EXECUTIVE INSIGHT
Q . IT ’ S A PHENOMENALLY EXCITING TIME TO BE WORKING IN THIS PARTICULAR SPACE , SOLVING THESE CHALLENGES . WHAT ’ S THE FUTURE OF IT ?
» You can look at the stock market and see the multiples on some of these software , hardware companies , but for good reason , supply chain ’ s unique because it was one of the original areas where complex maths really showed itself . The original availability to promise transportation or inventory optimisation involved linear algebra , which is constraint based and ultimately required software to do calculations . So in the supply chain , we ’ ve seen the power of maths can have , and now we ’ re talking about taking the next leap forward . In the SAP world , we ’ re doing things as simple as trying to help suppliers generate catalogues automatically and write descriptions that are more effective to help them promote themselves to the buyers , which is good for their business . On the buying side , the sourcing side with category managers , we ’ ve added some AI to generate cost breakdown structures by categories to pull in some of the third party data to generate a market dynamics view just to do some of the difficult time consuming work , which can be in most cases more accurate . Then where it really gets interesting is what a lot of us have seen as consumers is more of a chat based copilot that exists . SAP has one , many other organisations are going down this
path where you can ask questions and its systems can be asking questions , and we truly do get this productivity lift going back to doing more with less .
Q . LET ’ S LOOK AT SOME OF THE FUTURE CHALLENGES . WHERE DO YOU SEE THEM COMING FROM ?
» A lot of people would agree we see sub-geographic challenges where there are borders . The de-globalisation that ’ s happening has a large impact , it can cause significant disruptions to the supply chain and can cause
54 December 2024