By Allen Foss and Matt Roche
As we start 2026, conversations with supply chain leaders across industries are becoming more focused — and more pragmatic. Global events over the past several years have pushed organizations to their limits, exposing weaknesses in visibility, resilience, and decision-making speed. What leaders are asking for now isn’t theoretical strategy or shiny tools; they want practical solutions that help them see risks sooner, act faster, and build supply chains that can withstand disruption without sacrificing performance.
Across healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation, a clear theme is emerging: data foundations first, visibility second, and actionability always. Below are the key patterns we’re hearing directly from sales meetings and pitch rooms.
Healthcare
Over the past six years — especially through COVID — the healthcare industry has experienced unprecedented supply chain disruption. While the public remembers mask shortages, hospital systems were also struggling to source critical items like needles and IV saline solutions. These shortages stretched organizations to their limits while they were also expected to deliver the highest level of patient care.
In response, many large healthcare systems invested heavily in strengthening their supply chains, often bringing in consulting firms to conduct critical supply chain analyses. These efforts focus on identifying essential items, mapping supplier networks, and incorporating this information into formal risk matrices. In some cases, organizations have had such negative experiences with intermediaries that they’ve eliminated middlemen entirely and gone directly to manufacturers.
Now, the conversation has shifted again. With critical items identified, healthcare leaders are asking: How do we gain real visibility into these supply chains? The answer increasingly starts with data — knowing where it lives, ensuring its accuracy, and making it easy to access. Platforms like AWS and Snowflake are becoming foundational tools to enable this visibility.
Recently, evolv has worked alongside teams leveraging real-time visibility solutions that combine advanced analytics, AI, and national disaster and event data to predict potential supply disruptions before they occur. These tools are powerful, but healthcare organizations are learning that the real value only emerges once strong data foundations and governance are in place.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing has been at the forefront of the digital supply chain revolution for over a decade, often serving as the proving ground for technologies later adopted elsewhere. For organizations running just-in-time (JIT) operations, data accuracy and system reliability are non-negotiable. Trust amongst the supply network is imperative to ensure accurate supplier forecasts and on-time manufacturing build schedules.
What’s changing now is the level of precision manufacturers expect. It’s no longer enough to know that materials will arrive “on time.” Leaders want to know exactly where items are — not just at the facility, but within the facility. When takt times are as short as seconds, teams need near-real-time visibility to ensure materials are adjacent to the line and available when needed.
In our line of work — and in a world where part category management by cost or volume has taken prevalence in the minds of purchasing professionals and company executives — we really do believe that the most important part number is the one you don’t have. That’s the beauty and the drama of the supply chain – the 10 cent bolt can be the part that makes the whole operation collapse… if you allow it to.
At the same time, we’re seeing a renewed focus on the data itself. Manufacturers are investing heavily in defining hierarchies, standardizing core data elements, and implementing structured governance models. These foundational efforts are designed to support whichever tools they choose next, and to enable the next evolution of digitally driven JIT manufacturing without constantly reworking the basics.
Transportation
Transportation has always been about speed and decision-making. When a driver is delayed, rerouted, or stuck, teams need immediate alternatives to keep operations moving. Over the past five years working in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) space, we’ve seen a growing demand for better resolution capabilities — not just tracking what went wrong, but acting on it in real time.
Leaders want clearer visibility into exceptions: wrong deliveries, unexpected pickups, or inventory that can be reintroduced into the system. Knowing about these issues earlier allows teams to respond proactively instead of reactively.
Recently, we worked with a disposal transportation company exploring Optical Character Recognition (OCR) based solutions for receipt processing. Their goal was to improve cost prediction and eliminate the inefficiency of reconciling digital and physical receipts. By extracting structured data from unstructured inputs, they were able to improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and gain clearer insight into operational performance.
As we move into 2026, supply chain leaders aren’t asking for more tools; they’re asking for clarity, resilience, and the ability to execute. Across industries, the priorities are remarkably consistent: trusted data foundations, real-time visibility into critical operations, and solutions that turn insight into action.
