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Transcription
The podcast episode discusses the importance of managing risks in the supply chain, particularly in the context of customs and compliance. The guests highlight the lessons learned from the pandemic, including the need for preparedness and the interconnectedness of supply chains. They emphasize the risks of operating in silos and the importance of collaboration and communication to mitigate these risks. The guests also mention the role of technology in managing risks and the challenges faced by companies during remote work. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Let's Talk Supply Chain. Last week on Episode 2 of our CargoWise mini-series, we dove deep into the world of customs and compliance, shedding light on the complexities and intricacies of international regulations. And as we explore all of those topics, one thing became abundantly clear. There are inherent risks lurking in the shadows. So today, we are continuing that exploration by asking a very big question. How should we approach and manage these risks, not just within the compliance landscape, but across every stage of the supply chain? So I'm joined by two brand new guests to take on this big question today. And we'll also dive into the lessons we've learned from the pandemic, you know, how organizations can start to build resilience in their operations, the role of technology and risk management, and why taking a holistic approach to your supply chain is the key to success. So I am welcoming to the show Nahi and Mohan, because last week we talked about compliance and the real cost of noncompliance, which honestly was really fascinating. Compliance is an area that we can be guilty of not talking about enough. We might think, oh, we'll leave that to legal or we'll leave that to finance. But as we discussed, compliance really touches every business area and has impacts that we might not even have thought about. And so that really leads us into today's conversation, which is about risk. Something that, you know, the pandemic taught us kind of the hard way. We have to build into each and every element of our supply chain strategy. So I'm looking forward to getting your thoughts on this today. And let's start with introductions. Welcome to both of you. Nahi, we'll start with you. Can you let us know who you are and what you do at CargoWise? Absolutely. So I'm Nahi, and I head the business development team for CargoWise and Wisestate Global into Africa. Effectively, I work with companies predominantly in South Africa, but also across the African continent, both companies which are headquartered in Africa and multinationals who are growing into Africa, to really understand their business needs and what they're trying to achieve, and then to help them translate that in terms of, you know, selecting and choosing the right software vendor in order to deliver that. Amazing. I mean, Africa is an emerging market, and I can't wait to hear your thoughts on all of this. I didn't mean to interrupt, so go ahead. I was basically going to say that when we talk about risks, they are often extremely pronounced in Africa. And overcoming risks, these risks are, you know, often technological solutions are deep at the core of that. Absolutely. And again, you know, it being such an emerging market, I've been hearing about different companies looking to go into Africa. There's talk about supply chain even more. We've got a really big community for Let's Talk Supply Chain in Africa as well. So super excited for that. And Mohan, it's great to see you again. Tell us about yourself, about Positive PC, and your Platinum partnership with Cargowise. Hey, Sarah. Thanks for having me. It's good to be on the show again. For our viewers, my name is Mohan Dipsing. I'm the owner and lead consultant at Positive PC. We are a Platinum Cargowise partner, and we provide training and consulting services to companies that use Cargowise. So, I mean, this is going to be a really interesting one because we see this every day. You know, we provide training. We go into clients. We see how they're handling or not handling risks, and we'll talk about that later. But, yeah, I can't wait to share my insights on these topics. All right. So let's do this. Let's go way back to the pandemic. It's clear that it really exposed a lot of vulnerabilities in supply chains worldwide and brought the topic of risk to the forefront. So what are the most significant lessons we've learned from the pandemic, and how should organizations really apply these lessons to enhance their supply chain risk management strategies moving forward? Mohan, I'm going to start with you, and then we'll go to you, Nahid. So I think the biggest risk, and I want to start here, that we saw was, oh, it was prepared. The preparedness was not there. We thought we were. That's one of the biggest things. We thought we were prepared. Right. And then we were absolutely not prepared. So you've got to have a mitigation plan, right, a risk management plan. But if you don't test it, how do you know it works? Right. And that's one of the things. So most people did not have a good plan. Maybe they did mentally, not written down on paper, not ready to execute. But it exposed a lot of things. We saw inadequate technology, training, staff were not ready to work differently. So we need to be prepared and have that mitigation plan. So, look, we can't see the future, but we can have a plan and be prepared. Yeah, absolutely. Nahid? For me, what was really fascinating to realize during COVID is how apt the term of a global village has become and the interconnectedness of people, of countries, of supply chains, where we saw the virus jumping between us, but we also saw, you know, worldwide how interconnected everything was. And we also, what was fascinating is for the first time ever, supply chain seemed to suddenly be on all the news channels and all the reports as people realized that this rather not noted industry and business was actually at the core of everything and was really from food to industry to all types of