Planning for supply chain optimization
Are advanced planning and scheduling systems (APS) transforming supply chains today? Explore how artificial intelligence (AI)-driven decision-making can reshape your planning process. This first article in our series dives into achieving the right balance between human expertise and AI collaboration.
Rethinking the value of planners
The past five years have been a period of significant learning for organizations navigating through changing consumer trends and global supply chain disruptions. Organizations that have a clear understanding of the value creation and loss areas of their business have a distinct advantage in these volatile market conditions. At the heart of it, all business value is created or destroyed in two ways:
- By the quality of the decisions you make
- By the quality of your execution
Traditionally, planners have been caught in the minutiae of data processing, firefighting and using heuristics to “get the job done.” As planning is a wholly decision-centric process, the ability to provide automation and decision support tools allows planners to focus on optimizing their value-creating decisions. An APS solution is a key enabler that provides the potential platform for planners to have all the right information required to make decisions that drive value for the business when they are designed and implemented well.
Understanding the nature of different decision types
The implementation of an APS represents the opportunity to automate much of the low-level decision-making, allowing planners to focus their effort where it delivers the most value. As you can’t—and shouldn’t—systematize every aspect of an organization, there will always be a need for human-driven insights and decisions. We categorize decisions in terms of the human and machine boundaries:
A more holistic approach
Instead of focusing on technology capabilities only, our decision-based approach shifts the focus to decisions, whether fully contained in a planning tool or not. This approach catalogs your key business decisions, identifies those that deliver the highest value based on your supply chain and business nuances, and then shapes the APS design and implementation to sequence for early value and maximize the return on your investment.
