Sustainable Supply Chain

Revealing the Balance: Automation vs. Human Intervention in Supply Chains

June 02, 2023 Tom Raftery / Tom Pierce Season 1 Episode 323
Sustainable Supply Chain
Revealing the Balance: Automation vs. Human Intervention in Supply Chains
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Show Notes Transcript

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast. I'm your host, Tom Raftery and today we're digging into a fascinating conversation about automation, human intervention, and collaboration in supply chain systems.

Our guest is Tom Pierce, the Founder and President of Integrated Information Systems. In this episode, Tom takes us on a deep dive into the nuances of supply chain processes and the balance between automated systems and human involvement. We discuss the importance of understanding the entire project lifecycle, particularly in industries where projects span several years.

Tom shares his insights on the importance of cross-functional collaboration and training. He emphasizes the need to understand the impact of decisions across the entire organization and the value of open communication.

We also take a closer look at the world of software systems - the constant interplay between standardization and specialization, and the tension between proprietary systems and interoperability. Tom's philosophy? The more open, exposed, and transparent we can be about our automated processes, the better.

This episode will make you think about the role of automation, the importance of visibility into processes, and the need for open, accessible information. It's a must-listen for anyone interested in how to make supply chains more efficient and collaborative.

Whether you're deep in the world of supply chain management or just curious about how things work behind the scenes, you won't want to miss this conversation. So tune in and let's dive right in!

Remember, you can find Tom Pierce on LinkedIn or reach out to him at Tom@i2s.us. For more great conversations on all things supply chain, be sure to subscribe and share the Digital Supply Chain podcast. See you in the next episode!

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Tom Pierce:

We are doing all of this work to bring all of this very important, even sometimes life critical information to your fingertips. And then the roadblocks come in. So we've just got to get better at making information accessible to the people that really need it.

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, and welcome to episode 323 of the Digital Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and I'm excited to be here with you today sharing the latest insights and trends in supply chain. Before we kick off today's show, I want to take a quick moment to express my gratitude to all of our amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping the podcast going, and I'm truly grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about supply chain. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable. With options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month, that's less than the cost of a cup of coffee, and your support will make a huge difference in keeping this show going strong. To become a supporter, simply click on the support link in the show notes of this and every episode, or visit tiny url.com/dsc pod. Now. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my special guest today, another Tom, Tom, or welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Tom Pierce:

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Yes. Tom Pierce. I'm the founder and president of a small company in, the US and Kentucky called Integrated Information Systems. We go by I two s for short. Born out of what I thought was a, a short term problem back in the eighties and early nineties of legacy systems by which we meant mainframes having difficulty sharing information with this new fangled object, called the pc, and Windows based and DOS based interchanges. And over over 30 years, we, we've just found that the problem has grown and gotten more and more interesting. And so integrating different computer systems and also integrating human intelligence and digital intelligence has actually formed the, the whole pathway of my career for 30 years and just fascinating to see where it's headed.

Tom Raftery:

Nice. Nice. So you've been in the business a long time, Tom. Fascinating. What have you seen lately that's happening in supply chain that's catching your interest?

Tom Pierce:

I think the most fascinating thing certainly, the hot topic of the day is, is artificial intelligence. It, it's not as new as people suspect. Sure. You know, people have been talking about deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning and machine learning for, for, for literally decades, but it seems to be reaching some sort of a critical mass and is starting, get an awful lot of attention. And, and the thing that that just highlights for me has been true since the beginning of computing in back to the eniac, of how the humans and the digital technology relate to each other and how they are related in business processes is getting ever more complex, ever more fascinating, both on the opportunity and the risk side. That intelligent, reasonable, wise, integration of information sources and information flow seems to be absolutely crucial to a business being able to, to make wise decisions. And it, it just seems to be fraught with traps where, where people end up placing their confidence in, in untested processes. And, and so I think that's where the challenge really comes at us to, to have a broad grasp of how data flows, information flows, insight flows, decisions flow how, how wisdom is built.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. I mean, that's an easy perspective for you having worked in the business for over 30 years, but for younger whipper snappers. I mean, how do you acquire that kind of wisdom, particularly when so much is digitized now and people haven't come through the same kind of academy of 30 years of work in the industry that you have.

