Manufacturing at aim10x Americas: Turning Supply Chain Complexity Into Better Decisions

Manufacturers are facing more volatility, more constraints, and more complexity across their networks.

At aim10x Americas in Chicago, leaders from Terex, HPE, Resideo, Acuity, and Clarios shared how they are using o9 to tackle those challenges, from improving responsiveness and service to reducing inventory, connecting suppliers, automating planning work, and helping teams make faster decisions.

Across the sessions, the story was not just about implementing technology. It was about how more connected planning can turn operational complexity into measurable business value, and how manufacturers are building on that foundation with AI and new decision models.

Terex: Proving how quickly transformation can deliver value

At Terex, one of the clearest lessons from the company’s o9 transformation was how quickly measurable value could begin to show up, and how those operational improvements could translate into commercial advantage.

Mike Ryan, Chief Operating Officer, Environmental Solutions Segment at Terex, shared how the business moved from a largely manual planning environment toward an integrated, constraint-based planning model with o9.

At Terex’s Alabama manufacturing operation, the impact was visible within roughly nine months: lead times fell 43%, inventory turns improved 17%, and planner and buyer productivity improved 37%.

The aftermarket business showed similarly rapid results across a highly complex network of roughly 100,000 SKUs. In approximately six months, forecast accuracy improved 37%, past-due backlog improved 83%, and fill rate improved 31%. Mike emphasized that this was not the result of a multi-year transformation, but of getting the technology and processes in place and beginning to drive value quickly.

But the story went beyond traditional supply chain metrics. Mike described a real customer situation in which Terex was competing for incremental demand and needed to demonstrate that it could fulfill the order faster than a competitor. The team used o9 to model the additional volume against available capacity, determine the supply actions required, and show the customer how Terex could support the request. Mike said Terex has since used this approach in customer conversations and that it has helped generate new demand for the plant.

That is why he framed o9 as having a broader commercial role:

“When you can turn an order in a lead time that’s quicker than your competitor, that translates to additional revenue. My advice is don’t view o9 as merely a Supply Chain tool but rather more broadly as a Commercial tool.”

For Terex, the value is therefore not only better planning, lower inventory, and greater productivity. It is also the ability to respond to customer opportunities with greater speed and confidence, creating a direct link between supply chain decision-making and commercial growth.

Terex is now taking that model further. Following the initial deployment in Environmental Solutions, the company is extending the approach into Terex Utilities, with a roadmap that could eventually cover the broader Terex portfolio.

HPE and Forbes: Global Planning in a World of Constant Volatility

The manufacturing discussion also moved into high tech with a fireside conversation between Steve Banker, Forbes.com Contributor, and Brian Louis, Senior Director, Digital Transformation & Analytics at HPE.

HPE operates a highly complex configure-to-order supply chain spanning approximately 170 countries and 90,000 channel partners. Its planning environment includes around 225,000 bills of materials, while component lead times that once lasted weeks can now stretch beyond six or even 12 months.

As Brian put it, “We’re up to our eyeballs in VUCA.”

Against that backdrop, HPE has been working to move from fragmented, site-level planning toward a more globally integrated model, giving planners a clearer view across demand, supply, deals, and inventory.

Brian shared several measurable outcomes from that journey. HPE saw a 150% improvement in deal-planning effectiveness, alongside record inventory reductions and a 10% improvement in customer service.

Automation is also changing the role of the planner.

“While we’ve gone to no touch, we’ve also seen a significant improvement on forecasting. We’ve seen a 40% improvement.”

For Brian, the significance is not simply greater automation. It is the opportunity to reduce the manual effort required to hold planning processes together and allow planners to spend more time influencing higher-value business decisions.

HPE sees AI as the next accelerator in that journey, helping teams understand what happened, improve decision-making, and continue moving toward a more strategic and connected planning model.

Resideo: Extending planning all the way to the supplier

At Resideo, connected planning extends beyond the four walls of the enterprise.

Matt O'Connor, Digital Supply Chain Optimization Executive at Resideo, described a supply chain that includes around 1,200 suppliers, each with different systems, integration methods, and levels of digital maturity.

That meant creating a model that could work with the supply base as it exists today.

“The goal is to ensure the planning engine always has the most current and accurate information, with a strong emphasis on data quality, consistency, and ongoing maintenance across all sources.”

Supplier commitments can come through different channels, including EDI, manual input, and o9 Vendor Collaboration. What matters is getting the latest information into supply planning so the organization can make better decisions.

Resideo is also moving supplier relationships from one-way communication toward two-way collaboration. The company now exposes two years of forecasts in weekly buckets and asks suppliers to respond with commitments that feed future planning cycles. Around 300 suppliers are currently on its vendor collaboration solution.

