Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
The logistics tech provider Körber Supply Chain Software continues to position itself in a fast-changing business landscape, aligning itself today with the digital transformation consulting firm Zero100.
Körber Supply Chain Software—to be formally known as Infios beginning in March—has plenty of funding to make those strategic changes, since the company is a joint venture between its parent company, the German business technology powerhouse Körber AG and KKR, the California-based merger and acquisition specialist.
London-based Zero100 calls itself a membership-based intelligence company connecting, informing, and inspiring the world’s supply chain leaders to accelerate progress on digital supply chain transformation. In January the company gained new financial backing through a “growth investment” from the private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners. According to Zero100, that new financing will accelerate its tech, data, research, and talent capabilities, further strengthen its team, and enable further product and service innovation on behalf of the company’s customers.
Infios says it is joining that community to access Zero100’s data-driven research insights and advisory, and to integrate innovative sustainability practices and digital tools into its adaptable solutions. Infios’s catalog of technology includes order management, warehousing and fulfillment, and transportation management.
By harnessing advanced technologies such as AI and data analytics and providing businesses with the right level of flexibility and control to evolve and adapt solutions to their needs, Infios says it can help its customers optimize their entire supply chain ecosystem and create a more optimistic outlook.
Most retail, wholesale, and manufacturing businesses are focused on fundamentally restructuring their supply chains to stay ahead of economic uncertainty. That’s according to results of the second annual State of Supply Chain report from supply chain solutions platform provider Relex Solutions, released Tuesday.
Relex surveyed nearly 600 professionals from retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and wholesale businesses across seven countries and found that 60% said they are overhauling their supply chains due to tariff uncertainty and market volatility.
Respondents said they are grappling with unpredictable consumer demand, escalating trade tensions, and unreliable supplier networks. More than half (52%) said demand volatility is their biggest challenge, forcing them to rethink inventory strategies in real time as shifting spending habits disrupt supply chains. In addition, 47% of businesses pointed to global trade disruptions and rising tariffs as a growing threat—with tariff volatility fueling concerns over higher costs and sourcing bottlenecks—and43% said they struggle with a lack of real-time data and visibility, making it harder to adapt to sudden shifts in demand, labor shortages, and transportation delays.
To counter those challenges, companies said they are making “bold operational shifts,” according to the study. Many are expanding their supplier networks, moving sourcing closer to home, and accelerating automation investments. Among retailers, 62% said they are addressing cost pressures through a combination of efficiency improvements and price adjustments, while 50% said they are actively broadening supplier bases to safeguard against economic and geopolitical instability.
“Supply chains are in a pressure cooker—between tariffs, demand shifts, and unpredictable disruptions, the outdated and traditional way of operating isn’t sustainable,” Dr. Madhav Durbha, Relex Solutions’ group vice president of CPG & Manufacturing, said in a statement announcing the findings. “Companies that lean into AI, automation, and supplier diversification will not only weather this volatility but emerge stronger. The ones that don’t risk falling behind.”
The full report, Relex State of Supply Chain 2025: Retail and CPG Dynamics, is slated for release in March. The report was conducted by market research firm Researchscape in January 2025.
Ask 10 warehousing experts about the optimal level of inventory visibility, and you'll get a dozen different responses.
Sure, most would agree on the importance of accurate inventory counts—knowing exactly how many items are in every carton, crate, and pallet stored in the facility. But depending on what type of goods the warehouse handles, opinions will vary widely on how much accuracy is good enough and what's the best technique for counting.
Fortunately, we live in an age when there have never been so many tools available to take those counts. Workers can perform cycle counts with paper and clipboards, as they've done for decades. Or a facility can deploy internet of things (IoT) sensors at dock doors, computer-vision cameras mounted on conveyors, handheld RFID (radio-frequency identification) scanners, wearable devices like ring scanners or voice-picking headsets, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), or even indoor flying drones.
In fact, many companies are now using those devices to obtain snapshots of the inventory held in various locations throughout their DCs. But assembling those snapshots into a full panoramic view remains an almost mythical pursuit, according to John Santagate, vice president, robotics at Körber Supply Chain Software. "Visibility remains the unicorn in warehouse operations," Santagate says. "No matter how much automation and RFID you have, you need to tie it all together. Visibility for visibility's sake is somewhat useless."
