Where supply chain breaks down?
What happens to stock when it leaves the warehouse?
It’s a seemingly straightforward question. Yet, during our time at the Total Supply Chain Summit 2026, we spoke with organisations for whom the answer was far from simple.
Stock could be accounted for within the warehouse, but once transferred to the shop floor, visibility became limited. Elsewhere, demand forecasting continued to rely heavily on spreadsheets, while unexpected inventory shortages were contributing to costly emergency airfreight.
These weren’t necessarily businesses lacking technology. Many already had established enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management (WMS) and other operational systems.
The challenge was making those systems, processes and the information they held work effectively together.
Across two days of conversations with supply chain, logistics and operations professionals, one theme became increasingly clear: the ability to capture data is not the same as the ability to act on it.
Visibility is only valuable when it extends across the business.
Supply chain visibility is hardly a new concept. Organisations have invested heavily in technologies designed to track inventory, manage warehouses, coordinate logistics and improve planning.
Yet, the conversations we had highlighted how easily visibility can become fragmented.
One particularly interesting challenge involved inventory moving between warehouse and production environments. While warehouse stock could be monitored, understanding what happened after materials reached the shop floor was significantly more difficult.
This raises an important question: if a business cannot confidently account for its inventory throughout its operations, how accurately can it plan production, forecast demand or manage its working capital?
We also heard from businesses whose existing warehouse management systems weren’t providing the depth of functionality or insight they required. Others were reviewing the capabilities of their ERP platforms or expressing concerns about how those systems were being supported.
While the challenges differed, they pointed towards a common issue.
Businesses increasingly need visibility that extends beyond individual systems and departments, bringing together operational, financial and supply chain information to provide a reliable picture of performance.
The hidden cost of disconnected data.
Perhaps one of the most interesting themes to emerge was how a lack of visibility translates into real operational costs.
Consider demand forecasting.
When planning relies on manually maintained spreadsheets, information can quickly become fragmented or outdated. Teams may spend valuable time reconciling information rather than interpreting it, while decisions are made using data that doesn’t necessarily reflect current operational conditions.
The consequences can extend well beyond administrative inefficiency.
During the summit, we heard about organisations facing unexpected stock shortages that required emergency airfreight to maintain continuity of supply.
While expedited freight is sometimes unavoidable, repeated reliance on it can be a symptom of deeper challenges in forecasting, inventory visibility or operational planning.
It also illustrates something frequently overlooked in conversations about digital transformation: the greatest cost of disconnected data isn’t always the time spent managing it. It’s the decisions that are delayed or made without reliable information.
This is what we refer to as decision latency, the time between something happening within a business and the organisation being able to respond effectively.
And as operational complexity increases, so too can the cost of those delays.
Designed for change: A different perspective on operational complexity
These themes closely aligned with the keynote delivered by Mysoft’s Managing Director, Jamie Watts, titled “Designed for Change: Turning Operational Complexity into Value.”
The session explored how businesses accumulate operational friction as they grow, often through decisions that were entirely sensible when originally made.
A new sales channel introduces another system. An acquisition brings different processes and datasets. A spreadsheet is developed to address a reporting gap. A manual workaround helps a department meet an immediate deadline.
Individually, these decisions make sense. Collectively, they can create an increasingly complicated operational environment.
As Jamie highlighted:
“Complexity is not the problem. Unmanaged complexity is.”
One of the most engaging elements of the keynote was a simple exercise: the five-minute test.
Could your leadership team confidently answer the following questions within five minutes?
- What is our true landed margin by product or customer?
- How much stock is available across all sites, right now?
- What happens to margin on our top 20 products if freight costs rise by 10%?
The exercise resonated particularly well with attendees and prompted further conversations around the accessibility, accuracy and reliability of operational information.
These are not unusual questions. They are fundamental to running a business effectively.
Yet answering them can become surprisingly difficult when information must be gathered, reconciled and validated across multiple systems.
Is more technology really the answer?
Another important reflection from the summit was that addressing operational challenges doesn’t always mean introducing another technology.
While some organisations were actively exploring new ERP and WMS solutions, others were trying to extract greater value from their existing investments.
It’s an important distinction.
Replacing an outdated system may be necessary when it can no longer support a business’s requirements. However, introducing new software without understanding the underlying processes, data dependencies and operational challenges can simply recreate existing inefficiencies in a different environment.
The starting point should therefore be understanding what the business needs to achieve.
Where does information become fragmented? Which processes depend on manual intervention? Where are operational decisions being delayed? And which inefficiencies are creating measurable financial consequences?
Sometimes the answer lies in better integration, stronger data governance or improved processes. In other cases, a more fundamental transformation may be required.
The objective should be the same: creating an operational foundation that enables businesses to adapt, grow and make better decisions without continually adding unnecessary complexity.
Taking the Conversation Beyond the Summit
Our time at the Total Supply Chain Summit was a valuable opportunity to step outside our day-to-day activities and hear first-hand how organisations are navigating their operational challenges.
From manufacturing and distribution to retail and food production, the conversations highlighted how businesses with very different operating models can encounter remarkably similar difficulties.
They also reinforced something we strongly believe at Mysoft: successful digital transformation isn’t simply about implementing technology. It’s about understanding how a business operates, identifying where value is being lost and creating the foundations for long-term success.
We’d like to thank the event organisers and everyone who took the time to share their experiences, exchange ideas and attend Jamie’s keynote.
For organisations reflecting on their own operational challenges, our Designed for Change friction self-assessment and friction ledger template offer a practical starting point for identifying inefficiencies and understanding their potential impact.
Because sometimes, the greatest opportunity for improvement isn’t found within an individual system, but in the gaps between them.