Leslie Hume:
I’m Leslie Hume, I’m with Everstream Analytics. And with me we have Brett Lankford. Brett, you can turn your camera on so everybody can see you if you haven’t already. As well as Julie. Brett is from the Campbell Soup Company. He’s been there for the last three years.
He’s held most recently the position of business process lead and has prior experience in both physical logistics and CPG. We’re also today joined by Julie Christensen, CEO of Gordon Labs, and a director of the F4SS board. So let’s have a look at today’s agenda. First we’re going to hear from Julie about the foundation of supply chain solutions, and then Brad’s going to share his insights on Campbell’s learning during their risk mitigation journey. I’ll briefly explain Everstream is and how we help a couple of other companies as well as Campbell’s manage their supply chain risk. And then finally we’ll get to take your questions. So with that, let me pass it over to Julie to talk about F4SS.
Julie Christiansen:
Thank you, Leslie. Good morning everyone. Hope everybody’s having a good day. It’s early here in Los Angeles. You can see all the trucks driving by to the port, so don’t worry your stuff’s getting there. Wanted to just start by introducing who I am. I’m the CEO of Gordon Labs. We’re a contract manufacturer of personal care skincare products in the Los Angeles area. We’re a member of the Foundation for Supply Chain Solutions, and I’ve also been a member at two previous companies. So when I talk about F4SS, I’m very passionate about it because truly I believe it’s in the top one or two things that has happened in my career that has helped me develop professionally and really helped create a strong network for me personally so that I can continue to develop in my career.
So we are a group that is focused on external manufacturing. I believe, and we all believe that we’re one of the only, if not the only industry organization that actually focuses on the external supply chain. So that’s really important.
We started about 15 years ago and the vein of trying to raise the baring contract manufacturing. The CPG companies felt like they needed better external capabilities. And I think that we can all agree that that has improved in the industry in the last 15 years, and I truly believe that F4SS has been a part of that journey. We also work on creating industry standards. We also look at efficiencies. We try to benchmark with each other without breaching any sort of antitrust. There’s none of that going on, but it’s really good to hear from other people to either commiserate or to share best practices so that you can try to apply them in your own organization. So Leslie, if you would like to advance the slide.
So this is just a kind of look at who we are. We’re made up again of CPG companies, both food, personal care, household products, and we have a lot of the big Fortune 100 brands. We have indie brands, we also have contract manufacturers, contract packagers, we have freights and logistics companies, and we also have advisors like SGS and NBSI that are part of our organization and service providers like Nulogy and Red Zone.
So we really have a broad spectrum of members and lots and lots of networking and information to get and share with each other. In the middle, you can see some of our key benefits, the tools that we provide. This webinar is one of those. We really try to create opportunities to share insights and best practices and see case studies and what’s really happening in the real world. Sure theory is great, but we want to hear how it’s being applied at these organizations and that really helps.
And then who do we engage with? Our flagship events are typically conferences twice a year. We do one in the spring and one in the fall. It’s a great opportunity to get together and then we always try to do a meaningful tour. We’ve toured car factories, we’ve toured Amazon distribution centers, we’ve done pit crew events at the 8,500 where we looked at lean and continuous improvement. And so we really try to find applicable tours that will allow us to see how things are being put into place, not only in our industry but also in other industries.
So with that, we invite everybody to join. We’re a boutique organization. I think that’s really important. Also, we have hundreds of members, not thousands of members. And so truly you do get that one-on-one ability to interact with really supply chain leaders, people that are the top of their organizations at many of the CPG and supplier companies.
So it’s really unprecedented to get that kind of access to these decision makers and leaders in supply chain. So our next conference is going to be this fall, it will be in Las Vegas. So it’ll be a lot of fun. We’ll be doing top golf and things like that, but also really getting some meaningful speakers that are going to be showing everybody and talking about what is happening in the industry. And our theme is pioneering the future of external supply chain.
