[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to the Supply Chain Careers Podcast. The only podcast for job seekers, professionals, and students who are focused on career enhancing conversations and insights across all aspects of the supply chain discipline. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
Visit SCM Talent Group at scmtalent. com. In this episode of the Supply Chain Careers Podcast, we speak with David Schillingford, a supply chain risk expert who is a venture partner at Columbia Capital and co founder of EverStream Analytics. From a chemistry degree to the British Army to recovery of stolen art, it hasn’t been the typical path into supply chain.
Listen as David provides an overview of risk management, the work of risk managers, and the characteristics they need to have to be successful. [00:01:00] David also provides his thoughts about understanding the dynamics of risk and predictive analytics to better prepare yourself for future actions, rather than trying to predict the future.
David closes with his thoughts about AI, sustainability, and industrial policy. I’m
[00:01:17] Rodney Apple: your podcast co host, Rodney Appel.
[00:01:19] Chris Gaffney: And I’m your
[00:01:20] Rodney Apple: podcast co host, Chris Gaffney. David, welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast. We’re excited to have you on the program today.
[00:01:29] David Shillingford: Yeah, thanks for having me looking forward to the discussion.
[00:01:33] Rodney Apple: So David, I would love to understand how you got started on your career journey and what sparked you moving into the field of supply chain and especially the risk management side of it.
[00:01:44] David Shillingford: I can for sure say that it was unplanned. I’d probably describe it as non linear. I came out of university with a chemistry degree and joined the British army because they had sponsored me through university.
Thoroughly enjoyed that. Ended up staying for eight years [00:02:00] beyond the years that I owed them as such and left with no clue as to what I was going to do and ended up in New York with a small company that was recovering stolen art and It turned out that was actually a data and information business back in the days when databases weren’t really, no one really knew what they were.
And that led to a series of startups that I had a lot of help with. And all of them were around data and risk and analytics. And it evolved in many ways, the way that. Technology is involved and have crossed a number of different industries ending up most recently in supply chain.
[00:02:36] Rodney Apple: Wonderful.
[00:02:37] Chris Gaffney: David a lot of our audience are interested in at some point in their career running their own show and you obviously as you reference have been involved in a number of startups and i’m curious if you could talk to us about the story around EverStream Analytics, including what are the always challenges of [00:03:00] starting something up from scratch that might be instructive for our audience who has interest in how do you deal with challenges that you face when you’re trying to run your own business?
[00:03:09] David Shillingford: I think the, what I would say is a headline is you have to really be careful about what you read. In the media about startups, because you’re generally hearing about one or one of two extremes. One most often is self reported success and how they got there. And at the other end of the sort of catastrophes, most startups are somewhere in the middle.
Most don’t make it. And of course, there’s a number of different ways in which that off ramp can end up looking like. And it’s not that it’s for a specific type of person. I think it’s more for a specific time in people’s lives where what they want out of life and what they’re able to put into the career side of their life.
Maps to some of the [00:04:00] challenges and opportunities in a more entrepreneurial environment, and there’s no single flavor of startup. There are many different flavors of startups. I’ve been in a few of them, and I think understanding that and being able to be intentional about the type of startup that you get involved in is important.
[00:04:19] Chris Gaffney: Yeah, I had a friend who was a serial startup person. He said sleeping on other people’s couches was cool until I got married, and my wife wasn’t so interested. Yeah, I can
[00:04:30] David Shillingford: relate to that.
[00:04:31] Chris Gaffney: Yes. So it’s interesting. I did my consulting business after I left Coke and it was at a different place in my life where the risk reward piece was much more palatable, but everyone picks their own spots.
[00:04:43] Rodney Apple: So David, supply chain risk management is, I would argue hotter today than it’s ever been before. And when I say that it, it. The importance of it has become uber important, especially as we move in and we’re seeing a lot of policy changes happen very quickly under the Trump 2. 0 administration. [00:05:00] But for those interested in the field, I would love to hear your perspective on some of the common roles that exist within supply chain risk management today.
