 Joe, thanks for getting us started off with a fascinating discussion and put a lot of issues on the table We I'd like to introduce Julie Vargas and West Duquette as our our two guests who joined the panel Julie is the vice president general manager of North America for every Avery Denison identification solutions and West is the vice president general manager B2B technology at Ship Bob But I'd like to do just offer each of you just to give the audience a little bit of a snapshot of What your role is in the company and then what I'd like to do is I'll I'll turn back to you and ask for your reactions to Joe's introductory remarks. So start with you Julie. Awesome. Thanks. Hi everyone So I am the general manager for North America for identification solutions Really excited about the panels this morning. I heard words like packaging identification. We talked barcodes So that's the intersect of where I am. We're at we basically are working on the food and Logistics segments. How do you actually take? Analog packaging and turn it into something that can be wirelessly read high fidelity to create larger data sets And automate things across the supply chain. I'm a veteran of the RFID industry since 2009 So it's all about how do we take things that are manual not as value add and automate them We're also one of the largest scale manufacturers from a packaging perspective So really excited to talk about not just how we connect through our devices But take everything in our everyday lives and connect them as well. Thank you Julie. Thanks for joining us. Wes sure I think first an introduction on ship Bob ship Bob is a technology driven 3pl or third party logistics provider So we provide warehousing and middle mile services to primarily SMB businesses So we have about 7,000 merchant brands Globally that we provide that to and our mission is to democratize fulfillment You know early on in our in our history used to say Provide Amazon level fulfillment to small and medium businesses Now that we're in competition with Amazon we replace that word we say enterprise level fulfillment But it's all about how to small brands Medium-sized businesses have that same horsepower for fulfillment standpoint from an Analytics standpoint to provide their goods across the country across the world So I run our omni-channel business which includes everything from retail omni-channel Everything really outside of e-commerce fulfillment is what we run Great. Thanks to each of you. So I've Started a poll question. So Catherine if it's possible you could post that and really just wanted to add Give you the opportunity to add your input as to how you see consumer behavior changing Joe's laid a foundation for us And while we get that started Soliciting your input. I'd like to turn to you Julie first and just say what are your reactions to Joe? Aha's takeaways. What are your thoughts? No, it's just content is always great. I think it's it's really a Unique time because if you overlay that with what we saw this morning around data And just the the size of what's happening from a transformation perspective There's a lot of great opportunity. My reflection was my seven-year-old daughter Goes to pick up packages at the front door more times in a month than she goes to a mall in a year So it's a very different world and it does drive a lot of what we The way we interact with brands products and as consumers Will not be disaggregated from the way that we live our lives And even our personal spaces will become points of commerce and points of commerce will become personal spaces And that can be That isn't exciting for everyone just you know, I think my there are generations that will want to opt out of pieces Of it, but ultimately having the ability to drive personalized solo experiences and what we have delivered as mass Production and supply chain worlds will be increasingly complex for the enterprise But very exciting as a consumer woman mother Member of society. Oh great. And so that leads to The nature of your business west. What are your initial reactions? You know, it's interesting. I think from the things Joe shared all all seem, you know That's the next step if I look at from a logistics and a supply chain provider standpoint, we're behind the curve Certainly, we're starting to just catch up with what was probably the Trend five years ago And we're in a place where as consumer preferences and demand changes Our merchant brands start to make their modifications thinking about where to put products and how to put it out there But those are the types of things that is, you know, still downstream at a logistics provider standpoint We don't see an immediately So it was a an interesting reflection to think about how do we start to predict some of those things a little bit further And almost not wait for that push strategy that comes Knowing that there's a lot of those changes abreast because you see a lot of strategy You know ups started this years ago where they were found that One of the ways to be excellent with our customer was to learn what their customer needed before the customer did And just to try to jump ahead if you will to do that. Sure So I'm looking at the the feedback that folks are providing and it looks like there's a lot of comments about Convenience convenience convenience customization and much higher expectations other Any other observations that you see that You would say that are affecting The nature of what supply chains are going to have to deliver in terms of what the consumer behavior is driving Joe talked about it being gray Women oriented six women as a key decision maker Very much centered at the home delayed and I think I'm missing one small small thing you go. Thank you Joe