Resilient Supply Chain — How Leaders Keep Business Moving

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A missed outbound load can begin long before anyone reaches the loading dock. A pallet in the wrong location or a trailer blocked behind others can drain labour, slow throughput and threaten delivery commitments.
I’m joined by Phil Newsome, COO of Lazer Logistics, and Todd Boone, VP North America at Dexory. They bring complementary perspectives from yard operations and warehouse inventory, where incomplete information often hides problems until someone urgently needs the freight.
We examine why 98% inventory accuracy can still leave thousands of errors in a large facility, why six people might become involved in resolving a single discrepancy, and why more labour isn't always the answer to a congested yard. The bigger question: what changes when yard and warehouse teams can anticipate problems rather than chase them?
Listen now to see where operational delays really begin, and which decisions can keep freight moving.
 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.
Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous Subscribers:
Alicia Farag
Kieran Ognev
Gary Lynch
And remember you too can become a Resilient Supply Chain+ subscriber  - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent episodes like this one and give you access to bonus episodes of topical, timely supply chain resilience analysis.

🎤 Looking for a keynote speaker on supply chain resilience, AI, and sustainability?
I help leaders understand the forces reshaping global supply chains, from geopolitical disruption and climate risk to AI and real-time decision-making. 
Download my Speaker Pack: https://tinyurl.com/spkrpck

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, or send me a message using this link.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. 

Thanks for listening.

Send me a message
A supply-chain decision can be perfectly correct, and still be useless if it arrives too late. Better forecasts matter, but the harder problem is turning uncertain, fragmented information into action while that information still has value.
My guest is Benji Price, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Wild Ducks, who has worked with supply-chain planning teams globally. We look at what happens when planners are expected to manage millions of SKU-location combinations, critical knowledge still sits in people’s heads, and understandable local decisions quietly create excess inventory and hidden cost.
We examine why every forecast is wrong to some degree, why the newest AI model is not automatically the best forecasting tool, and where automation should hand decisions back to experienced people. We also get into a harder question: if faster decisions sometimes beat more accurate ones, what should supply-chain leaders actually optimise for?
Listen now to understand how forecasting, automation and human judgement can work together to produce better decisions before the opportunity to act has passed.
 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.
Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous Subscribers:
Alicia Farag
Kieran Ognev
Gary Lynch
And remember you too can become a Resilient Supply Chain+ subscriber  - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent episodes like this one and give you access to bonus episodes of topical, timely supply chain resilience analysis.

🎤 Looking for a keynote speaker on supply chain resilience, AI, and sustainability?
I help leaders understand the forces reshaping global supply chains, from geopolitical disruption and climate risk to AI and real-time decision-making. 
Download my Speaker Pack: https://tinyurl.com/spkrpck

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, or send me a message using this link.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. 

Thanks for listening.

Send me a message
AI can make supply-chain decisions faster. It can also scale the data problems people have been quietly correcting for years. Once machines start acting rather than merely reporting, inconsistent definitions, missing context and weak governance become operational problems.
I speak with Sagar Paul, Chief Revenue and Growth Officer at The Modern Data Company, who brings nearly three decades across operations, enterprise data, manufacturing and supply chain. We look at what changes when AI in supply chain moves from helping humans interpret information to making decisions itself — and why that raises the stakes for procurement, manufacturing and operations.
We examine why “better data” depends on the decision being made, how tribal knowledge has been masking semantic inconsistencies, and why real-time data can become expensive noise rather than useful signal. We also challenge a dangerous assumption: that automating an existing process automatically improves it. Sometimes it simply automates the leakage.
Listen now to understand what your data needs to prove before you let machines act on it.
 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.
Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous Subscribers:
Alicia Farag
Kieran Ognev
Gary Lynch
And remember you too can become a Resilient Supply Chain+ subscriber  - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent episodes like this one and give you access to bonus episodes of topical, timely supply chain resilience analysis.

🎤 Looking for a keynote speaker on supply chain resilience, AI, and sustainability?
I help leaders understand the forces reshaping global supply chains, from geopolitical disruption and climate risk to AI and real-time decision-making. 
Download my Speaker Pack: https://tinyurl.com/spkrpck

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, or send me a message using this link.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. 

Thanks for listening.

Send me a message
A production line can go down because two people are passing an Excel file back and forth with no audit trail. That is the uncomfortable reality behind this episode: some of the biggest supply-chain risks sit inside ordinary workarounds that nobody questions because, until they fail, they appear to work.
My guest is Patrick Van Hull, now an Agentic Operations Consultant at Salesforce and, when we recorded this conversation, an Industry Consultant at Tungsten Automation. Drawing on experience across companies including Dell, Rio Tinto, Apple and CVS Health, Patrick has seen how document flows, manual hand-offs and disconnected processes can create delays, downtime and business interruption far beyond the back office.
We examine why automating a broken process can simply make the inefficiency faster, why a single inbound supply chain can involve more than 30 documents, and what frontline teams know that formal process maps often miss. We also challenge the assumption that an AI strategy should come before clarity about the work itself — and ask where human judgement still matters most.
Listen now to understand where hidden workflow risk enters your supply chain — and what to fix before you automate it.
 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.
Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous Subscribers:
Alicia Farag
Kieran Ognev
Gary Lynch
And remember you too can become a Resilient Supply Chain+ subscriber  - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent episodes like this one and give you access to bonus episodes of topical, timely supply chain resilience analysis.

🎤 Looking for a keynote speaker on supply chain resilience, AI, and sustainability?
I help leaders understand the forces reshaping global supply chains, from geopolitical disruption and climate risk to AI and real-time decision-making. 
Download my Speaker Pack: https://tinyurl.com/spkrpck

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, or send me a message using this link.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. 

Thanks for listening.

Send me a message
A 98% response rate sounds excellent—until the missing 2% includes police and ambulance calls. That is the problem with judging automation by averages when the exceptions carry the greatest operational risk.
My guest is Josh Gould, CEO of The Big Word, whose teams operate at the intersection of AI, human judgement and mission-critical language services. His experience exposes a wider business issue: automation can cut cost and increase capacity, but poor escalation design can create service, legal and continuity failures.
We examine why AI works best on repeatable volume, what changes when speed and accuracy start pulling in opposite directions, and why the handoff to a human matters more than many leaders assume. We also get into the economics: where automation genuinely lowers operating cost, where technology spend gets wasted, and why adoption may move more slowly than the current AI narrative suggests.
Listen now to understand where AI should run autonomously—and where resilient operations still need a human ready to take over.
 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.
Support the show

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous Subscribers:
Alicia Farag
Kieran Ognev
Gary Lynch
And remember you too can become a Resilient Supply Chain+ subscriber  - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent episodes like this one and give you access to bonus episodes of topical, timely supply chain resilience analysis.

🎤 Looking for a keynote speaker on supply chain resilience, AI, and sustainability?
I help leaders understand the forces reshaping global supply chains, from geopolitical disruption and climate risk to AI and real-time decision-making. 
Download my Speaker Pack: https://tinyurl.com/spkrpck

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, or send me a message using this link.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. 

Thanks for listening.