Global Logistics Across Borders: Navigating Clinical Trials, Compliance, and Complexity

Safety is primary in the military because you're moving equipment, you're moving personnel, sometimes you're moving explosives and it's on the same aircraft. Welcome to Supply Chain Optimizers, the show that uncovers the controversial strategies and candid stories of innovators and disruptors from some of the world's largest supply chain operations. Let's cut through the noise and optimize your logistics and supply chain one bold idea at a time. Welcome to Supply Chain Optimizers. I'm Diego Solorzano, and today it is my absolute pleasure to welcome Ben Taylor. And he's a very seasoned logistics and supply chain leaders. More than 20 years of experience across a lot of things that we normally don't really think about, right? Pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, global logistics, hazardous materials. He has built and scaled international supply chains, supporting clinical trials across, for instance, 90 countries, implemented Lean Six Sigma practices for operational efficiency, managed a bunch of hazardous materials with rigorous compliance standards. Beyond his corporate work, Ben also serves in the Air National Guard, bringing a military precision and discipline to logistics. His career uniquely bridges highly regulated medical supply chains, dangerous goods, handling real world military logistics, and that gives him a very rare perspective on challenges and patience in global operations. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it and I'm excited to have the conversation. Ben, what initially drew you to this intersection of logistics, healthcare, military operations, everything that I just quoted. How did your career evolve from your earlier roles to global leadership? Well, I think like most people, logistics, I kind of just fell into the position. It's not something that even when people go to school for logistics tends to be business management. And there's a hole that needs to be filled. And so somebody jumps into it. Usually they're thrown into it. And that's similar. What happened to me, I didn't ever anticipate being this. My degree is in international economics and I love geography. I love international business. This is kind of a very normal fit. You know when you talk to people and they're talking about, well, we need to ship something from Moldova. If you were asking them to point on a map where Moldova is, they probably couldn't do it. And so that's where I kind of come in and started business with my dad. And then he got sick, so we ended up having to sell that. I got into management and manufacturing, then with the military. That gave me a lot of other international, different sorts of cargo and shipping experience. And then I fell into clinical trials. And I've been Doing that for a while now, and now with Precision Medicine Group, it's just kind of one of those things that like a lot of people I've spoken to, just kind of fell into it to fill the need and then fix the department and then you gain more experience, kind of move up that scale. And that's kind of where I came into this. And then with the military, the same thing. I switched fields from doing electronics and communications navigation work into logistics and cargo. And then it really behooved and helped my career because we had to deal with really different types of shipping, different shipping lanes, dangerous goods, hazardous materials, and working with IATA and CFR 49, those are sorts of things. So that's going to help me in this field. And again, that was not where I originally planned. I went in the infantry before I went into college, and then all of it just kind of brought me into the position I'm in now with international shipping logistics. It's interesting, a true geography nerd. I also, like, adore geography, maps, etc. As soon as you mentioned Moldova, I immediately thought of the capital city, Kishnev. Right. I can go all day talking about, you know, weird geography, fun facts and stuff. Yeah. Globes. I grew up looking at globes and it's a shame that people don't have globes much anymore because there's so much to be said about flipping through a book that has maps. You see the terrain, especially the topographical globes. So you're, you're, you know, you're rubbing your hands on, you're seeing the map. The mountains here, the mountains there, they get bigger in the Andes or they get bigger in the Alps. And just imagining what people had to go through to do that, traveling with the military. And you see some of these areas and it's amazing. I think what humanity has had to go through just to go 35 miles across certain areas. And it's no wonder they didn't communicate with each other. And then nowadays you just take it all for granted. Yeah. I think geography, you have to really like geography to enjoy global logistics. I absolutely agree. Yeah, I mean, we're deviating off topic a little bit, but during my days at Stanford, my favorite piece of Stanford was their map room. It's just full of maps. Right. And a very, very large collection of maps. And I just be there for hours. So I agree there's some component of loving geography to loving global logistics. Right? There is. And I think there's still some, like, if you think about even going through where when people Europeans were moving through Africa in the 1800s, 1700s, or even when the Europeans or anyone were moving through Central America or South America. We take for granted today that a plane can fly over it. But to think any stories that went on there, having to move from one place to another, supplies, or even if you think about Easter island, where they said they were moving, I don't know how true it is. They were moving the trees in certain areas, moving stones when they built the pyramids in Central America or anywhere else. The complication of that. And today we just take it for granted that you're going to move through a jungle or move over mountains. And so it's amazing to think what humanity had to go through to deal with supplies and logistics 400 years ago for, you know, 250 years ago. Forget about even in the last 50 years or even now. And I think talking to project managers, talking to people, they don't realize that, all right, you have a bumpy road, can't you just get it there? An 18 wheeler. And that's not how it was. Not at all. Sometimes mopeds are, you know, and deal in certain areas. We've had to deal with logistics companies using local service providers and they were mopeds because that was the way they got around and it was faster. They could weave in and out of traffic. So they still adhere to SOPs and adhere to what you had to for safety. But sometimes that's a faster route than you would think. Throw in the back of an Amazon truck and take it where it's going. Fascinating. And I absolutely agree. We just take it for granted. Similar to global logistics. And speaking of that, you've worked extensively, very extensively in global medical logistics. But