Mike:
Katie, welcome to the supply chain careers podcast.
Katie:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here to talk to you guys about supply chain careers and education and really empowerment.
Mike:
And we’d love to hear how you got started in supply chain and some of the biggest influences that got you deeper into a career in supply chain.
Katie:
It starts way back when I was around 15 years old. I guess you could really say that supply chain found me. There was a peer led event at my church and I wanted to be selected as the leader for it. And lo and behold, and at the time to my dismay, I was selected to be the logistics director and really My thought process was, I will do this.
I will knock it out of the park and I will get the lead director next time. And I got chosen to be the logistics director two more times. So really supply chain found me. I lived in East Tennessee born and raised in Knoxville, which is right down the road from the university of Tennessee, which is one of the top supply chain universities in the country.
My father said, I’m in this type of industry and I think you would be really good at it. By the way, you have a scholarship already and, it’s one of the top universities in the country for supply chain. Why don’t you think about this as a career? And so I went to the University of Tennessee.
I got involved with it. I fell in love with, international. Cultures and international business studying there and doing study abroad. And then I was actually on a path to become a lawyer at one point in time. I was wanting to do maritime law, still in supply chain. And decided, at the last minute to take a job as a planner buyer in the furthest away point I can get in the United States.
So I moved to Seattle, Washington on a whim, up and overnight and started working in manufacturing as a planer buyer where I started my career with Fluke it’s now a FortiF company. At the time it was a Danaher company. And just really learned so much for the next two and a half years. I went, manufacturing master scheduling, really the basics, the foundations and it was wonderful.
It was, thrown in headfirst into the operations. I got to learn lean Kaizen, it was a great day when you could go to work, redesigning a manufacturing cell with some beeline and a drill and, just playing Legos, but for the purpose of. Making a process better right and working together with a great team so I did that for a few years and then I decided that I wanted to get my graduate degree and I ended up applying to several different schools and got waitlisted to one in particular, which was and I ended up getting accepted into and went there for their supply chain master’s program.
It’s a cross disciplinary program and their center for transportation logistics and that was eye opening. I think I spent probably the first three months thinking they put my resume in the wrong pile. What am I doing here? This is MIT. So I had a bit of the imposter syndrome. But at the same time I was surrounded by this great group of people.
We had about 35 people in our class. And we are still connected today. We talk regularly on a monthly basis, if not weekly. And, I went to MIT and then I came out and I went headfirst into the oil and gas industry. Something that I knew nothing about.
I, I didn’t know how this process works. Come to find out it is literally rocket science. It’s just the rocket is going the other way. It’s not going up into the sky. It’s going into the earth and, it was migrating from manufacturing into more of a service plus manufacturing plus customization.
I worked in that industry for about 13 years and then I went back into more consumer goods industrial goods in manufacturing and lighting. And really took a different approach looking at S and O P. And I think that was a fantastic change to really diversify my career. So a lot of the influences that I had was diversify.
It was, a family, it was, being around peers and teams. And I think everyone in supply chain, we like to fix puzzles. We like to solve puzzles. Thank you. So we can go from one puzzle to another puzzle. And so for me, it was just one puzzle to another puzzle.
Rodney:
So Katie, I’d love to touch on those industry shifts because our firm works across a lot of pretty much every industry. And I know that electronics is drastically different from oil and gas. What are some of those learnings as you made that transition? What was some of the transferable skills that may have carried over and then what’s something that was just brand new that you really had to soak in and learn?
Katie:
I think it was. From a standpoint of you’re going from a manufacturing heavy environment into a Service focused environment like MRO and we’re providing a service. We may manufacture these tools, but in the end, our client gets a service. They don’t necessarily get a product they want an outcome. That was definitely a major mindset shift, right?
That, we weren’t just looking at product quality. We were looking at service quality. And when you’re looking at service quality logistics, Logistics is actually, the last piece on the critical path. Sometimes it’s the last piece that gets to interact with the customer. So logistics has to be a huge focus that you have in order to make sure not only that you’re on time, but you’re on time with the right things.
