Transforming Supply Chains with Real-Time Insights

Transcript

• Steve Statler 0:00

  Welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. This week, we're interviewing Sanjay Sharma, who is the CEO of Roambee. Roambee are one of the pioneers of real time visibility. They have end to end solution which allows you to get visibility of inventory assets. They've been doing this for a while. Very smart people have some cool GPS tags that are kind of paper thin integration capabilities, analytical capabilities, and I was really fascinated talking to Sanjay. He has a great way of looking thing at things. And I think for anyone that is trying to assess this market, understand it better, see where the opportunities are, figure out the best way to talk about this thing, that we're unlocking this new capability, then this interview will be helpful to you. I think I always say I enjoy the interviews, but this was like, I may not have shown it, but I was grinning a lot, because I just love the way he talks about this visibility space that we're all working to make happen and really scale and open these opportunities. So have fun. Enjoy it. The Mr. Beacon, ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Willi art, bringing intelligence to every single thing. Dan Jane, thanks so much for coming on the Mr. Beacon podcast. I've admired the work that you've done your and everything that your company has done for a while now, and it's been a while since we've spoke, so it's a great to get a chance to check in with you and pick your brains on how Rome is doing and your approach to the market. So welcome to the

  Sanjay Sharma 2:08

  show. Thank you for having me. Steve

  Steve Statler 2:12

  So Sanjay, for those that don't know Romi, can you give us kind of the quick summary of what your company does?

  Sanjay Sharma 2:20

  Yeah, at a vision level, very ambitious vision. We want to make a global trade transparent, agile and contextual. But under the hoods, what we are doing is we are using real time visibility as one of the secret sauces to make the supply chain autonomous and help our customers transform their supply chain at a point where it's dynamic, it's contextual, it's self healing, and it's not an Easy mandate, but romby and many other companies in our ecosystem has a similar mission. We are approaching it through different ways, and I feel this particular sector is ripe for not only innovation, but also transformation and rethinking of how automated the supply chain could be. So

  Steve Statler 3:23

  how, how's it going? You? You outlined inspiring vision, a big vision and a transition. We'll talk. We'll drill into what that transition means. But how, how are you progressing on this, on this journey? Where have you got to

  Sanjay Sharma 3:40

  Yes. So I think the takeaway, after talking to many global 2000 customers, they have they already have a lot of systems in place. So they have SFE for order management, they have a warehouse management system, they have a yard management system. They have made investments in TMS. I call all these applications. I put them in the bucket of planning tools. There is very little or no technology that can really feed what's happening in real time on the ground, in the field. And I feel if we can bring a lot of real time knowledge of what's happening with their supply chain from an execution perspective, then execution becomes the feedback loop to planning that will improve planning, improve demand forecasting and many other things. So our with that thesis in mind, rumbi is basically delivering high quality, high visibility and high fidelity business signals to our customers. So for example, you know, we have a customer who. Is retail, Fortune five and and their problem statement is, when they deliver their products to their customers, they often get into a receivable dispute. Their customers say, you know, I received only 3000 pallets, while you know the the retailer says, I shipped 3500 and these receivable disputes kill the profitability impact the top line and the bottom line so customers like these retailers come to romebi and say, romby, can you basically solve this problem? All we need is a business signal that I can share it with my customer that tells us and our customers that indeed, 3500 pallets were delivered. They were delivered on time. They were delivered in good quality condition, and if we were to automate that 10,000 20,000 shipments over this would not only eliminate some of these receivable disputes I often have with my customers, but I can also automate my invoicing process, and if I do that in a much automated fashion, then my order to Cash cycles will be compressed. So with this value proposition, our customers care less about how we achieve that, whether it's sensors, you know, trackers, whether it's labels, as long as that mandate achieved. Now, obviously we as a company feel that we are sensing in real time will only improves the fidelity and the quality of this business signals. So a large part of our solution hinges on bringing sensing technology for data collection. And if you can collect data much, much faster in more real time, we become the single source of truth. And if that single source of truth is combined with other data, like order data, demand data, weather data, traffic data, and many other data streams, we can give that one signal that the customer is most interested in. So we have taken that signals approach and gone into various verticals and made it repeatable, made it out of the box so deployments are easy return or investments can be measurable. It's shorter for customers to realize those investments. So it's not just about putting a tracker on the shipments. It's taking it all the way along to transform or to to impact those, those businesses.

