One of the things that you will know is that by applying or using analytics and digital technologies to novice business products and models offering; now the companies can develop or create value. The agriculture players are farmers or end customers who have now discovered these techniques and they also know that this technology can play a role in changing and helping the cruelly complex system or supply chain and agriculture or agriculture supply chain. Using a lot of data the companies are these days capturing and also leading the agricultural consultants or players. They work mainly like the lead of the companies also in alternative industries by creating digital twins of their supply chains. These real-time imitations enable the firms to run optimizations and simulations leading to important potential savings. In addition, there are costs of moving the crops through the system.
In this guide, you will come to know why the agriculture supply chains are so complex and how the agrifood consulting companies can use analytics and digital technologies to enhance them. The agricultural consultants who use the techniques like digital twins can get a competitive benefit in the challenging scenario.
Complicated Supply Chain –
The process of the supply chain is naturally a complicated process across industries. In addition, there are different functions that interact with different and potentially differing purposes and several dependencies between information flows and material. Then, the agriculture supply chain is further complex by disjointed outbound and inbound networks. The agriculture supply chain, which is typical, comprises of the following 3 steps – from farmers to intermediate grain storage, from grain storage to transformation plants, and from transformation plants to customers. And, every step needs multiple decisions to be made.
Now, if you want to or are a farmer you want to maximize the value of the agricultural supply chain, then one of the most important things that are needed is the ability to make multiple decisions. For every decision that a consultant makes or farmer makes, the number of solutions possible brings improvements analysis even in the complexity. The fragmentation of the supply chain multiplies the number of possibilities at every step, which in turn gives rise to 1000s of possible outcomes or results or options.
Then, there are also uncertainties in the outcome, which is again a complicated situation. The uncertainty comes mainly from 2 areas – one is an operational factor-like uncertain yield in every field. Next, are external factors like – capabilities of the farmer, inputs, meteorological conditions, pricing unpredictability that arises due to global imbalance in the demand and supply chain, and so on.
Digital Twins and Its Help –
Advancements in analytics and digital technology provide a way to improve the agriculture supply chain. These days the industry of agriculture is taking more information than ever on anything and everything like agronomy, weather, logistics, market price fluctuations, and so on. One of the reasons for the same is that the storage capacity of the data has increased and the cost of storage has fallen and there has been a rise in the computational power. Besides prescriptive improvement techniques and predictive data, science has matured and gained popularity and visibility.
One of the best and the most powerful ways in which analytics and digital technologies can be used is to make a digital twin of the supply chain (physical) from the end of farmers to the end of the customer. Plus, it can be used for real-time or virtual simulations and improvements. Digital twins can comprise all the components of the supply chain and its interfaces including the POS for finished goods, warehousing, transportation, inventory points, production, procurement, and so on. Consultants can adjust with the mathematical models that comprise various objective functions like inventory improvements, cycle time, throughput, and profit depending on the need of the organization.
Learning More on Agricultural Practice –
The digital twin’s value always lies in its dynamic predictive power. Digital twins use a kind of algorithm that is purely based on AI (artificial intelligence) to explore all the possible scheduling and planning combinations including variables. For instance, lot sizes. Scheduling and planning improvements could be re-run online when unexpected things happen.