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REFASHIOND Ventures

The World is a Supply Chain

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Lisa Morales-Hellebo, and Brian Laung Aoaeh. Kicking off #SCIT2019, June 19, 2019 in NYC. Photo Credit: Ray Neutron.

Originally published at www.refashiond.com on Friday, October 18, 2019.

Note: 3,749 Words, 14 Minutes Reading Time

Authors: Brian Laung Aoaeh, CFA, and Lisa Morales-Hellebo

The world is a supply chain. It’s that simple. 

But what does that really mean?  Whether we like it or not, current economic, political, social, and technology trends will compel more people to think about the implications of that statement more consciously each day.

In this blog post we;

  • Share a definition of supply chain,
  • Put the challenges confronting supply chains in context,
  • Discuss why socio-cultural forces will act as the leading catalyst for the innovations that will define supply chains of the future,
  • Explain why the refashioning of supply chains matters,
  • Explain why the technological transformation of supply chains is an economic issue, as well as one driven by evolving consumer preferences,
  • Describe the role that early stage technology venture capital can play in the transformation of supply chains,
  • Describe how individuals, private sources of capital, and governments can play a role in the transformations that will lead us to the supply chains of the future. 

What Is A Supply Chain?

First, let’s answer the question: What is a supply chain? 

A supply chain is a network of organizations that work collaboratively to move products and services from producers to consumers. At a high level, the business of supply chain can be subdivided into: 

  • Supply chain management;  which is about supply chain network design and management; 
  • Supply chain logistics; which is about the storage, transportation, and movement of physical goods from one place to another;
  • Supply chain finance; which is about ensuring that producers, and other supply chain participants and intermediaries get paid for the value they create and deliver to consumers.

Supply chains play two critical functions: 

  • First, they enable the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers. 
  • Second, they facilitate the transfer of information about the movement of goods and services between every entity that is part of the supply chain network.  

The world we’ve become accustomed to will not exist without supply chains.  And further, the world is a mechanism for providing humanity with the resources we need to survive on Earth.  We know this to be true — “when supply chains function, societies thrive”.

The Challenges Confronting Supply Chains

Today, we face an inflection point as our world confronts some big crises. If current trends hold, between 2015 and 2050 the world’s population is expected to increase by about a third, to roughly 10 billion people. According to Our World in Data, the world’s population stood at about 190 million people in the Year 0, and approximately 4 billion in 1975. In other words, the world’s population will jump by about 6 billion people over the 75 years between 1975 and 2050 after having only climbed to 4 billion people over the previous 1,975 years. This is happening, according to Our World in Data, despite the world’s population growth rate peaking at 2.2% per year in 1962 and 1963, and then declining to its current rate of about 1% per year. 

While this rapid increase in the world’s population is occuring, global supply chains face some big challenges: 

  • An ongoing increase in the frequency of severe weather events that cause large-scale disruptions to local and global supply chains. 
  • Trade disputes threaten to dismember the system of world trade established following the end of World War II. 
  • The growing world population has created a critical need for significantly better dynamic resource allocation throughout supply chain networks in every industry around the world. 
  • Changes in consumer behavior are putting the world’s supply chains under increasing strain and business competitiveness is increasingly tied to supply chain mastery.

Socio-cultural Attitudes Will Be The Catalyst For Supply Chain Innovation

Perhaps counterintuitively, innovation in global trade and supply chains will be driven most immediately by changing social attitudes towards climate change. A recent poll of adults and teenagers in the United States conducted between July 9 and August 5, 2019 by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation offers some early evidence of the changes taking place. 

When asked if human activity is causing climate change, 79% of the adults polled responded yes, while 86% of teenagers responded yes. When asked if reducing the negative effects of global warming and climate change would require major sacrifices, more than 30% of adults, and more than 40% of the teenagers surveyed said yes. Also, at least 70% of adults and nearly 80% of teenagers said that technological advances will be able to reduce most of the negative effects of climate change. 

There are more conversations than ever about decarbonizing supply chains. At about the same time this poll was published, Quartz reported that two states in India have said they will not build new coal power plants. Earlier this year, governments in Europe called on the fashion industry to tackle its waste and pollution problems more aggressively and some are looking at passing legislation to that end. In Asia, more governments are moving to address issues around plastic waste imported from abroad. Starting in January 2020, the International Maritime Organization will begin adopting new regulations to curb harmful emissions from the container shipping industry. 

Another example of the rapidly evolving social and cultural attitudes that will drive innovation in supply chains and global trade is the growing movement led by young people such as Greta Thunberg, Jamie Marglois and others like them. Political, business, and technological leadership is shifting into the hands of a generation of men and women who do not want to leave a more inhospitable planet as their legacy to their children and grandchildren.

What does this mean? 

In the next half-decade or so we will see political and business leaders facing increasing pressure to adopt policies and business practices that reflect how voters and consumers feel about climate change. Those who do not risk losing political power and market share, respectively, to their opponents and competitors who do. As this social and cultural movement gains strength, it will accelerate the economic drivers of innovation, which in turn will propel the drivers of technological innovation in global trade and supply chain. 

In his August 2011 article, Why Software is Eating The World, Marc Andreessen said: “Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.” The process he described has only accelerated over the intervening 8 years, and that statement is more true now than it was then. As information technologies that were pioneered in the 1950s have reached maturity, technology startups around the world are developing new innovations to solve some of the supply chain problems that seemed intractable in the recent past.

Why The Refashioning Of Supply Chains Matters

However, before we can understand why the confluence of software and hardware engineering is going to be transformative to the supply chains on which the world runs, we must understand why that matters.

Supply chains exist to connect producers and consumers in an ongoing exchange of value. As a result, innovations in supply chain drives innovations in the rest of the economy. Given that supply chains are about the back-and-forth movement of physical goods, services, and information, it is easy to understand why advances in information technology must necessarily precede cycles of innovation in supply chain.

Because innovation in supply chain acts as an accelerant for increases in production and consumption, supply chain innovation acts as an economic multiplier. Every dollar of innovation in supply chain innovation leads to more than a dollar of total economic output. It is not a coincidence that countries ranked highest on the Worldbank’s Logistics Performance Index tend to have the most developed economies, while those ranked lowest tend to have the least developed economies. 

Supply chains are to human civilization what oxygen is to life; When they work well, no one notices them. It is only when they start to fail that we realize there’s a problem. It is easy to assume that there’s no room for innovation in global supply chains and trade, but this is simply not true. Here are four examples. 

  • As governments and people around the world awaken to the issues posed by climate change, there’s a growing social, regulatory, and economic push for innovations in supply chain logistics that will significantly reduce the amount of pollution created by the transportation industry. Some of these innovations involve the application of machine learning to the analysis of data obtained from connected devices in transportation and supply chain networks in order to make the operation of such networks more efficient and optimized. This needs to be done in a way that ensures that the transportation of people and merchandise does not destroy the environment. 
  • There is an ongoing shift away from linear supply chains in which the materials that remain after consumption has taken place are discarded, and more towards circular and regenerative supply chains that place an emphasis on using post-consumption waste as raw materials for new products. This shift relies on advances in materials science – both in the creation of new materials that did not exist before, and in the processing of materials that we have become accustomed to, but which we now recognize pose a growing threat to the environment as waste accumulates in quantities that the world can no longer sustain. In order to reduce or eliminate waste and pollution, the focus here is on developing supply chains around the repair, renewal, regeneration, and recycling of materials and products.
  • Manufacturing is undergoing a transformation of its own, one which will make the changes happening in transportation and materials that much more impactful. With the recent shift in political attitudes towards global trade, more companies are beginning to consider regionalized and localized manufacturing as a path towards avoiding costly tariffs. Such a transformation will rely on a mix of emerging and mature manufacturing techniques in order to keep costs within a manageable range. These advances in manufacturing will rely heavily on manufacturing goods to fulfill actual demand, rather than manufacturing goods in anticipation of future demand.
  • Invariably, software is being used more than ever to create new methods of collecting, storing, and analyzing data to augment human decision making in every industry. These technologies are being applied in industrial supply chains as distinct as: Pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals – to simulate new compounds and test them more quickly and inexpensively; They’re also used in agriculture – to manage the production, storage and distribution of food and other agricultural produce in order to minimize food loss and food waste; And in energy – to aid in the production, storage, and distribution of energy from increasingly complex power grids that incorporate renewable and non-renewable sources of electrical power. 