there's a distinction here, right, like managing clinical trial supply chains and, and some of traditional pharmaceutical logistics. Right. Can you just give us the 101 on how these are different or similar? Yeah, so they're not. Pharmaceuticals is very complicated. There's a lot of regulatory items that go with that. There's a lot of different temperature controls. They tend to move through much larger chains. Because you're talking about drugs versus a clinical trial, there's different phases of that. Right. So when you're moving the drugs in, particularly you have to have very specific regulations that are moving those. You have to have chain of custody. That's very specific. You have to always know where they're at at all times. And then when they arrive, where they're going, they have to be under basically a quarantine. They're not but they have to be highly regulated where they go. When you look at supply chains and clinical trials, we may be moving specifics of a lab kit or a blood draw kit, but that's still different than the drugs themselves. So within the industry, there's also different regulatory commitments that you have to adhere to. And a lot of the couriers will work with that. You have to deal with a lot of importer and exporter issues with that. So when you're looking at supply chain, you're saying, all right, we need to move a computer or we have to move a desk, we have to move these specific goods and materials. That becomes very different when all of a sudden you're saying we have to move 25,000 drug samples somewhere. Or even when you're looking at certain biospecimens and blood samples, there are some countries that are very particular about how they move those or if they even want them leaving the country. And China is a good example. There are certain countries that are difficult to move samples out of. So a lot of medical trials companies, they will just open a lab in that country because it makes it much easier. And then you get into. Most people today don't think about AIDS and hiv. Thirty years ago, that was a big deal, and it was very dangerous, I guess, to move those. Today, though, while it's still a horrible disease and it's dangerous, it's handled much more lightly saying, oh, you know what, there's a possibility this may have HIV to sample, and it's not a big deal. It still ships the same way. Something with the flu, somebody who has any of these other diseases or sicknesses that we may not think a big deal of. But then when you get into tuberculosis or you get into the bubonic plague, those now ship as a category A versus category B. And now you change your licensing because you're not allowed to ship those. So there's a lot of different regulations that go into shipping the drug part versus the supply chain. And supply chain is so vast that shipping pens might just be supply chain. But that's not necessarily going to be under clinical trial. We may ship a laptop or a tablet because it assists with scanning in barcodes or other things we use. But some countries are very regulated in the batteries that you're shipping. So now that does affect the pharmaceutical or the clinical trial side more so than the pharmaceutical. But that also now we have to figure out how do we source it internally inside the country versus shipping externally. So there's a lot of those items that go into it and now we have to look at some things that you never think of the way the codes go into the items. You can have one item that ships a certain way, exact same item, different gauge, and all of a sudden it ships under a different HTS code. And now it becomes regulated. Band aids are a good example. If you have antibiotics on it, the antibiotic can now make it ship as a dangerous good and countries don't want to take it in. But you're like, it's just a band aid with Neosporin regulatory across the board, how those things are handled. And so the supply chain of pharmaceutical is kind of two different parts, but they do melt over into one another and they do become cause a lot of difficulties because most people don't think of those terms. So we're just thinking it's just, it's just a band aid with antibiotics. It might be, but some countries don't view it that way. That's a very. Yeah, interesting answer. I have so much to unpack here as I was taking some of the. Of the notes of going deeper. Right. Our audience really loves examples. Right. You did mention some countries are way harder to deal with so that you end up actually opening up a facility there just so that you don't have to ship anything. Can you give us an example and maybe double click on what are the biggest challenges, right, in maintaining these supply chains running? You know, even just between the EU and the UK now there's issues sometimes moving things back and forth. Fifteen years ago that was easy. If you had it in Europe, you could go to the uk. Wasn't a big deal with Norway, it wasn't a big deal with any of these countries. Now, though, with the UK going through Brexit, they're creating their own supplies. So what used to be just a CE standard item framing, I was going to touch subject. Now the UK still adheres to that, but they're going to go to the uk. So there's a lot of adjustments have to be made just within that area. And then even within certain countries, you can export out of Netherlands or France and I have a problem. But if you're going to export something out of Spain now, even though it's the same economic union, you have to fill out certain paperwork. So it's easier to open a location in the eu because Spain can ship to Germany or to Netherlands, not a problem. Italy goes there, not a problem. But if you want to ship from Italy or Spain to the U.S. now, you have to go through certain regulatory standards and it's the Same with Australia. Australia has specific standards, so having a lab there because it's so far away from Europe and America makes it much easier. And you also don't have to worry about having an importer of record available, exporter of record. And a lot of people look at New Zealand and say, oh well, New Zealand and Australia, it's like saying U.S. and Canada, you know, until 2017, 2018, things were a little easier really. Now things are a little more difficult to ship between there. And we're basically sibling nations and what used to be a 16 to 20 hour lane is now a 48 hour lane. And that's difficult for a lot of people to understand because in our heads we still think it's just Canada and I'm sure Canadians think it's just the US but it's not that simple anymore due to whatever is going on governmentally. So now we have issues with moving things back and forth and it's not even as easy as well, if you're in Montreal, I'm going to drive it over the border to Vermont because they still have to clear customs and then you still have to fly it, so you have to get a flight out. And China is a good example because they're very protective of any that's anything that's genetic or DNA behooves a company to try and open a lab