Data, Tech, and Team Alignment with Justin Kyngdon

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In this episode, Justin Kyngdon, Principal of Supply Chain Solutions at Expeditors, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:

• The importance of data, technology, and team alignment in supply chain management
• Why you need a clear philosophy and collaboration between procurement and supply chain
• The challenges of supply chain negotiations and partnerships
• Some best practices for organizing supply chain data

Justin has over 20 years of experience in the supply chain and transport industry across APAC. In his current role at Expeditors, he works on the Supply Chain Solutions team to offer professional consulting services with a focus on supply chain performance utilizing Digital Twin technology, and network performance.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and may contain slight errors. We've edited lightly for clarity.

Brian Glick  00:04

Welcome to supply chain connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. On today's episode, we're going to talk to Justin Kyngdon. Justin's title is Principal Supply Chain Solutions at expediters, but I like Justin's subheading on his LinkedIn profile as a much better explanation of what Justin does. Justin is the supply chain data coach. We're gonna talk actually not about data per se, but about the things you need to do as a company to be ready to use data. Well, it's a pretty wide ranging conversation, and I think it'll be really interesting, whether you're a freight forwarder, or whether you are a shipper who moves freight, lots of really good insights on how to set yourself up for success when it comes to using supply chain data and thinking about your supply chain, not just how do I move this one piece of freight? So I hope you enjoy the episode.

Brian Glick  01:02

Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin Kyngdon  01:05

Thanks for having me. It's great to speak to you again.

Brian Glick  01:08

Oh yeah. So before we dive in with your background and your history, I actually thought maybe we could make a good point. Why don't you tell everyone how we met?

Justin Kyngdon  01:16

Okay, well, I have a philosophy, which is, when someone connects with me on LinkedIn, I send them a message thanking them for the connection, and then saying, if you'd like to catch up for a virtual coffee or in person, then let me know. And 9.99 times out of 10, you hear nothing back, but Brian, you just pinged me straight back and said, Sure, why not? And we got on a call, and here we are,

Brian Glick  01:41

yeah, and I think it just illustrates that we both have a very similar philosophy, which is, good things happen from random conversations. Yeah,

Justin Kyngdon  01:49

completely correct. And also, too, is, is that I think, you know, networking, honestly, networking, I don't think, is anyone's innate strength, and it can be uncomfortable, but you've just gotta keep putting yourself out there professionally, and it'll happen at some point, but you can't guess when, where or why. Don't worry about that. Just get it done.

Brian Glick  02:14

Yeah, and I think a lot of people kind of over estimate the complexity of it, yeah, right, like just being available and talking to people and just, you know, even if you don't think you have anything to say, I mean, I just, I was laughing, yes, I was on the phone with somebody else who I've known for quite a while. And, you know, she called me a super networker. And then I had to call my father afterwards and say, I just want to tell you that that happened because he raised the kid who spent his entire formative years locked in a room playing on the computer and not talking. So you're right, or it's not an innate skill, it's a learned behavior, correct?

Justin Kyngdon  02:54

Yeah, and I think that we have maybe in supply chain, or it could be wrong, but we're very much used to for a very long period of time in this industry, you've got to connect with people as best you can, in the best way you can, to build some trust and rapport. It could be the person overseas in an office that's organizing the collection of your customers' freight, what have you, and you just need to get a connection with them so that they know how important that shipment might be, and to give that one extra attention. So I think we're very used to operating in that type of medium as well connecting virtually and not necessarily in person. And yeah, I think that is something that if you're in the supply chain space, just lean on that you're doing this today. You're networking inside the company in which you work for, or no matter what side you're on, me you're in the freight forwarding or carrier side, or if you're in that space, sourcing the products and you're responsible for that, you are networking. And you just take that skill that you've been building and transfer that into people you don't know. That's it. It's not much more complicated than that.

Brian Glick  04:01

So I have a feeling, if I don't pull us back, you and I can go down this thread and never, never give you an actual opportunity to introduce yourself. So why don't you tell everyone just a little bit about who you are and what your background is and how you got into the industry.

