This Week's Top Five Stories in Supply Chain

Q&A: Tim Beckhoff, o9 on AI-Driven Demand Planning

In recent years, companies with global supply chains have been forced to undergo constant reconfiguration, driven by geopolitical upheaval. 

As a result, leaders have been turning to AI-driven demand planning to help them better adapt to changing tariffs and trade agreements. 

Through this, organisations can see reduced decision lag, better manage disruptions and build more resilience throughout their supply chains. 

Supply Chain Digital spoke to Tim Beckhoff, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at o9 Solutions to discuss how AI-driven demand planning capabilities are helping companies as they navigate evolving tariffs, through scenario planing and real-time forecasting.

Tim started his career in operations as buyer, specialising in supply chain risk. Throughout this, he explored technology partnerships between his previous company, McKinsey and o9. Here, he gained a passion for delivery-focused responsibilities.

He has now been at o9 for two years, working to deploy concepts into the field.

Blue Yonder vs. ERP Giants: The Battle for the Network

Warehouses play a vital role in the supply chain, but but they need to be tightly managed with significant visibility within.

Global supply chains have many moving parts in them, but warehouses are their own ecosystem within. With inventory movement, alignment of plans and the need to meet demand with real-time changes, they need to operate as a well-oiled machine.

Blue Yonder's warehouse management systems beat out traditional ERP systems, as it bridges the gap between planning and warehouse execution. 

Why Logility Beats Legacy Suites on Fast Time-to-Value

Supply chain planning has shifted significantly over the years, with global changes forcing businesses to rethink their strategies. 

As a result, many of the legacy supply chain management suites have become somewhat outdated, unable to keep up with the speed demanded of supply chains.  

Logility, however, is built to be more agile, meeting the pace with today's ever-changing landscape.

Top 10: Supply Chain Start Ups

The world is led by global giants, but even those giants began with a dream, a plan and some funding. 

Navigating the current market is a trial, but start ups are demonstrating how they can grow within volatility to unlock value for some of those very giants that are dominating the industry.

Through various stages of funding and new innovations, these 10 companies have started to make their mark on the supply chain and logistics industry – despite being less than five years old.

Supply Chain Digital takes a look at 10 of the top start ups to keep an eye on.

Why CSCOs Trust Kinaxis Maestro Over Rigid Legacy ERPs

Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) face unprecedented operational volatility.

In this climate of continuous global disruption, traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from legacy are increasingly exposing their limitations.

Built on rigid architectures, these legacy systems force planning teams into slow, siloed batch processing. By the time an ERP processes data and generates a response, the reality on the ground has already changed.

To bridge this operational gap, CSCOs are turning away from fixed planning cycles and adopting modern supply chain orchestration. At the forefront of this shift is Kinaxis, which unifies planning and execution within a shared, concurrent model.

Rather than waiting for overnight batch updates, the AI-powered Kinaxis Maestro platform allows organisations to evaluate trade-offs, optimise working capital and respond to disruptions in real time.