there and do all of their information pass the regulatory bodies that have to handle any of that information in the labs, you sanitize information and then you can share it with the sponsor or the client who's working that study. South Africa is another one. They don't like shipping. Well, nobody likes shipping infectious goods, but South Africa is very particular to highly infectious. They don't want to moving around. They're going to keep it specifically in there. So going through all of these regulations, we think today we just look at, you know, the Internet gets everything around. You can look up whatever you want. Your doctor, you can basically use, you know, an AI system to be your, you know, your medical practitioner almost. But you still have to move the goods around and there's still a lot of, I don't want to say biases, but there's still a lot of regulatory standards that you have to pass. And the FDA is a good example. They have a lot of things that are older as regulations still in place that to us may not make sense, but there's a reason why it takes 10 years for clinical trials to make their money back. They want to get these things in place and that's how it goes with opening locations and trying to move things around different countries. So something as simple as, you know, Indonesia and Philippines, they're two very different countries and very different regulations. So we have to really watch how we're moving things around that area. And even at that point, when you look at the islands in the Philippines, there are so many islands there that part of what we do is try and advise our clients on how to do things logistically. But if you're looking at a very small sampling subjects, trying to get things in and out of a country, just within a country, from one island to the next, where you can process it and then move it out of that country, it's very difficult. And then you also have some, you know, religious regulations with who wants to handle whatever. And so that also starts to have a lot of issues. We used to be able to move things between Middle Eastern countries and Israel. Obviously two years ago that ceased. But when you're in the middle of a clinical trial, that causes a big hiccup and a big issue. And so those regulations and those governmental bodies having issues, it ends up being tit for tat and a lot of stuff and causes a lot of issues. Shipping internationally, that's a fascinating problem to think about. Right. And so, so specific and I guess, you know, if we step back a little bit, this is obviously a very highly regulated. How do you approach building this culture of safety compliance and at the same time being efficient? Because there's, there's got to be some trade offs there on, oh, I can just do whatever it takes, nothing to just ship it versus oh, I have to be very compliant and have this glimpse of compliance and safety. How do you think about this balance? Well, I think a lot of it starts at the very beginning. If we know we have to ship somewhere or we have clients asking us a question, we need to review that. We need to work with the trading appliance team, talk about the different regulatory items that are important there. And then once you get that standard standard, you keep that and you advise clients on it as much as possible. And when we're talking about dealing with dangerous goods, a lot of times we're dealing with a reagent or we're dealing with something that's very small amount of dangerous good. But we do have to ship sometimes radioactive material. So that has its own standards as a Class 7 material that you have to ship. When we're looking at that, normally I find you work from the very beginning and it's a partnership between us and our sponsors and Our clients, anyone we work with dealing with this, we kind of have to look as a partnership. So maybe if you're shipping clothes or whether it's, you know, Temu or it's Amazon, the partnership, they want to keep their client. But to be honest with you, they're shipping whatever they're shipping and it's getting there. They have these large bodies that work with that. And when you look at that, they're not advising their, the people they're shipping their computer or their jeans or their books to. They're not saying, listen, we need you to be here at this point and do you have any issues on your street you have to worry about, they just ship it for us. When we look at the beginning of a study and a client comes to us, we start saying what countries you're looking at. All right, these are the issues you may have here. Oh, do you want to go to Georgia? All right, that's fine. But anything outside Tbilisi, we're going to have to look at an extended shipping time. You want to go to Turkey, that's fine. Ankara, Istanbul, no problem. So these are issues. For example, I had to work with shipping to Pakistan once and we needed dry ice, but the sites didn't have their own dry ice. So we had to work closely with specialty courier to ship there, bring dry ice in. But of course, temperature wise, you have a variation of temperatures from really hot to cold and accident. So they had, within five days, basically they had to bring the dry ice and clear customs, have the sites pack out their samples, put in dry ice. The courier had of extra dry ice to supply the dry ice, then pack it back out. And it was a five to seven day route back the laboratory. So we don't think about these, we just say it's dry ice coming in, dry ice going out. But from a regulatory standpoint, we have to look at that and say, how do we get dry ice even to Greece? If you're going to northern Greece and you're outside of Athens, how do you say, how can we get dry ice to those sites and how can we manage that? Because they also have to be trained in handling dry ice. So anyone who touches dry ice has to also have some sort of dangerous goods training on it. And that's where we talk to the client at the very beginning. That's how we try and adhere to SOPs. We work through lab manuals, we work through training for the sites, sometimes we do videos to show them how they have to handle this. And we're talking about from a supply Chain side or our kit hacking, we're working with them too, to say, hey, do you have a hazardous material cabinet you can store this in? Now we have to have somebody who can manage the distance. Do you have to have it segregated in certain area? So to be quarantined, can you put this hazardous material in the cabinet with that hazardous material? So that comes down at that point to having a safety person on site that can train the people touching it. You limit the amount of people who are going to handle the hazardous materials. And then the big thing is shipping internationally. You have to make sure that you have the correct permits in place, that you're licensed, that the couriers you're going to work with are licensed certain ways. And there's a lot of those different regulatory items that go into that and whether it's free trade zones. So there's all