Sustainable Supply Chain

Improving Supply Chains With Better Supplier Data - A Chat With TealBook's Matt Palackdharry

December 09, 2022 Tom Raftery / Matt Palackdharrry Season 1 Episode 277
Sustainable Supply Chain
Improving Supply Chains With Better Supplier Data - A Chat With TealBook's Matt Palackdharry
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Show Notes Transcript

Supply chains are complex beasts as we all know. Most organisations have 10's to 100's to even 1000's of suppliers. How to keep up with all of them? Are they secure, up-to-date? Certified for what they're saying they can do? and so on.

How to find new suppliers to meet your criteria. One company looking to help organisations stay up-to-speed all of their suppliers is TealBook.

I reached out to TealBook's Chief  Strategy and Revenue Officer Matt Palackdharry to come on the podcast to talk about it.

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Matt Palackdharry:

Oftentimes we've got customers that are re-orchestrating their supply chain right now. So maybe they had heavy manufacturing in China and they have to move it to Mexico, for example. Well now because you have everybody that's making decisions or they're actually doing the thought process in TealBook, we have information like where is manufacturing moving over the next five to 10 years?

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Digital Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Matt. Matt, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Matt Palackdharry:

Thank you, Tom. Yes, I would. My name is Matt Palackdharry. I am the Chief Strategy Officer at TealBook, and really I've found my love for this space over the. 10 years or so. I got my start in procurement technology at a company called Vinamaya, which coincidentally my dad and I decided to take over together. It was a seven person company in Cincinnati. It was very, very small but next thing you knew, we turned it into one of the fastest growing companies in the space, and we sold it to Cupa in 2018. And I learned a lot about data during that time. Specifically at that time, we were trying to solve a lot around catalog data and how do we get access of catalog data to all of our customers. And during my time there I learned that there was an even bigger data problem in the space, and that's that the core supplier data is really difficult to get right. And nobody was approaching it using machine learning other than TealBook. So I joined in 2019 to come and help build this technology and I'm really excited I'm here.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, so you're in TealBook, but for people who might not be aware, who or what is TealBook?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah, TealBook is a supplier data company and we are striving to be the trusted source of supplier data for the entire procurement world. And when you think about our space, you can think about all the vendor information changing. Really on a day to day basis around a vendor and for you to do your category management job or to really sit in the nitty gritty of procurement, know everything that's happening with your vendors. You need up to date supplier information. Typically, most organizations have gone to updating and maintaining this information manually, whether that be through a supplier portal or a low cost country elsewhere. We go through maintaining it all through machines. And so we use a lot of the emerging machine learning concepts to monitor this information at scale with the idea that you shouldn't have to worry about your vendor information at all, that we should be able to gather this information, power the rest of your systems and tools, power you and your role to enable you to make the right decisions to save money, for your organization.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And what kind of information are we talking about? What is it that you can do that you know you couldn't do with a Google search?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah. For us it's really about aggregating a bunch of information together. It's not that you couldn't find some of this information, it's just that it takes a lot of time. And to give you an idea of the type of data we go after and the type of scale we go after, we break down what we target on the supplier into we call 'em five buckets of data. The first is anything offering related, so think who the supplier is, what they do, what products and services they offer, and which part of the world. We do all the commodity categorization of that too, so that if you only own a certain amount of categories, that you can just see the vendors that are applicable to you. That's the the first bucket. The second then is contact information, so think opposite of what Zoom Info does here, we typically try to get you sales contacts that you can reach out to if you're interested in their products or services. We get you all the generic inboxes like accounting at, or marketing at whoever you need to get in touch with. We, we maintain that log along with all the social media presence. So we, the idea here is that you should be able to contact somebody you want, you should be able to see what the company is about, anything that they're posting, uh, you'll have it in a centralized place. The third is then trust and risk information. And here we're typically targeting things that are on supplier code of conduct forms. We have this theory that most supplier code of conduct forms are, are signed more for a breach backstop. If something happens with your vendor and you need to get out of a contract, you can cite that. There's not really been a proactive way to monitor that. And we do a lot of the metadata monitoring needed for trust and risk. Fourth is financial detail. So