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The Freight Technology Adoption Curve with Bart De Muynck
56 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Bart De Muynck, Strategic Advisor and Supply Chain Expert, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- Evolving technology across supply chains from the early days to now
- Technology implementations and the importance of organizational change when getting started
- Staying competitive with technology
- The future of AI in supply chains
- What supply chain pros should expect for 2025 any beyond
Bart De Muynck is an Industry Thought Leader with over 30 years of Supply Chain and Logistics experience. Bart has worked for major International companies such as EY, GE Capital, Penske Logistics, PepsiCo as well as several Tech companies. Bart spent 8 years as a VP of Research at Gartner and most recently served as the Chief Industry Officer at project44.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bart Dumont and His Impact
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On this episode, we're going to talk to Bart Dumont. Bart is one of the few people who can honestly use the term thought leader, an industry expert in his description of who he is and what he does. Bart's had this really interesting journey through the industry that we'll talk about, seeing it from a lot of different angles and is out there participating in the community and being a positive force inside the industry. and I think everyone should really enjoy the episode. so Without further ado, here we go.
Bart Dumont's Journey into Logistics
00:00:41
Speaker
Bart, welcome to the show. Brian, good to see you. How are you? I'm good. Good to see you too. i'm Excited to have you on here. I know we're going to do not the really cliched year-end wrap-up, but it's going to be good to get ah a chat here with a real industry insider about
00:00:58
Speaker
kind of your views on what's going on. But let's start with a little bit of background. Why don't you just tell us how you got into this industry and more importantly, why you decided to stick around.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I think ah many of us that have been around for a while probably kind of got into it, um maybe by coincidence, some of us by mistake. But I've been now in the industry in supply chain for about 33 years. Now, I will tell you right out of college, I wasn't in supply chain.
00:01:29
Speaker
I was actually in construction. My dad ran the largest construction company in Belgium. And so I guess being the one son that went to to study management and strategy, I was kind of picked to be his follow up for my dad. Now I did that for a year and a half and I quickly realized two things. And one of them was that I wasn't really interested in construction.
00:01:51
Speaker
And so I'm like, yeah, I think I got to do something and find my own way. And kind of by coincidence, went to G capital, but on the mergers and acquisitions side, because I had a bit of a finance background and economics background as well.
Career Transitions and Insights in Logistics
00:02:06
Speaker
But luckily GE Capital at the time, this is in 97, they wanted to create a logistics company that would provide logistics services to all their manufacturing businesses in Europe, right? Because I'm originally from Belgium, started my career in the Benelux. And so they did that as a joint venture with Penske, a large 3PL here in the US. s And it was named Penske Logistics Europe because Penske was a name people knew in the world of logistics. So that's how I got into logistics.
00:02:35
Speaker
And again, you learn as you get into that industry. And I'd seen a lot of logistics before, but I wasn't deep into it. And then very quickly after that, I became finance manager from a couple of the divisions. I started running operations, learning more about it. I was also trained as a six to come out black belt. So I was really getting myself into the details of the processes. And then around 98, we're heavily investing also in technology, TMSs, telematics, routing solutions.
00:03:03
Speaker
And especially when there was a connection of logistics process with technology, I just felt it's like, bam, this is my thing. I love it. I like doing it. And I say, I'll stick around. And I've had plenty of opportunities over the years, especially when I was with PepsiCo to switch to other areas, supply chain planning, manufacturing.
00:03:23
Speaker
And I'm like, no, I'm good. I love logistics. And more than just logistics as a field, I love logistics people. I don't know what it is. We seem to, it's like a Harley Davidson gang. When you see another gang, either you fight or you all get along. And I feel logistics is a little bit like that, but we all seem to get together when you go to these large conferences. It's like one big family.
00:03:46
Speaker
I think it's shared trauma. That could be, but you know, survivors always like, you know, when you go through a war, people always create a bigger bond. So maybe you're right. Yeah, no, I think it's very true. I won't call the people out, but we were on a call the other day and someone said, our company's closed the last two weeks of the year. And I was on the call and so was their customs broker. And I just saw this, like I got, I could not hold my poker face.
