Resilient Supply Chain— stories and strategies that keep business moving

Send me a message Given all that has happened in the last 12 months, the importance of cold chains management in supply chain has jumped to the fore. With this in mind I invited Deloitte's Subit Mathew to come on the podcast. Subit is a Managing Director in Deloitte’s Enterprise Performance Consulting Practice and as such manages Deloitte's cold chain solutions. At the end of our intervi...

Send me a message The world has changed enormously in the last 12 months. Ecommerce is at an all time high as people are avoiding going to physical stores, and increasingly ordering online. This has huge implications for the logistics sector. To talk about this and strategies to improve their efficacy I invited Mark Stanton onto the podcast. Mark is GM of Powerfleet for Supply Chain. We had a very...

Send me a message I came across Joseph Grobler after I (virtually) keynoted the Mastering SAP supply chain event in Australia last year. We had some great conversations about how supply chain software is often poorly setup, and how his organisation Transform Value Consulting helps with that. We also touched on how Covid has changed how his business operates. This was a really interesting episode f...

Send me a message It is a new year. In fact we're well into the second month of 2021. Very early into the pandemic I recorded a podcast with SAP's Global Head of Solution Management for Digital Supply Chain Martin Barkman ,  where we had intended to talk about Industry 4.0 but very quickly we got sidetracked into discussing this new pandemic thing, and its implications. Almost a year on,...

Send me a message In the last episode of the podcast David Vallejo talked about Supply Chain Planning , and how that is changing. In this episode, I wanted to dig in a little deeper into some of the reasons why Planning is important - global volatility, both geopolitical, and climactic, and the relationship between the two. So, I invited Jacob Shapiro to come back on the podcast to talk about thes...

Send me a message I'm participating in a 5-part Design to Operate:Live livestream series which streams on LinkedIn Live and Twitter on Wednesdays. I will be co-hosting the next one with my colleague David Vallejo on Wednesday February 17th on the topic of Planning as a Critical Part of a Resilient, Sustainable #SupplyChain . David is the Global Head of Digital Business Planning at SAP, so I t...

Send me a message The Covid pandemic has had seismic repercussions on all aspects of supply chains. To get a flavour of how the manufacturing world has been impacted, and what the future of manufacturing will look like, I invited Mike Lackey back onto the podcast. Mike is SAP's Global VP of Solution Management for Manufacturing, and so is uniquely positioned to comment on this. We had a fasci...

Send me a message Factories are becoming more and more complex animals. They are now connected digital machines, sloughing off gigabytes of data - do we know what to do with it? In this episode I talk to Festo Didactic 's Director of Engineering Ted Rozier and hear how they are equipping colleges with custom built mini-factories, complete with all the equipment, courseware, training for train...

Send me a message I am a big fan of the folks over on the Supply Chain Now podcasts and livestreams. I regularly attend their livestreams, and was even honoured to be asked to be a guest on one of their episodes . I wanted to reciprocate, so I invited the newest podcaster to their fold, Karin Bursa who runs the TekTok Supply Chain Now podcast , which as the name suggests focuses more on the tech s...

Send me a message Eurasian Resources Group is a leading natural resources producer, and one of the world's leading mining and smelting groups. They recently co-developed and implemented a new SAP cloud delivered solution called SAP Asset Strategy and Performance Management  (ASPM). I was keen to know more, so I invited Sergey Margaryan , the Head of their Plant Maintenance Transformation Depa...

Send me a message BDO is one of the largest accountancy firms globally and they recently released their 2021 Middle Market CFO Outlook Survey - an annual survey of 600 CFOs and amongst the findings was that supply chain has emerged as a top 3 challenge for the first time. Curious to know more, I invited Eskander Yavar , leader of BDO’s US Manufacturing Practice to come on the podcast to discuss th...

Send me a message It is episode 100 - wohoo!!! For this episode I wanted to tackle an important topic, and what is more important than the issue of human rights in supply chain? With this in mind I reached out to Dr Jan Hermann who is a Partner in PwC's Sustainability Practice based out of Germany.  Germany is about to pass legislation regulating transparency around slavery in supply chains (...

