Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain, real-time visibility, Romebe, SNC Electric, operational excellence, quality, employee-owned, lean production, IoT, manufacturing operations, digital worker, MES system, AI predictive analytics, Kanban, Kaizen.

SPEAKERS

James Boss, Scott Mears

Scott Mears  00:07

Welcome to the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. In this episode, we speak with James Boss the Global Operational Excellence and Quality from S&C Electric Company. James speaks with us about the challenges, essence he faced before they invested in real time visibility with Roambee. We also discussed what their approach was, their learnings, advice to others and what they want to achieve with Roambee in the future. We finish off the podcast with a round of quick fire questions, where James talks about some of the challenges and trends heads of supply chain of today need to keep an eye on giving you a great insight into the supply chain industry of today. Scott Mears here, Global Field Marketing Manager at Roambee. Really excited to have you here today. Really interested in this video today, we always look to bring more and more interviews to you guys and and the industry, so you can learn about the supply chain heroes fighting those challenges in the industry. And I’ve got a really interesting one for the viewers today. It’s with James Boss, really happy to be welcoming James on today the Global Operational Excellence and Quality at S&C Electric Company. And he’s actually, we just spoke about this coming up to 25 years at S&C. So if that’s not a testimonial, I do not know what is, because that is amazing, amazing part of the company. So really excited to bring you on stage, James, welcome to the podcast.

James Boss  01:45

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Scott Mears  01:46

Fantastic. So I did do a little introduction to you then, but really, for the viewers to really know a bit more about yourself, your role the 25 years you’ve been at S&C, I’d love to just ask you to talk in your own words, to tell me more about yourself, your role in the company?

James Boss  02:05

Sure. So S&C Electric Company is one of those companies that nobody’s ever heard of, but affects a lot of people’s lives throughout North America, Europe and other areas. So we build electric switches, fuses and equipment for the utility industry. So we build a good component of the smart in the smart grid, as well as some of the good old fashioned, simple fuses that are up on the pole. And when I had started with S&C, I’d never heard of them. So they started explaining, here’s the products. And now I see them everywhere. Usually if I’m outside, I can point to a one of our products down the road or something like that to somebody when I explain what we do, but it’s okay. We’re the type of company where you have you don’t need to heard of us. In fact, it’s almost better that you didn’t, because that means our products are working and keeping the electricity on. Yeah, yeah. So it’s nice to be under the radar. We are an employee owned company. So we’re privately held. There’s, there’s lots of interesting companies that would love to buy us. But the beauty of being employee owned is that we get to grow in our own way, and we get to be innovators and reinvest in our business in a way that publicly held companies would just really struggle to do nowadays. So I started 25 years ago. I actually started in IT. And medium sized companies are the place to be in that when you think about career direction you’ve got, you still have to wear a good number of hats in a medium sized company and help out in a number of different areas, which means that your robustness of your career can can grow. So I moved over to from IT to leading our lean production operation, with some help from Toyota to running part of our production operations to now having our global sourcing, our global quality, our IoT organization and and our Lean performance system underneath it. And that that’s been pretty exciting, and I think that’s a little bit why we’re here today, talking about Roambee because all of those areas end up getting touched with this technology.

Scott Mears  04:59

Absolutely. Really great insight into the company and yourself. There very much the hidden little gems around the world. It sounds like the Batmans of the world hidden, but there and as you find fantastic, really, really good to hear and gives great insight to the viewers to understand more about who you are and the company we work with today, I’d love to kick off with quite a fun question I like to ask before we really get into the meat of the podcast, is, what’s a common myth would you say about your job or field of expertise? I’d love to know.

