Tony Ward
Senior US Partner
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Breaking silos: A new supply chain optimization playbook
Senior Partner, Director & Business Manager
Blog
8 min
27th May 2026
What it takes today to deliver the right goods at the right price the moment consumers need them
Imagine another disruption emerges today, because it easily could. Think Post‑Covid bullwhip effects creating yet another inventory swing, Make America Healthy Again updating the food pyramid, consumer interest increasing in protein and fibremaxxing, business splits and spinouts, price volatility, labor shifts – and those are the things we know about.
You jump to assessing the opportunities and risks it poses to delivering what your customers need. Import or manufacture in-house? Hold stock centrally or closer to customers? Build to demand or play it safe with high levels of safety stock? What are the sustainability implications? And beyond! Everyone else is doing it too: new product innovation is predicted to double by 2029 with up to 90% of portfolios being reformulated within three years1 – an incredible rate of change.
The problem is that each one of these many trade-offs has consequences elsewhere. Often, they are not only unexpected but initially unseen, spiraling under the surface.
The system-wide impact of siloed thinking
If you’re a Chief Supply Chain Officer reading this, you’ve almost certainly pulled on a thread in your supply chain and been shocked by what you uncovered – something even people outside your workplace would be left open mouthed by – like branded packets of food or beauty products being repacked as own brand. Then there are more everyday issues like the system showing that milk is available, but the fridge being empty.
Even in our recent work with leading retailers and CPGs, we see issues like this crop up and it is because a decision was made without understanding the end‑to‑end system. That simply can’t be done manually with the complexity we face today. Considering logistics alone, most shippers manage more than seven third-party logistics providers across fragmented carrier networks2, and network modeling has shifted from every one to two years to quarterly3.
Your organization may well have identified the same issues before, tried to unpick why they had happened and correct them – but so far, nobody has managed. Fingers may get pointed between teams, but the issue cannot be one team’s fault. Store processes are a key part of the problem, while stockfile inaccuracy alone is the root cause of up to a quarter of availability issues. In one high profile retailer we work with, the system was showing availability as high as 96%, yet 75% of family-shop carts couldn’t be completely filled. This is a system-wide data and decision-making issue.
Forensic, cross‑functional course correction
Just 18% of R&D leaders involve supply chain at project charter, and only 38% during concept and design4. By the time the call comes, trade-offs are already baked in. Costs show up downstream as excess inventory, complexity and missed launches.
Siloed teams and stale data can’t surface the trade-offs hiding in your supply chain, leaving CSCOs to discover problems only after they have cost real money. But forensic, cross-functional decision-making – fast enough to act in real time – is the lever to course correct.
The winners in this world calculate answers at pace, understanding their impact not just now and within their own team but across the supply chain and across teams. They react confidently to make calls fast, treating disruption as part of the everyday (because it is).
How to make cross-silo decisions and the impact on availability, waste and stockholding
When we diagnosed the issue in the retailer mentioned above, low availability and waste had four causes: accuracy of forecast, depot delivery and stockfile, and case size. That granularity is what “forensic” actually looks like – and turns finger-pointing into action.
Many organizations are not there, but aggregate results from our own work show the impact of getting it right:
01
Availability
+2-4%pt improvement in on-shelf availability and up to 20%pt improvement in stock accuracy
02
Waste
10-20% reduction in waste stockholding
03
Stockholding
5-15% working capital release
In fact, improving the entire supply chain process – from suppliers to delivery to the consumer – can reduce total supply chain costs by between 3-7%.
Leading with a new lens
So, how do you stop supply chain issues springing up in the first place? How do you move fast to correct course, ideally in real-time? How do you understand the exact route products take and where and how much value is added along every step of the supply chain?
It requires meticulous understanding, continuous conversation and visible senior sponsorship. Our programs approach it through the lens of:
- Structured understanding of cost drivers across the end-to-end supply chain
- A forensic, methodical approach to interrogating it, always informed by the on-the-ground reality
- Leadership promoting and rewarding the right behaviors
- A combined, cross-silo team with the right incentives and authority to make decisions
The outcome is a system-wide point of view which finds actions in the moment benefiting every team.
Conditions for change
Get the right approach in place and system-wide thinking, even in disruption, becomes every day. Organizations start to solve the root causes of issues by:
1
Leveraging existing data to isolate challenges
2
Being aware of operational realities
3
Ensuring governance works cross-functionally
Go deep and forensic where required to find the unlock. Understand the true cost of decisions – including all the incremental costs driven in.
Data never tells the whole story. Some issues won’t show up unless they are rooted out by people on the frontline who see, for instance, where stock shows up in the system but not on the shop floor.
Common for initiatives, it is now critical every day. Define a playbook and guardrails for how functions interact with one another and the holistic measures to work towards (even if one function’s KPI’s have to dip) making it possible to weigh up whether extra SKUs are worth the supply chain complexity.
This cross-organizational governance is exactly how silos are being broken down at the retailer mentioned earlier to live up to shopper expectations.
The heart of it all
“Whenever I travel, I always go out of my way to visit local stores. Not for groceries or things I’d forgotten to pack – to look around. I love seeing what ranges different retailers carry, what brands they back, how they lay the store out. It’s been a quiet obsession of mine for years and is probably why I ended up in retail and supply chain. But I can’t switch off the operational eye. I notice the empty shelf, the yellow sticker, the promotion and the things that don’t quite add up. And I’m always curious: did someone choose this, or is it a problem nobody’s caught? It’s often the latter – and that’s where the opportunity is.”
Jiri Pluhar, Director, US Consumer Team Newton
AI and tech solutions help connect everyone with everything but it’s still up to people, working within the right structures, to use that information to make informed decisions that get to the heart of what customers want and the operational reality. Next time you spot branded goods being repacked or the overstocking of items that end up being marked down, you’re not fixing a small misstep; you’re exposing how the whole system can be strengthened.
If this sounds familiar, connect with our US team who work with large global and domestic brands to solve exactly these supply chain issues. We’re so confident we can solve your trickiest problems that 100% of our implementation fees are guaranteed against delivering outcomes you can measure.
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