00:04:14
Speaker
And one of my employees called me and I said, Brian, why do you look like you're in pain right now? I said, because someday I'm going to work for a company where I can take the last two weeks of the year off. But as the people in logistics, we go through that like, oh, our customers off, but we're open, right? yeah And there's always a container stuck somewhere. And there's always a compliance issue somewhere. And and I think it really does bond us very, very well.
00:04:38
Speaker
and Yeah, people don't stop shopping or eating just because it's the end of the year, right? And if logistics doesn't work, you're not going to get any product in the store. I would say in Europe, that was a little bit easier because we close more shops with holidays, whereas here, it's 24-7. I came to the US about 21 years ago, thought it was incredible. You can go to Walmart and it's open 24-7. We don't have that in Europe. It's not even legal to do that.
00:05:07
Speaker
what's so you've you've On that journey, you've been on the logistics side, you've been on the on the BCO side, on the analyst side, on the software side. kind of Help me kind of understand, compare and contrast a little bit. like you know You've worked at at at all these different companies and and you can choose which ones you want to share or not, but like you've seen this from ah more angles than almost any And kind of like, how do you how do you, what has that changed in you having had these different perspectives?
00:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, and and sometimes it wasn't necessarily like I planned all this out, right? Like I sketched it out, like, I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to go from a 3PL and acid-base side, and I'm going to go to a tech side, and then I'm going to go shipper. It wasn't necessarily planned. It was just these opportunities that came along, and it took me from, you know, from Belgium to Holland, to Germany, to Australia, to England, and now to the United States for the last 20-plus years. But I will say I enjoyed every part of it,
00:06:13
Speaker
I'm probably kind of most liking kind of the entrepreneurial tech side if I look at it now. But as a result of having all these experiences, I can look at things a little bit different. It's like looking like at a little bit like ah a Rubik's Cube, but you have the ability to look at it from every single side and understanding it. So when I talk to an investor, I know what they're looking for and I know what's important to them.
00:06:37
Speaker
But when I look at an end user, I know what's important for them. When I look at it from a technology vendor, I know what drives them. But it's also very cool if you can then orchestrate all of that and kind of be a little bit of the the glue between all those different parties and kind of speak maybe a lingo that connects these people. And that's the other part that I really like about my position now, is being a promoter of the industry. That's why When you see me post, I'm typically very positive about things. I'm not one of these guys that go on LinkedIn with negative stuff because there's already a lot of negative stuff in our industry. I mean, we're one of the few industries really gone through a recession.
00:07:17
Speaker
But um'm I'm a promoter of it, but I also like bringing people together, even if they're competitors, because I think the way really forward is whether it's through connecting people through processes and through technology is for us to collaborate better as an industry and everyone's going to do better because of that.
Evolution of Technology in Logistics
00:07:37
Speaker
In that context then, you know there's always a lot going on. Even going back to the 90s, there was things going on then. ah you know I was plugging mainframes together back then, and we were getting Dow Chemical connected in to actually be able to send them their invoices via modem every day, which was exciting at the time. But things have changed a lot since then. and They're continuing to change. you know You had mentioned during our prep that maybe there's more supply than demand on the tech side. I'm putting words in your mouth there a little bit. but yeah yeah kind of like What are you excited about and where do you see the industry going as far as tech ah adoption? and I know there's so many different places you could take that. but Yeah. You're right. Because in the 90s, the Internet was invented in 1989, but I remember when I was with Ernst & Young in 95,
00:08:31
Speaker
I was one of the first people that were there at the office that actually used the internet, right? And it was one of those little dialogue modems, which was incredibly slow. Like what was it? 26 kilobits per second. um And now you had a fast one. Now we have five gigabits per second. I mean, it's like thousands of times faster. It's it's just amazing. um And then we went through all this thing from manual and then we got EDI. And then we got, I went to Alemica and we started using XML and we thought, oh, XML is so much better, right? So you would think that's going to replace EDI. Well, imagine now, 25 years later, we're still using lots of EDI.
