Technology has made significant advancements and has already solved many of the supply chain challenges affecting companies today. However, we can't claim that all the challenges have decreased when compared to previous years. On the contrary, globalisation, trade sanctions, Brexit, an eCommerce revolution and finally a global pandemic are just some of the factors that are complicating an overcomplicated supply chain – especially for companies that might lack the resources of bigger corporations. Developments in AI have assisted in the planning and development of operations across the supply chain. And if the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is the importance of forward planning and anticipating supply chain challenges.

The latest Deloitte UK CFO survey, for the third quarter of 2022, demonstrates just how badly external economic factors are impacting businesses. Some 91% of CFOs expect operating margins to decline over the next 12 months, and cost reduction and cash control are now their top priorities. Faced with these challenges, finance departments need to shift away from dealing with basic accountancy tasks, and instead become more strategic, identifying ways to add value to the business to ensure survival through the economic crisis. One of the best ways to achieve this is with technology that helps CFOs not only predict, forecast and plan, but also apply automation to reduce manual finance tasks. Through its enterprise performance management (EPM) and analytics technology, Oracle offers capabilities around planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting, as well as risk management and automation.

Levi's developed its BOOST engine to maximize efficiency and minimize the resources required to ship ecommerce orders. The system allows more orders to be fulfilled by stores, which expands inventory availability while reducing fulfillment costs. DoorDash is partnering with Relex Solutions to use machine learning to optimize inventory planning and restocking for its DashMart convenience stores. The partnership should allow the food delivery platform to avoid getting caught with excess perishable inventory, as well as tailor its product selection based on local demand. Levi's developed its BOOST engine to maximize efficiency and minimize the resources required to ship ecommerce orders.

Moving from production to, perhaps a more relevant application given the holiday season, goods delivery. AI can be used in logistics to automatically locate expiration dates for packages, read them and output standard format dates that can be logged in the customer's control system, a process often subject to failures that result in incorrect data, extra manual labor and delays in shipping. The supply chain issues can be resolved with flexible AI and Robotics, deployed alongside people and assisting every stage of production, from checking the quality of our ingredients and parts all the way to final assembly and shipping of products to end-consumers.

How Emerging Technologies are Shaping the Future of Supply Chain and its impact in addressing the Supply Chain Challenges? The supply chain industry has witnessed a paradigm shift, especially in recent times due to the disruption caused by the Pandemic. The industry is now considering an intrinsic part of the overall business strategy, thanks to the Covid-19, which has made the adoption of Digital Transformation a need of the hour in every industry. Besides, supply chain networks face enormous pressure caused by rising and shifting customer expectations for various products and services. The pre-covid era faced challenges relating to additional customer service requirements or fulfilment needs. The businesses responded by ramping up hiring and also throwing more people to address the problems.