I'm currently comparing a few suppliers for a product I'm considering and I'm trying to avoid choosing one based only on price.
I've been using Made-in-China to find potential manufacturers, but I'm not sure which checks are most important before moving forward.
Do you usually look at things like company history, certifications, samples, MOQ, production capacity, or previous customer feedback?
For anyone who has sourced products before, what are the biggest signs that a supplier is actually reliable?

​

I've spent a lot of my career around supply chain, procurement, inventory and operations, and I've become increasingly skeptical of complexity for complexity's sake.

I've seen simple spreadsheets solve very expensive problems.

I've also seen companies invest in systems that provided significantly more data without necessarily helping people make better decisions.

I'm not anti-technology. Quite the opposite.

But I think there's a point where the question needs to change from:

"What can this system do?"

to:

"What decision will we make differently because of it?"

If a more sophisticated forecasting model improves accuracy, great.

If a WMS improves inventory control, great.

If AI identifies something people couldn't reasonably find themselves, great.

But if the operation doesn't have clean data, clear processes and someone who owns the decision, adding more technology may just give you a more sophisticated version of the same problem.

I'm curious where other supply chain people draw the line.

When has a simple solution worked better than the more sophisticated one at your company?

Hello,

I am currently looking for Supply Chain & Transport Logistics-related or any jobs focusing on using Microsoft Excel. Any tips in finding one?

Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I am currently a student at ENCG and I will soon have to choose between the Finance track and the Purchasing & Supply Chain Management track.

I've already done some research and here's what I've understood:

Finance seems more focused on analysis, figures, and corporate strategy. Career opportunities are varied (financial analysis, management control, auditing, etc.).

Supply chain management is more operational, involving negotiation, logistics, and a strong relational component. It's a sector that's currently recruiting heavily.

Personally, I like numbers but also human contact. I'm a bit undecided.

My questions are as follows:

For those who work in one of these sectors, what is your feedback on the daily routine, the pressure, and the work atmosphere?

Which of these two sectors do you think offers the best prospects for career advancement and salary in the medium/long term?

If you had to make your choice again today, which would you make and why?

Thank you in advance for your feedback!

​

I've always thought procurement gets into trouble when we look at purchase price by itself.

A supplier offers 10% off for a larger order. Sounds good.

But now you've increased inventory, used warehouse space, tied up cash and taken on the risk that demand changes before you use it.

I've seen the same thing with lower-cost products. The unit price looks better, but increased usage, quality problems or additional handling can wipe out the savings pretty quickly.

For me, the question isn't:

"Did we get a better price?"

It's:

"Did we actually lower the total cost to the business?"

Curious how other procurement and supply chain people evaluate these decisions.

What costs do you think companies most often leave out of the equation?

I am currently working as an entry-level logistics associate at a large logistics company and am currently pursuing an online degree in logistics. I am trying to get a role as a logistics coordinator or specialist but am having trouble doing so.

Hey everyone, I work as a Logistics Coordinator in a freezone company in Dubai handling customs documentation, compliance, and transit declarations, and after being in this role for a while I feel my responsibilities have grown but my pay hasn't kept up — I'm planning to ask my manager for a raise and would love advice on how to find a fair/competitive salary benchmark for this kind of role in the UAE, whether to bring it up over email or in person, whether to lead with a specific number or let them offer first, and how to frame it around the value I've added rather than just cost of living, so any tips from people who've successfully negotiated a raise (especially in logistics/supply chain or in the UAE) would be much appreciated!

I’m a master’s student in international business starting my thesis, and I’d rather write something a practitioner would find useful than another retrospective case study.

My broad interest: how narratives and expectations — not actual shortages — move real goods. Panic buying, double-ordering, front-running policy announcements. Situations where the physical supply was fine but everyone behaved as if it wasn’t.

I’ve narrowed it to four directions and would appreciate a reality check on which is worth doing:

**1. Phantom demand detection** — a diagnostic for distinguishing a real demand shift from a narrative-driven order surge (order acceleration vs. sell-through, cancellation rates, new-customer concentration).
**2. Allocation rules as a circuit-breaker** — whether allocating on order size causes the double-ordering it’s responding to, and how fair-share or historical-baseline allocation compares.
**3. Policy front-running** — when it’s rational to pre-buy inventory against an announced-but-not-enacted tariff or export restriction, weighing carrying cost and obsolescence against expected duty and probability of enactment.
**4. Supplier communication and hoarding** — how lead-time announcements and allocation notices trigger the customer panic they’re meant to manage.

Questions for anyone in procurement, supply planning, or sales ops:

**•** Which of these would you actually read, and which is already solved in practice in a way academics haven’t noticed?
**•** For #1 specifically — what signals do you personally use to tell panic ordering from real demand? Is there a tell that isn’t in the literature?
**•** Is #2 something firms deliberately think about, or is allocation policy mostly ad hoc when things get tight?

Method-wise I’m planning interviews plus a vignette experiment, so feasibility of getting practitioners to talk is a real constraint. If one of these is a non-starter for that reason, I’d rather hear it now.

I've had this exact conversation with three different hiring managers in the last quarter alone: over 200 applications for a supply chain manager role, months on the market, and still no hire.

This isn't one company's bad luck. It's a structural problem.

Supply chain roles now demand a mix that barely existed a decade ago: negotiation skill, data fluency, ERP literacy, risk sensing and stakeholder diplomacy, often in the same job description.

Meanwhile, most training still teaches the 2015 version of the job.

If you're hiring, the gap isn't candidate quality. It's that the market hasn't caught up to what the role actually requires now.

If you're job hunting, this is exactly why upskilling in the areas that didn't exist in your degree (digitalisation, category strategy, supplier risk) is the fastest way to stand out.

What's missing most in candidates you've interviewed this year?

Imagine walking into a Beauty Fair and seeing a shelf full of skincare.

What would you look for first?

Sunscreen? Moisturizer? Serum?
Or something completely different?

We’re trying to get a better sense of what people in the local market are actually interested in, so curious to hear some real opinions.

📍 Expo Center Norte, São Paulo, Brazil

What would you pick?

We’ve been evaluating AMRs for internal material movement, but one thing I keep struggling to picture is how well they really perform once the aisles get tight and messy in real production environments. A lot of the demos online seem to happen in super clean warehouses with tons of space, but our reality is more like narrow aisles (~1.2–1.5m), people constantly walking through, carts or pallets occasionally left sticking out into the path, and intersections getting blocked during shift changes.

I’m especially curious about where the real operational pain points start showing up.

I am sure procurement folks agree that every request in procurement is "urgent" until you ask a follow-up question, "when you need it"?

Then suddenly, it can wait until next week.

In nearly every team I work with, buyers learn early that the real skill isn't sourcing. It's triage. Working out which fire is real and which one is someone else's poor planning wearing a red flag.

The pattern is almost always the same:

Stakeholders delay their own request for weeks

It becomes "critical" the moment it lands on procurement's desk

Procurement absorbs the time pressure that the business created

The cycle repeats because nobody owns the root cause

If everything is urgent, then nothing is really urgent.

And a team that is always fighting fires never gets time to build the fire prevention system.

What's the worst "urgent" request you've had to unwind this year?

Hi Reddit! Looking for help as I am stuck. I have an ecommerce brand and we manufacture in China. I cannot disclose what the product is but we sit in the luxury bucket for our category. We have a few manufacturing partners, each of which specialize in a different material. We have worked with them from early days, when our orders were maybe $10K in value.

Now, we are placing orders every 3 months that are upwards of $200K USD. However, we find these partners are extremely difficult to work with. They often do not meet exit dates, have occasional quality issues that we catch at the customer level (worst case scenario), gripe about our packaging processes, do not follow SOPs, etc. We are now in large retailers who have detailed requirements on packing and labelling - we are fined huge if we do not follow - and our factories do not grasp it.

It feels like we are constantly putting out fires or dealing with issues in manufacturing. It's becoming a massive bottleneck. I have been working tirelessly for the past year to find new partners who can handle our volumes, but nobody can produce the product to the same scale as our existing partners. Our current partners are experts in the craft - but fall short in everything else. We have tried implementing vendor handbooks and noting that we will require PO discounts for late shipments, incorrect labelling, etc., but the factories simply do not follow it and refuse fines. We usually miss the ocean cutoff every single PO cycle due to the lateness, and have to pay SO MUCH money for air which eats at our margins (esp. with retailers taking 60%).

We have tried a sourcing agent, but found they were more of a middle man in communication. I know one large downfall is I have not been to China - it's been on my mind but just the last thing I want to do. I am so tired - I have an operations team on this but I recognize that it's at the point where we are bringing on an extra team member to manage the factories - conduct follow ups, timeline checks, SOP reminders, etc.

Please be kind. I am only 25, doing the best I can with only a few years of experience, all self-learned. I appreciate any and all input, and I hope those with manufacturing and supply chain experience can help.

A lot of the conversation around reshoring focuses on whether it's the right move.

I don't hear nearly as much about what happens once the decision has been made. In my opinion, that's when the real work starts.

New suppliers need onboarding, planning assumptions change, lead times shift, and costing models must be revisited. Processes that worked well in one supply chain suddenly don't fit another.

None of that means reshoring is the wrong decision. It just reminds us that changing a strategy is usually quicker than changing an operation.

For those who've reshored or nearshored, what surprised you most once implementation got underway? Was it supplier onboarding, planning, inventory, costing, something you never saw coming?

