 And we are live. Great. OK, hey, Global Supply Chainers. Thanks for joining us today. This is our second live event for SE3x Supply Chain Dynamics. And as you've been hearing from me from the emails, if you don't already know me, I'm Alexis Bateman, a research scientist with the Center. And I'm back for my maternity leave. So now I'm running the course I took over from INMA a couple of weeks ago. So I'm excited to get to work with all of you guys. And today we have a really exciting live event. We're going to host Kathy Rodriguez from General Mills, Director of End-to-End Supply Chain Strategy. So I'm just going to give a very brief course update. And then I'm going to introduce her background. And then she'll tell you a little bit about herself and General Mills. And then we're going to get started with a really cool interview. So let's just start the really quick housekeeping stuff for a course update. So as you received the email yesterday, midterm will be opening tomorrow at 1,500 UTC. And so be prepared for that midterm. You only have one week to take it. But once you open it, it will only be open for four hours for you. So set aside that block of time to take your midterm. It should only run about two hours, but just be prepared to have that block of time ready to take the midterm. I would probably go back, do some creative assignments that trip you up, review some notes, look at the slides. And that should prepare you well for the midterm. Other housekeeping things is for our week four graded assignment. Remember that it will close tomorrow. But then if you haven't yet graded your peers, you'll need to do that in the next week. And that will close after the midterm or at the same time as the midterm. So make sure to grade your peers so that you get the full credit for the question. And then you will have your full credit for the graded assignment. So those are just some really quick housekeeping things. I'd rather spend more time with Kathy because we're very lucky to have her today. So just a quick background bio about her. So Kathy Rodriguez, as I already said, is the director of end-to-end supply chain strategy at General Mills. She's also a MIT supply chain management master's alumni. So she got the master's with us a few years ago and has benefited from it. So Kathy is a seasoned supply chain expert. She's been with General Mills for the last 18 years. And she's held various positions, including plant operations manager, demand planning manager, director of supply chain transformation, and into her current role now as the director of end-to-end supply chain strategy. She really has the whole range of experience. She has it from hands-on day to day to the strategic across the supply chain. So we're really lucky to have her. And so I just want to hand it over to her for it to give her a little bit more about herself and a little bit on General Mills. Thanks, Kathy. Great, thank you, Alexis. It's really, in a few years, it's been 10 years since I was attending the program at MIT. And it's been quite a fun decade since. And so just to give you a little bit of background on, first, on General Mills, that's the company I've been with for 18 years. So those of you who are from the US, I'm sure you're very familiar with General Mills, but around the world, different brands are probably how you might know us. So we're a company that's been around for over 150 years. We were founded back in 1866 and started our business in the flower industry. And we were very much a purpose-driven company. So all employees know that our purpose is to serve the world by making food people love. And we're doing a pretty good job of that at being the sixth largest food company. We have hundreds of iconic brands, and we're also the third largest organic food supplier. And the brands that you might know are the Big G breakfast cereals, such as Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of my favorites. And we have hundreds of other global brands, Yo-Play, Pillsbury, Nature Valley, Granola Bars, Betty Crocker, Old El Paso, and then, of course, Yanis, and that's our big organic business. And then most recently, we've acquired, we've moved into the pet food business and we've recently acquired Blue Buffalo. So pretty excited about adding blue to our family. And then Alexis, you also introduced me, so thanks for sharing the bio there. I've been, as she mentioned, with General Mills for 18 years. Currently in an end-to-end supply chain strategy role at General Mills, my background is both manufacturing operations. So when I started with General Mills right out of undergrad, I was a chemical engineering major. I worked in several of our factories, making cereal and making yogurt. And then after I attended MIT, I then went into corporate supply planning and supply chain planning leadership roles. And then on and off for the past five years, I've been in the space leading supply chain strategy and optimization for the North America businesses. Great, thanks. So we're really lucky to have you. Thank you so much. So today, as we talked about and as we've done in the past is, I have a few questions for you and I'll try not to dominate it too much. And then we'll open it up to the student questions. So we'll, and as some of you guys, the students have seen already, we pulled out a poll there. And so if you haven't already, throw in your answers. So just thinking about, you know, Kathy and her career progression, how she's, you know, in her mid-career and joined, it came back for the Masters and then came back into General Mills and is now in the strategy position. We see that about 16% of you guys are just getting started in your career. 35% of majority are early career and then 26% mid-career. And then some of you guys are switching careers to supply chain management, which is also very exciting, 19% and then there, which is 3%. So that kind of gives an idea that we're a lot of early career, so really, oh, mid-career just jumped up. So definitely still a kind of formative phase of a supply chain management. So we'll talk a little bit through Kathy's experience and some of her experience at General Mills. So Kathy, can you talk a little bit about your decision to return for SEM, a supply chain management Masters during your career and then how that changed your path? Absolutely. So it's good to hear there's folks in early career all the way to mid-career and I think there's never, it's never too late to change careers and move into supply chain management. For me, as I mentioned, I started out working in manufacturing. So with the chemical engineering background, I was in a cereal plant really responsible for improving the processing of how we made our different cereals. And so my focus was really deep on the manufacturing systems and how efficiently and safely our products were made really within the four walls of the plant. And so so much of my time was really focused on learning to be a leader and how to serve our plant employees well. And I would say it was fairly insular and I was lacking really