commerce. It's one of the pillars that, you know, had to continue. And so there was extreme pressure on people to deliver, and there was extreme uncertainty. And it was quite incredible to witness how, no matter what, we had to keep those boats flowing, we had to keep those entries moving, and how supply chain really is so fundamental for everything that happens in this global village. And how do you do that when people are out sick or they've had to quarantine? You know, I remember the crews on the boats, right, had to be flown in, or they had to quarantine on the boats. I mean, there were so many different scenarios that none of us could have seen and really thought about how to work through and figure out to keep everything moving. Now, everybody knows that I believe that collaboration is the future of business, and that certainly became clearer for the industry, obviously, during the pandemic. Siloed working was kind of a real barrier to agility and the ability to solve those challenges that came up so often, quickly. So what are the inherent risks for companies that continue to operate in silos? And what steps can those companies take to then mitigate those risks? I mean, really, the answer is, get out of your own way, get out of those silos. But Naki, let's start with you. What do you think? So I remember as a child playing a game called Broken Telephone, where you'd sit in a circle with a whole lot of other children, you'd whisper a word into the ear, and the next person would whisper it along. And it was quite fun because the final word that came out the other end was almost never what was first said. And I think that game really illustrates what happens when you're working in silos. And when the distances between those silos gets bigger, those challenges get greater. So you often see silos in the businesses where operations don't understand what accounts are doing, and within a single business, then sometimes between the business in one country as it operates to another, there might be silos for different types of processes or ways of communicating. And then you get the supply chain, where you basically have to work with people from every country around the world, in every language. Some of them are customers, some of them are suppliers. And the complexity just goes up by an incredible factor. And so it's a great question about how do we really ensure that there's transparency and communication and information and knowledge management across all these different parties, and to do it in a way that feels natural. So I think in some ways we learned very powerfully the power of how we can communicate digitally during COVID. But I think we also learned how important it is that we get together and have those discussions over the water tower, and where there's a bit of cross-collaboration and cross-pollination between teams, and even between companies and their suppliers and their customers. Because the bottom line is the better we can all understand each other, the better we can work together to enable supply chain and goods moving and arriving when they should. It's so true. And I really like your example of broken telephone. And I think about how we've taken it to the next level, where people have headphones on, and they've got really loud music, and you're trying to read somebody's lips. Like that's kind of what happened during the pandemic, right? We took that broken telephone to the extreme, and that's why, you know, that communication breakdown. Mohan, what do you think? Yeah, I think that was a really good analogy there, because that's exactly what was happening in offices. And it worked, because, you know, you were all sitting right there. And, I mean, it's a better connection, because you're sitting there, you can say what you got to say. But then what happens if you take the whole group playing broken telephone and you put them in different cities? How do you communicate, right? And how quickly can you communicate? So that ended up to be one of the risks and one of the things that became to be a problem. Like, how do you communicate? Now, how do you operate individually when you're all working from home? You can't hand a file over to somebody, the next cubicle over anymore, that's gone. And that's where a lot of companies struggle. So that's the risk. And unfortunately, I do see some companies falling back to that now that we're back in the office again. And that's something we really got to be careful with. We have to learn from these things that we see and all these experiences and improve our processes going forward. So, you know, look, if you work in silos, there's always going to be a risk when something happens. You know, you wouldn't be ready. Productivity suffers because, you know, if you can't hand over that file to the person because they've gotten up and are taking a break, now you're waiting five minutes just to hand the file over, where in a system, you just move on to your next task and they would get it when they're ready. So we're eliminating bottlenecks also by implementing and getting rid of these silos, I should say. So if I look at it from that perspective, that's one type of silo, right? From a process perspective, you also have systems silos where you have different systems that don't really talk to each other. Yeah. And that's another form of silos that we have to be careful with, where we end up with redundancy in terms of data entry and data processing. If it was we're all in one system, you don't have silos anymore. If you enter it once, it's available everywhere. We kind of call that digital straight-through processing if that term kind of rings a bell. Yeah, absolutely. And what about the word resilience? I think everybody might be a little bit tired of this word, but it's very, very important, right? Because I think coming out of the pandemic, it was like resilience, resilience, resilience. And we're like, well, what exactly does that mean? But it does correlate to what we're talking about today in risk. So how, Mohan, how can companies really build resilience into their supply chain operations? Is it the right word even? But, you know, we want to look at how we can adapt, tackle challenges, manage those risks and disruptions. So how does resilience help with that? So look, resilience, if we go back to the root of resilience, it's basically the ability or the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties or something. So resilience is really about being ready, being able to recover, being able to deal with something that's not normal. And we can talk about operational resilience, where it comes to your operational processes and how can they withstand a change in the environment or a change in the conditions. There is also security. We can talk about that when we get into some other aspects. Compliance, which kind of is related there. We need to be resilient when it comes to compliance because that changes all the time. We have global compliance. We have local compliance. How do we deal with a change when there is a country that says, OK, now all of a sudden you need to supply five bits of information or else we're going to reject your shipment? How do you know that as an operator and what's your plan to deal with that? And these are things we don't have to wait for an event to happen or a disruption. These are things we need to have a plan in place for. And we support that with training and the necessary support services internally at organizations and also having an escalation process, right? You're not going to have a process to deal with everything that comes along. What do you do? You see a situation that you don't have it in your SOP. Where does it go? A lot of companies don't have an escalation process or something that's abnormal. That's so true. We don't talk about escalation process in our supply chains very often either. But I think also systems, right? When we were talking about compliance in the last episode, it was like you need to be able to have the technology to make you aware of all the changes so that you can mitigate those risks. I mean, if I go back to the changes that they made on the tariffs, I think in footwear in the U.S. and I think it was right before the pandemic, there were so many different changes. I was talking to a bunch of customs brokers and they were like, we are working weekends because we've had to upend all of our systems and everything for our clients so that they're ready to go on Monday. And, you know, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of pressure on the amazing people that are in our industry, too. And so the risk is also burnout. Definitely. If you don't have everything in place. Nahim, what do you think about this particular question around resilience? I mean, we've determined that it's the right word. But how do we use it in our supply chain operations? I think it's a great word. And I like Mohan's definition of the ability to recover. But I think it's more than just recover. It's the ability to respond. And I think, you know, people in supply chain, at the heart of what we do, we're problem solvers. Things are always changing. Planes are changing. Our ETAs and ATAs, what's planned and what happens are always changing. And our ability to respond is really our ability to be resilient. How we respond is very deeply linked to the topic about risk management. Because on some things we need to have backup systems, backup solutions, so that, you know, if one, for example, Internet line, as an example, goes down, we've got a backup. Or if, in terms of the service providers and your servers that you need, you know, you need to know that you have backups and proper disaster recovery plans in place. Because, you know, to be truly resilient is to not even notice when these things have happened because you've planned for them. Then the things happen which you haven't planned for. But because at least everything else is so structured in what you're doing, you have time to be able to respond in that way. But I think resilience is really about, at the end of the day, people. And it's people who need to respond when things don't work exactly as planned and have to make calls. And so at the heart of resilience, I think, is enabling and empowering staff with training, with a deeper understanding of what they're doing and what they're trying to achieve, so that when the pathway to what they're trying to achieve is blocked, they can find other ways of achieving it. And that they really understand or focus on the goals they're working towards and not just on the processes that they are following. And I find, you know, there's a term they call anti-fragility. And the idea is fragile systems get weaker when you put pressure on them. And anti-fragile systems get stronger when you put pressure on it. So like the human body, when we exercise, we actually get stronger, not weaker. And so I think that when we enable and empower staff and they know that they're problem solvers and they understand what we're really trying to achieve, and we create a culture of learning and of education, you know, that's really where true resilience stems from. I like that. And I also like the fact that you said that resilience should be the fact that something happens and we don't even know about it because we've got the right systems in place and we can move on. That's a really great point. Now let's talk about a holistic approach. I've heard this term a number of times. You know, why is it so important and how can organizations start to adapt a holistic approach to identify and mitigate risks across different aspects of their supply chain? Nahi, I'm going to go to you and I'm going to surmise that this probably has to do with your comment about people as well. So again, a holistic approach is the opposite of a siloed approach. It's a space in which there's communication and there is visibility. And so what happens is there's really an understanding of what is required, you know, across that supply chain. One of the challenges that we find sometimes in businesses and definitely along the supply chain is you sometimes have this conflict between local optimization and global optimization. So what happens is each