 Hi, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for being here with us today. I'm Laura Jaeger, a course lead here at MIT CDL for the MITx MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management. I'm very happy to be co-hosting this live event again once more with Mr. Kellen Betz here, also a course lead at the MicroMasters program. Today, we are very, very fortunate to have Mr. Alessandro Celeste joining us today. He's a director of industry 4.0 and sustainability strategist at Cognizant Technology Solutions. Welcome, Alessandro. Thanks for having me. Hi, Laura. Very happy to have you here today. Thank you. So before going to the agenda for this session, I will ask our team members, Lisa here today and Emma with us, to launch our first poll for the live audience. We want to learn, as usual on our events, why are you here today? What do you wanna learn? So if you check the poll, there are some options there. Are you here for the digital technology portion for the lean strategies, for learning how to improve the supply chain? Or are you just here because you'd never missed any of the MicroMasters live events? So I'm giving the floor to Mr. Kellen now. Awesome. Thank you, Laura. Hello, everyone. So for the next 30 minutes or so, we're gonna discuss the complex trade-offs we see in supply chain management. Definitely a fascinating field and lots of complex trade-offs. So we're gonna discuss the tools and the awareness that we need to strive towards that lean, green and digital supply chain. And the last 15 minutes, we'll definitely save for your questions and so start thinking of those. And please use that webinar Q&A feature so we can keep track of those questions and bring them to Alessandro. I'd love to see introductions in discussion in the chat and please use that Q&A feature for your questions. And also be sure you're logged in with a name. We won't be drawing any questions from anonymous users. Awesome. We'll have a few more polls throughout the events. We'll keep an eye out for those. To see your input and feedback in those polls. And we'll just check on the results of those first polls here. You can end that poll and see the results. So the question, why are you here today? And lots of options to learn about digital supply chain technologies. This looks like a popular one. That's great to see. It's no more about optimizing supply chains using technology. So definitely a technology focus, I think here with our audience. I don't know, Alessandro, if you have any thoughts on those four results. Yeah, absolutely. So those are very just in topics. And I'll put more accent as we speak into the maybe top two or three answers that have been selected. Awesome. With that, are you ready to get things started, Alessandro? Get things on. Yes. Awesome. So yeah, maybe you could just share a little bit about your background and what brought you here today and a little bit about your story, if you could, please. Yeah, absolutely. So again, thanks for having me. Laura already told you, I'm principal director for the industry for the oil and sustainability strategy at County's technology solutions. And I have about 15 years of working experience. I graduated as an industrial engineer from Milan, come a region from Italy, lived now in Cologne and worked in the past 15 years in manufacturing, operations, supply chain, industrial internal things, what we call in Europe, industry for the oil and now sustainability. As to give an example of the industries I've been working on, it's automotive, consumer goods, eating systems, package gases. I've been building greenfields and expanding brownfields in Eastern Europe, doing strategic performance roadmaps and transformational programs all around Europe and sometimes also around the globe. And today in my position, I basically help clients in there. Digitally enable sustainability journey, which means achieving people, planet, profit goals all at the same time in different ways that you can achieve them. And we'll talk about that later. Awesome. And almost for God, I'm also, I was an MITX student. So, and then I had the opportunity to pursue the supply chain management blended master program at MIT in 2020. Almost forgotten, most important thing. Don't worry, don't worry. We're very happy to have you as a credential holder here, but you're bringing a lot of information from the industry, a variety coming from your experience, but I'm sure we're going to connect with all the topics that we'll learn across the courses, but also with a lot of important matters that are happening right now out there in the supply chain world. So just going straight to it, I would say like you're bringing to our table this on the title that we put for a live event today, a lot of concepts like lean, green and digital supply chains, but those are basically buzzwords that we hear and read about everywhere and that we all want to work for whenever we are in the industry. We really want to be part of that. And when we get hands on and we have to be a part of the implementation, we know there are several constraints we may face. So aspects we can think of as resource availability and allocation of resources, company goals, of course priorities, market expectations and many more could affect the decisions and forces going in different directions, sometimes one opposite to the other. So based on your experience, how do you face the decision and where to begin? What's the sequence in which you would implement those goals? And what would be your advice for someone that's in the same journey? Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. It goes right into the core of the three words that we chose as buzzwords for this event today. I learned a lot of tools during the MATX program and also a lot of tools during my career. I'm gonna share just one slide with you and walk you through the dimensions that I have in my mind and different approaches on how to, let's say holistically have a look at what are the company pain points and how to address solutions. Let me see if the sharing screen is working. Perfect. Can you see my screen? Okay, so this is loosely adapted from, and it's also one of my favorite slides about the baseline of the case flow model. And it's loosely adapted from the MATX supply chain course. And when you are, let's assume you are in a company that wants from you to improve their operations, then it doesn't really matter where you report into the senior management or you are in the middle management or you are just a supply chain practitioner. Now you start thinking about the tools that you gather throughout your experience and your studies. And I highlighted a couple of those thinking about the end-to-end production, let's assume it's a manufacturing company. So you have raw materials, the manufacturing, the distribution and the customer delivery. And you may have some lean approaches. So lean manufacturing for those of you who don't know is a methodology and a philosophy that focuses on reducing waste all along the body chain. And the supply chain approaches that you might very well know are the ones that you also learned through the MicroMasters. So you have different approaches in orange and purple. And now that's what I call the lean or supply chain part that you want to maybe increase your inventory terms, have higher on-time delivery so that you can capture not only customer satisfaction but also new markets. But internally in your manufacturing, you may want to change your machinery, the tools in such a way that you have a lower inventories and you want to accelerate the cycle times and then back to your inbound warehouse. Again, you want maybe to lower your inventory targets, lower your transit times, collaborate with your suppliers. So you have a whole bunch of tools. And now if you think about the dimensions and the digital and green part, well, the digital part is there's a lot of solutions that are there to cover and to end those processes. So you left to right, you have supplier management systems and that's where you focus on how to spend for the supplier and what's the volume you are insourcing. And then you have manufacturing execution system for the production of material flow and the truck and trace within a manufacturing plant. And then you have the warehouse and inventory management system for the finished goods to be organized. And then you have the distribution and outbound logistics that reaches the client and then the CRM customer relationship management and order management. So that's the digital part. And this is an additional dimension that allows you to simplify and automate workflows that are behind the tools that you learned. And then you have the sustainability dimension. How do I account for the CO2 that is emitted during the upstream supply chain? Do I have the opportunity to collaborate with supplier for near shoring of some standard components so that the components, they don't have to travel so much around the globe and thus emitting more CO2. Or can I handle my manufacturing process in such a way that I save energy while standing by and waiting for parts? Or can I optimize the routing of the goods to the client so having CO2 emissions in mind? And all circular economy principles like refurbish, reuse, repair, recycle. Can I have more durable products? So you have all those bunch of tools and all those ways to think strategically on how to address those issues. But when you enter in a company, remember we said at the beginning you would work for the senior management. They don't really understand most likely the supply chain and the value chain the way you do. So the first thing you need to make your priority their priority. And one way out of the book will be, okay, I take my approach as a kind of rank them according to the benefit they could bring and according to the F or they would cast me in the organization to implement them. And it's a good approach and it's a good start but it's most likely not enough because as you go along with, asking for the resources, asking for commitment, trying to get the right level of sponsorship you will find resistance and you will have a lot of change management going on. And that's where you need to kind of dynamically adjust your targets having a holistic global roadmap in mind for those goals, whether it's productivity or lead time or on time delivery, use the tools that we discussed afar and many others that are available. And at the end of the day, making sure that the company understands what you want to achieve. So that top down, you have the right sponsorship and bottom up, people understand where you want to go one step at a time. Laura, I hope I didn't take too much time. I mean, I could talk already about this slide forever. Awesome, thank you, Alessandro. I really love the visual. Definitely highlights you on the one hand, you know, the simplicity of this flight chain, maybe, you know, at least the chain concept of, you know, from raw material to delivery but then also just the complexity and the manifold opportunities that our first flight chain professionals to engage in those different processes and look for opportunities to achieve or work towards that goal of lean, green and digital. I'm wondering if maybe we can just kind of pick up on one of those threads you mentioned there. I know many maybe on their journey, their digital transformation journey, you know, it's been a focus for a lot in the last few years with all the disruptions, you know, gaining better