Anam Rahman, co-founder of Kavida, told an audience that in today’s world when things go wrong in supply chains it is “absolutely catastrophic, deadly” for your business.
Citing a report from Oracle he revealed 80% of consumers would switch brands because of a shortage linked to supply chain delays.
“In other words, if your orders don’t arrive in time, you will lose customers. They will go to competitors and may never come back.”
He added a year’s profit is lost each decade due to supply chain delays.
He pointed out that while many apparel brands and retailers choose to source from Asia, primarily on the cost-benefit, it must be understood that they carry more risk than sourcing from European makers.
“If you’re getting the cost-benefit but there’s more risk, we’d suggest spending some resources, building capabilities to hedge some of these risks with technology and processes with systems.”
Speaking exclusively to Just Style at the sidelines of the event, Rahman said: “If you are a manufacturer, and you can show companies and brands that you take risks seriously, that you have processes in place, you have the technology for visibility and risk detection, you will set yourself apart compared to everybody else.”
Founded in 2020, Kavida.ai builds digital twins of enterprise supply chains to gain a 360-degree view of all types of disruption risks. The platform analyses live publicly available data – from sources such as Twitter, YouTube, news channels, and more – and converts it into simulation mathematics to quantify the impact of emerging threats and identify the optimal decisions to mitigate these threats. In 2021 it secured £300,000 ($425,000) in pre-seed capital from strategic investors.
Rahman told Just Style he believes there are key opportunities in GenerativeAI: “I’d use my designers to sketch 100 different designs in hours that would ordinarily take them weeks or months. GenAI can do that. So in design, GenAI is a really exciting area. I’d also use it to look at customer reviews to understand what improvements my brand can make.”
Kavida is adding an AI assistant to it’s technology which will be released next month to customers.
The chat UX AI feature sits on top of an order management platform and allows users to see the status of orders and manage those by exception. Alerts and notifications indicate when there is a potential risk to an order.
“We have an AI that’s analysing 50,000 news articles an hour and a million tweets an hour and it’s filtering through all of that to find issues that could delay you at borders,” Rahman asserts.
Rahman goes on to explain workflows can have many hidden risks: “Most of the issues that can lead to your delays or these big seismic catastrophic shocks are silly things like miscommunication or documents with one or two errors.
“As a supply chain manager, I might receive a document requesting approval on a new delivery date. I need to approve or reject. Sometimes my oversight in rejecting it or approving it could cause a huge delay.”
The new updates allow for all documents to be managed in one place, creating greater efficiencies and lower risks.
