 Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Laura Azege, your course lead for the MITx MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management program here at MIT CTL. I'm very happy to be co-hosting today this live event with Mr. Kellen Betz, also course lead at the MicroMasters program. Today, we are very fortunate to have Mr. Gerald Jackson joining us, who's a product management leader at Microsoft. Gerald has over 20 years of experience as a supply chain leader at Microsoft, GE Digital, and Accenture. So welcome, Gerald. Hello, everybody. Hi, thank you so much, Laura and Kellen, for inviting me to share some of my experience and some of the exciting things that are happening in supply chain today. Awesome. We are very happy to have you joining us. And if everyone in our audience has been here before with us, you already know we love to kick off our events with Paul. So we want to know why you're here today. We want to know more about our audience. So you can see Paul jumping in if you are watching live. And let us know if you want to learn more about IoT, if you just want to learn about cybersecurity, if you're here because you're part of our program and just love to join us every time. And while we let this populate, I will let Kellen share the agenda for this session. Awesome. Well, hi, everyone, and thank you, Laura. And welcome, Gerald. So for the next 15 minutes or so, Gerald will discuss the impact of technology and what the impact will be in supply chains, including really exciting topics, I think like control towers, logistic networks, cybersecurity, some of those topics you see there in the poll on the right-hand side. So hopefully we'll cover what you're interested in. Gerald will also be available to ask your questions. He'll also discuss cloud infrastructure and how cloud infrastructure can enable a resilience and dynamic supply chain network. After Gerald discusses these topics for a few minutes, Laura and I will have a few questions we have pre-prepared. We'll ask, and then we'll definitely save time at the end for your questions. We definitely hope to get the audience engaged here and answer some of your questions and cover some of the topics you're interested in hearing about. If you want to ask a question, please do so with that Q&A feature on the bottom. There's that Zoom button on the bottom called Q&A. Please use that Q&A feature to ask your questions. I'd love to see introductions in chat in the poll or in the chat section, but we will keep an eye on the Q&A for those questions. That's where we'll be looking for those questions. And please be logged in with a name, and we won't be answering any anonymous questions as well. So be prepared to participate. We look forward to seeing your questions. With that, let's check on that first poll and just share those results there. Awesome, so the poll, the question was, why are you here today? I'm just looking at some of the results. It looks like the most popular result was I'm interested in knowing more about the impact of just technology in general on supply chains. So that's a great, we'll definitely cover that topic. Some of the other, looks like there's some who are interested in IoT, learning more about IoT, learning more about improving their supply chain performance. Gerald, I don't know if you have any thoughts or comments on those poll results there. Well, I think you've come to the right place because we're gonna talk about some of that. And if I don't cover it in the presentation, please ask the questions in the Q&A. There's a lot of information to share. So hopefully we can get to the Q&A quickly. Awesome. With that, I'll pass it back to my co-host, Laura, who will kick it off with our first question. I actually know we're just jumping straight into, maybe just jumping straight into Gerald. Gerald, are you ready to jump into your slides and present and kick it off? Ready to go. Ready to rock and roll. Awesome, let's rock and roll. Sharing. All right, well, thank you so much for that introduction. Well, let me just get it in. OneHind is a company. Of course, it's always gonna be, it's like doing a demo, right? There's always gonna be a little flop here or there. Well, thanks for that introduction. I won't spend too much time on this. Laura did a great job. So you're gonna actually hear my passions through this presentation. So I'm gonna talk about some challenges and trends. Most supply chain transformation is a response to a need, right? There's always good ideas. People are reading white papers, but the stuff that really happens in companies is really when they need to respond to challenges. So we're gonna talk about the challenges that are driving companies towards these 21st century tools. I'll talk about some of the new tools in the toolkit, including cloud, AI, and then a couple of examples if we have time, but mostly I wanna get to your questions and comments. And that's, for me, that's the fun part. It's where I really get to focus on the things that you care about. So some of the challenges and trends. If I covered one thing, I'd look at the lower right-hand corner here, which is 50% of supply chain leaders say their supply chain is facing more frequent and more impactful business disruptions. Now, the rest of the slide just talks about a few that are happening. On the right side, you see 30% are anticipating a decrease in exports from China. Really, this is a very current trend around de-globalization, right? About 20 years ago, 15 years ago, we