The Freight Technology Adoption Curve with Bart De Muynck

Listen Now

In this episode

Bart De Muynck, Strategic Advisor and Supply Chain Expert, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:

• Evolving technology across supply chains from the early days to now
• Technology implementations and the importance of organizational change when getting started
• Staying competitive with technology
• The future of AI in supply chains
• What supply chain pros should expect for 2025 any beyond

Bart De Muynck is an Industry Thought Leader with over 30 years of Supply Chain and Logistics experience. Bart has worked for major International companies such as EY, GE Capital, Penske Logistics, PepsiCo as well as several Tech companies. Bart spent 8 years as a VP of Research at Gartner and most recently served as the Chief Industry Officer at project44.

Listen Here

Episode Transcript

Brian Glick: Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io. In this episode, we're going to talk to Bart DeMunk. Bart is one of the few people who can honestly use the term thought leader, an industry expert in his description of who he is and what he does. Bart's had this really interesting journey through the industry that we'll talk about, really seeing it from a lot of different angles and, is out there participating in the community and being a positive force inside the industry.

[00:00:35] Brian Glick: And I think everyone should really enjoy the episode. So without further ado, here we go.

[00:00:47] Brian Glick: welcome to the show.

[00:00:49] Bart De Muynck: Brian, good to see you. How are you?

[00:00:51] Brian Glick: I'm good. Good to see you too. I'm excited to have you on here. I know we're going to do, not the really cliched year end wrap up, but it's going to be good to get a chat here with a real industry insider about kind of your views on what's going on, but let's start with a little bit of background.

[00:01:08] Brian Glick: Why don't you just tell us how you got into this industry and more importantly, why you decided to stick around?

[00:01:29] Bart De Muynck: About 33 years. Now I will tell you right out of college, I wasn't in supply chain. I was actually in construction.

[00:01:36] Bart De Muynck: My dad ran the largest construction company in Belgium. And so I guess, being the one son that went to, to, study management and strategy, I was kind of picked to be his follow up, for my dad. Now I did that for a year and a half and I quickly realized two things. And one of them was that I wasn't really interested in construction.

[00:01:58] Bart De Muynck: And so I'm like, yeah, I think I got to do something and find my own way. And kind of by coincidence went to GE Capital, but on the mergers and acquisitions side, because I had a bit of a finance background and economics background as well,

[00:02:16] Bart De Muynck: They wanted to create a logistics company that would provide logistic services to all their manufacturing businesses in Europe, right?

[00:02:24] Bart De Muynck: Cause I'm originally from Belgium, started my career in the Benelux. And so they did that as a joint venture with Penske, a large 3PL here in the U. S. And it was named Penske Logistics Europe because Penske was a name people knew in the world of logistics. So that's how I got into logistics. And again, you learn as you get into that industry.

[00:02:44] Bart De Muynck: And I'd seen a lot of logistics before, but I wasn't deep into it. And then very quickly after that, I became finance manager from a couple of the divisions. I started running operations, learning more about it. I was also trained as a Six Sigma black belt. So I was really getting myself into the details of the processes.

[00:03:02] Bart De Muynck: And then around 98, we were heavily investing also in technology. TMS is a telematics routing solution. And especially when there was that connection of logistics processes with technology. I just felt this like, bam, this is my thing. I love it. I like doing it. And I say I'll stick around and I've had plenty of opportunities over the years, especially when I was with

[00:03:25] Bart De Muynck: PepsiCo to switch to other areas, supply chain, planning, manufacturing. And I'm like, no, I'm good. I love logistics and more than just logistics as a field. I love logistics people. I don't know what it is. We seem to, it's like a Harley Davidson gang. When you see another gang, either you fight or you all get along.

[00:03:43] Bart De Muynck: And I feel logistics is a little bit like that, but we all seem to get together when you go to these large conferences, it's like one big family.

[00:03:51] Brian Glick: I think it's shared trauma.

[00:03:54] Bart De Muynck: That could be, but you know, survivors always like, you know, when you go through a war, people always create bigger bonds or maybe you're right.

[00:04:01] Brian Glick: Yeah, no, I think it's very true. I won't call the people out, but we were on a call the other day and, someone said, our companies closed the last two weeks of the year and I was on the call and so was their customs broker. And I just saw this, like I got, I could not hold my poker face.

[00:04:20] Brian Glick: And one of my employees called me, I was like, Brian, why do you look like you're in pain right now? I said, because someday I'm going to work for a company where I can take the last two weeks of the year off. But as the people in logistics, we go through that like, Oh, our customer's off, but we're open.