And before you answer that, I’ll go back to 2008. I was working together with Chris at Coca Cola covering the end to end supply chain on the recruitment side, 22 factories, procurement, sourcing, planning, all the different functions. And they threw a curveball at me. I had not seen this type of role before.
It was for a director of supply chain risk management. I was like, Whoa, what, what is I, it was my first foray. And I remember going to market looking for that. Type of candidate. And of course went down the traditional fortune 500 companies, but I was really shocked to see that there were maybe just a handful of people in these companies that had that particular title.
You’d find your risk compliance type folks, but you didn’t see that dedicated risk management towards the supply chain function. So Howard got him, John Brown. He was. I did this type of work at Heinz company, [00:06:00] and that was back in 2008, but again, it was mostly maybe some independent consultants doing that kind of work.
And I think fast forward to today, it’s, it seems to be a pretty hot field. So I would love to hear your perspective on the job and career side of supply chain risk management.
[00:06:16] David Shillingford: Yeah, it’s a great question, and I’m not too sure it’s, it’s all that straightforward, but maybe the best way to think about it is the past and the future, because where we are right now is a little bit of a sort of in between transition, and in the past, as you say, there would be Someone called a supply chain risk manager.
They were few and far between
[00:06:37] Rodney Apple: right
[00:06:37] David Shillingford: and their job was to manage supply chain risk The challenge for them of course is that they sat in a position generally in the company where they had zero control over budget they had very little connectivity to the things they were supposed to be helping to manage risk for i.
e the supply chain and as a result, they very Often ended up being somewhat siloed and [00:07:00] more focused towards enterprise risk management, insurance, risk transfer, that type of thing. And so when you really picked it apart and looked at it through the lens of, say, the chief supply chain officer, there was very little material impact in terms of what that role ended up doing.
And that, of course, you then get into all sorts of discussions about ROI and what are we paying for? I think if you fast forward to I don’t know, five years from now, it just makes it easier for me to say what I think it should be. And what I’m starting to see in some companies is to think of that role, which I don’t think should be called supply chain risk management.
Uh, maybe it has to be, but it should be thought of as an enabling and a communication role. And that person or that group or that center of excellence, whatever it is, should be the connective tissue between. Supply chain management functions and the world of risk and the world of [00:08:00] risk might be external data sets or it might be internal because there’s a lot of internal risk management around enterprise risk management, financial risks, Iberus.
These are things that companies. Under the heading of third, third party risk management, they’re spending a lot of time and money and energy on. And, and they always have, and the unlock is to have a person or people that connect between the world of risk and the world of supply chain with a view towards and KPIs that reflect supply chain outcomes on time and in full.
Don’t talk to me about risk. Talk to me about on time and in full. And, and that’s how I believe. That role, whatever it ends up being called, will be and will be considered extremely valuable in the future. And as I say, some companies are there now, very few, some are getting there.
[00:08:54] Chris Gaffney: So David, I’m going to ask you about two parter, but if I’m listening to this podcast and I say, [00:09:00] I like the sound of that and I’m a more junior person.
So if that’s my five year goal for an experience like that. What are the places that someone comes to that role from? What experiences do they bring? What technical capabilities do they bring from our audience? What should be in their development plan if they want to get into that space in the future?
[00:09:21] David Shillingford: Yeah, that’s a great question. I guess it falls into the traditional buckets of experience, capabilities, And I guess what you might call characteristics. So I’ll start with characteristics because the way I described it, I imagine someone who would be really good at that would be somebody who’s a good communicator, somebody who’s curious and, and looks outside themselves and their team and, and ultimately their enterprise to have that sort of, that would be the sort of characteristics that I would be looking for.
I think in terms of technical skills, it’s the same answer as it is to a lot of people, a lot of roles, but [00:10:00] even more so because this is really about data. It’s about, it’s about workflow. It’s about analytics. But understanding how to connect an outcome and act and to to an insight to an analytic and back to well, what data do we need to to make that all happen?
