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From natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes to pandemics, cyberattacks, and labor strikes, companies have to navigate so many complexities to get goods where they need to go.
What's their secret weapon to operating within the unknown?
It’s the people.
Welcome to Supply Chain Champions, the show that showcases the stories of those who keep supply chains running smoothly. We're here to highlight their untold stories and share lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Join us as we peel back the curtain on the people who make supply chains work and enhance your own career in the process.
Tune in. Get smart. Move forward.
Percy Fields [00:00:00]:
The only thing that's guaranteed to stay the same is that things will change. We always try to break our plan on paper, never get comfortable, because you always got to have the what if scenario. And so, you know, breaking your plan on paper allows you to screw up your operation before somebody else comes in and screws up your operation. That way, you're always ready for whatever's coming next.
Eric Fullerton [00:00:22]:
Welcome to Supply Chain Champions, the show brought to you by project44, where we're talking to the people who make supply chains work. Hello, everyone, and thank you for listening to Supply Chain Champions. I am your host, Eric Fullerton, and we have a very special guest. Today. I am joined by Percy Fields. Percy is the President and GM of the Belt Railway Company of Chicago, the largest switching terminal railroad in the United States. Percy, before we get started, thank you for being here, man.
Percy Fields [00:00:59]:
Thank you for having me.
Eric Fullerton [00:01:00]:
In our conversation today, we're going to talk about the Belt Railway career trajectory, lessons learned, some stuff maybe you can share. Dig into a little bit about supply chains, future transportation. We're going to get into all that. But before I do that, I want you to do me a favor, because I did my research on you, man, and I'm going to ask you to flash back for me 24 years ago because I really want to know, and I'm sure our listeners do, too, what it is like to be a freight train conductor on the Union Pacific Railroad. I think that is really cool. Can you start by just sharing your experience there?
Percy Fields [00:01:41]:
Sure. Actually, I'm just going to go back one year, even before that as a senior in high school, just kind of where my professional career began. So I'm a second-generation railroader. My dad worked for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad and then ultimately the Union Pacific after they were, they merged together in the mid-nineties. So railroading has been in my family and in my blood, I'll say for, for my entire life. But it really started back in high school. My parents didn't go to college. I have five sisters.
Percy Fields [00:02:10]:
They didn't go to college. And so college for me was like a kind of an unknown. What comes after high school? I knew I needed to do something, but college wasn't really on the radar. And what really sold it for me was we had a career fair in high school, you know, career day where seniors go and you just kind of go around and see what's available. And we had an assessment where you go and kind of fill out all the characteristics and things that are about you and what you like, and it spits out your ideal job. So I do that, the calculation goes through, and it spits out that I'm destined to be a school bus driver. And I was like, wow, how do I go home and tell my parents that is destined to be a school bus driver for his career? And so at the same career fair, there was a marine recruiter there, Sergeant Stevens. I'll never forget his name.
Percy Fields [00:03:00]:
And, you know, I kind of explained my story to him, and I said, you know what? I'm not really sure what I'm going to do after high school. I can't be a bus driver, so I might as well sign up for the military. Well, I was too young to do it myself, so Sergeant Stevens had to come to my house, have my parents sign the recruitment paperwork to be able to authorize me to go in. So all that was happening, he's at my house, we're filling out the paperwork. My mom is completely distraught because she doesn't want me to go off to war. And she has all these crazy images in her mind. While I'm filling out the paperwork, our doorbell rings, and my parents had bought a dog. The dog was brought to us from the breeder who was from Iowa.
Percy Fields [00:03:36]:
Dubuque, Iowa is the name of the city. And so he comes in and he says, you know, like, okay, see, you're filling out paperwork here. I don't want to intrude, but I'm a recruiter for the University of Dubuque, which is a small, Division III liberal arts college in Iowa. Do you have any interest? And my mom was like, absolutely, he has interest. She ripped up the paperwork for the marine recruiter, told him, get out. We'll see you later. And long story short, because my parents bought a dog, that kind of changed my trajectory. And I went to college for two years.
