00:00:00
00:00:01
Data, Tech, and Team Alignment with Justin Kyngdon
50 Plays25 days ago
In this episode, Justin Kyngdon, Principal of Supply Chain Solutions at Expeditors, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- The importance of data, technology, and team alignment in supply chain management
- Why you need a clear philosophy and collaboration between procurement and supply chain
- The challenges of supply chain negotiations and partnerships
- Some best practices for organizing supply chain data
Justin has over 20 years of experience in the supply chain and transport industry across APAC. In his current role at Expeditors, he works on the Supply Chain Solutions team to offer professional consulting services with a focus on supply chain performance utilizing Digital Twin technology, and network performance.
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On today's episode, we're going to talk to Justin Kingdon. Justin's title is Principal Supply Chain Solutions at Expeditors. But I like Justin's subheading on his LinkedIn profile as a much better explanation of what Justin does. Justin is the supply chain data coach. We're going to talk actually not about data per se, but about the things you need to do as a company to be ready to use data well. It's a pretty wide ranging conversation. And I think it'll be really interesting whether you're a freight forwarder or whether you're a shipper who moves freight, uh, lots of really good insights on how to set yourself up for success when it comes to using supply chain data and thinking about your supply chain, not just how do I move this one piece of freight? So I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:01:04
Speaker
Justin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to speak to you again. cool Yeah. So before we dive in with your background and your history, I actually thought maybe we could make a good point. Why don't you tell everyone how we met? Okay. Well, I have a philosophy, which is when someone connects with me on LinkedIn, I send them a message, thanking them for the connection and then saying, if you'd like to catch up for a virtual coffee or in person, then let me know.
00:01:31
Speaker
and 9.99 times out of 10, you hear nothing back. But Brian, you just ping me straight back and said, sure, why not? and We got on a call and here we are. Yeah. and I think it just illustrates that we both have a very similar philosophy, which is good things happen from random conversations. Yeah, completely correct. and Also too is is that I think, you know networking honestly, networking, I don't think is anyone's innate strength and it can be uncomfortable but you've just got to keep putting yourself out there professionally and it'll happen at some point but you can't guess when where or why don't worry about that just get it done. Yeah and I think a lot of people kind of overestimate the complexity of it.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Like just being available and talking to people and just, you know, even if you don't think you have anything to say, I mean, I just, I was laughing. Yes. I was on the phone with somebody else who I've known for quite a while. And, you know, she, she called me a super networker and then I had to call my father afterwards and say, I just want to tell you that that happened because he raised the kid.
00:02:44
Speaker
who spent his entire formative years locked in a room playing on the computer and not talking. So you're right, or it's not an innate skill. It's a learned behavior. Correct. Yeah. And I think that we have maybe in supply chain, or it could be wrong, but We're very much used to, for a very long period of time in this industry, you've got to connect with people as best as you can in the best way you can to build some trust and rapport. It could be the person overseas in an office that's organizing the collection of your customers freight, what have you, and you just need to get a connection with them so that they know how important that shipment might be and to give that one extra attention.
00:03:26
Speaker
So i think we're very used to operating in that this type of medium as well connecting virtually not necessarily in person and yeah i think that is something that if you're in the supply chain space. Just lean on that you're doing this today you're networking inside the on your own the the company in which you work for or no matter what side you're on eitherre in the front forty more carrier side or if you.
00:03:48
Speaker
in that space sourcing the products and you're responsible for that. You are networking and you just take that skill that you've been building and transfer that into people you don't know. That's it. It's not much more complicated than that. So i have a feeling if I don't pull us back, you and I can go down this thread and never do an i never give you an actual opportunity to introduce yourself. So why don't you tell everyone just a little bit about who you are and what your background is and how you got into the industry.
00:04:13
Speaker
Well, I was going to be a chef. So that was my thing. And I showed some skills in that space and all my work experience was in ah working in hotels and kitchens specifically. And then I went and studied at a hotel school and that opportunity represented to me a scholarship to then go work in a hotel in Thailand and study in Thailand.
