Transcript
Intro:聽You鈥檙e listening to Supply Chain @ 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网, a 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网 podcast series that addresses your supply chain needs from strategy through execution.
Mary Rollman: Welcome to the 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网 supply chain podcast. My name is Mary Rollman and I lead supply chain at 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网. Today we're diving into a fascinating world of global supply chains and the latest trends that are shaping all industries. And with me today is Peter Liddell. Peter is a partner at 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网 and leads the Global Operations Centre of Excellence. Peter, do you want to take a couple of seconds to introduce yourself?
Peter Liddell: Yeah, thanks Mary, really appreciate the opportunity to catch up with you this morning. So yes, as you mentioned, I'm currently leading the Operations Centre of Excellence for 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网. Been with the firm for just over 35 years and very fortunate to have lived in Australia, China, and now in Singapore. And that's given me the opportunity to really work with a whole range of clients across multiple industries. And really help to support them, navigate, you know, the challenges and opportunities that are presented with many domestic, regional and global supply chain issues that they've experienced through that period of time.
Mary Rollman: Absolutely. And not only do you get to work with clients on their current issues, but I'm guessing you spend a lot of time thinking about the trends and the direction of travel that ultimately is reshaping global supply chains. I'd love to hear your perspective on how those trends are actually influencing the priorities of businesses when it comes to their supply chains.
Peter Liddell: Yeah, well, there's definitely a lot going on at the moment, Mary as I'm sure we're all aware of, and so we do anticipate that for 2025, there will be a number of trends that will shape and influence the supply chain strategies that a lot of our clients will implement this year. Yeah, I think the top 4 for me, and again, in no order of importance, definitely technology. While much of this has been, you know, experimental, you know, think about GenAI, AI investments, we expect that supply chain leaders will really start to drive value, so genuine value from their GenAI, AI investments. And we expect that they'll double down on, on AI and predictive capabilities, but also their physical automation and process automation. So, technology is one of those big trends without doubt. What we've seen over the last 1 to 2 years, but what's happening going forward from a geopolitics, and therefore the related trade policies, there'll be significant impacts on transport and logistics and product related costs. It will force some companies to reconsider or search for alternative supplier considerations, and it'll even cause many to change a number of their key nodes or manufacturing sites. So as a result, I think we're gonna see a greater focus on two key areas going forward. Without doubt, there'll be a lot of replay and reconsideration around the cost to serve, and we'll see greater analysis of that cost to serve by product, by customer, by channel. And this will be done to help mitigate these rising product and supply chain costs. And I expect we'll see a next generation of supply chain risk management, a real focus on new strategies using big data, advanced AI and technologies to help predict, and proactively manage a number of these new and emerging supply chain risks, and some of these trends we've just spoken about.
Mary Rollman: That is a lot of change that you just described there, but I want to take you all the way back to the first trend that you were talking about and the technology advancements like AI and Internet of Things and how it's changing global and regional supply chain. I'd love to hear your perspective, maybe a double click into some of those technology advancements and how it's actually addressing productivity and resilience and efficiencies for supply chains.
Peter Liddell: Sure, I mean, we, we're all aware that I think for a good five years, probably even a decade, there's been a lot of investment proof concepts around the use of AI process automation. Many industries have had rapid investment into physical automation robotics. We've seen the emergence of blockchain capabilities and IoT has been well and truly, you know, invested across many industries now for, for a good decade plus. You know, even virtual reality and digital twins have really increased in prominence recently, and I think that it's important for supply chain leaders to keep leveraging these capabilities, but also they've got to ensure that they're driving tangible benefits for the business. And that's probably been one of the biggest sticking points over the last 18 months to 2 years. And front and center around investment and generating tangible value is this whole investment in GenAI. Now, we're starting to see, and I think particularly in this year 2025, GenAI will be front and center of that investment, and we're starting to see it present immense potential to really take the supply chain to the next level. Now, we're starting to see how AI agents, so agenic AI, is providing substantial benefit within operational activities across global and regional supply chains and even over the last 4 to 5 months, some of the organizations that I've been working with have been able to, you know, reduce their supply chain issue resolution time by up to 70, 80%. So as these issues emerge, what would typically take them days, weeks, unfortunately even months, they're reducing that resolution time quite substantially. They're able to, you know, get far deeper insights and information by node, by channel, by market, and use those insights to rapidly ramp down their inventory. And I'd say one of the other big areas from a transport logistics perspective, through the use of some of this technology, we're seeing reduction in delivery time, you know, as, as much as up to 40 to 50%. So, some of the typical and new and emerging supply chain operations use cases, particularly for AI agents, that I think are really interesting and I think this is where it's gonna get a lot of investment in 2025. So, supply chain we're seeing a lot of investment in automated inventory management, so letting the AI agents handle all those decisions, all the information across multiple systems, internal external systems, with suppliers, with 3PLs, internal managed DCs, external managed DCs. So automated inventory management, autonomous supply chain planning, and supply chain optim, and supply chain optimization are also other areas where AI agents are being rapidly deployed.