00:09:09
Speaker
So then came API, same thing. People go, oh, maybe API is going to replace it. So you have this natural evolution of technology, but at the same time, there's so many more technology companies. If you would kind of list it, I would say back in the nineties, when we're looking at technology companies, I would say if you had a hundred transportation technology company, now you would have like 50,000 technology companies.
00:09:31
Speaker
It's kinda just, I wouldn't say that, don't look at that as an exact number, but just how exponentially we've grown um and using more technology and being part of a Venture 53 as well. I've talked to a lot of startups, right? Sometimes Pre-C, they're just starting. How many new companies are being created every day? So it's very exciting, but you have to look at from people that are buying that technology, how are they going to figure out what they need? And now with AI on top of that, they're going, what should I invest in? And where's the value coming from? But that's also why I think there's value for more seasoned people to go in there and for technology vendors like yourself to really be a true partner to your customer and say, I can help you to make those decisions and to say,
00:10:16
Speaker
not just what is maybe hype from what is reality, but also for your specifically, what could create value in your business? And I think a lot of people still think, well, we have a problem. Let's put some technology against it. That really doesn't work. And we've seen many, many examples of that. But there is technology that can help. So it's based around how much value can you create But also I think what's different, the larger companies, because i that's the other part, 30 years of only very large companies could afford the transportation technology. Now there's free stuff out there. Now you also have to implement that very quickly and get to value very quickly. So technology plays ah quite a different role. But what I think, in my personal opinion,
00:11:03
Speaker
I feel with everything that's happened in supply chain last 30 years, I would say huge acceleration the last five years. I don't think we can sustain kind of doing things the way we used to do things even from but your traditional process model like the score, the traditional score model and how we're using that. Supply chains are completely different. It's so much more global. It's so much faster, real time.
00:11:30
Speaker
customer and consumer expectations are completely different. So the the reality is really how do companies figure out what are the right technologies to really help them to give them that kind of agility they need to be a lot more flexible as all these things, whether it's weather and port strikes, and, you know, every day hear something else on the news that's hitting them. I had a call the other day with a very large BCO chipper. And they were talking about a particular piece of technology that they had bought a couple years ago that they were thinking of getting rid of, because they hadn't gotten any value from it. This is the sentence. And I said to them on on the call, because it's not really a thing that's competitive with us. but
00:12:18
Speaker
you know it would be part of the landscape of things we would be looking at integrating. I said, well, what was the value that you thought you were going to get at the time that wasn't delivered? and It was really interesting because the guy who I was talking to wasn't there when they made the purchase. so He was able to be a little more like honest with me about it. He goes, I think the salesperson just sold it to us, and we didn't really think about whether we needed it. We knew that everyone else was buying it,
00:12:48
Speaker
And now we're looking at it and going, oh, maybe we didn't need that in the first place. And you know I think this is an interesting thing. and and you know and And I'm actually very interested to hear your thoughts on this, given you your experience with Gartner, of like people who just sort of follow the trends.
00:13:06
Speaker
and don't go through the discipline process of figuring out whether they need that tech in their business. and yeah Coming from that consulting world or that advisory world, did you see that? is Is that a thing that people are getting better, more disciplined at now? like is Is that getting better or worse? What's your job? I would say probably not. and Yes, you you are correct. I saw so many examples. like What are you really trying to solve? People said, oh we part we want a TMS. oh Why do you want a TMS?
00:13:34
Speaker
Well, everyone's got a TMS, we need a TMS. It's like, no, you don't. What is it you're trying to solve? And then how does that link to your business strategy? How does it link to your technology strategy overall? And that was, I would say, a great learning that I had early on working for GE and then doing the whole Six Sigma thing where it's like, hey, if you kind of work on the process and you improve your process and then put technology against it, which is an enabler, then you can do great things and be very efficient.
00:14:03
Speaker
But also on the other side, if you don't do it the right way and you don't change your process or maybe put the wrong technology against it, all you're doing is creating a lot more disturbances in your organization. And unfortunately, because there's more pressure also from the board, like right now, it's the board that says, hey, what are we doing on AI? You've got to go do AI.
