <p>“We believe this level of recognition reflects Logility’s continued commitment to delivering tangible and measurable outcomes for our customers,” said Allan Dow, EVP/General Manager, Aptean. “Our AI-powered, decision-centric solutions help organizations plan, execute, and adapt across the full scope of their operations. Whether it’s providing instant answers, automating tedious and time-consuming tasks, or surfacing and then executing scenarios based on real-time information, the Logility Decision Intelligence Platform lets supply chain leaders move from reacting to anticipating.”</p> <p>“Aptean’s continued investment in advanced AI and integrating new capabilities across our broader portfolio reinforces Logility’s position as the intelligence core of an autonomous, AI-enabled supply chain platform,” said TVN Reddy, CEO, Aptean.</p> <p>Gartner’s Magic Quadrant methodology assesses vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, a framework that has been used across consecutive annual reports to compare providers of supply chain planning technology. Recent iterations of the evaluation have featured a broad set of competitors spanning legacy ERP and specialist planning vendors, underscoring the crowded and fast-evolving nature of the market. Industry summaries show the analyst firm has repeatedly assessed a similar competitive set in prior years, reflecting both continuity and incremental change in vendor capabilities.</p> <p>Logility’s recognition comes after Aptean completed its acquisition of the company in April 2025, a deal the buyer said last year was designed to create an integrated, end-to-end planning experience and accelerate AI-led capabilities. Aptean showcased further AI-driven execution and enterprise decisioning at its Manifest 2026 event in February, emphasising unified orchestration across planning, manufacturing execution and transportation functions.</p> <p>Analysts and market trackers have also noted separate vendor accolades for Logility in related areas such as supply chain network design, signalling wider industry attention to the platform’s optimisation and scenario-modelling tools. Nevertheless, the Magic Quadrant itself carries Gartner’s standard disclaimer that inclusion or positioning does not constitute an endorsement and that its publications are the opinions of the analyst firm.</p> <p>The company has offered readers complimentary access to the two Gartner reports via its own web pages. Aptean said the placements validate ongoing investment in AI and indicate momentum for what it describes as a shift from reactive to anticipatory supply chain operations.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c26be643917267188574aeTue, 24 Mar 2026 15:01:22 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/24/digital-twins-and-generative-ai-revolutionise-predictive-maintenance-in-industry<p>Advancements in digital twin technology and generative AI are transforming predictive maintenance, enabling industries to anticipate failures, optimise operations, and enhance resilience through smarter, data-driven decisions.</p><p>Industrial operations have moved beyond an era defined solely by machines and production lines; competitiveness increasingly depends on the systems that translate streams of sensor readings into timely, actionable foresight. As the Industrial Internet of Things knits together equipment, control systems and enterprise data, mere connectivity is no longer the end goal. The decisive change comes when data is harnessed to anticipate events and guide decisions, and predictive analytics is at the heart of that shift.</p> <p>Factories, refineries, warehouses and fleets now generate high-velocity signals, vibration, temperature, pressure, acoustic and environmental metrics, augmented by maintenance logs, production schedules and business systems. Left unmanaged this torrent of information is fragmented and reactive. Predictive analytics provides the interpretive layer that unifies historical patterns with live telemetry, spotting incipient faults, forecasting remaining useful life and turning transient anomalies into early warnings that teams can act on before disruption occurs.</p> <p>Predictive maintenance remains the clearest early win. Moving away from calendar-based servicing and break‑fix responses, analytic models correlate multi-sensor signatures with failure histories and operating context to pinpoint when interventions are genuinely needed. The outcome is more targeted downtime, lower spare-parts inventory and extended asset life. When applied enterprise-wide, analytics can benchmark equipment health against manufacturer specifications and operating environments, enabling standardised strategies that nonetheless respect local conditions.</p> <p>That asset-level intelligence scales through digital twins, continuously updated virtual replicas of machines, production lines or whole sites. Digital twins allow engineers to rehearse changes, stress-test scenarios and optimise configurations without risking live operations. Recent work shows that coupling generative AI techniques such as GANs and VAEs with digital twins improves their realism by producing synthetic failure data and rare-event scenarios absent from historical records; this enrichment raises prediction accuracy and supports more robust maintenance planning, according to a review of generative-AI-driven digital-twin research. Academic syntheses also point to an evolving AI-enabled digital twin architecture that blends predictive, explainable and context-aware modalities to increase autonomy and interoperability across manufacturing systems.</p> <p>Generative models do more than fill data gaps. They accelerate experimentation inside virtualised environments, enabling millions of what-if simulations to explore degradation trajectories and maintenance trade-offs rapidly. Meanwhile, edge AI and machine-learning augmented twins deploy inference closer to sensors, delivering low-latency detection for time-critical use cases while reserving cloud resources for heavier model training and cross-site learning. A review of digital-twin and edge-AI integration highlights how this combination supports predictive maintenance, quality control and process optimisation across diverse industrial settings.</p> <p>The potential gains are tangible. An agent-based IIoT framework combining data-centric modelling and AI-driven decision support showed material operational improvements in experimental evaluations, reporting performance uplifts of roughly 20% and resource consumption reductions near 15% compared with conventional IoT approaches. These findings underline how analytics-driven orchestration can raise throughput and reduce waste when models are embedded into operational workflows.</p> <p>Beyond maintenance, predictive analytics underpins quality control and energy management. By elevating monitoring upstream, manufacturers can detect small process drifts, thermal, humidity, visual or acoustic, that presage defects, reducing scrap, rework and customer disputes. In energy-constrained settings, models that fuse historical consumption with production plans, weather forecasts and market signals allow firms to predict demand, manage peak loads and inform scheduling decisions that lower costs and emissions. Such visibility also supports more credible sustainability reporting and compliance.</p> <p>Analytics also extends into supply chains and logistics. Layering predictive models on top of GPS, inventory and transport data produces anticipatory supply-chain intelligence: forecasts of demand swings, early identification of transport disruptions and fleet diagnostics that reduce the likelihood of breakdowns en route. In a world of geopolitical uncertainty and climate risk, this anticipatory capability bolsters resilience and responsiveness.</p> <p>Human safety and ergonomics benefit as well. Wearable sensors and environmental monitors feed predictive models that detect fatigue, hazardous exposure or unsafe proximity, enabling pre-emptive interventions. Rather than displacing operators, predictive systems are most effective when they augment human judgement, reducing cognitive load and surfacing the most relevant, time-sensitive insights to support decisions on the plant floor.</p> <p>Emerging capabilities in generative and agentic AI promise to broaden the remit of predictive systems. Generative AI supports scenario generation and design optimisation; agentic systems, autonomous agents confined by governance rules, can run closed-loop processes that detect anomalies, diagnose root causes and initiate corrective actions. When multiple agents coordinate across maintenance, production and logistics, the potential is a shift from siloed optimisation to system-wide improvement.</p> <p>Despite the upside, scaling predictive analytics remains difficult. Data quality and integration are perennial obstacles: sensor streams, legacy control systems and enterprise records often require extensive preprocessing and feature engineering. Real-time needs push intelligence to the edge, while continuous learning and model refinement demand cloud scale. Interoperability and standards lag behind heterogeneous industrial estates, and the complexity of retrofitting older assets constrains rollout. Workforce readiness, trust in model outputs and change management are as consequential as the underlying technology.</p> <p>Cybersecurity further complicates adoption. Transmitting operational data across networks exposes manufacturing processes to manipulation, espionage and safety risks. Industry commentary stresses that encryption, strong authentication, network segmentation and intrusion detection are essential controls, and it highlights the difficulty of achieving global standardisation given regional regulation and legacy infrastructure. Securing the analytic pipeline, from sensor provenance to model integrity, must be integral to any deployment.</p> <p>Research and reviews point to a pragmatic path forward. Hybrid architectures that place inference at the edge while aggregating anonymised data to the cloud for continuous model training preserve latency and scale. Augmenting digital twins with synthetic data and explainable-AI layers improves both reliability and operator trust. Agent-based and autonomous approaches should be introduced incrementally within bounded rulesets, with human oversight retained for critical decisions.</p> <p>When organisations combine robust data management, layered AI models, careful security and a focus on human-centred design, predictive analytics moves from a pilot technology to the nervous system of industrial enterprises. The most advanced adopters are already blending predictive and generative techniques to create adaptive systems that forecast problems, propose interventions and, where governance allows, execute corrective actions. As IIoT ecosystems mature, those that make foresight a core capability, rather than an add-on, will shape the next wave of industrial performance, resilience and sustainability.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69bbc176d85cb0be34fcd685Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:01:01 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/24/how-ai-and-continuous-supplier-oversight-are-transforming-procurement-in-2026<p>Organisations are shifting towards strategic ecosystems, leveraging continuous supplier oversight and AI-driven insights to enhance agility, resilience, and innovation in procurement processes amid ongoing inflationary pressures.</p><p>Procurement in 2026 is being recast around information, relationships and new skill sets rather than solely cost cutting. Insights drawn from a recent Ardent Partners webinar with Andrew Bartolini and Vishal Patel, and from industry reporting, show organisations treating suppliers as strategic ecosystems whose stability, innovation and agility directly affect competitive position.</p> <p>Where supplier risk was once assessed episodically, companies are moving to continuous oversight. Modern platforms fuse transactional records, interactions and third‑party feeds to deliver site‑level visibility of financial health, operational performance and exposure to geopolitical or regulatory shocks. According to Ardent Partners’ discussion, that always‑on stance permits firms to shift from firefighting to designing continuity into supply networks. Industry commentary underscores the point: comprehensive supplier mapping and unified data are prerequisites for rapid responses to tariffs, trade barriers and sudden cost swings.</p> <p>Inflationary pressures remain a persistent backdrop. Reports note that suppliers are increasingly building price escalations into contracts and that protection of margins will depend on combining market intelligence, cost transparency and disciplined negotiations. Analysis from SpecLens indicates early AI deployments in procurement have already produced meaningful efficiency and cost outcomes, with adopters reporting 15–30% cost savings and substantial reductions in manual processing time. Those gains make data and insight the central tools for distinguishing legitimate inflation from opportunistic increases.</p> <p>Technology is reshaping roles within procurement. As intelligent systems take on routine tasks, the traditional model that relied on low‑cost human labour is undercut. Instead of trimming teams, many forward‑looking organisations are reallocating capacity toward supplier collaboration, cross‑functional influence and high‑value decision making. Procurement professionals are therefore expected to combine domain expertise with technological fluency, understanding how AI systems are built, governed and iterated. Gartner forecasts similar shifts in talent acquisition: recruiting, early career programmes and assessor roles will evolve as AI handles volume tasks and human work moves to more complex responsibilities.</p> <p>The year ahead is also one of experimentation, not blanket deployment. Multiple sources predict 2026 will see organisations moving from isolated pilots to scaled AI adoption. FindMyFactory projects that a large majority of firms intend to scale AI implementations within the year, and that AI agents will increasingly be embedded into operational workflows. ProcurementMag and KodiaKHub describe a broader transition toward AI‑native procurement, where connected capabilities , from automated should‑costing to AI‑guided negotiations and specification optimisation , form orchestrated value chains. McKinsey similarly argues that AI agents and automation can free procurement to be more strategic and responsive.</p> <p>Supplier management itself is being elevated as a source of advantage. Companies investing in collaborative supplier models, transparent data sharing and co‑innovation are better placed to respond to disruption. Technology supports this evolution by enriching supplier profiles through ongoing transactions, third‑party inputs and interaction data, enabling more nuanced segmentation and proactive engagement.</p> <p>For leaders preparing their organisations, the practical implications are clear. Build systems that deliver continuous supplier intelligence; align procurement talent programmes to develop technology literacy alongside commercial acumen; treat AI initiatives as a portfolio of experiments to be measured and scaled; and refocus metrics of success beyond savings to include resilience, innovation and speed to market. As Ardent Partners’ webinar emphasised, the most successful procurement teams will be those that weave technology, people and supplier strategy into an integrated capability that creates enduring value.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c154b0ddee4f0d12399499Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:00:12 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/24/saps-embedded-ai-revolutionises-retail-operations-ahead-of-2026-surge<p>Retailers are increasingly integrating AI into core systems, with SAP leading a shift towards platform-level intelligence designed to enhance demand forecasting, personalised marketing, and supply chain resilience by 2026.</p><p>Retailers in 2026 are reshaping their operations around embedded artificial intelligence, moving beyond isolated tools toward AI woven into the fabric of merchandising, supply chains and customer experience. What began as point solutions for forecasting and personalisation has matured into platform-level systems that promise real-time decisioning across stores, warehouses and online channels.</p> <p>At the centre of this shift is SAP’s strategy to place AI inside the core of its retail suite. According to SAP’s announcement at NRF 2026, the vendor is rolling out a new generation of AI-enhanced retail capabilities designed to help merchants run “with greater intelligence, resilience and trust.” The company says these capabilities extend from demand and inventory planning to personalised marketing and sustainability tracking. Industry coverage calls the initiative an AI-enabled retail operating system intended to unify data from SAP applications and third-party sources to power actionable insights. </p> <p>How retailers will use that consolidated intelligence is becoming clearer. SAP describes a layered architecture in which a foundational cloud platform hosts data, an AI runtime executes models and a generative-AI hub produces shopper-facing content and recommendations. SAP’s vision also includes an assistant layer , marketed as a conversational interface for operations teams , to translate analytics into concrete actions such as automated reorder proposals or promotional suggestions. According to reporting by PYMNTS and SAP’s own materials, the Retail Intelligence solution in SAP Business Data Cloud is a key component, ingesting cross-system data to improve demand sensing and inventory accuracy.</p> <p>Beyond technology plumbing, SAP is urging a change to how product information is prepared. The company argues that agentic commerce , a future in which AI agents initiate shopping journeys on behalf of consumers , requires product data to be machine-readable, semantically summarised and tagged by the problems products solve. SAP told attendees that retailers who restructure back-office data to those standards will be better positioned for discovery, payments and trust in an AI-driven ecosystem. Coverage of the NRF briefings emphasised that these are not optional upgrades but preparatory steps for an anticipated surge in generative-AI interaction between buyers and commerce systems.</p> <p>The practical benefits that vendors and early adopters cite are familiar but now framed as system-level gains rather than isolated improvements. Demand sensing and short-horizon forecasting aim to reduce stockouts and overstocks; dynamic pricing engines adjust offers in near real time; sentiment analysis pulls signals from social platforms to inform assortment and promotions; and sustainability modules measure supply-chain emissions for regulatory and consumer reporting. SAP material and industry reporting suggest these capabilities can trim waste in perishable categories, fine-tune staffing through better traffic prediction, and detect anomalous checkout behaviour to reduce shrinkage.</p> <p>That said, the move to an embedded-AI model raises implementation and governance questions. Integrating models across heterogeneous POS, e-commerce and ERP systems is technically demanding; vendors stress the need for clean, well-governed master data. SAP’s programme materials acknowledge this workstream, positioning platform services and APIs as the bridge from store hardware to cloud models. Observers also point to trust and transparency: retailers will need to balance automated decisioning with human oversight and to ensure that personalised offers and dynamic pricing meet regulatory and consumer expectations.</p> <p>Training and skills are another piece of the transition. As retailers adopt platform-scale AI, demand is growing for professionals who can configure models, interpret outputs and manage data pipelines. Training providers and corporate programmes are marketing courses that combine SAP product knowledge with applied machine-learning concepts to meet that demand. Vendors characterise such education as essential for teams to convert insights into execution without adding operational risk.</p> <p>Taken together, the developments announced at NRF and detailed in vendor briefings signal a consolidation of AI into retail’s operational core. SAP and others present the change as a move from analytics that report what happened to systems that propose and, in some cases, execute what should happen next. Whether that promise translates into consistent profitability and better customer outcomes will depend on the quality of data foundations, the rigour of model governance and retailers’ ability to integrate AI workflows into everyday decision-making.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69c291b4151e4567c8f97bcbTue, 24 Mar 2026 14:59:51 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/20/agentic-ai-transforms-supply-chain-oversight-with-real-time-autonomous-decision-making<p>A new wave of agentic AI systems is revolutionising supply chain management by enabling continuous, autonomous oversight that can preempt disruptions, promising faster detection and stronger resilience for global networks.</p><p>Supplier oversight has migrated from back-office duty to a topic for senior executives as global networks lengthen, regulation tightens and buyers demand more than low cost. Procurement teams are now judged on speed, quality, reliability and the ability to absorb shocks, yet many organisations still rely on static scorecards, quarterly reviews and manual reconciliation. Those tools can illuminate performance after the fact, but they rarely allow leaders to intervene before a disruption affects production lines or revenue.</p> <p>A new class of systems, often described as agentic AI, aims to close that gap by moving from retrospective reporting to continuous, outcome-driven oversight. Unlike rule-bound automation that executes predefined tasks, agentic AI observes streams of operational, financial and external data, infers relationships among signals and pursues defined objectives such as reducing supplier risk or preserving service levels. According to a Gartner forecast, by 2030 half of cross‑functional supply chain management solutions will include such autonomous agents, reflecting industry expectations that these capabilities will act as a virtual workforce to augment human decision-making.</p> <p>Practically, agentic approaches fuse internal sources, ERP records, procurement platforms, audit results, with outside inputs such as credit ratings, environmental, social and governance histories, news sentiment and geopolitical indicators. That breadth matters: isolated anomalies, like a minor rise in late shipments or a temporary dip in liquidity, are often survivable on their own, but when several indicators converge they can signal an escalating failure. Systems that link and contextualise those signals can surface actionable scenarios before a problem becomes a crisis.</p> <p>The shift from automation to autonomy is not merely semantic. Robotic process automation and other script-driven tools reduce manual effort, but they require human interpretation and operate within fixed boundaries. Agentic AI is designed to reassess context continuously, prioritise responses and, within governance limits, execute mitigating actions or escalate recommendations. Industry analysis and vendor case studies suggest substantive benefits: the lead material cites potential detection speed-ups of 40–60% from persistent monitoring, while a Zycus case study reported a 40% drop in procurement cycle time and a 25% uplift in compliance audit outcomes following agentic AI deployment. Such figures underline where early intervention and automated validation can improve resilience and compliance.</p> <p>Adopters will need to reconcile technological promise with governance and oversight. Ernst &amp; Young highlights agentic AI’s role as a collaborative intermediary that can improve coordination, inventory accuracy, and predictive maintenance, including automated scheduling for repairs and spare parts procurement. Yet EY and other advisers stress that these systems must be deployed with clear controls, auditability and human-in-the-loop checkpoints so strategic choices and accountability remain with procurement leaders.</p> <p>The limitations of legacy methods are well documented. Commentary from compliance specialists warns that static scorecards and manual vendor risk programmes are increasingly inadequate for layered, multi‑tier supply networks and can leave dangerous visibility gaps. That critique is echoed in guidance from education providers: the McCombs School of Business is offering a professional course on integrating agentic AI into sourcing and supplier management that emphasises responsible use, governance and preserving human oversight even as systems take on more complex tasks.</p> <p>For procurement organisations considering change, the architecture typically includes a continuously learning agent that ingests diverse data, a decision layer that assesses risk and trade-offs, and an orchestration layer that triggers actions or alerts. The benefits offered, faster detection, lower disruption rates, automated compliance checks and improved sourcing returns, depend on data quality, integration breadth and disciplined governance. Vendors’ performance claims should therefore be evaluated against independent metrics and pilot results rather than accepted at face value.