Stacey Pierce

At Manifest 2026, Scott Luton caught up with Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and Co-Founder and Content Director of the Women in Supply Chain Forum, for a conversation that cut through the tech buzz and landed squarely on what matters most: people. Marina leads two influential digital publications covering the full spectrum of supply chain — from temperature-controlled cold chain logistics to e-commerce and retail — along with four major industry awards programs and the rapidly growing Women in Supply Chain Forum, now entering its fifth year. But amid all the innovation on display in Las Vegas, her message was refreshingly grounded.   Disruption Is the Baseline. Proactivity Is the Shift When asked about dominant themes shaping the industry, Marina didn’t hesitate. One common theme linking 2025 and 2026 is that “disruptions obviously still exist,” she said. From tariffs to trade wars to Mother Nature, the hits keep coming. What’s different in 2026 isn’t the disruption itself; it’s the response. Instead of dwelling on what’s gone wrong, companies are getting proactive. Leaders are “acting on it and being proactive about getting in front of it,” she noted. Since COVID, organizations have learned that…

In a rapidly evolving global supply chain landscape, SAP’s David Vallejo believes the most exciting innovations are happening in planning—and that the industry is entering a fundamentally new era. At the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit 2025 in Denver, Vallejo, who leads global product marketing for SAP’s supply chain portfolio, joined Scott Luton to discuss how planning is transforming, why data now sits at the center of competitiveness, and what SAP is doing to help organizations make faster, more confident decisions.   A Shift From ERP-Centric to Data-Centric Vallejo described his team’s role as one that constantly scans the market—identifying trends, customer expectations, and the problems companies will need to solve next. Those insights help shape new innovations across the SAP ecosystem. He noted that SAP has moved decisively from an ERP-centric worldview to a data-centric one. This shift is essential, he argued, because the biggest advantage in modern planning lies in having the right data—clean, connected, contextualized, and ready to drive decisions. As Vallejo put it, “It’s all about the data that I need to make better planning decisions.”   Planning Models Are No Longer Static Reflecting on how planning has evolved since he entered the field two decades…