And that your delivery and execution is flawless. And that’s where supply chain and operations really mesh together. In addition, going to a heavily engineered atmosphere, where we do a lot of custom product, projects and products. It was a, it was also a mindset shift. Because you’re going from one product that has scale and you can go inside even the company where I was, you could have one business unit that had an extreme amount of scale to another business that had very small scale, but were very large ticket items.
So this I think is where you really have to take and shift your focus and make sure you Segment what’s important to your customer and segment your supply chain, because not all supply chains are created equal. You have to look at them in different ways. A scale supply chain is very different than an engineer to order supply chain.
You have to use different archetypes, as a colleague of mine once said, educated me on. So I think that going from those different industries helped, and you could bring certain things with you. And it was always a different mindset. One of the most power thing, powerful things that you could bring with you is.
You had a different perspective and you can always ask the question. You can always suggest it. You can always try it. You can always break the mold a little bit. Because you’re just trying to push yourself, your entire team, your entire operation to the next level all the time. So having that different perspective, you may bring things in that another colleague who’s always been an engineer to order business may not think of.
This is where you need to look at things like postponement versus manufacturing the whole thing and then shipping it, right? So these are a lot of things that you could bring in and flex together. So I think having that ability, that openness, that willingness to speak up, to ask questions is one of the things that I learned.
A second thing I would say is Different businesses and different product lines have their own personality. If you look at, a technology curve, you have your early adopters versus your late adopters and all along that spectrum, right? And sometimes businesses, even business units, Within a firm have different cultures and you have to be able to adapt to that culture, which were you’re in right now and be able to understand what is going to motivate that team.
How you need to communicate that team to articulate. You have to edit your message or the way you deliver your message to really make it, Sync and make it, take hold in a person’s mind or in a group’s mind. So being able to flex and go from different environments was a challenge, but it was really fun because you got to know all these different.
Entities and these different people and how people thought, and you really got to challenge yourself in order to be, how can I communicate? How can I articulate? How can I be effective? Because a lot of times in supply chain, we manage by influence, right? We may not be head of operations, but we have to influence that operational entity in order to say this might be a better route, or this might be a more cost effective route, or this might generate more revenue.
Rodney:
What was your your favorite experience between the two out of curiosity?
Katie:
Oh, across the industry? That’s hard. That’s really hard. I wouldn’t necessarily say that. Actually, I would I really enjoyed, I worked on More the mechanical side at one point in time. So a lot of heavy duty equipment, mechanical side, and I really enjoyed that. I also worked in a more higher technology application.
And that, that group was very much the early adopters. They wanted to challenge themselves. They wanted to lead the way. And then our mechanical side was very much the innovators. They knew they had a job to get done. They knew they had a little bit of time to do it. And they were very skilled at using what they had and being able to think on their feet.
Mike:
Good answer. And I think now When you look at what you’ve done in starting up Unchained Value and what it does for people’s supply chain careers, there’s gotta be a little bit of that variety that has to be rewarding to you as well is you can choose your customers, but there’s going to be a mix and who you decide or who you’re marketing to or run into.
It’d be great for the audience to be able to hear about. Motivations for starting up unchained value and what it does for people’s careers.
Katie:
Love to tell you about that. So unchained value, we are a very niche focused firm. Our goal is to unchain that value. And in my career, I commonly flipped back and forth between an operational role and a transformation and a project role.
I call the operation rules. My reality check where, I was in a transformation role before, then I had to go do the operation of it. So I would set myself up for success. Like you always should if you’re in a project. And. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed going back and forth with that, and I enjoyed working on those projects and having a different problem or puzzle that we had to solve.
And so at one point in my career, I decided it was more about how I want to work and what I want to do and who I want to do it with. And I decided that how I wanted to do was really work on transformations, work on empowerment. I had a friend of mine who sent me a quote. That was just really captured it.
And it said, “you are the greatest project you will ever work on. Restart, reset, refocus as many times as you need. Just don’t give up.” And I think when I heard that it summed it all up for me. I came to this point in my career where I wanted to focus on the, how I was working on projects side of it.
And so I took all the great things that I had in my career and I bundled them into a business. I imagined, if I was to start a business who would I want to be working with? And luckily I had a lot of good colleagues who I’d worked with in the past, who either came in and started working with me in this endeavor, or they’re actually our clients now.
