2026 Supply Chain Optimization Trends in Wholesale Distribution
Download the full 2026 Supply Chain Optimization Trends Report here.
This free industry report outlines industry perspectives and expert advice from our team of supply chain consultants. You can view an excerpt of the report below, and if you’d like to discuss any of the above trends or other challenges in the wholesale distribution space, connect with our team today.
Key Supply Chain Optimization Trends
As we move into 2026 and beyond, optimization capabilities will be vital to lean your operations, move and manage products faster, and adjust to changing customer demand. The leaders in wholesale distribution will be those who use data, automation, and visibility to act before problems escalate, turning uncertainty into opportunity and resilience into a standard practice.
Clarkston Consulting’s wholesale distribution consultants have highlighted the top supply chain optimization trends that businesses should consider and keep top-of-mind throughout the year:
- Continuous, Strategy-Driven Network Design Optimization
- Total Cost-to-Serve Analysis for Integrated Decision Making
- Digital Twin–Enabled Efficiency and Predictive Simulation
- Advanced Inventory Orchestration with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine
Learning (ML)
Trend 1:
Network Design Optimization
Network design leverages advanced modeling tools to look at the end-to-end supply chain to analyze network configurations and optimize the supply chain. The methodology considers the natural competing priorities of cost, service level, efficiency, and agility and allows them to operate together to define the optimized design for your organization. But what does “optimized” mean for your company?
Start with assessing your customer value proposition and business strategy, then utilize the network design to model source of supply, distribution center locations, and transportation routes to configure your network to align with your strategy. Wholesale distributors should evaluate their networks regularly. Network design used to be a long, involved process, conducted every few years or once in a decade – but in today’s dynamic environment, that’s not sufficient.
Network design should be a more frequent activity, depending on the nature of the business and the analysis, that should be reviewed quarterly, or even monthly, to ensure the network is meeting current business needs; at the very least, it should be “sensing” tipping points. This will provide the distributor with the opportunity to continually assess and address if inventory is positioned in the right location to meet customer service levels and stock requirements, if capacity is appropriately balanced across distribution centers, and if cost efficiencies have been realized while improving lead times across the network.
Trend 2:
Cost-to-Serve Analysis
Cost to serve looks at the complete end-to-end network and determines the landed cost of sourcing a product and delivering it to the customer. The analysis accounts for procurement prices, transportation rates, labor, inventory management, time value of money, and facility expenses, to name a few.
Internal department objectives often compete, and with total cost to serve, collaboration between operations, procurement, and commercial drive organizational objectives and targets as opposed to competing departmental targets. The criticality of trade-offs must be understood relative to the total cost to define appropriate decisions, such as minimum order quantity, safety stocks, delivery modes, and replenishment frequency.
The total cost can then allow decisions on how to manage customers or customer segments, identify opportunities and efficiencies in the warehouse operations, or drive changes within sourcing or transportation based upon non-siloed objectives – basically, managing trade-offs.
Overall savings can be realized by making data-driven decisions using modeling that accounts for cost and service. With constant changes in the current trade market (new trade deals, tariffs, and the end of de minimis exemption for direct shipping to customers), the ability to quickly model and understand end-to-end cost implications is critical.
Continue reading by downloading the full report below.
Download the Full 2026 Supply Chain Optimization Trends Report Here
