The Evolution of Demand Planning: Augmentation & AI-Agents  

Summary this paper discusses how AI decision agents will help evolve demand planning from a function focused on creating a point plan, to a gap detection, gap closure and decision management function, where demand planners provide cross functional aligned decision input to the Demand Review with significantly increased speed, consistency and accuracy. It highlights how demand planning decisions will be digitised, augmented and status managed … Continue reading The Evolution of Demand Planning: Augmentation & AI-Agents  

Treat your Decision Agent as a Co-Worker!

Kasparov’s law indicates that a collaborative process between humans and machines leads to superior results. Supply Chain professor Nada Sanders therefore advocates in her book Humachine, an AI-collaborative culture. At a personal level, I’ve highlighted that this requires an AI-mindset, where we see an agent as a co-worker we collaboratively approach with a growth-mindset and smart trust. We can teach our experience to an agent, … Continue reading Treat your Decision Agent as a Co-Worker!

Embracing Decision Intelligence to Enhance Integrated Business Planning

Many Integrated Business Planning (IBP) cycles around the world are based on a 30-year-old process definition supported by similarly aged planning concepts. This traditional IBP is often not sufficient anymore for a fast-changing world, where speed of decision making and taking the right action means competitive advantage. Well run, traditional IBP can have many positive outcomes, but there are also many limitations like sequential process … Continue reading Embracing Decision Intelligence to Enhance Integrated Business Planning

Outside-in planning: a big elephant that needs a bite-sized approach

“There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” Desmond Tutu Outside-in thinking in theory Outside-in thinking makes sense. It has been suggested to include a market, customer, and competitor view in a strategy definition for more than 50 years. It is not new in strategy. It is not new in supply chain management either.  Lee’s uncertainty framework (2002) shows … Continue reading Outside-in planning: a big elephant that needs a bite-sized approach

Decision Centric IBP is Becoming a Reality

A Vision coming to Life IBP decisions can be segmented by machine centric S&OE decisions and human centric IBP decisions. This new planning paradigm was suggested by my colleague Hein Regeer and I in a Foresight article in 2021 Our article was a continuation of my articles autonomous supply chain planning (2019) and Technology Support in Integrated Business Planning: Automation, Augmentation and Human Centricity (2021), where I lay out a … Continue reading Decision Centric IBP is Becoming a Reality

How to Overcome the Supply Chain Decision Gap

As John Lennon said, “Live is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”. Every supply chain plan or schedule meets variations or disruptions that require corrective decisions and actions. However, a gap remains between data, plans, insights and taking action to solve short and long term issues and grasp opportunities. I called this the “Decision Gap” in a recent webinar. A week later I … Continue reading How to Overcome the Supply Chain Decision Gap

Planners, Embrace your Biased Judgements

The content discusses the limitations of forecasting and the evolving role of forecasters/planners. It emphasizes the need for integrating human judgment and predictive analytics in the digital supply chain, highlighting the advantages of machine detection and correction of human bias. It suggests using decision checklists to counteract human biases, and encourages collaboration between humans and machines for improvement. Continue reading Planners, Embrace your Biased Judgements

Think Decision first, Data and AI later

“Companies with flaky master data would be wise to cleaning that up first before embarking on DI.”, a comment on my last blog about Decision Intelligence said. I surely agree, data is absolutely important when implementing technology. It already was when I was implementing ERP and APS systems 20+ years ago. And it still is. Garbage in is still garbage out indeed.   Maybe more … Continue reading Think Decision first, Data and AI later

Decision Intelligence, a Natural Step in the Planning Evolution

Decision Intelligence (DI) is a natural evolution in supply chain planning technology. It closes the planning and execution automation gap which has been left by ERP and APS, both technologies that have reached the maturity phase for their functional aims. 7% of companies have started to adopt autonomous end-to-end planning. 3% of companies use autonomous execution to enhance their supply chain resilience. Prediction are that … Continue reading Decision Intelligence, a Natural Step in the Planning Evolution

The Intelligent IBP Manifesto – 50 principles for a new planning paradigm

The IBP paradigm has hardly changed for 30 years, the decision needle has not moved enough. We’ve entered an AI era where 74% of work can be augmented or automated and 26% eliminated. Planning will not be excluded from this evolution. However, only 3% of companies apply automated execution and 7% autonomous end to end planning. 2% of managers apply best practice decision methods. Hardly … Continue reading The Intelligent IBP Manifesto – 50 principles for a new planning paradigm