Technology Solutions for Global Supply Chain Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities

[Music] welcome thanks for joining us I'm Kellen bets a course lead in the mitx micromasters program in Supply Chain management here at MIT Center for transportation and Logistics I'm honor today to be co-hosting with laa ala also Co also a CO also excuse me also a course lead in the micromasters program and today we're very excited to have Harris chalat join us Harris welcome welcome Kellen excited to be here thank you awesome so thank you for joining us today and thank you for our audience for joining us today as well and so if we can maybe um launch our first poll those who attend our webinars before we'd like to start things off with a poll just to kind of quy what um brought you here today what you're interested in learning about today so the question why are you here today if you of the options to better understand how technology can help you achieve sustainability goals I'm into technology any new perspective is interesting to me hopefully we have some microm Masters leers out here who don't miss any of our Live Events we' love to see you and have you join us here as well and while we give you a few minutes or minute or so there to to take a look at that poll L we'll go through our agenda for today awesome thank you Kellen and welcome everyone so during the next 10 to 15 minutes haris will discuss the challenges that all companies face with emissions data in their supply chains and of course we're also here to discuss how technology help companies understand the role they play the impact they have and to design better Supply chains K and I will then ask some questions we have prepared for haris and we will always save time for a Q&A at the very end for your questions so start thinking of those and remember that we use the Q&A feature to ask the questions so don't put the questions in the chat just use the Q&A feature of course be sure to be logged in with the name because we don't read anonymous questions so we appreciate that and before going to hares let's just end this poll and share the results I'm curious if we have more people into technology into sustainability or into the combination of both so the great thing is that almost 70% of you are here for both technology helping achieve sustainability goals which is amazing and also uh 61% of you answer about learning more about sustainable Supply chains so how do you feel about that Harris are you ready to kick it off considering this poll results yeah I'm excited I Pi today will be a fun discussion awesome so the floor is is yours okay excellent I'll pull up my presentation love to see our 50% of audience out there who are micromaster owners don't miss any of our events thank you for joining us again today hopefully you're enjoying the courses and thanks everyone who is saying hi in the chat we are always excited to see some names we we we've known from the courses joining us today okay there we go thank you thank you uh I appreciate K Laura for the introduction again my name is haris schlot I'm the CEO and co-founder at Miri um and we're going to spend today talking a little bit about how we see technology being able to help build more sustainable global Supply chains uh really quickly k l asked that I gave a little bit of background on myself and how I ended up to where I am today year so I wanted to give that to the group uh definitely a little bit of a unique uh story into sustainability I went to undergraduate school at MIT um studied course 16 for everyone that's familiar with the the MIT language which is aerospace engineering uh one of the more unique aspects of my co-founder stories I actually played football with my now co-founder Peter Williams there's a nice Act shot of us playing together back in the day uh definitely think there's some unique bonds that were built during the college time with me and him that helped us now build a successful company after school I went and spent majority of my career in the Aerospace industry um largely at SpaceX where I was focused on a mixture of engineering program management Business Development uh largely for some unique PR and satellite technology that we were building uh there's a nice shot of a Falcon 9 rocket that we were helping roll out to the Launchpad um back in the day just to give you some appreciation like the immensity of platforms we were working on I loved working in space it's a very exciting Shield uh getting humans to Mars is is you know a very cool thing to to want to go build towards but fundamentally I just didn't feel like that was the biggest problem that we had as a society or where we should focus and really wanted to find Opportunities to go apply myself and climate um it was about this time that me and Peter came back together and agreed that the best way to do that was to find ways with and technology and the new company to go and solve challenges that we saw and that's what led to us founding me in 2022 uh Mir is a seed stage climate tech company based out in Seattle and our focus is on leveraging artificial intelligence to help corporations both reduce cost and Emissions within their Global Supply chains so clearly the jump from aerospace engineering to carbon missions and Global Supply chains is unique um how did we end up here I think that's a completely Fair question and and the answer is there's a significant opportunity to reduce emissions at a gigaton scale in a very near time frame by going and addressing the challenges that we're seen within Global Supply chains so I think most of the people on this call probably appreciate that Global Supply chains are large complex networks and when we're talking about the supply chains we're not just talking about the transportation of goods but the full value chain of uh processing manufacturing and building Goods across uh the the world to then develop an end product that a company is purchasing and to give you this I understand of the size of the sustainability impact that Supply chains have for corporations I pulled really quickly a few different corporations uh uh sustainability reports across a few different Industries you know we have General Motors when you think of cars you typically think of the emissions associated with driving the car but the building of those cars is a significant portion of the overall carbon footprint you know 50 megatons or or oneth of DM's overall carbon footprint is from the manufacturing of the cars so it's on par with the emissions Associated driving the cars is just building them um if you go to the electronic space we have apple here as an example it that percentage increases significantly