Sage’s State of Supply Chain Report indicates many companies and midmarket leaders aren’t adequately prepared for supply chain disruption gaps. The report also doubles as a checklist for what CIOs, COOs and supply chain heads need to change in their daily operating rhythm in 2026.
Visibility Defines Actual Readiness
The survey of more than 200 retail and wholesale operators finds half of supply chain teams feel confident in their ability to respond to disruption heading into 2026. The gap is not about knowing risks exist. It is about whether organizations can see and act on those risks with enough precision and speed. Preparedness closely tracks with visibility and system maturity, not with general awareness of geopolitical, tariff or logistics volatility.
For technology executives, daily work shifts from chasing point disruptions to closing structural visibility gaps. Teams still working from fragmented spreadsheets, email threads and portal downloads are statistically less confident and slower to respond than peers with integrated platforms that connect demand, inventory, supplier performance and logistics data. In practical terms, a typical day often includes reviewing exception-driven dashboards, interrogating root causes and validating that data feeding those decisions is complete and current, not anecdotal.
Nearshoring trends underline the same point. Almost half of respondents plan to shift sourcing closer to home, but quality and compliance, not cost, are the primary drivers. That emphasis moves attention from one-off sourcing events to ongoing supplier performance monitoring, quality metrics and auditability, all of which depend on systems linking supplier, logistics and financial data into a single view.
Early-Stage AI Raises Data, Platform Questions
Despite the hype, only 10% of brands surveyed have AI live in supply chain workflows today, and adoption correlates with data readiness and visibility maturity rather than interest alone. For CIOs and enterprise architects, AI pilots will underperform unless data models are rationalized, manual rekeying eliminated and basic event visibility established across the network.
Cost pressure remains the dominant constraint, even among optimized teams, pushing leaders to prioritize investments that deliver near-term operational impact over grand multi-year transformations.
When supply chain platforms and partners are evaluated, three axes stand out: Speed of consolidating critical data sources into a usable model, support for exception-based workflows for planners and buyers, and explicit linkage between improvements and measurable outcomes such as lead-time reductions, stockout avoidance or working capital gains.
Daily responsibilities for senior leaders revolve around designing and governing the data and workflow fabric that determines whether an organization lands in the confident or exposed half of the survey curve. The report resets expectations for what “good enough” looks like in midmarket supply chains.
Click here to view the full Sage report.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Supply chain visibility becomes a board-level ERP mandate. The survey’s link between confidence and system maturity signals that ERP and supply chain platforms must prioritize end-to-end visibility, connecting orders, inventory, suppliers and logistics into a single operational fabric that supports faster, evidence-based decisions across finance and operations.
AI readiness depends on ERP data discipline first. With only 10 percent of brands running AI in live supply chain workflows, the bottleneck is data quality and integration, not interest. ERP vendors and integrators must therefore frame AI roadmaps around cleansing, modeling and exposing supply chain data consistently before promising autonomous planning or execution.
Midmarket cost pressure reshapes transformation patterns. Persistent cost constraints mean midmarket organizations will favor modular, outcome-focused upgrades instead of big-bang suites. ERP providers and GSIs will need packaged scenarios that link specific visibility gains to inventory, margin or service-level improvements, rather than generic digital transformation narratives.
