In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to David Cahn, Product Marketing Manager with BlueRidge Global about "The Need for Supply Chain to Invest in Resiliency". Get the answers to your "Supply Chain Resiliency" questions along with David's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

You can find out more about David and the wonderful team at BlueRidge Global on creating a resilient Supply Chain by the links below. Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2020. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

DAVID CAHN'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dacahn/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-ridge-global/

Company Website: https://blueridgeglobal.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

https://youtu.be/dnyM3wCFC4E

THE STRATEGIC REASON "WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST":

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Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

Safety With Purpose Podcast: https://safetywithpurpose.com/

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

supply chain, demand, pandemic, optimize, people, inventory, blue ridge, systems, problems, industrial, industry, supply, drive, managing, david, collaborate, talk, planning, technology, selling

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. All right, again, welcome to the industrial talk podcast. That's right. It's about you, you industry here on if you're out there on video, I'm pointing right at your face right now. This platform celebrates you, you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly. you innovate. You're changing lives and you're changing the world each and every day. And if you're not, you know, think, come talk to me because you are. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you for joining this particular celebration. All right. in the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of David Kahn, that ca h n. Blue Ridge global is the company and this is a timely topic because of this squiffy, whatever this market we call post pandemic, pandemic, whatever it is. Supply Chain must invest in resiliency. How about that one? Yeah, let's get cracking.

01:16

Come on. That's a cool topic.

01:19

I mean, I've had a number of conversations about supply chain and why it's important and it is important, don't get me wrong, it is important. But I think one thing that this particular COVID world we live in, we need some level of resiliency within that supply chain, because I think it caught us off guard. But you know what people like David, Blue Ridge, and others, they have answers because you know what we're all about here on the industrial talk podcast, right? You know, we're all about educating. But we want to educate in a entertaining way. That's right. And we want to be collaborating, and we don't just want to collaborate and chirping each other. We want to collaborate to come up and solve problems, because industry, you solve problems. And we have to collaborate to do that. We don't have all the answers. But when we get together in a collaborative way,

02:12

answers happen. I love it, you're solving problems. And then of course, we got to really think about innovation, we do. And they're not gonna happen if you're not educated. And if you're not collaborating, and you know, innovation is a result of that type of stuff. You got to dream, you got to think big, you got to work with people. The industrial talk podcast, the industrial talk platform, is a network of networks, where we're doing an industry talk, industrial talk. 2.0, how about that, because we want to be able to take you, industry professional, you, whoever you are, you know who it doesn't really matter, and be able to highlight your skills because you solve problems. Industrial talk.com is where it's at. Be on the lookout because it's pretty duck gun. Cool. I'd telling you right now, um, for me, I get, you know, I'm always excited. I am I do, I'm pointing at myself, right now, Scott does get pretty amped up about things. But this one I was I'm really amped up about because you could go out to industrial talk, you can then go to industry heroes, we're going down that road, you go to that industry heroes, right? And then you're gonna say, Well, I want to know somebody that's in, let's say, oil and gas. I want to know somebody that's in a, you know, IoT industry for data, whatever might be, and you can filter and find those individuals and their companies and reach out, and then find out everything that is damn cool about every single one. And then you're gonna say, I want to educate some more. I want to collaborate with them, because I want to innovate. How about that? I'm all tingling now. That's pretty doggone Cool. All right. Let's get cracking. Again, I gotta tell you, man, this was a pretty cool doggone interview. I really enjoyed it. David, just, he's got a lot of energy too. You'll notice if you go out there and a video if you go to YouTube channel, my youtube channel industrial talk, and you find this particular video, or you can just go to industrial talk and then find his where his podcast is located. You'll see the video there too.

04:24

He's, he's, he is infectious when it comes to this supply chain stuff. I'm telling you right now. It makes it fun. And I mean, it is entertaining. I'm new without a doubt. I'm thinking about changing my career to be more simple. No, I'm not. I'm sorry. That's, that's just me just putting myself way out there jumping the Shark Tank right now. But anyway, we're gonna be talking a lot about supply chain resiliency, and we do need it and what do we do? What are the strategies? David is out there.

