'Tis the season… for making supply chain predictions. Given how volatile 2025 was, anyone willing to share their opinions about the coming year deserves an award for courage.

In this episode of Art of Supply, the last of 2025, Kelly Barner shares her curated list of picks for the most compelling 2026 supply chain predictions, not ranked in any particular order, and with no guarantees for how likely they are to come true.

These predictions suggest that:

• Localization, automation, and resilience will keep colliding with reality, not hype
• Decision-making will stay fast, data will stay late, and companies will learn to live with the gap
• Rising costs and tighter oversight (from freight to cyber risk to returns) will force uncomfortable tradeoffs
• Government influence on supply chains isn't fading, it's expanding in new and unexpected ways

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

GE Appliances has been making news for years for the success of their reshoring program. It is a great story: a well-known consumer brand that is bringing production home, both to their own benefit and also to the benefit of customers and employees.

But even while GE Appliances has continued to make investments and earn positive headlines for continuing their commitment to reshoring efforts and partnering with suppliers, one of their competitors isn't so sure.

Whirlpool recently alleged that GE Appliances, along with two other competitors, was evading tariffs by artificially lowering the declared value of the goods they import – without passing those 'savings' along to customers. But does the data show evidence of misdeeds?

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers the balance of GE Appliances's good headlines and recent allegations against them:

• Background on GE Appliances's efforts to reshore production and the investments that has required
• The additional ways they are investing in domestic supplier partnerships, through collaboration and consultation
• And the recent investigation into potential tariff fraud… as alleged by Whirlpool… and what might explain the discrepancies

Links:

• Advancements & Adjustments in the GE Appliances Supply Chain
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

UPS is currently stuck between dropping parcel rates, rising union leverage, and stiff competition from their peers. Unlike their peers, UPS is unionized (part of the Teamsters), adding additional complexity and bottom-line pressure.

Not one to give up after 120 years in business, UPS has been looking for creative ways to make ends meet without disappointing the public. They created a massive buyout opportunity for drivers and have been working with gig drivers to handle spikes in seasonal volume without paying expensive overtime. Both strategies are saving them money, but running afoul of the Teamsters in the process.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner looks at UPS's challenges and the creative options they are trying in response:

• Leveraging gig drivers while warning against the danger of a loosely-managed final mile
• Introducing automation where they can, shutting warehouses where they can't
• Working to maintain a premium delivery service in a world dominated by low-cost eCommerce volume

Links:

• Negotiating the Big One: UPS and the Teamsters Labor Union
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

Commercial Driver's Licenses have been in the news a lot lately, and not for good reasons. A number of fatal accidents have been caused by questionably licensed drivers. These high profile incidents have caused a number of states and the Federal government to start digging into who is getting these licenses and how.

Much of the current situation dates back to a regulatory change made in 2022 that allowed CDL training schools to 'self certify' that they are turning out qualified drivers. The idea was to make it easier to get more drivers on the road in response to a reported driver shortage, but we've gotten less safe roads instead.

According to reporting by FreightWaves, there are approximately 100,000 truck crashes annually resulting in roughly 5,000 fatalities - a 40% increase over the last decade.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner digs past the recent headlines about CDL administration:

• Looking into the 2022 regulatory change, including the minimum federal requirements for safe commercial drivers and the system supposedly put in place to ensure training schools follow them
• The details behind the debate over English language proficiency and the eligibility status of non-domiciled drivers
• And the question that underpins it all: Is there a driver shortage?

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

On June 18, 2023, the OceanGate TITAN, a submersible on its way to the Titanic wreck site, imploded, killing all five passengers, including OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush.

There were a number of factors leading to this tragic event, including a horrible disregard of basic safety measures, a deliberate effort to work outside of regulatory and inspection protocols, and a toxic company culture.

While many of these issues were internal, OceanGate did not make the TITAN or its predecessors in-house. This means that they had suppliers, and those companies had a front row seat to what was unfolding.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers the OceanGate operation from a supply chain point of view:

• OceanGate's evolutionary journey – first to buy and retrofit their submersibles and then to build them
• The different suppliers that played a role in manufacturing the TITAN, and signs that the company was looking for alternatives
• The challenge presented by innovation that seems to defy convention. When is an idea truly groundbreaking, and when is it just reckless?

