The Changing role of Procurement, Traceability-as-a-Service, Sustainability and Blockchain's use case with Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Listen to the Podcast here
Watch the Podcast here
Doug Johnson-Poensgen is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Circulor. We covered a lot of ground in this 25-minute podcast and this podcast is going to be exceptionally beneficial to you if you are currently looking at your supply chain and wondering how can we improve visibility, how can we reach our sustainability goals using our supply chains and how do we know what is in this product?
I think all of us, regardless of sector, are starting to have more conversations around this. Circulor describes itself as a company that provides Traceability-as-a-Service to verify responsible sourcing, to underpin effective recycling and to improve efficiency. We reach parts of OEM's supply chains that most currently have little real visibility into.
Circulor boasts high profile clients such as Jaguar Landrover, Volvo, Polestar and Boeing. Circulor is built upon traditional databases and distributed ledger technology from Hyperledger, a blockchain company.
Check out the timestamps for this Procurement Podcast Below:
Intro 00:00
What Mica is and how it is used in Electric Vehicle Battery Technology 1:11
Doug’s Business background 2:21Carbon Emissions in the Car Manufacturers supply chains 3:35
How Procurement Teams can aid net-zero manufacture 4:40
Insight into Circulor’s customers: Jaguar Landrover, Daimler, Polestar (who have just committed to their first Net Zero Car by 2030) 5:00
How Doug Came up with the idea to found Circular 5:41
How Circulor uses databases and Blockchain 8:17 (https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric ) (https://www.hyperledger.org/learn/publications/tantalum-case-study )
Doug is a sceptic on blockchain 9:12
The changing role of the Procurement Profession 12:15
There are visionary procurement professionals in sustainability 16:35 (Martina is a visionary - https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-buchhauser/ )
Volvo’s use of traceability in its Procurements 18:23
What procurement can do to drive sustainability and change the status quo 19:38
A future vision that Procurement can help build 24:40
Where to find Doug and Circulor 26:00
Find our more about Circulor here: https://www.circulor.com
Connect with Doug: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougjohnsonpoensgen/
Check out the Transcript here:
00:00
Daniel Barnes
Today we've got Doug from Circulor and Doug is the CEO and co-founder of. I know all of you, I hope all of you have heard of SAAS, software as a service. Well, this one's a little bit different. We've got traceability as a service here, and this is provided by Circulor. Circulor are, well, I'm not going to go over this too much right now because Doug is going to explain it far better than I could, but effectively their focus on traceability and sustainability within the supply chain focused on emissions. They're very big in the car sector. I mean, they are a company that are simply growing and growing. I mean, if I look at some of their headlines, some of the more recent news articles you can see here that in their series, a they've just raised $14 million and they've had an early Tesla investor, the west D group, actually fund or invest, in that round.
01:05
Daniel Barnes
They're looking to expand or build more and more of a presence and continue to innovate, especially in two new or two additional geographies. I think they're already there, but they're definitely already, so they're just growing their presence in north America and Asia. A little while back, a month ago, they announced the partnership with Polestar to work with their supply chain, transparency agendas, or you've probably saw recently Polestar looking to meet the first carbon and I'm probably going to butcher this here. We've covered this off in the podcast, but the first, carbon neutral, car. I call it that in the manufacturing process creates new carbon whatsoever. That's a big challenge with electric vehicles. We're going to talk a lot in this episode about electric vehicles, traceability, sustainability, talk about the platform, Circulor, how it was built, how Doug kind of came up with it. I think this is really exciting and that's kind of some really exciting sexy points to talk about, but actually it's something Doug was fairly much keen to talk about is procurement.
02:23
Daniel Barnes
And Doug is an advocate ofr procurement. We can, you can tell, he gets excited about it here. We're kind of talking about the change in role of procurement. It's kind of why I've titled this episode that. We were talking about very much the focus on supply chain management and as part of the standard procurement role now, how we're moving away from very manual work and getting that more strategic supply chain management piece. It's something that I've seen and witnessed over the last five, six years now when I've worked in places and the supply chain is the focus, not just the standard procurement activities. So enjoy this episode.
