Narrator:

Welcome to the supply chain visibility stories, the podcast for supply chain managers, brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Supply chain visibility stories is hosted by Bill Wohl, a technology industry veteran and enterprise software professional.

Bill Wohl:

Thanks everyone for joining us today marks the next in a series of discussions exploring a variety of business related topics with a focus on the intersection of technology and business. Our discussions are designed to be brief and focused and we're hoping this podcast format inspires you, the audience, to think about how technology impacts your own organization and to engage with us as our series continues. I'll have information about how to engage with this series and our guests at the end of today's discussion. My name is Bill Wohl and I'm honored to be the host of this series which is brought to you by ACSIS. I've been working in the technology sector since the late 1990s, including 11 years at SAP. So, I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by the use of technology. In our first segment, we explored some of the macro trends facing companies today, including the impact of the pandemic and how that's been driving a renewed focus on global supply chains. In our next podcast, I welcome today's guest, John DiPalo of ACSIS. He's the Chief Strategy Officer. John, welcome.

John DiPalo:

Thanks, Bill. I appreciate the opportunity today.

Bill Wohl:

Listen, before we dig in, can you remind our audience what ACSIS is all about?

John DiPalo:

Absolutely. So, ACSIS is a supply chain visibility solution that provides track and trace capabilities for products, assets,  and integration across their extended supply chain, providing them visibility and integration into their business systems so they can have a better understanding as to what's going on across their supply chain.

Bill Wohl:

Okay, great. I, you know, the last time we talked on this podcast series, we talked about sort of big business issues that are in the news today and so-called macro trends. It's interesting to me to see the focus back on supply chain. I remember when I joined SAP in the early 2000s, supply chain was really big business. There was a lot of discussion at from where you sit as a strategy officer. Why the renewed focus on supply chain now?

John DiPalo:

You know, Bill, I think think that when we look at what's going on you know kind of globally in the world the pandemic and I don't want to make it a pandemic discussion but it has really highlighted a lot of the fragility of the supply chain so challenges across the board you know everything from being able to get product through the extended supply chain transportation issues visibility issues companies not really being able to understand not only where their products are but the timing as to when they're going to be able to get those products. So the impact downstream is magnified by the fact that there are all these bottlenecks and challenges in both the transit of raw materials and finished goods through the supply chain as well as the ability to to understand where things are. So this magnification of these challenges I think, has really brought forward the fact that people need to re-evaluate what their supply chains look like  both internally and externally.

Bill Wohl:

Even though the pandemic has sort of exposed the weaknesses,  these kinds of underlying weaknesses have all always been there. Companies have been working on these issues. It's just the fact that they've been much more exposed given the stressors of e-business or digital business as a primary way of getting things done the last 18 months. Do you agree?

John DiPalo:

I would agree. And you know, I think we can look backwards a little bit to look forward, right? You know, so when you look at what a lot of large companies did, you know, when they looked at their supply chains and kind of squeezing out the inefficiencies and you know, doing six sigman kaizon events to be able to understand kind of where things are and where best practices should be. I think one of the challenges that has come out of that is the corresponding ability to see and visualize where things are and take action in the case of a disruption was left kind of on the cutting room floor, right? And now we have all these processes that are in place which you know ultimately were put in place to drive efficiency within the enterprise. But now it seems as if the cost of that efficiency may have been very one-sided because the visibility and the ability to react quickly to any sort of supply chain issue is not there. And I think that's been exposed.

Bill Wohl:

Companies have invested collectively hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise resource planning solutions that are designed to keep an eye on assets to look at supply chain. Why are those ERP investments not enough to really understand where everything is in the supply chain?

John DiPalo:

Yeah, I think that's a good point and you know I don't want to step on anyone's toes or, you know be negative but you know the ERP based solution to try and solve all problems is not really a realistic solution. Right? ERP systems are great at financial information. They're great at managing overarching inventory positions and they're great at, you know, being able to provide you with a level of planning across your entire enterprise. And those things are all necessary, but the challenge that we run into, especially in a very dynamic supply chain, is the execution needed in order to provide the information to drive those ERP systems is challenging.

