 I'm Paulo Sousa Jr., course lead for SC3x, Supply Chain Dynamics, which is part of the MITx MicroMasters and Supply Chain Management program here at MIT CTL. I'm happy to be co-hosting this live event today with my colleague Miguel Rodriguez Garcia, course lead for SC1x, Supply Chain Fundamentals. Hi Miguel. Hi everyone. Thank you Paulo for the introduction. I'm really happy to be here with you guys. I'm excited to share some great supply chains with all our learners. So today we have an amazing speaker joining us, someone who is actually a MicroMasters alumna. So she went through the same path as most of you guys watching this live event today. But before introducing her, Paulo and I wanted to remind you something really important for the program. So this is a cross-course live event between SC1x and SC3x courses and verification for both courses is still open. So we just wanted to remember that verification is really important for you guys as learners because it's the only chance that you actually have to get a certificate of the course from MIT. So from us, the Center for Transportation and Logistics. And it's also the best way to support us as a global program that wants to keep giving away this content for free to many, many learners around the globe. And also to do things like what we are doing here today, having live events like this one. So if you like the content, we'll post the verification links in the chat so you can easily access them. You guys can also do it on the edX platform. You know that already. So as I said, if you like this kind of content, if you like what you see, keep supporting us please and become verified learners. So I think now Paulo, it's all yours. You can share the agenda for today and introduce our guest speaker. Sure. So today we're going to follow the following agenda. First, our guest speaker, Danielle and Scorb Proctor will give us a presentation that will last around 25 minutes. Then Miguel and I will ask some questions. And finally, Danielle will also be answering questions from the audience. So we want to encourage you to participate and use the Zoom Q&A feature. You can use it right now if you wish. So without excitation, we are honored to have Danielle and Scorb Proctor joining us. She's the Director of Inventory Operations at Penguin Rendon House. Danielle holds a master degree from MIT in supply chain management. And she's also a MicroMasters alumina. I'd like to add that Danielle has been voluntarily contributing to the program for many courses so far as a community teaching assistant. So she has been sharing her knowledge and experience with many learners in the courses, discussion forums. And we really appreciate this. So many of the audience may already know Danielle from the interactions in our discussion forums. All right. So welcome, Danielle. Hello. Hello, Paulo. Hello, everyone. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you with us today. So could you please share a little bit more about yourself with our audience? Yeah, absolutely. So as Paulo mentioned, my name is Danielle Proctor. I'm a 2020 MicroMasters graduate and a 2021 MIT graduate from the blended program at CTL. And I'm currently the Director of Inventory Operations at Penguin Random House, which is a publishing house here in the U.S. It's the largest publishing house in the U.S. or North America. I think it's worth noting that I took a pretty non-traditional path to supply chain. So I started in wine importing out of college, which seemed like a really good idea when I was 21. And then I eventually moved on. I moved to Boston for a short period of time and worked at the furniture, online furniture company Wayfair. She may be familiar with and then eventually found myself at Penguin Random House working in inventory management. I want to really just interject here for just one moment. My undergraduate degree is from Smith College in Massachusetts here in the U.S. And it's also a degree in sociology, and I minored in government. So I just wanted to give a brief shout out to any of you who may be in the SCX courses and feeling a little overwhelmed because they don't have an engineering or a math background. I want you to know that you're not alone. I went through it. I was also intimidated and a little overwhelmed, but I got through it. And so I just want you to know that it's possible and that support is out there if you need it. Thank you so much, Danielle. This is really interesting and I think also helpful for many of our learners. So right before we get into our topic from today, we want to launch a poll. I'd ask to, yeah, she's already shared with you. So you may now see up all displayed on your screen. So we want to know what brought you here. What is the topic that you are most excited about? And what do you expect to learn today? So keen sights about the publishing industry or maybe demand forecasting, inventory management, handling disruptions in the supply chain. I see that many from our audience is already participating here. Let's give people a couple more seconds. Yeah, I think we're good to go now. So it seems that the demand forecasting is the top one topic here. Then we can see handling disruptions in the supply chain and then inventory management and keen sights about the publishing industries as well. I'm pretty sure that all of these will be covered today. Okay, so I think with this in mind, we are ready to start and the screen is yours Danielle. Great, thank you so much. Okay, let's see if I can do this right the first time. Okay, can everybody see my screen? Brilliant. Okay. Yes, we can. Great. So to start, I want to talk a little bit about by giving you a brief overview of what it's like to be in the publishing world in general. For me, it's an industry that I feel is really defined by these almost contrasting values and that's what makes it an exciting