[00:04:34] Brian Glick: Right. And there's always a container stuck somewhere. And there's always a compliance issue somewhere. And I think it really does bond us very, very well

[00:04:44] Bart De Muynck: Yeah. People don't stop shopping or eating just because it's the end of the year. Right. And if logistics doesn't work, you're not going to get any product in the store. I would say in Europe, that was a little bit easier because we close more shops, with holidays, whereas here it's 24/7.

[00:05:00] Bart De Muynck: I came to the U. S. About 21 years ago, I thought it was incredible. You can go to Walmart and it's open 24/7. We don't have that in Europe. It's not even legal to do that.

[00:05:13] Brian Glick: What's so you've, you've on that journey, right? You've been on the logistics side. You've been on the, on the PCO side, on the analyst side, on the software side, kind of helped me kind of understand. Compare and contrast a little bit like, you know, you've worked at all these different companies and you can choose which ones you want to share or not.

[00:05:37] Brian Glick: But like, you've seen this from more angles than almost anyone and kind of like, how do you, how do you, what has that changed in you having had these different perspectives?

[00:05:48] Bart De Muynck: Yeah. And sometimes it wasn't necessarily like I planned all this out, right? Like I sketch it out, like I'm going to do this and then I'm going to go from a 3PL and asset based side, and I'm going to go to a tech side and then I'm going to go shipper. It wasn't necessarily planned. It was just these opportunities.

[00:06:03] Bart De Muynck: They came along and it took me from, you know, from Belgium to Holland, to Germany, to Australia, to England. And now to the United States for the last 20 plus years. But I will say I enjoyed every part of it. I'm probably, kind of, most liking, kind of the entrepreneurial tech side if I look at it now, but as a result of having all these experiences, I can look at things a little bit different.

[00:06:29] Bart De Muynck: It's like looking a little bit like a Rubik's cube, but you have the ability to look at it from every single side and understand it. So when I talk to an investor, I know what they're looking for and I know what's important to them. But when I look at an end user, I know what's important for them.

[00:06:46] Bart De Muynck: When I look at it from a technology vendor, I know what drives them, but it's also very cool if you can then orchestrate all of that and kind of be a little bit of the glue between all those different parties. And kind of speak maybe a lingo that connects these people and that's the other part that I really like about my position now is being a promoter of in the industry?

[00:07:08] Bart De Muynck: That's why when you see me post I’m typically very positive about things, I'm not one of these guys that go on LinkedIn with negative stuff because there's already a lot of negative stuff in our industry. I mean, we're one of the few industries really gone through a recession. But I'm, I'm a promoter of it, but I also like bringing people together, even if they're competitors because I think the way really forward is whether it's through connecting people through processes and through technology is for us to collaborate better as an industry and everyone's going to do better because of that.

[00:07:43] Brian Glick: So. In that context, then, you know, there's always a lot going on. Even going back to the nineties, right, there was, things going on then, you know, I was plugging mainframes together back then and, we were getting Dow Chemical connected in to actually be able to send them their invoices via modem every day, which was exciting at the time.

[00:08:06] Brian Glick: But things have changed a lot since then and they're continuing to change. You know, you had mentioned during our prep that, maybe there's more supply than demand on the tech side. I'm putting words in your mouth there a little bit,

[00:08:18] Bart De Muynck: Yeah.

[00:08:19] Brian Glick: Kind of like, what are you excited about?

[00:08:21] Brian Glick: And where do you see the industry going as far as tech adoption? And I know there's so many different places you could take that.

[00:08:29] Bart De Muynck: Yeah, yeah, no, you're right because in the 90s, right? I mean the Internet was invented in 1989. But I remember when I was with Ernst and Young in 95 I was one of the first people that were there at the office that actually used the internet, right? It was with one of those little Dialogue modems, which was incredibly slow.

[00:08:49] Bart De Muynck: Like what was it? 26 kilobit per second. I now have

[00:08:52] Brian Glick: You had a fast one.

[00:08:54] Bart De Muynck: have five gigabits per second. I mean, it's like thousands of times faster. It's, it's just amazing. Um, and then we went through all this thing from manual and then we got EDI and then we got, I went to Alemica and we started using XML and we thought, Oh, XML is so much better, right?

