Retail Titans’ AI Supply Chains, Gartner Top 25, Volkswagen’s EU Challenge & numi Feature Updates
Stefan Gaubatz
01 Aug 2025
News to watch
Retail Titans’ AI Supply Chains: Walmart’s & Target’s AI Inventory Optimizations
Walmart, Target and fellow big-box peers are wiring artificial-intelligence engines deep into their inventory networks. What began as isolated pilots is fast becoming the default operating system for demand-forecasting, replenishment and in-store execution—pushing the sector from yesterday’s batch planning to real-time, self-correcting supply chains. The prize is fewer empty shelves, slimmer overstocks and quicker capital turns; the price is heavy data-science investment, organisational change and fresh dependence on algorithmic accuracy. As AI’s reach widens, retailers that lag risk higher working-capital drag and lost sales in an increasingly unforgiving market.
- Target shows the upside: Its in-house “Inventory Ledger” now governs more than 40 % of the assortment and has lifted on-shelf availability four years in a row.
- Walmart moves inventory like a thermostat: Algorithms shift pool toys to warm-state stores and sweaters to cold ones, and flag regional demand mismatches for rapid stock re-positioning.
- Home Depot’s Sidekick app turns staff into AI agents: The machine-learning tool guides associates to restock and locate overhead items, feeding cleaner data back into replenishment models.
- Next horizon, according to academics: Within three years AI will detect stock-outs autonomously; in five it will place automatic reorders; in ten it will bake macro-economic shocks directly into inventory rules.
Numi’s Demand, Replenishment and Missing Parts Apps follow a similar approach by using demand signals in order to proactively provide improvement recommendations for supply chain disruptions.
Gartner’s 2025 Global Supply Chain Top 25
Gartner’s 2025 Global Supply Chain Top 25 shows Schneider Electric holding the No. 1 spot for the third year running, with NVIDIA leaping to No. 2. Gartner again moved Amazon, Apple, P&G and Unilever into a separate Masters category for their decade-long dominance. The analysts say three forces set this year’s leaders apart:
Quick takeaways:
- Europe is punching above its weight: five of the top-15 firms (Schneider, L’Oréal, Danone, Nestlé, Siemens) are European, signalling competitiveness in resilient, sustainable operations.
- Tech and pharma surge: NVIDIA, Cisco and AstraZeneca all sit in the top five, underscoring AI and healthcare supply-chain complexity as performance catalysts.
- German leadership gap: Siemens’ position at #15 shows strength in digital manufacturing, but the next German firm (BMW) appears only at #23 – a cue for other German industrials to accelerate supply-chain digitisation.
Volkswagen embodies the challenge ahead for European industry
- Even market leaders like Volkswagen can no longer offset Europe’s rising costs and regulatory complexity by exporting to China. VW will cut German capacity by 750 k cars and 35 000 jobs while investing €165 bn in electrification and software.
- Policy plea: Calls for flexible labour laws, pragmatic battery rules and faster permitting; warns that EU battery-content tariffs could backfire because Europe still lacks a mature cell-component ecosystem.
- The auto sector’s restructuring foreshadows broader industrial retrenchment unless EU frameworks lower energy, labour and compliance costs and accelerate home-grown supplier clusters.
What’s new at numi
Numi’s new Production Planning App dynamically reschedules production orders at both machine-specific and aggregated levels. Users can choose from a range of scheduling algorithms, from simple heuristics and optimization techniques to advanced reinforcement learning — to generate efficient and constraint-aware production schedules that improve capacity utilization and OTIF (On Time In Full) performance.
Events
International Conference on Supply Chain & Inventory Management (ICSCIM)
When: August 7–8, 2025
Where: Amsterdam, Netherlands
What: ICSCIM concentrates on inventory optimisation, network design and cold-chain challenges, giving practitioners and researchers two days of peer-reviewed talks and networking with European supply-chain academics and tech vendors.
CIPS Excellence in Procurement & Supply Awards
When: 4 September 2025
Where: London (UK)
What: A one-night gala plus daytime expo that draws senior supply-chain and procurement leaders from across Europe to showcase best-in-class projects and new solution providers.