 Hey, let's get this thing kicked off. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone. Thank you for joining our Collaboratory. This discussion is going to be about the coronavirus and how it's impacting companies across the world. And we're very lucky today to have some speakers from Latin America and Europe who will give us their views and not providing some ideas about North America as well and the globe as well. I am the Executive Director and Chief Reachers Officer for the Digital Supply Chain Institute. My name is George Bailey, as I said. And we really are excited to have this discussion. And I wanna be very clear upfront that this is not a discussion of the overall impact of the coronavirus on the world. It's a discussion about how it impacts business, especially the supply chain. And as you know, the supply chain is the key process for most companies. And it certainly is highly impacted by what's happening in the world today with this pandemic. For those of you who don't know the Digital Supply Chain Institute, and I think almost everybody in this call does, but for those of you don't know, we are a not-for-profit. We're headquartered in New York City, but we have GlobalReach. We have a set of co-directors that manage us who give us guidance and vision. And that includes Sam Pombazano, who is a very active board member and was the chairman and CEO of IBM, a very successful chairman and CEO of IBM for a long time, really record-setting. We have Mike Crow, who's the CIO for Colgate-Palmolive, fabulous company. We have Andre Soldo, who's the head of operation strategy for Dell. And Colin Brown, who's the head of under-armors supply chain business and chief operating officer. So we have some great co-chairs for a membership-driven organization. And we seek to tell the absolute truth about what's happening in the world of supply chain and most importantly, where things are going. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. So let's go to the next slide, please. So here's the objectives for today's session. The first thing we wanna do is we wanna make sure we can outline the overall impact of this coronavirus, COVID-19, on supply chains, especially how these supply chains are going to survive. For many companies, there's a real difficult issues to make out around cost and revenue and demand and future actions. So we'll talk a little bit about that today and make sure that that discussion gets heard. We'll also talk very importantly about demand. And as you may know, we really believe that demand is probably the most important thing to work on in this time of... It's also probably the most important thing a supply chain can work on, in addition to, of course, sales and marketing and other groups, but this whole idea of front-side flip where the supply chain faces the front, faces the customer, faces the market is something that's really, really critical, especially now. So that's first thing is outline that. Second is to describe what companies are doing and you're gonna have some great examples today and I'll describe what those speakers are in a minute or two, but real examples of what companies are doing and how they're deploying their solutions in this uncertain world in front of us. And finally, as we go through this discussion, we should develop recommendations that help your supply chain. How does it win with your customers? How does it win with your shareholders? How can you make the situation work as best possible for those constituencies? And I wanna make it clear that it's really important that you participate in this. So most of you can just click on the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And when you do that, you'll be able to put in questions that our panelists will answer. So I'll make sure that we'll either answer those questions today on the call, or afterwards I'll send you an email with the answers that you're looking for. So really, really super important that we participate. I may call on some of you, you can raise your hand if you have some question you wanna ask verbally. There's a way to click on the chat screen and you'll be able to raise your hand and ask a question and we'll go ahead and call on you. So use the Q&A button as your first option. If you have something that verbally makes more sense to do, then raise your hand and we'll try to call on you and get that discussion going. We've really programmed this so that at least half the time is on Q&A. So your participation is important. It's the best way for you to get value from this. And we've had a couple of really successful sessions for this one and we plan to do several others. Our next one, by the way, is gonna be May 7th and we'll have a different set of speakers, a different set of companies here to talk. But it will also be about what companies are doing to be successful and push ahead in the coronavirus era. So next slide, please. Those are our objectives, here's our agenda. Now I wanna start out by saying we had originally planned to have Micro from Colgate Pomalov speak to us today. He contacted me just a little while ago and they had some meetings come up that will prevent him from joining the call. So I apologize for Colgate Pomalov not being on the agenda right now. We'll have them in a future session. They're a great company with a lot of actions going on and as you probably know, right now everybody's calendar is a little bit the difficult to manage because things are going on in such a rapid pace. But here's what our agenda is right now. I'm gonna give you some observations and some recommendations based on what we see around the world and particularly in North America. I'm gonna turn that over to Diego de la Masa who's the director of supply chain and planning for Aralco. Probably every single person on this call has experience with Aralco products. They are one of the world's top top forest products companies and their brand is not well known, but believe me you've been in places where their materials their wood products are a part of the building. So you may not know who they are but you actually know what their products are. So they've got a great story they have a global supply chain Diego can tell us a lot about how that works and we'll hear more in just a minute or two. After Diego, we're lucky enough to have Luca share her from chain IQ. Chain IQ is a very innovative procurement company headquartered in Zurich. I should point out that Diego's in Santiago, Chile. Lucas is in Zurich, Switzerland. And it's a very innovative company that provides really good ways to outsource particular procurement functions. He'll describe more about this and how it works. We're lucky to have them here today. And actually their business is really interesting now as the coronavirus grows in intensity. So he'll describe that. Then we'll go right to Q&A. So please throughout the presentation click the Q&A button, ask questions and answers raise your hand if you want to and we'll be sure to get those questions answered as we go through the agenda. So we'll work from there all the way through the end of the Collaboratory we'll make sure that we finish at 10 a.m. New York time and you'll have a lot of things to do. I know and we'll get you back. We'll keep you on schedule. So that's our plan for the agenda. That's our plan for how we're going to work and we'll keep that schedule. Here's just a few words from me to get us started. Companies right now around the world are struggling to keep their supply chains alive. There's a series of things happening that make continuity an essential thing to consider. Some of the suppliers are struggling in different industries across industries. It doesn't matter if you're B2C or B2B. Many of the suppliers are struggling and you know that having a strong supplier place is key to running a good supply chain. So some of you may be suppliers, some of you may be the customer, but either way you're involved with this whole discussion about keeping supply chains active and working effectively across the board. It turns out, as all of you know that geography really matters to companies. And as they look at their supply chain right now and where they have certain elements of production and distribution, the question of geography becomes more and more important. It's not just a thing about, gee, we have too much in China. It's a thing about where should we create physical presence, where should we create virtual presence to service our customers best? And there's big, big changes going on as people rethink that given this particular pandemic. The third thing listed on that chart is demand. And I will say this, that demand has always been a challenge for supply chains, really understanding the demand signals of the future. And as I mentioned earlier, it's key for supply chains not only to respond to demand, but to create it by the way they supply the customer, the business, the way that they make the interaction happen, it really is possible. In fact, it's required for companies to make supply chain changes, to attract and manage demand. But right now, it's very, very difficult. It's very difficult for companies to know what their demand is in the immediate future and in the longer term. So that demand question becomes a big, big issue for companies and you have to have some estimate where you can't move forward regardless of the business you're in. So demand, demand, demand, very, very critical. Next point is about severe impacts on cash flow. Many companies are having trouble recovering their costs. Their labor costs, their facilities costs are high and their cash flow is actually not as strong as it should be to cover those costs. So many companies, and I think you all know this, are in fact taking costs out. Labor costs, reductions, closing plans, doing things to reduce their capacity because quite frankly, the capacity required in the world today is less than it was even six months ago. So that's another thing that happens. There are companies though that have some amazing revenue increases. So people who make, I'll just use one obvious one, who make hand sanitizer. There's one around the world called Purell. They cannot make enough or personal protective equipment cannot make enough. Revenue increases across the board but for how long will that be? So as a supply chain, you have to understand what your revenue is now, what's the demand now and what will be in the future and how you can maintain that. So really, really important to understand. The equity markets have been gyrating. We saw a huge sell-off. We see now some markets coming back. The footsie was up today. I think the markets in the US are trending upward. So not sure where that's gonna wind up because we have unemployment rates that are increasing. We have state home orders maintaining in many, many countries around the world. And so demand is really, really difficult to understand. Massive amounts of government assistance happening now. I'll just mention the US. The US is spending literally trillions of dollars on companies to help and people to help them work through this whole process of COVID-19 and the coronavirus. So government assistance is part of the marketplace. It's part of how things are being done. And there's huge uncertainty about when things will return to normal. What will normal be? Well, for sure we know normal is going to be much more online and your supply chain has to be much more adept for example. And finally, this is a really important point. You have to bet about this as a company. You have to bet right or mostly right where you're not gonna be successful. So understanding how you can shape your demand, how you can manage your cash flow, how you can manage your supplier base, how you can keep your stock price up and valuable really, really is super important. So I'm gonna keep going here. I just wanna make sure that everybody has your, has yourself on mute until you raise your hand and we call on you and go ahead and get going. So I'm gonna, I see there's a Thomas Jenden. You've raised your hand. Can you see what Thomas' question is? I don't, I'm sorry, that was a mistake. That was a user error. So- Okay, all right, thank you. I thought, boy, a question already. That's surprising. Okay, great. So I'm glad you raised your hand. Glad that works. So raise your hand when you have questions or as I said before, put in a Q and A. So here's what's happening in the market today. Next slide please, Bivik. And it's just an era of unprecedented change. The coronavirus is clearly having huge impact across industries. I just picked out a few things to mention. You know, United Airlines announced last week that they had a 97% reduction in the airline seat requirements this year compared to last time, last year, same time. So a 97% reduction. That is a really significant issue for any business because of course, if you're not selling seats in an airline, you're not getting revenue. If you're not getting revenue, you can't cover your costs and so forth and so on. So a very obvious example. Multiple trillion dollar government programs across the world. Interestingly enough, in the US, we've seen nearly 26% gain in food and beverage store sales. Most restaurants are closed, but food and beverage store sales are up, up, up. And demand is hard to meet in some of those locations and some items. Global market cap in January was around 90 trillion. And in February and March, we lost about six trillion of that and potentially more as we move forward. So we'll see how that goes, but clearly this is a time where everything is moving and it's important to stay focused on your customer and keep your supply chain successful. Next slide, please. Okay, so what are companies doing? These are things that we see happening around the world, particularly in North America, but really around the world. So first thing is forming a war room, some team that cuts across the organization. It includes operations, supply chain sales and marketing, finance, HR, and the focus is on the customer and on the financials. How can we make those things work? The second thing is calculating demand. This means looking at your risk profile, looking at past needs, current requirements, and what are the needs of the new customer? And increasingly people understand that something that we've been writing on a lot in the Digital Supply Chain Institute is that there is a new customer set of requirements that the supply chains we've built before don't necessarily meet those requirements. So what used to be considered fast delivery in the past is no longer considered fast. There's a lot of things around what new customers want that we didn't even imagine could exist even five years ago. So calculating demand, very important. Third thing is enabling rapid action. It's quite clear that companies are working very, very quickly to make decisions and overcoming what some people call coronavirus inertia. That means people are working from home potentially or they just feel so overwhelmed, they're not creating the same level of productivity that they used to. So people are making decisions, they're overcoming inertia, a real big program to reduce their costs, know the customer and pick the man. And I just put in red the word financials. Managing the financials for many companies is extremely important. Knowing how to cut costs, but make sure your customers are happy and make sure that you're investing in the right things for the future. Absolutely important. Next is a grocery assessment strategy. You know, the truth is that we all knew that the supply chain would change over the next five years. It was quite clear. Even though in the next three years dramatically changed. We knew it had been more focused on people and demand and so forth. And we know that to make any change happen, you have to make changes in how you manage demand, the people you have on board, the technology that you're using and the risk profile that you're living through. So those four things are elements that are really really important. And now we know we got to make those changes sooner rather than later. Big focus on financials, big focus on winter products and in some cases reducing the number of products that are being sold in order to fulfill demand for the ones that are important. But really having a strategy moving forward for what the supply chain is going to look like, where you're going to have things located, what technology you're going to use, all going on right now, even as we try to work through this period of extreme uncertainty. Deciding the customer, the next thing, really important to get the right profile of your new customer. That doesn't mean the next customer you're going to get, it means let's look at the market today and decide what customers really want and set some priorities around that. In some cases, companies are going through a process of saying, here are my key customers that I must service and satisfy and here are the ones I'm going to try to satisfy and service, but their importance is a little bit less given the long-term trajectory of our business. And finally, the growth of ideas. We have to develop growth ideas that we make sure that we are the ones who are shaping the market in the future and we're not left behind as the market changes. So those are three or four very important things that we have to look at. So let's go to the next slide. So midterm actions. Well, it turns out that we've got to do a little short-term things just to survive and be successful in the short-term, whether your demand is up or down or changing. But midterm, we've got to reposition ourselves. Here are the six things that we see companies doing. One is they're really reengineering the supply chain around this new customer idea and they're really looking a new way to manage and make demand happen. Now, there's one thing I will point out is that we've done some writing about new measures for demand. I have to say that there are very few companies that are using demand measurement in their supply chain operation. So companies admit that, hey, the supply chain makes a big difference in demand, but they're not currently measuring as rigorously as they could be, as frankly as we think they should be. But anyway, it's happening. People are making this reengineering thing they're going on. Figure out the right people. Clearly, people is an important issue and we need different kinds of people. We have to hire them, train them and make sure we have the right set of skills, particularly around data. Third, a lot of new technology. AI and ML, absolutely important. 3D design and manufacturing, really, really critical, particularly as we bring these close to the customer. Logistics and delivery and all things happening there. And even blockchain, which is getting a little bit less pressed than it did before, but still could be a key element of your solution. Number four is creating better visibility all the way through your customer base down through your tier three suppliers and further. Fifth is deciding where you can locate part of your supply chain to reduce risk and improve performance. And we want to do both those things now. So it's very important to do that longer term as well. And the sixth thing is, and this is actually easier now than it has been in a long time, communicate, communicate, communicate about all of this because people need to know how important the supply chain is and why change is necessary and why investments and changes and requirements are going to be really at the front and center of management across the world. So those are the things that are super, super important. So I'm going to go to the next slide. And I'm going to introduce our next speaker, Diego from Maralco, fabulous company and amazing speaker. So Diego, can I ask you to take it on from here? Okay. Hello, George. Hello, everybody. I would like to start this presentation taking one or two minutes to talk a little bit about the Raúlco. As George said a few minutes ago, we are a forest company based in South America. We have industrial operations in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, the US and Canada and commercial offices and activities in about 70 countries around the world. We have three main businesses in Raúlco. We have the forest, the forest business. The purpose or the main purpose of the forest business is to supply raw material to our industrial business, the wood pulp business and the wood product business. I involve 100% on the wood product business, not in the pulp business. But anyway, this presentation is going to talk a little bit about the everything we're doing in Raúlco, not just the wood product business. Next slide, please. In Raúlco, we are thinking in basically three stages for these coronavirus situations. The first one is the reaction, what we have been forced to do. The second one is the recovery stage. I mean, what are we thinking? We're going to have to do. As soon as the world is a little bit more, let's say, calm. And as everybody is saying now, we know that the world is going to be different. There's going to be a new normal. And we're going to have to think different and make different things. So I'd like to start talking a little bit about the reaction and what things we have done so far. Some more specific things and very simple things. The first one, of course, is the home office. We have been facing lockdowns, I would say, in pretty much every country where we have operations. So most of our employees has been either forced by the local authorities or recommended by the company to work from home. Working from home, it's kind of new for us. Even though in the administration, since we're in the administration positions and since we're an international company, we travel a lot. But most of the times when we travel, to go to either visit customers, visit our factories or visit our offices. Working from home is kind of new for us. And this has proven to be a challenge. But I have to say that a very successful one. We can talk a little bit about this later. Something that we have been doing a lot is what if scenarios, information, has been changing a lot. Local regulations in every country has been changing in terms of lockdowns, what companies are allowed to work, what factories are allowed to work. In most of the countries, the force activities has been the clear essential. So I would say that at this point, we are allowed to operate on a daily basis. We are allowed to operate on a daily basis. We are allowed to operate all of our factories around the world. Some of them are not currently working, but because of demand issues and not because of government or local authorities, the restrictions. But this information is changing. We're expecting that it's going to continue changing. Of course, the demand is highly unpredictable now. Our customers, they do not know what's going to happen next week. Forecasting demand is always being a challenge, but this day has proven to be a real, real complex thing to do. Since we are producers, and pretty much what we produce, 98% of what we are selling, if we are going to have a change in demand, we have to adjust capacity because we do not want to overstock. Every time we have new information about changes in demand, we have to change also the planning of our production. We are in the wood business products. We are running five different product lines. And in some product lines, especially products that are designed for furniture, the demand is very affected. But surprisingly, in some other products, most related to remodeling, the demand has to keep really high. And in two product lines, today we have more demand than what we can offer. And we have to make a customer or redo our customer prioritization. Even though every meal with the demand is working, they are not working at 100% capacity because we haven't been able to get all the workers working. I'm going to talk a little bit about that now. The company made a definition that every person that is in a risk group, and for us to be in a risk group is people older than 60, or everybody who has a medical condition, they must remain at home. In our meals, it will depend on the country, it will depend on the meal, but I would say that about 10% to 15% of our employees or machine operators or people working in a shop floor are not allowed to work. So it has, of course, affect our ability to get our products done. We have also been facing a shortage of containers in some particular countries, especially Chile. So we do have some product that is already sold waiting on the ports to be shipped. Also something that has to affect our production is that we have implemented strictly safety measures in our meals. I'm going to show you some pictures later. In terms of how many people can be having lunch or dinner in the company's facilities, I mean how many people can be in the bathroom or taking a shower in the same location, how big the distance has to be in the shop floor, how many people can we have in the same bus, and it has also, as I said before, affected our production. For the recovery state, and something that we are working now, we know that having end-to-end supply chain visibility in real time based in data is going to be a must. Today we have some applications and software that are helping us, but it's not really end-to-end. It's not only one software, it's not only one database. The situation is changing so fast that we are receiving calls. I'm not going to say on a daily basis, but maybe on an hourly basis from some of our customers, asking what status of the order can they change from SKU A to SKU B, and not having all that information in the same platform has proven to be a real challenge for us. Also in terms of why if supply and demand scenarios, even though we have, I'm going to say, great software to run why these scenarios, those softwares are not integrated in terms of data gathering with our operational systems. So it takes for us, I could say, in some particular product lines, maybe a day to go all data so we can run these scenarios. It has happened that when we have finished loading the data, the data is obsolete and the scenario is no longer valid. Also that we need to improve is our ability to have a more dynamic and programming in production. Most of our meals are scheduled for production once a week or twice a week. With a world that's changing so fast, that's not enough. I would say that at this point and in some particular product lines, we are needing to take definitions on a daily basis, which is something that we are not used to, and it's also has been proving to be very challenging and it also has affected our productivity in some of our meals. We've been working in RPAs over the last, I would say, year, but we are not where we need to be and something that we are going to have to enhance and move faster is the development of RPAs solutions like getting orders into our systems or getting work orders to our meals. This is still a highly manual activity and we need to do it better, we need to do it faster and we understand that having RPAs is a good way to do it. Also something that we have been thinking a lot is we think about how many people do we have in our factories. We have been operating factories for the last 60 years and we have made some definitions about who has to be inside an in-supply change. We say that all the people working on the planning for the meal has to be at meal, all the people working on the machine programming or scheduling has to be at the meal. With the coronavirus situation, we have moved every people in administrations in the meal to the home office, so today we have all the schedulers working from home, most of the planners on the meals working from home. We are running like 30 meals in America, so that's a bunch of people and it has worked great. So we say, okay, it has a cause to move people from their houses to the meals, especially in South America, where the company has to provide transportation. For most of our people, it's taking us up to two to three hours a day to move from their houses to the meals. If they can work at home, it's going to be great for them. It's going to be great for the company because we are not going to have to pay for transportation. We're not going to have to pay for lunch or dinner. Our insurance probably is going to go down and we're going to have less people in the meals. I think that also we're going to need less people if we can have all this, but maybe not all, but a big portion of the supply chain people working in a central office and not at the meal. So that, of course, is something that we're going to have to think about it. In order to do that, we're going to have to have a better visibility than the one that we have now. We're going to have to have, I don't know, maybe drones in our meals. So the planners of the schedule are going to be able to take a look at the inventory because it's not always, with information in the system, it's not always 100% accurate and sometimes you have to go to the shop floor or to the warehouse to actually check if a unit is at the warehouse and so on. And for the new normal, I think that we are thinking, or I'm going to say dreaming now because, to be honest, we haven't had too much time to think about the new normal, but thinking about operational data and having 100% of our equipment since rights so we can have online information about what's going on in all of our factories. We have made some, we have been working about analytic tools to support machine operators, but there's much things that we can do about it. We also think that by using machine learning and analytics, we can do some optimization of our processes, even in the design processes. And also something that we have been thinking about is augmented reality for remote monitoring and maintenance. So maybe we are not going to need to have so many staff of maintenance people at mail. Next slide please. If you could work to wrap this up so that the other speakers get some time as well. Thank you. What I'm showing here is just a couple of screenshots of our what if scenarios. I mean, that's basically tools that we've developed in-house, so to speak. And when we have all the information load in the system, I mean, we can run many different scenarios. We can get an estimation on how our cost is going to be affected. I mean, how much product are we going to be able to produce, what percentage of each SKU are we going to be able to get, how long it's going to take to get them produced. So they have been proven to be a really, really useful tools for this period of time. But again, one weakness that we have now is taking us a lot of time to get all the data in these tools, basically all the operational data. Next slide please. Here, what I'm showing you is just what the, this is in Spanish, sorry, but to show how are we handling our home office work. Sebastián Fernández with our BP for digital transformation is in the presentation. And if possible, I would like to Sebastián to talk one or two minutes about this. Sebastián, are you in? Yes, I mean, thanks Diego. Just very briefly to comment on the fact that last year we were already incorporating agility as a methodology for working in several of our teams. And what you're looking at here is basically the, some tools that all of you who have been working with this methodology might be aware of that help. And we've seen how successfully teams have been able to manage home office and still being in contact, still being very clear in terms of what the objectives are, how their daily, weekly, or monthly work is being planned and how they, despite the fact that they are not face-to-face and are not sitting within the same meeting room or work room, are still able to be efficient and productive about their work. Because of the fact that these tools that are available, we've been using dashboards and command boards and things like that have allowed them to still be on track, still knowing what everyone's doing at every moment during the week or day. And to our surprise, we were concerned, of course, that this wouldn't work the way we were used to because of the fact that even the agile teams, we were used to seeing them pasting post-its in a wall all together in the same room. Well, technology has proven us wrong and we know now that home office is, except for a period of adjustment, of course, at the beginning, but now it's not an issue. All right, great. Hey, thank you, Sebastian. I appreciate those ideas. I want to make sure we leave enough time for our other coffee to present. Sorry, give me just one minute to finish with this. Sure, go ahead. And I would like to show you these pictures because I mean, keeping the operation running is not just about digitalization. It's not just about technology. It's not just about the business definitions, but it's also about people. It's also about to keep the people working to make them feel that they are safe in our facilities, to let them, all of our workers know that they are not going to be in danger if they are working in our facilities. And that's most of the times based on really simple definitions like cleaning the equipment we have been providing materials, of course, and instruction to all of our workers on how to clean their equipment after their work. In all of our meals, we have a draw, as you can see in the picture, lines in the floor so people know, I mean, how to give distance between each other. I'm showing also a picture of our dining rooms in the meals. I mean, at the beginning, we say, okay, we are not allowed to be more than two per table, but they start sitting together. So we have to put crosses on the table so they just can see where the cross is. And that's especially for a production-based company like Raúlco, given the sense of safety to the people, it's absolutely necessary to keep the operation running. So, well, that's for my side, George. Great. Hey, thank you. Thank you both for a great presentation on Raúlco. It's an exciting company. You're doing great things. I want to turn it over now to Jane IQ. There's two speakers from Jane IQ. Lucas is the Chief Operating Officer and Richard Pacara, who we didn't have on our introductory slide. He is a key member of the team in North America. So can I turn it over to you, Lucas and Richard? Thank you very much, George. And let's just jump on the next slide. In fact, what we have so far prepared is about, you know, that we are just quickly giving you a perspective and understanding about what Jane IQ is doing, because I truly don't believe, you know, it's important that you can then also put a little bit of our experience into a context. And certainly we have prepared about a two-pature, where especially Richard and myself would like to give you an insight, in fact, what we are doing together with our clients, and especially this current situation with her co-initial. So let's just very quickly about Jane IQ. Jane IQ, in fact, what we are, we are one of the global leading independent indirect procurement service providers. What does it exactly mean? It means that we offer global procurement services to our clients, whereas we roughly have roughly 50 clients in our portfolio. And the very nice thing is about we are operating out of six main centers, whereas with additional 11 officers worldwide, we are roughly managing a spend of roughly 12 billion. Why I'm saying that, because for me it's important that everybody understands in the call that we are not just an advisor, we are not just about a consultant, meaning about we indeed are managing a spend of roughly 12 billion, and especially very much focused on indirect spending, especially focusing on global clients which have definitely footprint around the globe. What does it mean? It means that we have roughly about 300 sourcing and the procurement specialists around the world, and we strongly believe that this is by the way one of our unique selling propositions that we have these 20 locations around the globe, where we can definitely also leverage on our shared service centers in Romania and India, but for us it's absolutely essential that we are very close to our clients, helping them locally to understand better what's going on, and finally being capable, obviously, also to discuss with them about strategic changes if strategic changes in the supply chains are necessary. While I'm looking at that one, also that you must probably understand it, it's about what we as chain IQ stands for is very much about the two pillars, the one is about that we are very much a digitalized company. We definitely drive digitalization procurement very actively forward. We're talking about platforms, RPA data, we're talking about artificial intelligence, etc. Whereas on the other side, we strongly believe that as it comes to more strategic views, strategic collaboration, strategic re-evaluation of supply chains for that we have locally and regionally our strategic sourcing experts helping the clients definitely to go through about all the different aspects of procurement. Now when I'm just quickly reviewing about what is currently our status, our status today in the COVID-19 situation, in fact, we are generally very, very happy because we were able to switch to 100% home office within one day. And this was mainly being given because of our digital platforms, digital setup, that means, in fact, purely from a chain IQ perspective, we are not even one day of business interruptions because we were just being capable to drive that forward. And actually what we see is about that purely from a client side, and believe me, we tried to forecast, we tried even about somehow to simulate about the demand in the future and to be honest, we're just giving up to do whatever simulation based on whatever models because currently the situation is so changing fast that what we are doing is about, we are very close to our clients and especially from our strategic sourcing expertise together with strategic source from the client and based in this very close collaboration we are reviewing, in fact, even daily about what's going on, which demand is coming in. And much probably interestingly, but not really a big surprise, much probably for the majority of the people also in the call is about what we see that there is a massive additional demand related to IT services, but it means we are currently sourcing massively more IT software, IT hardware, we definitely are being very much engaged to enable all our clients to definitely get more and quicker to a digital framework. Additionally, what we are seeing is there is a very strong need from our clients to start now having more strategic discussions with us about how to re-design, how to re-paradise, how to de-risk the whole supply chains. And I'm not saying either but richly but even globally because we definitely see that now the clients they do start to think about what's going off to COVID-19, especially because we definitely see especially in Europe certain light at the end of the tunnel what we're seeing is about to go and it's also now re-starting to definitely change about lockdown situation in different client countries. So that means when I'm just quickly wrapping up from my perspective we are so far I believe in a good situation because we are pretty much digitalised what we see is about we cannot really forecast and predict the forecast means the demand especially about our clients to even understand about what's going on so at least we see a strong need to further focus on strategic sourcing and category management to much better understand in fact what's truly going on in the supply chains today but also in the future. What I now would like to do is about to introduce quickly about Richard because Richard is our head of delivery in the US and he definitely can also give you a very good insight from the front what also Richard did together with our clients we truly believe that we are doing especially Richard there is doing an exceptional job. Richard? Yes Lucas thank you can you hear me well? Yes we hear you great. Thank you George, thank you Lucas. So again Lucas thank you for the kind introduction just a little bit of context I mean obviously the focus is on indirect procurement we're not we're non-production so really the focus of what we deliver and how we advise our clients is really around commercial points and corporate function points and so I think stepping back a second before we hit the content of the slide is I think the one thing that's clear about COVID is that everyone was wrong whether it be the healthcare professionals whether it be the governments and I think what's very obvious is we're in a state of incredible uncertainty and that's obviously been reflected in business overall supply chain so on and so forth and I think you know just a personal thought you know obviously the importance of digitalization has gone up 100 fold and hence the importance of this organization DSCI is also gone up 100 fold within the span of 6-8 weeks so I think the one thing that's emerging in the US for sure is you know the possibility that we may never go back to our former ways of working you know entirely so digital supply chain digitization the ways we work I think we're all in for quite a big paradigm shift plate tectonic frankly in terms of our organization as Lucas said you know we switch to a digital delivery model very quickly and I think right now if you ask me hey you know what's the what you're concerned with keeping you up at night it's actually the opposite of something George mentioned earlier where our concern is not around the productivity of our staff globally our concern is around burnout because you know I think what we're seeing is incredible engagement with our employee base and we're seeing people you know having a very difficult time myself included frankly being able to separate the personal and professional lives and maybe spending a little too much time in the work mode so burnout is one of our top concerns so to get to the slide content very quickly here so the content that is showing on your screen is actually over six weeks old so what we initially wanted to do for our clients is give them some very tactical very actionable tasks immediately as soon as the COVID situation unfolded we knew we didn't have time for a webinar or a white paper or anything like that we want to get as tactical as possible with feedback directly from our front line sources and buyers put that into this bulletin which I'll sort of walk you through in a moment but where we're really at now is we're moving from these initial tactical bits to develop a separate set of recommendations and strategies for that matter because what we're seeing across our client base is they're through the initial shock and they're almost moving into a recession like or even depression like mentality questioning okay what is my business going to look like going forward you know beyond COVID or COVID elongates disruption you know what's that look like so the much more systemic discussion now than a survival discussion than it was six weeks ago or so so to run through the slides and I will not go through every bullet because there's a lot of content there and it doesn't make for a fun presentation feel free to employ or use any of this yourselves if you like but just a couple of points so the first bit was we told our clients that you really have to go back and look at the BCP plans the continuity plans of your suppliers obviously we're all executing our own BCPs but you know it's not going to help if a source of supply good or service into a critical process is is failing on you and we found some interesting things I'll give you one Antique Dill you know on the services side outsourced services side what we found was there a tremendous number of outsourced services providers whose BCP plans entailed moving from facility A to facility B very few of them had a BCP plan that said move from facility A to virtual home office many of them at least in the initial days had absolutely no remote work possibility whatsoever because think about it they didn't have laptops they were wired in you know from a security perspective you know to a physical physical terminal so and so forth so that was a challenge again one example but underscores a good reason as to why you know your suppliers BCPs really need to be scrutinized quickly moving along you know obviously technology as I mentioned earlier becoming more paramount than ever I'll give you an example that I never thought I would have experienced in my professional life shortages on laptops and others than client related supply absolutely stunning to us in the early days of this in terms of other things that we looked at you know obviously scaling up and scaling down so understanding employee onboarding off-boarding how do you do a fingerprint how do you do a badge if you need an employee ID how do you get access to systems and platforms if some of the onboarding and off-boarding or onboarding in that case is physical you know something to talk about in terms of the next section contractual rights flexibility you know this is where you have to understand your positions but also be very careful so understanding force majeure looking at contracts you could suspend or cancel things you need to understand but also bear in mind that if you action them it can have long-term consequences with your supply base I have similar thought for you on employees later on but also in terms of benefits having a look at your benefits contracts and what we found is look most companies were not really pushing a lot of the benefits that they were paying for and their employees were paying for their self-funded plans telemedicine mental health services different kinds of insurances COVID specific services again worth a look you're paying for it and you really reap the benefit of it can we go to the next slide and then I'll wrap up so last slide again a long section I'm just going to hit you with a couple of highlights you know look looking at your policies why would you look at your not exactly the most interesting thing you can do in supply chain however very important to ensure that the controls that we put in before COVID are not crushing your business you know changing rules or in systems that facilitate purchasing looking at new purchasing vehicles maybe you didn't use virtual cards before maybe you want to repurpose your expense mechanisms to get critical items to your people again worth a look and just want to make sure that you don't get yourself based on controls that were relevant pre-COVID and with the processing I think this speaks for itself I mean clearly you know if you were a firm and you were set up for 10% of your workforce to be to be virtual and now you're at 100 clearly you want to sit down and understand you know what increased bandwidth what you know what's required from a supply side perspective I think it's obvious physical documents critical statutory HR documents contracts hardware delivery as I mentioned earlier to your staff you know laptops monitors things of that ilk did you have a control that said that you couldn't ship that stuff to home offices don't know worth a look very important repairs don't bother really exchanges are what it's all about in a crisis the physical piece and the cycles associated with repair if you can avoid them do it now's the time all of us I'm sure have a significant significant experience with your Reva's your Cooper's your trade shifts you name it if you have the technology exploit it now because now's the time so that's all I have George thank you excellent hey thank you thank you both can I queue the very interesting company doing great great work and I really appreciate you're sharing your ideas here let me just find out where we've gone through and tried to answer you some of your Q&A's as you as you've asked them I'll go through and get more of those after the call is over is there anyone here who would like to offer any thoughts on these topics as we as we go through as we wrap up the session where we've only got a couple of minutes left so anybody want to offer any thoughts or ideas or questions for the panelists George let me hop in here for a second Mark Baum are you able to share a perspective from the food industry given your membership or Doug Baker are you able to just give us a perspective on another sector in the impact that what you've heard from Diego and from Lucas and Richard how it might compare with what you're doing in the food sector so yeah hi Mark I don't know if Doug is on Doug are you on the line you may not be yeah so where one of those frontline industries whereby we've had to test our supply chain in ways almost unimaginable before all of this and what we've learned without having a lot of time to go into detail here is just how flexible and agile and expandable the supply chain can be put to the test we've had to in some cases just given the exponential increase in demand had to rationalize certain skews to expand capacity for those items that were most in demand and in many cases we had to repurpose so because of the huge increase in demand at retail with a corresponding drop and in a way from home food service and related outlets it wasn't the shortage of supply per se it was really about getting inventory to where it needed to be and that's both you know geographically to stores to in some cases the local food banks and other agencies that were taking care of a lot of people that were laid off or furloughed as a result of this we are still seeing some spot shortages some category somebody mentioned sanitize I think it was you George at the top of the call that is still the case but we are starting to see consumption pick up and sort of level out with demand of course as several of the other speakers mentioned we have no idea with what the back end of this will look like and if we have another outbreak in the fall what the impact will be during a second wave one thing and this might merit some conversation for a future collaboratory which is what this looks like on our business and operating model on the back end what this how this impacts R&D and innovation or SKU rationalization or assortment at store level we have certainly seen a reduction in skews and a reconfiguration of assortment both in center store and around the perimeter and we will see more of that going forward one could actually argue we probably should have been in this exercise 10 or 12 years ago and this is forced the reckoning of that and of course we'll see how this affects line extensions vis-a-vis real innovation going forward there are there's been an unprecedented level of collaboration between upstream players between agriculture and food processors and manufacturers and then downstream between wholesalers and distributors and the self-distributing retail chains as well in order to understand where shortages might occur to also communicate to consumers and other stakeholders the media financial markets and the like just what kind of an impact this is having we're monitoring take away at point of sale on a week by week basis we're still doing some truly incredible spikes in some categories up into triple digits and in some cases we're seeing a leveling off and we'll just have to see how that goes and by the way that's just in the US we're also looking at this globally and I apologize because I know we're out of time but hopefully that gives you some idea of what's been happening here Mark thank you very much that's really helpful thank you over to you it's good to hear how that's working in your industry and we're at the top of the hour so I want to thank everybody for joining we're going to be doing another one of these on May 7th we'll have different companies involved we'll have different geographies again we'd like to look at the world view and we hope you can all join us again thank you very much and everybody stay healthy bye for now thank you very much