The way we make things, the way we consume things, the way we move things, and the power that is required to make all that possible is changing dramatically thanks to advances in software and hardware technologies. Solving the foundational problems that plague global supply chains is a daunting task. Moreover, global GDP, most recently estimated at about $88 trillion, rests on our ability to solve these problems. 

Technological Transformation of Supply Chains: An Economic Problem, An Economic Opportunity

In our conversations with other people, we are often asked the question; “Wouldn’t this be easier if the transformation of supply chains were driven more by economic forces and consumer needs?”

In The Supply Chain Economy: A New Framework for Understanding Innovation and Services, Mercedes Delgado and Karen Mills state that; “The U.S. supply chain contains 37% of all jobs, employing 44 million people. These jobs have significantly higher than average wages, and account for much of the innovative activity in the economy.” 

Similar conclusions hold true in every other region of the world, and there is ample evidence to support that belief thanks to work by a number of global. Multilateral organizations like the World Economic Forum, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, various agencies of the United Nations, and others.

For example;

  • According to Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use, a September 2019 report by the Food and Land Use Coalition;  “The hidden costs of global food and land use systems sum to $12 trillion, compared to a market value of the global food system of $10 trillion.”
  • According to Long-Term Macroeconomic Effects of Climate Change: A Cross-Country Analysis, a July 2019 paper by researchers at the University of Southern California (USA), the University of Cambridge (UK), Trinity College (UK), the International Monetary Fund (Washington DC, USA), and National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan); “Our counterfactual analysis suggests that a persistent increase in average global temperature by 0.04C per year, in the absence of mitigation policies, reduces world real GDP per capita by 7.22 percent by 2100.” Furthermore the authors state; “We also provide supplementary evidence using data on a sample of 48 U.S. states between 1963 and 2016, and show that climate change has a long-lasting adverse impact on real output in various states and economic sectors, and on labour productivity and employment.”
  • According to Impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on Supply Chains, an October 2017 report published by the World Economic Forum; “Disruptive technologies are transforming all end-to-end steps in production and business models in most sectors of the economy. The products that consumers demand, factory processes and footprints, and the management of global supply chains are being re-shaped to an unprecedented degree and at unprecedented pace. Industry leaders who were consulted believe that new technological solutions heralded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution – such as advanced robotics, autonomous systems and additive manufacturing – will revolutionize traditional ways of creating value. As the costs of deploying technology continue to fall, international differentials in labour costs will no longer be a decisive factor in choosing the location of production.” 

Other examples are not difficult to find. 

A company’s supply chain is an integral part of that company’s customer experience, and consumers all over the world will continue to become more demanding, not less. The supply chains of the future will become a reality precisely because the refashioning of global and local trade infrastructure is an economic issue that is driven by consumer preferences.

That being said, it is important to recognize why conversations about the transformation of supply chains are less straightforward than one might hope.

In Disaster Mitigation is Cost Effective, a world development background note by Ilan Kelman, he states that it is easier for politicians who tend to seek visibility for themselves to pursue after-the-fact measures rather than pursue prospective and preventative measures related to disaster risk reduction. After-the-fact measures are more visible, while prevention is intangible and difficult to quantify, resulting in less of a boost for the personal ambitions and ego of individual politicians.

We observe a similar pattern of behavior among corporate executives, who tend to pursue highly visible, customer facing, short-term, tactical initiatives at the expense of long-term strategic initiatives that will help their companies develop and gain mastery over their backend supply chain operations. On the other hand, we observe that the companies that have become globally dominant are also those that have developed superior supply chain mastery within their respective markets and industries. We believe that companies with inferior supply chain operations will continue to fall victim to a degraded customer experience. We also believe that companies with inferior supply chains will lose market share to established, and new, competitors with superior supply chain capabilities.

Early-Stage Technology Venture Capital Will Play An Important Role

Surprisingly, the men and women who set out to tackle these problems usually find a lack of sufficient early-stage venture capital to support their efforts at the earliest and riskiest stages of their work – as they take that work out of academic research labs, or small apartments and houses, and start the often arduous process of commercialization. 

That is when there is the greatest need for venture capitalists who understand the nature of the problems, who recognize the potential commercial opportunities, who have a willingness to do the necessary hard work required to help these entrepreneurs succeed, and who have developed relationships with prospective commercial partners willing to investigate new technological innovations for long-standing supply chain problems.

This is changing, but it is not changing fast enough. The world needs much more risk-seeking capital to fund these entrepreneurs – the market opportunity is enormous. As we have already pointed out, global GDP rests on a foundation built entirely on physical and digital supply chains.

For these innovations to succeed, governments and traditional industry must become more open to partnering with venture capitalists and technology startups. Unlike innovations in information technology, the technological innovations that will transform global supply chains and trade interact with the real world. As a result, it is not enough for policies and regulations to lag innovation by years. Instead, regulators and policy makers must work hard to create regulatory frameworks that help to nurture innovation rather than assist in suffocating it. Correspondingly, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs must partner with community organizations, politicians, and regulators to help them keep up with advances in technology and innovation. 

One might ask: “Are there really enough opportunities for early-stage investments in supply chain?” Yet, once one understands what a supply chain is, a few minutes spent thinking about that question illuminates the misconception. 

The recent success of funds like Lux Capital – which announced that it raised a billion dollars distributed across two funds, and DCVC – which announced a $725 million fund, suggests that there are significant financial returns to be harvested by limited partners who have the foresight to invest in the small handful of venture funds that are now choosing to focus on funding early-stage startups solving the sorts of problems we have already described. 

The longevity of Supply Chain Ventures, established in 2001 by Dave Anderson, also suggests that this is a market that is ready for more early-stage venture capital, not less. This is assertion is based on how many advances in computational and information technologies have occurred since 2001, and how much easier it is now for such technologies to be implemented in physical supply chains. That observation is also based on the rising interest, relatively speaking, in issues surrounding supply chains within the general population.

Our conversations with corporate executives responsible for meeting demand from customers suggests that there is a growing appetite for new technology to enable companies to meet the expectations of an ever more impatient and demanding customer base. Also, our conversations with government officials point to a growing desire by public servants to seek new innovations geared at solving the problems that plague large and growing urban communities, and the suburban communities that surround them. 

What Can You Do?

There is a lot that one can do to participate in the coming transformation of supply chains;

  • Individual Consumers: As individual consumers we can all continue to become more active and engaged about understanding how our consumption affects the finite world around us. Social media and information technology makes it easy for attitudes and beliefs about consumption, production, sustainability, the environment, and climate change to spread. In Consumer attitudes towards sustainability and sustainable business: An exploratory study of New Zealand consumers., a 2015 master’s thesis by David Anthony Thompson at Lincoln University in New Zealand, he states; “From a purely pragmatic perspective, this study has indicated that consumers are generally likely to be supportive of not just purchasing sustainably produced goods and services, but that they feel positively towards companies that demonstrate sustainable social and environmental behaviour. This has implications for reputation building for organisations and in turn hints at benefits when it comes to securing supply contracts, recruiting staff and relationships with their physical communities. The study also suggests that understanding and knowledge play a – 56 – contributory role in forming these attitudes, therefore supporting the value in education and information strategies for sustainably run businesses.”
  • Sources of Private Capital: As we have already discussed previously, investing in early-stage innovations in supply chain transformation is an opportunity that remains largely under-resourced in terms of risk-seeking capital relative to the size of the opportunity. It is an area that is ripe for increased allocations of capital within the private equity asset allocation targets of family offices, endowments, foundations, and pension funds.
  • Governments: During #SCIT2019, The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation’s inaugural global summit on supply chain, innovation, and technology held in NYC on June 19 – 20, 2019, Samuel Chan, Regional Vice President, Americas, at the Singapore Economic Development Board provided attendees with a sense of how the Government of Singapore is thinking about the role that supply chain, innovation, and technology can play in Singapore’s economic development. Supply chain occupies a central position in Smart Nation Singapore, and specifically in its Smart Logistics initiative. As we have stated previously; It is not a coincidence that countries ranked highest on the Worldbank’s Logistics Performance Index tend to have the most developed economies, while those ranked lowest tend to have the least developed economies. Increasingly, the countries and regions of the world that will continue to experience the strongest economic growth will be those that are quickest to embrace and deploy the still nascent and emerging engineered systems that reflect a tight integration of computation and physical supply chains, in every area of economic activity.

If by now, the reader is beginning to conclude that the future of supply chains will be driven largely by supply chain enthusiasts, we agree.

