 Thank you for joining today's event. Please stand by for about one minute as we let people join the room and get situated. We hope you enjoy today's presentation. All right, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining our event today. My name is Alexis Bateman and I'm a research scientist here at MIT CTL and the director of MIT Sustainable Supply Chains. And of course some of you will know me as the course lead for SC3X Supply Chain Dynamics. I am co-hosting this live event today with Dr. Ima Brea, course lead of SC1X and also a research scientist here at MIT CTL. Today we're really fortunate to have Mr. Mark Backer, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Operations for Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Thank you so much for joining us today and welcome. Thank you and good morning, good afternoon, good evening maybe in some cases to everybody. It's my pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Great, we're excited to get started. And first, as you know, we like to keep this interactive and so we're gonna be running some polls as we go through the event. So just watch out for it to pop up onto your screen. And so let's get kick off our first poll and see why are you here today? So just take a second to fill this out and then we'll get going. So over to you Ima. Great, thanks Alexis. For about the next five minutes, Mark will provide some context on Hewlett Packard Enterprises and some background about his role. After that Alexis and I will ask some questions. We have prepared based on questions we have received already from some of you. And the last 20 minutes will be saved for your questions. So be ready to ask good questions, use the webinar Q&A feature that you can find at the bottom of your screen to ask these questions and be sure to log with your name because we won't be reading any anonymous questions. And just to reinforce what Alexis said, we will be sharing some polls during the event so be prepared to participate. Let's check the results of that poll, Alexis. I think we have like quite a few people have already responded. So why are you here today? So most of you are already working in the area of supply chain management, 46% of all the participants, which is wonderful. I'm also happy that none of you had nothing else to do today. So that is good that you guys are all very busy people and we appreciate that and we appreciate you sharing that time with us. But yes, definitely getting the practitioner and executive input is great to have today. I guess some more people are just, yeah, just want to get inspired to take the next step in their careers because they want to move to supply chain, to the supply chain space and work there in the future, which is also great. This is a great area to work in. Yep, yep, no, so thanks for sharing that. And also I guess all of you guys know what HPE stands for. So glad that that's already assumed here. So we have next on the agenda, we, oh, go ahead. Yeah, so Mark, would you like to kick it off and introduce yourself and give a brief overview of HPE? Yeah, I certainly can. You know, take a few minutes to talk about that. So we start, I think you introduced me. Hi everybody, Mark Bukker. I lead global operations for Ulet Packard Enterprise. Ulet Packard Enterprise is a, you could call it a spin-off. You could call it a spin-off of the original Ulet Packard company. Founded in 1939 by Bill Ulet and Dave Packard. Also considered as the founding fathers of Silicon Valley. They founded the company in 1939 in Palo Alto, California. This is a small town, small town in the San Francisco Bay Area, about 30 minutes south of San Francisco. For those of you who don't know where that is, and they founded it in a garage. That garage still exists. By the way, it's considered a little bit of a monument in the Silicon Valley area, as I said, because it's considered the early start of Silicon Valley as a tech haven with lots of development. And in that area, as many of you may know, still today, there's lots of headquartered, tech headquartered companies. And not too far away, Stone Throwaway is Google, is Facebook, Apple has massive headquarters there, just to name a few. And over the years, there has been lots of money made and lots of money put into venture capital, private equity, invested in startups. And that's how Silicon Valley continued to grow and grow and grow. As I said, companies existed in quite some time. Company originally mostly known for its printing business, HP DeskJet, laser jet printers, known for its personal computing products, notebooks, laptops, desktop products, as well as server networking equipment and services around that. About five years ago, almost six years ago, the company went through significant restructuring and separated itself in two pieces. One piece is HP, still considered HP, which takes care of print and personal systems or PC clients. And the other part, ULT Packet Enterprise, which is focused on the enterprise side of products, server business, storage, data management, networking equipment and its associated services. That's the area where I work and lead the global operations organization. Global operations is a combination of what is considered customer operations, everything front end, taking care of order management activities, processing orders, invoicing orders, fulfilling orders, quoting, pricing, and so on. And then there is what you could call classic supply chain activities, a part of global operations. And classic supply chain activities include planning, everything around planning, planning is everything. We can talk more about that as we continue the dialogue, but demand planning, forecasting, supply planning, inventory planning included in there, but also the manufacturing activities to bring a product to life, fulfilling the product logistics, engineering is included in that sourcing, very important sourcing of parts, to build the product in the factories. So true end-to-end supply chain activities fall under my responsibility. And we are here to support the business. We're here to support customers. On the front end, the customer operations piece, we are here to support the business to be successful. When they sell products, we wanna make sure that customers get their products delivered. As the reality is, if you sell what you do not deliver, the company doesn't make any revenue or doesn't make any profit off of it because the customer doesn't pay for something he doesn't receive. So it's fairly simple that way, a critical role. And so for those of you who are thinking about being a supply chain practitioner, I can only recommend you to take it very serious and do it because it's the most exciting part of the business because you are in the middle of everything and touching every part of a company from a front end, engaging with customers to being involved in manufacturing and sourcing, supporting the P&L performance of a business and so on. So if I haven't convinced you yet, in about 50 minutes from now, it's my goal to convince you that you should be considering a career in supply chain. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for the great introduction to HPE and also for the passionate defense of the supply chain management space, which I could not agree more that supply chain is so relevant for the business and how it connects everything and how it's so interesting to work in that space. So now let's dive into some questions. And actually my first question is very much related to what you just said. In one of our courses, the C1X Supply Chain Fundamentals, the one I'm running, we just teach these fundamentals that you use daily at work and you just mentioned some of those for casting inventory management, transportation management. So can you talk a little bit more about some of those applications and how they impact the top and bottom line of your business? Yeah, that's very exciting actually. We only have about an hour. I can talk for days on these topics and how relevant and how important they are. I said, planning is everything. And that truly is the case, not to minimize, marginalize the importance of other domains or functional areas in a supply chain environment, but it starts with the plan and it's fairly simple. Demand, customers are particularly in an enterprise environment. Customers are thinking about what they're going to spend their money on. They have budgets to spend and what infrastructure or what investments are they going to make in the next year? And what is very challenging in a supply chain environment is to know early enough what the demand is going to look like. What are customers going to order from us? And when you think about a tech product, whether it is a PC or a printer or in our case a server, there is a lot of components that go in there. There is memory chips, there is processors, there's motherboards, there is storage device, hard disk drive or solid state drives, network cards, all those things make up a product and you need to know how many of those parts you need where in your supply chain, in your manufacturing network. And if you are wrong, if you plan it wrongly, so you do not have enough parts, you get customer orders that you cannot fulfill within a certain period of time. If you have too many parts at the end of a period, you sit on inventory which has a value and that value sits on your balance sheet, is a drag on your cash conversion cycle, on your cash performance, cash flow performance for the company, which if you are a private company, you may be able to handle it depending on your financial statements and how much cash you actually have available. But if you're a publicly traded company, stock listed, that can be an influencer in the performance of your stock on the stock exchange. So, two things, one is if you don't plan right, you have two evils, which is one is, your customers will not be happy with you because they place an order and you tell them, well, I can only service you five months from now. The other way around is, I have too much stuff, your financial performance takes a hit. So planning, super important, and it goes into a lot of detail. So it's actually, again, for those of you who are interested in that very fascinating data rich environment, where data science, data management, analytics, et cetera, comes together with managing the physical world of parts and components in an environment. So planning, forecasting, usually important in the value chain as such. I hope I answered that, Ima. Yeah, that's perfect. Or in another, I can go, like I said, I can talk for hours on this. This is great. And actually you highlighted one point that we repeat over and over and over during our courses that in supply chains, you always have to make these decisions that are trade-offs between having too much and having too little. And just finding the right balance is very challenging, but it's also like the way to go. So thanks so much, Mark. I think that you responded to that. One important aspect of that as well is depending on the company, the product, and the characteristics of that, there is sometimes this aspect of perishable. Parishable is a term which goes both ways. One is from a customer demand point of view, customer demand can be perishable. Think about government spend. Government spend has a budget for the year. And typically they have to spend it before a certain date. And if they don't, that budget is gone because we've moved into the next year. That's how that demand might be perishable. So if you do not take the order, fulfill the order, it's gone, it will not come back. And so perishable. The flip side is from a material point of view or inventory point of view, some products or some parts, they can perish as well. They're no longer current or especially when you go down pharma or food, and then you have to write it off, which is costing a lot of money, right? So depending on what the product set is and so on, those are things that become even more important. Definitely. Thank you, Mark. Yeah, that was super interesting. Definitely thinking about some of the fundamentals we're teaching right now and how we're coming to some of those perspectives and how you can apply it in your situation. And then of course not that there's any right answer. Sometimes it's a juggle to trade off. So let's launch our second poll, which is a fun HPE trivia. So I wish I had a drawing, but I don't. So let's see which of you guys get it right. So just, I can see there's a pause on filling this out so that everyone's furiously Googling this. So to see if we can get this right, but while everyone responds, I know this is the question and the elephant in the room of the last year, given that you are running global supply chains and global operations, how have you seen COVID-19 and the disruptions, not just COVID-19, but the disruptions of the course of the last year really challenge and complicate global supply chain management and perhaps also how you've seen it drive innovation in terms of what has been happening over that time period. Yeah, in recent years in particular, supply chain disruptions have become a more common term where even nowadays, the White House in the United States starts to talk about it, which is a good thing. We can go there if you like, but supply chain disruptions are significant and I keep telling everybody they're becoming more, more frequently and they're becoming bigger. I've been doing this for close to 20 years in the meantime and over those years, I've seen various forms of disruptions with significant floods in Thailand that disrupted the hard disk drive manufacturing. All of hard drive manufacturing was basically concentrated in Thailand, earthquakes resulting in tsunamis in Japan. It's very much involved in components, technological supply chain activity, which disrupted seen volcano eruptions in Iceland that created an ash cloud over Western Europe, which disrupted air freight and air freight is usually important when you talk about logistics and transportation, the amount of goods that are being transported by air and if you don't do that, your supply chain gets disrupted. So they've seen many over the years, but most of the time those are, call it isolated in one particular area. I mean, there's other examples of a factory catching fire, which reduces a significant amount of capacity globally, but it's contained in one area. The difference with last year is that the pandemic affected everything and everybody almost at the same time. Nobody spared and impacted from finished goods manufacturing facilities to component manufacturing facilities to logistics networks because of local authority restrictions on moving of people and goods, even to the point of if we would be able to find parts, build them and ship them, customers being closed because they shut down their offices and there's nobody to receive anything. So from that perspective, this the pandemic, I always say, we plan a good supply chain organization has a focus on business continuity planning and how do you react to disruptions and so on, but typically it's a reactive activity. You always review the latest event that happened and you adjust your plan accordingly. So what did we learn from this event and what do we need to adjust in our continuity planning? And so that's great, but you never plan for the eventuality of the next and we don't know what the next one is. We know something's coming. After the pandemic, there is a new disruption coming. Actually the latest and the greatest already happened which was the vessel that got stuck in the Suez Canal which disrupted about 10%, 15% of global trade some more affected than others, but we were also focused on pandemic related stuff. Did anybody think about what are we gonna do if a vessel gets stuck in the Suez Canal? And then there's plans that happen along the way. So I think it opened our eyes to even more global disruption happening at the same time. I think from our perspective, we look at that and say, are we, and the new buzzword in supply chain lingo, but even CEOs and boards of companies now think about supply chain disruptions and they talk about resiliency and agility associated with that. Are we resilient? I think many of us will say, yeah, we were resilient because if you think of it, it took the world maybe one quarter, three, four months. And after that, we restarted global supply chains fairly quickly. Biggest disruption that everybody probably experienced was we ran out of toilet paper. We did, but it took us maybe a month, two months, three months to figure that one out. And then we all had toilet paper again. So we have a certain level of resiliency built in and I think considering the magnitude of the pandemic, we've proven that we are resilient, but are we resilient enough? Probably not because we want to be even faster. We don't want three months, four months. Before we feel that we have enough toilet paper on the shelves again, right? We want it to be a week, two weeks or board members or CEOs wanted to not happen at all. Now, that is more difficult. Resiliency, agility in the supply chain environment comes with a cost. You can duplicate your entire infrastructure. Say, I have one factory in the East and one factory in the West and they do the same thing. If this one goes down, I have that one taking over, but then you have a lot of idle capacity which has a lot of cost. You have a lot of inventory sitting in both places which is very expensive. So there is this right balance to find in terms of I want to be resilient and agile and agility is probably the more important aspect of this whole resiliency and disruption conversation which means how fast can you switch? How fast can you react and resolve the problem? And I think that's where we're learning a lot about the importance of data, the importance of systems, the importance of visibility in your entire supply chain, what is happening where, where are your capacity constraints, your over capacity, where are your parts, your components, what are your inventory levels, how fast can I move inventory from A to B to fix a disruption, but also overall, I think this is where again, supply chain becomes a fascinating space to work in. The importance of IT solutions, applications, et cetera and the connection, supply chain cannot function well without a proper architecture and a proper infrastructure of tools and systems and processes that provide the right level of visibility which you then can use for multiple reasons to react to the agility piece, but also to be better in terms of the way you serve customers and so on. So I think we knew that already, but the whole pandemic situation only amplified the importance of that. Yeah, that's really interesting and thinking about one dimension that you mentioned was now that the supply chain has the clearing of shelves and those physical manifestations of that disruption, it's escalated it to conversations that may not have existed before such as at the C-suite level in the White House and of course, my dad finally knows what a supply chain is most important of all those factors. So I think, do you see that recognition of the criticality of supply chains changing the dynamic of the investment of resources to plan for disruption or do you see some change as a result of that? No, absolutely. I think the importance of supply chain or recognition for supply chain as a critical business process, if you want increased substantially, increased during pandemic, but actually it started already before the pandemic. There's several events that triggered reactions from CEOs and boards of companies, et cetera, which was not so much pandemic related, but global trade and trade tension related. The introduction of import duties or tariffs on products manufactured in China created a significant wave of reactions particularly in the United States, companies, a lot of companies headquartered in the United States, US companies, they have a significant portion of their business, depending on the revenue they make in the United States. For many, many years enjoyed zero import duties, zero tariffs on their products, all of a sudden it became 15%, 25%. And that's a huge impact, right? If you think of it, all of a sudden you have 25% more cost and if you don't plan for it and consumers that buy those products not necessarily want to see prices go up by 25% because of it. So that created already a lot more interest in the whole concept of supply chain and other dimensions as well, but a pandemic again amplified some of that. What I'm seeing, as the global operations lead I report to the CEO, I'm a member of the executive leadership team of the company. Take it five years ago, 10 years ago, the supply chain leader would probably be sitting in a level two, level three part of the organization and doing more or less the same thing, but the impact in multiple areas has triggered the attention of leadership teams and boards and so on and like you said, including politics. And it's about the impact on the financials of a company but also other things have become more and more relevant. Again, resiliency, agility, disruptions related, important, but also social, environmental, corporate responsibility aspects become more and more important. We are seeing, as one of those things is that corporate enterprise and even more so public sector, so government agencies are making some of those aspects part of their RFQ. So when they tend their business saying, I'm interested in buying a ton of equipment from somebody, but I want to know, is the product you're selling to me, is there anything around conflict minerals or labor issues or what's your impact on the environment the way you manufacture stuff or the way you transport stuff? I want to understand and it becomes a criteria for decision making more and more. And because of that, all of a sudden, more people start paying attention to those things. So definitely seen that happen over the years I've been involved in this, that it becomes more of a conversation in the boardroom. And again, like I said, the most recent example of that is in the tech industry, there is another issue happening right now which is the semiconductor shortage, or the chip shortage you read about in the news due to significantly more demand or recovery after pandemic happening faster than anybody anticipated, but also more segments, sectors, needing those chips, automotive, cars nowadays, have a lot more technology in them than they used to maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago. Smartphones keep growing. People working from home, studying from home, only laptops and more so than ever before. We have the switch from 4G to 5G on smartphone, on telecom, which comes with IoT, internet of things. There's more devices that can connect and they can talk through mobile networks. So more and more of those chips required. Now there is a shortage. Everybody is concerned about it. Automotive plans are down, they're not producing as many cars as they can. They have millions of backlog because they're missing a 25 cent part. That's it, right? A whole car cannot be finished because they're missing one 25 cent part. And so that has led to President Biden doing a workshop two weeks ago with leaders from the tech industry to talk about how can we fix this problem? Where do we need to invest in more chip capacity? We are too dependent on Taiwan, on China for chips. We need to invest in the United States because we need to reduce the dependency. So you see how supply chain as a concept, as a practice becomes more and more relevant, more important and enters a whole range of new discussions, which is good. It's exciting. Living that shortage is not so exciting, but like I said, if it's not this one, it will be something else in the years to come. Yes, absolutely, that was awesome. Really awesome coverage of kind of how it's evolved over the last few years. So let's get back to our poll, Ima, do you wanna? No, I just wanted to thank Mar for the great, no explanation on how like just he frame it so well, like so many different sources for disruptions and also the trade-offs again, but like you have a budget, how do you allocate that budget to prepare for an uncertain future? So again, we see that concept of how would you make those decisions? Let's go with the poll. So did people get it right? So the most popular answer was walkie-talkies for the military. So that is certainly one potential. I was hoping you guys were gonna pick personal computer for NASA, but the actual answer is audio oscillator for Disney. So that was the original. First product, $500. That was it. So just some fun to read there. Thanks for that. Great, so let's continue with another question. And I think this one connects very well with something you mentioned earlier, Mark, to an appropriate IT infrastructure for the supply chain to provide this end-to-end visibility that allows you to make better decisions. And now like in the future too. So all these eruptions we've seen in the past year and the other ones you mentioned, right? We've seen that that has driven innovation and also digital transformation in many companies. So could you share a little bit how has HP innovated and built more resilience just through implementing more digital technologies? Yeah, super trendy supply chain disruptions, resilience, agility, super trendy words, right? Digital transformation, also very trendy words. But very important. Actually, from the company perspective, you look back at enterprise, there is the two parts, right? The job I have that requires digital transformation and a solid architecture and infrastructure to support that. But the company sells solutions that help do digital transformation for companies, right? So it's important on top of mind, for me, from multiple aspects. What have we done? And we hear others do that. There's a lot of development in new systems and capabilities. But first of all, a lot of companies, the backbone of any supply chain and operational environment is the ERP system and a price resource planning. And what you see typically is companies over the years, the big companies, large enterprise companies, they go through growth, they acquire other companies, they started off being a decentralized company, and then they started centralizing and globalizing more, resulting in having 10, 15, 20 different versions of ERP, which if you're the supply chain guy is a nightmare because that means you have 20 different versions of data to look at. So what you wanna do is try to get to one single instance of an ERP, but one single instance of an ERP in a global company that runs billions and billions of dollars in transactions through it is also a challenge because then you get into performance issues and so on, right? So, but a lot has happened over the years with large companies like SAP and Oracle, developing new state of the art 2021, 2022 style solutions there. So what we've done as if others migrated our ERP system to the latest version, that's tricky because as I said, it's the backbone of the company. And so, it's like open heart surgery. Because you're running your shop and you're trying to put something new in place, you still have lots of customers that place orders that need to be fulfilled and so on, right? So those are exciting things. So that's one. The other one is investments in the planning solutions, demand planning, forecasting and so on investments there. But the most, I think the most impactful and where there's a lot of development from a digital transformation and investments in IT infrastructure architecture is the capturing of data. The biggest challenge in a supply chain environment is that it's end to end, right? You go from customer demand, customer demand, which talks about a unit, a sales guy wants to talk dollars, the manufacturing guy wants to talk units, the sourcing guy wants to talk parts. I don't care about how many finished goods you're talking. I need to know how many hard drives, how many processors, how many network cards I need to go buy and which ones. The logistics guy doesn't care about that. He cares about kilos. He cares about pallets. He cares about containers, ocean vessels, airplane, ULDs and cost per kilogram and uplifting that stuff, right? So each of them have their own version unit of measure and each of them will generate tons of data. And if you then have my logistics data and one database with those units of measures and I have my planning database and my manufacturing database, how do I take all that stuff and aggregate it and make some sense out of it from an end to end, left to right perspective, right? That's where there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of investment as well. Visibility is hugely important and huge investments creating networks whereby you hook up suppliers and logistics providers and manufacturing partners, et cetera. You hook them up into a network where all the data comes together and then you put this layer of data analytics, data science. And now we go into the artificial intelligence, machine learning that can help a ton. That's the next evolution if you think about digital transformation. We're investing in from a demand planning forecasting point of view is that, we have a lot of historical data, what algorithms can we develop that will help us to be more accurate in our forecasting at the component level. So that's where, as I said in the beginning, it becomes a really fascinating place because it combines a physical supply chain world with data, the logical world. And depending on what your passion is, you can find jobs and interesting things to work on in this environment easily. You're an engineer, if you're a data scientist, you're a business guy, if you are a planner, all these different aspects are there. But yeah, digital transformation, investment in tools is a big hype, very important, because as I said, there's more and more data available and to manage all that data the right way and take advantage of it and make better decisions along the supply chain. It's gonna be very helpful, but it takes a lot of work and education development of all of us on what we can do with it. Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I think digital transformation is a huge challenge and anyone that is trying to make it happen in their company know that it is, but it's also necessary. It's a step that everyone needs to take to be competitive and remain competitive. I loved how you highlighted the role of supply chain as this connector and translator between all these different parts of the supply chain and even the company and also with external stakeholders and partners. So I think that's a key element also in the digital transformation and a role that only supply chain management can play. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I thought that was really fascinating just kind of putting in sort of that singular objective of each of those roles, right? That they need to get their job done, but really to make supply chain effective, you have to look across all those functions and put them together. And so just the huge, the significance of it was really amazing. So you touched on it a little bit earlier, but something near and dear to my heart and many on the line, I'm sure, is the shift to sustainability and supply chain. We've seen clearly there's a push for sustainability broadly in business, but the centralization and strategicness of supply chain, pushing or owning sustainability, driving it across the value chain. Can you talk a little bit about how you've seen that and what do you think it means for some of the professionals we have on the line? Yeah, sustainability again has different aspects. There is a social aspect to it. There's an environmental aspect to it. I think those are equally important. I engage with a fair amount of peers of mine, practitioners in different companies, even different industries, from consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, tech, and so on and everybody has one way or another. We had a big session with Unilever a couple of weeks ago where the chief supply chain officer of Unilever talked about why and how they give sustainability, how they've made that a big agenda all the way up to the executive level, the boardroom level. It's just simply everybody realizes, like us in our daily lives, we've become a lot more conscious about the impact we all have on the planet and the role we can and need to play. And there is one big truth, which is in the supply chain environment, supply chain has a huge impact. Logistics manufacturing, right? Depending on what you manufacture, how you manufacture and any kind of emissions that are there have an impact. Logistics, CO2 emissions, the worst offender, believe it or not, to CO2 emissions is ocean freight. If you look at these ocean vessels and what they produce, these big diesel engines in the transportation, air freight, similar. So it's simply no denying that doing those things has CO2 emissions are there, which is bad for the environment and we need to be conscious about it. So it's just simply the right thing to do to focus on it. Secondly, as we all as consumers, as human beings, become more sensitive to this, we are also human beings that have a professional life. We work in companies. We are people that become decision makers in these companies. And as we become more sensitized and conscious about the impact, we built that into the decision-making process of what we buy. When we want to separate our waste, we go to supermarkets and we look at the labels and things like that, right? So that finds itself into procurement departments in companies and when they, like I said, when they tender. So when you then run a business, there's the two aspects. You want to do what's right. And secondly, your customers are asking for it. So it becomes an imperative by design to focus on and to do the right thing. That's mostly, you know, the most sensitivity is around the environmental stuff, but for us, you know, in the larger HP company and Ulet Packard Enterprise, now for many years, we've also been very concerned about labor conditions. We set up, you know, together with our tech partners, you know, in the industry, think about Apple and so on, set up huge factories in China where all these products are being manufactured. Millions of people work in there. And the conditions in some of these are manufacturing places that have 250, 500,000 people that live in the factory dorm, you know, they go to work there on the production line and at night they go to their dorm, there is some entertainment, they get their food, et cetera. And so those conditions, you know, have been focused for us in the tech industry for sure, right, because it's just the right thing to do. We can't, you know, it's just not right, you know, when, you know, people are working 15-hour days and hardly get food, hardly get breaks, you know, seven days a week, you know, are treated, you know, badly, you know, it's just not right. So we shouldn't let that happen. Similar, you know, when you go into tech, some of the components or raw material required to build components, you know, printed circuit boards and all those integrated circuits, et cetera, those raw components where they come from, it's mining. And so what are the conditions, you know, in mining, are we sending little kids into mines, you know, the conflict mineral story in Africa, you know, those are things that are usually important, you know, and it's hard because it goes deep into, you know, upstream into your supply chain, right? It goes from raw material building this stuff and how do you control all those things? And, you know, again, you know, it's just the right thing to do for the people, the planet around us. And we need to keep working it. Is it perfect? I don't think it's perfect, right? I mean, there's stuff happening every day, all day in certain places from a, you know, people impact perspective in communities around the world, from an environmental perspective, it's a challenge, right? Because we all want stuff, you know, to be built and we want it cheap and we want it fast and, you know, then it's easy to cut corners, but it has an impact and we need to be conscious about it and we need to find ways, all of us together on how we solve that problem. Yeah, that was really well said, really interesting. I think, you know, as many explore sustainability, right? They jump really to the environmental issues because they're easier to quantify, they're the kind of very physical manifestation of, you know, sustainability as it was this time, you know, it was defined originally, but as you so rightly said, the social side is critical to our supply chains and it's sort of a hidden issue that people really don't understand about some of the conditions that are deep in supply chains that are at the raw material phase of mining and production and I think it was just really great to kind of look at the big picture of sustainability that it's all encompassing. And there is this aspect of cost that comes into play, you know, one big problem where probably many of us are aware of is the amount of plastic in ocean, right? Huge opportunity that provides a huge source of material to collect it, right? To melt it and to reuse it as resin, you know, becoming plastics, you know, for products and so on. But it's cheaper, you know, to pump oil out of the ground, you know, make resin, you know, virgin resin as they call it, you know, and use that. It's cheaper than to go out into the ocean, collect all this stuff, then you need to melt it, you need to clean it because it's not, you know, virgin, so colors, you know, things like that. You know, we've had this big debate in the company, in our printing division about, you know, building white printers. And, you know, you take virgin plastic, you can make it as white as white can be. You use recycled plastic, getting it white as white can be is practically impossible because there's contamination in it, you know, one way or another. And the amount of time you would have to clean it and filter it and so on is just not practical, not possible even. But then the question becomes, as consumers, right? How important is it that that printer is white as white can be, or is it okay if it's a little bit less white? Or is it okay, you know, to pay $5 more so that we can collectively, you know, go out, collect all these bottles, you know, plastic, you know, from the ocean, et cetera, recycle it and so on. And those are, you know, the really fundamental societal questions, you know, that we struggle with because many of us as consumers, if you're not involved in it, you just don't know, you know, some of these practicalities of it or the differences, right? And the fact that we should, you know, this is one big theme in supply chain that we need to do a lot more circular economy and, you know, really start reusing, recycling materials in a much better way to avoid having to keep pulling, you know, from the planet for raw material. Yeah, absolutely. Now, and I thought it was really a good example of bringing out the plastics and the choices between, obviously, you know, ocean plastics and the challenges of collection and extra cost there. So I think it's a great way to frame it. So I think we're going to run our last poll. Ema, do you wanna grab some questions to start with so we can get a few questions before we end? I think I can launch the poll. Okay, it's out. So one last poll for you guys. While you respond to that, we can start like just picking on some of your questions. We have a bunch of questions, 48 questions. I don't think we have time to go through all of them, but we'll pick up some. I think these are really great questions in this poll. So this one is about actually the people I choose to work in your team. So what is one of the skills you consider most valuable for someone working in the supply chain? I think, you know, there's multiple skills that I think are important, but I would say nowadays, no matter what domain, whether it is planning or transportation or logistics or manufacturing, engineering, et cetera, I think the most important skill is, you know, almost like curiosity, focus on innovation. There's innovation, you know, possible in each and every one of these areas. Innovation, you know, with a customer mindset, right? Focused on what will help our customers be more successful. Innovation and process improvement, analytics. You know, we talked about data, the abundance of available data and using that data to your advantage, I think is really, you know, important skill, digital transformation, innovation of processes and procedures, customer centricity, very important, you know, because that's why we're here, business acumen, you know. So there's, you know, a lot of those things that can help depending on what you do, a technical stuff, like I said, you know, even if you're an engineer, working in a supply chain environment, engineering, products, you know, need to be introduced into a manufacturing environment, quality, you know, we want to build products that have quality that, you know, customers can actually use and don't have to return or repair. So yeah, depending on which domain, there is plenty of interesting skills required and apply. Okay, so data literacy and skills, innovation and customer centric would be like three of the pillars and then of course, beyond that, like many other skills. Thanks Mark, Alex, would you like to pick another one? Yeah, absolutely. So Darzat asks, I thought it was good, you talked about resiliency. So he's asking how resiliency was implemented in your supply chain during the pandemic and now into the new normal and sort of how you're building resiliency in. So we did another, you know, a round of working with our manufacturing facilities and partners and suppliers on, you know, taking a look at their business continuity plans. We revisited, you know, areas where we felt, you know, we might be single sourced, you know, from a component supply perspective. So if you're single sourced and that one supplier has one factory and that one goes down, right, that limits your ability to react. So we looked at that. We looked at, you know, our system capabilities to transfer quickly from one location to another. Because sometimes, you know, people think that it's easy, you know, or just move manufacturing of product A to another location, but if you don't have your system set up, don't have your products set up in the system on what the bill of material is to go build, you know, that product, you know, you can move the material, but the line worker doesn't know what to do with that order because he doesn't see it in his system, right? So we looked at things like that, re-looked obviously again at all the locations around the world where they are and are they more susceptible to disruptions than other places. And those have been some of the things we have been working on. We're not done. There's more because as I said, you know, this has opened our eyes to a whole new concept of disruptions when it happens everywhere at the same time as opposed to one single area, you know, that is affected. So more than it can, it needs to be done. Yeah, absolutely. So going back to the digital transformation discussion that we started earlier, people are wondering what is the approach or your approach to increase adherence to the new tools and processes that you're implementing to talk about the challenge of like bringing everyone together in the new ERP system. So how are you actually like incentivizing people to make this move? You know, the interesting, so there's two parts to it. One is, you know, when you go through those mega transformation activities and you implement new systems, one of the important aspects of the process or the project itself is to switch off the old one. So, you know, you transition and you migrate over to the new one. And once you're done and everybody's on the new one, you switch off the other one so that nobody can go back because that would be a disaster, right? If you, an ERP system, new orders need to come into your new ERP system. If they keep coming in the old one, you know, I mean, that's, you know, complete chaos, you know, from there and forward. So switching off, you know, the old system is one. And the second one is the new systems, new ERPs, you know, they're designed and developed in a way most of the time that they guide the process, right? So it's built on a business process or a business process is built on the systemic capabilities. And, you know, in some cases, you know, these things become a lot more rigorous. So, you know, depending on what you do in the process, you sometimes don't even have a choice to, you know, to follow, you know, how the new system will do these things. And then it's change management with these big transformations, management of change, you know, having, you know, helping people to migrate over, change is hard. I mean, we can talk for another hour about, you know, change management, management of change, how do you do these big projects, right? And how do you get people, you know, to adopt and adapt to change, you know, it's hard. It's really hard because people are used to something and, you know, you give them something new or something different and to migrate over is always a challenge. Some people are, you know, more eager to do that kind of stuff. Some people are more conservative and say, you know, I just like the way things are today. And you need to manage that very carefully. Yeah, absolutely. That's really helpful. So supply chains need to be agile and people as well. So learning and upgrading all the time. So we'll just, so we have 50 more questions, but unfortunately we're coming down to the end just to share the poll results. What was more interesting? What was the most interesting part of today's session? 46% said, expanding my knowledge on global supply chain management. So certainly a really fascinating session on that. And then 28 on understanding the constraints of operating during a crisis. So clearly, clearly top of mind for those that are operating the supply chain and our professionals from around the world and 12% learning more about the methods practitioners use. So really interesting there. So we're at the hour. Any final words for our professionals, Mark? And as we sign off. Yeah, I'm disappointed in this last poll to have only been able to convince 11% of the audience to consider a career in supply. But at the same time. I think they're a convinced audience. So that's it. You must have been ready in the end. Maybe a lot of them already are. So then to have been able to expand the knowledge is probably a good achievement. No, it was my pleasure to be here and cover some of these fascinating and interesting topics. I enjoy talking about these things. I enjoy being a practitioner and continuing to do so. And I hope it was helpful. We so appreciate your time. And yes, it's super fascinating for us and all those that were on the line. So really, really thankful for your time and everyone have a great day. Have a great day and thanks for sharing your passion, Mark. Thank you. Really came through.