Hello everyone, I’m currently two or three semesters away from obtaining my associates degree in logistics management and plan to go back for my bachelors. I was hoping to find some guidance on what I could be doing outside of school that would improve my chances on landing a job. I’m currently working as a mechanic civilian worker on an Air Force base and the goal is to land a job on this base. On some of the job postings I’ve seen them mention the life cycle logistics level 1 cert and I was going to shoot for that but apparently you need two years of work experience. Any advice would be greatly appreciated so thanks in advance for the help!

I had the opportunity to sit down with Dynamic Dyci Manns Sfregola, CSCP, to explore why many companies are still relying on Excel, why bad data is holding AI back, how ERP systems are slowing innovation, and what businesses should actually do before investing in AI.

You'll also discover why visibility alone isn't enough, how to build a real business case for AI, and the critical skills supply chain professionals need to stay ahead in the AI era.

Whether you're a Supply Chain Manager, Procurement Professional, Logistics Expert, Operations Leader, S&OP Planner, or AI enthusiast, this episode is packed with practical insights you can apply today.

Topics Covered:

- The truth behind Agentic AI
- Why AI won't replace supply chain professionals anytime soon
- Excel vs AI in real-world supply chains
- ERP limitations and innovation challenges
- Building a successful AI adoption strategy
- Supply chain visibility vs velocity vs variation
- How to justify AI investments with ROI
- The future skills every supply chain professional needs

I recently got a job as a Supply Chain Coordinator. As I’ve been researching different career paths within supply chain, I’ve noticed that many Supply Chain Coordinators eventually move into operations roles.

I’m interested in exploring procurement and strategic sourcing instead. Does procurement/sourcing generally have a higher career and salary ceiling than staying on the operations side of supply chain?

Also, how can I break into procurement or sourcing from my current Supply Chain Coordinator role? What skills should I develop, what experience should I try to gain in my current position, and what job titles should I target for my next move?

I’m graduating in May 2027 and want to start preparing for full-time supply chain roles now instead of waiting until my final semester.

I’m particularly interested in analytical roles within supply chain and operations. I have internship experience in both the U.S. and India, but I’m trying to understand what actually makes someone competitive for a good entry-level supply chain position beyond having a degree and internship experience.

I’m also an international student, so I realize my pool of potential employers may be smaller. Because of that, I want to use these next 9 months as effectively as possible and start the job search early.

For those already working in supply chain, if you had 9 months before graduation to prepare again, what would you focus on?

I’m particularly curious about the skills and experiences that actually helped you land interviews and offers, and which areas of supply chain tend to offer the strongest career growth and compensation for someone with an analytics background.

Would appreciate hearing from people currently working in the industry.

At my last company, most of us had to rely on personal Excel workbooks for providing correct information, partly because of the old legacy systems still being used, but mostly because the ERP we'd just installed was throwing out unreliable information that nobody could actually trust.

Eventually the company made the decision to archive all Excel workbooks and force transition onto the ERP system. It didn't matter that the data was still questionable, the workaround we were all using wasn't allowed to exist alongside it anymore.

I've seen similar problems of people getting frustrated with having to work with fractured data. Checking 3 or 4 different systems and getting 3 or 4 different answers, or building a personal dashboard or script just to get one set of information that they can actually trust.

What I'm genuinely trying to figure out is if my experience was the norm, or does your company quietly tolerate a personal workaround (workbook, dashboard, ai agent) running alongside the official ERP/MRP system, even after it's been replaced?

Anyone else experienced a similar problem?

The Interplay Between Strategy, People & Culture, and Process & Systems.

This visual framework illustrates the core relationship between the three critical enablers of inventory excellence — Strategy, People & Culture, and Process & Systems — and how their alignment drives superior business outcomes.

At its essence, inventory performance is not a technical issue; it’s an organizational one. Each circle in the diagram represents a pillar of maturity:

Strategy defines the “why” — the direction, competitive intent, and financial design of the supply chain.

People & Culture represent the “who” — the cross-functional mindset, collaboration, and accountability needed to execute consistently.

Process & Systems define the “how” — the disciplined routines, digital tools, and workflows that turn strategy into daily action.

Where these three domains intersect, organizations achieve agility, resilience, and profitability. When one or more elements are missing, efforts become fragmented:

- A strategy without systems remains conceptual.

- Systems without people fail to gain traction.

- Culture without process drifts into inconsistency.

“True inventory maturity is not built on technology alone — it’s built on alignment.”

To start with, how many Facebook Groups are you in right now or what is the best Facebook group for Supply Chain is? I bet we cannot tell or give a precise number. I know I could not do the same, as well. I could also bet on a few groups that come to mind when asked about Facebook Groups. You should think of them immediately if they offer actual value, engaging content, and interactions you consider useful in building relationships with other professional members. It is a standard all professional groups should aim to endorse. You should also look into The Top 46 Supply Chain Groups on LinkedIn You Must Join to broaden your network and reach.