Percy Fields [00:04:08]:
Ran track, played football, got no car accident, had a couple of knee surgeries. Had to figure out where I was going in life. Had a little too much fun in college. Sometimes when I give presentations that if you want to be the president of a railroad, drop out of college like I did, which catches people's attention, but in all seriousness. So came back home, and my dad was like, hey, you gotta figure out what you're going to do in life. Why don't you just come to the railroad and work there, have some vacancies for a conductor. So, became a conductor at 19 years old. I started selling tickets on passenger trains here in Chicago, on the metro trains, and then taking freight trains from Chicago up to Milwaukee, Janesville, and then ultimately transferred my seniority.
Percy Fields [00:04:48]:
I got furloughed when I was on the railroad for a year and a half and then transferred my seniority to the Chicago freight terminal, where I worked another three or four years as a conductor, which was a really cool job. You know, that experience, those five years that's starting from the bottom, has given me so much. I'll call it street cred in any job I've had since then, because I'm able to relate to what work people are doing and being out in the elements and just having that understanding. So that's helped me along the way. Now, fast forward 24 years later, here I am as the president and general manager of the Belt Railway, and I. I absolutely believe that the assessment that I took back in high school was spot on at being a bus driver in the literal and the figurative sense. So bus drivers literally move people. And I believe that that's my job as the president and general manager, is to sometimes literally, but most often figuratively, emotionally, spiritually, is to move the people that I work with.
Percy Fields [00:05:41]:
So I think I'm fulfilling my destiny. Just didn't realize that 25 years ago that bus driver was going to be it. So I own that title proudly today.
Eric Fullerton [00:05:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so you spent 20 years, though, with Union Pacific, is that right?
Percy Fields [00:06:00]:
Yep. 20 years, yeah.
Eric Fullerton [00:06:02]:
Now, not to make this about me, but I am a bit of a history buff, so I'm quite familiar with Union Pacific, you know, the whole Thomas Durant race with the Central Pacific and the big four. Actually, I was pretty hyped to see that. When you think about that journey, and we'll get to Belt Railway in a second. So 20 years there, from conductor to GM, what was that like? And were there any of those kind of make or break moments that you can share throughout it?
Percy Fields [00:06:33]:
Yeah. So when I started as conductor, I never had any thought into moving beyond that. I really loved the work I was doing, loved the people I was working with, loved the job, great pay, great benefits in this, you know, city that I'm from. So I didn't have to worry about moving and leaving, but an opportunity came for me to go into management, and so I jumped right on that and spent about five or six years here, you know, in Chicago. Met my wife. Met my wife in March of zero eight. We got married in 2010, pregnant with our first child, who was due in September of 2011. We moved to Kansas City in August of 2011, less than a month before he was born.
Percy Fields [00:07:13]:
So when you talk about make or break, I believe that what breaks you makes you. And that was probably the most challenging time in my professional and personal life. Moving to Kansas City with first time moving away from home. I lived in the same place for 30 something years, just newlyweds, one month away from having our first child where we had a nothing but support here in the Chicago area. Moving to a place where we knew no one. When my son was born, he was in the NICU for a couple of weeks. So all those things I was working on my MBA, I was in a leadership program with Union Pacific. So all the top stressors that I feel like you could go through in life, I was doing that all at one time in the first move to Kansas City.
Percy Fields [00:07:52]:
And honestly, it was probably the greatest experience of my life. That was a definitely tipping point in life where it was like, man, this is like really stressful. This is really hard. Can I get through this? And then everything after that's just been pretty much a breeze. Like, we figure out we got each other and we can take whatever comes our way.
Eric Fullerton [00:08:10]:
Nice. Awesome. So then after that we head back home a little bit. Belt Railway. I talked about it a little bit in the beginning. Largest switching terminal railroad in the United States. I don't think that really does it justice, though, for people who are listening and, and they're not familiar. And if they're listening, they probably should be relatively familiar.
Eric Fullerton [00:08:34]:
But can you talk a little bit about size and scope and what you see on, on the day to day?
