The Harvard Business Review recently published a timely and insightful article that is most definitely relevant for our focus on Supply Chain trends:
👉 How Generative AI Improves Supply Chain Management
you can find the article at this link, and it is well worth a read.
It’s relevant for anyone in operations, planning, procurement, or logistics. The article explains how Generative AI — tools that can generate text, scenarios, insights, or forecasts — are already being applied across supply chains to:
- Interpret large volumes of messy or unstructured data
- Improve scenario planning in S&OP and risk assessments
- Speed up repetitive or document-heavy tasks
- Help make faster, more informed decisions
Key Takeaways
The emphasis in the article is on augmenting human judgment, not replacing it. GenAI isn’t doing the planning — but it is helping teams get to the insights faster, enabling more agile and timely responses.
Some of the examples highlighted include:
- Creating demand and supply narratives to support executive S&OP
- Summarising customer data to inform service strategies
- Drafting supplier communications or performance reports
Our View
At Supply Chain Planning.ie, we welcome this shift. We’ve always believed that structure enables innovation. Tools like SCOR and DDMRP provide the consistency, clarity, and process logic that make emerging tech like GenAI genuinely useful — not just interesting.
In short: AI works best when the basics are sound. When your processes are documented, your data is reliable, and your decision-making cadence is clear, AI can make a real impact.
If those basics are missing, the technology may still produce results — but they’ll likely be built on shaky ground.
Want to Read More?
You can read the full article here:
🔗 Harvard Business Review – How Generative AI Improves Supply Chain Management
It’s a great piece to reflect on — not just for what it says about technology, but for what it reminds us about the importance of foundations in supply chain work.