We Will All Be Supply Chain Enthusiasts

So who is today’s supply chain enthusiast? A supply chain enthusiast is;

  • Someone who recognizes that the world is a mechanism for providing humanity with the resources it needs to survive. 
  • Someone who recognizes that each of us has a responsibility for ensuring that this supply chain that we are part of is managed in a way that ensures that humans continue to thrive. 
  • Someone who understands that collectively, we must summon the political will to begin the effort of arresting, and then reversing, the harm that we have caused to the environment. 

We will all become supply chain enthusiasts, not because it is the fashionable thing to do, but because with every year that passes it will become an issue of increasing and critical necessity. As more people become aware of, and start to understand that how we produce, store, transport, and consume things has a profound impact on our environment, enthusiasm about supply chain, innovation, and technology will become more socially and culturally mainstream. 

At that point, “The world is a supply chain.” will become a rallying cry everyone innately understands.

Note: “The world is a supply chain.” is a trademark owned by The New York Supply  Chain Meetup.

About The Authors: Brian Laung Aoaeh (@brianlaungaoaeh) and Lisa Morales-Hellebo (@lisahellebo) are co-founders of REFASHIOND Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that is being built to invest in startups creating innovations to refashion global supply chain networks. They are also co-founders of The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, a growing network of grassroots-driven communities focused on supply chain, innovation, and technology.

#UserManual – Send Us All The Early-Stage Supply Chain Technology Startups

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Brian Laung Aoaeh and Lisa Morales-Hellebo, at #SCIT2019, June 19 – 20, Microsoft, Times Square, NYC. Photo Credit: Ray Neutron.

Author’s Note: This blog post is an updated version of User Manual: The Early Stage Startups I Want To Hear About Most in 2016 and 2017 and User Manual: The Early Stage Startups I Want To Hear About Most in 2017 and 2018. Certain portions of this version may be exactly the same as in the prior versions. However, there are significant differences between the prior versions and this one.

About REFASHIOND Ventures

REFASHIOND Ventures is a seed-stage venture fund that Lisa Morales-Hellebo and I are building to: invest in startups developing technology innovations to refashion global supply chains – across different industries. 

We are in the process of raising our first fund. Once we raise the fund, we will be based in New York City. 

While we are raising the fund, we are collaborating with a family office to make some early investments that fit our investment thesis, and the family office’s investment interests.

The three philosophical pillars of our investment thesis are;

  1. The world is a supply chain.TM
  2. Software is eating the world.
  3. Disruption creates opportunity.

Our working definition of a supply chain: “A network of connected and interdependent organisations mutually and cooperatively working together to control, manage and improve the flow of materials and information from suppliers to end users.”

– Martin Christopher, Logistics & Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks, 4th ed, Pearson Education Limited 2011, p4

We believe that a perfect storm of irreversible social, economic, technological, and environmental forces, has created an urgent and critical need to refashion global supply chains. This process presents the biggest investment opportunity of the next half-century. We are building a fund to invest in that opportunity.

We’ll invest in startups in the following areas; Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Logistics, and Supply Chain Finance – across industries.

Our initial focus is on startups based in the United States, and Canada.

About The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, which we founded in August 2017, is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Each chapter is a community of practice that connects the builders of technology innovations for supply chain with the buyers of technology innovations for implementation in real world commercial supply chains. The New York Supply Chain Meetup is its founding chapter.

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the world’s first, largest, fastest growing, and most active network of grassroots driven communities focused on supply chain, innovation, and technology. You can learn more here: The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation.

You can check out our Youtube Channel here. Join our community here. Follow @tnyscm on Twitter.

Characteristics We Look for in Teams, and Founders

We look for – we will not learn this until we actually interact with you. But this is what we will be looking for;

  • Teams in which the founders have known one another for a considerable amount of time prior to launching their startup; We look for teams in which the level of trust and respect between the co-founders is high. This reflects our belief that at the earliest stages of a startup’s life, team risk is the greatest risk we must worry about.
  • Teams that will not have difficulty attracting other great people to join the startup; We look for founders who inspire confidence and loyalty from others because they are good at what they do, the kind of people we could picture myself working for. We look for people that others outside the startup can come to look up to as thought leaders in their chosen area of expertise.
  • Founders for whom solving the problem that their startup is solving has become their life’s mission and they will work to solve that problem with or without help from outside investors; We look for founders who have an unconventional opinion about the market opportunity they are pursuing, and can explain their position is with evidence that investors can analyze independently. We look for founders who are focused squarely on solving their customers problems.
  • Teams that can focus on building a simple product that their initial customers love, and who can focus on a niche within which to launch that product. We look for teams that are judicious and frugal in how they deploy the startup’s resources.
  • Founders who value teamwork, and who can become great leaders if they desire to do so; We value transparency, honesty, and openness. We value self-awareness. We like people who are determined and tenacious, who do not give up just because the going gets uncomfortable and things seem bleak.
  • Founders who have a hard time doing something simply because it is what someone else expects them to do; We do not like obedience. We detest arrogance. We admire confidence. We look for founders who are not afraid to be different. We look for founders who have prior demonstrable experience of good decision-making when things are uncertain and information is incomplete. We are not looking for perfection.

Characteristics We Look For in Markets

We look for;

  • Large markets that could ultimately be served by the startup’s product, even though the initial target might be a small portion of the whole. We look for customers capable of and willing to pay for the product, and who are looking for and eager to find a solution to their problem.
  • Markets in which the pain is acute because the problem suppresses customers’ profits significantly, or because the problem makes users far less effective and efficient than they could be.

If currently the addressable market is between $1B and $10B, we want to see evidence that it is growing quickly enough to support the startup’s future goals, and the competition that we assume will quickly follow if the team is successful.

Characteristics We Look For in Business Models

We look for products and business models that:

  • Will benefit from network effects as time progresses,
  • Can scale efficiently and quickly once product-market-fit has been established, and
  • Can eventually benefit from an economic moat as the startup matures into a company, and the business model becomes established.

The Themes We Are Focused On

Notes:

  • These themes cut across different industries and sectors. That is a deliberate choice in the way we are designing REFASHIOND Ventures.
  • The technology sector evolves constantly. Accordingly, our team’s interests might adjust in response. The themes we have described below should serve as a rough guide to how we think about the universe of startups in which REFASHIOND Ventures will invest. It is not comprehensively exhaustive, nor is it mutually exclusive of themes we have not described. If the innovation you are working on fits our definition of supply chain and the descriptions above, please reach out to us.
  • We anticipate that REFASHIOND Ventures first fund will be a pre-seed and seed-stage fund. Our current collaboration will primarily focus on startups raising an institutional seed round, or raising a round between a previous institutional seed round and a series A round.

Our current investment themes;

  • Next Generation Logistics: Platforms or applications that significantly improve how logistics and transportation networks are operated and managed.
  • Advanced Materials: Platforms or products that make it possible to research, invent, and create new types of materials at scale. We are especially interested in the conversion of large quantities of waste of different types into new materials. 
  • Advanced Manufacturing: Platforms or applications that make it possible to integrate advances in software engineering into manufacturing processes. 
  • Data & Analytics: Platforms or applications that help people or other machines to manage, analyze, interpret, make decisions, and take actions based on vast and growing amounts of centralized or decentralized data from disparate sources. Such platforms or products enable large numbers of different types of connected devices, machines, apps, and websites to communicate with one another seamlessly, and with the people managing or using them, within a secure environment. 

Connecting With Us

If you know someone who knows us, an introduction would help. If you do not, never hesitate to communicate with us directly. We are both very easy to reach on the major social networking platforms. 

The best time to start communicating with us is before you are raising a round because we believe it is important to build trust and understanding before entering into the kind of working relationship that exists between startup founders and their early stage investors.

That also gives us sufficient time to understand the problem you are solving, so that if REFASHIOND Ventures invests, we are doing so with conviction. Time enables us to become a more effective advocate on your startup’s behalf when we have discussions about you with other investors we know, and who we feel would be a good match for the round you are raising.

Communicating With Us

If we are not meeting through an introduction, we will respond quickest to founders who get straight to the point, and explain why we should speak with them in 250 – 400 words in their first email to us. We try our best to respond to founders who initiate communication with us. However, depending on what else we have going on, we may not respond if we feel the startup is outside REFASHIOND Ventures’ areas of interest. 

Follow up with us once or twice if you believe we have made a mistake by not responding.

