Aera Unveils Cognitive Operating System™, World's First Cloud Platform for Cognitive Automation

 Today, Aera Technology announced the Aera Cognitive Operating System™, the world's first cloud platform for Cognitive Automation, allowing customers and partners to easily and directly build Cognitive Skills™ and deploy Aera with greater flexibility and at scale. Today's platform release meets the growing demand for expanding the use of Aera across supply chains and beyond among some of the world's largest companies including Unilever¹ and RB². In addition, it will help new adopters speed up the deployment of Aera.

Aera is the industry's first Cognitive Operating System that enables the Self-Driving Enterprise™. Aera harmonizes both internal and external data across the enterprise; applies science (analytics, search, optimization, modeling and data science) to derive insights and recommendations; digitizes, automates and augments decision processes; and operationalizes change by digitizing institutional expertise and experience. Aera's Cognitive Operating System is the only solution that connects data, science, process and change, building a digital brain within the enterprise. Aera continuously improves decision-making, accuracy, automation, and augmentation over time.

"Aera's Cognitive Operating System is the only solution that builds a permanent memory of every decision and outcome," said Frederic Laluyaux, CEO of Aera Technology. "Even though companies are digitally transforming, critical supply chain decision-making and processes are still driven by humans interacting with aging organizational ERP and CRM systems, processes, and data silos. The Aera Cognitive Operating System becomes the digital brain within the enterprise. Aera learns how businesses work, makes real-time recommendations, predicts outcomes, and acts autonomously, allowing enterprises to become self-driving."

Today's release provides customers and partners the following capabilities to build Cognitive Skills and deploy Aera:

• For Harmonizing Data – Data Workbench including Patented Bi-directional Data Crawlers, Pre-packaged Industry content, and Cognitive Data Layer
• For Applying Science – Analytics, Modeling and Cortex (AI/ML Services)
• For Digitizing Processes – Process Builder, Automation Rules and Write-backs
• For Operationalizing Change – Cognitive Workbench, Cognitive Decision Board and Dynamic User Experience including Voice, Skills on Mobile and Search.

With Aera's Cognitive Operating System, large enterprises and partners are able to capitalize on Aera's Cognitive Automation to create new possibilities and opportunities for success and growth in the digital era. How does a Cognitive Skill built on Platform work?

"Aera's Cognitive Automation Operating System solves critical business imperatives for us," said Saqib Mehmood, Global SVP Business Solutions & Insights, Hygiene Home, RB. "The Aera Cognitive Automation Platform accelerates operations to Internet speed and scale by introducing a cloud cognitive layer to augment and automate our enterprise analytics and decision-making. As Aera learns, decisions are made faster, they're more accurate and impactful. Organizationally, we're learning, adapting and becoming more agile too. New insights are continually discovered that improve and transform supply chains, operations, and organizational performance."

Skill Example 1: Demand Planning in the Supply Chain

One example is Aera's Cognitive Skill for demand planning in supply chain. Demand planning in today's world is nearly impossible due to faster pace of changes and volatile variables. Planners can only do so much. At most companies, demand planning is a static activity due to outdated technology and fragmented systems. The Cognitive Skill for demand planning has the ability to instantly sense, forecast, and track changes in demand through harmonized internal and external data sources (ERP, CRM, sales, marketing, market trends, social media, etc.) pertinent to demand planning. It predicts variability, market conditions and customer patterns in real-time and makes real-time recommendations to the plan such as inventory adjustments, new product introductions (NPIs), safety stock and more based on insights derived from Aera's Cognitive Automation Platform. Aera then executes the resulting actions in the transactional systems autonomously and sends exceptions to the planners. Planners can accept or decline the decisions recommended. The Skill will take action accordingly. Operational decisions made across an organization are monitored and their impact is measured for continuous improvement.

Skill Example 2: Trade Promotion Optimization

Another example of a Cognitive Skill is Trade Promotion Optimization. The Aera Promotions Skill combines market feeds on channel sales, promotions, prices, and market share with the organization's promotion and forecast. It considers SKU and region-specific rules as well as channel constraints to determine optimal promotion plans and calendars. The Aera Promotion Skills help organizations make data-driven promotions plans as well as continuous monitoring to detect when promotion plans need adjustment because of marketing opportunities or promotion effectiveness. And the Aera Promotions Skill is agile enough to enable the business to tune the target objective to the needs of the business and lifecycle of the product- from margin optimization, to cost optimization, to revenue optimization and several others. And the tight integration of promotions optimization and execution gives the business data-driven results on performance to use for future marketing strategies and budgeting.