to 74% for 15 megatons and then if you move into the more consed good space it typically is even higher at 85% for Johnson and Johnson here as a representation these are huge numbers and maybe unsurprisingly with these huge numbers in terms of overall footprint there's also lots of opportunities to reduce the emissions a the way the way that we typically think about these reductions are a few different buckets the first is sourcing decisions you know where am I buying my goods from who is that person that I bought it from where are they based in the world the material selections so what are those goods going into my product is it metal is it plastic is it recycled is it virgin um and then what are those efficiency and energy Investments that we can take to go reduce emissions you know this is where renewable energy come in or efficiency Investments to make a processes more green um and those are the the unique broad buckets that we talk about when we talk about reductions but there's lots of specific attributes that you can go take to reduce emissions for manufacturing give good and those different reduction opportunities when compounded together provide a significant opportunity to reduce overall carbon emissions so these opportunities exist but we're not really seeing companies being able to go and execute on them and and that leads to ask why is that um the simple answer is is that Global Supply chains are incredibly complex opaque networks you know we have visual representation here of a 41,000 corporations this is one of their business unit supply chain to tier three and you can just see how quickly these networks become tens of thousands of interactions between different companies that the the thought of trying to keep track of it becomes very challenging and because corporations only have this partial Insight of what's happening within their supply chains they really lack the ability to understand identify those key reduction opportunities within their supply chain um when we were talking about what are the emissions associated with a given good there's typically three questions that we like to think about it's where in the world did this process happened what went into the product what were those materials consumed and how was the product built and if you can answer those three questions from the you know delivered and good back to raw material you'll have a pretty strong understanding of what your emissions for that given product are corporations are trying to get an appreciation of answering those questions to date uh via supplier surveys so that's you know a company going out to their suppliers and asking them to provide some detailed information about how they manufacture the goods asking them to ask those same questions to their suppliers and that sounds simple enough right but in actuality when you're talking about tens of thousands of buers that may be disincentivized to provide you truthful clear answers what we're seeing is a significant amount of time invested by corporations to go and try to gather this type of data and being left with them imp partial and incomplete insights in terms of what's actually happening um BCG ran a recent survey that they do this annually in 2022 they found that 90% of respondents felt that they did not have a comprehensive understanding of their missions so Global Supply chains we know are a huge portion of corporation's overall carbon footprint but because of the complexities that are associated with global supply chain there's a real inability to understand how can I go actually manage submissions and that's where we M see an opportunity for technology to come in and help address these challenges um specifically at me what we're focused on is is leveraging artificial intelligence combined with large public and proprietary data sets um to be able to provide actual insights for companies to go reduce those emissions at scale um and what that means is technology stepping into help assist these procurement supply chain teams by requiring minimal amount of customer inputs to be able to provide answers so being able to do something quickly autonomously and at the quantity of hundreds of thousands being able to answer those key questions that I talked about earlier where did this good probably come from what went into it how was it made and doing so out a granularity with the understanding of drivers and benchmarks to be able to then say okay now that we understand the where what and how how I've then reduce my emissions and that's specifically what we're focused on there is is taking this type of Technology capability assessing to againsts hundreds of thousands of different products for corporations being able to Benchmark and understand how that Corporation is performing against their peers uh and then from there being able to map out different scenarios and identifying clear reduction plans for customers and then a unique aspect of what we're focused on is also helping companies understand what are these impacts uh from reduction strategies on a pricing perspective um the way that we like to think of finding best reduction opportunities is by finding what we like to call win-win opportunities these are ways that you help corporations find um a decision point that both lowers emissions as well as the cost of good soul and clearly if you are able to identify those types of opportunities companies it's a no-brainer for them they'll go take those every day and so that's where we really see the opportunity for technology to go have a fundamental impact on Global Supply chains today is by answering these questions and from their driving then to hear the answers of how we can go manage the missions for your supply chain given the complexities that exist in today's world um I'll pause there Kell Laura I think we'll probably shift over questions now yeah awesome thank you Harris I definitely appreciate the the background there and the your presentation and little describing a little bit how you're approaching this problem it definitely it seems like a challenging problem you know I love that diagram you have that Network diagram really shows the complexity of of like even just a tier three supply chain like even trying to to visualize that is is difficult cult you know it's really hard to see all those relationships you know so many and then you also have the scale of of the number of products you you're talking about hundreds of thousands of products someone who's done those calculations like for a single product I can't imagine scaling that to hundreds of products even hundreds of thousands of products um so maybe I want to kind of start like with the first question here