Links:

• Marine Board's Report Into the Implosion of the Submersible TITAN in the North Atlantic Ocean Near the Wreck Site of the RMS TITANIC Resulting in the Loss of Five Lives on June 18, 2023
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

"No trucking company in the history of trucking companies has ever made money if their wheels aren't moving basically all the time." - Sean Devine, Founder and CEO, XBE

When costs are high and competition is tight, how companies think about opportunities and challenges determines how successful they will be.

They must deal with the never-ending push and pull between procurement and sales, the role of operational planning, and demand that alternates between peaks and troughs, but the big question is always the same: Is your core business as profitable as it could be?

Sean Devine is the Founder and CEO of XBE, and Sean Correll is their General Manager of Heavy Logistics. XBE is an operations platform focused on heavy materials, logistics, and construction. Their customers build and maintain roads, manufacture with concrete and asphalt, and mine and transport aggregate – expensive, asset-intensive activities.

Starting with the need to maximize asset utilization, and then transitioning into how the most strategic business decisions are made, this conversation applies far beyond heavy logistics.

Kelly, Sean, and Sean discuss:

• How to optimize owned v. hired logistics capacity
• The many different levers that can turn a good operation into a great one
• Understanding the cost of an opportunity, as well as buy-side competition
• Why we all need to resist the temptation to run towards even the best answers

"Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary." - Austrian Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1950)

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was recently awarded to Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, Philippe Aghion, who is affiliated with universities in France and the U.K., and Peter Howitt, a professor of economics at Brown University.

Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt worked together for decades to develop and publish a model that makes it possible to better understand business growth - but not just any growth. The growth fueled by Creative Destruction.

Creative Destruction was first described by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 in response to ideas from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. In fact, Marx thought, and Schumpeter agreed, that it would lead to the end of capitalism… they just didn't agree on why.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers:

• What Creative Destruction is, and why it is no ordinary form of growth
• How the idea is connected to the potential end of capitalism
• Why it is so fascinating that this idea is being highlighted at this moment in time, with the rise of AI right before us.

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

When it comes to moving freight long distances, you can go from ship to drayage to rail to over-the-road trucking… or you can go intermodal.

Intermodal freight transportation combines the advantages of sea, air, and land transport to facilitate a preplanned end-to-end journey. Understanding the relative cost, security, and emissions benefits of intermodal transportation is key for companies looking for the most efficient way to move their goods.

In this episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner is joined by Anne Reinke, the CEO and President of the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA). Anne has experience lobbying for the rail industry and working at the Department of Transportation, as well as with an organization representing 3PLs.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly and Anne discuss:

• How the relative roles of private companies and government agencies vary by mode of transportation
• Which factors are most influential in driving demand for intermodal transportation
• How tariffs are changing shipper behavior, altering the usual seasonal patterns for transportation peaks and lows

Links:

• Anne Reinke on LinkedIn
• Intermodal Association of North America
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

Global trading of steel, lumber, and rare earth minerals makes our companies and industries and economies work. And yet, right up there with those examples is an agricultural commodity many people don't like and won't eat: soybeans.

Soybeans are a huge focus of the trade talks between the U.S. and China, and there is a lot at stake between now and the end of the year, especially for U.S. soybean farmers.

China has been actively diversifying their sources of soybeans away from the United States, and they have developed at least two viable alternatives: Brazil and Argentina. The U.S. has less actively (and only lately) started diversifying their customer base for exported soybeans, leaving farmers with a bumper crop and no one to sell it to.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers the soybean supply chain and its intersection with geopolitics:

• Starting with an overview of the global soybean market and how soybean trade is being affected by tariffs
• Why soybean farmers are upset with the country of Argentina - and the Federal government
• How the United States actually took soybean production away from China in the 1950s and 1960s, but now stands to lose their place as a prominent global source

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

On September 25, 2025, Kodiak, an autonomous truck software company founded in 2018, went public with a $2.5 Billion valuation.

Unlike other companies that make the whole truck autonomous, Kodiak retrofits existing equipment with their sensors and software. Also, unlike other companies in their space… they have revenue, something that is a challenge in any emerging industry.

In 2024, Kodiak became the first company to announce the delivery of a driverless semi-truck to a paying customer, but I think everyone has the same question: will it work? That goes for both Kodiak's solution and their business model.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner:

• Reviews how the Kodiak model works and what makes it different – including how they generate revenue
• Explains where they already have trucks in operation and how that is going, as well as the military investment that infused them with the capital required to grow
• And finally, she tries to answer the question 'Will it work long term?' from an operational and investment point of view

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement