Autonomous Resource Planning
Autonomous Resource Planning is an architecture in which the system that holds the state of an enterprise's resources is also the system that decides and acts on them.
Six stages turning without being asked, inside an authority someone granted, writing to and reading from the one ledger that holds the seven classes of resource. The only line that leaves is the exception.
Autonomous Resource Planning is an architecture in which the system that holds the state of an enterprise's resources is also the system that decides and acts on them. It observes resource state and external signals continuously, forms plans against stated objectives and constraints, executes actions within explicitly granted authority, records the consequence in the same ledger it read from, confirms the intended outcome occurred, and escalates what falls outside its authority or its confidence.
Each clause is there to rule something out. A system that proposes and waits is ruled out by decides and acts. A system that acts into a queue somebody rekeys is ruled out by the same ledger it read from. A system that acts and never checks is ruled out by confirms the intended outcome occurred. A system that acts past what it was given is ruled out by explicitly granted authority.
The definition is written to be failed. If every clause held of every product on the market, it would be describing the market, not a category inside it.
Three things at once
The three hold together or not at all. A system with any two of them is a familiar thing behind a new interface, and each of the three pairs has been sold for decades.
It plans without being asked
The work begins because something in the world moved: a receipt, a bank line, a revised forecast, a delivery that did not arrive. A system that waits to be opened leaves the hardest judgement, which is when the decision was needed, with whoever remembered to open it.
It commits rather than recommends
The decision lands in the record the system already holds, under an authority somebody granted in writing, with its reversal recorded beside it. A recommendation handed to a person to key in has moved the typing and nothing else.
It answers for the outcome
Acting is not the end of the sequence. The system confirms that the result it intended actually occurred, posts the consequence, and raises what it could not absorb, instead of reporting success from its own intent.
Every era automated the record and left the judgement
Each of these was the right answer to the problem in front of it, and none of them was a mistake. Read down the last column instead: what was left to people barely moves in sixty years, which is the whole argument for a new name.
- Material requirements planningWhether the master schedule was achievable, what to do when it was not, and every decision about capacity, labour and money that the material plan implied.
- Manufacturing resource planningClosing the loop. People decided whether the plan was feasible, negotiated the trade-offs between the plant, the sales promise and the cash position, and re-entered the answer.
- Enterprise resource planningEvery decision. The suite held an accurate, shared account of the enterprise, and people read it, judged it and keyed the consequence back in.
- Client/server deliveryThe same decisions as before, now in front of more people in more companies, most of whom had never had an integrated system to argue with.
- Cloud ERPEvery workflow inside it. The system was reachable from anywhere and updated without a project, and a person still decided what to order, what to pay and what to promise.
- Composable and best of breedThe joins. People carried context between systems, reconciled the versions of a record that had drifted apart, and owned the integrations when they broke.
- Assistive AIAuthority. The software proposes and a person accepts, which means the decision, the timing and the consequence all remain where they were before.
- Autonomous resource planningObjectives, constraints, the grants themselves, and everything the system stops on: ambiguity, low confidence and anything outside the bounds it was given.
The loop that has to close
No stage below is new on its own. Reporting observed, analytics interpreted, planning engines planned and workflow acted, decades before any of this was called autonomous. What is new is one system running all six without a person carrying the result between them.
- Take in transactions, events, resource states, constraints and outside signals as they happen.
- Work out what those signals mean for this business: its policies, its history, its commitments.
- Decide what should happen next, given dependencies, policies, objectives and constraints.
- Execute the permitted actions, across every resource the plan touches.
- Confirm the intended outcome actually occurred, record the consequence, and prove the record against the world outside the system.
- Re-plan as conditions move, learn from what the reconciliation showed, and escalate what needs judgement.
The break is nearly always in the same two places: between acting and reconciling, where a system asserts an outcome it never proved, and between reconciling and adapting, where it records what went wrong and changes nothing. The loop, stage by stage
Six levels, and the one where consequence moves
The ladder grades one thing: how much of a resource decision a system carries on its own. The break sits between level 2 and level 3, the first point at which the system can be wrong about something no person chose.
| Level | Name | Who carries the consequence |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Record | A person |
| 1 | Advise | A person |
| 2 | Execute on instruction | A person |
| 3 | Act within bounds | Shared, inside written bounds |
| 4 | Own the outcome | The system |
| 5 | Allocate across resources | The system |
One rule makes the ladder useful, and its absence makes it decorative: grade per resource class, never per company. Cash, inventory, capacity and labour are planned by different mechanisms on different clocks, and they reach different levels in the same building. A single company figure hides the one thing worth knowing, which is where the next increment of autonomy is worth paying for. The maturity model
Seven resource classes
A resource planning system is read class by class, because that is how it is built and how it fails. Six of these have been planned by software since the 1960s. The seventh arrives with the autonomy itself.
Money
cash, receivables, payables, the ledger, the close, treasury
Materials
inventory, procurement, suppliers, logistics
People
labour, roles, assignment, scheduling, workforce planning
Capacity
equipment, facilities, production capacity, throughput
Time
lead times, commitments, calendars, sequencing
Information
master data, documents, contracts, the enterprise record itself
Agents
compute, licences, permissions, authority budgets, escalation capacity
No previous era planned the seventh, because no previous era gave software authority of its own. Once software holds authority, that authority is finite, costed and allocable, with its own utilisation and its own segregation of duties. An autonomous system therefore has to plan the thing doing the planning, which is the one structural addition this category makes to a model that has otherwise held since manufacturing resource planning.
Eight questions, three of which decide it
A definition is worth as much as the test that applies it. Each of these eight is answerable about a system in production, and each has an answer that sounds like a pass and is not.
- Does the system start the work itself, or does a person start it every time?
- Can you print the list of actions the system may take on its own, with the limits on each?
- Does the action land in the system of record, or in a queue somebody rekeys?
- Does the system notice its own failures before a person does?
- For one action taken last quarter, can you recover the inputs, the policy, the alternatives and the evidence?
- When the system is wrong, is there a recorded reversal, or a person cleaning up by hand?
- When conditions move, does the plan move with them without being asked again?
- Does the system stop when it is outside its bounds or below its confidence, and hand over with its evidence?
A system can miss any of the other five and still be doing this, less completely. Miss one of the three marked and it is not: without enumerated authority nobody can say what it was permitted to do, without closure nothing it decided actually happened, and without reconstruction no single decision it took can be reviewed afterwards. The test in full, with the passing and the weak answers
Where this argument is weak
The term is already in public use by other people, and the claim made here is depth rather than priority. What is offered here is a definition specific enough to fail a product against, not a claim to have coined anything. If the name settles somewhere else, the six levels, the seven classes and the eight questions survive the renaming, because none of them depends on the label.
The levels are easy to self-assess generously. Nothing in a ladder stops a team reading its own approval queue as bounded authority, or its nightly rerun as continuous planning. The test exists because the model on its own is too comfortable, and even the test is usually answered by the people with an interest in the answer.
Almost nothing in production today reaches level 4 in any resource class. That makes this a description of a direction and not of a market, and a reader is entitled to discount it accordingly. The honest claim is narrower: the distance between what is sold and what is defined here is the interesting quantity, and naming it precisely is worth more than predicting when it closes.
Autonomy raises accountability questions that are not settled anywhere. Who answers for a decision no person made, what an auditor will accept as evidence of control, and how segregation of duties survives when one system holds both sides of it stay open, and are marked as open, not answered. The objections, including the unresolved ones
Where to go next
One page each, by what you came to do.