In other words, simply collecting data isn't enough these days. To master the inventory visibility game, a company must be able to analyze the information it collects; compare the results to the records in, say, its warehouse management system (WMS) or order management system (OMS); and quickly act on any discrepancies. Done right, these steps can lead to a number of follow-on benefits, including the ability to track and trace on demand, determine optimal restocking rates, and build the supply chain resilience needed to weather the inevitable supply disruptions.
However, few companies have reached that goal, Santagate says. "You need to know what's in the entire network, where it is, and how to capitalize on it. Most folks are still chasing that and making [only] incremental improvements."
CLOSING THE GAP
Santagate's assessment is backed up by a study conducted last August among 1,000 U.S. supply chain managers by Impinj, a developer of RFID solutions and software. In its "Supply Chain Integrity Outlook 2025" research report, the firm found that the majority (91%) of supply chain managers believe they are equipped to drive accurate supply chain visibility, but only a third (33%) can consistently obtain accurate, real-time inventory data.
According to Impinj's chief revenue officer, Jeff Dossett, that data accuracy gap leaves many struggling to attain the level of insights, visibility, and accuracy required to drive confidence in their supply chain and respond quickly to market changes. "Supply chain managers continue to face data blind spots that prevent them from ensuring secure, reliable, and adaptable supply chains," Dossett said in a release announcing the study's findings. "It's essential that organizations address the data accuracy gap by putting technology in place to surface accurate data that fuels the real-time, actionable insights and visibility needed to ensure supply chain resilience."
HOW SHARP IS YOUR VISION?
That raises a couple of questions for DC managers seeking to bridge that visibility gap: How much detail is good enough, and how can they make the optimal use of the data they collect?
Those are tricky questions to answer, because many warehouse managers probably don't realize what they're missing, says Chris Coote, head of product at Dexory, a London-based company that makes inventory-counting robots.
In fact, enhanced visibility sometimes brings to light underlying problems that managers didn't realize they had. "Visibility reveals what people don't know about their warehouse," Coote says. For example, he says, there could be a corner of the warehouse that's particularly prone to mispicks, but the managers are not aware there's a problem and don't scan for that. "Or the [problem] could be something they do scan for but don't realize they could be [addressing more effectively]."
Most people think their system of record is pretty good, but in reality, those systems can almost always be improved, according to Coote. In many cases, those improvements would bring real benefits, like freeing human workers from the drudgery of case counting so they can take on higher-level tasks, he says.
Dexory's view aligns closely with Körber's perspective on inventory visibility—so closely, in fact, that the two companies last month launched a partnership to integrate the DexoryView advanced visibility platform with Körber's warehouse management software (WMS). The partnership will enable users to swiftly uncover and address issues in the warehouse through data-driven decision-making based on Dexory's daily scans of the facility, the companies said.
Based on these and other market developments, it looks like the warehouse visibility sector is getting its moment in the sun. It's also clear that the technology used for inventory counting is getting "smarter" and faster by the day. Together, those trends could combine to shine a bright light on the darkest corners of the warehouse, illuminating every pallet, case, and carton so DCs can get a sharper view of all the inventory inside.
Supply chain technology firm Manhattan Associates, which is known for its “tier one” warehouse, transportation, and labor management software products, says that CEO Eddie Capel will retire tomorrow after 25 total years at the California company, including 12 as its top executive.
Capel originally joined Manhattan in 2000, and, after serving in various operations and technology roles, became its chief operating officer (COO) in 2011 and its president and CEO in 2013.
He will continue to serve Manhattan in the role of Executive Vice-Chairman of the Board, assisting with the CEO transition and special projects. Capel will be succeeded in the corner officer by Eric Clark, who has been serving as CEO of NTT Data North America, the U.S. arm of the Japan-based tech services firm.
Texas-based NTT Data North America says its services include business and technology consulting, data and artificial intelligence, and industry solutions, as well as the development, implementation and management of applications, infrastructure, and connectivity.
Clark comes to his new role after joining NTT in 2018 and becoming CEO in 2022. Earlier in his career, he had held senior leadership positions with ServiceNow, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Arthur Andersen Business Consulting, Ernst & Young and Bank of America.
“This is an ideal time for a CEO transition,” Capel said in a release. “Our company is in an exceptionally strong position strategically, competitively, operationally and financially. I want to thank our management team and our entire workforce, which is second to none, for their hard work and dedication to our mission of advancing global commerce through advanced technology. I look forward to working closely with Eric and continuing to contribute to our product vision, interacting with our customers and partners, and ensuring the growth and success of Manhattan Associates.”
