Myron Burke sits down with Mike about the retailer implications of on-shelf availability and out of stocks.  Myron spent 18 years with Walmart and Sam’s Club both in the U.S. and international and now is a consultant leading retail technology initiatives for the industry.  

Myron provides listeners prospective about the retailer implications of out of stocks. Why is it so difficult for a retailer to deliver and maintain OSA? What are the issues on exposing retailer on hands for BOPIS customers? What are the implications of retail theft and store operations to maintain on hand accuracy?

Donnie Williams 0:04

Welcome to Season Two of the SCMRC lead podcast featuring epic supply chain lessons from our industry partners. My name is Donnie Williams and I am the Executive Director of the Supply Chain Management Research Center in the Walton College at the University of Arkansas. Season Two of the podcast will be hosted by Mike Graen. Mike is the director of the retail supply chain initiative, and this is a strategic partnership within the SCMRC. The goal of this initiative is to surface the challenges and opportunities of on-shelf availability or OSA focusing on the concepts tools and technologies driving retail OSA. Season Two will feature a dynamic guest list of retailers, CPG suppliers, solution providers and industry leaders to drive collaborative efforts and advanced learning within the industry. Thank you for joining and enjoy the podcast.

Mike Graen 1:02

Myron Burke 2:17

Thanks, Mike. Great to be with you today.

Mike Graen 2:19

Awesome. We're been we've been we've been talking to a lot of folks about the whole challenge of on shelf availability and making sure that you know what you have and where it's located in both brick and mortar and online experience. But before we jump into all the business part of this, we we've been asking everybody to get their reaction to have you personally ever had a situation where you went in to get something from a store either ordered it online, or actually looked in went to get a store and they didn't have what you what you were looking for. You got any examples, and from a customer perspective where that's created a problem for you.

Myron Burke 2:56

Yeah, there, there's a few, you know, some go further back in time. But just this past Christmas, we had a scenario where our son wanted a workout tower. And so it was too big to buy in store. And I didn't want to manhandle that myself. I won't name the retailer, so I'll spare them the media buzz. But we had ordered one online, paid for it. And went in to pick it up at the time that said it would be there. And it wasn't there. And they were like, well, we don't sell that. Then I was like well, no, it shows right here that you sell it. Well, we don't have that. Well, where do you keep that stuff? Well, we put all that in a special process. And we bring it up front for people and stage it up front. Well, where is it? Well, it's not here. And so it was just you know, everybody has been through this. I've paid for it. You've given me a confirmation. Now you don't have it. Now, what are you going to do? Well, you have to go to these people. And it's just a bad experience. And for me, it was frustrating in the aspect of, you and I've had history in this space of being able to manage inventory where I've paid for something now you have my money and you're unable to deliver feel it's a huge break of trust in the relationship. Versus if I go into the shelf, I'm taking, if I walk into the store, I'm taking the chance that you may or may not have what I want or have it in stock if I've seen it before, but I'm taking on that risk. When I transact with you and you confirm that I feel like there's a legal barter there. And so it really eroded how I thought about that partner from an online portfolio of mine. Are they in my online portfolio or are they out of my online portfolio? And they actually fell out of my online portfolio because of that, you know, it was a few hundred bucks, but well, we'll get it to you. We'll ship it to you and long story short, they shipped it to me and it was damaged. So I had to take it back to the store and they wanted all this extra paperwork, I was like, just deal with it, I don't, I don't have the patience anymore. And I think that expectation of service, and this high velocity, sometimes low cost, low touch retail model, is we're trying to create an expectation as expectation of service when the infrastructure for that service level doesn't exist. And then you're baiting and switching the customer to be like, hey, we want to give you this customized service. But then when you get to the store, they don't either have the tools or the connectivity, or all of the things knitted together in the system to connect the dots to make it a great service experience. And I think when when that breaks down, the customer always loses in the breakdown situation, and in the end that causes the retailer to lose. And so I think it's important that retailers really look at that holistic journey on the customer journey. And what's the lifetime value of a customer versus just my pick rate or my efficiency of moving product from node A to node B? Because if I get it there, and it's not right, it's still wrong.