talked about near, short, and onshore as a way of providing better service to customers. It's shorter lead times and that sort of thing, but now the driver for de-globalization is political unrest, significant climate disasters that are happening all over. And so you're seeing more and more folks moving away from the fixed low-cost supply chain sources they've had in the past to other alternatives. In the upper right-hand corner, I wanna talk about something about its robots and situational data and analytics. People are looking at data, they're looking at automation because we're actually going through a transition of the workforce where most of the boomers are in their retirement ages. They've built up a lot of tribal knowledge in terms of how do they do their jobs and replacing them is very difficult because the subsequent generations aren't as big and quite frankly, not many of them have gone into supply chain and manufacturing. And so they're looking towards automation and robotics. So there's a number of big challenges coming our way that companies are trying to respond to. Now, what does that mean to supply chain? Here, I just have your traditional, on the left side is tier one suppliers, on the right side, you're getting to your customer's customers. I wanna just highlight a few pressures that we're all facing as supply chain managers that are driving us to create these resilient supply chains that must adapt quickly. And I'll talk about sense and respond in the next slide as well. One, short-term profit pressures are not gonna change. So the fact that we need to have resilience in our supply chains, if we had unlimited resources, we could be building factories and distribution centers and set up transportation lanes all over the world. And we would be ready to go. We would just fail over like you do in a data center. When one cluster gets overwhelmed, you just move over to the next. Well, you can't really do that in a world where short-term profit pressures are demanding that you don't overbuild your supply chains. So all those really cool things you're learning about in supply chain design are very, very relevant, but you're going to have to figure out, well, how do I rapidly redesign and redeploy resources when the world requires me to do so? The second one I wanna call your attention to is over on the top around challenges with visibility. And traditionally, we've wanted to see what is. The challenge now is seeing what's going to happen next. How do we use the data that's coming in today to help me to predict what's gonna happen tomorrow? So much of our supply chain tools of the past have been based on historical activity, whether it's historical shipments, historical sales data, assuming that the past was prologue, right? We could look at the past and estimate what was gonna happen tomorrow. Well, the reality is that there's things happening today that didn't happen tomorrow. Every year we hear about the 100-year storm, right? The last time this happened was 100 years ago. I don't think that's in my dataset. So we've got populations that are moving towards urban areas. We've got folks moving from state to state. So whatever you, if you look at last year, I mean, we had COVID-19 over the last couple of years, I hope, and I think most of us hope that the last two years aren't predictive of the next two years. So in this world where things are just changing constantly, the challenge is how do we use data and get visibility, build these models, use AI to predict what's gonna happen next? So prediction is gonna be sort of the forecast of the future for supply chain managers. I'll talk a little bit more about diversifying operations, right? Now, we definitely know that we're gonna, we're challenged with figuring out where's our new factory going to be? Where's our distribution center need to be? When our customers are changing, geopolitical unrest is happening, I need the ability to plug and play the nodes of my supply chain wherever they need to be so that I can run my business. And so I'm gonna talk a bit about some of the barriers to making that happen. And in the interest of time, I'll only talk about a couple and then feel free to ask me some questions later. But end to end visibility continues to be a problem for supply chain managers. Back in the day, it was all the data was stuck in my ERP system. So companies were investing in, business intelligence solutions, data stores, that sort of thing. So they can just see what's happening inside the four walls of their operation. Actually about 50 years ago, when all operations in the supply chain were happening out of one factory, managers would take their offices and put them in the middle of the factory so they could actually see inbound, outbound production distribution. And they were visually managing the entire shop from the middle of the facility. Well, that's just not possible today, especially when the nodes of your supply chain are all over the world and they're constantly changing. How do we create the visibility in a very dynamic global supply chain? Next is lack of agility to meet customer demands. When I was starting my career, it took about 24 months to set up a new factory up to 18 months to get a distribution center online. And so we were thinking about in the retail space, we were thinking about Black Friday, two years out so that we could build the supply chain infrastructure today. Well, today we don't have those options because two years from now, we don't know what the