  Steve Statler 7:52

  You use the word sensing, and it seemed like that was deliberate. In what sense is sensing, the state of the supply chain different to what was done in the past.

  Sanjay Sharma 8:03

  So actually, it's very interesting. So sensing was very discrete, you know, about 1015, 20 years ago, RFID played a role in that, and that sensing was at choke points. So if you look at bar code, you look at RFID, you know, I would basically collect information at various choke points in my supply chain. And that was good enough, because supply chain was not as complicated as it is today. You know, things moved from A to A, one to b and and it was good, but now with nth tier of suppliers bringing raw materials, then there are other set of assemblers or manufacturers who are manufacturing those products, and then multiple forms of distribution, okay, it could be a Costco, like distribution. It could be a store like distribution. It could be you and I going on a website and buying the product. It could be buy online, pick up at the store. So this whole forms of distribution has also become complicated, and that's the reason the visibility aspect that technology that was earlier used, like the barcode and the RFID, is no longer useful. If you want to basically be responsible for customer satisfaction, you want to be responsible for driving automation, for you know, protecting or increasing your margins and and visibility from a compliance perspective, right? Can I make sure the suppliers and the supplier suppliers are are using the SOPs that we have developed and delivering against the quality that I expect? To be delivered. So when you put this together, sensim becomes the very base of everything we do in the supply chain. And we feel that the analogy I like to give is like the driverless car, right? The most ability to sense the environmental conditions and how the car is driving, the more opportunity for us to deliver a safe and better driving experience. So we feel if we can get sensing on each item, each case, each pallet, each container unit, and we can bring it all together in a meaningful fashion, we can solve this, you know, optimization problem, which, which I feel is the holy grail for for supply chain, and Steve you and your company is doing a lot of good work in that category. We are coming from the real timeliness, GPS sensing type of a category. But it's all going towards that common vision. No,

  Steve Statler 11:03

  I agree. I'm nodding away. And people have pointed out that I sometimes when I get into vigorous agreement, I'm like some headbanger at a concert because, but I'm nodding frantically because I completely align and agree with what you're saying. So, but just going back to this sensing word, so sensing seems to imply a few things. It's sort of an automated way of data capture that's not relying on tapping and scanning. It's continuous. That's right. So it's kind of more efficient, and it's avoiding just the partial visibility of code points. And when someone's doing it, and you're using modern sensors to do that, and you mentioned GPS as one example. So how big is the opportunity? So you're kind of going in, you're starting a dialog, and I want to talk next about who you're talking to and how these decisions get made. But what is the opportunity? There's no it takes work to what, however streamlined the solution is. So is, how big is the ROI? How big is the opportunity? In your opinion? Yeah, I think,

  Sanjay Sharma 12:18

  I think pre COVID, a lot of Fortune Global, 2000 companies used real time sensing technology on critical shipments, and it was nice to have I have a problem on a lane, or I have a problem skew, or I have a problem customer, and if I can slap some trackers on this and get data on where my shipments are, I can share it with my customers, or I can solve some of these problems. But post COVID, the supply chain became even more complicated, and in that journey, there were two use cases that got derived. The first use case was shifting from critical shipments to shipments that are going within the facilities that I own or control, and that kind of a market opportunity. You know, last time you know, I was developing a presentation for my board was somewhere between 40 to $50 billion and these are all products going to my own distribution center, or the distribution centers or the warehouses that I don't own, but in sort of some way I control, and think about it like closed loop supply chain, and a lot of companies were born, and the lot of companies are servicing and and most likely, there is a tracker, something like this, that gets placed on on a pallet, and it goes from the facility a to my facility B, and then I collect this tracker, bring it back and then reuse it. And it made a lot of sense, because the ROI on tracking products that move between our two facilities is not as important as the product flows I need till the end destination. But then there was a second category that got created by the customer. I say, customer said, you know, I'm I'm now having visibility on my raw material or my semi finished products, but now I want to delight my customers. Do you have a technology that will allow us to not put this trackers, but put something else, because most often, these trackers won't come back, shipping to third party locations anywhere in the world, and, and, and because it needs to be a disposable we decided we. Would basically go ahead and rethink the product. And what we have today is a GPS label. So everything that you see in here is in this label, and

