Smarter Supply Chains With Data and AI: Why It’s Time to Rethink Inventory Management

Supply chains have never been more complex or more critical to business success. From retail and consumer goods to manufacturing, energy and healthcare, organizations must balance various facets of the process from demand forecasting and production planning to supply chain logistics and inventory management.

Yet many of these processes are still powered by fragmented systems and manual workarounds, which slow insights and productivity. When disruption strikes, those gaps can quickly translate into wasted capital or lost customer trust.

Why Supply Chain Transformation Can’t Wait

Traditional approaches to inventory management simply can’t keep up with today’s volatility. What’s needed is a way to:

• Centralize data across ERP, IoT and partner systems
• Deliver predictive insights and scenario planning in real time
• Empower both technical and business users with governed, trustworthy data
• Automate repetitive processes to increase agility and resilience

That’s where data and AI come in.

A Unified Approach to Data + AI with Databricks

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows enterprises to unify their data, scale AI and deliver insights across all supply chain functions. By unifying all data sources, organizations can generate actionable intelligence at unprecedented speed. Key capabilities include:

• Real-time data integration across silos: Including live ingestion from ERP, IoT, and external sources using Delta Sharing and a unified data engineering solution with Lakeflow.
• Governance and quality assurance: Unity Catalog ensures accurate, compliant, and auditable data across all business units.
• AI-driven automation: Scale predictive models, agentic workflows, and scenario simulations for smarter, faster decision-making.
• Secure collaboration: Share insights with partners and suppliers without compromising compliance or performance.

Enterprises such as Walgreens, Bayer, Shell, and Reckitt are already leveraging Databricks to build more agile, sustainable and cost-effective supply chains.

Unlocking the Value of SAP Data With Databricks

For most enterprises, SAP is at the heart of supply chain operations, from inventory management to production planning and logistics. Yet SAP data often remains trapped in silos, making it difficult to combine with external signals like IoT, partner or market data.

Databricks and SAP are changing that. With SAP Databricks, enterprises can seamlessly blend SAP data with external sources, unlocking predictive insights and enabling AI-driven applications that were previously too complex or costly to build. The result is a trusted, real-time view of your supply chain that empowers organizations to anticipate demand, optimize inventory and respond to disruptions faster than ever before.

Ready to Build a Smarter Supply Chain?

Supply chain resilience isn’t a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a competitive advantage. By leveraging data and AI, organizations can turn complexity into clarity, ensuring inventory is optimized, risks are mitigated and operations remain agile in a rapidly changing world.

Building this foundation begins with governed, unified data and extends to AI-powered insights and automation that drive better decisions across every link in the supply chain. Learn from leading enterprises across industries about how they are building smarter supply chains with Databricks.

Read the ebook Streamlined Supply Chains — Managing Inventory With Data and AI to learn how leading companies across retail, manufacturing, energy and healthcare are transforming inventory management with Databricks. Download the ebook

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