Made Everywhere, Shipped Everywhere: Supply Chain Visibility

Gil Rodriguez: Pleasure to be here, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Bill Wohl: So, let’s set the stage for podcast number nine. We’ve been talking about filling the gaps in transparency in the supply chain and, in particular, how companies can think about that effort, sort of from concept to execution. But let’s dig a little bit further into what’s going on and how supply chains have really become globally intertwined. What are you hearing from customers, Gil? What’s keeping them up at night?

Gil Rodriguez: Well, thanks for framing the question that way because I have just gotten off of a series of calls recently with both customers and prospects. And Bill, we asked that very direct question. What keeps you up at night? What are the pain points? If you had a blank check and all the resources in the world, what would you work on? And there seems to be a common thread that you can weave through the fabric of all that.

They are talking about a lack of containers. They are talking about a lack of available shipping. A big topic item is terminal space at these various ports—LA, Long Beach, New York, New Jersey—and a lack of drivers. There are 64,000 open job slots out there for drivers. So the big push that everyone seems to talk about, and you could boil the ocean down to two words, is visibility and flexibility.

Bill Wohl: Mhm.

Gil Rodriguez: That is the big push. That is what they are driving towards.

ill Wohl:
It’s kind of interesting because this is a topic that is not hidden in the background in the industry. It’s not something that’s being talked about by supply chain managers and executives.

This is a global news focus, and that has brought the topic of global supply chains really out into the public forefront. In all of your years of doing this, have you ever seen it like this?

Gil Rodriguez:
No. Absolutely not. And there’s an upside to that and a downside to that. So the upside is that there’s buzz, and everybody’s talking about it. The downside is that there’s a lot of buzz and everybody’s talking about it, and there’s almost a built-in inertia.

It’s where do I start? How do I get the ball rolling in order to be able to address these issues of visibility? The one view, if you will, are things that I keep hearing about and the flexibility ultimately be able to adjust to be able to onboard and offload partners as your supply chain continues to expand, continues to change, your customer base changes, heck, even your packaging changes.

So that is pushing these customers to remain highly flexible and highly adaptive to these changes.

Bill Wohl: So let’s step back from what’s in the news and sort of dig into this a little bit. You’ve talked previously about this concept of supply chains and linearity and what I thought was an interesting expression of the world is operating today, industry is operating today under the concept of made everywhere, ship everywhere.

What do you mean by that?

Gil Rodriguez: I’m smiling as you frame the question. I think back to a comment I heard from a supply chain VP, and that was not a title that was thrown around loosely 10 years ago. That’s become much more in vogue recently.

But the comment was—and I wrote it down—as a global chemical company, we went from made in the USA and ship it everywhere to now making semifinished products everywhere. We assemble them someplace, and then we ship them everywhere.

So that takes the concept of a linear relationship and just throws it out the window.

Bill Wohl: And so that means that what we’re seeing in news—what we’re all experiencing about breakdowns in the ability of products to be shipped from place to place—that puts an extraordinarily much more, maybe exponentially is a better word, exponential impact on an industry like chemicals.

Because if goods are not moving, then that entire nonlinear supply chain starts to collapse.

Gil Rodriguez: 100% correct, and if you think about that industry specifically, perhaps the only one that would compare to it from a complexity standpoint would be life sciences. But it’s highly globalized. It is highly diversified.

So there are a number of chemical companies out there that went from being true traditional chemical companies to investing heavily in what’s called ENI—electronics and imaging. These goods are regulated. In some cases, they are shipping dangerous goods. There’s a heavy reliance on ocean-bound shipping, railcar, tank cars—heavily regulated, lots of supply chain touch points.

And added recently, and rightfully so, is pressure to address the issue of sustainability.

Bill Wohl: Mhm.

Gil Rodriguez: So, companies that used to ship in what they called the one-way vessel—and I don’t mean an ocean carrying vessel or a railcar or a tank car, but packaging, one-way packaging. These could be one-ton packages, two-ton packages.

The onus used to be on the recipient—Bill, or a customer—to be able to recycle or discard that. And there is pressure now coming from various pockets of the world that this is an opportunity for sustainability. That is an opportunity to address environmental issues.

And I can’t emphasize enough, rightfully so. So, these companies are under pressure now to go from a concept of a one-way shipment to introducing the concept of returnables. So that is a huge change to their supply chain ecosystem. And now, it’s not just a function of managing the outbound but where is it on its journey on the way back? And what kind of shape does the container come in on the way back?

Does it need to be re-serviced? Does it need to be maintained? Does it need to be segregated for another product, etc.? So again—go ahead, I’m sorry.

