 and let's get started. So good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today. I am Sugathri Kalluru, Manager Emerging Technologies at the Digital Supply Chain Institute. This is our second session on women-leading digital supply chains transformations. And for those of you who are joining us for the first time, this is an initiative through which we aim to inspire more women advance careers in their supply chains and build a value community by sharing experiences and knowledge. So today, it is my pleasure to have Dean Hopkins, Vice President, Global Revenue Planning under Armour, join me today for the fireside chat. Dean, welcome and thank you very much. Thank you, Sugathri. Great to be here. Awesome. Before we get started, a couple of housekeeping notes. The duration of the session is going to be 30 minutes in which Dean's going to share her stories and insights from her 10 plus years of a supply chain career. We have requested the attendees to submit the questions beforehand during the registration so there will be no separate Q&A. For those of you who submitted the questions, thank you so much and we will try our best to include most of them. So without further ado, let's get started. Dean, so let's set the stage for our audience. So can you tell us about Under Armour and a little bit about your current role, the scope and breadth of the supply chain you're responsible for? Yeah, absolutely. So Under Armour is an athletic performance apparel and footwear company. We were founded in 1996 by Kevin Plank, who was a football player at the University of Maryland and he had the idea to make amazing performance enhancing products for athletes. So upon his graduation from the University of Maryland, he founded Under Armour and as such our global headquarters are based here in Baltimore, Maryland. Under Armour grew in popularity. The brand grew among athletes. So by 2005, again founded in 1996, by 2005 we made our IPO. That actually happened to be the year that I joined Under Armour. So I had kind of started when it became a big company I would say or at least on the small end of a big company. That year we did about $250 million in revenues. So from that point we continued to grow domestically and also expanded internationally to the point that last year we did 5.3 billion in revenues. Tremendous growth that I'm certainly grateful to have been a part of. My role specifically right now is leader of global planning and that consists of demand forecasting as well as inventory management and managing our enterprise wide SNOP process. Within the planning aspect, our teams forecast they project demand across our whole product line. We offer about 15,000 items per year. So those teams are forecasting not just how much of each product but also where it needs to be. We have 18 different inventory locations globally as well as when it needs to be there what month out there in the future. So as you can imagine, a ton of data involved in those projections and a ton of advanced analytics involved. With respect to inventory management those demand forecasts ultimately get procured as finished goods production through our supply chain. So that needless to say generates a lot of inventory and inventory is our largest utilization of cash. So it's really important that we maintain responsible inventory levels relative to what we intend to generate as revenues. And then lastly, the sales and operations process the SNOP process is really a cross functional operating rhythm that repeats itself on a monthly basis. And it's through that that we orchestrate our planning cycle, our buying cycle and then monitoring of KPIs that tell us how we're doing and also if any action is needed. The SNOP cycle culminates on a monthly basis with an executive SNOP, the ESNOP meeting where we present to our top leaders again the key KPIs as well as any decisions that we're looking for them to drive our action into the next cycle. That's amazing. And looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts and how you're managing this inventory and demand planning as we proceed to the session. Okay. So next question is after your MBA you joined UA in a sales road, right? But later you transitioned into demand planning. Tell us why demand planning and revenue planning and how all that led you to choose supply chains over other departments? Yes. I love that you asked this question to Gathria as if I had a focused career path in mind. I really didn't. I've certainly followed an organic unfolding of my career. In fact, as I mentor others who are looking to develop and grow their career path I often make the recommendation not necessarily to focus on a particular role or a particular level that you're trying to get to but rather focus on the impact that you're trying to make and ultimately what you're trying to contribute every day. I feel like that's what I've been doing is focusing on what are the needs of the organization and how can I best deliver them and ultimately through that the next opportunity becomes available. But starting in the early years I actually came into Under Armour right after my undergrad degree and it was during the first few years while working that I did an MBA program in the evening part time. But I started in a customer service role which is an entry level position within the sales organization. And I'd say that that was really my first exposure to supply chain. I was actually doing customer service for some of our big wholesale customers like Dick's Sporting Goods and at the time the sports authority was a big customer of ours here in the U.S. And as part of my role I would be