Joy Hicks

Supply Chain Now announces an expanded program portfolio to include Procurement. Dial P for Procurement, anchored by procurement expert Kelly Barner, will explore the business value of spend management with the power of supply chain. READ FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

Supply chain organizations have never lacked data. What they have often lacked is the ability to connect it, normalize it, trust it, and turn it into better decisions. That was one of the central themes in a recent conversation between Scott Luton and Matt McKinney, Co-Founder and CEO of Loop. Drawing on his experience helping build Uber Freight and now leading a logistics technology company, McKinney offered a clear-eyed view of where AI is already creating value, as well as why the data foundation still matters more than the model itself. The Real Problem Is Not Data Volume McKinney traces Loop’s origins back to a recurring problem he and his co-founder (Shaosu Liu) saw at Uber Freight: rapid growth on the revenue side paired with a back office still dependent on people manually reconciling invoices, contracts, proofs of delivery, and surcharges. The bigger realization was that this was not unique to Uber. “The thing people miss is that the value isn’t in the quantity of data, it’s in the utility of it,” McKinney explained. “Most companies have plenty of data. What they don’t have is data that connects.” That disconnect is especially painful in logistics, where data is scattered across…