So I think data and patent recognition and analytics is is is critical. And from an experience standpoint, I say this last because actually, I think this might be it might be the least important because if you’re a good communicator and a good listener. You’re going to be bringing experience from both sides of the equation because there’s no one really who’s an expert in everything in risk or everything in supply chain management, but certainly coming from a risk background that’s going to help coming from a supply chain management background.
Probably helps more. There’s just knowing the vocabulary and what does score mean? Stuff like that.
[00:10:54] Chris Gaffney: Yeah, it’s interesting. I, as I’ve thought about it and I’ve talked to people recently, [00:11:00] mentally, they’re thinking about, some companies will think about it. In the space of procurement, if it’s around supplier performance management, supplier development, supplier assessment, some people may think about it in their supply chain planning function, at least.
And so to me, those might be some kind of relevant experiences within the supply chain field that might position you along with everything you said, I’m not sure if that makes sense
[00:11:24] David Shillingford: for you, it does. And I think it depends in terms of the sort of size and shape of the company and how you would architect the.
The human side of this, because it may be that your piece in the middle, the center of excellence is quite small, but that there is somebody in procurement and in planning and in logistics, who’s your point of contact. Maybe they’re full time risk analysts. Maybe they’re not, but you need someone. From each of those functions, who’s thinking about risk and making risk an opportunity for their function.
[00:11:57] Rodney Apple: David, when you think about industries, I like to look [00:12:00] through the lens of you’ve got your shippers and service providers of manufacture, retail, wholesale, distribution, and then a whole slew of service providers, including EverStream Analytics. Where do you see companies when you look through those different lenses who are investing heavily into, into risk management or potentially hiring people into their departments, or is it all of the above?
[00:12:23] David Shillingford: So. I think that you’re going to have a different flavor of that depending upon where you are in the supply chain functionally. It’s quite different if you’re thinking about commodity risk versus, say, final mile delivery. Risk is important in all of that, but the way the data you need, the way the data is being processed and Just, for example, the dynamism of it, because if you’re in, if you’re in logistics planning, you need very dynamic insights that’s going to be different if you’re in the realm of, say, network design.
So [00:13:00] there are different approaches, different skill sets, depending upon the function. And that’s also going to vary from industry to industry. You’re going to have a different approach in sort of food and beverage, CPG than say automotive or life sciences. A lot of it’s the same, but 80, 90 percent is, is the same, but 10, 20 percent is really important to get right, both on a functional basis and on a, on a sector basis.
[00:13:23] Rodney Apple: That makes good sense.
[00:13:25] Chris Gaffney: Well, David, as we talked warming up, clearly the risk barometer in the grand scheme of things is high right now, relative to the last 10 years. You live in the field, signal to noise. If, when you’re talking closely to people, what are the risks you say? These may be getting a lot of news, but you need to keep an eye on these as well.
Or are there a few that you really say, I want to make sure if I’m talking to clients, they’re really focused on these things.
[00:13:52] David Shillingford: So, sure, and I can go down that list, but I’ll always preempt and caveat this with, you really [00:14:00] don’t know what’s going to happen. So if anyone walks into the room and sounds convinced that they know what’s going to happen or even close to that, I would treat that with some caution, not to say that we shouldn’t analyze this as much as we can, but particularly on the geopolitical stage.
Things can change very quickly and in a very unexpected way. If you look at, so the last 12, 18 months of geopolitical fault lines, whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza, the Red Sea, Syria, it’s actually quite hard to find an expert who predicted that. Not that it wasn’t a risk, but the time and place and way in which it happened, very few people foresaw that.
So. I think the other thing I’d say, just in general terms, is it’s really useful, I think, to understand the dynamics of risk, because if you can categorize it less so by [00:15:00] What people generally call it, but more so by how severe is it likely to be? How likely is it likely to be? And these are things that people often talk about.
