Retail’s Future In Focus: The Connected Supply Chain

The retail supply chain stopped being linear years ago, yet most systems still run as if it were.The retail supply chain stopped being linear years ago, yet most systems still run as if it were. This panel digs into what comes next.

The 2020 pandemic exposed how fragile and linear most retail supply chains really were, and the industry has spent the years since trying to make them faster, smarter, and genuinely responsive. In this Retail Future Focus panel, host Mike Graen of Collaboration, LLC convenes five operators and technologists to work through what a genuinely connected supply chain demands. He’s joined by Vic Miles, Americas Region Business Leader for Retail and Consumer Goods at Microsoft; Suzy Monford, CEO and Founder of Food Sport International and former grocery executive at Kroger, H-E-B, and PCC; Mark Propes, Chief Business Development Officer at Vusion; and Emil Martinez, CEO of Badger Technologies.

The conversation keeps returning to a question the industry has wrestled with for two decades and still hasn’t cracked. Do retailers actually know what inventory they have and where it physically is? The panel pushes past the obvious answer into harder territory, including why “states of inventory” matters more than raw counts, why many retailers still operate on inventory accuracy in the low-to-high 70s, and why bidirectional data sharing between trading partners remains the real unlock. A live role-play closes the session, with Monford playing a grocery CEO facing markdown and fresh-food waste while the three technology leaders explain how their tools would actually work together to solve it. No single vendor owns the end-to-end answer, and the panel keeps coming back to interoperability over any single platform.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why the panel argues resilience comes from a connected data fabric rather than safety stock alone
• How “states of inventory” reframes the availability problem beyond simple on-hand counts
• Why bidirectional, near-real-time data between retailers and suppliers remains the missing piece after 25 years of EDI
• What “taking the human out of the loop” really means for autonomous supply chain decisions, and where it gets controversial
• How retailers can act on imperfect data now instead of waiting years for a master data management program to finish
• Why no single technology vendor can deliver the full solution, and what interoperability actually demands
• What the time dimension in fresh and food supply chains changes about how inventory has to be managed
• Why the panel frames new sensing technology as a way to supercharge labor rather than displace it

Rather than treating the supply chain as a back-office logistics function, this conversation reframes it as a connected, customer-facing system that succeeds or fails at the shelf and in the cart.

🌐 Learn more about Badger Technologies: https://www.badger-technologies.com/
🌐 Learn more about Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
🌐 Learn more about Vusion: https://www.vusion.com/

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