“Industries need to find a way to move into the predictive area first: focusing on the customer, inventory, and cost.”

– Mike Griswold is the Vice President of Research at Gartner

Mike Griswold is the Vice President of Research at Gartner, specializing in retail with a particular focus on forecasting and replenishment. He is responsible for Gartner’s annual Top 25 Supply Chain ranking and joins Supply Chain Now on a monthly basis to discuss the latest in retail supply chains from an analyst’s perspective.

In this hour of anything-goes exchanges with Mike, the Supply Chain Now community brought their best questions for this highly qualified guest to answer. From healthy v. unhealthy inventory to basketball to designing network capabilities, Mike has a perspective you won’t want to miss.

In this conversation, Mike answers questions from Co-hosts Greg White and Scott Luton and the livestream audience about:

· During COVID, inventory was full, and we kept adding products at a faster rate than they were moving back out. How can we manage situations like this?

· How do you view demand driven material requirement planning, focusing on strategic inventory, decoupling, and buffer-level management materializing in a complex supply chain setup, given a transition from traditional MRP setup, focusing on statistical forecasts to market demand?

· How do you see the future of sourcing roles after all these pandemic and digitalization driven changes take place? How many years do we have to live with a question mark?