Mike Graen 6:12

Yeah.

Myron Burke 6:13

So any, any level of failure in this interconnected supply chain now becomes a much bigger impact than it was before COVID I would say.

Mike Graen 6:21

Yeah man, it's a great point. I mean, I've literally been in this space, probably as long as you have, I just learned something new today, which there's a difference in I go in to buy something in a store, and they don't have it and my disappointments. There's a disappointment there. But if I order it and pay for it, and then go to do it, there's a whole level others, which is, you almost lied to me. You got my money. And now you're telling me you don't have it that's different than I went to go buy something, I haven't paid it. I'm disappointed. They didn't have it. But oh, well, I'll go somewhere else. But but I've never actually never thought about the fact that yeah, I've paid the money out, you're almost lying to me now because you got my money, and you tell me you don't have it. That's a very interesting customer perspective.

Myron Burke 7:08

Yeah. And there's, sometimes you'll get the follow up point of, oh, we'll do a refund, but it may take 20 days for that money to hit your account.

Mike Graen 7:18

Right.

Myron Burke 7:19

And that's a very one way street, if if a customer said, we went in and bought about $300 worth of something from anybody, and you said, Oh, may take 20 to 20 days for me to actually have the money in my account. They wouldn't allow that. And so it's just it's not a parallel road right now. And the customer is starting to feel that friction, I think.

Mike Graen 7:39

Well, you spent enough time both running clubs, running stores, etc, you know, the operational part of this. But when you got a really big box retailer, or club or whatever, that's got several 100,000 items in it, supposedly, and you're relying on traditional on-hand systems, etc, which we know are inherently inaccurate. How in the world do you know and in terms of meeting this customer expectation, how do you know what you have and where it's located today? And, and we're gonna get into the technology and where it goes in the future. But it's gotta be really hard as a retailer to really have a good understanding of what you have and where it's located. Right?

Myron Burke 8:21

Yeah, I think it is. And that's historically relied on operational planning and execution of that operational plan. And I think that's actually a good base model. It's a really good platform. The problem is when you look at retail today, retail workforces, and a lot of places are, are a lot like what I would call McDonald's workforces they are open entry, first time jobs, where people are coming in, it's very transient. You don't have a lot of department manager authority to make decisions. It's sort of they get to choose from a series of options and their decision making process today. And so when you look at fixing an inventory situation, it's actually quite difficult in a lot of places to do that at the worker line level. And then when you go up the chain, it becomes a financial consideration. Well prove to me what you've done to show that's not there. So I think leaning on operational process is important, but really explaining the why. But we, the retail marketplace has to move into more automated systems. And I know I think we'll get to tech around that. But what is your system inventory? And how are you validating that on a day in day out basis? It's not just a running algorithm, right? It can't be you've got to have a check and balance on that. And then a group I think, a task force that kind of goes and does that investigation that you empower with more authority to keep that number right, and you probably tie some incentives to that. And I think the other thing is inventory has to be a core metric for the business. I think there's a lot of times there's a new GMV or in net promoter score, or what are these sort of metrics of the month to the quarter that look at where the market wants to go. And the Western world particularly North America, so market driven on short term, that they lose sight of, Oh, I've got an annual inventory in 12 months. We'll digest we'll deal with that when I get there. Well, by that, by that point, it's a number you've never seen before, and you don't want publicized. So I think leaning into the operational core part of the business putting taskforce teams in place to be able to modify that. When I was in Sam's Club years ago, we had an audit team that did specifically that. I think there's another piece this is put financial accountability into inventory. Moving from retail accounting to cost accounting drives a very different view of management, ownership of inventory, you know, and for those that don't know, retail accounting is just sort of a blend or a markdown into margin. So I'll just, well, if I sell more apparel, I'll cover my margin, and you have people who've been fired for playing that game. Or maybe if it's on landed margin, I'll just buy more apparel, I don't have to worry about selling it right, I can do something later with the suppliers. Again, a game versus a cost accounting model says if I'm going to change inventory, I'm gonna write off 100, 1,000, $5,000 worth of merchandise, the minute I push that button, it's gonna show up in my financials for the day. And that drives, I think, a better level of accountability to the store level associates and management team for inventory responsibility.

