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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.
David Null [00:00:00]:
Technology is just a tool. The real results are driven by processes. So it's very easy to talk about the technology side of supply chain and it's exciting. A lot of talk about transformation. I think it's very easy to undervalue the importance of both people and process, and particularly process. Don't undervalue the process side of things. In the end, that's really probably what's the most important.
Eric Fullerton [00:00:29]:
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 welcome to another episode of Supply Chain Champions. I'm your host, Eric Fullerton and I am joined today by Mr. David Null. David has spent 18 years at Georgia-Pacific. Over 18 years, David, actually, and was running there, their customer experience and supply chain space. It's got a lot of amazing experience to share with us today. So David, thank you for taking some time and chat.
David Null [00:01:09]:
Yeah, thank you very much, Eric. It's an honor to join you.
Eric Fullerton [00:01:14]:
So I wanted to start talking a little bit about Georgia-Pacific because I am pretty fascinated by Georgia-Pacific. It is a, a company that I think everyone interacts with, but they may not know it. Right. It's, it's a hundred year old company. It's paper products and building products. The largest wholesale supplier of building products in North America. There's well over 100,000 employees, you know, revenues maybe 20 billion or so, 150 facilities. So it's this massive ecosystem.
Eric Fullerton [00:01:51]:
And there's gotta be a lot of complexity, David, for you, in managing that size and breadth and then those different business units. So can you just share a little bit about Georgia-Pacific, the company, how it operates and then really how that falls down into you on the supply chain and transportation side?
David Null [00:02:10]:
Yeah, as you mentioned, we're roughly a 20 billion hour company. It's comprised of three major segments. One is building products like you mentioned. The second one is probably the one that most people have the most familiarity with. It's around our consumer products group. So, you know, we have tissue and tile. We're a very large supplier to some large private label brands that probably end up on a lot of people's households but also have some branded products like Golden Northern, Angel Soft, you know, Dixie, Dixie plates. And then the third segment is what we call our packaging and cellulose segment.
David Null [00:02:49]:
So it's a number of different products in that segment, one of which is corrugated boxes and then the container board that goes into those corrugated boxes. We're largely integrated, but we do sell some of the container board externally as well. And then we have a pulp business or as Georgia-Pacific refers to as a cellulose business. And it makes pulp primarily for baby diapers. And it's a very international business selling to over 80 countries and roughly 75% of the sales outside the U.S.
Eric Fullerton [00:03:24]:
Yeah. So massive breadth, scope, very high volume of products. And it's also interesting because it's kind of squarely in like the, forgive the non-technical component, but it's like in the very middle of the supply chain in the sense that you have suppliers, many suppliers and you are a supplier to many organizations and then you also have your own consumer products which, that creates a lot of complexity. So when you're thinking about the transportation, the logistics, zooming out into supply chain, what are some of the things that you bring to practice or use to focus on managing that complexity.
David Null [00:04:09]:
So we have to think about the whole supply chain and you know, in our world it sort of starts with the customer and ends with the customer. You're obviously trying to understand customer demand, forecast demand, you know, get as good a demand signal as you can and that rolls into your, your planning group. And the planning is really important for us. Pulp and paper is a very capital intensive industry. So it's very important to run the facilities basically at 100%. You know, they run 24/7, 365 days a year except for you know, an annual outage and a few planned outages. So it's, it's really important to run those plants full. Most of the businesses things are made to order, it's not made to stock.
David Null [00:05:00]:
So that adds complexity to that planning group. Also end up with many cases, some pretty long transit times. So again that adds more complexity to that planning group. You know, as I mentioned, our manufacturing facilities, that's so capital intensive and it's, it's costly. Each port of efficiency is really important so you're really trying to plan the facilities to optimize their output. And then the other part where the supply chain picks up then is managing that transportation and logistics. And like I mentioned, for the most part products are delivered directly to the customer. It depends somewhat on our segment, segments that I've worked with the most.
David Null [00:05:46]:
A lot of the deliveries are direct to the customer so you don't have that warehouse buffer and it's, that's done because you're trying to minimize cost. We do have some customers that basically are willing to pay for the warehousing. So we'll, we'll add the warehousing piece to it. It's a lot of, a lot of fun, you know, a lot of sort of just in time manufacturing, you know, you do your best to do planning. As I say, you come up with a really good plan and typically have a frozen window of about a couple of weeks. And then, you know, you get inside that frozen period and then all kinds of disruptions happen. So you have to be nimble and adjusting the fly quite a bit.