But I think also how easy is it to predict and how quickly can it change? Because I think that’s where people quite often get tripped up because they They’ve done all of their risk assessment, but if you treat every risk the same in terms of how quickly it might change and your ability to see and sense that change, that generally is the blind spot.
So with that as preamble, I’ll talk about geopolitics, I’ll talk about trade, I’ll talk about weather, I’ll talk about cybercrime. And you, in all of those, you can see different dynamics in terms of the likelihood, the severity, and the ability for people to actually see how things are changing.
[00:15:52] Chris Gaffney: You
[00:15:52] David Shillingford: sound
[00:15:53] Chris Gaffney: a little bit like you’re walking through an FMEA there.
And you could correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to go off script and ask [00:16:00] you a question. If you’re advising Reasonably large clients and you’re trying to make a case to say how much of their share of mind this should get. What kind of coaching do you give people? They’re running an intense business.
I heard somebody say, you know, we’re typically running three years closing last year, working on this year, planning next year. Where, where should this fit in with somebody’s share of time and mind?
[00:16:25] David Shillingford: Yeah, that’s actually, it’s a really good question because I, I think that, I think that is where you lose focus.
I think that. And I’ll blame the risk managers for this a little bit because risk managers tend to ask people to look away to look towards risk. And I think people should be doing the opposite. They should be in their planning cycle doing what they always do in their planning cycle. But adjusting that slightly, and it’s a mindset just to be saying, as we do this, how can we be taking risk into account?
And, and that could be [00:17:00] whether it’s network design, network planning, shipment planning, supply, and I think to your earlier point, in and around procurement, I think that’s done more than a lot of other functions. The idea of supplier risk is pretty well embedded in CPO organizations. Many could do it better, but they’re at least talking, they’re thinking about it.
No, no one’s going to onboard a supplier without thinking about risk, but there are a lot of other functions where, particularly planning functions, where just asking the question, how should we be taking risk into account as we make this decision? Even if the answer is, I don’t know, the first step is always to be saying, how do we take risk into account as we make this decision?
[00:17:44] Chris Gaffney: Now, I couldn’t give that a stronger endorsement. That’s super clear, very consistent with what I saw. And my only thing is it’s actually shockingly small amount of time if we can just get people to focus on it. But thank you for that.
[00:17:57] Rodney Apple: Yeah, David, you touched on predictive [00:18:00] analytics. We know that’s a big component of EverStream analytics, but love to hear if you had an example of how companies are leveraging predictive analytics to try to mitigate impacts to their business through supply chain disruptions.
[00:18:12] David Shillingford: Yeah, sure. So I think I would I’ll break this into two parts. One is the second bit is what people normally think of when we say predictive analytics. The first I think is where there’s a lot of low hanging fruit where I’ll define predictive analytics as something has happened. We know it’s going to happen, but it hasn’t impacted you yet.
And that is a window of opportunity. And if companies can give themselves A month or a week or however long it is rather than a day or no time because it just hits them. That’s, that’s the biggest opportunity for most companies and a lot of that is to do with fairly simple workflow and just having really good world class monitoring.
The other side of it, where it [00:19:00] gets, I think, pretty interesting and pretty cool, is where predictive analytics are genuinely being used. And I’ll give two examples of that. One is, and both of these are going to be related to weather, and I like weather because it impacts every supply chain every day of the year.
So this applies to everyone. Sometimes it’s catastrophic, sometimes it isn’t. But sometimes the biggest loss Is the aggregation of small misses rather than one big event and weather is both of those things. So at one end of the spectrum, anybody and back to the question about how should I be thinking about risk in my planning?
Anyone who was in the process of network design, network planning, certainly network design. have got to be taking climate risk into account. And sure, it’s an art as well as a science, but to understand at least the relative risk of things [00:20:00] like flood, high wind, drought, all of the things associated with climate change, it’s now possible.