here things like revenue projections, parent child hierarchies, everything you need to actually onboard a supplier falls into that bucket. And the fifth, which is really difficult, and what I would say 80% of our customers come to us for is around certifications. And this here would would say, are they diverse, certified? Do they have, any sustainable practices do they have ISO certifications for good manufacturing processes, for example? And the idea here is just because a vendor says they can do something doesn't mean that they actually can do it. And so here's the validation from third parties that are actually going in and auditing this. And we take all of that data, we combine it into what we call a universal supplier record. And when you access, you have all the the up to date information about that supplier that we can find at your fingertips, and for the size of scale for you. We, uh, I like to use this because it's, I think it really gives an idea of how much we're doing, but we cross reference at the very first part of our algorithm we cross reference the top 400 million websites. And to give me an idea of how, how many that is in the grand scheme of things. They're predicted to be only about 300 million unique websites. So if a supplier has their own website, we typically know about them. Now we're working into the top a hundred million sub domains, which, a sub domain is an example of, say, a LinkedIn page or a Facebook marketplace page where there could be lots of vendors, but it's under a different domain. In different parts of the world that's the common way for suppliers to advertise themselves. So we're starting to now work into those sub domains in different parts of the world to round out our data set.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, cool. I had a, an episode of the podcast recently around, cybersecurity. And I'm just wondering, as you mentioned, certifications, do the certifications that you do, that you check out, do they include certifications for cybersecurity?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yes, a absolutely. And cybersecurity certifications are really important to all. Are a lot of our customers for a number of reasons. Uh, and we actually have cybersecurity organizations that are using our certificates to come up with their score. And so while, TealBook itself doesn't come up with a score, so you wouldn't be able to log in and say, this vendor has a cybersecurity score of two out of 10, for example. What you can do is come in and see a lot of the changing leading indicators that would indicate whether something could be up with a supplier. And so some of those examples would be we're hitting all these domains globally or cross reference in to see whether there's been activity on them. You can see whether the website hasn't been updated in 18 months, which is usually a leading indicator that something is up with the vendor. You can see whether the domain is for sale, which is a really, really great sign that there's something up with, with your vendor. We're cross-referencing all the sanctions lists globally, so you can see whether there's been, things like, adverse events, whether cyber security related or even ethically related, but all those certifications can be used to produce scores. And so, um, we have customers that are consuming that data for, producing the score as well.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. that's cool that you can get all this kind of information today, but if we look ahead, what kind of information is likely to be available in the future that isn't available today?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah. Well I think that's the really fun part about TealBook and it's the part that certainly gets me going and, and sometimes I actually get a little goosebumps thinking about it because if you get the data right, the possibilities are endless. And, and so I'll kind of paint a picture of what our customers are doing today so you can get an idea of the type of information we're aggregating for the future. But, we aggregate all these public source information to make it really easy on a category manager per se, to find suppliers that they want to do business with. Oftentimes we've got customers that are re-orchestrating their supply chain right now. So maybe they had heavy manufacturing in China and they have to move it to Mexico, for example. Well now because you have everybody that's making decisions or they're actually doing the thought process in TealBook, we have information like where is manufacturing moving over the next five to 10 years? And I use the example of China and Mexico because that's a trend we see all over right now. We see that if you were in North America, the chances of you being overreliant on Chinese manufacturing were really high. And to find somewhere in the same hemisphere that can provide about the same cost advantages in in a pretty tough political environment, geopolitical environment is something that's become very strategic for a lot of our customers. And so things like, where's the supply chain moving to, which vendors are increasing their market share, which vendors are decreasing their market share, which ones are winning business because they have really great products versus which customers are winning business because for example, they are on the cutting edge of, ESG related topics. And so a lot of that type of metadata is being harvested by Teal Book and we eventually see us releasing an intelligence, platform where you can come in and not just see the raw data around the supplier or, or use it in a way to prop up your STP instance, but instead use it to be a real thought partner here and actually give you data that you wouldn't have access to anywhere else in the world.

Tom Raftery:

Fascinating. Fascinating. Do you have use cases, customer examples that you can speak to?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah, we have a lot. And, um, it's interesting in our business because sometimes the tougher the world gets, the better use cases we get within TealBook. And so, you know, I say some really cool examples and I sometimes I am a little sheepish about it because I know that a lot of people are going through a lot of turmoil at the moment, and they're looking for a solution and, and fortunately we're in a position where we can help. But I like going back to Covid for the first examples because I, I think that's where we really made our mark. It's, at the time, the global supply chain was really shut down for months on end. Uh, when you think about the, the full life cycle and, with us, we had some really high profile cases where, we actually got listed in Forbes, for example, where the UK government, you may remember, was in the news left and right because they couldn't get PPE into the country. It was a very big problem. There were a lot of citizens that didn't have access to ppe. There were a lot of medical staff that didn't have access to ppe. The government had no idea how to even find this information. They did what most organizations do, and they went and hired Accenture to go figure it out, or a big consulting organization. And Accenture looked at something like 300 different data sources to see how could they find out, what data's available to reorchestrate, getting p PE into the uk. They eventually stumbled across little TealBook and what we were doing, and sure enough, we became the crux of, orchestrating how we can find new manufacturers in Southeast Asia that could make similar products to N 95 masks. Put in bulk orders, help coordinate the shipment of those and then ultimately bring PPE into the country. And so that was, that was kind of the first really big public win for TealBook. And we had many others during that time too. So it, we are fortunate that we, Forbes was all over us that year. We got listed in there three times because of the UK government example. And then the other one I really like is both Brooks Brothers and General Motors shifted their production lines overnight to either, in Brooks Brothers case, produce a hundred thousand N 95 masks a day to fuel the surge of Covid in New York. And then GE, or I, I'm sorry, GM shifted their production lines to, producing respirators and doing such a big shift all at once requires a lot of intelligence, and they were using TealBook data to identify vendors that could provide the goods and materials that come in, shift some of the manufacturing lines, actually get the product service, certified. So it was a very cool time to be able to prove out our company. Now we've since gone through two additional rounds of funding and so now our use cases and things have stabilized a little bit. So our use cases are a little bit more Hey we stabilized this organization's vendor master, or we reduced a bunch of risk in, uh, in some of our customers. Or most recently we've had organizations that had up to 20% of their supply chain operating in Russia, and they needed to get it out of Russia, just given everything that's going on. So their business continuity plans became very important to act on. And that's great to act on it, but you need a data source to actually fuel it. And Teal Book is that in many cases,

Tom Raftery:

Okay, and where to next for TealBook?

Matt Palackdharry:

You know, honestly, I think a lot of it is just continuing to get more and more users using our platform so that we can fuel the next level of insights. Right now we just want to continue to get as deep as we can in vendor intelligence using all machine learning. We, we, Quite frankly, we view the supplier portal as a single biggest point of failure in our space. And so if you, if your answer and, and most technology providers, their answer is, I get my information through the supplier portal and the supplier inputting it themselves. That, that for us is a big red easy button for you to think, okay, well how can I get better performance? TealBook could way outperform a supplier portal, but as we continue to eliminate the dependency on supplier portals, that's when we get more and more of that really cool usage that I mentioned in the, what we can do in the future. And that's where I think a lot of our customers are interested. Our investors are interested. I would say a lot of our employees, they wake up really dreaming about that next level state because no matter what you're trying to accomplish, whether that be just reduced cost out of procurement, whether that be, create a really agile procurement that can wade through any disruption that's out there, or whether that be meet ESG goals that's been set forward by the UN. All of these really strategic, really cool initiatives can only be done when you have really great data, and that's where we feel like we're really at the forefront of this race.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And I'm glad you mentioned the SDG goals on sustainability, Can you, or how can you help organizations with those goals?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah. So the real answer here is that nobody really knows yet because I, I view this shift in the space where if we rewind 10 years, for example, you would hear the term corporate social responsibility, right? And I, I think people generally wanted to meet their corporate social responsibility goals. And then ESG pops up and I, I think a lot of uh, CSR kind of fell into esg and we have a prediction here at TealBook that ESG is continuing to be absorbed into the UN SDGs. And so what's really important for us is we know that there are three taxonomies, three standards that are out there. We don't really know in the long run which one's going to win. We predict it's probably going to be the UN SDGs, but the idea here is that we should be able to take our certificates and any of our data, map it into every single one of the different taxonomies and the different standards so that no matter which one ends up winning, we have the data that can show you whether you're increasing your spend for ESG related activities, whether you're increasing your compliance to different SDG goals. We know right now that our certificates map into seven of the SDG goals, and so we don't have the complete set yet, nor do I think the full supply chain will will be involved into all of the SDGs, where in esg, we very much are in every single one of those pillars. But, um, it'll be interesting to observe over the next several years because I, I think one of the two will win as a standard. It's either gonna be an ESG or a UN. And I, you know, I have a hard time batting against the UN, especially when I see all of these large, countries going in and making commitments to the SDG goals now. I think that was really the catalyst to now them taking those goals and pushing it down to the, corporate entities within that country. And once that happens and you know, that standard has won.

Tom Raftery:

Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Tend to agree. Tend to agree. Cool. We are coming towards the end of the podcast now, Matt, before I get to, this question, I want to ask, where does the name TealBook come from? I'm just curious.

