Every organization has components, commodities, and even finished products on stock. With these, they ride waves of high demand or supplier constraints. Inventories such as these constitute a huge management task, with ambiguous variables and high stakes. In fact, the effort needed to succeed in managing inventory is often so high, so specialized, that many larger companies seek external help. This is where inventory optimization companies come in. 

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.

Is your organization aiming for the moon but not even capable of setting realistic goals? Goal-setting can be the bane or the boon of your organization. Whether you can set realistic goals and targets for your business can make all the difference between success and failure.

After all, it is not just about the demoralization that employees and stakeholders face when the targets are not attained. It also means that you have wasted a lot of resources, time, and effort in chasing a goal that could not have been accomplished in the first place, resulting in the company losing out on achievable results that it could have realized. 

The concept of digital twins has been around for a long time in terms of modeling and simulation. However, the two are vastly different. The digital twin is a living-learning model, as described by Colin Parris, CTO of GE Digital. Thus, it is continuously running and updating itself based on data received from the subject of the twin. 

With the rise of the age of data abundance, it is natural for technology like data infrastructure, analytics, and AI platforms that process such data to appear. These new technologies enable to access, transform, and analyze the vast reservoirs of data available to us. However, analyzing and processing data provides us with insights in dashboards and more information involving the worst-case, and such information is useless – unless it can be put to good use.

With the advancement and widespread use of the Internet, there has been an astronomical increase in both the number of data sources and the amount of data generated from each source.  

The main aim of the digitalization of supply chain management is to simplify the management of the complex, interconnected processes of the supply chain. Moreover, for the digitalization of tactical decision-making, a digital model of the decision-making process is necessary. This is because every digital technology runs on rules, algorithms, and frameworks, learned or discovered.