#7 - Levine Naidoo. Reducing supply chain friction.
Levine Naidoo is a frictionless supply chain executive with the IBM Sterling business unit. His passion is to reduce business friction within supply chain and compliance related disciplines. He is an active member of several international standards, technical committees, and has a wealth of experience in driving mass market adoption of standards and technological change.
We talk about how to reduce friction in supply chains and business in general. We discuss the role of AI and automation. We talk about the central role of change management and people, even within the field of AI itself.
Highlights and take-aways
In every interaction that a business has with its trading partners, there’s friction. Many organizations have implemented the supply chain operations reference model, which comes with siloes: Plan, source, make, deliver. Handovers from one silo to another create friction and inefficiencies, and a loss of visibility.
Combined with a lack of up-to-the-minute information creates challenges for decision support. Frictionless business is about trying to remove as much of this as possible and making your business more streamlined, more optimized.
An important step towards that is to maximize automation and freeing people up from too onerous manual activities, freeing them up for high value activities.
Artificial intelligence really means augmented intelligence. So it's never about replacing people, it's about augmenting people's work, freeing their time, so they do more higher valued work, and also helping people in their jobs. One of the biggest issues when implementing AI in organizations is when leadership doesn't really create a vision and address those fears.
Not many people consider that IBM itself is a supply chain. But IBM operates in 175 countries and has a massive supply chain; it has acquired a long range of analytics companies to build an “analytics arsenal” to solve common problems.
Harvard Business Review did a survey some time ago which found that 90% of successful AI projects devoted 50% of the budget to change management. And part of the change management was actually involving the staff who are most impacted by the problem to actually develop the solution.
Change management is very hard. When you involve people in designing a solution there's a high chance of success because people who are involved and participate in creating a solution feel that it's their solution - they've got ownership. When you have ownership of something, you will do your best to actually see it implemented.
It's all too easy to forget that in today's complex world, we are still actually dealing with people. There isn’t any such thing as a technology project. It's all about people. People conceive systems, they design systems, they build systems, they implement systems, and they operate systems for people as well. We can use AI as much as possible, but that people element is just so important.
Even within the AI field itself it's people who create the models. It's people who figure out new algorithms.
Maritime Makers Quality Quotes
“There isn’t any such thing as a technology project. It's all about people. People conceive systems, they design systems, they build systems, they implement systems, and they operate systems for people as well.” - Levine Naidoo
“When you involve people in designing a solution there's a high chance of success because people who are involved and participate in creating a solution feel that it's their solution - they've got ownership. When you have ownership of something, you will do your best to actually see it implemented.” - Levine Naidoo
Resources
IBM Sterling, where Levine is a frictionless supply chain executive.
The growth mindset, by Carol Dweck.
Tradelens, a blockchain solution developed for container shipping.