 Welcome back to this first life event in SC3x, Supply Chain Dynamics. Mary Long is here with me to I'm happy to discuss and answer your questions. So let's start, Mary, with Charles Arnold, one of our students. First of all, he said, hi, Mary, it is a tremendous opportunity to have you here today. So let us really, really appreciate to have you with us today. So our question is, do you have input in a store placement as it is related to supply chain efficiency or just work with the locations given? I guess that this question is related to how do you decide where to manufacture and where to store all of the products at temples, I guess is this question. And how much influence maybe supply chain has over those store locations was one way I interpreted this as well. So the supply chain at Domino's, those centers are pre-located and the stores have locations. What's interesting about this question, this really great question, is that supply chain did have influence in where new stores were built. Not tremendous influence because when you think of all the dynamics that go into choosing where to locate a store, if the very best location would be in the center more of a small town square type of thing where there's a lot of foot traffic or even just a lot of buzz and a lot of people, that might from a branding perspective and from servicing if there are schools nearby, like if you're near a university, that's gonna be a great location. It might be very difficult to deliver with a truck to that location and unload ingredients and get them into the store. So the broader perspective of the sales value, potential sales drivers of a store are a priority. The location and the lease rate are important to the franchisee because they're the ones who are paying that money. So they weigh that. And then, but where supply chain weighed in is we would identify stores where that proposal for that location, it would be unsafe to deliver. It was that it would require the driver because of some restricted access. It would require the driver to walk like literally like almost a quarter mile for every cart delivery, which would be crazy hard on that person to do that repetitively. And then there were other things related to the truck access. There was one location that, it would require like the truck to back up an inordinate amount of distance that would be an unsafe line of sight. So there were locations where we could mitigate that risk by working with franchisee in the store to some, in some cases, they negotiated with the landlord to provide different egress, like a different access. So I found it fascinating. Like I love this question because obviously you could tell, I could talk about this for like an hour. It's awesome. So it links. Also connect with the network design models. How did you see, which difference did you see in terms of in Campbell's and Domino's, how they deal with the supply chain network design modeling by itself? Any difference or difference? Definitely, a ton of difference in the approaches, the systems that they used, the different constraints, you know, in a more contained system like Domino's then also the insights you can act differently on it because you could influence more of the decisions where Campbell's can't tell Walmart where to locate their stores. So, you know, it's that whole difference. Yeah, perfect. So let's go Param. Param asked the following question. How does Domino's manage the pizza delivery timelines considering disruptions and traffic even during peak demand periods? So I'm going to focus. I think that the intent of this I'll interpret as focused on the delivery of the truck of all those ingredients to the store, not the individual pizza delivery because that wasn't part of supply chain. So when we plotted out the routing for the delivery of the truck getting to the stores, this is really a complicated problem, right? And everything that you bring up in this question are overlays to it. So there are some locations in the United States where there's noise abatement. And so having a reefer truck running during certain hours, you know, is not allowed. There are locations in Manhattan and New York where, you know, anytime you would be parking a truck to make a delivery, you'd be ticketed unless you somehow lucked out that you actually got a spot, which would be rare. And so it's planning those routes to be the most efficient they can and get to the stores when it's the least disruptive to traffic. So we thought it was kind of funny in supply chain for Domino's when the brand team wanted to label the trucks, you know, to have the beautiful, they have beautiful billboards on them for Domino's. And from a geeky supply chain standpoint, we were like, well, you know, it's kind of a waste of money because they're driving at night. And like not a lot of people are really gonna see it, but I do always love seeing them now when I'm driving and stuff. So it's really fun to see them in the daytime and go, okay, well, there's one that's good. Definitely. There is a question from Heybert and I like this question. He said, we spend a lot of time and energy to work with optimization algorithms. And this is true. If you supply chain design, we spend a lot of time and explain the linear programming mixing into linear programming models and they apply to some problems that we propose to them. So they spend a lot of time with these optimization network design models. So his question is, could you please talk a little bit about the way you saw these optimization tools used in practice? Okay. They are definitely used and it's more probably the discipline of the thought behind it and the sequencing of how you're going through those problems, right? So you're universally for every, for many supply chain challenges, you're looking at constraints. Like what are my constraints? What is my demand? Where is my demand? Cause supply chain is so much a location problem like a location geographic challenge. And then it's prediction of how much is my demand? How much will it grow in these different locations? And then it's timing, like how much time do I have and how can I lower the cost of arrival and the service? What are my service goals? I, in another world, I would have started with service first. I didn't because in over five years at Domino's, service is a given. Like it's, you know, you never shut down a store. So like I don't, I didn't say that first, but so they're definitely your, all the hard work you're putting into understanding optimization and really work on those problems. It's really valuable long term for how you approach problem solving. I will frankly say though, that the minute outcomes of optimization in the modeling that I've done, it