Art of Supply

"We have that emotional pull to group together as humans and fight the automation. The reality is you cannot have one without the other, and they are very much working together." -Matt Naslund , Chief Commercial Officer, Mytra As businesses look to streamline operations and optimize decision-making, a combination of hardware, software, and automation offer a solution. The challenge then becomes fi...

In 2001, Jim Collins published the book 'Good to Great.' He was supported by a team that  invested 10.5 'people years' over the course of 5 calendar years to figure out what allows some good companies to become great companies. Their research revealed key findings about leadership, use of technology, building a team, company culture, and vision. In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly...

Many of the supply chain news stories we covered in 2024 look ready to carry right over - or even rise to the top - as we start a new year. Some of these stories are likely to re-emerge with the incoming Trump Administration, while others are ready for a change in direction thanks to geopolitics. Supply chain professionals that already have an eye out for breaking news will be best positioned to r...

This year on Art of Supply, we welcomed a fantastic group of guests. Each interview episode creates two kinds of challenges: asking questions worthy of the guest's expertise and capturing a conversation that lives up to audience expectations. Looking back on the interviews we ran in 2024, there are a few key messages that stand out, as individual points of view and what they collectively offer sup...

"I think if you could summarize what the trend is going to be in the future - It's going to be volatile. That's the trend." -  Tim Richardson , Founder and CEO of Iter Consulting In order to be influential with the C-suite, someone must have experience and expertise in a given subject. They must do detailed technical work and analysis to prepare their strategy recommendations and to be ready to an...

"Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I'm humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings."   -  J. Ann Selzer , President and Owner, Selzer & Company    Data and analysis are at the heart of nearly everything attempted in modern business. And while human skill is critical in the process of converting data into insight,...

"The reason I like listening is I think, 'If I'd have been CPO there or in other organizations, what would I have done to try and prevent that? And what red flags would I have held up? And what can we learn from that so that it doesn't happen again?'" - Alex Jennings , CEO and co-founder of The Alchemie Network We all consume content for different reasons–education, entertainment, or otherwise. Th...

When we cover a news story on Art of Supply, we stick with it, even when it seems to have gone cold. In late August, we got an update on the case of the 53 migrants who lost their lives as a result of illegal attempted smuggling over the Mexico border back in 2022. On June 27th, 2022, an abandoned tractor trailer was found near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The truck had mechanica...

When something goes wrong in the supply chain, it is never good news. It always leads to disruption, often costs a lot of money, and sometimes people get hurt - or worse. In July of 2024, the USDA suspended production at a Boar's Head processing plant in Jarratt, Virginia. A listeria outbreak, the worst such outbreak in over a decade, had started in the plant. The facility has been closed indefini...

"Humans are so much more effective in processing something visually than, let's say, a table or two pieces of text next to each other. If you see it on a map, you can say, okay, this line goes like this, the other goes like this. I can make the connection in my head very easily that, okay, this is what changes. And it also makes it very easy to sort of have an opinion on it, because it clicks in y...

The United States Postal Service occupies a unique spot in the supply chain.  On the one hand, it is a federal agency, tasked with delivering mail to every home, business, and P.O. box 6 (and sometimes 7) days per week. On the other hand, it does not "generally" receive taxpayer funding; it must meet its mission by selling postage and services. Thanks to this middle space between the worlds of pub...

"Most fundamentally, strategy is about asking good questions, creating alternatives, and then making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. [...] It's a place where you have a 360-degree view of a business." - Ashley Hubka , Senior Vice President & General Manager, Walmart Business Corporate and consumer buying started and developed on separate tracks, and while there are some things th...

In the final part of this four-part special series, we compare and contrast the actual policy positions of Democratic Candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Candidate Former President Donald J. Trump.  With less than two weeks until election day, procurement and supply chain professionals must have plans in place for the eventuality of either candidate being voted into office, focus...

In part three of this four-part special series, we will cover the policies and plans of Republican Candidate former President Donald Trump.  Former President Donald Trump is 78 Years old, and a former businessman/real estate developer as well as the former host of The Apprentice. He became the nominee on July 18, 2024 when he accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention Listen in...

In part two of this four-part special series, we will cover the policies and plans of Democratic Candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.  Vice President Kamala is 60 Years old and a former Senator and Attorney General from the State of California. She became the presumptive Democratic nominee on July 21, 2024 when President Biden suspended his campaign for re-election, and the official nominee on...

There are two weeks to go until the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Interest, speculation, and tension have been building all year. Most news coverage of the election is intended to sway voters, hyperbolic to a fault, and not tailored to the specific information needs of procurement and supply chain professionals. What we really need to know is what each major party candidate has said and what li...

'Brave New World' was published by Aldous Huxley in 1932, right between two World Wars and during a time of accelerated scientific discovery. It comes as no surprise, then, that this fictional dystopian society 600 years in the future had adopted Henry Ford as their spiritual leader. 92 years later, we find ourselves in another time of rapid technological advancement, innovation that often seems t...

"Let me be clear: we don't want any form of semi-automation or full automation. We want our jobs—the jobs we have historically done for over 132 years." - Harold Daggett , President of the International Longshoremen's Association  In April of 2024, most 'experts' felt that a strike of unionized workers at ports along the East and Gulf Coasts was unlikely. The International Longshoremen's Associati...

"The vigor with which companies left to go to the Far East and pursue low cost country sourcing has certainly not been reversed. That's why it is largely emotional; it's largely talk." - Thomas Goldsby , Dee and Jimmy Haslam Chair of Logistics at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville Business never allows us to stop learning. You might not take formal classes or p...

"Digital empathy is the ability to humanize customer behaviors, preferences, and aspirations through the connection between human-centered data, insights, and the meaningful customer engagement powered by those insights." - Brian Solis, Forbes Contributor Despite the fact that AI and automation seem to dominate business discussions, we haven't stopped talking about relationships and soft skills. A...

"Folks from Dell to HP to Nike to Hasbro to Sony to Apple to Google to Goldman, they're all looking back at India and saying, let's go double down, triple down and build a presence here." - Samir Kapadia , Managing Principal at Vogel Group and Founder and CEO at India Index Most companies are obsessed with moving their supply chains out of and away from China - whether it is for regulatory, risk,...

"The way we were running distribution, the processes we were using, it wasn't a matter of, 'Well, just incrementally improve what you've got.' "We needed to rethink, take a step back and say, 'Are we really set up the way we need to be set up?'" - Marcia Brey , VP of Logistics for GE Appliances (via the WSJ) GE Appliances recently made news for a series of planned investments in their supply chain...

Procurement and supply chain professionals rely upon competitive market dynamics. After all, competition drives innovation, cost savings, efficiency, and - profit. Anything that changes the dynamics around the benefits associated with disclosed innovation has the potential to alter how companies invest, how much of that information they make public, and, ultimately, the value and diversity of solu...

"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism." - Norman Vincent Peale The Art of Supply podcast regularly covers topics that come with a bit of discomfort: allegations of child labor and greenwashing, the role of government regulations in bringing about change, and China, and absolutely anything to do with China. It isn't possible to talk about t...

There are a lot of preconceived notions about the barriers preventing electrified road freight from becoming mainstream. It is seen as too difficult, expensive, complicated, inefficient, and more. Most of those perceptions are based on the approaches to electrified trucking that have been tried so far. Perhaps by taking a different approach we can advance the transition away from diesel. In this e...