Bill Wohl: To see if I get that right though—so now because you have that bidirectional issue, you’re not just as a supply chain leader worried about materials arriving that are in process.

But the return carriers become critical because if they’re not available, the return trip of finished or semi-finished goods can’t occur. If the carriers don’t exist, then that’s also a potential block to the free flow in the supply chain. So, transparency becomes really important in both directions.

Gil Rodriguez: That’s exactly right. So imagine, if you will, a U-turn on a highway.

If you have bottlenecks in one direction and you need to return that package—that container, that shipping packaging—needs to be returned in the other direction, those same bottlenecks exist on the return journey. Or the same potential bottlenecks exist.

Bill Wohl: So I know that you can’t always talk about companies by name, but can you talk about a particular example about a chemical company that’s dealing with this issue and some of the challenges that they’re experiencing?

Gil Rodriguez: Absolutely. So, in one example—and again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to not name names. I can name a dozen, but I’ll pick one out in particular where they manufacture a product in the United States. And I can’t even give you the generic name of the product, but they manufacture a product in the United States.

That product is shipped to another location in the United States where it is processed. It undergoes some type of a cutting. It undergoes a repackaging effort. The item is then sent to Europe where it is treated, and I’ll leave the verb at “treated.”

It’s then sent back across to Asia Pacific, where it is assembled. So you think of that journey—that is an around-the-world journey for one product, one SKU, if you will. And that needs to be tracked. Because at the end of the day, Bill, the customer doesn’t care about the journey that the product went through.

All they see is the logo of the company that manufactured it and, frankly, sent them the invoice. They want to make sure that it’s the right product, it’s at the right place, it’s at the right time, and it’s at the right price.

Bill Wohl: So, we learned the concept in the consumer packaged goods space 15 years ago about just-in-time inventory at the retail level.

But what we’re really talking about here in your example—a number of manufacturing companies along the way whose very production schedules, their operations depend on these materials showing up right at the right time—or there becomes a domino effect. So this issue of transparency and flexibility in the supply chain comes right to the forefront.

Gil Rodriguez: 100%. So, the majority of chemical companies out there operate under what’s called a co-man or a toller model. So it’s not just one or two entities that need to know where the thing—the widget, let’s call it, back to our college days—where the widget is in the supply chain.

There’s a number of actors that need to know where that is in the supply chain. Everyone from distribution, and in some cases, to the consumer.

Bill Wohl: Okay, that makes sense. So, we’ve talked on this series about the fact that some companies are at the forefront of leveraging technology. We’ll call them progressive, but many companies are really just getting started.

They may have put in a business process around supply chain management, but finding that true transparency and the ability to bring shipping partners in and out of their supply chain—they’re just getting started. What keeps companies from making advances into this area and being further along this journey?

Gil Rodriguez: The biggest challenge I’ve seen so far—and we’ve been at this a while, and we’ve been helping customers to at least put a framework in place—is to define the network. Know who your suppliers are.

Get an understanding of what you’re able to track within the four walls—your plants, your tollers, your warehouses, your distribution centers—and literally sometimes, Bill, it’s a whiteboarding exercise.

Go to the whiteboard and map out the network, then define the processes within those networks, and then identify one asset that you want to track and to what degree of data fidelity and granularity. You want to track that. Customers are doing proof of concepts all the time, or they’re doing phase ones. So it’s as broad as identify your network, identify your process, and pick a SKU.

Bill Wohl: So given the complexity of these global supply chains you’ve described—in the old days, having visibility into multiple systems from multiple suppliers was enough.

But today you want your system to be able to seamlessly, on what we would once call a single pane of glass, really look at how the supply chain systems from all of those players on your whiteboard example—how do they all seamlessly come together and integrate from a technology perspective, correct?

Gil Rodriguez: Agreed. What’s old is new. So the concept of the one window pane has been around for a while, and it is absolutely—it’s back and forth now.

And it started long before COVID, but COVID has absolutely accelerated that requirement to be able to have that one view—to not jump from portal to portal to portal to manually track where something is.

Bill Wohl: Typically, Gil, we close up our program, we always sort of talk about providing customers the best advice to get started. And it sounds like mapping out one aspect of your supply chain in that exercise you described on the whiteboard might be the right first step.

Gil Rodriguez: Yes.

Bill Wohl: Gil Rodriguez of ACSIS, always great to have you on the program. Thanks so much.

Gil Rodriguez: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Hope to be able to talk to you again.

Bill Wohl: So, that wraps up today’s podcast. My thanks to Gil and the folks at 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 that 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.