[00:00:05] It’s time for Supply Chain Now Radio. Broadcasting live Supply chain capital of the country. Atlanta, Georgia. Supply Chain Now Radio spotlights the best in all things supply chain the people, the technology, the best practices and the critical issues of the day. And now here are your hosts.

[00:00:29] Hey, good afternoon, Scott Luton. Back with you here. Liveline Supply Chain Now Radio. Welcome back to the show. On today’s show, we aren’t broadcasting from Atlanta, Georgia. Probably hear a lot of buzz in the background we are at. We’re in Austin, Texas, where it is home of EAF TS Logistics C.F.O. Forum, a Reuters event where we’ve been interviewing some of the most innovative thought leaders. They’re doing big things across in an supply chain industry and one welcome in my fearless, esteemed co-host here today. Greg White Serial Supply chain tech entrepreneur, kronic disruptor and interrupter and trusted advisor. Greg Hey, interrupter.

[00:01:07] That’s good. That’s very appropriate. Well, we’ll try to finish your sentence. I did it again.

[00:01:14] We have really enjoyed thoroughly enjoyed the conversations we’ve had here. Yes, he has put on yet another homerun of it.

[00:01:21] And as we’ve talked about, this is really there’s been a lot of consistency in the quality of these interviews that we’re having with these leaders and content that they’re I mean, that they are sharing amongst our colleagues and that they’re receiving, you know, from other panelists and and speakers.

[00:01:36] Yeah. As well. Yeah, we have really enjoyed it. And now I think we’re gonna continue that trend. The hits keep on coming as we’re going. Welcome. In our feature guest for this segment, Rob Turner of Partner Alliance executive with Fujitsu Rob. Hey, Don. Doing great. How about you, Scott? Doing fantastic. That ad that I say that, right? Yes. Yes. Did fantastic. You feel free to use the acronym FDCPA? That I will. That works, too. I’ve been known to get my kids names wrong from time to time. I spent the week rahavan. Right.

[00:02:01] We’ll try typing Fujitsu fast. I guarantee you get fumble fingers and spellchecker comes on and I’m gonna correct it.

[00:02:08] All right.

[00:02:09] Well, thanks for carving out some time. And now you’ve been busy yet. You gave a great presentation earlier today that we’ve heard a lot of things about. It was packed and we’ll touch on that later on. But thanks for carving out time to share some of your insights with our Supply Chain Now Radio audience. So we want to start, Greg, like with all of our guests, our audience really enjoys getting to know kind of who’s here sitting with us, kind of the background, the backstory that the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to used to say.

[00:02:37] So introduce everyone to who Paul Harvey is.

[00:02:41] What made you guys relate yourself here? There are some overlap.

[00:02:45] Paul Harvey, WonderCon Hall of Famer. OK. So let’s talk about Rob. Tell us about yourself. Where do you grow up? Well, you know, what were some of the things you did? Well, what before you joined Fujitsu? What are your professional journal looked like?

[00:02:57] Yes. So a lot of people asked me, where are you from? And I always say, pick a place. So step-dad working for IBM. Yeah. I know the joke. What did I do? Stanfill I’ve been moved. I’ve been moved. And so I went to 14 public schools. I’ve lived in Europe twice. I’ve almost moved to Brazil once. And, you know, it’s going along with a family. And so I literally lived all over the U.S. and the world moved to Austin in 74. So it’s funny. I used to ride down modpack, which is the main north south corridor on my bike before was, you know, finished heading down to the drag, which if anybody knows Austin well, they’ll say, oh, wow, ice date himself.

[00:03:39] But yeah, so lived all over and stayed here once the universe of Texas and then moved up to Dallas, entered into the into the electronics business. Finally, after, you know, some kind of low level jobs ended up at pioneer in the storage industry. So they used to sell optical drives and storage libraries. And through that got into the content management industry. And I’ve been in the content and management industry for 25 years and 16 of them with Fujitsu. So it’s been a it’s been a good road. This has been a good industry to be a part of. It’s been, as I mentioned in my in my talk. Yes. Yesterday, the one thing that that’s been interesting about this is been, you know, change. We’ve seen so much change. You know, content management, document imaging used to be a nice to have. And now really for most industries today, content management and the tools that go along with it. It’s a must-have table stakes. Yeah, it really is. And so it’s been interesting to see that change. It’s also been interesting to see how the entire process has gotten more efficient over time.

[00:04:40] Yeah, we’ll do more on that in a second. I want to talk about two passions of yours. Racecar driving. Yes, retired retired racecar driver. So what did you race?

[00:04:51] A race to Portia’s with PGA. And then I raced. Myard is with an organization called NASA. What’s PCI? A Porsha club. murka Yeah, yeah. And currently on portion number 14. So really, that’s what model did you raise? I raced 9:44 turbos. OK. Yeah. So great car. Great car. Indestructible. If you change out the belts and change the oil right. In just just a great platform and very comfortable relative to a 9/11. I have you know, I’ve owned a 9/11 and I’ve owned for nine 44s in various guises. I fought for us to 9:44 Turbo’s 9 6 8. And so, yeah, sorry, this is Auggie man car stuff, but, you know, raced for a number of years and then finally after a minor accident, a coda just down the scale from here and which I was able to fix. And then an engine meltdown at Halit, which is up in Oklahoma. My wife finally turned to me. She said, it’s been 17 years. It’s time to hang it up. So sold my. Fixed it. Fixed the race car. Sold the entire package to be trailer. Race car. All the gear, everything. The guy came and picked it up on my birthday. Ouch. And as he hooked it up to his pickup truck and drove it back to Florida, my wife turned to me and she said, you know, this is the best birthday ever.

[00:06:07] I love you to your birthday.

[00:06:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And music. Yeah. Starbound music cause Austin you know. Yeah. You were keeping it weird before keeping it weird.

[00:06:18] You think really was when I first moved here in. You know what. OK. As a kid in high school, not much activity amusing, but I went and moved to Italy for a couple of years and played it up. A good band in Italy for a long time and actually toured a bit and then came back to go to u._t. And one of my bandmates came with me and we went to school together and just kept on playing. So we were really in the very early days of not punk rock already kind of morphed into some new wave and alternative. Yeah. And so we were really kind of right in that. So we we played a lot of clubs here. We played a lot of venues. It was I was a lot of fun. Arsenal So I play bass and sang and I still playing. Still playing. Even after all these years, I still have. Your wife didn’t make you sell your pace? No, no. It’s your birthday. That one might that might cause some problems with my ex. I still have the bass. I had custom made for me here in Austin. I still have it. I had it built for me at South Austin. Music down the Lamar back in 1983 while I was still open. Wow. Yeah. So that’s pretty cool. That is so. Switching gears, let’s talk about the company again. It’s really dove into what it does at Fujitsu. Tell tell us about what a company does. Sure. So Fujitsu, you know, it’s a pretty big company. Annual turnover, about 35 billion a year. About 150000 employees.

[00:07:37] It’s all right. It’s like a European turnover. Revenue, yes, here can be. Some folks may not make that connection. Turnover UPS oversee revenue. Yeah.

[00:07:46] So in this case, it’s revenue. And a lot of the terms we use sometimes the Japanese use terms that are a little bit closer to what some of the European size. Yeah. And so it’s a it’s a fairly big company and we make a little bit everything. I was like start off with airconditioners because we make air conditioners, we make lots of chips and circuits, supercomputers. US and Hitachi are always butting heads and who has the most massive supercomputer. And they were always one upping each other. And he seems the size of a small building and consume lots of power and require a lot of air conditioning, which Fujitsu makes. And then we also make document scanners, which is the division. I’m I mean, that’s Fujitsu Computer Products of America FCPA. And in that particular vertical, we’re the dominant player. We’ve got about 50 percent market share globally, probably getting closer to 50, 70, 50 percent here in North America. In certain verticals where the dominant players, health care, probably 80, 83 percent market share in health care, pharmacy, probably 90 percent.

[00:08:47] You know, if you look at what we do, we give customers the tools on board paper efficiently and it processes. And that really runs the gamut of of any vertical, whether it’s health care, government. Logistics, supply chain. I mean, fill in the blank construction. I just had a realization here that I I just I just exited a company. We sold it to a large player who shall remain nameless, nameless. Right. But we were in the middle of actually actually integrating with you all. Yeah, I just realized that. So what we did was the workforce workforce management.

[00:09:28] So go there, do that. Here’s how you do it, that sort of thing. And some of those documents were on paper. And the documents that that we used because we used geolocation, the documents that we use were often blueprints, Ryder or whatnot.

[00:09:43] So we were actually starting to integrate with that at the time that the company got sold. Construction’s a perfect vertical. It’s actually one of the one of my projects also is if we’re not talk about getting off subject, but think of this as the remote sites of, you know, construction. All right. They have to get content into a system just like a Logistics provider, just like signing buddy in Supply chain has to get content into a system. And so in the case of this construction, they actually are focusing on just fidgets a device because they can initiate a process by pushing one button. Right. And that’s what they need. And those kind of environments very ditto going into in the Logistics industry, where in the warehouse there’s a lot of paper that touch certain aspects of of of of, you know, processing shipments. Right. And so it’s the same thing. We recently went to a shipping Logistics warehouse and we walk through the process. And the process was they logged into a big copier. They found their email. They put the paper in. They pressed a button to eat it, sent it to that that those documents to their e-mail. They then turned, logged into a computer, opened up their e-mail, opened up that e-mail, then detached it, put it into a folder. And then the folder was imported into whatever system was next. Now we replace that with walkup push, paper push. One button goes right into this system. So it saved him massive amount of time.