Send me a message Bridgei2i are an interesting company in the Supply Chain space, offering as they do AI and analytics to organisations via what they call accelerators. I invited Arun Krishnamoorthy , their VP of Supply Chain Analytics to come on the podcast to talk about what it is they do, and how it is different from other companies in the space. This was a really interesting episode of the pod...

Send me a message Siemens and SAP announced a very significant partnership last year .  My colleague, and occasional podcast guest Richard Howells wrote a nice explainer about the partnership which is also worth checking out, as is this quick video . The partnership helps organisations accelerate time to value by enabling a digital thread throughout the manufacturing lifecycle, so  I invited Joe B...

Send me a message Managing quality of your supply chain is especially challenging when you are outsourcing manufacturing, for example. This is a topic I've not yet addressed on the podcast, so I reached out to Sebastien Breteau , CEO and Founder of Qima - a leading provider of quality control and supply chain compliance services to come on the podcast to discuss their offerings, and their new...

Send me a message Digitisation, digital transformation, product as a service - what do these mean, and what are the differences between them. Furthermore, how do you embark on a digital transformation project? For this episode of the podcast I chatted with Luke Smaul , founder of consulting firm Chakra . Luke has spearheaded several large digital transformation projects for some of the world'...

Send me a message Episode 95 - the last Digital Supply Chain podcast episode of 2020 Quick announcement - to help serve you the podcast audience better I have created a chat room on my TomRaftery.com website. Just go to TomRaftery.com/dsc and in there you can leave suggestions for topics for upcoming podcasts, speaker suggestions, feedback on episodes, or create your own topic for people to chat a...

Send me a message I was interested to see how covid has been impacting factories digitisation plans globally so I reached out to IDC Manufacturing Insights Research Manager Lorenzo Veronesi to ask him to have a chat with me on the podcast about what he's seeing. He kindly agreed and we had a fascinating conversation where he shared a lot of what IDC research is finding in this space. This was...

Send me a message My colleague Richard Howells (aka @HowellsRichard on Twitter) penned a great piece on Forbes recently that was timely and topical - Santa's Socially Distanced Supply Chain . In it Richard Richard explores some of the challenges facing many organisation this holiday season, but as seen from the perspective of one of the most complex supply chains on the planet - that of Santa...

Send me a message On Tuesday of this week (Dec 8th) we in SAP along with Microsoft announced a very significant expansion of our partnership to enable customers to design and operate intelligent digital supply chain and Industry 4.0 solutions in the cloud and at the edge. We will also work together to drive interoperability as members of industry alliances, such as the Open Manufacturing Platform...

Send me a message On this week's episode of the podcast I invited Anu Shah to join the podcast to talk about one of SAP's initiatives to help our customers on their supply chain digitisation journeys. The JumpStart initiative is a program to enable customers to get a quick start on their digitisation projects  by identifying a discrete supply chain function, such as planning which could...

Send me a message A scheduling snafu meant that I was without a guest for this episode today, so I did what any good podcast host does in this situation, I stepped in and filled the breach myself! I normally prefer to let my guests shine on this podcast, showing off their expertise while I stay mostly quiet, throwing in the occasional question from time to time. Obviously this time, that wasn&apos...

Send me a message This is the second of my two part podcast series on the challenges of vaccinating everyone against Covid-19. If you missed episode one with Alina Gross, you can check it out here . Background - in August a colleague of mine Alina Gross ( @gross_alinaa on Twitter) penned an excellent in-depth piece of Forbes titled The Next Supply Chain Challenge: How To Vaccinate The World . I wa...

Send me a message This is the first of a two part podcast series on the challenges of vaccinating everyone against Covid-19. Background - in August a colleague of mine Alina Gross ( @gross_alinaa on Twitter) penned an excellent in-depth piece of Forbes titled The Next Supply Chain Challenge: How To Vaccinate The World . I was reminded of that recently when Pfizer and BioNTech announced the success...

Send me a message One aspect of the supply chain I haven't talked about for a while is logistics, so I invited John Tillison onto the podcast. John is Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing for A. Duie Pyle , a US based logistics company. We talked about the impact of the pandemic on the logistics industry. Also, because A. Duie Pyle has been recently recognised by Heavy Duty Trucking for...