Visibility isn't enough for supply chain leaders today, says Adrian Wood, director of strategy and marketing at Dassault Systèmes. Organizations need to know how to use the data gathered.
Wood acknowledges that visibility is good at telling you what’s happening, but it doesn't tell you what to do next. Control towers, visibility platforms and dashboards may take center stage, but to see what’s occurring in the moment is not as important as the ability to determine what’s coming next.
“The decisions we're making today obviously need to be done in real time with the changes in economy and geopolitical tensions,” Wood says, “but the real thing that companies want to do is make a decision very quickly on what to do next.” Visibility today doesn't provide the capability to actually execute against that reality.
Fragmentation is a barrier to turning supply-chain insight into real-time action, he says. Organizations within companies, such as supply chain, manufacturing, design and engineering, typically work toward their own goals. Planning systems are often fragmented. The master production schedule might not be integrated with scheduling or manufacturing execution. “So, it's process fragmentation, data fragmentation,” Wood says. “Visibility doesn't show us what's happening across the entire supply chain.”
The fault isn’t entirely internal, he says. Collaboration and integration failures may stem from working with external partners, such as third-party distributors and contract manufacturers, who have their own silos.
Those hoping that artificial intelligence is a panacea may be disappointed. Many companies asking about AI don't have the foundation, the data or the governance to support an initiative for agentic AI. “These applications are still largely unproven,” Wood says. “The use cases where agentic AI is being used effectively, where we see our customers using it is not trivial, but is in fairly low-risk, non-strategic applications.”
