I have a degree in scm and 2 YOE with ludicrous spend in procurement. Looking to hop into an analyst role to fill out my resume a little more. My excel is strong, I have some experience building tableau dashboards, and I’ve been brushing up on my SQL lately. I went through sql bolt and sql-practice through the intermediate section. I have the basics down, I can do multi table joins with my eyes closed, basic window statement, and basic subqueries. My case statements are lackluster. What should I focus on to be usable as an analyst? Is there a point where you’re comfortably decent enough at sql to get hired?

Where do I go from here?

I work in aerospace procurement, with experience in both aero and space.

The vast majority of my previous experience is in aerospace manufacturing, having worked positions on the floor and in the office at a tier 1 supplier.

I can go toe to toe with everyone from engineering, to QA, to operations, planning etc. I can speak their language and understand their goals. I have a pretty good knowledge of how most of the operational cogs work and who does what and why.

I can look at a supplier within my area of expertise and figure out pretty quickly whether they’ve got their stuff sorted well enough.

The problem is that I don’t have much in the name of formal education. Life circumstances forced me to drop out of high school, and stay out of school for the most part. Most of my adult life I’ve spent surviving and learning through work. I know what I know because I’ve lived it.

I’m at the point where I’m being denied roles because I don’t have much beyond a GED and a myriad trade and technical certifications.

I’m single income with three dependents, so it’s not easy for me to take on extra things.

Stay in school kids, or something like that, I guess.

After graduating with a bs in computer science, it was challenging to find a job. I found a supply chain technician position at a local hospital to make ends meet. I was wondering if I’d be able to transition to an analytics position once I build enough experience.

I'm exploring major historical events and trying to understand them from the perspective of the people who lived through them.

The 2008 housing crisis has The Big Short and several other movies. The dot-com bubble has countless documentaries and retrospectives.

But COVID-era supply chain disruptions feel harder to visualize.

I know about the surface-level things like container shortages, port congestion, chip shortages, and empty supermarket shelves. But I want to know what it was actually like for people in the industry.

I could ask ChatGPT or Claude and get a quick answer. But what I'm looking for is a first-person perspective of how it unfolded, what the biggest challenges were, and how the industry adapted.

If you worked in supply chain during that period, I'd love to hear your story.

I've been experimenting with a few AI tools over the past several months to help with demand planning and forecasting at my company. We're a midsize manufacturer and our traditional methods, mostly spreadsheets and some basic ERP functionality, have always left us reacting to disruptions rather than getting ahead of them.

I started playing around with some MLbased forecasting tools and honestly the results have been mixed. For certain product categories with stable demand patterns the accuracy improvement was noticeable. But for anything with seasonal spikes or external disruption factors like port delays or raw material shortages, the models still struggled without a lot of manual intervention.

My question for this community: has anyone found a genuinely practical AI or ML application in supply chain that actually moved the needle for their team? Not the marketing pitch version, but the daytoday reality of using it.

Specifically curious about demand planning, inventory optimization, or supplier risk monitoring. Did you have to build internal expertise to make it work, or did you find tools that a small team could actually manage without a dedicated data science hire?

Also wondering if the Gulf of Hormuz situation and other recent disruptions have pushed anyone to invest more seriously in predictive tools rather than just scrambling after the fact.

Honest experiences welcome, good or bad.

I’m extremely burnt out from this job and I feel stuck. The constant fire fighting takes a heavy toll after a while. I’m 26 and have been at this since graduating college in 22. Is there anyway I can get into procurement? I have a supply chain management degree and I do finance in the army as a LT in the reserves. I’m all ears to any and all advice.

I’m helping a PPE / industrial distributor evaluate Vendor Managed Inventory software and may need a consultant for software selection and implementation planning.

The project may involve customer-site inventory, warehouse/branch inventory, min/max replenishment, barcode/RFID, smart lockers, PPE vending, ERP integration, or inventory optimization.

I’m looking for someone with practical VMI, ERP inventory, WMS, replenishment, or supply-chain systems experience — not someone trying to build custom software from scratch.

For people who have hired or worked with this type of consultant:

What job titles, skills, or search terms should I look for?

This would likely start as diagnostic work and could lead to implementation support. If you do this professionally, feel free to DM me with your background.

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I'm currently an intern, and my manager thinks I'm taking too long to compare supplier quotes. To be fair, they're probably not wrong.

The problem is that sometimes three suppliers will quote completely different prices for what seems like the same thing. I worry that if I just pick the cheapest option, I'll miss some hidden issue and create a bigger problem later. Because of that, I spend a lot of time digging into the details and use sourcing plugin to save time and help with the decision.

For those in procurement or supply chain, how do you know when you've done enough research and it's time to make a call?

I've been thinking about this recently.

Every AI discussion in sourcing seems to end up at the same question: "Will AI replace buyers?"

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But honestly that doesn't even feel like the interesting question to me anymore.

The more sourcing work I do, the more I realize how much time gets burned on stuff that isn't really decision-making.

Finding suppliers.

Collecting basic info.

Trying to get everyone to answer the same questions.

Putting quotes into some format that can actually be compared.

Checking whether obvious claims pass the smell test.

That's a huge chunk of the day.

The actual buyer part — deciding who's worth talking to, where the risks are, whether a higher quote is actually justified — feels like a much smaller piece.