visibility, for example. And obviously in our first poll, it was definitely an interest for our audience. And so I'm wondering if you can maybe expand on that digital dimension, if you will, the digital or the technology dimension and how it fits into this puzzle. Yeah, absolutely. So my recurring topic that I have discussing with executives either earlier today is that there's no one-size-fits-all solutions. You need to think about your IT tool set and sometimes people want to buy a Ferrari or a Porsche for their organization in terms of digitalization tool but it doesn't mean that that's the right approach. Sometimes you want to try fast and fail cheap so that at the end of the day, when you have the right tool set in the source-made delivery processes, then you can expand your MVP into a full blown solution, building small white houses as you go along. So that kind of provides the positive culture enforcement. What doesn't work is trying to take just, and that's my opinion, of course, but that's what I see in the industry, is trying to take one tool and try to fit it and customize it for everything. So you will end up having maybe 50% of the functionalities out of the box and a lot of customization and probably a multi-year development, maybe five, seven years. And by the time you are finished, then the technology is obsolete. So you need nowadays that the agility that is required to implement the IT tool set is more about small use cases that you can scale up fairly quickly with a very strong return on investment. Thank you for sharing those. And thank you for, well, you brought this like the availability of tools that is out there and what is possible to implement in a certain time that makes it timely and helpful at the same time. So we were thinking, and also when we discussed before joining today, that one of the key constraints that they have supply chain manager in general business management would be budget. And budget does also include not only the number but also timeframe to develop something, to develop this project or to move forward with an implementation, whether it's of the digital tools or any of the others that you mentioned to go in this kind of lean and green and digital projects. So when we manage decision-making, we need to analyze costs at a more granular level. And it's not always easy to identify costs to make sure that we're within that budget and within that timeframe. So can we expand a little bit on how you identify true costs versus perceived cost and how you roll out the decisions and this information to executive decisions? So, okay, that's almost a three, four part question. So tied up with the previous one and then expand upon it. And also give you a bit of my experience. So fairly easy, let's say, either you work among the audience, either you work in a company that is bigger than 10,000 people or lower than 10,000 people, then chances are if you are joining a supply chain position or a lean improvement position for first one management position combined with the ability to implement digital tools, it's either top down. So a corporate mandate that tells you you need to do X, Y, Z and you have a budget allocated and resources and all you get to do, it's complicated enough, but all you get to do is structure your sequence of actions and define milestones and a rollout plan. I was more often than not, in cases in which the senior management understands there's a need for operational improvement, but they don't really understand what it is and you are now hiring, let's call it in a mid-sized company under 10,000 people and you need to figure out how to start, what is the right sequence of tools and approaches with no budget. So at some point, three, six months in, you will feel like, I need to save the world of this company on pennies and by the way, I needed to do it yesterday. It's very hard when you don't ever, and I'm taking the purpose, the worst case scenario because that's the one that I had most of the time. It's usually once you have, sometimes you find islands or pockets in the company of excellence. You don't have to come up with new solutions right away. If you have a network of 20 or 10 production plants, you will always find somebody that has already tried an innovative local platform for manufacturing execution system or an innovative supply chain practitioner for scenario planning and sales and operational planning. And then you start to understand, okay, what is the maturity of those plants and now what does it take from the senior management to invest in the first year's cases, having a very fast return on investment on those and then scale up. Chances are to answer your questions, especially nowadays, when I started Michael Reed 15 years ago, it was acceptable to have a return on investment of five years. Nowadays, most of the companies, even the big ones that I mentioned before, they want either 18 months and some of them want to have 100 days. It means that you want to have a use case with the operational transformation and IT transformation and even sustainability on top of it in 100 days. And it's super challenging because the companies are already operating at the maximum. And long story short, there's no, again, one size fits all. You need to understand your baseline, what's going well, what's not going well, what kind of multi-dimensional tool that I need to pick from my supply chain leans sustainability toolbox and digital toolbox. And then as you go along, if you don't have the right budget and you don't have the right resources, try to build with little money, those use cases. And I never forgot, I know the question is long, so I don't forget about the true cost versus the perceived cost. If you are in a sales driven organization, most of the