Women in Tech – Building Supply Chain Resilience

Author: Jen Hall

Feb 25, 2026 | 3 min read

While preparing for a Women in Tech panel late last year, I was asked what the biggest change in supply chain has been over the past five years. You might expect my answer to be about what’s happening inside the warehouse.

It wasn’t.

What stood out most is how much advantage now comes from the ability to react quickly, not from having the most precise plan. When scenario evaluation drops from weeks to hours, the impact on operations is immediate: less expediting, fewer stop-start priorities, and a surprising amount of productivity recovered.

It fundamentally changes the role of inventory: from something we hold to something we deploy.

I put a few of those reflections into this month’s article below:

Toward the end of last year, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at a Women in Tech event in Toronto. It’s an organization that does an incredible job of creating space for thoughtful, candid conversations and bringing together a community that genuinely wants to move the industry forward. As part of the panel preparation, we were asked to reflect on what we believed had been the biggest change in supply chain over the past five years.

Beyond the Warehouse Walls

My first instinct was to point to the most visible transformations. The acceleration of warehouse automation, the growing role of orchestration layers, and the very tangible transformation happening inside the four walls. And maybe I still will next time marketing has me write one of these.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the most meaningful change I’m seeing isn’t happening in the warehouse at all. It starts much earlier, in how organizations position, react and ultimately deploy inventory in an environment that refuses to behave according to plan.

The Gap Between Theory and Reality

In many of the network studies I’m involved in each year, a significant amount of effort goes into quantifying the impact to inventory, usually through the lens of working capital. How much cash is tied up, how much could be released, and what the carrying cost looks like under different scenarios. Those are essential questions when large capital decisions are on the table, and they help leadership teams move forward with confidence.

Operationally, however, the precision of those projected inventory profiles is often more theoretical than we would like to admit. Even the most sophisticated models rely on assumptions that begin to erode as soon as they meet reality. Demand shifts, supply gets constrained, commercial priorities evolve, and new channels are introduced.

There’s a military expression often attributed to Helmuth von Moltke: no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Supply chains don’t have enemies, but they do have reality. And reality has a way of invalidating even the most elegant plans.

When that happens, the “optimal” inventory profile quickly stops looking optimal, not because the analysis was flawed, but because the environment moved.

From Forecast Accuracy to Response Velocity

For a long time, the primary objective in supply chain planning has been to improve forecast accuracy. More data, better models, and more statistical rigor have delivered real value. What I am seeing now in leading organizations is a subtle but important shift in focus. The conversation is moving away from how to make the plan more precise and toward how to reduce the time between a new signal and a meaningful operational response.

Modern planning platforms are making it possible to evaluate multiple what-if scenarios in near real time, understand the service, cost, and inventory implications of each, and move from insight to execution in a much shorter cycle. Conceptually, this is concurrent planning rather than a fixed monthly cadence. In practice, it removes one of the biggest historical barriers to resilience: the time it takes to turn a decision into an actionable plan.

The Productivity of Speed

In environments where these capabilities are in place, responses to short-term changes in demand or supply no longer take days or weeks. They take minutes or hours. That compression in decision and deployment time has a direct operational impact. We routinely see double-digit productivity losses when organizations are forced to wait for the next planning cycle or work through multiple layers of manual analysis before acting. Enabling faster, scenario-based reactions can recover the order of 15–20% of that lost productivity, simply by allowing the operation to realign sooner.

Resilience, in this context, is no longer constrained by how the network was originally designed. It is enabled by the tools that allow teams to continuously rebalance, redeploy, and reprioritize as conditions change.

Seen through that lens, inventory stops being just a balance sheet line or the output of a forecast; It becomes a deployment lever. Its value is determined by the speed at which it can be repositioned, the number of scenarios it can support, and the visibility that planners must act on before a disruption becomes a service issue.

This is where the operational reality has shifted most. In the past, the limiting factor was often physical: where product was stored, how fast it could move, or how long it took to change a flow. Today, in many organizations, the longer pole in the tent is the time required to evaluate options, align on a decision, and translate that decision into an executable plan.

When that cycle takes weeks, agility is theoretical. When it takes hours or days, agility becomes operational.

Redefining Competitive Advantage

The competitive advantage is no longer defined by who can produce the most robust long-term plan. It will increasingly belong to the organizations that can sense change earlier, evaluate trade-offs faster, and deploy inventory in line with those decisions without waiting for the next planning cycle.

In a volatile environment, resilience is not the outcome of a perfect plan. It is the result of having the visibility, the scenario capability, and the execution alignment to change direction quickly and with confidence.

And that starts with the systems that put those capabilities directly into the hands of the people making the decisions.

Because inventory is not just stock held to satisfy a forecast. It is a dynamic, deployable asset, and its effectiveness is powered by the speed and quality of the decisions behind it.

Why Planning Strategy Matters

Building a resilient supply chain isn’t just about the right logistics—it’s about optimizing the systems that empower your people to make faster, higher-quality decisions. A robust supply chain planning framework provides the insights needed to remain agile as your business evolves. At LIDD, we specialize in the digital transformation advisory services that bridge the gap between high-level strategy and technical execution.

Need guidance on evolving your planning platforms or warehouse operating systems? Connect with Jennifer Hall  to explore how LIDD can help your organization transition from static plans to operational agility.

For more updates, follow us on Linkedin. 

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