Supply Chain Unlocked

Volatility isn’t a phase to ride out, it’s the operating system of modern logistics. We sit down with Michael Zimmerman, partner at Kearney and veteran of Fortune 500 supply chains, to unpack how structural shocks from trade policy, weather, and geopolitics have rewritten the rules of planning, sourcing, and execution. The throughline is clear: decision advantage beats tool accumulation.

We dig into layered planning that r...

What if your supply chain could answer hard questions in minutes instead of days? We sit down with Laurie Tuschen, Head of Customer Strategy at Optilogic, to explore how modern design stacks blend optimization, simulation, and AI to deliver faster, smarter decisions without adding new buildings or bloated spreadsheets. From the early days of mainframes to sensitivity-at-scale tools, Laurie shows how teams can test uncertainty direc...

Checkout isn’t a place anymore. It’s a strategy. We dive into how modern POS now spans mobile devices in the aisle, self-checkout, curbside pickup, and scan-and-go, and what that means for customer experience, associate workflows, and the bottom line. With guest Michael Leister, who helped deploy hundreds of thousands of devices across Walmart and Sam’s Club and later supported Amazon’s last mile, we unpack the operational playbook...

What happens when a Navy nuclear power alum and finance PhD turns his focus to trucking? Sam Tibbs joins us to make a bold case: freight doesn’t have a tech problem, it has an incentive problem. He traces the unlikely route from teaching and data science to building the tools that exposed lane-level profit and drove the most-used variables in Sonar, then explains why today’s rate products miss the mark. If your pricing relies on pa...

Orders don’t move without clean data. We go deep with Jonathan Kish, SVP at Orderful, to reveal why EDI still runs global retail, where it quietly breaks omnichannel performance, and how modern teams can turn a tangle of maps and testing into a fast, reliable growth engine. From empty shelves to OTIF deductions, the symptoms are familiar; the root causes live in outdated mapping, slow retailer testing cycles, and inventory that nev...

Ever wonder why a “standard” return policy can feel so unfair at the counter? We unpack the psychology and operations behind returns with Dr. Travis Tokar, Professor of Supply Chain Management at TCU, and explore how loss aversion, fairness, and frontline interactions shape customer reactions far more than a PDF policy ever will.

We walk through the five policy levers: money, exchange, time, scope, effort, and show which o...

What if your warehouse could flex labor across sites on demand, cut safety risk, and feed cleaner data into your WMS—all without a massive retrofit? We sit down with Brian Nachtigall, VP & GM of Vaux at ArcBest, to unpack smart autonomy that blends autonomous forklifts with remote teleoperation for a fast, pragmatic path to automation. No gimmicks, no buzzword soup—just a clear look at how deep learning, digital twins, and disc...

Money should move as fast as your cart. We sit down with Garrett Harper, Head of Business Development at Squads Labs, to unpack how Stablecoin is quietly becoming the payment rail that matches modern retail speed: instant refunds, cheaper settlements, and programmable rewards that actually feel valuable. If “buy online, pick up in store” reset fulfillment, Stablecoin is poised to reset how cash flows through every step of the retai...

A single chat that fills your cart, schedules pickup, and optimizes delivery isn’t sci-fi anymore. We break down Walmart’s new partnership with OpenAI and show how turning conversation into checkout could reshape margins, loyalty, and the last mile—without asking shoppers to open an app.

We start with what the integration actually does: ChatGPT pulls live Walmart prices, builds context-aware baskets, and enables instant ch...