Justin Kyngdon  04:14

Well, I was going to be a chef, so that was my thing, and I showed some skills in that space. And all my work experience was in working in hotels and kitchens, specifically. And then I went and studied at a hotel school. And that opportunity represented to me a scholarship to then go work in a hotel in Thailand and study in Thailand. And it was a six month scholarship. And it was fantastic. So at the and this is, you know, talking from a boy that had grown up in a town of 5000 people. And I'm in Australia, and the only place I had been overseas to prior to going to Thailand was New Zealand, which, you know, isn't, you know, really getting outside your comfort zone, right? And so I land in Thailand totally on my own, and it's that first time into Asia. And at the university, I was at Mahi DOM at muic, and I took as many subjects as I could, including I had a wonderful teacher that taught Asian business environment, and another wonderful teacher that taught operations management, and they were brilliant at opening my mind up to the world. And I really got into then studying in that space and understanding the connections in the world. Being in the city of Bangkok, seeing all the movement of cargo, freight, goods, just on a scale I'd never experienced before. I left Thailand knowing I've got to get into this game, this international game. When I plug into my job, I want to plug into the world, is effectively how I thought. And so then I got a job in a family owned customs brokerage firm, then a freight forwarder, a couple other freight forwarders after that, and eventually where I am today at expedits, so which I've been here coming up to 14 years now, and yeah, so that's my story.

Brian Glick  06:10

So the other question I like to pry onto sometimes is that's a really good reason to get into this business. There are a lot of really good reasons to get out of this business too. Once you're in, why do you stay? Why go through the chaos that is supply chain?

Justin Kyngdon  06:26

I think if you asked any of my siblings, they would say, Justin always likes to be busy. And I'm a very curious person. This is an industry that has so much change occurring in it, as well as change that's forced in by the outside. So be it government, environmental, the way that markets are moving trends in society, just so on and so forth. So you have external pressures, internal pressures and change. And so I think this industry just poses a lot of opportunities where my mind likes to go. As I said, from that curious point of view, solving problems for customers that for all types of problems that they have, you have your typical project problems, then you will have specific logistics and freight and transport problems, then data and the management of that data and how it can then elucidate and help a customer understand their business better. So there are an array of opportunities in this industry that once you're inside, you can see and understand it, and you understand that it's quite broad in that space, in that ability to challenge you. And I think that's what keeps me connected.

Brian Glick  07:36

So your role today is a supply chain solutions role, which is very different from, say, being a customs brokerage person or a freight person, but that difference is lost on a lot of people. So what do you do in Supply Chain Solutions that's different from what somebody in expediters does, who books cargo for a living?

Justin Kyngdon  07:56

Sure. So in our space, our main interest is in the data that supply chain, transport and logistics creates, and the processes that a business follows and the technology that they use and we sit in a space of helping customers align what the data is telling them and showing them and what they are doing. So what they see themselves do, what they see the technology do, what they see their fellow employees do, and it's our focus is, then all about how to make those supply chain teams, and I use that term very broadly, covid view could involve procurement, accounting, legal, finance, others, how to get those teams aligned and operating in the most efficient way possible for their business to operate successfully, really, from that ground up of supply chain, You know, great foundation of supply chain, data, wonderful, transparent and functional SOP program. So then execution. When you see the supply chain operating, it's a supply chain run with purpose. And the people running the supply chain have, as we would say, you know, they had their arms around it, to use a colloquialism, but they have the idea of visibility. They have visibility of their supply chain so they understand what's occurring at the transactional and then strategic. They are planning on how their supply chain can operate in the future. So in the freight sense, we call that, say transactional, you're dealing with a day to day of picking up widgets, cargo goods, moving them through a network and getting them delivered, or picking them off a warehouse shelf, getting them onto a truck and getting them delivered. That's the role of freight, and we're in that other role, on that solution side, encompassing all those aspects of supply chain, a

Brian Glick  09:59

chain with. Talk to our customers, we try to break problems down into these two big categories of execution problems and insights problems, correct, right, the things of like you can you stay like no matter what happens, you still have to make a booking and you still have to move a container and like that actually has to happen. But once you get good at that, then you can go start learning things about what you're doing and making better decisions, correct?

