When you think about an e-commerce player or retail player, there's more flexibility in being able to do that. You can probably go out and find a vendor that makes a similar product in another country and begin to source some of that product there. Right. For manufacturers and, you know, many of our customers are manufacturers as well as retailers, e-commerce, all different types. It's more challenging, right? Because you're creating a product somewhere with a vendor and moving that sourcing of that product somewhere else, can be a big expense. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 69 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one show focusing exclusively on the intersection of sustainability and supply chains. Today's episode is very generously sponsored by Sayari. Sayari uncovers risk in corporate and trade networks. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. I'm thrilled to have you here. A huge thank you to this podcast's, amazing supporters, Kieran Ognev and Alicia Farag. You make this podcast possible. I. If you'd like to become a supporter, support starts at just three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the price of a cup of coffee, and you can find the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or at tinyurl.com/ssc pod. Now, you know how supply chain leaders are under pressure to deliver resilience, efficiency, and sustainability all at once? Well, today's guest has been doing exactly that for over 30 years long before it became a boardroom buzzword. Jim McCullen, has spent his career turning chaos into calm. As CTO of Century Supply Chain Solutions. He's helped some of the world's biggest importers navigate everything from trade wars to port strikes, to carbon reduction targets. He's a tech veteran who's seen the evolution from paper manifests to AI driven logistics and isn't just talking about the future. He's building it. And when he is not solving global supply chain challenges, he's racing mountain bikes and teaching people how to take control of their inboxes. This is a conversation about what's really working in supply chain today and what leaders should be doing now to stay ahead. But before we get to that in the next few weeks on this podcast, I will be talking to Gary Loh, who's the CEO of DiMuto, Rene Schrama, who's CCO of Peak Tech, Pierre Lapree, who's CPO of spend, hq, and Eric Biel, who's director of Strategic Partnerships for Powercast Corp. But now back to today's episode, and as I mentioned, my special guest on the show today is Jim. Jim, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Thanks Tom. It's it's great to be here with you today. So my name's Jim McCullen, I'm CTO, at Century Supply Chain Solutions. We're a a global logistics provider focused on a service called Origin Cargo Management, which hopefully we'll get to talk about a little bit later in the podcast. Located in Charlottesville Virginia. Just recently moved out here from Richmond. So, a new area of focus for me. Been in supply chain space for over 30 years now driving supply chain technology. Okay. And what's been your route to CTO of Century Jim? I started with Century over three decades ago and really started as their sole IT person. Right outta the gates was sent all over Asia to begin to build out technologies to help customers understand what was happening in their supply chains. You think back that long ago and things like the internet didn't exist, email was just getting started. And so, there were so many challenges in the technical components and aspects of being able to share information across the world. And so got my early start there at Century and just continued with Century and evolved into leading our global IT teams that we have today. You know, look at around the world to support our, our technology and our customers. So yeah, it's, it's been a, a more or less a lifetime evolution for me in supply chain and at Century. Cool. And what do you think has surprised you most in the last 30 years of your work at Century? Yeah, so it, I, I'd say it's a couple of things. One, that in supply chain and global logistics, some of the things that have taken so long to change problems that we faced years and years ago that have come again under new names or, or different focuses, but the same concepts. But when I think about the technology and all of the advances that we've made, that technology has made over the past 30 years. It was so much more of an effort to be able to exchange data, to be able to talk both electronically through data and in real terms with people around the world, right? And when you think about today, you can, jump on a teams call or a Zoom call with anyone in the world, and you can even have it convert to local language in real time as the conversations are taking place. When I started it was I had to have a translator over my shoulder talking to the teams that were doing the work in the system and translating back and forth. And, today, we have so much better communication. The technologies are there to support, you know, everything that we need to do in the supply chain. So, so yeah, it's been a really fun, fun journey to watch all of this materialise over the years. You've been at Century, you said over three decades. That's, that's quite rare in in tech and logistics. What's kept you there so long? There's always a new challenge