Welcome to TFEST26 Insights

TFEST26 Insights is the editorial home of TFEST26, Europe's senior supply chain transformation event. We publish for the people who run supply chains at scale: Chief Supply Chain Officers, VPs, and senior directors at companies turning over €500M and up. If you brief a board on resilience, sign off an AI pilot, or decide which two conferences are worth your year, this blog is written for you.

The conference itself runs on 1 and 2 December 2026 at Colosseum Berlin. It brings together more than 400 Director-level and above leaders from companies including Cisco, Henkel, Estée Lauder, Diageo, Schneider Electric, Novartis, and Mars, for two days of peer benchmarking and candid practitioner sessions rather than vendor pitches. This blog extends that ethos into the rest of the year, the 360 days when the conference is not running.

Who this is for

Every post is written for one reader: a senior supply chain practitioner reading on a train, on a plane, or between two back-to-back leadership meetings. We assume you already know the basics, so we skip the 101 explanations and go straight to the decision you actually face, the trade-off you are weighing, and what your peers have done about it.

We lean on first-hand practitioner insight. That means the 153 verified speaker bios already on this site, TFEST25 session content, and direct conversations with the CSCOs who attend. When we cite a leader such as Mourad Tamoud, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Schneider Electric, or Chuck Graham, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Cisco, it is grounded in what they have said in public rather than invented for effect.

What we cover

The blog runs across seven content pillars. Here is where to start in each.

AI and autonomous decisioning. The shift from dashboards that report to agents that act. Start with what an agentic supply chain actually is, a 2026 definition built around the questions senior leaders are asking now.

Resilience and geopolitics. Tariffs, dual-sourcing, nearshoring, and multipolar value chains. Our supply chain trends for European CSCOs maps the forces reshaping the year and the action each one calls for.

Digital transformation. Control towers, digital twins, and network design. Begin with what a supply chain control tower is, including an honest test of when you actually need one and when you do not.

Sustainability and decarbonisation. Scope 3, CSRD, and EUDR. Our guide to Scope 3 in the supply chain covers the definition, the regulatory pressure building on it, and a mitigation playbook for CSCOs.

CSCO and procurement mandate. The widening remit of the role and the board-level expectations that come with it. See what a Chief Supply Chain Officer actually does in 2026, benchmarked across named leaders from the speaker roster.

Talent and operating model. Workforce planning, the AI talent question, and cross-functional design. New posts in this pillar are on the way.

Peer learning at events. Honest conference comparisons and event reviews. Read the 12 best supply chain conferences in Europe, the shorter must-attend shortlist for CSCOs, and our head-to-head on TFEST versus Gartner Supply Chain Symposium.

How we write

Three standards shape every post. We take a position rather than hedging, because a senior reader wants a view they can argue with, not a summary they could have written themselves. We are honest about trade-offs, so listicles carry a drawback for every entry and comparisons say plainly who each option is wrong for. And we name our sources, because an unattributed claim is worth nothing in a board paper.

We are not writing for search ranking alone. We are writing what we wish we had read while briefing for our own last board meeting on supply chain strategy.

Where to start

If you have ten minutes, read the trends piece for the lay of the land, then pick the pillar closest to your current project. If you are deciding where to spend your conference budget, the events comparison is the most direct place to begin. If AI is on your desk this quarter, start with the agentic supply chain definition and follow it into the CSCO and digital pillars.

Cadence and subscribing

We publish three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 09:00 UTC. You can subscribe by RSS or follow Andrew Bonner on LinkedIn, where each new post goes out with a short practitioner take. Over a quarter that adds up to a working library across all seven pillars, which is the point: a reference you can pull from when a specific decision lands on your desk.

If you are attending TFEST26, or weighing it up, browse the speaker lineup before you read further. The blog and the event share the same source material, so the posts are a fair preview of the rooms you would be sitting in.

Reserve your TFEST26 pass for Berlin, December 1 and 2, 2026

— TFEST26 Editorial Team