Team misalignment and outdated thinking are hindering circular supply chains, leading to untapped inventory value loss.
Trey Closson, CEO of Amplio, highlights poor data quality from manufacturers as a major barrier to scaling circular logistics.
Amplio uses AI to improve decision-making and make inventory resale as easy as disposal.
Systemic misalignment, rather than technical challenges, is the primary barrier to circular supply chain success.
A finance team could value inventory because it’s on the books for a certain value, when in reality the surplus inventory needs to be depreciated or written off.
Misaligned teams are killing circular supply chains. Bad data, inflated valuations, and sunk-cost thinking are quietly burning through untapped inventory value.
Trey Closson is Co-Founder and CEO of Amplio, a platform helping manufacturers resell surplus inventory and source hard-to-find parts. He joined us to discuss how siloed systems and outdated thinking stall circular progress and bleed value.
The illusion of value: The breakdown doesn’t start in the warehouse—it starts in the ledger. “A finance team could value inventory because it’s on the books for a certain value, when in reality the surplus inventory needs to be depreciated or written off,” explains Closson.
What looks like profit protection on a spreadsheet often blocks real-world progress. Finance holds out for book value, while supply chain sees dead stock taking up space. Some suppliers still expect to recover 80 to 90 percent of the original purchase price on inventory they’ve held for years—a valuation that no longer reflects market reality.
The result is a quiet stalemate: assets that could be liquidated or repurposed sit untouched because teams aren’t calibrated on risk, value, or timing. “The organizations that we work with where those two teams are working in tandem together, those are the most successful relationships,” says Closson.
Garbage in: Visibility is critical to resale, yet manufacturers often fall short. “The data quality that we receive from manufacturers is almost always incredibly poor,” admits Closson. Inventory records aren’t complete either. “The asset lists that we receive are typically missing critical information for us to make a decision or buyers to make decisions on appraising the inventory,” Closson says.
To combat this, his team built a product database designed to patch missing fields and standardize inconsistent supplier inputs. Without solid data, circular logistics can’t scale—yet, most manufacturers still treat data quality as an afterthought.
We need to make the process as easy as just chucking something in a dumpster out back of the warehouse.
Exceptions are the rule: Supply chains don’t run on repeatable scripts. They run on constant exceptions. “There’s going to be deviations on a daily basis across the supply chain,” Closson says. “Any system that’s built for the same process every single time, it’s just going to fail.” Tools that assume clean inputs and predictable flows break the moment reality steps in.
Classon views EI as a reinforcement. “We’re leveraging AI on a daily basis,” he explains, “but it’s built to make us more efficient and augment decision-making, as opposed to replacing anything anybody’s doing.” In a world of variability, intelligence matters—but adaptability matters more.
Trash or cash: For circular supply chains to work, they have to feel effortless. “Our promise to our customers is that working with Amplio is no more difficult—and oftentimes easier—than actually throwing the inventory away,” Closson says. If the process feels like extra work, it won’t stick. “We need to make the process as easy as just chucking something in a dumpster out back of the warehouse.”
The real barriers aren’t technical, they’re systemic. Misalignment, bad data, and outdated assumptions still dominate. Until finance, ops, and tech speak the same language, valuable inventory won’t make it out of the dumpster.