in supply chain. So, you know, when, when you think about every new customer that we onboard, they have unique supply chain requirements that, yes, we've seen, you collectively across customers, but, everyone is special and unique in their way and how they, they manage and orchestrate their supply chain. In a lot of jobs, I think you get to a point where it's like, okay, you've learned everything There's really nothing new here. I need to go find something else to do. At Century, that's never been the case because there's always been some, something growing or changing, whether that's, you know, new customers, new verticals that we're approaching onboarding new origins around the world. So when you think about the expansion over the last 30 years from, you know, where we were hyper-focused on just China, to start with in Hong Kong. And then that expansion across Asia, across the Europe and other countries around the world. That's always brought on new challenges. And then I think for me a good friend of mine once said, you know, we were talking about why we're, we've, you know, we're in supply chain and been here for so long, and, in some ways it's about, being able to take chaos and turn it into calm, right? So there's always some level of chaos that you're dealing with. And for me that's the challenge that's kept me excited and engaged about it is, is there's always something new to, to work towards, to solve. And then when you look at the technology aspect of it, we're finally at a time now where we're seeing the technology that's truly capable of replacing what people have had to do in the the global logistics processes. Right? Because again, there's so much you know, adaption and customisation to what each account wants. In the past that was purely done with people. And now these technologies that we're seeing are, are truly allowing us to do that. So like you, you know, you would have seen in the news, you know, five, seven years ago, these big companies talking about, you know, they're gonna digitise supply chain, they're gonna change the way supply chain works. And none of that really materialised right. Now we're really starting to see that materialise because these technologies have, have honestly caught up to what logistics needed. Okay. Okay. And you mentioned Origin Cargo Management a little while ago. What is that? Why is it such a big deal? And why is it so popular? Yeah. So, let me kind of give you a little bit of a, an overview of it.'cause there, I'm sure some of your listeners are not that familiar with it because it does tend to be focused on the North American region aggressively and some other regions are more focused on using freight forwarders, using NVOs. And so, you know, I'll start with it, you know, kind of general overview and then dig in and ask me more questions as we go. But, so as an origin cargo manager, the importer hires Century or someone like Century to be their, control tower, their gateway between their vendors or manufacturers, and they're transportation providers. And so we connect with all of their internal systems. We connect with their ERP systems, like SAP and Oracle and other tools like that. We connect with their TMSs, their warehouse management systems, and we bring that data into our platform, which is called Viziv. So Viziv is our innovative technology for supply chain management, and then their suppliers around the world are booking inside of our system to be able to transport the product. And we in turn our teams around the world. And that's something that's a little bit unique from Century's side is there's other technology providers out there that, offer the technology to deliver these services, but not the people. So we have the supply chain experts located at every origin port around the world. We have the CFSs container freight stations set up where goods can be delivered, you know, carton level goods can be delivered and consolidated into ocean containers, which is a big part of what we do. And so then, so these vendors are interacting with us. We're in turn booking with the transportation providers that the customer, the importer has selected. And so that's where it's really different, right? As an importer, if you're selecting a freight forwarder or, or an NVO, to be your transportation provider and coordinator, they've got a, personal interest or a professional interest in the transportation costs, right? So, so that's where they're trying to make the most of their money. From Century's side, the importer pays us the same amount, no matter what the freight cost is, because we are just their eyes and ears at origin, making sure that vendor is shipping the goods at the right time to the right place, right quantity at the most efficient cost in transit, right? So, so we manage all of that for those importers. And again, because we're not the transportation provider, we're always looking for the best interest of the customer, right? So that could be fulfilling their carrier contracts. It could be going after spot rates during a certain time period because the pricing makes more sense for that. It could be looking at carbon footprint and, you know, certain percentages of goods that we want to move through a more sustainable path. And so our teams are orchestrating that for our customers around the world. And then our Viziv platform gives them the visibility the precision visibility to everything that's happening in the supply chain. And when you think about everything that's happening today, whether it's around the tariffs or, potential port strikes or you know, vessel ownership or any of those kind of things, understanding and being able to see into your supply chain through our Viziv platform and through our data, which we make accessible gives you that power to be able to plan to, to react to situations faster, and to adapt to what's coming next. So it's a little bit different, you know, in the origin cargo management model we are, just there for the benefit of the importer to make sure that the decisions that are being made are in their best interest. And, you know, it's instead of that importer having to have an origin office at every one of those countries to, to babysit that process for them, right? Our people are there to do that. Does that make sense? Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. But this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. So how does one connect to the other? How is, how is this more sustainable? Sure. So, you know, I think from a sustainability standpoint, our customers can come to us again as a central control point to make those decisions, right? So, number one, we can provide, you know, all of the carbon reporting on, on what it's costing them from a carbon standpoint to move these goods. And, What routes are more efficient? We have things like, EVs at origin where, you know, we can reduce transportation spend when it comes to carbon footprint. So they have this, this centralised control point where the importer can orchestrate how they wanna manage their sustainability effort when it comes to global transportation. So rather than them having to do that individually with each ocean carrier, with each warehouse, with each origin trucking company, right? Like we are that collection point for them to bring all that data together. And then also that decision point where they can come back and begin to kind of set levers as to, how they wanna manage transport, whether you know it's cost, it's carbon footprint, it's transit time, and in some cases, all three of those may come together, right, for the most efficient delivery of goods. You've got a, a, a viewpoint over global supply chains that I, I'm guessing, seeing as you're all over essentially. What would you say is the most common point of failure you see in global supply chains today? Yeah, so it's a great question. I think it tends to be when we go into kind of crisis situations, right? So when, for example, when we have capacity issues at origin, so there's not enough ocean carrier space for all of the goods that are moving and you know, begins to create challenges, especially for customers that don't have somebody like an origin cargo manager in place. Because we have visibility to all of their data, we understand, what purchase orders are high priority or not. We can make those decisions in advance. So when that vendor is booking the goods, we can push back on vendor A and say, I'm sorry, you know, your goods are gonna have to wait an additional week because the customer needs vendor B or C. Right. If those vendors are working directly with the transportation providers, every one of those vendors wants to get their cargo moving as fast as possible. Right. Sure. That's their concern. From Century's standpoint, our concern is the customer. What product do you need first? So when you're in that, capacity crunch at origin we're able to help with that. Right? On the domestic side, it's the same thing. When you get into these situations where, you know, maybe you've got back logs at a port, maybe you've got some kind of a port strike going on, or something like that. Having that better visibility to what's inbound, to where it is, gives the importer that control that power to be able to overcome those situations faster, and also to anticipate them. Right? So one of the things that our supply chain teams do. We actually have what's called a disruption team. And so before a crisis, you know, not all crisis', you know about in advance, right? But many of them you do. And so before something like that happens, we bring this team together to really think about what are our customers gonna need during this time period. So I'll take the ILA strike that was threatened last year with the long shoremen on the East Coast and Gulf coasts. So our team got together in advance of that and sat down and really thought through, okay, how have we dealt with these situations in the past? What information are our customers gonna be in need of, right? And so potentially you could have vessels stacked up at ports and you need to understand what product is on there. And you know, when did each of those vessels arrive? So I have at least some idea when they're gonna come in, right? And what can we share with our customers in advance of that for their planning standpoint. And you know, we saw customers that were early on diverting cargo, you know, to the west coast for example. But then you get bottlenecks at the west coast because everybody's trying to move product through that area. And so again, you know, we're just trying to anticipate potentially what's gonna happen? What are we gonna need to be able to give our customers so they can use that data to be able to deal with these situations better. And then afterwards we'll do a retrospective and come back around to it and say, okay, what went well and what didn't? Right? Like what did we miss out on that, customers came to us at the 11th hour asking for and we didn't think about. And so then we kind of put that into a toolbox so that the next time something similar happens, we can open up that toolbox and say, oh yeah, we use these four things. Let's make sure those are dusted off and ready to go, and deliver those to the customer. So that evolution of this disruption team has allowed us to, to really build better products for our, our offering. There's obviously a huge difference between having access to data and having insight from that data. So talk me through there how you see that breaking out in terms of your customers getting insights versus just being flooded with data. So there's, I think a couple of things going on there. One is that the data analysis tools have gotten so much better and so much easier to use. And you know, what I'm seeing today is that many large importers, they have their own data analysis team. They have data storage technologies, data warehouse technologies, other things like that. And so, like for example, we use a technology called Snowflake at Century to manage our data warehouse. And and what that allows us to do is deliver reporting, analytics, dashboards to our customers through our Viziv platform. But it also allows us to expose that data to our customers to be able to access directly so that their teams can analyse it. So to come back to your question there's really two sides to it, right? One, and really a couple. The first is, you have to have trusted data, right? So you've gotta have information that you know is right, that you can trust. The second is we have teams across Century and at the various origins at destination control tower type teams that understand each of our customer's needs, and they are working with their information to make recommendations, suggestions. So this could be things like looking at longer term plans. You know, like how much of your freight are you having the vendors deliver as factory loaded containers to the port versus consolidated freight coming through our facilities. Right. And is there a, a way to offset maybe some of your inventory carrying costs by adjusting that blend? So our teams will look at that, analyse that, present that to our customers. Same thing when you think about hub programs, you know, for like franchisee divisions and things like that. We'll go through that analysis. Take all of the customer's data, analyse it, and then present recommendations to them on, on what they could do. And you know, when you think about like these hub programs, they could really run from many, many different ports, across the world, you know, primarily in Asia. And so, really doing that analysis to understand where's the best cost benefit, the best value will present that information to the customers in that format. So yeah, our teams, I think the key is that our teams understand our customer's supply chains really well. They understand their data, and then we can do that analysis. And then at the same time, making that data available to our customers directly so that they can do their own analysis as well. So it's, it's that combination. Okay. You've managed to carefully avoid using the term AI, even though it's the kind of hot topic du jour across all technology, not just supply chain. So is it that they've gotten no AI whatsoever in Viziv, or are you just being coy? Yeah, so I, I, I guess I wanted to have you start that conversation before we went down there. Right. So not not go right outta the gates there. So, yeah. Absolutely. As I, I, you know, kind of alluded to earlier, the technology shift that we're seeing today is, because of AI, right? And so I think we're finally at this point where the AI capabilities that are out there allow us to, analyse data so much faster, to make decisions through the technology and really replace what, operators have had to do in the past. And so, from Century's perspective, at TPM, the Transpacific Marine Conference in Long Beach a few weeks ago, we were presenting our latest features in our Viziv platform. And a couple of those included our new AI routing and consolidation engine. And so when you think about you know, our customers will ship anywhere from thousands of containers to hundreds of thousands of containers a year. And, you know, our operations teams are coordinating all of that. And when you think about you've got carrier contracts, you've got carrier allocations, you've got transit times, all of the freight costs, right? You've got all these different components that you need to think about when you're gonna book a shipment. And so the routing engine that we've built takes all of that information in and allows us to set levers at a customer level to determine what they're focused on. And drive the decision making on how we're gonna route that freight through this AI engine. So the operators are able to take all those vendor bookings that are coming in, feed them to these AI agents. They analyse all the data within seconds and then come back with all the possible routings and this the preferred routing to take. Right? And then same on the consolidation planning. That's the second piece of it. And, what we're doing there is, is looking at all of the bookings that are coming in from the vendors and determining is there a better consolidation plan here. So you might have, 10 vendors bringing product in and three of them are shipping light loaded, 40 foot containers, right? And a couple are delivering into a CFS. Well, we can analyse all of that data in advance and go back to the customer and say, Hey, we we're gonna suggest that this vendor deliver these goods to the CFS because you're gonna end up getting a better utilised container outbound from there, right? Yes. There's some more costs to bring it through the warehouse at origin, but you've reduced your costs on your transport spend and on your inland spend, which can be a big piece of that cost, right? The inland dre, the DC receiving costs, all of that comes into play. So for us, those two tools and we just announced them basically at TPM and we will be rolling them out in the next couple of months with our customers. Those two tools alone, I think will dramatically change how, we operate as a business. And I think for me, that's the key is that we're finally at a place in logistics. Like I said earlier, there, there was so much talk about digitisation of supply chain and everything else in the, past five years or so. And now we're at this place where, where we truly can do it and we can replace what these operators are doing with the technology. The other one that we're bringing out is a new chat bot we're calling Robolytics that allows you to talk to your supply chain data. We have all different types of analytics, reporting, data access screens, that you can look at things, but a lot of times you just want to ask a question, right? Like, how many containers do I have coming in to Long Beach in the next two weeks that have this product on it? Those kind of questions, right? Or if something happens in the supply chain, like you know, a vessel hits a bridge or whatever, you can go in and and pull that up and say, you know, did I have any freight on this vessel? And have it come back. And yes, you could go through a report and find that, but being able to just ask it the question is, is the real power, right? And so that's a combination of all of the work that we've done to build out this data warehouse through Snowflake, but also the chat bot capabilities of generative AI and being able to layer those on top. And when you think about global logistics and supply chain, there's so much terminology that's unique to our space, right? So part of it is we have to teach the chat bot what you're asking and what that relates to, right? Because everybody's got slightly different terms that they use for a lot of these words. That's the piece that we're working on is, is enhancing that so that no matter how you phrase your question about your supply chain, the chatbot can figure it out, and respond with the right data. We're seeing Jim, the rise now of tariffs rearing their ugly head again, and with trade policies shifting, what are smart companies doing now to prepare? There's some longer term things that folks have been doing, in essence in preparation for this. And there's some short term things that people are attacking as well. The longer term side of it is being able to distribute the risk of your supply chain, right? So being able to expand where you're sourcing product from. And when you think about an e-commerce player or retail player, there's more flexibility in being able to do that. You can probably go out and find a vendor that makes a similar product in another country and begin to source some of that product there. Right. For manufacturers and, you know, many of our customers are manufacturers as well as retailers, e-commerce, all different types. It's more challenging, right? Because you're creating a product somewhere with a vendor and moving that sourcing of that product somewhere else, can be a big expense. But that's what we've seen, you know, over the last few years. And, you know, and some of that has just been to expand the sourcing options, you know, the countries that people are buying product from so that they're not so isolated in just one country. And so that's been going on. That's helped right now because as these tariffs materialise, if you've got a distributed sourcing plan, you've got some ability to move things around in where your, purchasing is taking place. You may not be able to do that overnight, but you may be able to make some of those adjustments. So, you know, that's one of the things on, on the longer term side, on the shorter term side, things that we're seeing folks really focusing in on again now. And it's just something that origin cargo management providers like Century can really help with are reducing the, the dutyable cost of the goods. And so a lot of cases the inco terms that, people will buy goods from tend to be like FOB, right? So that the importers buying the goods and paying for the transportation from the, the vessel forward, right? But the vendor is paying for that initial transportation to get the goods to the port. And so in many cases, that cost could be factored into your first cost and in turn you're gonna pay duty on that. So being able to isolate that, and there's a couple of ways to do that. One is to take over the origin trucking and manage that from the vendor's door, or the other is to have better visibility to those costs. And so through our Viziv technology, we can collect the front end transportation costs and then they can be reduced from that dutyable cost to reduce that exposure. So, you know, that's one thing that we're seeing. We've seen, you know, we've got customers that'll look at different freight terms. So for example, DDP, where the, the vendor is landing the goods on behalf of the customer. That changes the negotiating position for the customer of who's responsible for paying those duties, right? And really kind of forces it back on the vendor to be able to renegotiate the price points. We've seen customers for sure going in back to vendors to to have them reduce their cost for that product to offset some of the tariffs. But, where the tariffs are headed right now, you're not gonna get that much cost back out of it. Right? We've also seen customers both accelerating and decelerating orders. And so we've seen you know, some orders getting pulled back as importers are, you know, not sure of the economic situation that we're gonna be addressing in the future and whether the consumer demand is going to continue at a stable level or decline. We've seen some customers that are pulling back on some of those orders. We've seen others that have greatly accelerated their orders to get as much product in country as they can before this materialises. Right. So, so definitely playing both sides of it there. It's really interesting too when you think about it from the consumer perspective. The consumer could go in two directions as well, right? On one side of it could pull back and say, okay, I'm not spending money on any big ticket items or anything else because I'm not sure of the economy and, and I wanna, save my money right now. Or they could look at it from the standpoint of, well if these tariffs are gonna happen, the cost of these goods are gonna go up. And especially for larger purchases. I better make this purchase now. Right. And so, like in my mind, you know, I'm a big mountain biker, right? And mountain bikes can get pretty expensive. So, you know, if there's a 25% increase in price on mountain bikes, I think I need to talk to my wife about getting another mountain mountain bike now instead of later. Right? So, so yeah, so there's, there's those dynamics going on and I think all, you know, the importers are all negotiating or thinking through that right now, like what is that impact gonna be? Do I want to have more product here at a lower cost ready to sell, or do I wanna keep my inventory levels in more control so that if consumer demand does decline, I'm not impacted as much? Right. So, so yeah, to come back to your original question, diversifying their sourcing, critically important. Having a player like Century in place, critically important because the more origins that you're sourcing from and the more distributed your product sourcing is, the more complex it is, right? And, and the more you need to rely on somebody like Century to be at each of those origin ports on your behalf, especially if you're gonna start sourcing from new regions that you haven't been in before. Right. Like we know it, we understand it, but if you're doing it on your own and just hoping that that NVO or freight forwarder is gonna really be there for your best interest, that could be a challenge, right? So having us in place to orchestrate it empowers the importer to be able to make those decisions. And what about trust? And when I'm talking about trust. Now I'm talking about trust in AI systems because they famously hallucinate. So, how do you make sure that your customers trust your systems to get the, the answers right? It's a great question. I think from from Century's perspective, what we're doing is really using the AI systems to empower, enable our operations teams. So at this stage, AI systems aren't making this decision to route the cargo. I think we will get there where it's like, okay, you know, in 80% of these routings, we don't need a, a human to touch it at all, right? But where we are right now is we can at least use these technologies to present to the operations teams. Hey, we believe this is the best option for you to route this cargo. And here's three other alternatives, and let them decide, make that final decision, and then give us some feedback in the platform to be able to say, why did they make that decision or why didn't they choose what the AI and AI engine chose? Right? So then we get this level of trust with it over time, where we can then start to say, okay, you know what, in these scenarios, there hasn't been a challenge, right? Let's let the AI engine pick those. And the, the chat bot side of it, you know, same thing there. It's, it's, we, we were analysing every question that our customers are asking, and right now it's, it's, we're internally running it and we're just starting on beta with our customers to start using it. So that we can understand like, what did the customer ask? What did it give back? And was that correct? Right. So that in, in most cases it's a, it's an interpretation of the language more so than the data itself. In both those cases we're, we're going at it conservatively and using it to, to power up our people rather than replace our people, right? It's enabling them to do their jobs faster, which in turn allows us as Century to continue to grow, adding more business, while not increasing head count necessarily, right? So we can, in the long run, we're reducing our costs to serve, and really enabling our people to be able to do more valuable work. And you mentioned you are a mountain bike racer. What lessons from mountain biking do you bring into managing supply chain chaos, if any? from the technology standpoint and, you know, in the business side of things, you know, when I think about racing and the planning that goes into it, right? So like, you know, I get to a race and I've spent months planning, training, working with my coach to make sure I'm doing the right things, to make sure I'm, using the time, the, the best way. Right? And so when you think about it from a business perspective, from a from a supply chain perspective, there's so many things that you could be touching and doing, but if you don't have a, a plan or a goal of what you're trying to achieve specifically? Yeah. You can keep busy all day, right? Like I could go out and do the wrong training stuff all day long and you know, be like, oh yeah, I got eight hours of training in this week. Right? But if it's not focused on, on the type of race I'm doing, for example, right? Like, is this a short track race, is this a, you know, endurance, five hour race? Very different training for that. And same when it comes to supply chain, like what problem are we trying to solve? How much time do we wanna allocate to it? And, and what resources do we want to allocate to it? Right? Like, so, being able to, to understand, and I think there's so many times in business where like you don't really get the clear goal of what's trying to be achieved. And you don't communicate that to the group, and so then you end up with folks that might be working on different interpretations of that goal. Right. You know, so for me, from the, from the racing standpoint, I know what that goal is and now I've got a coach that's gonna help me to be able to make the right decision so I don't have to think about it. And that's, that'll bring it right back. Right. So for me, I just get up and I look at my training schedule and I do what my coach tells me to do, and I meet with him once a month and we go through and we analyse everything. That's what Century does for our customers, right? So, we sit with our customers, we work with them to understand their goals, their plans, you know, we meet with them to update what's happening, but then we take that work. And we define, okay, here's what needs to be done to get you, whether it's implementing a new customer, implementing a new program, changing something in their supply chain, right? Like we, our teams, our supply chain experts will, will do that work to to, to get them to that finish line and they can focus on what's most important to them, which is satisfying their customers, making sure they've got the right product to sell instead of doing all of this work. Right? And so it's the same for me as a mountain biker. I don't have to think about like the periodisation, the training, all of those kind of things. My coach does that for me and brings it to me. Century does that for our customers. Okay. Nice And what are you seeing on the horizon in supply chain that others might be missing? So when you think about modernisation of supply chain, you know, we're seeing a lot of customers modernising their technologies that they're using. The one piece that I think it's left out so often, and I, and I'm constantly trying to challenge on it, is the data integration layer. And so today, so many customers are still focused on EDI transactions, document formats that were built 20 plus years ago, right? And the point is, and you know from Century side as well, like, we wanna implement a new customer as fast as possible, right? And the customer wants to get implemented as fast as possible. But I think we lose a real opportunity there at times because we're not taking the time to redesign how we talk to each other. We've got some really forward looking companies that we've onboarded in the last couple of years where they've actually built with us a a separate API layer. So a separate way to talk between our systems and their systems. And so if they need to upgrade their TMS, their WMS, their ERP, it doesn't impact anything that we're doing because we have this separate layer that we can talk about, right? And so in the old style of EDI integrations with all of their systems directly, if they do wanna do an upgrade, they now have to go out to all their partners like Century and say, okay, we're gonna do a major upgrade of our ERP system next year. We need you to schedule all this time to go through these integrations with us. Right? And so it, it creates a lot of extra risk. And so I feel like that's one area where as supply chain professionals, we really need to take that time to recognise that these data integrations need to be modernised with the rest of the system. Because that's the critical point, being able to flow this data in real time at, really kind of almost topic based yeah you know, segments of data just allows so much more power and speed. So I think that's one thing that we're seeing. Just, you know, on the note on there's a, you know, there's, there's been some discussions around additional charges for Chinese vessels, whether they're flagged or owned or built coming into the ports, if that materialises, I think that could have a big impact on, you know, ocean