00:14:26
Speaker
and Just like a few years ago, it was like, hey, we're going to do blockchain. It's like it always starts with what is it we need from a business perspective, right? And then how
Challenges in Technology Adoption
00:14:36
Speaker
does technology enable that? And then how does that particular technology, which technology and how does it provide value? So it's very difficult, especially if you have more emerging technologies like When i was looking at visibility like eight years ago people said all we need visibility but they had no clue where the value came from they said well i know we have a hundred people doing phone calls all day so maybe we can let some of those people go but they had no idea how it impacted the rest of the organization.
00:15:04
Speaker
So it's like, well, it's great opportunity for us to start writing about that and assisting people and and getting more, you know, given the more information about that. But no, I would say that where where it was TMS or visibility or APIs or now artificial intelligence, blockchain.
00:15:22
Speaker
People sometimes dive into it because they think they need to do it without necessarily saying, is that the right thing to do? And are we getting the value? And unfortunately, then afterwards, they go like, oh, that vendor sucks because we didn't get the value. No, it wasn't the vendor's fault. You implemented something maybe that you didn't need, right? And you're buying a TMS. I've seen that quite a bit as well. And they're using it for 10% of their business. But they're paying it year over year for 100% of their freight.
00:15:50
Speaker
So there's a a lot of things. Now, on the other hand, I'd say you can't blame those people because they're operations people. you know And a lot of companies have smaller and smaller IT departments. So they don't always have the right assistance or the right help or the right insights to make that decision if you go once every few years through the procurement cycle of technology.
00:16:13
Speaker
So I think people need to understand, if you really want to do what they've been calling now for years, this digital transformation, make sure you look at it that way, but at the same time, it can't just be technology. The organization needs to change, the process needs to change, and then the kind of talent that you attract for to execute on that vision also needs to change. Just buying technology alone,
00:16:39
Speaker
Unfortunately, that's typically a good setup for failure. I'll try to find it for the show, not somebody on LinkedIn posted a comment that basically said, if you're not willing to do organizational change, don't buy new technology. And I thought that was a very well, obviously oversimplified a sage piece of advice. Most of the failures that I've seen in tech are change management failures or.
00:17:08
Speaker
an unwillingness. We have one where I was just on the phone with a big TMS company, and they were talking about a failed implementation. And they said, Yeah, the implement, we knew the inflation was going to fail as soon as we started, because the company wanted to change our software to match their existing process. Oh, like from the TMS vendor is but it doesn't matter, though. I mean, I've seen it with SAP. I've seen it on finance implementations. I mean, we had at one time,
00:17:38
Speaker
just implementing new billing software inside a chain where like, we're like, Oh, no, no, we have to build this one. And luckily, we kind of went, Okay, I've seen enough of this pattern. But it's very tempting. And the bigger you are, the more tempting it is to just go to your software banner and say, No, no, no, just make it look work. Like my old thing worked.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, which is I think that's also part of the way software change. I mean, software, if you look like, for example, you're operating system for your computer, it used to be a product, right? You could physically buy a box. It used to be a disk, then it became a CD-ROM, right? But you would buy it and you put it in there.
00:18:14
Speaker
Now, technology is much more than just a product, right? I don't see them as software vendors anymore. They're your value creation partners. So you should really lean on them as well, having the expertise to say, how do you create that value? But then also, if they're saying their solution is going to create value, hold them to it, right? And say, okay, hey, we need to figure this out, how we create that value. But it's much more of a partnership.
00:18:40
Speaker
and then it can go well if you do it the right way. and You build it up the right way. It used to be you buy something, you have to buy the whole thing. Now, a lot of these newer systems there, microservices-based, they're componentized, so you can buy or start small and get value very quickly. so Sometimes it's like, yeah, I know how I can do this, but I can start small so I can immediately know if it works or not, rather than spend two years implementing all of it and then go like, yeah, that wasn't right.
00:19:08
Speaker
And we've seen massive failure, especially in the logistics industry, large freight forwarders, 3PLs that did these projects that were over $100 million dollars and go, doesn't work, and they just had to scrap it. Yeah, but we won't call that company out. I talked to their old CFO the other day, but yes, there's been some really ugly ones. You know, and it's funny, because it's the same on the retailer side, right? You look at early 2000s, some of those really, really ugly failed SAP implementations, the patterns are the same.
