Sustainability, circular economy and decarbonization: all extremely relevant themes for today's supply chains. Dr. Andreas Müller speaks with Georg Hantschke, supply chain sustainability expert at aioneers. What are the steps we need to take to make our supply chains more sustainable, and where do we start?

We’ve said it before: shifting to being a project-based company is crucial to future-proof your business in an increasingly VUCA world. Today, aioneers co-founder Dr. Adrian Reisch speaks with Christian Schumacher of MT Aerospace and dives into how they managed their digital transformation while balancing core business and simultaneously branching out into new fields, enabling innovation with a solid digital infrastructure.

Tactical execution management – what does this actually mean, and what is its value in business? Execution management is at the core of our business. It drives our closed-loop approach: first generating transparency through analytics, then utilizing AI and ML for decision support, and finally, supported execution. Dr. Andreas Müller and Dr. Boris Reuter met for an episode of our AIOpodcast to discuss their views.

Sustainability is one of the top trends in supply chain management, as many businesses are making changes to adapt their supply chains to enable, for instance, carbon reduction. Our sustainability expert Georg Hantschke had a chat with Marc Hetzer, Supply Chain Sustainability Expert at EY Carbon, on supply chain sustainability.

For complex supply chain networks in a VUCA world, expertise in supply chain planning is key to meet demand most efficiently and reliably possible. It is essential for a competitive advantage. Suppose you do not have this expertise in-house. In that case, supply chain planning as a service can be a good alternative by utilizing the expertise of specialized data scientists to increase the quality of your forecasts. 

As supply chains are becoming increasingly more complex, managed services are gaining importance as this allows businesses to profit from expertise in those fields they need it, as they need it. Analytics demands will grow with increasing complexity, and managed services enable a business to focus on their core objectives, scale up and down as necessary while receiving support – ongoing or project-based – as they need it. Today, we're looking at a project in Inventory Management as a Service that we have implemented at one of our customers. 

We live in a changing world, where in the future, supply chains will no longer be managed in a linear fashion, as suggested by the SCOR model of Source-Make-Deliver chains. In this article, we present our vision for the future of supply chains and the topics that will determine their competitiveness. The future of supply chains will be characterized by growing business networks and cloud-enabled ecosystems. Companies will be members in multiple ecosystems and may play multiple roles. For instance, an OEM could act as a supplier, an engineering contractor, and a participant in a marketplace he has created with competitors.

Supply chain optimization is crucial in an increasingly globalized competitive world where margins are under constant pressure. In the recent decade, most of the attention in supply chain design has been on maximizing resource utilization, offshoring to lower-cost regions, outsourcing non-value added operations, implementing just-in-time systems, and investing in communication technologies. With the rapid expansion of the economy and technology, business competition has morphed into supply chain competition. Supply chain management has sparked public concern due to the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks, pandemics, hurricanes, and other disasters, resulting in lower production, higher costs, rising customer dissatisfaction, and much more.

No matter how big or small, all markets are ruled by many factors and rules that are impossible to predict perfectly. In an age where conditions change by the second, it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict trends and events without the help of a framework that allows versatility and helps you to stay ahead of the game. Today, the market is defined by VUCA - Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. To survive and thrive in the next normal requires a transformation not to be blindsided at any point. A vital element of this transformation is agility, and the agile supply chain is one part of this epoch.

Increased levels of customization and particularization of every capability have made their way into all forms of business and production. The supply chain has not been able to stay out of this domain of reorganization, and as a result, supply chain segmentation is a hot topic.