Global supply chains are being reshaped by nonstop disruption, accelerating geopolitical tension, and an unprecedented wave of digital innovation. Organizations are under mounting pressure to build operations that can withstand volatility, scale intelligently, and respond to customers with real-time precision.

In this episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott Luton is joined by Mourad Tamoud, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Schneider Electric from the Schneider Electric Innovation Summit North America 2025, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it takes to build a modern, future-ready supply chain. Drawing on nearly three decades with Schneider Electric across seven countries, Mourad shares how the company has evolved into one of the industry’s most advanced, human-centric global supply chains.

Scott and Mourad explore the strategies behind Schneider Electric’s “glocal” operating model, the design principles that enable resilient multi-hub networks, and why end-to-end visibility is essential in today’s environment. They also discuss Schneider Electric’s smart factory journey, the real impact of AI on planning and productivity, and why people remain the foundation of every successful transformation.

Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Intro

(00:58) Mourad’s hobbies and creative outlets

(02:04) Mourad’s 30-year journey at Schneider

(03:23) How modern supply chains are evolving

(04:56) Designing resilient and anti-fragile networks

(07:10) Regionalization, sovereignty, and shorter chains

(10:02) Smart factories and digital transformation

(12:43) AI innovation and end-to-end visibility

(21:32) How to connect and keep learning

Additional Links & Resources:

• Connect with Mourad Tamoud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mourad-tamoud-a06b40 
• Learn more about Schneider Electric: https://www.se.com/ww/en/ 
• Learn more about our hosts: https://supplychainnow.com/about 
• Learn more about Supply Chain Now: https://supplychainnow.com 
• Watch and listen to more Supply Chain Now episodes here: https://supplychainnow.com/program/supply-chain-now  
• Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on your favorite platform: https://supplychainnow.com/join  
• Work with us! Download Supply Chain Now’s NEW Media Kit: https://bit.ly/3XH6OVk
• WEBINAR- 2026 Procurement Priorities: What’s Changing (and What You Need to Do First): https://bit.ly/3Yodf0Z
• WEBINAR- Building the New Manufacturing Workforce: https://bit.ly/4iVb4vl

This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated show page at: https://supplychainnow.com/building-innovative-supply-chains-perform-under-pressure-1519

[00:00:23] Voice Over: Welcome to Supply Chain Now, the number one voice of supply chain. Join us as we share critical news, key insights, and real supply chain leadership from across the globe. One conversation at a time.

[00:00:53] Mourad Tamoud: Very good. Thank you, Scott, and thanks for enabling this conversation.

[00:01:13] Mourad Tamoud: Well, I love to go out in nature, hike, and also I love photography, and that’s the moment where somewhere it enables me to clean my head and settle after travels and very exciting times managing a very large and complex supply chain like the one at Schneider Electric.

[00:01:52] Mourad Tamoud: I use a Sony Alpha 7, so pretty nice device. And I mean, when you put your eye and observe the world through that lens, it’s really a moment of, again, relaxation for me.

[00:02:27] Mourad Tamoud: I’ve been three decades now in supply chain in Schneider Electric, and I have seen an amazing journey and the evolution of the company, coming from a European French company to becoming a multi-global setup. And the size at which we operate has been a very exciting journey. Lived in seven different countries across these three decades and met fantastic people across the entire planet. So it has been a very, very rewarding experience.

[00:03:23] Mourad Tamoud: It is, and I think you’re bringing a very good point. The way of looking at supply chain the way it was three decades ago was more of a linear— you have a supplier delivering to our manufacturing, delivering to our distribution network, and that’s it. Today, the way modern supply chains are operating is much more of a network of networks. It’s more about an end-to-end view of that supply chain, embarking from the customer all the way back to the suppliers of the suppliers. We talk more and more about the Tier X of our vendors.

To just give you an illustration of how important those vendors and partners that are part of this system or ecosystem of supply chain is: we have the chance to be this week in Las Vegas doing our Innovation Summit. And in fact, we have invited 50 of our most critical vendors to be part of the event. So not only are we talking to them as vendors or suppliers or partners, but we are inviting them to join and listen to the entire strategy, the innovation that Schneider puts on the market, and we really treat them as part of the whole ecosystem.

[00:04:56] Scott W. Luton: Alright, supply chain resilience. Right. Let’s talk about that for a minute. So, a few weeks ago you spent time in Mexico as part of the World Economic Forum CSCO community meeting or event you were having. And I think from what I could tell, one of the big themes that came out of those discussions with all your peers and the attendees was: build supply chains that perform under pressure.