Tom Pierce:

Yeah. You know, the key for me, I think is a timeless truth that that remains true and, but actually gets a little bit caught up in, in also this massive generational shift that that's going on. And, and that is that no matter how savvy you are about modern techniques and modern modern technologies, There are still people available who are very articulate at the very human ways of understanding the same phenomenon, the same flow. I I, I think it's very important to surround yourself with a spectrum of people that, that are multilingual, certainly bilingual on understanding the, the digital aspect of information flow. As well as the very human process. So, you know, senior subject matter experts have a very valuable role to play, but maybe with diminished hours, maybe with diminished decision making authority. But certainly as a, as a check, as a sanity check, some of those valuable people in my career have been people that had no interest in, in a keyboard or a mouse. They didn't want to get their information from a stupid computer. They wanted to walk the floor and get to know the humans and watch the parts move. And when you can merge those two, when, when you can get the best subject matter experts that just know almost by instinct, by impulse, what's good and what's not good, when you can get them engaged in what's coming through the digital process. You can really find an awful lot of value in the conflict that, that, that when you are able to reconcile what the humans you really trust, say and believe with what is coming out of the computer models or the computer systems, now you've got a different kind of confidence. I'm, I'm a big fan of, of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, and, and I, I, I think it was on his, in his book, Blink, where he talked about how so many seasoned experts just knew when a, when a painting was fake or, or when a couple wasn't gonna make it in their marriage. And, and they can't articulate how they know what they know. But when you, when you are able to, to plug into the humans that truly know what they're talking about in, in a way that's not dismissive of technology, but but embraces technology, now you're talking about true learning at at, at its greatest steps. You know, ancient wisdom combined with modern technology is, is the, the holy grail of information.

Tom Raftery:

Sure. But people like that are few and far between, I have to think. So how do you come across them and how do you bridge that divide between the, the computer processes and the human or business processes?

Tom Pierce:

I'll start with my own experience, but then I, I think I can broaden it to, to, you know, to other ways that have experienced it. I've got a diverse background, very fortunate in that. I spent 4 years in the Army and I ended up getting plucked out into an analysis branch, where I ended up in a facilitating role where I, as a young 21 year old, was responsible for facilitating workshops of all of the senior civil servants and, and retired military and some active duty military that were in their forties and fifties. So I was, I was listening to people with 20 and 30 years experience all the time, and I, I took that with me when I, when I started my business. And so I, I employ a number of retired or semi-retired people as consultants and advisors. Uh, they, they come in typically once a week for a four or five hour workshop where we go over everything that our technical staff has been working on and our analytical books have been working on, and we test it against 30 years worth of seasoned experience. Broadening that a little bit, you know, don't, don't discard the old books. You know, I, I, I still occasionally pull out, uh, you know, an all in white, textbook on, on how to how M R P actually works. One of the people I've been absolutely fascinated, by, as a, as a fellow, resident of Spain, Sam who has written several books over the decades and has, you know, consulted with thousands of people. So I, I give a special place in my understanding to the, the, the very seasoned veterans wherever I find them, whether it's in form or in consulting or just you know, sit in a coffee shop and listen to the old timers. I know I'm an old timer now, but I can still pull in information from people that are 10 to 20 years older than me. It's foolish to dismiss the, the older and wiser, strictly in favor of the, the new shiny object.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, but couldn't we just take all their learnings and feed their learnings into ChatGPT and then hey, we've got them digitized and on tap in perpetuity?

Tom Pierce:

Oh, it's such a fascinating conversation that is. Let's start with the fact that a lot of people absolutely do not know how to explain how they know what they know. And so to actually download that and digitize that is, is quite a challenge. I. I don't think it's time to get rid of the older concepts of mentorship and apprenticeship to, to actually learn by watching, learn by doing. I know that there's a lot of parallels in large language models and in machine learning to that concept. We are essentially creating elements in our own image. We are teaching computers how to learn the way we learn, but there's gotta be an element of humility in all of that. That, that, you know, the, the more you learn, the more you realize what you don't know, the more you realize that the flaws in your own learning. What we are introducing flaws into the artificial side, uh, just as well, just as much, uh, the, the element of how, how to decide which humans you trust is now going to be transferred into how to decide, which AI you trust, you know. I don't know how many articles I've read about ChatGPT and others coming up with beautiful sounding legal briefs that cite cases that never existed or, or, you know, academic papers with, beautiful bibliographies. And referencing works that have never been written. You know, people have been making stuff up to pass themselves off as intelligents for millennia. Now we've just taught computers how to do the same thing. So the problem hasn't changed, the medium in which we have to deal with it. And the speed, and I think this is the biggest thing. The, the volume and speed of information that's coming out of it, discerning truth from fiction is not that simple. It's a spectrum of, of confidence and credibility that that absolutely, you know, fills the bloodstream of business with a mixture of highly reliable and highly unreliable information from which chief executives have to try to discern what, what do I trust and what direction do I go? To me, one of the, the pivotal events in, in, in my career, you, you go back to the, the, the 2008, the, the rise of quantitative analysis and the people that came up with these incredibly complex mortgage back securities with the assurance, the statistical assurance that these cannot fail, and yet they did. You know, the, the overstated confidence that comes from the impression of intelligence that is driven by speed and amplification, it is a very dangerous thing if you overtrust it. So it, it's always a matter of, you know, double checking, triple checking, multiple sources, human and digital to, to gain confidence in the processes and don't, don't trust blindly human or digital.

Tom Raftery:

Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Regular listeners to this podcast will be aware that I'm ex-SAP. I was in the SAP supply chain organization for a number of years, until recently. What would an organization like, or how would an organization like an SAP who builds supply chain software, how would they incorporate what you were saying about needing to bring humans into the system as well, and human knowledge into the supply chain, business processes.

Tom Pierce:

I know that there's an awful lot, at work in, in the migration, the forced migration, if you will, from R3 ECC, user communities to HANA, S4, and, and I do understand that the technology is better suited to communication and collaboration. The, the, you know, greater transparency of data, greater interconnectivity of data. But one of the things that, that s SAP communities, I think, with good reason kept out of scope from what SAP as a company does.

Tom Raftery:

Let, let just stop you there a sec, Tom, because yes. I I I didn't mean the question to be SAP specific, I mean in general Okay. Companies, yes. Like SAP, who are building these, these digital twins essentially of supply chains. How should they incorporate the requirement that you're saying that is needed to incorporate more humans with their knowledge into the system that SAP are and, and, and all the others, are digitizing correct? How do you marry, how do you marry those two things?

Tom Pierce:

Excellent question and, and so I'll broaden what I was saying about about S4 HANA and its reach cuz I think everybody is, is, is chasing the same phenomenon that, that when you intentionally make your data and information accessible, I I, I think there's been a movement among IT professionals, that, that out of the nervousness of, of hacking and, and, you know, trying to protect data, that there's this temptation to just gather all the data and put it in a vault and make sure nobody ever reads it. That way it's secure, but the point of the information was to get people to read it. So finding more and more, you know, embracing emerging technologies to make information accessible to a network of collaborative users. And, and again, I, I, I think that's where the, the designers of infrastructure of, of enterprise software need to understand their scope. And, and it's not just to collect the data, it's to collect the data and to make it accessible. But, but it's not, you, you almost end up with the old, Martin Luther concern about, printing bibles in the common language. Well, do you need a high priest to interpret that for you? Well, can you actually put the data in the hands of end users and trust them to download it, extract it, interpret and aggregate it? Yeah, you're gonna get slightly different results, but that's what all the humans do with all the input is we come up with slightly different interpretations. So finding that magic balance point of how much data cleansing, how much data interpretation do you do before you put it in a repository? You make it accessible to, to the end user community, which is not just the last mile, that's a whole nuther set of pipelines it goes through before it actually gets decision makers. And one of the, one of the trends that I'm noticing in information flow, certainly it impacts the supply chain, the, the longer the chain, the more it impacts it. I'm hearing people start talking about data pipelines, old concept, new terminology. The, you know, the old game telephone information flows from one system to another system, to another system. However many humans are involved. Some of the humans add value, some subtract, some distort, some deceive. So how do you ensure credibility from one node to the next? I think you always have to design a closed system. You always have to have a feedback loop. It's not a one way pipe. You've got to test data on the other end that comes out the faucet for, for, for the cleanliness, the drinkability, the, the, the toxicity of the information that's coming out the end. And so I, I think it's a mistake to just say, you know, to take the DoorDash approach. I've gathered up all the information and I dropped it on your doorstep. What happens to it from there is up to you, not my problem. There's got to be, better connectivity between the people that are actually understanding, interpreting and using the data all the way back to its source so that, that you create opportunities for feedback so that the entire loop improves with iteration. So, so that the, you know, too many technical people tend to kind of live very isolated, but lives or from home sort of exacerbates that. And may have absolutely no familiarity whatsoever with the people that ultimately use the technology they create. And, and I think the more we can do to create both sides, the two-way communication between techno gurus or geniuses and the end users that depend on the accuracy and credibility of that data to make decisions, the more opportunity we have to improve with iteration rather than just stall.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Okay. I've seen some companies, and what they do is they'll often move people around within organizations so they get, you know, experience in lots of different roles and that then adds to their own institutional knowledge and so that they can then, have a better idea of what's going on. To your point, they have walked the floor. Is, is that something you'd recommend as a, as a way to kind of help bridge this gap?

