Webinar Description

In this episode of Let’s Wine About Supply Chain, we pour a glass and dive deep into the career of Julia Bedanova, the Chief Operating Officer at Million Dollar Baby Co.

Julia shares her journey leading operations for a premier name in children’s furnishings and discusses the unique complexities of managing a high-growth manufacturing and retail brand in the era of the Great Reconfiguration.

What you will take away:

• The Transition from Scribe to Steward: A primary takeaway is the necessity of moving the workforce away from manual data entry and ""firefighting"" (Scribes) toward roles as ""Stewards"" who govern AI-driven systems and focus on strategic trade-off negotiations.
• The End of Deterministic Planning: The session highlights why legacy, deterministic systems that plan for ""averages"" are failing in 2026. The takeaway is the need for Probabilistic Reasoning—modeling a range of possibilities to thrive within uncertainty.
• Bridging the Data Readiness Gap: Audiences will understand the ""intelligence vacuum"" caused by the fact that only a small % of enterprise data is AI-ready. A key lesson is the mandate for Data Normalization to ensure AI initiatives actually scale.
• Human-Machine Augmentation: A critical lesson is that the future is about Augmentation, Not Replacement. Winning organizations will blend machine precision with human socio-emotional intelligence and strategic trade-off capabilities.

Speakers:

Julia Bedanova, Chief Operating Officer, Million Dollar Baby
Amy Thorn, CEO of DBM Associates and Owner/Winemaker of Thorn Hill Winery, Thorn Hill Winery 

Host & Moderator:

Bart A. De Muynck, Supply Chain Advisor and Industry Expert, Better Supply Chains

Moderator:

Robert Bowman, Editor-in-Chief, SupplyChainBrain