The Freight Buyers' Club
Reimagine Your Supply Chain First, Then Add the Technology, with e2open's Pawan Joshi
In this extended clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, digs into how far AI has actually taken supply chains, and where the real opportunity still sits. Pawan explains that a lot of supply chain processes and company structures were designed decades ago, in a world before the internet, before cell phones, when even desktop computing was limited. Technology has moved on dramatically since then. His point is that the real opportunity isn't just adding AI on top of existing processes. It's rethinking them with today's connectivity and compute in mind. He walks through a real example: monitoring temperature in real time on a refrigerated shipping container. Catching a broken cold chain early gives a business weeks of lead time to plan around a shortage, rather than finding out only when the container arrives. He calls this closing the loop, a concept borrowed from control systems. His argument is that closing the loop matters more than which specific technology, AI included, does the work. Pawan also explains the logic behind e2open and WiseTech's CargoWise coming together. He breaks the supply chain into three groups: the people who make products, the people who sell them, and the people who move them. CargoWise was built for the movers, e2open for the makers and sellers, and bringing them together aims to connect the whole chain rather than stopping at the handoff points. Finally, he addresses what actually blocks companies from sharing supply chain data across their networks. His answer: not a lack of standards, but a lack of trust.
