- Bekaert already uses AI agents alongside the optimization engines in Unison Planning to speed up decisions and advance toward autonomous planning
OMP, a leader in supply chain orchestration, today extended UnisonIQ, the AI framework in its Unison Planning™ platform, with the Agent Library of ready-to-deploy AI agents and Agent Studio, where companies build their own. The agents run on the optimization engines in Unison Planning™ and produce executable supply chain plans. Bekaert is among the early adopters of UnisonIQ.
Supply chain organizations face board-level pressure to show progress on AI, but many struggle to move beyond experiments. Generic AI models and decision-intelligence tools miss the industry-specific context and semantics that planning depends on, while planning tools with an AI layer on top lack reasoning depth. Both can produce a confident answer that ignores real-world constraints such as shelf life, co-products, and shared capacity.
In UnisonIQ, by contrast, each agent works from a reality-based digital twin of the customer’s own supply chain and calls on the optimization engines in Unison Planning™, so the plan changes it prepares hold up in practice. Planners work with the agents through Unison Companion, the AI assistant in the platform. A planner asks a question in plain language, and Companion assigns the right agents to answer it or to prepare a plan change.
Bekaert: comparing S&OP scenarios in plain language
Bekaert, a leader in steel wire transformation and coating technologies, uses Unison Companion in the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process of its Energy Transition subdivision. Planners describe the scenario they want to test in plain language, such as adding capacity at bottlenecks while demand rises. UnisonIQ then models it, runs it, and compares it with the current plan. Bekaert is now extending Unison Companion to demand planning in its Steel Wire Solutions division, where planners use it to challenge their forecast.
“Our planners can describe different scenarios in plain language and compare the modeled outcomes with the current plan. This helps keep our S&OP discussions focused on evaluating options and making informed decisions,” said Filip Lanckmans, Global Supply Chain Manager at Bekaert.
The Agent Library covers supply, demand, and data management, so teams can put ready-to-deploy agents to work. With Agent Studio, companies build their own agents on the same digital twin and optimization engines. Whether agents are self-built or ready-made, each organization decides what an agent may decide, execute, or escalate, and moves toward autonomous planning at its own pace.
“Most companies don’t struggle to start with AI. They struggle to scale it,” said Tom Wouters, Chief Product Officer at OMP. “An agent is only as good as the engine behind it. UnisonIQ agents run on the same optimization engines behind our customers’ plans, so planners can hand over more work as trust grows and stay in control.”
For more information about UnisonIQ and how OMP is helping organizations achieve scalable, trusted AI adoption, visit the website.
About OMP
OMP helps companies facing complex planning challenges to excel, grow and thrive by offering the best digitized supply chain planning solution on the market. Hundreds of customers in a wide range of industries – spanning consumer goods, life sciences, chemicals, metals, paper and packaging – benefit from using OMP’s unique Unison Planning™.
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SOURCE: OMP