Why do so many digital supply chain initiatives stall?
BRANDON: Most digital supply chain initiatives fail because companies skip the hardest part. They want an AI layer that creates executive dashboards and control-tower capabilities that are easy to demo in a boardroom. But they don’ t want to tackle the foundational work of ensuring all their underlying systems feed consistent, accurate data into a single shared view. Manufacturers typically run separate systems for production scheduling, logistics, supplier management and quality tracking, and those systems rarely speak the same language. Most manufacturers have plenty of data, but what they don’ t have is truth.
The problem is that if a manufacturer’ s production scheduling system and factory floor are telling different stories, all that dashboards do is amplify messy data. The dashboard looks impressive until someone acts on it and the information turns out to be wrong. After that happens once or twice,
110 June 2026