00:19:37
Speaker
right and The very excited board, very big press release, we're going all in on this. you know We're going to transform our whole company and then four years later, here comes the write-off. I think that you're right, that over-enthusiasm at the beginning can often lead to that failure at the end because, oh, we have to change everything today. yeah It's very, very hard to do inside of a company.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, and unfortunately sometimes it has a company stall in the sense that it limits their willingness to innovate because the failure of one particular area. I think what I've seen and that was a learning I had with PepsiCo where we had this lab internally where we were able to look at a lot more technologies and then take them through the lab and understand it very quickly. It was like, if you're going to fail, fail fast.
00:20:26
Speaker
right? So run it through, see if it works, if it doesn't work, what the value is, and then push it in. And I think more and more companies are doing that to try to understand that. But unfortunately, a lot of small organizations don't have that ability. But that's also why we're seeing that, you know especially on the shipper side, you're seeing the large companies, the P&Gs. They're the guys that at the forefront, right they're the guys that take high risks and some of them don't pay off. But the good thing is they're P&Gs, so most of the time they get a lot of that stuff for free because they're saying, hey, you're a newer vendor, we'll try your solution. You can show our logo, but instead we get that stuff for free. And then even after P&G is successful and the PepsiCo will go like, hey, we're an early follower, we'll try that as well.
00:21:12
Speaker
And then you see other companies following as well. But I think I see more willingness of companies nowadays to try software, because like I said, these newer platforms are a lot easier to implement. And so that helps innovation, because it it doesn't require the amount of time, the cost, the amount of resources. That's the one thing, right? In logistics, yes, all your resources are logistics. But if you look at the shippers,
00:21:36
Speaker
The one thing I continuously heard towards the end of when I was with Gartner was like, hey, Bart, we want to do this technology, but I don't have resources on my team to put on the project. right so So they would go, I need something that's quick to implement, easy to use, very kind of like a LinkedIn Facebook. We weren't trained on it, but it's very intuitive. And so technology that works like that and then working with strong partners that continue to innovate, that's, I think, where you can be very successful. And I do think, though, if you want to remain competitive,
00:22:06
Speaker
because I don't want to kind of give the i impression to say, don't do technology. That's not my message here at all. You have to do technology. and If you think you can stall or you cannot innovate, your competitor is going to leapfrog you and you're going to be left behind. and All your customers, right everyone nowadays, they're expecting you to communicate and collaborate with them through technology. yeah You talked about the adoption curve right and the innovators and the early adopters and the followers and so on.
00:22:36
Speaker
um One of the things that I think a lot of smaller freight forwarders in particular that I've talked to struggle with is being comfortable with where they are in that curve. If you are resource constrained, it's okay to be middle or late on the curve. Because when you're early on the curve, the risk is 80% of the things that these big companies try fail,
00:23:03
Speaker
They fell quickly, hopefully. right And that's really the learning of the early 2000s was fell fast. People could say whatever they want about agile and whether it's popular or not. But the idea of failing, of getting something in, failing quickly and getting it out if it didn't work was the big win there. But I think one of the things I see that companies make a mistake is, like you said, somebody at the board goes to a conference, OK, we have to be doing AI today. go Well, are we the kind of company that is willing to accept the risk and make the investment in 10 things to find one thing? Or are we a company who wants to invest in two things and have both of them work? right like Where you are in that curve matters a lot. MERS can afford to do Trade Lens and have it fail. right Trade Lens was a big risk and it was not successful, but
00:23:54
Speaker
That's what your early adoption looks like. Yep. Yeah. And I always thought it was a knee jerk because they had that big cyber security event happening. And so they went from maybe older systems that weren't secure to kind of go like everything needs to be overly secure. And obviously it was right in the middle where blockchain was kind of put out there as the next big thing, right? Similar to when I joined PepsiCo, it was right at the beginning where Walmart had their RFID mandate. We have to put RFID on everything. It doesn't doesn't make any sense to put that on little 99 cent bags of Lays or, you know, soda cans. Now, if it's Gillette razors that are very expensive and you don't want to be out of stock, that's one thing, but not on everything. But guess what? You know, 15, 20 years later, RFID is back.