So I want to get you to expound on that a little bit. When you see those supply chain ecosystems and those business leaders that are truly building entities and organizations that can withstand all the pressure—the old pressure, the new pressure that we find here today—what are some common themes in their approaches?

And when we say that at Schneider Electric, we have developed our resilience plan and strategy—developing the notion of Power of Two, making sure that for every strategic product where it has an important impact to our customers, we would be able to have multiple plants able to produce. We go all the way back to Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier X vendors, understanding the single points of failure and building different ways of resilience. It can be dual sourcing, it can be strategic inventories, those can be long-term supply agreements with some of these partners. So having that notion—which helped us go from “just-in-time,” where I grew up my first 25 years, and now to “just-in-case,” being ready to face the disruptions, be it geopolitical, be it natural disasters, being many kinds of elements that we have been observing.

[00:07:45] Mourad Tamoud: Well, I think part of that notion of resilience, and also when we look at geopolitical tensions—be it wars in some areas of the world—the notion of reducing complexity, driving shorter supply chains, making sure that you become more regional for regional. Producing in Europe for customers based in Europe, producing in China for China, producing in the US for the customers in the US— all that gives you that additional agility, that additional resilience that is required in the world of today.

What we have seen in the last five years is that the notion of speed has significantly increased. We have also seen customers putting a lot of attention on business continuity, learning from the hard times of COVID and electronics shortages, etc. So our ability to drive that local, regional ecosystem is becoming absolutely critical. We sometimes call ourselves one of the most “glocal” companies in the world, with the notion of a multi-hub strategy—where we want to design, engage with the customer, design, industrialize, source, and manufacture in the country or in the region for the customers located in that region.

[00:09:14] Mourad Tamoud: Well, look, we have seen that a few years ago what we call “regional rate” was around 85%. And what we are doing now is we are moving with the objective to be above 90%, and in some places 95%. What that means—what we sell in a given market, in a given region, is coming at 90% or more from that region. That includes manufacturing, that includes sourcing, that includes the raw materials that we are bringing to our supply chain. So we are very committed to simplify, to shorten that supply chain, and to ensure that we bring the right capabilities in the region where we are selling.

[00:10:42] Mourad Tamoud: Look, it has been a very exciting journey working on Industry 4.0, and we called it at Schneider Electric many years ago “Smart Factory” and “Smart Supply Chain,” with the idea of embracing IoT, embracing digital, starting to deploy new technologies on our sites, going with automated guided vehicles, connecting machines and collecting data, etc.

We formalized it better working with the World Economic Forum. We put a framework around that and we got seven sites that have been certified as Lighthouses. And what is exciting is, in fact, we don’t only have greenfield sites that have been recognized, but I’m super proud—and we are super proud—of 70-year-old sites like Lexington, Kentucky, where we were recognized as a Lighthouse, with a team that did an amazing job taking legacy processes and legacy buildings and bringing them up to speed. Connecting those devices, being able to adopt software and digital at all layers of the organization, and delivering value to the business in terms of efficiency, in terms of energy optimization, in terms of end-to-end visibility.

And I just give that example—seven of them are there all around the globe. We have in Europe, we have in Asia, and we have here in North America with Lexington, Juarez, and Monterrey, which have been also doing a great, great job.

[00:12:37] Mourad Tamoud: And maybe one—I didn’t answer one of your questions before. You said “What’s next?”

[00:12:43] Mourad Tamoud: And maybe to answer that—the last years we have really built the infrastructure and the backbone of our digital architecture. I do see today the acceleration on AI. And I’m sorry, I would not be doing my job if I would not talk about AI.

And the reality is, we see the power that comes from having done all the work we did with the Smart Supply Chain, Smart Factories, Smart Distribution Centers—collecting all these real-time data. Today, what it enables us—if you plug AI on—is the ability to improve your maintenance downtimes, how you improve your quality, how you bring visibility to customers, how you react faster to variations of the demand. So it’s limitless possibilities.

We have plenty of pilots, proof of concepts, that are running. We also address it from a real end-to-end perspective, with actions like autonomous planning—that’s something we are pretty proud to bring into life in the coming cycle—as well as our intelligent procurement.

[00:14:23] Scott W. Luton: And you’re reading my mind. That’s where I was going to go. Because my hunch is in those brownfield sites, as you mentioned, the culture— it might be one of the best elements to power digital transformation moving forward. Would you agree with that?