</p> <p>As adoption accelerates, firms should also plan for cultural and capability shifts. Successful programmes combine technical deployment with process redesign, change management and upskilling so procurement professionals can focus on strategic supplier relationships and scenario planning instead of manual data aggregation. Third‑party risk commentators argue that without internal buy‑in and cross‑functional collaboration, even sophisticated systems will struggle to deliver promised outcomes.</p> <p>Agentic AI will not supplant procurement expertise; it is positioned to amplify it by turning streams of signals into early, interpretable warnings and by automating routine validation and remediation steps. For organisations that move beyond periodic reporting cycles and embrace continuous, governed intelligence, the result can be a more anticipatory supply‑chain function able to identify exposure before it affects operations. As the pace and distribution of risk increase across global networks, the path to greater resilience increasingly runs through systems that can observe, reason and act at scale.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b987134391726718840c65Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:19:26 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/20/adastra-earns-aws-consumer-goods-competency-to-boost-cloud-solutions-for-cpg-sector<p>Adastra secures AWS Consumer Goods Competency, validating its sector-specific cloud capabilities designed to enhance data-driven decision-making and digital transformation for consumer packaged goods companies amid industry pressures.</p><p>Adastra has been awarded the AWS Consumer Goods Competency, a designation from Amazon Web Services that recognises partners with sector-specific cloud capabilities for consumer packaged goods firms. The company said the accreditation validates its ability to deploy secure, scalable cloud solutions tailored to product development, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, unified commerce and digital transformation.</p> <p>According to the announcement, the competency requires partners to complete a demanding technical validation that aligns with AWS architectural best practice and the AWS Well‑Architected Framework. AWS introduced the Consumer Goods Competency in December 2024 as part of an effort to link consumer goods companies with vetted partners able to accelerate cloud adoption and reduce implementation risk.</p> <p>The firm said it helps CPG clients build unified data foundations to support AI‑driven decision‑making across commercial and operational functions. It pointed to use cases including improved forecast accuracy, production analytics, trade promotion optimisation and consolidated consumer and sell‑through views to sharpen assortment and marketing investment choices. Adastra added that its work focuses on governance, standardised data models and secure cloud operating frameworks to move insight more rapidly into action.</p> <p>“Achieving the AWS Consumer Goods Competency reinforces our commitment to helping CPG organisations unify data, modernize operations, and scale AI responsibly across the enterprise,” Shameer Kanji, Head of North American Enterprise Sales at Adastra, said. “We focus on delivering measurable business outcomes, from improving forecast accuracy and manufacturing performance to optimizing trade promotion effectiveness and strengthening consumer engagement.”</p> <p>The certification arrives amid wider efforts by vendors and consultancies to address persistent pressures on the consumer goods sector, including margin squeeze, supply‑chain volatility and rising operational costs. Industry observers say that while many companies have invested in digital platforms, fragmented data estates , spanning ERP, manufacturing execution, demand planning and marketing systems , continue to slow enterprise visibility and the deployment of advanced analytics.</p> <p>Adastra’s new AWS competency builds on a string of recent industry recognitions and partnerships the company has publicised. Over the past two years it has disclosed elevated partner status with major data and cloud vendors, a Microsoft Data &amp; AI Americas Partner of the Year award, an Elite Partner designation in a prominent lakehouse ecosystem and expanded reseller partnerships in Latin America focused on data quality. The firm employs more than 2,200 professionals across North America, Europe and Asia, the company said.</p> <p>Analysts caution that competency badges are a useful signal of technical capability but do not substitute for client references and demonstrable outcomes on live programmes. Speaking to industry publications, procurement leads typically look for case studies showing measured ROI on forecasting, inventory turns or promotion lift before committing to enterprise‑scale rollouts. Adastra says it partners with supply‑chain leaders, commercial teams and manufacturing executives to define roadmaps intended to unlock measurable returns across product development, operations and go‑to‑market execution.</p> <p>The company said firms seeking more detail on its AWS work can consult its published AWS services and retail/CPG solution pages.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69bbe0ab799d264d6e3b3afcFri, 20 Mar 2026 01:18:50 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/20/risk-segmentation-transforms-commercial-debt-recovery-with-ai-driven-strategies<p>Southwest Recovery Services advocates a shift from blunt recovery tactics to personalised, risk-based approaches using AI and technological insights, aiming to optimise collection rates and preserve business relationships.</p><p>According to the announcement from Southwest Recovery Services, commercial debt recovery is moving from blunt, uniform tactics to finely tuned risk segmentation that matches collection intensity to debtor profiles. The firm argues this approach conserves creditor resources, raises recovery rates and preserves ongoing commercial relationships by deploying distinct strategies for low-, medium- and high-risk accounts.</p> <p>Industry data underscores why speed and segmentation matter. According to Intuit's 2025 Small Business Late Payments Report, more than half of small businesses are awaiting funds from unpaid invoices and many face overdue balances within weeks, increasing the likelihood of cash‑flow stress. Independent analyses show collectability declines sharply as receivables age: early-stage delinquencies typically yield the highest recovery rates, while accounts beyond a year frequently drop into single‑digit prospects for full collection. Leib Solutions' assessment of receivable collectibility by age and benchmarks compiled by EagleRock CFO both stress that prompt, differentiated action materially reduces write‑offs and shortens Days Sales Outstanding.</p> <p>In practical terms, segmentation separates accounts that merit light-touch, relationship-focused engagement from those requiring structured negotiation or immediate escalation. For low‑risk debtors , organisations with solid payment histories experiencing temporary timing issues , the emphasis is on courteous reminders, flexible arrangements and incentives to settle quickly so future business is not compromised. Middle-tier cases often demand thorough financial assessment and scheduled repayment plans to secure a realistic path to settlement. For accounts flagged as high risk, where insolvency, fraud or prolonged silence is likely, collectors concentrate on asset discovery, skip tracing and legal preparedness to protect creditor claims.</p> <p>Technological tools now underpin these differentiated workflows. The announcement notes growing use of AI‑assisted scorecards and portfolio analytics to prioritise cases and automate follow‑up for predictable payers. This mirrors observed market trends: accounts‑receivable automation vendors and advisory pieces from Chaser and Runway highlight how automation and AR‑aging dashboards deliver faster sight of exposures, reduce manual workload and ensure critical aged items receive prompt human attention. Such systems also feed data that refines segmentation models over time, improving prediction of which accounts will respond to softer tactics and which will not.</p> <p>The operational and legal contours of B2B collection also differ from consumer work, and the article stresses those distinctions. Commercial invoices frequently represent substantial sums and communications take place between corporate functions , accounts payable, controllers or finance directors , requiring a diplomatic, professionally attuned approach. B2B recoveries are not regulated by the FDCPA, providing more tactical latitude than consumer collections, but legal constraints remain important. LegalClarity’s review of account aging and statutes of limitation emphasises that state‑specific recovery windows and procedural rules can alter the calculus for pursuing older debts, so timeliness and jurisdictional awareness are essential.</p> <p>For many creditors, outsourcing to specialised recovery firms offers a commercial advantage beyond recoveries alone. According to the announcement, third‑party agencies create a buffer that can preserve client relationships by removing direct confrontation from vendor‑buyer interactions. Practical guidance from BYL Collections and other practitioner sources supports this view, advising creditors to escalate to external specialists when internal efforts stall to avoid damaging future trade while still seeking resolution.</p> <p>Ultimately, the shift to risk segmentation blends behavioural insight, technology and legal know‑how to protect working capital more efficiently. Benchmarks and industry research consistently show that early, targeted interventions reduce DSO and lower write‑off rates; firms that combine automated monitoring with tailored human engagement stand the best chance of recovering value without severing commercial ties.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69bc476bddee4f0d1238e835Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:18:20 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/20/c2fo-hits-milestone-with-500-billion-in-funding-amid-shift-to-invoice-driven-liquidity<p>C2FO announces it has advanced over $500 billion in working capital globally, highlighting a move towards faster, invoice-based funding as traditional credit models face pressures, with zero credit losses reported.</p><p>C2FO says it has crossed the $500 billion mark in cumulative working capital advanced to businesses worldwide, a milestone the company presents as evidence of a shift away from traditional credit-based funding towards faster, invoice-driven liquidity. According to Crowdfund Insider, the platform now claims it has supported more than one million suppliers across over 180 countries and territories. </p> <p>The company frames the achievement as particularly timely given persistently high borrowing costs and a tougher lending backdrop for many firms. C2FO’s marketplace matches buyers with suppliers willing to receive early payment in exchange for a discount set by the supplier, allowing firms to convert unpaid invoices into usable cash within days rather than waiting customary 60 to 90 days. The firm says this preserves balance-sheet flexibility without creating new debt burdens for suppliers.</p> <p>Alexander “Sandy” Kemper, founder and CEO of C2FO, is quoted as saying: "Reaching half a trillion in funded capital without a single credit default is truly distinctive in finance and demonstrates the immense value our system delivers." He added: "Firms are recognizing that their outstanding invoices represent prime opportunities for internal funding. We’ve engineered the infrastructure to scale this globally, all while eliminating credit exposure."</p> <p>C2FO’s claim of zero credit losses underlines the company’s argument that its model transfers neither borrower risk nor conventional credit exposure to the platform. The announcement follows a string of prior milestones the company has published: $200 billion in cumulative funding announced in April 2022, $300 billion reached by August 2023 and more than $386 billion reported in November 2024. The firm also said in January 2025 that December 2024 saw its first $1 billion funding day and that lifetime funding then exceeded $400 billion. Company materials attribute much of the recent growth to enterprise customers: in 2024 C2FO says it paid over 42 million invoices an average of about 32 days early for supply chains that include more than 200 global enterprise clients, among them six members of the Fortune 10.</p> <p>Industry observers note that the scale of receivables sitting on corporate balance sheets represents substantial, under‑utilised liquidity, and platforms that unlock those cash flows have gained traction as an alternative to bank lending. According to the company’s published data, users receive payments roughly a month before scheduled due dates on average, and the service has been promoted as a way to reduce the cost of delayed payments and strengthen supplier relationships amid inflationary pressures.</p> <p>C2FO’s own materials highlight additional metrics it says demonstrate broader social impact: a high global Net Promoter Score and the acceleration of billions in invoices for companies owned by women and minorities. The company positions its marketplace as a tool for supply-chain resilience, arguing that buyers can deploy idle cash to shore up suppliers while suppliers retain control over when and at what discount they access funds.</p> <p>While C2FO portrays its growth as reflective of a structural change in trade finance, analysts caution that claims by private companies warrant scrutiny and that independent verification of outcomes such as loss rates and counterparty exposure is important. Nonetheless, the rapid succession of publicly announced funding milestones since 2022 , described in the company’s newsroom and press releases , illustrates the pace at which invoice-financing platforms have scaled in recent years.</p> <p>As businesses continue to face higher financing costs, C2FO asserts its model offers a debt-free route to working capital that can be executed quickly and on supplier-defined terms. Whether this approach will become a dominant model for corporate liquidity management or remain one among several alternatives will depend on broader market adoption, regulatory oversight and the long-term performance of such marketplaces.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69bc9419f200c70089203dc6Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:18:20 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/17/supply-chain-resilience-in-2026-hinges-on-real-time-insight-and-integrated-systems-industry-warns<p>Industry assessments forecast that many midmarket consumer brands will struggle to manage disruptions in 2026 due to fragmented technology landscapes and delayed visibility, emphasising the need for integrated, real-time data systems to improve resilience.</p><p>Many midmarket consumer brands enter 2026 exposed because their operations lack timely insight and tightly integrated systems, leaving them slow to see and respond to supply shocks, according to a new industry assessment and related research.</p> <p>According to Sage’s 2026 State of Supply Chain Report, only around half of consumer brands feel confident in their ability to manage disruptions, a shortfall the vendor links to weak early-stage visibility and fragmented technology landscapes. The report finds that delayed or incomplete information about production, supplier stock and shipments turns recognised risks, tariffs, transport delays, supplier failures, into operational surprises that drive downtime and margin erosion. The company said in a statement that preparedness tracks closely with how well data moves across ERP, supplier-management platforms and visibility tools.</p> <p>Speaking to ERP Today, Rodney Manzo, Sage’s senior director of supply chain intelligence, said: "Confidence heading into 2026 is less about optimism and more about capability." He added that organisations that can observe production progress, shipment status and cost exposure sooner “stop reacting late” because a common operational picture enables quicker decisions. Manzo warned, however, that the largest blind spots are typically further down the chain where supplier inventory, manufacturing status and in‑transit updates remain intermittent or delayed. He said: "When visibility is limited, exposure is easy to underestimate, and response slows when action is required."</p> <p>Industry research paints a consistent picture. A recent Sphera report found a striking mismatch between perceived and actual readiness: while nearly all leaders expressed confidence in their risk data, many still reported material losses from disruption. Sphera emphasises that verifiable, timely insight and faster decision cycles, paired with focused supplier engagement, are required to translate confidence into defensible resilience. ProcureCon’s state‑of‑procurement study similarly identifies disruption management as the top concern for 2026, noting widespread shortages and the growing impact of regulation and geopolitical friction over the prior 12 months.</p> <p>The surveys also show a shifting approach to sourcing. Nearly half of operators say they intend to move production closer to home, with quality and compliance cited as stronger drivers than simple cost or lead‑time calculations. "Reliability and oversight matter more than geography alone," Manzo observed, arguing that proximity without rigorous supplier governance does not reliably improve outcomes.</p> <p>Technology adoption, particularly for advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, remains uneven. Sage and other industry commentators report that only a small minority of brands have AI embedded in live supply‑chain workflows today. Adoption is strongly correlated with how mature and clean an organisation’s data flows are; executives are reluctant to scale machine learning where inputs remain patchy. Manzo put it succinctly: scaling AI requires trustworthy, connected systems rather than piecemeal fixes.</p> <p>Sage has itself been promoting a cloud‑native visibility platform it launched last year aimed at smaller brands, presenting it as a way to link procurement, operations and finance and to supply real‑time milestone tracking and alerts. The company claims the product reduces delays and helps protect margins for businesses that move away from spreadsheets and siloed communication. Reuters‑style caution applies: these are vendor assertions about product outcomes rather than independently verified results.</p> <p>Cost pressures are intensifying the trade‑offs facing supply‑chain leaders. Many teams prioritise near‑term efficiency and margin protection over large transformation projects unless those investments demonstrate payback quickly. That dynamic, combined with persistent gaps in supplier management and data hygiene, means firms often strengthen fundamentals before adopting more sophisticated capabilities.</p> <p>Taken together, the research suggests a practical roadmap for operators seeking to shift from reactive to resilient. Industry data shows that firms with centralised, interoperable systems, standardised supplier data and earlier sight of upstream milestones tend to make decisions faster and limit exposure. As Manzo put it: "Resilient brands stand out because of execution visibility, connected systems, and disciplined supplier management."</p> <p>For 2026, then, resilience looks less like a strategy headline and more like operational muscle: the routines, data connections and supplier oversight that enable teams to detect problems sooner and act with certainty.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b1405984dd7ea0520e2ba0Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:33:00 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/17/nulogy-launches-manufacturing-operating-system-to-unify-production-quality-and-compliance-tools<p>Nulogy unveils its Manufacturing Operating System, a modular platform designed to integrate production, quality, and compliance functions on a single data and workflow backbone, aiming to enhance efficiency and regulatory performance across supply chains.</p><p>Nulogy has unveiled a platform it calls the Manufacturing Operating System, a modular software suite intended to bring production, quality, compliance, maintenance and warehouse execution onto a single data and workflow backbone. According to Nulogy’s announcement, the MOS is designed to integrate with existing enterprise systems rather than replace them, offering real‑time analytics and AI‑driven insights to reduce manual handoffs and improve visibility across complex operations. (Nulogy said in a press release.)</p> <p>The company positions the MOS as a response to pressures facing manufacturers today: volatile demand, squeezed margins, expanding regulatory obligations and persistent labour shortages. Industry coverage notes the platform targets not only manufacturers but contract packagers and third‑party logistics providers, allowing organisations to take a phased approach by deploying the module that addresses their most urgent pain point and then expanding over time. (Robotics &amp; Automation News; Food Engineering.)</p> <p>Nulogy cited client results that it says demonstrate measurable benefits from the MOS. Customers have reportedly achieved 97 percent inventory accuracy, a 99 percent customer fill rate and a 12 percent improvement in overall equipment efficiency within nine months. The vendor named Autoliv, DHL Supply Chain, MSI Express and Summit Packaging Solutions among early users. (Nulogy press release; Food Engineering.)</p> <p>The launch builds on a series of product introductions from Nulogy earlier this year. The company recently confirmed two complementary modules, Nulogy QMS and Nulogy EHS, aimed at strengthening quality, safety and compliance processes across plants and partner networks. According to coverage of those releases, the QMS offering focuses on standardising quality workflows, detecting issues earlier and simplifying audit readiness, while EHS targets incident management, inspections and environmental controls. (Packaging Scotland.)</p> <p>Nulogy has also moved to broaden its compliance capabilities through acquisition. The company said it has acquired AuditComply, a Belfast‑based provider of quality, risk and compliance management software, and will fold AuditComply’s Environmental, Health and Safety, Quality Management System and Supplier Compliance Management tools into the MOS. Observers said the deal is intended to give manufacturers tighter control over regulatory performance and supplier risk across complex supply chains. (Sustainable Logistics International; StartupResearcher.)</p> <p>Executives from customer organisations endorsed the proposition in published comments. Adam Walker, chief executive and founder of Summit Packaging Solutions, said: "Being Powered by Nulogy signals to our clients that Summit isn’t just a vendor; we’re an integrated, intelligent expansion of their supply chain." Michael Copeland, vice president IT – life sciences and healthcare at DHL Supply Chain, added: "When you are looking for a solution to solve a very boutique set of requirements associated with secondary, tertiary, or even primary packaging, the tools required are very specific. Nulogy does a great job of targeting that." (Robotics &amp; Automation News.)</p> <p>Nulogy’s chief executive underlined the company’s framing of the product as an enabler rather than a wholesale replacement of incumbent systems. Bill Ryan said: "Manufacturers don’t win by replacing systems – they win by responding faster, operating more consistently, and delivering with confidence when conditions change." He added: "Nulogy MOS brings together the capabilities teams rely on today so our customers can improve operations now, scale as they grow, and compete more effectively without taking on a massive transformation." (Robotics &amp; Automation News.)</p> <p>Analysts and practitioners will be watching two aspects as deployments scale. First, the practical integration with customers’ existing ERPs and point solutions will determine how quickly the platform can reduce manual work and deliver the vendor’s cited productivity gains. Second, the integration of AuditComply’s compliance modules will be judged on their ability to translate regulatory and supplier risk data into actionable workflows on the shop floor and across multi‑site operations. Industry reporting highlights both the promise of tighter coordination and the challenge of weaving diverse datasets into consistent, auditable processes. (Food Engineering; Sustainable Logistics International.)</p> <p>For manufacturers and logistics providers operating in regulated or high‑variability environments, Nulogy’s MOS represents a further example of software vendors moving from isolated point products to broader, workflow‑centric platforms. Whether the approach yields the rapid returns Nulogy describes will depend on the speed of integrations, the quality of site‑level change management and the degree to which customers adopt the suite beyond initial pilots. (Nulogy website; Packaging Scotland.)