Eric Fullerton [00:06:26]:
Yeah. So random aside, but my grandfather worked in pulp and paper for 40 years as an engineer at a company called Charles T. Maine. So maybe I have more passion about this than others, but I think it's a really interesting industry and space to be. And one of the things that, you know, you shared in the past as you were kind of building the. The practice is that supply chain, when you have commodity materials, which a $20 billion business on commodity materials means that there's a lot of key components to being able to differentiate. And I think you and the business more broadly really saw supply chain as an opportunity for competitive advantage. We chatted about this a little bit ago, but can you kind of dig into that point?
David Null [00:07:15]:
Yeah, sure. To start with, you know, when you look at the cost, particularly the transportation and logistics aspect of supply chain, those costs can be 10 to 20% of the final products costs, as you mentioned, also dealing with a lot of volume. Big, big stuff. And in these mills, it's almost hard to imagine they're putting out, you know, two to 3,000, 4,000 ton a day. So that's, you're moving a lot of stuff. And of course, basically all that stuff you're moving out, you're. You're moving in as well in the form of wood and, and so on. But it's large volumes.
David Null [00:07:49]:
I mean, I figured in our segment I'm working in, we're moving about 14 to 15 million tons of product annually. And looking at a ton-mile, it's like 30 billion ton-miles. So one ton crossed, one mile would be a ton-mile. So 30 billion of that. So you're moving a lot of stuff a lot of places. But when we think about competitive advantage, then I think it first starts with a customer perspective or customer satisfaction. In our industry, largely, you sort of achieve a threshold level of satisfaction. I'd say most of the suppliers are pretty good.
David Null [00:08:29]:
It's almost a requirement. You have to be decent at it. I do think there's some advantage to say have better O to F, be easier to work with or so on. So we do a lot of work with, with that at Georgia-Pacific. Try to understand customer satisfaction and try to put a value on those things. The second part, you know, I mentioned, you know, around creating a competitive advantage is really creating a cost advantage. Again, if you could cut that cost, let's say from 15% to 14%, you know, that's quite a bit when you're spending. Just within my segment, we would spend almost a billion dollars on transportation logistics costs.
David Null [00:09:09]:
So it's a big number and like you say, you know, cross GP or $20 billion company, so you can, you can think of the math, you know, we're probably up to, you know, a couple billion dollars. And then the third thing, I mean, you always have to be cognizant of the investment that you're making. So could be investment in tools, could be an investment in equipment, could be investment in inventory. We're trying to maximize that return on investment, you know, across the business. And we have to think about supply chain. Exactly same way. So, you know, basically just trying to do more with less.
Eric Fullerton [00:09:41]:
So yeah, absolutely. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about kind of the data and data quality story. You've been in the industry for a long time, you have a lot of experience and I think the growth and evolution of the quest or the holy grail of of data quality has probably changed quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit about how you've seen data quality improve? Maybe in some places and others where we're still looking for more.
David Null [00:10:11]:
There's so much more data now than there was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. But I also think that in a way that complicates things because then you do have to be maybe more skeptical of the data. So many more tools and reports and metrics nowadays and a lot of self service tools which are fantastic but also creates more propensity to have issues with data quality or to have users that may not know exactly how to use a tool or what data to pull from. I think it's just increased the importance or sensitivity to that data quality. And then of course you can have different reports end up with different answers because they are accessing different sources of data or they're massaging the data somewhat differently. You know, one real life example that we had was we had a big project to improve otif and then of course one of the things we had to do was start tracking our shipments much better. And particularly we wanted to provide better predictions of ETAs to our customers and share proactively with them. And we worked with a couple different groups to pull in data from steamship lines and the first two attempts were big failures because the data quality was so poor.
David Null [00:11:40]:
In retrospect, what we learned was probably 10% of the data was wrong. It was out of sequence or maybe just missing or maybe just totally wrong. But when initially we didn't realize that, so you probably put too much dependency on each piece of data. And then we didn't get the kind of results that we expected. We really created a lot of confusion and the tools lost credibility pretty quick. Then I went to the third attempt at it and we worked with a group that then started applying machine learning to clean up the data. And then the data started making sense and then it became a valuable tool. So I think it was a great lesson.
David Null [00:12:24]:
It could be extrapolated across probably many, many technology endeavors.
Eric Fullerton [00:12:30]:
The other kind of interesting angle on data quality and you started to speak a little bit about the visibility component, but that's something I know you focused on. It's one of the many, many tools I'm sure that you, you are employing. And again, it's all a journey and a path. But what was the focus when you're trying to gain visibility into your supply chain? What are you trying to do?
