OptiCon 2026 Agenda

June 2-4, 2026 | Detroit, MI

Tuesday, June 2

Training Courses Pre-Registration Required: 
See full training course description here

8:30am - 11:30am

  • Simulating Results of an Optimization Model
  • Rethinking Vehicle Routing: Strategy Beyond Miles
  • Network Design: Beyond the Basics II
  • AI Enabled Supply Chain Design with DataStar
  • Operationalizing Insights with Composable Apps

1:00pm - 4:00pm

  • Simulating Results of an Optimization Model
  • Rethinking Vehicle Routing: Strategy Beyond Miles
  • Network Design: Beyond the Basics II
  • AI Enabled Supply Chain Design with DataStar
  • Operationalizing Insights with Composable Apps

6:30pm - 9:30pm

Welcome reception at The Department at Hudson's - Second floor

6:30pm - 7:30pm

CAB and PAB Appreciation Happy Hour (by invitation) - The Department at Hudson's - Second Floor

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Wednesday, June 3

6:45am - 7:15am — Daybreak Guided Walk/Run

8:00am - 9:00am — Breakfast and Registration

8:00am - 9:00am — Networking and Solution Innovation Lab

9:00am - 10:15am — Keynote: Don Hicks, CEO of Optilogic

  • Planning Isn't Enough. Here's How AI-Driven Design Changes Everything

10:15am - 10:30am — Break

10:30am - 11:30am — AI-Driven Decisions: Optimize Your Current Supply Chain, Design the One You Need

  • The old way takes three months. We'll show you how to do it in an hour. Watch Optilogic's agentic AI cleanse raw data, build a baseline model from a natural language prompt, and run what-if scenarios on demand. Then see that same intelligence power composable decision apps for sourcing, inventory, routing, and demand — deployed to your entire organization in days with your team in control at every step.

11:30am - 1:00pm — Networking and Solution Innovation Lab

12:00pm - 1:00pm — Lunch

12:00pm - 1:00pm — Design Dialogue Lunchtime Roundtables

12:00pm - 1:00pm — Executive Insights Luncheon (Pre-registration Required)

  • An intimate conversation with Optilogic leadership to discuss your strategic priorities for the next few years. Share what's keeping you up at night—tariffs, growth plans, AI, data, organizational challenges—to help us understand how to better support your goals. Your insights shape our roadmap. Limited to 25 senior supply chain leaders. Pre-registration required.

1:00pm - 1:30pm — Optimizing Global Export Flows at Scale: How 3M Is Rethinking International Supply Chain Design

  • 3M is taking a bold, company-wide approach to optimizing international export flows across multiple modes and geographies — going beyond traditional distribution center focus to tackle complex global network design. In partnership with Optilogic, 3M is building an internal capability for ongoing multimodal optimization at a scale few companies have attempted.

    Felipe Luz - Senior Manager Supply Chain & Logistics, 3M

1:30pm - 2:30pm — Authentic Partnership: How the Optilogic Solutions Team Accelerates Your Competitive Advantage

  • The fastest path to supply chain transformation isn't technology alone — it's what your team does with it. In this session, we'll share real examples of how Optilogic customers accelerated time-to-value, built lasting internal capability, and turned supply chain design into a continuous competitive advantage.

2:00pm - 2:30pm — Designer Cookie Break

2:30pm - 3:00pm — Customer Presentation: Amazon

3:00pm - 3:30pm — From Outsourced to Owned: How Castrol Built an Internal Supply Chain Design Capability

  • Castrol made a strategic bet to build an internal design capability for the first time. Hear why Castrol selected Optilogic, how they identified savings through product sourcing and distribution network design, expanded into cost-to-serve analysis, and where AI-driven design takes them next.

    Daniel Davis, Global Supply Chain Optimisation Manager, Castrol

3:30pm - 5:00pm — Networking and Solution Innovation Lab

6:30pm - 9:30pm — Evening Event at The Yard

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Thursday, June 4

8:00am - 9:00am

  • Breakfast and Solution Innovation Lab

9:00am - 9:45am

  • Customer Presentation: Designing for What's Next: How Discount Tire Turns Disruption and Growth Into Competitive Advantage

    Rapid growth strategy while tariffs shift and fuel prices spike—most companies would call that impossible. Discount Tire calls it Tuesday. Learn how they're using AI-driven supply chain design to scale while staying agile through constant disruption. You'll hear the company's real challenges around expansion, e-commerce, fleet growth, and geopolitical volatility, how design enables smart decisions, and lessons learned.
    Sahil Tandon - Supply Chain Principal, Discount Tire
  • Building the New Supply Chain Organization: Executive Peer Discussion with Lora Cecere

    Join Lora Cecere for an intimate, peer-led discussion on the organizational challenges of AI-powered supply chain transformation. This working session explores two critical questions: How do we build new skill sets when traditional education isn't keeping pace? And how do we redesign work when design becomes continuous? Come ready to share challenges and approaches with fellow leaders navigating the same transformation.

