Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain disruption, COVID impact, technology adoption, resilience, local supply chains, personalization trend, Amazon generation, sustainability, track and trace, digital work instructions, remote management, inventory management, pharma industry, essential goods, supply chain control tower.

SPEAKERS

Jochen Vincke, Premsai Sainathan, Scott Mears

Premsai Sainathan  00:00

Hey, welcome to the supply chain tech podcast with Roambee. In this episode, we speak with Jochen Vincke, a partner at PwC Belgium. Jochen reflects on the supply chain and manufacturing technology landscape and trends in the run up to and during the pandemic, including globalization, consumer centricity and the transition from lead thinking to resilience. Jochen, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure having you here.

Jochen Vincke  00:36

Thanks. It’s a pleasure being here. I’m very excited in sharing some of my experience in how COVID has affected supply chains and operations around the world. And of course, what we’ve been seeing happening with the role of technology in that so I’m very much looking forward to this conversation.

Premsai Sainathan  00:53

Jochen, wonderful, you’ve been working very closely with the essential goods sector, and this has actually been a key pillar, I would actually say, for humanity during this time of the pandemic, because industries like food, industries like pharma, and of course, the industries like chemicals, which support the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and sometimes in food processing. These industries took a big hit when, you know, the lockdowns and the shutdowns were enforced, and I think they went through a very, very tough time in in terms of bringing back their production and supply chain back, you know, curious to understand from you, Josh, and because you’ve worked very closely with this industries, what was the experience like for your clients? Sector?

Jochen Vincke  01:51

Yeah, it was a very turbulent period I went in, especially in Europe. It hit mostly in March. Thing at that point in time we, first of all, we saw that the industries with the bigger supply chains that really had the global integration in terms of supply chains, like, for example, let’s take the easy examples, like the automotive chain, or also, for example, apples, Apple iPhones and so on. You would see that these companies really struggled, and it had a real impact on demand. Certain point in the Apple Store, you couldn’t even buy more than two iPhones per person. In automotive as well, we saw that it basically came to a halt in the difference with the more essential industries. What we’ve seen in the work I’ve been doing, because my main experience really in food, pharmaceuticals and chemicals. What we’ve seen is that we’ve tried our best to keep those companies going. But of course, because of the lockdown at that point in time, and also in Western Europe at that point, companies were forced, also in the industry, in the essential industries, to really reinvent the way they were operating the factories, and we saw that companies really struggle to keep the same level of output as they usually would have. And in certain essential industries, like, for example, retail foods, we saw a boom while companies were struggling to get the same output out of the factories. And in the supply chain, we got a surge in demand at the customer side, and it was really a big struggle. We saw that a lot of our retailers out there how to get a really big surge in terms of revenues, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into the bottom and to the bottom line. And that’s something that you wonder, where did that go? And if I look at how a lot of the companies I work with hand that was basically a lot of additional measures in terms of getting safety measures in place, how do we treat someone that comes in and is ill? How do we deal with that? We have a lot more people who are at home, which usually know what we’re doing, which are trained, and you said that these fall away, so we need to integrate more interim or temporary labor. So we saw also that the way that we train people in doing these activities is crucial in being able to pick up surges and in terms of demand. So it was a turbulent time. I think I saw basically three different types of approaches. And the first thing you had was the firefighting mode. How the hell are we going to do this? So companies, oxygen, chemicals, really trying to figure out, how are we going to produce with our teams coming into the factory normally, at the same time being in the same locker rooms together and leaving again, then at the same time, eating together, all those the ways that they were working had to be changed. And I think a lot of them in the firefighting mode have done a tremendous job in doing that. And then the second phase, which you saw, was really okay now, now that we’ve contained a bit the impact. In our factories and in our supply chain. How do we build around this? Well, how do we make sure that we can now ramp up and slow down with the peaks in terms of lockdowns or in terms of increased demand again? How do we deal with that? And we saw a lot of companies really questioning inventories. Where do we put inventory? How do we deal with capacity issues? How do we make sure that we have sufficient people in there? Can we automate more to be less dependent on people? So those are the second category of questions that we saw being answered mostly around the summer period. And then coming out of the summer, we do see that some of the of these essential goods have made the switch to how can we now build in resilience into the supply chain? How can we make sure that the next one hits, we are coping with that better than the last, and I think that’s also what we see now. I think a lot of countries in Europe are back in lockdown outside of Europe, of course, as well. But we see that the impact on the industry is overall a lot lower. Companies we keep on running, the companies we keep on running, the supply chains, we have found a way to deal with the impact of COVID in this moment. So in that sense, I’m quite positive with the flexibility.

Premsai Sainathan  06:21

That’s very interesting, Josh. And because what I was also noticing, and maybe I could get more insights from you, is a lot of the traditional models of supply chain were actually questioned, and not from a perspective of the pandemic, right. There has been a major change in a small period of time, but the change is not being just to tackle the last six months of what happened in the pandemic, but it’s actually changed for a more permanent future. So talk about some of these key changes and restructures in these supply chains of the scale goods market?

Jochen Vincke  07:08

Yeah, indeed. I think it’s a very good point, which you bring down in terms of there’s a lot that’s happened, but at an accelerated base over the last couple of months. Take a stupid example, like, how many people have you seen in the past struggling with video conferencing? While now it has become such a necessity, everyone is very much aware how they work. I think the oh, sorry, you’re on mute, or I don’t know where this button is and I had trouble connecting, all those discussions are really far behind us. And that’s just one small piece. The same thing happens on a far larger scale. If you look at how companies treat technology now, and see how the impact of technology has changed the way of working, it’s really something that has lowered the threshold to test and try and to develop new things. But as you rightfully indicate, I also believe that there were underlying forces that have already begun working at our supply chain networks, even from before the corona crisis. It is, I think it was early, 2000 this was already described in what was called distributed economies. That’s a very interesting way of looking at supply chains, meaning that instead of having global supply chains, we’re moving towards more local supply chains, which are more oriented towards local for local. So we produce locally for the local market, and then distribute there as well. We move away a bit from the the the global globalization aspect, seeing that, for example, the labor cost scale effects. By moving manufacturing and supply chain into a lower cost company country, we see that that has a lesser impact now. And there’s a couple of reasons behind. If you look at the forces which are behind, well, we already, and I’m at the time of recording, we still don’t know if we’re going red or blue. So in the sense that the policies that have been put forward the last four years by Mr. Trump, they have changed the way that a lot of companies have been looking at their location. I saw a lot of companies where I work with moving out of China towards Vietnam was a big pro, or India has been a big pro. Also, some companies have been experimenting, experimenting with bringing back manufacturing to closer to the customer. For example, Adidas experimented with the speed factory, where they try to build 3d-printed specifically for you, shoes, close to the markets. So we see that this geopolitical landscape has influenced the way people look at supply chains. That was already happening so and it will continue on, being an aspect going forward. The second thing I saw also happening is that it’s what I call the Amazon generation, a lot of a lot of us. Out there are really part of the Amazon generation being very much used to being delivered almost at the spot immediately what we want. And that fast delivery base really has an effect on a lot of our industries now. And of course, the closer you are in an industry to your consumer, the more harder you feel that force being there. But I see it’s really crawling up the industry ladder, going to also the more older or more heavy industry. So that Amazon model, fast delivery, basically, you can only add actually adhere to that model if you’re close to your customer. And then there’s a third trend, which you’ve seen as well. It’s a personalization trend. So almost everything we want, but we’re happy to pay extra if it’s personalized for us. And I think a very good example that opened my eyes around three years ago is Dwikit. It’s a company. Check it out, D, W, I K, I T. It’s a company that you would say it’s a 3d printing company, but it’s basically not they’ve built a platform for personalization of consumer goods. The best known example is a BMW Mini Cooper when you order it, and you can use the platform from Dwikit to actually customize the car so you could put your name on the dash, or you could put your name on an air vent and tweak it. Actually uses their app for you to do that on your phone, and they make sure that piece that you developed specifically for you is being manufactured traditionally or additive manufacturing delivered on the production line, just in sequence to be assembled on your car, and you receive a personal, personalized car. Well, they this is now, of course, for an obvious example, but they’ve they’re doing the same for other consumer goods, like razors. You could think of your espresso machine being personalized and so on. I really see this as a trend which is coming and which will also, in combination of the previous one, need companies to be very close to the market. You cannot do this if you’re far away and with long lead time. So we see really a more regional approach to supply chains. And then there’s another aspect which has been playing a lot, and it’s gone a little bit to the to the background because of COVID. But I think it’s an even more important discussion to have any sustainability. Global warming is not going anywhere. I hope COVID will sometimes go away. I’m quite sure it will. But global warming is here for quite a bit of time, I think, and it’s something that we need to address. And these local for local supply chains supported by a global back end. That’s perfectly possible, but the local for local will also help in this, in the respect of sustainability. So if you one of the best examples that I know out there is the floating farm. I don’t know if you heard about that one.

Premsai Sainathan  12:54

I haven’t. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jochen Vincke  12:56

So the floating Farm is a very nice concept, and it’s basically, it’s a boat in the harbor of Rotterdam, and the two, it’s the couple that raised that company were actually based in, I think they were in the US at the time that Hurricane Katrina hit, and they saw very quickly that the stores were running empty very soon after the hurricane hit. And so it made them think about a different model of how do we actually deliver our food products to an urbanized world? So what they did is they put actually, cows on a boat very close to the city center of Rotterdam. And what they do is they they provide milk and yogurt based on the milk production of those cows on the boat every day, and then they transport this into the city center with electric small vehicles. And it’s it’s anecdotal evidence, but it’s still Ii proves a trend which is there, which is becoming more and more apparent, going to fast delivery, personalized, close to your customer, really needing us for essential businesses to become more you would say Glocal. So local for local with a global back end. And I think that is something that will not go away. And the reason why we see this coming up is just because the technology allows for allows for it the tweaked example, personalization of your of your car that would not have been possible in the in the area in the time of Henry Ford, of course, is something that has been developed over time. Now has become possible, if you look at technologies out there, what I what I think was amazing. I think Roambee also has a few, but I saw during the pandemic in March, over April or May, I saw a company like Sensorless coming out with, listen, we have hundreds of 1000s of assets out there, and we track them. We have a platform to track them. We can actually see which industries are already recovering, which are totally. At a standstill, which are at a higher level of activity than before, basically just based on the movements of the asset trackers that they had. And I think that’s a new kind of insight, which you didn’t have. I saw also some interesting analysis popping up from, I don’t know if you know this company, it’s called, I think orbital insight. It’s been over. It’s just a company from Atif, so I’m not entirely sure, but they basically provide satellite imaging of of com, of companies, and then you can see how much trucks leave come in, or you can see how filled the the floor is with inventory. So it really helps creating additional insight in terms of supply chains and how they’re doing. So it’s a really exciting time to be in supply chain and operations, because there’s so much that we can do. And I think also Roambee is helping, I would say, shifting the values there what is possible and what we can do going forward

Premsai Sainathan  15:59

Jochen that’s very interesting and also very ironical, I would say, because if you really look at the, look at look at our at least the last 100 years, we have always come out stronger and benefited at scale. I would say, during crisis, it’s very unfortunate. So, you know, during the world wars, the aviation industry, really, it became very common for somebody to actually travel by air. And you know, that was timed actually, with the World War because, you know, it was helping troops move. It was for people to move troops one area to another. And also, you know, plan their strategic combat. If you look at the if you look at another example, where I come from, in India, demonetization, and that actually drove, drove the technology of digital payments at a scale that developing country has never witnessed today. You got the COVID 19 pandemic, right, and it’s it’s obviously driving technology at a scale and pace, the accelerated pace that you talked about, which the world would have never imagined. So it’s very ironical. But also on the positive side, there is a very accelerated deployment of technology, which is helping remodel and bring in all these new, you know, Amazon, like experience customization that you talk about the customers. So in this context, your shin where, how do you, how did you see, or what the technologies that you saw were opted at such a fast pace. So just for we noticed that a lot of our customers adopting warehouse monitoring technology in their cold chain warehouse because the number of staff that they had was actually much lesser, so they could not person go and log the temperature at every corner of the warehouse every day onto the system so they needed to automate it. Companies began adopting monitoring of their air shipments because the freight capacity became low, and they were looking at any means to get their goods across, and sometimes not by air. So in your experience with the essential good services, what are the technologies that you saw that really has taken the supply chain world by storm?

Jochen Vincke  18:55

Well, I think there’s a couple of technologies out there that really have been surging. I think when the pandemic hit and everyone was looking at what the hell is going to happen? Is demand going to search for some food articles that did Campbell Soup and so on? For others, it just dropped to almost zero. So how to deal with those kind of things? A lot of companies experience a lack of transparency on their stocks, on their production orders, on where the shipments were. So we actually from PwC, we received a lot of additional questions on, how can we create more transparency? We call this supply chain control tower. So really, how do we use technology to get a view, not only on our own ecosystem, but also outside of our own small world. Enterprise, basically tower suppliers doing with our how are they doing? Do they have enough yeah, and do they have enough stock as well for us? Now? Are they on stock or not? I. And also on the client side, how are they doing? Do we need to foresee additional capacity or not? And that was the first thing we saw. I think it was also the main thing, to be honest, other aspects of technology, which we saw surging was, for example, this is more related into the maintenance world is we? We had a lot of questions on listen, you know, we cannot travel, but we have an expert here, which is an expert in a glass furnace. So by coincidence, one of my clients in a glass furnace or in cocoa processing, these experts, he should actually be able to support someone who is an Ivory Coast at this point, but he cannot travel. So how are we doing that? And then basically what we did is we actually shipped smart glasses to Ivory Coast and to other countries where people can put an app on there and share the screen. So see what I see with the expert, which is in a different country, and the cost of this technology has opened a lot of eyes. The demand for the software, it’s called helpline, is actually it’s, it’s the first quarter was times for the demand, and now they’re times 10. I think the demand for those kind of technologies is really surging, because the cost of it is really low. If you compare it to one flight buys you the Smart Glass and software, so you save a lot of travel costs, and you have almost an interme, an immediate connection with with people which are far away that you can help on the spot. And what they did is, then they support, now from a distance, operators in the factory. And the next step that they’re planning on taking is really using that support. You see what I see, and I help you. You can even indicate on the screen of the person who’s looking through the smart glass which points you’re you’re talking about, what not to turn or what aspect to look at that, taking that video and building instruction out of it, because that’s another thing we saw, is especially in retail as well, where the demand surged, there was simply not enough people around to do picking, to load trucks, to take products from the manufacturing to the warehouse. And there we saw that there’s a big need for how can we use technology to increase or decrease the time, sorry, to decrease the time it takes to train someone. And I think digital work instructions are the perfect tool to really help people to learn as fast as they can in a new environment, without having to rely on the old way of training people, which was, this is the new guy. It’s George. George. You follow Josh for the whole day, and then you learn on the job, and then it takes you a year, but after a year, you’re trained, that system will not work anymore. So people are far more aware that using technology can really help taking that time to train someone to a bare minimum, and in the same time, when you use, for example, tablets to train people, you also immediately have a track record of the compliance of the operate of the procedures that you did you know at any time who was where, and you have a good overview and transparency on what happened in your supply chain. So that’s definitely also an area which we saw pick up in the last couple of months. And the final thing is that, because of all these technologies, you see them popping up everywhere. We experimented with AI as well, for example, using video imaging to determine whether or not people are distancing enough, or whether or not people have the necessary PPE on through their helmets and their safety shoes, you can do this now with deep learning based and video imaging. We’ve been experimenting with drum bits. I don’t know if you know them, but they were in on CNBC as well as like bracelets that give an alarm and you’re too close to your colleague. This is coming as well. And we see, in general, an acceptance towards new technology that we didn’t see in the past. In the past, it was us convincing our clients really and think about this company, think about that kind of technology. I think there’s a value for you in it. And now we see that companies are actually pulling in. So they’re saying, we want to do this on a broader scale. We want to automate more because then you’re less dependent on neighbor. We want to be able to get more transparency, because then you can make better decisions in times of uncertainty. And we see this pool coming. The only, the only thing that we need to guard a bit our companies that we work with for is that that they’re not too, I would say over-eager, if that’s word in English, if they’re not too eager to really take everything that they see, and because there needs to be a business value linked to the technology that you want to introduce, and I see far.

Premsai Sainathan  24:54

That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you, Josh. And because you know the pace of adoption, that’s. That’s happening today is every technology is going through that approval process, which would typically take months to years, in a large corporation right. So do you think companies are actually adopting technologies too soon, too fast, without aligning with business value?

Jochen Vincke  25:20

Absolutely, there’s two ways that this happens, and there’s, you have a lot of startups and scale ups out there that have new and exciting technology. And they often have some don’t some have so and they reach out to a lot of companies out there. And as a company, it’s very hard to understand which one of these is trustworthy, has this technology stable and can deliver a business case. And then we see a lot of clients that then basically start experimenting. It ends up with having very interesting discussions and projects, but in the end, you lose a lot of time. So I think if I can reflect on my own role, what I personally want to do going forward is I want to be a bridge in that ecosystem of technology, trying to help multinationals and companies to identify which technology is worthwhile investing in, which are trustworthy, And where will we actually get the value out of certain technology? So I think that’s certainly that being the bridge in the ecosystem, and filtering out the good from the bad is something where I think, for me personally, there’s a space that operates, and then there’s a second point I wanted to make, is, if you look at companies which don’t start from I’m intrigued by technology, and I want to test but you have companies that start from the sea level, the headquarters say we need to digitize, and we need to go for it, and we need to have AI, and you need to have tablets, and we need to have drones. And then this, this question comes down to the divisions, or comes down to business units or factories or supply chains, and these guys say, Okay, you want tablets. Why the hell do you want tablets? Everything is working fine. You don’t need so you need to be able to create what I call the pool in the operating unit as well, instead of the push from the technology point of view. And the way you do that is by showing technology networks don’t just tell about it, but really have them experiment with technology so they can see the value, and then they actually can take what they’ve seen, apply it in their own environment, and say, Okay, this makes sense for me, and actually see a business case attached to this, and at that point you get the buy in from the operating units, the supply chains, the factories and so on as well, to really go after the right implementations. And, yeah, it’s, it’s, I see it’s a journey a lot of companies are taking. There’s, there’s a lot are in the experimentation phase with the small apps and the small things. Some companies, especially chemistry. So chemical industry is ahead of the game in terms of, let’s try to put this in a managed, governed program where we try not to jump on everything, but see what we can digest and what is valuable for our business, having the fully digitized and reaping the full benefits of technology. And in all honesty, I don’t think any company is there yet. I haven’t seen any which has no work left to do in that area. So it’s a huge opportunity for for everyone society to to jump in there and make it count and make sure that customers are better served, that people have more interesting jobs as well, in factories, in supply chains, and that we can make societies better by by investing in our companies.

Premsai Sainathan  28:50

Yup, because you’re moving now factory workers, transforming them into knowledge workers. Yes, and that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s really going to lift the whole workforce, large. Jochen, what’s what’s your experience with the pharma industry as part of the essential good services? What the the food and the chemical companies really faced during the pandemic is something that a lot of the wax COVID 19 vaccine manufacturers are preparing for, right because maybe a huge shipment volume of these factors going out, especially into developing regions and territories, which many of these companies possibly wouldn’t handle before. How are they preparing for this challenge, Jochen?

Jochen Vincke  29:49

It’s a huge, huge effort, one of we have quite a bit of pharma in Europe as well, which we’re quite close to, and we’re supporting some of the. Are the larger names out there in really preparing and setting up the supply chains, but it’s basically a lot of front loading, meaning, while we’re not yet sure about what the effect will be of the of the vaccine, we’re still re focusing funding resources in a huge amount towards building those supply chains, building stocks really make sure that once we get the go, we can go as fast as we can. And we see this if you look at the from a consulting experience as an advisor to our clients, if you look at the different industries, over the summer, we saw a surge in terms of restructuring so companies that needed our help to security, BDA and so on. I think as of the summer, we received a lot of questions from pharmaceutical companies to help them set up that supply chain, because they realize it’s, it’s, it’s going to take a lot to be able to go from production capacity, finding sufficiently to stocks and to distributing to the right countries, really down to the consumers that need the vaccine. It’s going to be huge efforts, and it’s it’s taking, I think, most of the management attention at the time being, and also most of the of the resources out there really refocusing on this going forward. So it’s a huge, it’s a huge effort. We see them already building a lot of stocks, to be honest, of vaccines, which are potentially going to work. And it’s the way that we’ll have to look at, I think there’s a big if I if I can add one more thing to that, and it’s not only for pharmaceuticals. If you look at resilience, we lived so far in the age of and I’m also a lean c sigma master black, but so if you look at the Lean philosophy, inventory is kind of the devil, and inventory is making sure that your lead times are expanding and you don’t service your customer good in the right way. I think that age has passed. I think we came from lean to anorexia, and some of our supply chains really had no so I didn’t invent it myself, but I like it as well. So if you look at how inventory is being looked at in that sense, we now get questions of, where can we put the strategic decoupling points? Where do we need to put some inventory so that we are secured in terms of supply chain, when this happens again, and how much should that be? I think there’s a like. It’s inventories now again, estimated for the real value it has. It takes away some of the insecurities you have on the supply side, also on the demand side. I think that is something that has changed. And also the dual dual source supply limiting the size of your supply chains is something that we really see companies putting some effort and and some thought in to make sure that they’re not so dependent anymore on some of the weaker links in their supply chain, and that they really like if you build an airplane, if, if one system drops out, you better have a backup system. And I think a lot of companies were not working in it in that way.

Premsai Sainathan  33:18

So that’s it’s it’s very interesting what you say, because when you talk about inventory, you know going from lean to anorexia, as you put it, I think somewhere down the line, the supply chain community probably forgot about the meaning of optimization. And optimization is not just cutting down. It also means buffering up, buffering up in the right places, cutting down in the right places. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s phenomenal that most of the companies today are actually trying to bring back the balance, trying to buffer needed, trying to reduce stock where it’s where it’s not. And of course, you know, technology is enabling a lot of this, because, you know, not able to see a lot of more things in real time, right? And in this environment, Josh and can you talk a little bit about about the remote management that you had touched on, especially in context of, you know, supply and demand, about inventory buffering and lean, how is the culture of supply chain management changed it comes to, which comes To the three phases? Right? Planning, you know, planning, implementation and measurement.

Jochen Vincke  34:46

The culture has changed on two aspects. And I think the first one we already touched upon is the use of technology to get more transparency. I think that has for sure. I that every supply chain manager, every. Pricing employees is is totally convinced that that is the way to go. So track and tracing solutions. I expect the technology to become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and to see more and more. And it’s also for Roambee maybe a good, a good idea. So, so as.

Premsai Sainathan  35:21

What you’re saying is absolutely right, because, you know, few years, few years before, nobody actually could think that, you know, somebody could actually monitor shipment on demand, and at a cost with this, you know.

Jochen Vincke  35:36

Huge difference. Yeah, I realize.

Premsai Sainathan  35:41

It’s not just Roambee because, because I think it’s a collective development of IoT actually making this happen. And I think be a point in time where this, the sensor, actually be disposable, where you can actually something onto a package and forget about it.

