TECHNOLOGY
metric, which means that the humans are then focusing on a very small subset of exceptions, where they typically have either more updated data or more knowledge to handle those.
Some of our clients are seeing a quite significant reduction in inventory that’ s held in the supply network because the forecast signal is more accurate, it’ s more stable, so you don’ t have to have a lot of inventory buffers in your network to guard against the volatile demand signal.
Q. WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE OF SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGY LOOKS LIKE?
» I think what we’ re going to see is a big push for companies to digitise a lot of their supply chain planning processes and knowledge into these models to gain efficiencies and productivity on one end, but also to democratise some of these processes inside of their organisations.
Right now most of the companies, their planning organisations are first of all highly skilled analytical organisations doing a lot of number crunching, but I think the way those are then propagated are through a series manually powered processes.
Typically, companies are going to have something called sales and operations planning, cadence or some field processes to disperse what the central planning organisation does into the field for the execution. With the advent of some of the chatbot interfaces where you can get a very precise, well-reasoned answer, it’ s going to allow the central planning organisations to communicate a lot better with the rest of the organisation.
So I see that as a major step change in how the value is going to get unlocked in the enterprise of the future. We call that an APEX operating model, which is agile and adaptive planning and execution process and the management system, and I think that’ s what we believe it’ s going to be the main driver of the next level of excellence in this domain in many enterprises.
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