world's gonna look like. So companies are now trying to figure out, well, how do I spin up or spin down elements of my supply chain, new nodes in months and not years? So companies that don't have this agility, they're not gonna be the winners in the future. And when you're plugging and playing your supply chain with outsourced partners or even factories that are changing different products based on the demand of the market, having multiple systems that are outdated and that don't talk to each other becomes a significant barrier for establishing the resilience and agility that the company needs. So this is all creating the need for some 21st century tools. And one that I'm gonna take a bit of time to go through is around the control tower. I think the control tower kind of pulls a lot of these pieces together. And I'm gonna go a little bit slower as I walk through this as it builds. First, the foundation is plug and play. This is technological connectors. In the IT world, you call them like APIs or these integration elements. This allows organizations to digitize their processes, turn them into inputs and outputs and enable folks to plug them together. In fact, this is the backbone of the way Amazon works. You've got a number of different services that represent things from distribution, logistics, even manufacturing, and they've got them digitized. And so when they need to light up a new factory or light up a new distribution center, they literally sort of plug it and play it. So having the ability to have those connectors where you can plug and play is a fundamental part of a 21st century supply chain infrastructure. Next is around connecting suppliers into your ecosystem, connecting distributors into your ecosystem. Companies like AvNet, Arvato, Ingram Micro, these are companies that are used to being, I'll call it 3PLs, third party logistics providers that support many companies. For those companies to survive, they actually have to work in this plug and play world. So they're already stubbed out to connect into N number of companies. Now, unfortunately, if your company doesn't have the ability to plug into that, you won't be able to take advantage of the power that comes from being able to adapt and light up a factory in Brazil for one season so that you can take advantage of the upside of whatever is happening in that country or the ability to ramp down a factory in Vietnam when the local economy is taking a turn and you don't wanna be saddled with that physical, the fixed infrastructure. So being able to ramp up and ramp down is dependent on your ability to plug in these suppliers, these distributors into your network. Here is one of my most interesting areas. It's now connecting the actual assets in your factory, in your supply chain into your platform. In the past, we would do procurement based on looking at inventory that's on hand and then a human being would do the math and then a human being would figure out what they need to order. In today's world, we could actually put the intelligence of reorder down to the machine level. In fact, companies like Starbucks are using the actual coffee machine itself to determine whether or not they need to buy more cups. They're able to look at the recipes that are being used today to predict what types of syrups are gonna be needed later in the afternoon. So relying on point of sale data or relying on historical shipments or historical receipts is not something that you have to do anymore. You can actually look at the equipment that's actually running the production operations in your supply chain to trigger the actions that need to be taken. Also here in the transportation space, everybody's heard about vaccines by now. Many of you have had them. But transferring vaccines around the world presents a particular problem. Vaccines, for example, need to be transported at a very specific temperature over its journey or they become no good. Now, this is fairly easy to do when you've got good roads like you have in the US, but it becomes a problem when you're starting to transport things like vaccines in the developing world. So cold chain technology becomes really important. Now the transportation equipment has to have sensors in it and they have to be monitored and you have to be able to remotely turn up or turn down the temperature so that things can stay within their good zone. So having smart and intelligent assets, smart transportation, connected suppliers all plugged into your control tower give you the ability to create a virtual representation of your supply chain in terms of a digital twin. Now you can get that visibility that managers used to have 50 years ago by sitting in the middle of a factory. Now you can get that sitting in your control tower, in your control room, where you've got digital representations of your entire supply chain on the board or on the wall or even on your phone. And so you can monitor and you can sense and you can predict and you can respond to the disruptions that are happening. So I said a lot there, so I'm expecting a few of you to have some questions about that. Now, one of the big challenges here is when you're connecting everything into your supply chain, you've got visibility to financials, customer data, you've got the ability to control different nodes of your supply chain. And so the question is, what happens if I forget security? Well, I can tell you what's been happening, right? 