How AI and Technology Are Transforming Supply Chains

Speaker A: Welcome to the Power of Data, the podcast by Dun and Bradstreet. Data is everywhere and there is more created every second of every day. Join us to hear from leaders unlocking the value of data.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Power of Data podcast. I'm Nick White, head of sales for D and B Worldwide Network. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Sean Cooley, uh, director of supply chain at the mtc. Hello, welcome.

Speaker A: Hi Nick, Nice to meet you.

Speaker B: Shaun. Before we dive into today's discussion, um, it would be great if you could share with our listeners a little bit about your background and career journey. Um, what's led you to the MTC and Cranfield University and what's shaped your perspective on supply Chain today?

Speaker A: I've had not a particularly typical career, I would say. Um, most people obviously work for organizations and they tend to sort of move up in the ranks and move along there. Um, I've always been very entrepreneurial and quite risk taking in my approach. So, um, I guess the first sort of role of note, um, was probably the near decade I spent the Cadbury Schweppes, uh, working on what was the world's largest SAP implementation at that particular point in time. Um, I was a global design authority for that. So I was responsible for the design of what was initially customer cash. Um, but I came to sort of realize that, you know, we were kind of replicating, well, changing sort of functional silos into process silos. So there was that sort of real realization that although we were implementing a very integrated business system, we weren't a particularly integrated business and that was the real opportunity. Um, and then I also worried about the fact that wherever we went in the world, because we were rolling out as a global project, that the sort of barriers to change were the same. So it didn't matter if it was Australia or Egypt or America. It was the same people saying the same sorts of things and the same issues. Um, so that interested me quite greatly. It led to me taking six of my colleagues and myself out to form a consultancy. So I was the CEO of a consultancy for six years, um, looking to help companies that invested heavily in ERP, effectively technologies, um, and to get value from that, not by sort of implementing a different type of technology, but simply by being able to sort of strategically align their processes, um, see beyond the sort of process silos and actually start to get value from the sort of data and systems that they've spent a lot of money on by operating in a much more aligned and integrated way. Um, that Finished up that, then spent a couple of small opportunities working with consultancies. But then you know, had a sort of little guide, strong mentor. So everyone seems want you, you, you, it's you thereafter, not necessarily company or whatever. So I spent a bit of it, my time as an independent consultant. Um, I then was offered an opportunity to be chief marketing officer of a analytics company in the Netherlands which I did. Um, again it was a product that sat on top of SAP, did a lot of sort, um, of created a lot of insights that weren't available in SAP. And I was really helping them to, to reach up into the C suite and because they were struggling, um, and then they just said come work for us, please just do it. So I ended up in marketing role. Um, and then throughout this time I've been um, I guess since the 2000 I've been keynote speaking about predominantly about supply chain strategy and also um, small. I guess I'm more renowned for talking about technology and implications of technology on supply chains. Um, and then come to 2000 I was sort of booked to work out in across Africa, um, with um, the Bill and Melinda Gates association working alongside the Global Fund to um, sort of basically sort out all of the supply chains for the malaria elimination program. So and then Covid hit in the middle of the first project. So that put ends of that that led me to working with um, the un. Um, so I spent the sort of COVID years doing supply chain strategies for the un first on the East Africa corridor and then their strategic deployment. And then I worked for Silicon Valley Organization working in artificial intelligence, what is now known as agentic AI, um, which I came across because I wrote about them in my book back in 2018 called Transition Point and they approached me to work for them. And then following that I then decided to be a bit more closer to home, shall we say. So I've been working in the director of supply chain uh, for the MTC since 2022, since I think I just started to becoming a visiting fellow at Cranfield around about 2016 as well. So I've been very closely associated with Cranfield and lecturing and speaking about supply chain Strategy and Industry 4.0 since then.

Speaker B: Amazing. Well, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today. No problem. Um, Sean, you've spoken and written extensively about how data and technology are reshaping manufacturing. Um, what inspired your focus on the theme and what do you see as the most significant shifts happening in supply chains today?

Speaker A: I think I can almost point to the moment I Started to really think about this, which was back in 2012. So um, I used to be a volunteer for what called Supply Chain Council, was on the European leadership team. And Supply Chain Council, which was the global not for profit organization that managed its score model, supply chain operations reference model, sort of global standard for supply chain. One of my roles was as the European uh, chair, um, for events. So in 2012, in summer 2012 in Madrid, um, I was the conference chair for an event there. We um, had a number of different speakers were brought in, some of which were coming from the U.S. um, and I listened to these speakers talk and as I listened to the various topics, because I was conference chair I had to kind of be at every keynote and I sort of mapped out a supply chain and one guy was talking about um, Google's experimentations with autonomous cars because they had, if you remember the Toyota Prius at that time, um, Amazon had just acquired Kiva Robotics. So the sort of concept that's inventory moving to the picker rather than the picker moving to inventory. Um, Rethink Robotics had just brought out it's back there were collaborative robots, there's lots of innovations around that. Everyone was talking about big data. At that particular point in time cloud computing was a big thing. So just sort of sat in this conference, sort of mapped out a sort of source, make, deliver, plan supply chain and then overlaid these technologies on top of it. And I just sat there and thought everyone's talking about each individual technology but no one's really talking about what happens when these technologies converge and across the entire supply chain. So I think what you're really looking at there is the ability to automate, um, the end to end supply chain. Um, at that point in time I was commissioned to write a series of articles for the European Business Review. And I'd written three. I had one left to write and I thought this made a really good article. So I wrote the article called Transformers, um, supply chain 3.0, the autonomous supply chain. And like I said this was back in 2012, so it's a few years ago now. Um, I was then booked to speak and chair an event in London back end of 2012 and the last speaker of the day, um, dropped out and I was asked, can you do another session? Really short notice, it was like in two days time. And I thought well I can take, I've just written this really good article, I'll take the concepts and I'll present on that. And I did and kind of the audience kind of lost their minds a Little bit. And, um, the Q and A went on for nearly an hour because it was the last presentation of the day, which really annoyed the conference organizer because he wanted people to go and have drinks and mix with all the vendors. But all of the questions weren't really about technology per se. They were about the impact that technology was going to have. So the questions were all about, what does this mean for my job? What does it mean for my children's education? What does it mean about future work? What happens? And again, remember this was back in 2012, before anyone was talking about this. So then I, uh, thought these are really interesting questions and I actually don't have the answer to these questions, but I really hit a nerve here. So I got booked from that after speaking there, a lot of people had sort of seen it and the book me just talk on that subject again. So it kind of developed from there, really. So it developed from sort of, to seeing the, the convergence of technologies across the supply chain, which no one was really talking about, talking about it, and then seeing the reaction. And that kind of led to me writing articles on it, which led to me writing a book all about it. Um, and the book was, the real interesting thing with the book was I didn't have the questions, I didn't have the answer to the questions that people were asking, which is, you know, why is this happening? And so what? And I could describe what was happening, but not why and what, not what. So that's why. Uh, my three month project to write a book on it, six years and then ended up coming out in 2018, but it ended up being quite a big book because obviously, and you know, that research, I think, um, it feeds into my talks and my other writing and just seemed to have gravitated really. So lots of people are really interested. And I always try and say, you know, the so what bit is really important. You know, we tend to talk so much about what's happening right now, but it's just describing what we're seeing. The really interesting thing is, so, so what do I do as a result of that? What action should I take? How do I change my business? What behavior, you know, what subjects should study? No one's really answering those questions. Everyone's just describing what's happening. And I think that's kind of where I differentiated myself really on that.

Speaker B: Okay, great. Sean, um, you often talk about the transition from traditional supply chains to what you call value networks. Um, could you unpack that concept to our listeners or for our listeners and why it's Such a pivotal shift.

Speaker A: I did a webinar earlier today for Dun and Bradstreet where I sort of, you know, one of my challenges is we've still got linear thinking in a sort of exponential digital world right now. And the value, the, the concept of value networks is really saying, look, supply chains are all based around a very linear kind of push model. We're pushing product to customer, we're very firm centric. And I use a line in my book that we need a Copernican business revolution, so we need to stop thinking that the customer will circle us when we need to put them in the center and actually realize we circle them. So in the same way Copernicus said that I don't think the sun circles the earth, I think we tend to circle it. We need that same kind of um, revolution in mindset. And so value really is coming from what is it of value to the customer, uh, and what is the network of value delivery that we actually have rather than just thinking about it as a supply chain pushing product. So really moving from sort of thinking about just selling and pushing a product to actually solving a problem or meeting a need that's of value to a customer. And then once you understand uh, what they value, what is the network of value delivery? Which nodes add value, which bits, ah, are just enabling and which bits are actually detrimental. So if we take an example, um, in that old supply chain push model, most companies certainly around just before the financial crash, not the financial crash really to offshore and outsource most of their supply chain. But actually what they did was they took a very myopic mindset, cost control in order to their supply chain, created what they thought was beneficial things that were beneficial to the organization and reduced costs, but actually increased lead times, increased, um, risk, decreased flexibility, decreased agility, um, and created a lot of fragility in their business. None of the stuff they were doing was actually had the customer in mind. It was only purely very internally focused, it was very inside in kind of thinking. So the content value networks is really the sort of outside in, sort of principle of thinking who is your customer, what do they value? And then what is the network that delivers that value in the most strategically effective way rather than just how do I make my supply chain more efficient as a concept?