[00:09:10] Bart De Muynck: So you would think that's going to replace EDI. Well, imagine now, 25 years later, we're still using lots of EDI. So then came API, same thing. People go, oh, maybe API is going to replace it. So you have this natural evolution of technology, but at the same time, there's so many more technology companies. If you would kind of list it, I would say back in the nineties, when we're looking at technology companies, I would say if you had a hundred transportation technology companies, now you would have like 50,000 technology companies.

[00:09:40] Bart De Muynck: As kind of just I wouldn't say that don't look at that as an exact number, but just how exponentially we've grown and using more technology and being part of a venture 53 as well. I've talked to a lot of startups, right? Sometimes pre-seed they're just starting how many new companies are being created every day.

[00:09:57] Bart De Muynck: So it's very exciting, but you have to look at, from people that are buying that technology, how are they going to figure out what they need and now with AI on top of that they're going, what should I invest in? And where's the value coming from? But that's also why I think there's value for more seasoned people to go in there and for technology vendors like yourself to really be a true partner to your customer and say I can help you to make those decisions and to say not just what is maybe hype from what is reality, but also for your specifically, what could create value in your business?

[00:10:33] Bart De Muynck: And I think a lot of people still think, well, we have a problem. Let's put some technology against it. That really doesn't work. And we've seen many, many examples of that, but there is technology that can help. So it's based around how much value can you create. But also I think what's different, the larger companies, cause that's the other part, 30 years ago, only very large companies could afford the transportation technology.

[00:10:58] Bart De Muynck: Now there's free stuff out there. Now you also have to implement that very quickly and get to value very quickly. So technology plays quite a different role. But what I think in my personal opinion I feel with everything that's happened in supply chain last 30 years I would say huge acceleration the last five years I don't think we can sustain kind of doing things the way we used to do things even from your traditional Process model like the score the traditional score model and how we're using that supply chains are completely different it's so much more global.

[00:11:35] Bart De Muynck: It's so much faster in real time. Customer and consumer expectations are completely different So the reality is really how do companies figure out what are the right technologies to really help them, to give them that kind of agility they need to be a lot more flexible as all these things, whether it's weather and port strikes and you know, every day you hear something else on the news that's hitting them.

[00:12:01] Brian Glick: I had a call the other day with a very large BCO shipper, and they were talking about a particular piece of technology that they had bought a couple years ago that they were thinking of getting rid of because they hadn't gotten any value from it. This is the sentence. And I said to them, on the call because it's not really a thing that's competitive with us, but you know, it would be part of the landscape of things we would be looking at integrating.

[00:12:30] Brian Glick: I said, well, what was the value that you thought you were going to get? At the time that wasn't delivered. And, it was really interesting because the guy who I was talking to wasn't there when they made the purchase. So he was able to be a little more honest with me about it. He goes, I think the salesperson just sold it to us.

[00:12:50] Brian Glick: And we didn't really think about whether we needed it. We knew that everyone else was buying it. And now we're looking at it and going, Oh, maybe we didn't need that in the first place. And, you know, I think there's a, there's an interesting thing and, and, you know, and, and I'm actually very interested to hear your thoughts on this, given your experience with Gartner of like, people who just sort of follow the trends and don't go through the discipline process of figuring out whether they need that tech in their business.

[00:13:19] Brian Glick: And coming from that consulting world or that advisory role, did you see that? Is that a thing that people are getting better, more disciplined at now? Like, is that getting better or worse?

[00:13:31] Bart De Muynck: Yeah. Um, I would say probably not. And yes, you are correct. I saw so many examples. Like, what are you really trying to solve? People said, Oh, we want a TMS. Oh, why do you want a TMS? Well, everyone's got a TMS. We need a TMS. It's like, no, you don't. What is it you're trying to solve? And then how does that link to your business strategy?

[00:13:51] Bart De Muynck: How does it link to your technology strategy overall? And that was, I would say a great learning that I had early on working for GE and then doing the whole Six Sigma thing where it's like, Hey, if you kind of work on the process and you improve your process and then put technology against it, which is an enabler then you can do great things and be very efficient. But also on the other side if you don't do it the right way and you don't change your process. Or maybe put the wrong technology against it.

[00:14:20] Bart De Muynck: All you're doing is creating a lot more disturbances in your organization. And unfortunately because there's more pressure also from the board like right now, it’s the board that says, Hey, what are we doing on AI? You got to go do AI. Just like a few years ago. It was like, Hey, we've got to do blockchain.

