Kraft, Walmart, & WestRock Dish on Demand Planning, Supply Chain Platform Implementation

Large-enterprise brand owners, major retailers, and their most robust packaging suppliers all rely on sometimes complex stacks of sometimes discordant supply chain management technology, from ERPs to demand planning and vendor management tools. These are often spread unevenly across different regions or functions within a company, and data is rarely compiled the same way between any two platforms. So, it’s tricky to get those disparate systems to speak the same language across a large enterprise in such a way that yields the accurate, actionable information about trade-offs that are needed for sound decision making.

But a growing resource planning platform with a billion-dollar valuation called o9 that seeks to do just that—to integrate disparate data in disparate formats within a single “digital brain.” The company’s state mission is “to provide global companies with a game-changing planning platform to transform their supply chain, commercial, finance, and sustainability decision-making.” The company aims to coordinate supply chain tech stacks in such a way that outputs the best, most accurate, apples-to-apples data in a single dashboard, with the assistance of what it calls AI (Augmented Intelligence). The platform seeks to optimize two pillars for brand owners: decision-making intelligence around P&L, and sustainability reporting (such as ESG metrics).