Today, in the context of digitalisation and full automation of business processes, fast trends, methods, and models appear that make it possible to realise the long-established must-haves of doing business.
In particular, this applies to planning models - touchless planning to replace the traditional one.
Touchless planning is an innovative approach that uses artificial intelligence to scale an organisation's supply chain planning process.
The use of this technology allows employees to spend more time analysing and performing other high-order tasks instead of routine work that requires less human intelligence, such as collecting and organising data.
What are the advantages of touchless planning over the traditional one?
These planning models allow you to work in a completely different way.
Firstly, most labour-intensive processes are non-contact and continuous, which allows you to shift the focus to the medium term.
Traditionally, the approach is reactive and control-based. Enterprise-wide insights and analytics accelerate decision making, while intelligent automated workflows enable multi-dimensional segmentation to be deployed.
Traditionally, the supply chain workforce is structured like a pyramid with a standard support model. The emphasis is on industrial processing of transactions in processing centers, while the contactless approach allows for a combination of center and market planning organisations to achieve standardisation and facilitate collaboration.
To see the impact of all these differences, let's take demand planning as an example. Traditionally, separate storage units are used for this. The non-contact model can consider more variables from the extended enterprise to influence the forecast and can also make adjustments to this forecast.
To use touchless planning effectively, organisations must first focus on implementing automation technology that synchronises and interacts with their existing systems.
Touchless planning is ideal for organisations that rely on supply chain management. Any businesses that manage inventory, manufacture goods, or distribute products will undoubtedly benefit.
Touchless planning technology can change the way companies in various industries operate and allow them to act at a more strategic level, instead of “playing small”.