Recommended Reading
We’ve scoured the web and selected the most relevant insight, research & thought leadership for you.
Energy Traders Are Missing a Major Opportunity
PUBLICIS SAPIENT - NOV 2021
“In a post-Covid period of accelerated change, where patterns of energy use are shifting and countries are pushing the energy transition agenda, companies need to become more agile. This requires IT systems that are quicker and cheaper to adapt to the new environment along with a new approach to technology development based on collaboration with industry peers in areas of common interest..
..Many of the operations they perform and the tools they use are undifferentiated with no unique competitive edge. These companies have a lot more in common than they might realize and share many of the same IT challenges – collaborating to tackle them and achieve common standards in areas where it makes sense could deliver major upsides for everyone.”
How Decision Intelligence Could Democratise Analytics
raconteur - OCT 2021
“Decisions, decisions, decisions. We make them every day: bad ones, good ones, seemingly inconsequential ones that have profound implications. It’s no wonder “analysis paralysis” plagues so many of us.
While business intelligence has proved enormously valuable to organisations of all stripes, a new practice is emerging: decision intelligence.
Put simply, this is the commercial application of artificial intelligence (AI) to make better business decisions. It aims to take data-led insights a step further.
It’s been called the “new BI”, but really it means broadening the capabilities established by business intelligence in a much more intuitive, smarter way.”
Longing For A Digital Twin: What The Colonial Pipeline Cyberattack Can Teach Us About Planning For Uncertainty
OPPORTUNE - JUN 2021
“On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline was hacked. The pipeline immediately shut down and backed up crude oil and refined products before the company could finally restore the pipeline system. The cybersecurity incident highlights just how fragile the energy supply chain is when unexpected disruptions like these occur.
Use the shock of the Colonial Pipeline as an impetus to rethink your supply chain. Turn old norms on their head about what’s “stable”. Bring in fresh ideas and rethink each piece along the way. The only constant in today’s world is that we’ll always be faced with challenges in a rapidly changing world.”
Retooling for the New Cost Imperative
BAIN & COMPANY - AUG 2020
“While the global financial crisis and other past shocks provide some insight into what winners do, the current crisis is different in many ways. What does a company need to think about now, in addition to those previous lessons? What are the big, high-value opportunities?
We asked nearly 150 executives across industries to identify the two cost-restructuring areas that they view as most important for their companies’ recovery. Their responses helped identify five big themes that will drive the new cost imperative.”
Building the Bionic Supply Chain
BCG - APR 2020
“The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore supply chain challenges that many companies have long grappled with.
Consequently, even though recent investments in digital solutions have helped somewhat, firms are still dealing with many of the performance challenges that they’ve been dealing with for decades.
To capture the greatest value from their end-to-end supply chains, companies need to adopt a bionic operating model.
With the help of adaptable KPIs that focus on optimizing overall performance in any situation, a platform organization that works cross-functionally, and a data and digital platform (DDP) that enables collaboration, a bionic supply chain leverages the best of what both machines and humans have to offer.”
Conquering Complexity in Supply Chains with Digital Twins
BCG - JAN 2020
“Imagine that you could see the risks in a complex, interconnected supply chain weeks in advance, enabling you to pinpoint bottlenecks in the system and impediments to fulfilling your promises to customers. Modeling with a digital twin makes this possible.
By allowing a company to achieve full control of the supply chain system, digital twins confer benefits beyond the end-to-end visibility provided by control towers and the predictive insights generated by planning models such as demand forecasting.
On the journey to a data-driven supply chain, control towers and predictive planning represent the first steps. Through the use of advanced simulation techniques and AI-based decision making, digital twins enable entirely new levels of visibility and predictive insights. The first companies to deploy digital twins of their supply chains have already gained impressive levels of control over their complex, interconnected systems.”
How to Love Non-Exotic Technology
DIGITAL ENERGY JOURNAL - JUL 2020
“You know what people intelligence means, but when we talk about people intelligence in the context of digital intelligence, we come up with a slightly different picture, emphasising what people intelligence can do that digital intelligence cannot do.
The big difference is modelling. People can make enormously complex models in their minds using enormous amounts of diverse information and uncertainty. Computers are less good at handling diverse data than people, but can handle bigger data volumes.
If you have a situation with low volumes of data, but many diverse components, a person is ideal. [..]
If you have a situation with high volumes of data, then only a computer could process it.
But if you have a situation with both high volumes of data and diverse data, like many situations in reasonably large organisations today, you may be better off working out how to use computers to distil the data and then having people to make decisions with it.”
Rebooting your stalled Digital Transformation in Oil and Gas
MCKINSEY & COMPANY - APR 2019
“Companies often struggle to make the leap from successful pilots to organization-wide rollout, and in many cases, transformation efforts have essentially stalled.