02:59
Daniel Barnes
Doug, thanks, firstly, for coming on the podcast because, I actually, how I saw what Circulor was doing and I do, I think I'd seen of you popping up on LinkedIn and then I saw you on digital procurement world, listings and things like that. It's a really good way for me to find really cool guests of people doing really cool stuff. And, I I'm sure they won't mind me using it, in that way. I thought it'd be cool just to get you on. Firstly, just to hear a bit of a background into how you maybe came to found second and what you were doing before. So.
03:38
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Yeah. Thanks Daniel. And I really appreciate you reaching out. I apologise that now you connected to me on LinkedIn, you'll get spammed with lots and lots of stuff about what we're doing around the place.
03:48
Daniel Barnes
I honestly I've been saving and this is a Testament to actually how visual your content is. As a, as a company I've been screenshot in the post from circulate. Oh, that's an interesting thing. I've not come across that. I think one of them was, is it Mika? M I C a, I don't even know what this is. I had a screenshot to look into it.
04:11
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Well, Mica is, actually it's all over the place. Mica is what makes pearlescent paint on the car. What makes makeup shimmer? So you'll find Mica in, for example, everything from lipstick to, face powders to, paint, but actually more importantly, Mica is also now used as a, a cheap heat barrier within electric vehicles. You might remember news a few years ago of Tesla's catching fire on the side of the road. That's because, the heat created by a battery and in use and actually, common in factories, electric car manufacturers now use Mica paper, which is essentially very thin sheets of scrap Mica that have been rolled as a form of heat insulation. It's a very efficient heat insulation. The problem though, is that it comes with real responsible sourcing concerns. Quite most of the world's Mica comes from places like Madagascar, where, it is a form of subsistence mining, involving for example, child labor.
05:15
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
That's clearly not good for anybody in their brand. Anyway, sorry to disappear off streets, rewind three steps and tell you about who I am and what we do. Maybe what I've just talked about might make some sense. I'm Doug Johnson-Poensgen. I'm the co-founder and chief executive of Circulor and. We use a combination of technologies to, digitize the supply chain to Tier N in order to help with a number of particular concerns of our customers. One is responsible sourcing, which you've just touched on in the context of Mica, but also relevant. For example, in the auto sector would be things like cobalt. 63% of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo, which has all sorts of concerns with corruption and child labor and funding of armed groups. And, all the worst practices that you could possibly imagine, or we could be talking about lithium from the Atacama desert causing, water shortages and, making it less and less habitable over time.
06:18
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Responsible sourcing is one of the drivers of digitizing the supply chain and being able to understand where stuff has come from. The second one, which is driving the growth of our business, probably slightly more than that, which is what we started the business doing is actually trying to understand the full scope three emissions in, carbon emissions in a supply chain. If you take, I'm going to talk about electric cars, but if you take an electric vehicle, we all assume they're better for the planet. Obviously the tailpipe emissions in life are much lower, but, the total energy invested in manufacturing like an extra vehicle is way higher than a petrol or diesel car. What that means is that the challenge has shifted firmly onto the car manufacturer, not only to reduce the carbon footprint of their own operations, their own manufacturing plants, but also the supply chain, the battery, the EV battery, it comes for half of the whole supply chains, contribution, massively polluting.
07:18
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
The point of which you pick up the keys to your new EV, you've actually got a significant carbon deficit, which you have to make up through sustainable driving. As car manufacturers commit to net zero targets in the late 2030s, 2040 timescale, that they need to understand the contribution of the supply chain. Use for example, procurement as a key driver of reducing that carbon footprint, I E buying from more sustainable sources, working with our tier one suppliers to specify lower carbon routes through the supply chain, for example, anyway, sorry, I've covered quite a lot of ground there, but hopefully that gives you a flavour of what we do and our customers today range from car manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo, Daimler, Polestar, who has actually just committed to creating the first net zero by 30, which is a massive challenge given what I just told you about electric vehicles, to, in aerospace, the likes of Boeing and also some very large consumer electronics companies, all of which are grappling with things like traceability of critical materials in battery supply chains, as well as sustainability.
08:29
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. That's, that's a re that's an awesome introduction by the way. I mean, I, there's a few bits I want to explore, from what you've just said, firstly though, like, how did you come up with this idea to co-found this? Did you just see a gap in the market? Like.
