Scotts Miracle-Gro is expanding its partnership with software company Kinaxis to optimize supply chain planning operations (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). The broader push aims to unify planning, decision-making, and execution into a single AI-assisted platform, with the company expecting improvements in responsiveness, performance, and resilience. The technology replaces manual workflows with limited standardization across business units, addressing a prior challenge where the company struggled to respond quickly during peak demand periods (Supply Chain Dive - Technology).
Scotts Miracle-Gro decided to scale the partnership due to Kinaxis' ability to model weather shifts, material constraints, and production trade-offs in real time (Supply Chain Dive - Technology). These capabilities help the company respond faster to demand spikes triggered by seasonal factors like early spring while reducing stockout risk. The move reflects a broader organizational push: Scotts Miracle-Gro has created an AI center that built 40 use cases across operations, including supply chain, and is implementing SAP S/4HANA as its ERP system to prepare data for AI tools (Supply Chain Dive - Technology).