Decision Intelligence was identified as a key enterprise trend this year by Gartner. Aera Technology, a Decision Intelligence innovator, defines it as the digitization, augmentation, and automation of decision making. Through a partnership with Aera, South Korea-based Pulmuone — the world’s top tofu producer— will use the Aera Decision Cloud platform to realize the advantages of a Decision Intelligence-powered global supply chain.
The following are interview Questions and Answers with Rajeev Mitroo, VP and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, Aera Technology.
Can you tell me about Aera Technology and your role?
Scaling business decision making today requires a modernized approach. And that’s why Aera Technology exists.
Long before Gartner had identified Decision Intelligence as a top trend, Aera was actively enabling the adoption of digital and automated decision-making at some of the world’s largest and most dynamic companies across consumer packaged goods (CPG), healthcare and life sciences, petrochemical, manufacturing, and more.
Today, Aera’s purpose-built Decision Intelligence platform, Aera Decision Cloud™, is integral to the technology stacks of several of the largest worldwide enterprises.
We enable a unified, real-time approach to decision making that can be scaled across an organization’s functions and processes. Using our platform, companies can identify issues early across their operations and supply chain ecosystems, receive data-driven auto-generated recommendations, and execute faster, better decisions at the point of impact.
As Aera’s VP & Managing Director for the Asia-Pacific region, my team and I work closely with local enterprises to educate them about Decision Intelligence and its value in their digital modernization journeys.
What challenges are Asia-Pacific enterprises facing in the market today, and how are their supply chains impacted?
Global and regional enterprises are facing an environment where business complexity and customer expectations are increasing dramatically. Companies are struggling to gain the agility needed to respond to disruptions and seize potential opportunities — and this is happening on a daily basis.
And at each moment of change, a business decision needs to be made. Our customers now have to think about a given problem across multiple dimensions, at speed and scale. Whether it’s sourcing raw materials or managing shipping logistics — how do you take the right actions, make the right decisions, at the right moment in time?
Most teams simply can’t keep up with the analysis and decision-making requirements.
And this is also compounded with the Great Resignation. The people making those decisions — decisions that drive the way work gets done — are no longer there. Teams are losing valuable institutional knowledge.
Our customers, who operate vast, complex supply chains across the world, are recognizing that in order to deliver on their customer promise, they need a new approach to decision making and a digital solution to address the growing volume and demand for decisions.
Would you agree that digital transformation is accelerating the rise of Decision Intelligence — and how does Aera define Decision Intelligence?
We believe Decision Intelligence is the next frontier in enterprise digital transformation.
Enterprises are realizing its value and starting to prioritize Decision Intelligence in their IT and digital transformation initiatives. In fact, Gartner estimates more than one-third of large organizations will practice Decision Intelligence by next year.
At Aera, we define Decision Intelligence as the digitization, augmentation, and automation of decision making to deliver faster, accurate decision making.
Decision Intelligence can be applied to any business function across any type of enterprise to achieve outcomes. For example, using the Aera Decision Cloud platform, our customers are achieving business efficiencies, reducing costs, elevating customer service, reducing environmental impact, and improving work — all through the ability to make faster decisions at the right moment in time.
For example, an international CPG is using our platform to estimate changes in demand and execute decisions to avoid obsolete inventory and reduce material waste. Another company is re-prioritizing customer demand, adjusting its response in real time, at the lowest level of detail, to meet increased expectations around on-time, in-full delivery. The team is digitizing and automating decisions using data that not only spans core inventory systems, but goes all the way upstream to logistics, manufacturing, and even inbound supply.
Purpose-built platforms for Decision Intelligence make this possible.
You recently announced news about Pulmuone, a global fresh foods company based in Seoul, and the world’s #1 tofu producer. Tell me how Pulmuone will use your Decision Intelligence platform?
We are excited to announce our partnership with Pulmuone and help the company realize the benefits of Decision Intelligence. As South Korea’s leading fresh food company and the world’s #1 tofu producer, Pulmuone is driving incredible growth and innovation in its markets across the globe.
Pulmuone is using the Aera Decision Cloud platform to execute faster demand, supply, and logistics decisions at scale. With a growing global footprint and its commitment to LOHAS in mind — Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability — Pulmuone sought to improve its supply chain management to respond to disruption and meet its rigorous standards for sourcing, processing, packing, and distribution.
Through our platform and Aera Cognitive Skills™ — customized, digitized decision-making capabilities — we are enabling Pulmuone to gain these capabilities:
• Forecast demand by considering multiple internal and external influencing factors with the ability to augment, or automate, demand planning decisions to avoid under or over forecasting.
• Predict estimated arrival times at destination ports, using real-time shipping data to identify the best shipper options.
• Identify master data errors using data crawled from multiple source systems to gain a single source of truth to track master data for completeness, consistency, and accuracy.
What is unique about how Aera is delivering Decision Intelligence?
Aera Decision Cloud delivers a true innovation. It provides a way for companies to link data with decisions, actions, and outcomes in a single integrated platform, purpose-built for Decision Intelligence.
Users are empowered with the advanced technologies and tools to aggregate and integrate data from internal and external systems and build and deploy decision-making models that generate informed, automated recommendations for any business scenario.
Aera Decision Cloud not only delivers end-to-end visibility and uses composite AI to monitor and make recommendations, it also provides the framework to engage users at the moment of impact, if needed, or provides the option to make the decision autonomously. It then applies the results of those decisions into the underlying systems automatically. This closed loop approach enables the platform to learn from every decision made, retain a memory of the context in which it was made, and the resulting impact.
Aera’s patented data crawling technology also enables any enterprise to experience Decision Intelligence – no matter the state of the data, where it exists, or how many internal systems. Designed to be enterprise architecture-friendly, the platform works with existing cloud and on-premise enterprise solutions with minimal impact.
Enterprises can transform their decision making and realize outcomes in a matter of weeks, not years.
