Our world is changing and becoming increasingly more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). What does this mean for top-performing supply chains? To maintain a sustainable competitive advantage over competitors, they need to excel in three qualities:

• They’re agile and can react speedily to sudden changes in demand or supply.
• They can easily adapt to evolving market structures and strategies.
• They always align the interests of all stakeholders to optimize the chain’s performance while also maximizing each stakeholder’s interests.

Allocation planning plays a key role in these three processes. This detailed guide discusses allocation planning, why it’s important in supply-constrained supply chains, and how it can help supply chains achieve agility, adaptability, and alignment in a challenging post-COVID world.

A digital twin is a highly detailed digital replica of any system that uses comprehensive data to emulate the working of the system at all times. Therefore, a supply chain digital twin is a simulation model of a supply chain. You feed the model real-time data from all sources and systems of the organizations that can exactly work out the effects of macro and micro-changes on the system using advanced analytics and learning models.

In our ongoing series, the AIO Data Science teams publish tutorials that go along with AIO on GitHub. Today, aioneer Maryam introduces read_and_write. This function is necessary because often, CSV files provided by clients contain bad_lines. These are lines with too many fields, like, for instance, too many commas. As a result, these CSV files cannot be read by Qlick, so they need to be cleaned. Doing this one by one would be very time-consuming. Secondly, sometimes it is necessary to combine data files if we receive data in several files or sheets. These need to be concatenated. It would be great to be able to do this in a simple function. In the tutorial, Maryam shows you how to do this!

We live in a changing world, and our environment becomes increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Over the last few weeks, we dove into the VUCA framework and the megatrends that shape VUCA. In the final article of this series, we'll put together the learnings and focus on the companies thriving in a VUCA world: competitive project-driven companies that are lean, agile and digital.

In the fifth article of our series on VUCA, we’re diving into Ambiguity. Ambiguous things are open to more than one interpretation and do not have one obvious meaning. Therefore, within the VUCA framework, Ambiguity tells us it is not clear how to interpret events. We rarely, if at all, know what effect events will have on the future. The role they will play in further developments is fuzzy.

This week, we're taking a look at Complexity: the third concept in the VUCA framework. In this sense, a complex world means a world where you deal with many interconnected parts and variables, and large amounts of information need to be processed to make sense of all aspects and their influence.

In today's article, we're continuing our deep dive into VUCA and will discuss Uncertainty. Uncertainty is driven by unpredictability and surprises – meaning that events will occur that we do not expect and have not planned for. Managing Uncertainty means planning for a world that is hard to predict.

In the first article of this series, we looked at the megatrends that shape VUCA: technology, globalization, demographics and resource scarcity. Today, we’re diving into Volatility. What does it mean for businesses, and how can you master volatile environments?

In today’s world, change is fast and new trends are constantly emerging. If we think back to the world 20 years ago, it was a radically different place. Even if we think back to just five years ago, our environment was very different. These changes do not only influence our lives, but also change the way businesses work: it makes accurate planning on the long term much harder. Traditional management and business strategies are reaching their limits and there is a need for new concepts to understand the increasingly complex framework conditions that change faster and more unpredictably. One of our co-founders, Adrian Reisch, helps you understand these new trends, but also helps you benefit from these new environments in our new series: living in a VUCA world.

Today, we’re talking to Tina Kintscher, our Chief Financial Officer who has been instrumental in starting aioneers at the very beginning of 2020. She's been hard at work making our startup one that functions fully remote fully digitally. Our aioneers are spread internationally, as we have offices in Mannheim, Germany, and Pune, India. Of course, like most businesses, we have worked primarily from home in the past year due to the pandemic.