The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly sent the global economy into unprecedented turmoil which has posed many challenges to supply chains. Susan A. Johnson, Executive Vice President – Global Connections and Supply Chain at AT&T, explains how AT&T is navigating these challenges including the importance of:

• Understanding the key drivers of the supply chain gaps and inflationary pressures
• Increasing supply chain visibility and end-to-end intelligence
• Optimizing distribution models to adapt to changing consumer preferences
• Seizing this crisis as an opportunity to use supply chains as a strategic differentiator

The grass roots built organization, WE RISE, at Coca-Cola was developed by supply chain professionals looking to fills needs in their own development. Three key quarterly routines emerged as cornerstones of development – Brag Sheets, Cold Calls, & Exposure Points. These techniques work because they are action oriented, require minimal resources, and can be deployed to a small team of two or systematically rolled out to an organization of thousands. Learn how you can implement these routines in your team to transform development.

Do feel victimized by the Supply Chain events of 2021?
Do you have little hope of improvement for the future?

We will learn how we can collectively start taking control and drawing the playbook for the future by thinking differently.

This session will dive into strategies for new approaches in supply chain procurement, operations and leadership.

In the strongest jobs market we have seen in over 25 years, today’s labor market is seeing more unfilled jobs than there are job seekers, leading to the war for talent being as prevalent as ever. Companies must focus on talent attraction and retention to not only recruit top talent but retain key players. This session will outline what today’s talent wants, how companies can best market themselves during the recruitment process, as well as key techniques to retain top talent.

Organizational design, effective processes and performance management tools can transform the procurement function from transactional to strategic organization. In this presentation, we will analyze several best-in-class procurement organizational structures. We will explore how to design and implement the most effective structure, create and upgrade processes and performance management tools that complement and enhance the structure in order to build a capable and world class procurement organization.

Join us for an exectuive interview with the Senior Director, Global Sourcing at John Wiley & Sons. We will be discussing the ins and outs of building strategic partnerships!

The CPO Digital Cockpit: How Artificial Intelligent Machine Learning Super Dashboards will transform the CPO’s office into the CPO Digital Cockpit; Cockpit designed to boost you with super Awareness of the total global supply chain. It delivers daily instructions to problem-solve immediate issues you didn’t know existed and pro-actively step you through problem-solving future issues before it is too late. Cockpit is armed with computerized algorithms programmed by the most seasoned and elite global procurement professionals. Global Procurement Best Practices plugged into the Cockpit to guide you with solutions to achieve Excellence in Global Sourcing by Breaking the Spend Code and the Supply Chain Bottleneck. Are you facing Spend Categories and Supply Bottlenecks you can’t break?

Join us for an Executive Interview with Peter Ucovich, the Director of Indirect Sourcing at Verizon. In the interview, Peter Ucovich will be covering the lessons he has learned within the digital transformation of procurement including the most critical components for success and how Covid-19 has impacted the market place in the procurement space.

It has been well established that building strategic supplier partnerships can have many advantages associated with cost reduction and business efficiency. However, purpose-driven organizations like The YMCA of Greater Toronto can also use partnerships with key suppliers to achieve other objectives, such as alignment with core values, community service delivery and emergency support in times of crisis (such as a global pandemic).

The choices we make today define the world we live in tomorrow. Therefore, we need to consider how to reduce climate impact, use the world’s resources more efficiently, and conduct business more responsibly. We will take a look at how sustainability is driving future businesses and how the supply chain is key in achieving our combined ambitions towards science-based targets. As well, as the importance of putting people first in order to best engage your organization in a cultural shift towards sustainability.

To successfully drive change requires a unifying vision and an engaging methodology. Join this session to learn how to engage stakeholders and team members in creating a vision and a methodology to strategically transform your organization. A methodical, proven approach will be described, including examples, timing, and a sustainable process to drive your transformation

Inventory optimization has benefited from advances in technology. A well-established capability called Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) is an often overlooked or under-appreciated capability that exists in many ERP and Supply Chain solutions. This session will provide a practical guide for understanding the benefits of this technology and starting an MEIO journey in your organization. Charles will also discuss how to sustain the improvements and maximize this powerful technology

The U.S. imported approximately $600 billion worth of products from China in 2020. Over half of these imports were capital goods used by U.S. manufacturers. Clearly, U.S. operations are heavily dependent on Chinese made goods. The same holds true for U.S. supply chains. Sixty cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on made-in-China goods go to the U.S. companies responsible for putting Chinese products into their hands. Counterbalancing the ongoing need for U.S.- China trade is the fact that relations between the two countries are at their lowest point since diplomatic relations were established in 1972. Successful supply chain managers need to develop new risk mitigation strategies when sourcing from China.

Supply chains have been under immense pressure over the past two years as supply chain professionals navigate a multitude of issues and demands. Companies are navigating a global health pandemic, environmental disasters, labor issues, capacity issues, and general economic complexities across the globe as they try to supply products to their customers. This presentation will discuss strategies for building agility and resiliency in your supply chain operations in order to manage and mitigate the impact the various issues plaguing the supply chain today have on your organization.

In this presentation, Johnny Ivanyi, Head of Distribution Excellence at Bayer will dive into digitalization in last-mile delivery. He will focus on digitally visualizing your current operation to increase the speed and efficiency of your delivery network along with creating a driven data-centric culture. Learn how to make logistics visibility a core functionality in your company and create a digital learning atmosphere and customer-centricity in the new organization.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Jake Dean the Director of Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As the need for Supply Chain talent increase, Jake will be covering tactics on attracting young professionals, mistakes to avoid when recruiting new candidates, and how to structure an internship for new college talent.

When designing business processes for supply chain, we often start by planning to implement best practices. What can be easily overlooked is the actual needs of the business, both now and in the future. Sometimes a less mature or simplified version of a best practice may be the right solution to achieve business excellence, with a roadmap for process maturity as the business changes. In this presentation I will discuss aligning best practices with business needs for Planning and Inventory based processes.

By now we know the importance of planning for the unknowns and COVID has only highlighted the need for strong partnerships across the organization when it comes to scenario planning. But how does an organization perform scenario planning successfully such that everyone is aligned to a plan or multiple plans. It is a culmination of culture, process, technology, partnerships, etc. and the information presented is meant to provoke the thought process on how to marry scenario planning with S&OP processes and technologies.

This presentation takes the 6-step change management process and walks you through how Wilton utilized the change management as part of their S&OP implementation.