the bigger picture of how to run a business and be a general manager. And then after about five years in manufacturing, I took a role that had a bigger accountability. So my scope was beyond just manufacturing. I also had logistics for the plant and it was the logistics of, it was a yogurt plant. So we had to ship our product from our plant through the distribution network and often directly to customers. And so that was my first real foray into understanding additional trade-offs, such as the fact that yogurt has a shorter shelf life. It's measured in weeks versus a lot of our products have months and months of shelf life. And so a lot of trade-offs to consider the costs and benefits of optimal inventory versus how often to cycle the manufacturing of products and how to deal with seasonality and the risk of product aging out and having really high destroy costs. So I realized that my understanding of manufacturing really limited, I was limited in having that broader understanding of how the business and the supply chain really worked well together to make these decision trade-offs. And so for the first time, it made me want to pursue understanding a little bit more about that and getting deeper in the education side. And I also had an interest in just trying to understand how marketing and business strategy work together, working for a marketing company. Sometimes the supply chain person has left questioning some of the decisions. So I wanted to have a better, just a better understanding of like what our strategy was as we went to market. And then I found the supply chain management program at MIT really ideally met what I was looking for in terms of content. And it had that appeal of coming to campus full time. So we didn't have the MicroX masters at the time. So the choice was to come full time and come to Cambridge and complete the program. And it was really appealing to be able to do it in under a year. And I found that the biggest benefit I received was the ability to study and really learn so much about the latest in external thinking about supply chain. And I have to say now that it's 10 years, I'm probably getting a little dated in that. But it gave me a good network and an ability to stay relevant. And so I really appreciated that. And then most of all, just learning from my cohort of students attending the program. That was the biggest benefit for me in intending and just hearing other perspectives and how they've dealt with similar challenges in their supply chains. Great. No, that's awesome. And if you ever feel like you wanna get back into some refresher, there's always the SCM Micro masters. So you can always pop back in there and watch Chris Caplus just in case you're feeling a little nostalgic. Are you still teaching 260? Yeah, so basically our, so 260 for the students is a, it's basically SC0X and SC1X. So that's pretty much SC1X is our 260 in a online course. So if you ever feel like you want that again, but that's great. Thank you so much. So kind of now that you've, you're almost getting to 20 years in supply chain management, is there, have you seen any kind of clear role change in your time at General Mills? And obviously you yourself changed positions, but kind of the progression of supply chain management. Have you seen that change? Oh, for sure. So those of us, those of you who aren't millennials in the room and are Xers, you might realize that probably the term supply chain really wasn't prevalent and it didn't really, wasn't something we really knew about when I graduated from college. I think the first time I heard the word supply chain was in a recruiting presentation on campus. So prior to that, I didn't even know it existed and the supply chain majors were, were either not existent or very, very, you know, something that was kind of obscure at the time. And so what that translated to when I started working at General Mills, we, what is now the supply chain function at the time was very siloed. So we had a manufacturing function and a purchasing and a distribution function and they all had distinct roles. They were very clear, not a ton of overlap and they worked fabricated pretty well together, but they were very separate and people had career paths that were siloed within that vertical wherever you started is kind of where you ended up. In fact, my foray into manufacturing and logistics was actually considered a cross functional move and having that logistics background really exposed me to a lot more, but it was rare at the time. Most people stuck to this strict path that was within their function. And I just happened to have the opportunity, we were doing some role consolidation and they said, well, let's give it a try and put a manufacturing person in charge of logistics and see what could go wrong. And so I learned a lot along the way about logistics. I still am learning. And so it, it was just, it was great. So I think I was one of the early people that did that. And now it's just very common. And today we consider global supply chain under one leader. We have one function, people still work in respective areas and there's areas to focus and depth, but we span a much broader scope than we once did. Great. Sorry, I glitched for one second. So I think we're back on though. Okay, great. So I think that's, it's awesome because I feel like, you know, some students are coming in and just entering supply chain management kind of assume supply chain is this very accepted term. And as you said, it's, it's changed and it's taken on a whole new life and being a much more comprehensive thing than it was in the past. Whereas, you know, you had your defined roles and now looking at it across, especially in your new position as end to end supply chain which is pulling together all those various functions which is, you know, kind of novel I'd feel in recent years. So the next question then we'll run our next poll after this question. Also everyone, if we're, students, you guys are posting questions and you can see them if you wanna upvote other people's questions then those will be the ones that, you know ones that have the most votes. Those are the ones I'll ask Kathy since we may not have time to get through all the great questions you guys are asking which are really spot on and relevant. So once I get through kind of what the few questions I'm asking and then we'll start pulling some of your guys' questions. So kind of on the next thing, you know thinking about as supply chains have changed over time what do you think makes some supply chains so complex and, you know, how do companies like General Mills begin to manage complex global supply chains that are our reality today which is exactly the topics we're dealing with in this course. Oh, that's a great question. It's not often that I take the time to reflect on why we're so complex but as I think about it, you know ultimately in my industry the consumer products industry, it's you. It's the consumer. It's everybody who's on this call that's looking on their phones and buying something from Amazon right