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah, well, it's a really great story. it's about our founder. Our founder is Stephanie LaPierre, and she had a consulting business. Ahead of time that really helped organizations, source materials. And, she'll go to our client's offices and oftentimes they would dig through binders and hand out cards and, Hey, you need to reach at this person, but then it would be 20 minutes of fumbling through all the business cards. And she thought there's gotta be a better way to know who an organization is, what products and services they provide, and how to get in touch with them. And, um, there was a client in the biopharma space that pulled out a binder from the desk and fumbled through a bunch of records, and I believe the binder was actually teal in color. And so that was, that was when she had the initial idea. And then that was there. And over time, as we went through branding and naming and really found that teal, the color really symbolizes a lot of tech enhancement and data and machine learning, and you'll see a lot of teal being used in a lot of ML based companies because of that symbolism. And so it just so happened there as teal binder, then it, it mimics what we're doing and it came all together to be TealBook. and yeah, since then we've, we've really done a good job building the brand. Now I think you always have this debate of, does the company name really tell you what we're doing? And I think based on what we've, what we've built, the, the name itself will be here to stay for a long time.

Tom Raftery:

Nice. Nice. You mentioned your dad at the start of the interview and the fact that you worked with him. Are you still working together?

Matt Palackdharry:

We are not. Yeah. So it was fun. We, we worked together for four years. He was gonna retire actually. So, you know, I went and we talked about doing something fun together and we decided to, to take over Vinamaya. He was CEO and I led our go to market strategy and it was fun. We really had no expectations. So it was, you know, it's not like we went in as, procurement experts thinking we were gonna change the world. We just, we really wanted to do something together. And we're a couple of tech guys at, at the end of the day, I'm a, I'm a data geek and I love looking at where the data's going, what, what's happening in the movement to the data. What can we deduce from that? We were, we were doing that at it started at Vinaya. We rebranded it as Acquire and I think it just out of passion really we turned it into one of the fastest growing companies in space and I'm really proud of what we did there and I'm really proud of how Cupa is now utilizing it because really cool technology, getting access to data that many thought was gonna be impossible to get access to. And it just so happened that we put the right amount of people with the right focus around it, that we solved a really critical pain point. So it was, uh, it was cool and I learned procurement at that company, so it was, uh, it was a very beneficial time for me.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, cool, cool. As I said, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now Matt. Is there any question that I haven't asked you that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Matt Palackdharry:

Sure. I think the only thing, we've talked a lot about data. And data is a really interesting phenomenon because you can, in some areas of the world, you can get really great data. In some areas of the world, it's still really tough, right? And so I like to articulate where we're really strong and where we're still working on. Because we are a global company, we have some of the largest brands in the world that are using us around the world today. And when you think about machine learning, the barrier for entry into new markets is not geographical. And so we do have a global reach, but the, the barrier is more language dependent. And so for us, really, really strong in any country that has English as a first, second, or third language. If English is not one of the top three languages spoken in a country, our machine learning is tough, and we're starting to take the code in native English and make it work in other languages. In Southeast Asia, we have a lot of wins, but at the same time, there's, and we ran into this with the UK government example, where you have, you have manufacturers that only speak Mandarin, for example, and they don't have a website, you may not even know they exist. And so finding them is the first challenge. And the second challenge is then translating everything. And, we can get you close enough where you can make a decision and do additional due diligence in Southeast Asia. But it does require an additional manu or a, sorry, a human component to it, where in North America, we feel really confident at this point that you should be able to log in a TealBook, you should be able to search what you're looking for and get a really nice curated list that takes really all the effort out of the data aggregation game for you. So just wanted to categorize a little bit on, where we're really strong and where we still got a little bit of room to go, but we we're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to deliver there in the next couple of years.

Tom Raftery:

Cool. Cool, cool. Great. Matt, that's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourself or about TealBook or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Matt Palackdharry:

Yeah, I'd send them one of two spots. Either my email address, which is very simple, it's just matt at teal book.com. And then the second is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn all the time, and so it's a little bit harder because I have a, a long last name, my name is Matt Palackdharry. And the last name, uh, I'll spell it for you. It's

Tom Raftery:

I'll, I'll, I'll put the link in the show notes. People will find it from there

Matt Palackdharry:

Okay, great. That's a lot easier.

Tom Raftery:

Super. Okay, Matt, that's been great. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Matt Palackdharry:

Thanks for having me, Tom. Really appreciate it.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, simply drop me an email to TomRaftery@outlook.com If you like the show, please don't forget to click Follow on it in your podcast application of choice to be sure to get new episodes as soon as they're published Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find a show. Thanks, catch you all next time..

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