Name: How to Optimise Financial Operations in Global Factories & Manufacturing
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T16:16:18.117Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: How to Optimise Financial Operations in Global Factories & Manufacturing

Transcript for "How to Optimise Financial Operations in Global Factories & Manufacturing": Hello everyone and welcome. In this webinar, we're going to explore how to optimise financial operations in global factories and manufacturing in association with Intuit QuickBooks. I'm Jazlyn Jessen, editor of Manufacturing Digital. We're going to break today's discussion down into three key areas. So first, how to align procurement, supply chain and finance so that everyone is working from the same playbook. Second, bridging the gap between your ERP and factory floor for better data and faster visibility. And third, how to boost your cash flow and resilience by streamlining the way you manage suppliers and inventory. Joining us today, we've got two brilliant guests: David Schultz, who's a strategic advisor in procurement and supply chain and Ashley Norton from NTT Data. Thank you both very much for joining us today. David, should we start with you? Could you introduce yourself to our audience, please? Yes. Well, good day, good afternoon to everybody, and thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to, you know, share some of the knowledge I had and of course, from others as well. I spent several years in several different positions for publicly held in private equity corporations, both in the supply chain and the procurement areas, well as a CPO and a Chief Supply Chain Officer. Many different industries as well in markets, healthcare, manufacturing, contract manufacturing and so forth. So, you know, exposed to a lot of these different things, seen a lot of things that have worked and a lot of things that, you know, are sort of on the horizon and happy to share some of that insight and like I said, learn from others as well. So thanks for having me. Thank you and Ashley, could you introduce yourself for us please? Yeah, hi there everyone. Thank you for joining. I lead the supply chain and manufacturers for NTT Data in The UK. I bring over twenty years experience in leadership roles in industry, largely in aerospace, defence, automotive and recently, over six or seven years, been consulting and help clients to transform their operations from an efficiency perspective, from a resiliency perspective, I do that across multiple industries and sectors. So glad to be here today and give some thoughts and discuss with David and hopefully it will be good. Thank you very much. If you're ready to get started, we're looking to begin with alignment. So my very first question for you today: when we look at the balance between service levels, total cost and cash flow, what shared KPIs can actually help us connect those dots? Ash, you're on my screen so I'm going to throw to you first if that's all right. Yeah, it's a really good question because I've got a fundamental belief that most organisations struggle with alignment because of a lack of clarity in how they measure value and efficiency. And I think the purpose of processes like S and OP, S and OE and integrated business planning, more appropriately to include finance, is really the mechanism where those measures should be agreed and aligned within the business. But often, and I'm sure David would have a view, that's missed. Think fundamentally some of the right measures are in place but often new measures which look at value creation or total landed cost, which actually then underpins how organisations and departments work together in a common way, is quite missed. So, that's the view. I think total landed cost is often spoken about but what does total landed cost mean, life cycle cost? It depends what your purpose is within the organisation. We've got silos in how a supply chain organisation will operate and how procurement will focus on costs down with suppliers, but that might be detrimental to increasing logistics costs because of the Incoterms which are applied to leverage a cost down. When you start to look at value in total cost across the enterprise and organisation, there has to be a process which orchestrates that value discussion and that has to be your integrated business planning, in my view, which, as I say, is quite frequent that organisations don't get that right. David, do you have any thoughts on this one? Yes, a couple. And that's very interesting, Ash, because we hadn't prepped and shared ideas before this and one of the items that I did have myself was total landed cost. So, I won't expand too much on what you said, but I'll just, you know, add to it and say, one, I agree a hundred percent and two, you know, it's kind of like, when you look at total landed cost, it prevents sort of the procurement price wins, you know, that are out there that end up increasing downstream costs. So sometimes you can get, you know, a cost savings, but I've seen in many organizations a lot of times from a KPI standpoint, that maybe the freight costs don't actually roll up into PPV or whatever it might be. Yeah. So, I could get from a procurement standpoint, a price reduction. The freight could be a lot more, but it doesn't make any difference potentially because it goes in a different bucket. And those are the things that we have to avoid. So, we talk about I think that's what the view is designed for when it talks about connecting service levels, total cost and cash. It's like a triad and it's a balloon where if you squeeze one side, the other side gets bigger. So you really can't escape it. You got to try to balance those three things. The other KPI I might add to that is OTIF on time and full. And I think, you know, when you measure sort of your suppliers on, are you getting everything on time and in full? That's a really important KPI. It's an outcome based KPI. And those are the ones I think that are the most effective. So, know, those are very, very important. And they force explicit trade offs, you know, between like inventory buffers and service risk and things of that nature. So, I think it is the alignment word itself is extremely important. Because I think in many cases, a lot of the KPIs are misaligned with the different functions within the company. And if that's the case, people can try to maximize their one area, but it could be at the detriment of another. So, it all rolls up under sort of what is called in many cases in the software industry, I think TCO, total cost of ownership. And ultimately, I think it all rolls up into that. So, OTIF, you know, a total landed cost and, you know, a couple others are ones that you really have to think about that are important for alignment across the organisation. What you've described, David, I've personally experienced with regards to that total landed cost and the trade off between, you know, PPV and driving a unit price reduction, but the trade off was increasing freight costs and those two different departments So, were not as a group logistics and supply chain executive, I wouldn't sign off on new supply nominations because the traders was driving an increase on the logistics and transportation because it was no longer included the requirement to deliver product wasn't included in the new agreement with that supplier, right? Of course there's a cost So, yeah, absolutely 100% correct, but only through the alignment of having a governance process which forces the departmental leaders to agree on the execution associated with new nominations or new suppliers or maybe it's resourcing, but it has to be structured through a process and that for me is where the IBP or your executive SMIP really comes into play, which I said earlier, a lot of organisations just don't execute it in the way it's intended for. So, I think we're over reliant, but I've got some real personal experiences of this. Yeah, just a final comment on that, wrapping that up. I've seen the misalignment more often than the alignment when it comes to the freight and the unit pricing. Lastly, I mean, chain, I think wants availability, finance wants a clean balance sheet, procurement wants MOQ leverage, and you've to kind of balance all those different things, and that's why everything should be sort of in concert, and I think when you look at outcome based KPIs, it's driving more in that direction. I think the COOs and CEOs have got a responsibility to look at how they incentivise and measure the C suite, right, because at the moment the traditional KPIs will all drive the CPA will be measured on the efficiency and the profitability associated with where he's sourcing from, right? So he's always going to be driven on PPV and cost downs. A logistics or supply chain officer will be measured on the availability and the cost associated with inventory and how effective the planning is and the forecasting. So, they're all measured in the traditional but different ways. That doesn't force that alignment and I think there's discussion where the CEO now needs to think about total cost and value and measure his C suite in a way that forces them to align, and that happens rarely in my experience. Thank you very much. So my next question for you guys: how can we bring procurement and finance into the OSNE process to ensure the whole team is making more unified and faster decisions? Anyone like to start or should I pick? Well, since Ash went first, maybe I'll go first here. I don't have a tremendous amount on this particular one to add, but maybe a couple of, you know, key points and I think you you basically want your KPIs to reveal themselves in the terms of when it's a dashboard, you really want trade offs versus dashboards, right? So when the information comes, what kind of, you know, decisions are you going to be able to make? Because pretty dashboards are one thing, and when, you know, suppliers or customers walk through the plant, they can see them up on TV screens, but, you know, it really needs to drive action. That's what's more important. So, I think you need to drive some of those areas and move them more from like indirect spend to operational levers. And, you know, I think that's what's important. And, you know, I think we spoke, you know, in the last couple of minutes about aligning the different functions. So, this is just a more of a, you know, a detail around that, but I don't think any decisions really should be made unless all three perspectives are represented. And it's not the easiest thing to do, but I can tell you I think they're merging together naturally. The reason why I say that is, if you take a quick read, it's not a quick read, but of the, you know, I think it's the 2025 CPO survey, the Deloitte CPO survey, which is one of the standards sort of in the industry. I think it's the first time in the last number of years that continuity of supply is the most important thing over price reduction. So, when look at that, like you said, Ash, mostly the Chief Supply Chain Officer is going to push back or and we also said they're worried about continuity of supply and, you know, and that. But now the CPO survey saying they're worried about continuity of supply as their number one. So, I think that's good. I think it's merging together because whatever price you get, you can get the world's best price on something. But if you can't get it, what good is it? So, again, I think the dashboard should sort of migrate more towards, you know, more things than just, you know, pretty charts and so on, but really operational levers. There's some great points there, some of those comments I really, really love. I believe that the modern role of a Chief Supply Chain Officer or Chief Procurement Officer is changing. Whether you're CPO or Chief Supply Chain, I actually don't really think it matters because the organisation is being pushed and driven in the direction where there are so many different factors to consider, whether that's sustainability and ESG, whether it's efficiency and costs, whether it's availability, whether it's compliance to you there's so much legislation now out there in different industries and each sector is grappling with their own list of compliance requirements it's almost too much. So I think that the convergence of these roles, these traditional roles, is going to be more prevalent going forward, and I think with that we're going to start to see these different measures become more discussed that we were talking about a few minutes ago. Visualisation is clearly a way to drive those discussions in a pragmatic way and that all depends on the availability of data within the business but also data that sits outside of the organisation, and it's then a question of how do you harness that data to drive those discussions. We spoke about S and OP and IBP a little bit already, fundamentally those processes have always run on the data which is available within that organisation and there's been a sprinkle of external stuff that's come in, you know, like sales influenced information and what are the sales guys saying, but for the most part it's been an internal discussion about risks within the business. Well, actually what we're going to start to see is much more external data come into those processes which forces a more dynamic and a more fluid discussion about how you actually start to de risk and manage the value chain rather than the business and the manufacturing plant maybe that you're sitting in. So I think that's part of the challenge and the opportunity, in my view, but dashboards, visualisation data is going be key to that. Yeah, mean, just to follow-up briefly, and I agree with that, As you mentioned, so adequately, you know, it's the S and OP and I think you also mentioned S and O E. And S and O E is like a shorter term focus, S and OP is a longer term. And, you know, when I say that all the folks need to be aligned, much like an executive S and OP meeting, which is designed to do that. But I think in the future, as you said, there'll be a lot more external data coming in. And really, the key thing and reason why sometimes it doesn't happen is, and it sounds fundamental, but a lot of times there's not one version of truth for service cost and cash. You know, there's different people come in with different numbers saying, no, it's not this, no, it's this, and so on. So you need to have that fewer KPIs, but, you know, all shared. And then as we said before, cadences that are designed to force trade offs. So it can't just be maximizing something in one area at the detriment of another. So it's really about strategic operating systems and looking at them, you know, from that standpoint. I think, as you said, I think things are moving in that direction where the information coming in is going to be handled in different ways. And data really is at the foundation of everything at the end of the day. And there's a lot more data that companies have that isn't being used than data that's being used. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that process is the nucleus to drive the integration and the alignment between chief supply chain, commercial operations and finance. I've got a good experience where I owned the executive S and OP process. It was co owned actually with commercial operations, but it wasn't a tri owned with finance. Maybe that is the evolution, right, where those three functions within the business start to agree on how they want to measure the success of that process and the organisation. It's not just about the outputs, as David was also suggesting, it's about the inputs that come in and it's about trying to remove the subjectivity about what comes in and what the colour and the feel and the flavours of information that's being used to make decisions. Thank you very much. So our next topic is looking at visibility a bit more. So when we look at kind of core systems like ERP and planning and execution systems, which of these integrations can deliver the fastest wins for visibility? Ashley, should we start with you? So I actually think there's some gaps. Don't think core ERP systems, which then feed into MRP, I don't think any of them offer the full stack of visibility that's needed to start to de risk your operation. And when I say operation, you can de risk from a financial perspective, you can de risk from a compliance perspective, from a sustainability perspective, from a continuity of manufacturing and supply. The truth is that you have to integrate ERP systems with external smaller technology platforms that have got very, very rich data ecosystems, and there are numerous technology partners out there who specialise in harvesting risk information, whether that's financial risk, ESG risk, delivery port disruption risk. It's about, as a business, what you want to ingest and what you want to see and harvest, so you're using technology like NLP. We said we wouldn't speak about AI but you're using NLP and AI to start to curate insights that the business can then decide on how it wants to act, and it's the action on the insight that creates the value, not the insight itself. So I actually think there's some real gaps in the traditional systems that businesses have always operated with, and what we're going to now see is an evolution of multiple different technology solutions all integrated to provide much more value chain resiliency as we start to move forward. Thank you. David, do you have anything to add on this one? In fact, we get those faster Sure, wins of yeah. Well, just a bit, and you know, again Ash and I are totally aligned on this particular one, because there are some gaps and I think true visibility, it's really not about one system doing everything. It's about connecting a small number of critical data flows really is what it's about. And then it's also being able to, you know, have an early warning on when risk is present. So, I say that, I mean, you know, when you think about tier one risk, then there's tier two and tier three, most companies at best only manage tier one risk and that is, you know, their suppliers, their direct suppliers. But tier two and tier three are your supplier suppliers and that's extremely critical because if your supplier can't service you, it might be because their supplier is not servicing them. So there's a number of tools out there now and I don't think we said we wouldn't talk about AI, but we would make this completely AI focused. But Ash, you opened up the waterfall, so here we go. I'm just kidding. But there definitely are some tools out there that will help and I believe that you can't really look your customer in the eye and say you're managing their risk unless you have visibility beyond tier one. And there's ways to get visibility beyond tier one without, you know, looking at the supplier and saying, want to know everything about your supply chain. And I think it's important to have those items because, you know, when you start to use AI, when it comes to, you know, tier one and risk management, It's a bit different like, you know, most risk does not knock on the front door. It usually sneaks around the back. An AI is sort of like the guard dog that protects you as it's looking around the back and seeing where it might maybe is going be sneaking in. So it gives you sort of sometimes those early warnings, but you have to use it with outside information, not just things that are inside your company, as you mentioned before, like on an S and OP process. So I think it's important from that standpoint, that that's critical. And what it comes down to is, as we talked about, continuity of supply is going to rely on tier two and tier three. And the last, you know, kind of item there is, you know, I've seen numbers as high as, you know, 70 or 80% of the risk exists beyond tier one. So, if all you're managing is tier one risk that's only about 20 of the potential risk that you have from a supplier standpoint. Yeah, mean that's perfectly correct. It's one of the subjects that I could probably speak an hour on, nothing else. I've spent a number of years on this, so probabilistic supply chain mapping is absolutely critical and AI is simply a way to deploy it at scale, okay? You can't canvas an audit, you know, 10,000 suppliers if you're a huge organisation. If you've got a small number of first tiers then, yeah, you probably understand half of the second tier, but if you've got a really large supply base it's simply impossible. So it's then a question of using technology and then aligning your needs, your business use cases and priorities to the data ecosystem that that technology partner would have leverage on. But there's still a question of segmentation. You're going to want to segment where you use supplier validation to actually ensure 100% that you know the second, third tier and beyond. You might only do that for 5% of your suppliers, right? They're the crucial ones that are going to kill you and you have to understand what that complete value chain looks like for compliance reasons, right? So that's your 5%. It could be a different number. And then you use AI and you use NLP and it does the rest, right, and you accept there's a level of inaccuracy with that. But at least now you've got a complete picture of what your probabilistic supply chain looks like and you start to choose what are the data fees which are going to trigger the alerts and give you the curation of those risks and then you choose to act as a business or not and you've got that choice, right? And that's where organisations are starting to move towards. Still, most organisations are in the infancy, I would say semiconductors let's take that example right. Most organisations were forced to understand their semiconductor supply chain, so they've got that depth of understanding to the wafer level but it's never been scaled more broadly because it's just impossible when you've got huge supply chains. And that's where technology and AI will come in and it will start to do things in 100 plus languages and dialects, scraping the internet real time with NLP and you'll get those great. But the key thing and I have to emphasise this it's not just about the technology, it's also about how you integrate the technology into the business. It has to be woven into your organisation. You have to decide how to use the risk. So does it get fed into your S and OP or not? What's the action on the risk? You have to workflow and put some controls around it, otherwise it becomes unfunctional. So, business integration is critical when you get into these types of solutions. My very next question is how can we get better ownership of data without it turning into like a really heavy IT lift? David, you want to start this one? Sure. Data, I think in many cases is the holy grail and, you know, I would think a lot of companies, you know, there's a lot of stagnation out there because people say, oh, our data is not good, or, you know, it's not good enough. I think it all it needs to be is good enough. If you look at the companies, like, you know, companies like Ash works for and other, you know, big organizations, they've done okay with the data they have somehow. So, when people say, you know, my data is not good enough, It's been good enough for a long time. May not be the most, you know, efficient, but I think you got to get started somewhere. So you really define what the critical fields are, you know, mainly what the critical fields are. You don't want to, as you said, Ash, it's not a technology issue. We need to rewrite everything and so on. I think you need to do that and then once you do that, I think what it becomes is the data gets clean when it's used in decisions. So it's a process. So in other words, when you open up the planners eyes and so on to what the lead times are for our supplier, and if they know their business, those errors will surface real fast. They'll look at it and they'll say, those lead times haven't been updated in the system for two years. Says lead times of three weeks. No, they're nine weeks. Right? So you need to update that so the MRP can run properly. You show finance price variance versus contract and the price drivers get fixed. And then you start looking at BOM accuracy and, you know, things of that nature. So I do think it comes down to looking at the critical fields only, and again, just like a lot of things, the eightytwenty rule, but it's not a complete IT rewrite, and it's not, and it shouldn't be stagnation by saying my data is not good enough, I'll wait till the data gets better', because it's not going to get better on its own. Yeah, think just building on that data is important, particularly as you start leverage technology more. We certainly help clients with their data maturity, but largely that involves looking for missing information, you know, that's core to running certain processes. If we think about inventory optimisation and using new complex systems and algorithms, when you do data preparation you're really looking for gaps. I'm really looking for is the lead time information there, is it in the right field. I'm not going to question whether the lead time is correct, but I am going to question whether there's an entry into that field. So I think there's a base preparation that you can do, but I think, as David's alluded to, you start to flush out the quality of the data rather than the quantity and whether it's there in the first place, and that comes with use. I think that's more the need. Organisations have had data discrepancies forever in a day and that continues. The other thing to say is, depending on what you want to do with technology and data makes it safer or riskier to actually trust or distrust. So you don't want to start using AI, dare we say to make decisions within the business that might be critically detrimental to either the bottom line or it might be a safety issue, it might be a compliance issue. So it's about proving the use of technology and data in a safe environment where, yeah, you may do a little bit of damage, there may be a bit of pain and you may need to correct some things that technology has suggested. But you want to do that in a safe way, so there has to be some governance around the deployment of technology and data consideration should be at least one of those things. Thank you very much. Well we're going to move on to our third topic: when we're standardising procure to pay, what can leadership do and where can they cut down that off contract spending and kind of make the month end close a bit more efficient? David, do want to start off again? Sure, that's fine. Average spending is certainly an issue, and I think it remains an issue, and that is something that I think can be assisted with certain technology that's out there that may allow you to do something or may block you from doing something else. So it depends on sort of maybe what the culture of the organization is and so on. But, know, there's guided buying, which has been around, you know, pretty much forever, punch outs and hosted catalogs and things like that. Maybe, you know, I've seen, like, blocking free text requisitions, you know, where contrast exists and so on. I think that's important. And maybe no PO, no pay. Sort of a focus on, you know, if there's no PO for all addressable spend, you know, may maybe there's there's an opportunity there to kind of stop it in its tracks and change sort of the process going forward. But I'd rather have a system that, you know, works closely with the folks because a lot of times in the organization, when you're talking about indirect spend or MRO for that matter, you might have 500 buyers in the company. You know, people all over the company in different areas of manufacturing are buying sort of what they want when they want it. And, you know, that sometimes can be a difficult situation. And I think if you handle that properly, you'll have fewer invoice exceptions, you'll have a faster close and maybe better cash forecasting. But, you know, as as Ash said, there still needs to be a human in the loop. There's a lot of discussion about AgenTik AI, and AgenTic AI is certainly on its way. It's not proper for this quite yet, but I think it's not too early to start training the systems to read, to understand, and to act on your behalf on the lower impact items, not on major items, on lower maybe impact, you know, indirect spend items, and that's going to come down the road. And again, the biggest thing about that is not so much that you're eliminating people, because I don't think that's going to eliminate people. I think what's going to do is take the folks that are there and allow them to design more strategic approaches to items as opposed to spend their time on a lot of rote activities that maybe can be done otherwise. So, you know, I I think you're looking for AP productivity, you know, reduced lead payments, all those kind of things, but I and maybe even an opportunity to capture early payment discounts, but if you don't have all that information handy or there's a lot of maverick spend going on, then I think it sometimes becomes a difficult upstream path to try to control. Ashley, do you want to jump in on this one? Okay. I think the availability and the wide use of cloud now is a massive enabler to start to standardise how business units operate over a global, regional company. I think maverick spend is often caused by indiscrepancies or lack of standardisation across a wider organisation, and naturally you're going to get buyers that are going to want to do certain things sometimes for good reasons, let's be honest and sometimes just because they prefer to go and buy from who they know rather than what the best deal is for the wider organisation. And this is similar in a way where we can compare total cost of ownership or total landed cost. You know, the use and the availability of cloud and some of the P2P SaaS based solutions out there now, and there's multiple which are really good solutions which help with this subject, can start to look at the most profitable procurement behaviour for the organisation and start to measure and attribute value through centralised procurement to regional operating entities in a way that's not been done before. So I think the use of cloud and P2P SaaS based solutions helps this massively. I understand that all organisations might not have those technologies and capabilities, so for those that don't, I think it's a question of really trying to understand do you have local procedures and a structure in place which forces procurement and expenditure over a set amount to go through a process, a decision channel. And if the answer is no, then you're always going to have uncontrollable maverick spend. I think maverick spend sometimes we talk about maverick spend. I think sometimes spot buys are appropriate because there's a business need, particularly if you've got continuity of operations and you need to do things to keep things running. I think there's a certain difference between SpotVend and MaverickVend. But yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff out there now that can be supported with cloud and standardisation and the right structures in place. Thank you very much. So if we take a look at the supply side, which inventory strategies actually work to kind of prevent stock outs and write offs while you're also protecting margins? Ashlee, do you want to go on this one? Well, this is the age old problem, isn't it, of finding the sweet spot of balancing the oath of your customers and keeping the CFO happy because you're not tying up too much cash in inventory and slow inventory turns. There's no right or wrong answer, is the truth. It's a question of the appetite of the business to accept some risk, particularly with regards to their performance on delivering to their customers. Every view will be different in every organisation and probably with different people in that same organisation. If I'm a supply chain guy, I want to be swimming in inventory, right, because it's what keeps me safe and I sleep at night, but that's going to create stress and restless nights with the CFO. There are some strategies. There are many, many different solutions in the market that can help with complicated and advanced algorithms to look at inventory management and different sectors will have a different view of what the right algorithms would be to use, there's different algorithms for different seasons within certain markets and sectors. Certain businesses will benefit from more of a demand driven MRP approach to things, so there are DDMRP technology. It's such a difficult question to answer because there's so many different you know, flavours of inventory management solutions in this world. So the simple answer is there's some great stuff but it all depends on what the business's appetite is to manage that risk and that kind of financial concern. Thank you. And David, what do you think? Yeah, do agree with that. It's definitely unique to each organisation. And again, the key thing I think that Ash pointed out is, even within the organisation, there could be varying views. And that's where it breaks down sometimes. So, you know, some organizations are cash strapped, some are not. So, depending upon whether they have cash or they don't, some are going to be working with suppliers on terms versus not. And again, it's all total cost of ownership, right? So if you get ninety day terms from a supplier, you know, I'm not sure you're getting the same price you would get if you were paying in thirty days. So, you know, again, it's that balloon and squeezing in that balloon. But, you know, I've always heard it, you know, for years spoken about from an inventory standpoint, is it JIT just in time or JIC just in case? And, you know, a lot of people that don't have the data, they work on a just in case inventory. Let's bring in, more than we think we need and we can sleep and as you mentioned, Ash, and get into that REM portion of sleep that's so important, right? Which doesn't happen often as a supply chain individual. But then you can also look at unique things, not unique things, but things that are tried and true and see how that works out if it makes sense where, you know, you can look at vendor managed inventory, can look at consignment, you know, things of that nature. But again, there's going to be a cost to that. And then also, there's a big difference between sole sourcing and single sourced. A lot of times people don't think of the differences. Sole sourcing is when there's only maybe one supplier that provides that. Single sourcing in my definition is when you choose only to use one supplier. So that can be a risk as well, right? You may be doing that for certain reasons, but that's where your resilience, you know, starts to diminish because if something happens in that regard, you may not have an alternative. And in highly regulated industries, like automotive or med devices and so on, that can really become crippling in many, many ways. So, you know, again, it is an internal discussion and I think that also goes back to the sort of on time and full metric. You know, you want to have that lead time and you want to measure to that and make sure they can handle that, and sometimes a supplier will keep their own inventory on hand so they can make sure they meet your metric on on time and full. And I think that's an important metric that isn't always measured across a lot of industries. Thank you very much I'm both Ashley and going to stop you here for a moment because we're running out of time. If you were to each leave the audience with one final piece of advice, what would that be? Is anyone kind of raring to go first? I can jump in. Yeah, no, I said this wouldn't be just sharing my thoughts, me learning as well and I've certainly learned a lot from what Ash has spoken about as well. I think at the end of the day, it all comes down to the data again. It all comes down to, you know, who owns the data and, you know, not when data models are perfect. Sometimes perfect can be the enemy of good in some cases or it's the other way around. But everybody needs to get started in some ways. And, but you certainly don't want to ignore data. Definitely want to make sure that you continually, refine it and improve it. But I think it comes down to the age old adage giggle, right? Garbage in garbage out. So you certainly want to improve that data. And then the last thing I would say on all of that is, I think a lot of things that we spoke about here, and I think it's the long term vision. When I say long term, I've been known to, you know, compare every year in this environment now with the advent of AI as equivalent to a dog year. So let's say for argument purposes every dog's years, seven years of a human every year. I think there's going to be as much advancement in the next year or so in this area as there is in seven years in other industries. Having said that, I believe the ultimate approach and what I'm trying to achieve with the folks that I'm working with is what I'll call the self healing supply chain. So that's something where, you know, in the middle of the night, there's a disruption in service in The Middle East, or you have something on the ocean and there's a disruption. You don't want to wake up in the morning to an email and spend the entire the next day trying to reroute it. You want it to be understood and rerouted, you know, automatically in the evening per your recommendations that you have in the system, let's say. So, I think ultimately we're trying to move towards a self healing supply chain. We're a good deal a ways away from that, but at least it's something I think we can aspire to. Again, data is the basis of being able to handle things like that or achieve things like the self healing supply chain. Thank you. And Ashley, do you have one final piece of advice for our audience today? Yeah, I'd just like to pick up on self healing supply chain. It's really interesting. It's something that I've looked into. It touches on a lot of the subjects which we've spoken about in terms of resiliency and data Dave has alluded to. I think there's a shift that's happening in how supply chains are viewed, that they're being seen more as growth enablers rather than cost centres and I think it's important that that recognition still continues. I think it's fundamentally important to see the transition which is moving more away from 'just in time, just in case' and we're now starting to almost challenge that historical and fundamental kind of lean methodology that we've all been working to in different industries and sectors, particularly in some like automotive where it has been very, very just in time, distant sequence. We're now starting to see some thinking where we're questioning whether that's the right approach given all of the risk and the uncertainty that is our new norm, right? So I think we have to start to challenge how we think about global supply chains and the use of data is fundamental in how we do that. So that's my final thoughts and hopefully that closes with the final thoughts that David was sharing with us. Well thank you ever so much. That's all we have time for today. David and Ashley, you very much for your thoughts. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with today and thank you to you all for watching. If you've got any questions please do feel free to pop a message in the chat and we'll send them all to our speakers so they can get back to you. If you enjoyed this session, please do check out our webinar section on manufacturingdigital.com. I hope you've learned as much as I have today and we'll see you next time.