these crazy things that go into that. And a lot of times we lean on the couriers and the logistics companies we're working with to get that information. And then we log it. And then for future reference, say, all right, I hate to say there's a lot of trial and error, unfortunately, but when an error occurs, you're like, take note of that. We're not going to be able to do that again in this country. But then you also have issues where, I hate to say it, sometimes the customs agent may just not be in a great mood that day. And we had this recently. Five packages went through, one didn't. And they all shipped together all the same pallet, everything they moved together, some went through. You know, they have to pull a certain percentage. And we're still working on trying to get that cleared many weeks later when our clients like, yeah, but the other ones were no problem. That's true. And it is what it is, unfortunately, with customs. So we try and train and we try and prevent it by preparing for the issue ahead of time. And that's really the biggest thing. And when you talk about the least amount of touches you have on the item, the more likely it is to be safe, the more likely you'll be able to train somebody properly. So I think a lot of that goes into working with compliance teams, making sure we know ahead of time that it is a dangerous good, making sure that we set everything up properly on the front end. Once we find out we might need a different chemical, we have to make sure we have the proper location for it and we can ship it properly, and then letting the couriers know, especially if we have a relationship with them, we're Going to have to ship this. What do we need so that they know chain of custody and their drivers can handle it. Because some places drivers can't handle a dangerous good or they can't handle dry ice. What do we have to do at that point? So I think it's the preparation, the knowledge of knowing more shipping and working before we even ship something or study kicks off on how to properly handle it. Have there been any innovations or technologies that significantly reduce this risk or basically improve this process or improve handling efficiency? What are you looking at from terms of innovations and technologies helping you do this more effectively? Well, for one thing, I will say AI in general has helped us with trying to research different correlations, different, especially with lanes, right? When you only have 24 to 48 hours to ship something, the couriers have a very good idea of how they could do this. But sometimes we do have to go back and say, hey, can we ship it this way instead? We know it seems like a longer route and they're always open to that. Right? Because they're looking the most efficient way, the most. It might add cost, but we can use AI to find a correlation between errors or find an issue. And sometimes it seems like it's a search engine, but there's a lot deeper review on an AI, especially as it holds information and say, hey, we're looking at this item. There's a problem here. Is there anything we have to look at within the next three months that could cause an issue to our clients in this region? Are there political or economic issues? Is there an election that's coming up? So those are things that we can utilize AI for which seems very high level. It's not really digging in. But over time it will maintain that information. It says, just like you did this time, and holds onto that, which a regular search engine doesn't do. But also the packaging materials are getting much better. As we look at environmentally friendly, as we look at recyclable packaging or reusable packaging, that's also helping with keeping costs down because there are some packaging companies that you can plug the item in and you can charge it so you can reuse it later on, but it costs a more upfront. But you're over time, as you space that over all the months, it actually decreases your cost. It helps in environmental items because you're not throwing Styrofoam or boxes away, you know, so we look at that also for materials because obviously we want to keep plastics out of the environment. We want to try and do what we can on that issue and use recyclables in that way. Technology is also helping. How can we use oil less, how can we use more cardboard, how can we use a reusable package? And then we run into situations where, you know, Russia, you can't use right now, you can't use a reusable package, you have to use a one time use package. Well, if we're trying to stay environmentally friendly, that's not always the best way to do that. And you look at other countries that packaging materials they have to use specific to that country. And then we also come into how do we keep our carbon footprint down? How do we take this one one pound package and try and keep our carbon footprint down as much possible? Because it's going on a vehicle that is utilizing diesel, gasoline, it's probably not electric. And then it's going to go on a plane that's using jet fuel and it's going to fly through the air in which this one one pound package is going through all this, it's going to touch down, go on another diesel truck. So do our couriers use electric vehicles? Do they find a way like you know, UPS said, they always turn right, so they cut down in time. It seems really silly in that aspect, but in that way technology has helped us for logistics itself. From a clinical trial standpoint, we are shipping a 1 and 2 pound package all over the world to try and get to a lab as quickly as possible. So the way we really assist with technology is how do we use technology to find the best route, how do we talk to our couriers that we can do things electronically versus via paper? How do we look at our carbon footprint and try and utilize electric vehicles as much as possible or that we can group shipments together so that we're using a lot less. And I think that's where we're going to find a lot of those savings in technology environmentally. And like I said, I think your background is AI. So you may look at what I'm saying with AI and be like, ah, that's not really what we can do with AI but it is how we utilize it a lot to try and gather as much information as possible, give it to correct variables and then it will feed us what we want and we can. And the nice thing is what you can't do with a search engine or something else is ask a question and say, well re, reanalyze this or look at this, is there another route you can use? While it may be longer kilometer wise, but it'll actually be shorter. Time wise. So those are things that a search engine isn't going to do. And then that gives us information to have this relationship with our couriers and go back to them and say, hey, can you look at here? What about this? And those are, those are items that technology, you know, AI, you couldn't do that five years ago, you couldn't do it seven years ago. But now there's enough in there that it'll find correlations between different shipments. We