James Boss  05:40

So I think a common myth might be that maybe title or position necessarily means that you’re an expert in all of these things. If, hopefully, if I’m an expert in something, I hope it would be in leadership. The reality is, is that my entire career, I’ve been blessed with having people that are way smarter than me working on teams that I’ve I’ve been a privilege to be on. So as we talk through some of these supply chain things, some of these technology things, you know, just aligning the right technologies and the right people with the right vision is is, is usually key. So I always keep that in mind when I’m listening to a podcast myself, of an expert, and I think the best experts are the best folks know where to go find the expertise, and they’re willing to experiment. They’re willing to leverage the creativity of the team. I think even the stuff we talk about today, there’s ideas that none of us have had yet, and I’m kind of excited to see that flesh out in the work that we’re doing and that we’re we’re going to discuss. So the myth might be that, you know, title equals expertise, and I’m not sure that I buy that.

Scott Mears  07:14

That’s a really good point, and I think.

James Boss  07:17

So you can stop listening.

Scott Mears  07:23

Yeah, wasn’t planned, but yeah, again, a good insight, I think one that you would find a lot of people would say that they have issues with that. People just thinking they know everything, just because they’ve got that, that title, but actually know that, know that someone else is a different department, but no really good to see that you’re always looking to learn and and learn to push the company forward, which is always, always the best mindset. So moving on to really, to get the get into this episode is I’d really want to know, as you’ve been with Roambee for quite some time now, and I’d, I’d really love to know what were the challenges you guys faced that encouraged you to adopt real time visibility.

James Boss  08:13

Yeah, so to quickly describe our operation at our headquarters here, we’ve got about 1.5 million square feet of manufacturing on the roof. Technically, we’re the largest manufacturer in Chicago proper. And so with that, and with the massive amount of sales that runs through our operation, we had, we have everything from fabrication to electroplating. We’ve got milling and and sheet metal forming. We’ve got paint operations. We’ve got assembly operations that build products that cost a few dollars to products that cost over a million dollars. So that type of diversity makes us a medium volume type manufacturer with with high variability in a number of our product lines, although we do have a number of product lines that are Toyota Corollas, right, and they just keep pumping off the line as well. So when we put our diversity glasses on and have to think about the robust needs of an operation like that, what we realize is, if I had a couch in my office, the thing that folks would want to kind of just kind of share with me their problems out on the floor. It would be, you know, lost parts. And as as good as we can be and as visual as we can make systems we still have. Uh, lost parts or misunderstood flows, because we’re uniquely creating parts for given customer needs, and we have certain challenges around that. We have a lot of square footage, which means sometimes those parts are made and they’re ready to go, but they’re sitting on a shelf somewhere that a forklift driver dropped off, and we were not quite sure where it went to, because that driver got interrupted and didn’t scan it in or something else. And there are limitations to some of the modern ERP systems that can only record so much in their current form as well. So we do have challenges there as well. The other thing is fully understanding our manufacturing lead times. So we’ve got, we’ve got a high level picture, and we’ve got, certainly, a digital picture of how things are transacted. But when we understand the lead times of where the physicalities are, where’s the dwell time of our material, we can understand where things are transacted. And that’s pretty, pretty good. But the material doesn’t always reflect that. The material could be very late coming to an area, even though digitally, it has been sitting there for quite some time. And when you want to understand a basis for improvement, you really do need to understand the physicalities of the environment. Japanese use a term called GEMBA. So going to the GEMBA to term that largely means where the action is and what a real time visibility allows me to better understand where the action is when I’m doing some higher level analytics. And the last thing that comes to mind is this actually helps me with quality track. So we have a number of operations that are lined up to make parts to very high quality, high specificity needs of our customers, and some of those transformations are almost imperceptible. So you can electroplate an additional layer on a part that you cannot necessarily tell that that part’s been electroplated, but it is very critical for the electrical conductivity. Well, if in a digital system, it’s easy to it’s easy to accidentally move the operation twice, so it effectively skips that. And we see that the part never physically goes there that then becomes a problem, and we might have a a part that doesn’t get the appropriate transformation that it needs. So those types of real time visibility are critical. You know, it’s really bad if we find it too late in the process and then have to disassemble it out of the product and go get something taken care of. So that that type of flow is critical to an operation, especially nowadays as supply chain, is more and more in the news.

Scott Mears  13:26

That I really like that sum up again. But if I got that right, that that seems to sum up very much what you just said, that, knowing where the actions happening, knowing what’s happening, very much within the process where your assets are, and making sure they are where they are, so they are, and really being able to even get more results from that, and being able to learn efficiencies from that, so that that’s a really interesting insight into the reasons for you adopting This real time visibility. And I’d love to know what’s been your approach, because you’ve just touched on quite a few challenges there. What has been your approach so far to increasing your visibility?

James Boss  14:15

Yeah, so I suppose the first umbrella point I would have is that the end of the day, I’ll never truly solve a problem from behind a computer screen. So that GEMBA is critical in that the computer screen, some of the analytics we might do, might tell me where to go. Look, I still have to get off this chair and go down to the floor and spend time with the people that do it, that do the work to better understand the problem, and in many cases, get the idea how to fix the problem from those folks as well, because they likely know how to fix the issue. So what we’ve done, though, is we’ve said, Okay, we need feedback on how. Our operation is running so that at the executive level, we’re making good strategic decisions, and at the operations level, we’re giving the we’re empowering those that are closest to the problems to get them solved. So one of the things we did, which ties into this work we’re discussing today is we decided to make every team member a digital worker, so every hourly team member out on the floor is equipped with a Samsung tablet that allows them to interact with our MES system, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but allows them to identify record problems right away. It allows us to communicate with them. You know, they can control and ons from that system. They they can see quality information, full of drawings, right? They become an empowered worker, as opposed many folks are familiar with the whole industry, 4.0 the next is the idea of our MES system. We call ours mom, which is short for manufacturing operations management. It’s a industry standard term, but it’s also cheeky, which is why I like it. So mom knows everything that’s going on. She’s always watching and she’s willing to help. So now, the beauty of mom, as you can imagine, when you’re running a manufacturing plant that sells, you know, items that sell for $25 and items that sell for a million dollars is that the diversity of needs from an MES system are pretty broad. Any of the off the shelf stuff, you have to have consultants kind of adjusting it and setting up all these fields. You spend a lot of time customizing it to your needs. And what we felt is we wanted to make sure that we owned all the data. It’s critical to me that that I own the data and whatever solution that we have, and so that’s true with our own be installation as well. So we’re using we’re using Microsoft and Azure, and we’re creating the data sets and tables that would allow us, for instance, to move to AWS or some other platform fairly quickly, because all the structures are our hours, and they’re in very industry standard terms. But that also means when I want to do something crazy, like use Bluetooth low energy to track all of our parts. I can look for a partner that has an open API so that, once again, I can own the data, but now we can interact in very creative ways, and the sky’s the limit. So that was one of the things that we were specifically looking for that room be offered. And we’ve, you know, we’ve partnered up on a number of things. So actually, Roambee has made a few adjustments to the API with some feedback from us in the way that we wanted to see the handshake work. So that’s been fantastic. And just getting the documentation working so that we can natively see these be beacons out on the floor. When somebody’s got a job order open up on their tablet, they can associate it, and beacon can move on. So all of those together along with all the other things you might imagine for industry, 4.0 you know, Spark cameras and things like that that are meant to be a help to the operator. So, big deal to me, as we talk through this is one thing that’ll drive me absolutely insane is if somebody proposes that only smart people can solve problems, right? You need to get an engineer in there, and they need to go off to a room. They need to tell us what the solution is. My belief is actually just the opposite. Maria, who builds the product every day and seen all of these issues, is going to be so far better equipped in solving the real issues than anybody up in an office somewhere that’s disconnected from what’s actually going on. So anytime that we bring these products to bear into our operation, we want to do it with a mine of empowering the Marias out on the floor.

Scott Mears  19:39

Amazing. So it sounds like you you really taking control of the data you have it, and you very much empower your the people within the company, to deal with any challenges you find from this data or on the field. And I really like that. It’s a really good insight into. The management and how it’s carried out. And I do like that you empower the these heroes that maybe are not a not a notice as much online. And it’s really good to see them empowered. And I’m sure you you learn a lot of efficiencies and quick turnarounds of problems on that. So that’s really interesting to learn that from your side. And I’d love to know, I mean, you have touched on this already, so we can sort of briefly go over this. Or maybe we talk more to the future, really. I would love to know the benefits you’re achieving right now. Or maybe we talk more to what the benefits you want to achieve in the future, because I know there’s a lot you’re still wanting to achieve in with Roambee, and I’d love to know and the viewers know what that looks like in the future.

James Boss  20:49

Yeah. So a couple of the things that we are just starting to see. We started very early on, on our returnable KANBANs, with our putting our beacons on those KANBANs so that we could see how they run through our operation and how they return back, and how that is going. Physically, it was something very easy, and we didn’t have to worry about losing the beacons, but we got the Early advantage of now a forklift driver can see where is that in this particular the first Kanban, it was actually a skid, a customized skid for these switches. So it’s a rather large thing, but when you have 1.5 million square feet, we can lose large things just as easily as we can lose small things. So being able to see that we’re toying with the idea of, even with a physical move, having it trigger the pull of that Kanban, which would then trigger the manufacturing operation to make the replacement part. So we’ve not yet turned that on, but there’s you could see some of the benefits there is that that eliminates a transaction, right? It automates that. It allows our team members to find the parts and see the real time status. It also allows us to audit. So one of the things that you know, our sensei from Toyota, Mr. Yokoi, would say, you know, if you cannot do Kanban, you should not breathe air. James San, so, but then he would also say, Kanban is admission of failure. That tells me you cannot flow. James San, but the idea of a kanban it does need maintenance, right? If you have 10 Kanbans, you don’t want to accidentally have nine. Some point that becomes a problem, yeah. So being able to so today, we manually audit these combines. We walk and we visually put eyes on them and make sure, okay, we still got that one. We still got that one. Wait a minute, I’m missing a card here. What’s going on, and we have to solve it, and that takes time out of the operation. And it’s not not enjoyable work, as you might well imagine. So a visual system on there that we can see the physicality of our Kanbans is absolutely fantastic. And you know, to Mr. Yoko’s point, the discipline makes all the difference. And I don’t intend the technology to be a replacement for the discipline, but I do want it to enhance because one of the things we want to do is to take away the unnecessary burden from our team members. At the end of the day, I don’t want a computer solving my problems. I want these team members to solve the problems, but if I don’t equip them with information that’s readily at their fingertips, they’ll have a harder time doing that. The other thing we do is we have a large manufacturing operation that includes fabrication. So we’re taking raw sheet steel and turning it into painted enclosures. We’re turning and milling different types of metals that we then electroplate to run other components. And so this is a very complex flow of parts through multiple buildings in our operation, and it’s pretty critical to see where the physicalities of those parts are. Now, most companies can see where it is digitally, right? Because everybody’s got an ERP system with a routing and a piece of paper that tracks it a. Although many companies that piece of paper, they’re just handwriting on that piece of paper and shoving it through and then it gets transacted at the very end, by us giving tablets to team members, they can use some of the technologies like mobile as a beat right to find given, given beacons. But most importantly, it shows me where is the physical material, not just where is the job order at, because digitally I can see transit where it is, but in a number of cases, we can see a digital job order is sitting at the queue of a given machine, and the physical material is nowhere to be found. It’s not there yet, because we do have logistics delays, even inside the plan, much less with outside processing. So outside processing is another area where we get a lot of things galvanized by some of our outside partners. And so in the middle of our fabrication operation, we send it to somebody else, they put a coating on it, they send it back to us, and then we may still have to drill some holes in it or transform it further. So to understand, is it back on site, and we just didn’t transact it yet. What else is going on? So lastly, for our assembly lines, we have, we have the entire spectrum of assembly. We’ve got some pretty automated, robotic, processes. We have some high volume flow. We’ve got some moving assembly lines right, and then we’ve got some big, wide open work areas where we grab three folks and we drag the product over and we start building it, because it’s very customized, and you need to build. So the intent here is to take these beacons and empower those with processes that are less industry 4.0 ready and allow Kaizen teams now, Kaizen is a Japanese term, meaning good change. So Zen meaning good, and Kai meaning change, right? So we empower teams of folks that are on the floor, facilitated by folks who understand lean manufacturing processes and they seek to improve their operation. So rather than pre determining exactly how we might use beacons, we want to equip those teams to say, okay, will this information help me? If not, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to use it. But if it does, well, that’s fantastic. Now we can see, are we doing sequence production? Are we having some parts that aren’t going through some sort of a FIFO process the way we were expecting? They can do small trials with them, right? Here’s 100 beacons. Go ahead and run trials for a week, so you can see how the process flows and record the data, and then we’ll pick it up from there, right? And we may not need the beacons after that, or we may use the beacon for the main product as it moves down the assembly line. All of these things are options, and I only mean to feed the creativity of folks who are much smarter than I am.

Scott Mears  28:44

No, that’s really interesting. Quite a lot going on there. And it gives us a really interesting look to what the plans are as well. And again, it comes down to you. You supporting the supply chain here is within your company as well. Very much to look at the data, but it doesn’t mean that we have to follow the data. Is there, use that, and then we we move forward together. And I really like that. And and you seem to also have a lot of Japanese quotes, I’m starting to know, is it, where is it? Where are these all coming from? Is there some sort of Japanese heritage you don’t know, or is there some.

James Boss  29:25

Yeah, so, so Toyota has a group called TSSC, who has helped us tremendously, yeah, over the years, the benefit of using some of the Japanese terms. If you would ask Toyota, where’d you learn about this lean manufacturing? They would say, well, we got it from the book, like, well, what book? And they would pull up Henry Ford’s production system book. It’s something that we forgot in America. But I. If, if you recall, when Henry Ford built his Rouge plant, he was able to take iron ore and have it rolling out in a car within five days, because he had a very lean production system. And in Japan, they came to America to learn that, and they took that back with them, and because they have a very disciplined culture, they were able to replicate and even perfect that in a number of ways. And so they came up with, you know, terms in their own language. For this, the benefit to me to use the Japanese terms is, in today’s world, we’ll hear a word that we know, and we’ll assume that we know the meaning of it or what somebody is saying. So if I say level loading to you, you might think, oh, okay, well, I’ll just put a pile in here and a pile here. I’ll just try to make sure all the piles of the same level, right? That’s not necessarily what I mean. So if I use the term high junka, now I get to explain. Oh, what do I mean by hi Junker? Well, I mean level loading at a very sophisticated way that that takes a look at the burdens and the loadings of the entire system and evens out the production system to match the customer demand. So I use Japanese terms so that I can define them, and that way, as I continue to teach, as I continue to lead, we’re in a shared space of what I’m talking about.

Scott Mears  31:38

Wow. So that wasn’t the answer I was expect, it’s the answer I was expecting that you’re, it was I, I love how you’re using this as a source of communication, and how you’re communicating to people that’s, that’s really cool, and that, and you’re so right, the misunderstanding of a few words, it can, can be, can be so catastrophic, but, but not noticed in that moment until go, what’s going on here? Well, you told me to do this. Go, no, so it’s that. That’s, yeah, I’m sure that how you adopted that was probably some challenges happened. I no doubt in the past that were probably not fun. And then you adopted this, which, which is, yeah, that’s really good and great to see you coy there, pushing the discipline of of Henry Ford as well, which is really interesting, getting back into it. I’d, I’d love to know your your your biggest learnings from this whole experience with real time visibility, what’s been your real big few learnings you’ve had?

James Boss  32:43

So a couple of things, and like most technologies, you do have to think through how it’s implemented on the floor. So we can think through all right. This is a Bluetooth, low energy tracker, and as long as we have a router that’s able to pick that up, that’s fantastic. However, it’s not as simple as that, because you do have to associate that with something. You do have to have team members understand, okay, this is what it’s for and how it’s helping me. And then when I’m done with it, you have to figure out, okay, how do I get this back to the beginning so it can then be used again. So we actually spend more time working through how to people use and live with this than we do with how do we get all the technology bits and bytes working? To be honest, the bits and bytes are never my never my worry, but maybe that’s because I’ve got more of a technology background. It’s always the people side, and if they’re my intended customer, if that’s who I hope to help the most, then I’m absolutely going to spend the time there and move at the speed that is appropriate for their needs. Sometimes that’s as fast as I can possibly run, and sometimes that is a lot of hand holding and explaining as to how this can take waste out of the process or burden out and make our overall process better for our customers and for our team members.

Scott Mears  34:24

You’re really good to hear that. I must say, your management style is really inspiring. You seem to really take time with your employees and really factor them into the decision making, where decisions may quickly, and other companies go to the top. You go, no, the Mary’s on this every day. She’s on this every day. And it seems like that that is really involved throughout all your questions, the questions, answers that that’s really involved in what you do. And it’s just really inspiring to see that, to see that you empower those guys. And they’re really involved in the process and the learnings.

James Boss  35:04

Yeah, let me give you a fun little story, yeah. So we did a small kaizen event on a product line, and we were this, this woman, Maria, and one of the things in our engineering specification. It says, take a screwdriver and tighten down all of these screws. Set that screwdriver down, grab another screwdriver that is a torque based screwdriver, and then check the torque level of all of the screws. Okay, right? And Maria just looks at me and says, Why can’t I just use the torque screwdriver to do it in the first place and save this entire step? I thought, Oh, my goodness, Maria, you just saved us 10 minutes per part. Like, of course, right? And she’s not looking at it with an engineering eye. She’s looking at it with the eyes of burden, or the idea of we galvanized parts, right? And you ever try to take a galvanized bolt and a galvanized nut and screw them together? Oh my goodness, good luck. It’s a lot of work, right? And so now imagine that process, if you do that all day long, and so we could make some sort of refinement on this or that. But if, if we can eliminate or minimize that type of burden and get more visibility, that we can make far better improvements for our team members and by the end to our customers right saving 10 minutes per per product as it goes through. Saves a lot for my customer at the end of the day.

Scott Mears  36:48

Yeah, huge amount. That’s a really fun little story that just showcases the value in really taking into consideration your employees and and seeing what they have to say that being really in the trenches of it every day, I just love how simple and quick the answer was. But you guys always went, Oh, I wasn’t expecting just a bit, you know, so many meetings, and they just go, and then you feel like, how did I figure that out? But I’m, yeah, no, that’s a wonderful story. I just want to finish off in the story piece on what would be your your piece of advice to companies, other companies, that are thinking about investing in real time visibility, there’s more digitalization, and companies are looking to digitalize more and looking at these solutions and don’t, maybe don’t really understand the values much or or not to share if it’s right for them. What would be your advice to those companies that are thinking about investing in real time visibility?

James Boss  37:55

I would say, certainly find, find some small projects to start out to prove it out, find a solution. This is where I believe we found in Roambee, something with a very light footprint. If we would have gone with a different type of footprint, that would have cost me a lot of infrastructure to set up. That would really rob me from the ability of problem solving, from the ability of adjusting as we as we deployed it, and customizing it to our needs, so therefore, finding something with as light of a footprint as possible, so that you can try it out, so that you can kind of grow it with use, I think is the best way to do it. So however that might work in your operations, I would definitely say, find a partnership that works like that for you so that you can learn together.