industry to be in. It's what makes it dynamic, which makes it interesting. And so you can see here this really elaborate artwork that I've designed that shows these polar opposites and how they sort of pull in opposite directions from publishing at its center. And I'm going to talk about them in pairs. So first, I want to talk about how publishing is really an established industry, but how it's also really working with innovative operations. So a brief history for you guys here who may not know, the first printing press was invented around 1440. The first publisher was established a couple decades later when we realized there was a market in these newfangled books in 1488. And then Random House itself was first published in 1927. This is all to really drive home the idea that this is not a startup, right? This is a new, this is a very established industry. There's nothing really new or really innovative about the product that we're selling. But on the other side of this is this idea of innovative operations. So at PRH, we're always looking to improve our operations, improve our analytics, improve our systems and processes. And we do that by leveraging data and really using innovative thinking. I think my title as director of inventory operations sort of hints at that I'm not actually managing any inventory. I'm looking at the way that we manage inventory and how do we do it better? We also have this very traditional product, but in this fast fashion space. So, you know, many of the books that we sell are what we call deep backlist. A book is backlist if it's been on sale for at least a year. Some of our books go back, you know, hundreds of years. PRH has only been in existence since 1927, but you know, we're selling things like Shakespeare and Plato. We have literal centuries of market knowledge about these titles. They're very established. They're very common traditional products. However, we're selling them in what I always think about as a fast fashion space. So, new books are brought to the market on Tuesdays every week in the US. That's our on sale day. That's because bestseller lists are compiled on Mondays. So, going to market on Tuesdays gives us the maximum number of days to get those sales out and make those lists. So, we're really trying to capture the market at a really rapid rate. It's a competitive space. And what we're often trying to do is predict market trends before they happen. Obviously, with each individual book, but also trying to see where is the zeitgeist going to be this time next year? What are these overall global market trends that we're going to have to deal with or that we want to be ahead of in the coming months? And the last dynamic that I want to talk about is this difference between widgets versus cultural objects or art objects. PRH is actively managing over, I think it's over 120,000 active SKUs right now. And we're adding a few 100 additional titles. They're going on sale on Tuesdays every month. So, we have just a ton of products that we're just actively trying to keep in stock and right size to the market, which means that we have to make some pretty, we have to move quickly and we have to have some pretty structured processes in place. Like at what point is a book worth it to keep or no longer worth it to keep in print? At what point do we decide that we want to move this inventory to a different location? They're going to be kind of sweeping decisions and because we're managing so many active SKUs. But of course, if anybody has ever read a book and fallen in love with it, we know that books are not widgets. They are much more than the sum of their parts. They are more than ink on paper wrapped in cardboard. And some of that is sort of, it sounds a little woo-woo or a little emotional. I always say that the most frustrating and the most rewarding part of working in publishing is working with book lovers. So it can make some of those tough inventory decisions really challenging. But then there's also very practical reasons why this really matters. We have to manage things like author relationships. You can't very well tell an author, hey, I'm going to want your next best seller. Also, your last book isn't selling anymore. So we decided to scrap it. It's not going to fly. He's not going to give you the rights. Content rights in general. If you let a book slide out of print and you're no longer actively printing it, eventually it will transition into the public domain and you don't own those rights anymore. So is it worth keeping a book in print that we know is costing us money because it has other market implications? And then of course the cultural implications in general that we just have to manage all the time when you're dealing with something as personal as a book for a written word. Okay. So that's a very fast overview or sort of some of the things that we're dealing with in the publishing world. And then the next thing I want to talk about is how we actually bring a book to market and how we do it from the perspective of a news vendor problem. Those of you in SC1X, if you're not already aware, you will learn about the news vendor problem. I assure you, you will learn to love it whether you think you will at first or not. But basically the news vendor problem outlines a scenario in which you have a finite production window followed by a finite sales window. So how do you determine how much you need to produce in order to maximize your sales with and minimize your excess unsellable stock? It talks about newspapers, right? So you print them the night before and you really can't sell them the day after. You just have to have that one day of sales. We're dealing with it sort of as in a complex way on a weekly basis when we bring our new release books to market. So our first print decisions are made well before a book is put on sale. We need to get a book. We try to get our books into our warehouses at least a month in advance of when we need to get them to our customers. So our book retailers, which means that we're making print decision months before that and we're often doing it with limited information. Sales estimates may be a bit soft. We don't know what media will have picked up the book or the marketing. Sometimes we don't even know what our marketing campaigns are going to be and we have to decide then how many units we're going to print. Also, much of our four color work is done overseas. Four color is books with pictures. So a lot of our children's books and our cookbooks and things like that are art books are printed overseas, which is only going to increase our lead times. Traditionally, they're printed in Asia. So that's an additional several weeks of lead time. It's not a pure news vendor problem. Replenishment is possible. We certainly reprint all the time, but it can be expensive, especially if you have to expedite it because you're running out of stock. And it's also worth noting that most of a book's lifetime sales for many books can actually occur in those first few weeks and certainly in the first few months. And if that period is missed, those sales may disappear forever. We call it the hockey stick chart. It's not universal, but it's definitely true for many books in the US that the bulk of a product sales are going to happen in that first little period. Oftentimes the bulk of the sales will happen as what we call an initial, meaning before it even goes on sale, the books that we're going to sell to the retailers to Amazon, to Barnes & Noble in advance of that on sale date. And then we sort of have a little bit of a Peter. And ideally what we get is a really long tail, right? So a book, we have this big initial sale and it sells forever. But that's not always true. Oh, so the point is that we really can't be too conservative in those first prints because if we do, we could potentially lose those sales and lose them forever. The market will move on and those sales will be gone forever. The other side of that coin is that we can't go too long in our printing because with such frequent releases and such a frankly fickle marketplace, it can really easily move on from an individual title and leave us with extra excess stock. And if we have excess stock, we may sell through some of it eventually. These are non-perishable goods so we can sell them for a long period of time. But that means that we've used space, warehouse space, transportation space, we've used labor and most importantly we used production capacity for these units that we may never sell. And so we've gotten all that cost and none of that revenue to offset it. And so we're really constantly living in this news vendor world where we're trying to figure out well before we really have any market information, what do we think this book is going to do and how do we capture the majority of the sales or as many sales as possible without generating too much stock that we end up having cost issues on the back end. When we talk about our forecasting, these forecasting decisions, we're dealing with a lot of different components. Demand forecasting in general is sort of trying to pull together all of these disparate data points and make a single decision. A lot of the forecasting considerations we have in publishing are not particularly unique to publishing. They may not be true for every industry but they're true for many. Seasonality, we have seasonal sales variances. And the US Q4 is a particularly big time for booksellers because people give them as gifts a lot. And we have the big Q4 holidays. In addition, we have season specific skews. This is especially true in children's books where we have specific holidays. Right now we're moving into Halloween titles. You don't sell a lot of Halloween titles in April. You don't sell a lot of Halloween titles in November. So you really got to hit that window. We have the sales and operations collaboration depending on your industry and your individual business. This may be a fraught relationship or it may be a really collaborative relationship. I think sales by their very nature is pretty optimistic. Operations by its very nature tends to need to be a bit more pragmatic. But how do you make sure, again, that you're not producing too much inventory but you're also able to support all of the sales that we can conceivably get? And how do you maintain those relationships so that you're continually building and building and reaffirming trust? Multitudinous active skews. Like I said, we have something like 120,000 active skews. This is certainly not unique to publishing. But it certainly makes inventory management a little bit more complicated when you're dealing with so many. And then very long lead times. Like I said, we can turn a book quickly. But often we need a little bit more time to deal with transportation or to sort of manage capacity issues, which I'll talk about a little bit later. So we, you know, you can't just make a decision today and have books in the warehouse tomorrow or even by end of week, we're dealing with at least multiple weeks, if not multiple months of lead times. Additionally, there are some publishing specific or sort of more unique considerations that we need to keep in mind when we're dealing with books, when we're dealing with titles. One is I already mentioned, right, we have this constant new releases. It's not like we're releasing a list of titles once a quarter and we can really take our time. It's just a constantly rotating door. We're always bringing new titles in and many are going on sale every week. And, you know, we typically have a couple hundred going on sale every month. Artistic implications on production. So, you know, artistic implications. So think about a really nice hardcover novel you may have