Kinexions 2023 took place June 19-21 in Nashville, Tennessee, the ‘Country Music Capital of the World.’ Country music was woven into the theme of this year’s event, and the customer appreciation party featured Grammy Award-winning duo, the Brothers Osborne.
Kinaxis CEO John Sicard kicked off Kinexions 2023 by sharing his perspective on the role of automation and the importance of the human element of supply chain to advance the practice – as we face a critical time for the evolution of the industry. He also shared insight into new partnerships, competencies and innovations. His key message was that, in a dynamic industry with the promise of new technological breakthroughs around every corner, it’s increasingly important to ground ourselves in the purpose of working in supply chain.
Andrew Bell, VP of Kinaxis Product Management, took the stage to announce major product releases. He explained how Kinaxis will continue to evolve as one platform to orchestrate the end-to-end supply chain network – all physical, digital and financial assets. Kinaxis’ major product releases align to the latest innovations fueling modern supply chain management:
Extending Concurrency
- Kinaxis Acquired MPO – Various capabilities are being integrated with Kinaxis, including supply chain execution focused on transport management, order management and multi-party orchestration, a key step in extending concurrency beyond planning.
- Emissions Planning Application – Understanding of Scope 3 emissions and planning in over five different dimensions. Kinaxis partnered with the company Climatic to get emissions data and provide an end-to-end solution.
- Kinaxis Enterprise Scheduling – Connect all planning and scheduling decisions concurrently, real-time integrations, simulate the changes and understand the global impact.
Amplifying Intelligence
- Demand.ai – Ingest any data signal, sense changes over every data horizon, automatically adjust the forecast, and empower planners with insights and recommendations.
Empowering People
- Simple Drag and Drop, One-Click Design – Direct manipulation related to content creation capabilities for creators with an efficient and lightweight UI; visual resource model, graphical tool to view the relationships between the resources.
Kinexions was also filled with customer success stories and the exchange of ideas, learnings and experiences using the Kinaxis platform. Following are some of the highlights:
- Unilever shared how they synchronized processes, people and technology development to deliver against the driving imperatives of customer service, cashflow and cost; how this transformational project has progressed and what the next wave entails.
- MillerKnoll talked about how they integrated their supply chain capabilities into a single harmonized system; the transformation journey on how they empowered their planners to make fast and confident decisions.
- Cardinal Health eliminated 13 manual processes, increased service levels by 3% and cut excess inventory by $5.7M in the first five months following RapidResponse implementation.
- Seagen discussed how they utilized the RapidStart approach to jump-start their digital transformation, key challenges faced and how in a matter of weeks they were able to enable a successful adoption of RapidResponse to the point of zero spreadsheet-based planning.
- Leonardo DRS shared their journey from a static operation plan to a dynamic concurrent system that can handle multiple demand streams, real-time inventory analysis across warehouses, and financial forecasting; they also shared how to make compelling arguments to secure c-suite buy-in to the new software adoption in your organization.
- Bell Textron talked about how they used RapidResponse to navigate planners through any clouds in the supply chain and their transformation journey, which has enabled them to shorten the integrated business planning cycle time from weeks to days, while also expanding capabilities in factory planning, engineering change analysis and inventory management.
- National Instruments shared their journey to improve financial accuracy, transform the customer experience, increase supply and capacity plan predictability, and enable planners to work in new, more efficient ways.
Bristlecone participated in Kinexions 2023 as a Bronze Sponsor. We had the opportunity to meet with dozens of current and potential customers of the Kinaxis platform and learn their business objectives and challenges. We can summarize the customer voices as follows:
New and Potential Kinaxis Customers
- Is Kinaxis the right platform for my planning solution needs?
- How does Kinaxis compare to other platforms?
- Who would be the best implementation partner for my company?
- Can we get references from other customers that are using Kinaxis?
- How can Kinaxis integrate with my other ERP platforms?
- What are the implementation and architectural challenges?
- How can we get Kinaxis skills and expertise from the market?
- What is the best way to create a Kinaxis Center of Excellence?
- What implementation processes and methodologies do we need to follow?
Existing Kinaxis Customers
- How can we leverage the new and upcoming product capabilities?
- What is the long-term roadmap for the product?
- How can we effectively transition from implementation to sustenance model?
- What is the best way to increase platform adaptation with our planners?
- How do we manage and control the overall cost of ownership of the platform?
- What can we do to optimize our global rollout and ensure our success?
Our Kinaxis practice is one of our fast-growing practices. We provide end-to-end solution assessment, market insights, implementation and sustenance services. Our services include implementation program management, solution architecture, product configuration, closed-loop system and data integrations, user training and adaptation improvements, and more. We also develop enablers, methodologies and frameworks to accelerate Kinaxis adoption.
Bristlecone has 20+ Kinaxis customers across North America, EMEA and APAC, and we are often praised by our customers and Kinaxis leadership for our flawless implementations.
Interested in learning more? Contact us to schedule an introductory meeting.
RAVI RANGASAMI
Client Partner
Bristlecone
RAMJI MANI
VP, Platform Solutions
Bristlecone
MICHAEL LEEN
VP, Sales
Bristlecone
RITESH KUMAR
Solutions Architect
Bristlecone
