Luke Smaul: 0:07

Breaking that value firewall, where you're selling stuff for dollars and every year your customers want more stuff for less dollars, break that cycle, which is why Philips did. And and it opens up a whole new world and it is much more sustainable.

Tom Raftery: 0:24

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in the world, this is the Digital Supply chain podcast, the number one podcast focussing on the digitisation of Supply chain. And I'm your host, Global vice president of SAP, Tom Raftery. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the digital Supply chain podcast, My name is Tom Raftery with SAP. And with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Luke. Luke, would you like to introduce yourself.

Luke Smaul: 0:50

Sure, Tom and thank you for having me on this. This is exciting. So Luke Smaul, one of the founders of Chakra and we're a digital transformation, Start-Up, really helping companies cut through all the hype around digital and digital transformation, figure out where to start and most importantly, get to get to value, OK?

Tom Raftery: 1:11

There's a lot of hype around digital transformation, obviously, but you say you're helping companies cut through the hype and show them how to start. How should they start?

Luke Smaul: 1:20

Right. Yeah. So the first thing I always tell companies to do well is pray two steps. The first is we got to get a little bit tighter on terminology. And I love every time I listen to your podcast, but I don't know if you use digitalisation or digitalisation. And I think I mix the two up, but you're pretty crisp on. A lot of the things we're focussed on today is our digitalisation or digitisation.

Tom Raftery: 1:45

I tend to go with digitisation. I just I think it rolls off the tongue a little easier than digitalisation. I think digitisation is just tighter.

Luke Smaul: 1:55

And until someone asked me the difference, I couldn't tell you. But let's stick with digitisation. So that's very different to digital transformation. So the first thing I recommend anybody do is you don't have to take my definition, but figure out what it actually means to you. So for me, digitisation, it's typically an existing process, good, bad or indifferent. Hopefully you make sure the process is good to start with and you're applying technology, applying what we call digital to that process to make it typically more efficient and nothing wrong with that. But you've got to decide. That's what I'm doing. Digital transformation, the T word, the transformation work to me is you are creating new channels of revenue or net new revenue for your company. And that's it really gets into business model innovation. And it if that's all you do when you're starting your journey is decide which one of those we're going to do and then set the right expectations up front. That is a huge step in the right direction for a successful digital transformation or even digitisation.

Tom Raftery: 3:03

OK, cool, nice. So we've got our digitisation is just making things, switching them from analogue to digital. Digital transformation is, as the name implies, transforming something, not just transforming it from analogue to digital, but transforming the processes involved underlying that as well. So I had a podcast where I spoke myself, where I interviewed myself a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about the shift from the shift to product as a service, for example. And I think that's kind of what you're referring to. Right?

Luke Smaul: 3:34

That is the best example. And that is we've been lucky enough to be in business for about 18 months now and we have been lucky enough to work with one of our major customers. And that's the journey we're collaborating with them on is absolutely that's the target product is a service. And when people ask. What do you mean by transformative and what is an example of a business model product as a service is a perfect, perfect example, and does it really tie a lot of the themes that I think got mixed up with digitisation around? Why are we talking about digital transformation? What is the need for a product as a service type business model? Or more broadly, what is the need for business model and innovation or business model transformation?

Tom Raftery: 4:20

OK, well, seeing as you've asked the question, what is the need for a business model transformation?

Luke Smaul: 4:26

Yeah, so I think the. That really gets to the history of digital transformation, which is kind of what I always recommend people do next, is the great difference between digitalisation and pure transformation. If we want to go after transformation, if you want to figure out why and the best way you're a futurist, you know the best way to predict the future is understand. So the history of digital transformation, I think, has been a little bit lost and it's only about 13 years old, but it has gotten lost in translation and lost in the fight. But the big milestones I always think about which help people figure out why products the service, why business model innovation is really two thousand and seven where we've gotten the four big pillars of digital become real. Right. We've got Amazon kick off us. We've got and the iPhone is really smart. Mobility just gets huge shot in the arm. And Facebook, that's the first year, I think the previous year where they opened up their platform outside of universities and Hadoop. Right. The big data movement driven by the open source folks based a lot on what Google had told the public presence and worst of works that all comes to life. And about three years later, Marc Andreessen, but from the another great podcast, the A16 podcast. But likewise, Mark. Great. So, yeah. So Mark predicts how software is eating the world and others. Frenulum, it is a very short article telling people read a book, anyone who's trying to figure out this space. That's a great article to read. And he really predicted what was going to happen next based on those big four pillars of tech, like the big data mobility, cloud and social. And he was right and it started, he said like in 10 years we're going to be in six years. You saw the market cap and rankings change. The highest value companies were no longer those companies that relied on big, big capital barriers to entry to be as valuable as they are. All the big tech companies, all the big platform companies started ranking up the top of the highest value companies in the world. That's when that happens, which is around twenty seventeen, that's when digital transformation became real for a lot of the companies that you and I would think about as customers or as people we can we work with and our careers. And the reason I got scared or the reason it became real for them and the reason why public service was so important was all the things that have kept them at the top of the rankings for so long. The main one being they have access to huge capital. They've built juge capital barriers to entry. So think about building a jet engine on building a train or building something that's going to sell for a gazillion dollars.

Tom Raftery: 7:21

In the in the top companies at the time, a lot of them more fossil fuel companies, the likes of the exons and chevrons and things like that. So I guess the big capital investments, there were refineries and oil derricks.

Luke Smaul: 7:35

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And we see now some of the fears they were seeing play out in oil and gas and mining and the ability to enter that market and use technology to offer a different way to play in that field. And the big one, and I hate to use this example because it's been overused. I don't to add to the hype, but Uber is kind of the best way to understand this for people, which is if you were a big, heavy industrial and you had survived and protected yourself through those capital barriers to entry, the thing they did was that people didn't know was they didn't actually make a lot of money on the as SAP they'd built. They would have these huge barriers to entry factories, refineries, all these different and. Infrastructure elements that would make the thing or create the thing, but they also sell a cost if even that and where they would make all the money is on the service contracts. And this is even true for car sales. Right. I know you're a big automotive guy and most of their money is on like I think it was like 30 cents or two hours.

Tom Raftery: 8:40

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But 30 grand and 30 grand after sales in over the lifetime of the vehicle in parts maintenance and repairs and all this kind of thing.

Luke Smaul: 8:50

Amazing. So that's the world right, where you're making cars or aircraft engines or you're in the oil and gas mining space. That's the world up until 2007, sorry 2017. That did change. And you companies who had no assets. Right. And suddenly get these huge valuations and leverage somebody else's assets. To make that money, I think, great for the consumer, right? I think a very necessary shift and we think about ownership models and sustainability and our obsession with consumerism. But for industrial companies, terrifying. And that kicked off the what I call the first wave of digital transformation and trying to bring that back to why product does a service. The only way you figured out that if the reason your customers bought from you up until now was because you designed the best product, made the best product you install the best product you service, it's the best you remanufacture with the best. That value chain no can absolutely be eroded piece by piece by digital. Competition or digitally enabled competition? You need to keep that value pie together so that you can't be eroded and people continue to buy from you for the same reason they've always bought from you. So selling that full value chain as a service, product and service sort of does it a excuse the pun a disservice. It's your full value chain, your everything you've done to keep your company in business and your customers happy out. Until now, you wrap in a new business model and you sell it as a service. And that is a great way to protect yourself from some of these new digital players.

Tom Raftery: 10:28

Yeah, fair point. Two bits of feedback, I guess, coming, as you say, from the automotive space. Tesla seems to kind of straddle the two sides of that, given that they're selling hardware and that they have completely disrupted the market and got an enormous valuation there. No, I think they're now their valuation is now exceeding the next nine automotive companies, the nine biggest automotive companies combined. Tesla's value exceeds them. And I can see why I it their stock may be overvalued, but it's not massively overvalued. I know they have a small amount of sales comparatively, but the but the share price. In other words, a company valuation isn't based on today's sales. It's based on future expected value. And of all the automotive companies, Tesla are the only one who have a clearly defined pathway and a track record of delivering on it for the future. Now, what's weird about Tesla and where their pathway is going is not that that they're going electric. It's not that they're building autonomy into the car and so on and so on. What's weird is they haven't announced any product as a service route where the others are going that way.

