This project focused on harnessing the AI capabilities of AIPlan4EU’s Unified Planning Framework (UPF) to enhance the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process at Agromarket company. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal the project is realized in collaboration with the AI leaders in the field: AI Institute of Serbia (https://ivi.ac.rs/en/) and AIPlan4EU Horizon project consortium.
The Agromarket is a leading supplier of agricultural products, with a wide portfolio of pesticides and seeds as well as a manufacturer and distributor of gardening equipment and tools in the Western Balkan region. It operates in global supply chains, characterized by uncertain market situations (pandemic eruptions, war crises, inflation, disrupted supply chains, uncertain sowing, etc.). These disruptions require additional planning and synchronization in order to efficiently satisfy the customers in the market. Therefore, the use-case in a given project is from the domain of tactical logistics planning. It assumes answering questions on how to balance efficiently customer demand and company supply, how to plan physical and human resources required to meet this balance and how to plan, design and implement all actions and activities related to this balance.
This process of developing a tactical logistics plan is called Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) or Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning. In general, the S&OP process enables ensuring the synchronization between demand (sales) and supply (purchasing). The S&OP process is constrained by a number of internal and external factors and represents a complex decision-making process. The current practice is that decisions in a given process are based on human intuition, which very often can be misleading and cause serious disruptions/costs in providing the right products, in the right place/time, for the right customer. These are the situations where AI can be very helpful in creating a seamless, optimized and efficient S&OP process. Therefore use-case context of this project is to utilize the AI power of AIPlan4EU’s Unified Planning Framework (UPF), in optimizing the S&OP process of Agromarket company. For that purpose, we have proposed the intelligent supply, inventory and operations planning (ISIOP) solution, which will be based on AI algorithms offered by AIPlan4EU and serve as the brain of the new logistics planning.