Vanessa Wieners

Special Guest Blog Post written by Dyci Sfregola   Why planning, procurement, and leadership must move beyond coordination theater Collaboration is one of the most overused (and misunderstood) words in both modern supply chain and construction management. Everyone claims to value it. Few organizations design their operating models to make it work. In a recent conversation, Scott Luton sat down with Dyci Sfregola, author of Next Level Construction Management, to unpack what real collaboration looks like in practice; and why so many well-intentioned efforts fail to deliver measurable results.   What “True” Collaborative Planning Really Means According to Sfregola, real collaboration isn’t about more meetings or more dashboards. It’s about working together to create one plan, one set of assumptions, and real tradeoff analysis – – all owned collectively across functions. That includes finance, commercial, marketing, manufacturing, planning, and procurement all working from the same reality. Capacity, labor, cash flow, and constraints are visible. Decisions are documented. Actions actually change what happens next. The most common failure? Confusing information sharing with alignment. Teams often circulate data and emails and call it alignment, but no one in the room has clear decision rights – – or the authority to commit resources…

Supply Chain Now is the voice of the supply chain industry, and our hosts are experts in the field. Podcast listeners and webinar viewers tune in to hear the sage advice of host Jake Barr, heralded as an architect of global supply chain strategy and creator of “profit powerhouses.” Earning His Spot on Stage Barr today is the CEO of BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting, which provides support to such Fortune 500 companies as Cargill, Caterpillar, 3M, PepsiCo, and Pfizer and helps them bring products to market. “We place a premium on accelerating speed to market by leveraging supply chain transformation,” he says. “The result is better operating margin performance and the opportunity to drive faster growth in revenue.” During his more than 33 years with Procter & Gamble, Barr served as the global director of supply network operations and led the end-to-end planning transformation project, which created control towers that now manage the daily business globally and earned him recognition as the architect for the company’s demand-driven supply chain strategy. He served on the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics advisory council for its Supply Chain 2020 Project, was named to the League of Leaders for retail and consumer goods…