can ask it different problems. Is there a problem here with dry ice? We're fighting this issue and we've done this before. We're having this issue, but we only have it from one location. Did you try looking at this? And it'll give us feedback on what we may have missed. So while that is not an in depth coding AI situation, it does help us technologically, which seven, eight years ago we wouldn't be able to do. And so technology wise, there's a lot of different factors that go into it, but a lot of it is materials, figuring out the best routes, saving with electricity versus carbon footprint, and then using AI to try and find correlations or different routes that we may not have known otherwise. Very, very interesting. I appreciate the thoughtful answer. Before we switch gears to some more operational questions, just an anecdote, right? To the extent that you can talk about it. What's the coolest or strangest material that you've ever moved? The coolest or strangest material? Military wise, there's been some pretty cool stuff. Clinical trials wise, I have to say I had to ship a device that had radioactive material inside it. And so I guess it doesn't sound that like cool per se, but there's a lot that goes into that because there's so much communication has to go around it. And then you have to say, well, can we measure the radioactivity? Well, what is the radioactivity? That's how far does that radiation move out so that you can actually ship it? Because you have to segregate? Do you have to have patchings, have to be in lead? There's a lot of those things. And I think from my standpoint that is a bothersome material to ship. But it's also the most interesting with the most conversations. And I will say a lot of the studies we deal with, there are a lot of different viruses and things that we ship. And there are questions sometimes when you're looking at tb, I had to deal with bubonic plague once it was coming out of an area dealing with Ebola. So depending on where you're at. There's a lot of those questions that come up. And I mean, anyone in their normal day life would never have to think, do we have to worry about Ebola and HIV and something that's shipping? And to think that, well, HIV is the least important of everything. Because growing up as a kid, it was so everyone was all about it, like, oh, hiv. And now it's like, ah, it's like the. It's like the flu. You're okay, don't worry about it. You'll get over a little while. Whoa. But Ebola or tb, those things now. So dealing with that and the packaging, that's. That's been interesting. But I do really like dealing with these into different areas. Like I said about packs and dry ice. How do you get dries to PACs? And how do you figure out how to get a material, no matter what it is, from some outlying city in Indonesia or Philippines to their capital city where you can export it? And that seems to be the most interesting conversations more than materials. But I think the most interesting material has been shipping a device that used radioactive material. And then, you know, you get that question once every 10 years. Your project manager's like, I've never gotten this question. I don't even know what this is. But they said it's a problem, and then we have to look at it. So I reach out to a trade compliance team of the courier and say, why is this the problem? We're looking at this. And they come back and like, well, where is it coming from? What's the radiation? It has radiation. All right, let's go back here. A lot of going back and forth in those things. So that's probably in clinical trial side. The most interesting thing that I've shipped. Pretty cool. Let's switch gears a little bit. You have both civilian, let's say, right. Military logistics experience. How do you compare the operational mindsets of and the approaches between these two? Are there any differences? How do you. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is in the military, it's horrible. Say we're there to spend money. We don't care about a budget. If we have to go somewhere, do something, we do it the way we have to do it. You know, when we deploy, we're given a certain budget to a certain point, but as soon as we say, listen, we have to do it this way. This is how it has to go. Safety is primary in the military because you're moving equipment, you're moving personnel, sometimes you're moving explosives, and it's on the same aircraft. And then you have to say, all right, according to iata, because we still have to adhere, even under certain conditions, we still have to adhere to international safety standards, especially when we're flying into different countries. So if we're touching down in Germany and then we're going somewhere else, we have to adhere to EU standards because we're passing through there. So in the military, you do what you can. You put it together, you figure out how to fly there and then what's the cost? Who cares? This is the mission. Has to get there. On civilian side, no client wants to hear, I don't care what the cost is. I'm going to get your stuff here. Even it's $47,000 per shipment, which you've had to do. You get a charter flight and $37,000 later, the client's like, well, we had to get the sample there, right? So that mindset is very different because the military, you just throw people at it and you say, let's figure this out. I don't care if you're not getting sleep for 24 hours. We have to get people here, we have to move this. We have to mitigate this issue. Doesn't matter if you're walking on the tarmac and your boots are melting, stand in the shade. Like, that's just how it goes. On civilian side, though, we're saying, no, we can't throw these people out. This is what our budget is. This is how we have to handle this. We can't skirt regulations because of depending on how it's shipping. Right? In the military, you can say, this is a mission essential item. You have to get it here. This is how we're going to manage it. Maybe you never take it off the plane and you can get around certain regulations. On civilian side, though, it's never like that. It's either passengers also or cargo only. And that's about that restriction with the planes. Then you get in some other items, such as, can they even ship into this country? Can we not ship in this country? How do we get it there? The military, to be honest with you, we don't think about that. We say, just don't take it off the plane if somebody pull guard on it, and that's what you're doing. But on the civilian side, we have to look at those budgets. We have to say, this isn't cost effective. Is there somebody else who can do it more cost effective? If we can't get it here, if we can't get the location this way, we have to Find a different way. Even if you have to circumnavigate the globe, how do we get it from an outer lying island to the capital city where the lab is? The military, they're just like, we're going to put on a helicopter, we're taking it. Civilian side, they don't have a helicopter to throw it on. So they're