[00:15:13] Scott W. Luton: I love it. And then once they know it’s going to make their days easier, it’s going to allow them to find more success and contribute in easier ways. It’s a beautiful thing, and I love the augmentation element you shared.

Okay. You touched on a lot of innovation there—right? Current state and future state. I was out in the Innovation Park. I spent a bunch of my time there, and to our audience out there—it’s like a supply chain circus, a technology circus out there. It’s really cool. It doesn’t do it justice, but just use that visual for now. All sorts of innovations out there and out in the industry beyond Innovation Summit here in Las Vegas. What’s one innovation, Mourad, that you’re finding really intriguing right now?

[00:15:57] Scott W. Luton: Like picking your favorite kid.

If I have to pick one thing, it’s what’s coming next with EcoStruxure Foresight, which is our digital transformation platform that’s going to be used in our Digital Energy and Digital Buildings businesses. And we foresee a real opportunity to adopt the AI power to be able to extract faster value from all our processes, all our connected buildings that we have already deployed with the Smart Factory and the World Economic Forum Lighthouses.

It’s interesting—I was reading a separate article in recent weeks about how we try to quantify… how can we quantify uncertainty? Because we all feel it. And a lot of analysts and economists, folks a lot smarter than me, point to this being like historic levels of uncertainty. I don’t know. We’ll see.

But one of the key timeless takeaways from that article you wrote was you really wanted readers to take away that agility and collaboration are—

[00:17:38] Scott W. Luton: —key. Expound on that perspective and advice— and if you can, in a real actionable manner.

[00:17:53] Scott W. Luton: We signed up for this, right?

I will illustrate—you mentioned innovation and collaboration. I will really illustrate that coming back to two things.

One is: modern supply chain has to be digital. Of course, we move stuff; we move products; we move parts; we add value. But that would not work if you don’t augment it through a digital layer, a digital twin—being able to run scenario planning, to be able to simulate events. I was exchanging with a colleague—the tariffs have, somewhere, forced us to accelerate our ability to simulate what’s happening.

We are today able to take a newly communicated tariff and instantly identify what could be the consequences. We are able to simulate the changes of sources and look at the consequences in terms of lead times, in terms of costs, in terms of availability—in months, in days. I’m very serious. We are today able, within 24–48 hours, to understand how it impacts our operations in terms of a new tariff.

So my comment here is really: digital is completely embedded and critical—crucial—to a modern supply chain. It also provides a real end-to-end capability and visibility—an ability to orchestrate for your customer. Customers are more and more asking not just the last mile, but they’re asking you to be able to provide them visibility and, I would say, the potential information from the upstream.

So that would be one of my takeaways on innovation.

Second element—and we could go on and on about innovation, because to be honest, the way we operate supply chain: we spoke about the Lighthouses. A manufacturing site today has nothing to do with the manufacturing site when I started in supply chain. You see today screens everywhere. You see zero paper. You see people having devices.

[00:20:14] Mourad Tamoud: Right. No, absolutely. I mean, so one is about innovation. Second—you mentioned collaboration. It’s crucial. I mean, it’s collaboration with the business. It’s collaboration with our customers.

We see much greater levels of integration and collaborative work, be it co-planning with our distributors, be it building dedicated factories for some segments of customers or for some customers, collaborating with our suppliers—just understanding with them what is their product roadmap, what is our product roadmap, how these two are augmenting each other.

We see more and more the ability of our inputs helping them to develop the next generation of materials, of chips, that would fit the demand and the requirements of AI or the requirement of lower consumption.

Before I wrap here, for those business leaders looking for more agility—beyond the technology and some of the cultural elements we’ve touched on here today—any other piece of advice that you could offer up?

And similarly, AI or digital would not be there if you don’t have the expertise, if you don’t have the talents inside the organization that are able to be future ready and prepare those transformations. So we are super passionate about the people piece. And I would say that—just linking all of what we do with the rest of the challenges we are facing.

[00:22:25] Mourad Tamoud: Absolutely.

[00:22:40] Mourad Tamoud: I mean, I have LinkedIn. I like it as a way to share thoughts and what we foresee as a vision, but also a way to interact with peers, interact with partners. And I like the way to use that tool to keep alive those discussions.

[00:23:11] Mourad Tamoud: Thank you, Scott.

[00:23:25] Voice Over: Join the Supply Chain Now community. For more supply chain perspectives, news, and innovation, check out supplychainnow.com. Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on YouTube and follow and listen to Supply Chain Now wherever you get your podcasts.