How can we get back on track? Five steps to a successful scale-up:
Deliver bite-size benefits to drive adoption
Double-check you have all the capabilities you need for scaling up
Make technology your enabler, not your bottleneck
Democratize your data
Reengineer your operating model and shift your culture
Digital holds tremendous potential for oil and gas operators. For the most part, the industry has completed its proof-of-concept phase. Now it’s time to capture business value at scale by treating digital as the top-level strategic priority it is and driving the next wave of operational and performance transformation.”
Commercial Optimization: How to ensure full value capture from oil and gas value chains
Marakon - Dec 2017
“Integrated oil and gas producers across the globe have done a herculean job of cutting production costs to become profitable at lower prices, but now need to capture additional value from downstream assets.
In an environment of increasing margin pressure, firms need clear frameworks and active processes in place to capture and maximize value from integrated value chains.
The result is a more dynamic and commercially oriented organization capable of ensuring money is not being left on the table and value in downstream assets is not being lost.”
Mastering Digitized Commodity Trading
BCG - MAY 2019
“Digitization is reshaping commodity trading at an accelerating pace, and players are investing substantial resources to develop critical capabilities.
Commodity trading’s classic organizational structure is vertical and siloed by commodity. Digitized trading puts fundamental stresses on that structure. A vital component of an optimized digital trading setup is scale - in platforms, data, and capabilities.
To enable this, companies must organize their platforms and capabilities horizontally across desks. This structure contrasts sharply with the heavy verticalization of costs and risk in traditional setups.
Regardless of how quickly the trading of individual commodities becomes digitized, the directional trend is clear. We see the evolution toward the Holy Grail of full digitization proceeding in four stages.”
How reinventing the supply chain can transform the planner role
EY & KINAXIS - Jun 2019
“Much of the challenge for companies is that the current states of their supply chains, planning capabilities, organization structures, processes and systems are ill-equipped for today’s business environment. This, in turn, places an undue burden on planners, who have to contend with greater workloads, complexity and frustration with planning.
Fortunately, there is another way.
For companies looking to reinvent their planning processes, a transition to concurrent planning can make all the difference. With concurrent planning, a company’s entire supply chain is always in sync, thanks to a single platform for all planning functions.
Concurrent planning instantly and continuously balances a company’s end-to-end supply chain, allowing for greater responsiveness and overarching visibility.
Supply, demand, capacity and inventory, and even sales and operations planning and integrated business planning are all aligned. Information is available in real-time, and everyone has instantaneous access to the people, data and results they need.”
Models of Enterprise Intelligence
ThoughtWorks - MAY 2019
“Data has, as the saying goes, become the enterprise’s lifeblood.
But data alone isn’t sufficient to guarantee success — being able to use data to produce tangible outcomes for business is the real value driver, and for that, we are seeing the world moving more towards intelligence. The use of machine intelligence to drive business outcomes is a central theme. Aligning the use of intelligent insights with business goals to drive better decision making challenges most organizations — even for relatively basic functions.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence, data engineering, and cloud computing have made it feasible to execute decisions in more sophisticated ways. This includes making decisions in greater number, faster, more nuanced, informed by more varied inputs and richer logic, and using more autonomous learning and iteration.
Business leaders that understand how to use new technology to align their organizational intelligence to their desired outcomes will secure a substantial advantage.”
Effective Use of Supply Chain Analytics to Mitigate Business Disruptions
GARTNER - MAY 2020
“A large majority of companies are facing more frequent and impactful disruptions to their operations. Supply chain leaders looking to build a holistic analytics capability can support their organization in mitigation, recovery, and longer-term planning goals.
The research outlines how executive can deploy a portfolio of analytics techniques while they sense, mitigate and recover from current events and prepare for future disruptions:
Use real-time data and analytics to track unfolding disruption
Deploy visualization to map your supply chain against the disruption
Use machine learning and AI to triage the supply chain in the near term
Leverage predictive analytics and simulation to gauge likely future scenarios
Use scenario modeling and prescriptive analytics to revise supply chain policies”
Deep Transformation with Smart Supply Chain Digitization
ACCENTURE - JAN 2021
“In just three years, a large global fashion retailer increased its market share by more than 28% and doubled its operating profit [..] The secret to its success was a significant investment in a supply chain digitization strategy that includes three important components: a unified, single, view of demand; supply chain segmentation; and smart planning and execution, all of which are powered by Digitization, Analytics, and Automation.
Specifically, while S&OP balances supply and demand for the next forty to fifty weeks, and commits resources for the first four to six weeks (the so-called frozen horizon,) smart execution is focused on the short term (no more than six weeks) and tries to identify and quickly respond to disruption and deviation from the plan.
Smart execution brings together three capabilities that define supply chain digitization: first, real-time internal and external data to identify potential deviations from the plan, supply disruption or new demand information; second, intelligence, specifically Artificial Intelligence, to identify the potential impact of the new signal on supply chain performance; third, optimization, to decide on the best way to respond, considering various supply chain trade-offs and objectives.”
Looking beyond the horizon: Preparing today’s supply chains to thrive in uncertainty
DELOITTE - DEC 2020
“The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare many of the long-standing vulnerabilities and risks lurking in organizations’ supply chains.