seen on it. There are things like a big beautiful picture and possibly some different textures and shiny metallic letters that's called foil or foil. And then maybe some benefits raised or embossed. All of those specs that we call them add an additional day to production because each time a spec is laid down on a cover, a jacket, it has to dry overnight before it can run through the press again. So we're not just dealing with the actual like literal time it takes to produce a book, any book, whatever. We also have to take into consideration how some of these marketing decisions or artistic decisions can actually impact our production time or even the facilities that can produce them. Media influence is incredibly important for publishing, talk shows, celebrity news, celebrity book clubs. There's now a little corner of TikTok called Book Talk that seems to be running all of our lives are all hugely important and can drive sales trends. In addition, world events can really be impactful. PRH was I would say lucky, but it's really very much by design and who we want to be as a company. But we had some really important, strong, resonant voices that spoke to some of the racial inequality protests and issues that were happening a couple of years ago. And that when those sort of became bigger and bigger news and we were seeing protests and activists and all of that, our books started to sell along with them because people wanted to read those voices. A bit morbid, author deaths can really drive sales. Some of them are like more predictable, right? Authors age, some of them will just like strike out of the blue. And then all of a sudden you need to get things out. You know, we've been working, we've been focusing really hard recently on making sure that we're keeping the satanic verses in stock after Salman Rushdie was attacked at an event last month. So things like that sort of, like I said, some of them are more predictable than others and sometimes they just come out of the blue and we need to be able to react to them. We have pretty tightly constrained production on publishing or on bookmaking with our printers and bindaries, especially in the U.S. domestic binder capacity has been declining in recent years. We've had some bindery consolidations and all of the publishers in the U.S. want to use this sort of dwindling pool of resources. So how do you make that work and make sure that you are going to be able to get a book made when you need it made. And then I really can't leave this talk without mentioning historic business practices. Like I said, we've been in business since 1927 and some of the things that are now part of the industry were decisions that were made a hundred years ago or more. Publishing is what we call a fully returnable industry, which means that the risk is on us. If a product doesn't sell, we will sell into our retailers and tell them there's some limits, of course, but like functionally for the rest of the lifetime of this product, you can send it back to us and get a full refund, which means we're constantly trying to figure out, are we going to get returns back? Do we need to print new books or can we rely on that stock coming back and we can send it back out again? Is it going to come back in good condition, et cetera? I mentioned this because this wasn't established that was incredibly clever decision, but it was made during the American Great Depression in the 1930s when we were hysterical to keep books on shelves so that people who had very limited income had the potential to buy them. And we decided that as publishers, we were going to take on that risk and we decided to never renegotiate those contracts for a century. So here we are almost a hundred years later dealing with the same issue. Okay. So this is our best case scenario forecasting. This is how complicated it is when everything's working perfectly, but next I'm going to talk about a little bit of what happens when things go profoundly off the rails as they did for all of us in one way or another over the last couple of years. I'm not going to get into what COVID is or what it did to the supply chain because I think you guys all know that personally, probably professionally, but I do want to talk about some of the specific consequences that we saw in the publishing industry and then sort of how we responded to them. So one of the first things that happened was our inability to acquire supplies. So our paper supply and our production capacity both grew very limited and very competitive very quickly. Paper suppliers dealt with labor shortages, dealt with partial shutdowns because they didn't really know if it was going to be worth keeping the overhead to keep their production lines going. Nobody knew if people were going to buy books, nobody knew what was happening. Additionally, I think some paper suppliers made perhaps a very wise choice to turn from white paper, which is what we print books on to brown paper, which is what we stack books in, right? So it's cardboard boxes. And I think that some of our paper suppliers saw the opportunity there and so transitioned away from white paper production to brown paper production, which is probably great for them, but didn't help us a ton. Additionally, our bindries globally, but I can definitely speak to what happened in the U.S., faced a lot of challenges. They had to rearrange their shop footprints, the floor plans, to make sure that they could keep safe space between workers. They had to deal with callouts or people getting sick. Every time someone tested positive, they had to shut down production for two whole days and do a deep cleaning. So there were a lot of issues that we were facing and actually being able to acquire books or physically get them made, I should say. In addition, we also had this inability to ship. So as we all know, ocean transport became