Living with Macroeconomic Uncertainty in Supply Chains with Christiane von Berg

“A control tower is not a product, and it’s not a dashboard. It is a multi-year journey of digital transformation.” A part that costs a few cents can stop production for a car worth thirty thousand euros. So how do you find it before it finds you? In this episode of Supply Chain Superintelligence, host Thomas George speaks with Thierry Blein, former Head of Supply Chain Risk Management and Business Continuity at Renault Group, about what it really takes to build a supply chain control tower, and why most people misunderstand what one is. Thierry’s role at Renault did not exist until 2023. It was created after a run of mega-crises (Covid, the war in Ukraine, the semiconductor shortage, the Suez Canal blockage) forced the industry to stop lurching from one emergency to the next. His answer was to hold prevention and reaction in a centralised Control Tower, bringing all the affected teams onto the same page with the same data. He walks through the four layers of a control tower in practice: reliable data that stays reliable, a digital twin of every supplier, plant, truck and container, a detection layer fed by internal and external signals – including Prewave’s – and finally an intelligence layer where information becomes decision. Along the way, he shares two stories that make the stakes concrete: a part costing a few cents, made in a non-compliant building in a Turkish earthquake zone, that could have halted up to 90% of production; and a chemical plant explosion in Pennsylvania where Renault traced the impact, found the affected supplier and secured an alternative source in under two weeks, while others in the industry only discovered the problem two months later. The conversation closes on where control towers go next: AI agents that triage alerts, run supplier investigations and draft the action plan, leaving humans to decide and manage exceptions.

"I think that the agents will save us. I'm very excited about realising that, because I think it's one of the most exciting times in the industry… ever." Risk teams can see further into their supply chains than ever before. So why does it still take weeks to do anything about what they find? Ahead of Prewave Day on 7 October, host Thomas George sits down with Harald Nitschinger, Co-founder and CEO of Prewave, and they start with a serious topic: the old way of managing supplier risk has stopped working. The post-Covid years broke the known model of supplier risk management, on both the risk side and the technology side: export controls, sanctions, and supply chains used as bargaining chips on the geopolitical board. These do not behave like the risks we once knew. For a decade, supplier risk management solutions framed the problem as not being able to see into the supply chain. That problem has largely been solved, and the result is tens of thousands of multi-tier suppliers and hundreds of alerts a month. Visibility, Harald argues, is now the foundation rather than the solution: the haystack is the easy part, and finding the needle is the work. Agentic AI is the key to changing where a team’s time actually goes. The gap between alert and actions is not an information problem but a context problem: which parts come from the affected suppliers, what inventory sits behind them, which lines are running them right now, how long requalification would take. That information exists, but it sits in different systems and different departments. That’s where the agents come in: taking on a large share of the work procurement and supply chain teams do today, but with one hard condition. Context. Procurement's context sits in ERP systems, material master data, inventory records, and in the heads of the most senior buyers in the building. Customers who spent years consolidating that into a data lake are in pole position. Customers running forty disconnected ERP systems are not, and an agent will struggle there for exactly the same reasons a human does. Key insights: Geopolitical risk persists and evolves rather than resolving, which breaks the one-alert-per-event model

"Digging rare earths is easy. Building an industry is hard." Join us for the most important summer travel guide you probably never asked for: ten mining sites with enormous global significance, and plenty of reasons why you wouldn't want to visit any of them. In this summer special of Supply Chain Superintelligence, Prewave Director of Product (Resilience) Sarah Naber and host Thomas George create a one-of-a-kind travel guide. Together, they’ll take you on a worldwide tour of the critical material mines that prop up the world we live in. Why? Because even though they’re rarely seen by outsiders, these mines have a huge impact on the daily lives of practically everyone on the planet. Without them, the automotive, energy, manufacturing, and defence industries would grind to a shuddering halt – with huge consequences for western economies and security. Thomas and Sarah’s journey takes you from a remarkably pleasant rare earth operation in the Australian outback to a lithium desert that has never seen rain. From America's comeback mine in the Mojave Desert to an active civil war zone in northern Myanmar. The thread they keep pulling on: rare earths just aren’t that rare. Scarcity is almost never caused by the rock itself – but everything else that’s built around it. Without the capacity to turn raw materials into the magnets, batteries and components that the world depends on, the mines alone will never be enough. Key insights: Real leverage sits in refining, processing and magnet manufacturing, not in the deposits themselves

"If you don't get the wheels of a car, there's no point getting the engine in." With the Strait of Hormuz under pressure, an industry-wide insolvency crisis brewing in Europe, and the EV transition rewriting decades-old supplier networks, how do automotive supply chains stay coordinated when every part of the system is moving at once? In this episode of Supply Chain Superintelligence, host Thomas George speaks with Falko Feldchen, Vice President of Procurement Solutions at o9 Solutions, about why orchestration, not just visibility or collaboration, has become the defining capability for modern automotive supply chains. Drawing on 25 years across the automotive and enterprise software industries, Falko explains how o9's "digital brain" connects demand planning, manufacturing, and procurement into a single decision-making layer, and why combining this with external risk data from partners like Prewave allows planners to contextualise thousands of risk signals into prioritised action. The conversation moves from the Strait of Hormuz and its ripple effects on aluminium, plastics, and helium, to the deeper structural shifts reshaping the industry: tariffs driving localisation, EVs reconfiguring supplier bases, and the rise of Catena-X as a mandatory data exchange standard for European OEMs. Key insights: Orchestration goes beyond visibility and collaboration by aligning every category and stakeholder around a single end-to-end decision.

“Supply chains have become a bargaining chip in political negotiations.” As Europe ramps up defence spending in response to geopolitical instability, supply chains have become a central pillar of economic security. But that creates a challenge. From rare earth dependencies to semiconductor chokepoints, the pressure to understand and control supply networks is growing rapidly across both industry and government. In this episode of Supply Chain Superintelligence – the first of season 2 – new host Thomas George speaks with Lisa Smith, co-founder of Prewave and Chair of the Board. Together, they explore how Europe is shifting from a focus on efficiency and sustainability toward resilience, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy in supply chains. Lisa explains why supply chain transparency is becoming essential at a national and EU level, how defense and public sector demand are reshaping supply chain priorities, and why Europe must rethink its approach to raw materials, diversification, and industrial coordination. The conversation also dives into the idea of a European “supply chain control tower” and what it would take to build true visibility across borders. Key insights: Supply chain transparency is emerging as a core capability at an EU government level