Justin Kyngdon  10:24

And so I was talking to a potential customer just yesterday, and to give it an insight into, say, our philosophy or the approach, and you'll you'll be the very similar to the customer operates their supply chain using very rudimentary technology. Okay, and they've grown, and they need to now in order to continue to grow and meet the service expectations their customers have, they have to change their supply chain the way that they run it. Our philosophy isn't to go and go run first at the data and start spending hours, weeks, months, analyzing data that the client knows is not great, and we already know it's not great, just through that one interaction, my first instinct is to say, Let's get together and run a structured, planned workshop where we bring everyone involved in the supply chain, and we get all of that data that's up here in everyone's mind, because it's running today. The supply chain is running today. It's delivering goods, so it's operational, but everyone has the rules up in their heads, not down on paper. So let's build out the network design, map that out, list out the people in the supply chain, the technology in the supply chain, and let's get that all up and out there, and then let's, you know, garnish that with some data analysis, knowing that the data is not great. So let's just do that. And often, I would say, for most businesses, that is a good way to start a project like this, if you're wanting to start improving your supply chain, and you're very clear as to why you want to so it's not just I want to digitize, because that's what everyone else is doing. We've got to have a digital we've got to be industry 4.0 if, like this client yesterday, knows that they have service failures. In order for them to continue to grow, they have to stop those service failures. And so they know why they need to do it. And that workshop idea, getting everyone into a room, whiteboarding, it takes the problems and the challenge out of everyone's mind and puts them on the paper, and it makes it the papers problem. Now, now we can see the problems, we can start solving them. It's not going to shorten the journey, but it will make it clear to everyone. And I also think from a team perspective, from a building up a cohort inside the organization that's going to follow this project through from beginning to end. If you get as many people who will be involved in that project exposed to it upfront, then the chances of success for this project will increase because of that. It's done in silos and it's just supply chain looking at this, then I think business is going to be challenged if they're facing that problem today. So that's I would say

Brian Glick  13:03

how. So I'm going to argue with one thing you said, sure. You said it doesn't shorten the journey in my experience. Yeah. What happens is, and we see this all the time, because people hire a systems integration layer company to go because they've already got a project in mind. Yeah, we want to connect this, this, this, then the other. And we always see, and I'm certain you see, the same thing is the customers that actually take it seriously at the beginning and say, Okay, let's make sure we understand what we're trying to accomplish. Let's go write that SOP in the current state, even if we're going to, even if it's going to change, so that we know what our baseline is. And let's talk about the future state. And let's be methodical. In that first 3060, days, whatever it takes. They're the ones that don't have two years worth of rework at the end because they didn't understand their problem. So yeah, the customers who skip it, they deploy faster, and then they start over and deploy again. That is two years.

Justin Kyngdon  14:00

Yeah, absolutely, a fair point, and I do agree, and it's good for you to raise that because, yeah, rework on any of those integrations with, say, an ERP or whatever is, well, it's incredibly expensive, and it takes your attention away from running your business today, when you're doing a big supply chain transformation, or, you know, big or small manner, what your mindset is, you've got to keep delivering freight, to keep selling product, to keep the lights on, right? The business has to keep running, and you have to be absolutely on top of that. And our philosophy is, is that you really, you know, don't use a cliche, don't boil the ocean, right with your project. So certainly, the other thing that we see is, is that businesses that you know, if you want to understand, like, who has it together, okay, and who's doing this brilliantly, and my perspective is it's a very small number of businesses who are doing. It, quote, unquote, brilliantly, or have it together. And it's not that they've got a massive budget for technology or a massive budget for headcount. In fact, I often find sometimes their logistics teams are quite small, but what they've done is spend a lot of time making sure that whatever they invest in for their supply chain bid, where they should put their warehouse distribution center, or what technology that they've invested in. It's very purposeful. They understand what they're doing, and therefore they aren't stretching themselves so thin, trying to do a little bit of this part of the project and then not fully complete it, then run over here and do a little bit over there. And we tend to see, and I don't know if you've seen this, but an ERP has been implemented. I'll be working with the client and maybe gathering data, and then something from the legacy is hung over, like a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet that sits at a really critical juncture where, yeah, it's all in the ERP, but then before we send it to our transport provider. We've got to take it out of the ERP, put it into the Google Sheet, the bill of lading, or airway bill, and then that way, we know what we're receiving from the forward when it gets to the warehouse dock, right, if that's a planned part of a transition through to onboarding the ERP fully. And you've got to have that for a little while, whilst you, you know, make sure that, as I said, keep the lights on the business running, sure. But if you're been a couple of years into running this ERP and that is still in place, that's a challenge, and that under any type of major disruptive event or pressure on the business, that sheet, that part, is going to be the first piece to break, that's my opinion.

Brian Glick  16:42

I think I've seen this thing over the last couple of years, and I've particularly actually seen it with our customers in Asia, where, up until, I want to say like 2018 2019 when the E commerce boom really started hitting every brand. But it wasn't just Amazon anymore. There was this principle that that spreadsheet was okay because the labor was cheap, right? Or because, okay, it's just the one person once a day, it's gonna cost us $100,000 to get the SAP mod. I pay this person, $20,000 a year, $10,000 a year, whatever it is to go manage the spreadsheet. There's no ROI on fixing the spreadsheet. Yeah. And then what we've seen change in the conversations is in a world where you're competing, you know, on the retail side, with a team, or with a Shein or or with an Amazon, even the idea that the cost of the time, not the time it takes to type it, but the delay in the activity while you wait for the person to do the thing. Means your end to end visibility for your client is broken. It means all of the alerting and automations and all of those things can't run that if you don't go all the way. If you take an incrementalist approach, we'll get the European we'll clean up this piece later. We'll clean up this piece later, you actually start seeing none of the benefit, which is very, very different than what all of us it. People were coaching. You know, we came out of the 90s and early 2000s with massive IT failures, and we said to everybody, okay, never do a big project, ever again. Everything needs to be really small and incremental, because at least then when we fail, we fail quickly, right? And we can adjust, and we can learn, sure, but when it comes to those manual processes, if you don't drive them all the way out, you only can get incremental benefit, like you don't get that big win, because you can't show all the dots on the map to the end customer, because it's dot.dot.oh, okay, we're gonna wait for Sally and then dot, dot, dot, dot. And that doesn't create a good experience.

Justin Kyngdon  18:48

Yeah. And I would add to that to say the other trend that I'm seeing certainly seeing that as absolutely correct, that we would often find, talking to customers all across Asia Pacific, that the version of the ERP that they're in, no matter what flavor that ERP is, was not the same version as North America or Europe. So what would happen is, is that integrations would work locally but not work with the rest of the business globally. And it was because, well, it's a smaller market. Doesn't make as much money for us. They just don't get the investment dollars in doing that. And so you might as well have been running a completely foreign ERP program, TMS program, down in APAC, relative to what you were operating in, say, in Europe and the US. And that was causing big challenges for these companies to understand their global supply chain and the impact to disruptions, because they had no signal in the United States or in Europe, when something broke in a pack because the signal didn't get through, like if you think of your mobile phone, there were no bars because they were basically on two separate they could have been the same name of that, ERP, but they're on two separate systems. What we're seeing now is. Is that that's not happening. That's transforming the region. APAC region is being ensured that they're being brought on to the same ERP as the rest of the world, and that the signal strength is equal to what is in the rest of the world. And that, I think, is being driven in two parts, that there were a lot of challenges coming out of Asia turning back on post covid. So people wanted to, you know, ensure businesses, rather, wanted to ensure that they were getting that information timely in terms of delays upstream in the production process. And then second, where we're seeing the big production shift. So they have to now have the top shelf ERP TMS, because the important SKUs are now being manufactured in APAC and coming out of China, so it could come here. So from APAC, I mean, into ASEAN, India and others. So the technology has to follow it, because those skews are now critical to the end consumer point, whatever that end consumer point is, even if it's a a semi finished good going into a factory in Mexico or something like that, they need to have the best solution. And so I think in the coming years, we'll see that shift away from what you described, which is still very prevalent. That's why I raised it as well. But also too, is, is that improvement overall, on that, on the tech stack? What do you see?

