Franziska Nothofer:
Hello and welcome to today’s webinar “Risk-Optimized Supply Chain Planning with Everstream Analytics and SAP IBP”. My name is Franziska and I’ll be your host today. And I’m excited to be joined by two outstanding leaders who’ve been shaping how companies approach supply chain planning. First up, we have Stijn-Peter van Houten, Chief Product Officer Supply Chain Management Planning at SAP, driving next generation supply chain planning, helping companies adopt SAP IBP to transform their operations, speed up decision-making, deliver real impact. With over 20 years of global experience, he’s a recognized thought leader in supply chain strategy and innovation.
We also have Paige Cox presenting today, Chief Product Officer at Everstream Analytics. Paige uses real-time risk data and AI to turn insights into action and help supply chains become more resilient and agile. She’s a former SAP executive and recognized as a top 100 woman in supply chain, bringing deep experience and a strategic experience. Now, a quick note before we start, all attendee lines are currently on mute in listen only mode, but we’d love to hear from you. So please drop any questions you might have throughout the session into the Q &A box at the top, and we’ll cover as many as we can towards the end of the session. All right. And with that, let’s get started. I’ll hand it right over to you, Paige. Thank you.
Paige Cox:
Thank you, Franzi. And hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. SP, a big thank you and welcome to our webinar today. As Franzi already mentioned, SP is the Chief Product Officer at SAP in charge of that supply chain planning. He’s a global supply chain leader, a product innovator, and a thought leader in digital planning and decision making transformations. So if the past years have taught us anything, It is that the supply chain resilience is no longer just a supply chain topic. It is a boardroom priority. We’ve all seen how disruptions from pandemics and tariffs to geopolitical tensions and extreme weather can ripple through industries in unpredictable and cost ways. Supply chains can no longer be optimized for efficiency alone. They must be resilient, agile, and capable of anticipating risks before it materializes. This is exactly why we are here today to explore how SAP IBP, integrated business planning, and Everstream Analytics are helping companies shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive risk-optimized planning. So SP, it’s a privilege to have you here. Would you start by telling a little bit about you, your new role at SAP and your vision about planning?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, thanks, Paige. First of all, thanks for having me and sharing our ideas here today. So for my background, I’ve been a 20 years plus background from consulting. Before SAP, I was with what we call a best of breed vendor. Within SAP, I look after what we call the SCM planning team, which basically includes our flagship product for planning IBP, as well as a team that looks after our engines, which we call our algorithms, our optimizers, and our production scheduling solution as well. So that’s my current role at SAP.
Paige Cox:
Great. Thank you, SP. And I, for one, also over the past two decades had the privilege of leading product transformations across the supply chain space from scaling SAP business network and supply chain solutions to now driving Everstream’s AI-powered risk intelligence platform. So it’s almost a great SAP family talk here. So let’s start with the big picture. SP, from your perspective, how is the role of the supply chain leaders shifting in response to global disruptions?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, Paige, thanks for an excellent starting point. So I think you already mentioned what we have seen over the years is that the typical role of supply chain leaders move from, let’s say, being more focused on driving efficiency, so let’s say optimizing for productivity to more resilient. Resiliency, obviously COVID was one of the many reasons why that push and the shift in focus accelerated, and what we’re seeing today is a shift towards what we call decision-centric autonomous planning, right? But obviously the background still is you have distributed and global economies that are continuously being heavily challenged by recent disruptions, there’s trade wars, there’s natural disasters and so on, but we also see is that multi-tier supply networks today require much closer collaboration to react more quickly and reliably. So basically the decision-making speed or cycle count has to go up to be able to keep up in the worlds and therefore also companies must move away from let’s say disconnected silent ways of working and adopt a more integrated outcome focus approach. That’s really where we see the role of say planners and executives really change as such.
