Enterprise AI for HealthTech

Challenge

The company, a global HealthTech leader, manufactures products in more than 35 facilities worldwide and ships products to customers globally via an extensive network of production and distribution centers. Throughout its long history, the company has grown organically as well as through many strategic acquisitions. This has resulted in a complex IT landscape with supply chain data stored across disparate ERP systems. The high degree of IT complexity hampers the company’s ability to obtain critical business insights and answer questions such as

• What product lines / SKUs should be prioritized to help condense lead times?
• Where in the supply chain do parts or products get stuck (i.e., “lazy inventory”)?
• What is the optimal allocation of inventory across distribution centers to maximize OTIF for each product line / SKU?

While these challenges were significant in the normal course of business, they became critical issues during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Approach

C3 AI team first targeted the inventory visibility challenge across the company’s respiratory ventilator products. In just 4 weeks, C3 AI configured the C3 AI Supply Network Risk application for 42 critical ventilator SKUs (stock keeping units) that the HealthTech company delivers to hospitals globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team began by unifying disparate supply chain data on the C3 AI Supply Chain Digital Twin. Leveraging the unified data image, the C3 AI team configured five dashboards on the C3 AI Supply Network Risk application to provide end users with a global real-time view across the supply chain. With the visibility challenge resolved, the team configured machine learning algorithms and the application logic to predict order lead times and OTIF (on-time in-full) delivery risks for over 10,000 SKUs. C3 AI Supply Network Risk was successfully configured and deployed into production in collaboration with a truly cross-functional team across the HealthTech company and C3 AI.

About The Global HealthTech Company

• +$22 billion revenue in 2020
• +80,000 employees
• 35 manufacturing sites worldwide
• Over 1,000 new patent filings in 2019

Project Highlights

• +500 million rows of data unified from three disparate source systems, including purchase and sales orders, end-of-day inventory, and other critical supply chain data
• Trained 11 supply chain planners on C3 AI Supply Chain Suite applications and created a comprehensive user guide

The C3 AI Platform provides the necessary comprehensive capabilities to build enterprise-scale AI applications 18-26x faster than alternative approaches. The C3 AI Platform enables manufacturers to rapidly integrate petabyte-scale data from any/all enterprise systems, operational sources, sensor networks, and external providers to power machine learning models that generate predictive insights to solve previously unsolvable problems.

Many global manufacturers are already using the C3 AI Platform to drive digital transformation efforts, generating results such as: reducing inventory by as much as 35%, lowering waste caused by quality defects by over 20%, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in economic value annually.