Yeah, great point. Great point, and great, great explanation of those two different methods as well for the audience. So obviously, we have our share of challenges with on shelf availability and inventory accuracy in the US. I mean, my question, given your international experiences, is this just a US phenomenon? Or do we see this in other parts of the world as well?

Yeah, no, it's a retail phenomenon. Whether you're a flea market, a farmers market, or whether you're one of the largest retailers in the world, it's a problem that runs across the business chasm. Now, I would say, you know, we lived in Asia for three years in Japan, and the the discipline of duties in Japan is very different than the discipline of duties in the US. So you can lean on operational process, much more. The level culturally, the level of authority was, if you're below a VP, you didn't use judgment in a business decision making policy, you follow the policy. And in other countries, there's a lot more judgment allowed. And so I think that's where when you look at how countries compared to each other, operational processes may tend to break down faster in one culture than another culture because of the cultural disciplines in the business. And so you'll, you'll see some effects take a lot longer to impact a retailer in say, Japan or Taiwan, then someplace in North America, or even Europe for that matter. But, you know, on shelf availability is a critical metric. When I was in Japan, we actually implemented that. Matching customer traffic trends and product movements per hour to workforce labor standards to scheduling protocols. And when do I have my peak traffic periods and want to stock in advance of those. When am I doing production planning on sushi is no different than when am I doing production planning on beef or, or bakery. But challenging the business models becomes important to get the labor standards, the hours, the workforce, the work process all in place. And that's a critical foundation. And then I think it only makes sense to empower associates to be responsible for their business, I think we've lost some accountability, responsibility, elements in the business and where the corporate office has tried to take a lot more control. But when you do that, you have to augment that with technology. And it doesn't say you replace it, with technology, you augment it, meaning I want technology to do 90% of the edit transactions here. And I want somebody looking at certain transactions that are repeatable, happen too often, they're high value products. They're high shrink type items, or something. That's an anomaly that we haven't seen before, because I need eyes on these things. So you know, I think automation and technology has become a component of that. But people are still part of that system. And I think too many times companies look at it and say, Well, what's our system? And people are never a component of the system in that new design model. But I think it's universal. I think it shows up differently based off how the principles of a country run and whether they're very short term focus, very long term focus, what's the discipline of the culture? What's the the historic historic infrastructure, you know, emerging markets. Some third world developing countries, you know, things in South Africa and Middle East. Exit exit readers that go beep still have a lot of value. Event driven data, without insight still has a lot of value because they don't have a lot of event driven data. But in more mature retail markets where you're dying from event data that you don't know how to manage needs value driven outcomes attached to that, that help you prioritize and quantify which events matter more. For my limited workforce to go attack and address to drive value.

Yeah. Great points, great points. So let's, let's let's, let's migrate a little bit to the technology area. And again, we're not talking about technology that is just put in for technology spaces, because you and I've seen enough programs where let's just put this cool technology in and you sort of go, well, what's the business problem we're trying to solve? I don't know. But it's really, really cool. So let's just do it, right. Some of our early work when I was with Procter and Gamble, and you were with Walmart was a little bit driven by Hey, there's really cool tech out there, let's go put it in and not a really good understanding of what the business problem was in the first place. Now, there are very clear business problems out there, which is if you're going to have enough confidence to expose on hands of merchandise you have in a store to a customer, and you're going to take money from that customer in an online environment, and then you're going to have them come in and pick up that item, or deliver to the home. You better know what you have. And you better know where it's located. So big kind of broad question, but talk about some of that. Because you're you're most of your career has been in the emerging technology space, from a retail perspective, everything from cameras and robotic fixed cameras to RFID to electronic shelf labels center. This is overwhelming for a lot of retailers. Where in the world do I start? Help us think through all of this emerging tech that's out there. And what do I really need to be able to help drive on shelf availability, my accuracy?

