Supply Chain 2026 or Supply Chain 2008? Part II

Still continuing our “the more things change, the more things stay the same” theme, back in 2008, the Supply Chain Digest published an article on Key Trends Impacting Supply Chain Management and Logistics for 2008 where it asked a number of leading academics and practitioners what they saw coming. (Their responses are summarized in this SI post.)

Nine (9) experts weighed in and provided 24 thoughts on what they saw coming in 2008. Those thoughts more-or-less fell into seven themes, and for the most part, those themes are the same themes today. Moreover, the specific concepts addressed are more-or-less the concepts being addressed today. Let’s continue to take them theme by theme.

Automation / Tech

Three (3) of the nine (9) experts centered on automation/tech as a core theme and stated that they believed:

  • Enhanced Visibility and Automation will take hold in logistics
  • The firms that recognize that a fresh approach focussed on value, cash flow, and light, non-intrusive, web-service-based, value-add software components that work with existing solutions and technologies will be the ones that make progress.
  • Successful supply chain technologies will become solution/results focussed, not just technology-focussed.
  • On-Demand / SaaS will continue to gain traction – particularly in TMS

Enhanced visibility is now needed across the entire supply chain. If you don’t identify a disruption at the source three levels down your supply chain (mine collapse, plant fire, etc. resulting in a material or part shortage), you won’t have time to recover by the time your tier 1 supplier misses the delivery date.

The best solutions are those that plug-and-play with the ones you already have — that connect out of the box. That’s why I2O (the “term-du-jour”) solutions are so hot — they help an organization plug and play disparate systems together.

The real leaders are those that use technology as an enabler, not a talent replacement, and definitely not as the ultimate solution. They focus on next generation tech that augments intelligence and makes their talent more efficient.

Despite all the hype that Agentic AI will take over, since the majority of it is based on hallucinatory Gen-AI and failures are becoming commonplace enough that organizations are losing faith in the hype, organizations will soon return to trustworty multi-tenant SaaS based on (A)RPA and deterministically controlled/gated agents, and efficient, affordably priced next-gen SaaS will soon come to the forefront again.

Logistics

Two (2) of the nine (9) experts centered heavily on logistics as a core theme and stated that they believed:

  • The need for Integrated Logistics will increase.
  • Carrier bankruptcies will increase in 2008.
  • The biggest challenge carriers will face is staying afloat as lower volumes and reduced margins crunch their cash-flow.
  • The biggest challenge for shippers will be maintaining service levels as carriers exit unprofitable markets and lanes.

The need for integrated logistics is still increasing as the constant interruptions across the global supply chains come fast and furious. We’re in a reality where you need to re-route shipments on the fly at not only every cross-dock and modal interchange point, but at every intermediate stop. Major road, bridge and border closures will force new routes; port, canal, and strait closures will force alternative shipping options or a switch to air cargo; sanctions will force entirely new carriers, routes, and supply chains; and so on. Once you head down the wrong route, it can take days to backtrack and select a new one, potentially causing perishable cargo to be wasted. Once your cargo is boarded on a ship that might be halted mid-route, it’s too late to have any hope of getting it on time. Once it gets into the hands of a now sanctioned carrier or hits a port in a sanctioned country, you’re never getting it back.

Carrier bankruptcies are a regular occurrence every time recessions cause a significant drop in spending and bookings drop, oil prices shoot up, insurance rates shoot up, or global pandemics prevent critical maintenance parts from being obtained and too much of the fleet goes offline. We’ve had multiple instances of mass carrier shutdowns and bankruptcies over the past 20 years (2008 recession, introduction of Map-21 in 2013 [RIP-21], COVID, and now the tariff crisis (with carrier shutdowns in 2025 almost equalling the closure rate of RIP-21: about 8,000 last year compared to about 10,000 during RIP-21).

Now that volumes are still down on many lanes and in many sectors due to the tariff crisis and rising oil costs are crushing their margins again, carriers are again desperately struggling to stay afloat.