Luke Smaul: 11:50

Yeah, yeah. And my expectation there and we may be going to deep into trouble with my there is, if you can say great product as a service, you can start to then move to a true platform strategy, which is the other problem that a lot of these industrials had, which is they confuse platform strategy with building a tech platform or platform strategy. Put simply is you become the hub of a value exchange. And credit cards are a great example. But all they do is they offer you a way to exchange value with a vendor across your original. I love this one because their company I respect and Intel, one of the first tech platforms right there, silicon was a tech platform. It allowed people stand up their companies and exchange values or values it through semiconductors. I think one of the reasons the valuation is there with Tesla is people are smart enough to see they can actually almost leapfrog products as a service and become a transportation platform. And they're going to have the infrastructure and the vehicles in place. That...

Tom Raftery: 12:54

And the data. Because don't forget, everyone, when I hear people talk about Tesla it's very rare, they talk about the fact that Tesla has the data of every mile driven by every car they've ever manufactured.

Luke Smaul: 13:41

Yep, yep. They are building a transportation platform. And it's it's not the tech that the tech is critical data. I fully agree with you, absolutely critical. But they're going to have in place and infrastructure the proof points, the business model to when people start wanting to really, really switch to transportation as a service, not just getting an Uber. And and when we're talking about buying fleets of of cars for whoever their partners are to provide transportation as a service. I don't know what you think, that's when when people ask me why the high valuation, it's like it's because the vision for platform is there with Tesla and it's exciting for people who get that.

Tom Raftery: 14:25

Yeah, the other... And sorry for dragging it down the automotive rabbit hole. But as you do, as you said, it is one that I have a bit of an interest in because I like I like places that are being because I'm right, I get bored easily. So I like places that are being heavily disrupted. And why would the transportation sector has got the the four case megatrends, I mean. Wow. Hitting at the same time. So, of course, is massive disruption. So hence my interest is no, it's not that I'm a car guy. I'm not my my current car is a Nissan Leaf and my previous car was a Prius. So definitely not a car guy, but I wouldn't slide show and I'm giving presentations about this is a slide depicting the three models of the Renault Zoe. OK, we're now on right now on the third of the three models that they've shipped of the Reanault Zoe. The first model came out in twenty twelve, had a range of about one hundred and forty kilometres, had a twenty two kilowatt hour battery. The second model came out in twenty sixteen, had a range of about 250 kilometres, had a nearly 40 kilowatt hour battery. The third model, which came out in twenty nineteen, had a fifty kilowatt hour battery and a range of 400 kilometres. So you went from one hundred and forty five kilometres to four hundred kilometres in about seven years. The price didn't change, the price of the Renaults always stayed roughly the same, adjusting for inflation, yada, yada, yada, it stayed more or less the same. Crucially, the battery housing stayed the same across the three models, so the same exact same battery housing, initially it could only carry twenty two kilowatt hours, then 40, 50. So the point we're getting to is. The for the model, the fourth model, the Zoe, will come out in two or three years time, whenever they release that, it'll have a range of maybe 600 kilometres and so on. They're improving all the time. Yeah. So far, you or I, as a consumer of I mean, this isn't I use this, Zoe, because I happen to have the data. Right. This is this is not unique to the Zoe. This is the same for the Tesla will be the same for all the other models of electric vehicles as they come up. The technology is improving all the time. The battery prices are dropping 15 percent, roughly 13 to 15 percent year on year. The battery energy density is increasing five to eight percent year on year. So the batteries are getting cheaper and they're increasing the amount of electricity they can hold. So do you want to spend fifty thousand euros or dollars or forty thousand or thirty thousand, depending on what model you go for on a car today to find in, you know, five years time that the car that you can buy in five years time can go twice the range, right. At a third or two thirds of the price. You know, suddenly your car has been devalued even even though it's an IV, it's been devalued like the internal combustion engine. Vehicles have been devalued years ago. So I'm talking five years in the future. So you're writing off a huge amount of value of the vehicle because you've had the advances in technology like a laptop, like a phone. You know, the new model comes out, the other one gets devalued, hence. For the consumer, there's a huge attraction, I think, because cars are now becoming technology objects like tablets, like phones, like laptops, etc., they're becoming technology objects that, you know, as the new version comes out, the older versions lose value. So if you go for something like product as a service in the in the automotive space you put down here in Spain, at least it is three hundred and fifty euros a month and you get an ID three from Volkswagen and you get, you know, you can do twelve thousand kilometres a year and you get your maintenance, you get your insurance, you get derald tax, you get management of bills and tolls all for hundred a month bang. And you know the car at the end of you can you can go over a period of four months to four years, I think. Is that the range of options you can go for at the end of the four years you give back the car, you don't have to try and resell it. You give back the car and you sign up for another one. And it is the more recent version with the extra 20 percent range or whatever, whatever changes have happened in the in that previous four years, I think that's got to be hugely attractive rather than going the ownership model anymore for cars.

Luke Smaul: 19:13

And first, I have to warn you, I've been out of Europe for 10 years and you said Renault and kilometres in the same sentence. But what I love about that is you gave the phone example and. It's I've been amazed that forced obsolescence has survived as long as it has with the how high we used to call it in school when I was doing economics or business studies or whatever, the Mars bar. Right. Like you're going to a store and you give them 30 pence or whatever for a Mars bar. No questions asked. That's the value of it. That's no. Seven hundred dollars for an iPhone. And it's just you go in and you give seven dollars and you get the VOCs, you walk out, you're happy. I I really hope as you were talking there, it made me visualise this point where it'll be the wake up call and I think it's already happening with automotive, right? I think there's multiple trends, including I'm probably the last generation that is a petrolhead. Sciama Petrolhead. Right. I, I do enjoy cars and people joke. I moved to America just like I own a big engine. But I think it's going to be the wakeup call and I think it's going to start to shift ownership expectations and it's going to tap into this current generation who is genuinely more interested in experiences and less materialistic around certain things. I think that's exciting and I think it's it's going to help me as well and help a lot of my customers, because it's going to start training the executives that we're talking to. And we're already having these conversations in certain industries where I'm helping customers move to service. But this is this is OK. And the best person I love having this conversation with, because I think a lot of people are still in the iPhone, like, I want to buy it. I want to own it. If I needed to be mine like a materialistic, I want to own my own factory. I want to own my assets. And the vendor is still here. It stresses me. I go talk to a CFO with my customers and we do the maths. And if nothing else, we just remove like it was just, hey, we're just fixed pricing this right. You're not going to get a surprise bill in the mail because you're in our world a pump or a piece of kit, a filler or whatever suddenly shut down. Yeah, automotive for me is fascinating. I can't say names, but with my previous employer, I got to meet a lot of the CEOs and some of the board members from the big automotive during the early days of digital transformation. And it was fascinating to sit with with these guys and girls and see the the the the shift that was happening and the sort of, frankly, some of the fear. And I think if that's twenty point three. Right. What to do to figure out digital transformation is what's the difference, know the history and then I don't follow you or just follow automotive. And it's happening in real time. The days where I was like, oh, an Uber is not rude. You got to come take my company. Look, well, go look at automotive. Right. And not just the taxi thing, but everything that's happening there. And it is it is disruption happening in real time.

Tom Raftery: 22:15

Huge time. I mean, most most people worldwide outside of the automotive space, I've never heard of Rivian, for example. And, you know, there they're an American Start-Up in the automotive space based out of not Detroit, near Detroit, forgotten the name of the town they're out of. They landed an order from Amazon for one hundred thousand delivery vehicles. Before they had manufactured anything because, well, a) because Amazon were a big investor in them, but b) because they had a platform that they were developing, I mean, I called them a Start-Up the Start-Up that who have been in operation for over 10 years. I think I think they were founded in 2008 or 2009, but they hadn't produced any vehicles. They had spent that time developing the platform that they were going to build a vehicle on top of the electric platform, that they're going to build a vehicle on top of. They had two prototype vehicles, the other one S and the other one T, the other one as an SUV and the other one to use a truck by the American definition of truck, you know, with with batteries that are over 100 kilowatt hours. So they could go five hundred miles. I think it is no problem between three and five hundred miles. And, you know, the typical kind of American truck/SUV and like I say, Amazon, that I love to have been the Rivian salesperson who landed that order - a hundred thousand.

Luke Smaul: 23:45

I hope they read their SIP plan before they got order.

Tom Raftery: 23:49

And since then, Amazon have gone and bought a Zoox's, Zoox's were another Start-Up in the space based out of California who have a or had no Amazon, have a platform for autonomy. And, you know, they they were founded, I think, by an Australian guy, an Australian entrepreneur who came to the States and they had an amazing platform for autonomous vehicles and then literally Amazon. They were building it for several years out of California. And certainly Amazon just swooped in and picked them up. So I'm really going to be a one to watch in this space. But I wanted to talk about something else for a second in the whole shift to product as a service that I think is also overlooked. And that is and, you know, guide me back on track as well if there is something else you want to talk about in this space.

Luke Smaul: 24:43

But I'm a digital transformation petrolhead, so this is perfect.

Tom Raftery: 24:47

Okay. Now, what I was going is I think something that's often overlooked is the fact the product as a service is a big sustainability win. And the reason I say that is because one of the first big movers in the and this isn't this isn't often talked about, but one of the first big movers in the product as a service route was the companies who made light bulbs. And they had to because you had a shift in regulations globally around the time frame. You're talking around around kind of 2007, 2008, 2009 timeframe. You had global regulations say we had to get rid of incandescent bulbs and move to CPFL isn't LEDs. So they were outlawed, incandescent bulbs were outlawed. You had a time frame to switch from them, but you could no longer sell incandescent bulbs from Data lakes depending on where you are. X was one year and another, but end of life for incandescent bulbs and incandescent bulbs were almost the definition of inbuilt obsolescence. Yeah, you know, you saw over decades the lifetime of the working life of the bulb shrink so that by around two eight, the lifetime of an incandescent bulb was around one to two thousand hours. The lifetime of an LED is twenty five to fifty thousand hours. So you're talking twenty five X. The price difference between an incandescent and an LED was about five X, so you'd have five X increase in the price for a twenty five X increase in the lifetime. So that meant a huge revenue crash about to hit the bulb companies, the manufacturers. So they had to scramble and so they had a burning platform. So they went after the product as a service route. And so no. And by the way, on the burning platform, thank you. So, so yeah, they had this burning platform. They had to scramble because they were going to have a massive drop in revenue and they went product to the service. So know, things like the city of Los Angeles doesn't own any streetlights. They're all owned by Philips Lighting or as it's know, known signify. So signify owns all the lights in Los Angeles. And because Signify owns them, they're connected. They charge the city of Los Angeles, parliament of late delivered. And so to measure the lumens of light delivered. These are connected bulbs. So they're constantly reporting back to their owners signify how much how many lumens have been delivered. And of course, because they're connected signify you can see whether the bulb is going to fail or not. And if the bulb is going to fail, then it's a threat to the revenue from that bulb. So they send an engineer out there, swap out the bulb for one that's new. And so the city of Los Angeles gets its light all the time when it's supposed to. And signifier keeps. Keep wanting to say Phillips signify, get the revenue from the bulbs all the time when they're supposed to. So it's constant revenue coming in for them. So that's great. It's a win win for both Bush. Where the sustainability angle comes in is the lifetime of the bulbs. They don't want the obsolescence anymore. This was something that was at least we say there was no incentive to get rid of the obsolescence up until as you were building incandescent bulbs. But now that you are maintaining ownership of the bulbs, you absolutely want to engineer out any obsolescence. So the bulbs have a much, much, much longer lifetime because its product as a service. So the product as a service one is great for that.

Luke Smaul: 28:27

I love it. And two stories around that. So first, I got to tell you, a good friend of both of ours, Deborah Dull, so like my go to on everything circular and sustainability. And when I was launching my firm and figuring out this digital transformation sort of system for companies, I did have in my mind, there is a very systematic approach and a very common approach, especially I'm really talking industrial OEMs. Right, these companies that had the big barriers to entry. So I sat with Deborah early on when I was still figuring out my product and sketched on a whiteboard with her. We work somewhere locally here in Washington. My plan, what I thought was broken about digital transformation and the example I always used was the famous digital thread, which was meant to be, hey, we do digital twin first and we connect all the assets and we connect the supply chain as if by magic we'll make more money. I said, the problem with that is there is what I call a value firewall in the digital thread between you and your customer, because the business model, they're not incentivised to reward you for efficiencies in your supply chain. I said product is a service fixes that. The digital transformation, the transformative part fixes that. And I showed my system of my approach. And Deborah, as always, was a genius and said, well, that's that's lovely. Look, we call out the circular economy. And to this day, I am not a circular first firm, I think there's a long way to go for people to accept circular economy. But I'm a huge fan and I've kept the principles and it is the core principles of circular as the underlying principles for transformation and those that are same. And it's the way I said it. And another friend of ours, Lorcan, we were talking about this recently about the impact of transformation on a supply chain. And I said, look, the way I do transformation, the way I teach companies and people to do transformation, it's actually monetising supply chain efficiencies and that is monetising your sustainability efforts. Right. And it's getting that all important. Breaking up the value firewall where you're selling stuff for dollars and every year your customers want more stuff for less dollars. Break that cycle, which is why Phillips did. And and it opens up a whole new world and it is much more sustainable. The other fun Phillips story, I have to tell you, and I can't say names, but I spent a lot of time with CFOs and VPs of finance with my customers because that's where this stuff really starts to hit the ground running is which finance and we're talking about Philips and the decision we were trying to make or one of my customers was whether we keep the assets under product or service on their balance sheet or we lose them. Right. We work with all these partners. So Rolls-Royce famously just made to serve a great book on this whole topic and. They work with a partner, right, so they sell the assets to at least partner the lease partner leases up to their end customer service contract around. That's their model. And we're talking about Phillips and this VP of finance made a very good point is like, yeah, that's great for engines. If you lease a car, go back to automotive. When they do the calc, there's a risk in the calculation to do. And one of the risks is kind of get the asset back and can I sell it? Yeah. You can't go collect ten thousand LED light bulbs from city streets and try and sell them on eBay. What are the challenges Philips had actually have to keep those light bulbs on their balance sheet? Interesting. So I thought it's a fun anecdote when you get down to the nitty gritty of this stuff, which is finance and that you got to figure it out again. You mqtt automotive because automotive, I figured out leasing them second hand market and secondary markets...

Tom Raftery: 32:15

Fascinating.

Luke Smaul: 32:16

...to a T, right?.

Tom Raftery: 32:17

And of course, one of the other cool things. Again, speaking of circular, one of the cool things about products and services, you can take that data back from the devices in the field and for the first time get actual real world usage data and feed that into your R&D division. So versions three and four and five of your products reflect actual real world use cases and therefore are even better again. So again, it's a win for your customer and it's a win for you.

Luke Smaul: 32:44

And that was the problem I was trying to solve for at the time I was with one of the big tech slash industrials we were trying to solve for data access and data sharing cloud and industrial IoT still a tricky words to talk about. And I was watching the what I call the value firewall limit, the access to data because customers and customers weren't incentivised if you start to shift the business model. Absolutely. And in the best part is. When you send that data to R&D and one of the things we talk about with some of our customers is designed for service, right, because you're typically only the service, too. So you have to design it better so that a tech can maintain it faster. It's straight to the bottom line when you do that because of product a service, you're going to make more margin on that. So it's a full closed loop business model, as you can tell. But my excitement on this, that's digital transformation. That's an. I'm not saying this is always what I have to work with customers on, and I love some of my customers because of how they understand time horizons for this stuff. I'm not saying. Move to Phillip's business model today or tomorrow or even next year, right? The system I've built there is a unproven that there is baby steps, right, that I can walk you through or I can teach you to get you there. And it avoids because it's discovered recently in a conversation, it avoids what a lot of companies are afraid of, which is the J curve that if I shifted this business model, I'm going to lose money for for years to come. And I teach customers. No, that's not right. If that's the case. The problem we haven't solved for first is that all important supply chain efficiency, like if you've got operational excellence in place across manufacturing agreement and service and typically the three elements a lot of these companies have, if they're going to jump quickly to products and services, we don't have them. You can use a partner. That's fine. If you've got true operational excellence and you've really got your arms around those elements of your supply chain, there shouldn't be a J curve. If you start to move to product service, you've got to baby step into it. But I think a lot of people make is that's cool. I'm going to move to product as a service. Yeah, but then you're responsible for how well your supply chain works. The customer doesn't feel the pain you do, and that can be a huge wake up call after a lot of people, I think, have gotten scared of this business model. But it's the value is there and there is a way to step into it carefully.

Tom Raftery: 35:12

Super, super. Luke, we've got we've run well over time, so we've started winding up. Is there any question I haven't asked you that you think I should have anything? We've not mentioned that you think it's important for people to be aware of.

Luke Smaul: 35:30

No, I just think, again, it's pretty clear from how excited I am to talk about this topic. And I've I've done this in two different settings now. Right. I work for one of the big industrials, had a relatively senior position there, drove one of their big digital transformation programmes. And that worked very well and have since launched on my own, have repeated that again, myself and my co-founder. We now have a system and I'm so passionate about this space and I want to stop people having to pump money into these programmes unnecessarily. So I'm really on a mission. I'm doing a lot of it for free and I'll talk about that in a second, or we talk about the second to educate this space and try and just get those simple things like what's the difference between digitisation and digital transformation? What's the history? Why are we doing this and why should we start and go? What's the end goal like product as a service? So I spent a lot of this year building a lot into some free e-learning content. And I think if there's no other takeaway today besides the fact that you're kind of like a. Petrolhead in hiding, and I'm a pure petrolhead and I don't know what a Renault is anymore, and it's that, yeah, please go check out my free master class. I'm sure that you can put the links.

Tom Raftery: 36:46

Yup any links you send me I'll put them in the show notes.

Luke Smaul: 36:49

Great, but that's really all I just want people to avoid. I've done this now for four years since it's been called digital transformation, 20 years when it hasn't been called digital transformation. And I can kind of show people where the. The pitfalls are where the landmines are and help people avoid them.

Tom Raftery: 37:07

Superb look, if people want to know more about yourself or your company or any of the things we've talked about, including that free course that we already talked about. I'm sure you'll send me the link to that. But other links, would you want to share?

Luke Smaul: 37:21

The best place to find me where I'm most active is on LinkedIn, and that's the easiest way to find me. So, Luke Smaul, I'm the only Luke Smaul on LinkedIn, you'll find me there. And that's where I do most of my conversation, most of my networking, and then get the the master class I've called it decoded transformation rather than digital transformation, trying to decode everything I've learnt to teach people how to not make the same mistake. So that's decoded transformation. Dotcom, you can log on there, get the free master class and you're you're kind of off and running.

Tom Raftery: 37:56

Super, super. Luke, that's been great Thanks a million for coming on the show today.

Luke Smaul: 38:00

Thank you for having me. Yeah, this is yeah. This has been amazing and I'm glad we've got to talk cars. That was great.

Tom Raftery: 38:06

OK, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chain to head on over to SAP dot com slash digital supply chain or simply drop me an email to Tom Dot Raftery at SAP dot com if you'd like to show, please don't forget to subscribe to it on your podcast application of choice 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 the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.