Business Transaction Intelligence Helps The Master Lock Company Ensure 100 Percent Supply Network Availability, While Improving B2B Collaboration and Efficiency to Better Serve Customers

Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit — IBM launched Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI), an AI-powered solution that offers anomaly detection and visualization capabilities for mitigating supply chain disruptions and accelerating data-driven decision making.

BTI, part of IBM’s Supply Chain Business Network, enables companies to garner deeper insights into supply chain data to help them better manage, for example, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay interactions. The technology does this, in part, using machine learning to identify volume, velocity and value-pattern anomalies in supply chain documents and transactions. Machine learning is a method used to teach artificial intelligence how to learn from data, spot patterns and make decisions on its own. This enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

More than 140 Watson Supply Chain customers are early adopters of BTI, which Greenworks, The Master Lock Company, Whirlpool Corporation and other customers discussed their initial successes in February at IBM’s 2019 THINK Conference.

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For The Master Lock Company, fast-paced global growth mean onboarding and transacting with more partners each year. To empower its lean EDI team and manage the rising requirements they migrated its trading partner integration processes to IBM Supply Chain Business Network Premium. This security-rich, cloud-based solution powered by IBM Business Transaction Intelligence reduces manual work for their EDI team, resulting in 50% faster onboarding for acquired trading partners to help support business growth, while 100% availability ensures mission-critical EDI services are always online.

“If one of our EDI transactions fails for any reason, IBM Supply Chain Business Network sends us an alert, which is valuable on a tactical level because it helps us start to pinpoint the underlying cause straight away,” explains Connie Rekau, EDI Manager, The Master Lock Company. “With IBM Business Transaction Intelligence, we can dig deeper into our EDI data to identify patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious. As well as building a scorecard to track our performance against internal service-level level agreements [SLAs] with the business, we have set up reports that highlight trading partners with higher-than-average error rates.”

In addition to Watson Supply Chain’s product release at Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Summit, IBM was named a finalist for the 2019 Gartner Supply Chainnovators Award in the High-Tech Manufacturing category. IBM’s Chief Supply Chain Officer, Ron Castro, keynoted on Monday, May 13^th for his Chainnovator session titled, IBM’s Digital Transformation Journey to a Learning, AI-Enabled Supply Chain Organization. The session explored IBM’s award nomination details that achieved end-to-end supply chain security to gain a competitive business advantage using AI, blockchain, and IoT, while also speaking on how IBM’s innovations materialize into client product offerings.

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Further evidencing IBM’s leadership and innovation, company executives will speak about the combined power of building a smarter supply chain using AI, blockchain and IoT in the following conference sessions:

• “5 Imperatives for Building a Smarter Supply Chain”
  Tuesday, May 14^th from 3 – 3:45 p.m.
  Inhi Cho Suh, General Manager, IBM Watson Customer Engagement
• “Busting Myths and Capturing Value: AI and Blockchain in the Supply Chain”
  Wednesday, May 15^th 3 – 3:45 p.m.
  Ron Castro, Chief Supply Chain Officer, IBM

“Today’s intelligent supply chains must rise to the challenge of adapting to changes in complex business environments by unlocking the value of existing systems, while providing increased agility and seamless collaboration to improve business outcomes,” said Jeanette Barlow, VP of Offering Management, IBM Watson Supply Chain. “We’re excited to introduce our latest AI innovation with the launch of BTI – further complementing our Blockchain and IoT capabilities – which helps our customers proactively mitigate disruptions and business risks by augmenting their workforce’s capabilities.”

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