Autonomous Supply Chain Planning : What’s the Hype about? (1 of 2)

Supply Chain Planning has already gone through three cycles of evolution and the fourth is underway.

The first one came with the deployments of ERP systems. ERP systems helped planners plan for capacities and materials using concepts like RCCP and MRP.

Supply Chain Planning went through the second round of evolution with the onset of APS systems. By using advanced optimization techniques, APS systems helped planners unlock value from their Supply Chains through better planning. With concepts like SIOP, it also helped them streamline and optimize planning across diverse functions within an organization.

Supply chains don’t exist in isolation or in a vacuum and COVID has shown us that, more than ever. The performance of our supply chains is intricately linked to the performance of many other external stakeholders like our Logistics Partners, 3PLs, Component Suppliers and Sub-contractors.  With concepts like CPFR, companies stopped viewing themselves in isolation and were encouraged to work with critical external stakeholders for better planning. Forecasts for critical components were shared with suppliers and their responses were baked into the plan. This was the Third cycle of evolution.

The fourth cycle of evolution of Supply Chain is underway with concepts like Autonomous Supply Chain Planning. This is a step towards taking a comprehensive view of the organization’s planning process along with the ecosystem of external stakeholders and percolating the changes that happen in this ecosystem to the organization and vice versa.

Autonomous Supply Chain Planning helps us mitigate the disruptions that happen in our ecosystem with timely and automated response & mitigation plan.