08:45
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
It's kind of, all these things now, obviously I'm going to now post rationalise this as genius, but clearly the reality is there's large amount of luck that comes up with com play comes into play in seizing on an idea that may have legs, that you are able to somehow bring to life and convince customers you want to buy. So, with that health warning, now, let me tell you how the genius works. I actually took a week off work in 2017 because I'd been, I was really interested in, blockchain and obviously 2017 was peak hype in terms of cryptocurrencies and things. My whole background has been in enterprise technology and I was thinking might wet, interesting technology where might there be use cases beyond cryptocurrencies in the vertical real world. I started looking at some of the fundamental attributes of distributed ledgers and thinking where might something like this possibly linked together with other technologies help solve some real world challenges.
09:53
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
That was the germ of the idea, actually responsible sourcing of cobalt used by car manufacturers in EV batteries. I thought, look, if I'm going to try and create a business, that's going to grow in value. If I can find a market that's, I, I don't have to explain to venture capitalists that this thing's going to be a hockey stick market. I'm trying to serve all I have to demonstrate is that I might be able to follow that trajectory over time. Now that sounds super easy to say, but it's an awful lot harder to do. If you ask me, we just closed a large funding round, and I have to say, I find the process of raising money from VCs, unbelievably painful, particularly if you're a sustainability technology business, which is know in a sector that is perceived to be hot, the amount of pitching you have to do to people who approach you and saying, oh, we like what you're doing.
10:41
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
The number of frogs you're kissing, and then trying to whittle that down, we are massively subscribed for what were looking to raise. Going through the tyranny of multiple sets of lawyers or having to go through the same time it's painful. If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, was it all worth the effort? I just said, absolutely not because I was tearing my hair up with, were lawyers now, of course, now we've got money in the bank. It, it feels like we're back onto the real mission of trying to make a difference in the world.
11:11
Daniel Barnes
That's great. Yeah. I actually, you kind of just touched one, point that I was going to ask you at some point if I had time, but it makes sense now. Your technology underpinned by blockchain? So a ledger.
11:24
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Yeah. Yeah. So, so, but we use a combination of traditional databases, blockchain. We use Hyperledger fabric, which is, the Hyperledger is a product, a project of the Linux foundation. An open source permission, ledger, and, things like machine learning and AI combined to try and create a reliable digital twin for a commodity it's source. To follow that commodity through the supply chain, to dynamically attributes, data to that flow of materials, such as, for example, scope one and two emissions from each participant in a supply chain that aggregates up over time. And, of itself, I I'm actually a bit of a skeptic about blockchain. I know we've been through that period where blockchain was the answer to everything, including world peace work. They're one of, in my view, at least one of the really prime use cases for a distributed ledger is in an environment where you have multiple actors, where there's potentially significant asymmetry of resources and information.
12:35
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
You need to be able to try and create trust over an extended period of time. If you take, a material coming out of a mine site in the Congo, it can take six months before that becomes a battery that goes into a car and the people who are mining or smelting or refining have no idea where their product will go. So it's that. Yet there are real risks that need to be managed and a real lack of trust within these sorts of supply chains. For those that are not nerds on cobalt, think of blood diamonds, same problem. The difference courses that are a diamond is a diamond at the mine site. It's still a diamond when it's come with Polish, put into a piece of jewellery where in this case you're talking about cobalt or that undergoes fundamental transformation through smelting and refining, and it's amalgamated with other materials and eventually finds its way and becomes a car, which is clearly, obviously not what we've got dug up to the ground.
13:28
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
There's an additional level of complexity, which is where things like machine learning come into it to try and identify anomalies. But, supply chain is now I think, broadly recognised as a sensible use case for distributed ledger, but a distributed ledger is an inefficient database. There are many things you can do better in a database than you can do in a distributed ledger, your complex business logic, for example, better done in a database than it might be in a distributed ledger. We use the distributed ledger predominantly for the neutralisation of transactions through that passage of material student's supply chain, and thereby giving the benefit of immutability to history. You clearly can't overwrite history. If it subsequently proves to be inconvenient, particularly when you're talking about multiple steps in the supply chain. And that's how you create trust. That's where the that's the contribution of, a distributed ledger or blockchain brings to the supply chain context.