So what does that look like in the future? What are the things that are being done and are going to take us into sort of the next element of the unknown in the supply chain world. So again, we invite everybody to join. So there’s a couple ways that you can find out more information. You can either contact Paige Jarvi who her email is listed here. You can also go on our website and that website’s very easy to remember. It’s F4SS.org and you can go on there and get information. And then I think we have a slide at the very end that will also provide some more information if you didn’t get a chance to take quick notes. So with that, I hope to see everybody in October and we’ll go on and speak with the presenters and learn about what they’re doing with supply chain. Thank you, Leslie.
Leslie Hume:
Awesome. That was great. Thank you so much Julie. So just referring back to our agenda, I’m about to turn it over to Brett to give an overview of the Campbell’s journey and how using technology improved their operations. But before I turn it over to Brett to share the Campbell’s journey, since he’s going to make mention of how Campbell’s is using Everstream technology, I wanted to maybe explain what it is that we do for those of you that are attending that may not know. So I’m just going to let this slide populate here.
Everstream gives you predictive insights and analytics to make sure that your supply chain is faster, smarter, safer and leaner through the entire supply chain process. Whether that’s plan, source, make, or deliver, businesses need to risk adjust all decisions.
And so with eyes in every port plus AI plus human intelligence to identify patterns and perfect predictions, we help your supply chain become smarter and more autonomous. We’ll show you your supply chain blind spots, we’ll tell you what’s about to happen no matter where you sit within your company’s supply chain. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of context, is the story we’re going to talk about today is very specific to transportation logistics, and we’ll talk a little bit later about a couple of other customer examples. All right, so with that, Brett, over to you.
Brett Langford:
Thank you, Leslie. Hello, my name is Brett Lankford. I wanted to start off today by telling you a little bit about my background and overall the headline is that over the last 10 years, my career has been focused on transportation strategy, processes and technology. I studied supply chain management at Auburn University, worked for a logistics service provider with Coyote Logistics and UPS, led TMS implementations and transportation managed services teams in the chemical and industrial sector with a leading chemical 3PL called CLX Logistics, served as a transportation manager with Pinnacle Foods, ConAgra brands, and the Campbell Soup Company.
And in my role with Campbell’s over the last three years, my focus has been on driving operational excellence in transportation. My current role as transportation manager and business process lead sits within the meals and beverages division of the more than 150-year-old Campbell Soup company. It’s home to the iconic brands in the traditional Campbell products that might come to mind, the red and white condensed soup, Chunky brand, V8, Prego pasta sauce, Pace salsa, and the Swanson chicken broth.
And these products have been feeding North America and helping families create new memories over the food that they love for generations. As supply chain complexity grows and new hurdles to keeping these products on the shelves arise, the need for more sophisticated and digital solutions to help drive both effective and efficient processes is becoming more and more imperative each day.
There’s been a growing focus on understanding and mitigating an increasingly complex landscape of disruptive supply chain events, particularly weather related. You think about the variety of external risks that disrupt supply chain networks, hurricanes, wildfires, extreme weather events occurring dynamically across the network. And these impact the entire host of stakeholders, Campbell’s facilities, our customers for all material suppliers and our co-manufacturer network. And in the past, managing these situations relied on pen and paper processes and heuristics rules of thumb.
Here are the states where the storms expected to hit or where temperatures may pose risk, look up orders shipping from delivering into those areas, pull an Excel file, gather comments and feedback manually from the stakeholders to ultimately make a risk management decision that’s cumbersome, lengthy, resource intensive, and an educated guest at best. As Campbell’s faced risk in the external environment with impacts ranging from product loss and compromise product to service risk, the need for a solution to help identify, understand and direct our actions to combat these dynamic environmental risks became a very clear business need.
We explored solutions with incumbent technology providers, off the shelf solutions and ultimately, we identified Everstream as a potential solution through partnership with our 3PL Transplace. And there were really three main reasons why Campbell’s moved forward with average stream fit of the solution to address our use cases, it allowed a high level of configuration to help dial it into our specific needs and integration capabilities with our TMS, which was a big one. These factors led us to embark on our digital journey to drive operational excellence with Everstream. The first step once we began this journey was proving it out. We have the solution, but our challenge was to then implement integrated processes that would allow us to effectively mitigate risk using the solution. And it all began with a pilot program and protect from freeze solution.
