DEEPER DIVES - #0002

Good morning,

First, as always, thank you for joining.

Week 1 is in the books and already some lessons learned.

The anchor links didn’t work.

My goal is to make Deeper Dives as easy for you to read as possible. While the links were set up the right way, they only work when the newsletter is also published to the web.

Since the content I share with you here ISN’T PUBLISHED anywhere else, they didn’t work.

New signups for the newsletter were up +10% after the first issue. That’s wicked cool - I appreciate all of you for your support!

Here’s what this issue brings:

• Featured Article: The negative impact sales and corporate programs have had on continuous improvement and operational excellence - and the money being lost because of it
  

• Broader Focus: One of the best pieces of open source (and free) software I have ever used
  

• From the Community: Why do I see AI as a tool and not a replacement

How Corporate Misfires Are Costing You Millions

Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, Agile, Scrum, ISO 9001 … the list goes on.

I am sure each and every one of you has (or currently is) participating in one of these programs.

We’ve all heard the success stories.

The reasons why.

The logic makes sense, and the benefits are great.

But you’re tired of these programs.

They never give the results they were supposed to.

Changing Tides

Programs like Lean and Six Sigma have their origins rooted in manufacturing. Benefiting from a rise in popularity through the 1980s to the early 2000s, they have both been successfully applied to all kinds of different industries.

They allowed business to increase their profitability by improving productivity. Programs built for a world of high volume, cyclic sales and stable pricing.

With that being true, should these programs not be as popular as ever?

I ran a poll today. It was inspired by a clear shift in the types of conversations I am having.

I was curious to see if the trend would repeat itself with a random sample of people from my network.

Here was the question:

The available options were:

1. Systems, Technology and Tools

2. Operational Excellence

3. Growth (Customer Acquisition)

4. Revenue Quality

Spoiler Alert: Operational Excellence got destroyed

This quick poll showed the exact same thing I am hearing from (pretty much) EVERYONE I am speaking to and working with.

Growth, customer acquisition / revenue, is top of mind.

With softening markets and increasing competition, everyone is looking to bolster their dollars in.

Business has shifted from stable, status quo sales to a market with unending innovation and disruption. People aren’t worried about reducing their spend, because they are more worried about keeping (and increasing) their market share.

The Lost Art

I worked all week on-site with clients.

I was on 3 different loading docks, all different operations, all doing different types of fulfillment.

Each one of these operations had varying degrees of maturity, technology, talent and goals.

From the least mature to the most - there were opportunities to improve all of them.

I got home with a laundry list of tasks, reports and processes that would make operational execution better for the internal teams, and the external customers.

The Real Goal

What I have always shared with my teams, but what most people miss, is this.

Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement isn’t about cutting costs

It’s about unlocking capacity

What boggles my mind is that being able to create capacity, gives your business the immediate ability to fill it … with new customers, rapidly growing revenue.

But this is rarely seen.

We default to standard sales process to layer more onto what we already have, and how we are already doing it.

I can guarantee you this.

If you are strained and feeling a squeeze from the market, you do not want to be onboarding customers at anything less than peak quality of revenue.

If you have to add labour, add assets, or increase your external spend in order to drive the new business you just won - you’re working twice as hard for half the benefit.

Improving your operational execution is the fastest and most reliable way to stand out when soliciting new business.

The customers you are engaged with already have problems. That’s why they are talking to you. They aren’t happy with what they are experiencing. The faster you can show them how much better you are, end-to-end, the faster they move over to your service or product.

So what do you need?

The keys to successfully getting your teams to drive capacity creation through CI is not programs.

It’s not training.

And not that new tool that the vendor promised was the missing piece.

This is what will help you win.

• People
  The right people in the right positions to create the culture and focus efforts
  

• Mindset
  This is attitude.
  Promote a “start with yes” mentality. This means that whatever the challenge is, you say yes. Then you work backwards to see all of the things that would stop you from succeeding, and systematically solve for them.
  

