Venkat Gopalan

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…

At Supply Chain Now, we talk a lot about innovation, resilience, and what’s next for our industry. But behind every great conversation, great idea, and great community is something even more fundamental: curiosity. We read because we’re curious. We read to learn. We read to grow. And sometimes, we read simply because it’s fun! That’s why we created Between the Lines by Supply Chain Now, a space for our community to share what we’re reading, what’s making us think, and what we’re excited to recommend to others. This isn’t a traditional book club where everyone follows the same reading list. Instead, it’s a shared shelf, built by the Supply Chain Now team and our broader community. You’ll find business books and personal development reads alongside novels, memoirs, histories, and unexpected favorites. No required genres. No assigned chapters. Just real people sharing real recommendations. Because great books shape us in different ways. Some help us sharpen our skills. Some challenge how we see the world. Some help us slow down, escape, or recharge. And often, the most meaningful growth comes from reading something we never would have picked up on our own. With Between the Lines, our goal is to create…