time, the CEO and the CXOs in general, they will look at the profit and loss or the balance sheet and they will determine that they need to increase some revenue and decrease cost of goods. Well, not even cost of goods also, let's call them operating expenses. And if they are in a hurry because they need to meet quarterly results, most likely they will cut with a myopic view, meaning they will try to source a lower material with a lower quality, but it's maybe 30% cheaper or maybe they will bring some people slowly to retirement because they are no longer needed. And when it, most of the time, in both ways, just to take the two examples, you will lose in quality or you will lose in experience in your company. So there's a lot of educational meetings, but don't call them like that with your cinemas, but there's a lot of educational meetings that you need to do to tell them, hey, the cost of goods holds, so working progress plus product cost of manufacturing, you need to break it down into material and energy and labor, for example. And now you start thinking, what can I improve with the resources that I have using principles that we said before, and also train the train and change management so that maybe you are not meeting the next quarter, but you are getting extremely good results by the end of the year. And another dimension in which I often found myself confrontative with similar management is we don't have budget, the cost of goods sold is already high enough. So how about transferring them production somewhere else or transferring capability somewhere else? That's easier said than done. It's not just because you find a spot in a locust country that the capabilities were unpacked. There's an ecosystem of suppliers or universities that need to collaborate and they need to be, as an input to this factory somewhere around the world. So more often than not, it's a complex discussion with a lot of educational thoughts and again, no one size fits all solution. Awesome, thank you Alessandro. There's a lot to unpack there. Definitely one thing, maybe one point you made that really stands out to me and kind of highlights the complexity of some of these trade-offs is that quarterly or like shorter term, if you will, vision versus a little bit longer term vision and maybe sacrificing your quarter or just having a quarter where you're investing versus improving the year's results or the five year results or whatever happens to be and just then that trade-off right there just with the time versus the budget and that balance really highlights I think at an area of complexity for sure. Awesome, so maybe we wanna shift gears a tiny bit and pick up on one point you made earlier, like one example so we can maybe kind of dive deep into one example. I think you mentioned this earlier and we discussed this earlier as well just on near shoring. I know this is kind of a strategy that you see near shoring, on shoring if you will to a certain degree here in the US at least and near shoring. It's kind of a strategy you see a lot in the supply chain media at least. I know a lot of companies are maybe rethinking about this and maybe if you could just expand on this concept and some of the impacts this might have within this lean green and digital ecosystem especially maybe some of those technology impacts. So I think we all maybe think about the network and maybe the shorter distances and so maybe the reduction in CO2 but we don't always think about the technology impacts or something like a near shoring strategy. Yeah, absolutely, Cotton. It's one of my favorite topic right now because also in the course and you've seen the Black Swan theory or the Black Swan principle. Now we talked about grace ones. We had Corona or COVID crisis. We had the microchip shortage crisis. The Suez Canal was closed a couple of years back for some weeks. There's normally a Black Swan is what? Every 10 years, maybe every 20 years but now every three, two years there's a new low probability occurrence or a bigger impact crisis and near shoring kind of solves the problem of resiliency on the supply chain but also the sustainability one and also the cost one and also the digital one. Let me explain. So from a sustainability perspective if I let's say based in Europe as of today and I was to source a component the starting component from Eastern Asia. Yeah, sure, I can do that but if it's a standard component and not a mission critical component why not doing the same with a little bit more cost perhaps in from Eastern Europe or from Southern Europe if it's a standard component should be available, right? Well, now you imagine you're having this discussion with senior management there and you will say, yeah, okay I need to pay 20 cents more per piece. Now you say, okay but you have more working capital available because the lead time is not six weeks from Eastern Asia is now a couple of days. So you have more cash to spend in other projects your projects softly you will finance later on. And from the sustainability side you are all things everything else equal you are drastically reducing the CO2 impact from a digital perspective it's also, I know everybody thinks we are all connected but systems across continents sometimes do not communicate well and there's also the opportunity to use the same platform or the say cloud provider and also cultural freedom time zone now you work with people that may understand you your requirements faster just because you work in the same region it would be the case in Asia for Asia and it's Europe for Europe, America for America and the times are right so you can react faster. So a lot, I love the near sharing example because on the green lean and the digital they kind of miss them all, right? So love the, did