Brian Glick  21:24

You get to go talk to a lot of customers. It's your your whole thing, right? Yeah, before you go meet a new customer, you probably already have a pretty good sense of them, just from having done this for 20 years at this point. Like, what are the big patterns that you see? Like, what's the problem that everyone has? Like, if the meetings go away, like, I need to go to,

Justin Kyngdon  21:45

okay, I'll start a little bit differently. I get asked in a lot of meetings, you know, what are our peers doing? Okay? So a medical device company wants to know what other medical device companies are doing, or a retailer. And what I find specifically in my space, is, is that the industry does not matter. It is the attitude of the business. You may not want to know what your peers are doing, because what they're doing is no good. You need to be doing what is the best for your company. And that could be occurring in an industry you are not in. It could be occurring in tech. It could be occurring somewhere else. What I say to customers in that instance is, is that if you are going to go on the path that I see that you want to go on, and as you said, I'm experiencing hearing all those cues inside a meeting. It comes down to the philosophy of the business that you have executive support or sponsorship of a significant project like this that will see this project through outside of one cycle. It's not going to happen within one quarter or one financial year. This is going to be an investment that is going to then occur over multiple cycles. And I'm not necessarily saying with me, but for example, that client yesterday, you're going to have to make investments in technology that you're going to be paying for well after I've gone and it's those businesses with that philosophy. So where I see, no matter the industry, doesn't matter what it's the philosophy of that improvement and transformation their supply chain. They know why they want to do it. They're very clear. Understand what the problem is. They've defined that well enough. Will define it better for them, and then they will take that forward well into the future. They are the ones that I see always as being successful, the cues that I have that if you're sitting in supply chain today, and red flags is where I see procurement and supply chain separate, right? The procurement select who are going to be service providers, select what the technology is going to be, and supply chain have no say in that. They get what they're given, and they've got to do their best with it. That splitting may have occurred around the GFC. I'm not exactly sure when it was all about cost out of supply chain, 10% out every single year. That's where you can keep saving cost out, cost out, cost out. And you talked about Amazon and others who are crushing it in the supply chain space. They all went through the GFC as well, but maintained investment in supply chain and supply chain tech. I'm not saying they didn't do any cuts or anything like that. I wouldn't know, but assuming they probably did, but they didn't strip the cupboard bear. And as a consequence, everyone's saying, Well, how can we get more like that? We need to be more responsive like that. Well, it requires looking at not that they are, they do e commerce, and online, there's the Amazon site. Don't worry about that. That's the distraction. What's the philosophy towards supply chain? How do they approach that? And how could you learn from that philosophy to implement your company and then bring supply chain along on that journey, that so that then supply chain. Okay, is adding value into procurement, adding value into the rest of the business? So does that answer the question? It does.

Brian Glick  25:07

I guess. I mean, it is the thing, and it's, I think, when you get, you know, you and I have both been doing this roughly the same amount of time, you know, you get to the point where you can almost see it in the body language in the first meeting, right? Like just, are, you know, do you have an executive in there who's taking this seriously? Or is this a meeting that people got sent to and they're just gonna, you know, this is really just the lead into an RFP where they're gonna ask for another 100 bucks a container, and they're like, you know, like, that's, you can tell it's like, to all the shippers out there, trust me, all of your service providers know whether you're serious or not, whether they whether they tell you that or not,