What what else is there to add do you think? Yeah, I can speak to that first, you know One of the things we see from a logistic provider standpoint is The old adage was always thinking about putting your products where consumers buy So this was long ago in retail and even with that the advent of e-commerce was a where where your next buyer going to be And most of that's location driven What we're seeing the shift now is very much around how your consumers want to buy It's do they want to have a social platform? Do they want to integrate through directly through the brand's website? Is there another place? And so Whereas you used to think about I just want to make sure my product is available You now need to think about being integrated to all the different platforms So some of the things we're doing today is around shop with instagram shop with tiktok being directly integrated from a logistic standpoint Makes it that much more that you're there for the how and so I see supply chains now need to adjust to this Criteria of the demand That consumers have and structure their supply chain around that Yeah, and it's um it was built for a different model, right? So there's always this push of how do you get? How do you make and we're in scale manufacturing? So let's make the most of the most productive cost efficient way and get them to the places in that same manner It looks very different in my future. I'm living in I'm living in your future kitchen Joe, but I want I want the efficiency from it as well And so we talked a little bit in the other panels around data the one to one How do you create, you know the perfect kind of robotics environment and the ability to capture information And collect it from packaging and things around it What is even more interesting is that the flip side of the consumer? We're still humans. So there's still a human element I might turn sideways when i'm loading my box on my on my box car. So there's still a human piece Looking at the consumer lens. We're now in a place where I still am the hub I still have to go on my phone or whatever that is place an order put in a subscription do something with it There are things in my life that I would like automated. I would like the products to collude on my behalf So that connected fridge, I not only wanted to reorder my Ben and Jerry's but also Tell me what I'm supposed to make for dinner tonight. Help me understand exactly what's there my closet It's great to be able to read garments as they go down a line or capture inventory in the enterprise Tons of money in the middle of PNL's everywhere that we can save people But the real exciting part on the human side is what if that connected space that I now have four more devices in from the pandemic period Could also take product information and do things for me. My daughter just turned seven Anything that's six X in her closet. It goes into the secondary market. I don't have to touch a thing And what happens there is everything about that is logistics So how do you get things to me on a one-to-one basis? But also take the things from my spaces to get them where they need to go Um, it is a lot harder though because human behavior consumer behavior and delivering to a personalized element of that Is is going to require more data sets more automation? And that's where it gets really exciting for large language models to take over some of that as well Really understanding the behavior in individual households if you will but also thinking about we may have to start thinking about different categories of product Which is shall we say from the premium down to the convenient? So to me ice cream is a food group so that that's required But also I don't want to know when I'm out of dishwasher. So I just want it done That's one kind of service that I would like to see in place the premium stuff that that's that's something that I'm willing to put time into So each of you have mentioned some a variety of different things in terms of what's what the consumer needs And I'm curious and jill you started to to talk a little bit about what the supply chain would need to do to serve that What what is the change in consumer behavior? What does that mean the new requirements are for supply chains? What does the supply chain have to be able to do? Go ahead Um, yeah, it's uh, it's been increasingly complex over the past Decades. So when I started my career Um in distribution, uh working for a brand you can easily say if you want the authentic products go to our website Our authorized retailer or buy it in our store The always-on wherever you want it however you want it means that supply chains are increasingly complex. I think that Again going back to what we talked about this morning. There's also great automation and there's great data sets and and capabilities for For for more Information to help us drive how we move things through the supply chain But right now that's only going to get more disparate. It's not going to aggregate And so how do we actually think about how we invest in the technology where we do it how we do it quickly? Across all of our manufacturing supply chains in a way that can transform with the consumer Do you do you think that in avery denison for instance? Are are you asking those questions? Are you thinking about that and if so? What does that look like? That's a good question. So um for those who don't know avery denison. How many of you like to drink wine? Well, okay shampoo use shampoo awesome. Have your favorite jersey from your favorite team Okay, get a couple a couple. We need some more sports fans here Get packages from amazon. UPS whoever Okay The short version is we have been printing information or putting branded information on