scarce, delayed, and expensive. This was really only exasperated by the ever given they got stuck in the canal that really just didn't help supply chain constraints at all. We were also sort of affected by that, where we could get our books made. At some point, it got to a point where production in Asia was sort of back on track. We could get the books made, but then we couldn't get them out of country. We couldn't get them onto a ship. And if we could, we couldn't get the ship unloaded because there were so many delays in port. Additionally, we saw really significant demand shifts in both volume and buying trends. Publishing saw a huge boom in 2020 and 2021. We weren't really sure what was going to happen, but it turns out people wanted books. They were sitting at home. They weren't driving in their cars every day. They had a little bit more free time and they wanted, I think, to get away from reality. There were some interesting shifts. Travel books, foreign language books, and business books sort of fell off the map. They dropped pretty precipitously, but cooking, gardening, and DIY trended up pretty quickly. We joke that we all stayed home and learned how to make bread, and PRH has some pretty great bread cookbooks, so people bought them and made an amazing sourdough. There was also a really interesting that we trend up in fantasy novels, especially serial fantasy novels, where there were sort of multiple books. And I think what we took from that is people wanted comfort and they wanted to get away from reality. They didn't want to watch the news anymore. They didn't want to read scientific journals. They wanted to leave this world and go to another one. It's not our book, but I think Harry Potter just soared off the charts at that time because people wanted comfort. They wanted something they knew. Reactions in recovery. This is certainly true for the industry, I think, in general, but also particularly true for PRH. We instituted or sort of doubled down, I guess I should say, on some of our redundant processes. So we brought on additional vendors, additional bindries and printers. So we had more suppliers than we had had previously, but we also onboarded them from different regions. So we spread out our work not just to more vendors, but also to more areas so that if there was an area of the world that was being particularly poorly hit, we could leverage our bindries in other places. We are in Europe more than we ever were before. We used to really print domestically and in Asia and now, like I said, there's Europe, but we're also printing more in North America, so more in Mexico and more in Canada. We also consolidated our manufacturing into longer print runs, which had sort of two major benefits. One is that we built additional safety stock. We built up more buffer, but we also helped out our bindries. One of the big time sucks in printing books is line changeovers because everything has to be adjusted along the press and bindry lines. And so the time it takes to print 10,000 of a book is much shorter than the time it takes to print 5,000 each of two books. And so by consolidating our manufacturing, we were asking for fewer line changeovers and going longer on those titles. So we're helping ourselves and then helping our bindries really cope with their issues. We also incorporated an earlier inventory review. So instead of looking at books that we thought we were going to be out of stock on in three months, we look at the books that we think we're going to be out of stock on in six months. We're making earlier decisions to compensate for the longer lead times. Publishers and bindries really cooperated to overcome the labor shortages and prioritize work. We used to say, hey, here's a couple hundred titles. We need reprints on. We need them reprinted in the next six weeks. Here's the last date that each of them will be acceptable. You figure it out. You prioritize your own work. You prioritize your own shift schedules. You just get them to us on time. We don't care. This became more of a really collaborative process. There would be multi-days a week that we would have these calls with our bindries to say like, okay, no, this book needs to be done first. This book needs to be done second. This book's been out of stock. We need it back. This book was written by Barack Obama. We really, really need you to pay attention to it. You know, it just became, we were very much in each other's business, but I think it a really beneficial way for everyone. And then the last thing that I want to mention is that we were willing to make marketing decisions to account for these shifting production timelines. This was, I think, the most dramatic when we talked about seasonal books, seasonal children's books. If we knew that we weren't going to get a Christmas title to our retailers before December 20th, we would just sit down and agree this isn't going to be a 2021 book. This is going to be a 2022 book. And we'd push that book released by an entire year. So we were willing to sit on that inventory and sort of take that cost on the chin, knowing that in a year we would be able to give that product the appropriate marketing and sales window that it needed to be successful. So supporting our sales teams, our marketing teams and then also our authors to say that we may lose a year of sales, but what we're going to gain is like a much better presence in market. And I think that's it. That was really fast. I tried to shove a lot of information in there. I apologize. But yeah, that's sort of sort of the biggest. There were a lot of things that we dealt with during COVID, but those were sort of some of the biggest and the most, I think, salient details from what we faced as an industry. That's really interesting. Thank you so much, Aniel. Great presentation. So many insights from the publishing industry. You mentioned some