kind of focusing on the technology side of things and you know how AI is coming to this I know AI is a Hot Topic in the news certainly with like chat GPT and some of these tools out there on the consumer side and you know chat Bots but it's also being leveraged a lot of other ways um so I wonder if you can maybe elaborate a little bit further on how AI in machine learning comes into this this play and how you're leveraging that to scale some of these calculations across the the tiers as well as the number of products yeah yeah so for us when we talk about our data system and how we're providing these answers to customers it it's through this unique pipeline that we like to talk about of you know answering first what went into your product um where did it come from and then how do we think it happened right those same three questions and so what we found is that there's unique steps and algorithms and processes that could be applied to each one of those questions to then help provide a comprehensive answer um so part of it's being able to you know leverage machine learning to understand natural language you know I'm looking at a cotton t-shirt versus an athletic t-shirt and then from their understanding what went into that material so that's like one unique application and machine learning that we we've leveraged um another is being able to understand what the given products likely alternative materials or reduction opportunities are um and that's something where we have large priet databases that to be able to S through it's helpful to have artificial intelligence um and then there's the communication of where do we see the reduction opportunities and that's where you can then start to get into some interesting like human interfacing aspects where something like an llm can be really helpful to help communicate insights it's not just artificial intelligence however there are more standard data science applications that we also leverage so like from when it comes to like trade modeling we typically fall back to like a more stochastic probability View and so it's for us this unique system of combining all these different applications and Technologies from the data science world with the insights and capabilities to answer each of those questions along the pipeline for a given good and so it's it's a complex multitude system which is why we like to call it data Fusion awesome and and as I hear you I can't think of how many more layers of complexity are out there in this decisionmaking process and and that you are supporting through technology that we may be missing when we make our decisions now thinking on the huge level of granularity in your information and and you also mentioned that in your in your slides um but to identify a little piece within some product or a raw material coming from somewhere else in the world and every piece of information that it generated throughout the supply chain I'm wondering how do you decide how how do you fit your model you talk about um public sources you also talk about company provided information but I'm thinking of data sources different languages different structures different pieces of information probably different metric systems so how do you manage to feed um your your uh tools to include all those and how do you provide a good level of accuracy considering all those assumptions you may make in the process yeah so for the first question generally how we like to approach this is by asking for as little as possible from customers at least from the start clearly as you get more mature and sophisticated with sustainability you'll have more insights but by saying in the beginning process and steps with a customer all we want to know is what products did you buy and who did you buy them from those simple inputs we can then leverage our systems provide you value it allows us to simplify the data Gathering and delivery to us so not having to have complex multilanguage inputs from like different suppliers across the world uh building materials like these more um thepoke data Wells aren't required for us to provide you initial service and so that that's a key aspect of how we were able to like simplify this process for customers as we get more sophisticated and start to look at CLS like billing materials or Supply tra ility insights or surveys um that's where like being able to leverage an API integration which is part of our service capability makes it a little bit cleaner and easier to just have something that if you integrate into this it'll be fully autonomous you don't have to worry about it again and it will feed into the system to give you insights and so finding ways to help reduce the friction of those data Gathering efforts and data processing efforts is clearly an important step to help companies not have friction when trying to go and understand what their sustainability management is in terms of the accuracy perspective um for us it's a little bit of twofold first is like making sure we have a really strong accurate understanding of the emissions for gim good um we've gone and G in our system verified against industry standards so there's ISO standards like 14067 that third parties have verify their system against we also take like a little bit of the data sciency role where we have a large database proprietary life cycle assessments sort of that ground truth what the emissions of good are and we run our model against those large databases to continue to have confidence as we are improving tinkering of the system to make sure that it it still hits the accuracy numbers we want to hit and then the second part of this is you have to look at the alter alternative right we'll never say that like artificial intelligence will give you pure golden truth understanding what's happening within the supply chain but it is very accurate and when you start to look at that compared to the other Solutions on Market which are typically falling back to things like industry averages for the emissions of a t-shirt let's say you start to see like significant higher uncertainty and accuracy with those types of solutions and what you do have with a solution that we see with Mir and so that's how we kind of think about the accuracy discussion and talk about it with customers awesome thank you definitely you know sounds like a challenging problem and and bring a lot of things together and make sense to try to Benchmark that with some of those databases as well and I also see there's some questions there in the Q&A so thank you for bringing those and keep bringing those we'll definitely have some time at the end here to to bring your questions we appreciate um your input um to this live event as