Matt also shared an early business outcome:

“We have seen inventory reduction, basically high-single-digit inventory reduction. And that’s even with the current environment where we are buying massive amounts of constrained material.”

The next phase includes deeper supplier analytics, AI-enabled processing of supplier documents, and further logistics integration.

For Resideo, supplier collaboration is becoming part of the planning process itself rather than a separate layer of emails, spreadsheets, portals, and manual follow-up.

Acuity: Using AI to learn from what happened and improve what happens next

At Acuity, the challenge has shifted from accessing data to focusing attention.

Amit Shah, Product Manager, Supply Chain Planning at Acuity, showed what becomes possible once a strong planning foundation is already in place.

Acuity manages a highly complex manufacturing environment, with roughly 150,000 finished goods, 2.2 million components, bills of materials that can run 18 levels deep, and more than 18,000 suppliers.

As that planning foundation matured, Amit said the challenge changed.

“Now our real big constraint is attention.”

Acuity has an enormous amount of planning data. It can identify potential demand misses, understand manufacturing constraints, and see where revenue may move above or below plan. The challenge is helping planners quickly find the signals that actually require action.

At aim10x Americas, Amit demonstrated how Acuity is addressing that problem with a live demo of o9’s Post-Game Analysis agent using real Acuity data from a copy of its production environment.

He began with a simple natural-language prompt: I think I have an inventory problem. Tell me about it.

The agent analyzed Acuity’s planning data, surfaced inventory above and below safety-stock levels, identified future risks, and generated views showing how excess inventory could burn down over time.

Amit then continued the analysis conversationally, narrowing the results to specific inventory types and asking the agent to identify SKUs that were overstocked in one location but understocked somewhere else, surfacing potential rebalancing opportunities.

The value is not simply another report. It is helping planners move more quickly from what happened, to why it happened, to what action should come next.

For Acuity, the next stage of planning is about turning a huge amount of intelligence into focused action and continuously learning from the decisions the business makes.

Clarios: Start with the decision, not the technology

For Clarios, transformation started with a simple sequence: define the decisions first, organize the business around those decisions, and only then choose the technology.

Sean Rierdon, VP Supply Chain - US/CA at Clarios, explained why that discipline matters at scale.

Clarios operates eight production facilities across North America, producing roughly 75 million batteries annually, with more than 10,000 production combinations across its network. Its distribution operation serves thousands of locations, while many of its component suppliers are actually Clarios facilities themselves, creating additional dependencies between planning and production.

Yet planning across that network had become disconnected. Sean’s team deliberately stepped away from the technology question and started somewhere more fundamental.

“We started with decisions first. What decisions are we making?”

The team mapped the decisions that needed to be made across different planning horizons: daily execution decisions around allocation, deployment, and expedites; weekly supply decisions around constraints, materials, and network balancing; and monthly decisions around capacity, sourcing, inventory, and trade-offs.

Sean said Clarios spent roughly six months mapping which decisions needed to happen, why they mattered, and at what cadence.

Then came the organization.

Once those decisions were clear, Clarios mapped its organizational structure and accountability around them. Rather than starting with traditional functional boundaries, the team focused on the outcomes it needed to drive, who should own each decision, and how frequently they needed to be accountable for it.

As Sean explained, that sequence gave Clarios clarity on both the decisions it needed to make and the team structure required to execute them.

“We knew what decisions we needed to make. We knew what our new team structure needed to be in order to execute on those decisions. And now we were ready to pick the engine.”

Technology came third.

“Third, you pick the engine, but you don’t start with the engine.”

That process ultimately led Clarios to o9, which Sean said was selected in part because of how well the platform aligned with the company’s newly defined operating model. Demand planning is now live, with supply planning underway.

Sean also emphasized that the people closest to execution need to help design the solution. The Clarios team shaping the transformation brings more than 75 years of production-floor experience. One of the leaders driving the effort spent 35 years at Clarios and previously ran a plant, bringing firsthand knowledge of how planning decisions ultimately translate into execution and playing a central role in driving change across the organization.

For Sean, that connection to the shop floor is critical. A sophisticated plan has little value if it does not work for the people responsible for executing it.

The lesson from Clarios is straightforward: better technology is not the starting point. First define the decisions. Then build the organization and accountability around them. Only then choose the technology capable of supporting that operating model.

From faster value to better decisions

The manufacturing sessions at aim10x Americas showed both the value manufacturers are unlocking today and the capabilities they are building for what comes next.

Across the stories, connected planning is helping organizations improve responsiveness, inventory, service, productivity, and decision speed, while AI and new operating models are opening the door to the next stage of transformation.

The broader takeaway is simple: manufacturing transformation is increasingly about delivering measurable value today while building the capability to keep making better decisions tomorrow.