Speaker B: And are there organizations today that are, ah, adopting that philosophy?

Speaker A: And yeah, I think your leaders are more so. I think, I mean, I guess if you look at companies like Unilever for example, they were always a good sort of case study that started to do that sort of thinking, value chains, I mean I use Unilever, um, a uh, gentleman called Pierre Luigi Sigismondi, who was the um, chief supply chain officer, I think he was one of the very first chief supply chain officers. Same year that I did my article, actually 2012. I heard him talk um, about the post financial crash situation and how when they were focusing on reducing costs, they were actually realizing they were destroying value. And then when they pivoted to actually focusing on delivering value, they actually realized they reduced more costs than when they were focusing on reducing cost because they were just looking at stripping out the things that weren't adding value to customer and that by nature removed cost from the supply chain. Whereas if you think about cost, you're not really thinking about the customer, you're just thinking about yourself. So there are organizations like that that are kind of leading away and I think anything that's in a, I mean Cadbury Schweppes, when I sort of worked there, that was, you know, that sort of organizations where you get a 15 minute delivery window to a custom to be a major retailer. So you have to be, your supply chain has to be quite sophisticated. It has to be very agile. Other organizations where they've not got that same sort of pressure I think are more in the laggard kind of mindset. They're still hanging on to those sort of industrial mindsets and they're still struggling to make that transition. But anything which is consumer facing I think is tending to realize that the old way just doesn't work anymore.

Speaker B: Okay, thanks Sean. One of the challenges we often hear from manufacturers is resistance to change is whether cultural, organizational, um, what are some of the best practices you've seen for overcoming these barriers and driving successful digital transformation?

Speaker A: Okay. I mean this is an area, I mean I found in my uh, consultancy, I guess, of trying to help companies do that. As I mentioned earlier when I was working in uh, vocabulary, that was one of the big issues which constantly seem resistance to change. One of the things I learned over the years is, you know, you can't make people change. It's difficult enough to change your own behaviors. You know, try changing your partner's behavior, see how that goes. It's never going to go well, is it? It's not. It's going to be a bad day for you really if you tell, you know, someone you love, they need to change. So how do you think you've got, you can change an entire organization of individuals just by telling them that they need to change. All you can do really is you can create the incentives in the environment where they make the decision that changing is in their own best interest. Uh, and I think one of the most challenging aspects of that is whenever we're talking specifically about technological change, the first reaction is fear. What does this mean to me? What does it mean to my job? So it's the same sort of questions that I got asked back in days. So you have to provide a vision for where this change is taking you that actually involves those individuals both being a participant in it and um, being a benefactor at it at the end. So they have to be able to understand what their contribution is to the change and how are they are going to be better as a result of it. And I think this is one of the areas where companies really miss the quite a bit, really. They talk about this new world and shareholder value increases and all this lovely stuff. And the individual's thinking, uh, how does that impact me? What's my part in that? Do I have a part in that? Kind of sounds like you've automated my job. Um, and you know, as I said earlier in your webinar, you know, people are very good at understanding, you know, the jobs that could be replaced. They're not great at thinking about the new jobs that could happen. And I always say, look, you've got to be able to present a picture of a future that's better for the individual so that they embrace that journey. Because if you don't, then they'll generally be quite fearful of that change and then will resist it. They will not work in the collaborative, commutative manner that you want. They naturally think about, how do I protect myself? How do I protect myself, team?

Speaker B: And if you've, you've seen examples of that in your career.