challenges that were faced by the publishing industry in the pandemic and the learners from one of our courses, SC3 Act Supply Chain Dynamics, they are studying the blue whip effect right now. So the blue whip effect is the situation where the variability of demand in the supply chain increases as one moves upstream from the consumer to the suppliers. And as you may know, many industries face that during the pandemic. Maybe the best example is what happened with toilet paper, first there was a panic buying of toilet paper. Months later, store shelves were overflowing with toilet paper. So the blue whip effect can be caused by factors like order batching, price fluctuation, but also because of demand forecasting, where forecasting relies on the demand each firm sees from its immediate downstream partner or customer and not the end downstream demand. So my question is divided in two parts. So first, did the publishing industry face the blue whip effect during the pandemic? Do you think it is still happening? And second, there are different approaches to counteract the blue whip effect, like improving forecasting methodology, reducing the inventory of forward buying, etc. So based on your experience, which approach is more effective for cases like this? Yeah. So yes, I think we definitely saw some aspect of the blue whip effect. And I want to speak a little bit to sort of how the blue whip effect, sorry, blue whip effect is actually hard to say, happened. And that it's important to remember that what it really is is an emotional response. So in SE3x, you sort of learn the ins and outs of the math, but it's important to understand that this is, it's because there is fear, right? So there is sort of this fear that we are going to miss out, this fear that we're going to like sort of this whole fear of missing out, this fear that we're going to lose sales because we need to like increase production or that we're not going to have stock. So we need to like place these ghost orders or whatever it is. And I think that that's sort of what I'm really seeing now is that as we sort of return to normalcy, it's actually really challenging to move people back away from these longer ordering times, because we're really starting anew with this idea of like, okay, we have to now rebuild trust that if a book takes off, we'll be able to get you a replenishment. So instead of printing, you know, the lifetime supply of a book before it goes on sale, let's print a bit shorter. And I promise you, I will be able to get you a reprint if you need it. But you can't, you know, you have to be able to prove that you can't just say that, and you have to really be able to show it and to earn that trust back a little bit over time. So I think like you really can't discount the emotional impact of the bullwhip effect and making sure that people feel confident in their ability to get the stock that they need, especially when it comes to things like, you know, your sales department, right, they need to know that you're going to be there to support them or else they're going to push, they're going to push for more stock to be on hand. In terms of actually counteracting it in a, you know, in a more logistical way, I think that we have always in publishing or at least with PRH, we have very open transparency with both our downstream partners and our upstream partners. So we're working very, very closely with our retailers to know what's going on. And we do have quite a lot of view into the end consumer. So with our biggest retailers, you know, you have your Barnes and Noble, your Amazon, those are sort of the ones that like are owning the market and then you have a lot of independent booksellers as well. But we share with them, they tell us like how much they're selling, how much stock they have on hand of each title. So like we can predict with pretty, pretty good accuracy when they're going to need to place another order. Amazon's a little bit more challenging because it's Amazon and they're massive and it's algorithmic. But you know, we have a lot of this insight and there's actually some collaboration. You know, I talked about sort of the frustrating bits of this fully returnable industry. The other side is that we can actually say, hey, we show that you have a lot of stock on hand. We think you're probably going to return it in the next couple of months. Could you send it to us now? And you know, that'll keep us from having to do a reprint right the second and we can send it to this other customer that may need it. It's all very cooperative. And then on the same time, like I said, we're having these really open conversations with their bindaries being like, okay, how many units do you think you can produce this month full stop? Let's work together to decide how we, you know, ration out those units. So I think for us in good times as well as disruptive times, it's that transparency and that communication between links of the supply chain that are really what keeps us from being in sort of a bullwhip panic all the time. Yeah, super amazing. Actually, like, thank you Daniel for all your insights. I think it's actually really interesting to see how open communication is so important in the supply chain because it's not as common as it should be probably. As you mentioned, like the bullwhip we've had, which is huge for many industries could actually be mitigated at least with this kind of like more open and in terms of like sharing information, like communicating in a certain way. So really, really interesting. So before jumping into the learners questions, because we have many questions and Paolo and I will work on selecting a few of them to ask you to. I wanted to focus a little bit on demand forecasting because we have mental learners from S1X here today to pledge fundamentals and they are starting the basics of demand forecasting right