Beyond the Dashboard: Where AI Helps Enterprise Supply Chains – and Where It Doesn’t

It’s Monday morning. A shipment of specialized components is headed to an aerospace OEM when your screening workflow flags a potential “denied-party match” on one supplier. Now you’re digging into records, cross-referencing databases, and your carrier is waiting. If the match is false, the shipment stalls anyway, the team burns time on triage, and the customer’s production line waits. The issue with due diligence screening: is how to keep it from grinding your shipping operation to a halt. The problem: compliance steps that slow shipments In global trade, compliance screening is non-negotiable. Denied-party screening, export controls, trade restrictions—regulations have teeth, and they’re tightening in aerospace, defense, high-tech, medical devices, and telecom. But many teams still screen shipments the hard way: manually, ad-hoc, and late in the fulfillment cycle. The friction is predictable, especially when a shipper verifies a partner’s name against screening lists manually. They get false positives: names that match sanctioned entities but aren’t actually them. A supplier named “Chen Technologies” gets flagged because “Chen” appears on an export-control list. Now your team can’t tell quickly whether this is a real hit. Escalations pile up, shipments stop moving, and your compliance team drowns in tickets. Three patterns of an…

Special Guest Blog Post written by Sofia Rivas Herrera   One of my greatest joys is travelling around the world; learning about other cultures, ways of living and traditions. I often say that “everything is supply chain”, and this topic is no exception. When we plan a trip, we first start by defining origin and destination followed by when we want to travel and how. Then we evaluate how much we want/can spend and identify our non-negotiables, which start reducing the horizon of combinations and options we have. Does this sound familiar? In my mind this is very similar to processes within planning, procurement, network optimization and supply chain strategy. Here are 5 questions travel-related that I loved to be asked to help prove my point of this connection with supply chain:   What is the best way to plan a trip?   Planning a trip is no different than planning a new distribution model or redesigning your network. This process can look a bit like this: Define your route; origin and destination Identify your constraints: budget, time available, level of convenience and comfort, Run your optimization scenarios From there, you identify available lanes, available modes of transport, and available…