Unification of planning and execution systems tears down information silos, says Allan Dow, executive vice president and general manager of supply chain at Aptean. 

Successful supply chains are “decision-centric enterprises,” Dow says, which he defines as an operation with real-time data immediately available to provide actionable insights. “Contrast that with historical supply chain management with data with a lot of latency in it. By the time the person trying to make that decision gets some information, does some analysis and takes action, the data might already be too old.”

That inadequate method owes to systems being set up as batch operations, Dow says. So, data could flow daily, but weekly or even monthly was not uncommon. “The reality is that things are happening today. What we're setting up with today's technology wasn’t possible in the past, being able to get that data in real time.”

Today, intelligent agents help companies manage the supply chain more effectively, he says, enabling the user to make better and faster decisions. “They take the grunt work off their hands and allow them to actually think about the business, act on what makes most sense, and then enable that change to happen in real time,” Dow says.

Given that today’s supply chains operate much faster than just a decade ago, unifying planning and execution is critical to desired outcomes, according to Dow. “A common disconnect we see every day in the supply chain is the planning team builds a plan they think is great. You hand that off to manufacturing, and the manufacturing folks go, ‘I can't do that.’ Why? Because the models aren't realistically mirroring each other. So the biggest gain is going to come from being able to pull those teams together and make it one cohesive supply chain across the organization. That's the power of putting it all in one place.”