Supply Chain Management Review

Editor’s note: How Do you Really Do It? is a monthly series on Supply Chain Management Review designed to clarify how organizations can adopt common supply chain strategies. The series is authored by Andrew Byer, a former P&G supply chain leader, and Mike Dobslaw, who leads EY’s Supply Chain Planning Practice, and appears on the second Thursday of the month.

The U.S. industrial and distribution property market is continuing through a period of transformation that has direct implications for supply chain resilience, cost structure and long-term competitiveness. Rising labor costs, accelerating use of automation, shifting demand patterns and tightening infrastructure constraints are fundamentally changing how companies think about where and how they operate.

Companies increasingly recognize that supplier integration into new product development (SINPD) is critical for innovation, speed to market, cost reduction, and competitive advantage. Yet many organizations continue to struggle with one fundamental issue: supply chain management (SCM) professionals are often expected to support strategic supplier collaboration without being fully prepared, empowered, or included early enough in the process.

When a major supply chain transformation program kicks off—a network redesign, a new ERP, a nearshoring initiative, a supplier consolidation—who is in the room? In most organizations, the answer is operations, IT, procurement and strategy. Finance, if it appears at all, shows up later, asked to validate numbers generated without its input and constrained by decisions it had no hand in making.

BROADCAST: June 30, 2026 TIME: 2:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM PDT Category strategies often die in static slide decks, leaving sourcing teams to rely on manual spreadsheets, intuition and now generic LLMs. This "Strategy-to-Execution Gap" leaks millions in margin. Join Jacob Gorm Larsen, Founder, Moneyball CPH and experts from Coupa for a practitioner’s guide to building a connected intelligence loop that turns strategic intent into mathematical execution.

The push for supply chain artificial intelligence investments is not facing a lot of pushback from the finance office, but it is facing scrutiny on the return being generated. “The COO is getting money from the CFO using the word AI,” Al Mendoza, U.S. & Americas supply chain leader for EY, told Supply Chain Management Review in an interview at the Gartner Supply Chain/Xpo Symposium last month.

Part 1: The room goes quiet A few weeks ago, I showed a colleague a demo of a supply chain planning application I had built. A sharp, experienced supply chain planner who has been navigating demand forecasting, capacity management, and supplier risk for over a decade. She is exactly the kind of person who should be excited about AI. “That’s cool,” she said politely when I opened the app.

Global business leaders can no longer treat AI regulation as a secondary issue. Regulatory divergence is reshaping supply chains by imposing uneven compliance obligations that extend across supplier networks. At one end are stringent, risk-based models such as the European Union AI Act, which impose detailed compliance, documentation, and governance requirements. These requirements extend deep into supplier networks and shape how AI systems are designed and deployed.

After four years and more than 22 startup pilots across Asia Pacific, PepsiCo is changing the focus of its Greenhouse Program from experimentation to operational deployment as the company looks to integrate sustainability technologies deeper into its supply chain network.

The NextGen Supply Chain Conference has announced that Mar Gimeno, Associate Director, U.S. Supply Chain at Eli Lilly and Company, will join the keynote lineup for the 2026 event. Gimeno will speak at the conference taking place Oct. 21-23, 2026, at the W Nashville hotel in Nashville, Tennessee.