To put scores on every location in your supply chain and understand what is, what is the likelihood that I’ll have water to run this facility in five years time or 10 years time? Because that’s the horizon I’m looking at as I think about my network design. So that’s something that A lot of ever streams clients are now doing that.
They were not doing two years ago. The other side of it. If I think about temperature risk is much more on the dynamic side, where as temperature volatility increases. You think about some of the cold chain operations where I need to change my thinking in terms of dwell time for air cargo. I need to think about packaging differently.
I need to think about facility design, lane design, all the way down [00:21:00] to equipment selection. I think this is public, but I won’t say the company, the largest purveyor of mayonnaise in the world, I think certainly North America chooses whether to use blanket, reefer or dry van. On a shipment by shipment basis, most companies do this based on a calendar and the problem with doing it on a calendar these days always, but particularly as temperature volatility increases.
Is it you’re more often going to be wrong. And if you’re wrong, it either means you don’t have reefer and you lose the load or you do have roof reefer and you didn’t need it. And you’re spending money on reefer and emissions when you don’t need to. And so when this use case originally came about, it was about saving lost loads.
But now when you hear the company talk about it, first thing they’ll say is the amount of money they save on reefer transportation and the improved service. And it’s now automated. So it checks the, it’s a risk management analytic, but back to my point about, look at this through the eye [00:22:00] of the supply chain manager, it improves service, it reduced cost direct and indirect, and significantly reduces transportation costs.
[00:22:09] Chris Gaffney: That’s a super practical use case.
[00:22:13] Mike Ogle: During this short break, we recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM Talent Group at scmtalent. com.
[00:22:30] Chris Gaffney: David, you’re in the world of analytics. And as I thought about this in my last few years at Koch, we start talking about advanced analytics and we get people got. Comfortable handling much larger sets of data. We were climbing the ladder, but somewhere in that ladder, you magically enter the world of quote unquote, artificial intelligence.
So I’m curious if you could say to folks how you think about that and in the context of the world of risk, where is AI [00:23:00] today in terms of enabling the kind of things you’re talking about and where might it be? In that next horizon that you’re thinking about, wow, that’s a big question. Three questions.
Yeah, I
[00:23:10] David Shillingford: think so. AI in general, I think it’s important to start by acknowledging that there are a lot of different types of AI, both from a sort of technology standpoint or a model standpoint, as well as a model output standpoint. And I see, I don’t know, saying a bifurcation is probably too extreme, but I, I think I’m seeing in the solution provider world, a big difference between companies that.
are focusing on data and analytics and investing in and around data science versus companies that are providing software platforms where essentially the data you’ve got is the data you’ll see. And I’ll come back to that. If I think about EverStream’s journey has been very much the form, we’ve invested an enormous amount of money in the [00:24:00] data infrastructure, in the data science team, and have for years now been using natural language processing, we’ve been using machine learning in a very big way.
One of the biggest challenges in supply chain and supply chain risk management is entity resolution is knowing that this product is the same as this product, even if you call them two different things. Same with the location, same with the name of a company. Knowing that is so foundational to success here.
And AI is really helping a lot with that challenge of entity resolution. I think some of the newer forms of AI around large language models and agentic AI, I think are pretty exciting. If there’s any hesitation in my voice, it’s not because of the technology, I think it’s to do with our capability to actually use the technology.
And much of that comes down to [00:25:00] the extent to which a company and a company’s partners have got their arms around the data. And have learned more about the data and can trust the data because by by feeding data that you’re not sure about into these models can really send you in the wrong direction and set you back if the output from a model is received by an expert who knows the answer and it’s wrong, you’ve really set yourself back a long way.
[00:25:28] Chris Gaffney: I’m going to throw one more in on the technical side before we jump to the next piece. If someone’s working with Evergreen and they’re working either in this predictive space or broadly, are you bringing them external or access or input from external data sets that they wouldn’t have on their own to help inform their own situation?