everything in our lives for for decades We are a scale manufacturer of you know, large rolls of sticky stuff But for for adhesive labeling and things like that What's really interesting and how we're trying to think through it is yes, we will continue with material science How do you make those packages easy to open? How do you make sure barcodes are are sticking and showing up whether someone? You know pokes the pencil in the middle of it. What does that look like? But the other side of that is how do we actually understand what information is needed from what parts of the supply chain to actually Help our customers drive efficiency for themselves as well So we've been a partner with gs1 across multiple layers of standards for a very long time And this is where it gets really exciting if every product has a unique identity Not just an aggregate one Then you're talking about the one to one between a product and a consumer How do you actually create the right integration of sensors in a way that is cost effective high fidelity and not a net new process not a net new piece of the puzzle but really automating everything from the very beginning whether you're on a farm or in and you know Creating an apparel garment. How do you actually make that a point of digital origin? In a way that is is less complex that can enable our brands to Start the data gathering at the point of origin and almost like a birth certificate a unique identity Running on the rails of gs1 standards and a common language because right now we always talk about reading a label It's not any different from that when it's a physically reading the label We're talking about having a common language of data to be able to capture that identity And actually run supply chains with the same large systems But at the unique item level that really gives you targeted information around What to deliver where and when so what's your sense about your customers the folks who are purchasing the labels to put on Their products are are they getting it? Are they also enlightened to recognize that they need to make Changes or you know, what's the the range of response? Yeah, most of them are there are there are leaders in the space somewhere in this room There are some that know it has to change. Um, you know, I remember thinking back in those mid 2000s There were a lot of people had different feelings around whether omni channel was a thing or amazon was going to take off And the pandemic accelerated some of the other verticals, especially around some of the food Grocery models which you saw earlier today Um, and but I think ash probably put it best the biggest hurdle is usually legal and procurement So there's still a change management element in the food industry in particular. They will tell you it's a penny margin business There's a lot of acceptable loss in the middle of their p&l That has been kind of siloed across multiple parties in that chain Transforming that does require some collaboration. It requires some ability But I think I'm trying to remember if it was Charlie who said it earlier That basically people know it wasn't it was in the first session that people are putting their careers on the line So you're risking your last penny to release five or six The way that we operate from a quarter to quarter basis kind of thinking through I run my own p&l How do I actually operate versus what space is there for future investments? And some of our largest customers that can be the biggest hurdle that they face Which is why some of the work that ship bob is doing is really exciting because it could leapfrog some of that foundational Structure that exists today. We think in that form So going back to to the youngest generation what's exciting is they've never been in a world. That's not digital They've never seen a green screen and I hope they never do I saw my feelings about as 400 But you you have this whole group that will see it completely differently And I think that is a hard thing for us to do once we have a successful business and we're running We struggle a lot to truly leapfrog or transform or replace We tend to go with iterative change and so where I think in the workplace this demographic will help Quite a bit in a lot of the work in large language models and data sets will help is the ability to actually not just Drive change management, but truly transform. What is it currently a push model? We make things we push it places We distribute it in the last mile into something that is more of a pull model driven by consumers Where demand and production are more closely connected Because the way that we operate is driven by the data sets and the demands not necessarily mass manufacturing and supply chain planning It is amazing how the consumer has become a pull force It used to be if you think about in the fall and uh, we'll pick one apple would come out with a new product People are going wow, what's what's coming out? I can't wait to see it now. It's like Oh It's not shiny faster cheaper. Now. It's like the consumer is always expecting more Yes, what are your thoughts and how the changing consumer behavior? How's that going to change? Supply chains. Yeah, look, this is a very challenging thing across this space You know mohan was up speaking to What I really liked about walmart's approach is it's consumer first And everybody in this business would like to be consumer first, but when you have a disconnected supply chain We run a middle mile network and so We are very much, you know Downstream from what happens at manufacturing upstream from what goes to retail And so the challenge is that when you don't have all those things interconnected That makes a big challenge to get to what consumers want at the end And so in a in a weird way, you know, my organization used to be a startup We wanted everything to go fast But we are now rooting for standardization and regulation because that's what will come to us from upstream That's what comes into a warehouse. That's what eventually goes down to the consumer and gives them any benefits from a Visibility to what this product is expiration dates things of that nature So it's an interesting position to be in when we see all of this new evolution and innovation We still want to get to some basics of standardization so that we can provide that all downstream and make sure that Truly these consumer preferences can be basically shown throughout the entire supply chain So how do you reconcile the your suggestion to drive towards standardization To the customization desire that we see from the the survey earlier like Customization we want it me me me and you can see here and I've asked how Consumer behavior would change requirements for supply chains custom products for me looks like, you know, the top desire for folks This is an interesting real world example in that I think I mentioned we used to try and say democratize Of fulfillment becoming the you know power of amazon to small businesses Well, that actually doesn't work for small businesses What small businesses want to be able to do is customize product to a certain level to their end consumer And so there's something as simple as you know, we have a merchant who sells towels They want a towel to be monogrammed. Well, that doesn't happen in the amazon world necessarily And so you're seeing some of these small things that now say all right Here are some preferences downstream, but they get even further from that You know the amount of custom products and requests that we now have to happen in a fulfillment center Upstream and manufacturing have increased and so that's where you have that consumer demand dragging through our capabilities and our ability to provide that at a fulfillment level Joe you've been given this talk or some measure of this for probably Many times What's your sense and what are your thoughts about how the consumer changes you you're talking about how that's going to affect operations businesses, you know I was thinking when I when I started in corporate America before I joined MIT a longer ago than I'd like to admit There was always there's always competition within companies for budget for access to decision making and like you know It's just listening to us in particular You know a brand if we step out of supply chain world for a moment a brand is a storied promise of experience If you can't bring that Experience to me in the way that the marketing people and even the ceo have promised that our brand means this Emotionally to the customer. That's a loss I would say that one of the big changes is this may give supply chain far more access visibility And budget and they've ever had before in corporate America because now Companies are touching Individually through the supply chain rather than through a third party or give an example Walgreens 70% on what's on Walgreens shelf is private label when Walgreens makes a promise They've got to be there Individually, so I think that this is an opportunity for supply chain not simply just to measure Efficiency which is done with a spreadsheet, but how do you measure the? The success of delivering the emotional feeling that was promised by the company. It's not about boxes. It's about experience Yeah, it's super interesting right because the even the face of that experience changes So if you think back just a decade ago You had advertising you had merchandising in store You had a lot of things that now if you're with a lot of the third party in the middle a transitional phase will be The only consistent thing in that journey Will there be the brand's Digital connection or physical connection through the actual product So how do you connect those stories in a way that are independent of kind of a retail traditional retail or Happy retail space whatever you call You know an older an older version of that for this generation And you know you talked about tiktok commerce talk about instagram commerce people are really buying in a lot of different places I can go through my hub of my device and find out a lot about a brand But when I get a product there's not necessarily a brand experience unless you're buying it directly from that brand So how do you actually think through the product itself being that so you know you think about digital and Experience our digital information and the goods now. It's about how to supply chain deliver that emotion I intentionally by the way jim ended my deck on a photo of a person doing delivery We're also going to have to rethink the workforce that we today think is supply chain Yes, they've got to be digitally savvy. Yes, they've got to know supply chain architecture But who is that face that final face that does the handoff is going to be more important than just who can drop it off on time Great that leads question I was going to work towards which is when you talked about y'all and we we've discussed this and even see this in The survey there's a need for customization and tailoring and at home service and it really Focuses more on the service supply chain and probably this is something that west you have a little more experience with But what does that mean for the people and the skills that we need in the human beings that we employ To serve our customers in a way that we haven't served before What do you think about that? Well, it's interesting after dr. Joe talked I think I have a different perspective than I might have You know earlier in that we're still delayed in the way