Supply Chain 2.0: From Risk 
to Real-Time

Sanju Nair – 01:35
Hi Neerja, let's go.

Moderator - 01:37
Let's start with the present moment, Sanju.
Q: In 2026 are manufacturers truly operating in real time or still reacting to risk?

Sanju Nair - 01:47
Thank you, Neerja.

Moderator – 01:50
That's a wonderful question to start the discussion. So in general, what we observe is most manufacturers are still reacting rather than operating in a real time model. But that's not to take anything away from the efforts that our customers have put in right, many have made lot of progress, especially in more critical areas, and many of these things we had outlined in our recently concluded ISG provider lens study on manufacturing, where we were positioned in the leader squadron. 
Now let's just take a quick run through of areas where we we've seen a lot of progress happening. The first and foremost has to be production facilities, right? Which include shop loads and assembly lines. Needless to say, you know, this is where most action happened because this is the highest value adding segment in the entire chain, right? 
So we've seen live OE quality signals, energy consumption via industrial IoT, manufacturing execution systems, real time alerts for breakdown Z laws. So many things happen in this area. Then we've seen a lot of action in the aftermarket and services area, which includes functions or activities like maintenance services, warranty management, etc, fairly simple to understand, because this is that end of the chain which is most customer facing. 
We've seen lot of innovative work like predictive maintenance using connected assets. So you know, equipments or machinery, install it with telematics, other sensors producing real time data and then algorithms and logic that predicts failure or maintenance requirement before they happen. Similarly, we've seen parts dispatch, parts planning, etc, happen based on this real time data. And then that we are also getting used for things like crew routing, parts, planning, etc. We've also seen a lot of innovative work happen in supply chain execution, right? Because, you know, this is that function which keeps day to day operations running right? So we've seen a lot of real time inventory management happen. We've seen control towers of various shapes and sizes come up, from basic dashboards to sophisticated AI powered decision systems. We've seen a lot of work happen in warehouse management. You know where, you know you can have automated storage, travel systems, more advanced robotics and cross functional integration, where, in today's world, warehousing actually happened at a fraction of the cost that used to happen in earlier times. 
Now, many of this has happened. See, it's not a common occurrence across the events. It's not a pattern that we would certainly call out, but we have seen this happen because many of the leaders in this industry, they have taken many initiatives towards foundational elements that are needed for these kind of changes, right? I'll call out some of those foundational elements. 
The most important one, I would think, is creating a unified industrial data foundation and digital thread. You know this is that function where you integrate your operational data, your information technology data, IT data, your engineering data, your supplier data, so you bring it all together to create that data foundation, then making your supply chain event driven, right. So, not based on reports, not based on Excel sheets, but based on events created through signals and similar triggers. Then integrating AI into your decision making engine to optimize across demand, supply maintenance, quality and risk and what have you. 
And then another critical investment that we have seen our customers make is making supply chain agentic, right? So there are autonomous and say, autonomous execution being done with the help of the agent AI across the chain, which of course, happen within certain predefined guardrails. But is that, then, are we saying that, you know, supply chain, there is a definite path ahead for real time operations? Certainly not. We see most of our customers still operate on legacy operating models, right? So you have pockets of innovation, pockets of optimization, but you still have these things operating within legacy operating models, right? 
If you notice, most of the organizations are still organized as procurement organization or production organization or warehousing or transportation organizations, right? You don't see, let's say, as a pattern across the industry. You don't see something like a customer fulfillment organization, or you don't see a risk or resilience organization, right? Because they tend to many companies still are organized in the legacy fashion, and that's why these legacy optimizations in pockets happen. That needs to change then data is still very fragmented across the organizations, we still don't see multi tiered visibility in many of our organizations. You know, the tier and supplier visibility is still not there. 
You don't integrate that visibility with, let's say, other external trade, logistics, weather, regulatory information, AI and agentic AI is still in extremely nascent stages, then we see a lot of work has happened in integrating sensors and industrial IOT and telematics, into this they gather data, they sit there, but there's still no closed loop AI driven decisioning happening, right? So we still see there's a long journey ahead of us, ahead of our customers before we can truly call ourselves real time supply chain organization, right?

Moderator - 07:47
Right Sanju, and you know, from what you said, as companies look to stay more efficient, reduce complexity near shoring is picking up pace. It's accelerating. 
Q: But is it actually lowering risk or just moving it ?

Sanju Nair - 08:05
So if you look at this holistically, there are multiple variables that influence supply chain risk right now. Geography is only one of it. So if I have to specifically call out some that are positively influenced by nearshoring, I'll start with geopolitical and trade policy risks, right? Then, of course, you know you're now more in familiar grounds. You're more aligned to, say, your country's tariff structure. You're insulated from, let's say you know the fluctuation that that we've seen in recent times, you're closer to export controls you're insulated from. Let's say this China, China, plus one type of issues, you have greater alignment with some of the local rules and regulations you know. You are at a position where you can take advantage of some more pro nearshoring acts, like the chips Act and other local state level incentives that are there you are inflated from logistics volatility, right? So in a few years back, we did see that Suez Canal issue, where evergreen was stranded, got grounded at the canal, right, which caused a lot of issues for a lot of companies. 
So you're insulated from those kind of logistics issues. You know, you're insulated from the other port congestion or freight fluctuation, the transit times, right? So then you're better insulated against IPs and regulatory exposure, because you have things more in closer to you, and you have additional local regulatory health for it, protection and so on. But that's only part of the story. You still have to contend with some of the less favorable issues, right? So cost and cost risk is high. One of the main reasons countries offshored was cost right now, cost structure in nearshore locations are most certainly going to be higher. Then you still have talent and capacity risk. So one reason offshoring boomed or manufacturing in remote locations boomed was easy access to skill, easy access to capacity. 
Many countries had these special economic zones and corridors which were designed only for exports, right so that kind of scale and capacity you will not be able to get in nearshore locations. Then supplier concentration, recently, we noticed with one of our customers that certain critical parts had extreme concentration in a certain geography.
Now, given the world that we live in today, that can be a big, big risk, right? You cannot have a critical risk issue impacted because of certain geographical problems.
Then infrastructure and ecosystem, now, many of these remote locations, like I said earlier, right, they're designed for export rights, which means that you have power, you have rail and port and road access easily built. You have utilities water easily available. You have custom clearance and other such governmental or regulatory support easily available. You have permitting, zoning, everything you know, everything taken care of. You have local political support and everything taken care of. That may not always be the case with the nearshore locations right. Now, given this, what some of the smarter manufacturers are doing is they are, you know, using these, you know, the push for nearshoring. They are using building options for themselves right now. That's actually making the supply chain more complex, but there are solutions available. So one of them that we emphasize on is building digital twins and scenario modeling, where you can take extremely well simulated, well understood, well designed decisions to optimize across things like tariff suppliers can port, you know logistics issues. So you know, in summary, I would say that a near shoring, just because, as a tactical decision, may not be the wisest thing to do, but near shoring with a full understanding of all the issues with a well supported simulation can indeed be a good strategy.

Moderator -12:20
Yeah, thanks for taking us through that Sanju. Something everyone says is control tower. 
Q: These two words, what makes it more than just a dashboard and more like a nerve center instead?

