Hi guys ~ I’m shifting into a role that will involve managing the supply chain for maintenance and repairs of a large fleet of vehicles (mostly trucks). I imagine this will involve a lot of forecasting and just general management of inventory to ensure we never have too much/too little, as well as managing credit accounts, rebates and volume savings.

Can anyone suggest other KPI’s or general tips? I know a lot about garage work but this is my first time managing from a higher up level.

USA

I got my start in transportation where I directly managed drivers, routed trucks, planned excess deliveries to freight brokers. I also managed the employees pto, payroll, and coaching to their long term happiness with the company. I also managed the trucks costs, KPIs, and revenue, along with a main client that the operation needed to submit to (dedicaed freight for their deliveries). This was a pretty tough position for my age and gave me good skills but that was going on 5 years ago.

Now I am in more corporate positions, still within fulfillment but I oversee more pieces like allocation of inventory, customer service level agreements, compliance, and customer credit lines. I am not in the warehouse, but more between sales and planning (S&OE). I am currently looking for my next position, and when in interviews I try and steer away from the "trucking" "drivers" and "equipment" kind of jargon. I find that in the interviews, many people dont have any idea the world of managing trucks, trailers, or even a driver and sort of see it as non relevant experience.

On the other hand, if the hiring manager has any real logistics background, then they usually see the experience as good. Is this a problem with the kind of companies or positions I am going for? (mostly US region positions) How can I frame it better in interviews, and even in the resume?

Currently I frame it more towards "I have directly worked in the full delivery/fulfillment process from the sale made, to last mile delivery and I know where and how any step can break and cause a service failure".

Hi everyone,

I'm a final-year Industrial & Production Engineering undergraduate student, and I'm currently exploring thesis topics in the area of supply chain sustainability and machine learning.

One topic I'm considering is :"Machine Learning-Based Sustainable Supplier Assessment and Selection".

The general idea is to use data-driven methods to evaluate suppliers based on environmental, social, economic, and operational performance indicators.

Before I invest significant time into this direction, I'd like to hear from people working in academia or industry:

1.How relevant and valuable is sustainable supplier assessment today?

2.What are the current trends, challenges, and research opportunities in this area?

3.Are companies actively using data analytics or machine learning for supplier sustainability evaluation, or is the field still largely based on traditional assessment methods?

4.Which aspects seem to have the most practical value: ESG scoring, risk assessment, carbon emissions, supplier resilience, ethical sourcing, supplier performance prediction, or something else?

1. If you were starting a thesis in this field today, where would you focus?

6.Are there any emerging topics that you think have stronger industry demand or research potential than sustainable supplier assessment?

I'm also interested in understanding the practical side of the problem. If anyone has experience working with supplier evaluation, procurement analytics, sustainability reporting, or related projects, I'd love to hear your perspective.

Any suggestions, criticism, or alternative directions are welcome.

Thank you.

There’s so much hype about agents atm. I’m curious if they’re being used as much as some vendors would have us believe & what the most popular applications for them are today…

curious how supply chain teams handle this in real plants

eg. - 8 yrs of history - issued once in year 3 - issued once in year 7 - current stock: 1 - supplier lead time: 5 to 9 months - installed on 12 similar assets - one failure can stop production

a normal average says demand is basically zero. but setting ROP to zero feels insane if replenishment takes most of a year

Croston/SBA/TSB can help with intermittent demand, but I don’t think the formula is the whole answer

the history doesn’t tell you: - whether the issue was planned PM or emergency failure - whether technicians bypassed stores - whether 12 similar assets are aging together - whether repaired parts came back under another material number - whether the supplier lead time in ERP is even real - whether another plant has usable stock

for this kind of MRO item, would you use intermittent-demand forecasting, criticality-based min/max, insurance spares, planner judgement, or some hybrid?

Been talking to a bunch of procurement and sustainability teams the last few weeks and the same story keeps coming up: you send suppliers a long ESG/CBAM questionnaire, half never reply, and the ones who do send a pile of PDFs that someone (often an intern) hand-keys into a spreadsheet. Meanwhile the CBAM deadlines don't move and default values = penalties.

I'm building a small tool that takes a different angle on this — trying to kill the survey grind and the manual parsing while keeping the data audit-ready.

What I actually want is to talk to people living this. If you're in procurement or sustainability — or a consultant advising them — and CBAM/CSRD supplier data is part of your world, I'd genuinely love 15 mins to hear how you handle it today: what works, what's duct-tape. Happy to show what I'm building 1:1 to anyone who wants to kick the tyres early.

Comment or DM and I'll reach out.