At the ARC Industry Leadership Forum, Avantor and Aera Technology showcased how targeted decision automation can transform inventory management, reduce waste, and enhance supply chain agility through incremental, pragmatic implementation.
At the ARC Advisory Group’s 30th Industry Leadership Forum in Orlando on February 10, Avantor and Aera Technology outlined a pragmatic path for embedding decision intelligence into large-scale supply-chain operations, demonstrating h...
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ow automated decisioning can convert chronic inventory friction into measurable business value.
According to the Logistics Viewpoints account of the session, Jared Guckenberger, Avantor’s vice-president of global supply chains, described the company’s starting point: a vast, high‑transaction network spanning 175 countries, around 40 distribution centres and hundreds of thousands of SKUs, where teams simultaneously faced excess stock, ageing inventory and stockouts. Confronted with noisy, incomplete data and a supplier base that in many cases lacks electronic integration, Avantor prioritised achievable, repeatable decisions rather than pursuing full autonomy.
Working with Aera Technology, Avantor funnelled its initial efforts into three discrete “skills” that targeted frequent, high‑friction processes: stock rebalancing, purchase‑order cancellation and purchase‑order prioritisation. The approach, Guckenberger said, couples classic machine learning and decision logic with agentic AI orchestration so the system can make thousands of routine choices that would otherwise be missed or delayed by humans.
The results reported at the forum were operational and incremental rather than speculative. Stock rebalancing moved from a monthly manual chore to an every‑other‑day systematic scan that surfaces small, otherwise overlooked transfer opportunities; when planners approve recommendations, stock transport orders are created automatically in SAP. Purchase‑order cancellations, once a two‑to‑three‑week cycle, are now proposed weekly and processed via email exchanges that the platform parses, reducing decision time to about a week and, in one early pilot, saving roughly $300,000 in inbound purchase orders within days. Purchase‑order prioritisation shifts the organisation from reactive firefighting to proactively asking suppliers to expedite deliveries when a shortage is forecast, with vendor responses captured and presented to buyers for final confirmation.
Those operational gains mirror claims from Aera. The company has reported that decision‑intelligence deployments can cut supply‑chain waste by as much as 20% by reducing excess, obsolescence and expiry risks, and its Aera Decision Cloud™ has been recognised in the Gartner Market Guide as a representative vendor in analytics and decision intelligence for supply chain. Aera also highlighted similar use cases in other large enterprises at recent industry conferences, underscoring the technology’s role in converting data into executable decisions.
Panel discussion at the session reinforced a pragmatic playbook for adopters. Jeremy Hudson, speaking as a systems‑integration perspective, advised starting with high‑impact, lower‑complexity problems rather than attempting “big bang” projects such as digital twins or full robotics rollouts. He emphasised choosing tools that tolerate imperfect data and support human decision makers. Peter Quimby framed the work as an explicit design problem: build decision processes, accept early friction and learn from outcomes. From a vendor development angle, Datex described efforts to accelerate customisation through low‑code platforms and to embed agentic tools that help define and operationalise data sources so organisations can assemble their own context‑aware agents.
Avantor’s experience offers several practical lessons for organisations exploring decision intelligence. Move early and iterate, Guckenberger noted a substantial backlog of incremental enhancements created by pilots, and choose skills with tangible business impact and executive sponsorship. Simplify processes before or alongside automation so the automated decisions operate in a cleaner context. And prepare a roadmap: successful pilots rapidly generate demand for further use cases that must be prioritised and funded.
The ARC forum itself underlined the wider industry momentum. Conference programming across February 9–12 stressed how AI, advanced analytics, automation and connected intelligence are converging to boost agility and resilience in industrial operations and supply chains. Presentations and vendor briefings at the event illustrated a common theme: many organisations are confronting more frequent disruptions even as they extract new efficiency through digital transformation.
What emerged from Avantor’s presentation is not a promise of sentient systems but a blueprint for pragmatic automation: apply decision intelligence to thousands of routine choices, preserve human oversight for judgement calls, and scale the capabilities that demonstrably reduce waste, shorten cycles and improve service. For companies wrestling with scale, data quality and diverse supplier capabilities, that combination of modest automation, clear business sponsorship and iterative improvement appears to be the most direct route from pilot to production value.
Source: Noah Wire Services