can maybe be this frustrating transition that when you're in the real world with companies, they don't act optimally, right? So I actually just had a person who was keynote speaking, I'm from San Diego, University of San Diego. So brewery, craft brewing is a big thing in San Diego. And they presented and talked about how they did all this network modeling and it told them to locate the next manufacturing center in a certain part of the country on the East Coast. And they looked at it and said, you know, we're not gonna do that. And they chose to locate like 400 miles away from that because of many other things that are hard to model. Like they modeled the vibrancy of the commitment to the community because craft brewing is so about connection to people there who really care. Like so they had all these other that would be very hard to model in tangibles that led them to say, the model would say from an optimization standpoint, like any model would say, you should be located in New Jersey if you're trying to serve the population in the East Coast. But New Jersey might not be the best place to put a plant, you know, and I'm not saying New Jersey was there. But like that's the thing, you trade off this balance. And I would say that sometimes what I saw over my career is some people struggled with that because that's a very people thing. And it doesn't seem a quant and then it seems wrong. Like, well, the facts say do this, I would say my learning has been, you know what? Like these have equal weight. It's, I have seen over 25 years that that value on the people aspect of things does carry. There were good decisions made that took a model and said, you know, okay, well, we understand that but we'll do this instead. I have seen a play out in a positive way. Yeah, and I fully agree with you. The model is always a simplification of the reality. We need to take this in mind, but at the same time allows us to play with the different parameters and values and see the effect on the solution. So sometimes it's helpful maybe not to implement directly the solution, but helps to go through the, at least the right solution. So yeah. From Teresa, you mentioned the bulwit effect while working on Campbell. How did you manage this? Well, I don't know that anyone can manage that like always effectively because you're chasing, right? Like the nature of that is that you're kind of the effect of the bulwit. To preempt it in that model was really hard because it was an industry model of promotion and new item launch. So there were mitigating things we did that did work to bring that closer and to help the customer and the brand team and supply chains on both sides, the customer supply chain and our supply chain be more aligned around what would be the effect of this launch. So those would be the mitigating things that the conversation and the pre-planning helped to streamline that. Perfect. From Dan, he said how to match sales and marketing department objectives with supply chain management end-to-end process. For example, who defines locations or customer relationship management strategy? Okay. I'll use Domino's as the example there. It can apply as well with Campbell's, but Domino's is probably an easier one for people to understand. So when you think about that, I ran a division at Domino's called Global Equipment and Supply. And so everything that was in a pizza store, we sourced. But we didn't own the design of the uniform gear like that team members would wear just ourselves from a supply chain perspective because if we did, we might go for the lowest cost or the most sufficient to source. We wouldn't consider other things. So the way we worked it is there is a brand like marketing, they have a seat at the table, an important voice in the process. They choose, I'll put it simply and give you an example. They would choose everything related to color and to the position of the logo, to the size of the logo. Everything about that, that's brand's call. Once brand has a vision for what they want that to look like, then store operations in Domino's world would control those other decisions about, well, the material, like how breathable is it? How lightweight, how long should the shirts be? Are they tucked into, are their pockets? Like all the things that functionally, a team member in the store might be impacted by that decision and that applied to equipment too. Like how heavy would appeal be? How, what's the size of the handle? Like all those things then store operations weighs in on. And then we as supply chain people, we source. We find the manufacturers or suppliers of those items and then we bring brand store operations and supply chain together again to look at things in practice. So we designed, did it come out the way we thought? And then, okay, how should we scale it? How will we launch this? Perfect. The last question is related to the suppliers and how to deal with the suppliers. These learners said, how involved in supply chain decisions about the supplier of ingredients for the food products at Campbell's and Domino's? I mean, this huge area for supply chain and a big source of competitive advantage if you can work with suppliers on the total cost of ownership, the total delivered cost for items, you're driving a unique value to your supply chain. And so the suppliers are the critical element to that and your strategy relative to them. So if you have supply or if you have needs it's easier to focus on specific. So let's take ingredients across the board. If you're analyzing your ingredients and you're saying, wow, we're using all these similar ingredients across these different recipes, we could consolidate the need for ingredients and leverage our spend. So that's a dual problem. It helps you lower the delivered cost in terms of who you would be partnering with to get the deliveries and everything. But it also helps you to work with the supplier on the quality and the tightness of their performance relative to a spec. If you're doing that against a few suppliers versus many. So hopefully that answered that question. I mean, there's so much there too. That's like a whole nother course probably. We have also many more questions but I think we need to end the event here. Thank you so much, Manny, for sharing your knowledge with our SCX learners that we really, really appreciate your time, your experience and bring this reality to our course. Thank you so much. Yes, see you in the second life event. Thank you so much for attending this event. Good luck with everything and those that want to pursue for the certificate or want to attend to the next life event, please verify as soon as possible and in any case, no later than the end of January. Thanks to all. Bye.