AI and Holistic Strategies Lead Supply Chain Talks at ASCM Conference

Hey, everybody, and welcome to a very special episode of hammer down on the market scale network. My name is Mike Bush. I'll be your host for this episode. So a couple weeks ago, we had Evesh Knozzi, the CEO of the a ISCM, Association of Supply Chain Managers, join the show and talk about what to expect at his upcoming conference. So this is part two of that, and we're actually gonna be on-site at the conference walking around talking to people. They actually brought me a moderated panel, which is pretty crazy, and I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks so much for watching. So so, Kareem Kapoori, you're my first repeat guest on Hammer Down. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you too. Appreciate it. So ASCM happening. Yes. What's been the turnout so far? What are you but what are you excited about? I mean, it's great. It's Austin, Texas. I mean, first of all, it's wonderful to be out here. You have so much innovation, unique, ideas. People, they're getting together to talk about best practices and what's gonna be happening in the future supply chain. So you really wanna be at an event like this because it gets your, you know, ear to the ground of what's new and what's coming. Sure. How's the book being received? You know, it's going really, really well. You know, supply chain ups and downs, we talked about it a little bit together. The idea behind this book, more than anything else, is to just give a very holistic a to c perspective of the entire supply chain. You have a lot of students that are here. Actually, our neighbor next door is from Michigan State. They run a lot of, graduate programs and undergraduate programs. You've got, business people that don't know a lot about supply chain, and then you've got even those that are in supply chain that have a bit of a siloed view and are looking for a more expansive view. So, the table's been busy. People have been coming around, and, it's been it's been really good so far. What's been the most exciting thing you've seen or the coolest thing you've seen? And you can't say the puppies. Yeah. No. What did I see that was really, really neat? I like I like I get a little nerdy about some of, like, the risk mitigation stuff. Moody's is over here, which is kinda cool. I like a company like that. You know, what's a little strange to me, but I think kind of an innovative thing is that a lot of the speakers are using those, like, headsets. Oh, yeah. So it's like you walk by it and it's really, really quiet. But but I guess it's really good to kinda transmit the information that way. And I I like that level of technology. It's kinda cool like that. I get you. Did you catch, Arianna Huffington? I stopped by. You know, we've been running things here at the table, which has been a little bit busy. But generally speaking, I mean, I heard she was great. I I don't did you did you get a chance to I thought I thought she was a really interesting choice. Yes. You know, not not from a supply chain background, but she went up and kind of she hit home on a lot of quality of life things. Yes. Like, we we work twenty four seven. We all know we bring up our test for our phone. She did a really great job of kinda saying, hey. It's okay to take a break. You know? It's okay to sharpen the ax, and and you're gonna be more effective in in doing that. And you know what I think is really interesting? I had one gentleman who came around here to the table. We'd sort of talk with someone. He goes, you know what the supply chain means? A lot of people that are not from the supply chain. And I said, okay. I said, why don't you tell me a little bit more about that? They said, well, you know, he's like, we just need perspectives. He's like, we need to have a a bigger vision than what we've known in order to know how we can improve and grow and develop. So I thought that was pretty cool. You know, coming to ASCM, you may not see as many people that are not from supply chain. Right. Of course. But at the same time too, I thought it was interesting. Yeah. It's, you know, it's funny. My my buddy, Reid Reid Laszlo, who does the please advise hats, you've probably seen Oliver Dina. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He, he's got this theory that, oh, supply chain people are only friends with supply chain people because we're the only ones that know what the hell we're talking about. Correct. Correct. So funny to me. Like, you think about it. I love I love the perspective of Yeah. I mean, you know, it can get a little bit insular and that and that's also, like, again, one of the reasons why I wrote this because I wanted it to be, it's not necessarily layman's terms, but it's something that is an easy read. People can really just kinda kinda get a good sense of it. And why not? I mean, supply chain impacts so many things of what we do every single day. You know? You're you're walking around, and you don't know why there aren't goods on the shelves at Walmart or one of your favorite stores. You know, you wanna know why food prices are skyrocketing or whatever may be happening in our just day to day lives, it's supply chain. So, you know, to to have a really kind of, easy take on that, you know, whether it's a book or what you read or or what you're looking at online, I think it's super important today. Alright. So guys, tell me a little bit about Kinaxis. Absolutely. So Kinaxis is a cloud based platform, that is essentially designed for supply chain planning and supply chain execution. And so when you put those two schools of thought together, we call it supply chain orchestration. We've been in the industry for a little over forty years, underpinned by AI and ML for the past ten to fifteen or so. A little over fifty plus patents in the space. But, essentially, what we go after is bringing visibility to the plat bringing visibility to the enterprise, along multiple kind of facets of the business, whether it's demand, supply, inventory, or all the way through transportation and order management. So when customers are trying to figure out different problems and understand ways to solve, we use a a patented technique called concurrency to essentially create scenarios and do, what if analysis for you to solve for different constraints within your supply chain. So when you talk about concurrency and Mhmm. You basically running simulations as to when something could go wrong with that. Mhmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. You wanna take that one? Yeah. So when we talk talk about concurrency, it's really a a methodology. So we're able to run things in real time, and we it's kind of like a brain. So you're able to run things in real time, and then when a risk does pop up, our software actually will alert, the user that there may be an issue, or an issue to plan for. And then we're able to create a complete digital twin of our supply chain and then run multiple scenarios, to really make the best ROI decisions on every aspect of your supply chain and the health of the company. Absolutely. And the the whole point of the scenario analysis, right, is as you work in these different sandboxes and understand the different drivers to your business, you can then see the scorecarding at the end. And so you see, okay. My margin was impacted by this in scenario a baseline versus this new scenario where we picked up a new customer. Right? And so being able to kinda forward plan and use that, that sandbox to plan for different situations makes the kind of resilience much more achievable than it is today with spreadsheets and kinda outdated architecture. Example, I mean, we're talking about scenarios. Right? Like, things that could go wrong. And what or any other kind of here's a here's a scenario type of thing that we would help with that. Absolutely. So, I'd say one specific let's say you're a high-tech, manufacturer that's developed that's bringing in wafers from overseas. Right? And then all of a sudden you're planning, everything looks good, and then boom, disruption. Right? There's a there's a strike. Right? Or there's something going on with the Taiwan, you know, pack legal agreements, things like that. So you can start to model a, this this this lane was disrupted, this man this plant was shut down. So you can go into the system live software and say, okay. This is my required quantity is still a thousand, but output is at at zero and so once you're able to model that it says okay your new available dates for this and then we actually have some series of pre built playbooks so you can do an alternate source you can do third shift you can do different plays to understand what the most optical out optimal outcome is from that. What I'm gonna ask you about should I have? What are the main benefits of what we do? Okay. Oh. I think really so why I got into supply chain technology, is I I'm very much so so I fell into technology. I fell into supply chain space as well. I do have family in supply chain, but also I was in multifacet of the supply chain before I landed, in the holistic. But my really passion for the software is really to be able to see fully, transparently everything, the health of the company. So it's almost like as a parent, I wanna see that my child is doing well, but also, you know, as business, you know, contributors and whatnot, we wanna know that our contributions are sound. And really technology of this nature allows us to see that intangible results. So Alright. So the final question I have to have you ask is, if you're talking to your younger self or maybe a newer recent college grad, what's the piece of advice you give? I say start early. Start now. Put down the beer and get to work. I, you know, one thing I I really encourage, especially especially even younger people to do, is a lot of now our culture is about the end result, and not understanding where it came from and how it's getting there, and how many steps and passes that there are in supply chain. So it's not a limited field. There are so many things that you can do within supply chain and explore, specialize in, and it's a really neat world. Matthew, tell me about Apex Analytics. So Apex Analytics has been in business for thirty five years. K. So it started in accounts payable recovery audit space, and no one at the show knows what that is. But bay or maybe you do. So I'm gonna I I wanna guess. So what what was it the exact reason? Accounts payable recovery audit. Okay. Accounts payable recovery audit. So that means I'm guessing AP has paid people that they shouldn't have paid, and they're trying to get their money back. Very, very close. They just Good. They paid the right people. They just paid them too many times Got it. Or too much. And we do that we're actually the largest provider that for commercial accounts payable recovery audits in the world. We have at any given moment two hundred audits going on, and we find millions and millions of dollars for our clients. All very large enterprise clients with lots of spend. And so these small errors add up to millions. Sure. And about ten years ago, one of our clients is a large media company. They said, we have trouble onboarding and manage our managing our suppliers and the compliance required for those suppliers because there's suppliers across the globe. And we built Apex portal to remove all the email exchanges between the vendor management team to get the required documents. And we took all those compliance requirements and put them into an online portal that suppliers can fill out their information, and we validate their data, like tax ID, diversity status, bank account information, because we've integrated with thousand data sources. So what this does is it allows you to collect as much information they need on suppliers and keep it accurate, So then you can identify any risk in your channels and then really protect your company. Okay. Now this is gonna be a bit of a an odd question for you, because freight fraud has become like a multibillion dollar industry. Are you guys living in that? Are you helping to eliminate freight fraud, or are you looking at solely kind of human error or machine error in terms of what you're provide what you're providing customers? So I'm not too familiar with freight fraud. So the fraud that we typically help prevent against, which is a driving reason why we people choose to go to Apex portal, is really payment fraud or, business email compromise. So hackers are impersonating suppliers, creating fake supplier accounts, and then submitting invoices. And so we have a layers of protection approach to preventing that. One is just removing the emails. You have a supplier going into a portal. You're tracking the IP address. Password protected. You can have passwordless. And then, you know, steps within the portal to make sure there's controls, security questions. You gotta include the previous bank account information to update it. And all these steps, we also include bank account ownership validation in multiple different countries. So you're actually connecting with the bank and then validating that the legal entity and your vendor master is legal entity in the bank. So that's the fraud that we prevent. Okay. And, you know, fraud event can easily be a million or ten million dollars. These are the stories I regularly hear in off the, you know, not public conversations. Of course. Okay. And, and so we drive a lot of value in really protecting companies, but then removing a ton of efficiencies inefficiencies of managing suppliers. Okay. Gotcha. So, basically, if I'm in the AP space, I should be talking to you guys to make sure that, one, the stuff I'm paying is what should be paid? Correct. Two, it's paid on time, accurately, and to a real person? Yes. So you're not gonna necessarily get an email from you guys are gonna validate whether the prints in Nigeria exists. Is that the way to think of it? They don't exist. They don't? Yes. But, yes, we will validate that. And, all of our clients are large and it's all global. So it's hard to validate it in real time, if you're doing it manually. And that's where you have to automate it. Okay. Awesome. Matthew, what happened I asked you that I should have? I don't know. That's okay. No worries. Oh, wait. Okay. I spoke earlier today. You can ask me what did I speak about. What did you talk about today? So today, I wanted to talk a little bit about data from clients. And we have a thousand data sources, and some of them are, you know, OFAC or sanctions list. And so I actually looked at, clients and data and it really said, no matter your size, whether it's six thousand or sixty four thousand of data I presented, you're gonna have a, you know, point one or point five percent of companies coming on the sanctions list. So do you know that is happening? And this is just one data point that, one data point that can help protect your company because I looked at OFAC fines for twenty twenty three, and there's seventeen fines allotted. And it totaled one point five billion. So if you are working with a, company that's on a sanction list and you don't know about it because some sub subsidiary or company that you just acquired was doing it, you have to voluntarily disclose that to OFAC, and you could be fined significantly. So it's happening in every company, whether you're six thousand or sixty thousand suppliers, and it's insanely impossible to track it. Got it. Matthew, one of my favorite questions asked, I guess, is if you're talking to a new or recent college grad who says, I'm thinking about supply chain. What's what's the piece of advice you give them? So go talk to people who are in the job right now. Go talk to a supply chain manager. You come to a show. I I go to a lot of different shows, and there's always students here and there. It's important to go talk to people to understand what the role is, but there's different areas. Different industries are gonna require different things. So I highly recommend finding people that you can talk to and get advice and help you clear that path to that role. One thing I would say that I didn't know within this supply chain space, you're really, you know, making change. Because if you're a big company and you implement certain requirements that are gonna make sure there's no child labor or it's gonna, create less carbon, these things can have a great impact and long lasting. So it can be a really interesting point today in supply chain. And, it's only more this focus right now because of COVID, you know, it's it's an interesting interesting space to be. Go find mentors, and you can make change in large companies. Awesome. Appreciate you. What does Traub is essentially a modernized version of a staffing agency matching light industrial companies with labor. Okay. Got it. So am I thinking this through the right way that I'm if I if I run a warehouse, I've got seasonal needs for staff, I approach you guys in order to staff up, or is it something beyond? So it's everything on the spectrum from kind of last minute contingent labor all the way through to more long term staffing up for either longer seasons or preparing your full time staff. Okay. Why why go through you guys and not a recruiter? Yeah. It's a great question. A recruiter. Yeah. So it really comes down to the ability to match the right worker with the role. Yeah. So from us being able to not only onboard a different pool of people, onboard a wider pool of people through different sources of recruiting, but it's also tracking all the data after associates start working. Okay. So it's really building up a real world performance resume, creating a true meritocracy, in contingent labor, which really hasn't existed before Got it. Okay. To match the people to the role. So, presumably, like, if if I think about you guys, you probably have two types of competitors realistically. Right? Like, there's recruiting firms. Yep. But there's also kind of a new showing. Right? Like, where do you run into folks like Lean Solutions Group or run into the folks that are kind of saying, hey. Look. You know, we can get you we can get you outsourced labor for for less. It's one of the things that since we only focus on light industrial labor, it's more kind of going head to head with the traditional staffing agency approach. Okay. Really all the distribution, diploma, manufacturing that's currently onshore. Okay. How did you end up here? What got you into this field? Yeah. So I was in high level management consulting focused specifically on industrials when I started my career Okay. And spent a year consulting for a large packaging manufacturer. And when we were interviewing their customers, think Amazon, HelloFresh, Spirit Halloween k. About the future of tape and packaging, the conversations always came back to challenges with labor. Got it. And so when I was thinking about making a switch, thinking about kind of building from a true needle moving company, came across Trauba. It was an immediate light bulb that, like, yes. This is a true product market fit. Okay. Very cool. Well, you know, if I think about the kind of, like, the coolest things you've accomplished, or what what are what are the things and I I I think I know where you're going. It's because I have I've seen that smile. Yeah. What what are what are things that that get you excited about going a job? What what are kind of the coolest things you've accomplished there? Yeah. I've been so amazed by the real world impact. I mean, honestly, the bar for contingent staffing, traditional temporary labor agencies is absolutely on the floor. Yeah. And so to have kind of that see that mistrust, go in, share how we're different, and then see it work in real time Got it. And really, again, increase that productivity, decrease costs, and provide real career opportunities for entry level associates. Like, all those coming together really excites me every day. Speaking of entry level, sis. Yep. So let's say you run into a kid who's just graduated college. Yep. I wanna go work in a supply chain. Yep. What's a piece of advice you give them? Just jump in. On the surface, it could seem like a non sexy industry. Right? Like, it's one of those things that it doesn't have all the public bells and whistles. But when you get in under the under the hood Right. It is honestly everything that drives not only the country, but the world. And the real world impact you have is absolutely incredible. The problem solving and the challenges you deal with is, absolutely incredible and impactful. And so, being able to really jump in and do that, that doesn't it. So I know Danny told you that we were gonna do this. Yep. Is there any talking point you you were like, man, I gotta make sure I hit on this and I haven't given a chance yet. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that, I think in this industry, people get very caught in their ways. They're happy with a long lasting relationship. Right? Or if they have the mentality if something's not broken, don't fix it. Sure. Rather than thinking about how we can really raise the bar, increase productivity, think about new ways to incentivize or recruit new types of talent, and even just thinking about kind of bringing the younger generation into supply chain, you need to think about things like gamification. Thinking about nontraditional incentives, especially especially at the entry level labor point. Things like daily pay, consistency bonuses, on time arrival bonuses can make a world of difference even if it ends up being the same cost versus kind of that that annual bonus. So Sure. Thinking about how to approach it in a way that the the new generation gets excited about and then wants to start their career from the bottom in supply chain. Very cool. Awesome. Appreciate it, man. Yeah. Thank you. Arturo, what company are you with? I run Vintagium Data Consulting. Me and my partner were started, this company around seven years ago. Okay. And what does what what do you do? Well, we help companies make the most out of their data. We're specialized in enterprise analytics tailored to supply chain problems. Okay. So one of the I think it was the third biggest supply chain trend of twenty twenty four according to ASCM is gonna be big data. Why Yes. Why is everybody thinking about this? Well, I think nowadays, there's, more access to data across the entire supply chain. It's not only companies having more internal data that they can use to make decisions, it's also third party data that now can be used to enhance their decision making, their decision process, forecasting models, and a bunch of other things that can help with their decision intelligence. So when you're talking decision intelligence and, you know, layering in other data, there's lots of different ways that can work. Right? That can be, hey. We we're keeping we're layering in weather data to understand that there's gonna be a particularly stormy season on the East Coast type of thing. So we'll have our our vessels avoid that. There's also, you know, far more, I guess, granular prescriptive type of things. Where where can the where do you live in that in that world? So what what we do there, seems to be around, like, nonsense. Okay. So when it comes to third party data, there's a lot of more data points around ZIP code level data or even a county level data that you can use to enhance your forecast and enhance your decision making so that you can have the right inventory flowing in as as things are are evolving. So you can manage your inventory in a way that makes more sense. So whenever the amount is going down in one zip code, but the amount is going up in another one, you can react faster because you have visibility on what's happening at the edge. Got it. Okay. So you're you're kind of in that inventory planning slash optimization space. Is that right? That's right. Okay. Very Mhmm. Very cool. So how did you get into that? I got into this in around I think it was around, like, fifteen years ago. I fell into, like, the eight. I went into manufacturing, and then I started realizing there was this big thing called supply chain. Right. And I wanted to get into humanitarian logistics. Okay. So I started, like, pushing my career towards that, learning about supply chain, doing a bunch of online classes, certifications, that sort of thing, until I ended up doing humanitarian logistics. But when I went into humanitarian logistics, I realized what I really liked was data. Okay. Gotcha. So So cofounded the company. Right? Yeah. Okay. I stopped working for the UN and then started my own started my own company with my founder. That that's amazing. Very cool. So one of the questions I ask everybody that comes on the show is if you're talking to a new or recent college grad, who says, I'm thinking about supply chain. What's the piece of advice you give them? I think supply chain poses just like a great challenge to keep on evolving as a person because you get all the technical problems, like technology and math and having to do, very hardcore technical solutions. But you also get the people problems. So you get to develop yourself as a as a person, as a leader. You have to interact with people. So I think post is a great opportunity to to evolve in all areas of life. So I think it's a great field to get into. Arturo, if people wanna find out about your company, find out more, what's the best way to do so? LinkedIn. So that or the website, dentation dot com. Alright. Alright. Terrific. Thank you, sir. Thank you. We make software that helps reduce waste with performance, and resilience in, external supply chains, particularly in in sort of the manufacturing activities there. Okay. So when you say software that reduces waste Yeah. Are we talking physical waste? Are we talking, you know, Lean Six Sigma? What are we talking about? Yeah. It's it's time waste. It's also material waste. It could be time for people who are doing planning, managing production, scheduling, managing the capacity of their operations, but it also is material waste as well too. So by improving visibility into inventory, in transit or on hand status, this type of stuff, and tying that back into planning systems, you're being bit better able to make decisions that are more optimal reduce waste. So do I have it right at the visibility software layered on top of productivity? Is that kind of the way it's You're pretty close. Yeah. I'm starting starting high level and then going in. But, there's sort of kind of two main main parts of it. One's more on the shop floor. So, like, in the four walls of a manufacturing environment, managing production inventory, scheduling this type of stuff. But there's also, a component which is multi enterprise for for collaboration essentially because we see the problem of making supply chains more efficient being like a multi enterprise problem. So it's not just about those manufacturers, but also how well they coordinate with their customers or also their own material suppliers. So, we we And and we're doing we're we're going to be on Google Sheet. Is that right? Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, purpose built solution for helping, provide that sort of single pane of glass shared single version of the truth for forecast, capacity, orders, and all of really the changes along the way because I'm sure as as you know and some of your audience knows, supply chain variability is is, like, the reality now. So as things change all the time, the supply chains the supply plans change, the demand plans change, and keeping those in sync is actually, a lot of work and pretty challenging. In terms of customer feedback, I'm I'm guessing customer love you, etcetera, etcetera. What has been sort of the coolest or most interesting use case that that some customers said, I can't believe you helped us find this or you helped helped us a whole minute pack? There's been a lot of interest in our capacity collaboration, capacity and forecast collaboration. So basically bringing, forecast for months out potentially into what finished products are they're expecting. Those are changing, and then those gradually progress into, you know, firm orders, but those firm orders are not really that firm. They're they're actually changing quite a bit up to weeks or days before. But then synchronizing that up with the capacity across different external manufacturers, which they haven't had good visibility into forever, kind of, other than phone calls or spreadsheets. So that's that's been the area of particular interest. Kevin, how'd you get into this? It's funny. So I'm one of the yeah. I'm one of the founders, like, twenty plus years ago. You know, we, we started the company. I had not sort of dreamed all along of from, like, a young boy to, to be getting into supply chain, but we really liked challenging problems and and solving things that needed solving, hadn't been solved before we started the company kind of out of the the dot com boom where there was a lot of, you know, maybe software and websites that really didn't maybe solve a really important problem. And and we kind of reacted to that and and and got very well. We thought there was real interesting problems to solve and and white space things that needed to be fixed. So yeah. If, if you wanna get in touch, how do they do so? LinkedIn is a great way. Kevin Wong is a pretty common name, but you throw Nulogy, n u l o g y in there, you'll find me. And, that's probably the best way these these days, to reach out. I try to check-in there and and respond. Alright. So final question I ask every guest. Yeah. If you're talking to a new or recent college grad who says, I'm thinking about supply chain. Yeah. What what piece of advice would you give them? I think, you know, people don't realize it. Maybe a little more now than before the pandemic, but it's it's how the whole world works and how everything gets to your your dinner table, into your bathroom before you brush your teeth in the morning or or or at night. And people take it for granted, but as as we've learned more and more over the past few years when that's not working, the whole world kinda grinds to stop or prices skyrocket. So you can solve really, you know, important problems and and really have a have a challenge there. And industry totally needs, bright young people who are really willing to shake things up, maybe break the status quo, bring in new thinking, new technologies, and and, make things a lot better. I know your your PR team preps you for interviews, and I love that. Is there any question I didn't ask you that they had you prepped for or any talking point you wanted to hit on? They mentioned what kind of challenges we're facing. But but What what what are you solving for, basically? Some of the challenges we see, I mean, I think interesting some of it is around change management and and culture change. So, you know, it's it's hard for for people to, you know, change their own businesses, let alone, trying to influence change within their external suppliers. So I think one of the things that we we really work on is helping customers understand it's really not that not hard or intimidating. There's, like, a process to doing this and and ways to sort of eat the whale one bite at a time. So we try to help customers understand that and also not sort of have a traditional thinking of seeing that, you know, they should have one solution that solves all of their supply chain and maybe procurement problems, but really kinda break it down to be specific about what kind of, solutions you need to solve specific use cases because, that's the future of of software, not just in supply chain. It's it's more, the ecosystem of solutions that that work together really well, and the technology is totally there to be able to to do that now. So, that's that's one of the things that that we're always trying to advocate for in our in our business. Love it. Thanks, man.