8 supply chain leaders to follow in 2026
Supply chains have spent much of this decade under pressure. Pandemic disruption gave way to inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, shifting trade policies and increasingly complex expectations around sustainability. Now artificial intelligence, automation and changing manufacturing footprints are adding another layer of transformation.
For the executives responsible for keeping goods, materials and components moving, that volatility has changed the job.
Supply chain leadership is no longer confined to procurement, logistics and manufacturing efficiency. Decisions about where companies manufacture, how much inventory they carry, which technologies they adopt and how they work with suppliers increasingly affect growth, profitability and competitive positioning.
The leaders attracting attention in 2026 are consequently those connecting operational execution with broader business strategy. Some are deploying AI and digital technologies across vast industrial networks. Others are reconsidering manufacturing footprints, developing more resilient supplier relationships or attempting to reconcile sustainability targets with commercial realities.
There is no single blueprint. The following eight supply chain leaders work across industries ranging from energy technology and consumer goods to sportswear and pharmaceuticals. What connects them is the scale of the operational challenge they face and the influence their decisions can have far beyond their own organisations.
1. Mourad Tamoud, Schneider Electric
Few executives have a better vantage point on the transformation of industrial supply chains than Mourad Tamoud.
As executive vice president of global supply chain at Schneider Electric, Tamoud oversees a network of 160 factories, 75 distribution centres and more than 80,000 employees. He has spent more than three decades working across industrial operations, with experience spanning manufacturing logistics, procurement, enterprise resource planning systems and industrial strategy.
That breadth matters as Schneider Electric attempts to respond to rapidly increasing demand for electrification, automation and digital infrastructure. AI is contributing to rising electricity demand at the same time that manufacturers are under pressure to improve efficiency and reduce emissions. Tamoud has argued that this environment requires the company’s supply chain to evolve alongside its positioning as an energy technology business.
The results have attracted external recognition. Schneider Electric said it ranked first in Gartner’s 2026 Supply Chain Top 25, the fourth consecutive year in which it occupied the top position. Tamoud attributed the performance to continued emphasis on people, digital technology and sustainability while the company manages accelerating demand.
His career also illustrates the value of deep operational experience. Before taking responsibility for the global organisation, Tamoud led supply chain operations in China and held positions across manufacturing, procurement and industrial strategy.
For other supply chain leaders, Schneider Electric offers an increasingly relevant model. Digitalisation and sustainability are not being treated as separate programmes layered onto existing operations. They are becoming part of the architecture through which the supply chain is designed and managed.
2. Venkatesh Alagirisamy, Nike
The career of Venkatesh Alagirisamy offers a particularly clear illustration of how the boundaries of supply chain leadership are expanding.
Alagirisamy became Nike’s executive vice president and chief operating officer in December 2025 after previously serving as chief supply chain officer. His responsibilities now encompass global supply chain, planning, operations, sustainability and technology.
It is an unusually broad portfolio, but one that reflects how interconnected these disciplines have become.
Nike operates a global network stretching from raw materials through footwear, apparel and accessories manufacturing to logistics and integrated planning. Alagirisamy is responsible for the strategic direction and operational performance of that network while also overseeing the technology organisation that increasingly supports it.
The appointment is significant beyond Nike. Technology was once largely an enabling function for supply chains. Increasingly, it determines how quickly organisations can identify changes in demand, optimise inventory, improve fulfilment and respond to disruption.
Alagirisamy also brings experience from across that operating system. Since joining Nike in 2006, he has worked in demand planning, inventory management and global operations, as well as serving as chief operating officer of Converse.
Nike’s decision to combine technology with Alagirisamy’s existing operational responsibilities gives him a position worth watching in 2026. The challenge is no longer simply moving products efficiently through a global network. It is building an operating model in which data, technology, sustainability and physical supply chain decisions work together.
3. Willem Uijen, Unilever
At Unilever, Willem Uijen is responsible for a supply chain operating at the scale of one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies.
Uijen is chief supply chain and operations officer and a member of the Unilever Leadership Executive, a position confirmed in company disclosures as recently as July 2026.
His work is particularly relevant as consumer goods businesses confront a difficult combination of pressures. They need to bring innovations to market faster while managing manufacturing complexity, volatile input costs and changing consumer demand.
Uijen has placed particular emphasis on using the supply chain to accelerate innovation. He has described how Unilever’s supply chain teams work with research and development, brand teams and external partners to understand emerging technologies and create manufacturing flexibility before new products are scaled. The objective is to build optionality into the system rather than waiting until demand has materialised before adapting operations.
That approach represents an important shift in supply chain strategy.
For decades, efficiency was often achieved through standardisation, scale and predictability. Those qualities remain important, but businesses operating in faster product cycles increasingly need flexibility alongside efficiency.
