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Product Management in Supply Chain with Hardik Chawla
47 Plays14 days ago
In this episode, Hardik Chawla, Senior Product Manager at Amazon, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- The role of product management in supply chain
- Building effective vendor relationships through technology
- The evolution from EDI to APIs
- Real-time supply chain visibility
- Making data-driven decisions with emerging tech
- Creating user-centric solutions for suppliers
- The future of supply chain innovation
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Transcript
Introduction: Podcast and Guest
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io. On this episode, we're going to speak with Hardik Chawla, who is a product manager for supply chain at Amazon. In case you're unaware, Amazon is a small e-commerce retailer based out of Pacific Northwest.
00:00:19
Speaker
But we'll hear more about them in a moment.
Role of Product Management in Supply Chains
00:00:21
Speaker
Really enjoyed, in particular on this episode, bringing the perspective of what is product management and what does it mean as a company that has a two-sided marketplace to teach and to work with your suppliers as customers to build those relationships, whether that's with direct product suppliers or logistics service providers, and really bring in that perspective of product management for the thing that doesn't actually face your end customer. So I hope you enjoy the episode and talk to you on the other side.
Hardik's Journey to Amazon
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, Hardrik, welcome to the show. Well, thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me here. Let's start from the beginning. Tell us how you got into this, into supply chain and why you decided to stay in this part of the universe.
00:01:08
Speaker
So but I'm originally from India and after I graduated, I started working with this company called ZS Associates, which was in the healthcare consulting space. So there I was dabbling with data science and operations. So really at the start of my career for the first four years, I was quite deep into like data analytics, operations and building solutions.
00:01:27
Speaker
to help improve the healthcare care supply chain of like thinking about how companies optimize the healthcare supply chain so that they can keep the costs down. And that sort of ingest interested me in the space of operations in general.
00:01:38
Speaker
And then chose to do my MBA at UCLA. um I came to the US, did my MBA at UCLA. And during my MBA, I worked with this transportation provider in New Zealand who was trying to venture into the US supply chain industry. So they were this was a So for manufacturers who used to help improvise how trailers work, like you can how to maximize the efficiency of a trailer. And that was a product that that they wanted to venture into the US with.
00:02:04
Speaker
And that is where I was talking to like one of these top trailer manufacturers or transcribers like GD Hunt on the logistics side and other companies like Amazon as well to help figure out how we could help this company enter into the US and make a dent in transportation efficiency.
00:02:23
Speaker
So that overall was at my first introduction to the US supply chain industry. And after that, fortunately enough, I sort of got into Amazon where I chose a team around the supply chain industry.
00:02:36
Speaker
And now I have been working with Amazon for the last two and a half to three years, quite in the supply chain optimization and technology org, which really focuses on ah how do we procure stuff from vendors ah and take care of the whole supply chain from vendor to Amazon fulfillment centers and also take it off the Amazon outbound side as well.
00:02:57
Speaker
So now I've been working with this industry industry for three years now. And overall, what has been really interesting to me has been the fact that there's always room to innovate here. Like on the outside, it may seem like as long as I'm getting my package in under one day,
00:03:15
Speaker
Everything is working perfectly fine, but there's always so much room for improvement. And we at Amazon are almost always thinking about what is that 10, 15 percent efficiency that it could drive more in my business to keep my costs down for vendors doing business at Amazon for my consumers and sort of keep on making the delay speeds even more faster, even more efficient. Right.
00:03:36
Speaker
So that is what has been very interesting to me so far. And before that, I did not really see supply chain as that core sector, but like looking closely, really seems that there's so much room for innovation here.
Responsibilities of an Amazon Product Manager
00:03:49
Speaker
What is a product manager's job? like What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis as a product manager? The product manager's job at Amazon is very varied. It cannot be described in one sentence. So this is something i often get asked as well, right?
00:04:06
Speaker
Like, what is your job? So I would break it down into, let's say, what different roles I play. So my role really starts with my customer is the vendor. right So like on one day I'm talking to a vendor, understanding what pain points do they have while doing business with Amazon? What kind of problems are they having? Are we placing the purchase orders to them in the right manner or not as per their requirements or not?
00:04:30
Speaker
Are we able to ship confirmed products accurately or not? Are we seeing any issues in receiving products from them and which we probably should not be seeing? right So really understanding what the vendor pain points are when they're working with Amazon, like that's a major part of my work.
00:04:47
Speaker
Then I have to go back to my team and talk to it experts in my team. There are experts who are taking care of how much product you need to purchase, like in stock managers, vendor managers, trying to understand that does this pain point really make sense or is this something that you're also seeing across different vendors or not?
00:05:04
Speaker
That is my customer research part of this business, like inter interviewing customers, serving customers, talking to the team to understand and validate those pain points. And then I have to go to my team, like engineering team and the UX team to figure out like what kind of tech product or ah like a UX solution or a brand new UI that I need to build to solve this thing.
00:05:25
Speaker
And then it's not that, hey, I figured out one thing and I have to develop this whole new three year long product based on just that. right I have to then convince people or the leadership that, hey, this is something that's worth investing in.
00:05:39
Speaker
And this is the benefit that it will give not just Amazon, but also the vendors. So that means like presenting some kind of a grand long term vision with good short term tangible outcomes that needs to be presented to the leadership.
00:05:52
Speaker
And then we sort of go on this execution phase of like getting this done. And in between that, like I'm talking to finance, legal marketing, like people who are working closely with the vendors as well and sort of helping all of them buy into this common vision that we have come up with and make sure that we're executing and meeting those targets.
00:06:13
Speaker
So a lot of stakeholder management, a lot of customer research, lot of product development in terms of talking to different people and a whole lot of convincing as well of figuring out that this is the right problem to solve.
00:06:25
Speaker
What do you think are the personality traits that are important to be successful in doing all
Key Traits for Product Management Success
00:06:31
Speaker
of that? Like what makes you good at it? I would say the first thing empathy. right So when you're talking to each vendor, the problems that each vendor faces is very different.
00:06:43
Speaker
For example, was talking me to a vendor that where they, even though like people are talking about automation and saying that everyone should be automating their processes, but they even had limitations in terms of the resources or funding that they have to like start automating stuff. right So they're interested to like drive efficiencies, but maybe they just are lacking the guidance or that oversight. Whereas some other vendor is all big on automation and just wants automate this full supply chain. so versus that empathy where you realize that customer needs are very different and like one size will not fit all. That's a big treat, I would say.
00:07:21
Speaker
Second is really stakeholder management, right? so Because as a product manager, you're talking to several people with more tackling like different parts of the problem.
00:07:32
Speaker
So then you have to understand that everyone will not understand the same language. So you have to manage their expectations accordingly and give them an ambitious vision that they can be bought into.
00:07:45
Speaker
And so the last is this fact that you have to be decisive. like At this point, a product manager is a job which does not really have an authority as such. I am not having ah bunch of people reporting to me, but I am like horizontally managing seven stakeholders.
00:08:01
Speaker
So then I have to be decisive because when I'm trying to drive the group to a conclusion, we need to be decisive that we cannot be stuck in a limbo. So if sometimes you have to make tough choices and owners lie on you as a product manager. So I would term this as like a one way door or two way door decision. So oftentimes you have to take a trade off about if this is a de decision,
00:08:23
Speaker
Am I if it's a risky decision, do I have the time enough to like get back to ground zero from it or not? Because that is what determines most of your life. You cannot be staggering or delaying stuff and you should really have the bias or action to get execution done fast and see results.
00:08:41
Speaker
So that I would say is the last three. That's again, what the more important one. So that idea of one-way door and two-way door decisions, i'm go to we use that internally at Chain.io as well. I know it's a very Amazon term, but I'm going to try to summarize it and tell me if I get this right. that like The idea is that if I'm making a decision that I can immediately turn around and go back through that door because the effort it takes to fix the consequences of a bad decision are low, then I don't need to invest
00:09:12
Speaker
inordinate amount of time and energy into the decision. i just make it and go. but Very rarely there's a decision ah you'll make where you can't walk back through that door, right? You've lit the building on fire on your way out. yeah And those ones, you do need to take time and be very careful. But think a lot of companies and people use the one way door energy on two way door decisions. Is that did I get that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So a lot of the time is like this identifying whether it's a two way door on a one way door.
00:09:43
Speaker
And if it's two way door, just go with it. You will fail fast. You will see what happens. And if it's a successful, it's a win win for everyone. If it was a failure, you can just come back from that.
00:09:53
Speaker
What do you do in the culture to make people comfortable? or I know you didn't obviously create Amazon, but like, what do you see in the culture that makes it comfortable for people to make those two way door decisions without feeling like everyone's just going to come down on them if it's
Amazon's Culture of Ownership
00:10:12
Speaker
wrong?
00:10:12
Speaker
The one word that really described the culture at Amazon really has been ownership. but so Right up from the lowest level employee in the company, everyone has a ownership of how this product charter looks like and no one is micromanaging you.
00:10:29
Speaker
So that is where you have the agency to like do a task however you want to get that done. So you have an outcome that you're driving towards and you have full agency of how to get that done.
00:10:40
Speaker
at the end of the day, people are sort of evaluating you on the basis of your outcome and not based on the micro choices that you may have made. So then you know that, hey, if this fits what I want to achieve. And in the long run, I can make certain mistakes as long as I get to that objective.
00:10:59
Speaker
And even if I do not, no one is going to say that, hey, why didn't you make the decision? Because we regard everyone who is working on a problem as the expert in that area. So we rely on them and then they have the ownership to do whatever they want to do. And that I would say is like, as far as an engineer goes as well, like even an engineer, when they're designing a document for the software solution,
00:11:21
Speaker
they can make whatever choices that they have to make. The manager never comes back to them and says, hey, do this, not that. So that is where everyone has that ownership to do whatever they feel is the best fit.
00:11:33
Speaker
And if it fails, we think about like how can we do it better the next time versus saying that, hey, why did you fail? So that's the difference again. So everything in supply chain has some level of tech and some level of business process or relationship management, you know, and there's almost nothing that's all one or all the other, right? So when you're thinking day to day about solving problems, right, starting from that, okay, I got some customer feedback, and I need to make the pickup process at the P&G facility easier, because they're complaining about x
00:12:10
Speaker
How do you think about like where new tech needs to come in, where it's just, oh, the customer is just doing something wrong and I just need to show them an easier way? like how How do you integrate tech into your life?
00:12:22
Speaker
I would say ideally, like that's where the role of product manager really comes in. So the engineering will say that, hey, let's implement tech and this fancy new tech will solve one of the world's problems. Whereas you know that the person is working on the ground with the vendor knows that whether it's a problem very specific to a vendor or not, or something very generic.
00:12:43
Speaker
So let's say the example of let a pickup problem with a vendor. right So let's say I'm getting some signal about the pickup problem that's happening with a vendor. ah first scenario is for me to send people to work with the vendor closely to see where the issues are actually existing. Is it how they are applying palette labels or is it how they are sending us electronic documents or is it how just the whole ERP system is configured?
00:13:09
Speaker
So firstly, just working very closely with that vendor because surprise here I have seen for each vendor is very nuanced. So you have to really, especially for the big ones, right? You have to really work with them very closely on a one on one basis to see where the problem really lies.
00:13:25
Speaker
If you figure out that this signal of the problem is very generic and like is quite broad in nature, that's where i the tech comes into play. And then we think about that.
00:13:37
Speaker
Hey, do I need to develop a tech solution for this or not? For example, One case would be like Amazon fulfillment centers. right So there is a lot of tech that we have internally, like you know how we scan labels automatically, how we have computer vision going on to scan labels on an incoming pallet, attach it to an incoming electronic document and get that received automated as much as possible.
00:14:00
Speaker
But we realize that that may not be the case for the vendor. right So they may may not be at the same technology curve. So then we have to make a product for these vendors in a way that it is able to like be a hybrid product. right So it is not something we want to develop for any vendor. We want to make it in a way that everyone can use it.
00:14:21
Speaker
That is where this feedback, human feedback really feeds into how we develop up and think about tech. And then what kind of best practices that I see at an Amazon FC, I can make it more generic for vendors to use such that most of the validations that we do internally at Amazon can be done by the vendor themselves.
00:14:38
Speaker
So that is how we think about tech. And we want to think about tech in a way that most of the hardware weird is probably that it does not need to be very cost and intensive for a vendor to implement and adopt, it should be easier for them to adopt.
