 We are live. Okay. Hello everyone. We'll get started in just about a minute. Hello and welcome to our latest expert connect series, the digital supply chain explained. My name is Ira Sager and I'm vice president for learning initiatives for the center for global enterprise. As we've, this is the third session we're doing here and this is something new for us. A 15 minute webinar that we're conducting over the period of five weeks. This is a third, as I mentioned. Our game is to share key management skills for successful digital supply chain transformation. We like to think of this 15 minute session as espresso for the mind brief, but packed with lots and lots of information. And that's thanks to the leader of these sessions and that's Vick Galani, manager of research programs and analytics for the digital supply chain institute, which is also affiliated with the center for global enterprise. We'll have, we hope a few minutes for Q and A at the end of this session. And if you have a question for Vivek, please just post it in the Q and A feature on Zoom. And Vivek, you can take it away now. Thank you, Ira, for introduction. Welcome everyone, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are. So for today's session, which is third session in the series, we'll quickly review the digital supply chain and the people aspect of it. We'll see the people side of the DSC. We'll talk about the DSC talent model that we developed earlier this year. And then we'll set the stage for coming weeks of expert connect. So those of you who joined us last week, we talked about the four areas of the digital supply chain, which is demand, people, technology, risk. And those of you who are joining us for the first time over the last two sessions, we talked about digital supply chain and demand. So digital supply chain is a customer-centric platform model which connects the four aspect of the digital supply chain, demand, people, technology, risk. And the digital supply chain institute came up with these ideas of four buckets by talking to 26 different supply chain executives and leaders across the world back in 2016. And I suggest everyone to read Frontside Flip to get more details on the four buckets. And in this four buckets, demand is all about how to calculate the stimulating demand and how to stimulate demand. People is focused on culture and our organizational shift right now in an organization. And I think the pandemic has accelerated those changes right now because of the work from home situation in many of the organizations. Technology is a supportive tool in terms of digital supply chain transformation. And when you are trying to direct to consumer model and going online on the e-commerce platform, I think it enhances your risk and I think managing it makes a really priority. So for today's session, we'll talk about the people aspect of it. So Dell is, let me talk about a quote from Dell for a bit. So Andre Solder from Dell is a member of the institution and also co-chair of the institute. And he mentioned in our latest white paper that digital workforce strategy designed to transform supply chain need to account for people experience skills and not just systems and processes. So most of the companies we have talked or we are talking right now, they are almost the main priority right now is technology, systems and processes always. They do not focus on talent. They do say that talent gap is the main concern for them but they do not have a talent strategy to work on it or to remove that gap. So I think our companies need to make sure that they focus on people experience and skills to make sure they remove the gap, to make sure they can transform to digital supply chain. And doing that research, we did a couple of surveys. So here are a couple of key insights from the survey. So majority of firm that we surveyed reported that there is a concern regarding the current talent pool that is inadequate for the executing the strategy of digital supply chain because they do not have the skills or the talent to go to a data-driven decision-making model instead of just intuition-based decision-making. So I think our companies need to make sure that they train their current people but also hire new talent or digital talent that actually are more focused on data-driven decision-making and they understand the data more than they understand anything else. The second, there is a lack of reported action to develop meaningful digital talent strategy to close the gap. As we talked about, most of the companies don't have a digital talent strategy. Every company has digital demand planning strategy but they don't have digital talent strategy. And talent brands are a meaningful way to attract digital talent must be developed and improved. And we'll talk more about that when we talk about the DSCA talent model. Also firms now see the development of existing talent rather than acquisition as a primary way to close the skills gap. So most companies realize that even if you hire a digital talent, they are, digital talent is lacking a functional expertise that they need to perform, they need to perform their roles and responsibility or better understand the business. So I think it's always better if an individual or an employee has both a digital talent but also a functional expertise or a domain expertise in that area. So what they are trying to do is trying to develop their current employees and make sure that they train them in a digital talent or digital skills to make sure that they can use them at a higher benefit level. And majority of companies do not have supply chain driven digital talent strategy. Some of the companies we talked to, for example, J&J or Colgate or other company, they do have digital talent strategy. But what they lack is supply chain input to those talent strategy. Because if you are using some of those talents for the supply chain, you need to make sure that you have some kind of inputs or requirements that you can put it into the digital talent strategy. And some companies are trying to do that when they hire a new member for the team, trying to put digital skills needed into the roles and responsibilities to make sure that they have those skills when they hire new ones. So by talking to all this company, we found out some of the characteristics of the future talent. So all the supply chain executives that we talked to agree that the new hire should be curious and it should be always about continuing learning. So learning is not an overhead cost or a one-time thing. I think every day in your job, a person has to be curious to learn and learn new stuff every day. And if you do that, you are just stagnant at that level and you won't be able to, you won't be effective to the company in implementing that strategy. And to do that, I think a person always has to have analytical skills, always needs to