  Steve Statler 15:12

  very cool. And for those people that are listening, you're basically holding up something that's about the size of a postcard, very thin. That's what very, very lightweight and

  Sanjay Sharma 15:22

  and the thinking was to have the very similar order processing experience than that of warehouse as so this device will get activated as soon as you peel it off. So there is a lot of time motion. There is a lot of user behavior studies that were done, and then you slap it very similar to how you would slap a label. It has temperature, humidity, it has tilt, shock and and many other sensors in here, but now I have tapped into a time that never existed. So the time now for what I call it as end product flows, product going to your customers, product going to your stores, basically now opens up, and that's a much bigger time. It's about $75 billion give and take together the visibility, the sensing part of the visibility market is even bigger, not including any analytics, not including any CO piloting opportunities, not including any models that will basically get created. So it's a huge opportunity. And the customers that we sell into, obviously our customer profiles are our fortune, 1000. Fortune, 2000 but within each of these customers, we basically do value proposition work with Chief supply chain officers, or, you know, executives in the transportation logistics portfolio. It's all about what you have and how we can extend that with some of this technology, but a lot of our customers basically are wanting us to track all of their shipments, whether it's raw material, it's finished products, whether it's going to a store, whether it's products that are delivered through E commerce. Now, obviously our obsession is, can we bring the cost of sensing down to substance? And if we do that, then obviously there is an exponential value at the other end in terms of agility and transparency. And I know you are approaching the same problem, and it's hard, it's hard to get to a price point where it will be on every box. But we don't have to wait there. We have use cases where it can be adopted today and and that's what we are going after. Yeah.

  Steve Statler 18:19

  So how are people approaching this journey? Because, I mean, I'd be interested in your sense of which I asked you about how far you're getting in your journey. But how far do you think the industry is in moving to real time visibility and the sorts of things that we're talking about, are we kind of the beginning? Is the beginning? The end of the beginning where,

  Sanjay Sharma 18:47

  yeah, we did a survey. We did a survey. And this lot of companies are unserved or underserved. Only 6% of the Fortune 1000s, or somewhere from brought visibility inside their technology stack. Some are doing critical shipments. Some are using carrier data to get some sort of visibility. It could be I know where the truck is, so I will deem that where the truck is, that's where my shipment is. Some are extracting data from ports and airports, and if I know it's on a plane, maybe. So there are a lot of these customers who are on this journey. And there are some customers who say, Who cares about the truck, the plane, the ship, I care about my shipment, and I want to be in total control, and that total control can only be achieved by me monitoring my shipments through its life cycle. So that's sort of. One inspiration, the second inspiration is sensing as a service has opened up a lot more areas for improvisation for customers. So an example, if you are doing there are a lot of route planning tools. So now the route planning tools say, hey, my delivery person can do 12 deliveries, and he embarks on that 12 delivery journey. Turns out he's only doing eight or he's only doing nine, and the reason he's doing eight or nine is because the estimated time of arrival at each location is way off. It's way off because those time of arrivals are only until the parking lot. But now from the parking lot to the door of the delivery could take anywhere from five minutes to 1520 minutes. And today, there is no Google Map for last mile steps from the parking lot to to this delivery points. But now that you have a sensor on, on a box, on a pallet, or anything that you're delivering to that last last step door. You can have now these bread crumbs from the parking lot to that delivery door. And if you can collect all of this data, you can course correct and recalibrate your delivery touch points so tomorrow it will no longer be 12 deliveries. It will be eight and now you have improved your supply chain, you have improved your customer satisfaction, and many more, this would not have been possible, because without sensing, and I feel, there are a lot of such golden opportunities for these enterprises to discover, because now they have a lot of sensing information.

  Steve Statler 22:08

  I suspect you're impatient. I know I'm impatient to get to achieve this vision, and it feels like there's momentum. People are actually doing it now, yes, but there's still a lot of people that are not what is it that you think is slowing this down and holding it back? Why wasn't it done? I had this question. I was giving a speech earlier in the week, and, you know, people were, I think, pretty impressed, and but the question was, why isn't everyone doing this now? So Sanjay, why isn't everyone doing this now?

