Supply & Demand Chain Executive Names aThingz Recipient of 2024 Top Supply Chain Projects Award
This award profiles innovative case study-type projects designed to automate, optimize, streamline and improve the supply chain.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Supply & Demand Chain Executive, the only publication covering the entire global supply chain named aThingz as one of the winners of this year’s Top Supply Chain Projects award, which profiles innovative case study-type projects designed to automate, optimize, streamline and improve the supply chain.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive has recognized aThingz for its role in helping a Top 5 global automotive OEM realize logistics financial cost to serve visibility. This breakthrough capability increased logistics financial plan to actuals accuracy by 20% raising overall performance to 95% accuracy sustained.
“International shipments can take anywhere between 30 to 120 days, or more, depending on what happens during that shipment journey,” says Kannan Ramachandran, Chief Commercial & AI Officer at aThingz. “In between long-lead invoices, the OEM lacked visibility into the costs they were accruing, leading to challenges in financial forecasting and cost variance resulting from their carrier invoices vs. what they had planned for.”
aThingz consumes shipment information from the OEM’s freight forwarder and carriers to uniquely construct the execution network and costs, leveraging the master data, planning, and contracted rate information.
“We perform reverse network planning,” says Vijaya Neela, aThingz CEO & President, to determine things like “Was it the contracted carrier who executed the shipment, did they do any spot buys, did they do something else? If the cost ended up being different than what was planned, did volumes change?”
aThingz then takes this to the next level by using AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and a suite of heuristics to better predict and validate the number of shipments or containers that will flow through OEM’s network for the upcoming month as well as the cost associated. This becomes another input for financial accruals.
Having visibility into expenses being accrued and financials associated with a shipment before they are invoiced is extremely critical to the logistics cost to serve and cash flow. By tying the carrier network to appropriate shipper rates and contracts, shippers like this OEM can accurately understand what happens during the shipment process and easily explain the operational costs and financials to stakeholders.
“The past 12 months has seen companies within the supply chain and logistics space upgrade, enhance, adopt and adapt in order to achieve greater efficiency along the chain. Companies implemented others’ software and technology to work smarter, together. Their partnerships cultivated resilience and placed a spotlight on projects designed to make the supply chain space safer and more efficient,” says Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Supply & Demand Chain Executive. “And, now it’s time to celebrate those projects!”
About aThingz
aThingz is an innovative supply chain AI company based out of Southfield, MI, to drive accelerated tangible business benefits. The following highlights aThingz innovative process and approach
Modernization and Reconfiguration of Logistics
aThingz, has adopted first principles design thinking to modernize and reconfigure logistics master data management, planning and execution.
S&OP for Logistics and Transportation
aThingz S&OP for logistics and transportation evolves traditional siloed logistics planning & execution functions into a continuous, closed-loop, process using modern day autonomous AI techniques and technologies.
Triple-Double Architecture
aThingz triple-double architecture for the first-time fuses together the information (or data), physical (movement of goods and services) and financial supply chains (cost to serve) – the triple play. The double play collapses, and unifies, and enables closed loop continuous logistics planning with execution.
For more information about our solution and services, please visit us at https://www.athingz.com.
Click here to view the full list of Top Supply Chain Project Winners.
Contacts
Jennifer Keranen
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