Joel Beal

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now! We started this week off with an episode of Dial P for Procurement with host Kelly Barner. She is accompanied by Bull Demartino Chief Product Officer and Constantine Limberakis the Senior Director of Product & Solutions Marketing for Riskmethods. During this show, the real meaning of creating a demand for new risk management gets discussed. In Monday’s episode of This Week In Business History, Kelly Barner shares the very interesting story of Clarence Birdseye, inventor and innovator of the frozen foods industry. Kelly talks about the initial challenges that Birdseye had to endure to become the legacy it is today. On Tuesday, we published an episode of Supply Chain Now with host Scott Luton and special co host Kelly Barner. This episode features Bob Gay, Rebate & Incentive Program Specialist for Advance Auto Parts. Scott Weir, the former Vice President of Purchasing for Thos. Sommerville Co, and Oisín Cooke the solutions consultant at Enable. They all put an emphasis of rebates and how they can be an effective way to reward and incentivize specific buying patterns and behaviors. On…

Special Guest Blog Post written by Philip Vervloesem   If your supply chain planning still runs on a monthly cycle, 2026 will be uncomfortable. We are operating in a polycrisis where change is constant, and responses need to be fast enough to keep up. From customer conversations, industry research, and leadership discussions at the Gartner supply chain conferences, a clear pattern has emerged: the organizations pulling ahead are not planning more often. They are embedding agility, intelligence, and speed into the way they make decisions. Here are five predictions shaping supply chain excellence in 2026 – our “bingo card” for what’s now table stakes.   1. Continuous, always-on planning is a must Monthly or quarterly cycles are no longer enough. The organizations that outperform treat planning as a continuous capability embedded in daily operations, and make it part of their governance and operational excellence. Imagine this: a sudden surge in demand hits or a supplier flags a delay. Instead of waiting for the next planning cycle, teams immediately evaluate options, share insights across functions, and adjust course. Planning stops being a calendar exercise and starts shaping real-time decisions.   “By shifting from process-centric to decision-centric planning, we now run hundreds…