04:56

He's got a badass stat card on LinkedIn.

05:00

Yeah, but you could find it on industrial talk and you're saying, Scott, Okay, I'm gonna do that. Yeah. David Kahn, he's bringing the lumber. Enjoy the interview. David, welcome to the industrial talk podcast. I'm excited about this conversation. How are you doing? I'm doing mighty fine. You know, living the dream, living the dream. And that dream is what?

05:22

solving problems on this solving, you know, the problems on industrial talk today. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I hear you, because that is important. And that's what people want to hear. problem solving. With a with a sparkly attitude.

05:39

All right, let's give the listeners a little background, a little 411 on who David Kahn is and Blue Ridge global and then we're going to venture into I like this resiliency in your supply chain and why we need to do that. Give us a little background. So David Kahn, been around the AARP supply chain CRM space for too long.

06:03

You know, Ben worked in manufacturing b2b distribution retail had my own e commerce companies for a while, built them grow them sold them

06:15

and, and driving really driving product marketing activities and content for Blue Ridge and and Blue Ridge. Global is isn't actually a supply chain planning provider. They're kind of a leading space in the

06:29

wine and spirits in the food service. Oh, really? distributing

06:35

automotive aftermarket? Yeah, I was you had me on line and spirits? Yeah, yes, they do.

06:44

Dramatically these days. So yeah. So they're doing very well. And they do pricing and planning and price optimization and planning optimization.

06:54

Well, the industry see it like that. And I mean, it was funny because the pre pandemic, right? If you can remember back then, because I certainly can't apparently, that was such a long time ago. But but apparently they were saying, but anyway, pre pandemic, we didn't realize how important the supply chain was right? Just like it you just took it for granted. You know, that product was on the shelf. Yeah, there it is. It's right there. It's ready to go. And then the pandemic hits, and then all of a sudden, Where the hell is that product? It's not on this. Then everybody all of a sudden said, Doggone it, where is it? And then they realize supply chains. pretty important. Yeah. As we go scramble for, you know, sanitary clothing and toilet paper and hand sanitizers and can't find them and empty shelves. And yeah, pretty cool stuff all sudden, it was but then that segues into what we're going to be talking about, I realized how

07:48

how, to a certain extent, how fragile that supply chain was, we just sort of took it for granted. And it was like, doing its thing. And then all of a sudden, there's a burp in the old thing. And then all of a sudden, boom, everybody's all pissed off. Tell us a little bit about investing in the resiliency. What does that mean? I don't know what that means. What are we really talking about here is that the pandemic and there's gonna be other crisis's, you know, that occur every, you know, every day, every year, you know, and that caused basically the supply chain disruptions that you talked about. And they're requiring really better visibility to supply and demand fluctuations. And that's really what, what we're talking about resiliency, and then how can I respond quicker. So you see, like, for example, unforeseen weather events, and seasonality. You know, we have spoilage on fresh fruits and vegetables, we have people hoarding items, we have demand for other items, you know, that comes to come almost to a complete standstill, you know, you got all these different changing business models, you know, you have foodservice distributors that were selling a lot to restaurants and that kind of distribution channel and now selling to grocery stores. And so whole different shifts and models are occurring. You know, same is true with, you know, the wine and spirits in a manufacturer starting to ship their business models and making hand sanitizers, you know, and selling that to totally different markets. And at the same time, you know, how do I get these products to the market, because of this, you know, there's labor shortages on drivers. And so, you know, so not only even if I was able to react, I got delivery and fulfillment issues. And as people come in, you know, people want to get this stuff faster, better, quicker, you know, they want to get used to ordering today and getting it tomorrow and getting into an hour. And so that puts unbelievable demand pressures on how I support and how I can respond to changes in demand a lot faster.

09:55

I'll tell you it

09:58

it highlighted just

10:00

That complexity that exists today in the supply chain and how, you know, that chain itself, there's some weak spots within those links. And, and once that one, one link begins to falter a little bit, then everything else starts to there's a rippling effect. And so, so the question I have to you recognizing that if you haven't taken this whole pandemic thing seriously, and made some adjustments, and making your supply chain more resilient, what do we need to do today to, to, to achieve that?

