Fixing the Decision Speed Gap in Modern Supply Chains - with Joris Wijpkema of Optilogic

**Marilie Fouché** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Joris Wijpkema, Executive Vice President for Solutions and Strategy at Optilogic. Optilogic provides an AI native platform for supply chain design where autonomous agents build models, generate scenarios and evaluate network trade-offs. Joris joins us on today's episode to explain that supply chain organizations still make critical decisions without the ability to model routine, inventory strategies or network changes at the depth required. He argues that the real problem is that APS and ERP systems were built for execution, not for evaluating large sets of structural options when conditions shift. His point is that companies now need a dedicated modeling layer that can run thousands of scenarios in minutes and feed the best decisions back into existing systems. Today's episode is sponsored by Optilogic. Emerj works with a select group of AI vendors to reach Fortune 500 decision makers through research, media and direct access. If you want to be considered, download our media kit at emerj.com/ad1. That's emerj.com/ad1. Now the conversation with Joris.
Joris, welcome to the show.

**Joris Wijpkema** (1:39)
Thank you, very glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Marilie.

**Marilie Fouché** (1:43)
So last time we had a really good conversation with Don, we explored why today's supply chain feels so brittle, the macro forces, the planning versus design split, which we feel we should be moving away from. And today, I want to go a level deeper. When a major disruption hits, how do organizations assist their network options, and how fast can they react?

**Joris Wijpkema** (2:02)
Yeah, it's an excellent question. And certainly, I think it's a question that's a hot topic today, right? It feels like, I think Don was talking about this as well.
We've always said in Supply Chain, it's more volatile than ever, and the world is less predictable than ever. And this time, it is actually true. And I think that is really the case. I don't need to go through the examples of the last year, year and a half. Everyone who's in Supply Chain will be well aware. And how do organizations react? I think we're actually seeing a bit of a split in how organizations react, depending on how well-prepared they are in building their organization around resilience and improved responsiveness. Most organizations still today, I think is fair to say, when these shocks happen, they kind of go into crisis mode, set up a war room, they'll get out the analysts, everyone gathers their data and their spreadsheets. And frankly, they work through it with hard efforts and a lot of life problem-solving, long days, long nights, and making them as best they can.

**Marilie Fouché** (3:08)
And it's too late, right? At that point, to start gathering it.

**Joris Wijpkema** (3:12)
You're really just managing, like mitigating the outcomes more than you're truly being responsive or even taking advantage of the change, because your competitor is, ideally, you are much more able to respond to this than your competitor, and it's actually a market opportunity. It happens to all of us. And so what are you doing that's actually taking advantage of it? And this is, I think, where an increasing number of companies, and we certainly see this with our customers, are using digital twins, models of their supply chain, to do two things, both to be better prepared for when shocks happen. This is really what I consider resilience, designing resilience into your supply chain, so that when these shocks happen, you're able to absorb them or you're able to react, adapt your supply chain automatically.
And then even for those where you haven't fully thought through what could happen under the design, you need to be responsive. You want to increase your response to this.
And so what that really requires is a way of modeling out your supply chain, so that you can understand how does it operate under a wide array of different circumstances, including massive shocks to the system and the environment. But then also, when these things happen, how can I quickly evaluate multiple ways of reacting to it? Even those shocks that I didn't see coming, how can I quickly evaluate 100, 1,000 different scenarios to choose the best one and get everyone in my organization across functions aligned on that's the plan, I trust in the model, and I know the answer is robust, and I can mobilize my entire organization around the best way to respond to those things happening. That's what we're seeing more and more with clients, other customers as they adapt this technology.

**Marilie Fouché** (5:09)
Yes, because I think especially in this moment where speed of responsiveness matters, you don't want to be, if you're in the position where you can actually take action, take the wrong action, because then you're already three steps behind, and you touched on how many scenarios you run. That was one of my questions. How many scenarios do companies actually think they're running, versus how many do they actually need?