[00:14:38] Bart De Muynck: It's like, it always starts with what is it we need from a business perspective. Right. And then how does technology enable that? And then how does that particular technology, which technology and how does it provide value? So it's very difficult, especially if you have more. Emerging technologies. Like when I was looking at visibility, like eight years ago, people said, Oh, we need visibility, but they had no clue where the value came from.

[00:15:03] Bart De Muynck: They'd said, well, I know we have a hundred people doing phone calls all day. So maybe we can let some of those people go, but they had no idea how it impacted the rest of the organization. So it's like, well, it's a great opportunity for us to start writing about that and assisting people and getting more, you know, giving them more information about that.

[00:15:21] Bart De Muynck: But no, I would say that whether you were, it was TMS or visibility or APIs or now artificial intelligence, blockchain,

[00:15:32] Bart De Muynck: sometimes dive into it because they think they need to do it without necessarily saying. Is that the right thing to do and are we getting the value and unfortunately then afterwards they go like Oh that vendor sucks because we didn't get the value.

[00:15:45] Bart De Muynck: No, it wasn't the vendor's fault. You implemented something maybe that you didn't need right and you're buying a TMS. I've seen that quite a bit as well. And they're using it for 10% of their business, but they're paying it year over year for 100% of their freight so there's a lot of things. Now on the other hand I’d say you can't blame those people because they're operations people, you know, and a lot of companies have smaller and smaller IT departments. So they don't always have the right assistance or the right help or the right insights to make that decision if you go on once every few years through the procurement cycle of technology. So I think people need to understand if you really want to do what they've been calling for years, this digital transformation, make sure you look at it that way, but at the same time, it can't just be technology.

[00:16:34] Bart De Muynck: Your organization needs to change. The process needs to change. And then the kind of talent that you attract to execute on that vision also needs to change. Just buying technology alone. Unfortunately, that's typically a good setup for failure.

[00:16:51] Brian Glick: I'll try to find it for the show notes. But somebody on LinkedIn posted a comment that basically said, if you're not willing to do organizational change, don't buy new technology. And I thought that was a very, well, obviously oversimplified, a very good sage piece of advice.

[00:17:10] Brian Glick: Most of the failures that I've seen in tech are change management failures or an unwillingness. We have one where I was just on the phone with a big TMS company and they were talking about a failed implementation and they said, yeah, the implementation, we knew the inflation was going to fail as soon as we started because the company wanted to change our software to match their existing process. Like from the idea,

[00:17:38] Bart De Muynck: I've heard that. I can, I can guess who the CMS vendor is, but

[00:17:42] Brian Glick: It doesn't matter though. I mean, I've seen it with SAP.

[00:17:45] Brian Glick: I've seen it on finance implementations. I mean, we had it one time just implementing new billing software inside at Chain where we're like, Oh, no, no, no. We have to build this way.

[00:17:54] Brian Glick: And luckily we kind of went, okay, I've seen enough of this pattern, but it's very tempting and the bigger you are, the more tempting it is to just go to your software vendor and say, no, no, no, just make it look work like my old thing worked,

[00:18:09] Bart De Muynck: Yeah, but I think that's also part of the way software changes. I mean, software, if you look like, for example, your operating system for your computer, it used to be a product, right? You could physically buy a box. It used to be a disc, then it became a CD ROM, right? But you would buy it and you put it in there.

[00:18:26] Bart De Muynck: Now technology is much more than just. I don't see them as software vendors anymore. They're your value creation partners. So you should really lean on them as well. Having the expertise to say, how do you create that value? But then also, if they're saying their solution is going to create value, hold them to it.

[00:18:45] Bart De Muynck: Right. And say, okay, Hey, we need to figure this out, how we create that value. But it's much more of a partnership. Yeah. And then it can go well if you do it the right way and you build it up the right way. It used to be you buy something you have to buy the whole thing now a lot of these newer systems They're micro services based they're componentized so you can buy or start small and get value very quickly so sometimes it's like yeah, I know how I can do this, but I can start small so I can immediately know if it works or not rather than spend two years implementing all of it and then go like yeah, that wasn't right and we've seen massive failure, especially in the logistics industry large freight forwarders 3PL’s that did these projects that were over 100 million dollars and go doesn't work and they just had to scrap it.

[00:19:31] Brian Glick: Yeah, we won't call that company. And I talked to their old CFO the other day, but yes, there've been some really ugly ones, you know, and it's funny cause it's the same on the retailer side, right? You look at early 2000, some of those really, really ugly failed SAP implementations, the patterns are the same.