4.2 billion customer records have been compromised due to cyber threats. And so if you're connecting more and more of your business into the cloud, you're actually exposing, you're expanding the surface area for you to be impacted. 99 days from reach to detection, this is kind of scary. What this means is for about a quarter, somebody's been in your house looking around, taking things, stealing things, using things or just listening without you even knowing about it. And last but not least, 17 million is the average cost of a security breach. So as breaches are starting to go, it's not just about security, it's also about dollars and cents. So when you're connecting your infrastructure all to the cloud, making it accessible globally, end-to-insecurity solutions become key to a supply chain manager's toolkit. Now, I'm not gonna bore you guys by talking about all the various hacker technologies and cyber threats. So what I've done is I've actually created, I'm gonna show you a video of something that we do here to make sure that we're monitoring all the cyber breaches. And this is a capability that I'm expecting many of your companies are gonna be tapping into or building themselves. So give me one minute and I'll play this video. OneHUD is a company-wide annual event that we do to bring together the red teams and the blue teams. OneHUD gives us an opportunity to simulate real adversaries. It gives us the chance to be able to defend against those adversaries. I think it would surprise a lot of customers to know that Microsoft is heavily invested in developing the state-of-the-art attacks. This is a real world where adversaries will use whatever techniques or resources that are available to them to breach and get access to that data. It really is who can outsmart who between the red and the blue team. The red teams know our product better than anybody else. They're able to attack in very unique ways. As we do this type of exercise, we're able to build defenses against that before it can be used against us. What differentiates Microsoft is we have defenders who are responding to real attacks. We're actually putting our plans into action, testing them, finding weaknesses and being able to get rid of the weaknesses and strengthen that which works better. This is a war game at a massive scale, at a global scale. Our time to detect, time to respond has to be fast. It has to be in minutes, not days, not hours. The blue team has definitely gotten better at detections and remediation. It's making things a little bit trickier for us. As we look at the resources that Microsoft brings together, anti-malware Office 365, the cloud enterprise team, the Windows devices group, they're able to quickly put protections in place in the middle of the activity to help stop the attack from being successful. All the learnings that we get from One Hunt directly improve all of our products that customers use. The One Hunt operation enables us as defenders to keep on top of the game. All right, hopefully from there, what you get a sense of is when you're connecting your company, essentially, and even if it's not just to the external internet, but when you're connecting it and you're actually exposing yourself to people driving by, sniffing your network, there's lots of new threats that we need to be worried about. And it's not enough just to be a really great supply chain expert, but you need to now partner with folks that really understand the mindset of the hacker that can look at your supply chain design, look at your connectivity strategy and help you identify where those threats are and then, quite frankly, know how to attack them. And so what you saw here is there's this internal war game that we do here at Microsoft for ourselves and for our customers where we actually pretend to be the hacker. We come in and we try to breach. And then we also have a team that is looking for detection. And so by doing that, we try to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. And so each of you that are leading supply chain teams that are driving towards more connectivity, leveraging AI, leveraging the cloud, this is something that needs to be on your radar. I highly recommend that you get with your chief security officer and make sure that they're really in tune with your supply chain plans. Now, I've got a number of examples in here that I wanted to talk about, but I think I'll pause for now and go to the questions that the team has that you guys have for me. So I'll stop sharing now and I will be happy to take some questions. Thank you, Gerald, for a great presentation on all those insights and things we probably didn't have in mind we need to consider when designing or building our supply chains. So thank you for that. I want to go now to a little bit of AI. You briefly touch on AI and I really want our audience to learn about how can we use AI to optimize our supply chains? We are thinking on AI to speed up decision-making using prescriptive analytics and I'm wondering how algorithms can improve that, enhance that possibility of changing our designs on our supply chain, making that faster or even if you foresee that AI is changing the way we design from scratch, our networks. Yeah, there's a couple areas where I'll just share some of my recent experience with AI and integrating it into supply chains. One of the big drivers is actually on the reverse supply chain side, right? In the world of sustainability we're trying to keep products out of landfills and we're trying to keep equipment that's running our factories, that's running our logistics