10:33

So it is a couple things. One is really, we have to fine tune how we drive our planning, and pricing, you know, and, and the amount of data that we're that we're coming into the supply chain, and how do I absorb that. So for example, Blue Ridge is using a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning, based on that data that's coming in, I mean, this phenomenal amount of data is coming into the supply chain. And so at the same time, they you have to maximize or optimize the 1000s and 1000s of stock keeping units that you're delivering to the market, and through different channels. So you may have a, what they call a multi Echelon network where you're selling food, distributors, you're selling those distributors and selling to wholesalers. And then you're you're selling

11:24

to retailers. And so managing the inventory and the price point and the geography by category by assortment, you know, how do I effectively do that without using some level of machine learning or artificial intelligence to help me drive that analytics, you know, much more effectively, and optimize my levels of assortment inventory, optimize my revenue, you know, slashed my inventory, carrying costs, but really one of the unique things about

11:57

it, it all comes back to our, you know, knowledge of supply and demand, you know, traditionally managing that supply and demand. And one of the unique things is we started out historically with supply, you know, supply chain planning. And that was really managing the supply side.

12:16

And then we started to wake up one day, and we said, you know, we need to start managing our demand better, we need to get better visibility to the math. And so up came this house sales and operations planning, and we were marrying demand management systems with supply chain with supply chain planning systems. And so the next evolution really came with integrated business planning.

12:41

And really what we're talking about there is integrating some financial modeling into the system. So I can find to my revenue streams, fine tune my margins, optimize and even tune that demand that selling the products that I want to sell versus reacting. And that's really where the pricing optimization comes into the equation. So yeah.

13:03

David, it's interesting, you're, you're talking talk, you're walking the walk, you're doing all this stuff, that's really pretty cool. I just think that people because of the pandemic got caught off guard, I think what you're talking about is a very sophisticated level of thinking associated with their supply chain that supply side demand side, using AI analytics data, pulling it in and, and and being able to identify those nuggets of insights to make better decisions. I think, because of the pandemic, everybody's like, Oh, my God.

13:37

It's out there. But I mean, you're, you're a sophisticated type of guy. So think about it, you know, simplistically, let's kind of take it back level. So simplistically, no one wants to hold the inventory. Nobody want it

13:53

doesn't want it, the distributors don't want it and the retailers want to keep their inventory, you know, as fast moving as possible. Everybody wants that inventory to move as fast as possible. So we implemented all of these different tools to manage that inventory, as fast as good as well as we can. And so we want to know, as fast as possible, from the demand of when we buy it, how to replenish it, we want to we want to react really fast. We want to know which stock keeping units are moving faster. How do I want, I want to optimize the fast flowing, I want to do something with the slow moving, but at the same time, how do I balance that? And since no one wants the inventory, you know, everyone's running lean, so you get a disruption or get a spike in demand. And the supply chain is not ready for that. We no longer have that luxury of huge buffer stocks and huge safety stocks.

14:56

You know, everyone is, you know, we're delivering right today.

15:00

The consumer, we're deliberately cutting out the middleman in a lot of industries, no one wants the inventory. Everyone wants to accelerate that whole supply and fulfillment equation. And what's funny is, I've been at a lot of industrial sites, and they have this hush hush conversation about their bone yard. And it's, it's a special locations where nobody wants to carry inventory, but they have a bone yard. So when that whole problem happens, they have a bone yard, that they have this buffer stock.

15:36

And so the buffer stocks, you know, is really what they call safety stocks. And it is, you know, how do I optimize that safety stock, because I really don't want it if I can, if, I mean, the safety stock is like your insurance policy, it is. And so, if but if I had better forecasting, and better demand visibility, and I was much more integrated throughout the supply chain, that bought the stock was safety stock could be lower, and lower and lower, and it would reduce everyone's carrying costs here, here's my, here's my question is,...