Percy Fields [00:08:42]:
Yeah. So, you know the Belt Railway, we've been here for 144 years now. Our main line is we've got a 28 miles mainline railroad that goes from the north side of Chicago almost to the border of Indiana. We process up to 8500 railcars a day. We've got 52 inbound and outbound trains. So every hour there's a train either coming in or going out of the Belt Railway. We've got 40 local customers that we spot. Our vision is connecting the nation.
Percy Fields [00:09:11]:
It's literally and figuratively what we do. We're owned by all six class one railroads. And so interchange traffic. 47% of the intermodal traffic that moves in the US comes through Chicago, and a large portion of that moves across the Belt Railway. Just under 30% of all rail traffic moves through Chicago, and a large portion of that, again, moves across the Belt Railway. So it's a very busy place. You got passenger, metro, Amtrak, you know, all of those move across us on a day to day basis. And so while it's a short line railroad, by definition we are fully engaged with all the class one carriers, whatever they're trying to do, we need to support that.
Percy Fields [00:09:50]:
The way that Chicago goes is how the belt goes. So if we're struggling, the city of Chicago is struggling. Our obligation is to make sure that we can keep traffic going through the city fluidly.
Eric Fullerton [00:10:01]:
I'm thinking specifically, and you don't have to do it in that much detail, but I'm curious, a day in the life you come in, we just talked about this earlier, but every day in transportation, every day in supply chain is different. But are there some kind of big things? Each day you're coming in and you're really trying to focus on keying on help, fix or solve, or is it just, I'm coming in every day it's a new challenge, and we're just going to tackle it.
Percy Fields [00:10:32]:
There's standards that we have, so we want to make sure that whatever the inbound demand is that we can meet, that we have a threshold that we try to keep ourselves to so that we're not oversubscribing what we can do, but we also want to be able to have surge capacity. So we look at that, you know, because six class one railroads, they all have something going on on their network every day, that they may need us more or less than the previous day. And so we really try to be flexible and accommodating to that degree. You know, right now, fortunately, it's summertime, so things are, you know, things are going well, but Mother Nature is probably the biggest constraint that we have, I would say. But, yeah, most days, you know, we're heavily focused on, obviously, the operation. But I also try to make sure that I'm focusing on the other areas that are not my areas of expertise, you know, making sure that we're financially sound and that we're, you know, when we're planning for our long term capital and operating budgets. So those higher level things are also a big part of the. My day to day.
Percy Fields [00:11:29]:
Cool.
Eric Fullerton [00:11:31]:
I want to play a little game specifically about your job. It's called hardest part, best part. What's the hardest part of your job? And then what's the best part, hardest part?
Percy Fields [00:11:40]:
I'm a perfectionist in a job that is never going to be perfect. And so I have to consciously remember to not try to impress upon everybody else my expectations of perfection. That's probably the hardest part for me, is you can see things on paper that make total sense, and it doesn't always happen that way in the real world. A big part of what we do is managing personality and attitude and we have. Everybody comes to work every day, not with the same mindset, necessarily. People have things going on outside of work that as much as we try to say, hey, when you come to work, keep home at home and keep work at work. But we're human beings, and there's not a line of demarcation that we cross that says, okay, I'm not gonna think about anything that I got going on back at home. And so that plays into that non perfect world that I would love for us to have but just isn't reality.
Percy Fields [00:12:32]:
So.
Eric Fullerton [00:12:33]:
All right, we gotta go. Best part, though.
Percy Fields [00:12:35]:
Best part. I'm gonna say the best part about being here at the BRC, this is truly a family railroad. You can't go and meet somebody that doesn't have a relative that works here. And so when you truly have a family environment, it's so awesome. Now with families, you know, I have sisters and, you know, my parents, like, families don't always get along, but that's okay. Like, I always tell people, like, really good ideas come from differences of opinion. As long as we're moving in the same direction, that's what matters. Definitely the best part is the people.
Percy Fields [00:13:05]:
That's what really makes this place great. And we have a lot of great people. Cool.
Eric Fullerton [00:13:09]:
All right, well, I'm going to shift a little bit. So, at project44, we have this concept. It's called high velocity. Very simple definition is it's the ability to optimize your supply chain with confidence, precision and speed. So that's our term and definition. But I'm curious, does that resonate with you? And maybe even more importantly, how would you apply that to your day to day, your week to week, month to month, even year to year?
