How Cognitive Automation Unlocks the
Future of Enterprise
2019
Table of Contents
Adapting to the Tide of Change 1
Cognitive Automation Makes the Difference 1
A Blueprint for Cognitive Automation 2
Map the Data 3
Deliver the Analysis in Context 3
Continue Learning 4
Unlock the Future 4
Augmenting the Work of Supply Chain Planners 4
Sharing Automated Lead-Time Forecasts with Customers 5
Build on Quick Wins, Then Expand Horizons 5
ADAPTING TO THE TIDE OF CHANGE
The transformative power of digital technology is redefining the enterprise. This is a tide of change that will
overwhelm those who cannot adapt fast enough. For established businesses, it’s not just a matter of catching up
to where the leaders are today. Survival depends on leaping ahead to where they’ll be tomorrow. But there are
many obstacles to finding the right path.
Global brands today are grappling with the convergence of three separate trends in this fast-changing world:
• Buyers want more personalized, responsive choices. While the global consistency and trust associated with
established brands remains powerful, we are entering the era of the microbrand. An agile ‘long tail’ serves the
last mile with diverse offerings that adapt more rapidly to changing tastes and preferences in each segment of
the market. Global players must find a way to operate at scale, with agility, in this new world of personalized
microbrands.
• Data is the lifeblood of a modern business, providing the raw material to analyze behavior and respond
accordingly. But in established global organizations, this valuable resource is locked away in antiquated
computer systems and business processes, which combine to make it impossible to access in a timely manner.
The digital natives entering markets to challenge the incumbents don’t have to wrestle with this legacy
restraint.
• While the speed and volume of data is growing fast, the organization’s institutional knowledge is in decline.
Longstanding employees who used to know the business inside-out are retiring, replaced by a younger cadre
who rarely stay in the same role for more than a few years at a time. A new mechanism is needed to retain and
apply that organizational knowledge.
These trends aren’t resolved simply by streamlining the existing systems in the hope that they will somehow
deliver the right answers for this new world. Those systems were built to handle homogeneous products designed
for decades-long lifecycles, not today’s diverse and fast-changing offers. The organization still needs its systems of
record, but they are not fast or flexible enough to sustain the real-time data analysis and responsiveness today’s
economy demands.
The processes of planning and execution must be rebuilt using modern digital technology to support a networked
organization – one that operates in real time, responds proactively to changing conditions, and is able to adapt its
structures within weeks.
COGNITIVE AUTOMATION MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
In today’s connected world, information never stands still. Every day brings new data, and business success is
defined by an organization’s ability to understand and instantly respond to those signals. This is a far cry from
the pre-digital era, when your only choice was to plan and forecast your needs weeks or months in advance –
and then wait just as long to review your performance. Traditional ERP systems, with their fixed structures and
separate data silos, are rooted in that past. They cannot keep pace with the new benchmark of real-time business
operations set by digital upstarts like Amazon, Uber, and many more.
To remain competitive, a modern enterprise must create a new layer of cognitive automation –connected digital
intelligence that supports responsive decision making and helps to orchestrate business operations in real time.
Cognitive automation frees information from the old data and process silos of traditional enterprise applications.
It enables more responsive operations focused on delivering business outcomes in the moment – locating
underused assets, anticipating interruptions to supply or spikes in demand, coordinating necessary actions, and
learning as it goes.
1
There are three distinct elements to making this happen.
• Access real-time data for analysis. A modern enterprise requires an always-on view of key information. Several
steps are needed to enable this:
o Establish access to information across all of an organization’s data sources – not easy when it is
typically locked away in ERP silos that conform to historic demarcations of function, geography or
business division.
o Add access to external data sources, whether from a partner ecosystem or supply chain, or third-party
data such as weather feeds, regulatory information, Google Trends, commodity prices, and so on.
o Build a framework to collate the data and apply real-time, intelligent data analytics to rapidly yield new
insights, predictions and recommendations.
• Present the results in a business context. The data is only useful if it can be acted upon. Cognitive automation
applies domain expertise to understand the business context. It engages in dialog with relevant users to refine
decisions and then orchestrates enterprise processes to drive execution. This empowers and augments your
organization with the agility to keep up with today’s fast-moving digital business environment.