you ask that question? Thank you, thank you for bringing that and I appreciate how everything come back to the trade-offs and the implications of one decision on the other the way that everything at the very end connects in how we need to consider all aspects it's not like we're only doing near sharing for a certain matters but as you said we have to meet all together analyze the impact on all the columns we have in any cost we're analyzing or in any type of or piece of our company just to have a full understanding of and an overview of the supply chain impact and the final decision and implementation of this kind of project. So connected to that and you brought optimization in terms of cost the inclusion of sustainability but you mentioned a lot of times during our conversation today the word lean. So I was thinking that whenever we focus on cost or just sustainability we miss the big picture and we sometimes have to answer different internal and external stakeholders and we have business implications of our decisions that we may be helping in some other ways that we're missing. So based on your knowledge on lean operations and the lean philosophy overall would you share with the audience the impact that we have a supply chain like set as the supply chain person now and think on how can we as supply chain help on a lean philosophy environment and what would be the benefits that this would bring not only to a supply chain team but also to the company. So now I mentioned before what lean is lean manufacturing and management to now lean in terms of being agile that expands upon it. We, I personally geek out on mixed integer linear programming is something that a lot of learning is going on during MITX but it's just one tool and if I want to model everything on my own maybe I will solve one specific problem I am definitely not agile I'm definitely not effective in the sense of a company. So I go back to the fact that being lean and being agile means you most likely know the tools that you're disposal you most likely know where you wanna go what is your future state in some years from now the hardest thing is the first step where do you start? And the second hardest thing once you start is how do I keep it dynamic? How do I, because the senior management will come back at you or the company will come back at you with different demands almost on a weekly base if not on a monthly base because the industry pressure is different because the requirements are different because the client wants something else. So being agile, being lean means understanding that it's not you against your own company trying to implement all the wonderful tools that nobody understands but you it's not about that it's about adjusting yourself and understanding that you need to embrace the moving target philosophy I know that it sounds contrary at first but you really need to understand that the people that are running the company face this every day so if you commit to improve the service levels for your client you need to commit to those and then you need to commit also on improve the profitability as sometimes both they don't really match together how you do that you need to keep balancing and juggling multiple balls and you need also to understand for yourself how many moving parts can you handle how many projects can you start so the concept of lean agility is empower the moving target scenario which you find yourself in especially if you are you are growing a position of middle management and having to take care between senior management and shop floor requirements and adjust your tactic and your strategy with the time you keep in mind your goals maybe you change a bit their weights but you always adjust and to your stakeholders Awesome, thank you Alessandro I think that if anything these last few years some of these disruptions have taught us is that moving target is definitely a true reality for everyone and especially in split chains but I know in a lot of other areas as well and sometimes those moves of the target if you will are fairly large and so we gotta move in fairly large ways pretty quickly so awesome, thank you so I just want to do a quick reminder to everyone in our audience there if you can use that Q&A feature to bring your questions Alessandro we're gonna get to the audience questions here shortly and so we just have maybe have one more question for you before we get to the audience Q&A and so if you can use that Q&A feature to bring your questions there and we'll start to pick from those shortly but maybe just kind of one last question if you will Alessandro I know some of our participants are in our MicroMasters program and well I know you saw some in that first poll who are here just because they don't miss our live events that's awesome but maybe starting their career they're perhaps in a transition that's why they're in our program and this may seem like a daunting next step or a daunting transition for them I'm wondering if you maybe if you just kind of have any general advice for our MicroMasters learners and where they should start or where they should build on their experience here in this MicroMasters program Oh yeah, great question I can tell you by my own experience I love supply chain it's probably to me the broadest discipline out there in terms of what you can do in a company everything that you can move in a company but apart from my first role in my career I never really had a 100% supply chain role I use a lot of supply chain principles and I'm enthusiastic about the MITX program I love the experience at MIT as a graduate but you don't have to be and I was also convinced prior to maybe a couple of years, not so far away not so long ago I was convinced that I needed to have a 100% pure supply