Hey there Retail Podcast listeners.
Today we've got someone very special on our show.
Meet Professor Richard Wilding, the supply chain superstar from
Cranfield University. Imagine a thought leader who's
not only shaped the world of logistics in fields like
pharmaceuticals, retail and automotive, but also encourages
business leaders everywhere to make a real difference
economically, environmentally and societally.
With over 500 publications under his belt, Richard doesn't just
talk the talk, he's a much sought after voice, delivering
keynote speeches around the globe.
On LinkedIn, you might have stumbled upon his courses on
resilient supply chain. Plus, he's got a key seat at the
Global Board of Trustees for CIPS advocating for global
excellence. And as if he wasn't busy enough,
in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the
area of logistics and AMP supply chain management, Professor
Richard Wilding was appointed an officer of the Most Excellent
Order of the British Empire, OBE, by Queen Elizabeth the
Second in the 2013 New Year honors for services to business.
If you're in the mood to be inspired and informed by a true
industry giant, stay tuned. Let's join Alex and Professor
Richard Wildings as he shares his wisdom.
Obviously, I want to maximize the time that we have with you.
I know there'll be a lot of listeners who who will be just
on tenderhooks to to what you had to say.
I think what would be super useful is if we can break down
what supply chain is and and get your perspective as as a
professional professor in in this subject.
So what is supply chain from your perspective?
Okay, so. So I think one of the things
that we're all recognizing now is that competition is no longer
between an individual organization.
It's between the supply chains they are part of.
So this is absolutely critical Then we're not talking about.
Well, the way I sometimes summarize it just to wind people
up is, is you're only as good as your worst supplier because
we're all in networks of all these different organizations.
So when you start to think about this, it's not a chain, it's a
network. It's multiple connections all
going on and that creates some of the.
If you like the dynamics that we experience within supply chains,
So when we're starting to actually really reflect on what
the supply chain is all about, it's all about delivering value
of course. And really importantly, that
means as a professor in supply chain strategy, I have to, if
you like, be very, very close to my marketing colleagues and
sales colleagues in within the organization.
Because in a way they have an understanding of what is
creating value for customers. And I think one of the
challenges we've had in the past is, is that if you like supply
chain seen as some operational entity and if it has to
basically deliver value, but if you don't know what that value
is very difficult to actually deliver the value.
So, so from a supply chain perspective.
You have to understand the competitive strategy.
That's basically about how demand is created by your
organization, whatever that is, how value is effectively being
created. And then from a supply chain
perspective, my job is really how do I actually deliver that
value, how do I have the support, the delivery of that
value? So understanding that customer
and the customer's customer becomes really front of mind
when we're actually working in that way.
So that becomes really important as we're actually moving forward
to really have that clarity of what's going on.
And then in simple terms, but it's not that simple really,
there's often four key things I like to play with.
It's the supply chain process design.
The network and infrastructure design even at a more micro
level this type of equipment we use.
So that's the overall network could be global, it could be
more local in the country, but then it's right down to Okay
what is the infrastructure equipment we're using in a
particular facility. Because if you've got to be able
to pick things within 30 minutes, you're going to have
very different equipment to if you're going to pick things in
where you're going to date to do it or something like that.
Information systems, absolutely key.
So we're going to think about the information systems design
and then we have to think about the organization.
This is the people side of things and the skills of people
and how they're operating as well.
So that in a nutshell, we have to think about the competition
is not between the individual companies, it's between the
supply chains they're part of. And then what we have to reflect
on, often the definition of youth supply chain management
is. Supply chain management, it's
all about the management of relationships with with all the
stakeholders so that you can enhance value for that final
customer but also reduce costs for the supply chain as a whole.
You've got to this is something it what's in it for we you can't
kill your suppliers, you've got to actually think about the
totality of what's going on. Otherwise the value delivery
will start to break down. And that's one of the key things
that we have to think through too.
So I think that that's probably not, you know, a super concise
definition, but I've summarized it in a in a couple of minutes.
