Resilient Supply Chain— stories and strategies that keep business moving

Send me a message We (in SAP) are running a webinar on September 22nd titled Building a Sustainable Supply Chain for the High Tech Industry . The idea of this webinar is to show how you can optimize both your shareholder return and your design-to-operate processes for sustainability. Given that the subject is both climate, and supply chain-related, I felt this made it an ideal episode to publish b...

Send me a message There is a massive amount of waste in the fresh produce industry - of all fruit/veg grown, only 55% makes it to the store shelves. The other 45% is wasted. This is the problem ClariFruit is aiming to solve using a combination of computer vision, AI, and analytics. To find out more I invited Elad Mardix , CEO and co-founder of ClariFruit to come on the podcast to tell me more. We...

Send me a message So, Tony Flath invited me to chat on his The Wave of Change podcast a few months back to talk tech and supply chain. It was a great chat . Time to return the compliment. Tony and I had a super chat in this episode around AI, Robots, and other emerging technologies, and how they are impacting supply chains globally. As is often the case, I learned loads, I hope you do too... If yo...

Send me a message Recycling and refurbishment are two topics we don't discuss enough on this podcast so I thought I'd change that with this episode. Sagent is a service provider to the telco space and it helps divert large amounts of communications equipment out of the waste stream. I invited Gordon Smith , President, and CEO of Sagent to come on the podcast to tell me how they achieve t...

Send me a message SAP has a very close partnership with Accenture around supply chain and Industry 4.0 so I wanted to invite one of their supply chain experts to come on the podcast. Max Brandl is the CEO of Salt Solutions, part of Accenture's Industry X, as well as a Managing Director in Accenture so he seemed an ideal candidate. Fortunately, he was more than willing to come on the podcast....

Send me a message Circular Performance as a Sustainable Service (CPaSS) - is a real mouthful, right? What is it? It is as if Circular Economy and Product as a Service had a performance-focussed child! I hadn't heard the term before I chatted to today's guest on the podcast, Lloyd O'Donnell . Lloyd is the Global Venture Lead for Circular Performance as a Service at SAP, and he introd...

Send me a message Food supply chains are some of the most complex supply chains that exist. And demands from the end consumer are growing day by day, adding to the complexity. One company working to address the complexity, adding transparency for the consumer, while easing access to fair and pricing and capital is GrainChain . To find out more I invited Luis Macias , founder and CEO of GrainChain...

Send me a message Keeping it short and sweet - I'm headed off on vacation for the next few weeks so the podcast is going on a brief break too. I will be back publishing the podcast at its normal twice-weekly (Monday and Friday at 6 am CET) cadence resuming with a cool episode on August 27th.  If you get lonely for the podcast, there are 152 episodes in the back catalog you can check out if yo...

Send me a message Procurement is a topic we don't cover enough on this podcast. Imagine then if we could cover off procurement, automation, and sustainability in one episode - and that is just what I did with this one. Meet Bid Ops . BidOps is a sourcing and procurement operations platform that helps procurement teams track key metrics, identify exceptions and run faster sourcing events to in...

Send me a message The food supply chain is ripe (sorry, terrible pun!) for disruption. It has been one of the slowest supply chains to adopt digital technologies. One of the companies trying to change this is HeavyConnect . HeavyConnect are a California based startup who have created a platform for what they call the first mile, which helps alleviate a lot of the time spent on paperwork and compli...

Send me a message The pandemic has seen a huge increase in the number of people taking advantage of e-commerce options for their purchases. Smaller retailers have had to scramble to get up to speed. One company aiming to help out here is Sendle .  Sendle is a delivery company which promises 100% carbon neutral delivery and it is aimed at the small business sector. To find out more about Sendle I i...

Send me a message Sustainability, and the circular economy are two topics which are only gaining in importance. I have covered them in several previous podcasts, but this time I wanted to approach the topics from an analysts perspective, so I invited  IDC 's Maggie Slowik  to join me on the podcast. Maggie is a Research Manager for IDC's Manufacturing Insights team and has published rese...

Send me a message Industry 4.0 projects are complex, by definition because of the number of hardware (and software) providers involved typically. One project that tries to simplify this issue is the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance . The alliance brings together some of the largest software and hardware organisations in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem to discuss how they can work more closely together for th...

Send me a message I've not done an episode of the podcast on the topic of Augmented Reality's usefulness in Supply Chains before now, so it was about time to put that right. Librestream is one of the leading companies in the industrial AR space so I invited Jon Newman, their VP of Product Development to come on the podcast to talk about how AR can help alleviate skills shortages, improve...

Send me a message When we think of the world of fashion, sustainability is one of the last words we'd associate with it. However, Queen of Raw wants to change that. Queen of Raw has built a software platform to help organisations discover, buy, and sell material that would otherwise go to landfill, or be burned. Given that around $120 billion of material is wasted annually, there's a hug...

Send me a message The worlds of low-code and no-code are really taking off, and starting to make convincing inroads into the realm of Supply Chain. To find out more about how low-code and no-code can help supply chains I invited Gabriel Paunescu , CEO of Naologic , a no-code enterprise SaaS platform to come on the podcast to have a quick chat about this. We had an excellent conversation and, as is...

Send me a message A relatively new field of AI called Deep Reinforcement Learning is starting to open up and shows a lot of promise . One company making use of Deep RL in the supply chain area is Pathmind . I invited the founder and CEO of Pathmind, Chris Nicholson to come on the podcast to explain what Deep RL is, why it is better than other forms of AI/ML, and how it can be used in the supply ch...

Send me a message Connecting Food is a startup in the supply chain transparency space (specifically in food as the name would imply). They have developed a platform powered by blockchain to provide real-time traceability of food products, and have several large customers in the agri-food space, including  Herta . To discuss this initiative, I invited Connecting Food co-founder and Managing Directo...

Send me a message In this the sixth episode of the Industry 4.0 on Fridays series I invited one of our hardware partners , Kuka, to come on the podcast to discuss the close partnership SAP has with Kuka, and the reasons why these kinds of partnerships are required for successful Industry 4.0 projects. From Kuka we had Christian Liedtke , and to talk about the SAP side of the partnership we had Ale...

Send me a message The US Consumer Brands Association came out recently with their Q1 Economic Pulse report which showed that demand for consumer-packaged goods is not letting up any time soon. All the demand has contributed to a supply chain at its breaking point. To learn more I invited Tom Madrecki to come on the podcast. Tom is Vice President of Supply Chain at the Consumer Brands Association,...

Send me a message Sustainability in supply chains is an extremely important topic these days. Atos do a huge amount of work in this space so I reached out to them to have someone come on to talk about what they're doing in the space. I got to speak to not one, but two of their senior execs - Prof dr Abbas Shahim , Global Head of Digital Decarbonisation at Atos. Abbas drives end to end custome...

Send me a message The agriculture and food production supply chains are some of the most complex, least connected, that exist. To talk about strategies to resolve that I invited Lindsay Suddon to come on the podcast. Lindsay is the Chief Strategy Officer for Progrica - a global provider of independent connectivity and data-driven support solutions for the agriculture and animal health industries....

Send me a message In this the fifth episode of the industry 4.0 on Fridays series I talk about the importance of Industry 4.0 in helping organisations reach their emissions reduction sustainability goals. I spoke to Ganesh Bukka , Wipro's Global Head of Industry 4.0 and Pavneet Bedi   Channel Director, Industry4.NOW Global Partnerships at SAP. We had an excellent conversation and, as is often...

Send me a message At our annual customer conference Sapphirenow last week SAP announced the SAP Business Network . The new Business Network brings together the Ariba Network , SAP Logistics Business Network and SAP Asset Intelligence Network . Over 5.5 million organizations will benefit from being members of this connected community. The announcement received a lot of press and I wanted to know mo...

Send me a message With supply chains coming under all kinds of pressures and disruptions globally, any and all steps that you can take to automate, and optimise to make supply chains more resilient and sustainable are steps in the right direction. With this in mind I had a great chat recently with Alex Ramirez , the CEO and co-founder of Cognitops . Cognitops uses machine learning to operationalis...