A Hybrid Agentic AI Framework for Intelligent Supply Chain Analytics
Organizations: Industrial AI Lab Hitachi America
Abstract
Efficient utilization of supply chain analytics for decision making remains a significant challenge for planners, as critical tasks such as database querying, key performance indicator (KPI) analysis, demand forecasting, and performance diagnosis require heterogeneous expertise spanning data engineering, operations research, and domain knowledge. In this work, we propose an agentic system for supply chain analytics that bridges the gap between business decision-making and technical expertise, where a coordinator agent interprets user intent and delegates sub-tasks to specialized agents. The system supports both exploratory analysis and deterministic workflows, enabling planners to transition between ad hoc questions and structured processes. Domain logic is encapsulated within specialist agents and prompts, yielding a scalable, modular, and auditable design and lowering the cost of functional extension through prompt-centric development. We evaluate the proposed architecture on a test environment that replicates multi-echelon inventory management operations. Results show that our multi-agent design achieves a 90% accuracy, which is competitive with a single agent baseline while reducing input token usage by roughly fourfold, substantially improving scalability and cost-efficiency. Furthermore, we provide case studies to demonstrate interpretable suboptimality detection and automated forecast optimization, illustrating how agentic architectures can effectively combine open-ended exploratory analysis and deterministic supply chain analytics workflows, and provide a practical pathway toward more accessible and extensible decision-support systems.
Figures & tables
| Sample Queries |
|---|
| 1. What is the delivery lead time between the warehouse and store_01 for June and July 2024? |
| 2. Plot the actual forecast for Item2 in store_01 from December 1, 2024 to January 31, 2025. |
| 3. Explain the demand patterns for Item1 and Item2 at store_01. |
| 4. Which store had the highest demand for Item1 in April 2024? |
| 5. What is the fill rate for Item2 in store_01 from January 12, 2025 to January 30, 2025? |
| Model | Setup | Mean Score | Tokens (Rel.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4.1 | Single-Agent (NR) | ||
| GPT-4.1 | Multi-Agent (NR) | ||
| o4-mini | Single-Agent | ||
| o4-mini | Multi-Agent |
| Model | Architecture | Fail (%) | Partial (%) | Success (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4.1 | Single-Agent | 8.4 | 52.2 | 39.4 |
| GPT-4.1 | Multi-Agent | 10.6 | 46.6 | 42.8 |
| o4-mini | Single-Agent | 1.0 | 11.6 | 87.4 |
| o4-mini | Multi-Agent | 1.6 | 16.0 | 82.4 |
| Task Category | o4-mini | GPT-4.1 |
|---|---|---|
| (Single / Multi) | (Single / Multi) | |
| Analyze or Summarize Results | 0.96 / 0.92 | 0.72 / 0.73 |
| Retrieve Data | 0.90 / 0.88 | 0.55 / 0.54 |
| Visualize Results | 0.99 / 0.94 | 0.50 / 0.47 |
| Calculate Metrics | 0.85 / 0.90 | 0.77 / 0.86 |
| Average | 0.94 / 0.91 | 0.66 / 0.66 |
| Representative Sample of Failure Responses |
|---|
| 1. It appears there was an error retrieving the delivery lead time data due to a technical issue with date formatting in the system. The delivery and shipment dates for warehouse to store_01 deliveries for June and July 2024 could not be fetched. |
| 2. There was an error retrieving the data due to a technical issue with date serialization in the query process. This issue relates to how the database handles date fields for output formatting rather than the underlying database structure. |
| 3. The system was unable to retrieve the demand data for Item1 and Item2 at store_01 due to a technical issue with the data source. Specifically, date fields could not be processed and the required file for visualization could not be found. |
| 4. An error occurred while retrieving delivery data for store_01 and store_02, likely because the deliveries table does not exist in the current database or the data source connection is misconfigured. |
| 5. There was an error retrieving inbound shipment data due to a date serialization issue during SQL execution, indicating a technical problem within the tool. |