now. So you talk in your presentation about the difficulty of handling new products, because of course predicting sales for this kind of like new lenses is super complicated. It's like a new vendors problem every time. And also many of the variables that you actually were taking into consideration for demand forecasting in general. So like considering that you have over, I think if I recall right 120,000 SKUs, most of those are still like books that have been in the market for a while. Like what kind of techniques that you actually use for predicting demand for those products? I mean, you take many variables into consideration, but if you can just mention a little bit about the techniques that you guys use, that I think would be great for a learner to listen to. Yeah, absolutely. So again, you know, just to start this off with another sort of point about how important transparency and communication is, I think one of the things that we absolutely take into consideration is also, you know, what is the market doing? So are we seeing trends? So we look at a specific book and we can look at our history of billings, how much we've sent out to our retailers, but we can also look at the market. Last year in November, Barnes & Noble ordered 20,000 units of this, but this year, you know, this book is down 25% where it was last year at point of sale. So like we probably, they probably aren't going to order another 20,000 units of this. So I think for us, it's really, really looking at that historical data and especially at that seasonality and understanding, seeing like if we can predict what is going to happen next with reasonable accuracy while also taking into consideration what the market is currently doing. I think that really has a big impact on what we do. It's also worth noting that so when I worked at Wayfair, you know, Wayfair is a very data-focused company in a sort of very data-focused industry. It's furniture, but it's online, it's tech. And it was sort of like nothing existed unless you could show it on a spreadsheet. And I think PRH has more of a balance where I think we really listen to each other. And there's something to be said for, I've been in publishing for 20 years and I have a really strong feeling about what this book is going to do. And I think we should act on it. And I think, you know, it comes down again to sort of like that trust building and that transparency where you can say like, okay, we'll take a flyer with you. Like we'll print more than we think we're going to print because you have a strong feeling about it. And sometimes we're wrong, but a lot of times we're right and we end up printing the right amount. So I think leveraging your historical data but contextualizing it with sort of more up-to-date market data is really important. And I think leveraging industry knowledge and industry expertise is really important. Thank you. Thank you for the response. I think it's really interesting because, yeah, I mean, we now think both of the engineers that are artificial intelligence, like predictive models, are going to solve the world for us. In the map forecast, there is a lot of like human interaction that is still needed in terms of capturing those market trends that some, well, people have a lot of expertise. And at the end of the day, we are all humans making the decisions. So really, really interesting to see how... It's just finding the balance. I think like we've just found that there's things that you're never going to be able to capture with an algorithm. You can have a really charming author go on Good Morning America and just knock it out of the park. And all of a sudden this clip is viral and everybody wants his book. And then next week, you can have an equally charming author go on Good Morning America and just nobody watches. And so it's like you can't program that into an algorithm. You just have to sort of have a sense for it. And you need to find that balance between the hard math and the... Oh, what does Chris Catalyst always say? That supply chain is an art as well as a science? Yes. So it's finding that artistic piece as well. No, but it's pretty cool that you mentioned that. So I think we can jump now into like some questions from the learners. Danielle and Paul, if you guys are okay with that. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, for a few minutes. So because we have many comments and they are really interesting because for example, like I just wanted to mention something that one of our learners mentioned about the similarities in demand patterns of the publishing industry with something that we are really familiar with, which is YouTube. Because most of YouTube videos actually follow that kind of like hockey stick shape in terms of like consumers going and watching all the videos like in the first days or weeks after launching them. So something similar to the publishing industry for example, like when sales actually happen like only most of the sales a few weeks right after the launch of the book. And so following up on that kind of like digital world and since I'm working in e-commerce and I've been working on it for a while now, we have two questions which are similar from Santiago Hernández and Zoe Baker. And they mentioned the impact of the digital world into the publishing industry. So digital books, audio books that we have now too in the market. So how this like impacts like right now the publishing industry in terms of false of demand forecasting, but how do you see it? Is it a direct competitor? Like it actually like contributes somehow to like making the book world even bigger or just more cannibalization? Like what are your thoughts on this, Danielle? Yeah, it's a really interesting question and I'll be up front and say that my knowledge on like the intricacies of e-books are somewhat limited because I work in inventory