Jochen Vincke  35:58

But it’s what we see sensorless. It’s the company we’ve been working with as well. It’s basically, you receive a sticker, you paste it on, on a container, on a pallet, depending on how much the palette is worth, of course, or on a box even, and then it tracks over stick Fox regular packages. And it’s technology which was 10 years ago, not available, and certainly not at that price. So and it’s disposable, just the battery lasts five years, and afterwards you don’t need, so that is happening. So I do see the awareness is there in supply chain, and the technology is there, and the cost of it will will evolve in a sense that it will penetrate all supply chain in a very fast pace. I expect that to be over the coming years, a huge market out there. And then secondly, and that is maybe showing the potential of what to do then, with all of the information, once you have track and tracing in place, is that a lot of companies struggled not to know what the demand was of the customer during the pandemic, but also of the customer’s customer. And we saw, instead of looking at supply chains from a company point of view, or looking at industries from chemicals, automotive, food, pharma, we really need to take a different angle, and not look at it as verticals, but look at it as a horizontal view. What I mean with that is, if you look at the supply chain to build a car, there’s everything in there. You have mining in there for the batteries. You have, for example, glass fiber in there that needs to be added to resins, where you have the big chemical players in there which need to go to compounders. We need to go to assembly factories and so on. So we need to take a more horizontal view on supply chain and start sharing data across those steps. Because one of the things I see happening now, we thought, when automotive started again, basically people were willing to work again, but they couldn’t because the parts were not there. So how can we make sure that the bullwhip effect in supply chain is being addressed with new technology, and something we couldn’t do in the past, I think, is becoming it’s at the grasp of our fingertips. We’re not there yet, because we need to find supply chains which are willing to cooperate across the value chain, share that data with each other and still be comfortable not giving away too much information in terms of negotiation power. So that will be a difficult balance to do, but I do think it’s an evolution coming over the next years to share more data across value chains so that we can manage better the full value chain and not be be all of a sudden confronted with a lack of material, lack of people, a furnace which hasn’t been started, which should have been already months ago, because you had to demand that you didn’t have that demand go through the different steps of the value chain and so on. And so I think there’s a huge amount of of work there to be done to really start linking supply chains fully.

Premsai Sainathan  39:03

Jochen, what would be your closing advice to the official goods sector, especially in context of the fact that they probably survived the worst. But the pandemic is not yet over, and there is a whole new normal in front of us, which could actually last maybe a year, two years and or even longer, be probably the top two or three tips that you would advise your clients when it comes to planning their logistics and supply chain.

Jochen Vincke  39:41

I think resilience going forward is the is the main topic I would like to bring forward if you, if you look at supply chains, how can you build in resilience for your specific supply chain? And it can be through buffering where it’s needed. It can be through dual supply it can be through technology. Just think about how you can really build in resilience to cope with surges and lows in terms of demands. I think that is something especially when you saw how the pandemic hit, you saw also a lot of predictions of the second peak. And even after this peak, another peak. So we need to be prepared to be able to downline and upscale again very fast have the procedures in place. I think that is something that people will need to start spending some strategic time on. If you’re in supply chain, you need to be thinking about resilience. And one of the concepts which I linked to earlier in our discussion is the local for local or Glocal organization. I’m convinced that companies will become more regional, so they will be more locally connected to the suppliers and to the customer. So be closer lower, I would say, smaller scale manufacturing, closer to the customer, but connected across different factories and regions and continents with the same virtual backbone to really take the best of, for example, corporate processes like IP and knowledge management. So in that sense, I do believe that we’re going to see more smaller, more local manufacturing and supply chains, but still connected because of the new technology out there. And if you’re looking into what you need to do as a company, put in some necessary time to reflect on how you can build in resilience in your supply chain. And when you think about using technology to do so think about the business case, the value which is behind. And don’t just implement something because it’s kind of gives you because it gives you a break, break points to your colleagues. So try to think first of the business value, and then the break points will come afterwards.

Premsai Sainathan  41:58

Wonderful Josh, and thank you so much for sharing your insights and experience. We’ve already come out stronger from this pandemic, and I hope this trend continues even after we are through this and the worst period.

Jochen Vincke  42:14

Thank you. I wish you all the best. Stay safe and thank you. Bye.

Scott Mears  42:22

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.