chain role but it's not the case you can use supply chain principles almost in any position maybe not R&D, maybe not sales but everything in between source make delivery you can use them to your advantage and my recommendation would be to not necessarily look for that particular role like okay, I love whatever network optimization or I love procurement collaboration there's also our roles out there that will fulfill you with maybe sustainability and digitalization components and where you can use those principles and always think strategic about not the next where you want to go and think backwards in your career like if tomorrow this is my role and I wanna be there in maybe 10 or 15 years what do I have to do? It's better to understand what is your next role if you have your end in mind that's what I would feel like recommending to that Thanks Alessandro, thank you for sharing your insights and as you say like supply chain brings you a lot of tools that you can operate and also I think it gives you a common language that goes right through the company in all fields and as we talk the impact on external stakeholders is huge, so having the possibility of getting this knowledge and applying it for different areas and fields of expertise, it's great. So we have a question the first one from the audience that I wanna bring here is from Nikhil Shankar, hopefully I'm pronouncing that well. So this is about the sustainability part and he's saying with scope one and two it is usually easier to have more control within a company as supply chain what is your opinion dealing with scope three targets with so many associated risks, crisis and variability with suppliers? So the standard agreement among professionals is that as you rightly mentioned scope three is not under direct responsibility of the company but if you're a product company there are ways to minimize your scope three. One is the product itself. So if my product is not too complex let's think about batteries. It's a great example. Leitium ion batteries are transitioning us into a, let's call it more sustainable world but if you think of down the line cobalt, lithium are very, it's the process of getting those rare minerals is very polluting. Now there's some development in terms of molten salt batteries that have a slightly lower energy efficiency but the salt is like 12,000 more times available on the cross of the earth. So that's one thing. Think about down to the mind what is that my product requires in terms of the emissions that generates in scope three. Another way of answering the same question is let's assume you have a supplier portal that for standard components allows you instead of sourcing on a span volume it allows you to kind of perform a multi-objective linear optimization between a emitted CO2 or estimated according to the averages and the volume and the span that there's also a way to implement your insourcing from a sustainability perspective by just there are platforms out there that do exactly this kind of job. So there are many ways to reduce co-free emissions. Awesome, thank you. I know that you mentioned your interest in mixed integer linear programming that sounds like a fascinating area to dive into. I'm sure we could try to dive into that extensively in terms of just incorporating sustainability or something like CO2 reduction for example as one of the objectives or as a constraint within those problems. But I wanna maybe bring back here some of our audience Q&A questions again please use that Q&A feature. But maybe before that should we launch our second poll here just to if we could launch that second poll I'd like to get your feedback on what you thought was the most interesting part of today's session. There we go. So it's just some of the options you know what was the most interesting part of today's session is the question maybe expanding my knowledge since pie chain management more generally I'm learning about specific digital technology applications and so if you could just give your feedback there in that poll and then while we do that I'll pull here a question looks like from McDonald here in our Q&A and he's interested or maybe has experience in developing countries and I'm wondering if you also have any experience in developing countries as well on how maybe that dimension or that context has any impact on this digital lean and green balance of trade offs that we strive for. Do you have any experience in developing countries or any ideas there? No, not directly. I, in every position I was I always tried to think down to the mind as I said before so that whatever I do doesn't indirectly cause an arm back in the upstream of the supply chain. I haven't worked, I didn't have the chance to work personally in developed countries but I like to elaborate on the concept of ESG so when we talk sustainability we have ESG framework where mental social and governance and many times we focus on the environmental side but the social and governance part is kind of forgotten and the social part is about enabling the local people to have fair work working conditions, basic human right development and also the G the governance is about having partnerships with governments or with universities to foster a culture of education and progress because with more education there's less disqualities. Let's go in this way. So it's something that many companies out there try to accomplish and maybe also link back to the question about what should I do or where should I work with the supply chain, MITX, credential, maybe I will sort of look at the ESG report of the company you're working, you want to apply for. Thanks Alessandro for bringing also the social sustainability to the equation as you say sometimes we think a lot or hear a lot