How can you plan your supply chain when the world is changing every day? E.J. Tavella, senior vice president of supply chain with Anaplan, charts the path to agile, end-to-end planning.

The biggest challenge that supply chain planners face today is the need “to connect supply chain decisions back to the rest of the business,” Tavella says. Once companies figure out demand and supply signals, they need to tie that information to such considerations as factory and warehouse labor, financials, and sales and marketing. “Being able to connect those dots is a huge challenge,” he says.

Businesses continue to be bedeviled by organizational siloes. They need to create true end-to-end supply chains, ranging from strategy to execution. The best companies, Tavella says, are “thinking outside the four walls” — connecting with multiple tiers of suppliers upstream, and customers downstream. Only in that way can they fully understand the impact of external factors such as tariffs.

Generative artificial intelligence offers the ability to pull together data from across the business. The latest models can data-mine to understand where product is coming from, then merge that information with input from government databases and other external sources.

Another challenge in supply chain planning today is the ability to replan, in accordance with shifts in the market and unanticipated disruptions. Not only do businesses need to know how to react in the short term; they need also to think beyond immediate lead times in order to make decisions on product mix, capacity and production location.

Coming to the rescue is AI’s ability to support the envisioning of various “what-if” scenarios, arming businesses with multiple strategies for reacting to actual events, Tavella says. Meanwhile, agentic AI offers the promise of automating discrete processes once final determinations for action are made.