[..] it has demonstrated the power of interconnected, digital supply networks (DSNs) to enable organizations to anticipate, sense, and respond to unexpected changes and minimize their impacts.
When done in isolation (i.e., “random acts of digital”), technology investments often serve to optimize only a component of the value chain, not the whole. In the DSN model, however, functional silos are broken down both within an organization as well as outwardly to include customers and suppliers (and in some cases, suppliers’ suppliers) to enable end-to-end visibility, collaboration, responsiveness, agility, and optimization.
In fact, as linear supply chains evolve into DSNs, the companies best positioned for growth maybe those that see these networks as core to their business, technology, and operational strategies.”
Introduction to Decision Intelligence
CASSIE KOZYRKOV @ GOOGLE - AUG 2019
“Curious to know what the psychology of avoiding lions on the savannah has in common with responsible AI leadership and the challenges of designing data warehouses? Welcome to decision intelligence!
Decision intelligence is the discipline of turning information into better actions at any scale.
Humans are not optimizers, we’re satisficers, which is a fancy word for corner cutters who are satisfied with good enough as opposed to perfect. [..] Some of the corners we cut lead to predictably sub-optimal outcomes.
If we had the facts, we’d be done already. Alas, we live in the real world and often we must work for our information. Data engineering is a sophisticated discipline centered on making information available reliably at scale. In the way that going to the grocery store for a pint of ice cream is easy, data engineering is easy when all available relevant information fits in a spreadsheet.
Things get tricky when you start asking for the delivery 2 million tons of ice cream… where it’s not allowed to melt! Things get even trickier if you have to design, set up, and maintain a huge warehouse and you don’t even know what the future will ask you to store next — maybe it’s a few tons of fish, maybe it’s plutonium… good luck!”
Capturing Commodity Trading’s $70 Billion Prize: How Digitalization Is Changing Commodity Trading
BCG - JUN 2017
“As digitalization redefines the commodity-trading value chain and puts cracks in existing ways of doing business, the requirements for success are changing. To win in this environment, competitors need to retool and reshape themselves across all three traditional sources of advantage:
Access to Information. Digital technologies enable companies to access and digest a growing mountain of increasingly complex data. Players must invest to increase their access to data and data-processing capabilities.
Trading Capabilities. The historical practice of trading by intuition, supported by limited analytics, is being replaced by more systematic, machine-based trading that utilizes algorithms to support the collection and treatment of information and the decision-making process. Competitors will need to invest in the necessary infrastructure and in personnel who focus on software development and mathematics.”
Downstream oil and gas amid COVID-19: Succeeding in a changed market
MCKINSEY & COMPANY - SEP 2020
“The global COVID-19 pandemic caught the oil and gas industry unprepared for a completely changed landscape.
To adjust, oil and gas companies will have to transform radically. Those that succeed will shape the industry’s future; those that fail will become consolidation targets.
Our experience in the downstream oil and gas sector [..] suggests that a successful response to the fundamental market changes seen in the COVID-19 crisis can be divided into three phases.
Phase three: Reform to position for growth
Deploy advanced analytics and machine-learning applications. Integrate new technology up and down the value chain: several areas are ripe for transformation. We have seen terminal-level pricing engines for products help capture margin by understanding local market dynamics, including price elasticity. [..] Using new software in scheduling and within a supply chain has enhanced maintenance execution, boosting labor productivity and reducing cost. In transportation, digitization has streamlined the movement of crude and products to and from refineries by determining the timing and optimizing the mode of transport (from pipeline to truck, rail, or ship).”
Is your Supply Chain planning ready for digital?
BCG - Oct 2018
“Not surprisingly, many senior executives today are looking at new digital technologies to bolster their supply-chain-planning efforts and repair any problems in the supply chain. As most are undoubtedly aware, a variety of new digital solutions are making companies more responsive, reducing waste, and strengthening business results.
Some of the latest technologies perform tasks such as aggregating internal and external data in real time - improving data availability and creating end-to-end transparency along the supply chain.
Digital technologies will soon enable a truly dynamic planning process, utilizing algorithms, machine learning, and AI to balance supply with demand; automating demand forecasting, inventory management, and production scheduling; and running scenario modeling—all through a digital control tower.”
AI This. Not So Fast.
SUPPLY CHAIN SHARMAN - JUN 2020
“The term “AI” is overused. The marketing is used freely without meaning. Technology vendors are hanging the word “AI” on their marketing like I hang icicles on my XMAS tree. When I get the press releases and briefings, I laugh. If only the aspirations were equal to the delivery. The reason? We don’t know enough about what drives performance improvement to code an AI engine even if it was ready.
The evolution of decision support is happening on the edges.
Companies are not satisfied with their capabilities to build a feasible supply plan. Only 1/3 of companies have access to what-if analysis, only 18% of supply chain leaders feel that they can get to planning data when they need it, and only 29% of organizations can easily get to total cost information.
My conclusion? It is time for a disruption in the supply chain planning market. Bring on new forms of analytics in a meaningful way”