Paige Cox:
Excellent, so well said. So let’s look ahead, how do we anticipate and how do you see the industry evolving, how it approaches planning and risk management in general?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, so again, if you come back to how we see the focus shifting over time, leaders need to from optimizing individual KPIs, whether that’s the service levels of managing inventory or managing cost of goods sold or and so on and so forth, to really driving outcomes. So now here we’re gonna talk about margin improvement is called as cost control, but taking it from an end-to-end value chain perspective and taking into account reliability as well. So increasingly, customers, businesses in the marketplace are looking for reliable partners that is as important that’s just delivering, let’s say, a product, but if you’re not on time, that’s obviously a problem. And we see that cloud-based platforms are essential to provide all network participants with the data to promise realistically and also deliver reliably. So what does it mean? It means the ability to run joint what-if impact and mitigation scenarios. It means enabling real-time data orchestration and alerting across the network. It means facilitating past information exchange, right? Which obviously is not about batch jobs, but it’s different ways and means of getting data across the network. It’s also evaluating risk holistically, right? So you cannot just optimize, let’s say, for environmental aspects. You also have to look at social impacts. You also have to look at geopolitical impacts and so on and so forth. So basically in short, it’s what we would call a full-court game where companies, suppliers, customers have to play both office and defense, but truly understanding the full picture.
Paige Cox:
Love the full-court game, the full circle. Let’s zoom in on how supply chain risk management fit into this full-court game where companies, suppliers and customers play both offensively and defensively. How is extending the planning architecture to include risk improve such decision making across the supply chain? And how do you see the capabilities evolving to address the next waves of risks and disruptions and the overall complexities in supply chain?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
So what we have seen in the evolution that solutions are going for is I think traditional supply chain planning often on your model tier one suppliers and often or sometimes if you will, assuming even infinite capacity for that, right? But if you look at supply risk management today, increasingly starts to extend visibility into multi-tier suppliers, right? So those increasingly those deeper into network who are often critical as well, but where often we see that companies have limited visibility, right? So use cases here include the ability monitor risk events in tier two, tier three parts of the network. The ability to, for example, run risk impacts scenarios. So let’s say we want to run a simulation where we do a two-week plan shutdown and understand what’s the impact on our downstream demand supply matching capability, right? It’s also around structured collaboration, part with scorecards, as well as performance tracking to keep everyone honest on the basis of, let’s say, undisputed facts. But there’s also a piece around unstructured collaboration, where sometimes the situation asks for contextual messaging, ad hoc tasks, and so on and so forth. And this really enriches ultimately planning and decision-making. And it provides a much, what we would say, a stronger foundation for risk-aware planning, as well as decision-making.
Paige Cox:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s so powerful. I think you hit the nail at the head, right? So it’s all about context, disruptions everywhere. It only becomes a supply chain risk when there’s the contextual impact of what it means to the ability to run your end-to-end supply chain. And this is precisely one of the questions we hear often from supply chain leaders, from our customers. What is the tangible advantages of being able to react earlier for the early warning signs to be able to deal with the supply risks? And how does Everstream and SAP-IBP partnership can help companies achieve such faster reaction time?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
So that’s obviously a few questions in the way, one question and such, right? But I think Today, the real bottleneck is reaction time. So again, we came back to this planning and decision-making cycle speed. But risks are often even publicly visible before companies start to act. And the cycle to get to a decision is quite long. You have to identify the issue. Then you have to assess, let’s say, local impact. Then you have to align internally with different teams, let’s say supply chain, then finance, then commercial. You obviously have to look and talk to your partners as well. You design mitigations, and then you decide, right? And more often than not, the output of that process is basically a plan that is kind of dead on arrival, right? So earlier action shortens the cycle dramatically, right? And that enables an obviously faster mitigation and avoiding additional costs. And then benefits can be found, areas like reduced inventory due to these disruptions, right? Better utilization of production capacity, lower expedites and emergency spent, revenue protection, which is obviously very relevant as well, and overall across the network a higher efficiency. So with a robust supply risk management, so that includes of course the mitigating scenarios and decision making, companies really get the ability to break through what we would call the strategic cost boundary, and that means basically the ability to shift from reactive firefighting to more proactive resilience. That’s where the new value unlock starts to come through for these businesses.