management. And so it's like the one piece of the company I don't touch at all because there's a limitless supply of e-books. I know that you know several years ago, like maybe six or seven years ago when e-books were really growing at sort of an astounding rate, we, well we, I wasn't working at period to the time, but they used to call it the terrifying jaws of death because the people on the inventory team were like looking at the future and really worried that like physical books were just going to disappear. And they didn't, they didn't disappear. You know it's sort of plateaued with e-books and physical books have actually started taking back market share from e-books, which I think is really interesting. If you look at the breakdown of it, it's fascinating. So the places where e-books don't tend to take over the market are things like children's books because you don't buy your baby a Kindle, right? You buy them, you buy them physical books and everybody buys physical books and our backlist children's books tend to do really well because you always have a new crop of babies coming through that are reading like the same, we have Dr. Seuss as our author. And so, you know, like those are, those are sort of perennial faves. Audio books are the new thing that are really starting to take, I wouldn't say like take market share, but they're really growing. And I think they're fabulous. And so you adjust, you know, you adapt PRH, we have our, well, you know, we still have it, it's in-house. We don't all spend as much time there, but we have recording facilities in our HQ in New York, you know, like we produce audio books, we have a whole library of them. And so you just, you make sure that that's, that becomes part of the offering of the publisher as a whole. I'm sure it does cannibalize some of the physical book sales, but I think it just, it brings more people to reading. And that's really something I can always stand behind. So, yeah, great, great to hear that. Father, do you want to pick another question? Yeah, let me share one more. I know we are almost on time, but let me share one more from the audience. So you already mentioned this, but Javier Castro made this the following question. How do you deal with viral topics and how do you balance those with your current plan and execution? Do you have a limited amount of production fixed to special situations? Oh, great question. That was a great question. No, we don't sort of have like a reserve capacity that we hold for stunning developments on the global market. But I think what happens is it definitely is a bit of an all hands on deck. Like I've definitely woken up to emails to be like, you know, somebody died and we need new books. And, you know, you get that order in as quickly as possible. You know, you sort of round everyone up and you make the decision immediately. And then you work with the bindaries. So the way that we work with our bindaries is that, and again, especially with these domestic bindaries that we're really closely partnered with, is we, we say, okay, they say how much capacity they are going to have with us and we tell them how many units we will fill on a daily, weekly basis. So we will send you enough printing that because it needs to be worth it for them, right? For you to keep your lines running, for you to fully staff your production facility. And so we say to them, we're pulling this one out of the queue, we're going to move it to next week or next month or whatever, you got to get this one in first and you got to get it in immediately. We are very much not a just in time kind of industry. So there is always some stock. It's very unlikely that someone will, something will happen and we won't have anything on hand. But, you know, even the heavily predictable, like Queen Elizabeth, you know, you want to make sure that you are going to be able to get a replenishment in that you're not going to, to sort of totally sell out in the first day or two. Domestically, we can turn around a book really fast if we have to, like a couple of weeks. It's not ideal. We'd like to have a bit more time and space to plan, but we can. So, yeah, I think it just comes down to how you prioritize. And for the bindries, it doesn't really matter which book it is. So if you need to move something out and move something into its place, that's just what you do. All right. Yeah, great. I see that we are right on time. And before we move to our final announcements, I just want to thank Danielle for such a great presentation and for sharing so many insights with the audience today. Thank you, Danielle. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. This was great. Yeah. Thank you so much, Danielle, for joining us. It's great to have actually, like someone who is taking this path already and like just sharing all this insight with learners. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Thank you. So, yeah, before we go, just two important reminders, Paulo, do you want to go on? And then I'll wrap it up. Oh, sure. So I just want to remind the learners that enrollment and verification for SE1x and 3x courses is closing soon. So if you're ready, a learner, please review the main page of the course. And if not, you can enroll right now by clicking on the links we shared in the chat box. We also have another course with Enrollment Open right now, which is SC0x Supply Chain Analytics. So, yeah, and just as I said, to wrap it up, just remind you guys that this was the first life event of a series of three that we're going to have this fall between SC1x and SC3x. So you're going to see Paulo and I quite a lot this fall. So two upcoming webinars from now on until probably December. So just stay tuned. We are going to let you know whenever that happens. And just saying thank you to everyone for joining. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye.