Navigating the Unpredictable - Kinaxis’ Maestro platform gives businesses real-time solutions to supply chain problems.

The volatility of upcoming tariffs. A container stuck in port. Your supplier country unexpectedly placed on a watch list. Supply chain issues such as these are as numerous as they are inevitable. Sooner or later, your business is going to be impacted by them. The faster and easier you can predict the impacts of supply chain issues, the more likely you’ll be able to avoid adverse effects further on down the supply chain. To do that, however, you have to be agile enough to react to issues both quickly and accurately. That’s where Kinaxis’ Maestro platform comes in. Maestro is a generative AI-powered intelligent assistant that provides guidance based on supply chain best practices to ensure disruptions are absorbed and managed in real time.

“The first step is that you have to be aware of the problem and understand the impacts of the issue all the way down the supply chain,” says Phil Howell, senior industry principal for Kinaxis. “If you don’t fully understand the implications of the issue, you can make a choice that actually makes the situation worse.” There are obstacles inherent to every business, however, that prevents it from being agile, and the Maestro platform is designed to overcome those obstacles.
The first obstacle to agility is transparency. It’s not enough to know that there’s a problem; you have to be able to actually see the implications of the problem if you want to react appropriately. “Transparency is a continuous understanding of the current and future state of the supply chain and who must act,” Howell says.

A large part of the problem for many businesses is that each department is working in a silo trying to solve the supply chain issue based just on the data that’s relevant to their side of the business. But it’s rare that a problem will only impact one aspect of the business. “Maestro allows you to aggregate information together into a harmonized data fabric that facilitates holistic views,” Howell says. “This way, everyone is working with the same information in the form they need to consume it.” That holistic view of the issue is what provides businesses with sufficient transparency to understand the problem and how it might impact all facets of the business. Once that happens, it’s time to act quickly and accurately. That’s the second obstacle to agility.

“If you have transparency, you know you need to take action, but what action should you take?” Howell says.
The classic conundrum for many businesses is that they have to act quickly before the problem gets worse, but they need time to gather the appropriate data required to make quality decisions. And the traditional way of modeling supply chain issues takes far too long. “There is a lot of data to consider, and it takes days to model in the traditional way,” Howell says. “The longer it takes, the more likely the data will become invalid.” When that happens, new models have to be created and new tests have to be run, which takes even more days when the data can change again. It can often become a vicious cycle that creates more problems than it solves. The Maestro solution, however, provides businesses with a high-level overview of the data, which allows for instant changes and updates.

“We give you scenarios—a lens through which you can look at the data and see the impact of potential changes in seconds rather than days,” Howell says. “That way the data is never stale and you’re creating solutions in real-time before they mature into performance impact.”

The platform also allows you to share the scenarios you test with other areas of the business so they can see what you’re seeing, but they get to see it from their perspective so they can better understand how the new scenario will impact them.
To be truly agile, however, the supply chain platform also has to be adaptable. This aspect is one of the biggest challenges with traditional modeling scenarios. Howell compares the Maestro platform and the traditional modeling solution as the same kind of difference between a smartphone and a rotary phone. “The rotary phone is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only,” he says. “It performs that job well, but if you want it to do anything else, you’re out of luck.”

Like a smartphone, the Maestro solution provides every customer with a standard operating system, which gives them an accurate view of the implications of supply chain issues in real time. “This operating system has the advantage of receiving regular updates so the product is living and improving constantly,” Howell says.

Because each business has its own unique challenges and obstacles, and each department within that business has different needs from a supply chain platform, the interface is configurable for every different user, just like every smartphone can be customized to meet the unique needs of the person using it. “Your supply chain solution has to be able to evolve to meet your current and changing needs,” Howell says. “That’s how Maestro allows companies to make better decisions faster—today and into the future.” While every business works hard to predict and plan for the many supply chain issues that inevitably arise, there’s no way to predict the unpredictable—it can only be navigated as it arrives. Without a crystal ball, the best you can do is make sure that your business is always prepared to detect, avoid, and overcome supply chain hardships. It sounds easy in principle. And by implementing the Maestro solution, the practical application can be as easy as the principle. Kinaxis.com