In your experience that you've had over the years specifically
because I know you also work across supply chains in general,
not just retail, what is that in terms of the four areas?
What is the thing that's always surprised you from a retail
perspective. I think that one of the key
things that we often find is, is that people will get locked into
one mode of operation. I think this is, this is quite
interesting. Now this a term which has been
used for a while and I've I've used it so and people started
discussing something called the bimodal supply chain and we
talked about two modes actually operating.
So the first mode is really. It's, it's about lean.
It's about predictable. It's, it's, it's that mode of
operation. So if you're configuring your
processes, your infrastructure, your network, your information
systems and getting your people to work in that that lean
predictable environment, of course that will structure a
supply chain in a particular way.
It will mean that you will have inventory positioned in that
network in a particular way and so on and so forth.
That's mode one. Mode two is very much focused on
agility. It's the flexible side of
things. It's, it's exploring new options
and so on and so forth. And one of the things that we
have to think of, if we think about the old normal, and I'll
say the old Normal was like 2019 before COVID came along and sort
of everybody suddenly realized, hey, we've got some issues here
and bounced out of control. So that old normal you could say
for most businesses probably about, I don't know 80% of what
they were up to was in that mode one and maybe a smaller
proportion in in mode two operations.
But when COVID came along, everything sort of switched
around and we're having to operate in that mode.
Two type of way of working and problem that you get with that
is. Is your supply chain, your
processes, your network infrastructure, your information
systems and your people are all geared to working in mode one
and it becomes very inefficient then for them to work in mode
two, if that makes sense. So one of one of the things
which just early on in 2020 we were talking about the fact that
you end up in a situation where. You end up with a pre new
normal, which sounded awful, but what we were saying is we're
going to be moving into a new normal, which we're sort of in
now. We're in this new normal.
The problem is what we've got is we've got a load of supply
chains, a load of processes, infrastructure, information
systems and people who are used to operating that old way.
Now the danger with that is your cost to serve goes through the
roof because basically what you're trying to do is push
product. Through a supply chain, which
isn't structured for the types of things that you're having to
do. So if you end up in retail with
everything moving online, the cost to serve dramatically
changes. And it was fine when you had a
very small proportion of your orders moving online.
We can pick from the store. We can do this and we can.
Do do all the rest of it, all of a sudden when you've got a
bigger proportion that drives you to have to think very, very
differently about this because you're into this mode to
operation. And if you're, I mean we all
know picking from store is a very inefficient way of doing
things. If you're doing sort of grocery
delivery or things like that, really what you need is these
dark stores which are configured to optimize that type of
operation and what I would argue is, is the transition.
That many organizations have been on is just it's just been
too slow. And the problem that we've got
it is, is we've got even more stuff coming at us at the
moment. It's like we're on the ocean and
we got these waves coming in, more waves coming and more waves
coming. We get a bit of calm.
We go, oh, that's great, we're OK.
But there's still some more waves coming, so.
This new normal is very different to the old normal and
therefore we've got to restructure our supply chains to
work in that way. But unfortunately that takes a
bit of time because it probably it probably took us 30 years to
put what we had in before. That's that's part of the
challenge and I think this is part of the when you see
retailers get caught out by. The various challenges in their
supply chain and cost of commodities is, is, is, is high
and it I think has reduced a little bit since the stop but
hasn't come down. And it's as you said how do they
efficiently optimize themselves to be able to serve the
customers in a in especially with the cost of living crisis
and an inflation in a in a sensible way.
But then how do you when you're meeting CEO's or board members
and they're like. We're we're we're looking at
reoptimizing this 30 year old beast.
We think technology is the answer for example, right.
So we're going to heavily invest in software and optimization in
our warehouse and everything. I'm just curious from again from
your experience, what is that thing that they're not thinking
of? What is that thing that they
always the got you, if you like when they're going through the
the system redesign or the process redesign?