It's only a 30 minute show, Mike.

I know. That's exactly why I asked the question.

Boil down 25 years into twenty minutes. Maybe it's two minutes? No, I think it's a good question. And you know, we spend a lot of time on that. I think, when you go back and you were talking about some of the early work we did with some tech in early 2000s, I think we had, you know, we kind of had a hypothesis couldn't prove it, because the data didn't exist, because nobody, when you did audits, nobody wanted to believe it, from that perspective, that it's that bad. But I think the world's come so far in data science and insights, and what we're able to see and do with edge computing and mobile computing and the networks that support that. And so I think it's, it's hard to tell in a broad brushstroke, someone where to start. I think if I had to break it down that way, I would say start with analyzing your business. And don't look at the top line numbers, look at what's driving those numbers, whether they're positive or negative. Because if your numbers are overly positive, you might have a problem that's actually in your favor. You just haven't seen the bad side of it yet. But it's coming.

So give, give me an example, the top line number versus an in process number, which is what you're talking about give us if I'm a retailer, what's the top line number versus an in process?

Well, if you're starting to see something that says, oh, gosh, our inventory utilization looks way better than it ever has before. You might have phantom PI into your business that says you you've got a negative number back here somewhere that you're you may not allow your system to run negatives. And so you've you're still selling inventory that you don't know you have. And so it looks like a productive margin play in your business. But you're actually you've been setting on sunk cost and inventory for maybe years, and don't know it from that perspective, or markdowns are way better than they where we've got a great control of our markdowns, well, what's the execution of that? Has your buy changed? Has your product packaging change? What's changed to drive that markdown performance improvement in that business as people look at waste and things because you know, one thing that that we all know is metrics matter. And if we say go get a metric, people go get it. However, they may sacrifice a bunch of other metrics. And then well, what's the reporting team doing with that metric? Because if you tell me what your goal is, I can make any dataset tell you that regardless of what the data is, I can make it tell you what you want your goal to be and align with that. So you have to just have good checks and balances, but I would say form a hypothesis around the focus point of where you want your business to be better, if it's margin, okay, what are the components that drive margin? If it's markdowns, what are the components that drive markdowns? So take the high level, break it down to its sub components, and then look at drafting, what's the operational process? Not the one we want it to be. What is it like time studies, walk through it capture the actual data, get some video of it. And then start to look at where are we falling apart. In some cases, computer vision is plenty good. It's a great technology. It can tell you if I have an algorithm for an on shelf availability that says I think this is out based off average rate of sale and your sales off. Is that shelf empty? Well, I don't need to have Bobby, quick cutting meat and go look at a shelf, just have a camera confirm that for you pictures truly worth 1000 words. The problem with computer vision is people are like, well, I'll just use that for everything. Well, computer vision can't count. It can count quantities that are there. But if I take a quantity away, and I put it back, it doesn't know if that's the one I took away or if it's a new one. So it doesn't have that license plate capability that RFID does. And that's where I think RFID is a superior technology in many of these places to computer vision, and some of the AI and machine learning things that are being done out there. Does it make sense in canned goods? No, because it's so highly substitutable. If I don't have, I've got four flavors of green beans every day, if I'm out of canned green beans, because the production facilities are down in the canning worlds out of business. I've got frozen, I've got four SKUs of frozen. So that's eight. If I don't have frozen, I've got fresh. So at any one point in a grocery store a lot of your sustainable shelf items, you may have four to 10 SKUs of, there's choice options for substitution, like paper towels and toilet paper, right? We learned in COVID there's probably way too much assortment in those spaces. And people are gonna go home with toilet paper, they will substitute readily in those areas. So having availability, computer vision and AI really play into that space. When you get into things with style size, color variations, unique branding variations, different voltages, nets, hardware, electronics, shoes, apparel, home, a lot of personal care, health care items, things like RFID make a ton of sense. I think RFID coupled with computer vision is a tremendous thing right now I've done a lot of work in that space here recently. Robots very valuable. I think they're they're they're becoming, I think people think of robots and they're like I'm buying a tool. I've always thought of robots more as a mobile IoT platform. I can put edge compute on a robot and not have to put a server in the back room, I don't have to tie up my network with all this traffic going to a mainframe, I can actually process stuff while it's collecting more stuff. And so I'm accelerating this functional loop. And if I want more sensors, I can just add sensors to that robot. So I think robots have a lot of advantage over fixed infrastructure. There are situations where fixed infrastructure makes a ton of sense, because I do want 24/7 monitoring of that, right? If I want to pull in organized retail crime and shelf sweeps and baby formula, well, I need to know and I want video with that. So I want video and RFID and time based. And then oh, an exit door alarm went off a fire exit door. Well, that's an IoT sensor that gets connected to a camera so and an RFID reader so the door opens, okay, did anybody take anything, I don't know, just close it and lock it back. I can look at the video and say no, somebody left and they took a 42 inch TV. And oh, by the way, that was a that was an associate that did that. Well, now I've got enough evidence to go through that because of the IoT string and the edge compute tied with that and the matching time date stamp across all my devices. So you don't get to that last scenario, you don't start there. You build up with infrastructure there. And I think you deploy it in strategic zones of your business that deliver value. And you start paying your way to earn the right to do more and educate your business partners and your business peers and the operational teams of why this makes sense how it works, how it delivers value. And it's not there to babysit or point out what everybody does wrong in a day. It's there to point out where the business is going to disappoint your customer and help you improve that before the customer gets there.

