Future Now Webinar Series

An Overview of Aera's AI Engine: Aera Cortex™

"Aera Cortex™ is the AI engine for the Aera Decision Cloud™ platform – a complete ModelOps platform purpose-built for Decision Intelligence. Learn how Aera Cortex can go beyond augmenting dashboards and reports to operationalizing data science at the moment of decision-making impact. Join Mustafa Kabul, vice president of data science and machine learning, and Henry Hwong, vice president of product marketing, for an engaging conversation and a look at the intelligence and learning capabilities of Aera Decision Cloud."

The Evolution of Digital Control Towers:AI Command Centers for Decision Making

Digital control towers helped modernize global supply chains, but they’re no longer sufficient in today’s business environment. Companies need end-to-end visibility, and a solution that goes beyond collecting data and delivering insights. Join Archana Ravi, solutions engineering director, and Naveen Kumar, senior product marketing director, and learn how Decision Intelligence leverages AI to create a true command center for decision making.

Turning Sustainability Goals into Realities with Decision Intelligence

Under increasing scrutiny from customers, investors, and regulators, many companies have made sustainability a part of their core supply-chain strategies. However, there is a growing disconnect between these ambitious, time-bound targets and the current trajectory of measurable progress. AI-enabled decision-making helps companies embed sustainability into their day-to-day operations.Join us to find out how Decision Intelligence enables the end-to-end visibility required to make sustainability objectives a part of daily business decisions. You’ll learn how companies can measure trade-offs, take a structural and organic approach to meeting ESG targets, and avoid accusations of “greenwashing.”

Gaining Value from Data Science and AI: A Fireside Chat with BCG

Many companies have been unable to realize and sustain measurable value from their data science initiatives and AI investments. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Join us for a fireside chat with Michael Barnett, associate director for supply chain AI at BCG, as we examine the most common challenges companies face when implementing AI – including data challenges that can be overcome with today’s technology and a purpose-built Decision Intelligence platform.

Marketing and Supply Synchronization with Decision Intelligence

Simply put, brands can’t ask customers to purchase their products if shelves at stores near them, or online, are empty. The complexity and speed at which decisions need to be made exceed the organization's capacity to make them. Join us to understand how Marketing & Supply Synchronization (MSS) connects supply and demand across organizational and data siloes to make fully-informed decisions on media planning and optimization, enabling collaboration between Marketing and Supply Chain.

How Decision Intelligence Solves for Sustainability Tradeoffs and Complexity

Sustainability decisions today involve tradeoffs. While businesses are embarking on long term initiatives to optimize across cost, service, and impact to the environment, a machine does better. With Decision Intelligence, you can take actions today that cut through the complexity. Learn how to leverage AI/ML to do so.

AI in Supply Chains - Challenges and Opportunities

Several years ago, leading analysts predicted that AI-powered automation would lead to "the death of supply chain management." The advent of ChatGPT has put AI in prime time and on top of the minds of several supply chain executives. However, this still seems to be a distant vision with no sight of realization. A recent BCG and Aera Technology study identified the source of challenges and potential opportunities to accelerate this vision to reality. This webinar will examine critical highlights from the study. a) Why do companies struggle to deploy AI in supply chains? b) What are some leading use cases for AI in supply chains? c) What are the key success criteria to realize AI's short- and long-term value? Join, learn, and discuss how your organization can jump-start AI in supply chains

Optimizing Procurement: Overcoming Supplier Constraints with Decision Intelligence

Shortages and supply constraints are difficult to overcome. But Decision Intelligence helps companies optimize their supply chains to balance revenue with important customer and market priorities.In this webinar, we’ll examine a very relevant example: electronic component shortages with a Tier 1 supplier. Join us as we examine the types of information that can be examined in real time to improve decision making; and how a Decision Intelligence platform can harmonize this data, then optimize business objectives against complex, interrelated constraints to produce data-driven recommendations – and also validate the results to ensure the best possible outcome.

Decision Intelligence Playbook: Starting Your Journey to Digitizing Business Decision Making

Your business can deploy and start to benefit from Decision Intelligence in a matter of weeks, without “ripping and replacing” your current technology stack. Bring your questions and join us as we discuss how to start digitizing, augmenting, and automating decisions as we show an example of Decision Intelligence applied to improving inventory performance.

Tech-Tonic Shifts: How Decision Intelligence is Helping the Beverage Industry Address Volatility

The beverage industry is a highly-competitive and rapidly-changing market. Due to rising costs, changing consumer preferences, and increasing competition, the need for data-driven decision making has never been greater. Decision Intelligence enables beverage companies to optimize operations, launch new products more quickly, and deliver excellent customer service. Join us to discuss how Decision Intelligence is giving leading beverage companies a competitive advantage.

Women in Innovation: The Decision Intelligence Opportunity

In the last 50 years, women have made good strides in STEM fields. In 1970, 38% of the employee base was female, and 8% of STEM jobs were held by women. In 2019, 48% of the workforce was female, and 27% were employed in STEM roles. While this progress is encouraging, there is still significant room for improvement. In this webinar, we’ll talk to 5 women that are leading the way in STEM and AI/ML to understand their road to success, where their ambitions will take them next, and advice for the women that follow in their footsteps. Join this all female panel to learn first hand what is possible, how to be inspired to aim higher, and embrace the mindset to achieve what’s possible. Join the Aera Technology team for our webinar, Women in Innovation: The Decision Intelligence Opportunity and take the next steps to be a female leader or an empowered supporter.

Unlocking AI with Decision Intelligence

 As industries continue to digitize, expectations around AI for the enterprise have increased. But the reality is that most companies are still experimenting with AI and advanced analytics. Very few have achieved enterprise-wide scale, let alone success within a single domain, geography, or business unit. Join us to discuss how Decision Intelligence is unlocking the full potential of AI by embedding it organically within the decision-making process – driving decision support, augmentation, and automation. You’ll learn how to maximize the value of AI by bringing it closer to the point of impact (i.e., decision making) while minimizing human bias.

Solving Data Integrity with Decision Intelligence

Data integrity is critical. But maintaining complete, accurate, and consistent information can be a challenge, especially across many different systems and data repositories. Today’s technology offers a solution, thanks to AI and machine learning. Join us to learn how Decision Intelligence is helping large, complex global companies improve data quality.

How to Run a Successful Decision Intelligence Transformation

Decision Intelligence has a rapid time-to-value and can deliver significant value over time. However, for this to be harnessed effectively, there are unique requirements specific to digitizing, augmenting, and automating decisions that need to be considered. Join Maarten Bellekom, Heiko Kahrels, and Larissa Sliwinski as they share their lessons learned and recommendations for designing and running a successful Decision Intelligence transformation.

Journey to the Autonomous Enterprise

A fireside chat with Sarah Burnett, author of the book, "The Autonomous Enterprise - Powered by AI." With upward of 60% efficiency savings, improved productivity, reductions in churn, and many more opportunities for innovation, Sarah Burnett argues that the journey towards the autonomous enterprise will gather momentum. She talks to Alison Crawford of Aera Technology about the concepts in her book, how to start the journey to get there, and why job losses won't be a problem.

Driving Supply Chain Agility Within the Chemicals Industry with Decision Intelligence

Over the past years, we have seen many companies within the chemicals industry struggle with the increasing VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) characteristics of supply chains all around the globe. We see an increased need for agility and resilience for organizations to be able to quickly sense, analyze, and understand unforeseen events, and make the right decision on which best actions to take accordingly.In collaboration with Aera Technology, Deloitte is helping organizations to move towards digital, interconnected, and above all, intelligent supply chains by bringing the concept of Decision Intelligence to life. This way, real-time data is used to continuously and autonomously monitor vast amounts of information, at a speed and accuracy unmatched by more traditional and human-involved processes. This is done with Decision Intelligence which augments and automates decisions focused on specific challenges and activities. Within this session, we will review the key trends and challenges driving supply chain disruptions, and how we apply Decision Intelligence as an answer to provide the required agility to deal with them accordingly.

The Top 10 Predictions for 2023 from Aera

This past year has shown us predicting what's going to happen isn't possible. But the team at Aera Technology is sure going to try. Join Henry Hwong, VP of Product Marketing and Alison Crawford, Senior Director of Product Marketing, while they review the top 10 predictions that the Aera team is making for 2023. We'll cover technology trends, industry trends, the future of work and more. This webinar will challenge the audience to think through the art of the possible and how they can take advantage of emerging trends and opportunities.

What is Decision Intelligence?

The topic of Decision Intelligence is emerging, pulling together several new and existing technologies and focusing them on an augmented future world. But what does it mean and how is it defined? Come join us for a discussion with the Aera GM for Customer Success as we explore what this new landscape looks like and how companies are thinking about Decision Intelligence.

What is the Future of Work in a Decision Intelligence World?

What does the future workforce and governance structure look like in a world as decisions are increasingly being automated? Who are the people we need to cultivate for the future? Come join a discussion with the Aera Chief Strategy Officer as we discuss how organizations are embracing new models like Human-in-the-Loop and Human-on-the-loop, and what role people play in Decision Intelligence. We'll also discuss what profiles we need to add to our strategic hiring plans.

The Future of Digital Control Towers in a Cognitive World

In a world shifting to Decision Intelligence, are Control Towers still relevant? Come join the conversation and learn how they actually play a critical role – when done correctly. Digital Control Towers can be an easy way to evolve an organization towards Decision Intelligence, quickly by lighting up a Digital Control Tower, while also laying the groundwork for Decision Intelligence with fully automatic recommendations.

How are Companies Leading Decision Intelligence?

5 years ago, Decision Intelligence was a completely new field, but today some of the largest organizations have deployed it across global teams and at large scale. Come join us in a discussion with the Aera GM for Customer Success as we explore how these companies started and evolved their journey, with an eye towards the lessons companies can learn and use. We'll discuss both the tactical need for organizations to prove short term value while putting in place disruptive technologies that will open up new business models and faster decision cycles in the future.

The Future of Planning in the Age of Decision Intelligence

The new digital reality has fundamentally changed the business world. Yet planning in most organizations, strategic, operational, or tactical, remains stuck in the 90s, posing a massive risk to performance. The process and the tools used for planning operate on a dated model where the variables are relatively predictable and stable (e.g., Demand for a product). But in today's VUCA reality, this cannot be any farther from the truth. Organizations address this by throwing more people into the problem, which unfortunately is not sustainable.
Join this session to: a) Understand the challenges in traditional planning b) Learn about ways to build agility in planning to deliver on the performance c) Discuss best practices and the latest innovations that make planning a sustainable competitive advantage.

How Decision Intelligence Enables Smart, Sustainable, and Strategically Aligned Supply Chains

Find out how Decision Intelligence can enable your business to align sustainability with other strategic requirements such as customer service, cost reduction, and inventory optimization. Decision Intelligence helps you understand the trade-offs and the different outcomes to ensure you make the optimal decision every time. Don’t just report on Co2, reduce it!

Using Decision Intelligence to Make the Perfect Customer Promise

The promise to the customer is the most important part of the buying process and the heart of delivering great customer satisfaction. Yet customer service organizations on the front line often don't have access to reliable promise dates or the ability to fix risks to orders. Come join the Sr. Director for Solution Engineering and learn how Decision Intelligence is putting true promise availability dates in front of customer service organizations to get the customer relationship started on the right foot. Learn how real-time information and the ability to automatically correct risks to orders is enabling organizations to prevent the death by a thousand cuts that can ruin your customer relationships.

Driving Decision Intelligence with MLOps

So much brilliant work in AI/ML is focused on getting the newest vendor tools and running the latest experiment. Yet many of these projects never see the light of day in the real world. Come join the Sr. Director for Aera ML/AI solutions and we'll discuss how Decision Intelligence is getting the most out of ML/AI by letting data scientists incorporate a diverse set of both external and integrated tools into one platform, with the real-time data integration and real-time model performance analytics needed to effectively deploy ML models.

