Aera Technology (formerly FusionOps) headquartered in Mountain View, provides cloud-based analytics and decision intelligence for supply chain, via the Aera Decision Cloud platform.

TrustRadius Research Team Analysis for Aera

Every day, each employee at an enterprise must make hundreds of decisions, large and small. As the volume of data enterprises collect grows, so do the factors that employees must weigh as they make each of these business decisions.

Decision intelligence is still an emerging field, but, at its core, it involves combining data analytics, business intelligence, AI and machine learning, and automation to help businesses make more informed decisions. Enterprises use Aera to increase supply chain efficiency, prediction accuracy, and revenue through a combination of data analysis, forecasting, and automation.

How Does Aera Work?

Aera Decision Cloud consists of three main components: the Cognitive Operating System, Cognitive Skills, and Aera Developer. The Cognitive Operating System, which CEO Fred Laluyaux frequently refers to as Aera’s “digital brain”, includes all of Aera’s core analysis, automation, and user interface functions. Cognitive Skills expand on these functions and harness them in specific areas related to supply chain, like demand or logistics. Aera Developer is a low-code integrated development environment (IDE) where your data team can perform analysis and modeling and help shape Aera’s decision logic.

All Aera customers get the Cognitive Operating System and Aera Developer, and you can choose which, if any of the Cognitive Skills Aera offers suit your business needs best.

Business Intelligence

Aera connects and combines siloed data from across all of your business’s disparate systems. Aera has pre-built data connectors for not only common applications used across industries and departments, like Salesforce and Teradata, but for software specific to the supply chain, like Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP SCM, and Blue Yonder.

A screenshot of Aeras UI for data connection — A few of Aera’s data connection options - image from Aera

Once your data is connected, Aera’s data crawlers aim to update it continuously, ensuring you and Aera’s AI have the most current information at all times. There are very few customer reviews for Aera, so it’s difficult to say for certain exactly how instantaneous these updates are, or whether Aera’s data crawlers truly have no noticeable impact on the speed of your other systems.

Aera offers multiple methods for building reports, visualizations, and what-if models with the data, from pre-built templates to a low-code visual development environment to full support for programming languages like Python, R, and SQL.

Automation

Aera truly begins to set itself apart as one of the founders of the emerging decision intelligence technology category with its incorporation of automation on top of this business intelligence layer. Traditional automation software, even AI-powered robotic process automation software, does not have all of the organization’s data and forecasts for potential future scenarios to consider when making decisions. This is why traditional automation focuses on low-level, repetitive processes rather than decision-making.

That being said, it’s difficult to draw clear comparisons between Aera and its decision intelligence competitors. They’re all comparatively new to the software landscape, with few user reviews and different approaches to solving problems.

You can build and iterate on decision automations in Aera’s Process Builder, a visual programming environment. The AI considers analytics, modeling, and what-if scenarios as well as the existing data when making decisions. You also have the option to roll back to previous versions at any time if a change you make doesn’t work.

A screenshot of Aeras process builder visual IDE — Aera’s visual IDE for building automation processes - image from Aera

You can give Aera’s “digital brain” more specific automation rules as well, providing the AI with conditional logic to follow. This is done in a low-code environment designed to allow non-technical, business users to participate directly in the model-building process.

Aera emphasizes trust and transparency in their machine-learning-powered decision making, something customers like Unilever say helps them stand out from the competition. Check out Unilever and Aera’s conversation in our video section below to hear more about why Unilever chose Aera. Aera’s AI can start by making suggestions or prompting you to make decisions yourself, then you may gradually entrust the platform with fully automated decision making and execution.

When Aera makes decisions and executes them, or asks for your approval, it can write changes into the necessary platforms directly, allowing for full automation. Once you’ve started making decisions through Aera, you’ll be able to see Aera’s Cognitive Decision Board, a complete record of decisions made by humans and the AI and their impacts on ROI. The AI model learns from the results of each decision, whether it makes the decision itself or a human employee does. The dashboard allows you to visualize how this learning changes the model and roll back to earlier versions at any time. It also offers insight on the impacts of your own decisions, helping you think critically about past decisions and make smarter ones in the future.

A screenshot of Aeras Cognitive Decision dashboard It shows multiple data visualizations and some written insights drawn from the decision data — Aera’s Cognitive Decision Board overview - image from Aera

Supply Chain Analytics and Decision Making

In addition to offering supply-chain-specific data connectors, Aera offers several Cognitive Skills that expand the platform’s functionality to address various aspects of the supply chain. These skills include prebuilt analytics calculations, machine learning models, and decision logic to make it easier to start automating and augmenting your decisions and gaining insights from your data.

Aera’s Cognitive Skills are broad and take a holistic look at an aspect of your organization’s supply chain, like logistics or procurement. This should ensure that your decision model is working with the most information possible to make its choices. Competitors who offer something similar, like Peak Decision Intelligence Platform’s applications, are a little more specific in their focus. Peak has an application just for vehicle routing rather than one for logistics as a whole. This might make something like Peak a better choice for smaller organizations that don’t need as broad of a view when making individual decisions.

Two side by side screenshots of Aeras Digital Control Tower Cognitive Skills specialized dashboard They include various data visualizations — Dashboards from Aera’s digital control tower skill - image from Aera

Aera has several large enterprise customers with complex supply chains, so offering broader skill sets makes sense. They even have a digital control tower skill, designed to provide an end-to-end view of your entire supply chain.

This focus on the bigger picture drives results for Aera’s customers. Check out our video section below to hear how Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain efficiency metrics have improved since implementing Aera.

Aera Pricing

Aera’s pricing is not publicly available. Factors that influence pricing likely include the scale of your implementation and whether you will be using pre-built skills and data crawlers or new ones.

Aera Use Case

Aera is ideal for large enterprises with complex supply chains and plenty of decisions to make about them every day. It’s great for those who have a lot of siloed data or who want to take action based on data science and analytics but aren’t sure how to. Those in other industries or smaller companies with less complex supply chains may find other decision intelligence platforms have models better designed for their needs.

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