we think about providing to the end consumer in the middle mile Right because we're hearing from our merchant brands as to what to do Um, but when I think about our workforce, there is something that became very transactional about what we do Because of this amazon economy, right? Everything was put it in a box get it out the door, right? And you know how it is when an amazon box shows up doesn't matter what's in there It looks the same from the outside and there's no experience with it And so when we think about bringing on bigger brands that want to have that true experience at unboxing experience Then you have a different workforce that then is How are you guiding them through the brand's mission those kind of things and how can that be Happening whether you're fulfilling that to a front porch or to a retailer and how can that continue? So it's something honestly. I don't know that we have fully conceptualized the need to get to that place Because originally everything in this world was two day fulfillment next day fulfillment all those hip things Those have kind of become table stakes and and to be honest are easy for us as a business to do now Now it's onto those next pieces of of not as much around the speed because that's there Much more about the experience a good thought experiment might be Think about zappos zappos is their brand is about delivering happiness. How does their supply chain partners? increase that delivery of happiness From the moment they open, you know, there's I know there's p and j in the room or someplace But that moment of truth like the opening of folger's coffee business case study, which they learned the consumers It was the smell of that coffee the sound of that opening of that can that was the moment of experience that Really linked them to the brand. What's the link? Should we say to whether it's zappos or any other Package that looks the same on my my deck I think this is interesting because You know we at our center I have many companies coming to hire our students and there's a great demand for a quantitative skills and analytical skills But I think what you're talking about here is really a different set of skills So the skills that are much more service oriented understand the consumer understand how to interact with the consumer um I don't know what do you do you have experience? Have you have you started thinking about that avery denison? Yeah, it's um Not necessarily But I have some thoughts not yet because I think we're also Thinking through how do you get each item to be individual but also so managed scaled supply chains But this conversation is fascinating because we do say something very often which is We have we can build the best products. We can drive innovation and we can make things But at the end of the day we're humans serving other humans And so what does that look like and where does that shift happen? If you think about kind of what we started with we had a lot behind the scenes pushing into A central location where we all went to shop or experience Now that's coming to our doorstep and that is that is the the true human connection point There's places for efficiency there because I'm getting Judge me three or four different types of drop-offs, you know throughout the week So there's already a place that there could be some aggregation but more importantly There is no human element today. And so what does that look like and how does it transform? I think the other accelerated piece of the pandemic is we learned we could do a lot virtually There's a lot of brand can do with me without ever Having a physical person or a physical product in front of me But we also simultaneously learned that there is a Value a human value to connection And so what does that look like and I believe that it has even an increasing value With the great you know demographic the older you get the more kind of this thought process of being isolated in the home There's going to be a need for for service That is not just about the thing that you're delivering but about the experience. I'm having in that moment So humans are important. All right now What do you think about that at mit first? How is ai I mean do you have ai initiatives? All right What are you doing and how is that going to potentially? Improve the service and that experience of the consumer I can start so I probably have a different perspective than A lot of the the brands or even some of the organizations we've had up here My perspective is driven from the smb merchant. These are merchants that You know up until a few years ago did not have access to a lot of the software and technology That many of the fortune 500 brands have access to you know these types of things that walmart's building Are certainly innovative and cutting-edge, but when we bring it back to what an smb Merchant brand entrepreneur led those are the majority of businesses within the u.s. We think about raw numbers They don't necessarily need all of those things that ai can potentially bring That said we do run some kind of traditional ai type things that are a really big benefit Some of the things that mohan started to mention around You know where they think about putting their inventory based on what the demand will be from e-commerce We certainly do that on a regular basis. We're able to think about data aggregation Across our 7 000 brands think about consumer behaviors and preferences and where should your goods be located throughout the united states Those are certainly pieces Some of those next level things that are probably More at hand with your fortune 500 companies today You know many of those organizations are running large supply chain departments with an army of resources, right? Well, those are the types of things that my smb brands want to do in the next three to five years You know when they start to think about When is the best time to bring over a container from their manufacturer in asia? What are the weather patterns that we should think about the macroeconomic conditions? Those types of things to start to bring in Outside of some of the you know single source data we're using today Those are somewhat the next level and while there's a really cool future in ai and generative ai A lot of the stuff for our brands today, especially in smb are about getting it right now How do we understand how we get inventory right get forecasting right? So there's some powerful things for supply chain planning But really a lot of smb brands today Just want to have the basics that enterprises had for a number of years at this point And by smd you mean small and medium small medium businesses. Correct. Yep. All right great Yeah, it's um So i'm going to take it in two pieces because we service multiple actually three service multiple types of industries But going back to our role as their partner for Eight decades plus we have analog put analog information on products out there in the world. That's kind of where it stops Um, what we're doing now is to be able to use that point of packaging to really drive sensor based So think about not just reading one to one What this unique item is and that it you know who it belongs to where it's going etc But being able to do that wirelessly across thousands of products as it moves through a supply chain In a way that also has a unique capability to do some of that In a you know kind of an edge environments where we know there isn't a lot of connections I'll start with logistics where there's tons of automation already a lot of it's driven by conveyor It's about they have one job They take a package and get it from here to there and the fastest most accurate most cost efficient way That is their goal and so if you think about that There's still people that have to take boxes off of trucks and put them on different trucks And how you get it to the right doorstep a lot of the work we're doing there From the the AI the automation is there It is how do we actually transform their data sets from being a dozen scans a day Into sensing environments where they can basically read Much more much faster and even drive human behavior if I walk one pack onto the wrong box car It tells me I'm in the wrong spot and I go to the next so how does that become faster and more efficient In other supply chains that we serve and one that I'm very passionate about is the food supply chain It is a very different world. So there are a lot of different places It's coming from um when I think about fresh and perishable goods You know Melanie mentioned earlier. There's other data sets not just the information about the product But the freshness of it um expiry there's a lot of happening right now for traceability as well How do you actually get to a place where You know, you can you can see the information in a broader way in a more accurate way that you can action things from a data set perspective Can can truly transform some of those industries our role is to say you're printing and putting information on a Pack at a farm a local farm in Salinas, California today. You're putting out a truck. It's gone You don't see anything else anymore. You don't necessarily empower to know where it goes How do you actually find a way to connect that to the point of consumption? So when you walk into your Favorite local quick service restaurant, you know who grew your lettuce, but more importantly if there's a safety event Or if there is something um that that needs to be you know There is some type of recall. You're not throwing away shelves of spinach You actually know specifically what's impacted in a timely manner More exciting is you know about 40 percent of what's flowing through perishable supply chains ends in a landfill. So it's literally Money in the garbage an acceptable loss associated to not having clean Wide accurate data sets that can drive Large language models to really create an efficient supply chain Versus kind of the acceptable loss of the way that it works today So you're enabling your customers to actually have access to greater data that they can use in some way shape or form Which customer segments are? Leading and which ones are lagging in terms of using that and really leveraging that data It's um so in specifically where we where we have the largest footprint for this Red wirelessly is in RFID technologies. That's been an apparel for over a decade. That's where I started my career That was few complex long story short a lot of people spent hours counting products Didn't seem to have the right assortment mix on the shelf It mattered a lot more when omni channel started because every store became a fulfillment center And there was a lot of um sales lost from it that same technology is ubiquitous now What we're looking at now and another leader in the space is logistics because they're truly understanding That time the time frames keep getting shorter And accuracy, you know the everything from one point in that promoter score to one mile off the road has a true cost impact in the tens million sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars In the food supply chain. I think there's a lot of People that are behind it. They want to do it is a lot more complex and there's a lot more stakeholders So that is moving slower But that is the one that I think once it starts there are leaders in that space that are really driving automation of data sets All of this in every single industry requires a common language of You know of data