Concept: Google has introduced Supply Chain Twin, a new Google Cloud solution that facilitates companies to create a digital twin — a representation of their physical supply chain — by arranging data to obtain a better understanding of suppliers, inventories, and factors like weather. The Supply Chain Pulse module, which can be used with Supply Chain Twin to deliver dashboards, analytics, alerts, and collaboration in Google Workspace, has arrived alongside Supply Chain Twin.

Nature of Disruption: Supply Chain Twin enables companies to integrate data from various by allowing them to share views of the datasets with suppliers and partners. The solution works with enterprise business systems that store information on a company’s locations, goods, orders, and inventory operations, along with data from suppliers and partners including stock and inventory levels and material transit status. The solution further leverages contextual data from public sources such as weather, risk, and sustainability. On the other hand, Supply Chain Pulse provides real-time insight, event management, and AI-driven optimization and simulation. Teams can use performance dashboards to dive down into operational indicators, making it easy to see supply chain status. They can also build workflows that let users collaborate to fix issues by setting alerts that get triggered when metrics hit user-defined thresholds. The AI-driven algorithm suggestions in Supply Chain Pulse offer reactions to events, identify more complicated issues, and simulate the impact of hypothetical scenarios.

Outlook: The majority of businesses lack insight into their supply chains, resulting in store “stock outs” and manufacturers’ aging inventories. Out-of-stock goods alone cost around a trillion USD in 2020. The necessity for insights into operations to dynamically modify fleet routes and inventory levels has been emphasized by supply chain disruptions over the last months. In the next days, Google Cloud clients should be able to combine Supply Chain Pulse and Supply Chain Twin with their existing setups using data, app, and system integration partners such as Climate Engine, Craft, Crux, Project44, SAP, Accenture, Deloitte, Pluto7, and TCS. Renault is one of the organizations that has implemented Supply Chain Twin to have a better understanding of inventories, suppliers, and other factors.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk