[Music] welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today i'm laura one of the micromasters in sem program course lead here at the mit center for transportation and logistics today i'm co-hosting this live event with my colleague calvin betts who is also a course lead at the micromaster program and we're fortunate to have today mr adam jane with us adam is the vice president for north america surface transportation at ch robinson one of the world's largest logistic platform companies welcome adam and thank you for joining us today thank you for having me awesome we are so grateful for having you so everyone in the audience if you have been here before you know that we love to kick off our events with some pools so we want to go for it now we will ask you why are you here today we want to meet you and learn more about you so i'm launching the first poll hopefully you can see it well maybe kellen can confirm that and so the questions are whether you want to learn about digital supply chains if you want to learn more about logistics in general in supply chain or how to deal with complexity so why we let that be populated by our audience i will go to kellen for the agenda of this session hi everyone so to start the session laura and i will be asking adam some questions about his personal journey as a supply chain professional and learn some about the opportunities and challenges he's experienced in logistics industry the last 15 minutes we'll save for your questions and please use the webinar q a the zoom q a function there that button on the bottom to ask your questions love to see introductions and and discussion in the chat but please use that q a function for questions so we can keep track of them and be sure you're logged in with the name we won't be reading any anonymous questions we'll also share another poll during the event so please prepare to participate and so let me let's check on the results of that first poll there can share the results here awesome so the question was why are we here today we see lots of interest across the board i'm curious about the paradox of digital should be very fascinating topic i'm looking forward to discussion as well i want to see how technology can help improve my supply chain performance that's great to know we'll have some great insights to share there as well also love to see some micromasters and scm students who don't miss any of our events that's awesome i'm great to see you here as well um so with that i'm laura are you ready to kick it off yeah let's go for it so adam asks helen just say we want to know more about your journey as a supply chain professional so we know that you have over 20 years of experience in the logistics industry from managing business development overseeing intermodal operations in business uh marketing and sales and solution design so you have been everywhere until you became vice president of surface transportation for a major company so i would love to start asking how you think your professional journey shaped you as a supply chain chain professional and how was it like to grow from a very operational or tactical perspective to a very strategic one now sure well i would go way back so prior to starting with robinson my undergraduate degrees are in english and history from a liberal arts school in illinois illinois wesleyan university and i was hired straight out of robinson from school without having taken a single business course or having no understanding of the term logistics or supply chain and so you might scratch your head well how in the world have what's been appropriate in terms of your education to allow you to develop in the supply chain realm and i think a lot of the soft skills and particularly if you think about some of the things that you teach and have your students think about have been highly highly important to to my development so i think about just the liberal arts education itself in this broad diverse cross-functional world of learning across many different segments of knowledge and trying to understand how they fit together an ability to communicate i wrote lots of papers and those turned into many supply chain conversations on emails and phone calls and in meeting rooms an ability to analyze you know you got to use a lot of analytical skills when you're reading a shakespeare play or a thomas pension novel and trying to make sense of that um an ability to argue um everything was in an argument in those two majors so i was constantly debating and persuading and that's really fed into things like business case construction and supply chain realm and storytelling and i could go on and on where the the things i learned in my undergraduate program actually set me up really well for development i've been really fortunate to work for a company ch robinson that's allowed for my development beyond that so i have since received a couple of certifications from ascm which is formerly apex both the cscp and cltd certifications and and i recently finished the micromasters and so the last 20 years has been a combination of a lot of experiential learning and internal mentoring and coaching combined with some formal training and like i said robinson has been a great place to support my development and continued professional growth and as i think about the last 20 years it's amazing to think about how we've evolved and changed and the market itself is transformed but robinson today is a key driver of digital transformation in our industry we deliver the supply chain of the future through automation artificial intelligence data-driven algorithms predictive technologies in fact robinson labs which is really our tech incubator that creates and tests and scales a lot of these big ideas we have over a thousand data scientists engineers and developers now on staff which just boggles my mind from 20 years ago when i started as an english and history major coming out and all of us were just really in the business to thinking now we have people like data scientists and engineers and resources like that it's pretty fun awesome well thank you we're very privileged to have you and share your time and expertise with us today very excited to have a micromasters alumni with us here today also i'm super excited about that so thank you again for participating and maybe let's just dive into it and maybe just dive into writing like our focus of the topic today and we're here to talk about what's that we call the digital or the paradox of digital i'm really tie into some of that digital technologies um that you just mentioned um so maybe would you share with our audience how you would define this paradox of digital maybe how it relates to supply chain operations sure the paradox of digital the i think the subtitle was something around people processes and technologies and i think that is really where the paradox comes in so the first paradox that i would think about is that digital means people and you might say huh um you know i think many people when they hear digital they think things like or they hear things like reduction in workforce or that automation will allow for uh for more to be done with less and and there there's some truth in that and certainly um that that statement does like i said have some truth behind it but i also think to have a really effective digital product the big disruption to talent is the need to upskill and renew the talent to evaluate the types of resources needed and make sure that you have the right talent to be able to execute the digital future the truth is in order to get digital off the ground and embedded into the culture you're going to need first of all people that are capable of working in the system so you have to have some tactical users that actually understand how to interact with the new digital platforms but then also the resources that can both build and set up the connections and then the ones that can continuously calibrate those connections you also have to have people that can interpret the output of those connections to identify insights and improvements and you need project managers that can corral all the resources working on the developments and then of course strong leadership that can work across functions to embrace the change prep new processes that will ultimately enable the digital transformation to be successful the second piece of it so digital means people but digital also means processes and again sometimes i think words like automation digital connections etc all seem to sound like things are flowing seamlessly or in other words digital will disrupt and replace poor processes however that digital can mean complexity lots of connections multiple systems lack of adoption you also think about terms like big data and visibility and information and those are all very exciting terms and can lead to exciting outcomes but sometimes i think information can come in the forms of misinformation and too much information as well and as digital connections grow and data sets expand and it begins to beg the question of what really is information it's the idea of identifying the signal through the noise because given the complexity we discussed oftentimes data that we review is wrong it's incomplete it's miscoded it's disparate or in the rare cases where you have a really great data set sometimes there's just so much of it that it leads to indecision because people don't know where to start and so i think without great processes the automation the analytics and the data won't come to life and so this requires focus it requires standardization and it requires a commitment to an architecture that ties the strategic with the tactical thank you adam so i loved how you mentioned that of identifying the signal through the noise so i was thinking while you were speaking about the fact that on our micromaster courses and you probably have seen that we will always tell our students what's the demand what's the behavior of that demand is there a seasonality or not how would it be distributed and i'm sure that the audience that is part of the courses knows what i'm talking about but we know that when you go back to reality people don't have such problem statement things uh to guide you or the tools that you should have in handy to solve any kind of problem uh so we wanted to know based on your experience and what you have just mentioned about this additional layer of complexity how do you deal with that how do you deal with lack of data with incomplete incorrect data or even with the lack of communication like you mentioned there is people involved in processing the data interpreting it how do you deal with um lack of communication that will bring that probably incomplete data and mainly if you can apply that to what you do with demand forecasting lead time variability or any other decision making process in logistics sure and there's no doubt lots of incomplete information we discussed that and and it it was always kind of funny to me as i was filling out the problems and the micromasters i would be given all of these things i'm like man i wish every everything when i was just given the inputs and then you know the math becomes easy uh a lot of the work that we do that robinson does is help companies model and analyze their supply chains to help them develop road maps for improvement so we're consistently working with large data sets from from companies to help them figure out how they should set their course both near term and long term and so there's a lot of approaches that we could take and i just think about them in my head some things to think about i don't know if these are in necessarily concurrent order but first and foremost i think it's important to be very transparent and call out what's missing part of that is you know there's a possibility that people can get access to different data but they weren't really fully aware of what's needed or why it's needed so many times people are pulling data and there's columns and rows but there's key pieces missing that maybe they have but they don't even know that they should use it or how to use it or why additionally looking at the amount of incompleteness is important you know 90 of the data is there then the likelihood of the findings from the analysis are likely to be directionally true if not somewhat precisely true i think all of the students here probably learned that no forecast is ever 100 accurate right so there's some level of of trusting that gap between what you have and what you don't and then you can begin to decipher so what areas of opportunity are most known and those that are less known those that are most known those that have the most data you know these can be more highly actionable or prioritized they might be the proverbial low-hanging fruit that you can go after because you can take action quickly but then there's likely a lot that that's unknown and this is where the process improvement piece comes in when i think about data it's both excel based and when i say excel based i mean tables and rows numbers figures um but data is also information-based or process-based um how information is captured or entered captured transferred is critical so where there continues to be doubt in the data that's when we discuss process improvements that can help capture better data to create a clear picture and again all of this assumes that you know what questions you're even trying to answer so maybe i should have started at the top before i went through all of that because it's important to not leave the witness it's like making an argument and then going out and finding only the research that supports your argument versus going out and doing all the research and then forming your argument based on all of the research that you've done right so many times the best approach is to map current state and then from there start deriving the questions that you want to answer from the data there's a saying that i've adopted from one of my mentors who loves to say let the data guide you don't pre-prescribe let's map things out and capture what information we can and go from that go from there another similar quote that i've stolen from a colleague and i think it's attributed to einstein but he said something to the effect of hey if i had to solve the world's biggest problem if i had an hour to solve the world's biggest problem i'd take 55 minutes just defining the problem and then the other five minutes you know becomes a piece of cake you can solve it easily but i think that's where a lot of people struggle even is knowing what to start with before they start this cascading effect of pulling the data together to answer those those questions that's a fascinating um concept and i love the idea of like the challenges really define the problem you know knowing the right question to be asking in the first place and then then maybe the solution is you know somewhat um you know smaller piece of the puzzle i guess you'd say that's very fascinating so i want to maybe dive into on that topic a little bit but then kind of bring it to a more concrete or kind of specific piece of supply chain if you will i'm just you know out of my personal interest you know one segment of transportation that i happen to be interested in is rail it's not really an area that we talk about often much especially today's you know supply chains which are facing many challenges like the ocean and the ports you know those are highly visible segments right now but i think rail's interesting especially here in north america we have a robust rail industry and at the same time i also think that you know rail you know has a unique niche where it also interfaces with the ocean and with the trucking segments in this intermodal space and so i want to kind of dive into this intermodal space if we could a little bit um so maybe you could probably explain a little bit more about maybe what intermodal is but then also trying to tie into that digital perspective where with intermodal you have trucking you have maybe even ocean and ports that are interfacing all these different modes and so then you know to me that seems like that adds to the complexity into the challenge of the data and the digital piece you have more parties to integrate you have more digital footprints to stitch together so maybe i wonder if you could share a little bit about that concept of also you know define the problem and that being a challenge but then also in like the space of this intermodal transportation if you will sure i'd say first of all i i think it was called out i started my career at robinson in intermodal but i'm about a decade removed from really living in that space but it's where i started and it continues to be a core part of our north american surface transportation portfolio at robinson and additionally like you mentioned uh the ocean part of it as one of the largest importers of goods robinson is served by the railroads with our global forwarding business moving those containers in from the imports and out from the exporting side so the railroads are a key part of the infrastructure or their key part of robinson's infrastructure and our portfolio of services and i'd say the railroads were one of the earliest adopters of providing those automated tracking updates i think the trucking world and the other segments have probably followed a lot of what the railroad started in terms of some of the updates that they've provided to their internal customers so from a digital trace perspective they've been a leader in that area but despite the visibility that they can provide you know intermodal does have some challenges i think about over the course of the last number of years as things have moved more to a just-in-time environment omni-channel kind of companies reducing their inventory reduction in miles and an increase in speed and a reduction in lead time doesn't play well with the intermodal service fully right they're not as responsive as what you'd get from a standard truckload service domestically i also think about congestion and imbalances and so the railroads are always managing chassis and yard space and things like that so they're challenged there and then size quite frankly trains can only be so long and hold so much so the railroads are always balancing how much space do they give to their bulk customers with more traditional coal and green and you know the big bulk type freight that they're moving um their ocean customers and then their domestic intermodal customers but in terms of digital outside of the tracking capabilities and the digital rail yards that have been and are being developed one last thing that i'd add and this is fairly speculative but as i was thinking about it i thought well maybe this is maybe an interesting thing to think about um and it relates to an area that robinson is actually involved in you may have seen a press release recently with us discussing our new relationship with waymo who's an autonomous trucking company so if you think about autonomous trucking driverless trucking all of those things i'd say the railroads in their systems provide an interesting case study in things like route structure density ultimately a driverless experience because those containers are traveling thousands of miles without trucks pulling them um so it makes me wonder if the market might look towards them to better determining the scale of change needed for our future infrastructure to support the types of trucking that that may come in the near future thank you adam and you're bringing a lot of things that i would love to know more about so i want to connect those new technologies you just mentioned to another goal so we have talked about the intermodal transportation and how important it is but then we wanted to know a little bit more about carbon emission reduction in freight transportation because we know this is one of the segments where it is harder to reduce the emission for a number of reasons and when we think about developing solutions most time it is about the new fuels uh for the ships to run on or using electric trucks to replace some diesel engines on the road so those are definitely important opportunities but we also think there may be something in the logistic world that we can do in terms of decision decision-making processes in addition to what we mean about fuel and vehicles types so do you think anything about the network design the coordination or any other logistic aspect would give us tools to reduce emissions in the freight transportation world sure you know in general there's no doubt there's heightened pressures from various sources to tackle this sustainability challenge that's out there students that are in the supply chain dynamics course i think it's supply chain dynamics course should be familiar with those causes of disruption things like the random phenomena government politics societal pressure or social i don't remember exactly the terminology right but these disruptions can cause significant impact like loss of suppliers loss of customers brand reputation diminishes things like this and i think that's where sustainability is really beginning to put a lot of pressure on shippers regulations or the potential for regulation puts pressure on companies to adopt new standards competitors are offering sustainable solutions which really speaks to societal pressure from consumers that are demanding more sustainable business practices and you could go on and on right and so companies are having to really wrap their arms around this and adapt it and figure out how are we going to be a citizen in this this marketplace of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions our carbon footprint etc and so grappling with un's sustainability goals regulatory requirements consumer demands companies have never been under more pressure to figure this out and a recent survey actually that robinson conducted in 2021 had sustainability as shipper's second biggest pain point and the number of companies planning to take action to reduce their carbon footprint has doubled since the last year but to cut emissions and to figure out how to do this the biggest challenge that we've found a lot of companies facing is they it's very hard for them to measure them um they're not easily equipped with tools to to know what we want what's the standard that we're to measure against so give me some benchmark to help me understand am i doing well or not doing well and so without those necessary tools and data many companies haven't really been able to pursue carbon reduction at all or they're investing a lot of time and effort to figure these things out and so one one product that we recently introduced this past year through robinson labs and worked with us to create a product called the missions iq which is really exciting it's a tool that will be it's a it's a free self-serve tool that customers can instantly evaluate their carbon emissions specific to transportation and i understand that that space is just one of many areas but i think this is where data science and digital and all these things are coming together to create products for companies to begin to leverage to allow them to start to benchmark their carbon output against their industry against other shippers and really allows them to then be able to take some some tangible steps so that was an exciting development i thought it was it fit perfectly because um here's our partners from mit that are helping us develop some of these great products using our data scientists from robinson labs to tackle these really tough questions and and hopefully really making steps towards improving our world that's a great um insight you know the concept or the challenge i guess really that companies face in terms of measuring you know what their carbon footprint is and how you define that and whether it's scope one or two or for those who are not familiar with those terms you know you know activities you control versus scope three which is like the supply chain if you will in a lot of other activities and how you define those two is definitely significant challenges that companies seem to be facing so great insight and great to see that you guys are are participating acting actively working in that space um so it looks like we have one more time for one more question on our side and then we'll get to the q a and again make sure you put the your questions in that q a tool that committee feature on the bottom so kind of our final question here before we get to the audience q a um some of our participants today are obviously involved in our micromasters program we're excited to have you as an alumni of our program as well i mean they may be involved in implementing new technologies or projects in their company or their their day job and the complexity of their supply chain um this may seem like a daunting task that complexity of that supply chain may seem like a daunting task and so what advice maybe would you give them kind of as a final advice i mean where should they start really with this digital transformation and the challenges um with this paradox of digital that you sure run up so well anytime we're we're helping companies implement you know some of our digital solutions we really ask them by by first starting by organizing a great cross-functional team getting access to people working together multiple roles kind of up and down the system or the organization along with that make sure you get sign off in leadership from the top it's so important for those senior leaders to be supportive because they have the ability to corral resources to add resources to set the tone and drive the investment but on the flip side it's also extremely important to establish buy-in and credibility with those individual contributors because they're the ones that are adopting it really they're the ones that are going to be asked to work inside of it to keep it updated to do the things that really are going to allow for the senior leaders to get the most benefit from whatever investment they're making and then i'd say um this is going to sound really bad but begin at the beginning start with current state map out what's happening we always start with the current state process maps first and make sure that we have a really strong understanding of the life cycle of whatever process where we're trying to digitally enhance um and and then begin to understand what can make their jobs easier more productive try to figure out from the users what is it about these processes that aren't working where does where do the bottlenecks and constraints come into play and then how might our products answer those to to improve our employees um ability to to be uh resourceful to to go out there and be strategic to do the type of work that i'm sure many of those employees would like to be doing um on a day-to-day basis thank you adam and i can tell you i've been scrolling down the questions from the audience and you have already answered several of them with that last answer there's a lot of concern on the fact of how to make that communication or how to raise that awareness and how important it is to have the right data to have the right processes and to communicate the strategy properly uh so it's great to hear a lot of your insights and connect those with our audience questions i will like to launch um our last poll for today and the idea is that we learn from the audience on what is it that you learned today what is it that you are taking away from this uh meeting today with adam so while we let that populate um i don't know colin if you have any of the questions of the audience identified yet yeah i can jump in there with one question um this question i apologize if i pronounce your names incorrectly but it's sebastiao um golding i think an interesting kind of deep dive or specific question especially in the logistics space that i find fascinating but his question is what are the challenges being facing creating digital standard um for like ebol you know digital digital standards for documentation and logistics you know so for example ebol's or invoices for example what are like some of the challenges or opportunities you see in that particular space you know i i think maybe this question is about hey how do we create standards across industries across companies and i think that there are some things that have become fairly standard but there's still so many uniquenesses i think specifically about companies gl codes as an example i'm just going to use this as one example but how they want those invoices to come through and how they want to apply those dollars to different parts of their organization that's so unique to each individual company and p l that it's really hard to create a field that would be allowable for everyone to use and that's just one minor example where again there's there's still some accounting things and i'll just use that as as one example of probably many where standards become difficult and uh and there's some customization that that tends to be required not saying that it's right but it's part of what we are challenged with and and work obviously what a lot of our work is to help companies move towards standardization but inevitably we find in many of these implementations that there's these custom elements that we have to configure things for and i think that's an important element maybe i'll continue to answer it is there's standards and then there's the flexibility to configure and confu configure is different than customize and if we can get to a level where our standards are flexible enough to allow us to configure where needed i think that's really where we can start to make some progress thank you adam there are also some other questions more referring to the barriers of implementing those digital transformations so i want to bring graziela's one here i hope i pronounced that well um graziella is saying that many warehouse and manufacturers still lack the basic id infrastructure processes and tools to enable data even the capture of it or the propagation of the data uh how do you see this changing in the near future how have you seen this change in the past and if you have anything to share on that well i think it's it's so true that every company out there i think is acknowledging they need a digital transformation but i also think on the flip side of that companies have to honestly assess where they're at today and they may not be ready fully for a digital transformation there are some very important foundational things that companies need to be able to you know thrust themselves forward if you will towards a digital transformation and in this case whatever this company is they're just gonna have to maybe take a step back before they can take steps forward and and that is sometimes the acknowledgement and it's a painful one and it's costly one and it does require investment to improve but a strong leadership group will acknowledge that if we don't then we're probably going to be even you know we're going to be even further behind in five years so we need to take the time now to get our infrastructure right so that we can begin to move faster with the things that we want to do using digital awesome um i don't know maybe laura should we maybe jump into the poll results here i can end and share results here perfect so some of the answers are most of them are expanding the knowledge of the data usage and supply chain and also understanding the interaction of people processes and data so i guess we fulfill the goal of this event with all those uh insights that adam shared with us um i don't know adam if you want to share anything else on those topics that it seems the most interesting to the audience i won't even get started because they're so big but maybe it's another plug for you to continue your development and and we talked about talent early on the upskill and the renewal of the talent there's so much to learn a lot around those topics to say that i'm an expert in them is probably a stretch as well because they're it's changing constantly um continue to build your network and interact with some great talent that can help help you understand not just what's happening today but what's going forward maybe the one comment that i would make is sometimes it feels like with digital you take a step forward and you're making progress and in fact when you take that step forward the technology can can leap instead of taking steps there it's leaping and so it's a constant battle that companies are facing of where do they make investments how quickly can they pluck move away from those investments to reinvest somewhere else because the the tools and products that are coming and the rate in which they're coming is just so fast that that it's important that we do our best to stay on top of it and i i appreciate forums like mit and others that give us access to to what's happening and trends and things like this so that we can try to stay ahead of it that's great insight definitely the keeping pace with technology it's even hard on our personal side but definitely in an enterprise setting where technology is evolving so fastly it's definitely challenging to keep up um and so maybe we have time for a couple more questions here and i have a question that kind of touches on that a little bit but maybe more on a specific um angle which is using analytics and kind of the interface of analytics with some of these digital systems you know so it might be an erp or other other digital systems that a company might have um and so the question here is from brian and again i apologize i've pronounced your name incorrectly but brian chito mo fuma i apologize again um but so his question is with data analytics how do you navigate some of the challenges of maybe extracting data and using the data from erps or other similar systems and how it can vary so much by accompanying different levels of maturity and all of that um and so he's looking for kind of some hints and some nuggets and some ticks maybe tips and tricks on how you you can maybe leverage some of the data in these systems given the variability of those systems you know i think one of the first tools that are very helpful which are at least when we're working with analytics is we we start with what we might call a profile or a dashboard first before doing a lot of true analysis it's more visualization um it paints a picture if you will of what's what's out there without any bias or any sort of math built in just is what it is and many times what what we say about these profiles and dashboards is um it creates more questions than gives answers but at least helps you ask the right questions um so you might start with 100 questions and then you run this profile and you're like well that question isn't even relevant because as you can see we don't even have that and then as you begin to narrow your questions that's when the analysis can come in when you can start asking the what-if questions or how might this be if we did this or what would be the result if we did that and that's when you can leverage the data but i would say don't go too fast to analyzing first understand what you have and and use that picture to start asking questions of it so then you can dive deeper and use your great analytical skills to do so thank you adam and i love how you like everything come back to the same like being aware on where we are acknowledging what our weaknesses uh see the opportunities out there to find the goal be super clear into where are we going and where do we want to be in the future and then what's the gap and how to fix that gap and i think this has come to like the answer for many of the different things that we have talked about and also i think this is not only for a very operational thing but also for a strategic thing we see this happening also even in the courses when we tell them how to approach our problems so i love how we can show the audience that this is how the real world works when you need to tackle any of the problems i want to summarize several questions in one so i probably won't name everyone who is asking about this but people is asking about how to incorporate some flexibility into their supply chains and they are talking about the use of technology for incorporating flexibility i don't know if you have any example of that but they have mentioned the disruptions uh that we've had in the past the slash canali the um covet situation so is there anything you have seen from the technology perspective that can help supply chains to be more flexible you know i think about some visibility tools and maybe this is this doesn't answer the question but just as you put it out there we have a product called navisphere vision it lives inside of our tms navisphere and what it does is it gives a full glimpse globally of all your inventory that's at rest and in motion so whether it's at a port or at a warehouse or moving on an ocean vessel or whatever regardless of where you you're using it you can see it around the world and the ways companies like microsoft as an example have been using that tech is being able to see where a product is at any given time if they know they could get it from somewhere else hey a big storm is coming here or this part of the world is going to be locked down but we know that we have xboxes over here that we can bypass all of that and bring them in while excuse me while this congestion is happening that allows us to be more flexible so enhanced visibility i think is one area where digital is really starting to allow customers or organizations to be more flexible more nimble and how they position inventory where they position inventory and ultimately how do they go to market with that inventory um so the consumer can can get it and in a timely manner and in a manner that they expect it that's visibility definitely is it seems like it'd be a key area um it makes total sense how you could you know improve your reflection you can add flexibility by having greater visibility that's a great great insight um so i want to probably have one more time for one more question so i want to ask one kind of like a more of a fun question there's a question that we often get especially in the digital space um and it's about you maybe some forward-looking technologies with blockchain and digital twins and i'll just kind of combine a couple of questions again together about these two different areas you know especially with blockchain blockchain there's a lot of buzz in the industry a few years back with blockchain technology and logistics applications and it seems to have died down a little bit but you also kind of see still some um projects continuing on and some new ideas bubbling up every once in a while so i'm wondering if you had any kind of you know in the industry-wide if you had any kind of interesting insight or you know where you think maybe we're going with some of these new futuristic technologies like blockchain or digital twins or some of the other similar technologies i don't know how far i want to speculate it can get a bit science fiction although the science fiction is turning into more science than fiction i guess anymore it's all of these and it's hard to know which what are we going to be the winners and losers in some of these things because like we talked about there's so many that are coming out so what what will ultimately resonate i'm not sure i'm ready to give a prediction but what i would say is i talked about ascm earlier and i sit on a board or a committee for ascm and part of that committee develops this top 10 trends list and last year five of the top 10 trends all had to do with digital so things like advanced analytics and automation visibility and digital supply chain cyber security you didn't even touch on that today that's a huge topic and we've definitely seen people even in our space get crippled by forces outside of their control from a cyber security perspective artificial intelligence robotics i mean you can go on and on and depending on where in the supply chain you are you know warehouses are probably thinking about the warehouse of the future and what's that going to look like unmanned warehouses with robots filling all the inventory and loading the trucks and then you've got the trucking side that's thinking about autonomous and driverless and all of these things too you know the the executive suites that are thinking about ways to harness data and answer key critical questions so i guess my message would be without trying to pinpoint any single digital product or application that's coming it's in every part of the work that we do and regardless of where you fall within the supply chain expect to be disrupted by digital in some way thank you adam and you brought so many interesting topics to that last answer that i think we should have another entire live event to cover all those because those are super interesting to the audience as well but in the interest of time i will wrap up the event we have so many questions at them that we will definitely share them with you afterwards just in case you want to take a look about the interest of the audience and of course everyone who has been asking about the recording of this event we will share it with you afterwards through emails and we will post it online so don't worry you will get the chance to see it again and maybe write some notes down that can help you in your own professional journey um so thank you adam for being here today we learned a lot from you uh thank you kellan always an extraordinary co-host i don't know if you want to add any final words no thank you everyone thank you for your participation and all the great questions in the q a and good luck in your courses thank you and thank you adam have a great day thank you everyone see you in the next one [Music]
2022-05-05