The Future of Planning: Integrating AI and human expertise in decision-making
Supply Chain Planning and Workforce Management have always been about making decisions that affect people – employees and customers – while impacting global supply chains, services, and revenues. Striking the right balance among these different perspectives in industries such as Retail, Manufacturing and Healthcare has a major impact and is a delicate balancing act. Although this challenge has long been present for the customers we’re serving, we are now experiencing rapid changes in the environments they operate in. New technology trends, such as Generative AI and tools like ChatGPT, are being used by a vast majority of the population – including users of planning software.
Text: Erica D’Acunto | VP Innovation at ORTEC
The changing role of planners in a tech-driven world
Today’s business professionals, with a mobile phone always in their hands, expect to make quick decisions, have access to the right information and change their minds to new or unforeseen circumstances. These prominent trends in the consumer world will soon transfer to the business world, too. Soon, planners will no longer spend hours looking at different options, manually scheduling deliveries, coordinating nurse visits, or managing technicians’ visits. Their job will evolve, and technology will play a significant part. Planners will oversee the planning process, both months and weeks before operations, to anticipate future needs as well as during operations to ensure that roadblocks are swiftly identified and resolved smoothly.
Adapting planning software to meet new challenges
As the role of the planners will become simpler and more streamlined, I expect the complexity of decision-making to increase, specifically in terms of the number of factors influencing decision-making. Previously, efficiency and revenue were the primary drivers of decisions. Now, in this new context, social responsibility and people’s happiness – both employee engagement and customer satisfaction - will take on greater importance. This will turn planners into “guardians” who balance these sometimes conflicting forces.
Cost-effectiveness
Employee happiness
Customer satisfaction
Sustainability
The evolving relationship between software and planners
As providers of planning software, it is essential to understand the broader challenges our customers face, not only the ones purely related to planning – but also those involving people, corporate image, and social responsibility. We’re coming from a situation where the main users of our software are operational planners whose work is very intense, especially in the couple of days before operations, ensuring that all orders can be fulfilled. This often requires a lot of digging into the data, manual interventions, and numerous assumptions.
Moving forward, with more information available in the cloud and in our data and analytics system, the relationship between ORTEC’s software and its users will shift. The burden of raising potential issues and generating ideas on how to solve them will move from the users to the system. In the future, software users will therefore focus on intervening in urgent situations and overseeing a planning process that strikes the right balance between customer happiness, employee satisfaction, sustainability and cost-effectiveness. This balance can vary from company to company, depending on the overall company strategy.
Erica D'Acunto - VP Innovation at ORTEC
"Decision-making today is no longer only about just efficiency and revenue, but about people’s well-being, social responsibility, and corporate image, too. This turns planners into ‘guardians’ who balance these sometimes conflicting forces.""
The transition to new software
Like any change, this transition will come with challenges and will not be frictionless. We are moving from a planner-centric model to a planning ecosystem that involves various stakeholders, including planners, dispatchers, drivers, nurses, and end customers. One major concern in this transition is capturing the vast knowledge and expertise stored in the employees’ minds, which is often difficult to quantify. This is a key point for the adoption of the next generation of solutions: employees and planners need to recognize and trust the information generated by the system, they need to be able to influence and overrule it when they feel the need for it, and they need to see it improve over time. A bigger impact we aim for with our solution will happen when two things happen at the same time: we offer smarter solutions, and our users use them to their full potential.
About Erica
Erica D'Acunto | VP Innovation at ORTEC
Throughout her career, Erica D’Acunto has been driven by a curious mindset and commitment to broad learning. Thanks to her academic background in Software Engineering from Italy and an MBA from the University of Amsterdam, she can effectively bring together business and technology. As VP Innovation at ORTEC, she firmly advocates that successful innovation stems from addressing vital customer needs with impactful, people-centric solutions, a principle that underpins her approach to driving meaningful, customer-focused innovations.
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This article is part of the 6th issue of our magazine Data and AI in the Boardroom.
Data-Driven Workforce: The Future Is Now
Discover how data and AI can revolutionize your workforce management. Learn about the latest trends, best practices, and real-world examples. Gain insights from experts on optimizing scheduling, balancing supply chain and workforce, and leveraging technology for improved efficiency.
