Chris Mennona

At the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in Denver, Scott Luton sat down with Nari Viswanathan, a veteran innovator in the planning and procurement technology space and a key leader at Coupa. The two reconnected after several recent collaborations—including webinars, industry sessions, and conversations in Dallas—and discussed the new realities of supply chain planning and how organizations are embracing technology like never before.   Coupa and Autonomous Spend Management For those less familiar with Coupa, Viswanathan explained the company as the global leader in autonomous spend management—a framework that brings together direct and indirect spending to help organizations manage total spend more intelligently. Direct spend, of course, is where supply chain operations come into focus, making planning, design, and cost optimization central to the value Coupa delivers. Viswanathan leads Coupa’s global supply chain strategy, shaping how the company positions and scales its solutions across the market. After years spent in supply chain planning technology, he now sits at the intersection of procurement, supply chain, and advanced analytics—an area he believes has never been more exciting or more critical.   Old Problems, New Pressures—and a Greater Willingness to Innovate When asked about the biggest challenges facing planners today, Viswanathan emphasized a…

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   It started over drinks, 80s music, and a shared frustration that has probably launched more good organizations than any strategic planning process ever has. The Circular Supply Chain Coalition, or CSCC, came out of a realization that a lot of the right work was already happening, in reverse logistics, in remanufacturing, in local procurement, in community-based value chains, but nobody had connected it. The people doing the work were not in the same room. The companies with the materials were not talking to the processors who could recover them. The states with enabling policies were not linked to the investors looking for exactly those environments. So the coalition became, as its founders describe it, a collector of collectors. The focus right now is on three priority waste streams: batteries, semiconductors, and e-waste. These were not chosen randomly. They have two elements in common. They carry geopolitical consequence, meaning the supply chains behind them are controlled by other countries and that is a known vulnerability. And they have business cases that a CFO can actually evaluate. That second part matters more than people in the sustainability world usually admit. The hub…