SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGIES AI agents are taking this even further: scheduling appointments, managing highpriority orders, handling communications and automating repetitive tasks, which frees up the human team for the more complex work.“ Good analytics maturity today means visibility, prediction and action are connected – not three separate capabilities sitting in different teams or systems.”
The gap between those leading the way on analytics and those still catching up, Howie argues, comes down to integration:“ The most mature operations we work with have built what you might call a digital thread: warehouse management, labour planning, transport management and demand forecasting, all talking to each other, so that an insight from one part of the chain can trigger a response somewhere else.”
WHAT LEADING THE WAY IN ANALYTICS LOOKS LIKE IN REAL LIFE
According to DHL, advanced supply chain operations share three characteristics:
• A digital thread that connects warehouse management, labour planning, transport and demand forecasting all in one system.
• Real-time, reliable data accessible from internal and external systems as a single source of truth.
• AI and machine learning capabilities that move from description to predictive to automated decision-making.
72 August 2026