monitoring inbound working process inventory from our factories and looking to apply it and allocate it to those customer orders and then drop them down to our distribution facilities to be picked and shipped out. So it definitely had a flavor of supply chain involved as well as a lot of problem solving and root cause analysis to be able to connect the dots of where's my supply? Where's the demand? And I noticed through that I had kind of a natural affinity towards that analysis. I recognized through that work that I was an analytical person and as did my leaders. So that ultimately led to my next experience which was I was invited to come help create this and build this department called planning. We didn't have planning at the time, this is 2006. At prior to that we had our sales team our sales force building the forecast for what we should buy. And I'm sure many of those who are joining this call can understand why that's not a best practice. So at that point we decided we're gonna get some analysts together who can really monitor our sales history and build an efficient level of inventory. So really that's where I've been ever since it's been 14 years in planning, I can hardly believe it but as I mentioned with that rapid growth that we've experienced during that time there's never been a dull moment. We've expanded to new geographies, had new product lines and so it's been a continuous challenge. But as I said, I've kind of just maintained focus on my impact and what does the company need and how can I best deliver? And that has ultimately allowed me to grow within the field. And then I also wanna add since this is a women in supply chain forum I can't talk about this development of my professional life without talking about a little bit of my personal life my family life, my love life. When I joined UA and that entry level role single young professional wound up meeting my husband and ultimately nearing my husband who came with two sons of his own who became my step sons or my bonus sons. And then we have ultimately had two daughters together as well. So now working mom have a nice blended family a lot going on and loving every minute. Awesome, such a great story and a great tip focus on the impact you make and not on the role. And I'm sure most of our audience could relate well to that. Okay, so you touched upon a little bit about saying there's no never a dull moment in the UN it's almost been 14 years you're with Underama now. So tell us what has been the most energizing aspect of being part of the UA supply chain team thus far? Yep, over those 15 years we've had something like a 20% cater across 15 years and some years were 25 and 40% growth. So we had a massive expansion particularly in those first 10 years of my time with UA when we had a get big fast strategy and we needed to because ultimately found ourselves as a global player competing against the big names and brands in sport. And I'd say within the last five years that explosive growth has tapered a bit which has been a great opportunity because our leader kept in plank recognize that through that wild ride of growth we did not build the scalable processes and discipline within our organization that were needed to then drive the next 10, 15 years of growth. So for the last five years we've really been focusing on stabilizing the organization driving discipline in our processes. As part of that, Kevin invited our new leader Patrick Frisk into the organization in 2017 as chief operating officer. And at that point immediately Patrick, he's an operator and he introduced this new mindset and culture around discipline and calendar adherence and just managing our profitability not just our top line growth. And in the beginning of this year in 2020 Patrick actually became CEO. He took over that role from our founder Kevin Plank. So again, just of those 15 years of growth and just incredible experiences Sue Guthrie, when you asked me what's been the most energizing it's actually been the last three years to see this transformation of our organization. I personally am very operationally oriented. So this was music to my ears that we were actually going to pay attention to how we could just refine our processes. And the most gratifying part is seeing the results. So I mentioned, we run this ES and OP process which in and of itself that process has improved throughout these years. But the best part is that when we monitor our KPIs whether it be service, margin, inventory we're seeing the results of this new focus discipline and that's absolutely been the most rewarding for me. Awesome. Thanks, Jean for sharing that. So let's slightly change the subjects here. For the past few months supply chains have been the hard topic because of the COVID pandemic. So I'm sure you faced a lot of challenges over the last nine months. So can you talk a little bit about what's changed for you over this period and what challenges you've faced? Yes, and I think anyone can attest everyone. Everyone on earth can attest that this has been an unparalleled experience this year. The journey through the year was so dynamic. You know, when we were in January timeframe and we could see the virus spreading in China and the Asia region, for us, you know, we certainly have a commercial business in Asia which was a concern, but we also have, you know, our vendors that are producing our products. We have a large presence in the Asia Pacific region. So for us, our biggest concern at that point was the supply issue and understanding what was gonna happen to our business throughout the latter part of the year when our factories who were building our back half inventory were closing due to COVID restrictions. So the early reaction phase was how can we mitigate our supply chain so and really preserve our revenues for the year. So we were looking at things like, you know, air freighting products as opposed to sending it through ocean freight and, you know, determining how we could work with our customers to be more flexible in their expectations as well. But then only a short time later in about the February timeframe where this became evident that it was a global pandemic and it was no longer just a supply chain crisis but it was a demand crisis as well. So, you know, what will happen to our consumer demand when folks are no longer leaving their home and stores are closed. So it created a different set of reaction in terms of not just we're trying to preserve our revenue but we now need to manage all this excess inventory that we've ordered that may not find a home for consumers. So just unbelievable, you know, whiplash in terms of reactions and changes in approach. We were concerned about revenue, of course. We were concerned about excess inventory. I mentioned to you that, you know, we were thinking let's air freight product to get it here to make up that time. Well, then as carrier flights were starting to cancel as all that activity started to cancel, air freight rates, the capacity was reduced and the rates went up tremendously, like five X the normal rate. So then we were thinking, okay, don't air freight, don't air freight. So that was tremendous. And then, you know, unbelievably what we saw when we started getting into the June, July timeframe once everyone kind of understood how to live and work remotely and what's their new way of working out, we actually saw an amazing bounce back to our business and consumers found us, you know, maybe not in the retail stores but through our direct to consumer online business. And with a lot of working from home, you know, folks wanna be comfortable and they wanna feel active. So that was kind of a wonderful silver lining as well is that we were still able to find the hearts of consumers. But yet again, that resurgence of demand created another need for us to just quickly respond and read and react in the best way. So just tremendous dynamic changes and urgency required throughout the year. For sure. Yeah, I can imagine this sheer amount of changes, you know, you've made to your supply chain strategies both on the supply side as well as the demand side. But, you know, do you see a significant shift because of all this which have happened over the past nine months? Do you see a significant shift to moving into more of a near-shore manufacturing or near-shore strategies? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, we were already moving in that direction as an organization. We have a very visionary leadership in that sense in terms of shortening the supply chain and tightening the supply chain. Identifying any buffering points and just eliminating them so that you can better absorb rapid shifts in demand. So we were already down that path, but I'd say that this experience from 2020 has just allowed us to double down on it. So for sure, near-shoring in VMI and then also, you know, making investments in machine learning and demand sensing to drive our demand forecasting so that we're just better at planning. I mean, I think that if anything, 2020 has taught us that the last five days of history are much more relevant than, you know, the last year of history. And that's really what machine learning and demand sensing picks up on is that intricacy of the more recent history and it allows you to project accordingly. Perfect, I think that's a perfect segue into my next question to you as well. So can we talk a little bit about the technology? You mentioned ML, but any other emerging technology you've been using to help get you through these volatile months of supply chain? Yeah, yes. You know, I think technology has been really important, but I also don't want to underestimate the importance of our people and our processes that we had to leverage through this time. I think, I mean, it's the old faithful. We were able to leverage our technology along with our processes and our team structure and collaboration to really respond in the best way. So, you know, I mentioned that ESNOP process and that's a monthly repeating rhythm and it's, you know, one that we've been working on and driving and effectiveness towards. And it was through that forum in the very beginning that our leaders, when they saw what was coming in, they were able to articulate to us what our key objective was, you know, and really make that clear. And I think that was so key to be able to articulate that upfront because it allowed all the teams underneath them to know exactly what we were trying to accomplish. It would have been very easy to get confused. Am I looking to preserve my revenue? Am I trying to improve my margin, my inventory? They made it very clear what the expectations are. With that expectation, we then formulated a task force, so to speak. And we called it Project Buffalo. And the reason we called it Project Buffalo, we've made the buffalo our totem animal, our spirit animal within Under Armour. And the reason that we do that, if you read up on the buffalo, compared to say a cow or a bull, when confronted with a storm, a buffalo puts his head down and charges right through. Whereas cow, cattle, bulls, they retreat from the storm. So by retreating from the storm, the storms come in no matter what, you're just prolonging your time in the storm. Whereas if you plow directly into the storm, you get