  Sanjay Sharma 22:46

  I think we are approaching the problem upside down, going back to it's a cool technology. It's a cool solution. It can tell you where things are at any point of time. And you know, the question to to all of us and to the customer is, can we help the customers to find that ROI and every customer's ROI is different, and I feel if we can change our way of communicating with the customer that this is all the technology in the toolbox that can make you transparent, but instead talk about ROI from day one in the first conversation. So some things that we have done very well when we engage with our prospective customers, we talk about ROI that could be derived by automating proof of delivery and what that dollar value will be. We talk about otif, the fact that I can tell you where things are and how all your shipments are going to come together in the form of one po that's huge. So there is opportunity to basically optimize the supply chain. So otif

  Steve Statler 24:05

  On time in full, on time in foot, yeah, who cares about otif? Then, what's

  Sanjay Sharma 24:12

  the a lot of companies? So every company, retail, pharmaceutical supply chain, chemical industry, automotive, for sure. You know, you got a just in timeline for manufacturing. You need parts that are coming from maybe 10 locations. They need to come more or less at the same time. How do you manage monitor that? Right? You're looking at pharmaceuticals, you're looking at retail, and order is, I'm just giving an examine, an order is 50 pallets, but not all 50 pallets will be on a single truck. So now you got five, six trucks that have picked up your load at various points of time, and they. Are going towards your destination, and some will reach fast, sooner. Some will reach later. Some you have no visibility on. How do you ensure so that could be the simplest form of otif, two companies who are in the food and beverages space, right? So now they got the mother warehouse, or distribution center. They have forward locations, and they have 7000 70,000 retailers, and the product, every time it's moving, is going through some sort of a decay. Okay, so you have to protect the condition of the product. It has to be delivered in the perfect condition at the retailer store. That's another form of what if, right? So when you look at technologies like data loggers and some of that, yeah, you can get the condition data. But is it actionable? The moment you make it actionable, there is ROI. So I feel the players in this industry should come together and change the narrative. The other problem is because it's not getting enabled very fast. Even the customer doesn't know where the ROI opportunities are. There is no playbook. There is there is no rinse and repeat capability. So this is a journey that has to be taken together. I might say there is a ROI on automating proof of delivery. We might say it's in otif, but the customer has to then put together $1 amount. So they need to go back look at their historical data, and they say, of these five ROI of opportunities, I find this one to be the low hanging fruit, and this one that could be a slam dunk when we implement and these conversations we are not happening. Instead, the customer and service providers, like most of us in this industry, are engaged in a proof of pilot, or let's prove that this works. Of course, it works. We have had BLE and we had GPS and tracking for ages. So we need to change the narrative with the customers saying, what are you what pilot are you doing? You know, this technology works. So if you want to do a pilot, don't do a pilot with one shipment. Do a pilot with all shipments going from Rhode Island to Guadalajara, or do all shipments that are going to a Best Buy that's the biggest bang for for these kind of pilots. And and pilot is a wrong word because sort of a limited rollout. So what you what you conceived in your Excel spreadsheet as ROI parameters, am I able to see that on that one lane, on one skew, or one destination? And if I'm able to prove that within a certain tolerance, then let's go all out, right? And that's the different approach room B is taking. So we, we don't close, you know 500 customers a quarter, we'll close the eight to 10, but we are deeply engaged.

  Steve Statler 28:28

  Sounds like you're going beyond being a technology provider. You're almost being like a business consultant, a management consultant. Where do you see those organizations being because you've been in this in the technology industry for for a long time, and I think we both seen waves of orthodoxy that just go from, you know, the early adopters that are starting to lead the way, whether it's, I mean, I'm ridiculously old. I remember when the transition to accounting systems, you know, before, you know, originally, there weren't any and automated ones, computerized ones. Then it was on mainframes, then it was on mini computers. And then, like, the idea of someone starting a company and not having an ERP system, it's just not even a conversation. No one in a board meeting saying, Why you invest? Why are you investing in NetSuite? That's a waste of money. It's the same with CRM systems. Same with having a website. It started off with, wow. So I don't think we're quite there yet, and I think one of the things that we don't I'm monitoring my own question now, so that's not good. But you know, where do you feel like the management consultants are the McKinsey's and the and the Deloitte on this space? Because to me, that's where this really starts to take off, when it becomes when, when they fire up the bus with the. Graduate consultants, and they drop them off, and it's kind of, there's a template, you know, they figure out well, there's like, four systems that do visibility really well, and you can choose them, but basically, we have 10,000 consultants that are ready to make it happen for you, just tell us when you're ready to go and we'll do it. Are we there yet? Or what's it going to take for them to get on board? It