Percy Fields [00:13:39]:
So when you talk about high speed and high velocity in railroad terms, that's car dwell. And so we have discussions quarterly with all of our owners, and we try to set a plan. Ironically, it's not always the plan that is the fastest to move a rail car through the BRC. It's what is most accommodating to our owners. Well, with that being said, speed, once the rail cars do get here, really is driven around safety, honestly, I mean, we have a good transportation plan. What we need is people to be able to come to work and have a good safety plan, have good capital investments, so that our infrastructure is sound, so we're not having derailments and mechanical issues. And so from our standpoint, we really try to minimize all of the service interruption opportunities when there are the safety type incidents. Or if one of our systems goes down or there's a track that's out of service because we haven't maintained it to the standard that we're supposed to.
Percy Fields [00:14:36]:
So that's what we really try to focus on is keeping our infrastructure sound and keeping our employees safe. We just had our best year ever from a derailment standpoint last year, and we're breaking that record this year. And from a safety, you know, personal injury standpoint, we're knocking it out of the park. And so those are the things that we really want to focus on.
Eric Fullerton [00:14:54]:
Yeah, that makes sense. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Percy Fields [00:14:58]:
You know, supply chain is. It's a conveyor belt, you know, from one mode to the next. And so you can't have one that's going super fast and then the next one's super slow. Then you get log jam. And so we really try to focus on the consistency part of it.
Eric Fullerton [00:15:11]:
Right. That makes sense. And, yeah, the way we're thinking about it is actually reaction. Like the ability to respond and react with that precision and speed. Not just move everything fast. If something's happened, I need to manage something by exception or there's a crisis that's occurring, how am I going to react? Do I have that intel at my fingertips? So, yeah, and we do.
Percy Fields [00:15:30]:
Like, you know, if there's a. Let's just say that there's a weather event somewhere and one of our owners is like, hey, we're going to have to reroute a bunch of traffic. Can we bring it? You know, and we'll say yes. And then we get the advanced billing and the volumes that are coming in. And so we'll communicate that to the receiving road that the traffic's going to go to to make sure that they can have the resources in place from crews and locomotives to be able to handle that. You know, we always talk about whatever we consume, we have to be able to expel also. So we can't just keep eating, eating, eating, and not have a way to, you know, empty our stomach, so to speak. And so we work really closely with all roads on that kind of stuff.
Eric Fullerton [00:16:04]:
Makes sense. I want to shift back for a second just on some big, broad career learnings experience. I'm curious, if you look back on your full career, is there one piece of advice that you wish you had received earlier?
Percy Fields [00:16:21]:
Part of it is the perfection thing. Don't worry about trying to please everybody at every time. I would say the big one would be if something feels wrong versus something that feels completely safe and completely expected and completely right. Choose the one that doesn't feel right. There's so many times where, you know, I I was very shy growing up. I was a very reserved kid and just was always afraid to raise my hand and speak out because I didn't want someone to think, like, oh, man. Like, why is he answering that? Like, that just sounds totally ridiculous. But ridiculous is what moves the needle.
Percy Fields [00:16:59]:
Going outside the box is what makes a difference. And you got to have people that are willing to do that. And so it takes courage. You got to open yourself up for potential criticism, and, you know, it's not the easy way. And so sometimes you have to take the easy way. Sometimes you have to take the path that's already been beaten down for you because it makes sense. But being able to have the courage when you realize, like, you know what? I think I really want to try something different here to stand out. Like, I would give myself that advice to do that sooner because I I try to do that often now.
Percy Fields [00:17:26]:
You know, just stuff that feels like maybe just not totally in line with the way that others would do it. I just want to push the boundaries just a little bit, just to be different.
Eric Fullerton [00:17:36]:
Of course, one thing I see is that there's a lot of people that are successful or in high ranking positions. They have, like, a mantra of sorts, right? This could be a life mantra, just how you live your life or something you try to bring to work. Do you have one that you can share? I mean, I got some nuggets just from. From what you were saying, but do you have kind of one that just, this is what I take to work, or this is how I try to live my life?
Percy Fields [00:18:04]:
Yeah. I mean, it's gonna sound cliche, and especially after what I just said, like, don't go the path that everybody else goes, but just be yourself, man. Like, I'm not Percy the president and then Percy the husband and Percy the dad. I'm just Percy. And it's so much easier when you don't have to fake who you are, and you could be your authentic self every day. And so that's my mantra. Like, you know, what you see is what you get. I'm completely honest with everybody.
Percy Fields [00:18:29]:
I don't sugarcoat things. I have no reason to lie and not tell the truth. While sometimes things may be uncomfortable, to have conversations, like, I have a responsibility to move towards conflict, to prevent it from spreading. Just be yourself all the time. I don't want to be a different person when I go home than I am when I'm here. It's hard enough being just me.
Eric Fullerton [00:18:47]:
Yeah, I hear you. Some people can do that. I never figured it out myself, nor did I think it was good for me. Right.
Percy Fields [00:18:54]:
You just got to be yourself. That's. It's much easier that way.
Eric Fullerton [00:18:58]:
Quick question. True or false, Chicago is the transportation and logistics capital of the United States?
Percy Fields [00:19:07]:
I'm going to say true.
Eric Fullerton [00:19:08]:
Yeah, I thought you might. But it's really interesting to see everything that's. That's happening from just transportation, that core industry, but then logistics, technology, all of that development. Chicago is an interesting, evolving, growing place. How do you see Belt Railway? And then there's this kind of new wave of gen one, gen two, gen three into gen four technology companies. Like, how do these things piece together?
Percy Fields [00:19:42]:
Well, as I'm sitting here looking out the window, you know, there's trains going by my window. There's every 45 seconds, there's a plane taken off or landing at Midway. You know, right next door to us is CSX Bedford park. You know, their large intermodal terminal here in Chicago. Like, all of this stuff is Lake Michigan's, you know, just down the road also, like, so everything is truly connected. And, you know, from a technology standpoint, it's. It's amazing, you know, some of the stuff that you're seeing.
Percy Fields [00:20:07]:
Here's one thing we don't have. We're never going to be on the leading edge of technology just because we aren't big enough and we don't have the team to do it. But, you know, we really let all the class one owners kind of do the research and development, and then we try to take the good things that come from that technology. I mean, yeah, they're all connected, and, you know, with all this artificial AI stuff that's going on and machine learning, like, the future is going to be very bright. I'm curious to see how it's going to play out.
Eric Fullerton [00:20:35]:
It's interesting, though, because from your purview, literally your actual window, it's like assets are still moving, and that's that connection. So it makes sense. So I'm thinking, do you have any kind of hot takes on supply chain, freight, transportation, logistics industry? You're a contrarian. I can tell just by chatting with you. Anything you want to share?
Percy Fields [00:21:03]:
Here's the one thing I share with the team. Every time we get together and meet is the only thing that's guaranteed to stay the same is that things will change. And we always try to break our plan on paper. That's something that I learned when I got to go through the Harvard Management AMP program, which was break your plan on paper, never get comfortable because you always got to have the what if scenario. And so, you know, breaking your plan on paper allows you to screw up your operation before somebody else comes in and screws up your operation. So that way you're always ready for whatever's coming next and, or maybe you're the next person to affect change for the industry and what's next. So I like that.
Eric Fullerton [00:21:41]:
We got a lot of mantras, man. Be yourself, break your plan on paper. I'm jotting down some notes. Appreciate it. Percy, you're obviously a busy guy, so thanks very much for, for spending some time with us, taking some time, sharing a little bit about who you are, where you kind of came through the industry. And now at least we're calling you a supply chain champion. So there you go.
Percy Fields [00:22:04]:
I'll take it.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:05]:
That's pretty cool. Yeah.
Percy Fields [00:22:06]:
Yeah, we'll take it.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:07]:
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for being here. Appreciate the time.
Percy Fields [00:22:11]:
Thank you.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:14]:
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Champions. To get connected and learn more visitors, click the link in the comments to subscribe to project44's newsletter. Tune in, get smart and move forward.