The Future of Supply Chain Operations | ParkourSC's Mahesh Veerina | E201

you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot fraud podcast the number one resource and publication for all things iot i'm your host ryan chicone if you are watching this on youtube please like the video and subscribe to our channel if you're listening to us on a podcast directory please be sure to subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available on today's episode we have mahesh farina the president and ceo of parkour sc they are a real-time supply chain operations platform company they focus on delivering agility and transparency into supply chain operations to help companies drive strategic innovation and resilience enabling timely decisions boosting customer satisfaction and increasing revenue kind of across the board lots of good stuff here we don't often have companies that are solely focused i don't say solely focused but um are hyper focused in in one area um such as supply chain uh which is a very relevant topic these days so we talk a lot about different supply chain challenges we talk about why resilience and the ability to anticipate adverse factors course correct in real time all that kind of stuff really matters in the supply chain world and how leveraging technological innovation can make substantial and tangible differences in this space so very relevant conversation these days with everything going on with supply chain issues and i really think you'll get a lot of value out of this one but before we get into it if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changeseverything.com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome hesh to the iot fall podcast thanks for being here this week thank you for having me ryan yeah it's fantastic to have you here as a guest um i want to kick things off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience sure my name is maheshwarina ceo of parkour sc we're based in silicon valley california company is about five-year-old company and myself my background i'm an engineer by training turned entrepreneur been in the valley 30 plus years last 20 years i've been doing companies this is my fourth company and pretty interesting comp array of companies i had opportunity to build in the security space i took a company public earlier so on it's been a fun journey for sure it sounds like yes absolutely nice so so what got you into um i guess tell me a little bit more about uh i guess start off with parkour sc and then kind of where this the company kind of developed from and story behind it yeah sure so i got involved with the company ran about five years ago when it just got started four or five people and my journey itself in the company i was began as a investor then joined the board then about three and a half four years ago got fully hands-on involved day-to-day operations as a ceo and it's a the company's history was some of our founders we came from a lot of iot technologies how do we kind of use sensors this whole emergence of iot which you cover a lot has been very interesting how do you use this edge intelligence to really impact different applications so that was the birth of the idea then as you well know you can serve many many markets with iot and supply chain seem to be a very natural fit with so many assets and products moving through how do you get intelligence on these and how do you kind of build insights for the operation supply chain so that was the germination of this idea and um so from the idea and the evolution of the company to where it is now tell me kind of what the company's focus is the role you play in the space just to kind of give our audience some context yes so we define ourselves as we provide this real-time supply chain operations platform to manage risk and volatility in supply chains right through the pandemic we've seen supply chain became a household word right not having toilet paper in your local grocery store to uc news on cnn all the time how much disruption has happened in the global supply chain networks so really supply chains day to day you might have the best plan laid out but when you take it to operations disruptions happen that's fact of life right small and large so how do you kind of predict or anticipate these disruptions happening and the only way is understanding once you go to operations getting that ground truth data in real time and anticipating some of these disruptions the next bigger question is uh disruptions happen that's a fact of life how do you minimize the impact of these disruptions or how do you predict even better before a disruption happens and take care of it so that's what our software helps with to manage that whole resiliency of supply chains and as it relates to the supply chain side of things are there any particular use cases um uh or i could basically have deployments out in the field that you could maybe talk us through to kind of bring it all full circle of maybe a problem a company came to you with and what you did to help solve that absolutely so we again supply chains are in every industry every sector one of our core focus ryan has been the pharma industry pharma supply chains and pharma is a 1.2 trillion dollar industry 500 billion of that is cold chain transport right these are vaccines clinical trials material insulin or plasma speciality medicine so on so one of our early forays into the sector happened three years ago uh with one of the world's largest plasma producers and plasma has to be stored at minus 20 degrees from the collection point through its entire journey and any infraction could cause a lot of material loss and plasma is a rare commodity you only get so many million liters a year so how do you manage that journey for quality compliance and they call it time auto refrigeration so measuring that using iot sensors on that was our first foray in so right from collection centers to the transport inside the facility until the final drug is produced and distributed right so these are completely sensorized we get the data into the cloud we have tools to manage the intelligence around it and give them all the single pane of glass for the supply chain layers to know what is being produced where is it in its journey and no excuses are happening throughout that journey absolutely and and one of the questions i have is this kind of moves it a little bit higher level here for a second is the general public we hear about supply chain a lot recently it's been a very hot topic across many different industries not just iot but can you talk to um what are the biggest challenges you're seeing in the supply chain space right now and it sounds like in order for us to kind of move forward and improve on supply chain we need to take somewhat of a different approach to managing supply chain operations so potentially even having you talk about kind of how things have been done and how things maybe are progressing or need to be done in order for us to see advances in the supply chain space to hopefully overcome a lot of the challenges that we're seeing now right now fantastic a great question there so if you look at historically right start with the second later part of your question and i'll come back to the first part historically if you look at supply chains and how they are built over the years uh first of all they started spanning as global networks right from regional uh sourcing all the way from sourcing to production to distribution they started spanning as global networks we see a lot of like china vietnam what not right from southeast asia a lot of material flows production and then distribution back so with that the the way their the software and technology is built by nature it's a multi-stakeholder environment run so you have this erp and planning systems you have mrp systems for manufacturing production control you have transportation management systems for moving logistics your warehouse management systems so the industry is now these data silos and fragments of them right a lot of data fragmentation sitting in silos across this network and then you add in not only your organization you have your suppliers your logistics providers three pls and their systems so it's become a complex network and data not really standard in these silos if you will so that's been one of the key challenges and getting accurate visibility so companies invested a lot in planning systems so today you get the best plan but once you move into operations day to day all kinds of surprises happen and planning happens on a monthly quarterly basis there your systems are record systems of transaction you need those but now the fork has shifted with the amazonification of the world what's happening in operation consumer got trained in click click and you expect your delivery next day next hour why is that not happening in rest of the supply chain right so that's been the challenge that's now being attacked building this and then with the advent of cloud and iot and all this aml and data science very interesting consumer technology companies solve this in a very interesting way so how do you bring that kind of cloud-based native cloud technologies to start streamlining supply chain operation site is what is happening that will be a big trend i mean the other buzzword for this is this digitization or digital transformation of supply chains right that'll be a it's a long process there's no overnight magic wand to do this because of all the fragmentation of data across back to your first part of the question the challenges are if you look at again as a complex network a lot of challenges from the sourcing side some are incidental because of pandemic and closures of factories and ports and so on they'll get smoothened out but the supply side and having predictability on that and then the production and distribution side and a lot of them are interested in taking care of the customer experience how do you make sure the orders can be delivered on time in full how do you kind of deliver quality and compliance nowadays sustainability mandates have really risen to the top how do you maintain esg so these are some of the challenges supply chains are dealing with capacity constraints now with the labor shortage more and more automation is being looked at right and use the lab talent pool we have for higher order decision making and then automate the workflows and so on so those are some of the challenges being addressed and i would say absolutely you know i think it's fantastic i did want to ask as we're thinking about these challenges and the new technologies and new processes that need to be put in place to help us move forward it's getting ever more important to meet customer demand fast delivery you name it what do you think are the biggest factors that companies need to be focusing on in order to do that well whether it's resiliency anticipation real time kind of course correction things like that what do you feel like are the biggest aspects that companies should be focusing on in order to meet that increasing customer demand for faster deliveries right now great question so it begins with uh having the data and visibility right so we believe and there's enough data disruptions happen and if you look at the time to react to this disruption or minimize the impact of the disruption or to predict disruption there is enough data out there mckinsey produced a report companies that are better prepared with real-time data from their operations right are much better prepared in minimizing the impact of this disruption as it happens so question is how do you get to this data how do you normalize across all your fragmented systems and that's where these cloud-based digital overlay systems are coming and once you get that data normalized and visibility in real time by the hour by the day by the week now you're able to kind of predict what's happening and that's where your aiml kind of algorithms come in whether it's a last mile delivery problem or a quality compliance problem or a sourcing side problem so the way we are attacking the problem is we build what is called a digital twin of your supply chain and model that and then you bring in all this edge data and add intelligence at every node to be able to predict what's going on in your network and now if with armed with that data you're able to make decisions faster in real time right as things are manifesting and so on and this way it's a continuous feedback loop into your planning cycle you have a plan but what's happening in the ground truth you understand and then you are doing this continuous realignment of your plan so that's where world is moving and there are varieties of tools available now to do that totally um and you kind of answered my next question in part but maybe you can expand on a little bit is when you were talking about the different technology components talking about digital twin and and other pieces that are really playing in a role in making a tangible difference in in these situations in this space so talk to me a little bit more about how leveraging technological innovation can really make a a tangible difference in the supply chain space and what people out there should be thinking about yes now so your spot on so what's happening is digital twin technologies is one of the latest innovation really coming in it's an architectural paradigm it's very heavily used in manufacturing modeling a car or a plane or something right now we are borrowing that paradigm that's well proven and really building out what we call a digital twin of your supply chain network right from the source of your suppliers your warehouses your factories your distribution trucks pallets what not imagine it's like a virtual model of your network in the cloud right a digital model now that's paired up with all this edge intelligence data with all these not only sensors these are signals coming from airports or planes or ships or whatnot right every moving part is sending signals traffic whether a lot of contextual data is married to it besides all the transactional data coming from your own systems now you have a live digital twin is what we call it's literally a snapshot of what's happening in real world with a slight latency given that there is intelligence that's the first step the second step is adding intelligence into this by putting whether a simple if then else rule or a business rule or a complex ai model to really predict hey what could happen give you practical scenarios let's say there is a thermal package in movement with a critical patient outcome at risk how much life is left in that thermal package in its journey if there is a decay i want to know it now so i can put a rescue package in play or take it into a cold storage or something so those kind of algorithms are now easy to build the intelligence piece and the last like i would say this is a under looked ryan but it's a very important piece because of the multi-stakeholder environment