[00:19:49] Brian Glick: Right. And the very excited board, very big press release. We're going all in on this, you know, we're going to transform our whole company and then four years later, here comes the write off, think that you're right. That over enthusiasm at the beginning can often lead to that failure at the end because, Oh, we have to change everything today.

[00:20:10] Brian Glick: It's very, very hard to do inside of a company.

[00:20:12] Bart De Muynck: yeah, and unfortunately, sometimes it has a company stall in the sense that it limits their willingness to innovate because the failure of one particular area, I think what I've seen, and that was a learning I had with PepsiCo, where we had this lab internally, where we were able to look at a lot more technologies and then take them through the lab and understand it very quickly.

[00:20:36] Bart De Muynck: It was like, if you're going to fail, fail fast, right? So run it through, see if it works. If it doesn't work, what the value is. And then push it in. And I think more and more companies are doing that to try and to understand that. But unfortunately, a lot of small organizations don't have that ability, but that's also why we're seeing that, you know, especially on the shipper side, you're seeing the large companies, the PNGs, they're the guys that at the forefront, right, they're the guys that take high risks.

[00:21:03] Bart De Muynck: And some of them don't pay off, but the good thing is they're PNG. So most of the time they get a lot of that stuff for free. Cause they're saying, Hey, you're a newer vendor. We'll try your solution. You can show our logo, but instead we get that stuff for free. And then even after PNG is successful and PepsiCo will go like, Hey.

[00:21:21] Bart De Muynck: We're early followers. We'll try that as well. And then you see other companies following as well, but I think I see more willingness of companies nowadays to try software, because like I said, these newer platforms are a lot easier to implement. And so that helps innovation because it doesn't require the amount of time, the cost, the amount of resources.

[00:21:43] Bart De Muynck: That's the one thing, right? In logistics, it has all your resources or logistics, but if you look at the shippers. The one thing I continuously heard, towards the end of when I was with Gartner was like, Hey, Bart, we want to do this technology, but I don't have resources on my team to put on the project.

[00:21:58] Brian Glick: Right.

[00:21:59] Bart De Muynck: So they would go, I need something that's quick to implement, easy to use, very kind of like a LinkedIn, Facebook, we weren't trained on it, but it's very intuitive. And so technology that works like that, and then working with strong partners that continue to innovate. That's, I think, where you can be very successful.

[00:22:15] Bart De Muynck: And I do think, though, if you want to remain competitive, because I don't want to kind of give the impression to say, don't do technology. That's not my message here at all. You have to do technology. And if you think you can stall or you cannot innovate, your competitor is going to leapfrog you, and you're going to be left behind.

[00:22:32] Bart De Muynck: And all your customers, right? Everyone nowadays, they're expecting you to communicate and collaborate with them through technology. Mm

[00:22:40] Brian Glick: Yeah, you talked about the adoption curve, right. And the innovators and the early adopters, the followers and so on. One of the things that I think a lot of smaller freight forwarders in particular that I've talked to struggle with is being comfortable with where they are in that curve, if you are resource constrained, it's okay to be, middle or late on the curve, because when you're early on the curve, the risk is, 80 percent of the things that these big companies try fail, they fail quickly, hopefully, right.

[00:23:17] Brian Glick: And that's really the learning of the early two thousands was fail fast. People could say whatever they want about agile and whether it's popular or not, but the idea of failing of getting something in failing quickly and getting it out, if it didn't work was the big win there.

[00:23:30] Brian Glick: But I think one of the things I see, that companies make a mistake is like you said, somebody at the board goes to a conference. Okay. We have to be doing AI today. Well, are we the kind of company that is willing to accept the risk and make the investment in 10 things to find one thing? Or are we a company who wants to invest in two things and have both of them work right?

[00:23:53] Brian Glick: Like where you are in that curve matters a lot, right?

[00:23:59] Brian Glick: MERS can afford to do TradeLens and have it fail, right? TradeLens was a big risk and it was not successful, but that's what early adoption looks like,

[00:24:08] Bart De Muynck: Yep. Yeah, and I always thought it was a knee jerk because they had that big cyber security event happening and so they went from maybe older systems that weren't secure to kind of go like everything needs to be overly secure and obviously it was right in the middle where blockchain was kind of put out there as the next big thing right similar to when I joined PepsiCo was right at the beginning where walmart had their RFID mandate We had to put RFID on everything.

