While attending Momentum 2025 by Manhattan Associates last week in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel conversation that hit home for every retailer in the room.
With a mix of tech leads, academic insight, and boots-on-the-ground experience, the panel unpacked what happens when your inventory doesn’t show up, can’t get through a port, or takes a wildly expensive detour.
Joining me were:
Here are seven key takeaways for retailers who are facing friction in their supply chain-and are looking for vendors who don’t just sell software but actually help solve problems.
Disruptions like the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore aren’t just headline news- they’re operational roadblocks. That kind of pivot isn’t sustainable unless you’ve accounted for disruption in your network design.
“We couldn’t bring anything into Baltimore, so we called a barge to tow the product. Slow moving, but it was the only option.” - Mandar Rahatekar
Retailers can no longer treat port access or overland transport as constants. Resilience isn’t a buzzword; it is a budget line.
Mandar Rahatekar shared one of those stories that makes every retailer in the room shift uncomfortably in their seat. “We were launching a product in six weeks with a 12-week supply chain,” he said. “We ended up flying adjustable mattress bases from Asia to the U.S.—thousands of them.”
Let that sink in. Mattress bases—bulky, heavy, and typically shipped via ocean freight—were loaded onto planes. The cost? Astronomical. The impact? A margin-eroding scramble to meet a deadline that wasn’t grounded in operational reality.
This wasn’t just a logistics failure. It was a cross-functional breakdown between product development, planning, marketing, and inventory teams. When one part of the business sets a launch date without syncing with the supply side, the whole operation pays for it—literally.
Retailers love speed, but speed without alignment is a recipe for chaos. The smarter strategy is to build cross-functional launch teams that work backwards from the supply chain realities, not forwards from a marketing calendar. As Mandar’s story proves, the true cost of urgency isn’t just freight—it’s the hit to your bottom line and team
Speed isn’t just about logistics. If your planning, sourcing, and marketing teams aren’t working together, you’re not fast- you’re reactionary. And those last-minute decisions? They don’t just erode margins, they expose the real problem: no one’s aligned.
If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. Mandar emphasized that fragmented data across partners often blocks retailers from getting ahead of problems.
“The key is using the right tools and making sure information flows across all boundaries. There are so many different partners, and too often, the data stops where the contract does.”
Retailers should expect end-to-end visibility from their platforms, not just what they own, but what their vendors, 3PLs, and suppliers are doing. It's no longer acceptable to operate in silos and hope things go smoothly. It's about visibility in real time.
I made this point during the panel: “If you’re waiting for five departments to approve a workaround, you’ve already missed the window.” When a disruption hits, waiting for five layers of internal signoff is often the bigger problem.
Decision velocity separates market leaders from the rest. The ability to act on insights in real-time and empower your teams to do so has become a competitive advantage.
Dr. Erera offered a perspective grounded in research and modeling. Traditional planning systems rely too heavily on steady-state assumptions - conditions that no longer exist.
“You can’t build a rigid plan anymore. It has to be predictive, agile, and flexible enough to absorb one-off shocks, because those are now weekly events.”
Retailers must invest in tools that can simulate disruptions, dynamically reallocate resources, and re-plan without human intervention. Agility is no longer optional; it’s the system.
When a product is late or missing, the blame game starts. But as Mandar reminded us, this mindset won’t move anything forward. After all, the customer wants what they want!
“The thing is, it all happens in the supply chain. It’s not someone else’s problem anymore.” - Mandar Rahatekar
Darryl Aldridge drove the point home with a retail operator’s lens, “We’ve learned that the fastest companies are the ones making the fastest decisions, not just moving the fastest trucks. You can have the best technology and transportation contracts in place, but if your team can’t make decisions quickly, you’re still going to miss out. Speed lives in decision-making.”
He made it clear that decision velocity isn’t just a logistics issue—it’s cultural. You can’t fix slow systems without fixing slow leadership. Retailers need cross-functional accountability. Every department must treat the supply chain as a shared priority because customers don’t care whose fault it is. They just want the product.
Too many vendors show up with ideas but not results. As I said during the panel, great tech doesn’t matter if it never leaves the whiteboard. “Retailers are tired of slide decks and buzzwords. They want execution.”
Innovation without adoption is wasted energy. Retailers need to seek out partners who are hands-on, who train teams on the floor, and who close the loop between promise and delivery.
This wasn’t a panel full of theory. It was a wake-up call. Retailers need to look at the supply chain not as a back-office function but as a front-line strategy. The vendors who will win are the ones who get that, and who can prove it on the store floor, not just the sales floor.
If you’re still flying mattresses across oceans, it might be time for a new playbook.