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February 2026
Supply Chain News to Know

 
 
February 2026

News To Know

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Everyone's talking about AI ROI, but most organizations still can't point to where it shows up on the P&L. Supply chain may be the one function where that changes in 2026… Let's dive in.

 
 
 

 The Lead: Data Rich, Action Poor
 
 
 
 
 
Supply chain teams have more data at their fingertips than ever. So why do so many of them still get stuck?

That's the central question in a new piece from Supply Chain 24/7, where FourKites' Stephen Dyke argues that the gap between insight and action is becoming the defining challenge for supply chain organizations. The problem is that most teams operate against siloed metrics — procurement chasing unit cost, manufacturing optimizing utilization, transportation focused on consolidation — and nobody is measured on how well those decisions work together.

Dyke walks through how functional scorecards actually incentivize decisions that hurt the broader operation, even when the people making them are doing exactly what they're told. It's a structural problem dressed up as a data problem, and it explains why so many organizations feel like they're running harder without gaining ground.

 
 

  In View
 
 
 
 
 
  • Nestlé's former global supply chain head makes the case that everyday variability — not the big disruptions — is what's quietly hurting margins. FourKites published the guest post from Vineet Khanna, who argues the cumulative cost of hundreds of suboptimal daily decisions dwarfs what companies spend on crisis response.
  • FourKites launched Loft, an AI orchestration platform that extends its Digital Workforce beyond supply chain and into any enterprise system. At the core is Sophie, a new AI developer agent that turns natural-language operating procedures into production-ready automations. Enterprise Times has the breakdown.
  • Why can't most companies get AI to reduce costs? Supply & Demand Chain Executive explores how disconnected P&Ls and competing incentive structures remain the biggest barrier — and why 2026 might be the year those contradictions become impossible to work around.
 
 

  Numbers to Know
 
 
 
 
 
Volume Changes by Region.png
 
 
Source: FourKites network data; Yahoo Finance / Sourcing Journal

Back-to-back storms Fern and Gianna hammered the eastern U.S. in late January, causing national shipment volumes to fall more than 55% week over week, with the Texas Gulf Coast seeing inbound freight drop 73%. Meanwhile, the Mid-Atlantic experienced the steepest decline in on-time delivery (OTD), dropping 14 percentage points — from 75% to 61%. The Northeast saw OTD fall by 11-13 percentage points as well.

 
 

Words of Wisdom
 
 
“A homegrown system might suggest rebooking a late shipment without knowing that carrier is already at capacity, that warehouse has limited dock doors during peak hours, or that the customer's receiving schedule won't accommodate the change. A network-trained system knows these things.”

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Sree Mangalampalli
VP OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SOLUTIONS, FOURKITES
 
 

  ICYMI
 
 
 
 
 
  • AI agents are thriving in the enterprise while consumer applications stall. A new post from FourKites' Sriram Nagaswamy explains the security architecture behind why that split exists — and why walled-garden environments make enterprise AI viable in ways the open web can't match.
  • Freight rates may be normalizing, but your cost baseline hasn't. FourKites' Tyler Nickel writes in Logistics IT that point solutions and better algorithms won't fix structural cost problems — only architecture that connects insight to execution will.
  • From digital twins to autonomous execution, FourKites' Kevin Kruekis outlines five strategies for preventing disruptions before they hit the bottom line in Enterprise Times.
 
 
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