Critical Parts Tracking Whitepaper

Manufacturer gains need-to-know insights to minimize disruption and improve productivity Mitigate risk with real-time, end-to-end visibility on sales, inventory and distribution for optimized operations Actionable Insights. Instantly. Anywhere Automated and Conversational Critical Parts Actionable AI Tracking Insights On-Time Production Insurance With The Power of AI A prominent Automobile OEM managing 40 facilities across the globe, manufacturing & selling ~450,000 commercial vehicles needed to gain better visibility on sales, inventory and distribution to understand unavailability of critical parts and supplier delays. One of the biggest challenges in highly dynamic supply chain environments is the threat of potential supply disruption. According to MHI-Deloitte research that surveyed 1000 organizations, 74% of the leaders have expressed shortages and supply chain disruptions as an extreme to very extreme risk. The client had developed a manual process for assessing materials risk against short-term production plans (7 to 14 days). The process proved quite effective and soon became the vital input for planning and controlling the entire production. A primary component of the organization’s planning was based on the inputs of a report called “Critical Parts Summary”. The dependency was so high on the report that the entire SCM and production team would struggle to smoothly execute plans in absence of the report. It also required a well crafted input/output process for smooth functioning and collaboration among the various users. www.conversight.ai 1

Challenges While the utility of the report was substantially high, so was the dependency on people. There were a few areas of improvement required, such as: • The entire Materials Buying function had to work out the critical parts manually • Mapping against the production sequence, knowing parts required, stocks, on-hand inventory, Transit Status (ASN), and supplier schedules required a lot of analytics • The sequence and demand continued to fluctuate and, therefore, critical parts analytics would be required on an every day basis • One dedicated senior analyst required consolidation of inputs of buyers and preparation for meetings/review with leadership • Delayed inputs to leadership negatively impacted the reporting and subsequent decision making process Scope for improvement was for enhancing the speed, reliability, and accuracy of this crucial input. Further, the thought leaders of the organization needed: • Digitally intelligent solutions for increasing productivity by reducing analysis paralysis and tremendously increasing the speed of response • Actionable & automated insights, rather than finding such insights from an overload of information • Build scalability with growing market demand www.conversight.ai 2

Solution ConverSight delivered an advanced augmented analytics solution to resolve all defined challenges and deliver additional value. ConverSight's new approach in the information search & analytics space allowed users to take an unscripted journey, asking questions they had not anticipated and discovering patterns and anomalies they did not know were there. ConverSight’s intelligent business companion, Athena, understands user behavior, context, and intent of the conversation while incorporating machine learning, data science and cognitive techniques to deliver personalized insights and actions. With a deep contextual understanding of user’s roles and search history, ConverSight is able to deliver enhanced visibility across the entire supply chain including sales, inventory and distribution to mitigate risk and proactively alert decision makers on potential delays due to unavailability of critical parts and/or supplier delayers. By delivering these need-to-know insights and alerts, ConverSight removes disturbances in product planning and on-time delivery. www.conversight.ai 3

Proactive Insights to streamline production Insights into changes in demand for parts and shipment delays to proactively identify shortages and analyze on-hand, allocated and on-order inventory along with demand forecasts End-to-End Visibility Visibility into distributed teams like sourcing, procurement, operations, logistics and sales to proactively alert on potential delays due to unavailability of critical parts and supplier delays Built-On Supplier Risk Analysis Analyze the reliability of the supplier to meet the expected lead time for the part to coordinate its arrival and inform the decision to stock the item as part of the inventory www.conversight.ai 4

Critical Parts Summary Visibility ConverSight enables automation of dashboards by supplier, day, region, model and ship for a holistic detailed status of each part. Further drill down capabilities allow users to understand more about the critical parts at the click of a button. Such dashboards are easily configured as needed by the roles to filter out non- relevant information. The manual tasks involved during preparation of these dashboards is completely eliminated with ConverSight. Easily prepare, save and share dashboards within minutes. This simple re-configuration allows more flexibility and much needed time to respond at all levels of the organization. www.conversight.ai 5

Automated & Actionable Insights When the user opens the application, Athena will proactively provide insights and initiate the conversation. On the mobile based app, Athena pushes notifications on screen as a real-time news feed. These insights are the most relevant for users to take action. Such insights are available to users proactively. Users can ask follow-up questions to understand the insights and then perform actions recommended by Athena. Unlike a chat bot, Athena will continuously engage users via bidirectional voice conversations. Similar to a news feed, Athena monitors key insights and creates a narrated story at any preferred time of day. Insights are configured at a role level and triggered based on a threshold. www.conversight.ai 6

Conversational Experience ConverSight delivers a unique, patented experience through a conversational AI. Users simply ask questions to Athena using terminology already in use by the business. This one-to-one interaction helps users diagnose data, investigate information from different perspectives, and create dashboards instantly. The information and data is then presented by Athena in meaningful visual formats such as charts, tables, pivot, Gantt, and calendar charts.This conversational interface is a key differentiator of ConverSight, encouraging enhanced collaboration and speeding critical and long-term decision making. Once Athena answers a question, the user is then presented a list of related questions or follow up actions to consider. This enables the user to be proactive and allows for easy exploration of data sets. www.conversight.ai 7

Contextual Conversation Another unique aspect of ConverSight’s conversational capabilities is the ability to learn and develop context over time. Without context, users need to repeat questions and give context every time. For example, if the procurement leader wants to understand shortages from the East region for last year’s first quarter, the user may want the answer for the same question but for the West region. Athena understands the context and applies it automatically. Users also have options to retain filters and force context. Scalability ConverSight ingests data from multiple sources, both structured and unstructured. These data sources may include transactional data, data lakes, internal product data or external data feeds. The platform is built in such a way that any further addition or changes into the data like vehicle models & variants, sales, forecast, plan changes, supplier & part changes are easily comprehended, making the solution highly flexible and scalable on-the-go with the least possible lag and effort. www.conversight.ai 8

“The simplicity, convenience, speed Summary to response, and decision cycle time have never been With the implementation of better!” ConverSight, the client gained tremendous visibility, diverse analytics, and overall productivity. The success of the implementation can be seen from below facts: • Time spent on analytics was substantially reduced by 110 hours per week • Decision cycle time was reduced by more than 60% due to instant availability of information, insights, and area to focus upon • The stakeholder alignment has switched to automated and instantaneous, instead of manual and time-consuming • High flexibility of contextual analytics as per need for all the stakeholders so that they can focus on what really matters For more info, visit www.conversight.ai www.conversight.ai 9