it's not just me understanding in the company with a single panel i want to collaborate and tell all my stakeholders they can see the same picture in real time on what's happening so you can chat and all these tools are there now but how do you make that uh i call it extended enterprise collaboration happening right so it's the twins the intelligence and collaboration that's the uh future and when you're talking to customers um and and kind of out there in the market how receptive are they to maybe not receptive but how how um does this resonate with companies looking to solve these supply chain issues uh internally and is it something that is requires more education for them to see the value and understand the benefit or kind of what are you seeing as kind of the reception from from the companies out there that may not be as deep into the tech and understand it as well as you do and your team does but just just out of curiosity how is it kind of received yeah no great question so it was an educational kind of cell two years ago before pandemic then clearly the pandemic has risen supply chain more to a board level conversation the c-suite how do we make ourselves more agile and more resilient so it's now definitely top of mind then a lot depends on the maturity of this organization where they are in their own journey in supply chains and so on but of late uh this year we are starting to see pretty much there is a digital program in most of these companies because face the facts right the days of where you can sit and do long three-year expensive projects to stitch all the systems that era is over they want very fast agile ways to solve problems and so they are looking for digital digital solutions and a lot more receptive now i would say right absolutely yeah i think we've kind of seen that in a lot of different areas of iot um the evolution of kind of the education to the acceptance and adoption um it seems to kind of flow very similar to that um no this has been fantastic conversation um one thing i wanted to ask is for the people out there listening and and maybe are you know active in the supply chain space looking to to be able to figure out how to start their journey what do you recommend that they do to um kind of start making these changes and start thinking about how to evolve their their operations and their technology in order to to move forward and help some solve a lot of these challenges that we're talking about here uh again a fantastic question so it's a journey so most of these companies the way our experience has been there is clearly a vision we need to transform and and they find a typical what i call a burning platform issue saying hey it's a revenue recognition problem we have 150 locations and when our drugs get into a certain market as simple as we are waiting on trade clearance documents internal quality compliance our customs clearance workflows are multi-party problem how do we solve this and make a revenue impact or improve our gross margin right so you have a burning platform problem they begin with that and then say hey what are tools we can deploy over and above our systems as a very quick fast digital overlay to our systems and get some immediate results so it begins with a simple proof of value or proof of concept kind of thing take few routes and lanes digitize them and see some value and once they have that they're blueprinting that across their networks and say okay now double click and extend to uh europe and asia or whatever right that's kind of the progression we're seeing ryan and happening very fast projects start three months boom within a year they expand to and they're constantly learning and evaluating and improving the processes and there's a bit of business process re-engineering in all of these right absolutely yeah yeah it's it's very exciting to kind of hear about and see the the adoption and and the time to market change and kind of that time decrease in order to get things out there deployed see the value and expand from there so so um all great kind of insights and and perspective really appreciate it i did want to ask this is unrelated to anything we've talked about but um as we wrap up i'm always curious to hear the evolution of of companies and brands and you all have kind of evolved from cloud leaf uh to parkour sc and tell me a little bit about kind of just that approach and decision and kind of what that means for you all why you did it always interested to kind of hear that side of things no nice stories there right so so as i said in the introduction the company began life as iot sensors and we built sensors gateways which is near and dear to your show and really understanding so cloud leaf was name that came off of that saying leaf is a sensor and cloud and we're moving the data to the cloud right so one of our board meetings we sat there it was very inwards looking and technology oriented what we're doing is what the name was reflecting versus now what we're doing with the company serving our customers is hey how to improve the agility and resilience and innovation and growth in these companies that's what we're really doing we should name towards that what the solution is so parkour happens to be a very interesting name that we liked it's a french word saying journey moving goods from place to place and parkour is also a sport i didn't know it when i first which is a very there's a plan you're agile and very athletic and there are a lot of obstacles and how do you uh navigate through that right so it really resonated with all of us and that was the naming and brand change ryan that's fair enough yeah actually they received it very well yeah it sounds like it it does uh it's very accurate um yeah if you ever just google parkour stuff on online and watch kind of what it takes to participate in that sport it's kind of a whole different animal but uh but that's fascinating i appreciate you kind of sharing those insights it's always good to kind of hear those stories and understand how companies shift and pivot and change with the times and um have a lot of exciting things going on over there um that i'm very excited to kind of keep an eye on and just see how you how things progress and supply chain in general is such a hot topic um hoping things can kind of get solved and improved um in that space as a whole just benefits everybody so for our audience out there who wants to learn more and kind of stay in touch and just get a better sense of everything going on at parkour sc what's the best way to do that um reach us on our website parkoursc.com that's the easiest there's a lot of information yeah love to reach me personally send me a mail if you have questions marina at parkoursc.com uh always happy to help and uh thank you for this opportunity to speak absolutely on the show yeah it was great to have you on here um a very timely topic uh right now so really appreciate you taking the time to share the insights um great to learn more about the company would love to find more ways for us to work together going forward and we can expand that um uh in the future but other than that thanks so much for your time really appreciate it i think our audience is going to get a ton of value out of this absolutely thank you so much thank you thank you bye-bye all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the i2 for all podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time

2022-07-19 23:17

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