about environmental sustainability but of course when we're talking about developing country in general about different regions of the world the focus in sustainability maybe switch into one or the other depending on their main needs or resources. So thank you for bringing that. I want to bring here a question that's more from the managerial perspective let's say but I know you have a lot of experience there too. So Evan is asking how did you manage or how do you manage in general stakeholders to change mindsets and ways of working and what was the most difficult challenge? How did you get that buy in of your projects when you need a mindset change? Yeah, I think there's a good proverb saying tell me now forget show me I might remember let me do it together and I'll be with you something like that. You need to in your mind there's a kind of no bell curve in the organization you have people that are 60% undecided they don't know whether they want to embrace your project or program whatever you want to do and then you have the people against it maybe 10% and the people for it for the percent. Depending on the management layer you have on top of you if it's just three people it's not really a bell curve or so if you're lucky they're all for you if you're not lucky they're all against what somebody higher do so you might have one sponsor or two against them so let's take that constellation. In that case you need to work with a bottom-up approach because obviously the corporate mandate doesn't work you have maybe a CEO, a CEO and a chief sales officer so maybe three or four of them and you need to show them that what your direct let's call it chief operating officer or chief supply chain officer what your direct boss wants you to do is not only the best for him but also the best for the others. So that's where supply chain helps you because as we said before it's a huge discipline you can connect operations to finance really quickly and finance and compliance are the two keywords to get to the CEO mind because compliance because of sustainability and finance because of results those are the two keywords you wanna use whenever you want to get their attention so now as you go along you start bottom-up you pick your use case wisely and you develop them to show returns and to show their scalability potential across your production network or supply chain and then at some point trust me those guys they will also support you and they will also ask you why are you done already what do you and they will understand the need for what you are trying to convey but they will not understand yet why it takes so long and that's why it's even more important to take them in your journey because if you don't show them they don't understand what's like to go to the show floor and change people culture with new technology new methodologies, new systems. So take them when it's the right time of course it's people's business so you need to understand if you have let's say somebody who is not necessarily friendly as a top manager in front of you you need to have this kind of feeling but take them with you in your journey and try to be political when it's needed but also effective when it's needed that's what I recommend. Awesome thank you Alessandra speaking the language of the CEO he's a key skill set for us to learn and I know we try to share some of those experiences here as well for sure and some of those terms and concepts they're definitely core to our program as well so I'm gonna pull in me one more question here before we discuss our poll one more question here from the Q and A this one is from Nielsen and his question I'm gonna kind of interpret it a little bit but his question I know challenges across industries and we've spoken about a lot of different challenges today but his question is like one of the biggest challenges that you've encountered that companies face with sustainability and where maybe some of those lean and sustainability trade-offs are compromised maybe that can vary by industry can vary by region of the world but maybe one of the biggest challenges you've encountered to sustainability. Well I think it's fair to say that for many companies whether they are product or service companies these years is transition here so there's a lot of cuts on budgets and less compliance which means law regulation doesn't dictate that you need to do something and here in Germany we have the supply chain which requires companies to provide evidence of their upstream supply chain compliance to human rights so tier one, tier two and so forth every year so unless you have a compliance driven process it's very hard to spend money on sustainability that's what I feel it's occurring more often than not but on the other hand if you are able to connect similar to operations and finance if you're able to connect sustainability with a financial gain then chances are your project will be approved and if you think about removing waste from a lean perspective it's also more sustainable if you reduce scrap, if you reuse material if you refurbish, if you recycle you are more efficient and therefore more sustainable so now you can try to get the buying from senior management for projects that are not maybe 100% sustainability related but they do both, they trade off between operational efficiency, sustainability and maybe why not, so digitalization so if you try to really fight your organization for pure sustainability project maybe this is not the right year it will be hard but if you combine it with some financial background as to why to do it, chances are they will listen Thanks for bringing all the finance conversation here because sometimes as supply chainers we struggle to understand the connection with finance and the