Paige Cox:
Absolutely, and most of the companies are sort of in a different maturity state and transformation speed, right? So let’s talk about where we see most of the companies are today. And what are the biggest challenges so that we see how organizations is currently managing their supply chain risks.
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, no, that’s a good point that you get that right. So obviously we can talk a lot about the great capabilities that our solutions can bring, but the current state of affairs is usually quite far from that, right? So what we see is still there’s disconnected systems, there’s multiple data hops that slow down this planning and actioning and decision-making. Most systems are still backward-looking, so it’s kind of more reporting the problems after they they happened. That’s again what I mentioned before, limited multi-tier modeling capabilities. There’s planning processes that lack flexibility and sometimes also hard to standardize. But then also there’s manual calibration that creates again inefficiencies and poor adoption of these processes. And then often also onboarding suppliers, right, it’s often slow and fragmented depending on the industry, you’re talking about easily tens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of suppliers that you have to build up a full or reasonable full picture on, etc.
Paige Cox:
So that’s the current state of the currently common question. Absolutely. And our teams, our joint teams have been working pretty hard over the past year to work on a joint solution by combining SAP’s, IBP’s planning depth and the leading planning system with AeroStream’s AI-powered predictive risk intelligence. How do you see our joint solution today can help overcome some of these challenges that you have just mentioned?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, I think what’s very important, what Everstream brings to businesses is by monitoring and classifying risk signals, Obviously, you can also see it on the screen, there’s a lot of risks and associated signals that are out there, but ultimately, it’s about the understanding what real risks to focus on. I think that’s one of the crucial aspects of that. We then can also link these risk signals to multi-tier networks, and then we can start understand linking risk signals to supply chain KPIs and also financial impacts. That’s obviously a crucial step for us to really understand what is about to happen or what might happen, what is the potential impact of that and should we actually care about that. And if we do care, we can then take the signals that you’ve brought in and understand and enable simulations mitigating scenarios to actually address that impact. Then obviously, each time we go through such a cycle, it’s about capturing the learnings for continuous improvement, because no same situation will ever get you the same output. So it’s important we continue to learn and improve to reduce the impact of these signals.
Paige Cox:
Yeah, that is so great. So for any kind of insight intelligence platform, if it can be directly linking into the decision making and being the input to enable that simulation, mitigation, continuous learning is definitely the key outcome we want to drive. So shall we get a little bit more concrete for our audience? And also, could you give us a little bit high level of our core capabilities for our joint partnership? What our joint capabilities would bring to the customers?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Sure, of course. Well, first of all, of course, there is the piece around getting the risk signals, right, that obviously you bring in and that we would jointly leverage. But then it’s also around capabilities like forecasted commit sharing, right, with flexible granularity between network partners so we can then build up that full visibility. It’s around smart dashboards that prioritize the exceptions or the risk signals that we should be able to allow planners and decision makers to look at. It’s around risk analytics and scorecards with also clear workflows and accountabilities around that so we don’t lose time in planning and actual decision-making. That comes with that collaboration cadence with some compliance tracking as well. Again, we can then use that for continuous learning afterwards. That’s contextual two-way messaging as well as task management, so that’s not obviously confined within, let’s say, the walls within one organization, but also how do you work with suppliers and how do you work with the suppliers of the suppliers, right?How do you orchestrate the task management? And then there’s, of course, master data and parameter management. That’s also a crucial element of our some of the capabilities that we bring to the table.