Maintaining service levels is a considerable challenge with declining margins and the need to maintain secondary lanes that will never operate at capacity in order to secure major contracts.

Supply Chain 2026 or Supply Chain 2008? Part I

Continuing on our “the more things change, the more things stay the same” theme, back in 2008, the Supply Chain Digest published an article on Key Trends Impacting Supply Chain Management and Logistics for 2008 where it asked a number of leading academics and practitioners what they saw coming. (Their responses are summarized in this SI post.)

Nine (9) experts weighed in and provided 24 thoughts on what they saw coming in 2008. Those thoughts more-or-less fell into seven themes, and for the most part, those themes are the same themes today. Moreover, the specific concepts addressed are more-or-less the concepts being addressed today. Let’s take them theme by theme.

Delivered Cost

Four (4) of the nine (9) experts centered on cost as a core theme and stated that they believed:

  • total delivered cost will take hold as a concept
  • The required cross-functional focus needed to reduce costs will not get its due in most organizations
  • The firms that recognize that a fresh approach focussed on value, cash flow, and light, non-intrusive, web-service-based, value-add software components that work with existing solutions and technologies will be the ones that make progress
  • There will be an extensive focus on controlling oil and logistics costs
  • Businesses will start to understand that supply chain efficiency is linked to price.

Total delivered cost is still a major theme today with the tariff mania, the steep price hikes in certain categories and shipping with the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz issues, and the increasingly price-sensitive consumer economy that is cash strapped as a result of so many essentials skyrocketing in price that is putting extra pressure on manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to keep costs down across the board.

Furthermore, in organizations that have already implemented reasonably modern procurement, logistics, and supply chain solutions, and achieved some process and cost savings, the only way they are going to get the next level of savings is with cross-functional coordination — reducing overstock and stock-outs; streamlining shop-floor procurement (from central warehouses and suppliers) with automation across manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and procurement; etc.

The best results always involve identifying where automation and augmented intelligence can increase process efficiency and help identify more savings.

Oil and logistics costs are again at the forefront.

Finally, businesses have always known that supply chain efficiency is always linked to price. Business exists for Procurement, and it only continues to exist if it is more efficient in Procurement than individuals acting on their own.

Strategy/Models

Four (4) of the nine (9) experts also centered on cost as a core theme and stated that they believed:

  • Strategy will become more important
  • Companies will re-examine their strategic supply chain design decisions with regards to outsourcing
  • Software and Service Provider Business Models will Continue to Change
  • SCM organizations will have to focus more time and effort on tactical and operational issues driven by economic and competitive pressures

Strategy is becoming more important by the day as the rate of man-made disasters exceeds even natural ones, which have increased five fold over the last couple of decades. Especially with an AI-Hype induced market crash coming.

As a result of the tariff mania, companies are finally reconsidering their outsourcing and seriously looking for friendly sourcing, near sourcing, and home sourcing options where they have the opportunity to do so. For complex electronics or manufactured components that can only be produced in a few factories in the world, companies don’t have any choice but to outsource for those components but they are rethinking where final production takes place and then importing just what they need into select destinations.

The reality is that the fundamental capabilities of the vast majority of today’s software offerings are not that much different than the fundamental capabilities of the same software 20 years ago. The only difference: true multi-tenant cloud SaaS, hundreds of features you probably don’t use, greatly improved user interfaces, and more data to power them. Not counting Gen-AI, which is not reliable anyway, earlier versions of every other AI tech existed 20 years ago. And maybe the processing power wasn’t available to the average user or corporation, but the tech was there. However, most business apps don’t need AI, and all of the core procurement, supply chain, logistics, production, etc. functionality was there 20 years ago. Integration wasn’t out of the box, sometimes took forever to get basic data transfer between systems, and often happened just in time for a system upgrade. And the workflows were often so clunky it would take days to do what should take about an hour. Thus, since no one wants to buy the same stuff over and over, you need to change the business model to make it happen. Also, most consultants sell the same playbook for at least a decade, so they need to change the business model to hook you over and over.