Mary Rollman: It's interesting, and I think you, you touched on, you know, there's the, the work that happens to continue to advance that, use more advanced technology to get more efficiencies and productivity out of supply chains. And then there's the advanced analytics that go into analyzing your current supply chain or supply chain scenarios of the future, looking for areas of risk or looking for ways to de-risk the whole of the supply chain. And we've definitely seen an increase in either movement towards or analysis of near shoring and regional or regionalization models for our global supply chains. What role do you think proximity would play in redefining the competitive advantage of a supply chain as it goes from global to more regional?
Peter Liddell: Yeah it's a, it's a good question, Mary, because even pre-COVID, you know, so we're talking probably a good decade now, you know, that regionalization strategy.
You know, near shoring, onshoring, was really gaining momentum, and I think during COVID, when supply chains, doesn't matter whether they are global, regional or domestic, they were completely disrupted, and so we actually, we noticed that across many industries, regionalization or near shoring certainly started to accelerate through that period and it certainly continued. So we've, we've certainly seen many examples of that happening, and those that you know, implemented these strategies, these initiatives, you know, the immediate impact was obviously, you know, first, much faster response times. You know, so you're seeing less lead time cycles naturally because you've got, you know, quicker responses to market changes, your custom demands, but even upstream in supply, because proximity of multiple nodes, multiple activities means you can share information quicker, you can respond and work together quicker. And this leads to obviously enhanced flexibility. So there's, there's much more ability to adapt to change, whether that's change in market conditions, change in the supplier base, change to, you know, or the need because customers require specific customization of their products or services. So, you know, faster response times enhance flexibility. So overall, absolutely, proximity does play a significant role, yes, in enhancing the efficiency and responsiveness, but now also the sustainability of supply chain, and the smarter organizations that are able to articulate those strategic and commercial benefits are the ones that are able to drive that competitive advantage in their marketplace.
Mary Rollman: You work with a lot of different clients and get a lot of different perspectives. There seems to be a lot of very good business benefits to doing a whole range of different activities or taking different actions as a supply chain leader. In your perspective, how do supply chain leaders decide what to do, knowing that there are strong business benefits that they could get in a whole range of doing a whole range of different activities or taking a whole range of different actions? How do they just decide what to do first. Have you talked to clients about that?
Peter Liddell: It's interesting, that's a really good question Mary, and it's interesting because I, you, you almost put a lot of the businesses and organizations we deal with in, in almost in two camps. There are the organizations that are continually reacting and responding, and there are those in the other camp that are more proactive and predictive in nature. There's definitely clearly two groups. The organizations that are probably traditional, so they've optimized their operations and supply chain around their long-term and short-term forecasts. They've got great sales and operation planning capability, they've got great demand planning capability, but they're still responding to what's happening in market, and they're still responding to what's happening in their supplier ecosystem and with their transport and logistics partners. So they're always reacting. You know, they're always optimizing based on worst outcome and they're trying to mitigate the impact of, you know, longer lead times, higher working capital, additional costs they didn't expect, whilst having customers, you know, making those different purchasing decisions or fulfilment decisions. So there's the reactive group. But I'd say over the last 3 to 4 years, there's been significant investment a lot more organizations that we're working with have really invested into the new technologies. They're leveraging their own data. They're leveraging the data of their, their ecosystem of partners that their suppliers, their customers, their 3PLs, other parties that they deal with, and they're starting to be a lot more predictive in nature, and they're looking forward and they're setting their supply chain strategies way ahead, but at the same time, they're using these new capabilities to sense and detect variability or change, and that could be at the customer end, but it could also be in the supply-based end. And so they're becoming, I would say more resilient because they're more agile, and they're more responsive to change, whether it's upstream or downstream.
Mary Rollman: So on this podcast, we always talk about the role of the supply chain leader and how the range of decisions continues to broaden and, and this conversation truly confirms that this role is not getting any easier. Peter, I want to thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your perspective. And I also want to thank our listeners for taking the time to hear what we have to say. For more information about this topic or any other topic in supply chain, you can check us out online at 乐鱼（Leyu）体育官网/supply chain and that is all we have for you today.
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