Paige Cox:
Absolutely. And then my view is, how do you bring data? How do you bring intelligence together with the processes, with orchestrations that bring that end to end data driven decision making? And that’s where magic really happens. And I also think what makes our partnership so powerful is not just the individual capabilities we each other bring. It is how we work together inside the same decision-making environment. For Everstream, we continuously sense risks across the global supply chain, whether it’s geopolitical, environmental, operational and we turn those into predicted risk scores and event alerts. And those insights now can land directly inside SAP IBP, where planners are already making daily decisions about supply, about production, about inventory. So instead of risk being something they check after plan is already built, it becomes a real-time signal, shaping the plan as it’s made, as it’s being adjusted, right? And this is what I see one plus one equals to five by combining Everstream’s foresight with IBP’s planning depth companies now can sense earlier, decide smarter and act faster. So as I understand, SP, we also have a great joint customer story. LEONI will be sharing more at our upcoming customer network day in Heidelberg. Would you be able to give everybody a quick sneak preview of what they’ve achieved through our partnership?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Absolutely, and I’m happy to do so. So, as you mentioned, LEONI, based in Germany, is a joint customer. What they do is they provide advanced wiring systems for modern vehicles they support electrification, connectivity and in general autonomous driving. So it’s quite an innovative and forward-looking company. I think it’s our pleasure to obviously work with them for the both of us. They operate around 36 locations and 21 countries right and therefore they also manage a highly complex global supply chain and what they’re doing is they’re leveraging Everstream’s risk insights, right, with the IBP platform, and they use that to then proactively identify and assess these and mitigate potential descriptions before they impact operations. And I think what they will also talk about, as you mentioned during the customer networking day in Heidelberg, is the results they’re seeing is really around the dimensions of scenario modeling, again, to better understand what might happen and how to go about that. It’s around improved visibility across the multi-tier network. It’s downtime reduction, which obviously is very important for them to manage cost, but again, also manage service levels and therefore the associated revenue as well.
Paige Cox:
So I think it’s a very exciting, exciting story and they really show the power that a business can actually derive from the combined capabilities that we bring.
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Nothing is more powerful than the testimony from customers themselves.
Paige Cox:
SP, thank you so much for this very insightful discussion. Before we open the floor for questions, let me leave everyone with some takeaways. Risk resilient supply chain planning is no longer optional, it is a competitive advantage. At Everstream, we’re embedding predictive, real-time risk intelligence and AI-driven insights into the planning processes to help companies achieve full-risk visibility, sense and respond faster, protect the material flow, support sustainable network design, optimize logistic executions, and drive risk-based decision-making at scale. Together, SAP IBP and Everstream are making resilience actionable, turning intelligence into decisions, and decisions into outcomes. With that, let’s take a few questions from the audience. Back to you, Franzi.
Franziska Nothofer:
Thank you so much both, for the great conversation. We’ve already had a few questions come in from our attendees. So the first one is, what mindset shift is most critical for moving from reactive to proactive risk management? Paige, would you like to take this one?
Paige Cox:
Sure. The key shift is to, I think, for the industry is really to treat risk as a planning input, not after the factor responses. So it can be an afterthought. Instead of reacting once disruption hits, I believe supply chain leaders now need to plan with the risk in mind from the very start, building that agility within its own supply chain design. Now, with Everstream’s predictive signals embedded in planning systems, execution systems like IBP, planners can design resilience into the decisions itself. SAP talked a lot about that scenario planning, mitigation, and what if scenarios. So it’s more about designing that resilience into the decisions itself or into the modeling simulation itself, not just the recover it later. That’s what I always I said earlier, and I strongly believe this one plus one becomes five. If we take the foresight plus the planning, and then that basically will equal to much smarter and faster actions. Wonderful. Thank you, Paige.
Franziska Nothofer:
That was a great explanation. We have another one come through. Great question. How can companies extend planning with risk management without overwhelming their teams? Who would like to take that one?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Yeah, I can formulate an answer to that one. It’s a great question indeed. And I think it’s really the ability to provide them with a unified planning workspace and decisioning workspace. So it’s really around meeting the planners and the decision makers where they are already working. So we don’t ask them to, say, use another tool. It’s really everything’s risk scores and alerts and signals appear directly inside the SAP IPP workflows as contextual input. And then really what it does to planners and decision makers, this doesn’t come or feel as an additional layer of work. We really provide them with a seamless experience which creates less friction, more impact, that obviously drives adoption on the long term as well. So we’re really there to help them provide a well-unified planning and decisioning workspace. And that really is what we see is reduces the risk of adoption and drives longer term impact.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you so much, SP. Okay, so we touched a lot on AI and the next question ties into that. What role will AI and predictive analytics play in the next few years? That’s an interesting one. Paige, would you like to take that one?