Things We Believe Are Red Flags

  1. Exploding rounds: An exploding round comes with a caveat like “Seed round in ground-breaking tech startup closing in 1 week!” We need time to do our own homework.
  2. Meetings led by an advisor: We prefer our first few interactions with a startup to be with the team of co-founders, not with an advisor or an investment banker. It is okay for an introduction to come from an advisor if that advisor is someone we already know. We do not like to have advisors or mentors micro-manage our interactions with startup founders. That does not inspire confidence.
  3. Lack of control over core technologies: We try to avoid situations in which the startup has a product that has launched to the public, but the startup’s team has no primary responsibility for actually building the core product. If there’s IP we’ll spend some time trying to understand who owns the IP.
  4. Founders who are mainly focused on invention: Some founders are born inventors. In and of itself, that is not a bad thing. However, as investors we have made a choice to invest in founders who want to build potentially big businesses. 

Our Commitment To Startup Founders

Based on Gil Dibner’s VC Code of Conduct;

  • We will be transparent.
  • We will respect your time.
  • We will not ask you for material we do not need.
  • We will not string you along.
  • We will let you know about any competitors in our portfolio.
  • We will be transparent about conflicts of interest.
  • We will not share any of your material without your permission.
  • We will not speak with your customers without your permission.
  • We will educate before we negotiate.
  • We will be honest about what standard terms are.
  • We will not issue a term sheet unless we have made a firm decision to invest.
  • We will reflect the term sheet in the final legal documents.
  • We will not seek an unreasonable equity stake.
  • We will avoid surprises.
  • We will always act in the best interests of the startup.

Without doubt, there will be times when we fail to live up to these ideals. When that happens we hope founders will let us know. That is the only way we can get better.

Supply Chain, Innovation, & Technology (#SCIT2019) – Event Summary

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More than 800 Supply Chain Professionals from 15 Countries Attend Supply Chain, Innovation & Technology Conference 

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation (#TWSCF) held its inaugural global summit on June 19 and June 20, 2019 in New York City. The 2-day conference was hosted by Microsoft Reactor NYC and Microsoft For Startups in NYC. 

The Supply Chain, Innovation and Technology Summit (#SCIT2019) is produced by The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation. Attendees of this FREE global gathering are the most obsessively enthusiastic technologists, supply chain executives, professionals, academics, entrepreneurs, and investors from around the world.  

BUYERS & BUILDERSTM of innovations for future-ready global supply chains came together over two days to talk about how technology is transforming their respective industries. 

A Cross Section of The Audience at #SCIT2019

Here are the highlights… 

Day One #SCIT2019 put all the emphasis on the future of supply chains – globally, and across industries.  Innovators in Fashion Technology, Logistics, Maritime and BlockChain talked about a variety of issues including:

  • What problems remain that need to be solved? 
  • What problems have now arisen that we did not anticipate even a decade ago? 
  • What is now possible with software-enabled technologies? 
  • How can intra-industry and inter-industry collaboration between BUYERS & BUILDERSTM  help make this future a reality? 
  • Why is this an important discussion we need to have now?

Day One Session Highlights – BUYERS

The first day of #SCIT2019 focused on people and organizations who want to buy new innovations for supply chain. 

Keynote with Q&A: Paul McCulloch, NYC Cyber Law Group

Title: The T.A.O of Supply Chain — Technology, Architecture, & Operations

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Welcome Remarks, Keynote, & Fashion Track

Notes: Paul’s keynote presentation starts at about 19 minutes.

Paul McCulloch is a coder and information technology architect, a government advisor, and an attorney in technology, privacy, and cybersecurity law at NYC CyberLaw Group. He is a former vice president of technology law & digital compliance at JP Morgan Chase. He now spends his time empowering companies to get compliant, innovate, and implement digital transformation.

The world is becoming more complex, more interconnected, more distributed and more decentralized. At the same time, society demands more from the BUYERS, BUILDERS, and OPERATORS of the world’s supply chain networks. In “The T.A.O of Supply Chain – Technology, Architecture, & Operations”, Paul discussed the issues that emerging startups, medium-sized businesses, and large corporations operating anywhere in the world should be concerned about.

  • Organizations that do not have a strong grasp of technology law risk being burdened by liabilities off-loaded onto them by their more knowledgeable competitors. This is especially critical for startups which can easily be hobbled with fines for non-compliance with technology related regulations.
  • The risks increase as data and information crosses borders and becomes subject to different compliance regulations each time national borders are crossed. This is the internationalization of risk as data is transmitted around the world.
  • Compliance has usually been used as a defensive mechanism. More and more it is being weaponized and used as an offensive mechanism to handicap competitors.

FASHION TRACK

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Welcome Remarks, Keynote, & Fashion Track

Notes: Fashion Track discussion starts at about 60 minutes.

How is the fashion industry adopting customization, personalization, and on-demand manufacturing? How is data being leveraged to provide predictive, personalized digital experiences? How are brands allowing their consumers to co-create? What does luxury on-demand manufacturing look like today and where will it be in 5 years?

Moderator — Emma Cosgrove, Supply Chain Reporter, Supply Chain Dive

ELSE Corp — Andrey Golub, Founder & CEO

Milaner — Elisa Rossi, Co-founder

Queen of Raw — Stephanie Benedetto, Founder & CEO

  • Technology makes it possible for fashion and apparel to operate on the basis of customization, personalization, and real-time inventory.
  • Companies who can introduce technology to address huge issues with waste and pollution will be the ultimate winners.
  • This requires major shifts in supply chain operations. It is NOT the same as the fast-fashion business model.
  • Speed to market is critical for luxury fashion which is all about exclusivity. Speed does not have to compromise the product and brand.
  • Breaking down silos can speed up the process of manufacturing luxury fashion and accessories.
  • There is a growing interest in localization, but there are still a lot of outstanding questions, and the process of transition will be gradual. 

LOGISTICS TRACK

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Logistics Track

What problems can technology solve in land-based supply chain logistics? What’s most promising in the near term? Where do we still have challenges? What’s happening in other parts of the world?

Moderator — Eric Johnson, Senior Editor, Technology at JOC.com

Maersk — Bob O’Donnell, Head of North America E-Commerce Logistics

Princeton University & Optimal Dynamics — Juliana Nascimento, Optimization Expert, Operations Research

SCMI University of San Diego — Joel Sutherland, Managing Director & Professor of Practice                                                                                                    Transfix – Ahmad El-Dardiry, Chief Revenue Officer

  • The biggest problem is harnessing technology to reduce waste in a fragmented industry.
  • Supply chain is a massive optimization problem. There’s a lot of value in implementing simple technologies in supply chain logistics.
  • Transparency and automation matter A LOT to shippers and carriers.
  • For supply chain optimization to be effective it cannot be siloed. It has to be organization-wide. Optimization requires critical mass.
  • Technology is allowing us to do things we could not do in the past but we still need people with expert knowledge to augment software systems.
  • Startups still make the mistake of building technology that is too cutting-edge for market realities, and there isn’t enough collaboration. 

MARITIME TRACK

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Maritime Track

What problems can technology solve in maritime supply chain logistics? What’s most promising in the near term? Where do we still have challenges? What’s happening in other parts of the world?

Moderator — Timothy Simpson, Maritz Global Events

Advent Intermodal Solutions — Allen Thomas, Chief Strategy Officer

Maersk — Erez Agmoni, Regional Head of Supply Chain Warehousing and Distribution, Americas

Gemini Shippers Group — Kenneth O’Brien, Chief Operating Officer

  • Shippers in the maritime industry are facing several complex problems, and many are looking for builders to help them solve those problems.
  • Visibility across intermodal systems was an issue 10 years ago, and it’s still a problem.
  • Shippers expect reliability, but it’s complicated. Reliability means different things to different companies.
  • Market-driven collaboration is the new norm.
  • Blockchain is still controversial in maritime and it is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on maritime logistics. 

BLOCKCHAIN TRACK I

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Blockchain Track I

Notes: Tanjila starts at 2 minutes, Patrick starts at 24:30 minutes, and Michael starts at 37:30 minutes.

What lessons have we learned about bringing blockchain + supply chain from the lab and into the real world? 

