Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Tire Tracks Podcast. I'm your host, Matthew Shumaker. Welcome to this episode of our Intelligent Freight Mini-Series. Today, we've got a special guest, Mark Baxa, the President and CEO of CSCMP, joining us here on the call and on the podcast here. Mark, how are you doing today?

Doing great, Matthew, and it's great to be with you and your audience. Before we get too far into this, thank you, too, for your leadership and your company and their engagement with CSCMP. We're really glad to have you onboard.

Yeah. You guys have been a great partner and we love everything we've done with you guys so far and couldn't think of anybody better to have on this episode here as we start to dive into this topic. Yeah. Let’s see. Tell us just a little bit more about you guys. I won't butcher the spelling of the acronym there for CSCMP, but tell us a little bit more about who you guys are, what you do. I'm sure everyone's aware. But if not, take the stage here a minute and set that up.

Well, as the journey of supply chain became known over time, we started out as a national distribution materials management organization early in the 60s and then moved to the council logistics management, or CLM in the early 80s, and then about the time of deregulation. Then in 2004, the board of directors, which I was a part of at the time, really cool experience, moved from CLM to the council of supply chain management professionals, CSCMP. Because it would be important for us to move across the entire span of supply chain professionals and that's who we are here for.

Our members know that our mission is to connect, educate and develop supply chain professionals throughout their career and that includes academics, service providers and shippers, or beneficial cargo owners and practitioners. Then outside of that are anyone that wants to be a part of our organization and learn about supply chain, sharpen their saw, as Stephen Covey would say. That applies to students, military, and you name it.

We also have a foundation inside of CSCMP that helps the overlooked and underserved populations engage in supply chain learning and development called our Talent Center. Multifaceted industry specific and supported organization for supply chain professionals around the world.

Wow, that's really, really great. It's cool to hear the evolution of it and how you guys have adapted. I think it's so critical to have an organization adapt with the times and not just keep teaching the same thing over and over again. How fast this industry moves, how quickly and out of date everything becomes from an education standpoint and from a job role standpoint.

Well, we want to be that organization where supply chain leaders and industry practitioners, service providers, educators come to actually help, or engage in our content and our learning portfolio to help sharpen their skill sets as well. That's why we exist. If you don't move, if you don't evolve, you can't help. That's really what we're all about.

That's great. That's a great segue as well into our topic for today. It’s a term that has shifted many times and evolved many times throughout the industry, and that's visibility. Really want to pick your brain a little bit about visibility and where it's gone and where it's come from. Mainly, when did it start to shift and how would you define visibility today?

Well, where’s my shipment became really cool 20 years ago with the advent of the Internet and Fred Smith showing people how to not only do their own customer service at fedex.com, but track their shipments. It began to steamroll from there, right? It's just like, where's my shipment? Well, it shifted recently when supply chains stopped being more predictable. Once congestion, geopolitical impacts, labor constraints, weather variability, and capacity whiplash became more normal it was really location on wasn't actionable. It wasn't enough. It has to evolve into something more risk-based and intent, signals that you'd likely to see, right, to give you an indication of what's next. What's about to happen? What did happen, but what's next?

Yeah, I love that. It's taking it from that static point in time and really making it something you can actually act on and work through. From that, how would you describe the differences between freight data and really interpreting it? Where does the difference lie in the two that you were just mentioning?

Well, you think about freight operations, because milestones are more of a rear-view mirror look. What happened? They tell you after something's either been lost, or has been put in place, right? Modern operations now really need to focus more on warning signals, dwells, predictability around route deviation, facility congestion, patterns that could in fact affect a particular shipment, or series of shipments, so you can intervene while there's still time to do that.

Yeah. I could see that being impactful in so many different ways. You just touched on a couple of them, but the dwell time's impacting, obviously, the customers who might be waiting on the freight and the customer relationship. Some of the risk factors as well and interpreting some of the risk factors around the freight, whether it's fraud, theft, or spoilage, whatever it might be. Trying to get ahead of those things can be really helpful.

Absolutely. I think today's logistics operations are looked upon to not only help people understand time in full deliveries, but not only where things are at, but what's on the road ahead, so that we can improve customer service and really, if people will promote your business to say, this is the place I want to engage.

Yeah, absolutely. What role does the TMS play in that and the technology providers that support this and support the people that are running the show behind the scenes?

Well, you think about a TMS platform, they've obviously become much more robust and perhaps, all-encompassing, versus what they were, say, five years ago, and for sure, when they first began to surface 25 years ago. TMS is really about not just setting expectations, but providing how well you're fulfilling against those expectations, whether they be established benchmarks, guaranteed shipments. It also enables a company to be much more proactive. We'd much rather know that it's not going to be there before we hit our promise date, right? If something needs to shift, I mean, let's face it, many times manufacturing operations, distribution operations are wanting to control cost, and that raw material cost, or working capital and inventory, and a TMS platform is a vital place where people get information, but also involve information to route and predict, show up and stage shipments, so that things are much more reliable.

With the induction of artificial intelligence into these platforms, I think it helps people understand the planning process to even know before you commit, are you going to be able to make it? Take, for example, the winter storm we just had, right? You wouldn't want to make a guarantee promise in Dallas, Texas for yesterday morning at 8 am, the Thursday before, right?

Yup.

The system might have said you can do it, right? You can get there in 24 hours with a rest over the weekend. But hello, right? Systems are evolving. They're becoming much more data hungry and much more multi-tenant in terms of the corporation of data elements to make a more predictable judgment about when freight will arrive.

Yeah. It's more of taking a holistic view. It's getting out of the trees, or looking at the tree and getting up to the forest level view to see what's going on and being able to react faster to everything that’s coming at you, including the weather and other things like that. We touched a little bit on it, just weather just now, but what other shipment behaviors start to emerge when you start to look at this and look across thousands of shipments, or loads and looking at it from a proactive standpoint? What are some of the shipment behaviors you're starting to look at?

Well, let's look at the relationship between a shipper and a 3PL. Two things. Tolerance for surprises has really collapsed.

People don't like surprises.

No. And the expectation of proactive community has exploded. Two parts play into that. The competency and capability of the individuals that are at the 3PL, as well as the customer, right? Do we have enough intelligence to understand what our options are, but what might be happening given circumstances around us, having that sixth sense, if you will. That only comes through experience and intentional knowledge learning. We want to know, just as I said, customers want to know before it's late. 3PLs want fewer check calls that say, where's my stuff? In other words, a fire drill. Visibility that these platforms offer really help smart people become even smarter about how to translate into predictable ETAs and recommended actions. We're thinking about things most differently than we have in the past.

That's really great. That's really great. It sounds like, that pattern recognition has really been a turning point in freight intelligence. That behavioral piece is really becoming something that's transforming the way that we manage all of this and manage our supply chain.

Well, let's think about visibility from status to intelligence. Let's build on this just a little bit. Seeing freight and then interpreting freight behavior are different things. One is at present and one is more prediction. The truck is here. That's easy, right? Okay, we know it's there. If somebody told us they keyed it in, or GPS said, that's where the truck is. The lane the carrier is using and the risk of additional dwell time, or routing. This is like, this route is trending late in awareness that this can happen. You can think about TMS starts going both ways. One to the logistics planner, and then also to the customer. Visibility on both sides and the interaction between the two that exists today redefines how we're using visibility clearly from a freight data and an interpretation and turning that into behaviors and all sharing in that together between the execution side and the receiver side.

Yeah. I really like the way you put that. Let's talk through an example where a shipment just looks fine, where everything in a traditional model of, hey, it's in route, or it's been picked up, it's in route. What's an example we could walk through where it might actually be at high risk operationally, something that is going on beneath the scenes, or behind the tracking update that they're not seeing that could be potentially disruptive?