Regaining Control of Order Fulfillment Processes with Decision Intelligence

Companies and entire industries are facing demand volatility and supply challenges as never before. In our complex, multi-polar global networks, identifying the right buttons and levers to navigate through these is becoming ever more difficult. Although we have spent decades optimizing processes, designing organizations, and implementing better and faster solutions, the challenges remain. In fact, we are throwing more complexity, more data, and additional dimensions into the mix. We have been focusing too much on the task and not enough on the decision. In order to fulfill demand as your customer requires, while balancing your complex supply chain, you need to process more data than ever before and act on decisions at a pace that has not been possible. This is where Decision Intelligence comes in: Leveraging the power of integrated internal and external data to achieve responsiveness based on real-time data, recalibrate priorities with full visibility of the consequences, and the ability to act swiftly is within reach.

How Can Decision Intelligence Transform Strategic Sourcing?

In the last decade, procurement organizations have implemented strategic sourcing to identify and deliver more savings by effectively managing spend and supplier performance. However, companies have struggled with certain aspects of strategic sourcing, such as creating a view of the total category spend, defining baselines, gathering the relevant market intelligence, creating a 360-degree view of suppliers, and keeping category strategies relevant when market conditions change. In a world of continuous disruptions, category strategies must be adapted quickly to deliver value, minimize supply chain risks and capitalize on market opportunities as soon as they appear. Decision Intelligence introduces a new paradigm in how strategic sourcing is conducted today. It addresses the traditional challenges and transforms them into an event-based process through recommendations that bring together internal data and external market insights.

Unlocking New Value with Decision Intelligence

Delivering impact to the bottom line in a sustainable manner ultimately matters to shareholders. Executive teams are tasked with increasing corporate value to their shareholders, as measured by a myriad of metrics, including Total Returns to Shareholders (TRS), Return on invested capital (ROIC), and Economic Profit (EP), while improving their social responsibility. While several levers drive shareholder value, a company’s value is just the sum of its decisions executed. Decision effectiveness and financial results are highly correlated. Join the discussion on how Decision Intelligence will change and unlock new value through the digitization, augmentation, and automation of decisions. We will share real-life examples of how Decision Intelligence drives business agility through increased decision velocity by making faster, better, and more decisions than ever possible.

Boosting your Business Performance with Decision Intelligence

On the one hand, according to McKinsey, an S&P 500 company currently loses an average of $250M per year on ineffective decision-making processes. On the other hand, according to Signal, companies could unleash $4.26 trillion per year by leveraging technology to support their decisions. This webinar will discuss the main issues companies currently face with decision-making and how Decision Intelligence can help solve them. We will also discuss the critical components of Decision Intelligence technology and the critical success factors in implementing them.

Decision Intelligence - How to Match the Market Pace of Change with High-Frequency Supply Chain Synchronization

Even in quiet periods, synchronizing all the supply chain moving parts is a challenge. Demand, sourcing, manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation all operate at different clocks, are run by different teams, and are dependent upon different constraints. In today’s post-pandemic world, the challenge has become more critical. You need to: a) Streamline decision making with periodic, heavy, and analog processes such as Sales and Operation Planning (S&OP) or Integrated Business Planning (IBP) b) Plan your supply chain more frequently than the usual once-a-month cycle to match volatile market demands. Join this webinar to learn about high-frequency supply chain flow synchronization — a level of agility that only Decision Intelligence can provide to crisis-proof your business.

How Decision Intelligence Prevents Supply Shortages and Facilitates Seamless Reallocation

Two years into the pandemic, supply disruptions continue to plague global supply chains leaving companies with no line of sight into the accuracy of their production plans or committing to dates of sales orders. Extended global supply chains have proven brittle in the face of demand volatility and supply challenges with severe impacts on revenue and consumers. Multi-tier supply chains face the challenges of extended lead times and parts availability where component shortages have wreaked havoc on industries from automotive and consumer electronics to healthcare devices and beyond. This webinar will discuss how Decision Intelligence introduces a new paradigm for multi-enterprise collaboration in a supply-constrained world. We will also discuss how it transforms firefighting into an event-based and priority-driven process through recommendations that bring together internal and external data to drive a transparent, agile, and automated solution. Join us to learn how Decision Intelligence can help your business absorb the impacts of the next major supply chain disruption.

