New research from Accenture finds that companies with the most mature supply chains are 23% more profitable than their peers. These leaders are six times as likely to use artificial intelligence (AI) and Generative AI widely across their supply chains, which allows them to generate additional business value.
The report also shows that “leaders” – the 10% of companies scoring highest on the maturity scale – achieved 23% higher margins than their peers (11.8% vs. 9.6%) between 2019 and 2023. At the same time, they delivered 15% better returns to shareholders (8.5% vs. 7.4%).
“Leaders are investing heavily in increasingly sophisticated technologies – especially AI and generative AI – to build the next generation of supply chain capabilities,” says Max Blanchet, Accenture’s global strategy lead for supply chains and operations. “These capabilities are essential to reinvent supply chains for efficiency, agility, sustainability and resilience. They enable leaders to move beyond traditional supply chain drivers consisting of cost, quality and delivery, which is causing many supply chain vulnerabilities and inefficiencies today and in the future.”
Key takeaways:
- While only 9% of all companies use AI and Generative AI widely across their supply chains, substantially more leaders already do (37%) compared to just 6% of their peers. Leaders are also expecting to see significant benefits. They are eight times as likely to reduce the time it takes to develop and launch new products by 30%, 8.5 times as likely to develop eco-friendly products, and six times as likely to improve the efficiency of engineering resources by 30%.
- While the average supply chain maturity score has jumped by 50% between 2019 and 2023, the average score across all companies remains low, at just 36%. It varies across industries and countries – from 22% in Mexico to 52% in Japan, and from 31% for consumer goods companies to 40% for aerospace and defense firms.
“If we compare supply chain maturity to the evolution of navigation – from following the stars to driving semi-autonomous vehicles – many of us are still running supply chains on a mix of paper maps and first-generation satnavs,” says Melissa Twining-Davis, Accenture’s global operations lead for supply chains. “The next-generation capabilities that exist, such as generative design to develop products, highly automated facilities to produce them, and advanced analytics and machine learning to predict supply roadblocks, are just at the beginning. The reinvention potential ahead is massive.”