For consulting firms, the conversation still includes AI and how it can help. But we’ve finally reached a point where the answer can confidently be “yes.” We are no longer spending months cleansing and stitching together data just to understand what’s happening across the supply chain. Instead, organizations can focus on applying intelligence to the problems that matter most.
So the question becomes: What technologies are actually enabling this shift and how are leaders using them in practice?
Technology That Actually Helps in 2026: From Dashboards to Intelligence
For years, supply chain visibility has largely meant dashboards. We’ve personally built solutions in Looker, Power BI, and Tableau that solved real problems, but they all shared the same limitations. These solutions depended heavily on upstream data engineering, extensive data cleaning, and static models. Ultimately, the insights were only as good as the data someone manually pulled together, and they often lagged the reality on the ground.
What we’re seeing now — particularly with Snowflake — is a shift from reporting on the past to predicting and acting on the future.
Recently, we were shown Snowflake’s Supply Chain Risk Intelligence framework, which demonstrates how modern data platforms can move beyond traditional BI and into true operational intelligence. Instead of simply visualizing internal data, this approach combines enterprise supply chain data with external signals — such as weather events, geopolitical disruptions, natural disasters, and supplier risk indicators — to proactively identify where disruptions are likely to occur.
At a high level, this capability allows organizations to:
- Continuously assess supply chain risk across suppliers, locations, and materials
- Detect potential disruptions before they impact operations
- Prioritize response actions based on severity and business impact
- Move from reactive firefighting to proactive mitigation
Why This Matters for Healthcare
In healthcare, where we’ve already helped organizations identify critical supplies and map supplier dependencies, this type of intelligence becomes the next logical step. Once you know which items are mission-critical, the question becomes: How early can I see risk forming?
With real-time risk signals layered on top of curated supply chain data, healthcare systems can anticipate shortages of essential items — such as IV solutions or medical consumables — before they hit patient care. This enables earlier sourcing decisions, inventory rebalancing, or supplier engagement, rather than emergency responses when it’s already too late. One-time use inventory (consumables) exposes the healthcare industry to a high level of risk when suppliers at various tiers in the supply chain fail to meet demand. Taking proactive approaches to plan for disruption puts the healthcare industry in the best position for success. As the adage goes, “fail to plan, plan to fail”.
Why This Matters for Transportation
In the CPG space, speed and margin matter. Transportation delays, supplier disruptions, or unexpected demand shifts can quickly cascade into lost revenue or excess inventory. By combining internal shipment, inventory, and cost data with external risk indicators, organizations can better understand not just what is happening, but what is likely to happen next.
This is especially powerful when paired with downstream resolution workflows—helping teams reroute shipments, adjust production plans, or make informed cost decisions before issues surface operationally.
The Bigger Shift
What’s most compelling isn’t any single model or visualization, it’s the platform shift. Snowflake enables organizations to centralize trusted data, integrate external intelligence, and apply advanced analytics without rebuilding pipelines for every new question. This dramatically lowers the barrier between insight and action.
For supply chain leaders in 2026, this represents a move away from static dashboards and toward living systems that continuously learn, adapt, and inform decisions in real time.
evolv can help teams across healthcare, manufacturing, transportation and other sectors turn data insights into action. Reach out to our team to learn more.
Allen Foss is a supply chain and digital transformation leader with over a decade of experience helping manufacturing, and CPG organizations turn data into operational outcomes. He specializes in bridging strategy and execution—building practical solutions across supply chain visibility, risk management, and decision intelligence using modern data platforms. Allen has led large-scale initiatives spanning inventory optimization, transportation resolution, manufacturing operations, and enterprise data foundations, with a focus on delivering resilient, real-world supply chains.
Matt Roche is a supply chain and logistics leader with over a decade of experience working primarily in the fields of import/export compliance, freight forwarding, third party logistics (3PL) management, procurement, chemical management, production control and reverse logistics. Throughout his career, Matt has spent time all along the supply chain both upstream and downstream to gain a full perspective on how changes impacts the entire network. Matt has made impactful changes in the Aerospace/Defense and Automotive industries where supply chain strategies are vastly different and require creative ways of contributing to a company’s competitive edge.
