Innovations to Orchestrate End-to-End Supply Chain

At its annual customer community conference Kinexions, Kinaxis Inc., a leading provider of supply chain management solutions, unveiled new product innovations spanning the end-to-end supply chain. Delivered during the Day One keynote, these innovations aim to empower businesses with the transparency, control and agility they need to navigate today’s volatile business landscape.

“The days of the cascaded flow of information passed down between teams are long behind us,” said John Sicard, President and CEO at Kinaxis. “Today, CEOs and boards of directors are demanding their supply chains operate in real time and with one view of information across planning and execution. The innovations we announced today make it easier for teams to collaborate and make decisions, as well as narrow the gap between planning and execution, to create both resiliency and efficiency at scale.”

End-to-End Supply Chain Orchestration

The product innovations unveiled include:
• Enterprise Scheduling, the first and only scheduling tool on the market to allow companies to create and manage a globally integrated production scheduling strategy that accounts for all plant layouts. Leveraging industry best practices, Enterprise Scheduling allows companies to orchestrate production across sites and create a comprehensive, feasible and efficient manufacturing schedule.
• Supply Chain Execution (formerly MPO) capabilities, including transportation management, order management and returns management, are now integrated with Supply Chain Planning, eliminating the siloes that exist between planning and execution. These new capabilities will empower businesses to drive supply chain orchestration from plan through delivery across all horizons, whether managing multi-year or down-to-the-second execution.
• Sustainable Supply Chain, a new solution that allows companies to embed emissions factors (including Scope 3 emissions) directly into RapidResponse® to design scenarios that will estimate, project and simulate supply chain related CO2e in real time. Not only does Sustainable Supply Chain create visibility into emissions data, but it also empowers planners to understand its impact in seconds.
• New intuitive features within Demand.AI, an advanced application within Planning.AI, will allow companies to better understand how both internal and external factors are influencing demand for their products and be able to quickly adjust plans to take advantage of these changes. Planning.AI is an analytical approach and part of the Kinaxis RapidResponse platform.

“Kinaxis has continually been on the cutting edge of what is needed and possible for supply chains,” said Robert Kugel, SVP and Research Director at Ventana Research. “The introduction of Enterprise Scheduling, Sustainable Supply Chain, and new AI capabilities for Demand Planning, are major improvements for companies. It furthers their ability to have transparency, control, and agility within their supply chains, equipping them with that they need to manage today’s disruptions.”

In addition to Planning.AI, Kinaxis is working to bring future innovation to supply chains as the only supply chain management company and industry partner of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Advances in Optimisation (AI4OPT).

“Supply chains are growing increasingly larger, and they are expected to be more resilient and sustainable than ever before,” said Pascal Van Hentenryck, Director of AI4OPT. “As a leader in the field, Kinaxis is ideally positioned to understand these fundamental challenges through their RapidResponse technology. Kinaxis, in collaboration with AI4OPT, is exploring how the fusion of machine learning and optimisation may bring a step change in capabilities for the next generation of supply chain management systems.”

Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor, and the associate chair of innovation and entrepreneurship in Technology at the H. Milton Steward School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Everyday volatility and uncertainty demand quick action. Kinaxis® delivers the agility to make fast, confident decisions across integrated business planning and the digital supply chain. People can plan better, live better and change the world. Trusted by innovative brands, we combine human intelligence with AI and concurrent planning to help companies plan for any future, monitor risks and opportunities and respond at the pace of change. Powered by an extensible, cloud-based platform, Kinaxis delivers industry-proven applications so everyone can know sooner, act faster and remove waste.