Ep. 8 - Supply Chain Design: From Mainframes to AI Agents with Laurie Tuschen

About this episode

What if your supply chain could answer hard questions in minutes instead of days? We sit down with Laurie Tuschen, Head of Customer Strategy at Optilogic, to explore how modern design stacks blend optimization, simulation, and AI to deliver faster, smarter decisions without adding new buildings or bloated spreadsheets. From the early days of mainframes to sensitivity-at-scale tools, Laurie shows how teams can test uncertainty directly and pinpoint when a decision breaks, where capacity buffers matter, and how mode shifts change the cost-to-service curve.

We walk through the practical power of a digital twin: a living model that captures facilities, flows, policies, and costs so leaders can run continuous what-ifs. When tariffs swing or lanes get disrupted, the twin helps reroute through existing assets, rebalance inventory, and protect service levels. Instead of periodic, months-long studies, cloud-native collaboration turns design into a weekly habit. Stakeholders enter data through intuitive apps, see clear scenario results, and build alignment around quantified risk, not gut feel.

AI is the accelerant, not the autopilot. Large language models make the twin queryable in plain English, while AI agents fill data gaps, profile quality, and automate scenario assembly. Humans stay firmly in the loop to judge tradeoffs and feasibility, but they spend their time on insight instead of grunt work. The payoff is real: flipping the old 80/20 so more energy goes to evaluating options, answering more project requests, and making resilient choices under cost volatility, labor constraints, and global shipping shocks.

If your team is ready to move beyond spreadsheets and embrace continuous design, this conversation maps the path; faster modeling, richer scenarios, and decisions that hold up when the world shifts. Listen, share with a colleague who owns network strategy, and leave a review with your toughest what-if we should tackle next.