00:04:37
Speaker
And it was a six month scholarship and it was fantastic. So at the end, this is you know talking from a boy that had grown up in a town of 5000 people. And I'm in Australia and the only place I had been overseas to prior to going to Thailand was New Zealand, which know isn't yeah really getting outside your comfort zone, right?
00:05:00
Speaker
And so I land in Thailand totally on my own, and it's that first time into Asia. And at the university, I was at Mahidam MUIC, and I took as many subjects as I could, and including I had a wonderful teacher that taught Asian business environment, and another wonderful teacher that taught operations management.
00:05:22
Speaker
And they were brilliant at then opening my mind up to the world. And I really got into then studying in that space and understanding the connections in the world. Being in the city of Bangkok, seeing all the movement of cargo, freight, goods, just on a scale I'd never experienced before.
00:05:43
Speaker
I left Thailand knowing I've got to get into this game, this international game. When I plug into my job, I want to plug into the world is effectively how I thought. and so Then I got a job in a family-owned customs brokerage firm, then a freight forwarder, a couple of other freight forwarders after that, and eventually where I am today at Expeditors, which I've been here coming up to 14 years now. and yeah so That's my story.
00:06:10
Speaker
so The other question I like to pry onto sometimes is that's a really good reason to get into this business. There are a lot of really good reasons to get out of this business too. Once you're in, why do you stay? Why go through the chaos that is supply chain?
00:06:27
Speaker
I think if you asked any of my siblings, they would say Justin always likes to be busy. And I'm a very curious person. This is an industry that has so much change occurring in it, as well as change that's forced in by the outside. So be it government, environmental, the way that markets are moving, trends in society,
00:06:48
Speaker
just so on and so forth So you have external pressures internal pressures and change and so i think this industry just poses a lot of opportunities where my mind likes to go as i said from that curious point of view solving problems for customers that.
00:07:05
Speaker
For all types of problems that they have, you have your typical project problems, then you will have specific logistics and freight and transport problems, then data and the management of that data and how it can then elucidate and help a customer understand their business better. So there are a range of opportunities in this industry.
00:07:26
Speaker
That once you're inside you can see and understand it and and you understand that it's it's quite broad in that space in that ability to challenge you and I think that's what keeps me connected so Your role today. Yeah is a supply chain solutions role, which is very different from, say, being a customs brokerage person or a freight person. But that difference is lost on a lot of people. So what do you do in supply chain solutions that's different than what somebody in Expeditors does who books cargo for a living? Sure. So in our space, our main interest is in the data that supply chain transport and logistics creates and the processes that a business follows
00:08:13
Speaker
and the technology that they use. And we sit in a space of helping customers align what the data is telling them and showing them and what they are doing. So what they see themselves do, what they see the technology do, what they see their fellow employees do.
00:08:34
Speaker
And it's our focus is then all about how to make those supply chain teams, and I use that term very broadly, could involve procurement, accounting, legal, finance, others, how to get those teams aligned and operating in the most efficient way possible for their business to operate successfully, really from that ground up of supply chain, you know great foundation of supply chain data.
00:09:00
Speaker
a wonderful, transparent and functional SNOP program. So then execution, when you see the supply chain operating, it's a supply chain run with purpose. And the people running the supply chain have, as we would say, you know they have their arms around it to lo to use a colloquialism, but they have the idea of visibility. They have visibility of their supply chain so they understand what's occurring at the transactional and then strategic they are planning on how the supply chain could operate in the future so in the freight sense we call that say transactional you dealing with the day to day of picking up widgets cargo goods moving them through a network
00:09:45
Speaker
and getting them delivered, or picking them off a warehouse shelf, getting them onto a truck and getting them delivered. That's the role of freight. And we're in that other role on that solution side, encompassing all those aspects of supply chain. At Chain, we talk to our customers, we try to break problems down into these two big categories of execution problems and insights problems, correct right? The things of like, you can use like no matter what happens, you still have to make a booking and you still have to move a container and like that actually has to happen. But once you get good at that, then you can go start
00:10:20
Speaker
learning things about what you're doing and making better decisions. Correct. And so I was talking to a potential customer just yesterday. And to give it an insight into, say, our philosophy or the approach, and you'll be the very similar to the customer operates a supply chain using very rudimentary technology okay and they've grown and they need to now in order to continue to grow and meet the service expectations their customers have they have to change their supply chain the way that they run it.