Emcee — Kelly LeValley Hunt, Blockchain Specialist, Forbes 2018 Blockchain “Pioneer”, Microsoft’s 2018 Women in Blockchain Award for Hyper-growth & Innovation

Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) — Patrick Duffy, President

BlockScience — Michael Zargham, Founder & CEO and Harry Goodnight, Lead Executive Advisor

TradeFlo — Tanjila Islam, Founder & CEO

  • Tanjila Islam is building TRADEFLO, a blockchain-powered platform to facilitate global trade and trade-financing with an initial focus on emerging markets. When she spoke at The New York Supply Chain Meetup’s event in April 2018, she had not yet started building TRADEFLO. However, after meeting an IBM executive at that event she began exploring building TRADEFLO in partnership with IBM. She’s been building TigerTrade for over a decade, and TRADEFLO is inspired by that experience. TigerTrade is the largest wholesale reseller of excess retail inventory.
  • The Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) focuses on creating open-source and royalty-free technology standards to encourage the adoption of blockchain in the transportation industry by bringing together technology companies, service providers, transportation companies, financiers, and insurers. Patrick Duffy is President of BiTA and he talks about the progress they’ve made in the two years or so that the organization has existed.
  • BlockScience’s Michael Zarghan and Harry Goodnight touched on supply chains as cyberphysical systems, what blockchains enable, and the implications on operations research, applied AI, and distributed systems. They believe that blockchains are ideally suited for describing and establishing supply chain network ontologies. They emphasize that corporate executives need to start thinking about ecosystems.

BLOCKCHAIN TRACK II

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day I Blockchain Track II

Given some of the lessons learned, what work is being done to bring blockchain + supply chain from the lab and into the real world? Kelly and Rob are returning speakers: They have each spoken at past meetups organized by The New York Supply Chain Meetup on the topic of blockchain in supply chain.

Emcee — Kelly LeValley Hunt, Blockchain Specialist, Forbes 2018 Blockchain “Pioneer”, Microsoft’s 2018 Women in Blockchain Award for Hyper-growth & Innovation

Inflection Point Blockchain Advisors — Joshua Klayman, Founder & CEO

MState — Rob Bailey, Co-founder & CEO

r3 — Alisa DiCaprio, Head of Trade and Supply Chain

  • We’re in the early days of figuring out how blockchains will impact supply chains and it is important to get try to get the fundamentals right.
  • Companies interested in figuring out how to deploy blockchain can tap into a wealth of resources, partnerships, and organizations focused on understanding how blockchains can be integrated into supply chains – no one has to go it alone.
  • There are many more blockchain projects that no one is publicizing than those that are in the news. There are a lot of questions that remain open.
  • Blockchain in supply chain is complicated by the fact that data traverses multiple legal jurisdictions. There are also relevant questions that surround laws specific to specific industries. This is an important part of the conversation. The role of incumbents is a source of concern.
  • Blockchain is a point of convergence of many other technologies. Container shipping is one of the industries doing early work on this issue. Here, blockchains function as a permissioned data transfer layer.
  • Supply chain might require the development of new blockchain protocols that are uniquely designed for application in supply chain.
  • There’s an outstanding question about the utility of product provenance for mass consumers. 
  • Here’s the reading list Kelly refers to during the conversation. 

Day Two Session Highlights – BUILDERS

The second day of #SCIT2019 focused on people and organizations who are building new innovations for supply chain. 

Keynote with Q&A: Rosemarie Truman, Center For Advanced Innovation

Title: SCALE – Supply Chain and Logistics Enterprises

Link to YouTube Video: #SCIT2019 Day II Welcome Remarks & Keynote

Rosemarie Truman is an entrepreneur, growth strategist, distinguished corporate executive, angel investor and prolific startup catalyst. She is the Founder and CEO of the Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI), a 501c3 non-profit which identifies breakthrough inventions and maximizes their commercial potential. 

SCALE – Supply Chain and Logistics Enterprises is a global contest to disrupt retail supply chain, logistics, and transportation. SCALE is orchestrated by the Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) in partnership with the Walton Family Foundation. CAI’s past challenges were the catalyst for 200+ startups and 2000+ knowledge-based jobs in the past 4 years. 

The rest of the day featured presentations from start-ups around the globe as well as a guest presenter from the Singapore Economic Development Board.

STARTUP SHOWCASES

BLOCK I – Emcee: Sapna Shah, Principal, Red Giraffe Advisors

MILANER

Elisa Rossi is co-founder MILANER. MILANER empowers the world’s top luxury manufacturers to sell direct to consumers for the first time. MILANER has operations in Europe and San Francisco, CA.

Link to YouTube Video: MILANER

FAST Applications

Adam Yaron is ceo of FAST Applications. FAST Applications designs, develops, and manages professional networking software solutions for the freight industry.

Link to YouTube Video: FAST Applications

limbiq, by Setlog

Guido Brackelsberg is a founding partner and managing director of Setlog. Setlog develops supply chain management software that optimizes transparency, digitalization and real-time data exchange. In this presentation, Guido premieres limbiq, a new platform for digital procurement that has been developed by Setlog.

Link to YouTube Video: limbiq by Setlog

FreightWaves Sonar

Description: Patrick Duffy is President of Blockchain in Transport Alliance, a sister organization of FreightWaves. FreightWaves is a provider of data for the freight markets. Patrick showcases Sonar, a platform that brings together millions of disparate freight market data points with a robust analytics toolset and the market intelligence of the FreightWaves team. FreightWaves operates from Chattanooga, TN.

Link to YouTube Video: FreightWaves Sonar

Queen of Raw

Description: Stephanie Benedetto is founder & CEO of Queen of Raw. Queen of Raw turns pollution into profits across the textile supply chain by building a marketplace for brands to sell excess and scrap textiles rather than warehousing or shipping and incinerating them at a loss. Their analytics tools provide real-time actionable insights, helping to create transparency and efficiency. Queen of Raw operates from New York, NY.

Link to YouTube Video: Queen of Raw

Voyage Control

Description: Jameson Peterson is Head of Construction Solutions at Voyage Control,  a cutting-edge ‘Air Traffic Control’ for inbound logistics management. 

A powerful and easy-to-use software platform, Voyage Control enables ground transport hubs to proactively manage, optimise, track, and communicate with their traffic. Voyage Control has operations in the UK and the US.

Link to YouTube Video: Voyage Control

BLOCK II – Emcee: – Michael Rentz, Founder, The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup

Optimal Dynamics

Daniel Powell is co-founder and CEO of Optimal Dynamics, a NY-based company bringing advanced AI to the supply chain and logistics industry. Based on over 30 years of innovation, Optimal Dynamics is changing how companies operate. 

Link to YouTube Video: Optimal Dynamics

Singapore Economic Development Board 

Samuel Chan is the regional vice president for the Americas at the Singapore Economic Development Board (SEDB). SEDB is a statutory board of the Government of Singapore that plans and executes strategies to sustain Singapore as a leading global hub for business and investment. *This is not a startup showcase, but rather an update on what’s happening in Singapore as the government facilitates and enables supply chain innovation to boost economic growth.

Link to YouTube Video: Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB)

PeerLedger

Dawn Jutla is founder and president of PeerLedger. PeerLedger uses cutting-edge blockchain technology to help companies collaborate to protect human rights, improve environmental performance and significantly reduce key risks, such as counterfeiting and safety, in their supply chains. PeerLedger is based in Halifax, Canada.

Link to YouTube Video: PeerLedger

ELSE Corp

Andrey Golub is founder and CEO of ELSE Corp, an Italian B2B and B2B/2C startup. Headquartered in Italy, ELSE Corp, designs new technological solutions for virtual retail and cloud manufacturing. 

Link to YouTube Video: ELSE Corp

Kontainers

Graham Parker is co-founder and CEO of Kontainers, an ocean freight platform serving some of the biggest brands in shipping. Kontainers allows users to get instant container shipping rates and transact entire shipments online in under one minute. Containers has operations in the UK, and in New York, NY.

Link to YouTube Video: Kontainers

Locus

Shaun Siler is vice president of sales for North America at Locus. Locus is a global decision-making platform in the supply chain that uses deep learning and proprietary algorithms to automate all human decisions required to transport a package or a person, between any two points on earth. Locus is headquartered in Bangalore, India and is establishing operations in the United States.

Link to YouTube Video: Locus

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of open and multidisciplinary grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Founded in August 2017, The New York Supply Chain Meetup is the founding chapter of #TWSCF with a sister chapter launched in Charleston, SC, and other chapters in the process of forming in Vancouver, Athens, Singapore, Bangalore, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities around the world. There are more than 1900 members in New York, and 2700+ members globally.