    **Participants should be leaders in supply chain organizations with design teams.
  • Optilogic session: Composable Apps: Put Design Tools in Everyone's Hands

    Optimize the supply chain you have today—without months-long implementations or Ph.D.-level expertise. Discover how composable apps let your team build custom decision tools for sourcing, inventory, routing, and capacity planning—deployed in days, not quarters. See real examples, understand the business value of democratizing optimization across your organization, and learn how to get started without overhauling your tech stack.

  • The Continuously Optimized Supply Chains: How AI is Redefining Strategic and Tactical Decision-Making [Bain]

    Supply chains are moving from periodic planning cycles to continuous, AI-enabled systems that dynamically sense, adapt, and optimize execution. In this session, Bain will share its perspective on how AI—combined with digital twins and advanced analytics—is reshaping supply chain decision-making. We’ll explore how companies are evolving from siloed tools and one-off analyses to integrated, real-time orchestration across the network, and what it takes to unlock meaningful value at scale.

    Cenk Tunasar, Partner
    Akshay Singh, Expert Senior Manager

9:45am - 10:30am

  • Sponsor Presentation: enVista

    Designing Supply Chain Networks for Measurable Cost Reduction

    In this session, enVista’s supply chain strategy expert, Nate Rosier, will explore network design strategies across transportation, inventory and facility strategy that uncover hidden cost drivers. Drawing on realworld network design initiatives, the discussion will focus on where cost savings actually come from, why they’re frequently missed and how leaders can quantify tradeoffs between cost, service levels and resilience.
  • Customer Presentation: TBA
  • Optilogic Session: From Raw Data to Decisions: Accelerate Modeling with DataStar

    DataStar is more than a data prep tool—it’s a workflow canvas for turning raw information into better supply chain decisions. In this session, we’ll show how teams can profile and cleanse messy data, automate transformations, run machine learning, and prepare decision-ready models for scenario testing. You’ll also see the next leap forward: chatting with an AI agent that can build full macros, explain complex workflows, trace table lineage, and modify logic on demand. The result is a faster, more transparent path from raw data to modeling, analytics, and action—without losing the ability to validate, refine, and show your work.
  • Customer Presentation: From Capacity Constraints to Strategic Expansion: How Nordstrom Designs for Growth

    Facing rapid Rack NSO expansion, Nordstrom’s outbound ship lanes are at risk of exceeding capacity—putting growth, service levels, and cost targets at risk. In this session, Renee and Kevin will share how they used network optimization and vehicle routing models to make faster, higher-confidence decisions. The work identified where constraints would hit first, prioritized the most valuable lane and capacity changes, and sequenced investments to match demand. The result was a practical growth roadmap that protected customer service, reduced transportation inefficiencies, delayed unnecessary capital spend, and turned the supply chain from a bottleneck into a strategic enabler of profitable expansion across the network.

    Renee Rockett, Transportation Specialist, Nordstrom
    Kevin Lin, Program Manager 2, Nordstrom

10:30am - 11:00 am — Networking break and Solution Innovation Lab

11:00am - 11:45am

  • From Strategic Design to Daily Reality: Turning Network Optimization Into Operational Excellence [ORTEC]

    Optimizing your network is only the beginning. Real value comes from connecting strategic design to daily execution. See an example of how a distributor can identify $11M in savings through strategic network redesign, then capture an additional $4M through ORTEC's operational routing and execution. Learn how operational feedback (actual route times, fleet utilization, service exceptions) improves strategic assumptions and creates a continuous cycle of design, execution, and refinement.
  • One Platform, Two Networks: Optimizing Dairy Milk Hauling and Animal Nutrition Sailing Schedules at Land O'Lakes

    How does the same design platform support vastly different transportation challenges? In this session, we will demonstrate how Optilogic is used to optimize both inbound milk supply and outbound feed sailing schedules for Land O’ Lakes. By comparing these use cases, we highlight common design principles, key differences in constraints and objectives, and how scenario-driven decision-making helps organizations design more efficient and resilient supply chains.

    Tomaz Vrabec – Director of Digital Supply Chain, Land O'Lakes
    Ryan Bruno – Senior Supply Chain Process Analyst, Land O'Lakes
  • Optilogic Session: AI Model Building: From Months to Days

    The tedious 80%—data cleansing, baseline modeling, scenario setup—now takes one day instead of months. Watch Optilogic's AI model building capabilities in action: natural language prompts generate optimization models, automate data prep, and free your team to focus on strategic scenario testing. Learn what's possible today, where AI fits your workflow, and how to start using it.
  • Solving the Unsolvable: How Penske Is Modeling Truckload Networks at Staggering Scale

    When you have 300+ drivers domiciled across the East Coast with unlimited possible route combinations, the modeling problem is extremely complex. Penske's general commodity truckload division is using Optilogic's Hopper engine to tackle it head-on — leveraging decomposition techniques and hyper-scaling to run scenarios that were previously out of reach. Attendees will learn what the Penske team built, what they've learned, and where they're headed next, including putting composable apps directly in the hands of non-modelers.

    Andrew Dilyard, Manager of Logistics Engineering, Penske

11:45am - 1:00pm — Networking and Solution Innovation Lab

1:00PM — Conference ends

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Questions about the event? Contact haley.burrill@optilogic.com