So we’re actually working with them and that is, that’s So powerful.
So we at Unchained value We do focus on transformation, but there’s also with any transformation, there is an education aspect to it. There is a change management aspect to it. We talked about the technology curve, early adopters, late adopters.
You have to speak to everyone who’s on that curve. And really bring them on board for a change, whether that’s a process change, digital change or a structural change. So we take teams and individuals through that change, whether we want to institutionalize a training program for our supply chain.
We don’t have anything for them. What does that look like? Are you wanting to do it for your workforce level? Are you wanting something for your high potential candidates? Do you want to do a fixed step program or rotational program? What tools do you want to use? What focus do you want to have? So we really ask a lot of questions with our clients and we try to understand the gap they’re trying to address.
To provide that right solution. And usually we give them a solution that’s configured from several different outlets and tools. That’s pretty holistic that they can grow, they can evolve with, and that not only grows their company and their company skillset, their individuals. Their teams, their most powerful asset in the company.
From an individual side, We also offer education for individuals, certifications, everything like that. And we also offer coaching and mentorship, right? Making sure that people when they have those questions, they have someone to go to. They have someone to ask. Who has been there so we can match individuals with the mentors and everything.
It’s a wonderful, fulfilling business that we have, right? Our whole goal is what I said, it’s in our name, Unchained Value. We want to unchain the value that you have as an organization or as an individual and unleash that potential.
Mike:
What have you seen As far as that change management process for people all the way, the folks that are right there on the floor doing the work, you all the way up to CEO being able to talk to all those different people with, from the different perspectives what has been most challenging, as you go lower down the totem pole and a little bit higher.
Katie:
I think it’s the level of detail and abstractness, right? I was putting it in a quadrant, right? When you are at a 40, 000 foot level, it’s very easy to oversimplify something. And when you’re at, the five foot level. It’s very easy to not see that big picture and just see the smaller detail, right?
That, that is impacting you, but may not be impacting everyone else. So I think from that aspect, we have to look both at those perspectives and tailor the message. The message is going to be different when it comes from a higher level leadership team. And it’s directed to a higher level leadership team.
It’s going to be more concise, more abstract to a certain degree. And it’s not necessarily going to go into those details. It will focus on results, but not necessarily the details. When you are on the ground, boots on the ground, getting your hands dirty, you need to understand what those steps are, right?
In addition, that on the ground team likely has the most valued input. To optimize something, you just have to be careful in that middle zone that if you optimize one piece, you’re not undermining another. So you need to bring people together. You need to bring them cross functionally. When we’re talking about change management, it’s one of the things that’s most often overlooked, and I am a huge fan of making sure change management is entertaining.
If you bring people to a training and it is just dry training, we’re talking like this, just going monotone, we’ll do this step and this step. The first thing they’re going to do is start picking up their phone and getting distracted, right? The more entertaining that you can make it in this day and age, the more interactive you can make it.
The more that you say we are leading on you as part of this training to understand this gamification is a way to do that. The more that message starts to sink, right? And, let’s take your standard user acceptance test. In the terms of a large company who may be implementing the same software solution, but doing it geographically, going from one to the other in a phase rollout.
You’ve done the first one, so you’ve done the user acceptance test. It’s no longer an IT related exercise or project management related exercise. It’s a user experience exercise. You’re not just going in and having the exercise say, click here, okay, click here. No, you want to go end to end and use it as a training, as a guide, as, as almost like a process relay where you can start from the sales, going all the way back to the procurement piece and all the way back to the logistics piece.
Where you’re handing everything off to each other and doing it live. So you can see what’s happening there. You’ve already tested the system. Or you haven’t tested is the user. So I think the more interaction we can have, the more focus on that user or that learner the better off your training is going to be.
Mike:
I was going to ask about, when you talk about not optimizing, one particular area that might hurt. else. So not just the internal side of things, but what are you seeing as far as externally, when a company is heading in a direction where they say, Hey, this works out best for us, but did you actually talk to the customers or their suppliers?
When you cross boundaries to other. Companies. Is there something that that you do for that as well?
Katie:
Yes. I think when you’re looking at things cross functionally, when you’re looking at transformations, you have to map your stakeholders. It is so important. You have to understand what is going to affect everyone. And you have to be able to manage that change in communication. You may have already made the decision to do this as a different rollout, but you may not have exactly looked and seen how that Impacts your suppliers or your customers.
So I think being able to identify those to segment those. What are the top customers you want feedback from? What are the top customers you want to help in this automation or in this optimization? Same thing with your top suppliers. We have a colleague of mine doing a supplier improvement program and it looks at the whole chain across the customers.
It brings everyone in to make sure everyone rises to the top, right? Thank you. So this is something that you have to do because if you just internally, even if it’s just in logistics versus planning or if it’s, Your company versus your supplier and your customer also have to bring in some of those, bring in that perspective, regularly solicit feedback.
Don’t be afraid of that feedback. But do be very careful because when you ask for that feedback, sometimes you can create an expectation that something is going to change. So you get the feedback, you need to make sure you acknowledge it. And you also communicate, okay, we’re going to act on this, but we can’t act on this.
Rodney:
Katie, I love the company name Unchained Value. You think about value chain and the play on words there, but I was just curious how you came up with that, how long it took to come up with that name?
It took a few weeks of going back and forth. There was a lot of brainstorming. There was a lot of scribbling on coasters and cocktail napkins with friends. And In the end, it was what’s going, what name, what title is really going to try to express what we do in the best way possible.
And we are all about, unchaining that value, unleashing that potential, unlocking that opportunity for people. So while it may start off with, a negative prefix it’s really about empowerment and that’s. The biggest thing in our company is to empower people. We jokingly tell our clients, like our goal is to make you independent from us.
To make you no longer need us. We’ll always be there on the other side of the bat phone if you ever need us. We’ll answer the call, we’ll answer the red phone. But we want you to become independent and you to change your culture and your life. So that’s really what it was about. And it’s just symbolizes that freedom, that empowerment, that, that great feeling of pride that you get when you can really take things to the next level.
Rodney:
Love it. On that note there’s been a lot of discussion. I’ve seen the evolution of we’ll call it hard skills, soft skills over the years and supply chain technology and adaption of these technologies is rapidly advanced. We’ve got robots now in warehouses and factories, but would love to hear your perspective. If you’ve worked across your client portfolio What have you seen in terms of what stick, what works as it relates to, upskilling learning and development programs, any best practices that you’d like to share?
Katie:
I would. And the number one thing I would like to share is that I go back to the fundamentals. The foundations, right? And it goes back to the old saying, garbage in, garbage out, right? If, models, simulations, robotics, AI, machine learning, they’re all great tools, but if you don’t understand the basics of what goes into them as an input, You’re going to get as an output something that’s extremely biased and something that can cause major issues.
So I go back to really starting with those fundamentals and making sure that we have a good basis for an understanding, for a process, for a digitization, for a tool. That’s what I see. I do see using some of these Modules and training. I would love to see and a I becoming that training coach that testing coach that sounding board for you.
But I think the best practice that I have is we need to look at training and development of our teams as an enterprise solution. It is. Iterative, it crosses personal development. It crosses professional development. It crosses team dynamic succession planning. It crosses, role definition, task definition.
So it is really, this multi step process where each layer of the organization is building on it to create that and you’re looking at it. Every few times, if I’m an individual, I’m going through and saying, I want to learn more about this so I can be a part of this organization or I can learn this domain.
That’s great. There’s probably a gap in that domain. So you’re doing a succession planning. Then you’re also doing an individual career planning to say, I think you’d be a great fit here. And then you’re assessing your own skills as an individual and understanding how you can embed those into your own training program, given the option.
And lastly, there’s, what are the skills that have been defined for that future role that you have for the current role that you have? How can you better prepare yourself? So I think one of the trends that I see that needs to stay is making sure it’s iterative, that it’s holistic, that it looks at both the individual and the organization.
Coming back to soft skills we talked about team dynamic. We talked a lot about supply chain as influencers. We manage a lot by influence. A lot of people in supply chain are actually very good salespeople. We usually have to sell our idea with a business case, right? We have to explain it, to articulate it.