[00:24:35] Bart De Muynck: It doesn't, doesn't make any sense to put that on little 99 cent bags of Lays or, you know, soda cans. Now, if it's Gillette razors that are very expensive and you don't want to be out of stock, that's one thing, but not on everything. But guess what? You know, 15, 20 years later, RFID is back in retail and doing very well.

[00:24:55] Bart De Muynck: So I'm sure some of these technologies just, Yeah. Take a longer time to become ingrained and I think AI as well and people sometimes are afraid of it, right? But the truth is we're using AI all day long. If you have an iPhone you're using AI just looking at that thing right it recognizing you and opening up that's AI Now you go like, well, why does that matter?

[00:25:17] Bart De Muynck: Well, before you had to put in a code, it took you some time. And if you have kind of fatty fingers, like me, you fat finger it quite often and you go like, Oh, darn thing. Or you had to put your thumbprint on it. And that didn't work half of the time. And that's what AI is. Maybe it's the same thing you're doing, but you're doing it faster and it's easier.

[00:25:35] Bart De Muynck: Maybe more secure on top of that. So there's a lot of applications there, but again, AI will take a long time to truly be integrated. And I think what the problem is with AI, it's so powerful that the organization and the people and the processes can't follow with it. I always tell people, you could have the most modern car in the world.

[00:25:57] Bart De Muynck: Like I have an electric car and it has all these sensors, right? But why is it that these sensors can do everything and notice everything, but yet when I overtake a car, I still do that looking over my shoulder at that corner. Why? Because that's how I was trained and I've always done it. Behavioral changes are very difficult,

[00:26:14] Brian Glick: I still can't use the backup camera in my car. I mean, I use it, but I still also look over my shoulder to back up because you're right. It's very hard to unlearn those things.

[00:26:26] Bart De Muynck: But also when you do have that, like I was just for Thanksgiving in Mexico and had a rental car and some of the, nothing against, I love Mexico, but some of the rental cars there don't have all that technology that we have standard here, so we didn't have a backup camera. Wow. I didn't know how much I missed the backup camera and, you know, I almost hit a pole a couple of times backing up in the garage cause I didn't have that.

[00:26:49] Bart De Muynck: I literally have to look, I'm not used to looking, I'm used to looking at the camera and seeing if my line lines up with it and then I know I'm good. So that's the other part, right? We're becoming dependent on technology. So you've got to make sure that that technology works and you don't have a cyber security attack because we're so dependent on it that if that thing is taken away, let's say last week, right, it was Black Friday.

[00:27:13] Bart De Muynck: We had Cyber Monday and all of a sudden that TMS or WMS stops working. Wow. How quickly can you revert back to old processes?

[00:27:20] Brian Glick: Yeah, no kidding. I will admit as a tech CEO, last night we were, I was looking at a feature in our product and I was like, Oh, this very small feature, we have a thing where people can send us files. And, you know, it's a new feature releasing where they could be able to send to the same API endpoint and they could send us.

[00:27:45] Brian Glick: A Magaya file, a Cargoize file, a Descartes file, or whatever, and we'll figure out which file type it is, and they don't have to go click a bunch of settings, and we don't need any AI to do that. There's a very finite list of TMSs, and we'll be able to figure it out, but I said, Oh, wouldn't it be interesting if we could also say, just send us any file, and we'll sort it through, and, you know, there's an AI solution there. What was incredibly tempting as a CEO, and especially one who likes to be out in the market and up on stages and everything was to go, Oh, cool.

[00:28:18] Brian Glick: Let's drop that one feature. And then we can call ourselves an AI company. Right? And I can go raise a whole bunch of money as an AI company, right? And I can be the, when Arizona IST had decided they were a blockchain company. And we're not gonna do that. We are going to implement probably that feature at some point because it's a useful feature, but it's a feature in a very large suite of what we do.

[00:28:42] Brian Glick: And, but I will tell you, it is damn hard to not just jump on that marketing chain because I know it works, right? And, and it will, it should be a warning. We keep using blockchain as the whipping boy, but you mentioned XML before, and I worked for a company that invested in a piece of software where the XML was going to replace all of our code and it was going to make programmers obsolete because we would have XML.

[00:29:18] Brian Glick: XML was going to make programming obsolete. This was like right before the dot com crash. Right? So this is not a new pattern, and everyone should be aware that AI is a feature. It is actually not even a feature. It's a thing that you use to build features and you buy business value.

[00:29:40] Brian Glick: And I know you believe this and I know that I'm sitting here preaching to the choir, but I think it's important when we talk about year end wrap up, this could be the year end wrap up every year is buzzword X is a feature. And if your tech vendor is leading with the feature, not the value, it may just be that they got really seduced by it and they may still have very good software, but if you can't figure out what the value is, don't buy it.

