Ongoing negotiations to bring a final resolution to the U.S. port workers strike pinpoint a key issue facing the logistics industry. When external disruptions occur unexpectedly, do you have the internal technology in place to weather them with little or no loss to your business?

The port workers were only out on strike for three days before they reached a tentative agreement, but the external disruptions keep coming. Between Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, supply chain resiliency is being tested like never before.

For example, the U.S. automotive supply chain is already feeling the effects of Helene. Many automotive production plants rely on just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing practices, which involve minimizing inventory in favor of close synchronization between parts deliveries and the production line schedule. As supply chains have become increasingly interconnected, no supply chain will remain unaffected by these storms.

Companies that have deployed cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have fared better than those who have not. The time to deploy IoT solutions is before disruptions ravage your supply chains. Here’s a look at what technology can do for you to safeguard your operations.

The IoT Technology Revolutionizing Supply Chain Safety
For supply chain managers everywhere, it pays to be proactive. Without real-time business intelligence and analysis, that is nearly impossible. It is essential to know where your goods are at any point in their journey from you to your customers. IoT technology can also help you recognize an overdependence on single suppliers, regions, or transportation modes that could be threatened in the event of external, unplanned disruptions.

Deploying appropriately sophisticated technology allows you to make real-time decisions to keep supply chains running smoothly, even in the face of unexpected factors like strikes and hurricanes. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever before to work with vendors who can help you deploy the latest in IoT technology. Whether it’s radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, ultra-wideband, cellular tracking or GPS data, technological advances can help secure today’s ever-lengthening supply chains. Clear command-and-control software packages, combined with the latest hardware, can make implementing a proactive supply chain protection program easier than ever—and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) can only enhance them.

Discussions of AI are permeating every facet of our lives, and it continues to improve its functionality with each passing day. While you may not see its immediate application for supply chain managers, a thoughtful and strategic approach to AI can allow your team to react quickly to changing market conditions and allow you to outwork the competition.

With the support of a skilled IoT software partner, AI can reduce friction between departments, drive real-time insights that can save you time and money, and track assets with greater precision than ever before. Adding computing power to human intelligence is essential to the future of supply chain management. The massive amounts of information coming in at any given time could intimidate workers if they had to take it all in and analyze it themselves, but AI can condense massive amounts of data from different work streams and put it into an easily actionable report.

Supply chain managers can analyze the data with the help of AI to forecast trends, offer proactive answers to often asked questions, and simplify decision-making. By outsourcing the basic tasks to AI, it allows your people to use their creativity to overcome any obstacles that might occur. It’s important that the power of the technology is understood from the warehouse floor to the C-suite because everyone must work together to maximize its utility.

Using AI, management and front-line employees can speed up decision-making to engage new suppliers or move assets in the face of any unforeseen external disruptions. Teams can also react quickly to common warehouse logistics challenges from shipping lane assignments to stop-ships and adjust to keep your supply chains from being disrupted.

However, the data is only as good as its accuracy. Inaccurate data can lead to poor decisions that may not allow the business to continue operating at maximum capacity. Some supply chain management software suppliers use machine learning to teach their AI modules and can guarantee data accuracy of 99.9%. With that level of accuracy, you can feel much more confident your team will be able to manage your supply chain through whatever disruptions may occur.

What makes these developments even more exciting is that AI is always becoming more sophisticated as the language-learning models (LLMs) expand their knowledge base. The more they learn, the less susceptible they become to external pressures, whether they are natural like once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes or human-caused like a port workers strike. Finding the right partner with the technology expertise and the experience to help you deploy AI and IoT technology correctly could mean the difference between success and failure when potential external disruptions happen.