like, all right, let's think about different ways to do this. How do we cross the border? In the military, again, if you have to go from, let's say, Kenya to South Africa, all you're doing is people are taking care of it ahead of time and they're saying, all right, you've been cleared to land, but you can't get off the plane, they're going to have their people come and grab it. On the civilian side, it doesn't work like that. There's customs, there's different regulatory bodies have to deal with. So there's a lot of those different. And again, if we were to fly, even now, if we were to say, I'm going to fly from Turkey to Israel with the military, so be it. They have to deal with it. Civilian side, you're not flying right now from Turkey to Israel. So there's a lot of those issues that we have to look at. On civilian side, which is the military side, you kind of just put your head down and you go through. Yeah, and you may have a time limit on this on the military side, but really it's just the timeline of how long does it take to get where you're going. Civilian side, sometimes we have stability that's 24 hours. Sometimes you have to get up from point A to point B in 16 hours. Because these samples have a viability that you. They don't go beyond that. So we rarely deal with that on the military side. But the civilian side, you also have to take that into account. Like we tend to look at in general, what is the stability of the material, then what is the turnaround time as the second option and then what is the cost? Because if you have a stability of two weeks, if it's on dry ice, and then your turnaround time, you can find in 96 hours now you can start to use a different courier. Because you have all this time in the military, they're just like, we're going to get it here. This is how long it's going to take. If you're on the ground there, you're just going to have to deal with it. And that's what it is, something that I really enjoyed about your answers is how much you touch another country's cultures. Right? Yeah. You've been doing like quite literally global logistics for a number of years now. The question here is, okay, countries, cultures, a lot of them and a lot of countries and a lot of cultures, how do you cultivate this alignment, trust, accountability? Right. Especially it's very regulated environments. Right. How do you build teams and account for, you know, let's keep it high performing and let's technology cultures. Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to every culture appreciates honesty and being candid, but there's different ways to go about it. So if you're dealing with somebody who's in Germany or Netherlands, they tend to be much more blunt than Americans are. And this has happened sometimes where they say something and I've had American team members who work for me say, but they're so rude. I'm like, but they're not rude. They just, you know, Americans are known for saying please and thank you at the beginning and the end of every sentence. We're like hyper polite for what we view as being polite. A lot of people view us as being too verbose. We just talk too much or we're too friendly. Right. So that's part of what we have to work through. And we. I have had to work with people culturally to say, listen, they're not being rude, they're just asking you a question. And they said hi in the email at the beginning of the chain. But they're not going to say, hey, how are you doing? In every instance. And at some point they're just going to start asking questions because you have to get to the point. So I think a lot of it comes down to from the top to the bottom. You have to understand there's cultural differences. And then you have to have these conversations, say, a lot of Americans don't understand how Europeans go on vacation for three weeks at a time. And it just blows our mind that they don't even take a phone with them. Right. In America, you know, if you enjoy your job. I'm a workaholic. I take my phone with me when I go on vacation. My family's always saying, do you really have to take that call? And I tell them, well, you know, I'm a director, so sometimes I have to take these calls. And if you're European, though, there are VPs. They go away because somebody else will handle a problem. And that's something culturally we have to figure out. But now that comes into a Succession plan and how we fix that. And after a while, as we become more global, people start to adhere and understand that a little more. But there's always the conversation. Listen, they're not being rude. They're just not saying hi and pleasing. Thank you. Every time they're being direct, which is what it is. And I think Americans have really gone away from that directness. And especially dealing with a lot of Latin countries, I feel that, you know, they love talking about a lot of different things. They're very friendly. But once you hang up and be like, I don't want to do anything with this guy. He's an idiot. He's fake, whatever it is. So we kind of have to bridge that by showing a certain level of trust and showing that we deal a certain way, being available and open to them when they call. And I think a lot of it comes into just experience of dealing with all these different cultures. It's like dealing with teenagers, right? You can explain to a teenager, don't touch the bottom of the pan because it's hot. And you go to hand them the pan, and they go to grab the bottom, and you pull it back. You're like, hey, don't touch the bottom. It's hot. So they put gloves on, they go to touch the bottom. You pull the pan back, like, listen, I don't know how many times I had to tell you, don't touch the bottom. Grab the handles that I'm grabbing right now. And then they finally get. Until one day they touch the bottom like, oh, I burned my hand. That's kind of what happens culturally with us. And it goes the other way, too, in telling our team members in other countries. And I've had conversations with them separately from Americans, saying, listen, Americans talk about a lot of things, talk about politics, we talk about guns, we talk about families. We talk about a lot of things that other cultures aren't used to. And so it comes down to, if you want me to tell them not to talk about these things, I will do that. But if you don't say anything, I don't know. So if you're uncomfortable with, address it with me and I'll address it with the team. There's ways to discuss those things without actually insulting anyone and making anyone feel uncomfortable. And around politics, that's a big thing. Around guns, it's another thing in America, we don't always understand this. We have a lot of people ask us about these. We don't understand the craziness of sports in other countries. We get it sometimes here So I think it comes to experience and then working with the teams on each side. But when it comes to dealing with customs and regulatory stuff, when it comes to brokerage houses dealing with people on the other side, a lot of times we