David Null [00:12:51]:
You know, one way I think about it, I think of some basic principles of supply chain and you know, one of those is just know where your stuff is at that's really important. And it might sound kind of trivial and easy, but some cases it's really not. So in our case, as I mentioned, we really want to keep our stuff moving. So I think that's another thing that's really important. We don't want inventory sitting somewhere and collecting dust or occurring working capital charges. So it's really important for us to keep things moving. So that's part of the visibility. And then we just really want to be proactive with our customers.
Eric Fullerton [00:13:35]:
What'd you say earlier? Made to order, not made to stock?
David Null [00:13:39]:
Yeah, for, for the most part, our business, particularly the pulp business, which is where I spend a lot of my time, was a make to stock business. So you'd think it's pretty much a commoditized product in large, large ways that is. But there's still enough, a large number of SKUs and and so on that we have to provide. And you know, that particular business, 40% of it was shipped to Asia. Long transit times, you know, almost all by container, a lot of cases, transshipment points, you know, it's sort of easy to lose track of things and you know, you might expect 30 day transit time and it turns into 40 or 45 days. Or if it goes through a transshipment point, you might expect 40, 45 days and it can end up 60 or 70 or it could even get stuck somewhere, so.
Eric Fullerton [00:14:29]:
So I wanted to talk about two more topics, kind of hot button in supply chain sustainability and then, and then AI. So let's start with sustainability. I think there's a lot of big sustainability flowery language, but can you talk to me a little bit about what it means to actually take a pragmatic approach to sustainability and supply chain and operations? Waste elimination, what does that mean?
David Null [00:14:55]:
Yeah, the way that Georgia-Pacific thinks about sustainability. And this would apply to all Koch Industries companies in Georgia-Pacific's part of Koch Industries. But they would define sustainability as creating the most value with the fewest resources. So waste elimination becomes a really important part of sustainability. We've all seen so many companies that made these really bold proclamations, particularly several years ago. A lot of them around 2030. So 2030 is getting a lot closer now.
Eric Fullerton [00:15:29]:
Getting really close, man.
David Null [00:15:30]:
Yeah, but they'd all said, yeah, by 2030 we're going to do this or we're going to do that. And you know, I think we're seeing a lot of them, you know, backing off on some of those commitments. I think we've been pretty careful to not do that. I also say, you know, talk quite a bit about the customer. I think we listen to the customer quite a bit. So we really try to understand what is important to the customer. You know, let's not add cost if it doesn't create value for the customer. At the same time, if it does add cost.
David Null [00:15:59]:
And then obviously we're expecting a customer to pay for that or pay for their share of that. You know, there are aspects of our industry, it's been where sustainability has been very important. You know, we're fiber based business for the most part. It's a very renewable fiber. I think we're fortunate in our industry, you know, we actually plant more trees than we harvest. That story probably is not out there as much as it should be.
Eric Fullerton [00:16:25]:
More trees than you harvest. You harvest a lot of trees.
David Null [00:16:28]:
And also, I mean for many, many, many years we've had high recycling rates in our industry, particularly for corrugated containers. You think about corrugated containers, probably the official stats in the U.S. it's like 90% of containers or more are recovered and recycled. It's a little hard to measure because there's quite a few boxes that come in from offshore. But needless to say, recovery rates for old corrugated containers are very High. It's been that way for a long time and again, like I mentioned, it's really about creating value with less resources. So recycled corrugated containers are used to supplement wood. It's, you know, it's a cost effective way to sort of extend the wood supply.
Eric Fullerton [00:17:18]:
Cool, so let’s talk a little bit about AI. I think there's obviously been an interesting evolution over the past couple of years. And there's a lot of these, a lot of the initial use cases were about some of the things we were talking about earlier, right? Data capture, data quality improvements, machine learning models. And now we're at the, you know, the new wave, it's all gen AI. And then there's some other thinking around. You know, AI, human collaboration to enhance decision making. Want to kind of hear your take on on that evolution and then and where you think the real value is going to be. I mean, based on based on your extensive experience working in this in this space.
David Null [00:17:54]:
I'm obviously not sort of a technology guru but you know, I've learned, you know, AI has been around for quite a while, particularly machine learning has been around for, for a long time. And of course, you know, I mentioned that visibility case earlier where machine learning which was used to help cleanse the data. So I think that was a great application. Think again. Sort of under the radar. You know, I don't think a lot of people sort of realized that. You know, I think what's really captured the imagination of a lot of folks is the generative AI and ChatGPTs and so on. Obviously we'll find some useful and valuable uses in our daily lives and in supply chain.
David Null [00:18:35]:
I'm still very optimistic, I guess about the more causal AI applications particularly. I mean we talked earlier about how much data there is now and how a lot of that data, a lot of the data frankly is sort of underutilized and it just becomes more and more data. So in a sense it's going to become more and more underutilized I think without some really powerful tools to help teams or people to do that. So I think a lot of talk around control towers, control centers, things like that, first collecting the data and then generating some of the metrics and analytics. And then I think there's a huge opportunity for AI to sort of sit above that to help with decision making or even to autonomize decision making. So that's, I think will be the really interesting piece. I think that's probably going to take more time than probably a lot of people expected, even myself a few years ago. It's going to Be done sort of a brick at a time.
David Null [00:19:41]:
It's going to be hard, really hard to do big projects that try to solve all the problems at once. And I don't think that's the right approach. So I think you've got to get some quick wins and, and get some confidence, get some experience. That's the way I would, I would see it. So I think it's important to pick meaningful, valuable problems, problems where you can hypothesize on a solution and to go after those.
Eric Fullerton [00:20:09]:
Yeah, I think a lot of the conversations I've had about it is in some instances it's like AI forced it everywhere. But I think what, when I talk to a lot of supply chain professionals, the guidance is very similar to what you just provided, which is like find the problem, find the use case and see how you can incorporate that to either get you to a decision faster, get you to higher data quality faster. Rather than blanket it out, it's actually like pull the problems out. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
David Null [00:20:39]:
I think we could all learn a little bit from the lesson of blockchain. You know, five, seven, I don't know what it was seven, eight years ago, you know, it was blockchain this, blockchain that. And I still think it has some, some interesting applications in supply chain, particularly where you've got a number of different partners or different entities involved, where you gotta share different pieces of data with different entities. But obviously it hasn't turned out quite like people prophesied about a few years ago, so.
Eric Fullerton [00:21:11]:
Didn't play out quite like that. We're getting to the end here. David, I was gonna do some quick hits with you. It's usually how we kind of wrap up the show, just get some takes from you. It doesn't have to be one word, but usually it's best if you keep it to just like a sentence or two for, for the quick hits. Ready to ride?
David Null [00:21:30]:
Sure.
Eric Fullerton [00:21:31]:
All right, cool. So what is the one thing that you wish everyone who worked in supply chain knew and the industry would be better forked?
David Null [00:21:45]:
I think folks need to realize that supply chains are a really complex and fragile ecosystem that's strive very much for efficiency. And when you really work hard for efficiency, you lose some of that redundancy. And it's really designed for. But I'd say, quote, unquote, normal situation, their normal environment, which is probably sort of never really the case. I mean, there are so many disruptions that are happening all the time. And then I think the other thing is think about supply chains and you really sort of mentioned it earlier. I think you really have to find that balance between customer satisfaction, costs and investment and really have to think about how to value each of those, particularly the customer satisfaction piece of it. I think it's a bit hard to value that sometimes, but to then really try to think through and you know, focus more on effectiveness than, than efficiency.
Eric Fullerton [00:22:48]:
I've heard people circle around that, that topic, but I haven't heard it said quite like that. So it's almost in some ways the, the strive for efficiency. They're at odds with the redundancy and the resilience that you put in. I'm going to go up next one.
Eric Fullerton [00:23:02]:
What is one trait that all of the best supply chain professionals seem to have?
David Null [00:23:09]:
Yeah, I think the most obvious answer would be around problem solving. But I think there's an important aspect of problem solving you have to think about. And I've just sort of learned that throughout my career, in fact, very early in my career, I had somebody somewhat jokingly or sarcastically say, you know, that person had 20 years experience one year at a time, but basically in a way saving sort of solving the same problems over and over. So I think the really important part of problem solving is not just to solve the immediate problem, but to think about a more sustainable solution that can solve tomorrow's problems or sort of learn from today's problems and put a process in place or the people and tools in place that can help solve that problem on a more sustainable kind of basis. Otherwise you're just firefighting, so.
Eric Fullerton [00:24:01]:
Yeah, exactly, because solving a problem doesn't mean you're solving the problem, right?
Eric Fullerton [00:24:06]:
So you gotta kind of dig deeper. Let's chat a little bit about supply chain trends. I'm curious your take and you talked about a bunch today, but one that you think is overrated and one that you think is underrated.
David Null [00:24:21]:
The answer's probably the same. And again, it's probably a pretty common answer. But you know, I think AI is both underrated and overrated. And I think Gartner's a great resource and Gartner has their, their hype curve, which I like a lot. They have AI right at the top of that hype curve. And again, like I talked about, yeah, I think the generative AI is gotten an awful lot of hype which is extended to, to all of AI. I still think AI has, has a lot of potential. You know, one of the things that I think about technology and supply chain, I mean it's.
David Null [00:25:01]:
Well, obviously some technology has been around For a long time. There's probably been so much more technology development in the last 10 years. It's probably one of those exponential, you know, almost like a Moore's Law kind of thing with technology. But I think technology will begin to mature a lot over the next decade. Those developing the technology will be able to communicate much better with those in the supply chain to. To come up with real solutions. Where in the past, you know, may have been a little bit of that, you know, hammer trying to find a nail kind of approach.
Eric Fullerton [00:25:33]:
So, David, I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to talk about something I don't think we talk about enough, maybe on this podcast or in general in supply chain, that's about leadership. And I wanted your perspective. What are some of the qualities that you believe make a really strong leader in supply chain to drive that team success?
David Null [00:25:56]:
Yeah, I think there's a number of things that are really important. I think probably what's most important, and I think it's probably creating the vision for your supply chain team. And obviously it needs to fall within the business segment, the business vision, or maybe even your company or your vision, and then not only to build that vision or create that vision, and it's probably done collaboratively, but also to make sure there's a lot of alignment across the organization to that vision. And then another thing I think is really important is just building a strong team. In fact, the way the organization that I just retired from looked at Georgia-Pacific is we really felt like the primary role of a supervisor was to develop his team. Oftentimes think of a supervisor leader, you know, sort of what they can contribute individually, but we would take the opposite view. It's. It's really more what the team could contribute.
David Null [00:26:58]:
And then as part of building that team, I think it's really important to define roles, responsibilities, and expectations, or we call them R&Es. And in our case, we would really try to tailor those R&Es to utilize the comparative strengths of the individuals on the team. So obviously looking for competitive advantage, but utilizing the team that we have, we want to use their comparative strengths as well. And then I think teamwork and collaboration is really important. Obviously, it goes back to building that team. So you want to build that team with folks that have the virtue that's consistent with teamwork and collaboration. And we would emphasize that the virtue side more than the talent side. When we make our hiring decisions, retention decisions, then sort of going back against the vision.
David Null [00:27:52]:
And you think about supply chain, it's easy to end up with an awful lot of initiatives, a lot of problems, a lot of opportunities, a lot of challenges. It's very easy to end up with a long list of things to work on. I think it's really, really important to prioritize those so you don't work on too many things. Really come at it from the lens of what creates the most value for your customers or value for your business. Then I think it's also important, very important to have strong economic thinking skills. Being able to think about almost every decision from an economic perspective and not just from a short term perspective, but from thinking about what creates the most long term value, which is hard to do. And particularly when you get in things like customer satisfaction, it oftentimes becomes challenging to put a value on that. We've already talked a little bit about problem solving.
David Null [00:28:56]:
I think associated with that is having, you know, good, strong analytical skills or at least being able to leverage analytical skills within the organization. And then I think one of the most important things and it's, it's, I think it's important for probably almost anybody in business is just have a high level of curiosity, just a hunger for knowledge, you know, be a student, you know, have that continuous improvement, mindset, transformation, mindset. And then I'd say the last thing is just having humility. You know, we're all going to make mistakes. I think we shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes. I think we should admit our mistakes. And I also think it goes back to the comments I made around teamwork and collaboration. You have to realize, you know, there's a lot of good ideas across the organization.
David Null [00:29:49]:
So I think you very much have to find ways to harvest those ideas.
Eric Fullerton [00:29:54]:
Last question, David. We're a podcast, so, you know, going viral is always good for us. We're looking for some hot takes to close us out today. What is one hot take that you have on the supply chain industry today?
David Null [00:30:08]:
One thing I'd say is it's not all about technology. So it's very easy to talk about the technology side of supply chain and it's exciting. You know, a lot of talk about transformation. I happen to be a large believer in that. But I think it's very easy to undervalue the importance of both people and process, and particularly process. That's the one thing I'd say, don't undervalue the process side of things. In the end, that's really probably what's the most important. Technology is just a tool.
David Null [00:30:45]:
The real results are driven by processes.
Eric Fullerton [00:30:48]:
100%. That was a great way to close and some sage wisdom. So, David, thank you very much for taking some time, for sharing your expertise, your background, and most of all, thank you for being a Supply Chain champion.
David Null [00:31:03]:
Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks Eric. This was fun.
Eric Fullerton [00:31:09]:
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Champions. To get connected and learn more, visit project44.com and click the link in the comments. To subscribe to project44's newsletter. Tune in, get smart, and move forward.