For Unilever, that means manufacturing and supply chain capabilities can influence how quickly an idea becomes a commercially viable product.
Uijen is therefore a leader to follow not simply because of the scale of the network under his responsibility, but because his remit demonstrates how operations can move closer to the centre of product innovation and growth.
4. Ewan Andrew, Diageo
Ewan Andrew occupies an unusual position at Diageo, combining responsibility for global supply chain and procurement with the role of chief sustainability officer.
That combination makes him particularly relevant to one of the most difficult questions confronting modern supply chain leaders: how to improve resilience and efficiency while reducing environmental impact.
As president of global supply chain and procurement and chief sustainability officer, Andrew has articulated a strategy centred on creating an efficient and resilient supply chain capable of supporting future growth.
For a drinks company, the challenge begins well before manufacturing. Agricultural ingredients, packaging, energy, water, logistics and relationships with suppliers all form part of the operational equation. Diageo works with suppliers in more than 100 countries, giving procurement decisions consequences across an extensive international ecosystem.
Andrew’s dual remit is important because sustainability ambitions ultimately have to survive contact with operational reality.
Reducing emissions or changing packaging can affect suppliers, manufacturing processes, capital requirements and cost. Conversely, investments designed to improve resource efficiency can strengthen resilience and reduce exposure to volatile inputs.
The strongest supply chain strategy increasingly treats those questions together.
Andrew is worth following in 2026 because Diageo provides a useful test of whether sustainability and commercial supply chain priorities can be managed as complementary objectives rather than competing ones.
5. Tamera Fenske, Kimberly-Clark
Tamera Fenske’s work at Kimberly-Clark centres on a challenge shared by many established manufacturers: how to modernise a large supply chain without losing the capabilities that made it successful.
Fenske remains senior vice president and chief supply chain officer at Kimberly-Clark, according to a company filing from May 2026.
She joined the business after more than two decades at 3M, bringing experience across manufacturing, supply chain leadership, technologies and different routes to market. At Kimberly-Clark, her focus has included modernising the company’s supply chain and improving how it manages an increasingly complex external supply ecosystem.
That challenge is familiar across the manufacturing sector.
Legacy industrial businesses frequently possess deep process knowledge, sophisticated production capabilities and decades of accumulated expertise. Yet the systems connecting those assets can be fragmented, making end-to-end visibility and rapid decision-making difficult.
Modernisation therefore cannot simply mean installing new software. It requires reconsidering processes, data, network design and the way teams make decisions.
Fenske’s work is notable because it puts the emphasis on managing the supply chain as an integrated system. That includes making better use of global scale while retaining the manufacturing and materials expertise on which the business has historically depended.
As manufacturers increase investment in automation and digital tools, her approach offers a reminder that transformation has to connect technology with operational capability.
6. Sally Gilligan, Gap Inc.
Retail supply chains face a particularly unforgiving equation. Consumers expect availability and speed, while excess inventory can quickly translate into discounting and margin pressure.
That makes supply chain strategy central to the economics of businesses such as Gap Inc.
Sally Gilligan has been one of the executives working at the intersection of those pressures. Her leadership responsibilities have combined supply chain with wider transformation, an increasingly significant pairing in a sector where inventory, sourcing, fulfilment and technology are closely connected.
The relevance of that model is straightforward. Retailers cannot transform customer experience without transforming the operational network behind it.
Changes to demand planning influence purchasing. Sourcing decisions influence lead times. Inventory positioning affects both availability and working capital. Fulfilment capabilities determine how effectively physical stores and digital channels can operate together.
For a global apparel company, these relationships are complicated further by long international supply chains and consumer demand that can change much faster than manufacturing capacity.
Gilligan is worth following because her remit highlights the extent to which supply chain decisions have become enterprise transformation decisions. The challenge is not simply to make logistics faster. It is to create an operating model capable of responding to demand while controlling inventory and protecting profitability.
That balance will remain one of retail’s defining supply chain challenges in 2026.
7. Rob Montgomery, Walmart
Few businesses expose the complexity of supply chain management at scale quite like Walmart.
Rob Montgomery has built his career around that complexity, with experience spanning distribution centre design, inventory management, replenishment, network optimisation and supply chain planning.
His work at Walmart has included responsibility for supply chain business operations and planning, covering areas such as demand planning, capacity management, quality, programme governance and project management. Earlier roles included digitally modelling supply chain strategies, overhauling inventory management in Walmart Brazil and leading network design and innovation.
The underlying objective is deceptively simple: create a consistent flow of inventory from suppliers to customers.
Achieving it across Walmart’s enormous network is considerably harder.
Availability depends on forecasting, supplier performance, transportation, distribution capacity and inventory positioning operating as a connected system. Small improvements can generate substantial results when applied at Walmart’s scale, while small inefficiencies can become equally significant.
