Challenges
Do you have complex supply chain transactions, such as multiple shipments per order, multiple orders per shipment or multiple invoices per order? Does this complexity inhibit your organization’s ability to access the supply chain information it needs?
Must your Line of Business (LOB) users contact IT to find answers to certain questions on order, shipment or invoice status? Do they wish they could find this information themselves in an easy-to-understand format? Is responding to these inquiries consuming IT resources that could be better allocated to other priorities?
IBM offers a solution that can help – Business Transaction Intelligence a capability of the IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network.
Solution Description
Business Transaction Intelligence provides business visibility for supply chain transactions communicated over the IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network.
It can visually represent complex supply chain flows that contain hundreds of correlated documents for an at-a-glance view of exactly what happened in the context of a particular order, shipment or invoice. Business Transaction Intelligence presents insights into the performance of the overall order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay processes and highlights anomalies.
Supply chain transactions are often complex and involve many different document types and participants. Answering simple questions often requires an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) specialist to search through raw data to find an answer. Business Transaction Intelligence uses IBM Watson services to save users time and effort when searching for information, such as where a specific order might be in its lifecycle.
With Business Transaction Intelligence, users can look for data using natural language search. Business users, regardless of skill level, are empowered to easily explore supply chain transaction data. Watson finds all documents that are relevant to your search and displays a graphical representation enabling each document to be easily accessed within that flow. This process saves much of the time and effort normally required to locate and reconcile the documents manually.
Anomaly detection capabilities allow you to find the trading partners contributing to an out-ofrange event, learn more about a potential problem and take corrective action to prevent business disruptions.
Uncover business insights about your B2B document exchanges
The information you need – quickly
Orders, ship notices and invoices are the lifeblood of an enterprise. Enterprises often find that the supply chain information they need is buried somewhere in the countless documents they exchange with suppliers and trading partners. Usually, LOB managers need the help of the IT team to retrieve the latest information. But this process can take hours or days to stitch together.
Business Transaction Intelligence changes all of that. It shows all business transactions in context so that the LOB teams have direct access to the many documents involved in each transaction. They can more easily navigate through them and quickly drill down to the information they need.
The solution puts the information in the hands of those who use it by letting LOB teams use natural language search to find what they need. It presents deeply technical information in a context they can understand. IT specialists can quickly troubleshoot issues with easy drill-down capabilities to see raw EDI data and get to the root cause. With Business Transaction Intelligence, teams across the business have immediate access to the information they need to do their jobs.
Ask natural language questions and view transaction details
Get ahead of issues and proactively address problems with anomaly detection
Business Transaction Intelligence provides anomaly detection capabilities that monitor day-today document trends between trading partners. When it discovers an anomaly, the user receives an early warning signal to investigate and proactively address the problem – instead of hearing about it from the customer. Anomaly detection works behind the scenes to track the contents of EDI supply chain documents, learn the patterns of typical activity and find issues out of the expected threshold.
With anomaly detection, LOB users – including customer support reps and vendor/supplier managers – get greater insights from order-to-cash and procure-to-pay so they can improve customer service and meet business objectives. Technical users also benefit because they can quickly see and fix EDI configuration problems to ensure EDI documents are sent and received smoothly.
Identify anomalies based on value, volume and velocity
Business Transaction Intelligence in action
Example 1: What if you need to find a specific order-to-cash or procure-to-pay transaction flow? By using natural language search, simply enter “Show me shipment 9546” Watson will return easy to understand information about that exact shipment. Watson takes highly complex supply chain scenarios with hundreds of individual documents and displays them in a clear, concise way. You can view the entire business transaction and more quickly find the details you need.
Example 2: What if you need to locate all shipments for an order? Searching a traditional EDI or supply chain visibility solution can require multiple searches for each document. Then, you must correlate and reconcile them – one by one – into a transaction flow. Watson collects all relevant documents and correlates them for you, before presenting the end-to-end view. you can always see what’s happening upstream and downstream in the flow.
Example 3: How can you automatically detect anomalies using AI to manage disruptions in your supply chain? Business Transaction Intelligence’s anomaly detection feature will automatically detect and highlight anomalies that fall outside of an expected range. For example, an anomaly on the number of invoices sent could be highlighted if the number of invoices falls below the expected range. Anomaly detection will show that a subset of net 30 invoices failed to send to a few specific trading partners, giving you enough insight to resend them the next day. This can prevent days of not realizing there is an issue and scrambling to piece together who was affected by this issue and managing unhappy customers.
Conclusion
Business Transaction Intelligence, a capability of the IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network, uses Watson cognitive computing to help you get faster access to the transaction information you need. It helps you make that information available to LOB teams in a form they can use and understand. Anomaly detection monitors document trends and provides early warning to get ahead of issues and prevent supply chain disruptions. It does this all without requiring a massive IT project.