00:14:53
Speaker
So as we're thinking about tech, we are thinking about the feedback the human feedback plus the signal if I'm writing from different vendors or not. Second is that, is this something that I have already figured out in Amazon that I could then give it to the vendor in a simplified manner?
00:15:09
Speaker
And third is, like is it going to be very costly for the vendor to implement? So those are the factors that we consider as we think about like bringing tech into the supply chain.
Post-COVID Supplier Relationships
00:15:18
Speaker
So you actually just kind of touched on something that I've always found very interesting and that I think a lot of people in supply chain haven't quite gotten to yet, which is this idea of defining the word product not only as the thing that we sell to people,
00:15:36
Speaker
but as the thing that people use is a product, right? And when I look at how a lot of companies interact with their suppliers, you know and and since I come mainly from the international side, they're often overseas suppliers who you never have met in person once.
00:15:51
Speaker
There used to be 25 years ago when I started in that space, the person who had the money and was going to give the money to somebody else was the hammer, and the other side was the nail. And so you would say,
00:16:03
Speaker
I, as the US-based, large multinational, I'm going to tell you, the small factor in China, that you have to use this website, and I'm not going to invest any money in evaluating the UI of that website. I'm not going to invest in understanding whether it's useful or sitting next to you.
00:16:21
Speaker
I'm just going to buy this tool and then tough, right? Like, I'm paying you. It's your problem. And I think this mentality that... it benefits everyone to bring the same product thinking that's done on the consumer side to these B2B transactions is is important.
00:16:41
Speaker
maybe Maybe just go in a little bit of like, what is the real benefit of creating a good product for that supplier? Yeah, that is true. I guess that that's something that was valid until like, I would say until four to five years ago as well, right?
00:16:57
Speaker
A lot changed after COVID-19. So before that, if you see most of supply chains had been very great at the outbound side of things, like you said, the customer side of things.
00:17:08
Speaker
So having the best experience of the customers, having like when you go to any consumer website or any e-com website, you have the best way of like recommending products which are similarly sized or similar to your preferences, getting that shipped very fast to you.
00:17:23
Speaker
So it was all good on the outbound side and the customer experience side for most companies. But COVID it was really the wake up call, the pandemic, because it really sets upon the fact that supply chain resilience is as much important as just driving both the GMS of your products.
00:17:42
Speaker
So you have to focus on having a resilient supply chain, having good vendor relationships, having a good procure to pay workflow and really treating your vendors and suppliers as tier one customers as well.
00:17:57
Speaker
i So that was a wake up call to a certain extent. And then this led to this sort of ah investment. So let's say in this aspect as well, like I am then creating products which suit my vendor needs and not just giving them sort of a downtrodden product to use such that they are able to do business with me accurately because What I would care for a vendor is that they are able to get the right orders from me.
00:18:25
Speaker
They are able to ship them accurately and I'm able to receive them accurately. And then in doing so, I am able to pay them on time because as long as I'm doing that, that is where I'm ensuring that I am getting steady supply of inventory and having them use my business as much as possible, right? Or rely on me for business as much as possible.
00:18:46
Speaker
So that has really changed, I would say, in the last few years. And and that's something we see on the ground as well when it comes to the decisions people are taking. Vendors are treated as those class one entities.
00:18:57
Speaker
And then we want to build products for them. So I think one of the places I'm seeing this a lot, and it's we actually just had somebody on the show, ah Lance Healy was talking about this, but you see it very transparently now in the US trucking market where truckers themselves and the truck brokers that support them are actively talking on LinkedIn about the quality of the product that is provided to the trucker when they make the delivery, right?
00:19:28
Speaker
Dwell time, what are the facilities available to the driver at that while they're waiting? you know like even you know You see all these memes and posts online of like the places that want to charge them for a cup of coffee or won't let them use the bathroom or all these things. But I think that's a really practical example of a very physical product, which is like,
00:19:50
Speaker
thinking of the driver experience of who's doing the drop-off at your distribution center right as someone who can choose to take that load or not take that load or can show up in a good mood or a bad mood, which can really affect productivity for everyone, right?