14:29
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I, I watched a little idea that consultants are an aerospace company and we're sourcing material to go under the wing of a plane to build, some stuff. And, the question was coming up was where is this material from? And there was no visibility within that entire supply chain. Were very much relying and were just discussing this before we recorded on the tier one suppliers, having that knowledge and flowing down the, almost the contractual conditions to say, you need to know where everything's coming from and flow that information back up. That's crazy and efficient in my eyes and it didn't work. So.
15:11
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Know, I think this touches on the changing role of procurement professionals, certainly with our clients who are, for example, car manufacturers, core procurement is evolving more into supply chain management. There are a number of reasons for that. The first is, you can't do responsible sourcing just by sending a questionnaire to your tier one supplier, where has your Palm oil come from? Has it been the source of deforestation? how much child labor do you have in your supply chain? What about your conflict minerals? And that's not something that's best done by spreadsheet. Although today our biggest competitor at Circulor is the status quo, which is largely the spreadsheet. First of all, under better understanding what's going on in our supply chains increasingly important to, basic compliance and risk management tasks like responsible sourcing of conflict rentals. But, if you are, if you're committing to a net zero target, you need, you can't manage something you can't measure.
16:12
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
That means that if the supply chain is a significant contributor to what you do, auto manufacturer we've talked about, but we could be talking about the construction industry, cement by definition in its manufacturer drives off CO2. So, you can have cement produced in plants that capture that CO2 or not. If you want, sustainable cement, well then where did it come from? And can you prove it, the same would apply to steel used in for example, manufacturer onshore, wind farms. There's no point having a unsustainable, we produce steel, which has more carbon emissions than you're ever going to be able to offset by the wind power that you generate. We've got a society as a whole. We've got a real challenge around trying to get a grip of the supply chains, contribution to the things that we consume or use. Boris Johnson talks about, the fact that only electric vehicles will be available by 2030.
17:12
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Well that's laudable at a superficial level, ignore for a second. Some of the practical challenges of where on earth, we all going to charge these things and how are we going to generate enough sustainable electricity for that to make a difference. What about the supply chains contribution to the manufacturer of these things? And by the way, where on earth of critical raw materials like cobalt and lithium gonna come from in sufficient quantities to make that even feasible. So nice headline, extremely challenging and practice. All of this ultimately comes down to procurement professionals who now have to be able to look to tear an in a supply chain and understand how to manage these risks or to measure things like, embedded carbon and find a way to try and engage in a dialogue with tier one suppliers about finding more sustainable routes through supply chains. That will drive real change in global missions.
18:03
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, that's a really good point. I was just thinking that like your concept, they have the biggest challenge to you is that status quo of people doing that almost it's a superficial, wasn't it? And I I've been having conversations about this. Like, how do we start? and it's not just around this, it's about diversity and things like that as well. Everything's very superficial. I, I there's. Were talking about why I set up the podcast beforehand, and I said, I just didn't like the content mostly in this space, but a lot of the content we see in the space around sustainability and all of these drives is so macro, so superficial, it doesn't go into the detail. Like I've already learned way more, just talking to you in five minutes than I've learned from every news headline. It, I guess the, I guess with technologies like yours it's and you see it is it's, the building of a trust is almost being able to point to something and say, we've got visibility of every step within our supply chain.
18:59
Daniel Barnes
That's the proof there. We are building out these new products, these new infrastructures, like you say, we could put all this stuff in for, I guess, like charging points for cars all around the country, but is that going to be offset everything else? Is that going to be, are we going to be able to offset that? And at the moment, I guess we would be guessing even, I just didn't know how people are going to point to someone and say, yeah, we know for definite that we've done a good thing here. We might well not be on the right track.
19:30
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Yeah. I mean, just bringing it back to procurement professionals for a second, there are some real visionaries in this space. I mean, our first large customer was Volvo cars and, their chief procurement officer, Martin. So she's just finished all their cars. Martina Hauser who was running procurement at Volvo cars, took sustainability on board. Really took it to heart and actually started to move the whole of the traditional procurement organization and a car manufacturer, which is a big buying operation and make sustainability as important to buying criteria as price and quality. Actually I heard her say that to their supplier conference, Christmas 2019, that from now on the sustainability would rank it in their concentration alongside price and quality. That's, that's a pretty big statement. She's not the only one. I mean, there's a guy called David Earner, Jaguar Landrover. Who's trying to drive something similar to Jaguar land Rover.
20:32
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
It's people like that who are fundamentally changing the role of procurement as a key driver of sustainability, in very big organizations in polluting industries. We need more of them and we need others to learn from those lessons and seek to improve on it and in their own organisation.
20:52
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. It's a really good point because when I, I I've seen, RFPs go out with evaluation criteria, things like that. It gets such a low can score in amount and you're right, like the 2.5% allocation of the overall school, or however they're doing it really, like there's no incentive on the supply chain to even react to that. I know typically between about to tier one suppliers there, but because the tier one suppliers didn't have to do much, it doesn't, they don't need to pass anything down through to supply chain, I guess, as well.
21:24
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
I give you a practical example. I mean, Volvo cars went through an extensive exercise to select its battery manufacturers for its EVs. They made traceability a core requirement of those contracts and they eventually led, the contracts to companies, LG chem, LG as in electronics company and CATL, which is probably the world's largest EV battery manufacturer. And, and, essentially that requirement for traceability, whether it is to demonstrate responsible sourcing or to help, drive greater sustainability in the manufacturer of batteries is a core, cornerstone of those contracts. Of course the battery manufacturers, the tier one now flew that obligation down their supply chain to their tier ones who float down to their tier ones. And that's how you change an industry. By making it a core requirements that not withstanding price quality and all the other things, demand, forecasting it's capacity, et cetera, sustainability or traceability is a core part of what it is you are going to buy because you're serious about your targets.
22:34
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. I think it's incredibly powerful and I think, yeah, the message is procurement needs to adopt and change the status square around us. Your supply chain will have no choice, I guess, but to follow, especially, I think you've read that you pulled out two examples. There are very big companies in the sector. Like if they shift everyone kind of has to shift, around them. I, I do think that should be an excused day for the smaller ones, right? Like they shouldn't just be like, oh, we don't have as much influence as somebody is a bigger company. The, the CPOs head of procurement or whoever it is, they can have just as much of an impact. Especially when you add all the compound, all that together.
23:19
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Absolutely. Right. The more, the more demanding that the end customers are of their suppliers, whether it be price or quality or sustainability or whatever, the more you change industries. Particularly in very polluting industries, I briefly touched on construction earlier, whether it's green steel or green cement is one example. Actually if you think about, building refurbishment and the amount of waste that goes into landfill, rather than is recycled or in the construction of buildings, how many buildings today, are designed with a circular economy in mind? The answer is not many and it's extremely expensive. Yet this has to become a commonplace. I mean, we have in the UK of course news, now that, the government is looking to have every household, a retrofit or take out their gas, central heating boiler, replace it with something like a heat pump laudable obviously likely to require significant government subsidy, but that should also be an opportunity to force the manufacturers of heat pumps and all the other new technologies we're gonna use to heat T to heat our homes, to manufacture whatever those things are more sustainably.
24:32
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
That the lifetime, the lifetime contribution of a more sustainable way of heating your home is not undermined by the enormous supply chain costs in environmental terms of manufacturing this stuff.
24:47
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, no great points. I, I think a good message that you've shared here so far has, a lot of these points, especially when they're government, the government initiatives, they're very laudable, right. They sound very good, but when you get into the detail, have they really been that well, fought out, maybe not, but it maybe as a step in the right direction, I really liked the example you just used. Funny enough, I did a little stint working, in, one defence, area. And, we were actually responsible for new build houses. It's it sounds weird, right? Like defence new build houses. Now if land, had contracted like Teeter wimpy and everyone like laps, and we had already forced those providers to stop with the gas boilers from 2023, just to get ready for all of this. When I think back to like, how are we tracking that, how are we tracing everything they're doing, how are we measuring them? The answer is they're not being measured in any way.
25:44
Daniel Barnes
It is, a single contract clause as a requirement in the contract, but that's it. I guess, therefore, if they're going to just do this in the cheapest way possible, which might not necessarily always be the most efficient. I might not be using the right terminology here.
26:04
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
We've got to mean it, I mean, it's quite interesting. I mean, we're talking quite a bit about carbon emissions, but a year and a bit ago, all of us stop traveling. We all went into forms of lockdown and global carbon emissions fell by about 5%. Well, why so little we're by the way, 5% is roughly what the Paris accord requires every year, Q1. Of course weren't flying places and that has a contribution and weren't driving very much, and that has a contribution, but we're all sitting at home and using our central heating and electricity, all the rest of it, but we're also still buying stuff and buying stuff. Of course, that global supply chains are still doing everything they do. That's why carbon emissions didn't fall very much. Actually, if you think about how radical putting everyone into a lockdown was and what the effect of it was on global carbon emissions, and you think you have to achieve that every year, we've got some big changes to make.
27:01
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
We, I mean, I'm not a plaque or waving headbanger for the environment, but it's, I can see how better understanding the impact that, we as consumers have in, who we buy from, that those organisations who are managed, managing things actually have real sway over their suppliers and how they act more sustainably combined that can make a very sizeable difference.
27:28
Daniel Barnes
Yeah. I think that's a really good point. Like, I, I I've seen some commentary on it where providers of whatever it is, lets just call it material goods, whether it's clothing from let's think of some UK shops, boohoo, asos, whatever, if they get to the point where they can display on the product page, all the stats, where does fabrics come from, where it was made in detail, we're going to have a far more aware by in society, like that, and I guess your technology and things like that, it could be a way to open up some of those points.
28:04
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
I mean, the digitalisation of the supply chain and understanding where stuff has come from, what the recycled content is, what the, how much carbon was emitted in its manufacturer, how much water was used, very relevant to things like, for example, cotton, most people don't realise the enormous amount of water that goes into the money. So it's the growing of cotton. And, quite apart from, the forced or child labor that goes into picking it in some of the Russian for Russian republics. So, there are many things that we, as consumers would be horrified about it in our collective desire for stuff. The, but we just don't have visibility into. Yeah,
28:50
Daniel Barnes
I, I think, yeah, you're right. Like, I think we would be horrified at what our buying decisions have allowed, and we're probably all very much guilty of it, especially all across the world. It's a really good point to raise. And Doug I'm very conscious of time. I want to, direct people to you here. Like, where is the best place people it's probably going to be your website, whether that's this specific link we can, include in the show notes description, we can sort that out, but where can people find you find out more about what you're up to us?
29:23
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
Yeah. I mean, yes, our website is a good stop www.Circulor.com. And, there's contact forms and stuff there. We currently work predominantly industrial supply chains, whether it's car manufacturers or others, so heavily polluting industries, whether a complex industrial supply chains where, there's a growing drive, both in terms of consumer demand for more sustainable and responsible business practices, but also institutional investors, whether they are lenders or, shareholders starting to require meaningful evidence of environmental, social, and governance performance from brands, which makes what we've been talking about with this in this podcast, a real boardroom issue. It's taking a while sometimes for that boardroom discussion to trickle down into new ways of working inside certainly very large organisations, but, five years ago, sustainability was not top of mind. I think we recognise now that it is, greater visibility of supply chains is right up there for folks. I mean, look at the auto industry at the moment and the global semiconductor shortage, the only way to solve that is to get a better understanding of the risks within the supply chain and to better forecast demand further out.
30:48
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
In order to secure supply, there are some common factors that are actually stopping the production of certain models simply because they don't have that level of visibility into the supply chain. And, I said this theme a number of times, I think the role of the procurement officer is moving into one of managing a supply chain. If you're at the downstream end of a supply chain, you need to be able to see past your tier one supplier in order to understand the key risks that will shape the future of your business.
31:19
Daniel Barnes
Yeah, I mean, I, honestly, Doug, this has been insane to talk to you. I can already tell right now it's been one of the best protocols to be fired. It's just been, you've just dropped so much knowledge, which is, and it is it's intuitive. It's, it's, I, I want to avoid using the word trending because trending feels like it's going to go away and I don't think this will…
31:40
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
I’ve never trended at anything, but now I can.
31:42
Daniel Barnes
It's been great to have you on here, dog. I think people are going to learn a lot from this. I certainly have. And, yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your time today.
31:52
Douglas Johnson-Poensgen
It's a pleasure to talk to you and thank you for having me.