importance it has so thank you for that I wanna bring another question from the audience before we close it because we have some more coming but this one is from Hassan and I actually was thinking like you have a lot of experience in big companies and we're talking about conversation with executives and how to get the buying and the bottom up but then there are also people here and joining us that come from small scale businesses that they work with small scale businesses and they are sometimes facing additional challenges to reduce cost because of the lower smaller scale they work with so they are asking about how can we implement lean green and digital here should we focus on lean where is this low hanging fruit when we wanna go there in a small scale business just to try to achieve some of the goals I don't wanna give you a one size fits all answer but I've been myself in small, medium and large companies so one thing that I notice more often than not in let's say companies under 10,000 or 4,000 people is that there's still a lot of room for operational improvement and now think about building a business case you want to put many items in your business case so that at the end of the day the entire calculation looks solid you have IRR or internal rate of return of 50% and payback time in three years you wanna have all of that net present value maybe of a couple of millions but you need to the right sequences to solve first the company's pain points so if you have a bottleneck here factory which is driving the pace down of the entire production line solve that and then after you do that you can move into the digital like okay now I have a well functioning process why don't we digitalize it and like we can try to extract two, three percent more efficiency it's like a per reader approach at some point you will achieve what's the maximums possible with the little resources that you have in a small business and if you want to go to the next per reader curve you will have to hire but by the time you have built a solid use case and the first business case around it hopefully you will have also sold to you to your management those good results so long story short anywhere in the source make delivery process you will find opportunity for streamline in the supplier base improving the manufacturing processes or maybe why not complexity reduction one of my favorite topic like SQ pruning SQ simplification are you in a consumer goods company you have nine other products and 80 percent of your revenues come from 20 percent of your rescues just kill the rest why do you so if you use there's a lot of things there's a lot of stuff you can do with almost no budget at all and that's where you need to start awesome thank you Alessandro I love the concept of you know they're being made a full opportunity even if there's not a budget for it you know even for smaller companies or maybe regions of the world where the resources aren't there there's still a lot of opportunity for supply chain professionals to get in there and improve processes and achieve some of these results and work towards that lean green and digital supply chain awesome so in the interest of time I'm gonna maybe share our results and look at that last poll here if we can and the question was just what was the most interesting part of today's session for you some of the options you're expanding my knowledge and supply chain management looks like the majority the most popular one was just getting an overview of the impact of supply chain decisions on different areas of the company I think that was definitely a key message that there's just so many complex trade-offs and so sometimes instead of going for that for an hour you gotta start small and maybe more incrementally work your way for some of those bigger goals I don't know Alessandro if you have any thoughts wanna share on that? Yeah it's interesting to see that everything is more or less there right okay we have a couple of 40 46% but most of the topics are equally represented which means hopefully we kind of answer 360 degrees of what the audience expected us today to do so I love the complex trade-offs we discussed and sometimes is of course a lot of headache but once you find the right sequence everything that you have at your disposal it's a pleasure to see it being implemented. Alessandro, go ahead, sorry. No it's totally fine, thank you for that in the interest of time we'll start robbing up this event so thank you for a very insightful conversation and bringing all this complex situations to the table and just sharing how to actually go there and have that conversation that's not usually the easy one to have. We're getting a lot of great emojis coming up on the screen but the audience is grateful with you. Do I have a bottom for 200 hearts? No, no that's accurate it's coming so thank you to everyone in the audience remember that SC0X and SC2X enrollment and verification is closing tomorrow so I'll make sure to get verified with us to continue with the program and Alessandro any final words to the audience? Again, thank you so much for having me and maybe next time we'll have the opportunity to talk one on one I don't like being a monologue sometimes but I hope you could gather some interesting insights and it's been super fun with you guys to be here today. Thank you, it's never a monologue we loved learning from you today and thank you Kellen for joining us today again I love hosting with you. Yeah, thank you Alessandro and always a pleasure to co-host with you Lara. Awesome, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone and see you stay tuned for the next webinar in the series this is the first out of three so stay tuned, okay? See you, thank you. Thanks, take care, bye. Bye everyone.