00:20:05
Speaker
yeah you know So I think that's a ah really interesting example that we had on a recent episode that should tie this together for people, that like if you don't treat your all of your suppliers, and you know whether that's your freight broker or the driver or the manufacturer or whoever it is, well,
00:20:24
Speaker
they can, A, there's enough markets now to sell elsewhere, but also it affects their productivity. It affects your data quality. If you have a crappy web form and I filled out enough purchase orders on 30-year-old ERP web forms before where it takes 20 minutes to get through entering a purchase order, if you don't do those things well,
00:20:47
Speaker
You never get fired for it, but it really does affect the bottom line of the company in in the aggregate across all of those behaviors.
Future of Supply Chain: Automation and AI
00:20:55
Speaker
So let's talk about the tech. So what tech are you excited about? What's what's getting you all excited for the next couple of years?
00:21:03
Speaker
So like you said, in this world where purchase orders are placed via web forms, so automating this whole supply chain transaction flow with vendors, that would mean using EDI, like which has been existing for the past few years. And then we'll say what we want to this API realm. layout now with So earlier like you did not have like things like cloud computing or thing like things like AWS or Google Cloud existing as much, right, or prevalent as much across different suppliers. And now as we are seeing suppliers investing these cloud computing technologies, there is no reason for our people to be using like web forms to filling out purchase orders or like confirming orders or even using EDI, which is kind of, a I would say,
00:21:47
Speaker
has quite a bit of pros in terms of it being an industry standard and being used quite widely by people, but mechanisms for people to like do transactions more autonomously, more frequently and a much more quicker latency in a way.
00:22:03
Speaker
That is something that will really improve the efficiency of how teams are structured, both on like the supplier side and the buyer side. So that is one. And the second is like that really is a foundational type that is being developed to improve transactions when operations.
00:22:17
Speaker
But then second is like, how do I make capacity aware or inventory aware ordering possible? So what kind of information do I then need to collect directly from the supplier ERP and WMS systems to make sure that, hey, I know that supplier one and distributed center X has like 15, 20 orders for me to like procure from. And then I will place the order accordingly.
00:22:40
Speaker
And then how do help them? make the decision of shipping the product to me. right So making more capacity aware and inventory aware decisions, taking into account the supply capability is a setting big thing.
00:22:52
Speaker
And the third really is that oftentimes with these technology, right so we are We have been making like big decisions using like ML models or fancy tech. But a lot of the times where we knew it, but where the gap was that these decisions could not be explained to people.
00:23:09
Speaker
And that is where we are seeing generative AI coming into the play. Now I'm still making those complex decisions or even more complex decisions about who to procure inventory from, how do I receive products? How do I think about the effects that happen in the receive process?
00:23:25
Speaker
or how do I want to mitigate them? But now one of this was being captured in some fancy ML model, which was not explainable to a layman.
00:23:36
Speaker
And now Generative A is helping us like bridge that gap. So that is where the third aspect is you are improving upon these models that are developing about getting better, having efficiency in our supply chain, how do you make sure that people are able to make decisions based on that and are confident in doing so?
00:23:55
Speaker
So that is the third aspect that I'm most excited about in a way that will happen in supply chain. So a lot of these ideas, when they they get out into the world, they hit some very concrete realities of the capabilities of everyone else who's playing in this team sport, right? That we call supply chain.
00:24:16
Speaker
And a lot of what we do at Chain is you know like We work with a Fortune 100 company and we we're collecting a lot of data from them. And a lot of it is we're interpreting spreadsheets because the supplier, just the person in the other Fortune 100 company doesn't have access to an IT t resource you know at their warehouse in Malaysia. And so they just they prefer to just email us a spreadsheet every day. right And we know that spreadsheet is coming out of SAP and it's going into someone else's SAP, but there's still going to be that yeah that gap, that spreadsheet in the middle.
00:24:49
Speaker
And one of the things we've been working on, I'm going to give everyone a little peek behind the curtain because we haven't announced this or even decided to fund it yet, but is kind of a universal set of APIs for some of the freight forwarding activity.
00:25:03
Speaker
And what we've heard in our initial product feedback sessions with our customers is as freight forwarders, they are very concerned that their shipper customers will are not going to know what to do with the API or are not there yet.
00:25:21
Speaker
Obviously, you work in the most tech forward supply chain on the planet, right? So a little bit of bias. But do you think when you go out and talk to the partners that you work with, is there a demand for you to be more API forward? Or do you feel like you're pulling the industry along with you?
