Three Moves Ahead-Operating a Winning Supply Chain

Growing up the second youngest of twelve siblings, you learn quickly that waiting your turn isn’t a strategy; it’s a guarantee you’ll miss out.

If I didn’t finish my slice of pizza fast enough, the whole pie was gone. The bathroom schedule required diplomacy worthy of the United Nations. The coveted window seat on a road trip? That negotiation started before anyone packed the car.

With twelve siblings, competitive advantage wasn’t a business school concept. It was how you got dinner. It wasn’t the loudest voice or the biggest appetite that won, it was the one who saw it coming. Who moved first. Who was already sitting in the right seat before anyone else realized the seat existed. By the time everyone else wanted something, someone had already claimed it. In our house, that was just Tuesday. Years later, I realized it was strategy.

Then came the board games, particularly chess, where that same instinct met its first real test. My older sibling taught me the game and then proceeded to beat me at it repeatedly and ruthlessly. Every loss revealed something I hadn’t seen-a trap set three moves earlier, or a position I thought was safe until three moves later. After another victory, big bro would grin and say: “From now on, you shall refer to me as Yoda.” Boy would that irk me!

Looking back, I didn’t realize those experiences were teaching me how winning supply chains operate. The instincts were the same, read the board, anticipate the move, act before the pressure arrives.

The board changed. The game didn’t

Years later, I realized those same instincts separate supply chains that bleed margin, from those that protect it, and ultimately from those that compound it. The difference comes down to one thing: whether procurement, demand planning, pricing, and inventory management are having a conversation or operating in silos. I think about it like the three phases of a chess match.

Opening Game: Set the Board Before the Market Moves

The opening game is procurement: selecting the right suppliers, negotiating the best landed cost, securing favorable freight and payment terms, and building vendor relationships that provide flexibility when the market tightens.

TRAP:  Procurement negotiates a great deal that gets celebrated in a meeting. Then the container sits at port. Detention and demurrage charges don’t announce themselves during the negotiation. They show up later, quietly at first, then all at once. By the time the container is unloaded, the landed cost that looked so competitive has been eaten alive by per diem charges nobody budgeted for. The great deal wasn’t a great deal. It was a great price with a hidden cost attached.

A strong opening accounts for the total cost, every step, every risk, every day of exposure, before the pieces start moving.

Middle Game: Signal Over Noise

The middle game is loud. Freight rates shift fluctuate. A competitor drops their price. Demand spikes in one DC and goes quiet in another. There is no shortage of information. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that the hardest part of supply chain isn’t finding information, it’s deciding which information deserves your attention. In supply chain, the ability to separate signal from noise isn’t a soft skill. It’s the difference between a winning position and an expensive mistake.

TRAP:  Freight rates spike and the instinct is to stop shipping. Hold the containers. Wait for rates to come down. It feels like discipline. It isn’t. The cost of being out of product dwarfs the freight premium most of the time. The sales that never happened, the customers who went elsewhere, the emergency restocking at whatever rate the market is charging then, you saved on the container and lost on everything else

That’s a noise decision masquerading as a signal. The real signal, the one all four disciplines need to recognize together; isn’t that freight is expensive. It’s asking: “What does being out of this product for thirty days actually cost us?”

When you run that number, the math almost always says ship the container. Absorb the higher freight rate into your landed cost, make sure your pricing is at a margin you can live with, and keep the product moving. The customer who gets what they need on time doesn’t care what the freight market did last week, and neither should your decision.

End Game: The Customer Never Sees the Game

A chess player isn’t judged by a brilliant opening or a clever middle game. They’re judged by whether they win. Supply chains are no different. Procurement, demand planning, pricing, and inventory management all exist for one reason, to make sure the customer never has to think about the supply chain.

TRAP:  The container didn’t move; the charges did. The inventory gap opened while we waited. The fancy dashboard showed green. But green on a screen doesn’t fill an empty shelf. The shop owner felt it all in one place, the customer walking out the door to get service elsewhere.

That gap between what the metrics said and what the customer experienced is exactly what a winning supply chain exists to close. Procurement, demand planning, pricing, and inventory management aren’t separate games,  they’re four players sitting on the same side of the board. When they move together, the customer simply receives the right product, at the right time, for the right price.

And here’s what twelve siblings taught me that chess never could: you can’t win alone forever. Someone saved you a slice without being asked. The best supply chains work the same way. The four disciplines don’t just need to talk to each other -they need to look out for each other. When they do, the shop owner never feels the pressure happening behind the scenes. They just get what they need. Every time.

When the customer never notices the complexity behind the scenes, that’s checkmate.

Luis Escoto