• Enhance performance with continuous learning. Cognitive automation goes beyond the rote learning of lesser
technologies such as robotic process automation. The system continuously learns from the decisions your
people make – and is always looking to suggest new ways to optimize performance. This creates a symbiotic
relationship in which human and machine intelligence work together to advance the results they can achieve.
All of this must be done at Internet speed and scale to ensure that the intelligence is up-to-date. It’s no use
extracting the data into a separate infrastructure, where it will always be out-of-date by the time it is ready
for analysis. The cognitive data must stay in tune with events as they unfold across the business. Cognitive
automation is like an enterprise-wide nervous system, responding instantly to new stimuli, sometimes as a reflex,
at other times calling on conscious decision-making, and constantly adjusting its behavior as conditions change.
A BLUEPRINT FOR COGNITIVE AUTOMATION
At Aera, we help our customers fast-forward to the intelligent, networked enterprise of the future. We achieve
this by enabling cognitive automation, a new layer of connected digital intelligence that allows the enterprise to
become ‘self-driving’. Machine learning algorithms take care of routine analysis, alerts and actions, releasing the
power of intelligent data to augment your business operations and your people’s effectiveness.
Getting started on this fast track to the future is challenging for most established enterprises. Aera has created a
platform to accelerate and optimize implementation of this powerful new layer of digital abstraction.
Understand. Recommend. Predict. Act.
Continuously crawls Suggests ways to improve Leverages real-time data Proactively engages
enterprise systems and financial and operational and AI to accurately predict relevant users and drives
provides end-to-end performance business outcomes, risks, the execution of their
visibility and opportunities decisions
This is very different than a traditional enterprise analytics platform. Aera has drawn on the best of Internet-scale
technology and engineering to build an infrastructure that’s ready for the digital future. The foundation is akin
to a search engine for business data, tuned by domain specialists to the specifics of your operations, and then
enriched with AI to not only anticipate the results you’ll want but also put your selections into effect. Here is how
Aera delivers the three elements of next-generation cognitive automation.
2
MAP THE DATA
The foundation step is to collate and aggregate information across all of an organization’s data sources for
analysis. Aera stays connected to maintain a constantly refreshed image of the data, which it automatically
transforms and restructures to provide real-time, contextualized visibility into business operations.
• Aera gathers data in much the same way as a search engine. Its proprietary crawlers are optimized to extract
business-critical information on an ongoing basis, with minimal impact to performance. They continuously
discover and extract data stored in SAP, Oracle and other enterprise systems, such as CRM and planning, both
on-premise and cloud.
• An internet-scale data processing engine running on high-performance Amazon Web Services infrastructure
automatically transforms this transactional data, in combination with unstructured data from external sources,
to normalize it for analysis.
• Applying business domain expertise coupled with machine learning, the Aera system enriches the raw data
with functional business models and a unique algorithmic library of key metrics, trends, and metadata. It takes
snapshots of the dataset to enable time series analysis, as well as continuously recording a working memory of
decisions and actions.
• Knowledge graphs add interpretive structure to identify vendors, products and customers, mapping
relationships between them for use in predictive analysis, search, and other functions.
DELIVER THE ANALYSIS IN CONTEXT
Aera brings cognitive automation to life in the form of preconfigured, customizable packages called ‘skills’. These
are end-to-end solutions that combine the underlying data and embedded AI to present analysis, forecasts and
recommendations as part of a decision-making workflow. Skills present information and ‘what-if’ options in the
context of business operations for decision, and then connect back to the source systems to complete the required
actions.
This is far more than a traditional business reporting tool or dashboard. Aera supports and augments decision-
making by enterprise managers, suggesting ways to improve financial and operational performance, predicting
business opportunities, risks and outcomes, and then prompting users for decisions and automatically completing
actions.
Aera doesn’t require any special know-how from the business user beyond their existing domain expertise. It
understands and responds using natural language interaction, on mobile, web or voice. It displays its analysis and
recommendations through interactive visual analytics that allow the user to drill all the way down to the underlying
data. Developers can modify or build their own custom skills using a self-service, drag-and-drop interface.
3
CONTINUE LEARNING
Aera skills include the ability to learn from experience. The cognitive architecture constantly reviews past
decisions and actions, looking for repeatable patterns that it can recommend for automation. For example, it may
notice that users always accept its recommendations under a certain value threshold, and so suggest routinely
automating that action. Aera provides detailed reporting and evaluation of decision-making over time through its
Cognitive Decision Board.
By learning how humans make decisions across the organization and feeding this back into the system, Aera
extends its decision-making capabilities, freeing users from repetitive tasks to spend more time on more complex
issues. This is where the true potential of cognitive automation is realized, continuously learning from an
organization’s people while augmenting their potential.
UNLOCK THE FUTURE
A growing number of top-tier global businesses are working with Aera’s internet-scale, AI-enabled platform to
stay in control of today’s faster, increasingly complex planning cycles. They are applying cognitive automation to
resolve key pain points in demand planning, supply chain forecasting and management. Here are two real-world
examples.
AUGMENTING THE WORK OF SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNERS
One CPG company uses Aera to automate routine supply chain planning across a range of products to predict
spikes and bottlenecks in demand and mitigate supply shortages. Cognitive automation reduces often tedious
and repetitive work and augments the work of the company’s supply chain planners. Machine learning algorithms
analyze the data brought together from ERP systems and other data stores, including external sources such as
weather reports, consumer trends and retail networks. The system automatically suggests appropriate actions
such as increasing inventory, starting a new production run or identifying a replacement product. It provides daily
alerts for time-critical decisions, based on real-time demand data.
4
SHARING AUTOMATED LEAD-TIME FORECASTS WITH CUSTOMERS
One pharma company has used Aera cognitive automation to improve forecasting accuracy in its demand chain
and automate the provision of available-to-promise data to its customers. The AI-powered system examines data
from dozens of different sources to estimate delivery dates for a given order. It has proven significantly more
accurate at forecasting than human demand planners had previously achieved, while freeing them to take on
more valuable work. The company has now made the forecasts available on its customer portal and is rolling out
the capability across multiple countries.
BUILD ON QUICK WINS, THEN EXPAND HORIZONS
A customer’s transformation journey typically begins by bringing end-to-end visibility to former data silos and
building a cognitive data model. An initial deployment can start showing metrics within days of beginning to
crawl data and have production-ready code within two to three months. Over time, this iteratively evolves to add
predictive, prescriptive and finally autonomous capabilities. The phased approach enables ‘quick wins’ from the
outset as an organization begins its journey to unlock the future enterprise.
Every business today faces this challenge of how to access meaningful information about its operations in a
timely manner. Whether it’s a demand planner getting advance warning of a storm that could affect deliveries, a
distribution manager seeing a suddenly popular new product about to go out of stock, or a VP of sales spotting a
sudden downtrend in sales in the final month of what was expected to be a blow-out quarter, people need to see
the right information when they can still have time to take action and achieve a better result.
In the past, enhancements were planned and implemented at scale over months and years, but in today’s world
there’s no time to wait. Whatever problem you’re trying to resolve, it shouldn’t take more than two to three
months to make an impact. Layering a framework for cognitive automation across the existing infrastructure
makes it possible to move one project at a time, resolving each issue in turn as you build out a new digital
framework capable of real-time analysis and responsive adaptation.
Business leaders see how rapidly technology is advancing all around them, and they know how their organizations
are held back by the structures and systems of the past. Powered by huge advances in machine learning and
artificial intelligence, the digital future is on its way. Cognitive automation is the key to unlock that future.
5
About the Company
Aera Technology delivers the Cognitive Operating System™ that enables the Self-Driving Enterprise™.
Aera understands how businesses work; makes real-time recommendations; predicts outcomes; and acts
autonomously. Using proprietary data crawling, industry models, machine learning and artificial intelligence,
Aera is revolutionizing how people relate to data and how organizations function.
Understand. Recommend. Predict. Act.
Continuously crawls Suggests ways to improve Leverages real-time data Proactively engages
enterprise systems and financial and operational and AI to accurately predict relevant users and drives
provides end-to-end performance business outcomes, risks, the execution of their
visibility and opportunities decisions
Opportunity and risk
Secure, low impact, and analytics Embedded AI and machine Autonomously take action
programmable Crawlers learning
Internet-scale data Analysis at any granularity Pre-defined process library
management and
processing
Data indexed for search
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