Five Minutes With: Karolina Tuttle, o9 Solutions

Karolina Tuttle is a successful supply chain leader with more than a decade's worth of industry, consulting and software experience under her belt. 

This has been accumulated in areas including S&OP, demand planning and forecasting, supply planning, master scheduling and project management.

Working for huge organisations like Shell, Goodyear, Gates Corporation and Capgemini Invent has enabled Karolina to become a specialist in driving supply chain digitisation. This is achieved by leveraging her extensive background in system agnostic supply chain transformations, as well as design, process deployment and audit and complex technology implementations.

These days, she serves as Global Supplier Relationship Management Go-to-Market Lead at o9 Solutions. 

Here, Supply Chain Digital sits down with Karolina to discuss the biggest challenges she is facing during turbulent times.

For those unfamiliar with o9, what services does the company offer?

o9 is an AI-powered platform provider for multi-tier integrated business planning and decision-making.

Our Digital Brain foundation helps global enterprises make planning processes (i.e. driving demand, aligning supply and demand and optimising commercial initiatives) faster and smarter. It brings together technology innovations – such as graph-based enterprise modelling, big data analytics, collaborative portals and cloud-based delivery – onto a single platform. This creates an integrated data model that has the ability to easily connect supply chain planning and supplier relationship management (SRM). Doing so extends the planning and collaboration capabilities beyond the four walls of the enterprise to effectively and seamlessly drive real-time supplier collaboration.

What does your role at o9 entail?

My role as Global Supplier Relationship Management Go-to-Market Lead is focused on driving the ambitious vision for o9’s SRM offering. This includes defining and managing marketing and sales activities, establishing strong relations with our global business partnerships and alliances, and supporting our product team with a product vision and roadmap. My main objective is to grow industry awareness of how our SRM capabilities address the critical importance of supplier collaboration, risk management and greater supply chain visibility, as well as showing how o9 can seamlessly connect SRM and supply chain planning activities within an organisation. 

What differentiates o9's solutions?

The flexibility of o9’s Digital Brain platform is a key differentiator because collaboration with suppliers looks different for every organisation. They have a wide range of planning systems and solutions and are at varying maturity levels. As such, o9 can cater to their unique needs while legacy programs are more rigid in this aspect.

Another differentiator is o9’s ability to build out multi-tier networks and scenarios and facilitate the exchange of information with a company’s tier-two suppliers, using a more unified and real-time approach as opposed to disconnected systems and multiple data hubs. This allows o9’s customers to be more responsive. 

From an SRM perspective, o9’s Digital Brain platform facilitates a connected planning process by creating a single version of truth and providing integrated planning capabilities, in which everyone can see the same number, whether they are internal or external stakeholders.

o9 also focuses on building supply chain resiliency by enhancing and enriching the platform’s scenario modelling, incorporating a rich variety of external risk signals that can be mapped down to the n-tier. o9 then takes the output into account when collaborating with suppliers and adjusting the procurement plan. Additionally, the collaboration within o9 SRM is bi-directional, parameters-driven and hyper-automated to foster a culture of management by exception. 

What are the big challenges facing SRM providers?

As companies navigate increased business headwinds and more complex supply chains, they are realising the need for greater collaboration between their in-house and external stakeholders. As such, the business decisions that impact supply chain and procurement functions are coming together like never before. Supply chain planning and SRM must be fully aligned to understand which disruptions are happening, where it's coming from, who's impacted and where the risks are. 

The challenge companies face is gaining visibility into potential risks within their extended supplier network, such as unethical procurement practices, weather events or geopolitical instabilities. Companies are realising the need for mitigation scenario platforms to quickly respond to global disruptions impacting their supply chains such as the Red Sea crisis and Panama Canal drought. With this in mind, some of the biggest challenges for SRM providers are building flexibility and reducing latency to facilitate seamless real-time collaboration and proactive risk mitigation. 

What's the best advice you've ever received?

The best advice I received was when I was working on a high-visibility project with many responsibilities: "Keep working the ground. Keep grinding. Pursuing your dreams isn’t mythical, it’s methodical. Sometimes, the most inspiring thing you can do is to keep showing up when you feel completely uninspired."

o9's vision for connected SRM is something that I am extremely passionate about and maintaining the daily focus to make it a reality is very powerful.

******

Check out the latest edition of Supply Chain Magazine and sign up to our global conference series – Procurement and SupplyChain LIVE 2024. 

******

Supply Chain Digital is a BizClik brand.