This year’s Supply Chain Track speakers brought together leaders from trade compliance, distribution, enterprise software, and healthcare. One line from Pete Mento’s opening session came up again in Sean Halligan’s talk: hope is not a strategy. Whether they were talking about tariffs, natural disasters, system transformation, or training the next generation of supply chain practitioners, the speakers made the case that resilience comes from preparing ahead of time and investing in people.
Pete Mento, Director of Global Trade Advisory Services at Baker Tilly, kicked things off with “International Trade and the Macroeconomic Environment: Staying Ahead of the Game.” Pete brought plenty of humor to a serious subject. Tariffs and trade rules are changing almost daily, he said, and U.S. Customs now sees its job as enforcement rather than facilitation. That puts the burden on importers, who are increasingly expected to show where their goods were actually made and to know who their suppliers buy from. His advice was to get ahead of it. Companies can pull five years of import history from ACE, the government’s taxpayer-funded Automated Commercial Environment, yet only about one in five importers has an account. He also encouraged attendees to double-check how their products are classified and valued, investigate foreign trade zones and duty drawback to mitigate duty spend, and prepare for announced changes ahead of when they are finalized and published in the Federal Register. He recommended regular meetings of a trade compliance council that includes finance, accounting, purchasing, logistics, and production. His homework for the room was to pull their ACE data and start building a plan for when things go wrong.
Sean Halligan, a senior global supply chain executive who has held leadership roles at Target, Nike, Cardinal Health, Wayfair, and Medline, followed with “Leadership, Partnership, and Solving Problems over Glorifying Solutions.” He opened with the story of a fire that destroyed a large medical distribution center in California in about two and a half hours. All 946 employees made it out safely. The fire broke out on a Thursday, and with help from logistics partners, hospitals were receiving deliveries again by Saturday. In a crisis, Sean said, moving quickly matters more than getting everything perfect, and the fine-tuning can come later. He also learned something about communication. Customers heard updates from senior leaders and the sales team, but the people they trusted most were the delivery drivers they saw every day. Sean’s second story went back to early in his career, when he was asked to improve receiving productivity and given a stretch goal. Rather than chase robotics, his team focused on identifying and solving the right problem – trailers that took the longest to unload – and added a simple conveyor system. Productivity more than doubled across the network, and the setup is still in use twenty years later. “Sometimes you just need a hammer,” he told the audience.
Kari Mahaffey, Senior Vice President of North America Applications at Oracle, spoke on “Leadership Lessons on Business Transformation.” Kari sits on steering committees for many Oracle customers, and she was candid about what she has seen work and what hasn’t. Before anything else, she said, a company needs to be able to explain why it’s taking on a transformation and how it will measure success. It also needs to put its strongest people on the project. Executive sponsors need enough credibility to make tough calls, and team members need to feel safe telling leaders the truth. Kari also pushed back on companies pursuing AI just so they have something to say on an earnings call. If a company’s data is scattered and its core systems aren’t in order, AI won’t deliver much. She reminded the room that go-live is a milestone, not the end of the work, and that the companies getting the most from their investments keep improving long after launch.
To close the track, Craig Schaefer and Megan Turek presented as case study from GE HealthCare, “Unlock Your Talent: Turning Supply Chain Capability Investment Into Business Results.” They started by putting the audience to work, asking everyone to vote on how they would respond if a critical supplier suddenly shut down for three weeks. It was a fitting start, since their session was about getting people to make decisions instead of sitting through lectures. When they reviewed their supply chain training, they found that only about 3% of it gave learners a chance to apply what they were learning. A team of four spent three days rebuilding the program around hands-on simulations, with no added budget, and used AI to help write the scenarios, data sets, and facilitator guides. Applied learning in that course rose to nearly 75%, and in their plan-to-deliver training it went from 26% to 60%. Megan shared a favorite story about a participant who found the simulation frustrating and overwhelming. A month later, in his first buyer role, he ran into the same flood of information and built a set of AI agents that give him his top three supply risks every day. As Craig told the audience, “You can’t lecture someone into judgment.”
Taken together, the four sessions gave supply chain leaders plenty to bring back to their teams. The speakers came from very different corners of the field, yet they agreed on the basics: plan ahead, be clear about the problem you’re solving, lean on your partners, and give your people real practice making decisions. Thank you to all of our speakers, to track sponsor Oracle, and to everyone who attended the track.
There’s even more to explore beyond these highlights! If you attended the conference, head back to the virtual portal to revisit the conversations, watch sessions you missed, and download presentation materials. Weren’t able to be there? A Digital Pass gives you access to the ideas and insights shared throughout the day.
Written by Wajid Siddiqui, UWEBC Marketing