</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b6c506ddee4f0d1237d832Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:32:24 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/14/manufacturers-accelerate-shift-from-spreadsheets-to-centralised-data-platforms-for-indirect-sales-by-2026<p>As manual data processes persist in manufacturing, industry experts warn that reliance on spreadsheets hampers scalability and introduces risks. By 2026, automation and integrated platforms are set to redefine channel and supply-chain operations, boosting accuracy, compliance, and partner trust.</p><p>By 2026, manufacturers seeking to scale indirect sales face a familiar but stubborn barrier: reliance on manual spreadsheets and ad hoc data collection. Industry benchmarks and sector studies paint a consistent picture , a large portion of organisations still depend on manual processes for channel and supply‑chain tasks, with material consequences for revenue, compliance and partner trust.</p> <p>According to Computer Market Research (CMR), a significant share of manufacturers continue to run channel operations on spreadsheets, a practice the firm links to measurable revenue leakage and rebate overpayments. CMR estimates that Point of Sale (POS) data inaccuracies and fragmented reporting can drive double‑digit losses in partner rebate spend and leave executives operating without a dependable single source of truth. The firm positions its PartnerPortal™ and managed data services as solutions that centralise POS normalisation, automate claim validation and create an auditable trail for incentive funds.</p> <p>Independent studies corroborate the persistence of manual practices across manufacturing and procurement. Research by InfinityQS International found that three quarters of manufacturers still use manual data capture methods, with over half depending on spreadsheets. A Log‑hub study similarly reported widespread spreadsheet use even as organisations pursue supplier diversification and nearshoring to boost resilience. Surveys in allied functions show the same tendency: Guideline’s work for marketers recorded 85% reliance on spreadsheets for media planning, and earlier Sikich LLP research documented more than half of manufacturers using manual processes instead of integrated ERP modules.</p> <p>The operational risks are tangible. Fragmented, inconsistent POS files undermine forecasting, increase the likelihood of stockouts or overstocking and complicate timely rebate payments. CMR and other analyses warn that manual rebate processing fosters “over‑claiming” errors and administrative delays that erode partner loyalty; automated validation, they say, can dramatically cut claim inaccuracies and accelerate payouts. The absence of standardised data also raises compliance and security concerns, since email attachments and unencrypted spreadsheets create weak audit trails and exposure to internal and external breaches.</p> <p>Technology and governance change the calculus. Industry practitioners argue that a modular, cloud‑based channel management platform becomes the functional backbone once partner counts and data complexity exceed what humans can reliably maintain. CMR notes that starting with targeted modules , for example Ship &amp; Debit reconciliation or MDF/co‑op management , lets operations address the most painful failure points without a full rip‑and‑replace. Integration with CRM and ERP systems preserves existing investments while removing repetitive manual synchronisation tasks that consume analyst time.</p> <p>Shifting channel leadership roles accompanies the technology change. The Channel Manager increasingly acts as a data strategist, coordinating Sales Ops, Marketing and Finance to allocate incentives based on performance metrics rather than intuition. Best practice frameworks call for KPIs beyond headline revenue , including lead conversion within partner portals, certification completion rates and time‑to‑first‑sale for new partners , to detect problems before quarters close.</p> <p>Financial discipline is central to sustaining partner networks. Clear, timestamped records for MDF and co‑op spend, automated claim validation and normalised POS data permit precise measurement of fund utilisation and return on investment. Studies show that improving fund claim processes can raise utilisation rates materially and reduce wasteful spending, while automation cuts administrative overhead and strengthens the audit trail required for regulatory compliance.</p> <p>Organisations still anchored to spreadsheets face a scalability ceiling. Multiple sources suggest that once a partner programme grows beyond a few dozen active entities, error rates and administrative burdens escalate rapidly. The combined evidence from CMR and sector research points to recurring hidden costs of manual methods , commonly estimated in the mid single digits of annual revenue , that can be addressed by automation and disciplined data management.</p> <p>Transitioning away from manual channel management is as much about process change as technology. Practical steps include conducting a ruthless audit of the partner base to prioritise high‑value relationships, adopting leading indicators to guide resource allocation, and deploying modular automation to eliminate the slow, error‑prone workflows that undermine partner confidence. For many large manufacturers and distributors, the objective is straightforward: replace scattered spreadsheets with a unified, auditable platform that enables predictable incentive payments, accurate forecasting and secure, compliant data sharing across tiers.</p> <p>The evidence from market studies and vendor experience converges on one conclusion: to make indirect channels a repeatable revenue engine in 2026, manufacturers must turn data from a liability into an asset. Centralised POS normalisation, automated rebate validation and integrated partner portals not only reduce waste and risk, they also restore operational control and free channel teams to focus on growth rather than data maintenance.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b36cdda80794ebae625dcfSat, 14 Mar 2026 22:50:29 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/14/blue-yonder-expands-autonomous-ai-to-enhance-supply-chain-resilience-and-speed<p>Blue Yonder has integrated agentic artificial intelligence across its planning and execution tools, enabling real-time decision support and automation for retail, manufacturing, transport, and warehousing teams, in a move aimed at boosting agility and reducing operational strain.</p><p>Blue Yonder has broadened the reach of its agentic artificial intelligence across its planning and execution portfolio, embedding autonomous agents into workflows and extending role-specific mobile apps to support retail, manufacturing, transport, warehousing and customer service teams, according to the report by Ecommerce News New Zealand.</p> <p>The company says the update places more AI-driven decision support directly into daily processes, with agents that continuously monitor data, flag issues, explain trade-offs and propose actions while leaving final judgement to human users. According to Blue Yonder’s product pages, the intent is to pair machine-led monitoring with human contextual oversight to speed up routines and increase resilience across supply chain functions.</p> <p>Duncan Angove, Blue Yonder’s chief executive, framed the release as a response to mounting operational strain and the need for quicker cross-team coordination. "In today's complex supply chain environment, teams need a competitive edge to collaborate and adapt to real-world operations and scale across the enterprise," he said. "Our new agentic AI capabilities and mobile companion applications help teams work faster, assess risks and opportunities instantly, and execute role-specific tasks consistently."</p> <p>In retail planning, the company has introduced agents into Merchandise Financial Planning and Assortment Planning that it says identify profit exposure, suggest remedial steps and draw on trend analysis to inform range decisions. Complementary Allocation and Replenishment mobile apps aim to move routine allocation and order confirmation off desktops and onto smartphones, enabling planners and distribution-centre staff to review, edit and confirm quantities while on the move.</p> <p>For sourcing and fulfilment, Blue Yonder has placed a Fulfilment &amp; Sourcing Agent into beta, which the vendor claims evaluates inventory availability, service-level risks and fulfilment metrics to support real-time sourcing choices and to provide explainable recommendations. Panasonic’s announcement of Blue Yonder’s retail innovations also highlights native AI-driven order-management capabilities and a sourcing simulator designed to rebalance orders under fluctuating demand.</p> <p>Manufacturing-focused agents automate detection and remediation across demand, supply and inventory plans by generating concise briefs that outline metric changes, probable causes, estimated financial impact and suggested priorities. Planners can query constraints and generate scenarios in natural language, a feature Blue Yonder presents as a way to accelerate comparative analysis during planning cycles.</p> <p>Transport features include machine-learning route guidance and a backhaul-identification function that the company links to lower empty miles, with potential transport-cost and emissions reductions depending on carrier networks and operational specifics. Blue Yonder’s documentation and earlier solution briefs describe the broader Transportation Management Suite as covering network modelling, planning, execution and real-time visibility.</p> <p>Warehouse Management now incorporates agents that translate live WMS signals into role-tailored insights and dynamic action briefs for supervisors and managers. Guided root-cause tools are available for selected exceptions such as late shipments and short orders, while the Warehouse Operator mobile app has been updated to support pallet-level workflows across receiving, picking and loading. Manufacturing Tomorrow’s coverage signals that these enhancements are part of a move towards predictive planning, unified decisioning and tighter labour-and-automation coordination in the warehouse.</p> <p>Customer-facing staff are being offered a Customer Service Agent in beta to help resolve enquiries and order problems; Blue Yonder also launched an Orchestrator mobile app to surface agentic suggestions and exception workflows at point of decision, and has expanded its mobile suite to cover shelf management, planogram compliance, inventory and logistics to better connect store and warehouse tasking.</p> <p>The vendor has deepened integration with Microsoft Teams so that selected agent insights and workflows can be surfaced inside collaboration channels, a capability Blue Yonder says is intended to reduce application switching and speed collective decision-making. Blue Yonder’s blog on the partnership with Microsoft underscores the aim of enabling rapid, co-ordinated responses to disruption, for example when weather events threaten delivery schedules.</p> <p>Blue Yonder offers an AI Advisory service to build bespoke agents for existing customers, including for earlier software versions, and has outlined advisory-built agents for inventory optimisation, warehouse operations, planogram compliance and allocation and replenishment. The company reported further platform enhancements in its Q4 2025 highlights, including AI-assisted migration tools to ease upgrades and reduce deployment complexity, and noted recognition such as inclusion on FreightWaves’ FreightTech 100.</p> <p>Industry materials and partner statements frame the developments as part of a broader shift towards cloud-based, AI-enabled supply chain platforms that promise faster sensing of disruption and tighter alignment of operational decisions with financial and sustainability objectives. Blue Yonder’s announcements present projected benefits in service levels, cost and emissions, but these outcomes will depend on how organisations configure agents, the quality of their data and the integration of human oversight into automated workflows.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b29ed13b8446da5fa9f12dSat, 14 Mar 2026 22:50:29 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/14/distributors-adopt-gmroi-to-navigate-margins-and-costs-amid-supply-chain-pressures<p>Wholesale distributors are increasingly turning to gross margin return on investment (GMROI) as a key performance indicator to improve inventory efficiency and profitability in a challenging cost environment, according to a new industry report.</p><p>Wholesale distributors facing tighter margins and rising costs are increasingly turning to gross margin return on investment to judge whether their inventory is delivering acceptable economic returns. According to the Phocas Wholesale Distribution Inventory Trends Report, GMROI has become the most commonly tracked KPI among wholesalers, a reflection of the pressure to align inventory holdings with profit generation in an environment where many firms hold very large SKU assortments. The report also found that 70% of distributors carry more than 5,000 SKUs, underscoring why a blended measure of margin and inventory efficiency is so useful.</p> <p>GMROI, or gross margin return on inventory investment, expresses how many dollars of gross profit a business earns for each dollar tied up in inventory. The standard calculation divides gross margin dollars by average inventory cost, with gross margin calculated as sales less cost of goods sold and average inventory typically taken as the mean of opening and closing inventory values for the period. Practical worked examples are widely available; for instance, an operation generating $50,000 in gross margin on an average inventory investment of $25,000 posts a GMROI of 2, meaning two dollars of gross profit per inventory dollar. Industry resources such as QuickBooks and calculator tools offer the same core formula and simple calculators to automate the arithmetic.</p> <p>Distributors prize GMROI because it brings together profitability and capital efficiency in a single metric. Measures such as turnover or margin alone can be misleading: high sales volumes with low margins or excessive stock can erode returns even when revenue looks strong. GMROI helps pinpoint SKUs or ranges that are tying up capital without delivering sufficient gross profit, enabling procurement, sales and finance teams to make targeted adjustments.</p> <p>In practice, firms calculate GMROI at multiple levels and cadences. Many measure it monthly to catch shifting demand patterns, while others report quarterly or annually as part of financial reviews. Analysis can be layered by SKU, supplier, category or product line so that weak performers are revealed in context. Software vendors and operations guides describe variants that fold in forecasted sales or available stock, but the central insight remains the combination of margin and inventory value. Storis and Slimstock, among other industry sources, outline methods that pair GMROI with turns and other metrics for a fuller picture of inventory health.</p> <p>GMROI is also widely used to guide pricing and discounting choices. When an item shows persistently low GMROI, businesses often opt to reduce price to accelerate sales, free up warehouse space and release capital for higher-return lines. The Phocas report notes that distributors commonly rely on GMROI to decide which products to discount when inventory accumulates. That said, the effectiveness of discounting should be tested against expected margin improvement and any longer-term brand or supplier implications.</p> <p>Benchmarks vary by sector and product type. A GMROI above 1 indicates inventory is covering its own cost, but many wholesalers seek ratios in the 2–3 range or higher to justify investment in inventory. Commodity-led businesses with thin margins will typically report lower GMROI than distributors of premium, high-margin lines, so comparisons are more meaningful when carried out within categories rather than at a company-wide aggregate. Industry guidelines from retail and distribution advisers reflect this nuance and recommend tailoring targets to product mix and business model.</p> <p>Integrating GMROI into reporting systems increases its operational value. According to Phocas, GMROI can be added as a custom calculation in dashboards and financial statements, allowing teams to view it alongside revenue, COGS, margin and turnover. This consolidated visibility speeds identification of underperforming stock and supports more disciplined purchasing and demand planning. Third-party calculators and vendor support articles provide step-by-step instructions for embedding the metric into analytics workflows.</p> <p>While GMROI is a powerful diagnostic, it is not a panacea. It does not replace qualitative judgement about strategic lines, seasonality or supplier relationships, and it can be sensitive to accounting choices for inventory valuation and timing. Best practice is to use GMROI together with complementary measures, inventory turns, sell-through rates, lead time variability, and to validate changes with commercial teams before executing broad markdown or delisting programmes.</p> <p>As distributors contend with supply chain uncertainty and cost pressures, GMROI’s combination of simplicity and direct link to working capital has helped it rise to prominence. When applied thoughtfully, tracked at the right levels and viewed alongside other operational indicators, it provides a focused lens for steering inventory decisions toward stronger profitability.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b3b0d19d48d97c600f5c5fSat, 14 Mar 2026 22:49:34 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/12/neos-launches-rocket-mobile-for-sap-promising-up-to-80-productivity-gains-in-warehouse-operations<p>NEOS by Argon &amp; Co has introduced Rocket Mobile for SAP, an AI-powered mobile solution aimed at transforming warehouse and logistics operations with faster processes, improved insights, and higher user adoption, claiming productivity increases of up to 80%.</p><p>NEOS by Argon &amp; Co has unveiled Rocket Mobile for SAP, a certified solution the company says brings artificial intelligence directly into SAP-driven warehouse and logistics operations to accelerate execution and improve insight.</p> <p>According to NEOS, the mobile application links SAP enterprise mobility with embedded AI to automate routine tasks, surface operational insights and speed user adoption. The vendor highlights a simplified user experience for warehouse transactions, faster load times and resilient online/offline performance. Rocket Mobile also incorporates multi-barcode scanning and OCR to accelerate data capture, while AI-driven workflows are intended to standardise hazard and quality inspections and strengthen compliance.</p> <p>“We are excited to introduce Rocket Mobile, a transformative solution designed to streamline operations, we are seeing productivity gains of up to 80% from standard SAP EWM tasks with this new solution,” said Johnny Balich, SAP Practice Lead at NEOS by Argon &amp; Co. “Our clients can experience 300% faster picking rates, as well as 5x faster user adoption, setting a new benchmark in supply chain efficiency.”</p> <p>NEOS describes Rocket Mobile as part of a broader ecosystem delivered in partnership with Rocket Consulting, whose Rocket AI and Rocket Vision offerings embed machine learning and computer vision into SAP Digital Supply Chain and execution processes. According to Rocket Consulting, those platforms are designed to improve material identification, automate invoice processing and raise throughput while reducing manual errors , capabilities NEOS says complement Rocket Mobile’s mobility and workflow functions.</p> <p>Lewis Marston, CEO of Rocket, emphasised the local delivery angle: “NEOS brings deep SAP capability and a strong on-the-ground presence in ANZ, giving customers access to Rocket’s platforms with a trusted local delivery partner. Together, we are helping SAP customers accelerate user adoption and operational performance, turning day-to-day execution into measurable value through Rocket Mobile (SAP enterprise mobility) and Rocket Vision (AI for supply chain and operational workflows).”</p> <p>NEOS positions the launch within its wider remit as a systems integrator focused on warehouse, transportation and inventory orchestration across manufacturing, procurement, logistics and planning. The firm , established inside Argon &amp; Co’s operations practice in 2024 by Paul Roddis , leverages consultancy and implementation experience to couple strategy with hands-on deployment. Paul Roddis died in August 2025; NEOS continues to operate under the Argon &amp; Co umbrella. Industry commentary and NEOS materials point to complementary alliances: the company has also expanded ties with Kinaxis to broaden end-to-end orchestration capabilities by combining transformation expertise with Kinaxis’s AI-infused planning platform.</p> <p>The company says Rocket Mobile is available globally and has already been deployed at more than 850 customer sites, a figure intended to demonstrate production readiness across varied warehouse environments. NEOS framed the release as a step towards reducing the gap between legacy SAP functionality and modern expectations for speed, automation and ease of use.</p> <p>Industry data on AI adoption in supply chains shows growing interest in embedding machine learning into execution and quality workflows to cut errors and improve throughput. According to Rocket Consulting, their AI products are designed to integrate natively with SAP without heavy middleware, enabling customers to introduce vision and automation into processes such as goods receipts, picking validation and logistics quality assurance.</p> <p>NEOS’s announcement positions Rocket Mobile as an option for SAP customers seeking faster user uptake and operational uplift through a combined mobility and AI approach. The company’s claims about productivity and adoption rates reflect vendor benchmarking; organisations evaluating the software should consider proof-of-concept trials and independent measurement of operational impacts.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b05ce84f4ef6333243c6c8Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:02:01 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/12/revolutionising-freight-invoice-validation-to-close-the-procurement-enforcement-gap<p>As transportation networks grow more complex, leading firms are adopting automated freight audit solutions to turn negotiated contracts into enforceable, auditable controls, unlocking significant savings and strengthening stakeholder confidence.</p><p>Contracts are intended to convert negotiation wins into predictable, auditable payments. Yet across global logistics networks many procurement teams find a widening gap between agreed freight terms and what lands on their supplier invoices. Small, routine mismatches , an accessorial posted in error, a discount that fails to apply, a conditional rate interpreted differently , accumulate into material leakage, damaged stakeholder confidence and weaker negotiating leverage.</p> <p>Complexity and fragmentation lie at the heart of the problem. Modern freight agreements embed lane‑ and mode‑specific rates, layered accessorials and fuel surcharges, conditional price rules and exception clauses. Billing systems, however, differ by carrier, geography and mode; invoice line‑formats rarely contain the full rate logic or service conditions required to validate charges automatically; and manual interpretation invites inconsistency. According to ICC Logistics, commonly observed causes include negotiated discounts not being applied, misclassified services and the simple proliferation of surcharges , each small error feeding larger losses over time.</p> <p>The financial scale of that erosion is striking. Industry analysis shows manual freight invoice reconciliation can cost organisations in excess of $55,000 a year and still miss as much as 40% of billing errors, exposing firms to substantial unrecovered overcharges. Phacet Labs finds many buyers recover only 60–80% of their negotiated procurement savings because invoices are not systematically checked against contracted rates. Separately, carrier‑facing reviews flag an “execution gap” averaging 5–15% between negotiated tariffs and billed amounts, driven by billing mistakes, misapplied discounts and surcharge creep.</p> <p>For procurement leaders the consequences extend beyond the immediate line‑item cost. Unverified invoices undermine the credibility of reported savings with finance and the executive team, limit willingness to commit volumes, and weaken the foundation for progressive sourcing strategies. In short, negotiation without repeatable enforcement leaves performance as an assertion rather than a fact.</p> <p>The response many leading teams are adopting reframes freight audit and payment from a transactional back‑office task into a control discipline centred on contract operationalisation. Industry commentators and vendors argue that automating validation , translating complex contract terms into rules that execute at the line‑item level, applying them consistently across carriers, regions and modes, and producing audit‑ready documentation , is the only practical way to scale enforcement and recover hidden savings. OutcomeDriven and other practitioner analyses point to measurable operational gains from such automation: fewer manual checks, faster exception resolution and sustained productivity improvements. TraxTech and similar providers emphasise the importance of “smart” invoice matching that verifies shipment legitimacy against purchase orders and authorised transport requests to prevent payments for unauthorised or inaccurate charges.