As digital investments accelerate, Gartner urges supply chain leaders to adopt one of four focused strategies – Deferment, Durability, Decision-making, or Design – to align tech deployments with operational and business goals. Each path reflects a distinct response to disruption, efficiency, and customer expectations.
Tech Investment Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
At this year’s Gartner Supply Chain Symposium, analyst Suzie Petrusic delivered a clear message to supply chain leaders navigating the expanding universe of digital tools that discipline matters more than breadth. The firms seeing the most traction, she said, aren’t the ones chasing every emerging technology, but those aligning targeted investments with well-defined strategic imperatives.
Petrusic laid out four distinct investment “pathways,” each representing a philosophy on how supply chains can evolve:
- Deferment: This pathway emphasizes cost efficiency and operational streamlining. Leaders on this path are adopting digital twins, probabilistic planning, and microfulfillment networks to minimize variance and improve agility without overstretching their capital base.
- Durability: This path focuses on resilience through sustainability. Here, investments aim to reduce risk exposure through traceability, additive manufacturing, and scenario modeling—tying environmental performance directly to long-term continuity.
- Decision-making: This one is built around human-machine collaboration. Companies on this path are deploying AI, ML, and real-time data architecture to drive ecosystem-wide performance metrics and predictive decision frameworks.
- Design: This pathway puts customer centricity at the core. It requires reengineering internal processes around external demands, with simplified product architecture and common components—supported by advanced modeling tools to anticipate customer needs and supply risks.
What differentiates these pathways isn’t simply the technology stack, but how the chosen tech reshapes workflows, priorities, and long-term capabilities. “Leaders don’t try to be good at everything,” said Petrusic. “They’re methodical in choosing what they want to be best at.”
Strategy, Not Speed, Drives Leadership Gains
Gartner’s latest research shows no single path holds a monopoly on success. Among companies surveyed, 27% of Deferment-led organizations were categorized as leaders, alongside 30% of Durability firms, 24% in Decision-making, and a notable 39% of those on the Design track. That spread suggests maturity isn’t about which strategy a company chooses—it’s about how clearly and consistently it commits to executing it.
For supply chain leaders, technology investments should be guided by structural priorities, whether that’s resilience, cost efficiency, customer alignment, or decision agility, rather than by innovation alone. Long-term success depends not just on the capabilities of the tools deployed, but on the strength of the governance and coordination that make those tools effective.
While many organizations are tempted to hedge their bets by investing across multiple fronts, Gartner’s findings caution against fragmentation. In a climate of persistent volatility, depth of focus is a stronger hedge than breadth of experimentation.
Strategic Focus Over Flash
Gartner’s framework brings needed structure to what has often been a scattershot approach to digital transformation. In practical terms, it reframes the conversation from “what’s next in technology” to “what’s most relevant for our operating model.” Each of the four pathways—Deferment, Durability, Decision-making, and Design—offers a credible route to performance gains, but not without trade-offs.
For today’s supply chain leaders, the challenge lies in anchoring decisions in structural business priorities, whether it’s cost efficiency, continuity, responsiveness, or agility, and building the governance capacity to scale those decisions consistently. The organizations most likely to gain ground in the coming years will be those that resist the urge to overextend and instead invest with intent, coherence, and staying power.