[00:30:07] Bart De Muynck: Right. I'd say the best use of AI is where the user doesn't realize it has AI. I just know it's better. It's faster. It helps them better in their job. That's the greatest. There's a lot of, I think right now, a lot of really good use cases for AI, but they're kind of behind the scenes. Like I think data quality, everyone's got so much data.

[00:30:26] Bart De Muynck: You guys collect and integrate a lot of data. A lot of other companies do as well. And why is it so important to have good data quality? Well, you got to remember, we used to use just data mostly for like, business intelligence, right? Which was historical reporting. What if the data was bad? Who cares?

[00:30:44] Bart De Muynck: It already happened. But now we're starting to predict and prescribe, and maybe in the future, automate certain parts of our supply chain processes based on that data. If that data is a little bit wrong, your prediction has got to be way off. So, you know, when you can use things like AI to improve data quality, you know, data harmonization, cleaning data, augmenting data, all of those different things, those are things that happen behind the scenes.

[00:31:13] Bart De Muynck: So it's a little bit like in your car, you drive your car. Now imagine you have a good engine, like in Formula, a good engine, right? Good fuel. Imagine AI is that little additive. That you add to it, that makes it that little bit more performant. You don't even have to know it, that it's in there. You just feel like, wow, there's something here that gives that thing just a little bit more power, a little bit more performant.

[00:31:36] Bart De Muynck: And I get to that end line or your bottom line a little bit faster or a little bit more profitable. I think that's right now where we are with AI. Because all those big, big things that you see out there from AI, people really aren't ready to truly use that. So it's a very gradual progression.

[00:31:53] Brian Glick: Yeah, I think the thing inside of our company where AI has had the most impact immediately, is the code generation tools. Microsoft did a very good branding when they called it copilot, because that is essentially, and I think there's a lot of non technical people who think that AI is writing like, Oh, I just typed in a thing and I wrote, it wrote all the code for me.

[00:32:17] Brian Glick: And when you're doing like, a little toy project, that's very easy. When you're doing a big enterprise piece of software, it's not so simple. But what we see is, we can get a developer sitting there on the keyboard and the AI is writing. The next line of code and the next line of code and next line of code.

[00:32:34] Brian Glick: And what it's doing is probably improving, and I don't have hard stats on this, but I would guess 20 or 30 percent productivity, but it's doing the 20 or 30% that’s the easiest part though. Like, Oh, I have an if statement and it knows that if I type if I'm probably checking whether the last line of code is valid, right?

[00:32:55] Brian Glick: Like, but it's not going to sit there and go, you know, it's not going to have a new idea. Like it's not bringing out like, Oh, we should be prompting the customer to give us this extra thing so that we can upsell them next year on why. Like it's just doing the same as the automatic braking in your car.

[00:33:14] Brian Glick: It's not telling you that you should have a better relationship with your mother, so you should drive to your mother's house. It's just making sure you don't rear end the guy on the way, right? Like there's a very big difference

[00:33:23] Bart De Muynck: And I think that's the value that I think is so important for a lot of companies because it does allow for those people right because it's still special logistics very human centric allows them to handle more volume. Do it better, do it faster. But also, which I always say at conferences, AI will help these people at the end of the day like their jobs better, which is also really good for talent attraction and retention, which we know is a big issue, right?

[00:33:51] Bart De Muynck: It's not just the labor. It's even the people in the offices. Everyone's fighting for the same talent, the same good talent and we know that the best supply chains are typically They have the best people. It's not just oh we have the best building and the best assets and the best technology No, it's the people right?

[00:34:09] Bart De Muynck: And so how do you as a company do that and I know that today it's quite different from 30 years ago. When I came out of college, what you saw as attractive as a company nowadays, everyone wants to go work for Google or Uber or something like that. So how are you as like, say, a 150 year old manufacturing company?

[00:34:26] Bart De Muynck: How do you attract that talent? Well, technology plays a big role in that because if you're on a 20 year old version of a technology, I can guarantee it, someone coming from the best supply chain university and they see that they're like, no, thank you. It doesn't matter how much you pay. They're not gonna do it

[00:34:42] Brian Glick: Without a doubt. So we're kind of running up on time here again. I think you and I have had 2 hour conversations in the past, and I know we could do 1 right now if we wanted to, but kind of bring us out with kind of what are you, what, what are you most excited about for next year?