Having reported on the supply chain world for some 25 years, I've seen technologies come and go. Many were once touted as the best thing since sliced bread but either failed to live up to the hype or else had to simmer a few years before they caught on.
Remember the hoopla surrounding dot-com retail? In the late 1990s, we were told that stores as we knew them would eventually go away, to be totally replaced by online shopping. The ease and convenience of e-commerce made that a reasonable expectation. But in March 2000, the bubble burst, and a host of online retailers closed their virtual doors forever. Of course, online shopping is still very much with us, and its share of total retail sales is growing by the year. Maybe we'll get to that retail seventh heaven someday, but it's taking much longer than originally predicted.
Then there's RFID (radio-frequency identification). These small electronic tags were going to replace barcodes largely because of the vast amount of data they can hold and their capacity to update information.
In 2003, Walmart famously demanded that its top 100 suppliers affix RFID tags to all pallets and cases shipped to its DCs. We figured that if Walmart had gone all in on RFID, the rest of the industry would automatically follow. Well, not so fast. It's true that after years of stutter-step progress, Walmart today is more heavily invested in RFID than ever. But in the rest of the world, the humble barcode is still king.
A more recently hyped technology is blockchain. It was actually conceived back in 1982 but remained just a concept until 2008, when a person (or persons) using the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" created an actual blockchain to serve as the public distributed ledger for cryptocurrency transactions. Blockchain was expected to revolutionize the way supply chain partners do business. But it, too, has been a bit slow to take off, and it's still unclear how the blockchain story will play out.
That brings us to the latest potentially game-changing technology: artificial intelligence (AI). In some ways, AI is really just data analytics on steroids. Supply chains have relied on data analytics for decades—the difference now is the promise of greater accuracy and better simulations. Will it ultimately change everything we do in supply chain management? Maybe. But it may take a while. A November report from workplace tools developer Slack showed that AI adoption rates among U.S. workers had slowed in the last quarter, while a recent analysis of open supply chain jobs by software integration specialist Cleo found that only 2% of open jobs required AI skills.
So is AI just another fad or a truly transformative technology? It appears we'll need a few good use cases before we can make that call.
The company’s Oracle Cloud SCM is part of its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, and enables customers to connect supply chain processes and quickly respond to changing demand, supply, and market conditions. In addition, embedded AI now acts as an advisor to help analyze supply chain data, generate content, and augment or automate processes to help improve business operations and create a resilient supply network to outpace change, Oracle says.
The new tech comes in the form of role-based AI agents within Oracle Cloud SCM that are designed to automate routine tasks, deliver personalized insights and recommendations, and allow organizations to focus more time on strategic supply chain initiatives. While past versions of Oracle software already included AI assistants—that could formulate descriptions or write emails—the new AI agents can help users by answering natural language queries about complex rules such as a policy document on returns or claims.
“One of our goals is to not have AI be an esoteric thing that you need special training to use, but just to act as part of the tool, to help you accomplish each task according to the standards of your own particular company,” Srini Rajagopal, Oracle’s vice president of logistics product strategy, said in a briefing.
For example, once a company’s IT office has uploaded the firm’s unique policy documents—on issues such as packaging, deadlines, or transaction requirements—then all the company’s customer service representatives (CSRs) can use the new AI-based advisory agents to type natural-language queries into a text-based chat box to obtain quick answers to complicated questions.
In addition to providing quick business answers to current employees, that approach can also help to train new workers on company policies in a labor market with high turnover rates. Additional use cases could apply to workers in roles such as a shop floor operator or warehouse worker, Rajagopal said.
In another application of the new AI, the updates have added new capabilities to Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle Global Trade Management, and Oracle Order Management.
Applied to the transportation management system (TMS) product, the AI enables “better, faster, smarter” operations through new capabilities such as AI-powered order route predictions, transit time predictions, and a transportation emissions calculator. In the global trade management (GTM) took, the new AI supports a user-configurable platform that can provide trade incentive program processing relief and reporting. And in the order management software, the AI can provide a returns summary, pricing promotions summary, item availability check, and order fulfillment view.
“To successfully navigate an increasingly complex global landscape, supply chain leaders need agile and efficient processes that can help them diversify and strengthen supplier networks, adapt transportation and logistics strategies, and stay ahead of regulatory changes,” Rajagopal said in a release.