like being able to Understand it's it's the what you read on a package Became a barcode now is becoming all sorts of unique identifiers so that you're not just Scanning and it goes beep. You're scanning. It goes beep. It has a very unique number If it is later part of a organized crime return You see what that is if it is a product that has been recalled you don't buy it and don't take it home There are a lot of places where industries could really start to drive a consumer centric experience If they had item level data sets and that's that's where we're partnering to that goes back to your comment earlier about standardization West absolutely, so let me shift over to joe. Um, you've been Thinking about this for some time What have you observed if anything about the application of ai? By different companies to get closer to provide that greater level of service By any companies out there in particular industries that are more advanced than others Well, you know, I was thinking ai or any of even the idea that we want to bring personalized Experience and product to people and personal being the new premium if you will ai will certainly get us there But ai is only as good as the information that trained the ai And I was looking at one of the questions one of the attendees put up there One of the things we're not bringing up. I want to know when I want somebody to know that I'm out of ben and jerry's before I do That means I'm going to allow them in my house in my life and in my freezer Privacy is one of those things that we have to start thinking about my colleague, lisa dembrosio Is sitting in the back has been looking at this quite a bit Who do we trust to allow all your sensors in the house so that you can get the things I want in the way? I want when I want Even if ai can do that we're going to have to shall we say have a social contract with the customer to be able to do that I can I build on that question social contracts will work probably for me But thinking back through your demographics. Is that good enough for the next generation? Or will they want to be in the power seat of controlling? No, I think one of the things and I can see lisa in the back She can throw something at me if I get this wrong But one of the things that privacy is a big issue for everyone, but privacy is also the new currency So I'll do a test to experiment right now. How many of you have a credit card in your your pocket or purse? Okay, so we know that privacy doesn't mean anything to you because american express knows more about me than my wife Probably even knows about me And so it's what does that give you is what the trade-off is going to be across the generations So the first question I popped up here should consumers be concerned however about sharing so much With their personal information, you're basically saying well apparently they don't care should they can should they care joe? I don't know I Was asked the other day to do a biometric in my hand to buy some produce in a grocery store that shall go unnamed You guys can guess who it is and it's funny. I've done clear. I've done tsa. I've done all kinds of things. No problem That's where I stopped Getting my bananas faster and cheaper. You don't get my bio scan That's me. Who knows Weston julia, what do you think about that? Well, I Yeah, I don't know that I'm doing that either and but this is where I think the difference in your talk when we talk about The consumer is is uh grayer and those types of things How comfortable is that group? And I think that you know, if I look at Kind of my generation and even my kids We've become comfortable with some of that level actually the younger you are the more paranoid you are about privacy But yet it's the same generation that sleeps on other people's couches and getting the stars There's this weird paradox. Yes. Yeah Yeah, so we don't see it as much in our business, but just personally I've seen that yeah, there is this next level of comfortability that Um needs to be reached and and there's a trust level and we think about standardization a lot in our business But is there a standardization around those types of things? It's certainly not to the level that that most would expect yet If anybody FedEx and UPS have entire health divisions Think about the people that they're going to have to have bring Product not just to the house, but in the house to care for your mother. Wow. That's privacy. That's trust. That's a lot going on at once There's a lot Wes. Oh, I'm sorry. Julie. You want to say something? I get really excited about this one because yes, that is where they'll intersect I do think the other piece though that I get excited about is I have a lot of I do still want a world where my products can collude on my behalf without you knowing who I am So is there a world where I say you don't have to know anything about Me or my demographics, you just need to know these are the rules of my closet or these are the rules of my refrigerator And I can still shield because they're that the younger the younger millennials are really good at this They they are found a way to like not opt into the right things where they're not getting cookies on their browser But they're not stopping watching tiktok or youtube. So how they do that someone will teach me someday um But that is a world where I could say okay If I don't need to tell you anything about me as the person But my aggregated data set helps you organize and make my life more efficient I I don't only have so many hands to take care of my two families of peanut butter and jelly sandwich and my two kids So I will accept you doing all of that on my behalf for the things that make my life more efficient Um in a trade-off of knowing what I