00:25:39
Speaker
I would say literally hit the nail there. People do recognize the value of investing in APIs. Companies have implemented infrastructure to consume APIs or lets have them into their systems and plug into the yeah ERPs. but So if you come to me with an API,
00:25:57
Speaker
I have to the value proposition for me to adopt that API has to be great because I have to then implement several other components along with it for people to use. For example, let's say I give an API to a supplier about pickup delays or the shipment disruptions.
00:26:13
Speaker
then it's not like they can just like the person who is shipping out the product can start using that API. night so they have They can't plug their brain directly into the API. right They have to build like a dashboard or some kind of ERP plugin to help that person see that information on a computer stream.
00:26:33
Speaker
So some investment is required. And all of this was not possible using an EDI. So there is no probability EDI for some of this information that we want to convey by an API, right? So API is needed, but then API comes with a bit of infrastructure as well, which needs investment. And a company will only invest in that if they see a lot of incremental value in doing so.
00:26:56
Speaker
It's a lot of, and I think this gets to to your earlier point that there's a lot of stakeholders and human dynamics and financial dynamics that are actually much more important than the particular tech that they're built on top of that we have to get right first, right? What are the incentives? And you you look at one of the great, I'll call it failures of the last 20 years was you know when when Walmart had the impression that they were going to push RFID the same way they did the barcode and they didn't take into account the difference in the cost.
00:27:30
Speaker
right Like adding a barcode to my product took some product redesign of the label. Adding an RFID at the time was going to cost me a dollar. right like that's ah That's a big difference between redesign the label and and a dollar per unit or or whatever it was.
00:27:45
Speaker
But yeah, I really appreciate you bringing the perspective of that you know there's all these dynamics to this. That it's not just... you know because i think A lot of people in this industry are still very afraid that when large companies come at them, it's, no, no, no, just we can afford to do this tech, so you just have to deal with it.
00:28:05
Speaker
Right. And that doesn't that doesn't work in the real world. Yeah. So where do you think the biggest opportunity is on this sort of inbound supply chain side you know for the industry, not necessarily for Amazon?
Real-time Visibility in Supply Chains
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I guess so the biggest opportunity and where I'm seeing the most stuff happen is around and like supply chain visibility. So as freight is moving from the distribution centers to carriers, to the carrier sites, and then to a buyer, a lot can happen and a lot can go wrong.
00:28:40
Speaker
And that leads to a lot of churn. And that is where I'm seeing a lot of, in the current scenario, a lot of time being spent in just being reactive to the supply chain.
00:28:52
Speaker
So let's say i gave a purchase order to some supplier They're shipping that stuff to me. But then I then see that realize that, hey, this is not matched with what was confirmed.
00:29:03
Speaker
And that leads to this whole layer of turn that, hey, I did ship you that in the moment. But then you realize that if the carrier probably messed up in between or hey the vendor actually had some theft that happened in between somewhere.
00:29:14
Speaker
And that leads to lot of mix shortages to a certain extent, which really affects the supplier and buyer relationship. which a lot of that could be improved by real-time supply chain visibility, where I'm seeing companies like 544 doing quite great.
00:29:30
Speaker
So they are helping you track your inventory from start to finish, thinking about things like where did this freight get split? Did I receive the right product or not? And much more like the trucker example that giving. right If you go into that world where the trucker is actually giving you a photograph of the inventory that they have procured at each point, you're adding so much evidence in the whole supply chain.
00:29:52
Speaker
so That is where by having supply chain visibility, it's a very loaded term, but what you're really focusing on is like clarity, evidence, and the ability to like take proactive actions as much as possible.
00:30:04
Speaker
So that is where I see ah lot of investment will go up. in the next two or three years. And that really forms a baseline for anything that is supposed to come on top of it.
00:30:15
Speaker
Right. So if I have good visibility, I can make like good interventions. I can make better customer promises. I can make all of those changes after that. But this real time supply chain visibility is really, I would say in a way, priority zero for me right now. And that's where I see most investments.
00:30:33
Speaker
The way we talk about it internally here, Chain, is The hard thing that is not the fun thing is getting the facts right.
00:30:45
Speaker
That supply chain has got two layers. It's got, we call them execution and insights. And everyone always wants to jump to insights because it's cool and there's graphs and there's machine learning engines and there's all this fun stuff to do.