</p> <p>One vendor, nVision Global, positions freight audit as a discipline built around global contract enforcement, claiming its platform converts negotiated agreements into executable audit rules and applies them uniformly across modes and regions. The company says this approach delivers line‑level compliance validation, automated enforcement of complex rate logic and transparent performance visibility for carriers. Presented as an architectural benefit, the ability to generate finance‑grade documentation and to flag disputes pre‑payment is central to their proposition.</p> <p>While providers differ in capability and footprint, the market evidence suggests three practical priorities for procurement teams seeking to close the execution gap. First, establish a single source of truth for contract terms and ensure those terms are codified in machine‑readable rules. Second, implement automated invoice validation that checks every line against contracted logic rather than relying on spot checks or after‑the‑fact reconciliations. Third, build reporting that ties dispute and recovery outcomes back into sourcing metrics so future negotiations are grounded in verified execution data.</p> <p>Where firms have taken these steps, recovery and control follow. Automated processes reduce the burden and cost of reconciliation, increase the proportion of errors caught before payment, and create defensible savings figures for finance and senior leadership. Conversely, organisations that accept invoice variance as inevitable continue to forfeit negotiated value and sacrifice the credibility needed to pursue more sophisticated procurement programmes.</p> <p>In an environment of growing transportation complexity, fragmented billing practices and heightened financial scrutiny, enforcement ceases to be optional. Converting negotiated contracts into consistently applied, audit‑ready controls is the mechanism that turns procurement rhetoric into measurable, defendable results.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b1405984dd7ea0520e2b9cThu, 12 Mar 2026 23:02:00 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/12/uk-businesses-accelerate-adoption-of-salesforce-revenue-management-for-end-to-end-automation<p>UK companies are increasingly integrating Salesforce’s Revenue Management platform to streamline quoting, billing, and revenue recognition, amid growing emphasis on automation and AI-driven innovations to boost efficiency and compliance.</p><p>Revenue operations are being reimagined across the UK as businesses move to consolidate quoting, pricing, billing and revenue recognition into single, automated systems. Fragmented technology landscapes , where sales, finance and operations run disconnected tools , have long been blamed for slow contract cycles, manual reconciliations and unreliable revenue metrics. Now, an expanding wave of implementations built around Salesforce’s Revenue Management platform aims to replace those patchworks with an end-to-end revenue lifecycle engine.</p> <p>According to Salesforce, its Revenue Management offering centralises product and pricing definitions, automates quote generation and billing, and provides real‑time revenue analytics that help teams close deals faster and meet accounting standards such as ASC 606 and IFRS 15. Industry observers say those capabilities are particularly valuable for firms with complex pricing or subscription models because they reduce errors in quotes and invoices, shorten approval bottlenecks and improve forecasting accuracy.</p> <p>Salesforce research cited by partners indicates that the most effective sales teams are rapidly adopting automation: 79% of top performers use advanced technology to cut manual tasks and gain clearer revenue insight. Broader market data shows Salesforce’s footprint remains substantial , more than 150,000 organisations use the platform globally and, according to a 2025 market analysis, it holds roughly a 13.6% share of the UK CRM market , a scale that supports increasingly sophisticated partner ecosystems.</p> <p>That ecosystem has diversified to meet sector needs. Technology and SaaS vendors are using the platform to manage renewals and tiered subscriptions; telecoms deploy it for high‑volume, multi‑element billing; manufacturers and distributors apply it to channel pricing and distributor agreements; and regulated firms in financial services and healthcare rely on its auditability for compliance. Consulting partners also stress that integration with existing ERPs and bespoke workflows is essential to deliver seamless quote‑to‑cash operations.</p> <p>In the UK, a wide range of consulting firms now market Revenue Management implementations. Global and specialist consultancies, from established professional‑services firms to smaller, CPQ‑focused teams, offer services that span discovery and process design, CPQ configuration, billing and subscription orchestration, custom integrations and ongoing managed services. According to the supplier landscape compiled by market commentators, GetonCRM, Nebula Consulting, Pinksamurais, Simpala, Advanced Communities, A5corp, Bluewave Technology, KPMG UK, Slalom and The Blue Flame Labs are among those promoting Revenue Management projects in the region. The companies quoted in that list position themselves as capable of delivering everything from enterprise transformations to fast CPQ rollouts for growing businesses.</p> <p>Buyers weighing partners are advised to prioritise demonstrable project outcomes, relevant industry experience and proof that planned solutions will integrate with back‑office systems. Case study reviews and certification checks remain common due diligence steps, while ongoing support arrangements are frequently cited as a determinant of long‑term success.</p> <p>The broader platform itself is evolving. Salesforce has been actively pushing generative and agent‑based capabilities: a December 2025 announcement from Salesforce UK highlighted fast adoption of its Agentforce 360 platform by British organisations, saying customers are deploying AI agents across functions to boost productivity and engagement. The company’s multi‑billion‑pound investment in the UK, announced in 2023, has underpinned local innovation and partner growth, according to the firm.</p> <p>That combination of automation, analytics and emergent AI is changing the implementation conversation. Rather than simply replacing spreadsheets, Revenue Management projects are increasingly framed as enterprise transformation programmes that rewire how revenue is modelled, priced and recognised. Proponents argue the shift yields faster deal cycles, cleaner financial close processes and better insight for strategic pricing decisions. Critics and cautious finance teams, however, warn that complexity can migrate from operational routine into platform configuration and change management; they emphasise the need for disciplined governance, phased rollouts and rigorous testing before moving billing into production.</p> <p>For UK organisations contemplating a deployment, the case for a unified revenue platform is strongest where pricing is variable, contracts evolve frequently, or subscriptions form a material part of income. Vendors and consulting partners alike recommend clear objectives up front, a mapped integration strategy for ERPs and ledgers, and a support model that covers both operational runbooks and continuous optimisation.</p> <p>As more UK firms adopt integrated revenue systems and experiment with AI‑driven agents, the focus is shifting from whether automation is possible to how it should be governed. The promise is a revenue operation that scales with the business and provides timely, auditable insight for both commercial and finance leaders; realising that promise, partners say, depends on the right combination of platform choice, implementation rigour and post‑go‑live stewardship.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b1d00d9d48d97c600ee968Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:01:22 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/12/oracle-fusion-cloud-integrates-ai-agents-to-revolutionise-enterprise-decision-making<p>Organisations are increasingly embedding role-aware AI agents into Oracle Fusion Cloud workflows, shifting from reactive reporting to proactive, real-time decision-making and operational efficiency.</p><p>Organisations leaning on Oracle Fusion Cloud are increasingly embedding AI agents into their enterprise resource planning workflows to extract more timely, actionable intelligence from operational data. What began as enhanced reporting and analytics has matured into an ecosystem of role-aware, pre-built agents, studio tools and partner templates that aim to shift companies from reactive reporting to proactive decision-making.</p> <p>According to Oracle, its AI agents for Fusion Applications are provided as embedded, role-based assistants that analyse unified application data, automate routine tasks and surface predictive insights to users within their existing workflows. Oracle states the agents are available at no additional cost and are intended to accelerate everyday activities such as opportunity-to-quote processing, shift scheduling and other transactional processes, freeing staff to concentrate on higher-value work.</p> <p>Beyond packaged agents, Oracle has invested in tooling to let organisations adapt or extend capabilities. AI Agent Studio is described in Oracle documentation as a design-time environment where teams can build, configure, validate and deploy single agents or multi-agent workflows that access Fusion data stores, APIs and knowledge assets securely. The studio is intended to enable rapid customisation while preserving role-based access controls and enterprise security standards.</p> <p>For organisations that prefer a faster path to deployment, Oracle’s AI Agent Marketplace offers partner-built templates from system integrators and independent software vendors. The marketplace is integrated with AI Agent Studio, allowing firms to adopt battle-tested agent designs and then tailor them to local processes and data models. Oracle positions the marketplace as a way to combine speed of adoption with vendor governance and security assurances.</p> <p>Practically, these capabilities extend several familiar analytics functions. Real-time monitoring and alerting can surface sales momentum, supply-chain variances or cash-flow anomalies more quickly than periodic reports. Predictive models can signal demand shifts or attrition risk by correlating historical transactions with external indicators. AI-driven visualisations and narrative summaries aim to make those signals easier to act on for non-technical decision-makers.</p> <p>Data governance and quality remain central. Oracle’s agent architecture and studio documentation emphasise secure access to the single source of truth within Fusion, while automation of cleansing and standardisation is framed as a route to reduce errors that would otherwise undermine downstream analytics. Where organisations already struggle with fragmented data across HR, finance and supply-chain modules, embedded agents are presented as a way to harmonise insights without extensive middleware projects.</p> <p>Industry commentary suggests trade-offs. Embedding analytics close to transactional systems can speed decisions and reduce context-switching, but it also concentrates business logic and predictive models inside a single vendor ecosystem. According to Oracle executives discussing the roadmap, the company intends to broaden agent autonomy to manage end-to-end processes, a direction that could multiply operational efficiencies but will increase scrutiny around model transparency, auditability and governance.</p> <p>Organisations adopting AI agents within Fusion should therefore balance ambition with controls: validate predictive outputs, monitor for model drift, and maintain human-in-the-loop safeguards for high-impact decisions. When implemented with clear data governance and aligned to concrete business outcomes, the combined toolset, pre-built agents, a configurable studio and a partner marketplace, offers a pathway to faster, more informed operations across finance, HR, sales and supply chain.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b30e72d85cb0be34fb6a27Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:01:05 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/11/zara-s-real-time-inventory-system-transforms-fashion-retail-agility<p>Zara leverages RFID-enabled point-of-sale data and a centralised logistics network to drastically shorten trend cycles, allowing rapid inventory shifts and near-instant design adjustments in a disruptive move toward retail agility.</p><p>Zara has turned rapid trend response into a commercial advantage by making its point-of-sale technology a central nerve of its business. Rather than treating tills as mere payment terminals, the company routes live sales and inventory signals from stores into design, manufacturing and logistics decisions, allowing assortment and supply to shift in near real time.</p> <p>The retailer’s operational footprint, running thousands of outlets globally and generating annual sales in the tens of billions of euros, relies on tight coordination between shops and a central operations hub. According to a study by Harvard Business School, Zara aggregates data from a vast store network into a central processing centre, where transactions and staff feedback inform everything from replenishment to product tweaks.</p> <p>A key enabler of that connectivity is radio-frequency identification. Multiple industry analyses note that Zara tags items with RFID chips to achieve accurate, minute-by-minute visibility of stock across stores and distribution centres. That capability supports small-batch replenishment and fast stock transfers, helping the company restock stores rapidly while keeping unsold inventory comparatively low.</p> <p>Logistics play an equally important role. Reporting from specialist logistics commentary explains how Zara’s distribution system moves new product to shops on a tight cadence, with fresh shipments dispatched frequently to maintain high turnover. The company’s mix of localised production and a centralised distribution hub in Spain allows it to shorten lead times and adjust production runs to reflect what customers are actually buying.</p> <p>The real-time sales feed emerging from tills also feeds design decisions. Store managers and regional teams communicate early signals, best sellers by size, colour and fit, which designers can use to alter assortments or accelerate replacement styles. Industry commentary and a variety of logistics and marketing analyses describe this feedback loop as a primary reason Zara can compress concept-to-shelf cycles that traditionally take months into a matter of weeks.</p> <p>Price management and store-level execution have been modernised alongside inventory tracking. Trade coverage notes Zara’s use of electronic price tags and centralised pricing systems that permit rapid, consistent updates across many locations, reducing manual labour and the risk of mismatched pricing during promotions or markdowns.</p> <p>For other retailers the lessons are straightforward: a POS architecture that captures and distributes real-time information can turn transactional data into operational decisions. Analysts say that the most important elements are accurate SKU-level data, systems that synchronise quickly with central planning tools, and logistics capable of responding to short replenishment windows. Smaller chains can apply the same principles at scale by prioritising near-real-time reporting and tighter links between stores and buying teams.</p> <p>Several technology vendors position their platforms as solutions for this model. ConnectPOS, for example, highlights features such as immediate omnichannel inventory updates, API-first architectures and offline modes designed to keep sales flowing during connectivity interruptions. The company says these capabilities help retailers replicate the responsiveness Zara achieves by turning store transactions into strategic signals.</p> <p>Zara’s approach does not eliminate risk, rapid cycles require disciplined production control and the ability to interpret noisy early signals, but the combination of live store data, RFID-enabled visibility and a logistics backbone tuned for speed has reduced unsold stock and lowered the need for steep clearance markdowns. As retail shifts toward shorter trend cycles, the integration of POS, inventory and supply-chain systems is likely to become a defining competence for any retailer aiming to compete on agility rather than price alone.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69acb750bba82c3fa3836c4eWed, 11 Mar 2026 00:32:20 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/11/canstar-transforms-supplier-contract-management-with-platform-integration-and-automation<p>Canstar Pty Ltd has overhauled its supplier contract process by implementing a unified contract lifecycle platform integrated with NetSuite ERP, eliminating auto-renewals and boosting operational efficiency.</p><p>Canstar Pty Ltd has overhauled its supplier contract process, moving from dispersed spreadsheets and ticketing threads to a single contract lifecycle platform that synchronises with its recently implemented NetSuite ERP. The change, driven by the legal team, addressed persistent gaps in oversight that had left the business vulnerable to unintended renewals and hidden ongoing commitments.</p> <p>Legal counsel Chelsea Simmons said the company had faced "an ongoing present risk of contracts rolling over before the Legal and Finance team could review the contract with appropriate lead time." That risk, she and colleagues concluded, stemmed from fragmented record‑keeping and manual renewal tracking that consumed Legal and Finance capacity while obscuring committed spend.</p> <p>After evaluating several systems, Canstar selected Gatekeeper. According to the company announcement, the decision rested on three operational priorities: eliminate siloed processes, achieve a native integration with NetSuite, and create a shared source of truth for legal and finance teams. Gatekeeper’s SuiteApp was presented as enabling vendor synchronisation and exposing contract data directly inside NetSuite, giving finance near‑real‑time visibility of obligations and allowing teams to reference identical supplier records.</p> <p>The implementation introduced standardised approval paths, executive sign‑off, budget validation, optional security review, legal authorisation and e‑signature, followed by automatic synchronisation into the ERP. Gatekeeper’s platform also consolidated executed contracts and audit trails into a single repository with automated notifications ahead of renewal dates. Chelsea Simmons said the platform delivered a single view of the year’s renewals, eliminating "surprises, no more last‑minute reviews, and no more accidental auto‑renewals."</p> <p>The results reported by Canstar were measurable: the organisation recorded zero unwanted auto‑renewals since go‑live, redirected staff time from administration to strategic tasks, and shortened approval cycles by removing duplicated requests. Executive dashboards now show renewal timelines and supplier concentration, which the organisation says has transformed vendor governance into a visible compliance asset. Lawyer Caleb Payne described rapid uptake by business users, noting the platform “has quickly eliminated the need for manual tracking spreadsheets and has eliminated the risk of the business accessing siloed information. We now use Gatekeeper as a central point for the management of all supplier contracts."</p> <p>Industry research underscores the stakes Canstar sought to address. A whitepaper by OpenText highlights that as many as 60% of supplier contracts may roll over automatically without buyer awareness, exposing organisations to automatic price adjustments and ongoing liabilities; the paper recommends steps such as issuing non‑renewal notices at execution to prevent unwanted extensions. Gatekeeper’s own customer resources emphasise the financial value of proactive renewals management and automation to reduce renegotiation pressure and enable timely non‑renewal decisions.</p> <p>Independent market commentary aligns with Canstar’s experience. User reviews compiled by Gartner praise Gatekeeper’s integration capabilities, intuitive interface and ability to provide portfolio‑level visibility that reduces administrative burden. Vendor overviews such as Procurescape highlight features relevant to Canstar’s outcomes, automated renewal alerts, dynamic data views and workflow engines, and note additional tools for third‑party risk, including vendor credit insight. Gatekeeper’s customer webinars further showcase how dashboards, workflow automation and reporting can convert renewal calendars into proactive negotiation levers.</p> <p>While Canstar attributes rapid operational gains to the platform and its implementation support, the company’s account should be viewed alongside broader best practice guidance: preventing inadvertent renewals typically requires a mix of contractual safeguards at signing, ongoing systemised monitoring and clear cross‑functional ownership. Canstar’s move to combine a contract repository with ERP synchronisation and standardised workflows illustrates how technical integration and process change can reduce the routine risk identified by industry studies.</p> <p>Canstar’s experience suggests that organisations wrestling with dispersed contract records and manual renewal management can achieve quicker, more strategic vendor oversight by centralising data, enforcing consistent review cycles and linking contract obligations into financial systems. According to Gartner reviews and vendor analyses, the benefits reported by Canstar, strong user adoption, reduced accidental renewals and improved spend visibility, are consistent with other customers’ experiences of cloud contract lifecycle solutions when implementation is supported by clear workflows and change management.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69b05ce84f4ef6333243c6ceWed, 11 Mar 2026 00:31:56 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/05/operational-technology-security-investments-deliver-significant-financial-and-safety-benefits-amid-rising-interconnected-risks<p>As operational technology and industrial networks become more interconnected, industry studies reveal that strategic security investments yield substantial financial and operational resilience benefits, driving a shift towards centre-stage security priorities in critical infrastructure sectors.</p><p>Operational technology and industrial networks have moved from isolated, purpose-built islands to densely interconnected systems that span corporate IT, cloud platforms and partner ecosystems. That change delivers productivity and scale but also multiplies points of vulnerability across sectors that include manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, energy and utilities. In these settings cyber incidents can cause more than data loss; they can halt production, damage equipment, endanger safety and create environmental hazards, making OT security a business-critical discipline rather than a narrow compliance exercise.</p> <p>A recent Omdia study commissioned by Palo Alto Networks modelled the economic effects of investing in OT security and concluded that such investments can deliver strong financial returns while lowering operational risk and security workload. According to the report by Omdia, the analysis found a 384% return on investment alongside measurable reductions in incident exposure and effort required to manage OT risk. Those findings reinforce a broader industry shift: executives are increasingly treating OT protection as a strategic investment in uptime, safety and continuity.</p> <p>Vendors are responding with platforms purpose-built for industrial constraints. Palo Alto Networks describes an OT security suite that aims to provide continuous device discovery, contextualised risk scoring, segmentation, inline threat prevention and automation tailored to operational requirements. According to Palo Alto Networks, its approach is intended to replace fragmented point products with a consolidated architecture that aligns IT and OT controls while preserving availability and safety. The company’s OT device security offerings have also been highlighted in analyst research, with recognitions in the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass and the Frost Radar in 2025, according to the vendor.</p> <p>Competing and complementary providers stress similar core capabilities. Niagara Systems, for example, offers a platform combining asset discovery, network segmentation, secure remote access, intrusion detection and patch management designed to respect real‑time and safety constraints in industrial environments. World Wide Technology highlights visibility as the foundational requirement for resilience, arguing that incomplete inventories undermine root cause analysis, predictive maintenance and regulatory reporting. Industry consultants and integrators, including Hunt &amp; Hackett, underscore the need for multi-layered programmes that pair segmentation and access controls with continuous monitoring, incident response and governance.