There is a familiar pattern playing out inside supply chain organizations. A performance gap emerges: shipments slow, costs rise, and fill rates slip. Someone raises the issue in a leadership meeting, and within days, the conversation shifts from understanding the problem to deciding which system to buy.

This is not laziness or poor leadership. It is the default mode of problem-solving in many organizations, and recent industry data suggests the pattern is widespread.

A survey of more than 2,000 senior supply chain, logistics, and technology leaders found that 27% of organizations frequently define transportation challenges in terms of systems or platforms, while another 22% said they typically move toward a technology solution before fully defining the operational problem. Only 15% consistently tackle strategy first.

That leap from identifying a challenge to investing in a technology solution is where many supply chain improvement efforts go wrong.

Read Supply Chain Xchange’s full article to learn what problem supply chain professionals need to be tackling first, according to JBF’s Strategy Principal, Tara Buchler.