Delivering on CPG Brand Promises with Decision Intelligence

Today's digitally-enabled, socially-conscious consumers are challenging large CPG organizations to deliver the experiences they want. How can companies keep up while adapting to supply chain disruptions, staffing challenges, and an unstable geopolitical environment? In this session we'll show how Decision Intelligence is helping CPG companies achieve the business agility and resilience they need to be successful today ... and tomorrow. What you'll learn by attending: a) The challenges faced by CPG organizations while trying to compete with nimble digital-native companies b) Key decision opportunities that can be addressed with Decision Intelligence. c) How Aera Decision Cloud™ helps organizations deliver decision agility and business resilience.

Decision Agility - How Decision Intelligence Breaks Through Current Operational Latency

In an increasingly uncertain and complex reality, businesses have grown organizationally siloed and their technology architectures fragmented. Despite data visibility and analytics improvements, decision making is often inaccurate and reactive, and leaders struggle to keep up with the speed of decision making required. Decision Intelligence, supported by AI, breaks the glass ceiling of decision accuracy and speed by addressing three common industry challenges: Broad access to data, Accurate Data Analysis, and Decision Execution itself. In doing so, companies that adopt Decision Intelligence significantly increase their business agility.

Decision Intelligence for Direct Procurement

Even with the vast investment in procurement technology over the past couple of decades, your procurement team is still spending around 80% of their time on transactional work. The constant changes and disruptions seem never-ending, and with the need to not only report on ESG compliance, but act on them, the complexity of supply decisions is growing exponentially. Incorporating key metrics in strategic sourcing, contracts, and supplier scorecards is a starting point, but not enough. You need to be able to use real-time analytics and intelligence at the moment of decision making when exceptions happen to ensure that strategic choices made are not lost/forgotten/missed due to the sheer number of decisions and speed at which they need to be taken. Learn how Aera Decision Cloud can help you bridge the everyday gap between execution and strategy.

Beyond the Digital Control Tower

Today's supply chains are exposed to more shocks than ever before, and have to manage an ever-increasing degree of demand & supply complexity. Just as SpaceX and Amazon have leveraged automation to improve how decisions are made in their respective domains, so can supply chains. Learn how Decision Intelligence can take you beyond end-to-end visibility of your supply chain, and enable you to gain the agility and resilience you need in today's uncertain times.

Future of Data Science

Data science, machine learning, and AI continue to be hot topics for data and analytics teams in large enterprises. Up until recently, the focus has been on the challenges inherent in creating and training models. However, now companies are looking at their data science investments and wondering what they’re getting out of it. Join us for a wide-ranging, interactive conversation about the challenges and opportunities with getting the ROI out of your data science investments with Mustafa Kabul, the head of Data Science at Aera Technology.

Improving the Customer Experience with Decision Intelligence

In a world where people have one-click access to any number of choices from which to buy, the need to differentiate based on the customer experience has become paramount. One of the keys to satisfying customers is being able to set the right expectations and delivering what was ordered at the time it was promised. Yet many customer service organizations still don’t have the visibility to reliable promise dates or can address challenges that put order quantity and/or delivery dates at risk. Learn how Decision Intelligence delivers true promise availability dates to customer service organizations to get the customer relationship started on the right foot. Learn how real-time information and the ability to automatically correct risks to orders is enabling organizations to address problems before they can ruin your customer relationships.

How Decision Intelligence Connects Planning and Execution to Manage Disruption

To deal with supply chain disruptions, planning and scheduling decisions are not enough anymore. Decision Intelligence complements, enhances, and extends planning capability to improve responsiveness, agility, and resilience in the supply chain.

