 waiting for the ship to dock so they can they can seize something right so so it's a very interesting situation now I think what'll have to happen is they'll have to get some temporary bailout or some temporary relief some guarantees either from governments or for other organizations that may be interested in acquiring some of their assets to relieve the situation so those goods can get unloaded I don't know what you think you're much more informed on I what I had read is that they hand in was scared about entering some ports because they were worried about the creditors would claim their goods but I know I've read that it's about 14 billion dollars to freight that's out there and this is a bad time because a lot of finished goods distributions coming in right before the push for Christmas this is the time when a lot of stuff's coming in so it's gonna have ripple effects and so the question if you're a Samsung or a Walmart right you have something on that ship do you reorder double do you bring other stuff in and fly that in do you try to recover I don't know I don't know how you can pivot I know there's some that are in port I'm just reading this this morning some ships that are in the port they don't want them to leave now because they're afraid they're going to go to a third a different port where they don't have extradition rights they have they don't have those privileges so they want to keep them where they are now so it's an interesting situation I'll continually evolve and what's interesting in week five and six you'll talk about this even more yeah we'll talk about the steamship industry it's ups and downs and how it works in the bullet perfect it's a lot it's actually an interesting and fun industry to watch because there's so much going on in it all the time it's crazy so speaking of the bullet effect are you aware of any recent examples of a company attempting to mitigate the bullet perfect how successful was the initiative and what are the lessons learned so I think there's debate now about how much the bullet perfect actually hits different companies because there's been such advances in a lot of technology and communication because I think is what Bruce was saying earlier communication is at the root of a lot of the problems and so use of point of sale data or more frequently updated point of sale data in most retail chains has really mitigated a lot of this so I've seen for some fast-moving consumer good companies where they've not totally eliminated it but they've reduced it significantly because they have better information not from the retailers DC's but from the retailer stores and so as they get that they can get some advanced notice so I don't think there is shocked anymore however some of the drivers are still there you know the minimum order quantities that drive batching of trucks and the batching of manufacturing stills there although interestingly Procter and Gamble for example has moved to these mixing centers where instead of a retailer requiring a full truckload of of Pampers for example now they can have a mixed full truckload of multiple items so what that does naturally is it reduces that batch size much smaller as you reduce the batch size you get a more frequent delivery so instead of requiring a full truckload of six different product lines you can have more frequent shipments of one full truckload of those six products or categories together so that's something that they've done that has really reduced the amount of batching which in turn reduces that amplitude problem of a bullet just another comment a lot of companies so when the stock market crashes is crashes that you know 2001 2008 there's a need to to reduce your cost structure as fast as you can typically your customers can reduce your your revenue stream a lot faster than you can reduce your cost structure and so having much more of a variable cost cost structure gives you a huge advantage and there's a number of companies that do a lot of outsourcing and purchasing materials and so forth on a variable cost basis you know if you own the factory and you own all the employees it's very slow for you to respond when the economy crashes right if things are contracted out on a variable cost basis then you can bring your expenses down much faster and and so you can minimize the impact of the ups and downs in the economy because you can respond more quickly and have less risk isn't that harder to convince in good times because you're paying more for that contract right you're not going to be paying less than if you own the whole thing so it's not necessarily a low cost when it's blue skies and everything's great well you know the I didn't say this the first time but almost all bad decisions are made in good times and it's very hard to convince in a senior management that you need to do business practices differently because when the crash happens you have to be able to respond you have to be able to reduce your costs you have to be able to cancel when incoming orders you need to be able to so cash be cashers king when the economy goes south and being able to respond quickly is a way to hold on to your cash and and respond yeah make sense okay great so here's a question from vikas he says when developing processes with external stakeholders like 3 pl's transporters etc what are the watchouts what do you look for and how do you dictate expectations in advance for a third party so so someone is not in your organization well one one of the things that that I always suggest is you you have to have those other players the third parties share the same sense of urgency around performance in your supply chain that you have right and that's often a problem where you're working really hard and they're not essentially as dedicated but they're not working over the weekend they're not keeping their employees late at night while you are and there's a big mismatch man so having a supplier scorecard a supplier scorecard is is a relatively simple thing to do but the scorecard has a tremendous amount of power when you submit a scorecard even to an organization much larger than you that scorecard has a life of its own inside that organization and it goes up the chain of command and senior management sees how well they're performing now it may be that you're a relatively small customer but they're still getting feedback from you that that actually has more importance than maybe it even should have but it's a great way to keep those suppliers performing well give them a scorecard that's so what's interesting I found it a slightly different effect when I go out and work with companies it's easier for a lot of companies to work with third parties because it's a contractual relationship that gives in the gets are well-established as opposed to working with someone who doesn't report to me they're kind of they think they're doing me a favor you know so you work with a company where for example large retailers many retailers will have a private fleet and third party a lot of times they'd rather work with the carriers the third-party carriers because they know what they get you know you hold a big hammer over them the fleet you don't control and so it's it's a different set of skills and sometimes the gives in the gets are more well established with a third party and we did a project with BSF several years ago we helped them to find the supply chain strategy because like many large companies I think they have 72 separate business units and everyone had it was his own P&L and so how do you establish a supply chain structure that works for that and they almost had to act as a third party and they had a contractual agreement that gives in the gets for each one of the P&L's custom to them but the only way they could make it work was to clearly define it so yeah it's a different set of challenges right so here's a question for you Chris sure you're gonna enjoy answering this one yes it's from one of our CTA's Alan hold on we're broke good hahaha well we're open again all right okay good no you're up yep all right we're back so question from one of our CTA's Alan or Lane yes with uber beginning testing of driverless cars this week what are the implications for the trucking industry specifically will this allow significant improvements in coordination of deliveries to other business processes so there's a couple different things there's this whole uberization of freight versus autonomous trucks so let's separate the two uberization of freight is really a misnomer right now what what the passenger transportation market is undergoing is what the trucking industry changed in the US in 1980 it's really the brokered brokery gestation of passenger freight so we've gone through that now as far as autonomous trucks that's huge and it's actually been happening in places and and so if you can look it in two different areas where it's applied and how it's applied and it's a it's a continuum it's not like suddenly robots driving no pure humans you sing more automation safety you know enhancements that are making it much more automated along the lines and you're seeing it used in contained areas first a lot of railroads are really leading in this in their yards you're seeing more of it I think eventually it will change dramatically I've made the claim in a bunch of talks I've given that in probably 30 years our kids kids said about what it is gonna be kids kids kids will be shocked that we drove our own cars it's going to become like a thinking back to when's the last generation that rode horses and had horse and bunnies it's gonna be like I can't imagine that it will change trucking I think because then all the hours of service laws go out delivery gets a lot easier but I think we're a good 10 to 15 but they're trying in Pittsburgh but you know they do anything except play football we won by 22 points that's what what's interesting is you see it coming in gradually like lane assist you know you drift you know you're driving but you start to drift off the lane the car tries to put you back in the lane the automatic braking that's happening you're not paying attention so so more and more of these sensors are coming into our existing cars and it be interesting I saw that the article in Pittsburgh you know that driverless uber ubers were taking people around yeah and you know the hype is leading the actuality it's four cars right now if I'm incorrect they have more ready to go and it's a really contained area it's still not they're working out kinks and so I don't think we'll see 53 foot over the road trucks going without anyone in them anytime soon but I think we'll start seeing platooning especially in anyone in Australia we'll see it out there I think they're already doing it to some degree where you have a human in the front maybe human in the back and it makes it a little easier I think the technology is advancing faster than the social acceptance and the regulations and that's why they're trying in in Pittsburgh they're trying to do before any laws have a chance to get written right and so it's very interesting it's a it's an interesting area it'll have a long-term effect I don't see the short term yet a lot of people are trying different things right so it's 1057 now one last question last question have a good one okay a BPR is mainly a cultural change project you take or have you take our business process redesigned okay yeah you take on or have you taken into account culture during these projects well we're out of time we can't Bruce you want to answer that no it's a big part of it's a very human experience business process re-engineering and you bring the parties in the room and they interact with each other and you do have you have engineers that come in the room you have people who are you know in finance and sales and so forth different different personalities and they have to learn to work together and that's part of the process of having to meet each other learn to work with each other and and they and of course if you have an international corporation that has people in different countries of the world they have a different appreciation of what time means when on time means or when meeting starts and so forth and they have different appreciations of risk not all countries think about risk the same way we do so there's a lot of a lot of blending of ideas that has to happen to make the process is successful but do you find that the corporate culture dominates the local culture geography or the other way around does P&G behave the same in Latin America India or does the local culture dominate I think the corporate culture would like to think that it but I don't think that's that's true I think that to be smart you have to adapt it to the local culture because that's after the guy from headquarters goes back home the people who are still there doing the work are from that culture and it has to work in that culture so the process will be consistent across cultures but will be executed differently have you seen that yeah and in fact as some companies L'Oreal was one of the companies that identified multi cultural people people who like spent part of their childhood in one country part of their childhood in another country so they grew up having multiple home countries those people were actually very good at working at a corporate job in trying to get different organizations they're more willing to accept ideas and and ways of doing things in different parts of the world great all right so I think we're gonna wrap it up here thank you Bruce thanks everyone for joining us I apologize for the technology we're trying a new platform so we'll continue to make this a little better I think our next hangout Eva do you know it's coming up we'll announce it it'll be on supply chain strategy it'll be after the midterm that would we'll be with Dr. Roberto Perez Franco and so I hope you're looking forward to that one we'll read the chat open we'll leave the chat open for about an hour or two and then we'll close it down thanks guys