well so one thing I want to kind of dive in maybe a little bit more is kind of how you see Data Systems evolving with this right and so you're talking about like a lot of external data sources and where maybe like the question would be where are these external data sources coming from and how are you kind of bringing these together you know are you bringing these together in a cloud platform and what is that kind of data you you talk about data Fusion but what does like that data platform if you will look like yeah so for us it's it's being able to take Data Insights that may not be valuable on their own and combining them together than to provide a process for customers that is valuable um and so for us what we're developing is this platform that customers can come on and from there be able to very easily again with like minimal input on their end start to understand how can I reduce my emissions where are those opportunities within my system and so it's being able to see dynamically both like that Top Line here's where we think you should focus to reduce emissions but how did we get there where do we think your goods are coming from like if we're talking about this Cott t-shir where do we think the cotton fabric is coming from where do we think that like the processes are associated with it and then being able to allow customers to say actually you know what I know my C's coming from this country vers as this one and being able to be iterative and gather then your bespoke Nuance insights that you do have within the system to to grow and morph into what's the most representative model of of your actual supply chain and so it's being able to drive platform that gives that Topline understanding recommendation but also a little bit of that story of how we got there and then like a checkpoint to make sure that what we think happened is is actual and so that that's that's where we're providing customers value within our platform and our system I'm trying to think now on the more on the business P perspective and also into the Chang in the mindset so I'm taking a little bit uh out of the technology now for for discussing something different so we are used to just as an example we're used to supplier collaboration we train ourselves to work on supplier collaboration if we're talking about strategic supplier strategic strategic products or anything like that but you're bringing the possibility with use the use of Technology of kind of not needing that survey or that conversation with the supplier to gather all the information that could make us um make better decision in terms of sustain ility so the question is do you see AI replacing the way we do things do you see it enhancing there there's all this conversation about AI replacing us or replacing our interactions I'm wondering based on your experience what is it that you see for the future of of this I I don't think that it's replacing anybody I don't think it's replacing like the relationships built via VIA supp engagement what I do see is the opportunity that is significant again is enhancing the capabilities of supply chain teams to engage with their supply chains understand how they should be engaging with their supply chains and Empower them in those engagement so being able to understand which supplier is actually worth your time to go and engage from an adions perspective because they're the ones that have a large portion of your footprint and also are doing poorly and then being able to understand how we can in our next supplier negotiations leverage new data sets and insights to make them more sustainable being able to have those typ of like new insights across tens of thousands of goods and not having to try to rely on data Gathering data cleaning steps but instead how do I go and do what we should all be focused on as supply chain professionals which is manage my supply chain to make it the better supply chain that I want it SE to be um is how we think about it awesome thank you for that um and then thank you also for all the questions in the Q&A we'll definitely save some time here for for the Q&A and so I'm going to kind of maybe shift gears ask one last question and then we'll bring some questions here from our audience but you know I know a lot of our audience are in maybe point of career transition or they're or they're learning and they're in a learning journey within our courses or they're just joining us here to learn more about this particular topic today and you mentioned how you started your journey in Aeronautics and engineering and then kind of found your passion in sustainability and kind of shifted Focus to climate technology as well so I wonder if you have any advice maybe for our micromasters Learners or others who are here in the audience today on kind of what they could do to maybe you know Orient their career in this way if they have that particular passion or if they just find themselves in that kind of similar transition going from you know one space where they have a a tool set and how they can apply to a particular passion they might find themselves with yeah I I think this is a great question um I think for many professionals like what what I habitually tell people is you don't need to have sustainability in your title to to go have impact within the company um very often it's people that are not sustainability professionals that are the ones being able to identify and drive decisions that also have positive impact on reducing carbon emissions and so what what I would say is if you're interested in sustainability if it matters to you is find those opportunities within your day-to-day operations within a company to go make those improvements and clearly like for us like we think that Supply chains are a huge opportunity there and so for a lot of the students on this call I I think thinking about how do I manage these potential supplier engagements the development sourcing decisions in the future to also fold in and incorporate sustainability aspects is a significant way for you to begin to drive towards a better world but also build out a deeper understanding and fundamental experience of what it means to be a sustainable professional that can continue to build your career and be part of your journey as you grow awesome thank you for sharing that we get that question a lot like there's a lot of people TR to switch years into sustainability or into supply chain or combining both and and the question is is it already too late for me so thank you for sharing your experience I think it's adding a lot of value to our audience so bring in some questions oh go ahead just say la like it's definitely not too late uh we need more and more people both uh you know directly involved in sustainability but just in the wider uh corporate world focus on sustainability and those are the the people that really Drive change so absolutely it's not too late this is the time to do it we need more people focused on this challenge awesome great call to identify more game changers that are joining us in this Quest so that's great um I was just thinking on a question on the uh Q&A feature it's from Sai so this is probably bringing us a little bit more into the technology again and probably for those that are not that familiar with AI or its capabilities um they are asking if you could please elaborate why using AI why that technology specifically out of all the possibility that you have and out of the existing tool that we already have to calculate emissions and try to identify hotspots yeah so the the key capability of artificial intelligence is to help provide more signal within a very noisy environment that's one of the ways I'd like to like think about what is the value of artificial intelligence um when we talk about understanding the carbon footprint of a given product and opportunities for reductions for a singular product uh it can be pretty easy to like build this story over a couple months and appreciate what the emissions are um but if you look at how do I handle this across a global supply chain when I'm a corporation that maybe has thousands or tens of thousands of products uh tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of suppliers it becomes a very very challenging to look across that entire field and understand not only just like what is my car footprint like companies can today get a relatively good understanding of the script through emissions they can incorporate sustainability reports they'll meet regulatory requirements but more specifically how do I actually go and reduce these emissions and do it in a strategic cost- effective manner that becomes a very complicated Nuance assessment where you need to be able to appreciate all these different factors from you know global grid performances to trade Behavior to manufacturing processing differences to then be able to say this is where we actually think that the opportunities are and and you need to be able to do that fast and you need to be able to do it at scale and that's where we see Artificial Intelligence coming in and providing a technology unlock to to solve that answer awesome yeah thank you it definitely makes sense the scale you know again just going back to that Network diagram you described you know the complexity there in terms of the tiers of a supply chain but also the complexity in terms of the number of products especially if you're doing something at a at a granular level like you're you're doing I want to kind of maybe build on that a little bit and earlier you mentioned how you do some benchmarking with some standards and there's a question here from Leo and he's his question is kind of you know specifically about are you using a specific standard but I want to maybe generalize it a little bit I know this kind of you know Carbon calculation is a little bit early days to a certain degree you know there's a lot of different companies and a lot of different you know researchers approaching those these problems in different ways there I think number of different standards and organizations out there putting standards out there so I'm wondering maybe if you could talk about maybe your approach to how you're thinking about this space like what standards should you know could be utilized how you compare different standards against each other and then how you're using those to Benchmark your particular methods yeah uh what I'll say is that like standards for carbon accounting are very mature for scope one and scope two we and we didn't get into the Scopes too much um and those types of definitions but scope one scope two are the more your direct emissions for your facility as well as the indirect emissions associated with things like your electricity consumption for your your facility so it's it's things that typically like a bill can really help you have a strong understanding of and there's well documented consistent ways across Industries to report those emissions scope three where the supply chain emissions lie um you'll see in some of the kind of General standards like greenhouse gas protocol it becomes a little bit more ambiguous and there's a little bit less certainty especially on the global supply chain side where you know there's this acknowledgement that if you can get ground truth primary data from suppliers that's the best but in the absence of that which is very typically the environment that companies find themselves in it's it's very challenging and there's a little bit of ambiguity in terms of how you solve that um specific to what we're focus on which is what is the emissions of a given product there are ISO standards so ISO 14067 is the sort of Baseline standard of how you try to go make that assessment for given good that's the methodology that we've gone and gr ourselves verified against because that's seen as the ground truth that then is applicable to things like the GH protocol as well as other regulatory standards that we're seeing come online the EU and California um so because of sort of the acknowledgement that there's a little bit here but the best that we have is ISO 14067 for a product car footprint that's the one that we've relied on today aome thanks for sharing it's great to see how things are actually done and not just what we read about all the available options in standar so it's great to to take it down to earth with your experience um I want to bring a couple of questions probably merg together from analy in our audience and also pin Swang um so the the questions they are bringing is that there are a lot of specifics detail within you and across Industries in without even considering the global and cultural impacts um how do you manage to build some some tools that work across Industries or is it that you need to fine-tune it or or tailor it every time you work on a different one yeah that's that's a great question for us we've been really focused on how can we make this a ambiguous model system part of it is because when you look at a large Fortune 500 Corporation supply chain like you're that company may be buying one specific good like a an apple is buying their their manufactured phones but they're also purchasing a lot of different items to be able to manufacture that good and so there becomes sort of like cross industry procurements that you have to like worry about and consider so even if if you're talking about a company that is