Bridging Procurement and Supply Chain with Decision Intelligence

In today’s ever-changing business environment, companies are dealing with supply risk at an increasing rate. Traditional procurement solutions have made the source-to-contract process more efficient, but when a preferred supplier starts to miss deadlines or logistical issues are holding up raw materials, how do you collaborate with your suppliers to resolve critical issues when complex decisions need to be made in real-time? Learn how Decision Intelligence can bring together procurement and supply chain that will allow you make supply decisions that will enable an agile, resilient supply chain.

How to Deal Effectively with Supply Disruptions in CPG

Disruptions in the supply of raw and packed material have become increasingly common and force many CPG companies in constant fire-fighting mode. Join us to explore how Decision Intelligence can help to build critical agility to effectively deal with supply disruptions.

Decision Intelligence for Supply Chain

Ever since the advent of MRP in the 1960’s, supply chain organizations have been focused on better, more accurate plans. But plans are a reflection of the business and operational environment in which they were created. When unforeseen events happen, planners go into fire-fighting mode to deal with all the exceptions, taking time away from the strategic thinking they need to do. Join us for a wide-ranging, interactive conversation about the challenges planners face and how Decision Intelligence can help with Ruan Van Vuuren, EMEA Client Partner at Aera Technology.

The Convergence of Sustainability and Decision Intelligence

The importance of sustainability is becoming clearer every day, but a unified understanding of what metrics matter and the best approach to making meaningful decisions is still missing. In this fireside chat with Matthew Bunce, Senior Principal at Aera Technology, and Alison Crawford, Senior Director of Product Marketing, they'll talk through opportunities to leverage Decision Intelligence to achieve an impactful ESG agenda, how digital transformation enables sustainability, and a circular "cradle to cradle" product approach which tie back to revenue targets.

Reducing Risk and Operational Complexity in Pharma with Decision Intelligence

The pharmaceutical industry is facing increased pressure to deliver innovations, continuing growth in M&A activity, and greater regulatory burdens. All these factors are increasing the number and complexity of decisions that must be made each day. Meanwhile, demand for experienced staff is higher than ever and some companies are struggling to fill critical roles. How can pharma companies address all of these challenges and make the best decisions at the moment of maximum impact? Bring your questions for our pharma industry experts and learn how Decision Intelligence allows companies to leverage AI and ML to reduce risk and human bias, even in a volatile and uncertain market.

Next Generation Trade Promotion Management and Media Spend Optimization

Due to the introduction of social selling, the Consumer Packaged Goods industry continues to evolve and change in its go-to-market strategies, trade promotion management, and media spending. But the key for CPG companies is understanding how each platform impacts their business. Tools like TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, and the overlay of influencers, dramatically change day-to-day operations. Still, few people can connect the demand and supply chain. Using Decision Intelligence, companies can see the event, financial impact, and demand impact in real time and then optimize their operations to capture the effects. The Aera Decision Cloud ingests impression data and promotion activity to recommend actions to take to optimize campaigns further, spend, and supply chain decisions.

How to Close the Planning and Execution Automation Gap with Decision Intelligence

Even with modern APS systems, day to day planning remains high touch. Planners spend 50% of their time on data gathering and manipulation and make decisions in the same way as they did 20 years ago. Disruption brings more and more decisions in a shorter-term horizon. The sheer volume of decisions that planners must make has grown past the ability of even the best teams to keep up. The existing planning to execution gap is ever growing, while planners have no time to address more strategic and value adding planning problems. Decision Intelligence can change this planning paradigm. Learn how Decision Intelligence closes the planning and execution gap, and gives planners valuable time back to spend on more strategic and human aspects of planning.

How CPG Companies are Deploying Decision Intelligence to Overcome Raw Material Disruption

Two years of unprecedented volatility and disruption have exposed supply-side vulnerabilities in companies’ raw materials supplier network. For decades, sourcing managers have been incentivized to drive a ‘lowest unit cost’ approach which has resulted in a gradual erosion of flexibility and agility. Join Chris Andrews, Consumer Sector Supply Chain Leader at EY, and Matt York, Regional VP UK&I at Aera Technology, to learn how supply chain and procurement leaders are deploying Decision Intelligence to reduce risk and build resilience, strengthen supplier collaboration, and synchronize the raw material value chain.