[00:25:50] David Shillingford: Yeah, a big part of EverStream’s value is that data that a company would not have on their own. And it falls [00:26:00] into two buckets. One is network data. So EverStream has been collecting and analyzing network data for 17 years. So it has a very good view on global networks, adding to that every day. And then on the other side is the risk data.
And part of that is building Essentially, a library of data sources that go deep into sources that other people either would find hard to find or simply don’t have access to. And then there’s the historical data, both in terms of what happened, but just as important, the impact of that and being able to build that into the predictive models.
It’s, it would be very difficult for the largest company in the world to, to build this if they had access to the data. So it’s, it’s a pretty big part of EverStream’s differentiation.
[00:26:55] Rodney Apple: And David, as a followup, but you mentioned network design and I think of network [00:27:00] modeling and your tool, uh, more of a standalone, or is it integrating with tools like a Llamasoft, if I’m out doing using supply chain guru, is it, does it integrate or is, yeah, just, yeah.
[00:27:10] David Shillingford: Yeah, it has to do both and it depends on the use case, because if it is something like network design or network planning, that’s going to be done in Coupa or whatever it is. And so it is, it’s necessary for EverStream’s client, for EverStream to be able to create an API that is essentially bi directional because Everstream needs to know about the asset, whether that’s a warehouse location or a plan, to be able to risk score that asset and send the risk score back into whatever platform that is.
If it’s a TMS platform, that needs to be done sub second. I’m talking millisecond turnaround, but if it’s a, if it’s an analysis of end to end risk and thinking about product risk as a [00:28:00] result of tier one, tier two, tier three supply risk, and the flow of the materials and product into that, then that’s something that a client is most likely going to be used ever streams in interface for that type of use case.
So it needs to be able to do both.
[00:28:16] Rodney Apple: Switching gears a little bit, I would love to hear, David, how you’ve, you’ve had, you’ve been involved with several startups and would just love to hear how you’ve shaped your leadership style over the years. And then part two of that question is what advice would you share with our audience, emerging leaders within the supply chain sector?
[00:28:35] David Shillingford: Yeah, it’s a big question. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking and thinking and learning about that in the army. And when I left the army, I moved away from that because I needed to learn about business and business leadership and how to run a business.
And it, it took me a few years to realize that actually it’s the same thing, although it’s called different things. And [00:29:00] sometimes the execution might be a little different. It comes down to the same few things. It comes, it really comes down to trust. And as you often hear, trust is hard fought and easily lost.
And it. It has a lot to do with how you interact with people. And I think the biggest thing that I would say to young leaders is, is to have courage because All of the other traits that show in good leaders really don’t happen without courage because they’re difficult things to do for us as humans. We still have the same brains we had when pretty much when we lived in caves, and it forces us to do things that aren’t necessarily good for team cohesion in the modern world.
And so understanding that, understanding yourself. Understanding the people around you, walking in their shoes more than you walk in your own shoes. And [00:30:00] really understanding whether it’s your client or employee number one or employee number 200, really understanding that human ecosystem around you and respecting it.
That’s at the core, I think, of every good leader that I’ve seen.
[00:30:15] Chris Gaffney: I’m going to bridge this question to the next one. I deal with a lot of people in the food supply chain space, so there’s a lot going on in that space. And in a couple of situations in the last year, I’ve heard very clear examples where someone who was the lead person from a quality food safety standpoint raised an issue, and then it became either a chief supply chain officer or a founder to either choose to listen to that person and choose how to act.
And clearly the junior person had to have courage because they were sticking their neck out and in some cases had to say to their boss, I don’t recommend we do that. That’s a tough one, being on either side of that, the leader listening and judging when they’ve got a larger scale, [00:31:00] but that frontline person saying I’ve got to call the ball to say something is not right.
And I guess my bridge to that is as you think about working with the companies and leaders you’re working with. In terms of how the current environment is changing their focus on risk management for you Is it mostly people coming to the table or people who had a risk management framework and are now having to adjust it?