00:10:54
Speaker
Our philosophy isn't to go and go run first at the data and start spending hours, weeks, months analyzing data that the client knows is not great and we already know it's not great just through that one interaction. My first instinct is to say let's get together and run a structured, planned workshop.
00:11:16
Speaker
where we bring everyone involved in the supply chain and we get all of that data that's up here in everyone's mind because it's running today, the supply chain's running today, it's delivering goods so it's operational, but everyone has the rules up in their heads, knocked down on paper. So let's yeah build out the network design, map that out, list out the people in the supply chain, the technology in the supply chain, and let's get that all up and out there and then Let's you know garnish that with some data analysis knowing the data is not great. So let's just do that and often I would say for most businesses that is a good way to start a project like this or if you're wanting to start improving a supply chain and you're very clear as to why you want to so it's not just I want to digitize because that's what everyone else is doing we've got to have a digital we've got to be industry 4.0 and If this client yesterday knows that they have service failures in order for them to continue to grow they have to stop those service failures and so they know why they need to do it and that workshop idea getting everyone into a room whiteboarding it takes the problems and the challenge out of everyone's mind and puts them on the paper and it makes it the papers problem now now we can see the problems we can start solving them.
00:12:31
Speaker
It's not going to shorten the journey, but it will make it clear to everyone. And I also think from a team perspective, from ah building up a cohort inside the organization that's going to follow these projects through from beginning to end, if you get as many people who will be involved in that project exposed to it upfront,
00:12:50
Speaker
then the chances of success for this project will increase because of that. It's done in silos, and it's just supply chain looking at this, and I think business is going to be challenged if they're facing that problem today. So that's, I would say how it happened. So I'm going to argue with one thing you said. Sure. You said it doesn't shorten the journey. In my experience, yeah what happens is, and we see this all the time because people hire a systems integration layer company to go because they've already got a project in mind. yeah oh We want to connect this, this, this, and the other. and We always see, and I'm certain you see the same thing, is the customers that actually take it seriously at the beginning and say, okay, let's make sure we understand what we're trying to accomplish. Let's go write that SOP in the current state, even if we're going to even if it's going to change so that we know what our baseline is, and let's talk about the future state, and let's be methodical in that first
00:13:45
Speaker
30, 60 days, whatever it takes. yeah They're the ones that don't have two years worth of rework at the end, yeah because they didn't understand their problem. So yeah, the customers who skip it, they deploy faster, and then they start over and deploy again.
00:13:58
Speaker
That yeah is the other two years. Yeah, absolutely. A fair point. And I do agree. And it's good for you to raise that because yeah, rework on any of those integrations with say an ERP or whatever is, well, it's incredibly expensive.
00:14:15
Speaker
and it takes your attention away from running your business today. When you're doing a big supply chain transformation or, you know, big or or small, no matter of what your mindset is, you've got to keep delivering freight to keep selling product to keep the lights on, right? The business has to keep running and you have to be absolutely on top of that. And our philosophy is is that you really, you know, don't use a cliche, don't boil the ocean, right? With with your project.
00:14:45
Speaker
So certainly, the other thing that we see is is that businesses that, you know, if you want to understand like who has it together, OK, and who's doing this brilliantly. And my perspective is is that it's a very small number of businesses who are doing it, quote unquote, brilliantly or have it together. And it's not that they've got a massive budget for technology or a massive budget for headcount. In fact, I often find sometimes their logistics teams are quite small.
00:15:11
Speaker
But what they've done is spend a lot of time making sure that whatever they invest in for their supply chain bid, where they should put their warehouse or distribution center or what technology that they've invested in, it's very purposeful. They understand what they're doing. And therefore, they aren't stretching themselves so thin trying to do a little bit of this part of the project and then not fully complete it, then run over here and do a little bit over there.
00:15:39
Speaker
And we tend to see and i don't know if you've seen this but any app is being implemented i'll be working with the client and and maybe gathering data and then. Something from the legacy is hungover like a google sheet or an excel spreadsheet that sits at a really critical juncture where it's all in the app but then before we send it to our transport provider.
00:16:01
Speaker
we've got to take it out of the ERP, put it into the Google sheet, merge it up with the bill of lading or airway bill, and then that way we know what we're receiving from the forward when it gets to the warehouse dock, right? yeah If that's a planned part of a transition through to onboarding the ERP fully, and you've got to have that for a little while whilst you you know make sure that, as I said, keep the lights on the business running, sure. But if you've been a couple of years into running this yeah e ERP and that is still in place,
00:16:31
Speaker
That's a challenge. And that under any type of major disruptive event or pressure on the business, that sheet, that part is going to be the first piece to break. That's my opinion. I think I've seen this thing over the last couple of years, and I've particularly actually seen it with our customers in Asia, where up until, I want to say like 2018, 2019, when the e-commerce boom really started hitting every brand, when it wasn't just Amazon anymore. um there was this principle that that spreadsheet was okay because the labor was cheap, right? Or because, okay, it's just the one person once a day, it's going to cost us $100,000 to get the SAP mod. I pay this person $20,000 a year, $10,000 a year, whatever it is to go manage the spreadsheet. There's no ah ROI on fixing the spreadsheet. yeah And then what we've seen change in the conversations is,
00:17:29
Speaker
In a world where you're competing you know on the retail side with a Teemo or with a Sheehan or with an Amazon even, the idea that the cost of the time, not the time it takes to to type it, but the delay in the activity while you wait for the person to do the thing means your end-to-end visibility for your client is broken. It means all of the ah alerting and automations and all of those things can't run that If you don't go all the way, if you take ah an incrementalist approach, we'll get the ERP in, we'll clean up this piece later, we'll clean up this piece later, you actually start seeing none of the benefit, which is very, very different than what all of us IT people were coaching. You know, we came out of the 90s and early 2000s of massive IT t failures. And we said to everybody, OK, never do a big project ever again. Everything needs to be really small and incremental, because at least then when we fail, we fail quickly.
00:18:25
Speaker
Right. And we can adjust and we can learn, so but when it comes to those manual processes, if you don't drive them all the way out, you only can get incremental benefit. Like you don't get that big win because you can't show all the dots on the map to the end customer because.
00:18:41
Speaker
It's dot, dot, dot, dot. Oh, okay. We're going to wait for Sally and then dot, dot, dot, dot. And that doesn't create a good experience. Yeah. And I would add to that to say the other trend that I'm seeing, certainly seeing that as absolutely correct, that we would often find talking to customers all across Asia Pacific.
00:18:59
Speaker
that the version of the yeah ah ERP that they're in, no matter what flavor that yeah ah ERP is, was not the same version as North America or Europe. So what would happen is is that integrations would work locally, but not work with the rest of the business globally.
00:19:17
Speaker
And it was because well it's a small market doesn't make as much money for us they just don't get the investment dollars in doing that and so you might as well have been running a completely foreign yeah erp program tms program down in a pack relative to what you are operating inside europe in the us and that was causing big challenges for these companies to understand their global supply chain and the impact to disruptions because they had no signal in the united states or in europe when something broke in apac because the signal didn't get through like if you think of your mobile phone there were no bars because they they were basically on two separate they could have been the same name of that arpe but they're on two separate systems
00:19:58
Speaker
What we're seeing now is is that that's transforming. ah that's transforming The APAC region is being ensured that they're being brought onto the same ERP as the rest of the world and that the signal strength is equal to what is in the rest of the world and that i think is being driven in two parts that there were a lot of challenges coming out of asia turning back on post covered so people wanted to you know in short businesses rather wanted to ensure that they were getting that information timely in terms of delays upstream in the production process.
00:20:34
Speaker
and then second where we're seeing the big production shift. So they have to now have the top shelf ERP TMS because the important SKUs are now being manufactured in APAC and coming out of China.
00:20:50
Speaker
So come here so from a pack I mean say into ASEAN India and others so the technology has to follow it because those cues are now critical to the end consumer point whatever that end consumer point is even if it's ah a Semi-finished good going into a factory in Mexico or something like that. They need to have the best solution and so I think in the coming years, we'll see that shift away from what you described, which is still very prevalent. That's why I raised it as well, but also too is that improvement overall on that on the tech stack. What do you see? You get to go talk to a lot of customers. It's your your whole thing. right yeah Before you go meet a new customer, you probably already have a pretty good sense of them just from having done this for 20 years at this point. like What are the big patterns that you see? like
00:21:39
Speaker
What's the problem that everyone has? Like, if the meeting's going well, you're like, I need to go to. Okay, I'll start a little bit differently. I get asked in a lot of meetings, you know, what are our peers doing? Okay, so a medical device company wants to know what other medical device companies are doing, or a retailer. And what I find specifically in my space is, is that the industry does not matter. It is the attitude of the business. You may not want to know what your peers are doing because what they're doing is no good. You need to be doing what is the best for your company. And that could be occurring in an industry you are not in. It could be occurring in tech. It could be occurring somewhere else. What I say to customers in that instance is that
00:22:31
Speaker
If you are going to go on the path that I see that you want to go on, and as you said, I'm experienced in hearing all those cues inside a meeting, it comes down to the philosophy of the business, that you have executive support or sponsorship of a significant project like this that will see this project through outside of one cycle. It's not going to happen within one quarter or one financial year. This is going to be an investment that is going to then occur over multiple cycles.
00:23:00
Speaker
And I'm not necessarily saying with me, but for example, that client yesterday, you're going to have to make investments in technology that you're going to be paying for well after I've gone. And it's those businesses with that philosophy. So where I see, no matter the industry, doesn't matter what, it's the philosophy of that improvement and transformation in their supply chain. They know why they want to do it. They're very clear and understand what the problem is. They've defined that well enough. We'll define it better for them.
00:23:30
Speaker
and then they will take that forward well into the future. They are the ones that I see always as being successful. The cues that I have that if you're sitting in supply chain today and red flags,
00:23:44
Speaker
is where I see procurement and supply chain separate. right The procurement select who are going to be service providers select what the technology is going to be and supply chain have no say in that. They get what they're given and they've got to do their best with it.
00:24:02
Speaker
That splitting may have occurred around the GFC, I'm not exactly sure when it was all about cost out of supply chain, 10% out every single year. That's where you can keep saving cost out, cost out, cost out. And you talked about Amazon and others who are crushing it in the supply chain space. They all went through the GFC as well, but maintained investment in supply chain and supply chain tech. I'm not saying they didn't do any cuts or anything like that. I wouldn't know, but assuming they probably did, but they didn't strip the cupboard bear. And as a consequence, everyone's saying, well, how can we get more like that? We need to be more responsive like that. Well, it requires looking at not that they do e-commerce and online as the Amazon side. Don't worry about that. That's the distraction.
00:24:46
Speaker
What's the philosophy towards supply chain? How do they approach that? And how could you learn from that philosophy to implement to your company and then bring supply chain along on that journey but so that then supply chain is adding value into procurement, adding value into the rest of the business? So does that answer the question? It does, I guess. yeah I mean, it it is the thing. And it's I think when you get, you know, you and I have both been doing this roughly the same amount of time.
00:25:15
Speaker
you know you get to the point where you can almost see it in the body language in the first meeting. right like just ah you know Do you have an executive in there who's taking this seriously or is this a meeting that people got sent to and they're just gonna, this is really just the lead into an RFP where they're gonna ask for another 100 bucks a container and they're like, you know yeah like that's you can tell. it's like To all the shippers out there, trust me, all of your service providers know whether you're serious or not, whether they whether they tell you that or not.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, I call them Spice Girls negotiations, right? like Because if you know the wannabe song, if you want to be my lover, yeah. Because you end up in this silly circumstance. They're sitting on that side and we're sitting on that side of the table. And they're like, well, you know, tell me what you want, what you really, really want. And then we're like, well, we'll tell you what you want, what you really, really want. And then you ah end up in this stalemate and it doesn't make sense, right? Because you'll go into like, you'll see an RFQ and it will be an RFQ where we will try and get the six providers responding
00:26:16
Speaker
that then they'll respond with rates plus how to optimize our supply chain for us. And we'll say, okay, what can you do with this? And we'll say, well, can you give me shipment level data, not just this aggregate data? Because you've told me there's 10,000 containers out of this port, 5,000 out of this port, etc. But do you have shipping reports? No. You don't have shipping reports on this that we can at least see, you know, how it trends over time? No.
00:26:38
Speaker
you do right and that type of approach is not helping any business and as you said you know straight away when they don't wanna give you a shipping report either they're playing a card that says I'm not really serious about this I'm just trying to get rates best in class without having to really pay for a consulting project to look at that. Or they don't want to show you the emperor has no clothes and that supply chains a mess and they need a lot of help because someone's told them, whatever you do, don't show your weakness because though that freight forward or carry, they're going to come in and sell you on all these different solutions and you're going to be up for so much money and we don't have that budget. And you recognize pretty quickly those companies that then say, look, here are our cards. You can see them.
00:27:27
Speaker
right How would you solve this? And knowing that we can't solve it, it we don't have like no one has a budget to do it all. No one has the time to solve every single supply chain that operate, every problem in them, or simultaneously. No one. I don't care how big the company is. But if they go to these different providers, including the incumbent, and say, how would you approach this problem to partner with us, help us, over what timeframe?
00:27:51
Speaker
you're going to get an answer and then you just observe those answers and you determine what is in your best interests. But don't have the approach that, you know that one as I said, that hold your cards thing because you're not actually going to get the best from your service provider in that approach. You're going to get a right. and It's one of these things where, at the risk of me just pitching and moaning about my past careers, I remember going into RFPs with existing customers who we'd had for 20 years.
00:28:19
Speaker
And they say, okay, they send out the ah RFP and you look at it and you go, this is not the company we've been servicing for 20 years. And then you end up in a rate discussion and you go, okay, the company you drew on this ah RFP, I can do your shipment or I can do your customs entry, whatever it is for X for you. I need three X because you don't actually send us electronic bookings.
00:28:46
Speaker
You aspire to, 2% of your electronic bookings are accurate. And then we call you for the rest of them. And then what they do is they play this game of like bringing in people who have no idea who responded to the RFP with X. And I remember losing some of those when it was really procurement-driven, especially 10, 15 years ago. yeah And going, like we would literally say, OK, we'll see you next year when you come crawling back to us. Because the provider you just selected is not going to service your business at that rate because they're about to open up the can and find out that it's a mess inside, you know, and you're in for it. I do think a lot of shippers learn that lesson and that they have learned how to manage pure play procurement people better inside their own companies, not all of them, but I think there's been a little bit of a maturity growth on that.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah. And there's certainly ways to go. Yeah. And I think companies have have looked at... See, I've worked with some brilliant strategic procurement people, and they're so different to what those strategic procurement people call what they refer to as their contract managers, Justin. Yes. They're not actually strategic procurement. What I'm doing with you and sitting down and trying to understand where you add value, why, and how I can you know, extract that back in my organization is very different to someone who just literally talks about prices. When we're finished with our negotiation, I hand your contract to one of those people to make sure you're operating within the price agreement that we've got. And I think what happened was is a lot of contract managers talking to other procurement people, a lot of contract managers got elevated.
00:30:29
Speaker
above what their competency was and just treated everything as a price negotiation. And it was so interesting, it was so obvious that those businesses that did not then were the ones that managed COVID so very differently. And I was talking to another commentator and as they said, they were making investments in other areas of e-commerce and all they had to do was put their foot down on the gas and they took off. Everyone else that had decided, no, we just cut everything. We were only going to invest in what we do in supply chain. Don't listen to them. They're coming in and they're offering you other solutions around e-com, this growing area of e-com. No, no, no, no, no. Then they had to build those things from scratch.
00:31:14
Speaker
So you do have to have at that senior you know either that's a senior supply chain manager or senior procurement manager if there is a line at that level and organization thinking about your organizational design there's alignment communication cooperation then.
00:31:31
Speaker
you can achieve your price your budget requirements, et cetera, et cetera, as well as getting the best level of service to help your business into the future. And what we're doing in our space is certainly yeah helping customers develop good quality forecasting for their logistics budgets and not just doing the forecast. We want to help businesses then as the bills start rolling in,
00:31:57
Speaker
measuring what was forecast against what was actual, and if there are differences, the all-important why. Why did it not occur happen the way we planned? Not just, oh well, that's a forecast, forecasts are unreliable.
00:32:13
Speaker
That is where we're working. And I think in that space, more businesses will work, particularly as supply chains become more fragmented and you're sourcing now from new and exotic locations, not just FOB China, then that capacity and that skill inside an organization will become more valued. And those businesses that do that well will just dominate.
00:32:35
Speaker
I think it would be hard for me to agree with you more before we wrap up. Sure. Tell me what you're excited about. Tell me what you're looking forward to over the next few years. That's a great question for me in this region in Asia Pacific. I think we're in an info, a really exciting period in supply chain, because we're going through a once in,
00:33:03
Speaker
35-40 year occurrence in that supply chains are transforming. Businesses are now putting factories into the ASEAN nations, India, other locations, of Australia, and the well-worn path of FOV, X-Works, Hong Kong, China is shifting. And this is an opportunity for people who are coming up through supply chain to really bring skills and expertise, creativity to the fore, and not just in the understanding of the physical movement of freight, but also the synthesis of that
00:33:47
Speaker
geopolitics, trade and trade optimization, and working out how within a company, within service providers, how to align that for the business in order to navigate this period of change successfully.
00:34:03
Speaker
In my region, yes, there are groups like ASEAN that work together, but they're not an economic block like the European Union. that It's not like a NAFTA. Every country is sovereign. They have their own logistics infrastructure, challenges and opportunities. They have their own rules of law, their own approach to the way a corporation can be set up, their own approach to way a free trade zone operates. It's all unique.
00:34:29
Speaker
And as a consequence, supply chain in the coming years will demand expertise. And I think that is what makes ah me excited about the coming years. It sounds like your siblings do not have to worry and you are definitely going to be busy. That's right. yeah just Justin, thank you so much for this. I think really enjoyed the opportunity to talk and and hopefully we'll get to do it again soon.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, likewise. And I think everything that you are doing in your space in, you know, I mean, in our first just to reference that first conversation where you talked about the data piece is doing the hard, dirty work inside a business. And I would just want to finish on on this note is that as I say to my own customers.
00:35:12
Speaker
We have to go through this difficult part. We have to go through the data. We have to work out where it's not great. We have to fix it. And it is going to be trying. It's going to be long. It's going to be frustrating. But it is the foundation that everything else is built on. Do this well. Then everything else is easier. It's clearer. And you can better communicate. I literally said those words to a potential customer not an hour ago. Right.
00:35:40
Speaker
I said, you this is the work you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Exactly. So yeah absolutely. So hey it's a wonderful place to wrap up again. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks. um Well, thanks again to Justin. Again, he and I have had a couple of really great conversations and look forward to meeting him in person one day, even though we live on opposite sides of the planet, which again, is one of my favorite things about being in this business. Hope you all enjoyed those conversations and you know I especially was excited about the insights about bringing executives and procurement teams into the conversations and making sure that they're thinking strategically about supply chain and not just about cost. For so long, many of us in the service provider side of the business just bemoaned the lack of that, and I'm really excited to see that that is changing in the world. As far as Chain.io updates, make sure that you're really paying attention over the next couple of months to the blog and to the LinkedIn page. We have some really exciting announcements coming up, some new product features that I think are very transformative and and have potential to really drive things forward. So, you know, don't like to turn this into a Chain.io commercial too much, but really excited for some of the stuff that you're going to see if you're making sure that you're following us on LinkedIn and subscribe to the blog.
00:37:01
Speaker
As always, thank you for listening and hope you enjoyed the episode. This is Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chainio.