When you think about the traditional Campbell’s meals and beverages product portfolio, many are liquid based, which can make these products susceptible to freezing. I wanted to pop the hood for everyone and give you a sense of how this process unfolds for us each day. We start with the highest level, a meteorological overview of North America. This gives us a solid foundation each day during the winter, understanding what temperatures are experienced over the planning horizon across the continent, abnormalities, where it’s colder and warmer than typical for that time of year and other impactful factors such as snowfall.
It’s a healthy foundation to then drill down with context. We then go a layer deeper and we review facilities in our network, which facilities are seeing temperature risk, Campbell’s plants, distribution centers, customer suppliers, and co-mans. Other key nodes in our network such as rail hubs were dwell and risk can manifest when temperatures drop, which lanes and routes such as high volume corridors or key rail lanes.
These themes begin to arise with how these specific locations fit into the overall weather risk across the continent. Finally, we moved to a shipment order view. This is really where the magic happens. We review actual orders and shipments that have been identified through the solution as having freeze risk, per our parameters and understanding of our product risk. And we’ll review orders still in the planning phase as well as those that are in transit. If it’s in the planning phase, where’s the risk going to occur? At origin, in transit, at destination? Do we protect it? Do we plan it differently? Do we ship ahead or delay shipping? Change the mode and equipment type to apply temperature control and protect from freeze. Those are some of the levers that we pull. And in transit, we know which carriers to collaborate and communicate with to help prevent the risk that’s been identified for these loads that are in flight.
And when in doubt, communicate with the boots on the ground and let them know what we’re seeing and then bridge our views of risk. Are they stopping in risky areas? Can their understanding of our view of risk help drive their actions while the order’s in transit? Those are some of the highlights of the tactics available to take action against this risk. Initially, this daily review took around 45 minutes as we digested the information and began to build out our processes and action planning. And now we spend about 15 minutes per day fully reviewing and actioning the orders identified as well as the other review layers preceding it. The really cool part is that through data capture in the process, we’re also then able to review, quantify, and communicate across the organization the actions and impacts to cost, service and product integrity. And at a minimum, we are far more informed when we pull the levers and we know which ones we need to pull.
With three winters now in rear view and an ability to reflect on all of this, this is a really well-oiled process with tribal knowledge distributed throughout the team and a process that continues to enhance and refine itself. And after establishing a clear and successful use case with protect and free, we began to expand our capabilities with Everstream to leverage it as our full weather risk management solution.
Fast forward to where we’re at today. Similar to the protect from freeze use case, we can now see impacts of specific weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires, major snowfall events to see the locations, suppliers, customers, and orders impacted. As these weather events begin to develop Everstream is now the first stop for us. In fact, the daily supply chain digest actually get pushed to the users’ inboxes. So each day we walk in, we have an update of what’s going on risk-wise across the globe, everything from weather events to political and social unrest, and yes, a healthy dose of updates on what’s going on with the war in Ukraine. And I really like demonstrating the product when I get presentations like this and giving you a picture of what it looks like living in the system. And here’s a real Kodak moment for you, a snapshot in our journey from this past winter season.
Here is a major winter storm that hit the Midwest and the East Coast this year, and a new incoming supply chain executive at Campbell’s asked the business, what is our potential production risk due to delayed inbound shipments as a result of this storm? That question alone would’ve caused the gears to grind into a halt in the past to pivot towards creative solutioning, more heuristics, digging for information and where do you even go to get it? And I’m not exaggerating, we answered that question in less than five minutes.
With one double click a drill down into the storm, we’re able to summarize all suppliers and production facilities potentially impacted as well as the individual PO’s and each individual PO’s level of risk. I’ll give you another example. Think about an incoming hurricane expected to hit the Houston Texas area. What are you even looking at customers in Houston, the 770 zip codes? What about shipments traveling through Texas or Oklahoma and Louisiana?