in a specific industry their their supply chain probably crosses over into different Industries as well so there's this like weird application where you talk about a company supply chain and it starts to become almost every industry um I will say that like we are focused um at Mir at a few more specific customers and Industry types being the manufacturing uh consumer good Fields where these types of companies have large complex Global Supply chains and there's real challenges understanding what the manufacturing processes and Emissions Associated them are there are some industries that um are more nuanced than verticalized like agricultur is one where clearly uh there are distinct challenges with trying to appreciate the emissions associated with cattle or or rice um that are nuanced and different and that's been a field that you were invested Less in frankly um there is a little bit more verticalization um to go and service those players as thank you for that it makes me think of like I Al I've seen a diagram you know one time where it's almost like the the hat is on both sides you know where you know goes to your your qu your comment there about how there's kind of some cross pollination or you know cross Industries where ultimately everything comes from the earth right the raw materials come from the earth and so there's kind of the the narrow funnel on one side and then it goes this really complex web of supply chain Network in the middle and then maybe goes to then that that single brand or whatever happens to be at the peak on the other side um it's kind of you know building on your thing your comment there but I want to also combine a couple of questions here from our audience as well um and shift gears a little bit just in terms of like the the perception or the the sensitivity around you know some of these calculations so like supply chain data and sharing data across supply chain Partners has always been kind of a it's a kind of a classic problem in supply chain if you will and there's always been you know disincentives and reasons why companies want to keep their information proprietary and those kinds of things and I'm wondering how your your thinking about this problem you know from the sustainability perspective and how you know you're you approach those conversations of you know how you share data and how you protect data and and and how this information is then also communicate outside of your particular platform like what is the what is kind of the conversation around that yeah so I I think it's clear that a large motivation for us at Mir is to be able to help companies manage and address their sustainability needs while not being reliant on some of those data sharing challenges like that that for us is one of the big unlocks that we're focused on um however Gathering data and helping promote those data sharing aspects as part of what we encourage and like to see because it gives you more accurate data and more Nuance assessment you do need to as you're going and taking in primary reported data from A supplier need to recognize that things like how much of a given production line is dedicated to a given customer where are you sourcing your goods from what are the materials that are going into it are very sensitive trade secret pieces of data to that given supplier and so having proper data security making sure there's not leakages across companies being able to be a trusted third party in this interaction of of proprietary data sharing is part of where we see ourselves at Mir so it's it can't be a thing where you're taking this trade secret information from a given supplier and then providing it to whoever may be interested for us you have to keep that secure you have to keep it walked away um in a manner that may maybe allows you to give higher value output to the customers that are interested but does not harm that trust that you're building with suppliers right I'm bring in here Pedro who's having another question you mentioned about the tradeoff between the cost and the emission emissions generated and that being a driver of decision making like loow hanging fruits kind of where to start um Pedro is wondering if you're considering this financial aspect how is it that you measure how do you incorporate that tradeoff with cost is it that companies are willing to open that is it that you have this as part of the common data set in terms of what's probably going to happen yeah so I I I think maybe just make sure that I answer the question because I I think there kind of two here um first off at M what we're doing is we're helping companies understand the cost of the raw material going into their good so it's along with the carbon another part of our our product is this capability to understand I purchased this good from this given supplier what should the raw material costs be what are they and what is then that like opportunity to make more strategic decision making um off of that um and then at the end of the day it's providing corporations understanding of these impacts both cost and uh sustainability for them to go make decisions off of you know there's corporations that have a distinct price point for carbon within their own internal systems like they'll say that carbon is worth $60 per metric ton of CO2 um that's not extremely common although I have seen and talk to companies that do that but there always seems to be some sort of undefined price point where the reduction of CO2 and it could vary a lot right like there's probably companies out there that value it at like a cent a ton um and I think a lot of them value maybe lower than market price but at some significant value where there is a point where the price becomes worth the reduction SE to um and trying to understand that and appreciate that so that then companies can consume and make decisions that then seem obvious based off their thought process is is challenging but it's part of the process of what we've been developing and trying to deliver to customers for our platform awesome thank you um I want to build on a question hear from NAD and I hopefully I'm pronouncing your name your name correctly there but his question is on track and Trace and I want to kind of pick up on something you said earlier you mentioned earlier about how a lot of you know the May the greenhouse gas protocol and some of the other um you know standards if you will say that the the go golden standard is that you know source of truth that dat that real supply chain data and that's what you always looking for and I'm wondering if you've like where the state of the industry is in terms of getting more of that like are there any new technologies out there like