We have to understand personalities. We have to understand cultures. We are dealing globally with different business units, different suppliers, different customers. Soft skills in supply chain, Are massively important. I’m doing a training right now where part of it is we’re looking at each person’s communication type and we’re trying to pair people in an exercise to where we bring multiple communication types in the table.
So they have to figure out a way to communicate. What they want to communicate, but all different personality types people take information differently. Some people are audio. Some people are visual. Some people like to write it down. They like to read it. Some people just like to go and do it and experience it.
And that’s how they learn. So we have to be very careful on how we communicate, what we communicate, what modes and methods we use for it. And it has to be very fit for purpose. In the event that you’re doing, whether it’s a negotiation plan, whether it is, a transaction that you’re executing, whether it is a training, whether it is a brainstorming session, right?
You need to make sure you have all voices in the room. So the soft skills are massively important. Especially recognizing team dynamic. There are a lot of people who, for lack of a better term, type eight personalities they can voice their opinion very easily. But at the same time and I had a colleague who I just had dinner with a few weeks ago, who used to work with me, and someone had come up to her when she first started working for me the second time, and they said, I don’t know, she’s quiet.
I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s going to be able to, cut it, so to speak. And I had just happened to walk up there, and this was my entire team and I heard that comment, and I, you don’t understand. When she has something to say, you should be able to hear her, as if a pin would drop in that room.
Because whenever she has something to say, she’s well thought, and she’s usually right, and she’s trying to prevent us from making a mistake. So I think it’s having the ability to understand it’s not just the loudest voice in the room. Sometimes the quietest voice in the room can speak the highest volume.
And that really goes back to the soft skills.
Mike:
Yeah, it’s a great example. You do have so many different people that you want to be able to learn from over time. And you’ve been very active in associations such as ASCM and others, I’m sure over time and a lot of networking, a lot of people that you meet and getting used to those styles.
Are there some networking tips and advice you could provide for our audience?
Katie:
Never underestimate your network. They are there to support you. You are there to support them. You never know when you’re going to need them. Never burn a bridge if you can. But they are one of your biggest strengths externally. My network is the ones who I scribbled the name down on the cocktail napkins, the ones who are now part of my team and Unchained Value, the ones who are my clients and customers at Unchained Value, the ones who are referring me to other clients and customers at Unchained Value.
So get involved. I would also say you have a voice. Use it. Don’t be afraid. Just like the example that I cited earlier when that person spoke up, it was usually very on point, very relevant, and we all needed to listen to her. So don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see that make sure that you have your team you create a space for people to speak up.
You, you create a space for yourself to speak up. So even though You’re in a network, even though you have a question you may have one question and 10 other people have the same question, so you really need to ask the question because it starts that discussion and you’re going to get a beautiful discussion out of it and probably more of a rich discussion than you thought you would just having it individually.
Last thing is. I had someone tell me very early in my career, good leaders create better leaders. So if you are in a leadership or a management role, it is your responsibility to develop and empower that team. If you leave that role, knowing that team can sustain that process or that organization without you being there, you have succeeded.
You have absolutely succeeded. I would rather work myself out of a role that my team can take on for me than be directly replaced. So I think that, good leaders create better leaders and we should all take that very seriously. It’s our job to help prop up others as they’re growing and empower them.
Rodney:
I’ll give that an amen. I’d love your perspectives as you Are consulting, you’re helping companies to drive transformation. You’re influencing a lot of change. So you touched on earlier on, machine learning and robotics and how that’s reshaping land supply chains. What are you seeing out there? And what can companies do to prepare themselves? And to be successful as things continue to shape.
Katie:
We’re moving into a period where it’s very much data driven and a lot of companies have taken data ownership and process ownership and thought it primarily just a support function within IT. But there is a piece of that. There is the data flow, which I do think our IT providers do understand and do own.
But there is the quality. Of that data, there is the discipline of that data, and there is the understanding of that, which is definitely owned by the business, right? You can have a data architect who designs what data technical. What are these fields need to be? How many characters? Where do they need to go?