Scott Mears  39:00

Yeah, absolutely. I really good comment there. And I really like that. You said, focus on on a small project first, to test there and prove the value there first. I like that you focus in on that first, rather than just just throwing it all out then trying to deal very problem. Just put it on that one challenge first. That’s a really good learning, if it’s okay, if you I’d love to do there’s been a great we’ve had such a great insight into your story, and I think this would be great for the viewers to to know the challenges you face and sort of the insights into the great learnings. But I’d love to do a bit of a quick fire just to finish up the off the episode. I love to do this. It gets it’s a bit more fun, and it gets a bit of an insight into the industry. We even get a bit more insight into James’s head as well.

James Boss  39:53

Sure.

Scott Mears  39:54

Awesome. So first question, what’s the one thing people misunderstand about supply chain the most?

James Boss  40:05

So I guess if I would pick sometimes we look at the supply chain, we think it works like the marketplace. So for those of you familiar with investing, you may have heard the term of the invisible hand of the market, that the market just kind of responds, and in most cases, it does that quite well, better than anybody with a programmed system could do. The supply chain can do that. But in instances where we are right now, where folks are extending lead times and things like that, it’s not quite as self healing on its own, without rational people getting together and talking through the issues. So if Company A extends, extends their lead time by 15 weeks, Customer A is then going to say, All right, well, then I’m going to double my order, because I don’t want to be short anything, right? Well, now that supplier now has twice as much to fulfill, and what are they going to do? They’re going to extend their lead times even farther. And you get this, this system that isn’t reacting to the actual needs of the marketplace, and so that does, that does require rational people getting together, meeting that requires more visibility in the supply chain. Right when we do have a visible supply chain, we can now see how things are reacting, where the real needs are, because there are broken things that we do have to put pressure on, that we have to resource or help. So I think that folks kind of misunderstand that you know this will just help itself out, and it does require us to be actively involved to make it a better place for all of us.

Scott Mears  42:07

Great. And following up from that point actually quite similar to what you just said with this question is, what’s one challenge you feel most heads of supply chain miss?

James Boss  42:20

I don’t know. So that that’s a harder one for me to answer, because I think most heads of supply chain are far, far more intelligent than I am. I would say that, you know, it’s easy to miss things that you can’t see, and one of the things that we’re starting to get more creative on is, how do we see tier two and tier three, uh, visibility into our supply chain. So most of us are really good at tier one our immediate supplier. How is that going? But when our immediate supplier is a circuit board manufacturer who supplies something else from someone else. We have a microchip that goes through something like six different countries just to make a $5 chip, right? So when you understand that a little bit more deeper, you can think through things like capacity planning, things like lead times a little bit more richly, and I think we’ve missed a lot of opportunities till now to start making that more visible so that we can work in a more cohesive manner. And when we do that, by the way, everything thrives, right? So that that chip four countries away, six tiers below what I can buy, right? They now see steady and stable demand. If we can keep this working well, which means they can produce at a steady and stable rate, which is better for their manufacturing, better for their team members. This, this lumpy stuff, doesn’t help them. It hurts them in the end, because the end of the day, somebody’s making a call this or this, and when we can make that simple and visible, we save them time and we improve things in their force.

Scott Mears  44:29

Yeah, they’re fantastic. And what’s one thing that surprises you about supply chain today?

James Boss  44:42

You know, I’m still getting over the whole toilet paper thing, I guess.

Scott Mears  44:47

Yeah, that’s a good, pretty, big surprise.

James Boss  44:58

I always think of that is the neat little thing like. Alright, so this really wasn’t a supply chain problem. There was enough toilet paper in the entire world for for every rear end in the world. And yet, because of a different instability, we missed that. And I always think that, golly, that would be a great one to draw out and simplify so everybody can see that, so that we can, we can replicate that tool in our supply chains and be better together.