I think one of the challenges for for businesses and it is
also a challenge for me, it's having also that a long view on
what's actually going on and you you can't constrain yourself to
just looking at a a very local market anymore.
As we've realized, things happening on the other side of
the world have an impact on on us maybe a few months or a few
days later. But they do have that thing.
So one of the things which I've been looking at recently just
some of the global mega trends so that everybody has their mega
trend lists. Yeah there are some common
features. So there's there's a number of
key things we're seeing. First you you just mentioned IT
technology and digitization. Now that is absolutely critical.
That is enabling us to do new things, but it's also enabling
us to destroy some of the old things as well, so.
So we we've, we've got some real opportunities with that
sustainability and the whole ESG environment, social governance
area, top of people's minds as well.
But a really interesting thing is a term which is being talked
about is the multipolar world, right and geopolitics.
So, So what that is it's multiple centers of power and
influence. So if we think about.
How things have changed in just the last five years.
We're seeing, if you like, centers of power forming around
the world. It could be China, it could be
Russia, it could be Iran, and so on and so forth.
So we can use more fragmented sort of states of states of
power. That has a big impact on the way
we manage the networks and supply chains.
We're dealing with also global economic inflation, of course.
And that's means that consumers are losing purchasing power.
I think that's that's the key thing to think about it.
So if you're we're looking at China at the moment, they're in
a big deflation, people's wages are in many situations are
actually dropping and also we're we're seeing the prices as well
in that particular market are actually dropping.
Why? Because people have less, less
cash to actually play with. And and that is ultimately going
to be sort of impacting us as well.
We've got this. It's basically what what does
inflation mean? It just means that I, I get less
for the money I've got in my pocket, right?
Yeah. So how can I create that value
which the customers want in a way that I have to accept that
I'm probably going to get less, less out of this as well.
So I'm going to have to get. I'm going to.
I'm just going to have to think about how I can actually.
Make my business work much harder.
And then the other thing which is, is, is just on the horizon
is the changing demographics and if you like the talent challenge
that we've got. So if you're looking at some of
the changing demographics we've got in particular nations, you
know some nations it's actually, well, I mean most nations it's
aging or we're getting you know in some, some nations with the
birth rates have dropped quite dramatically.
So that actually forcing different things as well and
that ultimately is going to impact what's actually going on.
Now from a retail perspective, all of these may have big
implications for the way we procure, the way we have to
manage things. So if you've got changing
demographics, we've got less workforce, we've got to start
thinking about technology and digitization which means we're
reliant on less workforce. I was working with an
organization recently to. Facilities to warehousing,
facilities doing the same job. One of them was super highly
automated. One of them had, I think it was
a couple of 100 people in it doing the same sort of stuff.
The other one had about, I can't remember what it was about 20 to
50 people. So it's a big, a big difference.
So you'd think to yourself, how are we saving loads of money in
wages and everything else? Well, no.
Actually, the wage differential was hardly.
Anything Why? Because those fifty people were
earning far more because of the technical skills and everything
else that they needed than the other the other hundreds of
people in the in the other place.
And and this is part of the thing that we're having to sort
of see is that the skills we need for today.
So going back to my processes, infrastructure, information
systems, and then the people and organization they if I'm having
clever warehouses with. Augmented reality and sort of
collaborative robotics, embedded and so on and so forth, and I
put that into my infrastructure. That then means that the people
side of things is going to have to change as well, Okay, because
I'm going to need different types of people to operate that
type of infrastructure. It will also have an impact on
my processes. So because I've got all that, I
can do things differently. Which then has an impact on my
information system. So you can see how it it changes
everything in that particular in in that particular sort of
environment and that's part of the the challenge of this that
these things force us to do things differently.
So global economic inflation, if people got less buying pad,
what? What is?
From that perspective, How can we offer the same level of value
but with less resource? When that that resource is all
resources, you know including at workforce which is a resource as
well as it could be the materials we're using and
everything else which is going back to the sustainability
agenda. So when we start to think we've
got these big trends which are there but they're all feeding
off each other. So from a from a perspective of
if we're thinking about retail and thinking about what's going
on, getting back to your original question.
It's really saying if if I'm sitting there designing a
warehouse for tomorrow and thinking about what's going on
there, I've got to have a bit of an eye on what's happening
globally. Yeah, because some of that is
going to be impacting us at some point.
We we're no longer we. We can't think that the old way
of thinking that you could have the UK is a little island when
it was beautifully surrounded or you have a nation which is just
isolated from the world. It doesn't work like that
anymore. We're totally dependent really
on that network, that global network which we're dealing
with. And of course that takes us into
the whole world of risk and resilience because you then have
to start thinking through, hang on a minute, can we.
I need to multishore, not just multisource.
Yeah, I'm caught out with that during it, during the pandemic,
people saying, Oh yeah, I'm multisource.
I've got 3 suppliers. Unfortunately they're all in
Northern, they're all down. So it's multi shore.
I need one in Italy, I need one in Brazil, I need one in you
know the Far East. So that so we we're hearing
people talking about China plus one, China +2, but they have big
global implications because all of a sudden if it's China plus
one that means half your stuff's no longer coming from China.
So you've got China hurting because they they haven't got.
That volume of stuff which is going on and if it's China +2,
that means it's dropped by nearly 60% the orders that
you're placing on that nature and that then has an impact on
the social side of things. So yeah, all these things are
very much interrelated. It's very complex.
What's the time period that you're thinking of 12 months, 18
months, 24 months, what is the, I think you're having to really
sort of look you're having to? It's interesting.
We did some work on supply chain strategy and how often people
actually thought about their supply chain strategy and
developed it. And this work goes back quite a
number of years. We were doing it in, you know
the the the 20 tens and stuff like that.
And in those days everybody used to be talking about this thing
that Oh yeah, it'll be five year, five year horizon.
And what we're actually finding now is it's sort of yet you'll
have a vision of where you're going, but it's got to adapt.
It's the scenarios, we've got to work through the scenarios.
In terms of what we're doing and and really if I look at supply
chain resilience, so I mean resilience, it's not just about
really important concept and if this is the adaptive capability
of the supply chain and there's really three key areas, prepare
for unexpected events, respond to disruptions and recover from
them by maintaining continuity of operations.
So it's prepare, respond and recover.
And that requires, if you like that that that scenario
planning, How often do you take your supply chain teams through
a sort of a a simulation of what would happen if this took place.
What would happen if a volcano went off again in Iceland and
and grounded grounded air freight again.
What would happen if the the ports got, you know, shut down
or? Suez Canal, These are the types
of things we need to do now. We've seen those come along.
And the problem is, with many organizations, they're very
short memories. So corporate memory isn't very
long. That becomes really important.
It's how do we actually learn and create that that philosophy
which we can really think about have front of mind our supply
chain resilience as we're moving forward.
And I think it's interesting because I launched oh gosh it is
just over a year ago now this on LinkedIn learning supply chain
fundamentals, risk and resilience.
So it's 90 minutes, 26 short videos, just taking people
through the basics. And I had to make it really
accessible to everybody because I believe that this is about who
you are in a business. Yeah, you've got to understand
supply chain resilience because if you're in an HR, human
resources department, for example, you will have an impact
on supply chain resilience through the people you actually
recruit into the business. So you need to have an
understanding of some of the issues which are going on.
And what's interesting about that is we, we have tools which
have been available to us for years.
We've got international standards on risk management and
we can use those with the supply chain viewpoint and perspective
and that will really help us. We've got international
standards on business relationships.
Pie chain management is all about management of
relationships. But these things don't happen by
accident. We have to actually work at them
and plan them and have a process in place to help develop them.
So those are available. So all these things enable us to
go through that sort of prepare, respond and recover and get that
way of working embedded into our businesses.
And I mean it's just, it's just it's just really important.
I mean what's been great about that is it's had over 17,000
people have completed that well. And I just think about that will
have big impact whole shit or chain resilience globally
hopefully in a very positive way.
But it's getting different businesses thinking about it and
getting this front of mind when when we're actually doing things
that that's the importance of what we're trying to achieve
with this. If you go through the course,
what you start to realize is, is this is not something for a team
or an individual to do to a business exactly.
So it's it's like if you go back a couple of decades, remember
total quality management and how you'd have a quality department.
Now many companies are going to do not have a quality
department. It's just business as usual for
everybody. Everybody has that embedded,
that way of thinking, that culture and I think that's
really important. You need a supply chain risk
management culture in your business.
And what I say to people is, is culture, but the simple
definition which upsets all of my academic colleagues, but I'll
use it anyway, which is culture is what people do in the absence
of instruction when they're under a bit of pressure.
So how does the business respond?
It's under a bit of pressure. Are they thinking supply chain
risk or are they just thinking, oh, I need to get my bonus or
something else? Are they thinking that?
And what we have to think is, is if everybody says so you're in
this and you ask the question, how will this change the risk
profile of the supply chain? How will it change the risk
profile of the supply chain? So I'm going to start sourcing
from India rather than China. So how's that going to change
the risk profile of the supply chain?
I'm going to introduce these new financial metrics on the
business. How will that change the risk
profile of the supply chain? Because it's going to mean that
people are going to be focusing on this issue rather than
something over here. I'm going to recruit these types
of people into this particular role and how will that change
the risk profile of the supply chain.
So if you start asking that type of question it becomes becomes
quite important then as you're as as you're moving forward
this. So we're starting to see this
whole, this whole sort of concept coming and this is a
lovely term which DHL has been talking about.
They talk about supply chain diversification and it's
developing flexibility and redundancy to minimize risk and
increase agility. So, so really it's this
flexibility and redundancy. So when you look at a supply
chain, it's, it's that network. How do we keep it healthy, how
do we keep it healthy? And I was sort of reflecting on
some of this. I came up with this bit like
high heart bypass surgery. We we put in a little vein here
and a little vein there so that we can maintain the flow to keep
keep the heart healthy. And that's what we're having to
think about is supply chains. Now in terms of creating that
resiliency you might have, well, we want to use that main flow
for the majority of the time, but I need to have a few
backups, yeah, because something would happen and I need to think
carefully about that. I do think there's a good
proportion of supply chain leaders who are starting to
really reflect on that and also procurement procurement leaders
as well. I mean it's amazing to see last
night at the at the Charter Institute procurement SPY awards
some of the innovation which is taking place there because
they're having to think a little bit differently because we
talked about multi shoring. It's actually a tough deal.
All of a sudden you're trying to find new markets to find these
things. Do you have the language skills,
Do you have the capability? Do you how, how do you manage
the flows and so on and so forth to keep it all working?
Earlier on in the conversation you you mentioned sustainability
and its impact on the supply chain.
I just wonder if we could just spend one or two minutes
unpacking what sustainability in the supply chain looks like or
what some of the activities within that area.
Yeah, I mean one of the key things that we can actually
start doing is one of the things that is we talk about product,
service, system. So all this technology and all
this digitization is actually moving us away from, if you like
that physical product, so to what we call like a service.
So we're starting to sell services.
So it's servitization is the they talk about the innovation a
number of organizations strategy from products to offering
solutions and product service systems is products and services
delivering value to the customer.
And we're seeing this already be HP printers with getting your
ink cartridges. It's highly reliant on effective
supply chain, Rolls Royce, you pay by hour for the use of the
engines and so on and so forth, buying that physical thing and
so on and so forth. And so what's actually quite
interesting I think from that is, is that when we think about
the product, these these new services that we're offering,
effectively you've got the forward logistics, which is the
lovely supplier to the manufacturer or remanufacturer,
distributor, retailer, customer. But then we've also got the
reverse logistics which might be repair, refurbish, dismantle,
recycle and then back into the supplier.
Now what I find really useful to think about this is, is in the,
if you like the forward logistics, we're really talking
about value being cocreated. So it's the creation of value to
the customer. But the really important thing
then is, is the retention of value.
So that repair, refurbish, dismantle, recycle, it's
actually value being retained. And I think this is what many
companies are starting to see. If we go about this in the right
way, it's not this is a real opportunity for our businesses
rather than rather than something which is going to cost
us money, it's actually retaining value as we go back
through that. And we've just seen recent
announcements, haven't we, from Apple, for example, saying that
they, their watches now are 100% sort of 0 footprint in terms of
using recycled materials and this and the other and I noticed
that cobalt, which is, and I mean their batteries mixed up.
But anyway, they they're basically saying we're not,
we're not using recycled for the next generation of what we're
doing. So there we're starting to see
this value retention and I think that's a really positive way to
think about it. So we think about
sustainability. This is something about
retaining value. How do we retain value rather
than just Chuck it into the ground and forget about it,
retain that from what we're doing?
Yeah. I mean look you can't talk about
the the focus on sustainability without talking about the risk
to the planet, right. In, in the sense that that it's
something that we're trying to mitigate that future risk by
focusing on something that we know the scientifically is
proven that it's going to have an impact on us.
And so the more the circular economy sort of spreads out into
companies like Apple and and the the economy and and I think it
was the donut economy that talks about that circular economy with
people, profit and planet which is great.
But just going back on to risk and how you mitigate that, what
that looks like what what are your what are your thoughts on
that what what where does it start, what's the process of
where does it end. Okay well I mean in you know
simple terms we have to you we we're often having to start with
risk evaluation. And I I generally have three
useful questions to ask. How will this, the risk disrupt
our company and what is the potential financial impact on
the business. So that's a really important
thing financial risk happen. Yeah you know what is the
financial impact. Yeah.
The next thing is, is how long would we be exposed to the
disruption before it can be fixed And that's often another
really interesting thing. So risk is also time dependent
if it's something which. So for me, I had a new router in
my house on Monday and I thought, this is, this is a bit
risky. And I had a meeting that
afternoon and I warned everybody it could go down and everything
was up and running and I thought, this is great, this is
great, this is great. And then bang, everything just
disappeared for about, I don't know what was going on, some
sort of crazy update or something like that.
Anyway, it all dropped out. But how long for me to get
started again? Well, of course it's.
I had a bit of a plan, right? OK, let's make a mobile hotspot
with my phone. At least then I'll be able to
get back into the meeting and get on my laptop and all the
rest of it. So I know that that was quite a
short period of time. How long will be exposed before
it can be fixed? But then also what is the cost
of recovering from a destruction in terms of the emergency
actions we may need to take to fix things.
So it's it's one of those things that what is the cost.
So I'm going to have to what's the worst case, let's say it
didn't come back, what would I have to do?
Well, the cost for me in my simple example is I'm probably
going to have to go and get a, I don't know, one of these sort of
Wi-Fi modem type things which runs on 4G chip or something
like that. So I know that might cost me, I
don't know, £100, right, Yeah, but we have to ask those
questions. How will the risk disrupt our
company and what are the potential financial impact?
How long would we be exposed, Will we be exposed and then what
is the cost of recovering? And you see once we've done
that, we can go into analyzing our exposure.
And that is really it's it's the likelihood, how likely is this
going to happen, what is the impact, but also what is the
difficulty of detection. So if we think about some of the
risks we're having to deal with now cyber particularly somebody
could be sitting in your computer systems harvesting
credit card details for a long period of time.
It could be, it could take, it could be very difficult to
detect okay. And so we're able to great
scores which then focuses in on those really important things.
So you might say it's very low livelihood, very high impact,
but it's not really likely. But actually the difficulty of
detection is massive, massive. So hey, we need to think about
something around that. And then really what we then do
is we have to create what we call risk treatment plans.
And the risk treatment plan is very simply what is going to be
the risk treatment who is responsible.
And this is where many companies fall over.
They don't make anybody responsible for thinking through
this. What is the time frame?
Once again, we're back to time. Many people sort of think this
way to happen and then how will we monitor and review it.
And really there's, there's six key things we can do.
We can remove the risk completely.
We can change the likelihood of course, you might say, well
actually that thing there. What I'll do is I'll go with
another provider or another supplier, because then that
might make it less lightly. We can change the impact.
So one of the examples I use in my LinkedIn courses, we have a
we have a big party and we worry about drinks getting spilled all
over the floors. Well, what I can do to change
the impact is we just have like drinks mopping up stations which
all the family know about hidden around the house.
So if somebody you know drops a, we're on it within within a
fraction of a second changes the impact, we can share the risk,
can we share that with other supply chain partners And then
we might just make the decision we retain the risk.
At the end of the day, we're not going to be able to remove
everything we just say. We just got to retain that and
it might cost us whatever we'll retain it.
But also what we need to be able to do is increase the speed of
detection. So this goes back to all our
digitization analytics. I want to have back in this
monitoring and you know detection across the supply
chain. So by getting those things in
place and thinking through procure for resilience rather
than for cost, you should want thinking about that.
We've got to explore all shoring, near shoring, multi
shoring. As we've said, we have to think
about innovation. But really key to all this is
going back to relationships. As I said, supply chain
management, it's all about relationships, it's
collaboration along the supply chain.
Those companies which did really well, they collaborate really
well and that will actually help you mitigate a lot of the risks.
So we, we painted earlier on quite a bleak picture, but
actually there's a lot of things that we can simply do and if we
can get the culture right within our business with everybody
thinking about how will this impact the risk profile of the
slide chain, all of a sudden it's going to change things.
And what you know, I would love to happen is that everybody in a
business, it doesn't matter who you are, a receptionist or
somebody like that, they just have some understanding of
supply and risk. When we give everybody fire
extinguisher training and fire training and diving and
inclusivity training, well, hang on a minute, that's probably
less likely. Well, it might do.
Is it going to shut your business down?
Your supply chain is probably a higher risk and it could shut
your business down pretty quickly.
So let's actually all get focused around it.
I, I, I love it and and and I'm sure people are now going to be
going on to different search engines to try and find you and
that LinkedIn course. So where can I final thought So
thank you so much. Where can I find out more about
your your what you're thinking and what is the name of that
LinkedIn course. OK.
So the the LinkedIn course is a Supply Chain Fundamentals Risk
and Resilience. It's on LinkedIn Learning.
If you want to find me, you can go to richardwylding.info.
So I've got my own website and of course you'll find me on
LinkedIn as well, so you can use that.
And the last thing about LinkedIn is, I shouldn't be
saying this, but with LinkedIn learning, you can generally get
it comes with LinkedIn premium, but also many corporates have it
as part of their Microsoft agreement.
So yeah, so it's not like you might find your company already
gives you access to LinkedIn learning and you're able to do
it. And there's a great wealth of
stuff going on on there on the supply chain side as well, which
really can help introduce you. So a lot of universities now are
using the courses for prelearning and postlearning.
So students are actually going through this.
There's great opportunity but more importantly my goal is
challenging and inspiring business and supply chain
leaders to innovate. So what I want people to do is
go through these things and then take it into their world and
really innovate with it, create some value out of it.
I I I'm sure they will. And one thing I will ask is will
you come back in maybe three months or as we coming into 24
and just have another conversation about the the the
things that we should be focused on.
Because I think it's it's through conversation and having
things at top of mind we can impact and have an an impact on
culture, which is ultimately what what what we're trying to
do. So was that a yes, You'll come
back? Yes, it will be a pleasure.
It will be a pleasure to come back.
Thank you. Professor Wilder.
Thank you so much.