Global Science & Technology Company
Aera Decision Cloud™ improves forecast accuracy, time to market, and service levels
A leading science and technology company that produces healthcare therapeutics in oncology, immuno-oncology, neurology, and immunology. With a presence in 66 countries and a revenue of US$100 billion, the company is dedicated to finding solutions to some of today’s toughest challenges and creating more sustainable ways to live.
Business Need
Accelerating agility while building a self-driving supply chain to improve forecast accuracy and resilience.
Results
- Reduced inventory by 13.5%
- 3% waste reduction across the supply chain
- Significantly improve service levels to over 99%
- Sales grew 3% because the supply chain became driven by what customers really want
The Challenges
The company’s humble journey began by analyzing insights from a single-siloed planning system, but over time grew to incorporate ERP and quality data as the company developed a Supply Chain Control Tower to produce dashboards and reports.
However, it recognized the limitations of its traditional planning system which offered little actionable reporting and had no ability to blend data sets – manually combining information was time-consuming, resulted in high forecast error rates, and delayed response to demand changes, which in turn meant excess inventory or shortfalls.
So, the company sought other solutions which could tap into machine learning to improve forecast accuracy and data harmonization and begin to move towards decision augmentation and automation.
The Solution
Aera Decision Cloud — Aera Digital Control Tower Skill
Aera Crawlers — SAP, JDA, Hadoop, and flat files
Picking platforms that are going to be innovative and grow with the company is critical to prevent the risk of being stuck with a system that may not be able to move the company forward due to its limiting past planning system.
The science and technology industry leader adopted Decision Intelligence through Aera and was able to realize an immediate improvement to its forecast through the data science capabilities of Aera Cortex.
With centralization of data, it was also able to bring products to market faster with time previously spent manually analyzing it and brought together previously siloed groups within the organization for better communication and understanding.
“You don’t want a more sophisticated Excel. That's not transformation, that’s a waste of technology, time, and effort. Don’t miss the opportunity - redesign the way you operate because of the technology. To do this really requires a different mindset and a different approach.”
-Head of Information Technology Strategy and Transformation
Results
The company made major gains in forecast accuracy and time to market, reducing costs, and increasing or maintaining service levels, even during the pandemic.
It also actively drove the change management around the new technology — highlighting it’s not just a new tool but also a new way of approaching a challenge and the importance of tracking user adoption which resulted in a successful collaboration with Aera.
Moving forward, the company plans to move from its current decision augmentation to no-touch automated execution, and wider rollout within its organization.