Last week, Optit team travelled to Barcelona to attend the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2024 and join the brightest minds for supply chain management and innovation, discussing and examining the latest strategic thinking, trends and technologies; from this insightful experience, we would like to share some takeaways:
- the concept of Antifragile supply chain, which is about resilience and opportunities for growth during periods of change and uncertainty. With heightened expectations, geopolitical challenges, market volatility, talent burnout, Chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and leaders are continuously facing increasingly complex challenges and at the same time are expected to outperform and overdeliver. It is more than ever crucial for businesses the ability to plan, optimize, and orchestrate their supply chain with dynamic, centric and fast responsive processes.
- The most popular terms at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium were Autonomous supply chain and Artificial Intelligence (AI), both GenAI and Machine Learning (ML). AI has the potential to bring substantial benefits to supply chain planning by enhancing forecasting accuracy, optimizing inventory management, streamlining logistics and improving the overall decision-making processes. However, the autonomous supply chain does not start with just AI, it is crucial to recognize that it cannot deliver its full potential without relevant data, fresh job skills and business collaboration.
- Organizations need new operational frameworks for CSCOs to drive real impact; one of the key message was that dynamic, self-determining and timely decision processes and systems are 4.9 times more likely to generate more revenues in fact traditional deterministic planning methods are proving inadequate in effectively overcome complexities and achieve antifragility; they have to bring about a paradigm shift towards probabilistic, semi-autonomous, and ultimately fully autonomous supply chain planning.
- Redefine “value” which is about more than cost reduction, it also includes growth, commercial innovation and sustainability. Companies need to prove sustainability claims with concrete data enhancing supply chain transparency using technologies like AI to track and verify sustainability metrics. Sustainable practices are not only satisfying regulatory demands but also attracting consumers and investors. Moreover, unlock the “value” of people through AI by empowering employees to effectively engage with new tools; for instance genAI can enhance what they can do, rather than replace them.
- Reduce complexity through designed simplicity. This user experience-based approach to business transformation seeks to deliberately design transformation to be easy to understand and execute. One of the biggest challenges identified is the distance between addressing real-world business problems and the actual application solutions. Systems should be innovative but also effective and easy-to-use for end users, therefore designed for a specific industry and dovetailed with the specific company business process and job function.
The Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2024 offered an unparalleled platform for networking, knowledge exchange, and collaboration. Optit is excited to integrate these learnings into our ongoing efforts to innovate and improve supply chain management solutions. We look forward to continuing to drive positive change and delivering exceptional value to our clients.