freight costs because of capacity constraints that may materialise. And also on, on drayage and, and port throughput if, carriers begin calling less ports in the US because of that, right? So I think that is something that we need to be on the lookout for as a, a potential chaos. Okay, cool. Good. And if a young supply chain leader is listening to this and wants to future proof their career, what do you think they should focus on today? Yeah. So, you know, I, I think certainly the technology is important, so understanding what technologies are available to you, right? Whether you're on the service provider side or the customer side of the equation. Understanding those technologies is, is extremely valuable, extremely important. Continually evaluating, you know, the partners that you're working with to make sure that they are advancing their technologies as well, right? You, you need to make sure that if you're reliant on them, that they're moving things forward. From a training aspect, you know, or not, not so much a training aspect, but an engagement aspect. I do think, you know, a lot of the conferences that are out there are valuable to attend to, you know, really get a kind of concentrated evaluation of what's happening out there. So even if you just go for a day, you know, whether it's TPM or Manifest or some of these other logistics conferences, just to go through the expo hall and meet with people, maybe attend a few of the sessions, see, you know, see the presenters. I think there's so much that you can learn.'cause there's, there's so many targeted solutions out there across the supply chain. You need to understand what's possible, but then you also need to recognise like, okay, do I need all of these technologies? Is there one company out there that can solve for a bunch of these for me? Because that's the other thing, like as a supply chain professional, you could just get so lost, spinning in meetings, trying to understand all of these, these things that are possible out there. The conferences give you that opportunity to see it in a concentrated time period. Okay, cool. And network as well. Absolutely. if you could have left field question for you, Jim, you could have any person or character, live or dead, real or fictional as a champion for AI powered supply chains, who would it be and why? Hmm. That's a good, that's a great question. I'd almost have to say, it'd be some superhero. I don't know, you know specifically which one, but I feel like We gotta invent one - AI-Man yeah, I mean at times, you know, there, there's so much expected of a technology leader or you know, someone that, that's driving forward with AI, right? So like it's it's a combination of a whole bunch of different people, right? Because you've gotta, first off, you've gotta have the, the ability to ingest information and, and understand technologies very, very quickly. You've gotta be able to then translate that into the business and communicate to the business why this is important. And then to your earlier question, right now, you have to deal with all of the challenges that come back to you of. Okay, what about this? What about this? What about this? But then on the other side, you've probably got a board or owner or something else that's like, why aren't you doing more in AI today? Right? And so, so you know, you've got this balancing act that you have to do, and then you have to, and then you've got change management, right? So now you have to, okay, you find these technologies, you're ready to go with them. got to drive the change management across the organisation to change how people work. And that is, that is dramatically hard to do. So it is a superhero role. I, I just don't have one in mind that fits today. Okay. Okay. Jim, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? I think from the supply chain side you know, covered some great content there. You know, just one last note. I do have a, a book and a system out there in the world called Control Your Day. It is a solution or framework that I created about 12 or 13 years ago that uses the best practices from David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. And applies them in Microsoft Outlook to allow you to manage your tasks, your email, all of that inside of Outlook without having to go out to any external technologies. And so, yeah, published a book on Amazon. Sold over a hundred thousand copies. I've created a Udemy course on it that teaches you how to set it up and how to use it. And I get emails, you know, almost every day from someone around the world saying, Hey, Jim, this just changed my world. Thank you very much. So, yeah, your, you know, your, your listeners can go out to control your day.net and check that out and you know, happy to ever answer any questions on that as well. And apart from that, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yeah, so LinkedIn probably the best place to go. So, you know, just search for me on LinkedIn, you'll find me and connect with me there and, you know, happy to, to have a further conversation with folks. Great. And I'll put those links as well in the show notes so everyone has access to them. Great. Excellent. Okay, Jim, that's been fantastic. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Yeah, thanks Tom. It's been a great, great conversation. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.