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data
December 17, 2025
SAP’s David Vallejo on the New Era of Planning: From Algorithms to Data-Driven Confidence
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…
ESG performance
June 11, 2026
The Sustainability Voice Missing From Most Boardrooms
Companies spend enormous amounts of time debating sustainability strategy. They invest in emissions reduction. They launch environmental initiatives. They publish ESG reports. They set ambitious goals. Yet many overlook a simpler question: Who is helping shape those decisions in the boardroom? Recent research published in the Journal of Business Logistics suggests that board composition may influence environmental performance in ways that executives do not fully appreciate. The study examined more than 2,000 firm year observations across 306 publicly traded business-to-business companies. The researchers explored whether having a customer or supplier represented on the board of directors affected a firm’s environmental performance. The answer was yes. But not in the way many executives might expect. Most discussions about board diversity focus on demographics, functional expertise, or independence. This research points to another form of diversity that may be equally important: where directors sit within the supply chain. A customer and a supplier can look at the same sustainability decision and see very different priorities. Those priorities often shape the choices firms ultimately make. The researchers found that companies with customer affiliated directors generally achieved stronger environmental performance. Customer representatives appeared to bring market knowledge and external stakeholder expectations into board discussions.…