Sanju Nair -12:33
Yeah. Now that's an interesting question, favorite topic of mine, because control tower, by definition, is a nerve center. But what has happened is, because supply chains tend to be complex, they tend to be fragmented, they tend to be localized across the world, we've ended up making a big visualization mess of control tower so many, many of our organization, many of our customers, have implemented control towers, which are nothing but visualization layers. 
So now there are counter arguments to it, right? Control tower building a nerve center is actually a fairly complex one. People can say that it's a journey, and with supply chains continuously evolving, you can never really have it as a destination, a control tower built as a destination, you can never really have it right. So you'll always have to be on a journey of building a control tower. And that's a fair argument. But I would say that for building a true control tower, a true nerve center, and you really have four capabilities. 
One, your supply chain should be event driven, so your control tower should be able to understand what's an event, what are the internal and external triggers, and what are the impact of those triggers. 
Then again, you know you have to have contextual information. So control tower needs to have the ability to understand the context about around an event I mentioned about evergreen getting stranded in the Suez Canal right now, if your ship is the 300 ship in the queue, the trigger with your control tower, understand it as a port delay or as something else, because it is certainly not a port delay, right? The control tower needs to know it is something far, far bigger, greater than a port delay.
Then you should be able to make decisions based on the context, upstream, downstream impact, and basically optimize holistically, right? So in this case, there are no right or wrong decisions you need to make the ideal compromise between all the different variables that you have. So if you are 300 ship in the queue, either you make a decision to fly across important parts from a different port, or wait if the parts that you're carrying are not so critical, right? So it is about making that right decision. 
And finally, the control tower should be able to execute in an orchestrated fashion. There's going to be impact downstream, upstream. So you should be able to update your planning systems. You should be able to trigger supplier orders, reroute shipments, adjust schedules, notify customers, and do so many actions now, in a continuously evolving supply chain, this whole thing can indeed be called as a ever evolving journey.

Moderator - 15:13
Yeah, well, speaking about this whole thing being ever evolving Sanju, let's look ahead and look at what it will evolve into. 
Q: What will define supply chain 2.0 leaders by 2028?

Sanju Nair -15:29
Interesting question again. So again, you know, becoming a leader meaning you move from A to B. So far, we looked at some of the problems that most of our customers face, or most of the industry faces, right? So there is fragmented data, there is lack of real time capabilities. Then we spoke about control tower, not they being able to take decisions, not being event driven, not having put AI or agent to get to full use. Those are some of the problems that we saw right. 
Now, if we synthesize and put all these things together into more actionable buckets i would think there are three things that will separate let's say a leader of 2028 or supply chain 2.0 versus, let's say a supply chain 1.0 of today, and that would be the leaders would display continuous, event driven orchestration capability, 
Like I said earlier. First, when you need to know what's an event and what's a non event, the leaders will be able to move away from, let's say, very rigid weekly monthly planning cycles to a more fluid event based continuously optimizing way. 
Second, ecosystem connectivity. So your ecosystem consists of suppliers, partners, distributors and so on. This connectivity would make sure that all of you are plugged into the same chain, right? You're not trying to optimize your own chain. You're optimizing one big chain where you share data according to, of course, you know certain guidelines, you're looking at the same supply chain, right? You all the partners that you have, you're looking at the same supply chain and not looking at it differently. 
The third thing that would separate the leaders of future is intelligent execution. We know that just knowing what is happening the supply chain doesn't really help you improve customer experience, revenue or margins, what you do with that knowledge is what makes a difference, right. The ability to take optimum decision, which is built on a strong data foundation, ability to simulate different scenarios based on that data foundation, and triggering right action check across the chain, like we said earlier, triggering actions like supplier orders, rerouting shipments and so on, right? 
So taking intelligent actions based on all the data, all the information that you have available. Now, these are the three things that would separate the leaders of tomorrow from the rest. So finally, I can say that it is one thing to commend these things into one thing is these are the companies who consider their supply chain as a growth engine and not as a necessary execution capability or a cost center that will make the difference.

Moderator - 18:17
Thank you. Sanju, everything you've shared today points to one thing, in 2026 supply chains don't just manage risk,they operate in real time. That is what supply chain 2.0 is. 
So thank you for this clear roadmap on the way forward. It was great speaking with you.

Sanju Nair –18:35
Thank you.

Moderator - 18:36
And for the rest of you, thank you for tuning in to Tech Lyceum. We'll see you in the next episode.

You were listening to Tech Lyceum, a podcast from Birlasoft.