now and trying to get a product within an hour. And this increased complexity is just it's getting, you know, it's continuing to increase. The desire for customized offerings and as I mentioned the OmniChannel shopper so you want to have a variety of flavors and formats and you want to receive your favorite snacks every venue that you walk into. So whether you're in a traditional grocery store you're into the drug or discount store or again you're at home on your computer and you're on your phone shopping with Amazon. And with that you have the expectation that you'll receive your project. You'll receive exactly what you want in hours. And I personally have gotten accustomed to that where I get a little bit slow in actually ordering items because I know I can get it in two days or I can get it in a day and waiting till the last minute continues so that just in time ordering is requiring both the retailers and us to anticipate even before the orders are placed because we don't have enough notice to supply so that makes the complexity really great. Gone are those days when Henry Ford said you can have any color you want as long as it's black. So I believe that the skew, this customization the item proliferation it's here to stay. And so as a supply chain leader I've made an attempt to show why the long tail is costing us money and why we could really optimize that but I found it's really a non-starter in my company and in my industry because the business that we're in we need to be competitive and having items on the shelf and having distribution and variety is absolutely a requirement. And so I've had to reframe the question and really say okay how can we embrace this complexity and make it a competitive advantage for general mills and that's really the work that we try to do in supply chain strategy. Great, absolutely. Actually on that note, can you discuss a specific example of complexity possibly as a product or a scenario and how you dealt with it? Sure, there's many examples. One that we're actually working on over the last several months. So as I talked about all of these all the skewer proliferation has continued to increase for us and when we acquire brands like Annie's and the number of new items just is extremely high and there's many items that don't do well and they may be exited but there's a lot of items that are here to stay and that long tail continues to get longer. And so we've had to learn how do we manage it and what are the different strategies we can take to mitigate that tail. So I will say that we're kind of set up as a one-size-fits-all supply chain in the way we manufacture our products and distribute them and what we've recently been doing is segmenting those products based on their characteristics. So really taking an approach to say what's the velocity of those items? How fast are they turning? And then the variability in the demand. And so there are some items that really aren't very forecastable. And so having a different production and deployment strategy around those items can really help us better efficiently manage our inventory and then more important improve our reliability so that we really have the product available at the right time. And so we've incorporated with our multieshalon network a postponement strategy for those real tail items and holding them back until really till the order comes in so that we can minimize how much inventory is spread across the country. So we're holding them back at the production location where we can. And then the ones that are high velocity, instead of also holding those back at the same proportion, we're pushing those out into the network because we know they're going to move. We don't have to worry about aging out product and shipping it. We often have to reposition product because we might have something that's aging in one location and there's demand in another location. The other thing we're doing to reduce complexity is just the complexity of our own distribution network. So making sure we're managing our inventory effectively so that we can really streamline and simplify the number of touches our products are taking because we have such a large and full network. So we're trying to really minimize what we're having to flow through it. Right, right. Now this is great. These are exactly the topics we're covering in the course. Postponement will be coming in week nine. So we're actually covering that as well on how to treat postponement in certain case scenarios. So just out of curiosity, you brought up Annie's. Is there enough difference with the way that the Annie's products flow over some of your other brands or is there something a little bit more complex with that or just as a- Yeah, so Annie's is a great example. So Annie's Mac and Cheese is the biggest brand within Annie's, but Annie's has many different products and all of the products in the organic world are a lot smaller in volume and lower in volume than our big Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios brands. And so it starts even with the manufacturing. We don't have the scale in Annie's for different brands to be able to produce those internally at scale at a General Mills internal location. So the majority of our products are made in external supply chain and through our contract manufacturers. And we have great partnerships but they're dispersed in different areas. And so there's a lot of complexity there just managing all the raw materials and the ingredients. And then in the organic supply chain, we have a shorter shelf life on those raw materials and longer lead times on procuring those. And so with organic, I mean, it really starts with the agriculture and going back even years to secure some of that supply for products that we don't even know the full future forecast. So that's a challenge on the upstream. And then on the distribution of Annie's products, customers, they're looking to order, they're not ordering full pallets of an Annie's skew. They're ordering layers and cases and they want smaller quantities and a lot of the products are even sold through a distributor. It's hard to fill trucks on customer orders with those kinds of products that are lower velocity and there's just a longer tail. So Annie's alone has over 200 items. And so again, if you imagine having all those items on a truck, you're not really selling it in full pallets. So that creates another challenge on the overall supply chain. So when we acquired Annie's, they were distributed out of one site which reduced the complexity of the distribution but it also limited what customers would even buy Annie's products. And so it also creates a cost having to pull this assortment of just organic skews from one distribution center in the country, create some other challenges. So a lot of them had to go through third party distributors. And so we were able to leverage the scale of the General Mills distribution network and basically expand the assortment where a customer now could order Annie's products along with the cereal products, snacks products and everything else in our portfolio. So then they could fill trucks every week and basically get the full assortment. But then the complexity that's, there's a complexity that's added when you go from one distribution center now to our full network and to the multi-national network. And so postponement, there's a great strategy to help with that. However, again, getting it out throughout the complex network is a challenge and it does offer more distribution options. So that's the benefit of doing it but it's definitely, again, we will take advantage of our scale. Right, oh, that's awesome. Thanks for that example. And as a parent of a three and a half year old, I'm quite familiar with Annie's mac and cheese. So we buy that quite frequently. Okay, so we also wanted to, we ran out the pull of kind of thinking about complexity as you talked through Annie's and other kind of, in the case in General Mills supply chain and what tools have you found most helpful to optimize your supply chain? So largely about 47% used PowerBuy, Excel, ERP, software service based analytic tools. So kind of that lump category. And then Excel, obviously 27%, a very strong kind of showing there as we all love Excel. ERP is 3%, SAP Oracle is 7% and a software service standalone is 13%. So Excel is obviously the large dominant. So I don't know if you wanted to say a few words possibly about how you treat complexity and using these different tools in your position. Yeah, that's a great polling question. And I'm glad to hear that ERP comes up as short for the rest of you as it does for us. We've struggled to use really ERP for a decision-making tool. It really becomes the system that we're a system of record and the system we're trying to, I wanna say Russell, to be able to effectively produce and deliver our products. But it's definitely a challenge to work within our systems. And so yes, Excel is certainly a very important tool and capability and one thing to caution those of you who really are enjoying the analytics of all the different tools and capabilities out there. I think there are so many powerful engines and with machine learning and AI coming on, that's an exciting new frontier. And I think it really has a lot of promise for how we do work. The thing to keep in mind though is when we're working on strategy type initiatives, what's most important above anything is to align on what is the question we're trying to answer? What problem are we trying to solve? And having the dialogue first and doing more of the either PowerPoint math or the Excel math to really back up a hypothesis and kind of taking that hypothesis-driven approach is a really effective way to develop a strategy and then determine what options do you want to go consider? And then from a scenario planning perspective, you might have three or four different options that could be viable, but you talk it through with business stakeholders and you might narrow it down to two or three. And then when you need to go vet a few options, then those more advanced tools can really help in decision-making and help guide that because then you can really refine an answer, but before you get to, you don't want to take multiple infinite iterations to a tool. Otherwise, you'll spend weeks and months just trying to get to an answer and it's not even the question or problem you're really trying to solve. So having that alignment is probably more important than any tool that you use to solve a problem. Right, that's great. Yeah, and it's nice to see kind of the different spread of what's being used and how strategically those could use in different scenarios. So we're, I'm going to wrap up my questions. We're getting a load of questions. So obviously I want to take some of there. So why don't we run the last poll and then we can discuss that and we'll start pulling questions from the student from our group here because they have some great, great questions. So I'll, I'm going to probably just jump to the student questions and does that's okay with you Kathy? Because they have some great ones. Okay, so one is coming from Amrush and actually overlaps with some of the ones I kind of already had in the list is what are the drivers of a successful supply chain strategy development and also how best can scenario planning be used to achieve the company's long-term desired goal? Oh, that's a great question. So thanks for asking that. So what's required of a successful supply chain strategy? So I think the first thing to keep in mind is it starts with understanding what are the business requirements. So for any supply chain, each business may have a unique supply chain. General Mills for a long time, a one-size-fits-all supply chain really worked well for us because our customers ordered full pallets of cereal and we filled trucks and we shipped efficiently to customer warehouses and that worked out fine and everyone shopped at the grocery store and got their product. And obviously that world has changed greatly. And as I mentioned, the complexity with skew proliferation is a big part of it. And so each business unit has its own set of requirements and goals for what it's trying to achieve. Some businesses are trying to grow rapidly and so being responsive and being able to secure that growth and maybe even be agile enough to shift to different product platforms is a really critical part of enabling those business needs. Other businesses are looking to be stable and to have modest growth. And so core brands of ours like cereal, that there's definitely growth in cereal and there's market share to be had. We also have a ton of scale. And so the best thing we can do for cereal is enable the growth, but do it efficiently and economically at scale and know that we can work with, we can create the variety we need within some of the capabilities we already have and then look for some of those fringe capabilities beyond however really rely heavily on the great scale we have and the competitive advantage we have right there within our network. And so with strategy, it's really about having a clear alignment on what the business needs. It's also important to understand the current state. So we don't often create full white papers where we create a supply chain from scratch unless we're doing really a startup of a company or a supply chain. So we have what we have and part of it is understanding how well does what we have meet the future needs and or the potential future needs when you think about different scenarios. And so part of that strategy development is assessing the gaps and having alignment with the business on whether the gaps are financial. So sometimes we look at our long range plan of our businesses and we look at the growth trajectory and the margin goals for a revenue. We're looking at our revenues and our margins and how much productivity do we need from the supply chain given certain inputs like inflation and other types of costs. How much productivity do we need to meet those costs and revenue and profit targets. And so that can help guide us to say is the track we're on sufficient or do we need to pivot and really relook at the strategy to better optimize what we need to do for the business. And the answer for a lot of our businesses is that cost leadership continues to be really important. And in our environment, we need an advantage supply chain versus our competitors. Advantage can have different meanings depending again on what the business is looking to do. Sure, sure. Yeah, that's great. And then John Mayer actually has a bolt on question sort of on the scenario planning. He was wondering, for instance, you know, in your kind of scenario planning and future planning, have you thought or has the contingencies for wheat production come up as a result of drop due to disease as a specific case scenario? Has that come up in your work? Sure. I mean, so agriculture is critical to what we make because it's the input to all of our products. And so whether it's wheat or corn or oat supply and then you can factor in the need for the organic farming, we spend a lot of time focusing on soil health contingencies with so going upstream. So a big part of that is getting beyond what's in our control and partnering with the farmers and even to the extent of not necessarily vertically integrating but forming strategic partnerships where we're helping promote development and technology and science and really addressing both the sustainability challenges with climate science as well as finding ways to more efficiently grow our products. How do we use less feed and less water for those inputs? And then contingencies when we do have shortages. So over the years, some of those shortages in all of our ingredients can be pretty cyclical or natural disasters or events happen and we might run short on supply. And if you guys have read Yossi Shafi's book on resiliency, I'll put a plug in for that. He shares an example about an explosion at a factory and you've got two cell phone manufacturers that are securing supply from there and one was on top of things and was able to get all the supply and keep going and the other didn't react fast enough. A lot of the resiliency is being able to react in the event that happens and have good plans in place. So we do a lot of work on even using tools like failure modes effects analysis tools. So we call them FMEAs and we look at different events that could happen and we identify the different risks. So it could be just the season is coming up and we know that crops are short during this particular season. What do we do when that shortage occurs and having the plan before it happens can really speed up the reaction time when the event occurs. And I wouldn't say we're by any means perfect but having visibility and then being able to monitor those kinds of events that are happening also allows us to be on top of reacting and pivoting where we need to be. So it's kind of a broad answer to your question and obviously you can go in a lot of different directions with that one. That was great. Actually it kind of builds on to a question that came in from Mannequin and he was actually wanting to know and you touched on it a little bit but if you could, you're talking a little bit about risk management strategies. Is there, do you have different ones for short term and long term risks in the supply chain and how do you treat those? Yeah, I think the short term so that the failure modes effects analysis is one of many tools that we can use but those are really good for short term and for discrete type of scenarios like projects if we're implementing a new product launch or where we're doing some kind of capital installation those are really effective tools to get the right people in a room to bring visibility to the risks and then understand the impact that they could have if they came to fruition and then what's the mitigation step? And so that's a really common practice for us as part of our culture to do that and to we call it syndicate those risks. So that we can again have good alignment on what we need to do and then it helps us by having even a way to wait the impact. It gives us a sense of what are the most critical things to really address ahead of time that have the biggest likelihood of occurring or have the biggest impact if they did occur and then determine what do we wanna do because redundancy has a cost and so it's outweighing the cost of that redundancy or insurance versus taking the risk of that event not occurring. So we do that very commonly and then longer term I think about climate change is one of the biggest risks that we think about to our business model. And so as a company we've made both a commitment publicly to reduce our greenhouse gases and so this is just one example. We know that we have to feed the world and eventually it will be 10 billion people and if we wanna feed 10 billion people we need to have a sustainable climate as well as the ability to grow and produce our products and so reducing our greenhouse gases is a big priority because it's helping us mitigate that risk in the future and eventually by 2050 we wanna get to the point where our greenhouse gases are sustainable. So we've reached a sustainable level and we've reduced it to that point and so in order to do that we have to look beyond even our supply chain. We have to go to the agriculture footprint I kinda mentioned that and we have to change our products and ensure that our materials are recyclable and really take those journeys from a longer view. So those won't happen in a few months those are really over the course of several years making that commitment to changing and then really expanding on it. Right, great. And you're speaking directly to my heart on sustainable supply chain so I'm always happy to hear the longer term focus and that actually also plays into our poll kind of thinking on the broader kind of end-to-end supply chain and you have to look across the supply chain and start thinking about those issues. So we ran the poll that said where do you work in the supply chain raw materials, manufacturing, processing, trading, retailing, wholesaling, warehousing, assembly, logistics, end-to-end or other. So largest is manufacturing 26%, logistics is 21%. Surprisingly end-to-end is 13% so that comes in third. Other is coming in at 16 so it's at various other positions and then retailing 5% and processing 3%. So kind of on that note and just one more additional question for me that builds on what you're just talking about is can you talk a little bit about your focus on the end-to-end supply chain and why is this important and how is it different from your other roles? You touch on this a little bit but maybe a little bit more on it. Absolutely, so I think the audience is a great representative sample of even my own career because to be end-to-end you have to start somewhere and those of you are pretty early in your career so starting and manufacturing, some of you are starting in logistics, that's just great and then those of you in other areas, getting broad experiences is what really enables anyone to be more end-to-end. So I think early in your career it's a combination of getting enough depth in a certain area so that you're somewhat of an expert or you're as good of an expert as anybody else in a general type of role and then being able to move up across, move laterally across the supply chain for example or even all the way into sales or marketing to be able to again see those hand-offs between each of the different areas because as much as we try to be a non-siload, broad end-to-end supply chain everybody still has an operational function and they have to make their piece work. We can't operate individually end-to-end but we can by connecting across and so I've found the experiential learning of working in one area and then just literally shifting to an area that's slightly downstream or upstream of it really helps you round out that perspective. So for me, going from the plants, I worked in manufacturing like so many of you and really focused on the products we were making in the four walls of the planet. Our mission was make and pack food safely and it's a pretty clear mission and then when you move, I moved upstream in that case after I graduated from MIT and so one thing about going to supply chain management and staying with the same company I felt like I really have had two careers because my first career was before I did supply chain management and again very focused in manufacturing and then after I've been basically brought supply chain ever since and so when I completed the program then it was my first move into corporate and I've been in corporate for 10 years and the first group I worked in was leading demand planning and so it was a, as some said, pretty good karma to go from manufacturing to now being responsible and accountable for the forecast that I had a few maybe not so kind words for forecasting when I was in the plant and so now I got to really understand what was involved in forecasting and really how well we do it and how strong of a process rigor we have around it and how important that is and so again seeing it from two different points of view really helped me and then later working in capacity planning that's so directly tied to the plant I found that I had a fluency so I could talk, I could take the manufacturing concepts and translate that for logistics professionals that might be struggling to interpret what was going on in the plant and the same thing for logistics taking that back to manufacturing and finding just that common language between the two and realizing how they're not so far apart but sometimes it feels that way so breaking down those walls and just creating those windows really has been a part of being end to end and so now having an end to end strategy role what that really means is being fully holistic in what we're doing not having my team off doing projects that are siloed or that are sub-optimizing for one particular area and that area can be an operating unit so a business area it can be a temp state it can be just specific to a specific part of the supply chain projects are done in those local groups however it's important to have what's the underlying strategy and just being really clear that it's not conflicting with something that's broader that we're trying to aspire to over time so it's definitely hard to manage but having that accountability for the overall just helps me pull back and make sure we're aligning across with all the stakeholders and it certainly is challenging to work in that environment and it's good, it's exciting and great to collaborate across all the functions. Great, that's great and definitely Alliance definitely with what we're kind of thinking about in this course and the next course we're like thinking across the functions and how they work together in that bigger picture so it's really helpful. We have a question coming in from Guillermay and he really wants to know what's the big difference in managing supply chain management in Latin America compared with the United States and what are the biggest challenges you see, Kathy? Okay, Guillermay, thanks for the question. So managing in Latin America versus the United States so I personally have never managed the supply chain in Latin America so it's more anecdotal for me so I'll just qualify that with this is just my experience so what I've learned about Latin America so one of the big brands we have in Latin America is Yokey it was an acquisition out of Brazil and it's a large business there and I know some of the challenges that we have each even within the country of Brazil each different area has taxes and there's challenges from producing and shipping in one area and arbitrage for moving to another area within the country and I probably don't have the right terminology on how those taxes happen but they're really complicated and I know as we were looking at some network optimization decisions around that supply chain we had to create a model that really took into account that and so those tax considerations were a bigger driver of the decision than they certainly would be operating in the US within the US within our borders obviously products are flowing more freely covering the land that we have so I think each market perhaps in Latin America is more customized similar to our other businesses internationally where so from a marketing perspective probably more skew variety because of different flavors and local markets are more prevalent because there's a lot of different countries within a smaller radius and when we think about the US again it's usually one national market so that makes in some ways it definitely simplifies the US business although we would say North America is pretty complex because it's so large. Right, that's great and thanks for that example. So a lot of the individuals joining us today are looking around and trying to promote their careers and so VJ is actually wondering just as you've kind of gotten to the position you're at he says if you don't mind sharing some of the thoughts on how you hire for your group and what are the typical skills that you look for in some of the roles? Oh, that's a great question, thanks VJ. So how do we hire for our group? Well, we have just a great team for one and I was the first person within General Mills supply chain to attend the supply chain management program so going back 10 years we started that relationship and we've had a strong relationship with MIT over the year so we've hired actually a good portion of our team graduates from the program so that's the good news. We do recruit from MIT and we definitely value the experience and exposure that our folks get and so we have just a phenomenal team from that perspective. We also externally hire so we do postings when we need to hire for our group and when we think about who we're looking for especially so my team has a couple of different areas we have more general supply chain managers and a lot of those folks tend to come even out of undergrad programs we have development programs out of undergrad or early career out of a master's program and really work in our plants as well so our factories as well as coming up to corporate and working in different roles in planning and brand planning and transportation and operations and trying to just get a broad background over the first five or six years and so my leaders again tend to have broad backgrounds they've worked in cross-functional areas because they need to really bring that perspective to really truly be end to end and then we also have the analytics and capabilities team and technology team and a lot of those folks we really we are looking for that supply chain management master's or advanced degree in operations research really looking for folks who have those deeper analytical skills and then the differentiator because all of you attending this program are really smart and you can in these classes are great you can learn the concepts so the biggest differentiator for you is how well can you relate to the business stakeholders are you able to understand their needs translate and communicate those needs into the solutions you're developing and so the biggest challenge is folks that again are really brilliant and off kind of doing their own thing is able to use so the biggest challenge for that is finding people that again can connect across and really leverage those talents to drive how people work and offer capabilities and solutions for teams that are really applicable. Right, right. Yeah, I know that's great because it kind of bringing together both the technical skills and analytical skills that we're teaching and kind of the first half of the course but then also the bigger softer skills connecting all the different pieces together and something in the bigger picture is something we're teaching these latter half courses so that's really helpful, thanks Kathy. So as a tool, we've just learned about system dynamics and it's kind of mapping out the connections and interactions and Santosh wants to know is this something you have ever used in general mills or applied in a situation? Oh, that's a really good question Santosh. So I remember my system dynamics course and I actually remember falling asleep working on it and then like waking up at four in the morning with an epiphany of how it was all gonna work and all the interrelations. What I can say is I personally, I haven't used the tool as much as the philosophy and the thinking. So I think it's more about what you learn about the cause and effect of just the ways different systems interact in the dynamics of a system. Now within general mills we absolutely do use those types of tools. If you think about the physical systems that we have in manufacturing, the way the unit ops are interconnected, those apps, we have a lot of simulation and a lot of different tools around the cause and effects overall. But when you think about risk management or just scenarios that can happen, we do a lot of maybe more qualitative versions of those tools. So doing like mind mapping or other kinds of tools that help us really identify what the different outcomes of an event could be and what the relationship is between that event and those different types of outcomes. So I do remember fondly the system dynamics course and I do have a few colleagues that have gone a lot deeper with it. Great, great. No, that's a great example and also just kind of thinking about the philosophy of it and how that can kind of create bigger picture things. That's really helpful. Shino has a great question also has how do you manage your supplier and customer relationships? And then also on that vein, how do you deal with powerful customers like Amazon? Yeah, that's a great question. So supplier and customer relationships, I'd like to think we're equally balanced in our relationships with how we manage our suppliers is similar to how our customers think about managing us. But I would say that there's a lot of retail power right now and our customers, we've got some really big customers that represent a large percentage of our business. So they have obviously have a lot of influence over what we do. And so when I think about the customer side of things that's been, there's always challenges there. And the biggest hot topic I'd say in the industry right now, you guys probably talk about it as a little bit of this on time in full requirement that of course was enacted by Walmart a little over a year ago, basically establishing rules around what on time in full means and putting thresholds out there that if we can achieve, we're getting fined and getting penalties. And so real dollars are coming out. And I give Walmart credit for doing that because they firmly believe that by achieving those higher levels of reliability, they can drive significant costs out of their supply chain because they, as you guys learn in your classes, the variability in lead time is a greater driver of cost than the actual lead time itself. And so we used to operate under the philosophy that arriving on time or a day early was great and just as good. And now you realize on time means I want it on that exact day and I want my fill rate to be exactly what I ordered. And so makes total sense. Most of our retailers are moving towards that and certainly we're seeing more penalties being imposed. And so that's certainly a relationship where we try to collaborate and but first of all, a big part of it is understanding the drivers of the loss. So where we're not achieving 100%, what's driving it and having visibility around it. So that's been a big journey for us is just being able to communicate what the drivers are. And some of those reasons are customer driven. And so then having that relationship with customers to say, here are the factors or behaviors that we're seeing that are causing these inefficiencies in the overall supply chain. And that's where everybody wins because we're bringing visibility to it and then we can work together to figure it out. So that's a big part of it. And so on the supplier side, we're starting to take some of those cues and really extend our relationship on supplier reliability because just as we've consolidated to reduce costs, we've seen our suppliers consolidate greatly in our industry. And so small disruptions are creating big ripples where we're out of supply on certain materials for long periods of time. And then transportation challenges that we've seen across the industry along with railroad issues have created plenty of different delays in our raw materials arriving at our plants. And so really working with suppliers to enact the same standards of reliability expectations and measuring it. And then also understanding the things that we're doing that are causing our suppliers to not be able to deliver the on time and full. Like making, we often make order changes that are really short lead time and that's creating disruption in their supply chain. So we all own it together. And I firmly believe it's about finding again the best outcome for everyone and really bringing visibility to what are the reasons for waste that's being generated and getting rid of those. Right, that's great. Super interesting. So we have more questions than we're gonna have time to answer, which is awesome. Kathy has such a good insight for everyone. I'm just gonna, we have about a little over five minutes so I'm just gonna take a handful more and then we will sign off. So Nicholas asks, how is General Mills supply chain management dealing with increasing product variety and are you trying to reduce the number of SKUs to reduce complexity? Great, so Nicholas as we mentioned a little bit earlier the complexity is obviously growing and then when we acquire somebody like Annie's or Blue we're inheriting a lot of different items and then our marketers are excited to develop new products. So that's the good news where when you're growing, you're adding new products. I think the bad news is for supply chain for us is again, we don't get rid of the tail that's generating and we are seeing more proliferation not only just flavors but also formats. The whole concept of price pack architecture is a really hot topic right now and what that means for us is having different sizes of the same item offered in all the different channels. And so again, for a while I used to try to make the strong argument of why these things were driving costs and we needed to consider skew rat and elimination and I realized that that really wasn't the answer that the businesses need us to be able to deliver the complexity in a cost-effective way and then have conversations about the trade-offs. So where we can eliminate complexity that's driving large costs so allergens might be a good example where we deal with a lot of different nut flavors and varieties and those require long changeovers at the plant. So being able to bring awareness to the complexity that are significantly cost-driving outcomes and then ones that like maybe flavors that you can flow through seamlessly or later stage complexity like different pack sizes is usually a little bit easier to manage than a whole new product offering. So being able to again work within that and then find solutions at scale. So that's the other thing my team's working on is not just having the one size fits all if you can't make it online at the plant gets really expensive if we have to repack items and then get the right pack sizes for the Amazons of the world or for different channels like drug and dollar to be able to make those tail skews in more scaled operation will be a benefit for us. So kind of working on how we can enable that so that it's not just extremely costly to do those types of things. Right, that's great. So the kind of last question from the audience I'm gonna pull and then we'll have a sign off question. So later in this course, we're gonna talk about tracing palm oil and kind of verifying the source of materials. So actually Param asks, how are you able to trace the authenticity of organic food supplies assuming your supply tiers might be quite complex? Oh, that's a great question. And traceability is such a prevalent topic in supply chain. And if you think about what we do is being able to make food that people love the very first and most important aspect is food safety and the human safety aspect of the food we make. And so what's great is the technology is just advancing in this area exponentially. We can trace when there is a food outbreak or an issue, today the FDA has got a lot more ability than they once had to really understand the DNA of what food is causing the outbreak and tracing it back to the source. And so that visibility is tremendously important so that one, we can learn from those kinds of incidents that happen more frequently than anyone wants them to happen and ensure that our supply chain is safe and our foods is safe. And so on the supply side, it's getting all the way back through our suppliers having contracts and commitments in place that again bring the transparency and the certificate of authenticity and all of the controls in place and the high standards to make sure that our food isn't being contaminated or in that we understand exactly the full extent of our global supply chain. And that even gets into other components like corporate social responsibility around child labor and other kind of working conditions for different agriculture manufacturers thinking about cocoa beans or vanilla around the world when they're really made in isolated places, we need to be responsible for how those products are grown and how they come into our supply chain. So our accountability extends far and wide and having control over that is absolutely essential. And so we're excited about the future technology, the blockchains of the world that can help bring even greater transparency. Right, that's great. And something that's near and dear to my heart, absolutely. So we're coming up on the hour, we have so many great questions we're not gonna get to but I do wanna be conscientious of your time. So just to sort of a final sign off question and then we'll close out and just wondering from what the journey, great journey you've been on is there some suggestions you have for our MicroMasters learners as they continue in their professional career and kind of any words of wisdom you can send them on with? Well, first of all, thank you for this opportunity. It's been really fun to come and have a chat with you all. And I guess my words of wisdom for you are pretty straightforward. I think you have to figure out what energizes you and what topics are really interesting to you and go explore them and go deep and learn as much as you can. And I talked a lot about end-to-end supply chain as an example extending way beyond what's in our control. And so part of being able to manage those effectively is understanding and having awareness all the way up and down the chain of what is interrelated. And so getting that awareness will help you and that curiosity really will help you be a better leader because curiosity and exploring that unknown territory is the way you're going to have a successful career. You're trying to solve problems that haven't been solved and maybe all of the inputs aren't completely clear. And so you have to be able to explore and pivot and adapt and your ability to adapt is based on the experiences and the knowledge that you bring to it. So getting as much of that knowledge as possible is great. So all of you taking the course right now, I mean, this is you going above and beyond trying to learn and trying to be a better supply chain leader so you're far well on your way and just keep going and keep asking questions and engaging with others because the dialogue is where you really learn a lot. That's great. Thank you so much, Kathy, that's the learner. We're so happy with our learners. They're so active and really happy to have them here. Thank you for joining us. Your insight was incredible. We have more questions than we could answer because you have such some great advice for everyone. So we'll sign off today and thanks all the learners for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Alexis. Bye.