Robert Kugel's Analyst Perspectives

I recently attended Kinaxis’ annual user group meeting, Kinexions. The most important theme of the event was the trifecta of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agents. Supply chain planning and execution software are the business software domains that are going to be major beneficiaries of AI and agentic AI automation. However, they also are going to be two of the more difficult to translate from potential to reality. Some of the basics, especially predictive analytics...

Smart manufacturing is a strategic operating approach that aligns advanced manufacturing technology with system and process design principles to promote adaptability. It is a digital, event-driven, collaborative orchestration of physical and digital processes designed to increase productivity, efficiency, adaptability and resilience. These systems use technologies to coordinate the planning and execution of even disparate operations within factories and across an entire manufacturing supply...

From my perspective, supply chain management (SCM) and sales and operations planning (S&OP) are two of the most underappreciated disciplines of modern corporate management. Properly applied, they can improve performance and competitiveness by increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs. A combination of more capable information technology with advances in operations research and analytics has made managing supply and demand chains potentially more impactful by making them more flexible...