This fireside chat recap is from Day 1 of FreightWaves’ The Future of Supply Chain live event in Rogers, Arkansas. For more information and content from the event, click here.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Enabling supply chain agility through digital capabilities.
DETAILS: Matt Waller, dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, and Ildefonso Silva discuss how technology can help people understand which data is the most important and improve supply chain agility.
SPEAKER: Silva is the executive vice president of business services at Tyson Foods.
BIO: Silva has more than 20 years of experience in global supply chain innovation and strategy. He previously worked at McKinsey & Company to improve companies’ performance by bridging operations and commercial areas, deploying digital tools and analytics to accelerate change. Silva has also worked at Procter & Gamble in customer business development, sales, distributing and customer marketing.
KEY QUOTES FROM SILVA:
“Now the machines can help us really understand when reality is different from the plan, how do we react to it? So that we react faster, we react without overtaxing the employees, and we react in a way that’s more precise.”
“Sometimes having more data just means you have more confusion because you have more places to look at and not necessarily translating that into a better quality of action. … There are technologies today that help us understand which variables really matter before you actually start forecasting, and that increases accuracy.”
“To a certain extent, technology is helping take the noise out of the planning.”
“The minute you start having a better way to plan downstream, the visibility of how many loads you’re going to need in every node with which reliability to which destinations, it starts increasing substantially, which of course allows companies to get more accurate in their freight planning.”
Click here for more FreightWaves articles by Alyssa Sporrer.
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