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 for this next in a series of discussions exploring the intersection of technology and business. We're talking supply chain. Our podcasts are designed to be brief and focused and we're hoping this format inspires our audience to think about how technology impacts their own organizations and to engage with us. I'll have information about how to engage with the series and our guest today at the end of today's discussion. Hi, I'm Bill Wohl and I'm honored to be the host of this series brought to you by ACSIS. I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by technology. We've had a focus of supply chain on our series, and we talked a lot about some very broad macro trends to global systems integrations, edge devices, all around the renewed focus on global supply chains. And during the course of our podcast, one of the recurring themes has been about the two-way flow of goods, the potential impacts on sustainability and operations, and the requirements for real flexibility in supply chains. And our guest today will allow us to dig into that just a little bit. We of course will have a guest from ACSIS, Jill Rodriguez of ACSIS of course a technology player in the supply chain space. But I'd like to start by welcoming our special guest Jim Hess of Google. Jim, welcome to the program.

Jim Hess:

Hi Bill and good morning.

Bill Wohl:

So I want to talk today a little bit about reverse logistics, which is an interesting topic, and what I find fascinating sometimes is we think about companies because of who they are and their brand. We all know Google as a tremendous source of search capabilities and cloud. We don't often think about the business behind the business and your team is involved in thinking about the logistics of IT and in particular one of the unique aspects of doing business today which is supporting an ever-hybrid workforce. So let's sort of start at a high level. Can you talk a little bit about your role at Google and what your team does and then we'll dig into the topic a little bit.

Jim Hess:

Sure, Bill. I'm the reverse logistics manager for corporate engineering for Google. We have about 208 offices. We probably service a workforce of over 250,000 globally in 165 different countries. The IT piece of this is that Google has you know enough hardware, laptops, desktops, things that people use across the globe and of course in a current fresh state. So that represents a very large and very liquid fleet. 

Bill Wohl:

So one of the things we've seen that has dramatically resulted is impacts to supply chains because of the pandemic, and that's come in a lot of different forms. In your world, the impact of the pandemic meant all workers were leaving the office and working at home. So that really sort of changed everything for your operation, right?

Jim Hess:

Well, it Sure did.  you know, Bill, we  had a legacy  distribution network where we could support users at their campus at their at their desk and  do everything we  needed to with providing inventory, providing support, even  with direct  returns and that could go  into our hub warehouses and everything was very clean and optimal and and  as you as Google has grown and built out its company globally. It's was easy  to look at these hub and spokes as modules across the distribution network with the offices closed and everybody working from home that it's basically up 250,000  people distributed across the globe that we needed to one get product to support and then return their items.

Bill Wohl:

The challenge to do that and not even know that it was coming. Business had to really react almost overnight to this change, which requires a great deal of flexibility. And as we think about the role of supply chain leaders, flexibility is always sort of has to be a bedrock way of managing the business, right?

Jim Hess:

it is, and you know, Bill, what we had to do is we had to build in another layer to our supply chain. is that not just change what our our brick-and-mortar distribution network because we knew we'd need to to do use that again once the offices reopened but we needed to also to service that direct channel where people were working from home and we need to do it with the tools we had. So we we we we used a omni channel approach with a with a a user demand driven interface and based on the automation what we would send product into our direct channel supply chain that was ran by separate 3PLs and and carriers or we would route that item back to say for instance if that particular office was open into the legacy distribution network.

Bill Wohl:

It's likely and none of us have a crystal ball certainly you and I don't about the future of work but it's pretty clear even from Google's statements that the future is hybrid and employees will work at the office they'll work at home. So as you think about the future of your supply chain, it really is about a model where the end customer in this case your employees has some choice about whether they go to it at the office or they go to it directly from their home. You've got to keep that flexibility in the model because we really don't know what work looks like going forward.

Jim Hess:

We do have a hybrid work model going forward and we presumably will have a workforce that that will be split between working from home or from a remote location or from the office and as a as a supply chain person I will continue to have those requirements in indefinitely to service the direct channel and the legacy brick-and-mortar network.

Bill Wohl:

It's interesting how this term of omni channel applies to so many industries. Your business is particularly unique. At the end of the day, you're supporting a large workforce. But we've talked to people in the retail space about omnichannel and giving consumers the choice to order online but pick up in the store or order online and have it direct delivered or even order online and pick up at a third location.

Jim Hess:

Right.

Bill Wohl:

You think about it the same way, right? Your customer here is the employee and they need an omnichannel experience.

Jim Hess:

That’s exactly true, Bill. It's not unique to us. And we'll have a  let's just say a worker that would work maybe part of the week in the office and the other part of the week  at at home and and based on their specific requirement and where they plan on being through throughout the the the week they they may order order something for delivery to their desk in the office  and return it from from their house into the direct channel. So this so we have to have build in that agility to provide multiple option to satisfy our users requirements.

Bill Wohl:

So, it's even more complicated, if you will, from that because we started our program with the words reverse logistics. And that's your world. Employees are not just returning equipment because they're leaving the company. They have repair requirements or their equipment gets dated out and needs to be upgraded. So, you've got to think about it's not just one classic return, that return can come in many forms, right?

Jim Hess:

That's right. You know, when I look back to just a few years ago, how easy it was where a user could take their laptop, walk up to a technical desk and and give it to an inventory technician to either change something, manipulate it, or just walk switch it out and walk back to their desk. And how simple and easy that transaction was today. We we would would have to service either the direct channel, send out empty packaging just like any RMA to get an item back in our system. It'll go through an inventory location and we built in special computer repair activities along the way to want to examine the condition of items manipulate the product because IT hardware has digital media, and it needs to be erased. It needs to be reimaged. Other security  applications have to be applied and then things just flat out have to be paired with such a large fleet with many different OEMs and warranties. All the work needs to be collected, repair parts ordered and of course fixes applied and back out into the world that at you mentioned earlier at many different permutations, right? Could come back from the office to go to a repairs facility to back to somebody's home. So, we've got to build in all the different ways to make that happen.

Bill Wohl:

I'll ask one last question because we're at time. You also have the challenge that some of these returns are at different paces. The person who has an immediate IT crisis and needs to be supported and then the slower pace of stuff that just has to be returned to go back into inventory. So your automation has to account not just for the purpose of the return but the pace of return too. Right?

Jim Hess:

That's right. You know when when you're supporting users You know, you you've got to not only have have a seamless entry into your supply chain where they can make demands, but to fundamentally support them to where they they pick up a phone, we we can make something happen. Either directly or through an expedited process for returns. You know, when we look at this distributed network,  returns move differently because we will pay a high margin for expedited distribution or carrier service but on the return side, things don't need to move as fast. So when you look look to economize well we'll move to ground instead of air you know we'll we'll collect things centrally at a hub warehouse or or we'll move things in in batches through a a repair center but the the forward order that goes out to support a a user that is either without a working device or or desperately needs a new platform. We can get that anywhere in the world overnight mostly.

Bill Wohl:

It's a fascinating insight into the back office of Google. Jim,  thanks for that. I  want to bring in Gil Rodriguez for sort of a last question here. Gil, we're tight on time, but I think it's important that a lot of our listeners are thinking, boy, this can be really complicated. There's many aspects. It's time. It's omnichannel and we don't really know what work will look like 6 months or 6 years from now. From your perspective, how does an IT leader think about meeting all of these challenges? What's sort of the first step to to get them navigating this journey?

Gil Rodriguez:

Well, Bill, you've you've asked the the quintessential question, you know, where where do I start? How do I start? And it's it's actually similar to other IT efforts where the mission is to continually optimize your supply chain and to and to do that using tools to improve visibility and the age-old adage is still appropriate. You don't you don't boil the ocean.  You start with a four-step process and the first step of the journey is you have to define your business network. Who are your suppliers? What are you doing within the four walls? Your plants, your tollers, your warehouse, your distribution and even the last leg of the journey onto the end users. Most customers think they know that but it's actually a cathartic exercise to put it into a wiring diagram because the supply chains are always changing. The second thing you do is you define the process within those networks. How are you doing procurement? How are you doing shipping, receiving, manufacturing? And then you get to the more granular level. Step three, you define the assets within your network that you want to track and to what degree of fidelity or granularity or item level detail that you're looking to to track. The last step is establish KPIs. What is deemed to be successful and and lastly not necessarily a step in the journey. It's a standard you put a team around you that's done this before and you put a team around you that has not only done it before at a proof of concept level that are able to scale it to a more global or more enterprise level.  Common sense things not always adhere to but it's a simple four-step process and again, the endgame is all about optimizing the supply chain.

Bill Wohl:

Well, we're an audio podcast, but I can tell you from Jim nodding that that certainly agreement there, Jim. Anytime we get the opportunity to hear from a company the size and scale of Google and understand some of the intricate features of your supply chain is useful to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining our program.

Jim Hess:

Thanks for having me, Bill.

Bill Wohl:

So, that wraps up today's podcast. My thanks to Gil Rodriguez of ACSIS for joining, Jim Hess from Google. And of course, thanks to ACSIS for making this podcast series possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. You can engage with us at the official ACSIS Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. So, please be a part of the discussion. 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.