</p> <p>Practical use cases that consistently yield operational benefits include comprehensive asset inventories, vulnerability and exposure management, protocol-aware threat detection, fine-grained segmentation, secure remote access, converged IT–OT policy enforcement, compliance reporting, supply‑chain risk management, AI-driven device posture and OT-specific forensics. Implemented together, these capabilities reduce unknowns on the network, enable prioritised remediation of the most consequential vulnerabilities, prevent unsafe or malicious commands at the protocol level and limit lateral movement when breaches occur.</p> <p>Market analysis points to broader trends that will shape OT strategy. A market research briefing notes increasing adoption of Zero Trust principles adapted for industrial contexts, stronger microsegmentation, continuous verification of users and devices, multi-factor authentication for remote sessions and enhanced session logging. Meanwhile, McKinsey warns that OT environments’ bespoke configurations and dependence on original equipment manufacturers introduce persistent blind spots; third-party access and unmanaged removable media remain recurring sources of compromise. Those industry observations align with the operational controls recommended by practitioners: verify every connection, profile device behaviour, and constrain vendor access to least-privilege sessions.</p> <p>Automation and machine learning are increasingly central to scaling OT risk management. Vendors claim AI-driven profiling and crowdsourced telemetry can build dynamic baselines of device behaviour, surface deviations that represent elevated risk and automatically translate insights into adaptive policies that block threats at Layer 7. Proponents say this reduces manual workload across inventory, risk ranking and policy application, enabling security teams to focus on high-value decisions rather than routine triage. Independent integrators caution that machine learning outputs must be validated against operational context to avoid false positives that could disrupt production.</p> <p>Regulatory and insurance drivers are reinforcing investment. World Wide Technology and other industry voices note that new regulatory frameworks demand asset registers, incident reporting and demonstrable resilience across IT and OT. Structured evidence of controls can streamline audits, reduce regulator exposure and improve insurability by giving underwriters clearer data on risk management practices.</p> <p>Despite the consensus on capability sets, implementation remains challenging. Industrial networks are heterogeneous, include legacy and unpatchable controllers, and often require change windows that conflict with traditional security patch cycles. Effective programmes therefore blend compensating controls such as virtual patching, segmentation and monitored access with governance that reflects operational priorities. Where vendors present product roadmaps or claims, that messaging should be read alongside independent assessments and tailored risk analyses by operators and integrators.</p> <p>For owners of critical infrastructure, the choice is increasingly framed as a trade-off between the short‑term friction of adaptation and the long‑term cost of failure. The emerging playbook, continuous discovery, contextualised risk prioritisation, protocol-aware prevention, least‑privilege remote access and resilient segmentation, aims to preserve availability while reducing the probability and impact of disruptive incidents. As industry commentary and market research indicate, organisations that align people, process and technology around those principles stand to gain not only stronger security but clearer operational resilience and financial returns.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a8ec8ebba82c3fa3827bd3Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:01:52 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/05/legal-and-financial-firms-face-escalating-supply-chain-risks-amid-demand-for-comprehensive-third-party-oversight<p>Law firms, financial software providers, and security vendors are confronting increasing supply-chain vulnerabilities, prompting a shift towards continuous monitoring, risk-based segmentation, and stricter contractual controls to safeguard sensitive data and prevent major breaches.</p><p>Law firms, financial software vendors, online marketplaces and the security providers that serve them are confronting a widening and more complex panorama of supply‑chain exposure, forcing a rethink of how organisations assess and manage the risks that live beyond their firewalls.</p> <p>Legal practices are now widely recognised as high‑value targets because of the sensitive material they hold. According to the American Bar Association, firms routinely process privileged communications, trade secrets, client financial information and personal data through an ecosystem of third‑party suppliers. That mix, the ABA warns, creates multiple attack vectors: insecure software updates, weakly worded contracts, undisclosed fourth‑party subprocessors and unregulated use of client material to train generative AI models. The ABA recommends standardising contractual language across vendor portfolios, demanding full disclosure of subprocessors and imposing strict vendor AI policies to limit unwanted training or reuse of client data.</p> <p>Those recommendations resonate with findings from KPMG’s 2026 Global Third‑Party Risk Management Survey, which shows many organisations remain some distance from a mature, enterprise‑wide approach. The consulting firm reports just 18% of TPRM programmes are fully integrated with broader enterprise risk management, only 15% of leaders express strong confidence in their TPRM data, and a mere 5% have adopted end‑to‑end managed services. KPMG notes that while 22% of respondents viewed AI as very effective for TPRM, most are still experimenting rather than operating at scale. The firm advises a shift from broad, checklist‑style screening to targeted, risk‑based segmentation, improved alignment between TPRM and enterprise risk functions, and greater visibility into Nth‑party relationships that sit several links down the chain.</p> <p>Evidence of why that visibility matters keeps mounting. The makers of Marquis Software have filed suit against firewall vendor SonicWall, alleging a February 2025 cloud breach exposed unencrypted multi‑factor authentication scratch codes and device configuration data via an insecure API. Marquis claims the exposed data , including predictable device serial numbers used as access keys , enabled attackers to mount a ransomware campaign that later compromised data at more than 700 banks and credit unions. The complaint accuses SonicWall of failing to encrypt sensitive information and of delaying disclosure.</p> <p>Similarly, an incident affecting ManoMano flowed through an overseas third‑party customer‑service provider, with the threat actor claiming to have lifted 37.8 million customer accounts and almost one million support tickets. ManoMano disputes the scale, but the material allegedly contained names, email addresses, telephone numbers and service correspondence across several European countries. Stolen support logs and attached documents, security analysts say, are fertile ground for highly convincing phishing and social‑engineering campaigns.</p> <p>These breaches underline a recurring blind spot: plugin and integration ecosystems. Security commentators note attackers increasingly go after third parties because that is where rich datasets are concentrated. Plugin modules and embedded integrations present particular difficulty; once woven into multiple systems they are hard to excise and are easily overlooked as teams reorganise or personnel move on. Practical steps still matter , regular contract reviews, documented vendor‑risk processes and automation of data collection , but industry voices stress these measures must be paired with continuous monitoring and stronger control of downstream suppliers.</p> <p>The consequences extend to managed security providers. With supply‑chain dependencies expanding the attack surface, MSSPs and MSPs that cling to manual, point‑in‑time assessments risk becoming liabilities rather than partners. Security advisers argue smaller organisations are especially vulnerable because they lack in‑house tools and scale, while larger enterprises attract campaigns capable of outsized impact. For service providers, the imperative is clear: evolve towards continuous, structured oversight and embed zero‑trust principles and automation into supplier governance.</p> <p>Taken together, the developments present a practical playbook for organisations aiming to reduce exposure. Industry analysts advocate applying risk‑based segmentation to concentrate scrutiny on the most critical relationships; extending discovery beyond direct suppliers to identify fourth‑ and Nth‑party links; automating evidence collection and monitoring to move from periodic checks to near‑real‑time awareness; and treating contractual protections , including encryption, multifactor authentication, subprocessor disclosure and incident notification timelines , as central, enforceable controls rather than boilerplate.</p> <p>The picture painted by recent reporting and surveys is unambiguous: third‑party risk is no longer an operational footnote. Organisations that continue to treat vendor oversight as a checkbox exercise will likely face more damaging incidents, while those that adopt continuous, data‑driven, and risk‑prioritised approaches will be better placed to limit both immediate compromise and the longer tail of supply‑chain fallout.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a9a7aa9de18c18633520e9Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:01:23 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/04/supply-chain-orchestration-turns-focus-to-shared-communities-and-real-time-ai-response<p>Emerging strategies are shifting supply chains from isolated point-to-point links towards collaborative, AI-driven communities that promote shared decision-making, resilience, and agility amid increasing global disruptions.</p><p>Most corporate supply chains remain stitched together with bespoke point-to‑point links, batch EDI flows and partner portals that rarely extend beyond direct suppliers. The result is a landscape where documents move but collective decision‑making does not, leaving networks ill prepared for the recurrent shocks of demand swings, regulation, sustainability pressures and geopolitical disruption. The constraint, increasingly, is not the quantity of data but the absence of shared meaning and co‑ordinated action across independent organisations.</p> <p>In practice, that fragmentation shows up when ports congest, key suppliers miss deliveries or new compliance obligations arrive. Organisations typically react with email threads, spreadsheets and a tangle of dashboards that define “risk,” “late” or “short” differently for each participant. Early adopters have experimented with artificial intelligence inside individual planning or visibility programmes, but those pilots rarely change how entire communities respond together.</p> <p>Closing that gap requires a shift from point integration to multi‑enterprise orchestration. Industry thinking points to five practical moves that can turn disparate partners into a functioning community.</p> <ul> <li><span>- </span><p>Establish common data semantics. Partners must agree definitions for business events such as at‑risk orders, in‑transit delays, capacity shortfalls and payment mismatches, and represent them with consistent data structures. When signals carry the same meaning across organisations, AI can learn useful patterns instead of noise.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Codify community playbooks. Repeatable, cross‑party response plans , specifying triggers, roles, service levels, required data and automatable steps , provide a blueprint for workflow engines and agentic AI to recommend and, where appropriate, execute joint actions.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Push lightweight, agentic AI to the edge. Small, context‑aware agents located near orders, shipments, inventory and invoices can surface emerging patterns in real time and propose remedial measures that span companies, from alternate fulfilment sources to freight rebooking or dynamic ATP adjustments.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Bake in rights‑based data sharing. Visibility without governance undermines trust. Role‑and policy‑driven access controls let each party see only what it needs while enabling AI to reason over a permissioned, aggregated view consistent with privacy and cross‑border rules.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Track time‑to‑joint‑action. Conventional KPIs end at enterprise boundaries. A community metric that measures how quickly a set of trading partners can detect, decide and act on a shared event converts orchestration from aspiration into operational practice.</p> </li> </ul> <p>Adoption will not be frictionless. Data lineage and provenance remain major obstacles: without traceable origins and transformation histories, model outputs struggle to gain traction with practitioners. Organisational change is equally demanding; technology roll‑outs can be fast, but aligning incentives, contracts and processes across multiple companies requires sustained executive sponsorship. Governance frameworks must walk a tightrope between enabling openness and enforcing control, while respecting regional data sovereignty and compliance obligations.</p> <p>Looking ahead, proponents expect a two‑stage evolution. In the near term, through roughly 2026–2028, leading networks will move away from reactive exception handling toward anticipatory orchestration. AI will not supplant human judgment but will pre‑analyse alternatives, quantify trade‑offs across cost, service and emissions, and coordinate proposed responses with affected partners. Real‑time community dashboards will surface early warnings such as accumulating delays, abnormal lead‑time variance or supplier stress, allowing remediation before disputes and deductions escalate.</p> <p>Beyond 2029, supply links are likely to cohere into digital communities governed by shared norms, transparent incentives and a collective memory that improves responses over time. Procurement, logistics and finance functions may converge around common outcomes , resilience, service and sustainability , rather than isolated transactions. Competitive advantage will accrue to ecosystems that can sense disruption and act together.</p> <p>Commercial platforms are positioning themselves to enable this transition. According to OpenText, its Business Network is designed to support large‑scale multi‑enterprise collaboration by linking suppliers, customers, logistics providers and financial institutions with standardised processes and shared data semantics. The vendor says the network normalises transactions into common business objects and events, creating the semantic bedrock necessary for cross‑partner orchestration and AI.</p> <p>OpenText also presents a layered view of capability: proven connectivity across EDI, APIs and cloud architectures to onboard and manage thousands of partners; community‑level workflow orchestration for processes such as purchase‑to‑pay, order‑to‑cash and logistics execution; and AI that operates over permissioned, multi‑party data to detect risks, prioritise exceptions and recommend actions. The company emphasises identity‑driven governance, role‑based visibility and auditability as the trust mechanisms that make broad collaboration feasible under strict regulatory and data‑sovereignty regimes.</p> <p>Other OpenText materials frame Supply Chain Orchestration as the next logical stage beyond traditional supply chain management, with a Trading Grid that acts as a secure conduit for integrating partners and turning fragmented information into an AI‑ready platform. Their automation roadmap stresses that removing manual, paper‑based processes and standardising B2B exchanges reduces human error, accelerates transactions and frees staff for strategic work , necessary preconditions for higher‑order orchestration.</p> <p>The technical and organisational challenges are real, but so are the potential payoffs. By aligning semantics, automating shared playbooks, deploying edge AI agents, enforcing governed data sharing and measuring community reaction time, firms can move from isolated efficiency to collective agility. Vendors such as OpenText position their cloud networks and integration stacks as the infrastructure to support that journey, though the ultimate determinant will be whether trading communities can reform incentives and governance as well as technology.</p> <p>As volatility, regulation and stakeholder expectations continue to intensify, the firms that succeed will be those that treat supply chains as communities rather than chained systems , creating the conditions for partners to sense, decide and act in concert.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a2a64b3d18d0a0ff8356a3Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:38 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/04/the-shift-towards-data-driven-partner-portals-redefining-channel-management<p>Modernised partner portal platforms are replacing manual workflows with automated, integrated systems, driving efficiency, transparency, and strategic growth in channel ecosystems.</p><p>The days when channel managers relied on manually maintained spreadsheets, disparate file formats and ad hoc email exchanges to coordinate partner activity are effectively behind us. For manufacturers and vendors operating multi-tiered indirect sales networks, contemporary partner portal platforms have become the mechanism through which channel policy, finance and performance are executed and measured. What was once a repository of collateral has been recast as an operational hub that tightly couples partner enablement with financial controls and real-time intelligence.</p> <p>At the centre of this shift is the imperative to replace error-prone manual workflows with automated, auditable processes. Industry vendors and channel consultants now stress that clean Point of Sale (POS) and inventory feeds are the non-negotiable inputs for any serious programme. According to Torchlite, centralising partner activities on a single platform reduces reliance on fragmented communications and gives partners immediate access to sales collateral, product updates and training materials, while exposing performance metrics that inform faster decisions. Similarly, ZINFI describes modern portals as cloud-native transaction engines that deliver visibility into sales, stock and partner productivity, eliminating the data silos that historically undermined forecasting and incentive management.</p> <p>Core functional modules have converged across providers. Onboarding and partner profile management create a single, authoritative record of a partner’s legal status, certifications and capabilities, enabling faster activation. Deal registration and lead management implement clear, rule-based workflows that protect partner-sourced opportunities and reduce internal conflict over territory and margins. Training and certification pathways ensure partners are market-ready, and integrated analytics tie enablement activity to measurable outcomes. Incenteev’s framework for partner adoption highlights the importance of personalised access, content libraries and transparent performance dashboards to drive actual usage rather than passive logins.</p> <p>Financial automation is a critical differentiator. Manual handling of Market Development Funds (MDF), co-op programmes, rebates and Ship &amp; Debit adjustments invites delays, disputes and leakage. Leading platforms automate the claim, validation and payment sequence, enforcing programme rules and collecting proof-of-performance in a structured manner. This reduces back-and-forth reconciliation and produces an auditable trail for finance teams. Channelscaler notes that automated workflows for deal registration, content access and claims cut administrative burdens while surfacing the utilisation and ROI of marketing funds.</p> <p>Yet automation delivers value only when fed with trustworthy data. Partners typically report sales and inventory in a mix of CSVs, spreadsheets, EDI feeds and portal submissions. Without normalisation, aggregating that information yields contradictory results, skewed commission calculations and unreliable forecasts. Best-practice deployments therefore include data cleansing and standardisation services so every incoming feed is deduplicated, validated and transformed into a common schema. This “single source of truth” enables timely identification of inventory imbalances, dead stock and regional variance in sell-through velocity, allowing vendors to move from reactive firefighting to proactive channel programmes.</p> <p>Architectural choices matter. The prevailing guidance from practitioners is to favour modular, API-first SaaS platforms rather than bespoke, in‑house builds. Custom systems carry long-term maintenance costs, security exposure and integration debt that often recreate the very silos organisations seek to eliminate. An API-centric portal supports two-way synchronisation with CRM systems such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics and with ERP and financial systems, so a deal entered by a partner flows into the vendor’s opportunity pipeline and any CRM updates are reflected back to the partner. Single sign-on and role-based access reduce friction and make the portal a daily operational tool rather than an optional resource.</p> <p>Measuring the impact of a partner ecosystem requires moving beyond superficial engagement metrics. Leading programmes track partner lifetime value and recruitment ROI to understand the economics of partner acquisition and retention. Time-to-first-deal is used as an adoption and onboarding benchmark; shortening that interval signals effective enablement. MDF utilisation, when attributable to pipeline and closed business, becomes a powerful metric for marketing accountability. Impartner emphasises that integrated reporting and analytics, not ad-hoc spreadsheets, are essential to connect activity to revenue performance.</p> <p>Vendors differentiate on two fronts: user experience and the underlying data services. Several platform providers , Channelscaler, Guru and others , prioritise intuitive interfaces, personalised dashboards and streamlined content co‑branding to increase partner engagement. At the same time, firms that pair software with managed data services claim an edge by removing the administrative load of data collection and cleansing from the customer. That combination addresses both daily usability for partners and the longer-term need for accurate, actionable channel intelligence.</p> <p>For organisations assessing readiness, practical indicators that a change is overdue include persistent spreadsheet-driven processes, inconsistent or delayed POS reporting, lack of clarity around MDF effectiveness, and slow or document-heavy onboarding. Where these symptoms exist, a phased implementation that begins with the highest-value automations , POS normalisation, deal registration and MDF workflows , typically delivers the fastest operational and financial payback.</p> <p>As partner ecosystems grow in scale and complexity, the role of the portal will continue to expand from a transactional tool into a strategic capability that shapes channel behaviour. The platforms that succeed will be those that combine frictionless partner experiences with rigorous data hygiene and deep integrations into core enterprise systems. In short, the future of channel performance is less about storing documents and more about operating a dependable, data-driven engine for shared revenue growth.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a5529c84dd7ea0520b3c33Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:23 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/04/locus-claims-top-spot-in-g2s-2026-supply-chain-software-awards-amid-evolving-logistics-landscape<p>Locus has been named the leading route-planning vendor in G2’s 2026 Best Software Awards, signalling a shift towards integrated, AI-driven transport systems that prioritise reliability and operational outcomes over mere cost minimisation.</p><p>Locus has been named the top route-planning vendor in G2’s 2026 Best Software Awards for Supply Chain &amp; Logistics, a recognition that reflects verified user feedback and measures of market presence, according to G2. The accolade arrives as shippers and retailers re-evaluate how transport planning fits into day-to-day operations, shifting expectations from isolated optimisation engines to systems that join planning, execution and financial control across complex networks.</p> <p>Industry observers say route planning is increasingly judged by its ability to deliver consistent execution across a distributed operation rather than merely producing the shortest sequence of stops. That broader performance remit places a premium on real‑time monitoring, exception management and the capacity to convert plans into measurable operational outcomes. According to G2, its awards draw on authentic customer reviews and public market metrics compiled across its software marketplace.</p> <p>Locus positions its DiSCO platform, short for Digital Supply Chain Officer, as an answer to that demand. The company describes DiSCO as an AI‑driven transport management framework that links planning, dispatch, settlement and analytics while using live operational data to balance trade‑offs among cost, service, capacity and compliance. Locus also highlights governance tools intended to keep human decision‑makers in control, with audit trails and performance visibility designed for enterprise deployments.</p> <p>“Being ranked #1 in Route Planning and recognized in G2's Best Software Awards reflects what enterprise logistics teams are prioritizing today: measurable outcomes at scale. It also signals a shift in transportation architecture. Route planning has moved beyond finding the shortest path. Enterprises now measure reliability, SLA adherence, and execution consistency across the network, which requires unified systems that coordinate planning, dispatch, visibility, and financial performance. That shift is what we see in our vision for DiSCO, the Digital Supply Chain Officer, bringing continuous, AI-driven decisioning across the transportation lifecycle,” Nishith Rastogi, Locus’s founder and CEO, said in comments accompanying the announcement.</p> <p>The recognition follows Locus’s acquisition in late 2025 by Ingka Group’s investment arm. Ingka has said the purchase is intended to strengthen its digital capabilities and sharpen control over a critical part of the customer experience. In its announcement, Ingka described Locus as an AI‑powered logistics platform offering route optimisation, real‑time tracking and intelligent resource management to improve efficiency from capacity planning to last‑mile fulfilment.</p> <p>Industry reporting has suggested financial rationale behind the tie‑up. Business Standard has reported the acquisition could help IKEA reduce delivery costs by an estimated €100 million a year. Locus and Ingka have stated the company will continue to operate independently while supporting Ingka’s fulfilment network and serving other global brands; Locus’s customer roster includes names such as Unilever and Nestlé, according to company material.</p> <p>Locus’s own statements quantify its platform’s reach and claimed impact: more than 1.5 billion deliveries across 30+ countries, in excess of USD 320 million in transit cost savings, over 800 million miles of travel avoided and 17 million kilograms of CO2 emissions offset, as well as reported 99.5% SLA adherence across enterprise implementations. The firm and partner communications also note more than 350 enterprise deployments worldwide. Those figures, presented in corporate releases, have become focal points for buyers who now press vendors for demonstrable links between routing recommendations and execution outcomes such as on‑time delivery and proof of delivery.</p> <p>“This recognition validates our focus on solving real transportation problems at enterprise scale: planning, dispatching, and adapting decisions across complex logistics networks,” Rastogi added in a separate statement.</p> <p>Analysts and practitioners say the market is tilting towards agentic and continuous planning approaches that blend optimisation with operational orchestration. Locus describes its direction as moving toward agent‑based automation that continuously re‑evaluates decisions across the transport lifecycle; Ingka and other adopters are testing how those capabilities translate into day‑to‑day reliability gains at scale.</p> <p>As logistics teams demand clearer evidence that software recommendations translate into execution, the sector is watching whether specialist route‑planning vendors embedded within large retail operators can maintain a multi‑customer posture while supporting their parent companies’ internal objectives. Locus’s integration with Ingka offers a live case: it situates a routing specialist inside one of the world’s largest retail distribution footprints, intensifying scrutiny of how in‑house systems and multi‑tenant software vendors coexist and compete.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a5fef39de18c186334351aThu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:07 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/04/spotsee-and-controlant-partner-to-enhance-cold-chain-integrity-with-layered-temperature-monitoring<p>SpotSee and Controlant have launched a strategic alliance that combines physical temperature indicators with real-time telemetry to improve oversight and safety of temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals during transit.</p><p>SpotSee and Controlant have formed a strategic partnership to tighten oversight of temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals by combining physical, shipment-level indicators with cloud-based, real-time telemetry. According to Pharmaceutical Commerce, the alliance is intended to create a stronger evidentiary trail for product condition as therapies move from manufacturing sites to the point of care. </p> <p>The collaboration pairs SpotSee’s single-use WarmMark QR temperature indicators with Controlant’s connected-device platform. A co‑branded Controlant Go device has been introduced to simplify continuous connectivity for higher‑value consignments, and the companies plan a software integration in 2026 that will permit WarmMark QR reads to flow directly into Controlant’s visibility and quality-management workflows. The firms say the layered design lets users target monitoring investments: continuous IoT capture for critical shipments, and economical package-level indicators for last‑mile verification.</p> <p>Controlant’s chief executive Gísli Herjólfsson stressed the customer need for automated sharing and uninterrupted visibility, stating, “The market is clear: customers need automated data sharing and continuous, end-to-end visibility.” In a similar vein SpotSee’s CEO Tony Fonk argued the approach addresses specific logistics shortfalls, saying the tie-up “closes the monitoring gaps from pallet to patient.” Fonk also projected that integrating indicator-based last‑mile checks with cloud analytics and connected devices could sharply reduce returns and boost patient satisfaction.</p> <p>Industry data underline the urgency for improved cold‑chain controls. According to reporting from Pharmaceutical Commerce and earlier analyses by ABI Research and consulting firms such as Infosys, failures in temperature management in the biopharma supply chain are estimated to cost the industry roughly $35 billion annually. Those losses reflect not only product value destroyed by excursions but also the compliance and safety risks of compromised therapies.</p> <p>The operational case for a dual‑layer model rests on risk differentiation and scalability. Real‑time devices generate continuous environmental traces that support dynamic interventions during transit; single‑use indicators deliver a simple, low‑cost audit at delivery that can validate whether individual packages experienced excursions. By linking these data types in a single cloud environment, manufacturers and specialist logistics providers can reconcile transit telemetry with proof‑of‑condition evidence at the last mile without substantially increasing handling complexity.</p> <p>Beyond cost containment, the partners frame the integration as a way to simplify supplier and carrier workflows. Pharmaceutical shippers with global networks face heterogeneous operational practices and regulatory scrutiny; the companies say standardized digital ingestion of QR indicator reads into visibility platforms will reduce manual reconciliation and speed disposition decisions at receipt. According to Pharmaceutical Commerce, SpotSee and Controlant have moved into joint customer engagements and are beginning deployments of these combined monitoring programmes.</p> <p>The move reflects a broader industry shift toward layered, data-centric cold‑chain strategies. Market commentary and white papers from multiple vendors and analysts recommend combining IoT track‑and‑trace with pragmatic, shipment-level verification to protect product quality while containing monitoring costs. By presenting an integrated hardware‑to‑cloud offering, SpotSee and Controlant aim to provide supply‑chain stakeholders a way to demonstrate unequivocal proof of condition from origin through final delivery.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a77846c13a9146f650577cWed, 04 Mar 2026 23:59:51 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/03/04/foot-traffic-analytics-revolutionise-retail-networks-with-real-time-centralised-insights<p>Retailers are increasingly adopting advanced foot traffic analytics platforms to unify customer flow data, enhance real-time decision-making, and optimise store performance across territories, transforming traditional retail management.</p><p>Retailers operating networks of stores are increasingly turning to foot traffic analytics platforms to move beyond fragmented spreadsheets and isolated reports, seeking a centralised view of customer flow, conversion and store performance across territories. Vendors say the technology gives operators the capability to benchmark sites, adjust resources in near real time and link physical visits to commercial outcomes.</p> <p>At the core of these systems is data consolidation. According to SensMax, their cloud service aggregates counts from radar and sensor devices into a single account so managers can view and compare sites by geography, store type or time period. Other suppliers describe similar approaches: CountR markets a unified platform that brings footfall, conversion and demographic signals together for portfolio-level analysis, while MRI OnLocation says its solution overlays AI-driven analytics on existing camera networks to report vehicle and pedestrian movement across thousands of locations. These providers argue that centralisation makes corporate KPIs consistent and simplifies executive and regional decision-making.</p> <p>Real-time visibility is a frequent selling point. Where traditional reporting often trails activity by days, platforms from CountBOX and Dor push updates at short intervals, CountBOX advertises 15-minute refreshes with high accuracy, and Dor highlights instantaneous feeds paired with point-of-sale integration. That immediacy allows operations teams to react to crowding, open additional service points, or reallocate staff during sudden surges, reducing wasted labour and service bottlenecks, vendors say.</p> <p>Converting visits into revenue is the analytics’ strategic value. Several suppliers emphasise integrations with transaction systems to calculate site-level conversion rates and assess merchandising or staffing impacts on sales. PassBy, which markets AI-powered market intelligence, claims its movement and spend models can illuminate trade-area dynamics that underpin store performance, while SensMax notes that marrying footfall with sales data enables evidence-based inventory decisions. Retailers can therefore prioritise interventions at low-conversion sites that otherwise look healthy on raw visits alone.</p> <p>Understanding how customers move within stores is another important strand. 3D and radar counters track entry, aisle dwell and exit patterns to reveal customer journeys and hotspots. Suppliers including Storetraffic and SensMax offer people-counting hardware and analytics that, when combined with loyalty data or survey responses, can point to underperforming areas of the layout or pricing misalignments. The insights are positioned as a way to refine merchandising, improve staff deployment and enhance the in-store experience.</p> <p>Automation and alerts aim to reduce manual monitoring. Platforms can trigger notifications when occupancy thresholds are crossed or when unusual traffic patterns emerge, allowing local managers to address queuing or safety concerns promptly. CountR and Dor emphasise centralised alerting as a means of enforcing standards across a roll-out while keeping local teams empowered.</p> <p>Scale and accuracy metrics are commonly used to support vendor claims. MRI OnLocation cites coverage across more than 5,200 US locations and dozens of downtown areas, PassBy highlights modelling of millions of trade areas, and CountBOX promotes near-98% accuracy for its counts. These performance figures are offered to justify adoption for large portfolios and to support cross-functional use cases in operations, marketing and real estate.</p> <p>Privacy and compliance also feature in vendor messaging. SensMax stresses GDPR conformity for its radar-based sensors; other providers point to anonymised, camera-agnostic processing or aggregate reporting to address regulatory and customer concerns.</p> <p>Industry data and supplier roadmaps suggest the role of foot traffic analytics will continue to broaden beyond tactical staffing and queue management. CountR and PassBy position their platforms as strategic tools for expansion planning and market benchmarking, while MRI OnLocation and others promote multi-source fusion, combining cameras, sensors, transaction feeds and external mobility data, to create more robust predictors of demand.</p> <p>Adoption does not, however, eliminate the need for sound governance and change management. Retailers that centralise metrics must also align on definitions, ensure clean integration with point-of-sale and workforce systems, and train regional teams to act on signals. When those pieces come together, vendors and users contend the result is a more responsive, evidence-led retail network that can tune staffing, stock and store design to local customer behaviour while retaining a consistent corporate view of performance.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a831b2bba82c3fa3824b63Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:59:38 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/28/supply-chains-shift-from-visibility-to-real-time-action-amidst-structural-and-legal-challenges<p>As supply chains face new legal, operational, and technological hurdles, industry leaders are racing to integrate decision-making and execution, transforming resilience and agility in a disrupted landscape.</p><p>This week’s developments underline a single, urgent theme for supply chains: abundant data no longer guarantees better outcomes. Firms and platforms are racing to convert visibility into immediate, coordinated action , and the winners will be those that rebuild architectures, align legal exposure with operational choices, and embed decision-making where work actually happens.</p> <p>Architectural: from isolated optimisation to connected execution Industry research is increasingly clear that the dominant technology shortcoming is structural, not fiscal. According to a report published by Infios, most execution systems remain optimised to operate inside narrow functional boundaries, leaving organisations dependent on manual workarounds when disruptions arrive. Infios’ survey finds that a large majority of supply‑chain leaders now prize rapid, real‑time action as their primary competitive advantage, and nearly six in ten expect to increase spending on execution solutions over the next year. Sage’s State of Supply Chain report reinforces the concern: only around half of consumer brands feel prepared to respond reliably to major disruptions, citing gaps in visibility, system maturity and data readiness. Together these findings point to a market shift toward modular, interoperable stacks that can synchronise decisions across planning, warehousing, transport and finance rather than simply reporting metrics after the fact.</p> <p>Legal: carriers press for clarity and cash after the Supreme Court ruling The legal landscape has immediate operational consequences. Following the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision that the president exceeded his authority by using emergency powers to impose tariffs, questions remain over the roughly $175 billion of duties collected under that policy. FedEx has moved first, filing suit to recover tariffs it says it paid under the now‑disputed order. According to reporting by The Guardian and business outlets, FedEx is seeking full refunds, a claim that, if successful, could create ripple effects across the logistics and importing community as companies evaluate landed‑cost exposure and tariff‑related accounting. Legal uncertainty of this scale is altering procurement and pricing behaviour today, not months from now.</p> <p>Operational: exposing blind spots beyond peak season Operational resilience is being tested not only by external policy shocks but by persistent internal blind spots. Research highlighted this week by practitioners points to “hidden” inventory and a returns system that traps value long after peak volumes subside. Hiu Wai Loh’s analysis warns that fragmented data causes false stockouts and leaves millions tied up in reverse logistics, and recommends unified, real‑time inventory models paired with AI‑driven disposition logic to route returns to their most profitable next use. At the ARC Advisory Group’s 30th Leadership Forum, Avantor and Aera Technology demonstrated how Decision Intelligence can be applied to this problem set, automating thousands of routine choices , from stock rebalancing to purchase‑order prioritisation , and delivering materially faster, more consistent outcomes than manual escalation paths. ARC’s message was pragmatic: focus on “change‑ready” solutions that solve high‑impact problems now, rather than waiting for perfect data or fully autonomous systems.</p> <p>Structural: labour, AI and the cost of rapid transformation The industry’s structural fabric is also shifting. WiseTech Global has announced a two‑year restructuring that will eliminate roughly 2,000 roles, about 29% of its workforce, as the company accelerates AI integration across its CargoWise platform. The firm handles a large share of global customs transactions, and its management frames the cuts as part of a strategy to embed AI more deeply in both internal processes and customer software. The company’s broader financial context , including a steep decline in its share price since late 2024 , has intensified investor pressure for rapid change. The move underscores a difficult reality: scaling decision automation often requires painful workforce adjustments and creates concentrated short‑term disruption even when longer‑term gains are promised.</p> <p>What this means for practitioners Taken together, these trends push companies to a single operational imperative: weld data, decisioning and execution into a single, responsive fabric. That requires new architectural choices that favour interoperable modules; legal strategies that treat regulatory and tariff risk as an input to operational plans; operational practices that surface and monetise hidden inventory and returns; and workforce plans that balance human expertise with increasingly capable machine decisioning. Industry surveys and event case studies suggest the transition is underway, but uneven: many organisations acknowledge the need and are budgeting for it, yet a sizeable minority still lack the systems or confidence to act quickly.</p> <p>The immediate competitive edge belongs to organisations that can make decisions at the point of impact , not simply observe them from dashboards. As February closes, the supply chain sector is transitioning from a visibility era to one of high‑consequence execution, where legal rulings, AI‑driven operating models and connected architectures together determine who can act faster and more profitably when the next disruption arrives.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a1979d3d18d0a0ff830786Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:55:21 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/28/budgyt-launches-middle-ground-budgeting-platform-to-simplify-complex-spreadsheets-for-mid-sized-organisations<p>Budgyt introduces a departmental-focused budgeting solution designed to replace fragile spreadsheet models, offering enhanced transparency, role-based control, and board-ready reporting for organisations with 20+ staff and up to $500m revenue.</p><p>Budgyt presents itself as a middle-ground budgeting platform aimed at organisations that find spreadsheet-based processes increasingly brittle but do not need full-scale enterprise planning systems. The company said its software is intended for entities with roughly 20 or more staff, multiple departments and formal board oversight, and that it replaces sprawling workbook models that can contain “8,000+” roll‑up formulas and complex permission workarounds.</p> <p>According to the announcement, the product centres on a department‑oriented architecture with built‑in consolidation logic, multi‑user collaboration and granular, role‑based permissions designed to limit access to sensitive payroll and line‑item detail while still producing board‑ready reports. Budgyt positioned this approach as a cost‑conscious alternative to larger FP&amp;A suites, targeted at for‑profit organisations with annual revenues between $10m and $500m and nonprofits with $1.5m or more in annual expenses. The firm said it does not pursue use cases such as automated SaaS forecasting, manufacturing planning or construction project modelling.</p> <p>Independent user feedback cited by the company supports parts of its positioning. Reviews on G2 describe the product as straightforward to adopt and useful for coordinating budgets across multiple departments. TrustRadius reviewers emphasise transparency and a positive implementation experience, and Capterra ratings reflect strong scores for usability and perceived value. Collectively, these platforms feature recurring user comments that the package improves visibility and reduces reliance on fragile spreadsheet processes.</p> <p>The product’s genesis is presented as practitioner‑led: the company said a former finance vice‑president developed the platform after encountering governance and versioning failures during board reporting. That provenance is used to explain the emphasis on controlled transparency, role separation and built‑in roll‑ups intended to limit manual reconciliation and emailed file versions.</p> <p>Market observers may note trade‑offs in Budgyt’s positioning. By focusing on structural budgeting rather than broader forecasting automation or industry‑specific modelling, the platform aims to simplify deployment and avoid the overhead associated with enterprise systems. However, organisations seeking advanced predictive analytics, heavy integration with operational planning or detailed project cost modelling may find those needs fall outside its stated scope.</p> <p>The company’s messaging frames Budgyt as a way to mitigate operational exposure associated with complex spreadsheet networks and to provide a clearer audit trail for board review. User reviews on major third‑party sites cited by the announcement generally corroborate improvements in usability and reporting, though buyers should assess functional fit against specific forecasting, manufacturing or project‑level requirements before committing.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69a1979d3d18d0a0ff830782Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:54:50 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/23/operative-integrates-grayswans-autonomous-ai-to-enhance-real-time-revenue-insights-across-linear-and-streaming-channels<p>Operative partners with GraySwan to embed AI-driven observability into its platforms, enabling media companies to identify revenue opportunities and optimise performance across multiple digital channels in real time.</p><p>Operative has teamed up with GraySwan to layer autonomous AI monitoring and visual analytics onto its AOS and STAQ revenue-management suites, in a move the vendors say will sharpen media companies’ operational visibility across linear, streaming and digital channels.</p> <p>According to a company announcement distributed via GlobeNewswire and reported by industry outlets, the integration embeds GraySwan’s agentic observability into Operative’s platforms so publishers and broadcasters can spot revenue opportunities, pre-empt delivery or pricing problems, and produce cross-platform forecasts and optimisation recommendations in near real time. Operative framed the collaboration as delivering actionable intelligence directly inside existing workflows rather than leaving teams to assemble reports manually.</p> <p>“Media companies need flexible, unified insights to drive their converged linear, streaming and digital businesses. Being at the forefront of Linear Streaming, Operative partnered with GraySwan to bring our customers AI-driven observability, so they have insights that make business intelligence accessible, immediate, and integrated into workflows,” said Nick Thor, Head of AI at Operative.</p> <p>GraySwan’s technology operates as a continuously running layer that evaluates signals across supply, demand, pricing and delivery, the company’s website and the announcement state. Its platform is designed to detect anomalies such as pacing deviations, bid drops or latency spikes, trigger alerts, and surface automated recommendations; GraySwan markets these capabilities for high-volume connected-TV publishers through tools including its Wingman enterprise command centre.