Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world around us, ushering in a technological revolution. At Datacor, we pride ourselves on staying ahead of the curve by anticipating customer trends and leveraging technology to its fullest potential. In response to a rapidly changing marketplace and valuable customer feedback, we’re integrating this powerful technology with our best-in-class enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to redefine the way you do business.

Some of you had the opportunity to preview these exciting new AI features at Interaxions in May. For those who missed it, this article highlights some of the functionality already available or coming soon.

Unlocking Your Potential

Datacor software solutions enable you to boost revenue, reduce costs, and improve productivity. By incorporating this powerful new technology, we can elevate these outcomes to a higher level.

AI effectively refers to computer assisted algorithms, formulas, or mathematical techniques that can identify patterns, process information, and predict what's going to happen in the future. This hugely powerful tool enables us to move quicker and make better informed business decisions.

You’ve likely already seen automated chatbots on websites or used an AI assistant on your cellphone, but AI has so many more practical uses in the world of process manufacturing and distribution. There’s a huge amount of potential for this nascent technology – and Datacor is making this possible.

We’re delivering something truly unique by providing tools that can process and analyze all the valuable data collected by the ERP and make it work for you and your business. With AI, you can save time by completing repetitive, mundane tasks extremely quickly; autofill data and create documents within seconds; create comprehensive reports and simulations that offer analytics and insight; and so much more.

In practical terms, our customers will be able to use AI to predict raw material costs, forecast future demand for certain chemical products, or gauge how much inventory they’re going to need. The opportunities are endless. Here are just a few ways that Datacor ERP is utilizing AI:

1. Sales Forecasting & Supply Chain Optimization (MRP)

Every day, your business collects huge amounts of invoice data, including information about the dollar amount sold, how many pounds of product were involved, where it's going from and to, its location in the warehouse, and so on.

By studying the patterns that appear in past sales data, it’s now feasible to create a robust and accurate forecast of what's likely to happen in the future. If, for example, there’s always a spike in your sales data in the summer months and sales have been increasing for 10% year over year, this can be factored into future years – determining sales targets and allowing you to allocate adequate resources and source the required raw materials.

2. Financial Projections

AI can also help predict future sales revenues. By harnessing sales data and patterns, you can forecast future earnings. It’s also possible to determine the cost of the raw materials themselves by tapping into financial futures data. Many feedstocks are derived from petrochemicals or natural gas, which both have a futures contract associated with them. AI uses this information to help plan, prepare, and manage costs moving forward.

3. Sanity Checks / Data Integrity

With an AI-powered smart system, it’s possible to verify that the data captured by the ERP is always accurate, based on a complex series of cross checks. By stipulating certain rules, the system can monitor all the data and highlight if there are any issues that need to be addressed.

4. Product Affinity

Most products have a certain affinity with one another and oftentimes, a basket of products is purchased together at the same time. When your customers are continuously buying a specified quantity from you month after month and that trend suddenly changes, it could be cause for concern. AI ensures that these anomalies are not missed or overlooked by flagging them for attention and recommending that action is taken.

5. Price Intelligence

Examining the distribution of prices for your customers lets you see how much they have paid for each product over a period of time. This provides valuable insight – such as a mean, median, and mode, as well as the percentiles for the prices. With this at hand, you’ll have a far better idea of how much to charge new customers that come onboard.

6. Churn Predictions

Studying the level of interaction a customer has with your business not only helps with customer service, but it allows you to step in if their engagement falters. By collecting data about their usage, how many clicks there have been, the activities of users, or how many times they’ve logged into the system, our proprietary algorithm can discern whether that trend is going downwards and subsequently alert your customer success department to reach out to try and reengage those users.

7. Predictive Maintenance

By collecting information about electricity consumption from equipment and analyzing frequencies and signals, Datacor’s AI can detect patterns in that data that directly precede machine failure. Alarms can be triggered and messages instantly sent to maintenance teams, requesting work to be carried out or systems stopped before potentially costly shutdowns.

8. Conversational UX with Chat, Voice

Got a question? Need help logging into the software? Want to find a specific feature? Just ask “Walt”, Datacor’s new chatbot! With our automated support specialist, help is always at hand. Rather than searching through our extensive documentation, simply ask conversational questions and get an instant response powered by AI.

As a leader in process manufacturing ERP software with over 40 years’ experience and a dedicated development team, we’re providing our customers with game changing tools to support their growth and success. AI poses unparalleled opportunity. It’s no longer something for the future… AI is relevant now and we’re making it happen.

For more information about these exciting new features, or to book a demo, reach out to Lou Zhang directly at lzhang@datacor.com.