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.