IN Supply has released its May/June 2026 edition, with supply chain elasticity at the centre of a wider industrial conversation about labour, data, automation, cyber exposure, and the increasingly fluid movement of goods.
The edition opens against a backdrop of familiar external disruption, including shipping uncertainty, energy pressure, and global trade volatility, before turning to a quieter domestic constraint: whether the supply chain sector can attract, train, and retain enough people for increasingly technical logistics roles. Warehousing alone now sits at the centre of that debate, with automation, robotics, data-led inventory systems, and more complex fulfilment models changing the skills required across the sector.
At one end of the operating model, subscription commerce is making demand harder to forecast, with fulfilment teams needing to scale around promotions, pauses, renewals, and churn without allowing inventory or carrier costs to run ahead of real demand. At the other, retailers and logistics providers are being pushed to connect planning systems with what is actually happening in stores, warehouses, and distribution centres.
The technology thread is deliberately less breathless than much of the AI debate. Several features return to the same constraint: AI cannot compensate for poor data, weak operational visibility, or fragmented execution systems. Real-world AI, agentic retail networks, warehouse automation, and ERP-integrated workflows are treated less as headline innovations and more as infrastructure for better decisions.
The issue also broadens resilience beyond planning software. Cybersecurity coverage examines supplier networks as attack surfaces, while retail logistics pieces look at returns, fair usage policies, and omnichannel operations that now treat stores, carriers, technology partners, and reverse logistics as one connected system.
The result is a timely industrial snapshot of supply chains under pressure from more than one direction. Elasticity, in this context, is not simply speed or spare capacity; it is the ability to join labour, data, automation, supplier oversight, and commercial decision-making before volatility reaches the customer or the production line.
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