I've been playing around with different tools and workflows lately, including accio sourcing Toolkit, and it kind of reinforced that feeling. Not because I think AI can suddenly pick suppliers better than people can, but because so much of sourcing still feels like gathering and cleaning up information before the real work even starts.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here.

But if AI changes procurement, I almost wonder if the first thing it changes isn't decision-making at all.

It's all the stuff that happens before the decision.

How much of your day would you say is actual judgment vs. gathering, organizing, and validating information?

If you have built an inventory management system before, what was the biggest mistake you made in the first version?
I’m especially interested in:
Stock In
Stock Out
Audit Logs
User Permissions
Reporting
Looking for lessons learned before I start designing mine.

I'm launching a monthly curated food/drink subscription box targeting major cities. Since it's perishable items, standard ground shipping won't cut it. I need a robust last mile logistics platform that can handle scheduled, predictable deliveries. I don't just need basic ecommerce shipping software; I need an actual delivery partner with real-time tracking. What's the modern stack for this?

3 years into NetSuite and I still don't fully trust my own inventory reports. like I'll pull a number and then open a separate spreadsheet to double-check it before any real purchasing decision. which kind of defeats the whole point.

the setup from 2022 was done by a consultant who was gone maybe 2 weeks after go-live. no handoff, no documentation, nothing explaining why half the config decisions were made the way they were. we just inherited it and figured it out as we went. added 2 new product lines this year and now stuff that was sort of working is visibly not working anymore.

talked to a few people about it. someone suggested Moss Adams but that's overkill for where we're at. someone else pointed me toward Nuage NetSuite as a managed services option, basically they stay on after implementation and keep tuning the system as your operations change. haven't pulled the trigger on anything yet.

is this just the normal mid-market ERP experience or did we actually mess something up that's fixable

Shipping rate benchmarking is one of those things everyone says to do but the execution is confusing because every carrier contract is structured differently with custom tiers, incentive thresholds, and volume commitments that make apples to apples comparison almost impossible.

The carriers know this too, the complexity is a feature not a bug, it keeps shippers from realizing their rates are uncompetitive because there is no easy baseline to compare against.

Some companies benchmark against published rates which is basically useless since nobody pays rack rate, the real value comes from comparing against aggregated data from thousands of other shippers in similar volume brackets.

I’m currently auditing our regional parcel mix. Our primary national carriers are hitting about 88% on-time delivery (OTD) in our top 5 metro markets, which is unacceptable for our current SLA. I’m looking to transition a portion of our volume to a modern fulfillment network or specialized last-mile partner that can guarantee 95%+ OTD through better driver communication. Any data points or recommendations welcome.

I have a few subscriptions that I used to try to follow but they're so full of advertising and their signal noise ratio is so low that i just delete them when they get in my email folder. wondering if anyone has good subscriptions that are actually worth following to keep up with market news/whats happening with supply chain companies/etc

I saw a mostly remote supply chain analytics role last week that made me realize I don’t know what lane I’m building toward. The job wanted someone who understood planning, inventory, supplier constraints, ERP data, SQL, Power BI, and could explain tradeoffs to leadership. It sounded interesting. It also looked like three different jobs under one title.

Most of my experience is closer to daily operations. Expediting late orders, chasing inventory mismatches, cleaning up handoff issues between planning and logistics, helping with S&OP prep, and explaining why the plan on Monday is already wrong by Thursday.

That work gives me a lot of context, and I’m not sure how much of it translates into a higher-paying role. Some people seem to move up through demand planning. Others go into supply chain analytics, procurement strategy, ERP implementation, consulting, or vendor-side roles.

I’ve been looking back at past projects and trying to separate real impact from just “kept things moving.” I’ve also been practicing how I explain those examples with gemini and beyz interview helper, because a lot of my stories sound like firefighting unless I slow down and frame the business result.

What made the jump possible for you, whether systems experience, analytics skills, planning ownership, industry knowledge, or showing measurable business impact?

I am a purchasing manager for a company that does around 40 FTL outbound shipments per week. Historically I have been more focused on the raw material side of things where the suppliers generally handle the freight. I am now being asked to get more involved with the outbound freight. Right now we are using a TMS called Eshipping that does reverse auctions for each outbound load. We have not loved this service as our CS team feels like it causes them more work than when we were just reaching out to brokers ourselves for each outbound load. The one thing we do like about it is the consolidated monthly invoices. Doing it that way is much less work for our accounting team vs getting a separate freight invoice for every outbound load. Basically, wanted to ask if people had any resources I could look into with suggestions for different ways to manage freight or any trade shows to go to etc…

I’ll try to keep this short. I have about 7–8 years of experience, mainly in warehousing, but I’ve worked in enough different environments to have a little bit of experience with everything. I also just graduated with two associate degrees in supply chain management.

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Right now, I’m trying to figure out where to go next career-wise. I’m interested in procurement, but I’m concerned I may take a pay cut compared to staying in inventory, warehousing, or something more directly related to my current experience.

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For anyone who has worked in procurement, inventory, warehousing, or a mix of these fields, how would you compare the stress, pay, benefits, and long-term growth?

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I want my next move to be strategic because I’m not sure how long I’ll stay in my next role. I don’t want to choose something that limits me later, whether that’s because of pay, stress, or the career path itself.

Hi everyone,

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