 Hi, this is Yoosupin Bhatia and we are here at SAP Safari and today we have with us Richard Holland, your VP of Solution Management for ERP Fitness and Digital Supply Chain at SAP. Richard is great to have you on the show. It's a pleasure to speak to you. When we talk about supply chain, of course, this is a hot topic these days once again and I'm not talking about software supply chain, which is a totally different area. We're talking about physical supply chain, which you enable your organization. Talk a bit about because of this whole, not only geopolitical situation changing, a lot of innovation is happening. Also, the companies are like close COVID era, things have changed, so talk a bit about what kind of changes you've seen in the supply chain, which also demand different solutions. Okay, so I mean things have evolved so much in the last three years. Supply chains for the last 20 years have been all around cost reduction and efficiency and as a result we created very global supply chains. And the reality is that the pandemic exposed the risk in our supply chains. And the word that has described supply chains for the last three years would be resiliency. How do I become more resilient? How do I minimize risk as much as possible? So we've seen companies, well first of all supply chains have now got a seat at the table from an executive level. It's a boardroom discussion. It's even a dining room discussion at homes. My family didn't really know what I did until the last three years and now they get it a little bit. So supply chains have become front and center. Resilience has been the key, which means that we've had to in many cases redesign and find new ways of doing business through our supply chains, look for alternate sourcing strategies, leverage inventory optimization strategies to better position inventory, look at offshoring and nearshoring manufacturing or move from offshoring to nearshoring and onshoreing. So all of these are different things that have been driving supply chains in the last three years and I'm seeing more and more as well moving forward. Sustainability will join resiliency as a key driving factor. If you just look at the COVID era, we learned a lot less since companies optimized there and it sometimes seemed like that optimization was for COVID era, but somehow those practices kind of become a new norm. Plus if we look at post-COVID era, cost is becoming a factor. Companies are trying to become more cost efficient. Once again supply chain plays a big role there. So how do you see these two have played a role in once again efficient? Supply chain has always been a balancing act. Previously it was all around cost and efficiency and that balancing act, but now cost and efficiency have been joined by resiliency and by sustainability. So I don't think we'll ever go back to the fully global supply chains. I think we will have local supply chains for key components for example, closer manufacturing or having manufacturing closer to the actual demand because that does reduce the risk. So supply chains, as you say, it's the new normal, but I don't think we'll ever go back to the totally global single sourcing in one country because we know the risk of that now. There will always be alternate strategies of I may be still supplying a lot of my goods from China, but I have an alternate supplier in cases of emergency and I split that 70-30 and I have the ability and contracts in place to change that dimension in different ways. So I think what the pandemic has caused is really us to have more resilient risk mitigation strategies. So again cost is still a key part of this because you still need to be profitable but you've got to be profitable and sustainable and keep customer service levels high. So that balancing act is the way that I'm seeing supply chain executives looking at things today. What are some of the fears that you hear again and again from customers because they have limited control over supply chain but you can efficiently help them? I think we're hearing a lot about how do I better leverage a network? How do I get better visibility of which suppliers can provide that material and have contracts in place with those suppliers? How can I better position inventory around my supply chains? It might be keeping more stock of certain products, it might be keeping less stock of certain products but having the right products in the right place at the right time and whether we're talking about resiliency or sustainability, the answer is always we need to improve visibility because you can't manage what you can't measure and you can't measure what you can't manage. So you have to have improved visibility across the supply chain which means a better collaboration and tighter relationships with suppliers, with contract manufacturers, with logistics service providers and any other partners as well. So that visibility outside within the four walls and outside of the four walls of your organization. What advice or how should we approach so because there are some patterns based on that it doesn't really matter which industry you are and these are the practices for you know having very secure resilience supply chain. I'll go back to some of the things I said a little earlier it's about identifying our network design, designing your networks to design risk out of your supply chain of having those alternate sourcing strategies, of having the inventory in the right positions, of working with your manufacturing facilities and having them as close as practical to your demand and the demand becomes really important as well, having an accurate view of demand, leveraging technology to not only get look at the forecast as a way of demand but looking at point of sales information, looking at sentiment analysis because the better your view of demand the better that your business processes will respond to that because if you start with the wrong demand you're going to be making the wrong materials making the wrong products which means you're going to be ordering the wrong raw materials and it all starts rolling from there. It's a bullwhip effect. Yeah it is. Now since we are here in Sapphire I would also love to hear from you any specific announcements that were made in terms of the supply chain? One of the there's been several big announcements around Sapphire and one of them has been around AI and we've in bet we are continuously embedding AI capabilities into our supply chain solutions. For example what we've announced at this event is improved slotting capabilities in the warehouse management logic which means it helps you optimize inventory and have the right inventory in the right place within the warehouse and optimize the use of the warehouse. Another example was in transportation management where we've improved the freight freight receiving process so you can use generative AI to to better automate the receiving process and matching processes within inventory management. I think I touched upon some key point that was there is there anything else that you folks think here we should talk about this as well? I think some of the other things that have happened the business network and improving well sustainability and the business network come hand in hand in many cases but having more sustainable practices what we've seen is that sustainability is a big issue many companies have created quite ambitious goals for being carbon neutral by a certain date and the challenges that many of them don't have the tools in place to actually capture that information to be able to act and respond on that information and supply chains are both a major problem when it comes to sustainability but therefore also a huge area of opportunity and capturing emissions minimizing waste and alleviating inequality within the supply chain is a key driver for most businesses as they strive to those goals. One of the other things that we've announced at Sapphire is enhancements to the footprint management solution which is really a life cycle sustainability calculation for a product or products capturing real information not estimates and averages and the whole green ledger concept of every every transaction has a a financial cost but also an environmental cost if we can start capturing that real-time information those real numbers then we'll get we'll at least be able to measure if we're starting to strive towards our goals and put actions in place to improve that. Richard thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about the whole supply chain some of the announcements that we've made here and roll up once again AI and as usual I would love to share with you again so thank you. It's been my pleasure thanks for having the opportunity.