E2E planning & decision-making in the complex manufacturing supply chain

The Takeaways:

1. For Joanne Lum of Intuitive Surgical, digitalization for their leadership team means four things. First, systems must be aware and able to detect physical events. Second, data needs to be available whenever the enterprise needs it. Third, algorithms need to enable data-driven decisions. Fourth, actions must be triggered by automatic decisions.

2. According to Scott Civzellis of DS Smith, supply chain planning technology has seen a giant leap over the past ten years. However, in his experience, many companies may not have exploited this advance in technological capability because their business ecosystem has not reached maturity across their people, processes, data, and organizational makeup.

3. Arnd Huchzermeier of WHU believes companies should integrate more data and make it usable. Companies need to have a data hierarchy that runs through all the systems so that they can pull out data in a consumable way. One example is to give every employee an iPad to allow employees at all sites to build dashboards and solve business problems on the fly.

4. According to Joanne, it is essential for organizations to link their data together to understand the whole picture. To do this, companies need to have a data hierarchy that runs through all the systems to pull out data in a consumable way. For Scott, two things can further help impact the business. First is data, and the second is having a modern S&OP or IBP process with adoption by the leadership team.

5. To understand demand, Intuitive Surgical uses its advanced planning tools with o9 Solutions. Within o9, they can derive two types of forecasts: one from historical shipments and applying an algorithm to take a forward-looking forecast, and two from procedural data.