Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain transformation, Frost & Sullivan, emerging technologies, IoT, Blockchain, Autonomous, Cloud, Analytics, COVID impact, digital transformation, logistics service providers, e-commerce, supply chain efficiency, technology adoption, regulatory compliance.

SPEAKERS

Premsai Sainathan, Gopal R

Premsai Sainathan  00:08

Welcome to the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. In this episode, we speak with Gopal R the global vice president of supply chain practice at Frost & Sullivan, a leading global research and consulting firm, world renowned for their market intelligence, insight and advisory services. Gopal shares with us supply chain transformation trends, the top five emerging technologies and how supply chain and logistics professionals are leveraging these technologies today. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Roambee Supply Chain Technology Podcast Series. In this episode, we have a guest Gopal with us, who’s from Frost and Sullivan to talk a little bit about Gopal. Gopal has been a supply chain transformation leader, and that’s what we’re going to be talking to him today. Gopal has had a long carrier with Frost and Sullivan. He has basically handled entire geography, set up consulting practices from bottom up in places like Malaysia. He’s currently in Dubai, and he is, apart from his global, global consulting expertise in supply chain, logistics and transportation, he is actually an expert in the EMEA and Southeast Asia market. And by the way, one more thing about Gopal is that I just came to know just before we sat down for this chat that Gopal is also a marathon runner, and he likes to run a marathon in pretty much every geo that he goes to transform supply chain set. Isn’t that Gopal?

Gopal R  01:57

Yeah, thanks Prem. Very good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you so much for having me on this session. It’s indeed quite exciting how, for instance, COVID 19 has actually transformed us, although, you know, we have social distancing norms in my in my view, it is actually brought us all closer with all these digitization and so on. So thanks for the very nice introduction. Yes, indeed, I want to be be able to at least do a 10k in all the places that I’ve traveled for business, I’m getting there. You know, I’m probably at maybe a 20 or 30% mark now, so hopefully we’ll get there soon, someday,

Premsai Sainathan  02:49

Wonderful Gopal. And as I think you get fitter and fitter, I think you’re also making the supply chains more fitter and fitter. So we would love to talk to you about that today. So welcome again. The topic for today is the top technologies that are powering supply chain transformation. So there are a lot of technologies that are powering supply chain transformation, but there are a few top ones which are actually making the largest change, right? Gopal and so as a supply chain transformational consultant leader, I want to basically begin with understanding a little bit from you about what you define as supply chain transformation before we actually get into the technologies that power it.

Gopal R  03:42

Yeah, before that, a short anecdote, I would say, back in 2011 I don’t know how many people recollect. You know, the floods in Thailand and those days in the rayon area. Used to be a lot of the the hard disk component suppliers. So there used to be some, close to about 14,000 15,000 odd companies and factories, which used to be part of the supply chain of the large hard disk manufacturers. Now suddenly, what happened was most of them were underwater, and the entire hard disk manufacturing was stalled and they couldn’t, you know, the prices shot up and there was significant challenges for almost all the large players. So during that time, a little closer to the time, one of the electronics companies was actually keen to look at how they could actually look up alternate suppliers in some other markets, as well as identify logistic service providers who can actually do the job of moving, you know, shifting from the existing. Supply base in Thailand to some other country, and also, most importantly, is to get better visibility in terms of, you know, in terms of their inventories and supplies. Because when such disruptions happen, the biggest challenge is that you start losing the visibility, and your entire planning and forecasting comes to a standstill, which is what we are experiencing now, or we had experienced, in terms of the COVID environment. So we did an exercise where we actually helped the company quickly, you know, transform or change from, you know, the existing supply base to a new supply base. Now that’s where, you know, frame, you know, linking that back to the question in terms of the definition is transformation. So what? What would you define a supply chain transformation? So transformation is essentially change. So what are you trying to change today? If you see there are a lot of redundant processes today, for example, you know, somebody is receiving some goods, or somebody is making a dispatch, or somebody is making a delivery, so somebody is recording it at a warehouse, or at a point of sale, or at a inventory level, first on a Paper, then that paper is taken to the, you know, to the place where the computers are. Somebody actually just fills it into a spreadsheet or scans it, sends it to another place, which is the headquarters, for example. So there somebody checks it, and further, they actually send it across to the data entry people who actually enter it into the system. So this sometimes can actually be close to about even sometimes it can take a day or two. Firstly, second thing is it also impacts efficiency. So the supply chain transformation definition would be to actually eliminate the redundancies and improve the efficiency. That is what I would call as supply chain transformation framework.

Premsai Sainathan  07:05

Excellent Gopal. That’s a very unique way you think about this, because most of the times when people are talking about supply chain transformation, they’re always talking about big budgets. How do you digitally transform your organization and so on. But I think you put it in a very, very simple manner to say that you take those efficiencies out of the system, which also now means that supply chain transformation is can actually be modularized, and it’s it’s most relevant now in the Post COVID period, contrary to what people would think.

Gopal R  07:43

Yeah, certainly, in fact, it is very relevant. Now, even more relevant because if you look at, you know, your earlier point you were talking about, you know, defining, and then you know, what are some of the critical things? So one of the one of the important things is the performance aspirations of companies. That is basically the trigger for any kind of a transformation. Now that performance aspiration becomes even more important in a post COVID environment, because you have actually suffered significantly and you have lost complete visibility. So if you look at, you know, some of the performance aspirations today of companies, not the aspirations part, but today the companies suffering from inventory levels low, forecasting accuracy, flexibility is a challenge. Transparency doesn’t exist, and also there is a lot of conflicting targets and KPIs and so on and so forth. Now, if you look at the aspirations, what we would, you know, sort of define as is, people want the supply chain to be demand driven, optimization across different processes, like I was talking about, redundancy minimization, customer focused. You know, at the end of the day, everybody wants things to be aligned towards the customer and proactive and agile supply chain, which means, you know, you can quickly change something and not wait for a week to actually, you know, change anything as regards to the process, and, most importantly, transparency and visibility, and overall, having one integrated system. So these are some essential drivers in the post COVID environment, which one needs to focus on to be able to actually have, you know, a good business case from a supply chain transformation aspect, Prem.

Premsai Sainathan  09:47

Interesting Gopal, and I know for a fact that you have talked about the role of technology, and this was in the supply chain and logistics Arabia conference of. Um, can you tell us what are the top five technologies that are really, really driving this transformation? And, like I began, there are a lot of technologies in the market, but there must be a few that are actually driving the large change. Which is enabling customers to do everything that you said, which is, which is, begin modularly, look at the places where they need to reduce their efficiencies, or a technology where, basically they don’t have to invest big or put in a huge amount of dollars, especially in a post COVID scenario.

Gopal R  10:40

Yeah, in fact, there are a lot of technology, you know, initiatives, or, you know, the the angle which has, which is actually leading to the transformation, like the example that I was talking about, you know, historically, or even now, logistics industry is traditionally fond of paper and the digitization. In fact, some days back, you know, when I was talking to, you know, an automotive company who was employing very reputed, you know, logistic service provider, I asked them, How do you get your like at the port of, you know, international entry? How do you get back your pre delivery inspection so you actually know what to do? Is it or the service provider at the end of the day checks it and sends it to us in an Excel file. So the Excel reaches somebody, and that somebody forwards it to somebody, and eventually, that eventually it gets to, you know, from the from the logistics, it goes to, you know, the manufacturing and goes to the plant. So the digitization Can, can be even just a simple Excel spreadsheet to, you know, a cloud platform. But today, what is happening with the transformation is, technology is leading. Is, you know, is, I would say, is becoming the equivalent of the word transformation. So it’s actually becoming a technology shaped change, because it is eliminating human error, it is eliminating the process redundancy, and it is actually helping you get better visibility. Three points, you know. So from that perspective, I would probably you know, not in not in any specific order, but some based on significant level of activity that is currently happening. I would say autonomous is one technology. The other is Internet of Things as blockchain, then analytics in different forms, as well as cloud on these are five technologies which is actually creating a lot of interest and value from a services perspective, from a function perspective, for customers and service providers alike.

Premsai Sainathan  13:00

Gopal, it’s very interesting. You listed five technologies, autonomous, IoT, Blockchain, you talked about cloud and you talked about analytics. So these five technologies, how, in your words, would you demystify this for any supply chain professional in the world, because when you talk about these technologies, it sounds very high tech. It sounds like when I’m actually doing a paper process. It’s going to take me lighties to adopt. So you in the way you’re talking about supply chain transformation today, which is so rapid, I think what would really help us is if you can demystify this and simplify the understanding of these five technologies.

Gopal R  13:48

Sure, so Prem firstly, I think these are not very high tech. In fact, yesterday, I had an opportunity to meet with one sort of a startup which is playing in the area of artificial intelligence, space software as a service. They actually started off trying to be another transport integrator of sorts, but they realized that being a transport integrator or a platform now, there is huge amount of working capital that you need, and the fact that even after doing such high value in terms of, you know, in terms of the turnover of the business, you eventually end up with eight or 10% in terms of profitability. And like I said, you need huge amount of working capital because, you know, you have checks from the clients, but you need to pay the day to day. You know, the transporters and so on. Who are, you know, single owner, truckers, right? So, I mean on. Let me start with that cloud note. So this is an example where they decided that the. Don’t want to go full fledged, as, you know, as an integration platform, but they adapted their product to a SaaS environment and brought it to a SaaS model and said, I’m driving a AI based SaaS model and enabling companies to actually build their transport, aggregation, you know, platform. And by doing so, they suddenly shifted from, you know, a 10% profitability to probably an 80% gross margin, kind of a scenario. So this is what is actually helping some of the technology companies so Cloud. And the best thing is you don’t have to invest in, you know, like any executable software in your system, or, you know, like licenses and so on. So you are subscribing, you know, within maybe about four to six, five weeks or so, they set up the, you know, the private cloud for you, which, you know, rest somewhere else. You are actually subscribing to them, to those services on a monthly basis. So there is no fixed cost, there is no maintenance. Somebody is taking care of the latest technologies and so on and so forth, analytics. So today, for example, you look at, you know, people having a lot of fleets of different kinds, whether it is aviation or, you know, maritime, or, most importantly is, you know, the trucking. So today, there are a lot of solutions that is coming around, that is being launched around, you know, fleet performance analysis. So which means they are in a position to, recently, had a conversation with one such startups, which was actually from India, which was looking at, you know, trying to capture metrics from the trucks, and telling the, you know, the fleet owner in advance, that if you can service it now, potentially you’re going To minimize, you know the downtime of, you know, 10 trucks and so on. So which means that you are doing a predictive maintenance in advance, and thereby actually limiting your loss in terms of downtime as well as any major damages, for example, right? So that’s for you on analytics, Blockchain, I think everybody knows why blockchain. Blockchain is essentially trying to replace the smart contracts management, which is basically cutting down the need for, you know, the legal, you know, intermediaries and so on, and trying to transact in a more safer environment IoT today, you know, recently, we interacted with some companies which are doing smart container movements using IoT. People have come up with their different business models that have come up with with reusable IoT devices, for example, whereby minimizing even costs, for example. So there is so much of innovation, but predominantly this IoT right now is fitting in the the the function of mostly the container tracking across geographies and continents and so on. And it is working really well and autonomous, which is, you know, autonomous guided vehicles now, not just recently, somebody was asking me, so that is AGV is going to be very popular, only in markets where the the labor cost is high, Not really today, probably in terms of the volume and penetration. Probably people look at China and India as two large markets. Are these places high on labor costs? No, but the volumes are so significant today. Where can you find most of you know the robotic equipment? You know, in terms of the warehousing environment, it is mostly, you know, is mostly in in case of E commerce, etc, where the level of automation is expected to be high. And you know, the the the volume of transactions is so significant, that’s where you know, China and India, for instance, you know, otherwise, if the volume is less, you don’t need that speed. Because today, you know, e Commerce has become all about speed. In fact, during the COVID times, we even had a scenario in in one of the countries in the region where people got fined because they were not living up to the delivery commitments, you know, so customers got really irritated. And so these are some examples, Prem of autonomous IoT blockchain analytics and, you know, cloud in terms of how they are actually playing a role in transforming the supply chain.

Premsai Sainathan  20:01

Wonderful Gopal and that, that kind of reminds me. I was reading an article this morning which was talking about Amazon getting the FDA clearance. I don’t know what level of clearance it was, but they got the FDA clearance to now deliver packages to your doorstep in the US. So I think a lot of the regulatory authorities are also now embracing these technologies, and I think we are living in a time where the go to market for these technologies is much faster, which actually brings me to my next question. I want to understand from you what the impact of these five technologies that you mentioned has actually been so far, because a lot of these technologies that are emerging technologies Gopal, which means that they we don’t know whether it has impacted at scale yet. So I would like to pick your brain from your experience on what is the level of impact that these technologies have had. Because a lot of companies are talking about PILOTs. Have companies actually embraced this technology at large scale? And if so, could you give us some examples.

Gopal R  21:23

So Prem, firstly, I think, irrespective of the region, I would say that these, these technologies, I wouldn’t call these as emerging, but these are probably, you know, there are emerging applications from a supply chain perspective, perhaps from a supply chain standpoint, these technologies are trying to look for new applications. So that’s where the readiness of the different applications might be different frame. So some applications could be very well entrenched. People wouldn’t think twice to quickly tell you from the top of their heads in terms of when you talk about blockchain or autonomous. But in some cases, it could have varying degrees of adoption. For example, you take the case of autonomous now, I would say, from a warehouse environment, the adoption may be different in different markets, but today, the robots in the warehouse have even created this new concept of warehousing called Dark warehouses, which means, you know, when they are Moving around, you don’t hit lights. And there are some food companies also which are using it because it actually, you know it, it ensures highest levels of hygiene, and consequently, they are able to demonstrate some additional value proposition to their customers, in terms of saying, is like even perfect case of COVID 19, they could say that it has not been touched by humans, for instance, like contactless handling, so things like that. So today, the robotic involvement from a intra logistics, which I call the moment within the warehouse, is actually picking up. Well, you know, there is no surprises here. But at the same time, if I were to look at autonomous applications in trucking right now, that is still at a pilot stage. For example, when I visited Germany, I saw a link between Frankfurt and downstairs, which is about an hour and a half outside of Frankfurt, where they were having a dedicated lane to have autonomous trucks between Frankfurt and downstairs, which will replace the trucks on the road. So which means this is more like a, you know, scheduled service between the two locations, so which you can book, and there are regular trucks which are actually applying those rules. And these are electric too. So which means on one side of the lane you have a, you know, electric, you know, connect, connectivity for these trucks, yeah, overhead connectivity for the trucks to apply. So that, I would say today, probably, you know, it is still in many places. It is at a pilot stage. In some, in some, some countries, it might be very challenging to even execute something like those.

Premsai Sainathan  24:40

What about IoT Gopal? Because there’s a lot of talk about IoT for from from from manufacturing standpoint, from from a logistics and supply chain standpoint, and you were also talking about multimodal shipments. So where the market in terms of IoT adoption when it comes to supply chain and logistics.

Gopal R  25:03

So like I was saying you, like I was explaining to you earlier the IoT adoption, we had seen some companies earlier in markets like Europe, which are already very well established beyond the pilot stage, and actually offering solutions for contain tracking, container moments. So probably, you know, there are certain geographic pockets where these companies are operating right now and again. You know the there are a lot of solutions which have come up in terms of reusability of these devices and etc, which makes, which is basically bringing down the cost of, you know, IoT applications and so on so. So even for IoT, or even blockchain, has been piloted by some leading shippers, shipping companies like Maersk and so on. So the I would say some of these technologies are at different levels of adoption depending on the application. Some applications might be at a nascent stage, or emerging stage, as you would term it. But some are actually in the process of gaining rapid adoption, because there is more value that one could actually derive. It is just a question of getting more or better economies of scale as well as you know, a lot of cases, you know, these are technology companies which are also actively seeking funding to expand and so on. So it’s like, you know, there’s they have to balance both sides of the coin, and you would see more of these develop in the near future frame.

Premsai Sainathan  26:55

Wonderful Gopal. So the blockchain that you talked about, for instance, could be a great solution for the same problem that you stated, where you have somebody entering something on a piece of paper, and then it goes through, not only does your parcel go now through a chain of custody, but your information is also going through a chain of custody, which is not verifiable.

Gopal R  27:20

So the most important aspect from blockchain perspective is the safe and secure transaction of the documentation or the contracts, and the fact that the respective people can actually deal with it without waiting for somebody else. So it is like, it is not a serial process, it’s a parallel process. So, which means a document could be cleared in two seconds or three seconds if all the people are working on it at the same time, and not like x plus y plus z is equal to, you know, so the greatly reduces transaction time. It simplifies, or rather it it keeps it very safe and secure and also but again, you know, in some instances, people feel, from a cost perspective, Blockchain is not something that they would approach it so quickly. So that’s why you will see that it is limited to very niche and very highly relevant applications. For example, slightly, you know, digressing from the logistics, Dubai Land Department plans to actually use blockchain to have all your land document. You know, land deeds on blockchain system so that, you know, you don’t need paper next time when somebody is buying and selling a property in Dubai, you know, it’s probably all electronic, and it is authorized by the buyer and the seller and the respective government departments that is involved. So which makes it extremely secure, right?

Premsai Sainathan  29:04

Wonderful Gopal, so you touched upon a very interesting point, which is the cost of scalability when you were talking about blockchain, for example. So can you tell us a little bit about how a company should be approaching ROI, what is the right? And I know this is your this is your space. And you know, you might actually be able to give us a lot of good guidance.

Gopal R  29:38

Sure, I think this is more about the transformation, and what makes sense from a transmit transformation. I would say, because everybody knows one needs to transform, but why and how? You know, I think that will be the primary question. So. Why, like I was at the start of the conversation, we spoke about, you know, in terms of the performance aspirations. This means, what do you want to get to? What is your performance aspiration? So that will actually, you know, drive that. But if you look at it from a holistic perspective, so you’re talking about three vertices of this whole construction. I would say one is a market, the other is the process, and then the customer, right? So the technology transformation revolves around these three key considerations by market, I would say, which is basically the regulatory angle as well as the competition, and by process, it will be internal as well as external, eventually delivering to the customer. So your technology transformation, or supply chain transformation, or digital transformation of the supply chain, whatever words you want to play with, but has to address the solution to the customer in a more simplistic manner. So which means, at the end of the day today, for instance, if you’re receiving a shipment, for example, you know things they are trying to make use of technology to simplify saying, click this link and you know and schedule your delivery. Now, there was one instance where a ship, you know, a delivery company sent me a link and said they wanted me to download some specific app and schedule it there. So that created, that is certainly not a simplification, or, you know, like I said, the transformation or the change, it doesn’t simplify. It is actually creating a further set of complication in that sense, yeah, process. So you need to look at these mainly two considerations. There’s a market as well as the process and your technology should eliminate some process, avoid redundancies, make it more efficient. And from a market perspective, look at how you can be better. In terms of competition, you can actually more simplistically, you know, adhere to, let’s say, regulatory processes and policy policies and so on, and eventually, delivering, you know, more convenient and cost effective solution to the customer. Probably, you know, people would say delivering value to the customer, but the value, I would want to just split it and say that it should be cost effective and it should it should simplify things today. If you look at any business today, it is actually going in the direction of trying to make things more simpler. For example, you take a look at, you know, the phones, for instance, the smartphones you know. So what iPhone has, or Apple has created, is that you can customize it, but we are making it very simple. So, you know, same, same goes for, you know, other brands like Samsung or anybody, for that matter, they have different models. In fact, they complicate little bit more, but you keep it simple so that that technology transformation is more effective at the end of the day. You know it has to deliver convenience, and you know, more efficiency in what you’re delivering, and at the end of the day, what I’m receiving as a customer, and the transformation need not always be paid for in full or created, you know, in full. Today, there is so many of these cloud based solutions which are available for you to, you know, for you to pick it up on a pay as you go basis, or on a monthly subscription basis and so on. So you can that also gives you the flexibility to change when there is somebody who is bringing in a newer version of the technology. So that’s a way, you know. Why would you want to do it? Look at the priorities. How do you want to do it? Gone are the days of, you know, like buying licenses and things like that. People are going in for, you know, let me try it for a few months, kind of an approach, and the onus is on the developer to make sure that there is constant changes.

Premsai Sainathan  34:40

I really like your point about simplicity and your example of Apple, because Apple completely got away with the feature of you having to close the app on your phone. So Apple always thought that close anything, the system takes care of it by itself. So. So really like that point. So coming to my next question, which I was very curious about when you talked about the ROI and how do you address the problem, make it more simple and make it cost effective for your cost effective for your customer, I also want to understand what are the new opportunities this brings, because we are playing in a very competitive space right now, post COVID. And very interesting. You talked about the the ambition of being, being a good, high performing enterprise. However, people are talking about surviving, right? So do you think the survival period is over? Number one and number two, if the survival period is over and if you come out surviving of the surviving from the pandemic, what are the new opportunities you should explore using technology as a backbone in your whole supply chain transformation process.

Gopal R  36:07

Yeah, yeah. Certainly, the change that we are seeing is more in terms of rebuilding and re establishing so it’s no longer the survival mode. Perhaps I would say the last, you know, three, four months have been, you know, quite a bit of a survival mode. But I think beginning August, I think you will see more of people, you know, building up the curve. So some of the things that you know, I would probably like to, you know, cluster my response as for two different segments. One is the logistics service provider. The other is in terms of the manufacturer or the logistics or a supply chain user. So from a manufacturing perspective, you’ll see that people have realized the beyond the traditional channels, there is new channels, you know, to reach out to the customers, which they had not prioritized significantly, which can actually give you, as people call it, exponential growth, you know, by using technology. So that is number one, people will start you will start seeing, you know, more of selling through this new channels. The second thing is, in terms of digital transformation. So this is the pandemic has taught us the relevance of, you know, being digitally transformed today, for example, zoom and teams. You know, these are all not luxuries, but these are essentials for the business, right? Previously, we never realized the it was an option. It was not mandatory. Now it is mandatory, right? So the digital transformation is critical. Then the third thing is, in terms of empowering their e commerce business, today, you’ll see that a lot of enterprises will get into the space of trying to empower e commerce of brands, because today, those brands suffered some reputation issues, some delivery issues when they were part of a platform, for example. So today, a lot of brands are saying, I want to build my own e commerce platform. So that is, you know, that will be another shift that you would see then sourcing rethink today we already seen, you know, when we were making certain presentations a couple months back during the start of the pandemic, in terms of how the COVID 19 impacts the entire supply chain and logistics business. One of the things that we realized was in the month of, I think, just in the month of February or March, the inability of some of the European countries not being able to complete their production due to lack of the components from the from sources like China, left gaps, to the extent of, you know, close to $50 billion in trade For some of the leading economies in a month. So this is because the entire supply chain. If you look at China, they have created that they were so significant as part of the entire supply chain. So now you you start seeing that people are trying to hedge that. Risk and diversifying the supply base to other countries. A lot of economies have been very vocal in actually shifting their supply base from places like China to some places in Southeast Asia as well as even India. And there is active discussions that is going on by some of the leading Asian manufacturers in relocating their production to some of these countries. The other most important factor is workplace approach. Today, the entire workplace approach has changed. We people are sitting anywhere you can. You can collaborate quickly, at, you know, at like, you know, a fraction of a second and then see each other and get things done. And from a logistics service provider perspective, they have realized that the scalability compared to the traditional model is not like I buy 10 trucks to, yes, we know what other you know, X percent of the business, but they say that I deploy this particular technology to actually make my three people 6x you know, in terms of productivity and logistics. Of these providers are also looking at trying to look at the entire value chain of the customers, and not just limited to what they know best, and taking it to different customers. So today, for example, if somebody knows electronics logistics, somebody knows food, logistics. They used to take that to another food company. They used to take that to another electronics company, which was a traditional model. There, your growth is limited. But today they go to the same customer and say, what else can I help you with? The customer says, Yeah, you do the logistics, but I need somebody to do the repackaging as well as combine the you know, like, yeah, you know, like freebies for a promotional period, and also, you know, like, collect my money and so on. So they actually go along the entire product life cycle. Then there are a lot of solutions. Now, companies have realized that SMEs are very important because, you know, most economies, smaller medium enterprises, accounts for at least about 97 to 98% in terms of the number of companies, but you are focused on this two or 3% of the companies. Consequently, if those two or 3% of the companies falls, then you have a significant challenge. So instead, people look at that 98% and say, How can I actually provide my services to the SMEs at a more cost effective, you know, basis. And finally, you know, from a logistic service provider standpoint, people have always claimed, oh, I’m I have a global network. I have this partner, that partner, you know, across the globe and so on so forth. But this pandemic actually made them realize that their ties regionally and globally are not so solid. They are suddenly they were alone, and that is where I think some of these logistic service providers how, or at least they should be working towards establishing better networks regionally and globally, so that at least when they have a trough period, they are at least they get some volumes to sustain their business, which can be to the extent of 20, 30% from other markets and so on. So this is my would be my final thought in terms of what you know I feel as the growth opportunities from both logistic service provider standpoint as well as the supply chain perspective from a manufacturing standpoint,

Premsai Sainathan  43:37

Wonderful Gopal. And this brings us to one of my our experiences working with some airlines where now, because of visibility and visibility that is advertised, some of the passenger carriers are now able to very easily offer the same level of transparency in shipping cargo, which was actually the specialty of cargo airline providers. So I completely agree with you that you know this is going to bring a lot of new opportunities, and the best way that companies can approach it is through a lot of lateral thinking. So coming to my final question, Gopal is we talked a lot about supply chain transformation and the technologies that drive it. So I think more than you leading the supply chain transformation consulting team, I think you actually become technologists yourself. But this question is more about Tell me one of your experiences where technology has not solved a problem or actually been solved very easily without using technology. Have you experienced anything like that?

Gopal R  44:51

Yeah, there is a small story I don’t know, from which organization. But this is more of, you know, you know, common sense, in fact, you know my view is, like I was telling you this example of, you know, my own experience of, you know, how technology should be, so it shouldn’t end up complicating lives, but it should simplify. So one story that comes to my mind is, you know, like, once it was this shop floor, once there was this, this company manufacturing soaps, they received a lot of complaints that they found empty, you know, soap boxes, when the customers are buying it, they realize that, oh, they bought a pack of three. Then there was, there wasn’t any soup in one of the cartons. So it went back, and the manager, the head of the organization, brought in all the people and said, we have this unique challenge where our quality control is not so good, so we are missing swaps from the cartons. So he said, No, let’s reward employees who are able to come up with some creative solution. So then the next day, somebody walks up to him, a technician lady, she says, so I’m from the manufacturing team, and I have a small solution for you on this one. I said, What is the solution? She said, Finally, after this whole packaging is done, the conveyor, as a conveyor moves and finally gets picked up in terms of lots of three or six or 12. So she said, I’m going to place a fan next to the conveyor. So it’s a simple solution. So which means that when there is no soap, they adjust the speed such that, you know, the empty cartons actually flies away. So which means it doesn’t reach the customer, right? So it’s a very simple, common sense approach. I think, at the end of the day, this is this, this is an example of how can you make things simple, if you are presenting and technology, and the first thing, if somebody starts saying that, you know, we are very unique, and we are very different, and we are, we are, I think then you probably have to pause and really look at, you know, what they are trying to do, but somebody is coming and trying to give you a simple solution and say, Look, I’m trying to solve this particular problem, then it would make lot more of an interesting business case, as as opposed to some technology, which is trying to reinvent the same wheel, but coming up with a different team and, you know, different sort of tools. So that’s some non-technology solution for you, Prem.

Premsai Sainathan  47:51

Excellent, Gopal. That was a very interesting story, and I think it makes total sense that problem solving comes first. So to summarize our entire conversation, I think what we gathered from this is that supply chain transformation is not a big change, it’s small changes, which you take, take, take on the different inefficiencies and problems that you find in your supply chain. The second takeaway that that I really registered from this chat is that there are five technologies which are, namely, IoT, Blockchain, autonomous analytics and cloud, which are the which are the drivers of supply chain transformation in a large way. And the third takeaway, really, for me, which was most interesting was that when you’re actually looking at deploying these technologies, you don’t need a whole IT team to come in and do this for you, because a lot of them are actually offering a pay as you go and on demand model, and you could use it specifically to solve your problem. And the last and more interesting takeaway, at least for me, was your passionate thoughts about simplicity and the fact that don’t use technology when you don’t need to like with the example you gave. So thank you, Gopal, wonderful, and we look forward to chatting with you some other time down the future. Appreciate your time.

Gopal R  49:21

Thank you so much to the Roambee team, as well as the rest of the team, and to Prem for this interesting dialog in terms of starting with the supply chain, ending with, you know, a tradition, you know traditional way of solving the problem. So thanks for this opportunity.

Scott Mears  49:45

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.