Yeah. This is one that I love. You have a route planned, and let's assume for a minute it's really high-value, high-risk freight. It's sole-sourced, and the only source, and if it doesn't get there on time, it's going to shut the machine down, okay, the manufacturing process. The carrier runs into their own constraints, be it driver illness, truck availability, mechanical failure, or whatever. The other option is they outsource it to somebody else who doesn't know the particular requirements of the load. The TMS tells you that there's a pause and rerouting is in process. You don't know what that is and all of a sudden, it's telling you it's on the rail, and it was needed tomorrow. It's now going to be there in five days, right?

The alternative is a lack of that value-added partnership and understanding between the service provider, be it 3PL, or the freight handling company directly, whoever that might be. The customer, the customer's requirements, what to do and what not to do. It's really a bad day. When things don't go well and you don't know why they're not going well, you find out information-wise, or it comes in later, only to find that it's been rerouted and it's been changed in terms of not just rerouting, but a different mode. For whatever reason, your single trailer load of the most valuable raw material is transiting on a different mode-like rail. Your plan is now facing a serious shutdown, and you can't get it off, right? You can't get it off till it hits the yard. These are risks, still today, that are prevalent in our business.

The other one is, somebody's keeping an eye on your freight that shouldn't be and gets into your ecosystem and it's stolen. Again, we're not going to know about this until the 11th and a half hour when we realize that a trailer in dwell have been noticed. Two hours earlier, that ping didn't come in on time and the freight has been – it's been dispatched to someone else that shouldn't have it. Like these scenarios, these are very important contextually, but also operationally that put things at risk.

Yeah. I like that you talk about the human element knowing the customer, knowing their shipping profile, knowing their needs. We have a large 3PL customer of ours that services the auto manufacturing industry. If one of the auto manufacturers, one of the major ones out there, it's a significant fine if you actually shut down their production facilities. A lot of that risk can even fall on the 3PLs for missing those shipments, and some of those fines can be passed through contractually. We see that, where there's a huge element of that, where the customer really wants to – the 3PL really needs to understand the customer, their production lines, everything like that. Then now in this new world we're living in, where automation's taking over an AI and everything like that, we need to train those AI agents and train those models to understand the customers as well and look for those different behavioral cues and look for that in the system. 

Just to say, it sounds like, we're really trending more towards decision support here, because failure in the pipeline, wherever it may be, and we're talking about specifically the logistics part of the supply chain, which is major and critical, both front-end or the raw material, or inbound finished goods, and also the outbound to final distribution, or customer, depending on how you operate as a company. Understanding the decision points and the decision support that's needed when using AI and training those bots, this is where the human element is difficult to override. It's going to take time. Some may already have it close, but still, it's going to take time to understand what's been suggested can be implemented. When we run into constraints that are more DOT and FFCSA related, the regulatory side, you got to be really careful. Really careful.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that ties into one of our notes here that we had was really about seeing intelligent systems as a second set of eyes, instead of a replacement for human judgment. I think it's really important and critical, and everybody thinks AI is coming for my job and these new technologies are going to reduce workforces. I think there's so much at stake that I don't think there ever could be that runaway AI handles everything itself, makes all its own decisions itself element to it. Is that what you guys are seeing? What are people's thoughts around AI and how it's going to impact their jobs in this current supply chain?

Well, you've asked a very big question and I'll touch on it in two different points. Thinking back to May of 2023, when Dr. Yossi Sheffi from MIT released one of his latest books, The Magic Conveyor Belt, it's more about the human intersection of artificial intelligence and workforce. He stated in there that supply chains are here for the betterment of society, and taking care of humankind. That was the preface of the book.

The interesting thing is that when we look at AI coming to part of our work ecosystem, there are certain segments. There are mundane tasks, repeated tasks that perhaps are best automated. You mentioned the automobile sector, they demonstrated that really well with single-arm, or multi-arm robotics and the manufacturing and assembly process of a car.

Absolutely.

Right? Spot welding and picking pieces up and holding them in place and those kinds of things that helps not only speed up the assembly line and produce more cars per day, but perhaps, takes away the things that would otherwise be long-term health risk, because of body motion and those kinds of things. Also, just repeatability and accuracy can be improved. Then making smarter machines, adapting to variances and those kinds of things to know intuitively that it's better to put a half an ounce of weld versus three quarter of an ounce and I can create the same whole. Machines possibly can learn this through adaptation.

There are other jobs that, and when you think about workforce development, there are co-bots working alongside of individuals and warehousing when it comes to picking and packing product to ship out to the next part of the food chain, or supply chain. Then there's the total fear of having very sophisticated roles such as data analytics and really in our procurement business, assembling contracts, using chatbots to do that, or artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT. They can all turn out great frameworks and that's something that probably would have taken a paralegal some time, or even a contract expert a little bit of time to develop in terms of days, maybe even weeks, when you do spot checking back and forth. Now, we can produce a full contract in a matter of seconds that you now then can evaluate and fine tune as a procurement specialist in the supply chain.

The whole spectrum of how we do our work, how we assist our work and how we execute our work is changing and it's evolving. It's not stapled down yet. We’re a long way away from that. One thing about supply chain is we've been on this journey of improvement and had we not evolved from the power sources in supply chain, from steam generation to electric, to now where we are today, right? The whole. Else, we wouldn't be doing things that we're doing now. A data center is all of this.

I would say that as people look at AI, what our BEM members are telling us is help us understand the success and the pitfalls, so we can make gradual but informed step changes. Some of those step changes are really big, right? Really big, really valuable. It depends on the industry vertical that they're in and of course, where they are in that supply chain, whether they're a raw materials provider of some kind technology, or final finished good manufacturer. It varies a lot. AI is being looked at broadly and I would say, reasonably deep across the supply chain, particularly in areas where humans supplementing work with that humans can do and make them that much more efficient. Job replacement, not a big fear. I mean, didn't we say that about computers 50 years ago? Think about the movie Apollo 13. I'm referencing a great movie with Tom Hanks, right?

Oh, phenomenal. 

They introduced a family to a computer that was a huge room and said, “1 megabyte of information in here?” Look at where we are now today, right? We're carrying these things with gigabytes. We'll continue to evolve and AI will continue to have its place and it will help us become that much more efficient along the way. Trials and tribulations definitely will be a part of the course.

Yeah, absolutely. Where do you see it going and where do you see us at now and where do you see us going in the next three to five years? How is that going to impact what we're doing today in freight platforms that are out there and with all the different technology advancing as it is?

I'd be remiss if I didn't say this. I've already talked about the human element, right? You can take it from job replacement to supplemental, right to the job, etc. Decision making, AI output, is it good? Is it not? Can I use it? Liability, all this. The human mind makes those decisions. Not a machine. How do you know? How do you validate that the output is reasonable? Well, you have to have a body of knowledge in logistics. Maybe you're in planning, maybe you're in procurement and sourcing, maybe you're in manufacturing, customer service, distribution. The first thing that is paramount and it doesn't matter whether you went to a four-year school, came out of high school and went right to the workforce and now going back to junior college and taking courses to help enable you to understand, you must know and understand how supply chain work and the functions that enable supply chains to exist. If you don't, you are already behind the eight ball, because no machine is going to replace the knowledge that you need to vet, validate and implement. No machine. I haven't seen it yet.

Yeah, we get on airplanes and we know the pilot upfront is perhaps taking off flying and landing completely in a remote-control scenario. They're also looking at the gauges. They're also understanding what they're looking at in terms of, are we, or are we not going to be okay when we get to the next theoretical mile marker in the air, right? It's not about the nose of the plane, it's what's next. What's going to happen when I get there, and is the machine doing okay? That pilot has the body of knowledge I'm talking about. Without that, the machine might fly on its own, but the moment it's in trouble, good luck, right?

This is the challenge, it's skilled workforce development and this is for everyone, including leaders in supplies chains. You build competitive advantage by developing your people and that's first and foremost, right? The second part of our journey comes from those that are inventing the technology. I love it. It was about three years ago when one of the leaders at Google said, “I got 2,500 people working on AI and nobody can explain to me what it does.” Beautiful. Fantastic. Here's where I'm at. Here's where I'm at. That might have been a quip, it's just a fast comment in the passing.

If you think about the evolution, it wasn't that long ago we weren't talking about AI, right? Here's the point I'm making is all of these systems, all of the producers of the semiconductors, all of the folks that are developing the technologies for shippers and practitioners to use in their operations have to be better teachers. You are accountable, right?

I like that.

You can't show up and give us eye candy. You've got to help us implement and that's part of the value proposition that shippers need to be prepared to pay for. If you want a greater success outcome, find a partner that can lead you to success. It's the third alternative. It's not win-win. It's when ideas culminate together and you create something even better. Frankly, that's what got us to the moon in 1969. That kind of thing must happen today.

I can't wait to see where it's going to go and then what's the next step.

I’m excited.

Oh, it's super exciting. Just some of the technology advances you just talked about even here and thinking back, yeah, like, when we went to the moon and what computers looked like and how we got to where we're at now, or robotics and automotive components, just all the different places where it's been transformed and how fast it's evolving is really awesome. What's the biggest barrier right now, or the biggest barrier to the shift happening into really taking data and machine learning and the human element and blending them together? Is it the technology maturity? Is it data quality? Is it organizational mindset? What is the biggest roadblock, or thing that you guys are educating on right now?

It's all of the above. The conversation goes one way versus another depending on who's in the room, or who's entertaining the conversation, what interests they have, but it's all of what you just said, Matthew. You said it fairly concisely. The thing I think we see more than anything is adoption and adaptation. I'm really talking about artificial intelligence and bringing a higher level of, if you will, work productivity and reliability to what supply chains do. It's also about sustainability. It's about doing the right things right for society, and I'm cutting across ethical, economic, fair play, and environmental. All three entities play into that, and AI could clearly help us with all of that. But I would say that on the journey ahead and what might be standing in front of us is the same thing we've always faced. It's more visible now, because we have somewhat of a moderated growth in our global economy and still in the US growth is there, but we don't have anybody holding up signs saying, all of us are winning, let's do war, let's rest now, because we've made billions. No.

We're all trying to figure out how to navigate the economy we're in, while we're trying to predict the next steps that are going to occur geopolitically that affect our face of our organization around the world, where we do business and who we do business with, and the cost of doing that. We have a lot of man-made, if you will, impacts. What might be holding back progress is everybody's pitch as a divisional leader. You've got the chief procurement officer, you've got the VP of logistics, you've got the VP of customer service, and on and on planning, coming to the chief supply chain officer and saying, “I got a great idea. I got a great idea. No, I got a better idea. No, no, no, no.”

There's a limited amount of cash, because cash is being preserved just a bit right now, right? People are trying to figure out their true cost position and they're looking for ways to add a super invoked level of efficiency, right? Super effectiveness. Containing costs, better if we can take cost out despite tariffs and everything else, but also enabling the business to do more with less, right? What kind of intelligences does this bring us? Inside a company, yeah, data quality and all that stuff with any IT platform, doesn't matter it’s AI or whatever, you got to have good data. You got to have predictable data and reliable data, right?

Oh, absolutely.

Because so many implementations over time have cut up and butchered ERP systems for the sake of getting one project done before another. The modules have been changed and they're not there in their usual form. You got to cleanse data and realign. But that's all part of the grassroots level of any implementation, whether it's AI or not. The biggest constraint we're facing just overall is business cost pressure versus the amount of money we have to invest. There's an appetite for risk that varies as well. Some companies are risk adverse, some are risk neutral, and some are really risk aggressive, right? A lot of this is depending on where people are at, back to your original question, and the sub-bits you asked about.

