Meet Bob Rogers, PhD & CEO at Supply Chain Design And Optimisation Company: Oii.ai

Oii.ai is a supply chain design and optimisation company that makes it possible to run supply chains efficiently, regardless of the disruptions and challenges that companies encounter, local or global. That’s the core of Oii.ai. Optii is our AI-powered supply chain design and optimization product.

It’s SaaS (software as a service) that can be deployed into a company’s existing supply chain infrastructure.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company, and what makes it unique?

Four years ago, when I was first researching my book “Demystifying AI for the Enterprise”, I was looking for experts on supply chains so that I could write the chapter on the subject. I reached out to an expert who would later become my co-founder, David Evans. He has decades of experience configuring supply chains.

He was the one who helped me understand that the biggest weakness within supply chains is that they run on the assumption that the world is static. Not just that, but I also discovered that most supply chains are designed and reconfigured manually, meaning humans are setting the parameters. But there could be thousands of parameters with thousands of scenarios. Human beings simply can’t keep up.

What makes Oii.ai unique is that our Optii system is able to model variables of supply chain variables, creating ‘what if/then’ scenarios. Then Optii provides actionable insight, and that’s where a human comes in: to make decisions based on Optii’s findings.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Oii.ai has actually been around for just over a year. We started it in 2021 and already we’ve been able to land very high profile clients, especially in the healthcare and food distribution sectors.

With every client, we learn more and more about how to uniquely tailor the system to address their pain points: whether they want to optimize inventory, reduce discards, improve service, maximize factory capacity and more.
 

What can we hope to see from Oii.ai in the future?

 
I expect to see Oii.ai improve on our ability to create new supply chain paradigms. Ones in which it’s possible to help clients continually adapt to changes in the circumstances of the supply chain, and to keep supply chains running at peak performance, where peak performance is determined by the company that’s running the supply chain.

So, for instance, if you care more about inventory, then inventory is emphasized. If you care more about eliminating discards or carbon, then that’s our focus. The idea is, if organizations can rely on AI to do the repetitive, tedious tasks, then the supply chain can automatically adapt to the circumstances to keep performing and achieving service goals at the optimum level.