facilities, distribution networks. We want that equipment to be up and running. And I don't know if any of you have ever worked in the reverse logistics part of your organizations where you've got spare parts that are being managed. Well, those spare parts usually the inventory tracking is about looking how many inches of dust are on those components that they just need to buy just in case, right? And if you look at the ballot sheet you actually have a ton of money stuck in the ballot sheet in spare parts in most organizations that are actually building things. And so one area where AI is coming into play is they're using their instrumenting equipment so that you're able to keep track of things like vibration, right? Vibration is one of those things that we're able to take as time series data, use algorithms to detect anomalies. And then you can start to, everybody here who drives a car who's ever driven what I call a bucket, an old car you can start to hear when something's gonna go wrong. You can hear when you need the oil change you can hear when something's not right with your wheels. Well, that's what vibrations do. Vibrations are sort of a leading indicator that something is gonna go really, really bad. And so they're using AI to detect, to monitor vibrations to detect when something might go bad so they can actually do the spare parts and they can also do the predictive maintenance. Now in the past maintenance, proactive maintenance was done on a schedule, right? And the issue was over servicing equipment. You're spending too much money, your downtime is too much. And so what we're using now is AI to figure out, well, I'm only gonna fix it when it needs to be fixed. So you're able to use AI to tell you, basically the equipment tells you when it's sick and it tells you how much time it's got before it needs to be taken offline. And so now you can be a bit more surgical about when you service it. And for the most sophisticated AI it will tell you which piece needs to be replaced. So you no longer have to hold on to equipment for 50 years just in case it breaks you'll be able to buy it or make it based on, you have a better way of opportunity to use your lead time. Now, you didn't ask this question but I'll tell you a complimentary emerging technology to this predictive maintenance world is 3D printing. Now I don't need to have stuff in stock at all. I can actually just 3D print my components when I need them. And so it's not like 3D print and print the stock it's like 3D print on demand. So I can imagine a world where I have a supply chain a spare parts team that drives its inventory down by 75% increases the uptime of the equipment while reducing costs. So that's one of the most exciting areas where AI is impacting supply chains today. Another one, I'll just say that it's really easy okay it's relatively easy but doing quality. Quality today, you have a quality engineer they write their stuff down they put it in a big database. We're using AI now to actually read all the reports and pick up the themes. And now you're using the same sort of AI that's used in sort of like Google that helps you do a better search. We're using AI to actually mine data that's been put into systems by humans to come out with themes and corrective actions. That's fascinating, especially the concept of like predictive maintenance and getting ahead of the curve and getting ahead of those equipment failures which can obviously like bring a node down for example on your supply chain or something like that. It's fascinating concept. I think it kind of builds on maybe like when I want to dive into a little deeper as well. I know we are was part of our theme for today which is IoT. I'm wondering how like IoT fits into this ecosystem of the control tower, you know you're connecting into suppliers, right? You have your AI engine inside that's trying to make predictions based on some of that data that it's collecting. I'm wondering how IoT like these connected devices kind of fit into this ecosystem. I mean, obviously that's probably the data source for the AI engine that's you know, sensing, you know, equipment status, et cetera maybe can you dive a little deeper on to that topic? Yeah, there's, I'll talk about so I talked about the predictive piece and I'll just, if you're a, let's say you're proctoring gamble and you have over a hundred and something factories around or your GE with 300 factories or something like that. And you've got a situation where all of your experts are retiring, right? Let's just say that hypothetically, right? That's actually happening in many places. When you have the equipment connected you now have the ability to have an expert sit somewhere not in each factory that can actually remotely monitor equipment of a certain type that's all over the world and be able to provide, you know instruction or guidance. In addition to that, you've got the ability and we're actually rolling this out in some markets where you have local technicians or local operators that will pop on like a virtual reality set of goggles and they will get guidance and instruction from the expert that's sitting thousands of miles away sort of like remote surgery that you've seen in like the movies and stuff. Well, we're doing remote surgery for equipment in factories and in warehouses. Now, where you get the instructions you get the heads up display, the work instruction, all that stuff that's happening now and it's powered by IoT, right? Connecting the equipment is the first step in enabling this sort of distributed virtual way of maintaining your operations. The other thing that I think is really cool is when you have equipment that can do many things oftentimes what it does is a function of the program that it's running, right? And so whether you're in a quick serve restaurant or you're in a process manufacturing plant these recipes are really driving the action. And so in today's world the way these recipes are updated are literally people driving around with like briefcases with USB sticks that are like, you know hold close to their vest and they go and they upload the recipe on each piece of equipment. And so if you need to start making a different product in a different factory it's gonna take a human in time to go and do that. Now when you're connecting equipment in IoT one of the big use cases that are driving investment is the ability to do over the year updates. Sounds very simple, you do it every day on your phone but in the industrial space because of the security threats that we just talked about people are very reticent to actually connect the equipment but once they do, once they overcome that security challenge they're able to actually do things like Starbucks can now deploy coffee recipes in minutes as opposed to over a week's time doing literally truck rolls to 30,000 stores to make sure that they're doing things. The other thing they can do is innovate faster. So pushing down recipes is one thing but being able to take what's coming off what's being used, people are asking for custom stuff. You've all been to the movie theater where you kind of make your own soda or whatever. I don't know if those push button new soda fountains. Well, what Coca-Cola is doing is they're actually listening they're paying attention to the combinations that customers want and they're actually putting that into their product development cycle. And so now they're coming out with these flavors that they can put in grocery stores and mass market and they're actually using your experience to drive their innovation. And that same concept can be put in place with in your supply chain. If you're monitoring the types of equipment that you're using constantly you can now go and update your ergonomic plans. So when you have the assets in your supply chain become intelligent, you have a whole another layer of data that you can use to drive optimization. Thank you, Gerald. And I love how you mentioned all those huge supply chains and you mentioned in all those huge companies. And that's what we usually talk about very large global networks. But within this networks, however there are many, many small actors. So those small companies are still playing vital part of our supply chains. And my question is, and I also saw some questions from the audience on that how do small companies feed into the concepts like supply chain control tower or how do they plug into the systems and how can they implement the technology? Is it feasible? Is it a long-term thing? Is it too cost expensive for small companies? How do you see that? You know, I'm actually seeing the companies that are... I was just talking about this the other day. The last companies to come to the table with the emerging disruptive technologies are the biggest ones. We call them the tier ones. The tier ones are laggards, right? They're the last ones to the... They're like, oh, I don't want the cloud. I have so much money. I can build my own cloud. I don't need to go do this thing. And so you're seeing a lot of that. And so it's the mid-sized businesses that have some resource that are actually taking advantage of public cloud-based solutions. They're working with startups and they're innovating. And so they're actually starting to push the curve. For a smaller company, let's say you're... I think there's so much... The cost of technology is continuing to go down. We're still living in the world of Moore's Law. There's also a convergence that's happening between your consumer technology and industrial technology, right? And so it's no longer required for a company to buy $30,000 servers and $100,000 software to be able to have like an ERP system, right? It's now all available to be rented or subscribed based on cloud providers, right? Also, you're seeing that the equipment manufacturers are making their equipment more intelligent. For example, well-built is they make the ovens that go in your local coffee shop, right? Those ovens are now being connected, right? They're making them available to connect. And so now my daughter runs a small coffee shop. And so one of the things that we're trying to figure out is if we get one of these connected ovens, can we start doing things like paying attention to the types of things that our customers are asking for? And how do we integrate that into our point of sale system which we're using Square? Square essentially provides me with the same functionality of the ERP system, but I can do all that in a small coffee shop. So the technology is actually quite accessible for the smaller folks in the organization. The thing that I would caution is we need to make sure that they're also paying attention to security. Now, the security solutions are available. There's encryption. We just need to be smart about our Wi-Fi passwords in our shops. It shouldn't be one, two, three, four, five or PSSWD and we should be okay. So there's tremendous opportunity for experimentation all the way from Raspberry Pi to what we use here at Microsoft. So I think the small folks have