Tom Pierce:

Absolutely with caveats, things have seasons. The, the, there's a seasonality to data and to information flow. One of my clients, for example, from, from the time of an initial contract incidentally in the defense industry, from the time of the initial, contract award to the time of final delivery, it might be three to five years. Okay? So if you are rotating people through functions every two years, then nobody is going to be around in one function for the entire life cycle of a single project. So, so there are times when a, a, a 10 year in a particular function might need to last five to seven years. I know people don't stay around that long, but see it's phenomenon. People change jobs more often. Maybe they can change jobs within the same organization. And, and hang around long enough to actually see the consequences of decisions made. And in many companies, that's a much shorter fuse. But depending on your environment, if you haven't had the opportunity, I, I'm a, I had my seventh grandchild born over the weekend, so I Oh, congratulations. I'm heavily into, thank you. I got seven grandchildren, four and under. And as you, as you, you know, see them grow and develop, Certainly, it seems like they're getting older faster than I am, but you get this much broader perspective of hoping to see growth all the way into adulthood. You know, to see your children become parents, become grandparents. The really long view of things takes time. And so I think in general, longer tenure in each role is better, but in the meantime, strong collaboration across functions. Build those relationships with your peers in other functions and, you know, be very intentional. There's way too much fragmentation in meeting structures and the businesses I'm familiar with that, you know, the planners meet over here and the supply chain meet over here and finance meets are, and they say bad things about each other. You know, just the, the intentional. Embed somebody from another organization in your meetings to get that perspective, learn from them, and then switch roles down the road. So yeah, I'm a big believer in, in cross-functional training, education, but also communication, collaboration, learn from each other. Learn, learn the other perspective, the impact of your decisions on their lives.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Yeah. This is, this is a fascinating conversation for me, particularly because the episode of this podcast that I published on Monday of this, no, on Friday last, was with, uh, Sanjay Sharma from CEO of Roambee, and that was a conversation about how to make supply chains more autonomous. And this conversation is going, Reverse, reverse.

Tom Pierce:

You know, I, I, I understand that, but, but the tone is coming from recent experience of overdoing it. I am, throughout my career, a, an enormous believer in automation. I absolutely love, you know, scheduling a process that will wake me up if there's a problem, and there's never a problem. I, I am designing software for a couple of small businesses here locally where they don't want humans to intervene unless absolutely necessary. But there's a little bit of an element that my geometry teacher had to drill into my head, you know, I can see the problem and know the answer and write it down, and he wasn't satisfied. Show your work. So it, it's a little bit like we're watching your pizza be made or, or, or tracking the delivery guy on, on the GPS. You want to have some visibility of what the automated system is doing. You don't want to blind yourself to how the whole process works. You know, you don't have to jump in and intervene. You don't have to go from one inbox and wait for a human to put to the next inbox. But you certainly want to preserve the, the capacity to see what's happening, to monitor what's happening and to intervene as necessary. You know, minimal exception based processing, but not totally sealed blind box where, sure, sorry, you put your quarter in and something's going to come out. Trust me. You know, I don't have that much trust. I'm too old for that. I'm jaded.

