Supply Chain Waste Prevention, Reimagined: Decision Intelligence in Action

Excess and obsolete (E&O) inventory is a persistent challenge across supply chains, locking up capital, driving write-offs, and inflating waste. As product portfolios expand and demand grows less predictable, inventory often exceeds what’s needed — or expires before it can be used.

And it’s not just a financial issue. E&O inventory undermines sustainability goals by increasing emissions, contributing to landfill, and inflating Scope 3 carbon impacts. In today’s environment of heightened accountability, managing waste is an enterprise imperative.

That’s why many organizations are turning to decision intelligence. By embedding real-time, context-aware intelligence into inventory operations, it enables earlier risk detection, smarter mitigation, and faster action. The result: a leaner, more resilient supply chain that prevents waste before it happens.

Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short

Legacy approaches to managing excess and obsolescence rely heavily on static business rules, delayed reporting cycles, and manual triage. These methods can’t keep up with modern supply chain complexity. Volatile demand, long lead times, and fast-changing product lifecycles demand faster, more context-aware decisions.

Traditional E&O mitigation suffers from three critical gaps:

• Lack of real-time visibility: Emerging risks go undetected until it’s too late.
• Static logic: Fixed thresholds can’t adapt to shifting conditions like seasonality or changing lead times.
• Siloed accountability: Mitigation falls through the cracks without clear ownership or coordinated action.

As a result, inventory write-offs remain high, and the opportunity to act before loss occurs is often missed.

The Case for Decision Intelligence

A smarter, more proactive approach is needed. That’s where decision intelligence comes in.

Aera, the decision intelligence agent built on Aera Decision Cloud, enables organizations to move from reactive mitigation to intelligent prevention of waste. Using the Waste Prevention and Reduction Skill, Aera transforms how companies detect risk, evaluate options, and execute mitigation actions — in real time and at scale.

Instead of waiting for a problem to surface in a report, Aera continuously monitors supply, demand, production, and inventory data to identify risks as they emerge. It then simulates mitigation options, recommends the most effective course of action, and enables execution, all while keeping human decision-makers in control.

A Closed-Loop System for Smarter Inventory Management

Leveraging the Waste Prevention and Reduction Skill, Aera follows a six-step process that connects data, intelligence, and action:

1. Unified data foundation: Aera integrates planning, demand, supply, shelf-life, and financial data across the enterprise to create a SKU-level view of E&O risk.
2. Trigger detection: Automated logic surfaces early warnings — such as forecast mismatches, aging inventory, or velocity declines — before loss occurs.
3. Context-aware simulation: AI/ML models evaluate mitigation options such as reallocation, production throttling, or demand shaping, scoring each based on financial, operational, and environmental impact.
4. Action recommendation: Next best actions are ranked and explained with clear rationale, and tailored to personas like planners, procurement leads, and category managers.
5. Execution enablement: Approved actions flow directly into enterprise systems for execution, tracked in real time with full visibility.
6. Continuous learning: Every action becomes input for system learning, improving accuracy, speed, and decision quality over time.

This isn’t just automation. It’s intelligent orchestration — a closed loop that turns insight into impact while continuously learning and improving.

Real-World Results at Scale

Aera’s customers are seeing measurable gains across key performance indicators:

• $50M–$200M in working capital released by reducing excess inventory holdings
• 1–3% improvement in gross margin through proactive write-off prevention
• 75–90% reduction in manual triage time for supply planners and inventory managers
• Tangible ESG impact, including waste avoidance and reduced Scope 3 emissions

These aren’t isolated wins; they’re systemic improvements across operations, finance, and sustainability.

Empowering the People Behind the Decisions

While Aera delivers automation at scale, it’s built around human judgment. Business users define decision thresholds, review recommendations, and configure the level of automation based on confidence and risk. The platform is explainable, auditable, and fully transparent — designed to build trust, not replace expertise.

Here’s how it transforms work across the enterprise:

• Planners and inventory managers spend less time on manual tracking and more time executing strategic actions.
• Procurement teams adjust supplier orders before excess builds up, reducing stranded materials and unneeded spend.
• Category and business unit leaders gain early visibility into risk and trade-off scenarios across cost, service, and ESG metrics.
• Finance and sustainability teams track avoided waste, emissions savings, and real-time exposure, shifting from reactive reporting to operational influence.

This cross-functional approach creates a shared framework where everyone sees the same data, interprets the same logic, and drives toward the same goals: reduced loss, better margins, and smarter sustainability.

Human + AI: Smarter Decisions, Together

At the core of decision intelligence is a powerful partnership: AI for scale and speed, humans for insight and control. Aera brings this collaboration to life through its Waste Prevention and Reduction Skill, aligning teams across planning, procurement, finance, and sustainability to manage inventory risk more effectively.

The agent continuously detects risk signals and simulates mitigation options, then delivers contextual, ranked recommendations that users can review and act on. But the real differentiator is flexibility: business teams define the decision logic, thresholds, and automation rules, ensuring the system works the way the organization does.

Over time, Aera learns from every action and outcome. Accepted, modified, or rejected recommendations all feed back into the intelligence layer, improving future precision and impact. The result is a self-improving system that amplifies the best of both human and machine, speeding up response times while keeping strategic control firmly in human hands.

A Blueprint for Zero-Waste Inventory

As supply chains become more interconnected and sustainability expectations rise, the need for intelligent, forward-looking systems is only increasing. Aera helps companies shift from firefighting to foresight, from loss prevention to strategic advantage.

Imagine a supply chain that:

• Predicts excess risk before it materializes
• Executes routine mitigation autonomously
• Aligns decisions with environmental and financial KPIs
• Learns and improves with every action taken

That’s the future Aera is enabling. And with decision intelligence, that future is no longer out of reach — it’s actionable today.