Yeah, so so what I hear you saying is based upon what you're trying to get done in the categories, it may be a number of sensor technologies working together, it could be some RFID in parts of the store could be a robot with a camera on it and other parts of store could be fixed cameras in certain parts of the store where we have milk and eggs and cheese and once every 12 hours is not sufficient. You better have the stuff. Who do you know really put you on the spot here who do you know, that's figured out how to connect all that together and make it work. I've not seen it in a retail platform. I've seen people do shelf scanning projects. I've seen people do fixed cameras projects, but I've not seen I've seen people do a lot of RFID projects. I've never seen anybody actually worked to put all this together, because every one of those categories may have a different solution, any ideas of who's kind of leading the way.

There's one, there's one store I saw when I was in Japan, that has taken those platforms and integrated them well across their business. They included electronic shelf labels and zones where it made sense and variable way products and things. And that's the Alibaba store in China. So the Alibaba store itself is a bit of a tech lab. And so they had a robotic conveyor system that was to each zone of the store and they would get order slips and they would break a customer's online order may go into six different zones and you get your order slip that has a unique QR code for that order you pick it freezer was a colored bag refrigerater was a colored bag, seafood was a different color bag, your tickets on the bag, you pick it, you put it on this conveyable system that goes to the back and gets aggregated, they audit the tote, the tote gets tagged, the tote goes out, it gets delivered GPS tracking on the delivery. They're probably the most advanced that I've seen in saying how do we build an automated network. And when I say that think automated car manufacturing lines, right? The chassis just moves and everybody does their component to the order the car is the order. And all the options get put into the car, and then the car gets shipped out. I think that's how you have to think about retail of the future. With a caveat, because I don't know that that model of retail is actually economically affordable.

Interesting.