Tom Raftery:

Excellent, excellent. So Tom, we're heading towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I haven't asked 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?

Tom Pierce:

One of the things that's that's been with me my whole career that I think is just taking on new dimensions and I still find it difficult to articulate. You're giving me an opportunity, so I'm gonna try it. And it has to do with the way that systems are designed to relate to each other positively or negatively. I think there's an awful lot of incentive for software developers in particular to make things as proprietary as possible. There's an incentive to not play well with others, and yet there's an underlying current that, that we all sense, that it's better when, when systems do play well together and work well together. I'm, I'm old enough to remember the, the phenomenon of Unix and even the US government decreed all programming from, henceforth shall be written in Ada. As a matter of fact, Dean whom you so earlier, uh, was the first ADA programmer I ever hired. This, the constant interplay between standardization and specialization, centralized versus decentralized. I really believe there is an emerging art that we are just in the beginning, the infancy of, of how to leverage new technologies in a way that allows companies, individuals to, to develop and enhance their career paths in, in a way that that doesn't, that preserves an intellectual property rights, preserves expertise, and yet still exposes well, the how do you communicate from this system to that system? One of the things that, that I've been amused by with the emergence of ChatGPT is, is now my fees are absolutely filled with people teaching you how to communicate with ChatGPT. Well, I thought the, the point was that that was from gonna be intuitive. No. It, somebody has to teach you how to talk to it and. I had a problem with my, uh, not a problem. Why? I had an embarrassing moment with my four year old grandchild yesterday. He was trying to tell me what he wanted, and I couldn't understand what he was trying to say, and it made him very sad. So when I finally figured out what he meant, we, we were back to happiness. And then I think that, you know, I, as much as the internet is bringing us together, I absolutely love the fact that, that, that you in Spain and me and the US can be having this conversation. But, you know, bridging more languages, more cultures, more technologies, more processes, more even, you know, cultural elements to running a business. I, I, I think that being multilingual, being bilingual also means that you are opening yourself up to be understood. And I think that is as much digital as it is human to expose your processes, your methodologies, I mean, Big scientific thinkers back in the day just had pages of methodology and assumptions, and, and all of that seems to be just hidden. Just tell me the answer. Well, don't just tell me the answer. Tell me how you arrived at the answer. And then collaboration can reach short work. So I really think a, a huge part of automation is also exposure of what are your, what are your methodologies? You know, Elon Musk made a huge, huge commitment to open source the algorithms, not that all of us can read it, but some can read it. So the more open and exposed and transparent we can be about our automated processes, without revealing proprietary logic, of course. I think that's really the pathway to, community and global excellence. Where if, if we give in to our lesser impulses of keeping everything proprietary and everything private, and if you want to know the truth, you gotta come ask me cuz he doesn't know it. One anecdote that was just very deeply personal and very this, um, we, we lost my mother-in-law about six months ago and she had a very rare disease and she got to where she was seeing multiple specialists. And at one very critical point in her illness, two of her doctors that were seeing her in the same hospital room were not allowed to see each other's medical records because they worked for different companies. And, and that was very, very disconcerting for us. So

Tom Raftery:

infuriating, I would've said

Tom Pierce:

infuriating is the right word. There was a piece of that also that became a little more close to home and, and, you know, maybe a little more lighthearted. The one physician that seemed most, you know, prone most well disposed towards sharing with us all the information, said Yes, I'll get you that information. Hang on just a second. And then he turned to his computer and he couldn't figure out how to log into it cuz they had just changed the software. It's like we are doing all of this work to bring all of this very important, even sometimes life critical information to your fingertips. And then the roadblocks come in. So we've just got to get better at making information accessible to the people that really need it.

Tom Raftery:

Right. Lovely. Very good. Very good. Okay, super. Tom, if people would like to know more about yourself, Tom, or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Tom Pierce:

Our website is I2s.us. My email is Tom@i2s.Us. You can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I do most of my interactions. Welcome any in all conversations.

Tom Raftery:

Phenomenal. I'll put those links in the show notes so everyone will have access to them. Tom, thanks a million for coming in the podcast today.

Tom Pierce:

Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure.

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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