Supply chain management solution company Zionex said on Wednesday it acquired BRFrame, a company with AI model development and analytics capabilities, and incorporated it as a subsidiary.

The acquisition is part of Zionex's push to internalise core AI technologies needed to build its Autonomous SCM platform.

BRFrame, a Microsoft global cloud partner, has AI platform design experience and capabilities to develop agents based on large language models. It has built and operated end-to-end AI pipelines covering data collection, preprocessing, embedding, retrieval and inference.

It also has experience designing edge AI models that analyse IoT-based data in real time. The company has carried out multiple AI development projects for public institutions, medical institutions and large companies.

Edge AI is an AI technology that processes data on devices where data is collected and generated, rather than on cloud servers. Zionex plans to use the acquisition to strengthen AI-based forecasting and analytics capabilities in its SCM solutions.

Using BRFrame's AI-based data refinement and analytics technologies, Zionex can automatically check and correct the quality of supply chain planning data. By using edge AI to run real-time analysis at sites where data is generated, it can ease data transmission and security issues.

Zionex plans to upgrade planning data analysis and simulation functions using an LLM-based query, reasoning and execution structure. It supports analysing supply chain data through natural language queries, identifying the causes of planning results or reviewing various scenarios. It also provides a function to check in advance the possibility of errors before plan execution.

Zionex plans to introduce an active AI structure based on multi-agent systems to build an autonomous supply chain management framework that analyses supply chain data in real time and automatically proposes response scenarios when exceptions occur. Ryu Dong-sik (류동식), the CEO of Zionex, said the acquisition was meaningful because it secured a technology base that enables the company to design and operate its own AI engine, rather than a simple function expansion. He said the company would implement an autonomous supply chain management system that analyses supply chain data in real time and automatically proposes response scenarios for exceptions through a multi-agent-based active AI structure.