  Sanjay Sharma 30:25

  is sort of there, but I think that then it should be a line drawn. Okay, so companies in the visibility category can only do so much, and they are afraid to go on the other side, which is business process, consulting, Process automation, which is the very delight Accenture type of opportunity, and they have been very hesitant to come on the visibility side. So that's sort of one observation I have, it is important, the sooner the the two camps come together, the faster the adoption. And I say this because, going back to the examples I have, I have outlined in our conversation, let's take proof of delivery as an example our job as a visibility provider ends when I have delivered that high quality of signal that indeed it has been delivered. Now, what do I do with that signal? Is the job for exchange the Deloitte, they will take it and they'll say, oh, I can now build better promotion plans for Halloween, or I can now drop three points, because now I can manage much tighter inventory cycles. So all of that exponential outcome, what what I many times called at second order value. So we are delivering the First Order value. The second order value will come from companies who take this to the next level, of impacting and transforming processes, or creating new processes, creating new supply chain networks that were never thought about before, and that's the real bang for the buck. So when I talk about ROI, ROI is only limited to what I deliver to you, but the exponential second value, second order value, odd ROI is when all of it comes together, and that's probably three to five years of implementation, rethinking, redesigning and making that as an effective competitive advantage too, right? So there's some also a change that needs to occur in the customer side. Supply chain is always looked as a cost center. They need to look at this as a profit center. So there needs to be investment made, continuous investment, before they can reap the benefits in the next five, seven years. And it could be not just visibility, it could be I need to invest so that I can clean up my supply chain metadata. You know, I have all these suppliers and their addresses, but who, who can tell me those addresses are real? That's actually where my products are made. So somebody has to do that exercise. So I feel there is a huge opportunity for these two camps to come together and deliver that unified message to the customer.

  Steve Statler 33:52

  Amen, where do you think we are in terms of the exchange of this data? So it feels to me like the maximum benefit is when you have the data going all the way downstream, upstream, back again. But it also feels like we're dealing with solutions for data exchange that were designed in the previous century. How do we get to better sharing of data? And I'm interested in your view on standards, and I'm also interested in your view of business orthodoxy, because there's a lot of players that feel like data is power and they don't really want to share it, and I feel like everyone's suffering as a result of that. What's your view on all of that?

  Sanjay Sharma 34:43

  Yeah, I think lot of companies are racing towards the control of the dashboard. Every company, if I can deliver a pie chart and a bar chart in my skin, I control. Customer, but I feel that there is a dashboard fatigue in the industry in general. And when you look at supply chain, because it's so fast, it's so fast changing this pie charts and bar charts don't work. I mean, it's great for trends, but it's not actionable. And there is a huge gap. The gap is the immediacy of delivering snippets of data that is actionable. So for example, there are lot of supply chain heroes who get up in the morning to solve 10 problems or 10 issues. They need data at the fingertips. They can't go to a chart and try to derive what needs to be done. Okay? A simple example, one of our customers uses bins and trays and totes to ship their products. They have open POS from their customers. In other words, ship as much as you can make. Now their top line is directly dependent to the availability of this bin. I don't have a bin to ship. I can have a big po for all I care, but I cannot realize revenue. So now there are a lot of these pie charts, graphs that say, you know, we had these many bins. These bins were used by this customer. All of that is great, but when somebody gets up in the morning, can you deliver three pieces of information, how many bins I have and where they are. Are they empty or full? If they are full, I can't use them. If they are empty, I need to use them. And how many bins do I need this week, three questions, and unfortunately, none of those 50 dashboards can deliver these three questions. So at room B, we are answering this three questions, not in a dashboard format, but think about like messages that you could be anywhere in the world, and you can be empowered, and it can be actionable. And interestingly, all of this information has a life. So I tell you, there are 50,525 bins in your Tennessee operations, you need 60,000 bins next week, you are 6000 short. You you have another 6000 in Portland. Start your movement today, okay, but this information that I gave to to the decision maker, the life of that decision is only maybe four hours, because the numbers might change now no longer you have that 6000 in Portland, because they were all used by somebody else. So I feel there is a huge opportunity to bring the immediacy and the quality of data to the forefront of the workers that make make decisions in real time. How do you

