Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo Orlando: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo, taking place in Orlando this week. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Opening Keynote on owning supply chain's value, as well as sessions on effective supplier negotiations and building an autonomous supply chain. Be sure to check this page throughout the week for updates. 

• Gartner Says Chief Supply Chain Officers Must Deliver Multiple Sources of Value to Retain Enterprise Influence
• Four Human Economic Drivers to Reignite Supply Chain Productivity
• Gartner Predicts Half of Procurement Contract Management Will Be AI-Enabled by 2027

Presented by Tom Enright, VP Analyst, Gartner

After assuming an elevated role within the enterprise and battling years of crises, the supply chain faces the prospect of receding in importance to stakeholders and accepting a diminished “post-crisis” role. In the opening keynote session of the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo, Tom Enright, VP Analyst at Gartner, shared key strategies for how the supply chain can retain its strategic importance and drive the outcomes that lead to business success.

• “CSCOs must prioritize delivering multiple sources of value with their investments that go beyond cost, including growth, innovation, sustainability, risk reduction and customer experience.” 

• “Leading supply chain organizations are adopting antifragile capabilities that go beyond resilience and deliver value in uncertain environments.” 

• “Supply chains must transform to keep pace, but transformations as currently practiced often lead to higher complexity, employee change fatigue, and lower team morale. 

• Top-tier transformations design simplicity into their transformation processes to not only achieve the targeted business outcomes but also improve employee satisfaction.” 

• “AI will be key to supply chain transformation, but just 54% of AI projects make it from pilot to production. Supply chain leaders must start with viable use cases and then set reasonable timelines for ROI.

Presented by Meghan O’Doherty, Senior Director Advisor, Gartner  

There has never been a better opportunity for procurement to leverage advanced negotiation tactics to achieve business outcomes. However, procurement leaders must prepare and be able to balance the conflicting priorities of stakeholders. In this session, Meghan O’Doherty, Senior Director Advisor at Gartner, highlighted common pitfalls of supplier negotiations and shared a roadmap for a successful approach.  

• “Shifting business priorities, inflation and supply chain complexity make negotiation skills more important than ever.” 
  

• “Before starting a negotiation, internal stakeholders must be engaged in order to define their priorities, collaborate to brainstorm needs and drive consensus.” 

• “Overcome conflicting stakeholder priorities by asking them to force rank negotiables and incorporate negotiables beyond the obvious cost  in your negotiation.”

• “Understanding the hidden drivers of suppliers’ costs and their total cost of ownership can provide the advanced perspective needed to better inform negotiations before they begin.” 

• “Stay ahead of opportunities to use technology, like AI and GenAI, to more effectively prepare and execute negotiations.”

Presented by Pierfrancesco Manenti, VP Analyst, Gartner  

Organizations are prioritizing productivity growth to drive economic gains, and they see artificial intelligence (AI) as the vehicle to propel them towards “next-generation productivity.” In this session, Pierfrancesco Manenti, VP Analyst at Gartner, outlined the three phases for organizations to build an AI-enabled autonomous supply chain that will provide a new basis for productivity. 

• “An autonomous business is partly governed, and majority operated, by self-learning software agents that provide smart products and services to machine customer prevalent markets.” 

• “Supply chain leaders should define a long-term strategic ambition to increase productivity by becoming autonomous; for most organizations this will take at least 10 years.” 

• “An autonomous supply chain must be able to make autonomous decisions, supply smart products and services, and respond to customer machine demand.” 

• “Supply chain leaders should plan the path to an autonomous supply chain along the 3 A’s: Automation (mainstream now), Augmentation (mainstream within 5-10 years) and Autonomy (mainstream in 10+ years).”

• “Create a next generation roadmap for the autonomous supply chain by focusing investments in machine learning and piloting GenAI.”