[00:31:25] David Shillingford: I think it depends on the conversation. Uh, it depends on what’s happening in the circumstances I think it depends on the level of urgency. I think it depends on The size in terms of the potential impact for the company and a lot of that has to do with external perceptions, call it reputational risk. Um, I think people need to, it’s difficult to be mathematical and scientific about reputational risk.
Um, but I a good yardstick isn’t to be perfect. A good yardstick is to be at least as good as anyone would reasonably [00:32:00] expect you to be, and that’s important when you think about risk management and how you prepare and react to an emergency, whether it’s internal, external, maybe it’s something that Was done and shouldn’t have been done.
Maybe it’s something you couldn’t have controlled because it’s a wildfire, but there’s still an expectation internally and externally that a company will do everything that it reasonably can do. And I think that’s a, it’s a pretty good benchmark for, for a lot of decisions that are being made this year in companies.
[00:32:29] Rodney Apple: David would love to hear your thoughts on sustainability. We know it’s becoming increasingly more important in supply chain. How can organizations balance their sustainability initiatives with the ongoing risk and threats to their businesses these days?
[00:32:47] David Shillingford: Yeah, I get asked that a lot, and I think I’m being asked that a lot for the same reason, and it comes down to losing budget for, or having no budget, for [00:33:00] sustainability efforts.
I’d say two things to that. The first is at least start by understanding the reality of the situation in your company. It comes back to reputational risk. It’s that gap between what people expect and the reality. And of course, if your website says something different from the reality, you’re creating risk for yourself.
So that’s what, that’s one side of it. And there’s a, there’s a certain amount of, it is what it is to that. I think the more actionable side of this. is to think about sustainability through the lens of saving money and going for those use cases. And there are plenty of them. What I talked about earlier in terms of choosing reefer only when you need reefer that reduces emissions.
But it’s being done because it saves money. Um, I, I, I, I found myself talking to a lot of people about warehouses and, and emissions associated with [00:34:00] warehouses, or at least power consumption in, in, in warehouses. As people think about solar and, uh, wind and there’s a big, there’s a big lift there just in, in changing the way that the electricity is brought in and distributed around the warehouse.
I believe that in five years time, micro grids, DC micro grids. You’re not going to be building a new warehouse with, without that, that reduces your power costs, which if you’re in Europe, that that’s a huge saving. And at the same time, it’s reducing emissions. So it’s not that everything that there are certain areas of sustainability, like sustainable aviation fuel, where you are going to have to be making an investment upfront.
And companies like DHL have the vision and the wherewithal to do that. But for most other companies to look for use cases, power saving is. It’s the obvious one because we all use power. We can all use less power to achieve what we want to do. And there’s a lot of use cases that revolve around that. So it’s just [00:35:00] look for those use cases where there’s genuinely a cost saving that is attached to, to sustainability goals.
David, last question for
[00:35:07] Chris Gaffney: me, you’re obviously being an entrepreneur running a business. You’re, you’re, you’re innovating in a field that’s changing very rapidly. Um, what are you most excited about? I could say what keeps you up at night, but I’m really curious about what are you excited about? How, you know, have the innovation in the field may shape how things look over the next few years.
[00:35:31] David Shillingford: Yeah, I’m excited about two things. One is one is technical, and that is the role that the AI will play in allowing companies to see and assess and act on risk. throughout their end to end supply chain. It’s a, it’s an enormous unlock for every single company and that’s going to happen. That’s number one.
Number two is. Is more the organizational side of this, which is necessary to create that unlock where [00:36:00] companies start thinking about risk in every decision that they’re making, whether it’s planning or execution and starting that journey towards how do we take risk into account as we do this, whatever this is, and starting, that’s the first step of the journey towards what I call a risk optimized supply chain, because I’m not saying risk should be higher or lower.
I’m saying that you should balance everything, and risk should be part of that equation, so that the supply chain becomes risk optimized.
[00:36:31] Chris Gaffney: So David, we’re in the world of what I would call a more active industrial policy right now. And when this started to rise over the last six to, six to nine months, I thought about my time at Koch when we had a situation where we had concentration of supply increasing.
