From shifts to remote work and an unstable global economy to supply chain shortages and evolving customer expectations, businesses have faced unprecedented challenges at almost every turn throughout the past few years. Complex, interconnected risks are emerging faster than ever.

In order for companies to not just keep pace, but thrive into the future, it’s no longer just about adapting and transforming in response to change—it’s about doing so quickly, effectively and at scale.

Intelligent operations, a strategic, next-gen approach that streamlines technology, processes and people to advance and make a business’s operating model more agile, resilient and adaptive, gets you there. But how do you get to intelligent operations?

Our answer: the Nerve Center.

Looking ahead, we’ll cover the following:

• How does Nerve Center fuel intelligent operations?
• What does a Nerve Center do?
• Where is a Nerve Center applicable?
• Intelligent operations in procurement through a Nerve Center

How does Nerve Center fuel intelligent operations?

The Nerve Center is Aligned Automation’s value-delivery methodology across end-to-end operations. By applying a connected data fabric, digital right-fit capabilities and powerful artificial intelligence (AI), businesses integrate value-driven solutions, gain the insights they need to make decisions faster and maximize efficiencies across the value chain and the enterprise.

The Nerve Center sets up organizations to meet today and tomorrow’s business challenges. COOs and CFOs need transformation initiatives with a direct tie to value. They need solutions that boost employee productivity while reducing cost. And they need the right data and insights to make decisions quickly and with confidence. That’s why the Nerve Center is designed as a scalable methodology—it can start with a single use case and grow to connect functions, processes and data across the organization.

What does a Nerve Center do?

The Nerve Center empowers teams to sense, respond and manage like never before and enables smart, rapid decision-making through automated and augmented support.

Sense

Predictive insights and alerts empower you to handle the invisible before it becomes visible.

- Predictive alerts with severity levels (early warning signals)

- Alerts to deviations from optimal workflows

Respond

Drive efficiencies across organizational processes while balancing cross-functional and cross-enterprise trade-offs with automated workflows.

- Root-cause analysis

- “What if?” scenarios

- Augmented decision support (e.g., recommended next-best action)

- Automated workflows

Manage

Gain E2E transparency with persona-based visibility and performance management.

- Action tracking

- Value tracking

- KPI dashboard

- Near real-time insights

Where is the Nerve Center applicable?

The Nerve Center is a fit for complex enterprises in a variety of functions, including procurement, supply chain, manufacturing and customer experience.

• Procurement: Drive innovation, boost profitability and minimize time to market by connecting your planning, sourcing, procurement and production activities.
  
  
• Supply chain: Reimagine, build and operate supply chain networks that orchestrate change, simplify life and positively impact business and the planet.
  
  
• Manufacturing: Optimize, digitize and connect factories, plants and sites. Create products that consumers love and get them to market quickly, sustainably and cost-effectively.
  
  
• Customer experience: Create products that consumers love and get them to market by integrating a relentless focus on the customer into your end-to-end operations.

Intelligent operations in procurement through a Nerve Center

Realizing the need for a new approach to manage the complex demands of their global value chain, one global manufacturer deployed a procurement-based Nerve Center. By leveraging tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), process mining and machine learning (ML)/AI, the teams were able to improve operations by establishing an intelligent, connected centralized procurement solution.

This new, collaborative environment allowed them to better manage business initiatives such as margin optimization, carbon-credit forecasting and intelligent contract management—and has led to more than $95 million in value unlocked between siloed functions.

The Nerve Center now acts as the organization’s single source of truth for cross-functional intelligence and collaboration, serving as the “brain” for procurement’s operational improvements, risk mitigation and value-capture projects.

Read more about our Nerve Center approach to intelligent operations and how it can help you make data-driven decisions faster and more efficiently.