Connecting Forecasting and Warehouse Decisions at Scale - with Jerod Hamilton of Tyson Foods

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Jerod Hamilton, director of 3PL Warehouse Strategy at Tyson Foods. In this episode, Jerod breaks down why modern distribution centers struggle to stay efficient. Massive facilities are built to last decades, yet the data, demand patterns and product flows inside them change weekly. With planning systems that don't talk to each other and warehouses locked into designs that age the moment they open, operators end up making decisions without a unified view. The result is costly leakage, misplaced inventory, outdated slotting, and labor-waste of navigating layouts that no longer match real demand. Jerod points to the future, warehouse systems that ingest forecasting directly, allowing real-time adjustments instead of discovering problems weeks later. Today's episode is sponsored by Easy Metrics. Just a quick note for our audience that the views expressed by Jerod Hamilton on today's program do not reflect that of Tyson Foods or its leadership. For our solutions partners, position your brand alongside the Fortune 500 leaders defining the enterprise AI roadmap for the opportunity to showcase your solution to the executives that are currently funding and scaling global initiatives partner with Emerge. Secure your partnership at go.emerge.com/partner. That's g-o dot emerj.com/p-a-r-t-n-e-r. Now the conversation with Jerod.
Jerod, thank you for joining us on the show today.

**Jerod Hamilton** (1:32)
Marilie, thanks for having me today. Look forward to connecting with you.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:36)
Perfect. We are very interested in hearing your experience around distribution and fulfillment within the warehousing. It's a complex space with a lot of moving parts and each with its own points of friction and cost leakage. What have you seen as the overarching problem in your experience in distribution and fulfillment?

**Jerod Hamilton** (1:54)
Yes. It's probably hard to put into one bucket as an overarching problem, but when you think about the size of distribution centers now and the cost to build those distribution centers, if you're looking at a $100 million facility, and the lifespan on those or the thought would be 30 to 40 years.
And then you think about the ever-changing technology, landscape, populations, materials, I mean, the boxes that they come in, the packaging, right? So when you think about all those that just constantly change in your, you're sometimes building a hundred million dollar facility that can't change or, you know, is a, you know, set once you finalize construction, that's the facility you have. And then everything in it and around it is continuously changing, you know, a lot of times before you even actually open the door.

**Daniel Faggella** (3:06)
Exactly. And for that space, with all of the different moving parts, I guess there are a lot of spots where tiny leakages can happen. And those all add up, right? So in some and every, you've got a system, it's not even just one warehouse and it's probably different for each warehouse. Is that what you're experiencing that those little tiny leakages do add up?

**Jerod Hamilton** (3:33)
Oh, I definitely think the leakages add up when you start thinking about, you've got a manufacturing system within that system. You have a supply planning system, a production planning system, a deployment planning system. Then you have built around that load planning. Then you're trying to take your historical data and pull that in there to create a forecast going forward. Then you've got, of course, a demand forecast and a supply forecast and a deployment forecast, and then a sales forecast. You've got these multiple streams of data that's entering through multiple different systems. Because it's great that you can have a supply system, but understanding how that's honestly talking to your production system and how your production system is actually feeding into your actual sales, not just forecast, but your sales system that's creating the orders and trying to fulfill the demand.

**Daniel Faggella** (4:39)
I guess for each one of those workflows and each one of those departments, they've optimized the system, the platform, their data to serve them the best for the insights they need. But on top of that layer, we've used this metaphor before as an orchestra, I guess it could be a traffic system as well. You've got all of the different moving parts and they each need to be optimized, but you also need that layer on top to see the entire thing and then orchestrate all of that. Is that what you're feeling is missing for most systems? We just don't have that, the overarching layer that brings it all together.

**Jerod Hamilton** (5:17)
Yeah, I think that's a big piece and I think that one of the reasons that it's not that overarching system that really pulls that together that can take all that data and just distribute it as usable information instantly is because when you think about the intersection you're referring to, you have like 14 lanes coming in from this direction, one lane coming in from this direction, three lanes from here and a one way over here. So it's definitely not your balance intersection, if you will, that you're trying to capture all this and then distribute to the users.