The customer promise now designs the network
That closing of distance, and the smarter decision making it demands, is precisely what occupies Sachin Bajaj, Head, Supply Chain Design, AkzoNobel, though his lens is manufacturing network design rather than aviation. Reflecting on which technologies have delivered genuine business impact, Bajaj points first to AI led forecasting, citing his own experience at Amazon Fresh, where machine learning and advanced analytics measurably improved forecast accuracy and, more importantly, translated into better inventory and supply decisions. He sees strong adoption of IoT and robotics as well, particularly in high volume, repetitive warehouse operations where the business case is clearest, and describes digital twins as an increasingly relevant tool for simulating warehouse, inventory and logistics scenarios before major network decisions are made, with the next frontier being the fusion of these models with real time data and AI to make them genuinely dynamic.
The Customer-Driven Supply Chain
Bajaj’s account of upstream customer influence is notably structural. Customer expectations, he argues, now shape product design, production planning, inventory positioning and even packaging decisions, and cannot be solved through logistics alone. Offering faster delivery, greater choice and flexibility often requires rethinking manufacturing footprint, sourcing strategy and production schedules in tandem, with transparency about where a product is and how it was made becoming just as important to customers as speed itself. The central question for supply chain design, in his framing, has shifted from how to move a product faster to how to design the entire chain around the customer promise while keeping the economics sustainable.
Designing for Optionality
On resilience, Bajaj describes a deliberate move away from optimising purely for cost and efficiency towards testing multiple scenarios involving geopolitical shifts, supplier constraints and lead time variability before making footprint or inventory decisions, treating inventory not as a simple buffer but as a strategic tool to be positioned against specific risks. Asked to redesign a network from scratch for the next decade’s customer, he would prioritise speed, flexibility and proximity over cost minimisation alone, building a distributed and agile network with technology, from AI demand sensing to warehouse automation, embedded from day one. The guiding question, he suggests, should no longer be what the lowest cost network looks like, but what network best balances customer experience, resilience and economics while remaining adaptable, a philosophy that finds its sharpest real world test in categories where the customer’s need can resurface years after the original sale.
