Using bills of sale and AI to improve supply chain visibility and risk management with Versed AI

Impact on supply chain management

Versed AI is transforming supply chain management through advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, providing businesses with multi-tier supply chain data that enhances visibility and mitigates risks. By solving the critical issue of multi-tier supply chain oversight, Versed AI is creating a comprehensive knowledge graph of supply chain relationships, extracted and aggregated from thousands of sources to empower companies to understand their supply chains down to the nth tier.

Introduction

Versed AI was part of the Digital Supply Chain Hub’s first cohort, partnering with BAE Systems and receiving a £100,000 grant to develop technology for bill of materials-based mapping, a client-demanded feature that was initially set aside due to its complexity and development requirements before reaching commercial viability.

Who supplies my supplier?

Companies often lack oversight of their extended supply chains, leaving them unaware of additional risks. Versed AI addresses this by creating a vast knowledge graph of supply chain relationships.

Initially, Versed AI expected clients to provide a bill of materials but found this data often didn’t exist. The company took on the task of developing this internally, experimenting with extracting information from product manuals. Eventually, tuning large language models emerged as the most effective solution for automatically generating this data.

Lessons learned from real-world examples

Client feedback has driven significant improvements in Versed AI’s product offering, enhancing both the volume and relevance of its supply chain data, for example, a category manager focused on robot procurement, while a cyber security manager is concerned with software suppliers.

Versed AI’s bill of materials-based mapping involves three inputs:

1. Multi-tier supply chain mapping

2. Identifying products companies in those supply chains produce or sell

3. Generating a bill of materials for the product purchased by the client

The result is a detailed supply chain map showing which suppliers produce specific components at each stage. For the first tier mapped, supplier numbers fell by 78%, and by 99% for the second tier, demonstrating a significant reduction in irrelevant supplier relationships.

Successes and insights

Follow-on funding from the Digital Supply Chain Hub has enabled Versed AI to train new AI algorithms to create a database that captures products and productionises all its processes, leading to commercial revenue generation. To date, Versed AI has mapped over 300 supply chains as part of a commercial contract for a global automotive company and has additional contracts in the pipeline.

Working with an automotive company has provided valuable real-life insights, such as identifying false positives and discovering previously omitted companies. These insights have allowed Versed AI to calibrate its algorithms and consider creating a feedback loop to further enhance client value.

Next Steps

Versed AI is seeking further client funding to continue developing its bill of materials-based mapping product. For more information or to connect with Versed AI, visit their profile and send a message through the Digital Supply Chain Hub.