What customers and suppliers do you even need to call? It’s helped us digitize the risk management process and brought a whole new level of sophistication and insights that allow us to work more effectively and more efficiently. Time saved, product saved, real ROI, no frozen loads. The information that this solution gleans is incredibly powerful. No more digging for needles in the haystack. They’re delivered to you every day.
This is a solution that’s exciting. It’s new technology. It’s one that shippers and logistics companies been seeking for years. And as we introduce people in the organization, the technology, it’s generated a lot of excitement. This is cool. The aesthetics, the functionality, the fact that you’re working in something that’s new and cutting edge. This really helps drive the success of technology implementations and change management initiatives. So this really has truly become an essential tool in our tool belt and one of the key steps in the digitization of our supply chain. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this peak behind the curtain into Campbell’s digital operational excellence journey with ever stream. Thank you and I’ll pass it back to you Leslie.
Leslie Hume:
Thanks Brett. That was very condensed, but some really fabulous insights and very specific, so thank you for sharing that with all of us. So now I’d like to talk a little bit about Everstream analytics and a couple of use cases that are a little bit different, but might give you an insight into the end-to-end supply chain coverage that we have. So we like to say that we keep the world moving by keeping risk out of the way. And we’re often asked, where do we get an ROI on this? Investing in technology is never easy to justify. So how do we bring this into our environment without breaking budgets and proving to our CFO that there’s an ROI here. So we think the results speak for themselves. Clients have achieved significant operational efficiencies in reducing costs in things like 30% reduction in revenue loss due to a disruption.
And like Brett shared in the Campbell’s example, our clients can often achieve 50% to 70% reduction in time to identify and assess the impact of a potential disruption. And as we’ve all seen through the last COVID years, disruptions have happened well beyond our expectations and certainly will more than likely continue to do so. And then additionally, Everstream clients can often achieve a 5% improvements on on time performance. So let’s look at a couple of client use cases. So like many of our clients today, a lot of you that are attending this webinar probably are saying, hey, I really want to look deeper into my sub-tier supply. Where does the risk sit there? So one of our global life science manufacturer clients wanted to do exactly that. They wanted to look deeper into their sub-tier supply of two critical materials covering two tier one suppliers in the US and India.
Our Everstream Discover solution identified 56 sub-tier supplier connections, which were previously unknown. They were also able to identify more than 20 sub-tier suppliers where similar categories of materials were being supplied to the tier one. And ultimately they were able to gain visibility to 38 incidences over the last 12 months that were linked to those sub tier suppliers. So in the end, they improve their overall supply chain visibility and an identified sourcing savings. The next case is a little bit different. This is one of our global CPG clients who has a very large reliance on wheat for their top selling products.
And they wanted to monitor weather risks that could impact global wheat markets. And now when I say wheat, it’s not just wheat because we have other CPG clients that want to monitor risks across a number of agricultural products. Things like soybean, palm and sun sunflower oil that I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Ukraine, Russia crisis, how that’s impacting that. Or maybe it’s something like sugar, vanilla, or coco.
What you’re seeing on the right hand side of this slide is a systematic visualization of major wheat producing locations around the world. Now knowing and tracking extreme or impactful temperatures. So in this case, this is a visualization, it’s not necessarily today. But where the red is saying, hey, wait a minute, we’ve got a problem here. There’s a high risk or high likelihood of some type of impactful event. So knowing and tracking these extreme or impactful temperatures and wetness levels in regions such as Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe, was extremely important to help this client manage optimal sourcing conditions.
I’ve really had a lot of fun today and I really want to thank those that attended the webinar and especially yourself, Julie and Brett, great meeting you both through this journey and thank you so much for spending some time with us today. It’s been awesome.
Brett Langford:
Thanks for having me.
Julie Christiansen:
Thank you all.
Brett Langford:
Have a great day everyone.
Leslie:
All right, take care. Bye-bye.