#CountDown: 8 Days To Launch in Charleston, SC

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Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Laura Corder and Benjamin Johnson of the South Carolina Department of Commerce for pointing me to relevant stats and data for this article.

Introduction

It is with great excitement and anticipation that I write this blog post; At 5:00 PM on Wednesday, March 27, 2019, I’ll join Michael Rentz as he launches The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup. The theme for the event is: Supply Chain & Innovation in South Carolina. The evening will feature a keynote address by Jim Newsome, President & CEO of the South Carolina Ports Authority. That will be followed by two discussion panels. You can find out more details by clicking to the event page using this link: #TCHSSCM01 – Launch: Supply Chain & Innovation in SC.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago – without as much of a focus on Charleston: UnderConstruction | Why Is A Global Grassroots Supply Chain Community Starting in NYC, and Charleston, SC?

What is The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup?

The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup is the first domestic, active sister-chapter of The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation.

In August 2017, Lisa Morales-Hellebo and I teamed up to start building The New York Supply Chain Meetup (#TNYSCM). Our goal was a very simple one; to create a grass-roots driven community that brings together the BUYERS of supply chain innovation and the BUILDERS of supply chain innovation. We have now built it into the world’s largest, fastest growing, and most active supply chain meetup, with 1700+ members in NYC alone. That success has led us to start creating The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation based on requests from people in other cities, like Charleston, SC. The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the world’s first network of collaborative and grass-roots driven supply chain meetups. Our network has 1880+ members globally. We are in the process of building an active chapter in Bangalore – The Bangalore Supply Chain Meetup held its first event on November 24, 2018, and we will now have our second active chapter in Charleston. We expect to launch a few more chapters by the end of 2019, and we already have a few communities in progress – awaiting the emergence of a community leader whose obsessive enthusiasm for supply chain and innovation drives them to opt-in to lead the initiative to build the local communities that will become part of our network on the ground.

Our Mission

To nurture and grow the world’s foremost open, global, multidisciplinary community of people devoted to building the supply chain networks of the future — starting in NYC.

Our Vision

To create a global movement; the largest community on the planet of people obsessed with supply chain technology and innovation.

Why Charleston, SC?

This is a question that arises whenever we tell people about The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup. The first answer is really quite simple. We’re optimising for enthusiasm. In the past year of building the community in New York City, we have discovered that you can’t manufacture enthusiasm for our declared mission. So, we need people like Michael who opt-in because our mission is something they believe in, not because it is part of some strategy. The enthusiasm for what we are trying to build has to be intrinsic, not extrinsic.

A little bit about Michael; He is a native of South Carolina. He studied Civil Engineering at the University of South Carolina – Columbia. Then he obtained a JD from the Charleston School of Law, and an MBA from the College of Charleston. Most recently, he spent 2 years at Maersk, and was based in the New York City area, before decided to return home to South Carolina towards the end of 2018. Before returning home, he joined us in NYC for several of our meetups, gaining a sense of the community we are building and understanding our mission better. Once he was settled in Charleston, he let us know he wanted to recreate a sister community in Charleston. We couldn’t have wished for a better sequence of events.

It turns out Charleston, SC is an ideal place to consider building grass-roots driven community that focuses on supply chain, innovation, and technology. Here are some stats;

  • According to the World Trade Atlas, South Carolina traded with 198 countries in 2018. Given that the Port of Charleston will boast the second deepest habor on the United States’ East Coast by 2025, one expects this number to increase in the very near future. Presently, the state’s biggest trading partners are China, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
  • According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, South Carolina’s GDP was $221.7 billion in 2017, having grown by 114% over the past 20 years. When you marry that with a 2015 economic development estimate that the Port of Charleston generates roughly $53 billion in annual economic activity that supports about 187,200 jobs across the state, one realizes how pivotal Charleston is to economic progress in South Carolina.
  • According to the South Carolina Ports Authority, $38 billion worth of exports travelled through South Carolina.
  • The Port of Charleston hosts 13 of the world’s 15 biggest container shipping lines, and the South Carolina Ports Authority plans $2.4 billion in capital expenditures to improve its physical and technological capabilities in order to handle more freight from post-Panamax vessels. It is one of the top 10 ports in the United States, and has the stated ambition of vaulting itself into the top 5.
  • According to the Charleston Regional Development Alliance; The Charleston region ranks 9th among U.S. metros in attracting foreign direct investments, benefits from transportation infrastructure that puts shipments through Charleston within 48 hours of most domestic markets, with more than 20% of the U.S. population within a day’s drive of the region.

So, while Charleston, SC may not be the first place most people think of when they think of the location for the next domestic chapter of our supply chain community, I would argue that Michael is right when he observes that the ground in Charleston, SC is fertile for a community like the one he’s set out to build.

As The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup grows, Michael and it’s other members will have the support of our growing network of communities, starting with the community in New York City. Join us in spreading the news about the community we are building, and specifically, The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup.

Our Mantra

About The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of open and multidisciplinary grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Founded in August, 2017, The New York Supply Chain Meetup is its founding chapter.

About REFASHIOND Ventures

REFASHIOND Ventures is an emerging early stage venture capital firm that is being built to invest in early-stage startups creating innovations to refashion global supply chain networks. REFASHIOND Ventures is based in New York City. The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation and The New York Supply Chain Meetup are initiatives of REFASHIOND Ventures.

NRF Big Show 2019 – My EXPO Hall Tour Notes

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My Supply Chain Credo

Disclaimer: This blog post reflects my personal opinions only. It does not represent the opinions of REFASHIOND Ventures, or REFASHIOND CO:LAB. It does not represent the opinions of The New York Supply Chain Meetup, or The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation. It does not reflect the opinions of any other person who is associated with any of those entities. This blog post does not represent the opinion of any other individual or organization that is mentioned by the author. I do not have any business or commercial relationship with organizations mentioned in this article, however CIM Tours paid The New York Supply Chain Meetup a stipend for my services as a tour guide during NRF’s Big Show 2019.

Background

During the fall of 2018, my co-founder, Lisa Morales-Hellebo and I met Daniel Hodges for coffee in NYC. We discussed what we were working on, and he told us about his company, Consumers in Motion Tours (CIM Tours). Paraphrasing the description from Dan’s LinkedIn profile; CIM Tours creates experiences that transform business. They guide CEOs, BODs and CMOs through technological, and consumer behavioral changes and the resulting disruption by exposing them to innovative ideas and technologies being used by startups and other cutting-edge companies. They utilize major conferences and workshops to accomplish this task. When he asked us if we’d be interested in leading the tours for the National Retail Federation’s 2019 Big Show Conference, we immediately said yes – after all, supply chain is our thing.

What is the National Retail Federation (NRF), you ask? It is a retail-industry trade organization that has existed for more than a hundred years. According to its website, the retail industry contributes $2.6 trillion to the United States’ gross domestic product – far outstripping any other industry. As an industry, retail is the largest private sector employer in the United States. The Big Show is the NRF’s annual flagship conference – the world’s largest retail conference and expo. This year it attracted 38,000 attendees, 16,000 retailers, and 800 exhibitors, representing 99 countries.

CIM helps delegates and attendees at conferences like NRF’s Big Show, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Cannes Lions, C2 Montreal, and the IoT Solutions World Congress, etc., navigate and explore the technologies and trends at the forefront of change today.

You can understand why Lisa and I were excited about this. Below are the notes I prepared for Lisa and I as we were getting ready to lead the tours. We led 3 tours, each 2 hours in duration, on each day from January 13 to January 15.

can you tell Lisa and I had just failed to find acceptably strong coffee to help us get through the first day of tours? The lines at Starbucks in the Javitz Center were too long, and we ran out of time.

Note: These notes are prepared directly from materials the participating companies provided us directly, or that I found on their websites. Any direct similarities between my notes and descriptions and other materials on their respective websites is deliberate.

ACCUSTORE

AccuStore is a store-intelligence software platform that helps retailers maintain and update store data in real-time. It helps retailers base decisions on a single-source of data to help execute store-specific initiatives.

Here are two examples of how AccuStore helps retailers.

Walgreens is one of the largest pharmacy chains in the United States. Walgreens implemented AccuStore to help them with marketing cost savings. With over 8,000 stores, they were throwing away money on marketing overages by sending the same generic sign kits to every store. Since each store had unique requirements, such as the number of windows or the number of fixtures, these sign kits were not only confusing for employees to install, but stores ended up throwing away up to half of what was being sent to them.

By using AccuStore’s store-specific profile data, store distributions are created for each individual store. So, each store receives only the signs that are appropriate for that location. Plus, marketing can now tailor POP by store to eliminate waste. Walgreens has saved over half a million dollars this year alone!

Another example of how retailers are using AccuStore is with the company, Crocs.

Crocs is a footwear brand. Crocs has saved tens of thousands of dollars during a single campaign because of accurate sign types and quantities. They needed to right-size their inventory so AccuStore developed a plan to gather and maintain their store profile data so they could send stores exactly what each store needed. Now, the information is available 24/7 via AccuStore’s cloud-based mobile platform. Plus, AccuStore helps Crocs gather store-specific information for inventory planning and store walks.

RELEX SOLUTIONS

RELEX Solutions helps retail businesses improve their competitiveness through localized assortments, profitable use of retail space, accurate forecasting and replenishment, and optimized workforce planning.

Here are two examples of how RELEX Solutions helps their customers.

Musti Group is the leading pet supplies and accessories retailer in the Nordics, with 264 stores in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. They needed supply chain integration between the company’s 5 distribution centers and 264 stores as managing changes and disruption in their supply chain was becoming a significant headache.

With an implementation period of a few months in 2015, RELEX Solutions; Optimized the flow of goods, for example, with deliveries scheduled for quieter days. Simplified Musti’s supply chain management – the complex supply chain is now managed by a single super-user – reducing the chaos that previously reigned when many managers at individual stores were involved. Improved campaigns the company runs by ensuring that there is adequate availability of promoted products. Inventory control now happens on a bottom-up basis using store-level data and optimizing transportation requirements.

Saarionen is a leading Finnish convenience foods manufacturer, with operations in Estonia as well. They needed demand planning software that is comprehensive, flexible, and transparent. They also wanted to introduce automation, so that planners could focus on exception management.

With an implementation period of 4 months in 2016, RELEX Solutions; Installed a system with error margins of less than 5% in weekly and monthly baseline forecasts for some standard high volume products. Improved efficacy for forecasting exceptions by incorporating the human expertise of the demand planners. Strengthened Saarionen’s position in its market.

Other Notes: Relex Solutions just raised a $200M growth equity round from Technology Crossover Ventures.

BOARD INTERNATIONAL

BOARD is a software platform for unified business intelligence, performance management, and predictive analytics.

Here is one example of how BOARD International helps its customers.

Coca-Cola European Partners is the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler. It is the market leader in one of the biggest fast-moving consumer goods markets, worth over 100 billion euros. The business serves over 300 million consumers in 13 European countries.

Coca-Cola European Partners needed a supply chain finance solution to deploy across 48 manufacturing plants, 85 warehousing locations, cold drinks operations sites, and across its supply chain logistics organization. The company also needed the solution to be used by divisional CFO, heads of supply chain management, controllers, and department and plant managers. The company wanted to achieve: leaner financial operations, automated planning, and optimized reporting – underpinning a new way of doing planning based on comprehensive communication across the company.

Using BOARD, Coca-Cola European Partners has; Increased the efficiency of its finance activities with 10 percent manual inputs based on country specific data, and 90 percent pre-populated data. Reduced data transfer times from 24 hours to 15 minutes. Implemented a live status tracker based on BOARD’s automation capabilities. Implemented consolidation with one click, simplifying the process of performing full country consolidation for all of Coca-Cola European Partners’ operations. Implemented data transparency by effectively enabling automation and standardization. Increased ease communication around supply chain management and planning across the company.

Other Notes: I had the most fun with the team from Board International. We kept cracking jokes with one another, and it always seemed like we were old friends meeting after a long time apart. They also had an espresso station on the second day. The name “board” is supposed to evoke the flexibility that comes with working with a whiteboard to design a robust supply chain management solution for each customer – with no need to write a single line of code.

ANAPLAN

Anaplan is a software platform for enterprise-wide planning needs. The software enables financial planning, budgeting and analysis, demand and supply chain planning, sales compensation and territory management by connecting data, people, and plans.

Here is one example of how Anaplan helps its customers.

Sonos is a consumer electronics company with a complex supply chain enabling sales in 60 countries, and relying on more than 200 suppliers. Before Anaplan, Sonos was managing its sales, component sourcing, and supply chain through countless spreadsheets. As you can imagine, planning and forecasting was slow and prone to mistakes.

Sonos is now using the Anaplan platform to build end-to-end supply chain visibility and connect plans across resources, spend, and product lines.

The Sonos team started their implementation with supply and demand balancing. Then, they added a supply planning module, which enables a granular view of products at the factory level. Lastly, they incorporated demand planning to add forecasting into the mix.

Anaplan has helped Sonos:

  • Reduce tedious and mistake laden manual data entry and increase value-added work
  • Cut down the amount of time integrating spreadsheets from 70% to 10% of analysts’ time
  • The Global Planning Team can now execute a change in demand in one day, when this activity used to take 2 weeks.

Other Notes: Imagine what a surprise it was to see Vivek Soneja, a member of The New York Supply Chain Meetup at the Anaplan booth! We have grown so quickly that it’s hard to get to know everyone – especially since I am usually running around trying to make sure that our events go on without a major hitch . . . So it was cool to see one of our members in action outside the context of one of our meetups. Lisa and I must have beamed with pride when he turned around and told everyone within earshot about how great The New York Supply Chain’s events are. In his words; “You have to check it out. They are doing an amazing job.”

Booth 1304: Anaplan at #NRFBigShow2019

MANHATTAN ASSOCIATES

Manhattan Associates designs and builds supply chain software that connects front-end customer facing solutions with back-end operations and execution.

Here is one example of how Manhattan Associates helps its customers.

Adidas Group is the second largest sportswear manufacturer in the world. Adidas sought to improve its supply chain systems across all its brands, with a global implementation.

Manhattan Associates’ Distribution Management software has been implemented at 3 strategic sites in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

This has led to; A standardized distribution systems model for Adidas, enhanced supply chain control and visibility, and improved inventory accuracy.

Other Notes: They refused to let me have a cup of coffee during the first tour, on the first day. I’ll leave it at that. I had just spent a few minutes talking up their company to the delegates on the tour, and they wouldn’t even let me have a fucking cup of coffee!?

DSI

DSI delivers mobile supply chain technology solutions focused on helping companies advance their business to meet the accelerated demands of the digital economy.

Here is one example of how DSI helps its customers.

Rally House is a national sports apparel and gift store. It specializes in immersing its customers in hometown pride by stocking products unique to each local areas professional and college teams. To do this, the company needs an efficient inventory management system, moving away from centralized planning and distribution and more towards in-store fulfillment. This became more of an issue as the company expanded to 61 stores, in 9 states, with products for hundreds of different teams, represented by thousands of SKUs.

Rally House was  already using DSI’s warehouse inventory management software, and so by implementing in-store logistics, the company transformed its stores from showrooms into warehouses.

DSI enabled Rally House to eliminate their central distribution center within a few months and move all shipments direct to store from their vendors using their existing apps. This change eliminated weeks of costly lag time associated with the movement of warehouse shipments and expanded available inventory to customers.

Rally House’s distribution processes have been simplified significantly on every level. As demand ebbs and flows for products or for specific team merchandise, stores can stock accordingly and have inventory on the floor in days instead of weeks. Individual stores can now respond faster to time sensitive and regional events—such as World Series Championships—by moving product direct to their stores.

Other Notes: DSI was the most mobile-focused of the companies on the tour. I’d even perhaps go as far as describing them as mobile-first and mobile-only – obviously an exaggeration, but you get the point.

ENVISTA CORP

enVista is a global consulting and software solutions firm that helps its customers to optimize supply chain efficiencies to drive cost savings, and unify commerce to drive customer engagement and revenue.

Here is one example of how enVista helps its customers.

Saddle Creek Logistics Services is a privately held, asset-based 3rd-party logistics provider. It provides omnichannel fulfillment, warehousing, and transportation services. It operates 19 million square feet of space, across 45 locations with 3,300+ employees.

Saddle Creek wanted an order management system as it grew. Because of the nature of its business it was important for such a system to work for various types of clients . . . from those who ship hundreds of orders per month, to those who ship millions of orders per month. It also had to integrate with a variety of supply chain software solutions used by Saddle Creek’s clients and suppliers.

enVista provided an out-of-the-box multi-tenant order management system. Saddle Creek’s developers work closely with enVista to enhance the product for Saddle Creek as well as Saddle Creek’s clients. The enhancements include automated order processing and exception handling.

Saddle Creek now has:

  • Full visibility to all clients using the order management system in a single snapshot.
  • The system is seamlessly connected to 14 different systems between Saddle Creek and its customers, with as many as 80 different integration points.
  • Greatly reduced manual order processing for Saddle Creek’s customers and clients.

Other Notes: During one of the tours – I do not recall which, we were lucky enough to catch Jim Barnes, CEO of enVista at the booth. Watching him engage with the delegates on the tour reminded me why it’s so important for early stage startup founders to be able to sell and engage with customers. His intensity level and mastery of the issues the delegates were curious about was without comparison throughout the tours we gave during the event. You could tell that in affected the delegates, they paid rapt attention. For example, he went fairly deep into the philosophical underpinning of enVista’s approach to unified commerce in a way no one did during the remainder of the event.

Booth 4249: enVista Corp. at #NRFBigShow2019, Jim Barnes – facing me, speaking with the delegates on the tour.

MAGSTAR

Magstar provides enterprise resource planning solutions with integrated POS and CRM software for retail supply chains. The company provides Enterprise Resource Planning, Point-of-Sale, Customer Relationship Management, Warehouse Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics, and Mobile Solutions specifically designed for the SMB market. It promises the same functionality and support provided by the big vendors, without the cost. For example, they said each customer is assigned to a specific customer support employee at Magstar for the duration of that customer’s relationship with Magstar.

Here is one example of how Magstar helps its customers.

Fields Canada is a mid-sized retailer with 62 locations and a warehouse. The company needed to reduce inventory cycle time, and gain full control over in-store inventory.

Using Magstar’s Total Warehouse, Fields was able to:

  • Gain real-time visibility into inventory.
  • Reduce time to store by 14+ days.
  • Reduce cycle time by 70%.
  • Implement a paperless warehouse – no more missing pallets.
  • Simplify ship-to-store processes
  • Implement instant purchase order creation.
  • View inventory trends across peak seasons.
I do not always attend conferences, but when I do it is most likely a supply chain conference where I’ll be trying to learn about supply chain, technology, innovation, and startups.

WHAT DID I GET OUT OF DOING THIS?

I always find it fascinating to understand how customers describe the problem that they want technology to solve. Many times technologists and entrepreneurs think they are solving one problem, when customers think about the problem from a completely different perspective. The number one cause of failure among startups is the failure to find product-market-fit, which is an indication that the startup has solved a problem that customers are unwilling to pay for. Activities like this help me gain a better understanding of how customers see their world and the role that technology can play in helping them achieve their goals. One may say that on the rare occasion when I attend a conference it is to enable me do market research. I met executives from all over the world, and got to see the various perspectives from which they were thinking about deploying technology where they live and do business.

About The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of open and multidisciplinary grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Founded in August, 2017, The New York Supply Chain Meetup is its founding chapter. Local chapters are run by volunteer organizers who each build a team to manage chapter activities and events. You can learn more here: The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation – Our Manifesto.

About REFASHIOND Ventures

REFASHIOND Ventures is an emerging early stage venture capital firm that is being built to invest in early-stage startups creating innovations to reinvent global supply chain networks. REFASHIOND Ventures is based in New York City. The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation and The New York Supply Chain Meetup are initiatives of REFASHIOND Ventures.

Update #01, at 23:54 EST on Sat Feb 16, 2019: Removed ghost bullets by changing from bullets to paragraphs for Board, and Manhattan Associates. Added whiteboard analogy for Board International.

#UnderConstruction | #TNYSCM15: Supply Chain Tech – From The World To NYC

by

A shot of Manhattan, taken from the 48th Floor of 10 Hudson Yards, New York, NY

WHAT IS A SUPPLY CHAIN?

A network of connected and interdependent organisations mutually and cooperatively working together to control, manage and improve the flow of materials and information from suppliers to end users.

— Martin Christopher, Logistics & Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks, 4th ed, Pearson Education Limited 2011, p4

For the month of June, The New York Supply Chain Meetup aka The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is thinking of hosting a “Supply Chain Tech – From The World To NYC” themed event. 

It would be a “showcase + demo” event, and each company/startup would get our customary 15 minutes, perhaps 20, to talk about what the company does and give a product demo. We are targeting 6 – 8 startups, but we could make room for more depending on the level of interest.

We already have a company from Germany earmarked – this is pending confirmation. We have confirmed participation from a startup from India. We have a request out to startups from Greece and Australia as well – and we can easily get many more if we really tap into our network. We are starting with startups we have been engaged with for more than 6 months. Obviously, that is only a small pool of all the supply chain technology startups that exist around the world.

The dates we have earmarked for June are a weekday during the week of June 17 (Ideally June 19 or 20), or during the week of June 27 (Ideally, June 26 or 27).

Here’s a form that you can fill if you are a startup or a small to medium size company that builds supply chain technology and want to be considered for the final list of participants. We would like participation in this event to be free, except for the cost of making the trip to NYC. So we will try to find sponsors to help us with space for the event, and food for the people who attend.

Cross-sections of the audience at #TNYSCM02 in January 2018 at SAP in NYC.

Background

A small group of us in New York City started building The New York Supply Chain Meetup in Summer 2017. In that time we have become the largest, most active, and fastest growing community on Meetup that focuses on supply chain, technology and innovation. Here are some of the things we have accomplished;

  • Our public launch was on November 16, 2017. We have had 10 events, at which we have attracted an average of 100+ attendees. We had roughly 150 at our very first event.
  • Our events have attracted speakers from emerging supply chain technology startups, as well as companies like SAP, IBM, Maersk, UPS, Tapestry, A.T. Kearny, L’Oreal, ALDO Group, EY, and GS1-US over the course of our first year.
  • We now have more than 1,600 members in The New York Supply Chain Meetup, and more than 1,700 across the network.
  • We are in the process of scaling to other cities (based on demand) and created the Worldwide Supply Chain Federation to facilitate that process.
  • We are launching The Charleston Supply Chain Meetup on March 27, 2019 and we launched The Bangalore Supply Chain Meetup on November 24, 2018. Other cities in which communities are in the process of forming are Athens, Singapore, Vancouver, Chicago, Jakarta, and Lusaka.

According to Mercedes Delgado and Karen Mills, in their book The Supply Chain Economy: A New Framework for Understanding Innovation and Services; “The U.S. supply chain contains 37% of all jobs, employing 44 million people. These jobs have significantly higher than average wages, and account for much of the innovative activity in the economy.” I believe similar conclusions can be inferred about the role supply chain plays in any growing economy around the world.

This makes the community we have set out to build one that offers enormous promise for collaboration between cities, states, and companies as well about how supply chain can function as a foundation for economic growth. The work we are doing to build this community is driven by our motivation to bring together two key groups of people;

  • The people inventing new technologies and developing the new innovations that will refashion the world’s supply chain networks, and
  • The people who make buying decisions related to deploying new technologies and innovations within the supply chains on which businesses are reliant for their commercial operations.
    • I believe firmly that supply chain is the basis on which companies win or lose competitive advantage. It is arguably the basis on which communities, countries, and societies prosper or fail.

Selfishly, we also want every growing supply chain technology startup, from any part of the world, to eventually set up a United States headquarters in New York City, with The New York Supply Chain Meetup as the community of first call, based on prior engagement with a local chapter of The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation. Moving to a new place is hard – I know, I came to the United States in 1997 from Ghana, after growing up in Nigeria. Knowing that you have friends when you arrive makes a big difference.

My Supply Chain Credo

About The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation

The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation is the collaborative, and mutually supportive coalition of open and multidisciplinary grassroots communities focused on technology and innovation in the global supply chain industry. Founded in August, 2017, The New York Supply Chain Meetup is its founding chapter. Local chapters are run by volunteer organizers who each build a team to manage chapter activities and events. You can learn more here: The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation – Our Manifesto.

About REFASHIOND Ventures

REFASHIOND Ventures is an emerging early stage venture capital firm that is being built to invest in early-stage startups creating innovations to reinvent global supply chain networks. REFASHIOND Ventures is based in New York City. The Worldwide Supply Chain Federation and The New York Supply Chain Meetup are initiatives of REFASHIOND Ventures.

#TWSCF & #TNYSCM Mantra