department is trying to optimize their department but sometimes doesn't realize that there's other departments that have very important goals that they need to achieve and we need to balance this so that at the end, you know, we're delivering the best service as a business and not just as a single business unit, for example, or department. When we go outside of companies now, so you've got suppliers and you've got customers, again, this issue of each customer and each entity along the supply chain trying to optimize locally, it gets more and more challenging. If we could really, you know, allow everyone again to understand what is the goal here? When does the customer really need the goods delivered? What are the true challenges? You know, what type of delivery schedules should we be aiming at? Something I sometimes think about is, you know, it's quite incredible. In America, you've got like same-day delivery on Amazon and a lot of these different things but often people don't need that same-day delivery. They may only need the product in a month's time. And if it was like, say, listen, actually deliver that tent for my holiday in a month, it would be easier for me because I don't have to keep a box, you know, in the house somewhere until I go And actually, fill a truck, don't send a half-filled truck because of trying to maximize speed. So a holistic approach is when we really balance these things between speed and price and what's really, I find great, which is now entering into the conversation, is environmental impact. And starting to recognize that, you know, if we can really align everyone from the supplier to the buyer around how to do this best, it could unlock great efficiencies throughout the entire supply chain. Yeah, I like what you said about the local and global, though, because a lot of times, like you said, we're focused on what we're doing locally, but we also have offices in different locations. Or maybe our service providers have offices in different locations that we're dealing with and we're talking to. And so what does that mean on a global scale? We know what it means and we talk to the internal stakeholders that we have access to locally, but are we really tapping into? And that's another siloed approach and a lot of risk when it comes to that. If we're only thinking about our local environment and not thinking about the global environment, such a great point. Mohan, I want to go to you about the holistic approach and maybe talk also about the strategies that we should be looking to employ when it comes to assessing and managing the risks with network of trading partners that I just mentioned. Right. There's financial, there's operational, there's geopolitical. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, so look, you know, taking a holistic approach, you can have the right idea and the right plan, but if you don't have the system to execute, it's not going to work very well. So you also have to have a system that can support that because you're thinking global and you have to think global in an international trade. You have data that originates on one side of the world and ends up on the other side of the world. And if you have disconnected systems, we're back to siloed operation. So we've really got to have the right system to support that global reach that can handle it. So you've got the right system, you implement the right process, but you also have to have the right partners. You need partners that are forward thinking, partners that are invested in technology, because at the end of the day, technology is what makes this all work. We can't rely on a paper system to do this. It'll never work. We're going back to our telex maze. And that's what technology does. But technology is evolving. Technology is enabling us to have a holistic system globally. So we have to think beyond local processing and think global. Even if we're responsible for just the local processing side of it, how can we take advantage of data and information that's available from a global perspective? And that's where interconnecting systems are being on the same platform or having a platform where there are portals where the originating party can send you all that information. You're just eliminating data entry, you're eliminating errors, and you're improving your productivity. Yeah. Well, and I also think speaking the same data language, right, between your service providers and third parties that you're dealing with, because also you also want to be on the same page about how you both think about the data. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they were like, if you're logging into each one of these systems, your data is actually being left behind in all of these systems. And so if you're interconnected and you're speaking the same data language, you need to be able to share that data and making sure that that data that belongs to that person also stays within their sphere and their platform as well, because that could be a really huge risk. Right, Mohawk? Absolutely. Yeah, you've got to have, you know, that approach where everything is shared. And, you know, think of, you know, if we were talking silos there, think of a process where you go on Amazon, you buy something, and you're like, okay, great. Now sign on to this other portal and enter all of your shipping information so we can ship it to you. Why, right? You already have my information. Now you're asking me, and that's free porting. You go into one system, you place your order with someone, and then there's another system where that is being entered again for the same exact shipment. And that's what we're doing. That could happen. Right. So, and that's what happens. That's reality. And that's where we need systems that are truly global and interconnected to prevent that. Absolutely. So we're talking about systems, we're talking about technology, and how technology has become a huge part of making this holistic, connected approach sort of happen. So, Nahid, you know, how has technology evolved to become a critical component of supply chain risk management? What are some of the specific solutions that you've seen that have proven effective? And when we think about our supply chains and we think about mitigating risk and that supply chain risk management, you know, where do we start? You know, what are the solutions that have proven effective? So I think, you know, to go back to what Mohan was saying, I totally agree with what he was saying. You know, we've been talking about these challenges of the different silos that exist. And if you then throw each silo onto different systems, you're just, again, multiplying the challenges. Where, alternatively, when you start bringing everyone onto a single system, both within the company itself, so that you've got operations, finance, you know, planning, everything in one system, you suddenly are automatically starting to break down those silos. When you start to include into that all of the external partners, from the customer to the suppliers, so that you're integrating with systems, you're sharing data, again, we are breaking those silos down further. Any data, you know, which has entered any one place should be available in all those places, as you mentioned. And then you're starting to unlock value for everyone across that supply chain. Because as you say, look, here's all the information you need in a data format, it's accurate, and you also don't have to recapture it, which raises its own risks. You know, that really creates great efficiencies. In general, we see that there's three supply chains, in a way. There's a movement of goods, physical goods that actually have to move. There's a movement of information, of bookings being made, of information being transferred between departments, between companies, and into, towards other companies as well. And then there's a financial supply chain, which is making sure that everything is getting invoiced, and the monies are being paid, that all the forex, et cetera, is being handled correctly. And along the line of each of those ones, there's different risks that start happening. There's risks at the operational level of the goods moving, of getting the trucks there, and making sure there's ample space in warehouses, and all of those. In terms of the documentation and the information, you know, you had a session on compliance, and the complexity just keeps going up. And to think that a human being is able to hold all the information about every country, the origin, the destination, the type of goods, where it's flowing through, it's just no longer possible. And so, again, systems help us to manage the physical goods. Scanning is becoming a very powerful way we are helping goods transition through warehouses, transiting, et cetera, between gates where they come into other places to be dispatched. At the documentary side, you know, having strong systems in place to ensure that all your legal requirements and compliance requirements are covered, all your documentary and messaging. And then at the financial level, to make sure you've got all the checks and balances in place across your financial system to ensure that you are handling that properly and, you know, your cash flow is being released as rapidly as possible due to having good systems in places. So all of these, at the end of the day, are technological solutions, which are allowing the management of these things in a truly efficient way. And having good systems and, even more, having one system, which allows you to achieve this, is really at the heart of how technology can transform risk and really allow us to collaborate. So Mohan, let's talk about that, because Nahid just talked about a single operating platform for end-to-end logistics. Why is it crucial for risk identification and mitigation? And you mentioned security earlier. I know that that is a huge risk to supply chains right now, currently in 2023. I don't see it leaving that top 10 risks in 2024. So talk to us a little bit about that and how that can also help with that security question. So, I mean, again, going back to holistic approach, right, it's if you have the data early, you can make decisions. One thing that we do and a specific solution that we implement for our cargo-wise clients is dashboards. We create these visual boards that, as soon as you get notified of a job or shipment, it's in the system. It starts off early, it's in the system, and all the data points are being added upon. We're adding layers and layers and adding information until it gets to the end. But the entire lifecycle of a job is visible on one screen. So you can see all of your files that are in the inception stage and as they move along. And that's great, but the real value comes from identifying issues and identifying those potential issues early before they actually become a problem. So we put in rules, we put in metrics to start changing colors and start sending alerts and start doing things. But having all the data in one place from an end-to-end visibility perspective is what really makes a difference. Because we can have all the data we want, but if it's locked away and we're not looking at it, it does us no good. It's not information, it's just data. We need to take all that data and make it and create information, which is where you need a good system that can take all of that and visualize. Give you the decision-making tools that you need to discover and react to issues proactively. So that's kind of one of the specific solutions that we do. But you have things like business intelligence, you know, compliance enforcement that goes along the way shipments go into a particular country. You need to know what needs to be done and what needs to be filed and how early it needs to be filed. And if you don't do these things, you know, there are penalties that are involved. So we're talking financial risk here. So we've got to be really careful with compliance, but all those compliance risks really end up being financial risks. Because if you don't file something on time, you know, you're going to get that letter saying you owe $10,000. And they are not small amounts when you violate these things. So that's where it really helps to have a single global platform, everything in one place. You can have that visibility as opposed to waiting for a pre-alert on a shipment and you didn't file the ISFs yet because you did not know that. You had a shipment. So that's where it really matters to have everything in one place. Amazing. And so, Nahi, you know, how has CargoWise helped some of those organizations? Like, thank you for that example, Mohan. But I want to know from Nahi about CargoWise and how that's helped organizations to really build resilience into their supply chains, especially in the face of unexpected disruptions. Walk us through what that looks like and if you have an example to share. Absolutely. So, first of all, you know, the CargoWise system itself is hosted on multiple continents, Australia, in Hamburg in Germany, and also in America. And so, again, having, you know, very strong IT infrastructure for customers is often a big risk. You know, to go down and not be able to access your systems is a large risk. And so, knowing that your service provider has, you know, put in extensive disaster recovery planning, security planning, you know, cyber threat is a real reality. And our industry has seen a market growth in terms of people focusing on it. And so, you know, CargoWise is really needed to ensure that we have really robust solutions in place to support customers at that level, you know, in terms of hosting as well as the cyber security type of things. What that also means is that our customers don't need to worry about that infrastructure. It's already in place and it allows them to focus on what they need to do. Another big, you know, place where I think mitigates a lot of risks is having partners like Mohan and ensuring that customers can access real strong expertise when they are looking at these. Sometimes, you know, customers, you know, they've got the view of the world as it is, and partners have had great experience in terms of working with multiple types of customers. And being from the outside is the same. A guest for a while can see for a mile. And so, sometimes, you know, having someone external to your business actually consulting you and telling you, you know, this is true, but we've also seen this done other ways, and it could be really helpful. I think what Mohan mentioned about dashboards is very important. You know, if you have all your information in one system, then you can have the information you need, and the earlier you can see it, the earlier you can respond. And having it in one system means it's actionable because you can actually see what's been happening as opposed to having to speak to 10 different people on 10 different systems to get a single view of what's going on. You know, the biggest thing to respond is to understand what's actually happened, and then you can work out what should we do. So, the Cargill system being a single system for operations all the way from quoting to invoicing, across forwarding, across clearing in, you know, over 20 countries, as we've said, the complexities keep going up. And trying to manage not just one company that's operating in 20 countries, but one company that's operating in 20 languages on 20 systems with 20 different databases, each one of them have 20 different cyber risks. Each one of them, it just becomes, multiplies those risks. So, at the heart of what CargillWise has is a single global system where all of your cyber security risks are taken care of. You've got infinite scalability in terms of you have the modules there, and you can turn them on when you need them in the countries you need. We've got the product in 50 languages, which allows us to, companies to really, you know, customize to do that. And local partners to make sure that even when you're rolling out a global solution, you can still think local and understand the local requirements and ensure that the system has been set up to allow for that. And having all of it in this way, a global system like that, means that your master data management, all of your organizations, your customers, you can sort them once, worldwide, and have true visibility of what are they doing, what are their patterns of behavior, you know, their trade lanes, et cetera, which really allows, at the end of the day, for you to deliver better services to your customers and really align that entire supply chain, you know, across goals. Across processes, and even across systems. Two things came up for me while you were just mentioning all of that. One is the word protect and protection, right? There's a lot of times when we're looking to work with new service providers or new technology providers. That really should be top of mind for everybody, is what is the disaster recovery plan? What do you have in plan, in place for me when something does happen? That should be a major question across the board. But what it says about CargoWise is that you're thinking about how to not only protect your systems, but you're also protecting your customer and your customer's customer as well, and that you've got those plans in place and you can share them with them, and that's why that single platform really makes a lot of sense. When we're thinking about a single platform, though, and I was thinking about having multiple platforms again, I'm going back to an example of something that I mentioned the other day, which was upload, download, upload, download, upload, download. Now, if you do not want to have that in your life, do not go with multiple systems. Make sure you have one system, because otherwise you're going to be doing that for the majority of your day, and I just wanted to mention that. Well, we've come to the end of this discussion, and so I want to ask both of you, what are some of the main risks that we can all expect in 2024? What should we be thinking about? What should we be putting into our plan or mitigating for the year to come? Mohan, I'm going to start with you. Well, we don't have the magic eight ball, but... Come on. Yes, you do. But there are things, I mean, we could see from research and from predictions and things, we can see and make a good guess as to what's going to happen or what we can expect, right? I think something that we really have to keep an eye on is regional conflicts and how that's going to affect, you know, trade, trade embargoes, denied parties, lane restrictions. We have all these things happening just because of disruptions and regional conflicts. We have to watch that. Cybersecurity. Ongoing. That's not new, but we really need to keep focusing on it because the bad guys always seem to find a new avenue of finding their way to circumvent systems and protections we have in place. So you can't let your foot off the gas on that one. And then inflation. I mean, we have inflation still going. I know there is a little bit of a control on it, but we have to watch it because that affects us from a financial perspective, right? That's a risk. If you're not factoring that into your pricing, you're not factoring that into your whole process. That's a risk that a lot of companies don't look at. And they keep charging the same prices, doing the same thing. But our costs keep going up. There is inflation affecting your costs. Your margins are getting thinner. So we're talking about risks. And it's one of the things that you don't really realize until you look at the numbers and you realize, wait a second. You know, our bottom line is shrinking here. And we always have regulatory changes, which, again, we've got to keep going. Disruptions, strikes at location, you know, we have to watch for those things. And then last but not least on my list is another significant event that's going to affect us like the pandemic has. We have to be ready for that and be prepared for that. Yeah, such great points and so many things for us to think about as supply chain professionals moving into the new year. Nahid, do you have anything to add to that one or maybe something that somebody should be leaving here thinking about? So I think, you know, all those risks are real risks. And it's very important to realize that complexity is not going down. Complexity is going up. You know, we think that things are getting more challenging. The cyber criminals, as you say, are getting more sophisticated. And as complexity goes up, the question is how do we respond to that? At the same time, the systems are improving and the capability to really share data, to work towards single visions, to implement, you know, single systems, which are, again, give you the information you need quickly in an actionable way, is the best thing we can do to be able to respond, to have early warning when things are changing and to be able to respond rapidly. That and always empowering people through training are the biggest things. I think that there are these risks that we've discussed, but there's also incredible opportunity. And I think the best way to also respond and focus on risks is to look at the opportunities and to keep our eyes open to that and to have systems that don't just respond to our requirements of today, but respond to the evolving requirements of our customers. Again, you know, the nature of risk is the things that are the hardest to respond to are the ones we haven't planned for. So it's hard to say how do you plan for things that you can't plan for, but at least if you have really strong systems in place and, you know, you don't have fires breaking out everywhere, when a fire does break out, you can turn the full focus of your organization on that to resolve it quickly. And so, you know, when should you start implementing these systems? Because we are already entering into this age of complexity and the earlier companies recognize that technology is at the heart of mitigating and actually transforming risk into opportunity, the better it will be. And so wherever there's a risk, there's an opportunity. And with the right systems, with the right people and the right training, the companies that will succeed are those who are able to transform those risks into opportunities. Absolutely. I love that. Well, as we prepare to enter 2024, business risk has never been greater. From constant changes in regulation and legislation to climate change, from macroeconomic developments like inflation to a surge in cybercrime, that is set to rise to nearly $24 trillion by 2027. Organizations will continue to face threats to their survival. And the interconnected nature of modern supply chains have left them even more vulnerable with each new system or integration posing a new potential threat to the entire chain. A single secure system that is able to retain and exchange your entire data set while offering a portal for all your trading partners to monitor and maintain their supply chain can dramatically reduce the risk of cyberattacks, data breaches, while simultaneously ensuring the safety and integrity of your data, people, and processes. Taking a holistic approach with a partner like CargoWise is truly the key to success. If you'd like to find out more, you can check them out at wisetechglobal.com or cargowise.com. And make sure to tune in next time for the fourth and final episode of our fantastic Wisetech Global mini-series. I'm joined by Tudor Maxwell, head of Wisetech Academy, to take a closer look at logistics digitization. And let me tell you, you do not want to miss this episode. He talks about sitting in the uncomfortable and having arguments. And he also talks specifically about the role of people in its success. As we talk more and more about digitization across the industry, one important element that's often missing from those conversations is people and the resistance they have to digital change. If we want to ensure smooth and effective digitization across the industry, we really need to start talking about the cultural changes that are also needed. And that's exactly what we're going to do next week. So that conversation is totally relevant to every single person in the industry, so make sure you tune in. Nahi and Mohan, thank you so much for joining me today and to the team at Wisetech Global for making this episode happen. Thank you both. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you.