[00:34:58] Bart De Muynck: Well, I hope that the economy is going to turn around and that, especially for the transportation logistics industry, things are going to look better. I think there's a lot more optimism going on around right now. But again, we always have these things that are out of our control that when we feel like we make a couple of steps forward and get pushed back because something is happening right and we know with the east coast and gulf coast ports we still don't have an agreement.

[00:35:23] Bart De Muynck: So we might be back to square one in January when that extension comes up and that might have huge repercussions. But I’m really hoping for next year that we're finally getting out of this deep period. There's way too many companies going out of business. Whether it's, you know, carriers, brokers, some of the tech companies who, you know, had to be acquired because they ran out of funding to really change that.

[00:35:48] Bart De Muynck: But then I would also say for people on the technology side that are the users, I know a lot of companies have said, Hey, I want it, but not now, you know, investing in technology. And not investing is not a solution, right? And you’ve got to remember that the way you have to operate, the way you have to work with your talent, the way you have to work with your customers, a big part of that will be in how you use technology and make it better.

[00:36:13] Bart De Muynck: But as we said before, start looking at technology and start really understanding what are those main pieces that have the biggest impact on your organization. Meaning don't invest in just these fluff solutions, invest in things that are kind of part of your core process. But that really helps.

[00:36:30] Bart De Muynck: So if you may be on a 20 year old solution. Buy a new solution that kind of covers the same process, but does it a lot more efficiently and gives you a lot more flexibility. Those I think are the very important part. So it's not the shiny thing or the cool thing. It's the basic thing that really helps your company and I think I hope that next year will be that year where companies are going like okay, it is now or realize that we have to do it. Well, we kind of start losing our competitiveness in the market.

[00:37:00] Brian Glick: And I think from what I've seen internally to our customers and our cadence through this year. I think you are right that people are starting to go, okay, I can't push this off anymore and it's time to go start investing again. So hopefully here's to a good 2025 for everyone.

[00:37:17] Brian Glick: And, I'll just say a short port strike. I don't think we can say no port strike at this point. Bart, again, thank you so much for being on. It's such a pleasure to chat. I know I'll personally see you a lot in the new year, but, anyone who wants to get in touch, where should they find you?

[00:37:32] Bart De Muynck: Well, always get me on LinkedIn. I'm a lot on there, so that's probably the easiest way to find me if you can spell my name. Also my website, bartdemuynck.com or my thought leadership website, which is bettersupplychains.com. I post my articles on there. Hopefully I can share this on there as well.

[00:37:50] Brian Glick: We’ll have all of that in the show notes as well.

[00:37:52] Bart De Muynck: And then, any of the upcoming conferences, you know, you'll probably see me and Brian or me or Brian.

[00:37:59] Brian Glick: You see the two of us in John Fitzgerald, and that's a guarantee at any logistics conference

[00:38:04] Bart De Muynck: Exactly. If one of us isn't there, it's not worth attending.

[00:38:08] Brian Glick: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right, well again, have a happy holidays and a great new year and, same to everyone who's listening and, and thanks so much for being on the show.

[00:38:18] Bart De Muynck: Yeah, you as well. Happy holidays and an incredibly strong start to the new year.

[00:38:27] Brian Glick: Well, thanks again to Bart. One of my goals has always been with this podcast to make sure that everyone who's listening kind of gets a glimpse into the conversations that happen in hallways and, at the cocktail hours when we're out at all these industry events, and there's nobody who's

[00:38:42] Brian Glick: better when I'm just sort of wandering around and exhausted to have a real honest conversation with than Bart. So glad we were able to open that up to everyone in the industry. As far as the end of the year here and heading into next year, super excited about a lot of updates to things that are coming very, very soon

[00:39:00] Brian Glick: for Chain.io, so make sure you're subscribed to the blog and to us on LinkedIn, sneak previews, some really cool new tools that we're releasing, to really focus on simplifying some of the very, very core problems that we know that you all have, with connecting with each other quickly and getting at that very raw, simple information that just makes your jobs easier.

[00:39:24] Brian Glick: So

[00:39:25] Brian Glick: really excited. Can't drop the announcements yet, but you can tell I'm chomping

[00:39:28] Brian Glick: at the bit.

[00:39:29] Brian Glick: So, be sure to be looking at everything as we go into the new year. And as always, I'm Brian Glick, founder, CEO of Chain.io, and thank you so much for listening.

Listen Now