Justin Kyngdon  25:42

yeah, I call them Spice Girls negotiations, you know, the wannabe song, if you want to, yeah, because you end up in this silly circumstance. They're sitting on that side, and we're sitting on that side of the table, and they're like, Well, you know, tell me what you want, what do you really, really want? And then we're like, well, we'll tell you what you want, what you really, really want, and then you will end up in this stalemate, and it doesn't make sense, right? Because you'll go into like, you'll see an RFQ, and it will be an RFQ where we will try and get the six providers responding that then they'll respond with rates, plus how to optimize our supply chain for us. And we'll say, what can you do with this? And we'll say, Well, can you give me shipment level data, not just this aggregate data, because you've told me there's 10,000 containers out of this port, 5000 out of this port, etc. But do you have shipping reports? No, you don't have shipping reports on this that we can at least see. You know how it trends over time. No, you do, right? And that type of approach is not helping any business. And as you said, you know straight away when they don't want to give you a shipping report, either they're playing a card that says, I'm not really serious about this. I'm just trying to get rates best in class without having to really pay for a consulting project to look at that, or they don't want to show you the emperor has no clothes and their supply chains a mess, and they need a lot of help, because someone's told them, whatever you do, don't show your weakness, because they'll that freight forward or carry they're going to come in and sell you on all these different solutions, and you're going to be up for so much money, and We don't have that budget, and you recognize pretty quickly those companies that then say, look, here are our cards. You can see them, right? How would you solve this? And knowing that we can't solve it, we don't have, like, no one has a budget to do it all. No one has the time to solve every single supply chain that operate, every problem in them or simultaneously. No one. I don't care how big the company is, but if they go to these different providers, including the incumbent, and say, how would you approach this problem, to partner with us, help us over what time frame you're going to get an answer, and then you just observe those answers, and you determine what is in your best interests. But don't have the approach that you know that one, as I said, that hold your cards thing, because you're not actually going to get the best from your service provider in that approach. You're going to get it

Brian Glick  28:08

right. And it's one of these things where, at the risk of me just bitching and moaning about my past careers, you know, I remember going into RFPs with existing customers who we'd had for 20 years, and they say, you know, okay, they send out the RFP. And you look at and you go, this is not the company we've been servicing for 20 years. And then you end up in a rate discussion, and you go, okay, the company you drew on this RFP, I can do your shipment, or I can do your customs entry, whatever it is for X for you, I need 3x because you don't actually send us electronic bookings you aspire to, you know, 2% of your electronic bookings are accurate, and then we call you for the rest of them, you know. And then what they do is they play this game of like, bringing in people who have no idea, who respond to the RFP with x. And I remember losing some of those when it was really procurement driven, especially, you know, 1015, years ago, yeah, and going like we would literally say, Okay, we'll see you next year, when you come crawling back to us, because the provider you just selected is not going to service your business at that rate, because they're about to open up the can and find out that it's a mess inside, You know, and you're in for it. I do think a lot of shippers learn that lesson, and that they have learned how to manage pure play procurement people better inside their own companies, not all of them, but I think there's been a little bit of a maturity growth on that. Yeah, and have certainly ways to go, yeah,

Justin Kyngdon  29:39

and I think companies have looked at so you have, I've worked with some brilliant Strategic Procurement people, and they're so different to what those strategic procurement people call, what they refer to as their contract managers. Justin, yes, they're not actually Strategic Procurement what I'm doing with you and sitting down and trying. Understand where you add value, why and how I can extract that back in my organization, is very different to someone who just literally talks about prices. When we're finished with our negotiation, I hand your contract to one of those people to make sure you're operating within the price agreement that we've got. And I think what happened was, is a lot of contract managers talking to other procurement people. A lot of contract managers got elevated above what their competency was, and just treated everything as a price negotiation. And it was so interesting, it was so obvious that those businesses that did not then, were the ones that managed covid So very differently. And I was talking to another commentator, and as I said, they were making investments in other areas of E commerce, and all they had to do was put their foot down on the gas, and they took off everyone else that had decided, No, we just cut everything. We were only going to invest in what we do in supply chain. Don't listen to them. They're coming in and they're offering you other solutions around e com, this growing area of E com, no, no, no, no, no, then they had to build those things from scratch. So you do have to have at that senior, you know, either that's a senior supply chain manager or senior procurement manager. If there is alignment at that level in an organization, good thing about your organizational design, there's alignment, communication, cooperation, then you can achieve your price, your budget requirements, etc, etc, as well as getting the best level of service to help your business into the future. And we're doing in our space is certainly helping customers develop good quality forecasting for their logistics budgets, and not just doing the forecast. We want to help businesses then, as the bills start rolling, in measuring what was forecast against what was actual, and if there are differences, the all important, why? Why did it not happen the way we planned? Not just, oh, well, that's a forecast. Forecasts are unreliable. That is where we're working. And I think in that space, more businesses will work, particularly as supply chains become more fragmented, and you're sourcing now from new and exotic locations, not just FOB China, then that capacity and that skill inside an organization will become more valued, and those businesses that do that well will just dominate.