Everything like that. But there’s also a business counterpart who is helping, especially on that. Where does this need to go? How often does it need to be updated? Where do we get the information from? How do we put it in? How do we make sure we’re getting it and segregating it to who needs to see it?
For instance, you’re talking about supplier data, banking details, data, you have remit to data and you have, bill to data, shift to data, terms, everything like that. Not everyone needs to see all that data. So you need to make sure you compartmentalize it as well. So I think the biggest thing I see is people taking data more seriously in terms of not just an IT role, but into a business role.
And that goes back to the foundations that we have. Once we have that, then it is things like AI and machine learning, especially, can help, right?
Mike:
Hey, have you had any interesting situations where there’s a solution that’s been developed, especially when you were on the execution side before of things, and you find that People are skipping the solution because maybe they didn’t trust it or it’s not doing what they thought it should do.
Katie:
Yes. I think that can be a common occurrence, when you’re designing and implementing a to work inside of the solution than it is to work outside of the solution. In one of my roles we were transitioning to a new business system fully for the entire company, but that was years off.
So we had to work with what we had. And so we figured out a way to change the process and change the IT landscape a little bit, leveraging tools that we already had. And brought my team along with me on that design aspect and when it was ready. I came to them and I said, I want you to try and break it.
Your user acceptance said, you know the process, I want you to break it. I want you to put all of your effort in to, to game it, to break it, to do whatever. So I think that bringing in the users in the very beginning is going to help you design it. Focusing on the problem first and not the solution, like really going into the root cause of the five whys and understanding that helps you avoid that scenario.
But if you do find yourself in that scenario, that’s when you need to go back to this restart, reset, refocus, right? You have to understand that you’re always going to have a little bit of that because you can’t plan for 100 percent of all the events. We have to parade it. We have to say 80 percent of the time, this is how we operate.
And then we have to say, 20 percent or less is going to be an exception management. So you are going to have to work outside of the system on occasion and figure out how to bring it back into the system. So we have that detail, but you need to focus on the majority of your operation.
Mike:
Excellent. One of the things that we always love to be able to get from experienced. Professionals to be able to close with some of the best advice that you’ve received over the years, that’s become a part of your career and a few of your own that you’ve learned on your own along the way that you’d like to pass along to others.
Katie:
We’ve touched on so many of them already. One of my favorites is, good leaders create better leaders. And we talked about that. We talked about using your voice. I’ll give you an example of using your voice. For this one was down at one of our headquarters and really talking to a colleague of mine and then I went to go visit another colleague of mine and I see someone else is in his office and they’re talking about this big problem, this big materials problem and how it was frustrating and they couldn’t see a path to overcome it.
And my friend saw me and knows me very well. I am one of those type A people who Struggles sometimes to keep their opinions to themselves and I just saw him lean back in his chair and smile because he knew I knew this problem and he knew I couldn’t help myself from stepping in and within five minutes I had a marker, a whiteboard and we were going through what the solution should be.
By the end of the two hours that I spent in that office, I had gotten a job. So never be afraid sometimes to speak up if you have a solution, right? You may not get a new job out of it, you may get, something else. So I think that’s a big lesson learned in my career. Patience and empathy. We are all human.
Don’t ascribe intent to an email, what someone sent, or a message that someone sent. Have the patience, have the empathy. Your team is there to support you, and you are there to support them. No matter what your role in the team, so make sure you guys can connect, have a report and express that empathy and express that patience as well.
Mike:
Excellent.
Rodney:
Katie, if folks in our audience would like to. Learn more about unchained value. Where would you want to point them?
Katie:
It’s very easy. You can go to unchained value. com or email us at info at unchainedvalue.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me there. We’d love to chat with you guys. We’d love to understand if you need our help or how you can help us.
Rodney:
Excellent. We really do appreciate you coming on the show today, Katie. This has been a fascinating discussion. You’ve got such a unique career path and we certainly wish you best as you continue to build and grow out unchained value again, thanks for coming on and sharing your unique career journey. And we wish you the best.
Katie:
Thank you guys for having me. I really enjoyed my time here and I look forward to having more conversations in the future.