Blake Johnson pioneered the development of business capabilities to proactively manage the impact of demand and supply uncertainty on performance and supply chain planning and execution.

In 2000 he founded Vivecon, which delivered the first supply planning capabilities of this kind to leading companies in high tech, CPG, automotive and energy, with financing by Texas Pacific Group, Benchmark Capital and Foundational Capital.

In 2008 he began development of Aztral (which is privately financed) to provide a fully integrated set of capabilities spanning performance management, planning, and operational execution. Large-scale deployment of these capabilities began in 2016. Now validated and refined, they are being delivered through Aztral’s highly automated “self-driving” enterprise analytic capabilities, which ensure optimal performance and extremely efficient implementation. The first capability, Aztral Demand and Forecast, launched in summer 2018.

Blake is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he was previously a full-time faculty member, and where for the last eight years he has hosted an industry conference on best practices for delivering analytics at scale in core operating processes. He began his career in investment banking at Credit Suisse in New York, where he was responsible for several categories of asset-backed securities and led the first issues of credit-card asset backed securities in Europe and Japan.

You have management processes to agree on and commit to customer and financial performance goals.
And you have enterprise planning, execution and transaction systems to run your operations.
But these two core elements of your business are unconnected.

Amazingly, planning systems don't take customer and financial performance objectives as inputs. Which makes it impossible for them to optimize to them.
So what performance goals are your planning systems optimizing to? We guarantee they aren’t customer or financial metrics you’ll recognize. Good luck even finding someone in your organization who can tell you what they are and how they can be managed. Most companies have many systems spread across functions, each driving to local metrics.

Aztral’s Enterprise Analytic Capabilities fill this critical gap.
Aztral translates your customer and financial objectives to the plans and execution policies that best achieve them, and then delivers these to your enterprise systems for execution.
The simple and direct connection Aztral establishes between your performance goals and the plans and execution that achieve them makes it easy to tailor the performance of each segment of your business, defined as specifically as you want (by market, product line, customer segment, product lifecycle stage…), to your objectives for it
And because you (and Aztral) now know and fully control your operational plans and performance, Aztral can measure and monitor every aspect of their execution and performance for you – the self-driving supply chain.
Which means you finally get the customer and financial performance you chose, or know exactly who to hold accountable.