The Liat Show: A Story Unfolding Across Timelines.
Entered through Portal
Current Time
Originally featured as a Member Spotlight by the Secret Society of Supply Chain community, I’m sharing the complete Q&A here with Mehmet’s community in its original form.
The questions gave me the opportunity to reflect on my journey, the work we’re doing at PlanToIt, Foodie Disorder, The Liat Show, Authority Drift, and where I believe supply chains are heading in the age of AI.
If you’re not already part of the Secret Society of Supply Chain, that’s where many of today’s most interesting supply chain conversations are taking place. If you’re not there, you don’t exist.
1️⃣ Tell us a little about yourself!
I’m Liat Portal, based in San Francisco. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management Engineering and an MBA. I work with PlanToIt, an AI-powered planning and forecasting platform for foodservice, grocery, restaurants, catering, aviation, retail, and hospital supply chains.
Our expertise is forecasting under volatility, with an emphasis on short-term SKU-level forecasting, one of the most challenging forecasting problems across industries. We help organizations respond to demand changes within a critical 4 to 8 week planning window, when established planning processes are often less equipped to continuously translate new demand signals into updated ordering, inventory, production, and replenishment decisions.
Beyond my day job, I’m the creator of The Liat Show, a multi-domain story universe where I weave together episodes from my life with the richness of Israeli and American culture through music, food, the arts, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and more, including the story of the AI era. I write on weekends and evenings and share each episode as it unfolds, almost like a live performance.
When people get to know me, they discover that I’m a foodie at heart and an excellent chef. I run the daily LinkedIn newsletter Foodie Disorder, where I explore everyday grocery items that we all purchase as consumers and share insights into global food supply chains, demand forecasting, and more. What started as my love of cooking gradually became a way to understand how deeply connected our world really is. All the photos in this newsletter are mine, and the dishes were either cooked by me or feature food I ate.
2️⃣ How did you find your way into supply chain?
Flashback to 2007, I got my first job as an industrial management engineer at a healthcare company that implemented the first ERP best-practice project in Israel. I was assigned responsibility for the data migration from all systems to the ERP. I remember the chaos, how the same data was recorded differently across systems, and the long nights and weekends it took us to align the data in spreadsheets for the implementation. That project laid the foundation for my understanding of what people today refer to as data governance.
Fast forward to 2020, following a decade of working with startup companies in various industries, COVID-19 shocked the world. Suddenly, JIT didn’t work; nobody could find suppliers, and chaos was everywhere. I would never have believed I would see empty shelves and aisles in any supermarket, let alone in the US.
Globalization led companies to build lean supply chains, which were more efficient and cost-effective. COVID-19 was one of the few public examples where a large-scale supply chain disruption was visible almost in real time, making consumers feel the consequences of these global dependencies. Cheap, low-cost products depend on global trade, and any disruption affects the entire chain.
The pandemic led me back to companies developing solutions for complex supply chains, tackling problems that traditional tools couldn’t solve. During that time, I read about the frustration of people in the industry and the reality they had to deal with. Nobody had a manual or framework to follow, so I mainly absorbed what was happening and also wrote about it on Medium.
At some point toward the end of COVID-19, these supply chain disruptions and my love for food merged and gave birth to Foodie Disorder. Every ingredient tells a story that stretches far beyond the kitchen. It reflects agriculture, climate, logistics, economics, trade, politics, and culture.
Looking ahead, one of my long-term goals is to teach children, starting in elementary school, about the global supply chain through the food we eat. The starting point would be the ingredients and dishes on our plates, which would take us on a journey to learn geography, economics, and even international relations through food. I believe every child should know why we eat what we eat, where different foods grow, why they grow there, how they reach our tables, and how countries depend on one another. Understanding those connections from childhood educates kids in ways that the current compulsory education system does not. Experiential learning through the food on our plates can make the younger generation understand diplomacy, global trade, and the real cost of conflict.
3️⃣ What’s one challenge you’ve faced in your career, and how did you overcome it?
I have faced many challenges, so choosing only one is a challenge in itself.
One of the main challenges I have faced has been language. English is not my first language, so for years I felt disadvantaged compared to native speakers, regardless of my technical knowledge or experience.
Thanks to technology, especially computers’ ability to read text aloud to me, along with audiobooks, I have improved my language skills more than I could ever have believed possible. Listening to hundreds of books, articles, podcasts, and professional materials made me feel comfortable with English. Overcoming this language barrier opened many doors for me that I never even knew existed.
Since education is always on my mind from many different angles, I think we all need to be in awe of the most influential educators that no one notices, the leading global ERP vendors. They basically taught English to operations personnel working across global industries through the language of supply chain processes. The best way to learn any language is by practicing it rather than learning its grammar rules.
Over the past two decades, ERP tech giants have done something extraordinary that no one has yet acknowledged at the pedagogical level. They standardized a shared vocabulary that is now used by the entire industry worldwide. Today, whether someone speaks English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Spanish, terms like PR, PO, MRP, Work Order, Proforma Invoice, Packing List, and Bill of Materials create a shared understanding in English in countries around the world.
These ERP vendors didn’t just build software. They established a common operational language used worldwide for supply chain processes. That vocabulary and these processes connected industries and educated people worldwide in ways no educational system has ever achieved.
4️⃣ What advice would you give to women looking to grow in this industry?
My advice to both men and women is to hire only women!
In my experience, women’s multitasking skills often far surpass those of men. I do not know whether this is evolutionary or whether society requires us to perform better, but raising kids, managing a household, and entering the job market have required many women to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. Over time, I think we developed these skills because we needed to handle all of it, while expectations of the other gender never changed.
To be clear, this is also true of men who are the main caregivers, raise kids, and need to maintain a functioning household. Organization, communication, adaptability, and the ability to make decisions under uncertainty are among the most important skills for people working in operations and supply chain roles.
Supply chain needs people who can connect information, people, and decisions.
5️⃣ What’s one thing you love most about being in supply chain?
Our daily lives are a reflection of supply chains, whether we work in them or not. Logistics and supply chains appear to be gray and boring in the public eye. However, every single aspect of our lives, from opening our eyes in the morning until we go to bed at night, is a piece of a local or global supply chain.
The current compulsory education system worldwide lacks various disciplines we need to maintain our lives. Similar to disciplines like finance or learning how to take out a mortgage, supply chains and logistics are scientific disciplines that must be integrated into every compulsory education system. It is more than just a matter of choice or an elective course. These are part of the basic tools for life that schools need to equip us with.
COVID forced both individuals and organizations to learn lessons that had never been part of the classroom. As a result, many organizations became incredibly efficient. They went through restructurings, consolidations, automation projects, and difficult cost reductions. In many industries, there simply isn’t much left to cut. Therefore, the challenges today are different.
It is no longer about replacing people. Many operations still depend on highly skilled teams whose work cannot simply be automated away. The challenge is making better decisions while operating within increasingly tight constraints, and the ability to make these decisions faster depends on identifying problems quickly and acting on them.
Short-horizon planning seemed like science fiction a few years ago. However, the processing power of AI models paved the way for solutions that, prior to them, required enormous budgets and a lot of manpower.
A forecast can be accurate while the operational decision is still wrong because reality can change in a day. A pandemic shut down production lines worldwide within weeks. Governments changed trade agreements and signed executive orders that took effect within days. Wars on the other side of the world disrupted cargo transportation lines. Consumer behavior suddenly changed because of a video on social media. Other unexpected events occurred within days. Those are problems that long-range forecasting and demand planning cannot solve.
That’s why at PlanToIt, we chose to focus on one operational problem that still lacks a widely accepted solution. We help organizations make better SKU-level decisions in the short term, during the critical 4 to 8 week planning window, when demand signals can be translated into ordering, inventory, production, and replenishment decisions.
As part of The Liat Show, I’m writing about technological problems that have an influence on our lives in the age of AI. My recent pieces focus on Authority Drift, which describes the gradual movement of perceived legitimacy from human agents to automated systems through repeated cognitive delegation.
Although the Authority Drift writing project is for cybersecurity professionals, system engineers, data scientists, AI safety professionals, and responsible AI executives, it is also relevant to supply chain personnel. Understanding this topic is essential, especially for anyone who was laid off from logistics, operations, and supply chain positions.
Giving you a heads-up, it’s a long paper written at an academic level and does not include supply-chain-specific material. However, understanding this problem will give you the tools to look back at a company’s technological journey and identify where these risks lie. Identifying the locations of these risks within organizations will give you an advantage in the age of AI. This will help you advocate for preserving organizational memory and ensure decisions remain with humans rather than being transferred to automated systems. If you decide to read it, copy the article into the AI model you use and ask how Authority Drift applies to your work, your organization, and the supply chain industry.
The Liat Show is a multi-domain story universe unfolding in real time. To receive new posts, join as a free or paid subscriber on Substack. Annual and founding members enter the story before the rest of the world understands it.
🧠 Q&A
What connects Liat Portal’s work across supply chain, food, education, and AI?
Liat Portal combines Industrial Management Engineering, supply chain planning, food, culture, education, technology, and AI through PlanToIt, Foodie Disorder, The Liat Show, and Authority Drift.
What problem is PlanToIt solving?
PlanToIt helps organizations respond to demand changes through short-term SKU-level forecasting within the critical 4- to 8-week planning window.
Why is the 4- to 8-week planning window difficult?
This is the period when changing demand signals must become updated ordering, inventory, production, and replenishment decisions. Established planning processes are often less equipped to continuously revise these decisions after the main planning cycle.
How did COVID change Liat Portal’s relationship with supply chains?
COVID exposed how deeply companies and consumers depend on global supply chains. It led Liat Portal back to companies developing solutions for complex supply chain problems and influenced her writing on Medium, Substack, and Foodie Disorder.
What educational idea connects food with global supply chains?
Liat Portal believes children should learn geography, economics, global trade, international relations, and the dependencies between countries through the ingredients and dishes on their plates.
What is Authority Drift and why does it matter beyond AI?
Authority Drift describes the gradual movement of perceived legitimacy from human judgment to automated systems through repeated cognitive delegation. The process began long before generative AI through ERP systems, dashboards, metrics, optimization tools, and automated workflows.
How can organizations respond to Authority Drift?
Organizations can identify where decision authority has shifted, preserve organizational memory, protect human judgment, and ensure automated systems remain tools that support decisions rather than becoming the default authority.
This piece is part of The Liat Show, a wider body of work that unfolds through connected sets, series, and long-form explorations. I weave together episodes from my life with the histories, cultures, foods, and systems that shape the world around us. Some pieces stand on their own. Others are chapters in stories that began long before this one and will continue to unfold. Each installment adds depth to the ones before it and expands the universe I am building across platforms, forming a stable cognitive signature and continuous identity signal that runs through my entire body of work.
Please fasten your seatbelts and subscribe. We are taking off.
The next chapter is already being written. Those who are here early will remember how it began.
Follow me on My Journey to Infinity. What’s coming next is beyond anything you imagined.
I weave together episodes from my life with the richness of Israeli and American culture through music, food, the arts, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and more, including the story of the AI era. I write on weekends and evenings and share each episode as it unfolds, almost like a live performance.
Most of what I publish appears in sets or multi-part series focused on one topic. Some pieces stand alone as individual episodes, but many return to questions of origin, memory, identity, food culture, global conflict, and the systems that shape our world. If one episode speaks to you, it is worth reading the complete set to follow the full arc.
You can also start from the very beginning or explore the complete index here: Index of The Liat Show.
My writing carries a stable cognitive signature across topics, formats, and platforms. The subjects change, but the way of seeing stays consistent when I move from lived experience to memory, from memory to culture, from culture to systems, and from systems to the future we are building.
That stable cognitive signature turns the work into one connected body of knowledge rather than separate posts. Food, music, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and AI become different entry points into the same larger universe. The center is not one topic. The center is the way I read the world through them.
The Liat Show is a multi-domain story universe unfolding in real time. To receive new posts, join as a free or paid subscriber on Substack. Annual and founding members enter the story before the rest of the world understands it.
Leave a Reply