The constant changing economic landscape as a result of tariff mania, the intermittent availability of straits and canals that change on a daily basis, the sanction wars, and other constant turmoil is forcing tactical and operational issues driven by economic pressure to the forefront.

Today’s “Social” and “Professional” Sites are Bad Netizens! So What Do We Do?

Two decades ago, I asked: Are You Being a Good Netizen because odds were if you were reading Sourcing Innovation (or, at the time, e-Sourcing Form or Spend Matters or one of the other sites offering you best practice advice and free insights on a daily basis) you were a consultant, service, or software provider. And while that wasn’t a bad thing, it also wasn’t a good thing.

The reason: the people who needed to be reading these independent sites the most were the actual procurement and sourcing professionals that these sites were created to serve. People who didn’t have regular access to high-priced best practice consultants, training course, or local professional groups to learn from. People who were thrust into the Island of Misfit Toys with little or no experience. People who needed real help, especially when it came to understanding the root of their problem, what processes and knowledge were needed to address them, and how to identify the right technology, and then solution provider, to help them.

People who, once they understood what they needed, would happily invite the consultancy or solution provider for a briefing or demo once they understood what that provider had to offer — yet few, (and sometimes) if any, consultancies or solution providers would tell their customers about the great resources that would not only help the customer, but the consultancy or solution provider. They weren’t good netizens, even when it would cost them nothing and only help them in the end. (And, frankly, helping a customer understand you’re not the right provider for them and saving you months of sales cycle effort only for the customer to walk away when the light-bulb turned on is a good thing — you want to spend your time with potential customers whom your solution is right for, because, once those customers get a taste of that solution, they’ll never let it go. While it’s true that organizations never want to change tech because of the time, effort, and cost required, it’s ten times true for tech that actually works that users like — they will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it, and when it’s a department/low-enough cost solution, even if corporate mandates something new, that department or user will still renew a license on a P-Card to keep it.)

Back before the social and professional networks were a big thing, the average buyer had no source of information beyond the country’s professional organization, the highly redacted analyst and consultancy sites, and whatever Google would serve them. That was not nearly enough.

But then the social and professional sites came along, and, for a while, things started to get better. Peers could inform each other of third party and independent sites that had free knowledge for the taking. And for a while, that’s what happened.

But then things changed, especially with the two most popular and commonly used sites (and, more or less, the only two sites that remain), when their focus shifted from enabling people to connect and learn to extracting money from their users any way they could, tweaking the algorithms to only advertise paid content or content from their most popular posters and favouring the few that regurgitate the mainstream hype over the independent thinkers trying to move knowledge, or at least the conversation, forward.

They’re not good netizens, and it’s hard for people who need good content to find the content they want.

Used to be you could Google, but now that “AI summary” is injected by default, the sources, and real information gets buried.

So we’re back to the early 2000s, where the only solution is for providers to stop pushing the hype and start sharing the knowledge again. There aren’t many sites left from when SI started (with Jon W. Hansen‘s Procurement Insights now being the 2nd oldest blog), but others have arisen — but how many people know about them?

(Including those who might follow the authors on LinkedIn and maybe see every third or fifth post. We’re talking about

and others. How many people really know about these sites? The answer: Not enough.)

So, pretend it’s the early noughts and go back to sharing human to human what’s really useful and what really matters. Otherwise, you’ll just end up getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator as a result of all the derivative Gen-AI garbage posts that now clog your social and professional media feeds.

The New Market Dilemma IV: Buyers Still Win the Battles!