track and Trace kind of comes to mind how we're you know tracking a unique serialized product if you will through the supply chain that's always been a significant Challenge and there's lots of kind of technology and other hurdles and but kind of where is the state-ofthe-art and where do you see that industry going just in terms of getting sustainability related data but from a track and Trace perspective yeah traceability there's a lot of companies and effort going on to like how do we build passports for goods so there's a lot of companies trying to figure out how do you get ground truth of that um and then I I think the more challenging question is is earnestly the the uh the tracking of the processes and what are the emissions for given facility or factory how do you contribute those uh there's aspects here where you're trying to reduce friction whether it's like by being able to incorporate utility bills which like Arcadia if you're familiar with that company is doing at a global level um or with the large carbon accounting Erp platforms where you're streamlining the the suppli request for forms um a lot of that technology Focus today is on reducing friction to allow suppliers more easily engage with their um their customers I think the bigger challenge in hurdle is really education for The Wider supply chain being able to help help in a a manner that can do so at scale of what does it mean to go report your own scope one and scope two emissions how do you handle that reporting um and I think that's one that still needs a little bit of thought in terms of how can we do this and how can technology help us do this at a a larger scale than what we're doing today thank you thank you for sharing that and and the fact that I think it's probably a mindset change we need to understand the impact we have in the sustainability kind of practices in the carbon emissions factors um so I have another question that probably is also talking about the scale and you're talking about probably huge companies and you're talking about Global Supply chains but there is also smaller scale kind of companies um how do you assess how ready a company is to implement this kind of Technology of course you're kind of bringing the technology to them so probably they don't have to beow the infrastructure and that's a huge help but in terms of available data in terms of decision making capabilities how do you see them being ready or not to move on with that yeah so you know I think sustain ability is a journey and corporations are in a pretty wide variance of where they are in that Journey for us we generally try to go and service companies that are starting that Journey um typically what we're seeing especially in like the mid Market space is these are the companies that all of a sudden are servicing you know like the General Motors or the the apple or the Johnson and Johnson that I brought up earlier in the presentation being told hey we now have requirements for you to sign up and commit to for reductions because we as GM Apple Johnson Johnson have made commitments ourselves to reduce our scope three emissions but these midmarket players are not the same as as an apple where they don't have that huge sustainability and supply chain team that could go manage engage and you know be involved for every single product and material selection and and really try to uh use their resources to to have impact instead like those are the types of players in the M Market where we see like a great opportunity for technology to Common step in take a smaller supply chain team and make them more effective and impactful given you know what may be a more re resource limited environment and that's who we really think is like can benefit most from us especially to dat um where we can go and give you answers immediately and then as you grow and as you start to advance along your sustainability Journey we can help grow with you and give you those new HS insights and representation as you start to get better supplier data as you start to implement reduction strategies as you start to model out these implications for us that's um that's where we see the real value if you're um yeah awesome yeah thank you it definitely makes sense to help companies who maybe don't have this expertise or maybe just have a small sustainability team or maybe it's you know a cross-disciplinary um scenario where it's a supply chain practitioner or someone you know working in a warehouse but giving them empowering them with tools to help you know them make an impact um that's awesome so I want to build on one one question but maybe before we jump into the next question if we could launch our final poll here and just kind of we like to always wrap things up with the poll here and just get a sense of what you got have today's presentation and discussion um so the question here what was the most interesting part of today's session for you you know a couple of options there learning how to increase efficiency through Innovation and supply chain so if you could just um take a moment to look at that poll and then while you while you do I want to again build on a question here also kind of building on a little bit really our discussion on the the standards um but maybe expand that on you know to your recent comments about how companies are maybe voluntarily doing this but I know there's also some regulatory component to this to a certain degree you know like for example in the US here the SEC recently has has some new requirements I think they're on hold now because of a a court case in the EU there's the carbon border tax and there's a number of different regulations coming in the EU as well so I'm wondering how regulation is coming into this and just in terms of the incentives but then also kind of the how that's going to help expand the scope of companies getting involved in these calculations yeah we like to think of regulations as like a Tailwind for us um we very much focus on like how do we help comfor companies um manage their supply chains reduce emissions reduce cost and have that as our focused business proposition the regulations are clearly a a strong Catalyst for companies to care about sustainability um in terms of the regulation sphere that's out there you know like California's uh emissions reporting SEC are occurring like there's discuss secs like clearly got a little bit um hamstrung in terms of what the scale for was that scope 3 emissions are not part of that and now that it's like you know will it actually come into place is another question but the one that I think is the most relevant and most impactful regulation going forward and you kind of alluded to it Kellen is the