Speaker A: Oh God, yeah, yeah, yeah. All the time. All the time. More often than not. I mean, it's, you know, it's not just good enough to create, to sort of define a vision. You've also got to, like you say, you've got to boil it down to individual activities.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What's, you know, I remember sitting, listening, um, to, um, to a very senior person talk about their new vision for the future in strategy. And you know, someone in the audience basically said, you know, I've heard this. I was involved in it. This sounds great. What do you want me to do differently tomorrow than we did today as a result of this new strategy? Can't answer that. So. Okay, well, in that case, we're going to do exactly the same things we've always done and actually Nothing is really going to change at the ground level because you've not been able to articulate what has to change, uh, at uh, an operational level in order to deliver that outcome. You've just presented a pretty picture of a desired future, but no one knows what to do differently in order to enable that future. So you're going to end up with lots of frustration and people just behaving in exactly the same way as you always have.

Speaker B: Yeah. We recently unveiled the findings from our 2025 Manufacturing Pulse Survey. One of the standout insights was that, uh, only 36% of manufacturers feel confident making informed decisions with their current data and almost half have experienced failed AI projects due to poor data quality. Why do you think data confidence is still such a challenge for manufacturing sector?

Speaker A: Because it's not sexy. I mean the analogy I used to use when I was, um, independently consultant was in London. So I'll use uh, it as a London example. So I said, you know, imagine the shard. You know, this is this beautiful sort of skyscraper, the building that got to. What have you got to build in order to do that? Well, first you got to have a vision of what it looks like. Secondly, we've got to acquire the resources, the land in order to do that. And then thirdly, we've got to dig a bloody big hole. So I, obviously the data bit as the, as the hole digging, it's the foundations needed and without that your skyscraper is going to fall over. So it doesn't matter how great your vision is unless it's underpinned by a foundation truth, um, it's not going to stay up. And no one wants to be the guy digging the hole or the gas. Everyone wants to be the architect, no one wants to be the worker. And that's kind of really the problem. So when it comes to data, you know, everyone wants to use it, no one wants to own it. You know, there is a real lack of, you know, clear, um, ownership of the key data points because actually most people don't understand what those key data points are. Everyone wants to run the reports at the end of it or use the AI tool that sits on top of it. No one wants to be the data steward who's looking after the data. So it's really down to it. People are not yet baked into their organization. The roles needed to manage the information, the supports, the, you know, the data quality needed to underpin their decision making. And that's, that doesn't seem to have

Speaker B: changed, hasn't changed at all. And back in the days when you were consulting with organizations, was that there then? Were you, were you helping people to understand?

Speaker A: Ah, yeah, I mean, I mean that analogy I used to use quite a lot and you get everyone nodding the heads, you know, and they, you know, they get it, you know, uh, and then they don't want to do it, you know. And a lot of the times, I mean if you look at ERP systems like SAP or Oracle or any of those ones, you know, it's a transactional recording system. It' capturing what you've done. And what you really want to do is not just have reports on what you've done, you want to use it to help you to make better decisions about what to do moving forwards. But in order to do that, you've got to have really accurate information that you can use to create some sort of trends. So, and actually what you really want to be looking at is some high quality external data that you can combine with your high quality internal data to give you your high quality plan or whatever it is or schedule. And it's just not there, you know, it's just not. You just don't trust it. So what you usually find is you've invested millions on ERP system, but actually the real foundation of truth is someone's spreadsheet on their laptop. And that still seems to be true even now. We made the mistake, um, when I was at Cadbury's, um, we rolled out um, APO version 2. This is in the early 2000s, very early 2000s, or as I like to call it, the version didn't work, um, and tried to put things like, um, very complicated mobile sales, um, solutions on top of a business that had actually gone from basically flip charts and pens. And the naivety, when I look back of that is just incredible. And, and before you knew it, you know, it was unusable. It just couldn't work because no one was managing the information needed to. So the technology and the promise was fantastic. Yeah, but it just relies on having information that's accurate and timely and that's a discipline that most organizations just didn't have then and I still don't think they have it now.

Speaker B: Yeah, agrees. But have more data, uh, they have

Speaker A: more data than ever and they don't trust any of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, agreed. The survey also revealed that 97% of manufacturers have faced disruptions due to complex supply chains. Visibility beyond Tier 1 supply chains remains limited. How can manufacturers begin to tackle this visibility gap and build more resilient ecosystems?

Speaker A: I think the challenge is, um, it's very Hard to control what you don't understand, and you can't understand that which you're unable to see. So most organizations don't have visibility into what their actual supply chain looks like. As a result of that, they don't actually understand where it starts and where it stops. And therefore, because they don't understand that, they can't control it. And that's the sort of perennial challenge. I find the approach of creating that visibility end to end and across all the suppliers into tier one and tier two is just too difficult for them. And because they're trying to boil the ocean and because you don't understand it, you don't understand what's important and what's not important. So if you want to go down to tier two, tier three level sort of visibility, you should only really do that in the 20% or products that actually give you the 80% of the value that you supply to your customer, rather than trying to just look everywhere. I always remember when I worked for a large, um, military defense company in the uk, you know, they were, they were trying to implement, um, the score metrics at the time. And, and that's really interesting. You know, I've got a lot of background in this. And they said, well, you know, which ones? And they went, all of them, you know, and why, why would you want to do that? That's that mindset a lot of business have. We need to give, you know, you know, understand absolutely everything to every potential level of our entire supply chain. Now you need to understand what's strategically important to you and then really drill down on those and then the other ones that actually commoditized items off the shelf, commercial off the shelf, whatever, you don't need to go down to tier two, Tier three, you just need to stick your tier one spot. They are enough. But also when it comes to things like restructuring your supply chain, something, you know, stuff I talk about quite a lot, you know, again, and are, uh, you focusing on the bits of your supply chain that actually add real value to you and create that unique value proposition or don't, you know, And I think in most cases they don't know. Like I say, they don't understand the supply chain, they don't know where it starts, they don't know where it stops. And then therefore control of that becomes incredibly difficult. And it has to start with some sort of visibility, really.

Speaker B: Yeah. And from your career and experience, have you got relevant examples of organizations that have been able to, you know, get that visibility into the, into the secondary, secondary and Tertiary supply chain risks or opportunities, um, effectively less than I would

Speaker A: like, I think is the answer. I've got far more examples of companies who can't do that or haven't done that or have taken this, you know, um, one size fits all approach to it. And that's kind of atypical of a lot of organizations is that, you know, they take a one size fits all model to their supply chain processes and the way to treat things, then they just, you know, average the result. And on average, as long as they've everything's okay, they're fine. Which is, you know, kind of like saying, my head's on fire, my feet are in ice water. So I'm round about here, I'm kind of okay. Yeah. You know, Jeff Bezos once said, you know, don't do averages. And I think that's a good message for a lot of organizations. Stop, you know, just averaging your results. Actually dig into which bits are actually strategically important. And I'm actually quite lacking, I think, in examples of companies who have got it right. And if I do look to the ones they are, they're probably similar to the ones I mentioned earlier. The sort of unilevers of the, of this world. Those companies that are able to take advantage of technologies like agentic AI simply because they've started to really understand what the supply chain looks like. All those organizations that have been burned, you know, that have actually, it's just, they've realized that, you know, a Tier 2 or a T3 supplier has caused some major issue in their business because of either lack of availability of a raw component or from. Certainly back in the day, they used a lot of issues with Chinese suppliers, you know, who were putting melanin in milk supply or blade of paint on toys for, you know, Hasbro and people like that who really got exposed to the fact that they were only concerned about tier one.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And just thought the tier two and tier three didn't really matter and. Because then you got brown envelopes changing hands and.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, you realize that things that happen, that uh, those lower tiers can come back and, and destroy your brand very quickly if you're not in control of it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I had an example from a car manufacturer myself at least a decade ago where, um, this, uh, car manufacturers, their whole production line had to stop for an entire week because, uh, every model of this specific car that went out of the gates had, um, to have, um, a repair kit in the back part. And it had a very specific tool now to create this bolt that the Tool needed to be able to change a wheel on this car. It was seen as a second or third tier supplier. I can't remember now. But anyway, that supplier failed, failed and the kit to make the bolt was still in the factory of this supply that failed. And the knock on effect, it was millions and millions of pounds of damages because they couldn't produce the cars, because they couldn't get the tool m out of this machine that they needed to put it into a second supplier. And it's incredible how those things can happen. Near shoring came up as a major trend with 62% of firms planning to localize their supply chains. Though only 8% see it taking place in the short term. What's your take on this? And is nearshoring the silver bullets for resilience? Are there other strategies manufacturers should consider?

