This is the third in a blog series of four that reviews discussion that occurred during ARC Advisory Group’s 2026 Industry Leadership Forum. Specifically, it details a keynote conversation held with senior executives from Rolls-Royce, BTX Precision, and MxD. Read the full four-part series here: Connected Manufacturing Networks and the New Supply Chain – Logistics Viewpoints
Pillar 2: The Demand Architect
In my previous post, I explored The Market Signal and the shift to real-time, non-linear markets, the first pillar of the modern industrial economy. Today, I’ll dig into the Demand Architect, the orchestrator responsible for fulfilling the value outlined by the market signal.
For decades, the standard operating procedure for industrial OEMs, particularly in discrete markets, was some form of issuing a purchase order, waiting for the parts to arrive, and swinging the penalty stick at the supply chain ecosystem if the order didn’t unfold as planned. That linear, somewhat adversarial approach worked adequately. Today, that transactional model eventually guarantees failure, and those that continue to bake it into their operational DNA are already falling behind.
In today’s increasingly connected business environment, market signals increasingly necessitate decisions that are proactive, accurate, and fast. Passive reaction doesn’t work and will invite disruption that will lead to obsolescence.
During the Wednesday keynote in February at the 30th annual ARC Industry Leadership Forum, I introduced the Demand Architect, exemplified by Greg Davidson, Global Commodity Executive at Rolls-Royce. The Demand Architect is a proactive orchestrator, designing and aligning an incredibly complex ecosystem to respond to the compressed market signals. Greg provided details and examples as to why this second pillar of the new, growing industrial reality is certainly the most visibly disruptive, but also the most necessary.
Moving From Dictation to Orchestration
True industrial innovation and transformation require structural agility and a fundamental shift in leadership and, subsequently, decision making across the organization. Davidson discussed his company’s transition into the Demand Architect role during our panel. On the surface, opening up data and collaborating deeply with external partners seems counterintuitive to lowering risk. However, he noted that following the post-COVID explosion in aerospace demand, Rolls-Royce realized that their traditional “directed buy” model—where the tier-one supplier was solely responsible for managing everything below them—was breaking down under market stress.
While I’m not suggesting leadership necessarily needs to change, that just happened to be the catalyst for Rolls-Royce. The shift began with a new CEO, who came from another industry and so was able to view the aerospace supply chain through a completely different lens. He asked his leadership team a pragmatic question: “What do you guys need to be successful?” It turns out that the answer fell, in part, outside the walls of the organization. Rolls-Royce needed to more aggressively support and collaborate with its supply chain ecosystem.
To be a true Demand Architect, which they saw as mission critical, they had to treat their external partners as extensions of their own enterprise. As an example, they shifted personnel into their raw material teams, expanding it to more than 400 people globally, to actively manage bottlenecks down to the second and third tiers.
Reorganizing for Responsiveness: The “Central Tower” and the “SOS Team”
They also understood that internal changes were required to develop and facilitate a more responsive ecosystem. Rolls-Royce tackled this by creating a “central warehouse” or “central tower” team. Rather than staffing this group only with traditional supply chain experts, they embedded IT and data analytics personnel directly into the team. Their sole job is to build data-driven information capabilities that help segment out market noise, better project demand, and provide operational transparency across the value chain.
Even more radically, they developed an internal “SOS team.” This is a rapid-response group of cross-functional experts, ranging from engineering to demand profiling, with the autonomy to parachute in to help a struggling supplier. Whether a supplier is dealing with casting porosity or struggling to secure rare earth minerals, the SOS team deploys to solve these bottleneck problems that introduce latency in meeting market signals.
Rolls-Royce also put effort into removing any commercial friction related to these interventions. When a severe technical issue arises, they mandate peer-to-peer engineering discussions. An engineer from Rolls-Royce will sit down with the same from the supplier to collaborate on how to fix the problem. Commercial buyers are explicitly banned from the conversation so that any improper vested interest doesn’t influence the outcome. The focus is entirely on the art of the possible and keeping the supply chain moving, not on imposing negative consequences, such as financial penalties.
Tearing Down Walls Without Exposing IP
Achieving this level of architectural agility isn’t easy. It forces incredibly risk-averse companies to overcome the pervasive fear of exposing mission-critical intellectual property. By starting with the market signal, Rolls-Royce was able to define the necessary outcome. In doing so, the value of the benefit was clearly well beyond the risk, which actually turned out to be perceived rather than real once the improvements were put in place.
As I discussed with a few of my ARC colleagues later in the Forum, the solution isn’t to recklessly open the floodgates of data, but to create targeted, secure pathways. Rolls-Royce, for instance, is pushing the envelope by creating new collaborative teams that actively work with and extend into their manufacturing supply chain’s processes. They are fundamentally changing how humans across different companies work together to meet a shared goal.
This is where technology actually earns its keep. The Demand Architect relies on an underlying technical foundation—specifically, Industrial Data Fabrics acting as silo breakers, and Agentic AI to facilitate secure, autonomous communication. By using AI as a targeted toolbox rather than a blanket solution, the Demand Architect manages the massive coordination complexity of this new ecosystem. Technology handles the data meshing and risk mitigation, freeing up the human workforce to do what they do best: focus on delivering production value.
Moving Past Technology Use for the Sake of Technology
Orchestrating a massive, multi-tiered ecosystem requires contextualized data sharing and advanced technological tools. Inevitably, this brings us to the elephant in every room today in artificial intelligence. As I have noted recently, AI is currently the shiniest of shiny objects. The temptation is to throw AI at every process, which inevitably leads to stranded coding, massive computing costs, and counterproductive software bloat. Or as Berardino Baratta, CEO of MxD, perfectly encapsulated, “You don’t need an AI strategy. You need a business strategy that fixes your problems, and AI might be the tool to fix it.”
Innovation leaders approach AI as a powerful toolbox, not a standalone outcome. They use AI to analyze shared design models for manufacturability, to secure data fabrics, and to automate agent-to-agent communication. Furthermore, they strive for VOI (Value on Investment) rather than just traditional ROI, understanding that the strategic value of real-time ecosystem agility exponentially outweighs short-term, isolated efficiency gains.
Finally, successful Demand Architects understand that AI does not replace human ingenuity. Rather, it augments it. If an enterprise attempts to replace human operational knowledge with the artificial variety too quickly, it will cripple its ability to innovate. An effective Demand Architect also recognizes that an enterprise is only as agile as its weakest supplier, and true competitive advantage is built by actively engineering the success of the entire ecosystem.
In our final blog in the series, I’ll outline the third pillar in the new fabric of demand, the agile partner. The blog will outline how companies like BTX Precision have shown market leadership by structurally reorganizing their ecosystem to continuously align with complex market signals in a hyperconnected business world.
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