Montgomery’s engineering background is also notable at a time when supply chain design is becoming increasingly quantitative. Network modelling, automation and digital planning tools allow companies to test scenarios before making costly physical investments.
For supply chain professionals, Walmart remains an important organisation to watch because operational innovation is tested at exceptional scale. Montgomery’s experience across both physical infrastructure and digital modelling places him close to the decisions determining how that network evolves.
8. Karin Shanahan, Bristol Myers Squibb
Supply chain performance takes on a different meaning in pharmaceuticals.
For Bristol Myers Squibb, Karin Shanahan’s responsibilities as executive vice president of global product development and supply place her at the intersection of manufacturing, product availability and patient access.
Unlike many consumer supply chains, pharmaceutical operations must work within strict quality and regulatory requirements. For advanced therapies, manufacturing itself can also become part of the treatment pathway.
That changes the definition of supply chain success.
Efficiency remains important, but so do reliability, quality, capacity and the ability to deliver highly specialised products to patients when they are needed. Decisions that might be measured primarily through cost or service levels in another industry can have direct clinical implications.
Shanahan is consequently representative of a broader change in supply chain leadership. As products become more complex and manufacturing technologies more specialised, operational leaders increasingly need to connect supply strategy with innovation, regulatory requirements and customer or patient outcomes.
The pharmaceutical sector also faces many of the pressures affecting other industries, including geopolitical risk, supplier concentration and the need for greater resilience. But it must manage those risks while operating under unusually demanding quality constraints.
For executives outside life sciences, that makes leaders such as Shanahan useful to follow. Pharmaceutical supply chains demonstrate what operational resilience looks like when failure carries consequences far beyond lost sales.
Taken together, these eight leaders illustrate how much the definition of supply chain leadership has changed.
There is still an intense focus on the fundamentals. Products must be manufactured safely, inventory needs to be available and costs must remain controlled. Yet the decisions surrounding those fundamentals increasingly overlap with technology, sustainability, product development and corporate strategy.
One of the clearest shifts is the relationship between physical operations and digital technology.
Nike’s decision to put technology within Alagirisamy’s broader operating remit is an obvious example. Schneider Electric’s strategy similarly places digitalisation alongside people and sustainability as a central component of supply chain transformation.
The implication is that digital transformation is moving beyond standalone pilots.
AI, advanced planning and automation have the potential to improve forecasting, scheduling, inventory management and network optimisation, but technology alone does not create a better supply chain. Leaders still have to redesign processes, determine how decisions are made and ensure employees can use the information being generated.
Resilience is undergoing a similar evolution.
The disruptions of the early 2020s encouraged businesses to reconsider supplier concentration and geographically extended networks. In 2026, the discussion is becoming more sophisticated. Companies must decide where additional capacity, alternative suppliers or inventory genuinely reduce risk and where they simply add cost.
That requires supply chain leaders to make choices with consequences for capital allocation and long-term competitiveness.
Sustainability adds another dimension. Andrew’s combined supply chain and sustainability responsibilities at Diageo demonstrate how closely environmental ambitions are connected to procurement, manufacturing and supplier relationships. Schneider Electric’s strategy similarly connects sustainability with operational transformation.
These are no longer peripheral considerations. Energy use, materials, water, packaging and transportation can affect both environmental performance and the resilience of the underlying operation.
What the next generation of supply chain strategy looks like
The most important lesson from these leaders is that there is no longer a clean boundary between supply chain strategy and business strategy.
A decision to redesign a manufacturing network can determine how quickly a company enters a market. A change in inventory strategy can alter cash flow. Investment in automation can affect productivity and workforce requirements for years. Supplier decisions can influence sustainability targets, geopolitical exposure and product availability simultaneously.
That gives supply chain leaders greater influence, but also greater responsibility.
The strongest operators will still need detailed knowledge of manufacturing, procurement, logistics and planning. What is changing is the context in which that expertise is applied. Executives increasingly need to understand technology investment, sustainability, geopolitical risk and customer behaviour while communicating the implications of operational decisions at board level.
Tamoud’s industrial transformation at Schneider Electric, Alagirisamy’s expanded technology and operations remit at Nike and Uijen’s emphasis on manufacturing flexibility at Unilever all point in that direction.
The companies themselves are very different. So are the networks they operate. A pharmaceutical supply chain cannot be managed like a retailer’s, just as a global energy technology manufacturer faces different constraints from a consumer goods business.
But the direction of travel is increasingly similar.
The supply chain is becoming one of the places where corporate promises are tested against physical reality. Growth requires capacity. Resilience requires choices about suppliers and networks. Sustainability requires changes to materials, manufacturing and transportation. AI requires operational processes capable of turning better information into better decisions.
That is why the supply chain leaders worth following in 2026 are not simply the executives responsible for keeping goods moving.
They are increasingly helping decide where their companies move next.
