The proliferation of new technologies against the backdrop of growing uncertainty mandates that supply chains adopt a higher level of "dynamic decision intelligence," says Raj Aiyar, vice president of industry solutions and value delivery with ParkourSC.

A decade ago, supply chain managers were taking a transactional approach to planning, says Aiyar: “What can I see? How do I need to plan to make demand and supply balance?” To the extent there was scenario planning, it was focused on identifying potential events and the creation of appropriate contingency plans, “to be able to react as fast as possible.”

Things are very different today, Aiyar says. In addition to relying on their enterprise resource planning applications, organizations are coping with multiple legacy systems, and drawing syndicated data from transportation, warehouse and advanced-planning modules. “It’s no longer plausible to do what we used to call manage by exception,” he says. “The exceptions are many.”

What companies need today is visibility across all of those systems and functions — “a single pane of glass” that focuses on the interaction among systems. With so much data available, however, the problem for many is that they become “data-rich, but information-poor.”

In other words, Aiyar says, companies have plenty of data on hand, but still don’t know how they should be addressing specific situations — or whether they should be addressing them at all.

Enter dynamic decision intelligence, which allows users “to filter out the noise from all this information,” so that they know what they should care about, and how quickly they need to react.

The “dynamic” aspect provides the ability to analyze data through probabilistic methods, and prioritize proper action. In the process, the system can make decisions “nearly as fast as the information that’s coming in.”