  Steve Statler 38:19

  see, I mean, you gave some examples of some. I mean, that message, it seems like could be delivered in a text message, and I am how are those messages actionable alerts manifested in a big company? Is it through an app or a text message? Yeah, it

  Sanjay Sharma 38:40

  could be. So it's again, interesting, if you deliver 5000 of these messages, they are going to be ignored. So now there is a pressure on technology providers like us. How can you identify the five out of the 5000 that are really problem alerts? And this is where, you know, with the tailwinds that we have with AI, ml and everything else, we can very nicely identify those five messages. And those five messages can go into the customer's control tower. They could be pushed in a form of an email or a text message, or they can be on on these rolling TV dashboards that are there in their manufacturing set. So multiple ways of consuming the data. But what's important is, at what point the data becomes overwhelming, right? And this is where I feel the second phase of evolution will happen. So llms and large language models have come into play, and we are all excited about that, but I feel there is a unique opportunity. What I call it as not large language model, but tailored knowledge model specifically for supply chain. So now. Now imagine I have delivered these. You know, I've got these 5000 different alerts. Of the five alerts I have got, of the 5000 I have derived five good alerts. But now, what do I do with this five alerts? That's where the models will come into play. Yeah, and and so would the models impact the hardware? So lot of hardware today is is not very well equipped for edge processing, okay? And simply put right, the devices of today are talking to the cloud with a lat long, and the cloud says, Yeah, you you are, keep going as you should. Or sometimes it would say, I see this lat long is an ocean, so go to deep sleep. But I question this thinking, because with this whole micro model creations, you now have the ability to not have the device interrogate with the cloud what they need to do, but all of that edge processing and decision making can happen on the device itself, which was not possible. So where I'm going with this whole examples is there is a huge opportunity to unify the data and and it's completely transparent to the customer. The customer really gets what they need. It's more actionable, and it's non dashboardy, right?

  Steve Statler 41:23

  Totally agree. Where are you in your thinking in terms of the need to integrate with some of those systems that you alluded to is that deep part of what you do on a daily basis when you do your deployments. Are you spending a lot of time integrating with telematics systems and transport management systems and control towers and supply chain management and warehouse management? I think

  Sanjay Sharma 41:57

  integration is a critical part of this ecosystem. How can we make integration simple is important. So there are companies like Zapier who have done a good job of automating integration without having it, engineers involved and and our thinking is if we can do no code integration, make it available to the customers at various levels of data quality. Customers can integrate this within days, without any engineering help, and that's sort of where we are striving towards. Our feeling is, the whole advent of LLM and other models come in play will make integration much easier. So, for example, I know of you know, large language model companies who basically, let's say I can query that that LLM saying I want to integrate with SAP. I want to push order data and get location data out in return, what API should, should it should I use? And it will spit out not only the APIs, but the sequence in which those APIs have to be called with pseudo code. So now where I'm going with this example is, again, this has become much, much easier. You can wrap a user interface on top of it, and you can say, these are my data sources. These are my target, target locations. And you can now you know, VCV, this data set going into multiple systems, and there are a lot of companies who are already doing it, it just need to be embraced in a much more supply chain centric manner. I want

  Steve Statler 43:50

  to go back to a question I meant to ask you before, how do these decisions to deploy get made? Is it something where you get to the chief supply chain officer, you're done, or do you see a broader committee, team, decision making process that you have to facilitate? Actually,

