Smarter Waste Prevention for Proactive Production Planning and Higher Margins

Preventing excess production is one of the most effective ways to reduce waste and protect profitability, yet limited visibility, disconnected planning processes, and manual analysis often make it difficult to identify overproduction before it creates short-dated or unsellable stock. With AI and automation, organizations can now detect risks earlier and take coordinated action before losses occur.

Using the Business Waste Prevention Skill, the Aera decision intelligence agent has helped organizations achieve 99% coverage across excess production risks, up to 80% improvement in planner efficiency, and 50–70% reduction in resolution time.

These results show how decision intelligence shifts production planning from a reactive exercise to a proactive, closed-loop system that prevents waste before it starts.

The Challenges: Overproduction, Siloed Planning, and Limited Visibility

Excess production typically begins long before waste becomes visible. When planners lack the data, time, or connected systems to evaluate whether production aligns with forecasted demand, at-risk orders slip through unnoticed. Organizations face several recurring issues:

• Manual production analysis that requires planners to compare production orders against forecasts by hand, delaying action.
• Disconnected planning processes across systems, making it hard to evaluate whether planned production matches demand and shelf-life requirements.
• No visibility into excess production because planning and demand systems are not integrated.
• Reactive waste management where overproduction is identified only after inventory has already been created.

Left unaddressed, these challenges lead to short-dated inventory, unnecessary write-offs, incremental operating cost, and significant margin erosion.

The Aera Solution: AI-Driven Waste Prevention

Aera, the decision intelligence agent, applies the Business Waste Prevention Skill to detect at-risk production orders early and recommend the best preventive actions to avoid excess inventory altogether. The skill:

• Matches production against demand. It evaluates existing supply, planned orders, and process orders, incorporating shelf-life, availability dates, and production constraints.
• Identifies at-risk production orders. It flags orders with no demand match, quantities that exceed demand, or quantities outside MOQ and safety stock thresholds.
• Generates actionable recommendations. It suggests targeted production adjustments, including order cancellations, production cuts, or MOQ-aligned reductions validated against safety stock.
• Enables rapid execution. It routes validated recommendations to planners and schedulers with clear supporting insights, enabling fast and confident plan updates.

Behind the scenes, a system of AI agents performs order-level pegging, FEFO/FIFO shelf-life matching, constraint analysis, and rule-based prevention logic, continuously improving accuracy and speed over time.

Case Study: From Reactive Waste Management to Intelligent Prevention

A global consumer packaged goods (CPG) company faced growing waste driven by excess production and limited visibility into whether upcoming orders aligned with demand. Manual comparisons slowed planners down, while disconnected systems made early detection nearly impossible.

After deploying Aera’s Business Waste Prevention Skill as part of its Control Tower journey, the company gained real-time visibility into at-risk production before orders were released to manufacturing. The skill proactively flagged mismatches, allowing planners to reduce or cancel production in time to prevent waste.

Within months, the company achieved:

• 99% increased coverage across excess production risks
• 50–70% reduction in resolution time
• 60–80% improvement in planner efficiency

These gains enabled the organization to reduce losses, optimize production planning, and strengthen overall supply chain performance.

Why Aera: What Sets It Apart

Aera transforms waste prevention from a manual, inconsistent process into a proactive, intelligent system of action. By connecting data, decision logic, and execution in a single closed loop, Aera helps organizations prevent overproduction before it becomes a financial or operational burden. Key differentiators include:

• Unified decision intelligence that integrates production plans, demand forecasts, shelf-life requirements, and inventory constraints into one connected platform.
• AI-augmented workflows that boost planner productivity with automated matching, constraint validation, and sequential prevention logic.
• Closed-loop execution that turns at-risk production insights into optimized production plans, supported by safety stock and frozen horizon awareness.

With Aera, teams can prevent waste entirely — not just respond to it — achieving faster, smarter, and more sustainable decisions across their production network.

Ready To Transform Your Waste Prevention Strategy?

For more on how Aera can help you detect at-risk production early, prevent excess inventory, and protect margins with AI-driven decision intelligence, download the Business Waste Prevention Skill brief or schedule a demo.