Vendors and Consultants are but a small portion of the industry, and the economy … as Buyers, you work for organizations that compose the majority. The only way we’re truly going to get back to business-as-usual is if you use the vision provided by the vendors looking ahead to solutions (and not looking back to outdated manuals or just offloading their work to hallucinatory Gen-AI LLMs) to identify what clarity you need, bring in consultants to help you realize it (and the significant ROI that accompanies it), and then use your newfound “savings” to procure the best-of-breed sourcing, procurement, and supply chain visibility technology offered by the visionary vendors, as this is the technology that will help you increase productivity and significantly reduce your costs across the board and survive the AI Hype Induced Market Crash to come.

We don’t know how bad the crash is going to be, and it might be a long road to recovery that requires a significant effort and initiative on your part (depending on the size, complexity, and focus of your organization), but the starting point is clear. So here’s a simple step-by-step guide to get you on the right path.

  1. Do a real process and spend analysis.
  2. Bring in process and category experts to get you real time savings on your most time-consuming processes and your most profitable tier-1 categories.
  3. Implement workflow and process orchestration and e-Procurement systems to realize the savings.
  4. Adopt e-Sourcing to streamline and maximize the savings potential on your tier-2 categories.

REAL ANALYSIS

We’re not talking about a simple time tracking exercise on a step-wise basis based on progression points, we’re talking about real end-to-end process analysis in terms of how much actual human time is spent on each step (not just when the steps happen), why, if the process can be redesigned to take out the time-consuming steps, and, if not, if the steps can be redesigned to take less time. It’s about real efficiency, not just a bit of streamlining with thoughtless automation.

And we’re talking about real spend analysis — not just loading your AP data into a UNSPSC cube and running out of the box reports on your top 10 vendors, top 10 categories, and top 10 departments. Even if you don’t know the exact amounts, a simple internal survey will tell you those with uncanny accuracy. And it’s definitely not throwing random spend data into your LLM of choice and asking for it to find “savings”. That’s just going to run the same dumb reports and give you the “obvious” recommendations that you already know, and that for one reason or another, you can’t do because of existing contracts, specific product needs, etc.

We’re talking about loading all of your spend-related data -— AP, Invoice, Contract, Third-Party Price Indices, etc. — in a real spend analysis product that will let you slice and dice it any way you can think of so that you can identify (a) where you have made overpayments and extract refunds and (b) identify the top categories with with the most savings potential. If you haven’t done this before, you’ll want to bring in an expert. There are a few providers in this space that typically find tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, and occasionally millions, of dollars in overpayments within a day. The ROI is well worth the investment.

CATEGORY EXPERTS

This is especially important in categories like energy, telecommunications, utilities, and SaaS that require significant expertise that you might not have. While you might be able to negotiate a 15% cost decrease in a buyer’s market if you’re well informed, a seasoned veteran who has been negotiating these deals day in and day out for a decade (or two) will find a way to save you 30%. And when many of the firms will work on contingency, i.e. you don’t pay until the new contract is cut for an amount less than what you’re paying now, the ROI will be significant.

IMPLEMENT MODERN E-PROCUREMENT

Up to 60% of negotiated savings never materialize at many companies. If you don’t implement state-of-the-art end-to-end e-procurement systems orchestrated with your sourcing, supplier, and supply chain solutions, with price control capabilities (contract integration, punch-out price verification, authorizations for off-contract spend), you too could lose 60% of the savings you negotiated.

ADOPT NEXT GENERATION E-SOURCING

While you’ll still want to bring in the big-guns for the big savings opportunities, as the ROI will be many times what the big-guns cost you, there will be a large number of tier-2 categories where the savings opportunities, though substantial, won’t be as significant if you have to pay high-powered consultants. These are the categories where you get your best returns if you can run the events quickly, and efficiently, in house. And this is what modern e-Sourcing execution platforms allow you to do … especially on categories where you need to go back to market regularly because the volatility is too high to risk long term contracts.

The key is a modern sourcing execution platform that will let you incorporate the right amount of automation, market intelligence, optimization, analytics, and suggestion. It’s all about allowing the buyer to spend just the right amount of time to extract the value and not a second more.