be flexible and always needs to be data driven. And the last point that I mentioned, it's all about collaborative with a purpose. So I think when we talk to our companies, most of the companies have siloed structure. So different functions don't talk in between. And I think that's the main barrier within the company when they try to do any kind of transformation project. And it doesn't go successful or it doesn't scale up. When you do a profile concept, so I think having those kinds of skills really help a company build a better and scale up a technology or a process that can really increase that revenue. So as you talked about talent, the DCI talent model, we developed this earlier this year with the help of Professor Dave Kerr. So there are three aspects of the DCI talent model. So the first one is about attract and acquire. So when we talk about attract and acquire, companies needs to build a digital supply chain employment brand. I think companies need to pivot that current employment brand to data driven employment brand that developed competency centers in a first location and utilize non-traditional recruitment to get new talent. And so for, and here is a good example. So Wayfair is a good example for this one because if you look at the data science community and how they promote their employment, how they promote some of their employees which are data scientists or data analysts, it really helps them attract and acquire new talent. And I think they are giving right now a really good competition to Amazon in terms of the inventory turnover because of they have a really good talent and they have a really good employment brand to fulfill their digital talent strategy. The second aspect is all about integrating perform. So how, and it's all about enable and drive digital strategies or digital supply chain transformation strategies for that. So how do you pair technologists with domain experts? How do you develop an organization structure that supports exploration and not just to data cleaning or data analyzing? Next we will train for integrated behavior and we'll talk about that model in the next slide. And the third part of the DSPI talent model is all about nurture a data driven culture. So how to create a data science community within your company that talks about different data exploration. If you have a overall community from different function and so data analysts from one function can talk to data analysts or data scientists from other function and talk about different kinds of problems and solutions that companies should be focused on and then start working on it to make it more impactful across functionals. And so commitment to digital community and also support external contributor in that community as well. So as we talked about the integrated behavior here is one of the way companies can, companies are doing an organization structure where they start to put a team for data exploration. And to be part of the team, I think it's not just data scientists can be part of it. It means to have data scientists, data analysts and domain experts. And it's not a hierarchical structure. It's a kind of center of excellence where a part of team member of the team are trying to come up with a non-intuitive insight for by using the unsocial data pattern and finding driven by questions and hypothesis. And sometimes team members are also trying to come up with a business problems that can be solved with the data. So you're not just finding a solution but also finding a business problem that's not has been discovered by senior leadership within the company. So that's part of the data exploration because when we talk to a company, most of the data scientists, they hire, they're 80% of time are spent on data cleansing and that's not a really good use of resources within a company. So companies are now moving away from that structure and make sure they have two different aspects which is function analytics where people can work on data cleansing and data analysis part of it within that function. But then that should be an essential part of the data exploration where people can go and explore insight and data throughout the company and it needs to be cross-functional within the company. So that's all we have. We have more details on each of the three buckets within the talent model and we have more examples and what questions supply chain leaders should ask to make sure that they have a really good demand talent strategy that can implement and stimulating demand, implement the new technologies, scale up a new technology but also managing risk and overall the goal for the digital supply chain is to reduce the cost but also increase the revenue from the supply chain. Thank you everyone to read the latest white paper which is talent and organization of funding guide which is available on DSL website. Thank you everyone to do that and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us and happy to have a detailed conversation regarding any of those questions. So back to you either. All right, very good. Thank you Vivek. One quick question before we let people go. I'm curious as you put together a talent or as the company puts together a talent strategy what is the advice for bringing in new talent, new people, new employees versus retraining existing employees and trying to get them to be more data savvy. So how do you strike that balance? Do you strike that balance at all? What is the recommendation? So it's a great question Ida and I think it depends on the company's size and the investment they have right now. So for a small company it's always if they don't have the talent even internally it's always go and get an attract and acquire talent but for big companies they can easily acquire a company to fill that gap immediately but most of those companies are trying to do right now it's train the internal people and trying to move them from intuition to data-driven decision making. And one of the challenges I think they are facing right now because they don't want to hire a new talent in COVID era especially because it's really hard for a new hire to collaborate with team members on a Zoom because they don't know them at all at this point in COVID and they are working from home. So it was attract and acquire before COVID but right now it's all about training and it will change next year and it will change the year after that. I think it's a continuous learning and continuously improving the talent strategy but most companies right now are training internally but then the focus on hiring afterwards if there is a lack of resources within the company then they will go to the second option of attract and acquire. All right, very good. Well, thank you very much. And thank you everyone for joining us and we will see you next week, same time. Thank you everyone and we'll see you next week at the same time.