Jennifer Roberts, Supply Chain Leader at IBM, is visibly buzzing as she shares her favourite Kinexions moments so far. “Kinexions is really exciting,” she says, having flown in from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina to be here. “The first thing for me is getting to see the people I work with at Kinaxis who help advance the solution within IBM,” she explains. “We have a great account management team that’s helping us look to the future. And the energy here is always exciting. They really are a motivating company when it comes to thinking about the future. I’m really thankful that IBM invested in the ability of our teams to join the event this year.”
Roberts and IBM’s C-level executive suite for supply chain are located at Raleigh-Durham’s Research Triangle Park where IBM has a large facility covering 600 acres. “It’s a good place to be,” she says. “But a large part of my team is broadly located throughout the US in Poughkeepsie, New York, Rochester and Minnesota. And then we also have a team down in Guadalajara, Mexico. The global supply chain is located everywhere, but the people I work with are primarily in those locations.”
Roberts leads Demand Planning Operations for IBM’s hardware manufacturing division, supporting mainframe, power, and storage products across both internal and contract manufacturing. She supports transformation efforts within the Demand Supply Planning and Inventory organisations.
Supply chain transformation
Roberts specialises in configuring and modelling planning architecture in Kinaxis and SAP, translating, automating and transforming business processes, while identifying and collecting the relevant data from various large unstructured data sources. Her goal is to optimise supply chain processes and tools, reduce costs, improve efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction.
The words “revolution” and “transformation” have embodied the discourse at Kinexions and these are two concepts that play out in a major way at IBM. “Our business is all about transformation,” she explains. “We are constantly looking to evolve to solve a variety of different areas of opportunity. There’s certainly never a day where we aren’t thinking about what the next disruption may be. And so within our organisation, we focus a lot on resiliency, protecting our supply chain and ensuring we can deliver quality to our clients.” Indeed, IBM onboarded Kinaxis around five years ago to help transform Demand Planning and Supply Planning. Kinaxis Maestro provides IBM with the transparency needed to see how changes in demand and supply affect each other, utilising the most current data to run multiple concurrent scenarios.
AI in supply chain
IBM’s supply chain transformation efforts are currently focused heavily on AI. Of course, IBM has been leaders in the AI space for quite some time with the Watsonx products, but supply chain is considered client zero within IBM for that platform. “We are focused on efficiencies in the organisation, digital transformation, developing digital twins and taking enterprise data and bringing it together so that we can orchestrate a plan that is visible to all through one source of truth,” she reveals. “And that’s something we can all execute against seamlessly.”
“Everyone wants data in real-time. Everyone is looking for accuracy of data. They’re looking for answers to problems faster than we’ve ever been able to perform before,” she explains. “When the next big diversion comes, the next big distraction, we need to be able to quickly align ourselves, not just within the supply chain, but upstream with our sales organisation, who are feeding us all the sales opportunities and giving us insight into where the business is going. And then our downstream suppliers need to be equally connected. So, we partner with those organisations to ensure it’s all very seamless and that our data flows in both directions so we can manage results. So, one of the advantages of our internal AI supply chain tool, which we call CSCA 360 (Cognitive Advisor), is to get a 360-degree view of the world considering all those products. And access is a big part of that because we run our S&OP and MRP (Material Requirements Planning) processes through that tool, along with our inventory management process as well.”
According to Roberts, the biggest opportunities for Supply Chain at IBM lay within ways to mitigate disruptions earlier, boosting resiliency and agility, while protecting the supply chain. “There are things that hit us between the eyes at the last minute, and we have to be as responsive as possible to solve those problems. Data insights and being able to assess them proactively, is so important. And that’s where I see our organisation heading more strategically, through taking the data, ingesting it faster, making decisions on it, using generative AI and focusing on allowing people to dig into the data more quickly and get answers on information they’re seeking. We’ve been using agentic AI for years, but we’re really starting to dig into what it can do for us now in terms of impacting productivity.”
The human touch
Although Kinexions has been showcasing transformation and technological revolution it has also stressed the importance of work culture, something vitally important to Roberts. “Our leadership drives the mindset of transformation being at the forefront of where we’re going, in order to keep up with the demands of the future,” she tells us. “We’re always being asked to look at where we can create opportunities within the business and not just taking the leadership’s advice on what we should be doing. We look to all our employees and get their ideas from the bottom up; deciding whether or not there’s business value that can be returned from things that aren’t always visible.
“I think the most important part of your business is your people. Without having the ability of your people to be transparent in where they see opportunities, you really are going to hold yourselves back. Keep an open mind, ask a lot of questions, listen closely. I’m always told you have two ears and one mouth. And I think as a leadership team, you should allow your employees to come forth with ideas, plus, we need to think about why they are suggesting them – well, it’s because they’re impacted every day by what’s going on around them. So, listen.”
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