have to leave it up to the couriers and the specialty shippers to deal with that side of it. And when our project managers are like, I don't understand, why is it taking three weeks to get something into Brazil? Just like, listen, Brazilians, they, they're, you know, in America and Germany, we want to move things really fast. Brazil, Spain, Italy, Argentina, they kind of want to take their time a little bit, and they're not that worried about it. It's not as important as we view it as. And that's just, you know, siesta in Spain. First time I went to Spain, they said, make sure you get water. When I was in Majorca, make sure you get water. Because between 11:30 and 2:30 everything closes. Get anything? Yeah. And not even the hotel staff's working and you can't drink the water. We couldn't drink the water. Then I go there and I'm lying on the tile floor trying to cool off because we were walking around all morning, it was so hot. I'm laying on the floor trying to cool off. And at 2:30 when that hit, we went down there and it still didn't open until 2:35. And the guy's like, oh, you're thirsty? Yeah, I'm thirsty. Walking around all morning, I have no water. We drank like four bottles of water each. So those are things that culturally, no matter what anyone tells you, you have to just kind of experience and then you have to kind of apply it to different areas. Not that the Latin and South American countries are all the same. The people are very different. But if you've dealt with certain Spanish or Latin ideas, they tend to resonate throughout most of the countries. Same thing. The Mediterranean countries are very similar. And a lot of Americans, a lot of Europeans don't understand, like, we need to get this in here. What is the problem? It's a Mediterranean country. They don't move as quickly or fluidly. Some of the northern European countries, those are items, I think, and making jokes. I think when you're serious all the time about the different cultural divides, people get really serious about it. And I think overall logistics is serious, but the more flexible and more ready you are to laugh at things. There are some things in logistics that are. Are just laughable. It happens one time and you can't do anything, but Just find the humor in it. It's maybe dark and sarcastic and cynical humor, but you still have to be somewhat. Have a sense of humor. And I think that humor goes a long way in building bonds. So I think experience working with the individual cultures and letting them know they're not insulting you, they're not just as serious as you or. I know you don't like all the words in the emails, but those are one thing you might have to be used to, you know, so it's. And sometimes English is the business language of the world right now, right? So dealing with Asian countries, sometimes they use the wrong word. And I'll talk to my American, you know, workers and say, have you ever been insulted by them before? No. They're normally very polite. They still are. Just what is the word they use now? Let's work as synonyms, because they most likely meant that word, not the one you took it as. Because when you speak the language as a first language, the connotations that come with certain words are not seen culturally or across the globe. And so that's another thing is making sure, like, hey, don't read into the email the way you would speak. Read the email as is or read the message as is, and don't put any inflections into it. So I think that's a lot of that. Texting is the same way, right? You text somebody, they take the wrong information is lost. And that's how emails work. So we have to just make sure, don't take insult to the email. If they've never even worked with them for two years and they've never insulted you before. So there's a lot of that is trying to teach them about the cultures and language, especially since they're speaking our language. I have to tell my team. How many languages do you speak? Well, I speak English. All right, well, the person you're dealing with spoke Polish as a first language, learned Czech because her mom was Czech, is speaking Dutch. And English is their fourth language, and they speak all of them fluently. So sometimes they don't always say the right word. That's the difficulty is English for us is the first word. We deal with the Dutch and the Germans, a lot of people in South America, English is their second language. But you look at somebody from Brazil, they may speak English and Portuguese as their first language, a local dialect or something, and then they're speaking English as their fourth language. And so this is something we have to get used to. And I have to work with the teams. Like, English is probably not even their top four languages, and they're still speaking it. Let's give them a little leeway in how they're and what they're saying. Ben, a couple of closing questions, one that you started talking to me about before we actually started recording. So I want to leave a record of this. But you did mention around Amazon is not logistics, it's distribution. And you have some discussions with people about this. What did you mean, Amazon does it perfect? Gap warehouse, Amazon, they all do these perfect setups for distribution when you order something. And most people don't realize there is an Amazon distribution center probably within one hour of any major urban area. It may not be as big as in Louisville or LA or somewhere like that, but it's there. Even in Europe, they're building up there. So when you order something from Amazon, the order may go through a central location in another country, but they're delivering it from the building that's 25 miles from your house. That's not logistics, that's distribution. They have perfected buying and getting the materials to that location, and then they contract out. They get somebody to bring it to you. But logistics is moving things globally, all around the world. So our expectation with technology, with Amazon, with all of these, is that I'm going to get, in 24 to 48 hours, it says Made in Sri Lanka or Made in Vietnam on your shirt, but it's sitting in a warehouse 10 miles from where you're at. But we're trying to ship kits and samples through all these regulatory bodies, trying to get them throughout the globe. And so I tell people all the time that to me, logistics is like spiderwebs in the forest, right? You're walking through the forest, it's no big deal. You're having a great day, and all of a sudden a spiderweb gets on your face and you're flailing, you're pulling it off your face, you're going crazy, right? And everyone's looking at you, going, oh, look, somebody just walked in a spider web, right? So my goal, logistics, is that we want to keep the spiderwebs to a minimum. We want to keep them off your face. And when it gets on your face, we want to make sure that we remove it. Amazon has already moved all the spiderwebs because they're not actually walking through the forest. They're sitting next to a tree ready to hand you what you want. So that's kind of my goal, is to tell people when I talk to them. Logistics and Amazon are two different things. One is distribution and one is True logistics. And whether it's moving metal or whether it's moving boxes, whether it's moving goods, our networks today and our economies are so global global and they're so intermixed that it's very difficult to move things from one place to another. Especially for what we're doing, we're moving one small item. Amazon has taken thousands of these items, put them on several skids or wherever they're doing, and they've moved it to a location, they've cleared customs as a group. They've done it before you've ever ordered. They're not doing it in real time. And they perfected that. And that's awesome. I love ordering stuff from Amazon. But we are saying we have a subject that's coming in last minute. We didn't know they were coming in. They're going to be here at 7am in the morning. We have to get to a plane by 12 because it's got to take off. So the local service provider has to pick up, get it to the airport, make sure the paperwork is good, find a location on the plane, stick it somewhere on that plane, get it into another country, clear customs there, work it through, get it to a lab, and they have to do all this within 24 hours. So we are moving internationally. To me, that is really the difference whether logistics is on a boat and they're moving across the oceans and whether it's on a plane, whether it's on a moped, going from one location to another. That is really what logistics is. And that's not distribution because we're bringing into a final location. Very interesting. Amazon is taking from their final location, which is really a depot, and moving to somebody's house. So we're going from the outside of the spider web in Amazon is going from the middle of the spider web out. So there's a lot more paths for us to go. But, you know, logistics has to manage all of those different borders and all of those different items which, you know, Amazon doesn't have to, they just have to manage. What street do we have to do to get to your house? Very interesting. Final question. What advice would you give aspiring logistics leaders about resilience, judgment, leadership in these very complex global operations? So I think the biggest thing is, is, and this goes across the board for anything, whether it's military, whether it's civilian, and it's to have a sense of humor. I think the only way to make it through life in general is whether you're laughing at yourself. Now you can only laugh at yourself. For the same problem two times after that, nobody cares anymore. It's not funny. But you have to have a certain level of humor to make it through a lot of issues and be resilient. And I think you also have to have forethought. So if you know that you are going to be working in an area, you need to try and think, how do we do this ahead of time? And plan these routes out. So organization helps, but having a strong team around you, having the ability to laugh at yourself and find humor in an issue while you're trying to fix it, not being so stern and so strict in your. The way you do things that culturally becomes a problem. You kind of, as in logistics especially, you need to understand geography. So you need to understand that. All right, so you're going from Chile, Valpraiso, from Cordoba and Argentina. It's not that far, right? Well, there's a big mountain range that you have to go through, and the roads may not take you directly through there. And it's actually faster than to fly from Cordoba to Buenos Aires over to Santiago and then go down to Valparaiso. It seems crazy, but we do that all the time. And understanding that, similar to what they said in, I think Albert Einstein said it, sometimes a straight line is not the fastest route. And so you have to maintain an open mind from culture, from geography, from humor to try and figure this out because it's funny. Your team comes on and you have to make a joke sometimes to get a little bit levity in there. But you also have to understand politics. And I think more than anything, logistics tends to touch every area of a company, whether they didn't get their pens and now they can't write because we didn't do correct supply chain, you know, redistribution, or whether we're moving a sample from one, you know, from somewhere in Africa to the United States or Canada. You have to understand geopolitical items. You have to always be aware of what's going on politically in different areas. You have to be able to communicate with your clients if you're going to move up in leadership. And there's some people that are very happy with where they're at. But as you move up in leadership, you have to. That you. You kind of have to be a salesperson on these ideas. So that means you have to be open, you have to be communicative, you have to understand geopolitics, you have to understand geography. And then you have to be aware of other things that are important. Some areas, you know, environmental parts may be important other areas they may not be. So you have to be able to think outside the box and say, all right, this is. And in management in general, this is the end point. Who cares where we start? Let's work our way back, find the bottleneck, fix that, and then now we have to work our way back again. And I think that's an important part is in logistics, is having all those, but being able to look at that final point and work your way back and you find those granular points, those smaller items as you work your way back. But you really have to be able to see the forest through the trees. That's the most important part, really working through logistics and in the end is remembering something that happened and you and your team being able to laugh at like, I can't believe we worked 18 hours to get kids to location that didn't need them for another four weeks. They just need to check something out their box and they get a bonus. That's kind of what happens sometimes, unfortunately, and they don't give us all the information because if they knew we had the information, we would figure a more cost effective way to do something and they just want to get it there. And sometimes that's just how it goes, you know, you just, you deal with what you're given and you just do what you have to do and just put your head down and work through it and then laugh at it afterwards. Pretty cool. Ben, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate talking to you. Thank you very much, Diego. All right, take care. That's a wrap on today's deep dive with supply chain optimizers. If you found value in our controversial tactics and data driven stories, don't forget to hit, follow and subscribe. So you never miss an episode, have a burning question, or want to share your own optimization success, Connect with me, Diego Solarsano on LinkedIn or for more information on how we can help you transform your supply chain and logistics operations, visit thestea.com thanks for listening.