• Learning
  Teams have to never stop learning.
  If everyone in the room always feels like there could be something new to understand, you’ll never run short of innovation.
  

• Experimentation
  Try stuff.
  Knowledge (and understanding) comes from information in action. Give your people the opportunity to test and learn.

QGIS: A Free Tool That May Change Your Current Strategy

The ability to give context and visualize your data is one of the most important things you can do for your business.

While we’ve all played with numbers, working with geospacial data in logistics is the next big thing.

In my last corporate role, GIS software made a massive impact to the revenue and profitability work I was doing.

It allowed me to take my models and get specific as to where money was being made, where it wasn’t being made, but more importantly - exactly where (and why) that change happened.

The following is a list of projects, initiatives or analyzes I have done using GIS software. From what I can tell so far, QGIS can help you do all of this.

• Batch geocoding
  Have a a few thousand addresses to geocode? You can do this yourself and do up to 40k address per month with a free Google Maps API key.
  (Granted, if you live in Canada or the US - Geocodio is a killer option here).

• Visualizing customers by segments
  Being able to group customers by delivery route, servicing depot, transportation lane, store type, frequency, volume, spend, etc - is a fantastic way to get “at a glance” understanding of what’s going on.
  
  You will often be surprised how quickly you will find inconsistencies and opportunities within your network or supply chain the second you can visually see everyone all at the same time.

• Heat Maps
  Create different views of your customers and understand what are the driving factors of their activity across your service area.

• Matching Different Data Sets
  Ever have two different files that have similar location data in them but aren’t properly geocoded? Instead of manually matching different line items across the two sheets, load each data set into QGIS and output a nearest neighbor analysis. You’ll be able to quickly tag and merge the data from one data set to the other

• Drive Time Rings (or isochrones)
  Every city is different. Knowing how far you can go in 30 minutes matters. Being able to quickly understand and analyze the uniqueness of each city you operate in versus another is key to creating profit generating pricing.

• Create Territories to analyze and segment customer data

• Analyze routes or travel paths

And much more.

These are some things that I use this type of software for given the nature of the work that I do.

What was once software and capability reserved for massive organizations or specifically trained people now has zero barrier to entry.

Give it a shot and see what you learn about your network.

AI Is The Greatest Equalizer Ever Created

People ask me all the time how I see AI in the Supply Chain world.

What jobs will it replace.

How will it improve current models.

Is it still worth entering the field with all of the robotics, automation and AI platforms.

While AI will replace and eliminate some jobs that currently are being done by people, that’s not the most dangerous part.

The most disruptive thing about AI isn’t the systems themselves, but the people using them to level up their talent.

AI is a PED.

It allows a user to take their current limitations and toss them out the window.

Where once there were gaps in knowledge or capability - now, nothing but opportunity.

Here’s an example.

I’ve been working a lot lately with messy data.

Annoyingly. Messy. Data.

I have been doing tons of manual matching of database values from different sources. There is nothing more frustrating than lookups and joins not working because of typos, spaces and capitalizations.

I’ve been on the hunt for fuzzy matching tools.

While this seems like something that should be built into Excel and Google Sheets natively, there aren’t a lot of great string similarity tools out there for end users to use quickly (especially on a locked down corporate machine).

One of the best solutions is Python.

Just write the code and leverage some really good existing libraries.

The challenge?

I don’t know how to code in Python.

My coding experience ended when I switched majors from Computer Science to Law in University.

Enter ChatGPT (and a few other AIs).

I’m in the process of using it to build my own, custom made Python script and GUI to specifically support Fuzzy Matching.

This is why AI is an equalizer.

Because it allows me to leverage my understanding and knowledge of what needs to be done, while removing the barrier of not being able to code.

I have now increased my capability. I can create new tools based on my creativity and don’t need to find or get access to a developer with specialized knowledge.

The most dangerous thing about AI right now is to not be using it.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for being here.