So, we wind up with a scenario where the data granularity, the data fidelity and the data accuracy required to drive your ERP investment the way that you want it to be run doesn't exist in a lot of companies and then you multiply that by the fact that we have changed from many vertically integrated companies to more of a partner network or an extended supply chain network and all of those moving parts become very hard to manage in a centralized ERP system. So now we start to think about you know how can I surround that ERP investment with a system visibility and a system of execution that provides significant value to ERP and actually improves the functionality that you can get out of your ERP investment. 

Bill Wohl:

So for our audience, if I think about an example, if I take a large airplane manufacturer company that begins with the letter A, you know, they're building subassemblies for their jets in 32 different factory locations all in real time. So what you're talking about is understanding where all of that work in progress is all across the supply chain so that they can figure out how to make those planes come together at the right moment.

John DiPalo:

Yeah. And when we think about it, you know, from an ACSIS perspective and how we think about these types of solutions is you have a large number of moving parts across that partner network, and the the idea is to bring them all together at the right time so that you can efficiently assemble, produce, and deliver that final product to your customer. And the challenge lies in the fact that across that entire supplier base and across that entire supply chain, there are various levels of technology. There are various levels of the ability to share information. And that's where the challenges start to come in. And you know, the interesting part that we look at when we talk with our customers and and folks in the industry is that even some of the simplest components of a final product, if they don't show up the right time in the right state and you have visibility from being able to plan and and manage that the whole process starts to you know become unraveled and then you start to get into delays and customer service issues and other challenges that we're seeing today.

Bill Wohl:

So that particular aircraft company, may or may not be one of your customers, but I want to use it as an example if I get really tactical if I go from 50,000 ft for the audience all the way down to the littlest of details. Any one of those small vendors in that supply chain may be building piece parts. Let's use the airline example or the aircraft example for just a second. The company that's making an individual flap has 18 screws in that flap. They believe those 18 screws, according to their ERP system, are sitting on the shelf, but when the assembly worker goes to pull those 18 screws, they can't find them. Is it that seems like a really simple issue. Why is it so hard?

John DiPalo:

Yeah, it's it's a good point, you know, and when we look across the industry, you know, certainly there are various and multiple ways that people have implemented their solutions in order to to help solve that. But the challenge that we find is even in the most accurate inventory position-based company,  there's a point in time where things are moving. There's a point in time when things are issued to a work order or received. From a work order you know or product is being manufactured and the challenges that we see is in something that I call sometimes data which the frequency of how that data gets into the ERP system the fidelity of how it gets into the ERP system and the accuracy of it is widely different based upon companies. So we have you know companies that have invested millions in their ERP system yet they report product movements or shop floor activities or manufacturing activities on an shift basis, on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. And the problem that you run into, Bill, is that the person looking for those six screws that you used in your example, somebody may have come 10 minutes earlier and picked those same six screws for a different job and didn't report it back. So, you know, as I like to say, if you're looking for something that doesn't exist, it's really hard to find and you'll spend a lot of time looking for it. And then it seems simple, but when you multiply that by 5, 10, 15, 20 times per day across multiple work cells. You know the challenges of efficiency and operational excellence are multiplied and then the downstream impacts of that in late shipments or making that assembly available for the next step in the process the cascading effect is significant.

Bill Wohl:

So let's talk about that business impact without getting specific on company names. Talk to me about customers that you've talked to. What are the business impacts that they're seeing from these inefficiencies? What does that translate to in time or in dollars or in bottom line impact?

John DiPalo:

Yeah. And you know, I can point to a couple of examples. You know, they're we're working with with anumberr of customers just as an example that either have you know, temperature sensitive product or time sensitive product. And you know, the challenge is that ERP doesn't necessarily they always manage those additional attributes equally to they do in counts or equal to they do in inventory positions and things like that. So, you know, you wind up with scenarios where you have potential inventory write offs of expired inventor  or inventory that you can no longer use or if you can't find something, then all of a sudden I turn around and I put a rush order in to my secondary supplier to ship me replacement parts when actually those replacement parts were somewhere else in my facility. So now I have spent money, spent capital, spent time, and now I have to store all this equipment, and maybe then that becomes obsolete because I don't need it for the next order. So there's all these follow-on challenges that can occur when you don't have a real-time visual understanding that you can get back to your stakeholders of where things are, who needs them, at what time they need them.

Bill Wohl:

Okay, that makes sense. So if I go back to my aircraft analogy a little bit earlier, and extend that. I I can remember one of the biggest challenges from a supply chain perspective that impacted the airline industry was lost baggage. And so the airlines spent hundreds of millions of dollars, probably even more. So that, you know, now when I sit down on the aircraft, I can look at my  airline app and I can tell that my bag was sent from the ticket counter to the plane. The app will tell me the exact moment that the bag was loaded onto the aircraft. It confirms that it is on my aircraft and when I get to the far end of my trip, I can watch it be on the app unloaded by time. , so if airlines can find all those bags, why is it still tough for B2B companies to know where their goods are throughout the supply chain?

John DiPalo:

Yeah. And I think it really boils down to, you know, in your example there, you know, we look at the airline industry and baggage handling specifically, and they've actually embraced a multimodal technology base in order to to track that. So you see now airlines leveraging barcode plus RFID plus integration with their material handling devices and it's all driven to provide a better customer experience and on the back side it saves them considerable amounts of money in the fact that I don't now have to deliver lost bags to everyone you know once  it has arrived at a at a location. So what I would like to think about and what I'd like companies to think about is how can I embrace this ability to capture information at a much more granular level, macro that up to the right level, integrate that into ERP, but also leverage that for visibility, right?  So, how do you put a solution in that provides you granular visibility and also drives transactional processing within your ERP all within the same system? You know, the one thing I like to leave people with is when you're thinking about manufacturing or distribution, the act of moving the product should feed the system. You shouldn't be thinking about feeding the system after the product is already left by some manual process that happens later. So that's kind of a little thought that  I try to keep in mind when we look at our solutions.

Bill Wohl:

So that takes us to to our last question. I think what you've been describing the last few seconds, John, is the DiPalo rule, right? It's to move from sometimes data to real-time data. It's feeding the system with where items are, finished goods or unfinished parts as often as possible so that the transparency of the supply chain is maximized. 

John DiPalo:

Absolutely.

Bill Wohl:

Is that ultimately what you're talking about?

John DiPalo:

It is. And you know the secret sauce to that one is also being able to have a system available that knows the level that your ERP system can absorb the information but also knows how I want to view the information. Right? Because those are two different things typically. And if you can solve that challenge, then you get the best of both worlds. You get an execution system that improves operational excellence that turns into a very highfidelity granular view of what's going on within your supply chain and at the same time your ERP and other business systems are updated with real data in real time.

Bill Wohl:

And I think that's a good place to wrap it up. John, thanks for joining us today.

John DiPalo:

Bill, I appreciate it and it was good to speak with you. 

Bill Wohl:

We have a lot more topics to discuss on this series. My thanks to ACSIS Chief Strategy Officer John DiPalo for joining us today and to everyone at ACSIS for making this podcast series possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. I know John would love to dig in on the topics. So, you can engage with us at the official ACSIS Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. That's where the discussion is taking place and I hope that you'll join. I'm your host, Bill Wohl. And for everyone at ACSIS, thanks for joining. We look forward to our next podcast. Talk soon.

Narrator:

Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Visibility Stories brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Visit us on the web at ACSISinc.com. That's acsisinc.com. Or join the dialogue on social media. Look for ACSIS Inc. on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time for supply chain visibility stories brought to you by ACSIS.