And over time, That became problematic. A stronger supplier limited your ability and so you ultimately had to do something. You either had [00:37:00] to diversify your supply sources or you had to vertically integrate. So that was my. supply chain mindset around industrial policy. Obviously, it’s coming at us hot and heavy.
How do you think about it short term, long term, you know, in terms of how businesses ought to think about it, how consumers ought to watch it?
[00:37:21] David Shillingford: Yeah, I think industrial policy, as you say, is, is top of mind for everyone right now. Consumers, politicians, supply chain managers, uh, everyone. And I think the risk there is going to be huge.
I think there’s, there’s a risk and there’s an opportunity. So I think that the risk is that becomes overwhelming to the point that other factors that should be in the mix either are lost or are under indexed. So I think it’s critical that companies continue to be data driven so that they’re looking at the actual rather [00:38:00] than the perceived.
And that means that If you’re making a decision about your network based upon trade policy, that’s okay, but consider all of the other factors as well. All of the other cost factors, total landed costs, and companies are still doing that, but consider the risk factors as well. And the risk factors have to go beyond supplier risk management.
They have to look at sub tier suppliers. They have to look at logistics networks. They have to look at intralogistics hubs, the entire network. And the second thing I’d say is the, and this is, I think of this as an opportunity. I think this is going to force or should force a lot of companies to get much more granular and global about their understanding of their supply chain network.
It is. Because understanding that in detail, knowing the exact location of your and your trading partners networks that you rely upon [00:39:00] is not just good practice in terms of understanding the impacts of trade policy. It is what you should be doing to understand risk and scope three and compliance and frankly, everything.
And if companies. Doing this on a project by project basis, the tail’s wagging the dock and they need to bring that back into the middle and think of network data holistically and then build their projects on top of that.
[00:39:28] Rodney Apple: And is there anything, David, you could speak to when you think about maybe more heightened awareness with contingency planning?
What if this happens, we need to be pivoting this way, like any examples there?
[00:39:40] David Shillingford: Yeah, I think contingency planning, scenario planning is, I’m hearing that talked about a lot more, which is great. I think one, one concern I have is that people assume they have to go out and buy a new software platform to do it.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t, I’m just saying that there are other ways of, there are other [00:40:00] ways of doing it, there’s, there are basic ways of doing it, traditional ways of doing it, and nothing should stop any company from doing that, and then there are what I would call more off the shelf systems that are Very powerful, but for doing that type of scenario planning, there are many different flavors of it, but it is in some way, shape or form.
It’s the same as asking in every decision, how should we take risk into account is, is changing that question slightly and saying, what can happen? What might go wrong? What might change and trying to get to. Not answering everything, but trying to get to the things that might change that would be most impactful for the business.
That’s
[00:40:43] Rodney Apple: a great perspective.
[00:40:44] Chris Gaffney: David, I love this topic. Being a supply chain geek myself, I think it’s, if you’re listening to this and you say, My team, my company is not spending enough time and focus on this. You’re probably right. But hopefully the dialogue today [00:41:00] helps spur some people to think about a next action.
[00:41:03] David Shillingford: Yeah. Amen. Thank you.
[00:41:06] Rodney Apple: David for our audience that’s listening and is interesting learning more about. The topic of supply chain risk management and your company ever stream analytics, where should they go?
[00:41:19] David Shillingford: So two places. One is LinkedIn. I’m pretty easy to find. I post about rest most days. Uh, the other is the ever stream website, which is ever stream.
ai not. com ever stream. ai.
[00:41:34] Rodney Apple: Wonderful. David, thank you so much for joining us today on the supply chain careers podcast, sharing your unique career journey and insights with our audience.
[00:41:44] David Shillingford: It’s my pleasure. Thank you very much for the conversation.
[00:41:50] Mike Ogle: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released [00:42:00] as we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.
Visit SCM talent [email protected].
