The pandemic tested businesses’ resiliency and the ability to deal with unexpected disruptions. Proper planning and preparation, especially when paired with the use of artificial intelligence, can lessen the damage of future disruptions, according to Dave Marmer (pictured), vice president of offering management for IBM Regtech in the Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics division at IBM.

One of the most effective methods of planning is inter-departmental communication, which opens up opportunities for collaboration and better preparation.

“The concept that we follow, an extending planning and analysis model, is decisions being moved outside of the operational areas, the office of finance, into the areas of supply chain, into sales and into workforce management,” Marmer said. “These all had to come together more agilely and connected than they ever were before. Decisions that one organization makes impacts others. They need to bring in additional exogenous data to augment the decisions they were already making.”

Marmer spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the importance of planning and collaboration, using AI to provide accurate planning strategies and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Using AI to plan for success

Scenario planning plays into the strengths of AI, utilizing its ability to consolidate data and predict future outcomes based on previous patterns.

“We’ve seen this time and time again where project planning for one of our customers who manage certain government projects would look at it and say, ‘If it wasn’t for AI, we wouldn’t have detected these issues and some of the project scope, because we look at managing them in a certain way based on historical patterns,’” Marmer explained.

Even with the help of AI, planning for success requires being proactive with a willingness to accept potential changes.

“You need to determine your planning horizon. You need to understand who’s going to be contributing to the plan, who hasn’t been doing this before. You want people closest to the processes and the decisions to do that,” Marmer stated.

Upping the frequency of forecasts also improves the accuracy and benefits of careful planning, with several companies switching from quarterly or monthly forecasts to weekly and even daily forecasts. Take Ancestry.com LLC, for example, which earlier adopted a enterprise planning platform as a reaction to the phenomenal growth the company experienced when it was launching its DNA product, according to Marmer.

“This put them in really good shape for what happened more recently,” he said. “It allowed them to run multiple scenarios on the impact of their supply chain all the way through the labs and back to the clients.”

While the facilities were impacted, Ancestry was able to adjust and maintain a high level of customer service.

Another example was seen with one of Europe’s largest bakeries when it was faced with a need to manage supply chain disruptions in a business that “lives in a world of just hours,” Marmer stated. The company uses planning analytics, based on historical data, to forecast energy needs in the frigid Nordic region to predict customer demand based on past sales.

“They were able to start to see things months earlier that they would have normally not been able to see if they’d not augmented their human intelligence with artificial intelligence,” he said. “Customer propensity was changing for repeat purchases and cross-sell purchases. And they were able to make adjustments on their offerings as a result.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE