Robert Mietus

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now. On Monday, we released 2 new episodes! On this episode of Digital Transformers, produced in partnership with TNS, host Kevin L. Jackson welcomes Praveen Rao, Managing Director with IBM, to the podcast. On This Week in Business History, host Scott W. Luton relates true stories marking notable anniversary dates this week, including the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the first Chevy Corvette to be produced in 1953, & more! On Tuesday, we released an episode of TEK TOK! In this episode, host Karin Bursa dives into 6 strategies that supply chain innovators are doing now to become more resilient. On Wednesday’s episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott Luton and Kelly Barner, Host of Dial P for Procurement, dive into the friction between North Face and the oil and gas industry – an industry that supplies the substance and materials North Face needs to make its products. Despite this, North Face is concerned with protecting their brand from the potential damage of publicly associating with oil and gas, leaving them in a tough spot with regard to their supply…

At MODEX 2026 in Atlanta, Scott Luton sat down with Andre Luecht, Global Strategy Lead for Transportation, Logistics & Warehousing at Zebra Technologies, to explore how synchronization, visibility, and practical innovation are shaping the next phase of supply chain performance. Interestingly, the conversation began not with technology, but with competitive dragon boat racing, a hobby of Andre Luecht’s that he enjoys in his free time. For Luecht, the analogy is clear: success depends on alignment. “The team that is the most synchronized team is the one that wins,” he explains, a principle that applies just as much to supply chains as it does to sport.   Turning Data Into Decisions At the Edge Zebra Technologies has long been known for enabling visibility across supply chains, from barcode scanning to RFID and beyond. But today, the focus is evolving toward something more powerful: decision-making at the edge. Luecht describes a world where frontline workers are empowered with real-time intelligence directly on their devices. “AI… is what you can build into a device in the hand of someone who has to decide what truck a certain pallet goes onto,” he says. This concept, what Zebra calls “frontline AI”, brings intelligence closer to…