Why supply chain, IT and security now sit under one role at Accuride

"You need to defend, you need to suspend, and don't pretend." That was the formula Skotti Fietsam brought to the Red Sofa and her keynote in Nashville – a memorable shorthand for building resilience across a supply chain that shares more data with more partners every year. As Accuride's senior vice-president of supply chain, CIO and CISO, Fietsam now runs all three disciplines as one remit, and she makes the case that the convergence changes how a business decides what matters.

Security, in her telling, is a lens over the whole organisation – from cyber systems to the physical "four walls" and everything the supply chain brings through them. "Understanding how to prioritise those projects for the whole company has really given me an enlightening picture of what needs to get done," she said.

The logistics-IT pairing is one Fietsam has championed across successive appearances, having flagged its potential at last year's event. It was also an early win: logistics is a domain where time is money, so automation that fills trucks faster and compresses timelines delivers an obvious return. The next frontier, Fietsam suggested, is AI – and not as an IT preserve. The opportunity sits across the supply chain, with the real shift being cultural. It is, she said, about "everybody learning how to learn."

Returning to that resilience formula: defending, she explains, means extending firewall protection beyond a company's own walls to its entire partner network, down to tier-N suppliers; suspending means being able to halt and manually run operations when an attack lands; and not pretending means accepting an incident will happen – and rehearsing for it.

She urges: "Security has to be up there in the beginning, in the planning, and then it really won't slow you down during the operations."

Fietsam shares the full picture in her Red Sofa interview – click play to uncover all the insights.