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Tom Wouters and Lachelle Buchanan, chief product officer and product marketing manager, respectively, with OMP, talk about the latest advances in supply chain planning enabled by the coming of artificial intelligence.
For today’s supply chain planners, the biggest obstacle isn’t just the volume of disruptions, says Buchanan. “It’s the speed at which they’re coming.” In the face of massive amounts of data and accompanying problems, traditional cyclical-based planning processes, such as sales and operations planning (S&OP) and sales and operations execution (S&OE), “just don’t deal well with disruptions.”
In response, planners are striving to move toward a “decision-centric” model that takes traditional time horizons out of the equation. Decisions need to be made, then fed back into the planning process, “in a way that’s much more dynamic,” Buchanan says.
Wouters adds that planners today struggle with the time needed to make key decisions, prompting the adoption of “autonomous” actions by “always-on” AI agents.
The goal is to minimize or eliminate many of the manual processes that slow down planning and limit companies’ ability to react to disruption and changes in the marketplace. “It’s buying planners more time,” he says. “You can cut out the noise, and get to the real thing faster.”
Key to the technology is its ability to communicate through a natural language interface. Buchanan says the move into fully autonomous supply chain planning is a journey, with companies at varying stages of reaching that goal. She expects half of all planning efforts to be “truly” autonomous within the next five years.
Buchanan sees planning systems evolving to become “much more dynamic and agile,” allowing companies to do more with fewer resources, while keeping humans in the loop for the most critical roles.
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