have in a space without knowing who I am I want to jump to a couple of questions. We've had a number of questions posted here First one I'd like to ask and this is for us Do you see any innovations that make director consumer more affordable attractive for businesses? And you could think a little more broadly about some of the innovations that You're you're saying maybe within your firm, but in the industry that is making a better connection to that consumer Yeah, the the interesting part about a lot of the younger brands we work with is they're they're very Able to take advantage of innovations quickly So if you think about long history brands that have you know, a lot of technical debt or have been on old ERPs They have an entire infrastructure that takes a long time to pivot to anything new When you're with smaller smb small medium businesses often the pivot for those businesses can be very quick They don't have legacy systems to move. They don't have legacy infrastructure And so when we look at innovation that happens in a facility or is going to happen integrations with social commerce platforms those kind of things those happen very quickly and so as we see changing trends We're able to quickly do You know within a number of six months when tiktok shop was coming through we set up a partnership We're now their fulfillment hubs So these kind of things happen very rapidly with small businesses That I think is probably different than what happens at the at the larger business space Everybody eventually gets there in some place, but we're having a much quicker pivot in a lot of cases And I think that that's probably something that Larger companies are probably envious of because you're able to make such a rapid change in response Julia is a question for you Are you delivering labels that provide information on products that consumers are demanding like environmental on more health related information? Yes, and I think that the hard part is especially the industries we serve is how do you do that in a high fidelity kind of Affordable way. What does that look like as it transforms? I have I have ideas that I think this will look very very different a decade from now But in today's world, you still need to be able to read it um Some of that means you also I think the really exciting thing that's going on is being able to connect to it So if I need more information, that's what then what's printed there then that's great I have a way to digitally connect to it and there's value there Um, I think that whether that's through a qr. I mean qa by the way I was in connected products in 2018 I just need to tell you that I could not hear qr codes were dead more than I did in 2018 and 2019 So if nothing else, we've learned to point our camera at something and see information But even that has has opportunity I think what's interesting is how can you also think about the physical side of packaging to drive Information that can be valuable back. So in other words Um, we'll talk about healthcare for for a minute pill pack or things that actually have a trigger some type of You know, we talk about loss prevention a lot. Is it is it a bit flip? I won't get too technical on some of it But how do you actually I think through the physical packaging doing what it needs to do Some type of sensor some type of physical element that can say hey I actually know from this I have taken these pills at the right time And it's triggered somebody else to know my my daughter or whoever to know that I've taken my pill at the right time And then if I need to connect it to digital Applications or digital information. I have the same ability to do that in an easy Um, low, you know low lift way as well through the point of packaging Um, I think that the interesting part of that is you'll have two experiences You won't necessarily have people all around you'll have a point of person potentially That's coming into your home to help in service and then you'll have the products that remain behind And so how do those serve you and how do those work through it? It has to be a combination of the physical analog thing and the digital connection that it can provide All right We have less than two minutes left But I wanted to give the the panel a chance for rapid fire response In in uh, thinking about some of the sections we had earlier, you know the automation of everything And then data data data any comments or thoughts or reaction to that? We have a little bit of time What are your thoughts anything? I'll be fast data is the most critical thing because I heard earlier that if you automate with bad data You get bad automation. So at the end of the day kind of getting the larger data sets higher quality Um higher quantity will be one of the key points for automation and generative Great. Thanks, julie. Wes. Yeah, I think to me. It's still a consumer first world The consumer is going to drive everything that's happening for brands and then everything that needs to happen in transportation logistics So, uh, I think one of my big takeaways from today is it doesn't have to wait for the brand to tell you There is a way to have uh, some of that ahead of time. So I thank dr. Joe for that Um, if you think of a very foundation supply chain in many ways, one of the foundational values is efficiency The consumers move to engagement. They are assuming efficiency Engagement is not clicks. It's also emotion and experience. How can you become a brand partner? Not just shall we say a supply chain partner With that I close. I want to say thank you to julie west and joe Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your the audience for your contributions and your questions And let's give them a nice round of applause