Today’s supply chains move faster than release cycles. It’s a mismatch that traps the logic of action inside complex code — changeable only through IT tickets and queued deployments. When conditions shift, systems lag. Inflexibility creeps in, latency compounds, and planners revert to spreadsheets while opportunities and risks slip by.

You can see the consequences in the weekly planning meeting: a wall of dashboards, filters applied, and three different versions of “the truth.” Sales is pushing a promotion that landed early, procurement is flagging a resin shortage, and operations is juggling labor constraints. Everyone agrees a decision must be made — rebalance inventory, advance a PO, divert a shipment — yet the tools still can’t reflect how the decision actually gets made.

This is where value leaks. IT built the system; business owns the outcome. The logic of real decisions rarely lives where the code does — and until that logic is surfaced, shared, and owned by the people making the trade-offs, the gap widens with every release cycle.

How We Got Here

For years we leaned on IT because supply chain processes are complex and deeply customized. Each exception spawned a ticket; each ticket became code; each piece of code created another dependency. Over time, the “process” hardened into brittle decision trees — essentially RPA: if this, then that; else, escalate. That’s useful for repetitive tasks. It is tone-deaf, however, to the context humans use every day: risk appetite, service levels by segment, supplier reliability, promotion cannibalization, logistics lead-time volatility, and the million-dollar question — what trades off against what. Real decisions require nuance that is hard to capture in code, and harder still to maintain.

That history leaves two reinforcing problems that show up in every planning cycle:

• Inflexibility. When the market shifts — or a supplier slips — changing logic means changing code. Releases queue up while planners patch with spreadsheets. The cost of customization skyrockets when every logic change requires a deployment.
• Latency. Opportunity cost compounds while organizations wait for update cycles that can’t keep pace with promotions, disruptions, and day-to-day performance gaps.

Put simply, this operating model is too slow for today’s demand signals and supply risk. When tools can’t adapt at the speed of the business, planners retreat to Excel, decisions drift from governance, and competitive advantage erodes. The model has to change.

What the Business Actually Needs

Supply chain decisions aren’t just workflows; they’re living models of intent. They blend policies (“Service Tier A must be protected”), heuristics (“This supplier’s promise date slips by five days on average”), and probabilistic signals (demand confidence intervals, lead-time distributions, inventory health). For that to work in practice, the people closest to the decision must be able to express and evolve the logic themselves — without turning every adjustment into a month-long IT project.

Said differently: business should own the logic and policies, IT should own platform integrity, and analytics should supply the signals and models. When those roles line up, collaboration becomes the default path rather than an exception process, and decision quality improves because intent, data, and execution finally move together.

Enter Decision Intelligence

Decision intelligence recenters the system on decisions, not screens. It connects data, analytics, and action in a simple loop: understand → recommend → act → learn. It also makes the “why” behind each recommendation explicit, so intent and execution stay aligned as conditions change.

This is precisely where the old model breaks down. Hard-coded rules can’t keep up with variability. Human-in-the-loop decision intelligence can — but only if business users can actually shape the logic that guides the system.

The Aera Approach (and Why It’s Different)

Aera, the decision intelligence agent, is built to close the gap between how we really decide and how systems assume decisions happen. It brings ownership, transparency, and action into the same frame.

• Composable, low-code skills. Instead of burying logic in code, Aera lets business, IT, and analytics teams co-create “skills” that encapsulate a decision. Policies, guardrails, and heuristics are visible and editable — no release cycle required.
• Shared ownership by design. As stated above, business users own decision logic and policies. IT governs security, data, and performance. Analytics injects models and quality signals. Because this collaboration is built in, it scales with the work rather than slowing it down.
• From recommendation to action. Skills don’t stop at highlighting exceptions. Aera recommends the best action, orchestrates the collaboration to align stakeholders, and executes. Then it captures outcomes, learns from results, and improves the next decision — closing the loop in practice, not just in theory.
• Decision governance. With logic and outcomes explicit, leaders can see how decisions are made, measure impact, and spot gaps in the process. Governance becomes practical, and performance follows.

If that still sounds abstract, the fastest way to feel the difference is to build something real.

Try Aera: Build a Stockout Skill in Two Days

In a two-day workshop, your business users — yes, the planners — build a functioning skill that recommends how to resolve projected stockouts. They define how to identify transfers to expedite, how to evaluate trade-offs, and how to weigh cost versus service risk. Because the logic is composable and low code, they can iterate in hours — not quarters — and see the effect immediately in their planning rhythm.

The experience changes the conversation. Instead of “Please code this exception,” the team asks, “Should our policy prioritize margin or service for this segment?” The logic becomes a living asset that the business can evolve as the market moves, and the collaboration between business, IT, and analytics becomes the norm rather than the workaround.

Decisions at the Speed of the Business

IT doesn’t need to understand every nuance of how planners decide; it needs to empower them. By making decision logic first-class, composable, and co-owned, Aera turns brittle rules into adaptive skills — and turns meetings full of dashboards into decisions that move the business. The result is a supply chain that learns, adapts, and decides at the speed of reality, without waiting for the next code release.