</p> <p>“Media is now a data-driven business, and power comes from turning that data into action,” said GraySwan Founder and CEO Zeev Neumeier. “Rather than spending hours pulling reports or missing real-time signals, Operative customers can continuously observe what’s happening across their businesses, surface new revenue opportunities, and optimize performance automatically.”</p> <p>Operative positions the enhancement as complementary to AOS’s existing remit of unifying inventory, orders, billing and planning across channels and embedding intelligence into sales and operations. Company materials suggest the GraySwan layer will be accessed by asking business questions in natural language and receiving immediate, visual answers that identify incremental yield, flag risks and recommend price or inventory adjustments.</p> <p>Industry commentary around the deal highlights a broader trend: media operators are increasingly seeking automated analytics that translate large transaction volumes into operational decisions without heavy manual intervention. Operative’s own product literature and ROI analyses emphasise time savings and revenue uplift from centralising data and automating workflows; adding an external observability service is intended to accelerate that value by surfacing anomalies and optimisation levers at enterprise scale.</p> <p>The vendors stress the solution is aimed at converged advertising environments where linear and streaming inventory must be planned and priced together. GraySwan’s focus on connected-TV signals and its agentic approach are presented as a fit for publishers wrestling with billions of ad transactions and the brittle performance behaviours those volumes can mask.</p> <p>Both companies described the offering in promotional materials; as such, editorial distance is warranted when evaluating claimed outcomes. Customers will need to validate in practice whether the continuous monitoring and AI-generated recommendations translate into sustained revenue gains and reduced operational friction across the diverse systems most media companies still run.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>6996844f78c81efd88fb5c84Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:29:26 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/23/amazon-brazil-adopts-ai-powered-supply-chain-platform-for-faster-deliveries<p>Amazon Brazil is deploying Optilogic’s AI-driven supply‑chain design platform to enhance delivery speed and optimise network planning across all 27 states, marking a significant shift towards data‑driven logistics strategies in the region.</p><p>Amazon is deploying an AI-led supply‑chain design platform in Brazil in a move it says will speed deliveries and support data‑driven network and transportation planning across all 27 states. The initiative, announced by Optilogic, will see Amazon Brazil use the vendor’s cloud‑native tools , including a large‑scale optimisation engine and a data preparation product , to model alternative network and transport strategies and test trade‑offs between speed, service quality and cost.</p> <p>According to the announcement, Amazon Brazil will use Optilogic’s Cosmic Frog for large‑scale optimisation and scenario modelling and DataStar for automated data preparation and validation. The firm said these capabilities will allow faster model iteration and greater transparency when evaluating complex supply‑chain decisions. “Optilogic enables us to explore these trade‑offs through sophisticated scenario modeling, helping our teams better understand the implications of different design and transportation strategies,” said Felipe Moraes, Head of Supply Chain and Integration at Amazon Brazil.</p> <p>Optilogic framed the work as part of a broader push to move supply‑chain modelling from protracted projects to more rapid, repeatable analysis. The company claims its platform combines artificial intelligence, mathematical optimisation and simulation to let enterprises answer “what‑if” questions in near real time. “By starting with focused, high‑value use cases and expanding over time, Amazon Brazil is building a scalable foundation for continuous, data‑driven supply chain optimization that will benefit millions of Brazilian customers,” said Max Mascarenhas, Vice President of Americas at Optilogic.</p> <p>The rollout in Brazil follows recent product and commercial signals from Optilogic. The vendor launched DataStar late last year as an agentic AI tool aimed at automating data transformation and enabling “always‑on” supply‑chain design, a capability the vendor says shifts teams from quarterly projects to continuous strategic responses. Optilogic has also publicised a strategic partnership with a Brazilian consulting firm to bolster local analytics and operations expertise, and has been recognised in industry awards for accelerating model build times.</p> <p>Analysts and customers familiar with large, geographically diverse networks caution that modelling gains do not automatically translate into operational improvements. Trade‑offs between delivery speed, cost and environmental impact often require changes in physical infrastructure, labour models and carrier contracts; scenario outputs are useful only insofar as organisations can act on them. The Optilogic materials acknowledge this, describing the work as an iterative programme that starts with focused use cases and can broaden to influence transportation strategy and fulfilment planning over time.</p> <p>Optilogic’s recent case list also includes collaborations with global manufacturers seeking to test network resilience and inventory strategies, which the company presents as evidence of the platform’s applicability beyond e‑commerce. The firm said its cloud approach requires no on‑premises IT footprint and is supported by a team of supply‑chain specialists focused on rapid value delivery.</p> <p>Amazon did not provide independent performance figures with the announcement. The company’s statement reiterated long‑standing priorities of improving customer experience while pursuing operational efficiency and environmental responsibility. Debate remains over how quickly AI‑driven modelling will change ground operations in markets with complex logistics dynamics such as Brazil, but the partnership signals that major retailers continue to invest in advanced scenario tools as part of broader supply‑chain modernisation efforts.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>69948cf371cc7d0bf828cfd2Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:29:13 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/23/loginext-finds-that-integrated-on-demand-delivery-software-boosts-scalability-and-resilience-amid-rising-consumer-expectations<p>As the on-demand delivery market surges, LogiNext emphasises the need for scalable, secure software that supports diverse use cases, with real-time tracking and automation key to meeting rapid consumer demands and maintaining operational efficiency.</p><p>According to the LogiNext guide, businesses stepping into the fast-moving on-demand delivery arena must pair operational agility with software that supports diverse use cases , from restaurant orders and same‑day prescriptions to temperature‑controlled consignments and age‑restricted alcohol deliveries. The company argues its SaaS platform delivers real‑time tracking, automated dispatch and white‑label customisation to help merchants scale and preserve customer experience as volumes climb.</p> <p>Market data underlines why such capabilities matter. The online food delivery sector alone was valued at about USD72.8 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow to roughly USD83.7 billion by 2025, driven by smartphone penetration and subscription models that reduce per‑order friction, according to MarketGrowthReports. That analysis also highlights persistent margin pressure from delivery fees , average add‑ons of USD2–5 prompt nearly half of shoppers to abandon baskets , and rising consumer preference for contactless fulfilment and sustainability initiatives.</p> <p>Broader logistics research paints a complementary picture. GlobalGrowthInsights estimates the on‑demand delivery software market at roughly USD0.53 billion in 2024 with a projected decade‑long climb to about USD1.26 billion, driven by demand for live tracking and automation. Its findings note widespread cloud adoption, accelerating AI usage for route and demand prediction, and recurring challenges such as integration headaches, regulatory compliance costs and cybersecurity risks. Meanwhile, the same‑day delivery market is forecast to expand sharply from around USD10.1 billion in 2023 to an estimated USD66.8 billion by 2033, reflecting retailers’ need to meet urban consumers’ expectations for immediacy and convenience, according to a market outlook published in February 2024.</p> <p>Against this backdrop, LogiNext highlights specific functional priorities. Live GPS visibility and order status updates reduce uncertainty for customers and provide operators the telemetry to tighten routing and reduce idle time. Automated dispatch and dynamic routing are presented as levers to shorten delivery windows and lower fuel and labour expenditure. For specialised segments, the guide stresses integration of temperature monitoring for refrigerated shipments and digital age verification for alcohol deliveries as ways to preserve product integrity and regulatory compliance. It also emphasises modular payment options and secure gateways to protect sensitive customer data.</p> <p>Independent reports reinforce these strategic focuses. Industry research shows a large majority of consumers now expect live tracking and faster fulfilment, and that platforms deploying AI and cloud infrastructure routinely report improved transparency and cost reductions. At the same time, analysts caution that rising compliance burdens and workforce rules can erode unit economics, an issue underscored in recent public company commentary.</p> <p>Operational performance among leading platforms illustrates both opportunity and complexity. DoorDash reported strong order growth and revenue gains in recent quarters as it broadened into groceries and convenience retail, while expanding subscription uptake to make delivery costs more predictable for frequent users, according to news coverage of its earnings. Those developments demonstrate how marketplace scale and diversified fulfilment can lift volumes , but also highlight integration and margin pressures that come with rapid international expansion.</p> <p>LogiNext’s set of customer case studies, as presented in the guide, offers concrete outcomes: operators citing order growth, faster fulfilment and reductions in delivery time after deploying the platform. Such anecdotes mirror wider market evidence that well‑implemented software can raise customer satisfaction and cut operational cost. Yet research cautions that technology alone is not a panacea; firms must also manage driver economics, regulatory compliance and changing consumer preferences , from healthier meal options to greener packaging , if gains are to be sustained.</p> <p>For businesses evaluating on‑demand platforms, several practical considerations emerge. Prioritise solutions that expose actionable metrics through analytics and reporting; demand seamless API integrations with inventory and payments systems; insist on robust security and compliance features; and verify the vendor’s ability to support vertical‑specific needs such as temperature control or age verification. Scalability matters, but so does the vendor’s track record of reducing time‑to‑market and supporting ongoing updates and localisation.</p> <p>The competitive and regulatory landscape will continue to evolve rapidly. Advances such as drone pilots and broader AI adoption promise efficiency gains yet introduce new operational and oversight questions. As same‑day and instantaneous fulfilment expectations expand, companies that combine precise, secure software with disciplined cost management and regulatory foresight will be best placed to convert short‑term demand into durable advantage. According to the LogiNext guide, that combination , rather than point solutions or ad hoc tools , is the foundation for turning on‑demand promise into reliable, scalable service.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>699cbac671cc7d0bf82a7dfcMon, 23 Feb 2026 22:28:36 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/21/2026-set-to-redefine-supply-chains-with-ai-automation-and-sustainability-breakthroughs<p>As global trade volatility intensifies, 2026 emerges as a pivotal year for supply chains, driven by advanced AI, automation, blockchain, and green initiatives that promise to revolutionise sourcing, logistics, and resilience strategies worldwide.</p><p>As organisations confront increasing volatility across global trade, 2026 looks set to be a year in which technology, sustainability and closer supplier collaboration reshape how goods move from source to customer. Executives are prioritising resilience and cost control while responding to customer demands for speed and transparency, and a number of emerging capabilities are beginning to alter the architecture of modern supply chains.</p> <p>Artificial intelligence is moving from experimental to operational. Companies are deploying predictive analytics to tighten demand forecasts, real‑time anomaly detection to surface logistics problems and automated decision engines to accelerate responses across planning and fulfilment. According to reporting from SupplyChainConnect on demonstrations at CES 2026, AI‑driven digital twins and other advanced modelling tools were among the most prominent innovations shown to optimise flows and test disruption scenarios in virtual environments. At the same time, a survey conducted by ORTEC found that although logistics leaders expect agentic AI to deliver efficiency gains and greater resilience, 42% of organisations are not yet exploring autonomous decision systems, underscoring a gap between promise and practice.</p> <p>Automation in the physical network is also advancing rapidly. Next‑generation warehouse robots and autonomous mobile robots are being adopted to address persistent labour shortages and raise throughput, while pilots of self‑driving trucks and delivery drones are expanding last‑mile options. SupplyChainConnect’s coverage of CES flagged autonomous airport robots and cutting‑edge warehousing machines as examples of technologies poised to reduce manual handling and accelerate turnaround times. Firms report savings from robotic process automation in back‑office tasks as well, freeing human staff for exception management and higher‑value work.</p> <p>Visibility and provenance remain central concerns, and distributed ledger technologies are being positioned as a tool for improved traceability. Blockchain implementations promise tamper‑resistant product records from origin to receipt, simplified compliance reporting and stronger anti‑counterfeit measures. Organisations with multi‑tier suppliers are increasingly experimenting with immutable ledgers to share verified data across partners, although integration with legacy systems and governance of shared data remain practical hurdles.</p> <p>Sustainability has moved beyond compliance into strategic differentiation. Companies are publishing net‑zero roadmaps, deploying carbon tracking across transport and warehousing, and investing in circular approaches such as reverse logistics and extended producer responsibility programmes. Consumers and regulators are intensifying pressure, and industry data shows firms that embed lifecycle assessment and eco‑design early in product development are better placed to avoid costly rework and reputational risk.</p> <p>Digital twins are emerging as a central tool for planning and crisis response. By modelling entire networks digitally, supply chain teams can run what‑if scenarios, reconfigure capacity and test contingency plans without the expense and disruption of physical trials. Coverage from CES 2026 highlighted AI‑enhanced digital twin demonstrations capable of suggesting corrective actions in near real time, a capability that complements predictive maintenance strategies driven by the Internet of Things. Sensor data, tied into maintenance planning systems, is reducing unplanned downtime by signalling component degradation before failures occur.</p> <p>Fulfilment strategies are becoming more local and flexible. The proliferation of micro‑fulfilment centres close to urban demand nodes, dynamic route optimisation and store‑based e‑commerce fulfilment are shortening delivery windows and cutting transport miles. Retailers and carriers are combining these tactics with same‑day and on‑demand options to meet heightened consumer expectations while containing cost.</p> <p>Cloud platforms are facilitating closer supplier collaboration by breaking down data silos. Unified systems provide shared dashboards, faster partner onboarding and smoother integration across ERP, planning and logistics functions. Those benefits support multi‑sourcing and flexible contracting approaches that form the backbone of more agile risk management, enabling firms to maintain service levels through regional shocks or supplier outages.</p> <p>Despite the technology surge, workforce adaptation remains a critical constraint. Demand is rising for data analysts, digital planners and technicians skilled in robotics and automation. Organisations are responding with targeted upskilling and hybrid human‑machine operating models, recognising that technology adoption without parallel investment in people will limit the value delivered.</p> <p>Finally, resilience is being treated as a measurable business objective rather than an ad hoc activity. Companies are formalising risk committees, maintaining scenario‑based inventory buffers and deploying real‑time risk dashboards to stay ahead of interruptions. Industry observers note that 2026 will likely be a pivotal year for testing agentic AI and autonomous orchestration tools at scale; how quickly firms move from pilots to production will determine which supply chains gain decisive advantage.</p> <p>Taken together, these trends suggest a shift from isolated project investments to systemwide transformation. Organisations that combine intelligent automation, greener operations and closer partner integration while building the required skills and governance will be best positioned to navigate the complexity of global trade in the years ahead.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>6998e68ee52aba12a04f8252Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:00:23 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/15/third-party-risk-management-accelerates-in-2026-with-ai-driven-automation-and-integrated-oversight<p>As vendor-related breaches increase, enterprises are shifting towards integrated, AI-powered third-party risk management solutions that enable continuous monitoring, automation, and streamlined compliance to mitigate cascading security failures in a complex supply chain environment.</p><p>We build software on cloud foundations but increasingly depend on a lattice of external services whose failures can cascade through product, compliance and sales. Recent industry reporting underscores that third‑party exposures are no longer hypothetical: Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 30 percent of breaches involved a third party, and Vanta’s 2025 State of Trust survey of more than 2,500 IT and business leaders found that 46 percent of respondents had suffered a vendor‑linked breach after a partnership began. Those figures frame why vendor oversight has moved from checkbox to boardroom priority in 2026.</p> <p>A confluence of drivers is accelerating enterprise investment in third‑party risk management (TPRM). Gartner warned in 2025 that trade volatility, cyberattacks, regulatory pressure and supply‑chain disruption are creating a “perfect storm” that is pushing organisations to adopt TPRM technologies and to run multiple tools across business functions. Regulators add urgency: Europe’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the SEC’s disclosure expectations and sector programmes such as CMMC increase the penalties for weak oversight and raise procurement bars for SaaS vendors.</p> <p>What modern TPRM needs to deliver TPRM must now do two things in parallel: shrink actual exposure and make vendor diligence frictionless for sales, procurement and auditors. That means continuous telemetry, fast remediation workflows and tight integrations with the systems where teams already work.</p> <p>Automation and workflow integration. Manual spreadsheets and ad‑hoc email threads do not scale. Platforms should automate intake, calculate inherent risk, surface outliers for human review and open remediation tickets directly into ticketing tools such as Jira or ServiceNow. The most effective products also reuse evidence, parsing SOC 2 reports and policy documents to reduce repeated vendor requests and speed approvals.</p> <p>Discovery and stack integration. True visibility requires linking identity, procurement and finance systems so shadow IT and overlooked services appear in inventory. A robust connector set that pulls data from SSO providers, CLMs and spend systems reduces blind spots and keeps risk calculations grounded in actual use‑cases.</p> <p>Continuous monitoring and signal context. Outside‑in ratings, dark‑web surveillance, vulnerability feeds and certificate monitoring must feed vendor records in near real time. Scores are useful only when paired with context and a clear path to action, alerts routed into the operational workflow rather than buried in dashboards.</p> <p>Compliance mapping and audit readiness. Auditors demand traceable evidence that vendor reviews map to controls such as encryption or access management. Exportable reports that show assessed vendors, control references and remediation status are essential for both deals and regulator requests.</p> <p>Scalability, hierarchy and cost transparency. As organisations grow, vendor estates can balloon from a handful to thousands. Tools should model complex supplier hierarchies and fourth‑party chains, keep performance at scale and offer pricing models that do not explode as vendor counts rise.</p> <p>How AI and automation are reshaping assessments AI is already reshaping the efficiency equation. A 2025 Panorays survey of CISOs reported average time savings of 44 percent when AI automation was applied to third‑party cyber risk tasks. That efficiency translates to more frequent reviews, faster evidence triage and the ability for small teams to cover larger portfolios. Forbes has also documented the move toward predictive and scenario‑driven TPRM, platforms that can simulate supply‑chain shocks and surface proactive mitigations to meet evolving regulatory expectations.</p> <p>Ratings versus full TPRM suites Distinct product classes persist. Cyber‑ratings services provide high‑frequency, outside‑in visibility that is excellent for triage and portfolio benchmarking, while full TPRM platforms manage intake, questionnaires, evidence, control mapping and remediation workflows.</p> <p>SecurityScorecard and BitSight exemplify the ratings model: quick, board‑friendly signals that refresh daily and help triage where to dig deeper. Their grades and numeric scores make vendor posture legible to leadership and insurers but lack internal context about the vendor’s role in your product or compensating controls you may have applied. They are therefore most effective as one signal in a broader program.</p> <p>By contrast, platforms such as Vanta, OneTrust and Prevalent emphasise lifecycle coverage and auditability. Vanta blends compliance automation with vendor oversight, exposing continuous tests and an evidence‑reuse experience that many customers say shortens reviews. OneTrust is built around privacy governance and complex intake constructs, making it a strong fit when GDPR, HIPAA or multi‑entity regulatory mapping drives the program. Prevalent targets full lifecycle management and exchange‑style reuse to cut duplicate review work for large estates.</p> <p>Selecting the right approach Choose based on primary objectives and organisational capability:</p> <ul> <li>- If rapid consolidation of compliance and vendor oversight matters, and you want fast time‑to‑value, a compliance‑centred platform that ties vendor findings back into controls can reduce audit friction.</li> <li>- If privacy governance and multi‑entity hierarchy modelling are central, prioritise a privacy‑first vendor risk product with rich regulatory templates and reporting.</li> <li>- If portfolio‑wide, external hygiene visibility is the priority, for insurers or board reporting, add a ratings provider for daily telemetry.</li> <li>- Most mature programmes run both: ratings for continuous external monitoring and a TPRM suite for intake, evidence collection and audit trails.</li> </ul> <p>Market and operational trends to watch in 2026 - Ecosystem and systemic risk: Analyses by industry vendors and consultancies highlight growing emphasis on fourth‑ and nth‑party mapping and concentration risk modelling to understand how a single supplier failure can ripple across many customers. - Managed TPRM services: For organisations that lack internal bandwidth, managed services are becoming a delivered option to run lifecycle tasks and respond to alerts. - Exchange and reuse networks: Shared repositories and vendor portals reduce survey fatigue when vendors can surface a single authoritative set of evidence across customers. Their value depends on vendor coverage and freshness, so validate overlap with your supplier base. - Pricing clarity: Several vendors and market reports note opacity around vendor‑count thresholds and add‑on modules. Get scenario pricing for double‑sized estates and confirm which capabilities are premium.</p> <p>Practical guidance for teams - Start where the business feels the pain. For a tiny startup, spreadsheets can suffice until enterprise prospects require documented due diligence. For scaling SaaS vendors, even a lightweight platform that automates intake and builds an audit trail can unlock deals and save analyst hours. - Layer signals. Use ratings for continuous, outside‑in monitoring and a TPRM platform to manage evidence, remediation and control mapping. - Measure value. Track hours saved per assessment, accelerated deal closures and avoided hires to quantify ROI. Labour savings alone often justify subscriptions in the first year. - Reduce vendor fatigue. Tier suppliers by risk so low‑risk partners answer short forms, accept existing SOC 2 reports when appropriate and use shared assessment hubs where available.</p> <p>A final note on verification and evaluation Gartner’s research shows many organisations run multiple TPRM tools across functions; your evaluation should include live demos that trigger real alerts, evidence parsing and ticketing handoffs. Ask vendors to demonstrate automated discovery from identity and spend systems, show a mock breach and route remediation into your workflow, and provide concrete pricing scenarios for your likely vendor counts. Validate roadmap items that appear in marketing materials, what is “coming soon” versus available today, as that distinction materially affects procurement and implementation timelines.</p> <p>In a world where supply‑chain exploits and AI‑driven shadow IT are rising concerns, third‑party exposure is product exposure. The right mix of continuous monitoring, automation, and operational integration will determine whether vendor relationships are a source of resilience or risk.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>698a5a27470bf610414a2e6eSun, 15 Feb 2026 22:05:08 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/15/uk-rail-industry-explores-adaptive-frameworks-to-withstand-post-pandemic-pressures<p>As financial constraints and shifting passenger needs challenge traditional procurement models, industry insiders advocate for more flexible, collaborative frameworks to ensure continued efficiency and value in UK rail projects.</p><p>Framework agreements have underpinned procurement in the UK rail sector for decades, promising stability, efficiency and closer working between clients and suppliers. Yet with public finances squeezed and demand patterns shifting since the pandemic, industry figures and trade reporting increasingly question whether traditional frameworks remain fit for purpose.</p> <p>Long-term deals were introduced to reduce repeated tendering, secure access to specialist skills and allow suppliers to invest in understanding client needs. Practitioners argue those benefits endure: established relationships let suppliers anticipate priorities, align teams more quickly and deliver outcomes that reflect operational realities rather than narrow contract terms. For clients, frameworks offer a faster route to commission work through call-offs and a degree of certainty about capability and delivery approach.</p> <p>But the economic and policy backdrop has altered the assumptions that once underpinned these arrangements. Post‑coronavirus fiscal pressures and tighter public spending have reduced the steady pipelines of work that many suppliers expected under earlier contracts, while shifting client priorities mean some frameworks are no longer delivering predictable volumes. According to Railway Gazette, this mismatch between expectation and reality is prompting calls for frameworks to evolve so they remain a source of value in a more volatile market.</p> <p>That evolution, industry insiders say, begins with the conversations partners have with one another. A more inquisitive approach, asking how pressures on budgets, programme risk or innovation pipelines affect delivery, can reveal gaps that standard frameworks do not address. From the supplier perspective, cultivating that deeper understanding enables more targeted proposals and smarter resource planning. From the client side, it can unlock creative uses of existing agreements without breaching procurement rules.</p> <p>Collaboration matters more where value for money is the primary metric. In a constrained environment, sharing insight and reframing success around end‑user outcomes rather than narrow outputs helps stretch scarce funding. Railway Gazette reporting suggests frameworks that tolerate greater flexibility on scope, incentivise continuous improvement and embed mechanisms for regular review perform better at delivering real value.</p> <p>There are practical implications for how frameworks are designed and managed. Shorter, modular arrangements or hybrid models that combine a core long‑term relationship with more responsive, shorter-term call-offs could reconcile the need for stability with the reality of unpredictable demand. Equally, establishing clearer channels for information exchange, joint risk management and incentives for innovation can reward suppliers that invest in understanding client objectives.</p> <p>Industry voices caution against abandoning long-term agreements entirely. The accrued institutional knowledge and trust that develop over time are hard to replicate through spot contracting. Instead, the argument advanced in trade coverage is for frameworks to be retooled: preserved where they add strategic value, but made more dynamic and conversation-driven so they can respond to shifting priorities and reduced certainty.</p> <p>The debate is one of balance. As the rail sector navigates tighter budgets and changing passenger patterns, frameworks that combine the efficiencies of continuity with the agility to adapt will be most likely to deliver improved outcomes. According to Railway Gazette, achieving that will require both clients and suppliers to adopt a more curious, collaborative stance, using long-term relationships not as an administrative convenience but as a platform for shared problem-solving and better value for the public purse.</p> <p>This piece is adapted from commentary first published on Rail Business Daily and reflects reporting in Railway Gazette on the need for frameworks in the UK rail industry to evolve to remain effective.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>698ea45478c81efd88f9da62Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:05:02 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/15/construction-firms-prioritise-financial-kpis-to-navigate-cash-flow-challenges-amid-busy-schedules<p>Despite abundant projects, construction companies are recognising that strong financial oversight through tailored KPIs is essential to prevent failures, optimise profitability, and sustain growth in a volatile market.</p><p>In construction, plentiful work on the schedule is no guarantee of financial stability. Projects can be abundant while cash is constrained, pay runs tighten and subcontractors complain about late settlements. Industry studies show a large share of contractor failures stem from weak financial oversight rather than a scarcity of contracts, underlining the need for disciplined measurement of the right financial indicators.</p> <p>Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tailored to construction give managers a clearer view of profitability, liquidity and leverage than generic metrics such as topline revenue or bank balance. Long project timelines, uneven billing cycles, fluctuating labour and material costs and project-specific risks all create blind spots that routine business metrics cannot expose. Tracking construction-focused financial KPIs provides early warning signs, supports better bidding and resourcing decisions, and helps preserve bonding and lending capacity.</p> <p>Six financial KPIs every owner, general contractor and subcontractor should prioritise</p> <ol> <li><span>- </span><p>Gross profit margin Formula: (Revenue − Cost of goods sold) ÷ Revenue This metric shows how much remains from project revenue after direct project costs, labour, materials and specialty trades. Construction benchmarks vary by sector and contract type, but many firms aim for margins in the low to mid‑20s. Break this down by project type, site manager or phase to reveal pocketed losses that aggregate into a weak company average. According to industry guidance, granular, job‑level visibility is essential for corrective action.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Net profit margin Formula: (Net income ÷ Revenue) × 100 Net margin reveals business‑level performance after overheads, administration, insurance, fleet and technology. Typical healthy ranges in construction are modest; many firms target mid single‑digit percentages. If jobs are profitable but company net margin is compressed, overhead control or pricing strategy is where attention must fall. Practitioners recommend monthly review and year‑on‑year comparison to spot structural cost drift.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Operating cash flow and short‑term cash forecasting Measure: Operating cash flow ÷ Current liabilities and rolling cash forecasts Cash is the industry’s lifeblood; receivable timing frequently lags the outlay of project costs. Maintaining a rolling 13‑week cash forecast and monitoring receivables ageing are widely advised best practices. Progress billing and disciplined collections reduce strain; tools that integrate accounting and project data can automate much of the forecasting work, minimising reliance on error‑prone spreadsheets.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Working capital ratio Formula: Current assets ÷ Current liabilities Working capital measures ability to meet near‑term obligations. In construction, where material price spikes or weather delays can create immediate demands, a ratio comfortably above 1.0 is prudent. Firms commonly target a range that balances liquidity with growth needs; using the ratio as a gating metric before accepting large new contracts helps avoid overstretching cash resources.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Backlog and pipeline value Measure: Value of signed but uncompleted contracts (backlog) and value of qualified leads (pipeline) Backlog and pipeline together indicate future revenue and resource demand. Effective practices distinguish legally committed work from preliminary leads so forecasts are reliable. Many advisers recommend maintaining several months of secured work and a steady conversion rate from pipeline to contracts to smooth staffing and equipment utilisation.</p> </li> <li><span>- </span><p>Debt‑to‑equity ratio Formula: Total debt ÷ Total equity Construction’s capital intensity means borrowing is common, but excessive leverage can impair bonding capacity and increase lender scrutiny. Industry guidance suggests monitoring debt levels relative to equity and factoring that constraint into decisions about equipment purchases or geographic expansion.</p> </li> </ol> <p>Additional metrics to refine decision‑making Beyond the core six, monitoring job cost variance, return on assets for equipment, bid‑hit ratios and other trade‑specific measures strengthens estimating accuracy and operational discipline. Professional bodies note that choosing a focused set of KPIs for each business process, and understanding how indicators interact, produces the most actionable insight.</p> <p>How to make KPI measurement work Select a concise dashboard of meaningful measures rather than an unwieldy list. Data should be captured from your accounting and project systems so reports are timely and consistent. Vendors and industry commentators recommend leveraging construction‑specific finance platforms or integrated project accounting suites to reduce manual reconciliation and forecasting errors.</p> <p>Cadence matters: review cash position and accounts receivable weekly; evaluate margins and backlog monthly; and assess capital structure and year‑on‑year trends quarterly. Tailor targets to your company’s size, trade specialism and market region rather than adopting generic benchmarks blindly. Case examples from contractors show that routine, job‑level reviews can quickly reveal recurring estimating or supervision issues; small process fixes can translate into six‑figure improvements over a year.</p> <p>Monitoring the right financial KPIs does not eliminate industry volatility, but it converts uncertainty into manageable business signals. When construction firms combine accurate job costing, disciplined cash management and focused KPI governance, they reduce the chance that healthy-looking revenues mask a fragile balance sheet. According to industry commentators and software vendors, those practices are the difference between a business that merely survives busy periods and one that grows with predictable profitability.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>698fe06571cc7d0bf827f0a3Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:04:28 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/12/diversifying-supply-chains-becomes-essential-to-stabilise-the-energy-transition<p>As the decarbonisation effort intensifies, industry and policymakers emphasise the need for diversified, resilient supply networks, leveraging advanced analytics and strategic standards to counter geopolitical and climate risks.</p><p>Global efforts to decarbonise depend on technologies whose supply chains are increasingly brittle, concentrated and exposed to geopolitical and climate risks. Industry and policy reports point to a narrowing set of suppliers for the minerals and components that underpin solar, batteries, hydrogen and fuel-cell systems, leaving the energy transition vulnerable to abrupt price swings, export controls and production disruptions. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2024 the three largest producers of copper, lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare-earth elements controlled roughly 86% of those markets, while China alone refines 19 of 20 strategic minerals and holds about three quarters of some processing capacity. The IEA warns this concentration could produce price volatility and future shortfalls unless diversification and government action accelerate.</p> <p>The problem is not only the geography of supply but also the physical fragility of production networks. The OECD and PwC have highlighted how single-region dominance of value chains , from polysilicon for solar to catalyst and membrane supply for fuel cells , creates single points of failure. The OECD’s analysis of solar manufacturing, for example, shows a striking concentration of capacity in a single province and even a handful of facilities, while PwC’s work presented at APEC emphasises that climate-driven stresses such as heat and drought add a further layer of disruption risk for key commodities including lithium, copper and bauxite. Together these findings underline that scaling clean technologies requires both broader sourcing and resilience to climate impacts.</p> <p>Against this backdrop, firms are rethinking procurement and engineering to reduce sole-source dependencies. One practical model comes from projects led by Irshadullah Asim Mohammed, who set out to convert supplier risk into an operational advantage. Faced with dependency on a single domestic vendor for mechanical components crucial to fuel-cell systems, his team surveyed more than 50 prospective manufacturers, raised technical specifications to tighter industry tolerances and aligned procurement to ASME and ISO standards to bring multiple suppliers into qualification. “Our objective was to reframe supply chain risk as a competitive advantage; building networks where every partner contributed in strengthening the system rather than becoming a potential point of failure,” he said.</p> <p>The results reported from those efforts were tangible: reduced lead times, lower unit costs and a diminished reliance on single vendors that otherwise threatened production schedules. Beyond the immediate gains for the company involved, the approach offers a replicable template for other firms in the clean-energy sector. When major buyers demonstrate that multi-sourcing and rigorous qualification can deliver cost and timing benefits, market incentives shift and the broader supply ecosystem can become more distributed.</p> <p>There is an economic logic to that shift. Diversified sourcing can make projects more bankable by reducing the likelihood of delays and cost overruns that deter long-term capital. Industry data and policy analysis suggest that equipment produced closer to deployment sites and validated across several suppliers improves competitiveness versus incumbent fossil-fuel options, thereby accelerating uptake. At the same time, broader supplier networks create opportunities for technology transfer, upskilling and local industrial development in new regions, strengthening both commercial and diplomatic ties.</p> <p>Technological tools amplify these gains. Academic work by Irshadullah Asim Mohammed explores machine-learning approaches to make supplier selection and monitoring more reliable, using random forests, support vector machines and neural networks to predict supplier risk and flag quality concerns. Other papers by the same author lay out AI-driven risk frameworks for carbon-capture and energy-storage chains, arguing that real-time data and predictive analytics can materially improve decision-making and reduce the probability of supplier-related shocks. Such capabilities are particularly valuable where supplier performance and environmental exposure vary rapidly.</p> <p>Policy measures will remain necessary to complement corporate strategies. The IEA and OECD both call for government interventions to reduce strategic dependencies , through incentives for domestic processing, trade partnerships, standards harmonisation and targeted investment in alternative production hubs. PwC’s assessment adds that adaptation planning for climate impacts on commodity supply must be integral to these strategies if resource production is to be reliable over decades. Without coordinated public–private action, market-led diversification alone will struggle to close projected shortfalls in materials such as copper by 2030.</p> <p>Practical initiatives that combine rigorous engineering standards, diversified procurement and advanced analytics can therefore move markets from fragility to resilience. They also produce social returns: cheaper, more reliable clean energy reduces emissions and air pollution, with attendant public-health and development benefits in emerging economies. For the United States and other importing economies, distributing production and qualification work across a wider set of partners strengthens energy security and reduces exposure to single-country risks.</p> <p>The lessons from recent initiatives are clear. Strengthening supply chains requires simultaneous upgrades to technical standards, data-driven supplier assessment and strategic policy support. When companies and governments adopt these measures in concert, the energy transition becomes not only technically feasible but materially more robust and inclusive. The shift from vulnerability to resilience remains an urgent priority if global net-zero ambitions are to be delivered at scale.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>698cfd1278c81efd88f9829eThu, 12 Feb 2026 22:02:44 +0000http://srmtoday.makes.news/gb/en/beyond-kpis/2026/02/12/oracle-netsuite-launches-ai-driven-updates-to-streamline-finance-and-supply-chains<p>Oracle NetSuite unveils a comprehensive suite of AI-powered features designed to enhance operational workflows, automate financial processes, and improve customer and supply chain management on a global scale, including new localisation efforts.</p><p>Oracle NetSuite has rolled out a broad set of AI-driven features and related product updates designed to tighten operational workflows across finance, customer service and supply‑chain functions, with the stated aim of boosting automation, reducing manual effort and accelerating decision making.</p> <p>According to the announcement from Oracle NetSuite, the new capabilities embed generative and traditional AI across the suite so organisations can convert disconnected tasks into continuous, end‑to‑end workflows. “With a single unified suite and the ability to leverage powerful AI models, NetSuite turns disconnected tasks into intelligent end-to-end workflows,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president, Oracle NetSuite.</p> <p>Finance automation and reconciliation are central to the release. NetSuite’s Intelligent Close Manager provides a single, AI‑driven command centre intended to shorten close cycles, strengthen accountability and surface trend and variance analytics with drill‑downs into transactional data across global operations. Complementing that, AI‑powered bank transaction matching and a reconciliation agent use generative models trained on historical data to raise auto‑match rates, reduce manual review and enable continuous, in‑quarter reconciliations while teams concentrate on high‑risk exceptions. The vendor says AI‑generated report narratives will convert dense financial and operational metrics into readable insights with a single click, initially available worldwide in English with additional languages planned.</p> <p>Customer experience and pricing also receive AI enhancements. NetSuite’s customer summaries and the new Customer 360 capability produce role‑based case and sales transaction briefs to speed triage and reassignments, while AI‑assisted advanced pricing centralises policy‑driven pricing and produces consolidated pricing summaries that combine inventory, cost and sales information to help protect margins and respond to market shifts.</p> <p>Developer and planning tooling have been extended. A SuiteCloud Developer Assistant offers an AI coding companion for SuiteScript to reduce repetitive tasks and accelerate customisation and testing. On the planning side, NetSuite’s EPM Planning Agent supports natural‑language trend and variance analysis and what‑if scenario exploration using data drawn from across the business, aiming to improve FP&amp;A responsiveness.</p> <p>Beyond AI, NetSuite is introducing enhancements intended for subscription and payments workflows and inventory control. New subscription metrics surface Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue and cohort heatmaps to help spot churn risk and track upsell or downsell impacts in real time. Intelligent Payment Automation now enables multi‑subsidiary vendor payments for US customers to consolidate vendor records and strengthen fraud controls. SuiteBilling gains flexible commitment allocation to handle complex consumption commitments and cross‑subscription prepaid balances. Consignment inventory management improves tracking for vendor‑owned stock so businesses pay only when goods are sold.</p> <p>Several related NetSuite initiatives and earlier Oracle releases provide extra context to the package. According to Oracle, NetSuite Text Enhance leverages company‑specific data to help users create contextual, personalised content; Bill Capture automatically extracts and categorises expenses; and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse consolidates data sources to speed visualisation and reporting. Oracle has also emphasised that these generative AI features are supported by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and include role‑based security and controls designed to protect enterprise data and privacy. The company has further promoted embedded services such as NetSuite Capital to accelerate invoice financing, NetSuite Pay to simplify merchant onboarding, and electronic invoicing to streamline global compliance and cash collection.</p> <p>Oracle statements and regional briefings also highlight localisation and industry expansions. The vendor has recently announced region‑specific updates for the UK and Southeast Asia that add generative AI, enterprise performance management and e‑invoicing features along with local product adjustments and licensing options tailored to those markets.</p> <p>Oracle NetSuite frames the package as the next step in a longer evolution: the company points out that NetSuite has spent more than 25 years building an integrated cloud ERP and, it says, now serves over 43,000 customers in 220 countries and dependent territories. Company statements describe the new capabilities as generally available to customers worldwide, with the exception of the multi‑subsidiary vendor payments feature, which is limited to the US at launch.</p> <p>Industry observers will watch for real‑world deployments and measurable improvements in close times, reconciliation automation and pricing accuracy, and for how well the vendor enforces the security and governance controls it highlights as the features scale across customers.</p> <p>Source: <a href="https://www.noahwire.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Noah Wire Services</a></p>698dd6c171cc7d0bf8279915Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:02:17 +0000