Advantage Chain Summit India

10:30 am – 11:10 am

Opening address

The 2030 north star: from just-in-time to just-in-case, and why the CSCO is eyeing the corner office

Pre-positioned, predictive inventory is becoming the default posture rather than the exception. This session asks what actually changed to put the chief supply chain officer on the chief executive shortlist, and what 2030-ready means operationally rather than as a slogan.

• 01Why pre-positioned, predictive inventory is becoming the default posture, not the exception.
• 02What put the CSCO on the CEO succession shortlist: P&L ownership, trade fluency, technology fluency.
• 03What 2030-ready means when you have to budget for it rather than present it.

11:10 am – 12:10 pm

Panel one

Global supply re-balancing: where India stands to gain

A global capability centre country head alongside a senior trade-policy voice. Diversification is described as India's opportunity. This hour tests what buyers actually say when they are not in a press release.

• 01Talent and cost advantage across manufacturing and services, separated from the rhetoric.
• 02Risk diversification rather than pure cost arbitrage: what buyers are actually optimising for now.
• 03From incentive scheme to physical fab: what the semiconductor investments at Sanand and Dholera have and have not delivered.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm

Working session

Tariff and tax clinic: rebuilding your landed-cost model after a year of trade whiplash

Run in the room with international trade counsel and an indirect-tax partner. One real SKU, three tariff regimes, worked live. Bring a product line and its bill of materials.

• 01Live in the room: running one real SKU through three different tariff regimes.
• 02What shifting trade policy has actually done to landed cost, and how quickly it moved.
• 03Building a landed-cost model that survives the next surprise rather than the last one.

2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Panel two

Convergence in motion: ports, airports, rail, road and inland hubs reshaping Maharashtra

The asset owners and the planning authority in one room: port, airport, freight corridor, metropolitan authority and the state industrial development body. What an operator can actually get, and when.

• 01From policy document to district node: what has been built, sanctioned or notified, and what is still a map.
• 02What an operator actually gets: incentives, land, single-window clearances, and how long each takes.
• 03The MIDC carve-out reserving estate space for private logistics nodes, and who has taken it up in Vidarbha.

3:50 pm – 4:40 pm

Fireside

Communicating value to investors: what warehouse automation really does to earnings

A listed logistics or industrial REIT CFO with an infrastructure investor. Automation spend does not show up in the accounts the way a board expects it to, and this is the hour about closing that gap.

• 01Connecting a warehouse management upgrade to earnings per share, in terms a board accepts.
• 02What institutional capital is actually underwriting when it backs a logistics asset: cash yield, or the automation story.
• 03The one metric CFOs wish analysts asked about instead of how many robots are on the floor.

4:50 pm – 5:50 pm

Panel three

Planning for the unplannable: supply chains after a year of reroutes and tariff shocks

A head of supply chain risk, an ocean freight executive and a geopolitical analyst. Closing day one on the question nobody has a clean answer to: how much resilience is actually worth paying for.

• 01When a temporary reroute quietly became permanent network design, and who noticed.
• 02Scenario planning against scenario paralysis: how much resilience is worth funding, and how you defend the number.
• 03What last year's tariff shocks taught risk teams that a decade of supply chain theory did not.

10:30 am – 11:10 am

Opening address

The feedback loop: how AI already predicts what your customer wants before they do

A chief data officer from retail or FMCG, or the India head of a demand-planning platform. Predictive replenishment described in terms of data plumbing rather than capability slides.

• 01What restocking before the customer notices actually requires underneath, and what it costs to build.
• 02Where this genuinely works today, and where it is still a slide rather than a system.
• 03The trust problem: getting merchandising and finance comfortable letting an algorithm place the order.

11:10 am – 12:10 pm

Panel one

Data entry to AI oversight: agentic intelligence inside a legacy ERP, and the planner who runs it

A VP of supply chain planning, a systems integrator and an upskilling lead. The panel that treats the technology problem and the people problem as the same problem, because in every deployment they turn out to be.

• 01Agentic intelligence bolted onto a fifteen-year-old ERP: what breaks first, the integration or the governance.
• 02The demand planner's job two years out: fewer spreadsheets, more exception handling and model supervision.
• 03Change management rather than model accuracy as the real blocker slowing Indian rollouts.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm

Working session

Remote control centres: running autonomous fleets from a city office

A disruption scenario run live from a mock control desk, with an autonomous logistics founder, a fleet operator piloting driver-assist, and the state's autonomous systems policy in the room.

• 01Live in the room: a disruption scenario run from a mock control desk.
• 02What a control-room operator actually does when an autonomous vehicle hits an edge case two hundred kilometres away.
• 03Where the state's autonomous systems policy creates room to operate, and where it still does not.

2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Panel two

Reinventing distribution economics: micro-fulfilment, shared capacity and the new maths of last mile

A quick-commerce operations head, a third-party logistics executive running a shared-capacity pilot, and a Bhiwandi warehousing operator. The hour where the delivery promise meets its own cost base.

• 01The three-kilometre promise: what keeping inventory that close actually costs per order, and when it stops paying.
• 02Sharing truck space with a competitor: the commercial and trust mechanics that make or break a pilot.
• 03Bhiwandi's next chapter: whether dark-store demand is complementing or cannibalising traditional third-party space.

3:50 pm – 4:40 pm

Fireside

The vulnerable edge: securing thousands of connected sensors across warehouses and fleets

A CISO from manufacturing or logistics with an industrial security lead. Placed straight after the autonomy sessions on purpose. Everything described in those hours widens the attack surface.

• 01Thousands of connected sensors across a warehouse and fleet network: where the real attack surface is against where people assume it is.
• 02One incident that changed how a logistics CISO thinks about operational technology security against IT security.
• 03The unglamorous fix that matters more than any new tool: patching and credential hygiene at scale.

4:50 pm – 5:50 pm

Panel three

Built for what's next: servitisation, mass personalisation and the battery wave

An executive running a product-as-a-service model, a Pune auto-component manufacturer on mass customisation, and a battery reverse-logistics operator. Three different answers to what a supply chain has to become.

• 01Selling performance instead of a product: what breaks in a chain built for a one-time sale rather than a lifecycle.
• 02Mass personalisation without mass cost: where Pune's component makers actually draw the line.
• 03The electric vehicle battery wave: what reverse logistics has to look like before volumes peak.