Paige Cox:
Sure. I mean, AI is really hot now, right? But most people don’t know. I was with a company 10 years ago before AI was so hot. But anyways, my personal feeling is, and I also believe because AI will shift the supply chain from reactive to anticipatory. So we talk about from reactive to proactive, then to prescribe to more autonomous, right? I think AI will help us to start moving into that autonomous supply chain. And predictive risk intelligence will allow companies to sense disruption early, getting the early signals. And then together with the systems like SAP IPP, you can run whatever scenarios instantly and choose the best path forward before competitors will react. So it really becomes a competitive advantage from a technology and transformation perspective. You always, AI, you know, really need that people process technology to come in its own joined intersection, right? So as agentic AI technology also become much more mature, that we also see conversational AIs and AI agents now can almost collaborate with planners. And then they can also suggest impact and then recommend playbooks. So these are the things. So basically, it’s not a replacement of what you do, it’s actually making what you do much more informed and then also giving you that extra collaboration, right? That you’ve made traditional needing to do a firm with a human, but now you can also do it with an agent that is AI powered. And as we talked about earlier, this continuous learning and this capability. So the more you learn from this, the more power you become and these AI-driven suggestive things and moving you from much into that prescribed intelligence. So it’s a really exciting time. And then think about the companies like us. We sit in this very deep domain of location-based, rich risk data in the past 10 years. AI will also allow us to be able to start aggregating that, to predict trends, to use historical patterns to derive future analysis or predictions. So I think, and that becomes so much more anticipatory and much more informed if receiving system like IBP can model that and can take advantage of that, then it’s a true insight to action.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect, thank you so much for touching on that page. Okay, we have another one coming through. How are event-driven risk insights translated into actionable plans for mitigating disruptions and enabling faster recovery within the SAP environment? That’s an interesting one.
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Can you phrase it again, Franzi, because you mentioned a lot of complicated words one after the other.
Franziska Nothofer:
How are event-driven risk insights translated into actionable plans to mitigate disruptions and enable faster recovery within the SAP environment?
Stijn-Pieter van Houten:
Right, so I think for us it starts obviously by the ability to run scenarios, right? And we can actually, what we use is what we call entrance packing, right? So we can, and this works in both directions, but let’s say the risk sits at the supply side for the example, then what we can do is we can propagate that, let’s say, delayed supply or maybe it doesn’t come at all, we can understand what is the, ultimately, what’s the upstream demand that is impacted by that delayed supply and we have different ways of doing that. But packing is the most common solution. That allows us to really understand and upstream start to model, okay, this supply is delayed, then that means we cannot produce X at that certain point in time. We can then run the simulation. Are we going to run out of, let’s say, is the business going to run out of safety stock? Yes or no. If they are, then obviously that’s going to have a real impact. And then we can also assess what can we do to recover. So that’s the kind of how we actually model such risk signals and how we then actually propagate that impact all the way to the end customer. That also allows us by understanding that impact to actually react faster. Can we then maybe reallocate inventory in the network? Can we maybe find a co-pack or co-manufacturer to actually help us mitigate the potential impact? But at a minimum what it allows us to do is actually proactively reach out to the customer to say, hey, this is what happened. This is the risk that we’re seeing or that’s the actual issue that we’re facing, we can also now predict and communicate to you that it will take us maybe two weeks or maybe three weeks to come back to normal business. So even though you don’t really solve the issue for them, at least the ability to communicate clearly when you will be recovered already carries quite some value as such. So the begging relationship end-to-end is one of the elements of the secret sauce, so to speak.
Franziska Nothofer:
Yeah, that’s a very good point and it really helps with improving the supplier and customer relationships on both ends.That was a great question and a great answer.Thank you. I’m just conscious of time and we’re almost at the end of today’s session. Thank you to both our presenters today for sharing their insights firsthand and also thank you to all our attendees for being here with us today. We will follow up on the remaining questions that we couldn’t get to one on one. If you’d like to get in touch with our experts directly, you can always email us at info at everstream.ai. You will then receive the full session recording via email within the next 24 hours. Thanks again. Have a great rest of your week, everyone, and see you soon. Goodbye.