Stacey Key

written by Nick Gospodinov, Founder & CEO of Mandel AI   There is a dirty secret in supply chain management: the most critical information about your orders, delays, and supplier commitments doesn’t live in your ERP. It lives in email. Not in dashboards. Not in control towers. In inboxes. Ask any procurement manager what they do first thing in the morning, and the answer is almost always the same: open Outlook, start scrolling. A supplier confirmed a ship date in a reply chain. A freight forwarder flagged a delay in an attachment. A pricing update came through as a PDF buried in a thread from two weeks ago. This is the real operating system of supply chain, and it has no search, no alerts, no reconciliation, and no memory.   The Coordination Gap No One Talks About The supply chain technology market has poured billions into planning, visibility, and execution systems. These tools work when the data is clean, structured, and already inside the system. The problem is that the most operationally critical information never makes it there in time. Manufacturers and distributors manage hundreds, sometimes thousands, of supplier relationships. Each one generates a constant stream of unstructured communication: order…

The late Steve Jobs demonstrated how to create a podcast using Apple’s audio editing software during a developers conference in 2006. Today, Apple hosts nearly 2.7 million podcasts devoted to everything from AI to zoology. There’s obviously a lot of noise in every industry, including supply chain, and not all supply chain podcasts are the same. Your time is valuable. You should get your supply chain industry insights from proven leaders, not self-proclaimed freight and logistics experts pontificating from their basements. The Power of Supply Chain Podcasts: Standing Out in a Crowded Industry Broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite was known as the most trusted man in America. You’ve got to wonder what he would have thought about the proliferation of social media influencers disseminating “news” on TikTok videos filmed with cellphones and flattering glow lights. Like other smart people with limited time, Cronkite probably would have skipped the fluff and gone for the substance — truly informative programming presented by industry thought leaders. The American people trusted that what newsman Cronkite said was accurate. Listeners of supply chain podcasts deserve the same — accurate, straightforward information delivered by a person who really knows what he or she is talking about. Why…