Scott Mears  45:35

That’s amazing. I love that answer. And the next one’s actually will, again, really interesting insight will be, what’s one trend in supply chain you have your eye on at the moment, and don’t say toilet paper?

James Boss  45:53

Yeah. So one trend in the supply chain that I’ve got my eye on is leveraging AI in some of the predictive analytics in the supply chain, so we’re just starting to better understand because we can’t see that that far deep, but using some of these AI tools, we’re able to now see that, oh, there’s a shortage of a key material here that one of our suppliers uses for all of their casting. We’ve had a number of instances where we’ve called the casting supplier and said, Did you realize that there’s going to be a magnesium shortage? And they said, no. Said, well, you better get your orders in place so that you can make sure that we’re still getting our iron castings on time, because some of these AI tools can do things that humans can’t right. They can read the news report in South Africa and translate it and say, oh, that supplies 50% of the magnesium or whatever into the industry. And therefore this may be an issue that you want to be aware of. So I think that trend, if used wisely, can can really help. If used poorly, it can equip some people to gain the system. And I’m not sure that that helps. We shall see.

Scott Mears  47:22

Yes, we sure will. And just one final question is, I always like to go talk about the future with my final question is, what excites you about the future of supply chain visibility solutions?

James Boss  47:40

I think what excites me is being a medium sized, employee owned company, right? We we care about everybody from the top to the bottom, and we realize that we are, you know, we’re kind of in this fight on our own to do our best for our customers. And when you stop and think about all of the myriad of companies that supply us, many of them are in that very same situation. And what excites me is that as we improve and stabilize things, we can be a better customer to our suppliers, which allows them to be a better supplier overall. And so increasing these partnerships, increasing that visibility, so we give a subset of our suppliers visibility into our demand before we even make it, which allows them to plan out their manufacturing and they can do that because they’ve got that visibility with us that they don’t have with their other customers. So when things get all squirreled up in the marketplace like they are right now, right we want to be that honest handshake every day, and so that we I’ve been here for 25 years. The company’s been here for well over 100 we hope to be here for hundreds more. And we want to have that great handshake with everybody that we work with, whether it’s Roambee whether it’s a casting supplier or a microchip supplier in the Philippines.

Scott Mears  49:22

Wonderful. What a lovely way to finish off the podcast, to be that trusted, that honest handshake. That’s a lovely way to finish off the episode. And I want to thank you, James. I really do this has been a really interesting episode to really get in the insight to not just the story of S&C electric, but the inside of supply chain today as well. And just a note to you as well, it’s been very clear throughout the episode how much you value your team and how much you really do encourage creativity and give space to that and encourage those individuals that are not seen as much. And I really commend you for that, because it really does show and it’s wonderful to see that.

James Boss  50:05

Well, thank you, and thanks for the help from your team to help us do that.

Scott Mears  50:10

No, thank you very much. If you are just for a little, maybe little wave or something, just for just for the camera, just to say goodbye, and the social media guys love this, maybe just a little wave, um, thank you again, James. Really appreciate it. And guys, I hope you really enjoyed that. Do keep an eye on this space. We will be bringing out interviews monthly. Um, do follow us on our YouTube channel, where you are now, and on all our social media, LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook at Roambee and make sure you subscribe and put notifications on to make sure you don’t miss another interview that we put out. So thank you very much, James again, and thank you very much for everyone watching. Hi, my name is Scott Mears, and I’m one of the hosts of the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. On this podcast we talk to supply chain heroes from around the world about everything, ranging from the disruptions related to supply chains, their personal experiences with tracking technologies, strategies to build resilience, and much, much more. We already have some recommended videos for you to the side of me, and if any of this sounds interesting to you, do subscribe to our Youtube channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss another Roambee video. I’ll see you next time.