Speaker A: There are no silver bullets. There are only strategic choices. So decisions like near shoring, reshoring, you know, these are structural decisions that you're making about your supply chain and they should therefore be done in a way to support your strategy. Challenges I find with a lot of organizations is they make structural decisions without really clearly knowing what their strategy is. So that structure first, then strategy second. It has to be the other way around. So there is, like I say, there is no silver bullet. It might not work for you in some supply chains. If you've got a very low cost supply chain which actually you're competing on price as completely commoditized product, um, then a low cost offshore supply chain might be perfectly fine. However, if you've got one that where do you need a high degree of sustainability or agility or resilience, then nearshore and becomes viable. But do you need it for everything in your supply chain? Uh, what components can you stockpile and have with long lead times? Which ones do you need to have? Quite close. That comes from that point I made earlier that if you don't understand your supply chain and the strategies behind it and whether or not it's make to stock or make to order or procure to, whatever, um, then your actions are always going to be suboptimal because you're making them with imperfect knowledge. You should be making strategic decisions based around a clearly defined customer centric strategy. And your structural decisions in your network decisions should be there to underpin that strategic directive. And you will have different strategies for different supply chains. But most companies just still have that one size fits all and they will therefore make a generic decision, oh, we're going to reshore near shore without actually understanding whether or not, that's the root cause of the issue for that particular supply chain. So again, uh, we can't look at this as silver bullet. I think actually these are beneficial acts because I think the whole offshoring was driven around the very myopic focus on cost and profit maximization. This is actually now being driven more by resilience and the need for agility, which I think is better. Um, but again it's not. In some cases it might be perfectly fine to procure from the lowest cost supplier. If that item is not scarce, if it's not critical, there's enough in your inventory supply chain to wait the lead times. If you have secondary sources, you know, then it's fine, it's. But you're making clear strategic choices. Not just broad brush, you know, just decisions.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we've gone, we've gone, we've taken one route for a period of time. We're now going to bring everything back actually that the two can coexist and should coexist.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly that, exactly that, yeah, yeah. But make strategic choices based on the individual SKUs based within the supply chain to support your supply chain strategy which should support your business model strategy, which should support your, your corporate strategy.

Speaker B: Perfect. Thanks Sean. Um, going back to AI now, um, you've written extensively about the role of AI, digital twins and automation in manufacturing. With AI adoption being a top priority for 2026 and beyond. What do you see as the most exciting opportunities and the biggest risks for manufacturers?

Speaker A: Um, I think the most exciting opportunity um, is the ability for, for organizations to use these new technologies to completely rethink the way they do business, to relook at their workflows, to re look at their processes, to redesign them for a digital age, not for the analog industrial age. Um, the risk therefore is that they don't do that and they simply take that same analog mindset and industrial sort of approach and use technology to simply look at how can we do what we've always done but with less FTEs, you know, with less cost. And we'll use it as a, you know, to automate away tasks which will create, as I mentioned earlier, create a lot of fear in the organization which become, creates resistance to change. Um, the opportunity therefore is for them to actually think, well how can I, let's just take Gen AI, there's an opportunity there to create, give every team a uh, sort of half an FTE that is effectively a digital worker that you can use to automate some of the potentially the value enabling tasks so that they can focus more on the value delivering tasks. Um, that's a good way of looking at it, but it's not the way companies are looking at it. What they're looking at it is how can I cut down my headcount to reduce my costs to maximize my short term profit. And again I presented earlier to you and I showed that this has been the biggest impact in that really has been your future talent pool. It's been the graduates, it's been the new people in every time. Those people who come in and do the start of work, the spreadsheet jockeying and the contractor then review viewing and analysis and that sort of work, they're the ones that just automated away so they're not creating jobs for people to come into their business. Which is your future talent pool. Yeah, um, which means you're restricting now your future capabilities, your human talent. Um, because of your move to cut costs out of your business in a very short term, um, perspective most of those organizations now regretting that decision and realizing that actually the people that they brought, they would have brought in to train up are the people that will create the future for that organization. And they've just basically told them they're not needed here. So they're taking a very, very short term um, very um, cost centric approach to artificial intelligence and digital technologies. When actually the real opportunity is to actually think, look back, um, take that sort of anti fragile mindset that I talked about this morning and really think about how we can reinvent ourselves in a digital way using these technologies and use these tools to free our people from doing that dredge work, not just replace. Awesome.

Speaker B: Great. Yeah, yeah, it's um, I see, I see that, see that as the risks. Are there any like additional opportunities you see for this uh, for AI in manufacturing specifically?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of the things, one of the benefits certainly when I worked um, in the field of sort of what's called the decision intelligence now agentic AI, um, is most people think they can't start until they get the data clean, but they're never going to get their data clean. And one of the use cases, I think really the most powerful use cases is you can use these tools to get your data clean. What I mean by that is creating agents for example that will look at the real lead time in terms of, to procure an item. So with the act. So rather than have a replenishment lead time um, on your SAP system that says it's going to take 12 days, actually tracking continuously how long from purchase order creation to goods receipt, uh, are these items taken? And dynamically updating, um, your data pool with real time data data. So your MRP schedule then becomes more accurate, for example, because now you're getting more better, you know, um, procurement lead times or better production lead times. So the ability for agents to sort of create a data feedback loop into their ERP systems to create more accurate information, that means their plans and their schedules themselves become more accurate. Which means their, you know, their stockouts and their inventory, um, excesses are less, I think is a real opportunity and I think a lot of companies are missing that they're looking at. They're coming kind of. We will use this when we get our data clean. And actually this could be used not just to clean up your data but to make it more dynamic. And I think that's a real exciting opportunity. I use it a lot at the moment. For example, um, we prefer to order a lot of goods in my supply chain, which means you capture a record of what you bought from a supplier, but never really capturing a record of what that supplier could actually do. So every time someone wants something different, they generally say, well, I need a new supplier for that, which ends up with a lot of suppliers, which I'm not a fan of. So I, you know, one of the opportunities I saw was said, why can't we use um, gen AI to research the suppliers for us, come up with what they're going to their website, find out their actual capabilities and then upload that into the supplier record with what they're actually capable to do. So my team, the engineers in the business I work with can then research, I know firmo forming or thread rolling and it will come up with a supplier who can do that, that even though we've never bought that service from them previously. So it's enhancing the master data, uh, by going out into the Internet trawling, getting information, updating it on a regular basis, providing capabilities that we simply didn't have before. And that's all been automated for us. Really.

Speaker B: Yeah, because I guess before that would have been a task of a category manager, somebody.

Speaker A: And it was too big a task.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Never had time.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Whereas now you've got, yeah, there's, that's right.

Speaker A: Here's a list of, you know, company names, company number, numbers go out and you just tell the agent what you want to see. These are the information I need. And the other thing as well is you can say that I want it in this format. So the format that gets loaded is exactly the same for Every supplier, and therefore it becomes searchable very easily because it's codified.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Sean. Um, you've worked with some of the world's leading manufacturers and helped guide transformation at scale. What's your advice to manufacturing leaders who are looking to future proof their supply chains in today's volatile environment?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to touch on points I've already raised, really, which is that, uh, to raise your eyes above the parapet, really, to stop just looking at this as a way to digitize your existing workflows and your existing modes of practice and actually take a step back. Think about who your customers are, where you want to play, how you are going to win, and then think about how technology can actually aid you in that. So one of the things that I talk about a lot is about becoming antifragile. Rather than just being resilient and antifragility, I've been creating a culture where you know, the people in your organization, because it's not just about the leaders, it's about everyone in the organization, how they can actually, you know, become antifragile in their thinking. So a cultural framework driven around, you know, a clarity of purpose, but also the freedom to innovate, become entrepreneurial and experimental in the creation of that purpose or the delivery of that purpose. And that purpose should be customer centric. That Copernican transformation I talked about earlier. The mind, the cognitive skills really, which if you can develop them at an individual level, that means you ultimately develop them at an organizational level are, is critical thinking. So really sort of the ability to think without bias. You know, again, you know, who is our customer? What do they value? What are their needs? What is our unique value proposition? You know, what is actually happening in the marketplace? And you can use standard tools like, you know, pestle analysis and things like that to help you get to those sorts of answers, but to look critically at the challenge that you're facing as an organization. Systems thinking so that you can actually start to understand the system of value delivery. Where are the trade offs you're making, where are the unintended consequences? Then you can go to the point you made asked earlier about where do we need to change the structure to support the strategy better by reassuring or near shoring. Once um, you understood the system, then you can start thinking about, um, the customer's relationship with that system. Where do we create frustrations or bottlenecks, or where do we make it diffic for the customer? Is there any way we can simplify? And I think, um, one of the best ways of simplifying is going back to first principles, going back to actually what is it we're actually trying to achieve here? And I use this line quite a lot. Complexity grows naturally, but simplicity has to be consciously designed. And that's why most people don't do it. It's easy just to add another system, add another process. Before you know it, you've got an incredibly complex supply network with incredibly complex portfolio of different systems all trying to integrate together. And your answer to that is to add another subsystem and another process. And actually really the challenge is to sort of step back and see how do I simplify that? And then obviously creative thinking so that you can look at technologies. And how does that help me do that? How does it help me simplify my system of value delivery? How does it help? Does it change the value we're able to enable? Has it changed the demand channels that the customer is going to engage with us with? Does it change their challenges? Does it open up new opportunities for us to maybe digitize our services or whatever? And then finally circular thinking, which is, can we create more circular value chains in order to, uh, both reduce, for example our own scope free footprint, but also maybe our customers, they're all facing the same challenge. Everyone's got the same regulatory requirements on them to actually make their business more sustainable. If you stop thinking just about yourself and start thinking about your customers and how you can help them to achieve their goals, they're probably likely to buy your services off them if you're helping them to solve their problems rather than just trying to sell them a product. And it's that combination of skill sets and the convergence between them that enables you to look at any of these technologies and think right critically. What, how does it, you know, how does it help us to deliver value to the customer? Where in the system of value delivery would we use it? How does it help remove frustrations? You know, where do we go? What sort of technology should we use? And does it help us become more sustainable and more circular? And if you can use their mindsets and it really doesn't matter what technology emerges, you're always going to be okay. And I think developing those skill sets actually is what we should be training the future people to, because we, you know, we, there's sort of skills we've tried, we've taught kids and stuff. Forever has been just learning things that aren't relevant anymore. But the ability to think, think critically, you know, to understand systems, to think creatively, they're not there And I think they're the things that actually people want nowadays. You know, and I think if we teach, we teach ourselves to, to those skills, then it doesn't really matter what happens at a technological level, we'll always be able to make sense of it.

Speaker B: Great, great. And final question for me really. Um, uh, what does the future look like for talent entering into your line of business? Uh, what does the future career of somebody in supply chain look like in 5 to 10 years time?

Speaker A: Certainly more exciting than it used to, I think. I think it was always trucks and sheds. That was always the supply chain. And I always use a lot. You know, there's been a paradigm shift in supply chain that, you know, the best supply chain in the world used to be the invisible supply chain. You know, the supply chain director was uh, never going to be on the C suite. Uh, no one was interested in supply chain. And actually if the CEO wanted to talk to you about it, you're in trouble because there's been some, you know, some issue somewhere that you're. This caused some sort of headline that you've now got to explain yourself. Um, I think the best supply chain in the world now is the visible supply chain. Because you've got to understand your supply chain, you've got to understand the provenance of items. There's been far too many instances where companies have um, been really exposed because of issues like we talked earlier, they need tier 2 or tier 3 of their supply chain. So now they've got to have full visibility. And I think the technologies of the, I was going to say of the future, but really of today, enable us to create that sort of end to end visibility that enables us to create those digital twins that enables us to think much more critically, system wise and analytically about our supply chains. So I think the job as a supply chain chain leader and the people in that is much more analytical, it's much more creative, it's much more strategic than it ever would. So uh, I kind of wish I would start my career now rather than sort of 30 years ago to be honest. Uh, because now I think it's an exciting place. It's a C suite role. It's seen as being just as important and in fact it should be because the supply chain is the one part that's trying to connect multiple different elements. Specifically, if you move beyond supply chain into value chain, into business model thinking, you're really trying to connect together a multitude of different parts of your organization, organizations together in order to deliver a desired outcome, which is more than other departments are doing. They're just focusing on their, you know, their little area of concern. So, you know, I think it's really exciting. Time to be in supply chain.

Speaker B: Sounds like that. That's a prospectus pitch if everyone heard. Sean, thank you so much for your time, uh, today. It's been a, it's been a real pleasure to speak to you this morning. Um, and thank you again, and all the best in the future.

Speaker A: Thanks, Nick. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Find out more about how Dun and Bradstreet can help your business be better. Contact us@marketinguknb.com and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.