Leah Knight

At the 2025 Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in Denver, Scott Luton sat down with Fred Baumann, Senior Industry Principal at Kinaxis, one of the world’s most recognized leaders in supply chain planning and orchestration. Kinaxis has spent over four decades shaping the planning landscape and has been named to the Gartner Leaders Quadrant an extraordinary 11 consecutive times—a testament to its execution strength and long-term vision. Baumann’s role at Kinaxis centers on helping chief supply chain officers and senior leaders shape their strategic transformation roadmaps, quantify value, and build the business cases necessary to achieve breakthrough outcomes.   From Episodic Disruptions to Continuous Turbulence When asked about old and new challenges facing supply chain planning teams, Baumann observed a major shift: disruption is no longer episodic—it’s continuous. Historically, companies faced major disruptions every few years. Today, volatility and constraint-related challenges—whether driven by tariffs, sourcing changes, geopolitical shifts, or supply shortages—are unfolding weekly or even daily. This environment demands a new way of working. The speed of global business is accelerating, and uncertainty is at historic highs. As Baumann noted, organizations must now adjust their supply chains “much faster than they had to even last year.” The shift isn’t only…

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now. On Monday’s episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott Luton and Greg White discuss the U.S. Bank 2021 Q2 Freight Payment Index with Bobby Holland of U.S. Bank & John Janson with Sanmar. On This Week in Business History, Kelly Barner shares the best and most interesting bits of historical business trivia, all occurring during the first week in August. We also released an episode of Supply Chain Now en Español with Enrique Alvarez and Demo Perez featuring Felisa Preciado. On Tuesday we released another Logistics With Purpose episode! Hosts Enrique Alvarez and Kristi Porter welcomed Alice Brown with GoodSteps to the show. Another show that was in the mix this week was TECHquila Sunrise with Greg White. This is the 2nd part of a great conversation with RateLinx CEO Shannon Vaillancourt, where they discussed 3 Keys to turn supply chain visibility into action. On Wednesday, Tim Nelson with Hope for Justice joined Scott Luton and Greg White. They discussed their noble efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking in the supply chain throughout the world. On Thursday, we released…