  Sanjay Sharma 44:15

  it's both ways, right? So Steve The my experience meeting with a lot of customers has been it needs to be a top down and a bottoms up approach. The bottoms the team that is the taking a bottoms up view is fighting fires. So they say, Yeah, you know, the mandate is supply chain optimization from the top leadership. But I have a problem. I have I have a skew, which is happens to be a 60 inch TV that I am shipping, and those 60 inch TVs are getting damaged more often than other s, room B. Do you have a solution that can. Take care of my problem, or I am delivering my products to this one customer who is very upset because I don't meet the SLS. So the bottoms up approach is all about instant gratification, solving the problem. And if you distill it, there are not more than five buckets this problem fall under. So what rumbi has done is build the solutions that are rinse and repeat for these five problem sets, so that takes care of the bottoms up approach. Then there is a top down approach, saying, you know, in a three year plan, I want to basically have full visibility across end tiers of supply chain and some solutions. For some solutions, I don't need sensing. Some solutions. I need some sensing. I have these existing stack. I have blue yonder. I have SAP. So that's sort of the but at the end of the day, there is a lot more confidence in in the future roadmap, because you've solved the bottoms up problem. That earns romby The seat on the committee that you talked about. That earns us the credibility by which we can go in and really create some impactful direction in their supply chain, optimization ambitions.

  Steve Statler 46:29

  What do you see in terms of the pace at which people make these decisions? I think those of us that have been in the industry. For a while, have seen these decisions take a very long time, but occasionally you see them happen pretty quickly. What's your feel for where we are in that tempo, and where do you feel like the meme, the media and the mode is moving towards

  Sanjay Sharma 47:00

  good question. So early on supply chain never used to be the topic of a board conversation, but it became one when the container rentals exponentially increased from whatever $500 to sometimes $10,000 for renting a container. And that came to the eyes of of the CEO of the companies, and they started investing in enabling their workforce, the supply chain workforce, to start learning about various technologies, including visibility and being able to come up with a program and a plan on how we can basically optimize some of these, these increasing and sporadic costing Now, the interesting part is today, the customer is more educated than the service providers like ourselves. Everybody in this visibility ecosystem is less savvy, I would say, than the customer to the customer really understand. I'll give you an example. You know, customer says, I want to understand my unloading times. And a provider would say, Okay, I'll put a geofence on your facility, and when the truck goes in, I'll start clocking it, and when it comes out, it's clocked out, and that's your unloading time. And it worked very well. Three years ago, this answer used to be simple, but today, the customer says that's not accurate. I'm sitting in a yard for two hours and then actual, I want the actual unloading time that does not include my idle time in the yard. Now that's extremely hard, and there are very few service providers who can find who can deliver this kind of a data Okay, so, so this, this makes me make a statement that you know the customer is very savvy. The customer really knows, you know, their requirements. We as service providers are a little bit vague because we have not caught up. So that the good news is, there is there is interest and there is high level of engagement with the customer if you have the right solution. So Product Market Fit becomes very interesting in servicing these customers. And the second aspect of it is, in this journey, sometimes you can close the opportunity, or the customer will close it in three months. Sometimes it takes a year, and most times it's not the sponsor, it just the many handshakes, unfortunately within supply chain, that happens that requires buy in and. That buying is a process that you can't overcome. So I feel the customer, the way to navigate, you know, is changes from customer to customer. And we have seen there are some times we will sign multi million dollar engagement within months, and then some that will take you know, even though the opportunity is blessed and the solution is blessed and they wanted it yesterday, just the process of buying takes a few more months than what we have been expecting. But that's the classic enterprise sales DNA, right? Sanjay, you

  Steve Statler 50:41

  started your career doing pretty technical things. You had a stint at NASA and were publishing papers on network algorithms and that sort of thing. How did you get from that to being a serial entrepreneur and running a bunch of companies and romby, which is really doing very well, and is kind of way beyond the technical stuff that you started doing at the beginning of your career.

  Sanjay Sharma 51:07

  One of the things I realized through my technical journey that a lot of technology doesn't get commercialized, and there is a lot of stuff, not only what we build, but many other companies are building that stay in the tech toolbox and never see the light of the day. And I felt there was a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs like ourselves to take some cutting edge technology, commercialize it, and solve some real world problems. And that led to me shifting gears from being in corporate America to being an entrepreneur. Very

  Steve Statler 51:47

  good. And is there anything that you learn in your technical days that kind of informs the work you do as a CEO?

  Sanjay Sharma 51:58

  Yes, I think the big takeaway from my early days is formulating a technology problem. I think what I've found through this journey, and, you know, there are times when I mentor startup entrepreneurs that many of us has this, you know, excitement of jumping quickly towards a solution, and I feel that if you can take a few step backs and really scope out the problem, problem statement that we are going to approach for the number of years, that we are going To be there building companies that would actually bring a product market fit much faster. So my early days of research, publishing technical papers was all about, how big is the problem? Can I bound this problem? Can I rate this problem between easy and complex? And then obviously the finding the solution is teamwork. So those are my experience that have brought into you know, my entrepreneurship journey. Very

  Steve Statler 53:08

  good, very good. Well, we have this tradition on the show, and I often think it's the most challenging question I ask. But three songs that have meaning for you? Did you get a chance to think about that?

  Sanjay Sharma 53:21

  Yeah, there is, there is one song I like from Will i am. It's Hall of Fame. It resonates with a lot of character that, you know I have, and we have in terms of fulfilling our ambitions.

  Steve Statler 53:42

  Well, will I am an interesting guy. He's sort of, he's definitely an entrepreneur himself, and that's right, you know, way beyond just kind of a performance artist,

  Sanjay Sharma 53:52

  yes. So it's interesting. I met. Will i am in in one of the events Deutsche Telekom, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, is an investor in us, and they were also an investor in reliance company. And through various summits that are set up by venture capitalists, I had the honor of meeting him. A lot of energy, a lot of big ambitions just beyond music, right? So, so you're right, yes, it's very interesting. It

  Steve Statler 54:27

  is interesting how there's this crossover. And obviously there are many artists that are just terrible business people, but there are some that are really pretty good you look at, like Ryan Reynolds and what he's done as an example, and then I look at it the opposite way. There's it's amazing how a big part of being a leader in a firm is about communicating and almost like performance art. So I don't know whether, whether you see the parallels as well, but it it strikes me. It's a two way street.

  Sanjay Sharma 55:00

  Yeah, including understanding the limitations of each of us, right? We think we can conquer the world. We think we can solve big problems, we can transform but often we forget about at what point we will be limited, limited, personally, as well as limited because of other conditions around us. So being grounded and being realistic in those calibrations are very important for the success of the company.

  Steve Statler 55:33

  I agree, very good. So that's first

  Sanjay Sharma 55:35

  one. The second one is that comes to mind is the Eye of the Tiger by survivor,

  Speaker 1 55:42

  yes, classic. It's,

  Sanjay Sharma 55:45

  it's interesting, right? It speaks about separating the problems of today with the ambitions of tomorrow. It resonates with with everything that I am from a character perspective. Yeah,

  Steve Statler 56:02

  I was listening to that on the way into into work on the road the other day, and it definitely stands up. It's one of these kind of energy songs that can really psych you very good. And

  Sanjay Sharma 56:18

  the third one was a tie, but I feel unstoppable by Sia. So that's another one that comes to my mind, but across the board, right? I mean, music is something that you know, is medicine, not only for relaxation, relaxation, but also it's it's a tool to clean your mind, rethink, recalibrate. So I'm glad this question comes up in your in your podcast. It makes, makes us think, and picking up the three from the many that you like is not easy.

  Steve Statler 57:04

  That's true. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I find you know a lot of your best work is done by your subconscious, and so as you grow older, learning how to harness that and trust it and feed it. And I think music is part of that. It's kind of part of almost a meditative process, where you can stop focusing on the problem and maybe relax a little bit, and then then let your subconscious help you with solving the problem. So that's my excuse for listening to music anyway, or at least one of one of many. That's good. That's good. Well, Sanjay, it's been wonderful having you on the show. Thanks very much for sharing your insights and for the work that you and your team are doing to educate the marketplace and move us to this vision, which I think a lot of us share.

  Sanjay Sharma 57:58

  Thank you, Steve. It's been a pleasure, and hopefully these nuggets of knowledge can can amplify our unified message that you and I and many others are having a mission for and thank you for having me on this podcast. It's a pleasure.

  Steve Statler 58:21

  So that was Sanjay. I hope from that you got what I got, which was a great sense of what Rome be doing, and a little bit about the man behind the company. I find both of those sides of the coin fascinating the people behind the industry. Sometimes you think of these companies as being kind of faceless entities, and what we try to do in this show is give you a sense of the personality of some of the key people in the companies that are shaping visibility and IoT unlocking some of The societal benefits that we see. So thanks for sticking with it to the end. Hope you enjoyed it. Aaron Hammack, thank you for all the work you do in the production. And Sierra Walden, thank you for helping get this show out there until next time, be safe and enjoy the journey.