The development of new technologies and the specialisation of organisations have driven the need to extend automation beyond the factory gates and across the whole organisation. The automation of supply chains is concerned with reducing the costs and effort involved in decisionmaking and management of design, production and logistics. To this end, the current state of automation in the supply chain can be grouped into four main classifications explored below.
1. Material flow automation The complexity of many production processes and the distribution of production across multiple organisations creates a pressing need to track and manage the supply of materials, particularly around bottleneck processes to ensure they are not starved of material. Material flow automation covers the flow of information relating to stock levels within…
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