Steer into Disruptive Events with an AI-Assisted Nerve Center

To “steer into the skid” is a phrase used to help drivers recover their vehicle’s control and momentum by avoiding oversteer, braking or accelerating incorrectly.

Disruptive events are global and varied, and to be more agile and resilient to this new normal of continuous change, companies are regrouping planners into value chain or product teams.

Many companies deployed a form of reactionary supply chain control tower during, and because of, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Control towers are used to identify internal and external issues, and alternate sources of supply, during extreme transport constraints, production closures and restrictions.

Gartner highlights that control towers are organizational tools that use real-time data from across the business ecosystem to provide enhanced visibility and improve decision making.

However, some companies developed and deployed isolated technology solutions to deal with supply chain issues. They missed the longer-term value of integrated processes to scan and take advantage of disruptive events across multiple tiers of suppliers.

An intelligent, sustainable enterprise is one that consistently applies advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes.

Can an intelligent enterprise nerve center, enabled by AI simulations at scale, help steer companies into, and take advantage of, disruptive events?

Control Tower to Nerve Center 

Separate control towers have been proposed for multiple separate business functions, from spend, to cost, to sustainability, as well as more classic supply chain control towers.

A combined ‘5C’ nerve center across customers, costs, cash, carbon, and criticality calculates interdependencies and cascades effects across different parts of the business.

The intelligent enterprise offers this agile and integrated approach, and Accenture has developed the concept and outcomes of a nerve center to the next level with SAP.

Accenture’s supply chain nerve center set-up develops the people and process support for decisions connected to real-time data from across the company’s network with AI support.

Accenture’s generative AI collaboration with SAP means that generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM) can further augment the nerve center’s capabilities.

Customers can deploy 30 predefined industry use cases, for swiftly deployed digital twins for consumer packaged goods (CPG) and manufacturing scenarios among other industries.

To strengthen the supply chain nerve center use cases, Accenture and SAP plan to co-develop new capabilities for SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) to help further enhancing organizations’ ability to quickly and cost-effectively respond to changes in supply, demand and inventory.

With embedded regular supply chain resilience stress tests, the nerve center becomes an agile collaboration platform for teams to predict, prepare and adapt to uncertainty, and work within probabilistic ranges for flexibility and swift decisions.

An intelligent enterprise nerve center uses signals and alerts to connect commercial, finance, treasury, and procurement with supply chain, to map an intelligent digital twin of the enterprise.

Using this nerve center, organizations can develop muscle memory to react faster in the context of previous learnings, developing automated procedure playbooks from vulnerability scans.

Enterprise Muscle Memory

In the last decades, companies consistently focused on minimizing costs across their supply chains, and efficiency and scale have been effective tools for operational excellence.

This focus on cost-cutting was exposed during the extreme supply constraints of the last few years, with rigid frameworks creating brittle and fragile supply chains that often broke under disruptive pressures.

After several years of bottlenecks and supply-side constraints, firms have changed their value disciplines emphasis across more flexible value chains to focus on product leadership, availability, and customer intimacy to capture market share.

Steering accurately into disruptive events, rather than stopping investments, oversteering operations, or accelerating into the wrong areas or regions, is critical to taking advantage of these events to drive growth.

Visualizing these vulnerabilities, potential supplier issues, black swan events, and resulting recommendations across the network requires integrated AI solving simulations at scale.

Without the right preparation and collaboration across functions, teams won’t trust these simulations and may resist the move to more touchless planning.

At intelligent enterprise level, companies need to automate as much as possible, running exception-based decision gates and using AI heuristics and optimizers to help solve these issues based on historical data, industry use cases, and playbooks across the network.

Instead of simply controlling issues, the nerve center approach can use organizational muscle memory to pre-empt and practice for disruptive events, recommending actions before disruptions occur.

Connected Cosmo Tech Capabilities

SAP have now partnered with Cosmo Tech to integrate their AI simulation and vulnerability scans with SAP IBP to enable an informed driver-based planning approach.

Customers can now identify risks and opportunities early within SAP IBP and simulate disruptive events, or regulatory compliance changes, with Cosmo Tech’s AI scans.

As these scenarios are captured and evaluated, companies can populate SAP IBP procedure playbooks to move to more autonomous planning and develop organizational muscle memory.

Collaborating and communication across functions means that effectiveness and impact of simulated recommendations can be evaluated for the enterprise before implementing them in practice. 

Using SAP IBP with Cosmo Tech to simulate changes to the end-to-end network, transportation lanes, service level agreements, and real-time inventory with accurate weights and dimensions, can also help customers optimize profitability and sustainability of their operations.

Automating custom alerts across these vulnerability scans can also add flexibility and exception-based agility to the Sales & Operations Planning process, while SAP IBP’s embedded analytics and real-time scenarios support executive decision making.

Using these business continuity and continuous improvement capabilities, connected with financial, workforce and commercial planning through the nerve center, can help customers steer into disruptive events with automated accurate playbooks to go for growth.

Conclusion

Connecting Cosmo Tech’s capabilities directly into SAP IBP delivers proactive planning for customers, with vulnerability scans and recommendations at scale.

SAP IBP customers, who are live with SAP IBP for Sales & Operations or Response & Supply have the unique opportunity to work with Accenture on going live with Cosmo Tech in this connected risk-aware process.

Combined with Accenture’s expertise in enterprise planning, and people and process change across companies’ financial, workforce and commercial teams, this delivers an intelligent enterprise nerve center across the ‘5Cs’ of customer, cost, cash, carbon, and criticality.