Carver board and adjustment mechanism um in the EU or cbam as it's called This is the first International tax associated with Goods imported to the EU for a few specific industries that are that are having many Industries to start with like steel and aluminum and fertilizer um but it's the first time that we've seen a regulatory body actually put a dollar sign against CO2 emissions and I I think that that we've seen to be a really big fundamental shift in perspective um I think that it's been a big driver in the like last year or two years for a few specific Industries like the automotive industry um to take more sincere Financial commitments and like I mentioned it earlier like the internal dollar per CO2 perspective I think it's made it a little bit more real like it's helped Define this will be if you are doing business in the EU or you're buying goods from the EU an actual dollar per CO2 that you need to consider and so I think it's one of those things that helps companies become more firm on the financial impact of their CO2 missions and I think it's going to be one of those drivers that we'll see over the next few years really have an impact definitely thank you for sharing that and it's also making it Tang like as as you say like it's a real dollar that you will need to pay so that's definitely changing all the equation if you start assigning the the real value of it so um I've got a question probably one of the last ones we have so many questions so probably we can share those afterwards with you if you are curious about that sorry we're not going to get to all of those um Kevin power uh one of our cdas is asking a question about how have you seen customers me measuring success is it something that you have been ever been involved to with have you have any conversation on that um because it's like you're providing very insightful information about how to drive decisions but what happens next yeah generally companies have some sort of uh key performance indicator um that they're trying to hold against there's typically some sort of year-over-year reduction of emissions that they're hoping to see or year-over-year reduction of emission intensity which is the emissions for the production of a given kilogram of a good so a little bit more of that direct relationship as well as then cost of good sold and so for us those are the typically the two kpis that we're focused on is like what is the reduction of emission intensity year over gear and then the cost and those are kind of like the hard number points and then i' say like the last part that we like to be able to work with customers on to like measure success is like can you build a good story off of it clearly part of the sustainability Jour is being able to be proud about you being more green improving the world and being able to provide that story to others so when we look at was a you know a a service successful was an action a reduction initiative successful was what is that year-over-year change from missions perspective what was the cost implications where they were what they thought they were going to be um and then is this something that you you're proud to incorporate and discuss from like a marketing perspective awesome thank you for that I love the idea of trying to tell telling stories with data is always a a challenge but I think it's a unique skill and something we need to do better makes it more accessible and kind of can bring that message Beyond just a marketing perspective and kind of can bring some of that impact you know expand the scope of the impact if you will and and bring it more make it more accessible um so with that let maybe we'll take a look at our our poll results here thank you for participating in our final poll the question was what was the most interesting part of today's um session for you I'm just looking at the the results here it looks like come of the two or the top picks are understanding how to use AI to gain insights in real life and so that's awesome I know AI is definitely a Hot Topic but there's a lot of different applications and a lot of a lot of complexity there with AI and so it's great to see that and then gain New Perspective on sustainability challenges and some of the just tools to overcome these and so I if Harris if you have any thoughts about our poll results there no I'm glad that this is what we're seeing like I think very much our Focus today was like what are those technology applications and how can they help make more sustainable supply chain so I think you know k mo is a a success from that perspective but um I'm glad to see it awesome so uh you have created a lot of new passionate members of our society about sustainability and youve brought a lot of insights on hey probably technology can make a difference here this can be a game changer or even adjust your mindset uh towards making better decision or more informed decisions um so is there any words you want to share with with your with our audience here today as we wrap it up um thank you very much for everybody for your time and and giving me the opportunity to talk uh you know maybe again leaning into discussion that we had about halfway through Laura I think that everybody every professional can have a sustainability impact and you know because you're interested in the space and you're thinking about it I think that's amazing and as you continue on with your growth like find those opportunities to have an impact within your company awesome yeah definitely thank you for joining us today Harris we appreciate your time and sharing the insights and the discussion with us today and thank you everyone in our audience for participating today in our polls but as well all the questions in the Q&A there's tons of questions still remaining and so we'll maybe we'll share those with you Harris offline afterwards and you can take a look but thank you all for your participation today and La it's always a pleasure to coost with you um thank you for coting with me today as well it's always fun on and discussions are great with our uh speakers so thank you haris for being here today thanks Kellen I'm always happy to go host for with you and to the audience this is the last webinar of our uh season with Kellen so you will now switch yours to the season uh with with the other members of our micromasters team so haris uh we've been very proud and very um grateful to have you as our last speaker on the season so thank you for that thank you very much okay thank you everyone for joining and see you soon good luck keep it up good luck with the final exams to those who are taking the courses

2024-04-04 12:14

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