IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI), an AI-powered solution that offers anomaly detection and visualization capabilities for mitigating supply chain disruptions and accelerating data-driven decision making.

BTI, part of IBM’s Supply Chain Business Network, enables companies to garner deeper insights into supply chain data to help them better manage, for example, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay interactions. The technology does this, in part, using machine learning to identify volume, velocity and value-pattern anomalies in supply chain documents and transactions. Machine learning is a method used to teach artificial intelligence how to learn from data, spot patterns and make decisions on its own. This enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

More than 140 Watson Supply Chain customers are early adopters of BTI, which Greenworks, The Master Lock Company, and Whirlpool Corporation discussed their initial successes in February at IBM’s 2019 THINK Conference.

For The Master Lock Company, fast-paced global growth mean onboarding and transacting with more partners each year. To empower its lean EDI team and manage the rising requirements they migrated its trading partner integration processes to IBM Supply Chain Business Network Premium. This security-rich, cloud-based solution powered by IBM Business Transaction Intelligence reduces manual work for their EDI team, resulting in 50% faster onboarding for acquired trading partners to help support business growth, while 100% availability ensures mission-critical EDI services are always online.

“If one of our EDI transactions fails for any reason, IBM Supply Chain Business Network sends us an alert, which is valuable on a tactical level because it helps us start to pinpoint the underlying cause straight away,” explains Connie Rekau, EDI Manager, The Master Lock Company. “With IBM Business Transaction Intelligence, we can dig deeper into our EDI data to identify patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious. As well as building a scorecard to track our performance against internal service-level level agreements [SLAs] with the business, we have set up reports that highlight trading partners with higher-than-average error rates.”

In addition to announcing BTI’s availability at Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Summit, IBM also won a 2019 High Tech Manufacturing Chainnovator Award for its use of AI, blockchain and IoT to drive its own supply chain transformation. IBM’s Chief Supply Chain Officer, Ron Castro, keynoted on Monday, May 13^th for his session titled, IBM’s Digital Transformation Journey to a Learning, AI-Enabled Supply Chain Organization. The session explored IBM’s award nomination details that achieved end-to-end supply chain security to gain a competitive business advantage using AI, blockchain, and IoT, while also speaking on how IBM’s innovations materialize into client product offerings.