A lot of the planning engines and algorithms in the ERP space are designed around being “black box”—meaning they draw on raw data from transactional systems and produce a single optimized result. These solutions have three primary problems.
- First, they hide the impact of bad data. Users can never tell when solutions are compromised by bad data.
- Second, they are difficult to use to model future states.
- Third, they ignore the single most important calculator in the strategy development realm: human judgment
We at Supply Chain Toolworks believe that the best way to determine the optimum solution is to give the user a means to easily model their environment or a set of possible environments. These models can then be used to establish an unlimited set of scenarios. Each scenario can be build using a set of facilitated optimization tools so that “Local” optimums can be found. This Sandbox approach gives the organization the ability to quickly assess a number of scenarios and be confident that the underlying model is clean and robust.
Bottom Line: Your people don’t need the big computer brain to think for them, they just need workflow and tools to make the decisions faster and more accurately