Yeah. What's one mindset shift that you would recommend that people started to take to keep up with this and to usher in this new wave of visibility and data and turning that into signals?

Well, it's really about make meaning, right? Make real meaning is the so what factor. In my 37-year career in corporate America, I won some and lost some. Sometimes I was in the cover of Time and other times, I was doing time, and particularly when it came to invoking technology. I was a believer. I was the believer that people can do anything if they put their minds to it. There are other impacts that get in the way that aren't always understood in the front end. I think breaking through the barriers of where we are today and seeing real advantage, like smarter intelligence and TMS systems, better logistics planning, predictive analytics, same thing with domain demand and manufacturing planning this is where AI has a real chance to help us out also in the contracting and other stages of the supply chain, communication, better ways to understand how to serve our customers.

All of this comes with time that needs to be invested to get it right. You have to figure out, it's the same old adage. This is not new. You figure out where you're going to make the most meaning. What's the so what factor? Great that all this is around me, or available to us as a leader, as a company, but where can you make the most meaning? What is the biggest gap in your business, and can it be solved through technology and then proof texting that and then moving quicker? The thing I'd say today is 10 years ago, we left the world of everything's got to be behind the firewall for data preservation. We got really good at ISO, SOC 2 compliance and everything else. Now, there's still impacts, right?

Yeah.

We know that if you leave a gate open overnight, you know somebody's going to get in there and steal your stuff. Okay, right? With everything we invent, there's risk. We just have to get better covering that. Where I'm going with this is that to bring smarter, more beneficial value to the consumer is when you truly invoke business process optimization and technology that makes real meaning for your customer, that's where you make more money, that's where you satisfy the demand of the consumer, and that's where supply chain really does great things for society. Those three things have to come into play.

Yeah, I love that. Absolutely. That was actually something we did with our AI initiatives over the last year, as well as just our product roadmap building for just the entire platform is really trying to invite in decision makers, not from just in our company, but from our clients, to come in and say, well, here's the things we're talking about. What are you guys talking about? What are your customers talking about? What, at the end of the day, we went back and forced ranked everything that we had learned from our customers and then from their customers and everything like that, and we looked at the roadmap and said, what's going to be the biggest impact? What's going to help people the most in this before we really ever single lay in a single line of code on anything with our technology platform? Let's really dig down to what is the most impactful thing for the end customer. Because if you don't start there, I think you miss a lot.

Yeah. I think you're spot on. 100%. It's customer first. Our people really matter. These new technologies create a high degree of people stress and organizations. You see that through some of the more recent studies about, has AI, or technology added value in the way I do my work? Now, these surveys are a bit suspect in relationship to how people feel about their employers, and maybe doing a great thing for me, but I really don't like my boss. One is my score, right? He brought me the A. He or she brought me the A.

I have ways to filter the highs and lows out. When you look at it, it's a mix. People say that it either creates value, or doesn't. If it's not creating value, or even if it is, is it creating more stress on the job, right? Is the satisfaction of how I do my work for my employer? Am I appreciated for learning these new technologies and bring a better work habit to this company, so they can do the better things for customers? Am I appreciated for what I do? investing in people so they can learn. We're not going to be able to create advantages. I don't know what you heard from your customers and prospects when you brought them in to help fine tune and dial up or down your technology. But if that's missing, it's a really good reason to go back and just ask those questions.

Absolutely.

Because it's not about what the leaders of the company say we need, or where we're working. It's really about the people and how do they feel about this? Companies that get this right, they're attractive employers, and they're going to be at a higher level of net promoter score from their customers to say, “A company I want to do business with it.” Absolutely.

If we've started here in visibility in terms of freight technology, what's chapter two of freight technology and where it's heading? If visibility is our starting point here, in your opinion, what's the next step?

Well, the high-speed answer is lights out. Nobody needs to come to work anymore. The computers are going to take over everything, right? That's what we said 50 years ago.

Yeah.

Back to my comment, Matthew. I'm joking, of course, but it's discovery. I think between –

I like that.

- between those that are creating the technologies and those that are using it, in order for it to be adopted, there has to be adaptability. Does it adapt to the ecosystem which we work? Certainly, logistics professionals that are thinking about what's next and the inventors, coming together and just strategizing on a continual basis, it should be part of your quartile business meetings with your technology and logistics providers, your 3PLs, and it should be more than just a question or two. It should be a really great round robin. It should be prompted by what the 3PL, or the service provider, the technology provider's hearing from others is, what do you think of this? What if it did this, right? Let me demonstrate how this could work.

Then letting the business think about, go back and think about, yeah, this could have merit. But if you just do this, it has a better appetite for us. We do better when we go together. Okay, let me just say it this way. When we do something for ourselves, we solve a problem for today. When we go together, we solve problems possibly for a lifetime. The supply chain has to go together. It's a chain for a reason. We're all interconnected. Let's use the example, sorry, I'm going to say it. Let's use the example of 2018 when the first 301 tariffs came out, when everybody was on the floor of the bus when they had a sudden 25% cost increase. Let's go to January of 20 when we were in the thick of a worldwide shutdown, and we discovered that then multi-service providers in the procurement world were a blind screen to how everything else worked upstream.

Many companies found that MSPs were great service points. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it. You'll see where I'm going, right? It's like the cartoon of where you pull into a gas station, you got three pumps, you got premium, mid-grade and regular, right? Below the ground, the three pipes are going into the same tank as a joke. That wasn't a joke during COVID. People discovered how networks really worked. Before that, we were coming together often enough. Smart companies probably were, but everybody else also ran world of procurement sourcing and manufacturing and head of design, “Oh, it's working. We can buy steering wheels from these three MSPs. We’re good.” Ah-ah. The steering wheels were coming from the same manufacturing plant. When it's shut down, nobody had anything, right? That's what I'm saying today is that we've got to be – we have been, we've become smarter, but we have to get even smarter yet around how the entire supply chain works in the business and the verticals that we're in. We have to all come together to make the solution stronger.

We still figured out how to get toilet paper to the consumer. It just took us a while to change the manufacturing line from commercial to home versus, right. Well, we got it done, right? We got everything done, right? Hats off to the supply chain. We will continue to get it done, if we continue to work together in the spirit by which a supply chain is designed. We'll get it done.

I love that. I love that. One last parting thought, I just want to get in one sentence, what does intelligent freight mean to you?

It means the ability to see where the naked eye of the human can't see. Alone, just by using traditional means of data before us actually gets us to a better place, right? Truly helping us uncover what we cannot see for the benefit of making better decisions now.

I love that. I love that. Well, Mark, I really appreciate your time. Now for the fun part where you – not that any of this wasn't fun. This is actually really awesome. Really excited we had this conversation. But tell us about CSCMP, where we can find you guys, are you guys coming up at any shows? You're going to be attending any shows this year, or where can they learn more about you guys?

I've got a deal for you. First and foremost, membership has its privileges. The many exclusive programs that we put together for our members that bring some of the best authors and content creators, service providers, and BCOs together under one, technically one roof, is a great place to be, and it's very affordable.

Absolutely.

You can find us at cscmp.org. For the executives, we have the executive inner circle. For everyone else, we have, and the executives, we have the whole ecosystem of learning in terms of roundtables around the world, right, where you can interact in live scenarios with industry professionals. We also have our annual global conference coming up in Nashville, which is October 4th through the 7th. That also our European conference, the 11th and 12th of June in Madrid, Spain. We also have other micro-conferences around the world, and they can all be found on our website. We invite anybody to participate. Your whole company can become a member of CSCMP. You don't have to be in the supply chain.

That's really great. Thank you for keeping us in the loop on that and filling us in on that and joining us today. For everybody else, thank you as well for joining this episode of the Tire Tracks Podcast. Please do subscribe to the podcast to keep up with our intelligent freight mini-series that we have going on. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Mark.

Thank you.