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How Platform Engineering Drives Real-Time Supply Chain Insights
How Platform Engineering Drives Real-Time Supply Chain Insights

April 24, 2025

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Authored bySrinand Ramachandra / Director – Sales, Xoriant

In 2024, global supply chain disruptions surged by nearly 40%, underscoring just how vulnerable modern supply networks remain. From geopolitical instability—such as missile strikes on commercial vessels—to natural disasters like severe flooding in Europe, supply chains are under constant threat. A recent McKinsey report reveals that many supply chain leaders feel their executive teams still don’t fully grasp the operational risks, with just 25% having formal mechanisms to address disruptions.

Even though transparency at a basic level has improved slightly over the past year, deep end-to-end visibility has dropped—from 37% in 2023 to just 30% in 2024. Legacy systems and fragmented data continue to limit real-time insights, hampering operational agility and resilience.

The Case for Real-Time Visibility in the Supply Chain

Real-time supply chain visibility refers to having a live view of product movement across the supply chain—from procurement and manufacturing to final delivery. This dynamic insight empowers organizations to respond swiftly to challenges, optimize resources, and maintain service levels even during disruptions.

Let’s explore how the absence of real-time visibility affects four critical areas:

1. Production Planning

Without real-time demand insights, manufacturers often rely on outdated forecasts, leading to either stock shortages or excess inventory. Both scenarios disrupt production flow and inflate costs.

Real-time data allows for precise inventory alignment with actual demand, improving production scheduling and reducing holding costs.

2. Procurement and Supplier Coordination

A siloed view of supplier activity limits collaboration and creates blind spots. Delays and discrepancies in delivery can ripple across the supply chain.

With continuous tracking of supplier shipments, companies can mitigate risks early, maintain quality standards, and strengthen supplier relationships.

3. Manufacturing Costs

Outdated or inaccurate data often leads to overproduction, underutilized equipment, and workforce inefficiencies. Real-time insights help optimize production volume, align labor allocation, and minimize material waste.

4. Order Fulfillment and Last-Mile Delivery

In logistics, last-mile disruptions can directly impact customer satisfaction. Without real-time routing and tracking, delays are harder to predict and resolve.

Conversely, live tracking helps companies reroute deliveries around bottlenecks, ultimately reducing fulfillment times and delivery costs.

Platform Engineering: Enabling Intelligent Supply Chains

To overcome these challenges, many enterprises are turning to platform engineering—a strategy that unifies disparate data and processes into a connected, AI-powered ecosystem. Let’s look at how this approach transforms the four problem areas:

  • Demand Forecasting & Planning: AI engines within platform architecture can synthesize sales data, market trends, and external signals like weather to fine-tune demand forecasts. This enables agile production planning and leaner inventory management.

  • Supplier Collaboration & Risk Detection: Integrated platforms allow seamless collaboration with suppliers, supporting real-time tracking and early warning systems for delays or risks. This strengthens trust and reduces procurement setbacks.

  • Smart Manufacturing: AI and IoT-powered factories use sensors and real-time analytics to monitor production assets and ensure quality. These smart capabilities improve uptime, automate quality checks, and support compliance with industry regulations.

  • Real-Time Logistics Optimization: Event-driven architectures and blockchain solutions offer full visibility into shipment status and milestones. Logistics teams can dynamically reroute in response to changing conditions, while blockchain adds a layer of tamper-proof tracking.

Business Benefits of Real-Time Visibility

Companies that embrace real-time visibility see measurable improvements across their operations:

  • Lower Disruption Impact: By predicting and responding to issues faster, supply chain teams can pivot to alternate plans and reduce downtime.

  • Reduced Inventory Costs: AI-powered automation ensures smarter reordering and leaner inventory holding, potentially saving millions annually.

  • Better Regulatory Compliance: Real-time data supports proactive documentation and monitoring, helping companies meet environmental, safety, and trade compliance requirements

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Supply Chain Visibility?

Emerging technologies are pushing visibility into even more intelligent territory. Digital twins allow companies to simulate entire supply chains using real-time data. Edge computing reduces latency, supporting faster decision-making closer to the data source. IoT sensors feed AI models with granular, real-world data, while blockchain maintains a secure, transparent ledger of all supply chain events.

Together, these technologies are shaping a future where visibility isn’t just real-time—it’s predictive, autonomous, and deeply integrated.

To thrive in this new era, businesses must adopt a platform-first mindset—where engineering, data, and AI converge to create resilient, transparent, and future-ready supply chains.

Author Bio:

Srinand Ramachandra is Director, Sales at Xoriant. With over 12 years of experience in decision science, data analytics, and retail strategy, Srinand Ramachandra has helped Fortune 100 companies turn data into retail growth engines. From fuzzy problems to scalable solutions, he specializes in platform-led transformation, predictive insights, and operational optimization across merchandising, customer analytics, and supply chain.


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Xoriant is a Silicon Valley-headquartered digital product engineering, software development, and technology services firm with offices in the USA,UK, Ireland, Mexico, Canada and Asia. From startups to the Fortune 100, we deliver innovative solutions, accelerating time to market and ensuring our clients' competitiveness in industries like BFSI, High Tech, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Retail. Across all our technology focus areas-digital product engineering, DevOps, cloud, infrastructure, and security, big data and analytics, data engineering, management and governance -every solution we develop benefits from our product engineering pedigree. It also includes successful methodologies, framework components, and accelerators for rapidly solving important client challenges. For 30 years and counting, we have taken great pride in our long-lasting, deep relationships with our clients.

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