Dear reader,

As I’m starting 2025 it is time for some change. I will finish my editorship at Foresight, and I will stop this blog supply chain trend.

For 15 years I’ve been writing this blog and related articles & field studies on average monthly. Content was anchored in S&OP and supply chain planning but touched visioning, strategy execution, company culture & behaviours, communication, philosophy, psychology, automation & augmentation, AI, human-machine collaboration & process design, decision centricity, and mindset, to name a few.

Sometimes I came up with new or evolving ideas, sometimes I was just commenting or calling out bullshit I saw online or in the market. Some blogs I forced myself to write in under 30 minutes before I brought my daughter to swimming lessons at 8am on a Saturday. Some articles took over a year through the editing process.

Ideas usually popped up in my head during a run, bike ride or a swim in the bay in Melbourne. Then I simply had to write them down. My writing style could rock the boat a bit, but content was driven by passion and my joy in writing. I call writing my happy place.

My tagline was ‘shaping the world of S&OP and Supply Chain’.  I started writing from a basis of lived supply chain/S&OP knowledge and APS implementation experience in over 10 countries and discussed what ought to be or what could be possible. I tried to shape what is possible based on what I call ‘wave 2’ technology, like an APS.

Especially the last 5 years I focused more on the future of supply chain. Automation & augmentation of the knowledge worker and the symbiosis of human & machine in future planning operating models. I started to discuss what I call wave 3 technology; systems of intelligence that mimic human behaviours and detect, analyse, decide, act & learn autonomously.

Although it is early days, wave 3 is now happening.  Intelligent agents are performing supply chain tasks autonomously or tell a human what to do. LLM’s can be prompted to take on a supply chain persona to make decisions within boundaries and with certain objectives or negotiate an outcome with another digital persona. If these digital persona’s can’t agree, they can escalate to a digital manager. If the digital manager can’t decide, it will get a human involved. We will soon simulate a whole digital S&OP team or leadership team to discuss a problem and recommend some options to the ‘human team’. And we’ve just started with wave 3.

This stuff is real, and it will shape the supply chain for the next 25 years. If I consider that some multi-billion $ companies I work with still use the same planning technology, frameworks, approaches, and UI/UX as I implemented 25 years ago, the wave 3 phase will probably go on for longer

During the preparation for a presentation about the future of decision making in IBP, I realised I have gone full circle during wave 2 technology. I also realised I don’t feel the urge to explain wave 3 technology further. Others are probably better at it. So, this is where I leave it at.

Thank you for reading, commenting or participating in my field studies. I appreciate it. I might still post the occasional blog, but nothing regularly. I will certainly comment on LinkedIn every now and then, so I might see you there. I will always stay open to explore new ideas, so feel free to reach out.

My blog will stay online, my articles will remain available for the foreseeable future. I made a ‘Digital Niels’ on open.ai and uploaded 100+ blogs and all my published articles. This personal GPT, or my ‘knowledge avatar’ as I call it, does a decent job in explaining my ideas/thinking, but it does make mistakes.

It was a great ride! Thanks again and all the best to you.

Niels