Um, the margins are too low and the turns are too high. And there's not a manufacturer or government subsidy on these programs. So I think I think you have to be really careful in chasing the shiny star for you know, how much buy online pickup in store can you do? And how fast can you pick? And how many people does it take to do that and the cost of delivery? Those things will continue to get better as people lean into it. But delivering a can of green beans to somebody's house is not a profitable play. And I don't know that I can think of a scenario where it is a profitable thing, right? When you make things so readily available for consumers. And this is just I think this is a humanity habit. The easier things become the lazier we get about doing it in an efficient way ourselves. And so it becomes now I Oh, I need butter. Okay, ordered butter. Oh, well I forgot the beer, ordered beer. And suddenly I've got 26 deliveries to one house, getting ready for Thanksgiving. If everybody if 30% of your customers increase their delivery frequency by 20%. I don't know that you can make that work. Right?

Yeah. All right. So I asked you about the most interesting retailer who's really got it figured out from an IoT perspective. And I think that was a good example. There's another example that I know you are pretty passionate about, which is seamless technologies, right? The just walk out technology kind of platform. And obviously we we know there's a big retailer up in the Seattle area that has a just go just walk out technology, but that that seamless checkout experience, where do you think that's gonna go? Is that just kind of an interesting fad? And just an interesting tech? Or do you think that's something that's, that's potentially scalable outside of just kind of a convenience store platform?

I think it's scalable in time. And the reason is, we we dabbled with this technology and had a version I remember when there was one big retailer in the Northwest launched their video and we're like, Hey, wait, we've done that. But it was a really good play to get investment in the marketplace. I think the challenge is that the tech is really really expensive. Doing I think they're, you know, you're seeing a Whole Foods, you're seeing some groups, eyefi and some groups do some things in Europe with 10,000 square foot facilities and people are talking about we'd like to do a 30,000 square foot facility. Retrofitting those buildings with the tech is still very, very expensive, including there's extra heating and ventilation costs just to keep things cool from that perspective. And then refrigeration upgrades because of your product temperatures on refrigerated products. That'll all work itself out, there's a timeline to do that, right. So maybe in 10 years, you start to see 200,000 square foot boxes start to get there. That's that's a bit of a stab I'm spitballing. I think the technology is really interesting. I think the technology is incredibly invasive to the consumer. And I think that's where you're gonna start to sense more resistance is what the people start to do with that data that says, I've got to identify when I walk into your store, which we've never had to do before.

Right.

And there's, you know, there's a lot of legislation with GDPR, and Illinois and New York and other states, blocking the use of facial recognition, biometrics, and those laws have got pretty stringent with three or four states that have them now. Depending on what people do with that consumer identity information, I think it'll become that'll dictate, I think how fast that moves, if I have trust, and you're not violating me in any way or over advertising me or whatever it is, if it creates value, then I think there's legs to it. If people abuse that then it's like, Hey, I don't I don't want to identify. And there's actually a pretty big movement around web three and sovereign identities and NFT's and I own this and these authentications, that it's merged on the dark web where people are saying, I don't know that I want to give everybody an identity of me, I actually want to control that data. Why should I give you data to sell about me making me a product?

Right.

And, you know, that's Google, Amazon's across the board, the platform companies, people are actually saying, hey, no, I should get a cut of that money. That's my data. And so I think there's companies leaning into that. So I think it would, it's a big coin flip right now to see if they can make it where as companies transact and move data about me around the world, if I get paid for that and get a $200 check every month, that's going to change the way people think about data as a alternate income stream. Right?

Yeah.

And I think that upsets that marketplace quite heavily. So Jury's out, I think the technology is cool. I think it's neat. But if I've got to have an app for Amazon, and then an app for whoever has eyefi then an app for another competing technology, and then an app for you know, Walmart, Walmart pay or whatever, I'm not going to do that. And so the, the interoperability of these technologies from IoT through just walk out functionality is going to be a tremendous hurdle, the cross. And I think quite honestly, it may happen, but it's a huge habit change for the consumer, which is a heavy, expensive lift. You know, US 30% of people are still cash on retail transactions, excuse me, convenience store I figure is probably higher than that. So you got to figure out how I want to deal with cash

Right

Because I can't just walk out in that scenario. You know, Asia, it's more like 70% cash, so bigger, bigger difference, their cash, cash equivalent cards.

Asia is bigger for them.

And when we were in Japan, that number was starting to slowly trend down about 2% a year, but it was like, we were like 78% cash in 13 through 16. I'd say they're probably 65 to 70 today. You're seeing cash cards are used cards from the train station and Metro, but you can put cash on that card at any train station. So it's a debit version, you're seeing a lot of those within again, then you're getting into a unique platform. And those are government subsidized in a lot of scenarios, because your utility cards so there's a lot of things that have to be brought together in an interoperable fashion, I think for that to take off. I think there's a it's probably probably overvalued right now in the marketplace, but it's it's disruptive. And I think you know, we all thrive for things that are disruptive in the marketplace.

Awesome. You have been doing this for a long time, both running retail organizations, running stores, running clubs, international, emerging tech. Here's the big question for you. What question didn't I ask you that should have? What's that, what's hot on your mind? What are the things that are going on in your mind that you think people should know about?

You know, I don't I don't know that there's unique question. It's probably just a bit of a statement. We, I think retail walks around looking for silver bullets. I'm looking for a solution to this problem that I have. And I'm afraid those are all gone. Quite honestly, I think that low hanging fruit is gone. And I think what, what we have to think about is or what I would want people to think about is how are you preparing your architecture, your system and architecture to be dynamic? I think retailers have to think about how is our architecture dynamic, so that if a new sensor comes in, we can plug into that. We can import data structures from other groups and that data can self submit simulate. So I think the industry has to ask itself a question of do we have the standards bodies and the work groups in place to allow us to move to this digitally autonomous world that we talked about? There's this whole thing with with Web Three Dot O and of being able to use game currency to buy goods in the metaverse and I'm I'm not a fan of the metaverse because it's shipped, we can't run retail stores today, perfectly. And we're talking about building a digital version of a retail store to try to run. There's not a universal exchange for those currencies. And people are fighting for that. And there's gas fees and Aetherium, and all these things and NFT tokens and things of authentic authenticity. But I think if you start using that world to build a digital twin of how you want your physical world to work, and when you can actually say I want to run my store this way and build that model and start to show people, you can use that Metaverse concept for something much more three dimensionally digital twin oriented to what your real business is. You can start building start building much more accurate models. What systems do we need? What's the actual profitability on this? We can throttle different services up and down and GE Stein there was this with jet engines, to just my amazement. And I think retail has a huge opportunity to lean into systems architecture to be able to do that. And and not guess so much. And to really plug user forum and these moms groups into this and saying, Hey, how does the demographic shift change this market? As people move around the country and more people migrate into this country? How does that change assortment needs and things in a manner that you may not have good government data to forecast it off of?

Right.

So I'm a big proponent of digital twinning and actually building out a model the infrastructure that you need. And I think all the labs that we built over the years, what was sort of my rudimentary effort of trying to do that, right? How do we mock this up so we know what we're doing, and we can test it before we sink hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars into these these hunches that look really good. But what are we what do we not know about this space and what influences it.

Awesome. Myron, incredible time with you. We really really do appreciate it. You know, you are,

My pleasure.

you are a thought leader in the industry, not only from a real because we we see too many times where we get a lot of people that are really good retail experts. We have a lot of good people that are really smart technology people. Very, very, very rarely, and you are you are a different breed that brings both of those together. So it is both driving it from a retail perspective, and the emerging technology that it takes to do that. So I have always looked up to you worked with you work for you. I've always had the utmost of appreciation for how you think about things and how you challenge the industry. And we just appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with us today.

Mike I loved it. Thank you for the opportunity. Great to visit with you and I look forward to more things with what you're gonna be working on.

Sounds great. Thank you, Myron.

You bet Thank you.

Thank you for taking the time for this epic discussion. And special thanks to Mike Graen for leading the retail supply chain initiative. On behalf of the Walton SCMRC, we are delighted to lead with you as we learn, engage, address and develop all things supply chain to lead the world of commerce from Northwest Arkansas. Have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai