Welcome To The Show

Intro & Outro 0:00

Welcome to Tennessee on Supply Chain Management, where we unpack the drivers shaping today's global supply chains. From innovative ideas to real-world solutions, each episode brings you insights from the leaders charting the course for our discipline. Now here are your hosts.

Tom Goldsby 0:19

Hello and welcome to another edition of Tennessee on Supply Chain Management. It's the podcast broadcast to you each and every month from the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee. I'm Professor Tom Goldsby and delighted to be joined by my co-host today, Mr. Scott DeGroot, the managing director of GSCI. Hello, Scott, how are you doing?

Scott DeGroot 0:40

Hey, Tom, I'm doing quite well. Thank you. I know you are as well. We're getting to enjoy spring break here on the campus. And so I think for most of us, that means we get a little bit of time to get caught up on our work, which I'm very glad for.

Tariffs Oil Shocks And Disruption

Tom Goldsby 0:55

No, that's exactly right. Certainly with uh regard to yourself, myself, and I think our assembled group, who we'll introduce here in a bit, Condre guests from the University of Tennessee. I'm looking around. Maybe one of us is doing something fun and exciting, but like you, I'm just trying to catch up. I've got some grading and some prep work that needs to get done. But uh nice to catch one's breath too. But uh hey, speaking of catching one's breath, that would be quite a luxury for our friends out there managing global supply chains right now, don't you think?

Scott DeGroot 1:27

I think it's just been crazy you use a technical term in the supply chain community. You and I can think about this, and the audience will deal with the fact that we just had some major changes in the um duty and tariff structure in the United States and Supreme Court rulings, and then refunds, which are called liquidations, are happening. And then, you know, not to say that that wasn't enough, let's have a major geopolitical crisis, you know, an excursion or an operation with Iran, and we see oil prices going up to, I don't know, maybe you'll know better than me, up to $113 a barrel yesterday on March 9th, today's March 10th, and then come back down. It's just if you're running a supply chain and you're dependent on these commodities, not just oil, but all the other distillates and feeds, you know, your your planning process has to be very disrupted right now.

Energy Independence And Global Pricing

Tom Goldsby 2:22

Absolutely. And by the way, how's your refund coming along? You get you getting a refund? It's so interesting to hear that you know the hemming and hawing coming from our government about we can't track that. Well, of course, this was all electronic, right? So um it's it's pretty interesting to see why we we can't get those refunds issued in expedient fashion, let's say. But anyway, hey, I guess there's interest being earned all the while. But with regard to you, you mentioned first and foremost, you know, maybe the the war, and and war is always going to introduce disruption to global supply chains. And I suspect you've also been getting hit up with a lot of media requests about, hey, can you kind of sort this out? And I think we all understand, right? About 20% of the world's supply is coming from the Persian Gulf region. And even though here stateside, we've become largely energy independent. I think still 10 to 12% of our oil is coming from the region. But the notion of global markets is something that has to be explained to a lot of folks.

Scott DeGroot 3:22

Yeah, you and I were chatting earlier. I agree. I have an undergraduate class, 413. We were talking about the fact that a student asked, well, I thought the United States was energy independent. And we chatted about what that really means. The fact that a good portion of our crude is not refined here. Instead, it's exported. We import a good bit of crude because it's better for our refineries, and that's what our refineries are built for. And it's a global commodity, so it's priced globally. And as you touched on, so many other things, fertilizer and distillates and everything, liquefied natural gas is coming through, you know, this very narrow strait of hormuz. And we are still interdependent supply chain despite our efforts to become more resilient. So it's it's a very difficult time. And I know it it kind of leads our topic today, really talking about planning and this idea that can you have a planning process that is completely understand the forecast demand and forecast of inbound raw materials? I think it's very, very appropriate time to be talking about planning.

Asymmetric Risk Drones And Slow Recovery

Tom Goldsby 4:27

Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, our supply chains by and large are planning based, and we're we're going to be getting to the work that we've been undertaking here at UT very intensely and getting some folks that have been at the forefront of that. But let's just kind of stick to maybe how this conflict, again, there's talk about forecast. How long is it going to last? And there seems to be some belief that, you know, if President Trump were just to kind of call the whole thing off and say mission accomplished, I wouldn't advise that he do it on an aircraft carrier with a bomber jacket. That hasn't played well in the past. But, you know, and some men are probably on truth social to say, all right, mission accomplished, we're all done there. It's not as though global supply chains and that flow of oil is going to resume right away. And also this notion that we're going to have Navy escorts of oil tankers. You know, we're dealing with a different kind of combat here. I think if the Russian-Ukraine war has demonstrated anything, drones, drones, drones are going to be out there. And you can take out all the big missile installations you want, but you know, we're dealing with a combatant that is going to be really hard to just squash out, right? And so long as there's a threat of drone attacks on oil tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz, I'm just not seeing that flow return to pre-conflict levels of transaction there.

Scott DeGroot 5:52

I heard yesterday, Tom, someone describe it as asymmetric. You know, the asymmetric threat will remain even after the United States and Iran and the other commands might say that it's done, because there are these cyber attacks, for example, on our infrastructure systems, the ability to get them, as you say, drones completely eliminated, the fact that there might be sleeper cells, not that I'm some I don't want to over-exaggerate this point, but I do think that the if you just took the price of oil before the event, let's just say it was $67 a barrel, roughly, and you say today it's $87 a barrel, I don't think that's a light switch to your point that you'd say, oh, the thing is over, and now oil is going to go back down to 67. All these things take time and confidence to build back up, get the flows back where they were, and the supply chains, I think, are going to have to account for that variability.

Tom Goldsby 6:50

Yeah, and also there's the economics principle of rockets and feathers, that prices tend to rise immediately, like a rocket, but they don't fall at a commensurate rate. And I don't know about you, but I've been thinking about airline tickets that I need to buy for the next three, four months. And I'm like, whew, all right, I've already bought a ticket to Europe. That was a trip I was planning to take early summer and some others, but I'm expecting jet fuel to be elevated for a time, but I'm also expecting those airline tickets to be elevated because even after conflict and the resumption of some sense of normalcy of flow of oil, yeah, I'm expecting the feather effect on the far side of this. It's going to take a long, long time, months, maybe even years before we get these prices back down.

Scott DeGroot 7:39

I mean, I appreciate that. Your principle about the feathers, I think, is right. You know, for the average consumer, let's just say in the United States, prices will take a while to come back down. Diesel fuel, I'm thinking about the logistics people, the shippers, all of our shippers and truck lines, three PLs who listen in to our commentary, you know, the price of diesel will take a long time to come back down. It's still shooting up today. A long time to come back down, and shippers are going to be paying that diesel pass-through, I think, for quite a while.

Talent Gaps With AI And Robotics

Tom Goldsby 8:09

Yeah, I think the world is no less interesting, if you will, and that's certainly holding true for supply chain management. Anything else kind of top of mind as far as uh you indicated we're on spring break here on Rocky Top? Anything else you're kind of musing about, talking about?

Scott DeGroot 8:24

Well, we continue to have great success with other big companies and really powerful companies coming to join us here at Tennessee. We've had some great conversations with some names that almost everyone would know who've expressed super interest in coming to join our community. I think the other thing we talk a lot about is uh talent and you know the intersection between talent and artificial intelligence and robotics and how to some degree our talent may not be keeping up, the capability of our people may not be keeping up with the technology advancements. And I know we'll probably touch on that a little bit when we talk about planning with our panel here in a few minutes, because the technology is amazing. But if the people don't really understand the context and the business decisions and can speak in the language of the business, then often we leave money on the table. So that's another topic over the last few days that people have been chatting with me about.

Tom Goldsby 9:18

Well, on the first point, it is always exciting for us when our family is growing, particularly with great companies that are already joining our already great organization, but uh we're so excited about additions to the family and opportunities to engage with them in a meaningful way, certainly through our supply chain forum, our research, our academies, a whole host of different things that we do here on Rocky Top. And again, it's nice to kind of keep that level of interest flowing and grow in the family. I know it's some challenge times. Going into 2026, we were kind of concerned, you know, frankly, if companies were struggling, they might, you know, look to cut education, training, and some of these partnerships. But we've seen the reverse. It's been really great to see the most progressive companies go, no, now is the time to maybe invest, and dare I say, maybe even create some advantage, some differentiation in the marketplace through working with the likes of top flight researchers and talking to partners like we have in our forum and GSCI.

UT Research Momentum And Recognition

Scott DeGroot 10:19

Oh, indeed. And of course, it's a little bit of self-promotion, especially for the people on the call today. But you know, I can see that the University of Tennessee, uh, the supply chain department was rated number one for empirical research in the 2026 uh SCM journal listing, which I think is just a testament to the depth of the talent that we have here and the importance of the work that they all do. So very, very excited about that.

Why Planning Became The Battleground

Tom Goldsby 10:46

Yeah, that was a great way to cap off the week last week. Uh, Craig Carter at Arizona State University, the creator and purveyor of the SCM list, uh, notified us that we had ascended to number one. It's something we've been working on for quite some time in the top empirical journals. You know, we'd been sitting there with great, great institutions, Arizona State, Ohio State, Michigan State, and a host of global organizations and and yet come out number one on that. There was uh, you might have heard out there some uh champagne quirks, bottles being uncorked and some celebration to be had. I think we're gonna also acknowledge that at our forum coming up next month. So it's uh it's something that we've been working toward for a long, long time. And now, of course, we got to defend it. We got to keep that good work coming out. Let's just kind of transition now and bring our guests who have been so, so patient. And I know that they've wanted to correct us on a whole host of things that we've uttered over the last 10 minutes or so. But Scott, as you indicated, planning. Planning is where a lot of the action has happened in supply chain management over the last, oh, I don't know, six years. It certainly needed to happen. And when I use the word planning, you might have even heard the way I said it. I invoke the original AI, Alan Iverson, when I say that. Does anyone remember out there remember that infamous interview when uh Alan Iverson was being interviewed in the locker room, famed point guard for the 76ers? And apparently Alan had missed some practices. And they were asking him about practice. And he uttered the word practice. We talking practice, we ain't talking about the game. Well, now that we're talking planning, we're not talking about sourcing, making, delivering. We're talking about the planning, the coordination of all that, setting the roadmap. And as indicated, you know, we're pretty disappointed, frankly. Scott, you were out in the industry, so maybe you can kind of speak to this, but how woefully deficient our planning methods, processes, technologies, and dare I say talent were to deal with the vagaries of a global pandemic, where you might have had supply chains that were hamstrung and yet your demand went up, I don't know, for toilet paper 700%. I don't know that anyone could properly prepare for that. But we really doubled down, and I got to give our group credit because we were starting to research improved planning processes even back in 2019 through pandemic, and we've learned oh so much since then. Well, what we have today, Scott, maybe you can introduce our panelists that are joining us today who have been at the forefront of our efforts here at UT.

Love To Hate The Forecast

Scott DeGroot 13:28

I would love to, and uh, we talk about planning as a central nervous system of the supply chain. Everything else operates on it. So the panel we have with us today, Tom, have been doing research for a number of years, and we're gonna talk about that here in a second. First of all, I'd like to introduce uh Mike Burnett, former senior executive at Procter Gamble Company, and now has been leading a lot of our pragmatic applied research and our white papers. Mike Burnett, together with Dr. Dan Pelothy, and Dr. Peloty works on a number of items. He leads our academy work, but also has been a deep researcher into planning and planning methods. And then Dr. Lance Saunders, who is also deeply knowledgeable about planning, and although he reminds me occasionally that he started out from a technical point of view, he's now on the management side of supply chain, and we're all better for it, and we're happy to have them here. And Mike, Dan, Lance, welcome. I don't know, Mike, maybe you could give us a little introduction to the topic and how you think about the work that we've done. And we've called this love to hate the forecast. What does that mean?

Mike Burnette 14:35

Thanks, Scott. And you know, I was reflecting on a point that Tom made. The very first white paper, applied research project we did, was in 2018, the very first planning framework concepts paper. And obviously it was accelerated by all the pandemic and geopolitical issues and other issues. But as we've evolved our work in planning, coincided with the development of the Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative, where we have an opportunity not only to take the work that we do in applied research benchmarking and networking, but actually put that in practice with partnership with industry, in many cases, multiple companies involved in similar challenges and problems. And I think we've had at least six or seven project years of planning in the last two or three years in the Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative. So we've been able to combine that with our own consulting work and our other research and really have made multiple publications. The most recent is coming out in April at the Supply Chain Forum. It's called Love to Hate the Forecast. And it comes at a basic level from what a few leading edge companies are doing in planning. And so if I differentiate what most companies are doing, benchmark companies, benchmark companies are those that have proven best practices, have proven the practices, and are implementing the best practice. And then you have those few companies that are building new capabilities that aren't necessarily proven, but they're showing outstanding results in their initial application. And we have just published a new e-book in this area talking about new ways to think about demand planning and moving away from the tradition of forecasting, which happened in the post-World War II era when forecasting methodology was developed and in the 80s, the statistical revolution of forecasting. And if you do any consulting at all, you know that in every case, I've never been in a consulting work where forecasting wasn't deemed as one of the top three problems. It was deemed as a top three problem by the supply chain community. It was deemed by the top three problem by the sales and commercial community, and also the owner or the leader of the organization as well. And to be honest, it's primarily a culture issue. There's a lot of dysfunction, you know, where we blame the forecast for everything, which really isn't based on the forecast. And then we've shifted. Originally, it was focused on the consumer. And like we typically do in these processes, we made it all about me, and we made it more based on internal needs. The supply chain protected themselves and created their own forecast to manage inventory or service. Different organization put it in their reward system and so forth. And honestly, in most of the companies we deal with, they have four or five forecasts. They don't have just SNOP, one, the gospel according to SNOP. No, that doesn't really exist in practice today, and it's caused a lot of issues. So this paper is based on how are leading edge companies reinventing forecasting or what I would call demand triggers.

Tom Goldsby 17:49

That's so great. Thanks for that foundation, Mike. And you know, something that I share with students routinely, you know, we work with great companies here at UT, and I like to ask the students, what percent accurate do you think a company's forecasts are? And there's one company we work with, large consumer goods company, and I share with them that they have a weighted average percent accurate, so volume based of low 60s. And before I utter that, you know, the students are going, oh, those are probably 85%, 90%. It's like, oh, they wish, right? But to your point, Mike, hey, you know, maybe AI is going to be helpful for us as we can convert you know data signals into inputs into our forecasting. Maybe we can take unstructured data on like social media inputs and make sense of that and all that. And that's helpful to Kaizen to continuously improve the forecast. But I think you've got a larger message there around demand management and maybe how we probably need to incorporate more agility. Now, I know that, Dan, you've been working a lot, Lance as well, in the area of agility. How do you kind of see that? Let's try to anticipate the future as best we can. We're always going to need to try to do that. But what else maybe do we need to be doing? Maybe what's in that demand management or elsewhere in the supply chain management realm for us to be concerned with?

Plan For The Demand Range

Dan Pellathy 19:13

It's a great question, Tom. Thanks for that. I think that a lot of the things, a lot of the practices that we see around agility and building agility into the planning process, I'll highlight two of those. One is thinking about planning around the distribution, not to the point. Right. And what do I mean by that, right? So the forecast is give you, give you a point estimate. That point estimate gives you directionality in terms of how you're thinking about where the demand is going to be. But really the planning process is around the distribution that occurs around that forecast to say, okay, if we're high, if we're low, what types of investments do we want to make in order to capture that distribution? And how do we build those decisions in so that we're ready to capture the distribution around that forecast that we want to capture? And so that's really a strategic question more than a forecast question, right? So you're not going to answer that question by tinkering a little bit with the forecast accuracy because any forecast is going to have some range of distribution around it. It's really more of a strategic conversation around where do you want to be positioned as a supply chain in terms of capturing the potential high or low around that distribution. I know that Lance also has been working on that. And, you know, they're pretty straightforward processes that companies can start to look at to really understand what that distribution looks like. Lance, maybe you want to jump in and talk a little bit about that.

Lance Saunders 20:51

Yeah, sure. Now, Scott, there was one thing I did want to correct you guys on earlier, which was we did not pop champagne corks at that ranking. We popped Tennessee whiskey. I just wanted to make that clear.

Scott DeGroot 21:05

That's a good point. I'm not going to be on the record on what I actually drank. I just prefer to have no comment. Uh okay.

Segment Planning By Value Chain

Lance Saunders 21:12

I'm going to comment that mine was Tennessee whiskey. But no, Dan, you're making a great point. I think the main thing that I've come to realize is that forecasting is not planning. Forecasting isn't put to planning. And it's a very important input to planning, but it's not the only input to planning. And so a lot of the work that we've done, you know, if you can go back and I won't go all Ted stank into history, only he can tell these stories in his Ted way. But, you know, if you really look into most planning systems we use today, you can trace them to 1950s automobile manufacturing, right? The MRP. And most companies today, we have way longer supply chains, way more complex supply chains, way more products, way more variants of those products. And so I think we took planning as a one size fits all mentality, and that's led us down this. Road. And so I think no matter how you look at it, and we could give you countless examples, is not that we need to take it too far the other way and have, you know, a different planning process for every product, every customer, whatever it is. But segmentation and understanding how you should segment your planning process, I think is critical. And it's kind of comical that a lot of companies, if you really look at it, you're probably planning Walmart demand the same as you're planning like your smallest customer. And if you take a step back, that makes no sense.

Scott DeGroot 22:32

Lance, I want to pick up on that point. And just for the audience listening, they will know that you and I, since I retired from my corporate job at Kimberley Clark and came here, you and I have been having a conversation about we rolled out um multi-million dollar advanced planning system. It's Canxis. You know, a lot of people use Kinaxis OMP09. There's lots of systems. But you really have called me on the fact that you know you can't run that one planning system, that one methodology if we have 17 distinct supply chain value chains, and the triggers, the inputs for finished product are not the same necessarily on replenishment as the raw material that's coming 21 days away from a third-tier supplier. That really made me think about that to some degree the systems are more capable than our process or our thinking, the way the planners sometimes, I don't know, maybe are a bit lazy, like, oh, geez. No, that's right. Talk to us more about the idea that planners are thinking about it the wrong way.

Lance Saunders 23:37

And you know, unfortunately, I can't take credit for this. My esteemed bass fisherman friend Mike Burnett, you know, I've I've learned more about planning from him and just about anyone. And he's made this point to me countless times is you really need to look at, we call it demand triggers. You can think of it like that, but it's really just like, when do you decide that product is needed somewhere? And how what what is that kind of switch? How do you get it? And for most companies, traditionally, it's been the forecast, but I call it a forecast-based push model. But for a lot of companies, for a lot of their products, like if you know how to use it correctly, we can use actual demand to actually tell us when we need to move product, not when we think we need to move product. You know, Mike, you can explain kind of what you've seen over your career of this evolution of using the data actually to your advantage to decide when to trigger that production or you know, movement in the supply chain.

Demand Triggers Replace Forecast Push

Mike Burnette 24:34

Yeah, Lance, I'm gonna stay with the leading edge companies because honestly, most companies don't do it the way we're gonna talk about demand triggers and and so forth. Uh, but it's inspirational. I mean, and this is why you should be coming to the forum and reading the white papers and shaking yourself up a little bit and determining, you know, where you want to improve. But most leading edge companies or the leading edge companies that we've interfaced with on this have determined, let's use Kimberly Clark as an example. So if you're if you're producing huggies or toddlers, they ship almost the same amount every month unless Kimberly Clark decides to manipulate the demand. Now, is that manipulation of the demand good? Does it create more value for Kimberly Clark? Or, you know, you could use any company as an example here. We'll just use this Kimberly Clark example. And we've learned largely that it does not. It might move the volume forward, but then you got to take it out later. The only thing that changes the overall demand long term is consumption. So if the commercial community worked on consumption, sampling or education or new products or something, it would create more value to the end-to-end supply chain. So then in this case, for those most important SKUs, particularly, that's where the leading edge companies are going away from using the forecast. What we would call A SKUs or the top B SKUs in the top categories, to Scott's point, not every category, in an area where we have more of a traditional supplier, customer, retailerslash consumption supply chain, that we're going to quit using the forecast, and we're just going to use the demand pattern, actual demand, and then try to create the capability, to Tom's point, the capability within the supply chain. Let's use our resources to keep that capability to handle the consumption variation. So then, you know, we're replacing inventory with capability, and that is a fundamental maxim for leading edge companies. Build capability. We will need some inventory. It's not like we don't need any inventory, but it's let's replace inventory, which has already been labeled and old and getting older by the time we have it, with something that's instantaneous. And so that's really the concept of demand triggers. Let's pick the correct demand trigger that we would use in ERP to create the flow from the consumer back of what we need to do in the supply chain. Now we can't do it for everything, but let's do it for our most viable things that have a more stable demand pattern, like Huggy toddlers. And we're talking about taking days on hand from 180 days to 90 days. We're talking about improving your customer service by 25%. These aren't things like, oh, we made our forecast accuracy one-tenth of a percent more accurate, and we didn't see it in inventory or customer service or cost. It's not that kind of thing. This is like a breakthrough change in what we're seeing.

Scott DeGroot 27:37

Yeah, it's amazing. Dan, I see you are biting your tongue. So what would you add to Mike's comments?

Dan Pellathy 27:43

Well, I just bring it back to your original question to me, which was what are some of the things that companies are doing to build in agility? And this is absolutely one of them, which is to move away from that forecast. And it's about time, really. It's about understanding really what that time frame is that you need in order to deliver to a company, in order to deliver to your customers, and then building capabilities in order to meet those requirements within that time frame, right? So you think about understanding the distribution around the forecast, and then you think about managing the time that it's gonna take to actually meet the requirements and then build capabilities so you can actually respond within that time frame. I mean, that's just an absolutely critical agility capability.

Intermittent Demand And Human Behavior

Scott DeGroot 28:32

There's so much to talk about in this time, you know, we're gonna run out of time, I'm afraid. But I just want to touch one thing, go back to Lance. I agree with you, Dan, of course. But um, Lance, you know, we've talked about uh you're doing some work with a number of companies on small parts and replenishment inventories for um lower velocity SKUs. And you make a point about, you know, it's not just the forecast, it's the intermittency of the demand pattern that can drive a different sort of replenishment trigger. Maybe you can talk a bit about that.

Lance Saunders 29:03

This is actually a project in our advanced supply chain collaborative that I actually thought was going to be quite niche, um, you know, spare parts. And what I found is the more we talk about this, the more companies are raising their hands. It's like, yeah, we deal with that. And when you take it out from just spare parts to intermittency, you know, one thing that we noticed is we were still measuring this intermittent demand using that MAPE, that percent error that Tom was alluding to a second ago. And the funny thing about that is if the MAPE is going to be zero, if it's backwards, it's there's two parts to it. When does demand occur, and then the magnitude when it does occur. And that's really applicable to a lot of companies. And another one of the things that we've kind of gone to is, you know, we talk about the forecast is not planning, but people treat the forecast like gospel a lot of times. And there's a behavioral aspect to this too. You know, we can have the best technical system. And what we've learned is still does and best forecast and you know, best in class, and it still doesn't turn into a good plan because people are part of this process. And you've got to, you not only have to really focus on that technical part of planning, but you gotta focus on the people side of planning. And understanding, you know, Scott, you and Dan are doing some great work on those competencies, understanding what where people are biased and where they trust. You know, you talk about AI now. I think there's some needed work into, you know, a lot of people look at AI as a black box. And what does that mean in terms of how they treat the outputs from a planning system or from an AI that sits on top of that planning system? Do we see some changes how they treat traditional ERPs? You know, it's an exciting world. There's a lot of possibilities out there. And yeah, I think this intermittent demand project has led us down a road that we didn't think we were going, but it's been a very valuable road in terms of understanding some of these behavioral issues.

White Papers Planning Academy And Forum

Tom Goldsby 30:58

Yeah, I just think back about how fortuitous it was that our partner companies told us that they wanted to work on agility. That then turned our attention toward planning and again, intensely studying this area since 2019. And then lo and behold, you know, we get into 2020 and the world is turned upside down, and we're able to work with those companies in real time. And that's what's been really great is to have a front row seat and be a part of those conversations as these companies are talking about changing the problem. And the idea is that hey, the forecast can maybe improve somewhat. But the point is, how can we reduce our dependence on bad forecasts? And that's the larger supply chain problem. And Dan, I know you've been at the forefront of all that. And hey, how can folks maybe get access to the white papers, maybe get access to this e-text? And then, oh, by the way, you also have a dedicated supply chain planning academy as well that folks might be interested in.

Dan Pellathy 31:59

Yeah, so again, we've been doing a lot of work here, and I don't want to take credit for all the work that we've done because it's absolutely been a team effort. Our white papers that are available on the GSCI website at the University of Tennessee, those white papers are free for folks to download and bring back to their teams. Tom, as you mentioned, and as Mike mentioned, Mike Lance and I just published an e-book on what we're calling right-to-left planning, which is starting with that customer, understanding those demand patterns and then building capabilities to those patterns, and not just simply relying on a forecast to trigger production or or the supply chain activities, but rather really understanding what the customer demand patterns look like and building capabilities to meet those. And so that book is also available. We'll be highlighting that at the forum coming up this spring. And then we have quite a number of executive education programs or professional development programs that folks can explore as well. One of those is in supply chain planning specifically, but we have others as well. So we're a full suite of kind of information to help push the field forward in this. It's a critical topic. And, you know, I think there's a lot that the University of Tennessee can do to support folks out there who are dealing with many of the issues that you all were talking about at the top of this podcast.

Follow Us And Final Thoughts

Scott DeGroot 33:23

Great. Dan, thank you to you and Lance and Mike Burnett. I wish we had more time. We could talk about this. The five of us, we could talk about this for many hours, but we should probably end it here. I do appreciate all of you being with us today. Remember that uh for all of you listeners here, the spring supply chain forum is April 21st, 22nd, 23rd in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're looking forward to having many people there. And remember, as always, you can follow us on Instagram at UTKGSCI, on LinkedIn, Global Supply Chain Institute. And you can follow us on X, actually. That would be some good contact. Let's stop following the war and start following us on X. The handle there is at GSCI Institute. Wonderful conversation, Tom. I think it was great. What do you think?

Tom Goldsby 34:14

No, it's fantastic. Again, I to your point, I think we could talk about this until the cows come home and then some. We could probably talk until Saunders gets to the bottom of that bottle and starts the next one. But uh really great too. Tom, I'm watching you, buddy.

Lance Saunders 34:28

You know, if you start slacking on this podcast, I'm coming for you.

Tom Goldsby 34:31

I know you are. I know you are, Lance. Gotta keep me on my toes. Appreciate it. All good. Well, hey, folks, uh, again, a lot of great stuff to keep up with here at GSTI. And uh really appreciate again the guests that we had join us. And Scott, thanks. You're doing a great job as co-host here. Really appreciate you stepping in for Dr. Ted Stang. And by the way, Dr. Stank sends his regards to everyone and looks forward to being back in the mix here real soon. But until next time, folks, be safe, be well, and uh hey, we'll get through this. Uh, keep those supply chains going.

Intro & Outro 35:01

Thanks for listening to Tennessee on supply chain management. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for more conversations with the leaders framing the path for practitioners, scholars, and students. Have a question or idea? We'd love to hear from you at gsdi at utk.edu. Until next time, listeners.