00:30:58
Speaker
you know What was my CO2 impact and how can I optimize my spend and rate management and this and that and the other But all of that is foundationally dependent on having actual facts of what is actually happening at the right level of granularity and fast enough that they are meaningful, as opposed to what did I move three years ago and I just finally like got it all correlated onto a spreadsheet, right?
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually a big, that resonates a lot with me personally because... we believe that that fact-collecting activity in most companies is underfunded and the right insights side might be overfunded because you're building on a house of sand.
00:31:43
Speaker
Right. Yeah, that is where it's see. Even if you look at like how the different governance and like and ENSI, all those bodies coming with different standards about how they think about... like this map in a way that coupling of the physical and electronic world.
00:32:03
Speaker
So as you say, and that's the you getting the facts right. like So you may be having your electronic transactions, but then there's a straight moment that's happening and that's where all the disconnect happens.
00:32:14
Speaker
And the fundamental problem there is like yeah you have different entities here. like There's a vendor, there's a carrier, there is a buyer. All of them are generating quite a bit of data, but all of that is in different formats.
00:32:26
Speaker
So it's not easy to like link it all together. And so we have these governing bodies like GS1 has the standard core EPCIS, the Electronic third Core Information Services.
00:32:36
Speaker
So what that is trying to tell you is that There's coming up with a standardized way to measure what is coming, when is it coming, where is it coming, how is it coming? And then if it did not come, why did it seem?
00:32:50
Speaker
So the industry will quite benefit from having certain standards when it thinks about all of these products and different granularities to have this similar mental model of how do I think about what, where and where of the freight inventory.
00:33:04
Speaker
And if we do so, like we are getting our facts right, and then all the different fancy ML models can develop on top of it. So I guess until a few years ago ago, people jumping the gun because everyone had data analytics, everyone got do like, I like this about, hey, where are things going wrong, etc.
00:33:19
Speaker
But unless you get a fact, cycle you're not really seeing the root cause of the problem. So now we're going into that trend with different industry standards as well. Well, as someone who founded a company solely to help a bunch of companies get their facts right, I should be paying you to to have this interview because I appreciate the validation of our entire underlying last eight years of my life.
Innovation in the Supply Chain Industry
00:33:43
Speaker
So take us out with something optimistic, something that you're excited about, something else that you think is cool in the world of supply chain that gets you out of bed in the morning, and we'll wrap up on that.
00:33:55
Speaker
i guess the one thing that I am excited about supply chain overall and having worked in this space for four years is it the fact that No one is saying the no to innovation. right At this point, like everyone is on board and is interested to innovate.
00:34:11
Speaker
So we are no longer in that world where like people are set in their old ways. People want to think about innovation. Of course, like they are thinking about like five like constraints like money, people, the cost to retrain people, etc.
00:34:24
Speaker
But we are seeing a resurgence in terms of People in supply chain being interested to think about the next big things, like the trends are going towards say how do I use things like NocChain, build more transparency into the supply chain, have more ways to integrate AI into the supply chain.
00:34:44
Speaker
So all those things are happening and everyone is interested in doing so. And that is something that I would say is the most optimistic factor right now. for this industry.
00:34:55
Speaker
The industry continues to remain resilient and eager to adopt innovation to mitigate all of these challenges. That I would say is a silver lining and something that's quite motivating for everyone who is working in this space.
00:35:08
Speaker
As someone who's got about 20 years head start on you, ah couldn't agree more that the culture in the business has changed and bringing people in who ah like yourself who bring that enthusiasm and that ability to apply a business sense to things is really, really welcome. And it's been so great chatting and and thank you so much for being on the show.
00:35:30
Speaker
Thanks, Brian, having me.
00:35:35
Speaker
um What a great conversation. Again, you can always find birds of a feather in this industry, and it's so great to hear people who really bring passion.
00:35:45
Speaker
Normally, I'd say the links are in the show notes, but I'm pretty sure you all know where to find Amazon. If you are having any trouble, I suggest just looking out your window. As far as Chain.io updates, we'll all be at TPM soon for those of you who are in the ocean freight industry, and be sure to reach out and see us there.
00:36:04
Speaker
And stay connected to us on LinkedIn and on the blog. Have a great rest of your day.