Bristlecone Drives AI-First Supply Chain Transformations

⇨ AI is significantly enhancing supply chain management by improving efficiency, prediction accuracy, and resilience, with 79% of companies either using or planning to implement AI in their supply chains within 24 months.

⇨ Bristlecone, as a veteran SAP partner, utilizes an AI-first methodology to deliver solutions that enhance procurement, supply chain visibility, and resilience through specialized tools like SENSE.AI and DEMAND.AI for risk assessment and demand forecasting.

⇨ Companies looking to maximize AI in their supply chains should focus on specific areas of waste and inefficiency, such as spend management and forecasting, to demonstrate tangible benefits and operational improvements.

AI is transforming the landscape of supply chain management by introducing new capabilities that enhance efficiency, prediction accuracy, and operational resilience. Related SAPinsider research indicates that 79% of companies are currently using or implementing AI in supply chain, plan to implement AI within 24 months or are evaluating AI for supply chain. Leaders in the SAP ecosystem are quickly moving past the hype to leverage AI to drive tangible benefits in areas like demand forecasting, inventory optimization, route optimization, logistics planning, and predictive maintenance.

Bristlecone has been an SAP partner for more than two decades, and brings a combination of consulting, platforms, and supply chain build and enablement expertise, to help its customers drive visibility, resilience, and efficiency across their supply chains. Bristlecone’s services span advisory, assessment, business case development, transition and adoption roadmap, proof of concept, implementation and rollout, steady state support, process optimization, and change management. With an AI-first methodology, Bristlecone aims to increase speed to value from SAP’s supply chain solutions.

First, in the area of intelligent spend management, Bristlecone leverages 400+ certified global consultants to help its clients to rethink end-to-end procurement and spend management to streamline business processes and guide users toward the best choices in the shortest amount of time. Focused on such areas as indirect procurement and strategic sourcing, Bristlecone’s SAP-qualified solutions enhance supplier relationships and drive increased visibility into enterprise spend. Bristlecone specializes in SAP Ariba, Fieldglass, Spend Management, Sourcing as a Service, and Business Network Solutions.

Second, in the area of digital supply chain, Bristlecone brings its team of cross-industry SAP supply chain consultants to help its clients achieve business resilience and accurate forecasting to drive greater responsiveness to continuous disruption, uncertainty, and fluctuations in supply and demand. Bristlecone continues to invest in end-to-end supply chain management capabilities and in helping clients to digitize and transform their supply chains to be more efficient and future-ready. Bristlecone specializes in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), Enterprise Warehouse Management (EWM), Intelligent Asset Management (IAM), and Sustainability.

Bristlecone enables businesses to harness advanced technologies, fast-track solution implementation, enhance user engagement, and optimize business returns by offering unique, tailored accelerators. Through their IP-led accelerators, the company strengthens the foundational SAP structure, supporting clients in the deployment and expansion of these platforms.

Bristlecone offers the following accelerators:

SENSE.AI: An early warning system, SENSE.AI assesses potential opportunities and risks, evaluates impact, and enables a timely response. It generates warnings for weather, regulatory changes, sanctions, tariffs, delays predictions and value-at-risk estimations for shipments and benchmarks and carries out scenario analysis for 100,000+ events.

TRACE.AI is a real-time customer order tracking system that uses condition monitoring leveraging an IoT-enabled tracking solution. It identifies leading indicators for ETA/EQA for multi-carrier tracking, automates with ERP and TMS, suggests timely alerts on delays, missing assets, counts and performance, and provides location/movement visibility.

A360 predicts machine breakdowns by monitoring the health, utilization, and efficiency of high-value assets. The tool allows asset preventive maintenance schedules, health and utilization input for capacity and budget planning, and timely alerts for failure rates, process breakdowns, etc.

DOC.AI extracts information from unstructured transactional documents using OCR and reduces manual workload by automatically extracting key data fields with OCR/AI algorithms, documenting and handling with higher degree of data accuracy, and transferring extracted data into digital systems and workflows.

DEMAND.AI is a responsive demand forecasting solution that factors external and internal demand signals for real-time demand sensing, dynamic capacity planning, AI-powered guided buying, advanced scenario planning, and visibility into supplier risk.

NEO DATA LAKES: A multitenant, cloud native, Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) Platform for the supply chain domain, NEO provides a Data Lake with associated Big Data Services & Analytics and a Low Code Application Development Platform for rapid application prototyping, building and deployment. This accelerates the building of an intelligent unified data layer that enables cross-system integrations.

Bristlecone claims such benefits from its services as 80% faster supplier onboarding, 60% reduction in procure-to-pay cycle time, 29% fewer stockouts, and 10% higher asset utilization. One of Bristlecone’s clients is one of the world’s largest battery manufactures, where the demand and supply planning processes were completely manual and relied heavily on spreadsheets, which was causing low forecast accuracy. As a result, the company had higher inventory and labor costs and lower customer fulfillment rates. The customer needed a centralized, integrated planning landscape with strong scenario planning capabilities to improve its forecast accuracy and inventory levels. So Bristlecone, rolled out SAP IBP in three phases across five major geographic regions. Key benefits from the solution were 15% increase in forecast accuracy, reduced working capital, increased customer fulfillment with improved on-time-in-full (OTIF), and improved planner productivity.

What this means for SAPinsiders

Participate in SAPinsider research. SAPinsider will be publishing a research report in December on AI in the Supply Chain that will explore the key drivers causing companies to adopt AI in supply chain, the primary strategies companies are deploying to operationalize AI in supply chain, the critical underlying capabilities that must be in place in order for AI to deliver durable outcomes, and the leading technology tools and providers companies are using to embed AI into supply chain processes and systems. Take the survey today and let your voice be heard!

Look for supply chain pedigree in systems integrator. For supply chain process and systems transformation, it’s important to find implementation and innovation partners that have proven supply chain domain experience. Bristlecone has built a business on AI-enhanced application transformation services tailored for the digital supply chain. Rooted in the robust foundation of the Mahindra Group, Bristlecone has an expansive global presence with over 12 hubs worldwide. Its team of over 2,700 supply chain and technology specialists further cements its reputation as a proven digital supply chain system integrator.

Sharpen Your Supply Chain AI Focus. Supply chain operations encompass a vast array of functions, systems and business processes, a target-rich environment for AI. When it comes to proving out the value of AI, it is important to pick your battles. Focus in on the pockets of waste and inefficiency that stand to benefit the most from the advanced decision-improving capabilities of AI, like spend management, planning, forecasting, and asset management.