Brian Glick  32:34

I think it would be hard for me to agree with you more before we wrap up, sure, tell me what you're excited about. Tell me what you're looking forward to over the next few years.

Justin Kyngdon  32:47

It's a great question for me in this region, in Asia Pacific, I think we're in an in for a really exciting period in supply chain, because we're going through a once in 3540 year occurrence in that supply chains are transforming. Businesses are now putting factories into the ASEAN nations, India, other locations, Australia and the well worn path of you know FOB X works Hong Kong, China is shifting, and this is an opportunity for people who are coming up through supply chain to really bring skills and expertise creativity to the fore, and not just in the understanding of the physical movement of freight, but also the synthesis of that geopolitics, trade and trade optimization, and working out how, within a company, within service providers, how to align that for the business In order to navigate this period of change successfully in my region. Yes, there are groups like ASEAN that work together, but they're not an economic block like the European Union. It's not like a NAFTA. Every country is sovereign. They have their own logistics, infrastructure, challenges and opportunities. They have their own rules of law, their own approach to the way a corporation can be set up, their own approach to way a free trade zone operates. It's all unique, and as a consequence, supply chain in the coming years will demand expertise, and I think that is what makes me excited about the coming years.

Brian Glick  34:39

It sounds like your siblings do not have to worry, and you are definitely going to be busy. So that's right again. Just, just, thank you so much for this. I think I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk, and hopefully we'll get to do it again soon.

Justin Kyngdon  34:52

Yeah, likewise. And I think everything that you are doing in your space, in, you know, I mean, in our first just a reference. That first conversation where you talked about the data piece is doing the hard, dirty work inside a business. And I would just want to finish on this note, is that, as I say to my own customers, we have to go through this difficult part. We have to go through the data. We have to work out where it's not great. We have to fix it, and it is going to be dry, it's going to be long, it's going to be frustrating, but it is the foundation that everything else is built on. Do this well, then everything else is easier, it's clearer, and you can better communicate.

Brian Glick  35:35

I literally said those words to a potential customer not an hour ago, right? I said you this is the work you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Exactly. So, yeah, absolutely. So hey, it's a wonderful place to wrap up again. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks. Well, thanks again to Justin. Again, he and I have had a couple of really great conversations, and look forward to meeting them in person one day, even though we live on opposite sides of the planet, which, again, is one of my favorite things about being in this business. Hope you all enjoyed those conversations, and you know, I especially was excited about the insights, about bringing executives and procurement teams into the conversations and making sure that they're thinking strategically about supply chain and not just about cost. For so long, many of us in the service provider side of the business just bemoaned the lack of that, and I'm really excited to see that that is changing in the world. As far as Chain.io updates, make sure that you're really paying attention over the next couple of months to the blog and to the LinkedIn page, we have some really exciting announcements coming up, some new product features that I think are very transformative and have potential to really drive things forward. So, you know, don't like to turn this into a Chain.io commercial too much, but really excited for some of the stuff that you're going to see, if you're making sure that you're following us on LinkedIn and subscribe to the blog as always. Thank you for listening and hope you enjoyed the episode. This is Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io.

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