Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Talk to me. Information, news and entertainment on demand. WUS radio.com. 0:11 [on-hold music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world with your host, Peggy Smedley. [on-hold music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:26 After making her stamp teaching business in her home country of Denmark, my next guest today headed across the pond to the US to take on the manufacturing world in a new way. 0:36 Since nineteen ninety-seven, the new company she has founded has become a leader in global supply chain management. Please welcome Hannah Kane, president and CEO of ALOM. Hannah, welcome to the show. Thank you, Peggy. 0:50 I re-- Uh, I appreciate, uh, being here. And, uh, you know, I, I'm a great admirer of yours. Oh, well, thank you very much. Well, congratulations on being named a woman of MtoM, uh, IoT. 1:04 You have done an amazing job, and it's exciting to have you on the show again today. So let's talk about your company and what you're doing in global supply chain management. What, what have you been doing? 1:16 Talk to our listeners a little bit about what that means and how successful you've made your company. Oh, thank you, uh, Peggy. 1:24 Well, um, I and a group of, uh, te-- uh, of technology and supply chain specialists started ALOM back in, uh, nineteen ninety-seven. 1:34 And, um, you know, there's been a lot of technology changes since then, but we had-- have had the privilege of being headquartered in Silicon Valley and get, uh, kind of infused with the entrepreneurial and technology spirit of Silicon Valley. 1:50 Uh, and, uh, really very fortunately started out, uh, uh, providing our services to some of the large Silicon Valley companies, and so it has allowed us to be at the forefront of technology. 2:05 What we really do is we procure, manufacture, configure, and, uh, distribute products on behalf of our customers. So you can think about us a little bit as a contract manufacturer. We are also a fulfillment company. 2:21 We are also a technology company. And the reason we are a technology company is really, uh, A, our customers are very technology-rich, so they have technology-rich products. 2:35 And B, uh, we use a lot of technology in the supply chain, and that's really one of the areas that excites me a lot, is h- the tremendous change of the supply chain and the technology impact over the last twenty years, uh, as well as the development we're in right now. 2:56 And that's an interesting point. So, uh- How has it changed in the last twenty years, would you say, the technology? 3:02 Because it's, it's changing very rapidly, but you've had to see a lot of change, let's say, in, in just the recently, but even the last twenty years, it's changed considerably. It's changed tremendously. 3:16 I mean, uh, um, some of your listeners may be, uh, old enough that they remember something called floppy disks. 3:22 Well, the first, uh, the first, uh, year we were in business, fifty-five percent of our revenue came from floppy disk duplication. And, uh, so, uh, the world has certainly moved on since then. 3:35 We, uh, we became one of the first companies, if not the first company in the world, doing e-commerce fulfillment. 3:42 Uh, and, uh, really were forced to develop our own proprietary systems because there simply were no systems out there. 3:51 And, uh, over the time, uh, I've seen technology come in and create this tremendous visibility in the supply chain that allows us to do many more, uh, really advanced, uh, things with the supply chain, including, uh, many country sourcing, uh, uh, very complex distribution, uh, what many people call just-in-time, uh, production. 4:21 Uh, you know, go from the old model, which was a push model, where you would manufacture big batches of products, and then you would go out and try to sell it, and you would push it out in the market, to more of a pull market-- uh, pull model, where, 4:39 uh, the consumers essentially go and decide what they want, and then they place an order, and you manufacture just when, when you're needed and, uh, uh, to a large extent, customized. 4:50 So that's the entire visibility in the supply chain that has allowed many of these developments. 4:57 When you look at all of that t-then, and, you know, when we talk about things, we had ERP and MRP and MRP two, and there was all this evolution that you're talking about, logistics and the supply chain. 5:08 Now we're talking about the Internet of Things, and that's dramatically changing how the supply chain is affected in a different way. 5:17 And, you know, you're opening up the four walls, and everything which was captured within the four walls is now being opened to the Internet. 5:24 How is that impacting what you are now effectively calling this new world of the supply chain? It's, it's, uh, super exciting. Uh, so supply chain is really affected two different ways. 5:38 Uh, the technology that, that runs the supply chain is developing really rapidly, and that is one way most people, uh, focuses-- focus on. 5:50 So for instance, on the container ship, you can go down to each container, you can see where it is, you can see what's happening with it. If it is temperature controlled, was it within the temperature range, et cetera. 6:02 So you, you have that type of granular, uh, visibility. You can see where the UPS truck is with your package. 6:10 You can see a lot of different things.And you see quite a bit of venture capital going into these areas with sensor technologies and with visibility tools and with, uh, account-based systems that allow you to, to track where things are and what's going on with them and were they within compliance and those type of things. 6:36 And it's exciting because what has happened over the last many years is you have increased paperwork, bureaucracy, et cetera, lots of border crossings, uh, lots of regulat-- different regulations in each country. 6:52 And as we can embed some of the information into, uh, either the product or into, uh, accompanying chips that go with the, with the product, w-we'll see that things m-- hopefully will get a little bit easier. 7:10 Do you think- So that's one area that, that I'm really excited about, but what, what 7:16 maybe is m-- even more exciting is that technology is going to be built into so many products that effectively every, every company is going to be a technology product. 7:29 I mean, the expectation is going to be that you have your, your, your chips in the product, and you can follow the, the product, uh, you know, uh, you... A-and, and that the products communicate to each other. 7:44 And this is exciting, and it's scary at the same time because you have the, the scary situation that many companies that in, in the old days, uh, meaning a couple of years ago, were just producing clothes now are starting to build in, uh, health sensors and other, uh, really small devices into the clothing or, uh, companies that were, uh, defining themselves as doing vehicles, uh, and, and, and producing engines are now more technology companies. 8:18 You have a big shift going from everybody's just making different things to technologies in everything. 8:27 And, and the exciting part of that is, of course, the added functionality and for me, you know, lots of business opportunities, frankly. 8:36 But the scary thing is that with technology comes also risk, uh, not just opportunity, but also risk, cybersecurity risk, uh, privacy considerations, et cetera. 8:49 And I feel that many of the companies that are really in the-- uh, going into these new areas are not, uh, prepared for that. And so this is a transition we're in now. 9:02 It's, it's exciting, and it requires a lot of thought from the companies that are really going into a totally new area for them. 9:12 Do you think manufacturers will start to embrace this, or are they taking a slow move into it for those very things that you just described? 9:21 Uh, I think, uh, I think many people will have problems with the business model. Uh, so, uh, let's say you are doing, uh, some kind of, uh, a toy. 9:35 Uh, the old thinking is that, uh, okay, you're playing a yo-yo, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and the manufacturer is going to, uh, to think about themselves as a manufacturer. 9:49 I manufacture this device, this toy, this whatever, and that's going to be it. But now you can build in training tools into that. You can build in, uh, peer-to-peer playing tools. 10:02 You can start maybe doing a contest around, uh, who, who has the best, uh, performance. You can do quite a bit of things. And maybe the business model is not the physical, the physical toy. 10:17 Maybe the business model is related to the as-associated services. And so how do you develop those services? Do you do a partnership? Do you develop it yourself? 10:28 All of a sudden, you're changing the way you're looking at, um, at, uh, your company but also as c-at consumers, right? 10:38 So maybe you sold through retail in the, in the old days, but now you're sitting with all this data about how people use your toy. You can see if it breaks. Do you want to replace it now? 10:50 And so you have a different touch model. And, and, and, um, and so I think i-it's more a, a totally different mentality, a to-totally different way of thinking. And that I think is much harder. 11:05 It's a, it's a much harder bridge to go into, okay, w-- A-and, and everybody has been saying that over the last ten years. We're not a-- just a manufacturing company, we're a service company. 11:16 But, but that entire concept is very difficult, and it's very difficult to go from a multi-tier sales channel into having direct touch with the consumers and how do you build excitement around your product? 11:31 How do you use social media to build excitement and- Hanne- and have a impact. We're out of time, but thank you so much for being with us. I hope you'll come back and talk to us soon. Absolutely. Thank you, Peggy. 11:44 All right, listeners, we're out of time, but stick around. We've got more to come right here on The Peggy Smedley Show, the Voice of IoT. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. 11:56 [outro music] Education. Thank you. Industry experts. Back to the basics. 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