through it much more quickly. So that's the mindset that we took. And we dubbed this task force Project Buffalo. It was a cross-functional group. We met daily for probably the first four months we were meeting on a daily basis. And that's where we were leveraging the technologies to go through. So we had invested prior to COVID, thankfully, we had invested in the capability around dashboards, real-time or near real-time dashboards and reporting around any timing slips from our vendor base, any slippage from our customer order book. And bringing all that together into a dashboard, again, near real-time reporting, allowed us to come in on a daily basis and with all those dynamic changes, get a sense of what was changing and most importantly, decide what we were going to do and drive the quick action. So I think the combination of the investment in that data, analytics dashboarding, the operations around Project Buffalo meetings, feeding up through the SNOP forum, and then generally just our people and the collaborative mindset that we all shared through that time is what really made a difference. Awesome. Good to know about the Project Buffalo. It's interesting. Dean, you mentioned slightly about how all this team, this cross-functional team comes together in identifying the key objectives. Then a DSCI also, we have a similar approach in the sense we ask our clients to focus on the proof of value rather than the proof of concept for any projects, especially with emerging technologies. So could you talk a little bit more about, in general, how do you keep your company moving forward and decide which technologies to invest in? You have a lot of options these days and a lot of emerging technologies. Yeah. What I mentioned about our leaders articulating the objective upfront, I think that's so critical is to know what your company strategy is and what the main objective is. You can't expect technology to do it for you. So if you have that in mind, then you can select the right technology that's going to support it. So I think the step number one before you start looking and shopping around for technologies is overarching. What are you trying to accomplish as an organization? Beyond that, I think it's very important to stay current, whether you're shopping around or not, but stay current on the technologies that are out there. And I will give you a plug with Digital Supply Chain Institute. The research that you do and the white papers that you put out are a perfect example. They're made available and it really allows you to apply and think about applying new technologies to your own business to start thinking about, if that's something that you'd like to pursue. So we've certainly gotten value from that. And then the other thing that I found benefit from is before you make that investment, assuming you're not the first mover, go find people who have already adopted the solution prior to you. I wouldn't necessarily just take the software company word for it, go find a test case, get a testimony of, how was the implementation process? How quickly were you able to utilize the functionality? And in general, are you happy with the result that you've gotten? I think that's really important before you make such a, oftentimes costly investment. Perfect, thank you, Dean. Okay, changing the subject a little bit again here, mode of reflections. Let's talk about reflections from the work you've done in the past few months. As you reflect upon your reactions to demand planning or revenue planning, how have you built resilience and flexibility into your supply chains? What have been the outcomes and what were the lessons learned? Yeah, I think what probably the biggest takeaway from this year is thinking about our supply chain holistically with truly an end-to-end enterprise mindset. We've got different sub-components of supply chain and I'm one of them in demand planning, but then you have supply planning and sourcing and logistics and distribution. And what's right for one of those components is not necessarily right for the total at large. And we had to strip away that thought process of what's gonna impact my own department's KPIs and think more of, we're in survival mode. So we truly need to collaborate and think bigger picture. And the benefit that we saw through that that was really driven through urgency, we're fully planning to take along with us into our standard ways of working and thinking and evaluating our business processes more from a complete supply chain angle. And if I may build on that, so what are the leadership skills and strengths which help you achieve this, you know? Sure. And what advice do you have for our audience and for other supply chain professionals to succeed in their supply chain journey? Yeah, well, I've hit this one a few times, but that very clear strategy and objective articulated from leadership is so key. I mean, it just makes everyone's lives so much easier and it also drives the results that you need if everybody's fully aligned to that business objective. So we've, again, I can't speak highly enough for my senior leaders for the work that they do there in making it very clear for us what we're looking to achieve. The other thing that I think has become really apparent this year, and this is why when thinking about women in leadership, this is why I think there's so much value to really balance the scale there is leading from a place of empathy with teammates. And if you think about, like, we've gone through some very dark times this year, a global health crisis, a financial crisis. We've seen, you know, our company, or excuse me, our country torn apart politically. We've had, you know, we've witnessed the pain of social injustice in our country. And, you know, our teammates are really holding all of this on their shoulders. It's very difficult on top of, you know, doing remote work for the first time ever on top of many times, you know, having to homeschool children, unbelievable challenges. And I think the empathy, you know, what I tried to do this year is just lead from my heart, show my vulnerability as a human as well and invite my teams to come bring their whole selves to work, bring their vulnerable selves to work. And I believe that, you know, in doing that, that it just helps ease the burden a little bit knowing that, you know, we're all in the same boat. It's okay if you need to step away to get your kid's class Zoom started. I feel like it just alleviates a little bit of tension. And when folks can come to work as their complete selves, ultimately they're going to be more fulfilled and they're going to be more productive. And then one last thing that I would mention in terms of leadership qualities, especially in times of crisis, one of our key values, we have five key values at Under Armour and one of them is celebrate the wins, which is, you know, certainly easy to overlook because of how busy we are. But in a time like COVID and through Project Buffalo, we really took time to celebrate the wins. So when we were looking at, you know, a scorecard that looked abysmal and maybe next week it looked a little less than abysmal, we took time to celebrate that win and energize the team so that they could continue to push forward for that next incremental gain. Awesome. And, you know, given all the six experiences and the lessons you took away from Under Armour, what do you advise further organizations and companies, you know, especially around people? You know, you emphasized a lot on how important people are especially, right? And, you know, they played in, especially in the world at once. So why should companies, you know, or what should companies do in order to address the low number of women in supply chains and the gender gap issue in general? And what steps can be taken to correct this imbalance? Yeah. You know, I think supply chain is certainly in need of fostering growth of women and the development into leadership roles and business in general, you know, it's certainly lacking. But we know the value. There's a ton of research that's been done on this. We know the value of building diverse teams. Homogenous teams will lead to homogenous solutions. You know, if you have a team with similar traits and characteristics and backgrounds, they're generally gonna think the same way and approach problems the same way. But when you can come from a multifaceted angle, that's when you're really gonna create the best, most robust solutions. And this is, as I mentioned, you know, very much observed through data. So I think it's important that when you're evaluating candidates to grow your team, that you consider what each candidate brings to the diversity of your team, you know, right up there with what they bring in terms of years of experience or education level. It's that critical to drive, you know, productivity and innovation among your team. And then I think at leadership levels, it's especially important. I think, you know, men and women think differently from each other. One is from ours, one is from Venus. So, you know, bring them together and that's where you create a nice, well-balanced culture. And it's really important for folks at lower levels in the organization to see people at the higher level that they assimilate with. Because it allows them, you know, to aspire to that level and continue to develop. So I can't say enough about the importance of fostering this in the organization. I do have some stats, speaking of the research that I wanted to share. McKinsey and Lainan.org have done an annual report of women in the workplace for the last five years. So they just published their 2020 report. And I have some stats here. So senior level women are more likely than senior level men to embrace employee-friendly policies and programs and to champion racial gender diversity. Over 50% of senior level women say they consistently take a public stand for gender and racial equality compared to roughly 40% of senior level men. 38% of senior level women currently mentor or sponsor one or more women of color compared to 23% of senior level men. And then when women are well-represented at the top of their, at the top, companies are 50% more likely to outperform their peers. So diversity drives innovation, see it over and over in the research. This is definitely something the company should be paying attention to and investing in. I think there's a perfect note to end with diversity drives innovation. So with that, I think we are at the top of the art. I wanna say thank you to Dean for sharing your knowledge, stories and experiences. It is, you know, time has passed so quick, you know, I wish we have 30 more minutes, but I think it's enlightening and inspiring. And I'm sure that attendees are walking over with the same experience as well. To all the attendees, you will be receiving a short survey right after this. Your feedback is very important and valuable for us in order to design the future course of the initiative. So please take a minute and let us know how you like the session and a new format. Just like you have heard today, we have amazing speakers lined up for you in 2021. So stay tuned, happy holidays and see you all in the next session. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Dean. Thanks Agathri.