an opportunity to innovate at a pace a lot faster than the big ones. That's awesome perspective. Fasting, we often hear about the big companies like Coca-Cola's with their machines, but we don't often hear about the opportunities and maybe even the innovators that are some of the smaller or medium-sized companies that are really driving some of that frontier, because they have some of those opportunities and some of those pressures that are forcing them there really as well. I tell you, Kellan, one of the areas that I'm personally very bullish about is the developing world, right? I've always believed that constraints drive innovation, right? And there's a company called Zipline in Rwanda. I don't know if you've heard about them or if they're part of like your curriculum, but they're trying to figure out, well, how do I get medicine from A to B and there's no road? Well, they're using drones and they're actually using like Ziplines and they're just innovating. And so they have this connected intelligent logistic solutions that are necessary because the actual physical infrastructure isn't there. So they're figuring out how do we leapfrog, right? If 5G is available, if they've actually got the ability to use drones, if there's remote power capabilities, right? Solar panels tied to batteries where you can actually then connect into Starlink. So you've actually got connectivity in the middle of nowhere. Now digital infrastructure can be in place faster than physical infrastructure and the types of solutions that you can put in place literally leapfrog, what you would see in the developing world. So I would say the supply chain innovation of the future is gonna come from areas on the planet where they must innovate to survive. And that's happening now, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, that's super exciting. I know we could probably have a whole session just on that specific topic. So I'm just taking a look at the time here. And so maybe in the interest of time, I want to give a chance to jump into some of the questions. We have a whole bunch of questions here from the audience. But maybe before we do that, could we launch our second poll here and we'll just, we'll jump into a couple of questions while you get a chance to fill out that second poll here. But let me see, there we go. So we got the second poll up here. So just for those, we're able to see it. So the questions, what's the most interesting part of today's session? We're just interested, to learn your tests and learn from these events. And so we're interested in learning about what you found interesting in today's events. And while we do that, maybe Laura, if you want to, if you have a question picked out from the Q&A there, you want to jump into that first question? Of course, thank you, Kellen. And we have so many questions that probably we will not get to most of those, but I want to bring one and it covers one of the topics you briefly named on one of your slides when we were talking about the challenges that are coming. And it's about workforce composition. And Mohamed Amir, if I'm pronouncing it well, is asking with IoT and supply chains, what challenges and opportunities are there for supply chain professionals in terms of job market, training, what skills are needed for our future supply chains professionals? Yeah, Mohamed, thank you for that question. I think the, first of all, the opportunities are growing, right? One of the things, one of the benefits of COVID is that supply chain ended up being on the news all over the place. And so those supply chain opportunities are there. It is an industry where we see the impact of retirements hitting us pretty hard. And so, so one, the opportunities are there. Two, the focus on, I'll just say the focus on diversity is also important in supply chain because supply chains are global. They are local and require understanding of different cultures, different ways of, different parts of the world for supply chain professionals to be relevant in the 21st century. And so you're seeing a very diverse pool for, all types of diversity in new leaders emerging in supply chain. So from a skill set standpoint though, I would say it's really important for you to understand the technologies that are available today, all right? You don't have to be a coder, but you should understand analytics. You should understand basic application layer technologies. You should, you understand the fundamentals of finance and ERP, there's physical flows, financial flows and information flows in every single supply chain. And you need to be able to master and understand all of those elements and how they work together. So I think those that are like just actually interested in the way the world works that are not averse to technology and then have some sort of acumen around finance and business, those skills will take you very, very far. The last thing I'll say is keep an end to end mindset, right? Over a long career, you will touch every element of supply chain if you're lucky and if you're focused. Planning, logistics, plan source, make, deliver, return, the whole thing, order management. So be open-minded, think end to end and take the long view. It's a marathon, not a sprint and you can have 25 years career and still not touch everything like I did. So I still haven't touched everything. So sky's the limit for new supply chain professionals. The last thing I'll say is be good at something. Like, you know, pay attention to what's going on and pick an expertise, right? Every five years or so and like go deep. And then, you know, at the end of the day, you're gonna be an expert in like four or five things and you'll just be super valuable to everybody. That's awesome perspective, I appreciate that. Definitely lots of learners are starting, learning some of that and building some of that knowledge just with our presentation here today. So I appreciate it. Maybe so we'll take a look at our poll results here and we can share those results but what was the most interesting part of today? You know, it looks like everyone was interested in kind of explaining their knowledge generally. So I think that really resonates with the comments you just made, you know, is building some of that knowledge and going deep, maybe on some of these topics. So that's awesome. So maybe I'll jump into that next question here in the Q and A and we're running short on time here but I think this is a pretty good question and you touched on this kind of briefly and this is something that I had some recent experiences with and so it's an area I'm fascinated with as well but Ramesh has a, Ramesh Zafar has a question about that satellite internet opportunity, I guess you'd almost say. He's also said some of the lower frequency bands suitable for IoT gadgets and so you probably would be able to maybe address that a little more than I could but what are some of the opportunities to monitor supply chains through that satellite connectivity? Yeah, I think the opportunities are there. What we're, I'm actually seeing in terms of the most modern sort of connectivity strategies that I'm running into I'm seeing a lot of it, 5G is being introduced. I don't see a lot of practical, okay, let me back up in sort of the developed world I'm seeing a lot of 5G, you know, interest. Part of one of the things I do is some sort of consulting to healthcare supply chains in sub-Saharan Africa where there's a lot of experimentation happening around with sort of satellite or, you know, very, yeah, I'll just call it satellite types of connectivity. The type of connectivity doesn't really make a huge difference in what you can do. The key question is the connectivity reliable, right? And what that does is it drives you to figure out what your solutions need to be able to do. If it's intermittent, then you need sort of asynchronous sync up type technology where you're able to do a lot of things on the device. So the devices need to be beefier when the connectivity is spottier, right? If the connectivity is solid, then you can put some of the beefiness in the cloud and have cheaper devices, right? So that's one of the big trade-offs that I think is there relative to connectivity. I can't say too much about the different bands and how that implication, I haven't run into that. But what I have run into is intermittent versus stable connectivity and how that impacts the types of devices that you're bringing into your supply chain. Awesome, thank you, Gerald. And we are running out of time. So I would like to thank everyone in the audience for the awesome questions. We will share those with our speaker, just in case he wants to get to know our audience and what is interesting for you all as well. Remember, this is the last webinar of the session. So we are very happy that you came through all the three of them with us. Thank you, Gerald, for joining us today. We've learned a lot and thank you for your great insights because as supply chain professionals, we hear a lot about technology and sometimes we don't know where to begin with. So you've given us great insights on that. Thank you, Galen. It's been great to co-host with you. So I don't know if you have some words for Gerald and the audience. No, I just wanted to thank you, Lara, for being a co-host. It's always a pleasure and Gerald, for sharing your time and your expertise with us today. I know we could probably dive into a lot of these topics. Like some of these ones you just mentioned, like healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. You know, there's some of these topics that we could probably dive into with many hours of webinars. And maybe we'll try to bring you back here in one of these days soon and expand on some of these concepts. But thank you for sharing your time and your expertise with us today. It's been my pleasure. And one thing I'll leave this next generation of supply chain leaders is I learned something really early that has stuck with me and has really helped me throughout my entire career. And it was actually Six Sigma and problem solving and using data to ask questions, answer questions. And it has been the backbone of everything that I've done for the last 20-something years. So while it might be old technology, having the ability to use data to understand situations, decompose problems down to their essence and use it to validate that you're on the right track, gets you out of opinion and into fact, and it becomes a really, really powerful tool. So I'm just doing a plug for my old Six Sigma capabilities out there as a foundation even relevant for the 21st century. Anyway, thank you both very much and thanks everyone for your engagement and the questions. It's really been an honor today. Thank you. Thank you, Gerald. And thanks everyone. Stay tuned because we will have another webinar series coming soon. And hopefully we will see you around again and also Gerald, hopefully we will host you again. Thank you very much everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.