00:24:41
Speaker
in retail and doing very well so i'm sure some of these technologies just take a longer time to become ingrained i think ai as well and
AI's Role in the Logistics Sector
00:24:50
Speaker
people sometimes afraid of it right but the truth is we're using ai all day long if you have an iphone you're using ai just looking at that thing right it recognizing you and and opening up That's AI. Now you go like, well, why does that matter? Well, before you had to put in a coat. It took you some time. And if you have like kind of fatty fingers like me, you fat finger it quite often. You go like, oh, darn thing. Or you had to put your thumb print on it and that didn't work half of the time. And that's what AI is. Maybe it's the same thing you're doing, but you're doing it faster and it's easier and maybe more secure.
00:25:25
Speaker
on top of that. So there's a lot of applications there, but again AI will take a long time to truly be integrated. And I think what the problem is with AI, it's so powerful that the organization and the people and the processes can't follow with it.
00:25:41
Speaker
always i always tell people you can have the most modern car in the world like i have an electric car and has all these sensors right but why is it that the sensors can do everything and notice everything but yet when i overtake a car i still do that looking over my shoulder by that corner why because that's how i was trained i've always done it Behavioral changes are very difficult. I still can't use the backup camera in my car. I mean, I use it, but I still also look over my shoulder to back up because you're right. It's very hard to unlearn those things. But also, when you do have that, like I was just for Thanksgiving in Mexico and had a rental car. and some of though nothing is I love Mexico, but some of the rental cars there don't have all that technology that we have standard here. So we didn't have a backup camera.
00:26:29
Speaker
wow i didn't know how much i miss the backup camera and i almost hit a pole a couple of times backing up in the garage cuz i didn't have that i ah literally have to look i'm not used to looking i'm used to looking at the camera and seeing if my line lines up with it and and i know i'm good so that's the other part right where becoming depend on technology.
00:26:49
Speaker
So you got to make sure that that the can technology works. You don't have a cybersecurity attack because we're so dependent on it that if that thing is taken away, let's say last week, right, it was Black Friday. We had Cyber Monday and all of a sudden that TMS or WMS stops working. Wow. How quickly can you revert back to old processes? Yeah, no kidding. I will admit as a tech CEO last night,
00:27:16
Speaker
we were I was looking at a feature in our product and I was like, oh, this very small feature, we have a thing where people can send us files and you know it's a new feature releasing where they could be able to send to the same API endpoint and they could send us a Maguia file, a Cargoize file, a Decarte file, or whatever, and we'll figure out which file type it is and they don't have to go click a bunch of settings. and We don't need any AI to do that. There's a very finite list of TMSs and we'll be able to figure it out. But I said, oh wouldn't it be interesting if we could also say, just send us any file and we'll sort it through. and you know There's an AI solution there. What was in incredibly tempting,
00:28:00
Speaker
as a CEO and especially one who likes to be out in the market and up on stages and everything was to go, Oh, cool. Let's drop that one feature. And then we can call ourselves an AI company. Right. And I can go raise a whole bunch of money as an AI company. Right. And I can be the, when Arizona is T had the decided they were a blockchain company and we're not gonna do that. We are going to implement probably that feature at some point because it's a useful feature.
00:28:26
Speaker
But it's a feature in a very large suite of what we do. and But I will tell you, it is damn hard to not just jump on that marketing chain because I know it works.
00:28:41
Speaker
right and and it will it it's ah It should be a warning. We keep using blockchain as the whipping boy, but you mentioned XML before.
00:28:53
Speaker
And I worked for a company that invested in a piece of software where the XML was going to replace all of our code and it was going to make programmers obsolete because we would have XML. XML was going to make programming obsolete. This was like right before the dot com crash, right? So this is not a new pattern and everyone should be aware that AI is a feature.
00:29:22
Speaker
And it's actually not even a feature. It's a thing that you use to build features. yeah And you buy business value, right? And I know you believe this, and I don't know that I'm sitting here preaching to the choir, but I think it's important. I'm going to talk about year-end wrap-up. This could be the year-end wrap-up every year is BuzzwordX is a feature. yeah And if your tech vendor is leading with the feature, not the value,
00:29:46
Speaker
It may just be that they got really seduced by it and they may still have very good software, but if you can't figure out what the value is, don't buy it. Right. I'd say the best use of AI is where the user doesn't realize it has AI. They just know it's better, it's faster, it helps them better in their job. That's the greatest. There's a lot of, I think right now, a lot of really good use cases for AI, but they're kind of behind the scenes. Like I think data quality, everyone's got so much data. You guys collect and and integrate a lot of data. A lot of other companies do as well.
00:30:20
Speaker
And why is it so important to have good data quality? Well, you got to remember, we used to use just data mostly for like business intelligence, right? Which was historical reporting. What if the data was bad? Who cares already happened? But now we're starting to predict and prescribe and maybe in the future automate certain parts of our supply chain processes based on that data. If that data is a little bit wrong, your prediction has got to be way off. So you know when you can use things like AI to improve data quality, you know data harmonization, cleaning data, augmenting data, all of those different things, those are things that happen behind the scenes. So it's a little bit like in your car, you drive your car. Now imagine you have a good engine, like informal, a good engine, right good fuel,
00:31:10
Speaker
Imagine AI is that little additive that you add to it that makes it that little bit more performant. You don't even have to know it, that it's in there. You just feel like, wow, there's something here that gives that thing just a little bit more power, a little bit more performance. And I get to that end line or your bottom line, a little bit faster, a little bit more profitable. I think that's right now where we are with AI, because all those big, big things that you see out there from AI, people really aren't ready to to truly use that. So it's a very gradual progression. Yeah, I think the thing inside of our company where
00:31:44
Speaker
AI has had the most impact immediately is the code generation tools. Microsoft did a very good branding when they called it co-pilot because that is essentially, and I think there's a lot of non-technical people who think that AI is writing oh like, oh, I just typed in a thing and I wrote it wrote all the code for me. And when you're doing like a little toy project, that's very easy. When you're doing a big enterprise piece of software, it's not so simple, but what we see is,
00:32:14
Speaker
we can get ah developers sitting there in the keyboard, and the AI is writing the next line of code and the next line of code and the next line of code. And what it's doing is probably improving, and I don't have hard stats on this, but I would guess 20 or 30% productivity big but it's doing the 20 or 30 percent that's the easiest part. though like yeah oh I have an if statement and it knows that if I type if, I'm probably checking whether the last line of code is valid. right like yeah But it's not going to sit there and go, it's not going to have a new idea. like It's not bringing out, like oh we should be prompting the customer to give us this extra thing so that we can upsell them next year on Y. It's just doing the same as the same as like the automatic braking in your car. It's not telling you that you should have a better relationship with your mother. So you should drive to your mother's house. It's just making sure you don't rear end the guy on the way. Exactly. There's a very big difference there. And I think that's the value that I think is so important for a lot of companies because it does allow
00:33:17
Speaker
for those people, right? Because it's still special logistics, very human-centric, allows them to handle more volume, do it better, do it faster, but also, which I always say at conferences, AI will help these people at the end of the day like their jobs better, which is also really good for talent attraction and retention, which we know is a big issue, right? It's not just the labor, it's even the people in the offices,
00:33:43
Speaker
Everyone's fighting for the same talent, the same good talent.
Technology and Talent in Supply Chain
00:33:46
Speaker
And we know that the best supply chains are typically, they have the best people. It's not just, oh, we have the best building and the best assets and the best technology. No, it's the people, right? And so how do you as a company do that? And I know that today it's quite different from 30 years ago when I came out of college, what you saw as attractive as a company nowadays, everyone wants to go work for Google or Uber or something like that.
00:34:10
Speaker
So how how are you as like, say, 150 year old manufacturing company, how do you attract that talent? Well, technology plays a big role into that. Because if you're on a 20 year old version of a technology, I can guarantee it, someone coming from the best supply chain university and they see that they're like, no, thank you. Doesn't matter how much you pay them. Absolutely. With it without a doubt. So we're kind of running up on time here again, I think you and I have had two-hour conversations in the past, and I know we could do one right now if we wanted to.
Future of Logistics: Economic Recovery and Tech Investments
00:34:40
Speaker
But kind of bring us out with, kind of what are you what what are you most excited about for next year?
00:34:46
Speaker
Well, I hope that truly that the economy is going to turn around and that especially for transportation logistics industry, things are going to look better. I think there's a lot more optimism going on the around right now. But again, we always have these things are out of our control that then when we feel like we make a couple of steps forward and get pushed back because of something happening, right? And we know with the East Coast and Gulf ah Coast ports, we still don't have an agreement. So we might be back to square one in January.
00:35:15
Speaker
ah when that extension comes up and that might have huge repercussions. But I'm really hoping for next year that we're finally getting out of this deep period. There's way too many companies going out of business, whether it's, you know, carriers, brokers, some of the tech companies who, you know, had to be acquired because they run out of funding to really change that. But then I would also say for people on the technology side that are the users, I know a lot of companies have said, hey, I want it, but not now.
00:35:45
Speaker
You know, investing in technology and not investing is not a solution, right? And you got to remember that the way you have to operate, the way you have to work with your talent, the way you have to work with your customers, a big part of that will be in how you use technology and make it better. But as we said before,
00:36:03
Speaker
Start looking at technology and start really understanding of what are those main pieces that have the biggest impact on your organization, meaning don't invest in just these fluff solutions. Invest in things that are kind of part of your core process, but that really helps. So if you're maybe on a 20 year old solution,
00:36:21
Speaker
buy a new solution that kind of covers the same process, but does it a lot more efficiently and gives you a lot more flexibility. Those I think are the very important parts. So it's not the shiny thing or the cool thing. It's the basic thing that really helps your company. And I think I hope that next year will be that year where companies are going like, okay, it is now or realize that we have to do it, or we kind of start losing our competitiveness in the market. And I think from what I've seen,
00:36:50
Speaker
internal to our customers and our cadence through this year. I think you are right that people are starting to go, okay, I can't push this off anymore, and it's time to go start investing again. So hopefully, here's to a good 2025 for everyone, and I'll just say a short port strike. I don't think we can say no port strike at this point. But again, thank you so much for being on us. is It's such a pleasure to chat. I know yeah I'll personally see you a lot in the new year, but anyone who wants to get in touch, where should they find you?
00:37:20
Speaker
Well, always get me on LinkedIn. I'm a lot on there. So that's probably the easiest way to find me. If you can spell my name, also my website partemongue.com or my thought leadership what website, which is bettersupplychains.com. I post my articles on there.
00:37:35
Speaker
webinars. Hopefully I can share this on there as well. well We will have all of that in the show notes as well. And then any of the upcoming conferences, you know, you'll probably see me and Brian or me or Brian. You see the two of us and John Fitzgerald, and that's a guarantee it at any logistics conference. Exactly. If one of us isn't there, it's not worth attending.
00:37:56
Speaker
Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well, again, have a happy holidays at ah at a great new year and the same to everyone who's listening. and And thanks so much for being on the show. Yeah, you as well. Happy holidays and an incredibly strong start to the new year.
00:38:14
Speaker
Well, thanks again to Bart. One of my goals has always been with this podcast to make sure that everyone who's listening kind of gets a glimpse into the conversations that happen in hallways and at the cocktail hours when we're out at all these industry events. And there's nobody who's better when I'm just sort of wandering around and exhausted to have a real honest conversation with the part. So glad we were able to open that up to everyone in the industry. As far as the end of the year here and heading into next year, super excited about a lot of updates of things that are coming very, very soon for Chain IOs. So make sure you're subscribed to the blog and to us on LinkedIn.
00:38:53
Speaker
sneak previews, some really cool new tools that we're releasing to really focus on simplifying some of the very, very core problems that we know that you all have with connecting with each other quickly and getting at that very raw, simple information that just makes your jobs easier. So really excited. Can't drop the announcements yet, but you can tell I'm chomping at the bit. So be sure to be looking at everything as we go into the new year. And as always, I'm Brian Glick. Founder, CEO, Chain.io, and thank you so much for listening.