[00:11:10] And time is money and then some. And we prove the IRA based on then. So let’s let’s talk about your role. So where do you spend your time and what is your favorite activity involved with your role?

[00:11:21] Yes. So I launch new platforms into the market. So this this particular device we’re talking about, it’s a Wi-Fi scanner with a smart server that controls an entire fleet of these scanners. That’s my team is brought that to to market. And we’ve worked with a number of companies to develop direct integrations. We’ve got the API level integrations so that now our Scanner Kentucky talk directly to the target application, whether it’s in our normal space, which is content management capture, you know, and then with RPE and a–i and workflow is kind of side tools to or in this case we would talk directly to some of the folks that are that are, you know, exhibiting here. Yeah. And then from there they can ingest that content and then surface it into a process so it can be, you know, much more efficiently processed versus a manual or it’s a lot of data entry, merging files, merging data, attaching, reattaching and detaching, you know, documents from emails. It just makes this whole process easy then.

[00:12:22] All right. So let’s talk about what brings you here. Because I think beyond the you presented earlier and we talk about standing room only. Yeah, I think you’ve had some autograph. Yes, I guess there were. Yeah.

[00:12:34] So I Keith beforehand. I always like to start off any talk a little bit of levity at the Daryl humor kind of sets things up. And so I talked about just how great Austin is. And some restaurants people should try some bars that people should try and and got some pretty positive things about that. So that’s not really, you know. Okay. I’m a great tour guide when it comes to Austin. But really, here’s here’s the opportunity we saw. We Fujitsu as a company is a big utilization.

[00:13:03] We utilize a lot of shipping Logistics supply and supply supply chain capabilities because we sell a lot of stuff. Right. So we’ve got relationships with some of the big players in this space. And so a series of conversations, conversations started internally. How do we spin that, those relationships into a business? And so based upon our knowledge of some key companies, rebels steps in meetings, really? Well, we do call what we do is called a site assessment. So we can go in and actually look at their their paper flow, their paper processes, not only physically how they handle the paperboard happens after it’s been ingested into a system. And that’s where we can offer a lot of both consultative or prescriptive kind of thought on on how they can improve their processes.

[00:13:53] No shortage of capability. It seems like you’re you’re helping the power that digital digitization as A-S-S, say, fast three times need three more cups of coffee. Let’s switch gears. I want to go broader. Right? We think of the end end supply chain industry has no shortage of trends and issues and developments. Yeah. I mean, in this global business, environment is changing by the minute. Right. Yes. What are some of the trends that are taking place now globally in that’s on your radar more than others right now?

[00:14:23] Yeah. So it’s interesting because it’s been a kind of an overarching theme of this entire conference. And it’s funny in that it puts digital transformation. All right. So it’s taking tools that can stitch systems and processes together. And I’ll get into kind of more the details, but just a little added levity. So I asked I turned to the crowd yesterday and I said, so do you all feel like you’ve you know, you’ve been beat over the head with with digital transformation? They said, well, guess what? The beatings will continue. Until morale improves. I got a got a pretty good laugh on that. But so here’s here’s the trends that we see it.

[00:15:07] There are so many systems that are out there that don’t talk to each other. There’s still it. And we love to say this as much as your your vendors of whatever particular platform they tell you. Otherwise, you’re never going to get rid of paper from your organization. You’re never gonna get Ryder paper from your processes. And so how do we help companies make that process more efficient? We built scanners. We love paper. We’d love to see as much paper come in as possible. We also love to see paper come into a process efficiently. And that’s where it’s things like what we kind of become ubiquitously.

[00:15:43] I still sense that that’s as hard as you know. It’s so ubiquitous that three times fast.

[00:15:50] So capture. So capture is a platform that we use that that ingests information. So capture, for instance, can take a look. I’ve got a page sitting in front of me here. And I may have certain key things like maybe the date on it or slide one or slide two and capture would say, you teach it, you say go and find these things for me and then tell me what’s to the right of it. So, for instance, I could be looking for a customer I.D. I could be looking for an invoice number. I could be looking for terms, I could be looking for. All of these different elements on a document document doesn’t have to be paper based. It can also be born digital. Ryder capture can perform the same thing. So you may, for instance, get something that’s detached from an e-mail that already been scanned or it’s been just added as a p_d_f_. The point is capture can take these unstructured elements. And that’s a big that’s a big thing is this unstructured element of information that’s on pages and be able to extract it and make intelligent use of smarter capture.

[00:16:48] Yes, smart capture. Smart ass smart. You have to buy that. And so that says one thing you are tracking. Yes. It’s one thing we’re tracking. And then it’s. What do you do then? All right. So now I’ve captured that information. Now what do I do? All right. So I’ve got this. And I loved some of the comments in in in in these breakout sessions. And they were saying, OK, now that we’ve got the data, is it good data? Is it not good data? Is it too much data? Is it too little? So now what do we do with it? So now it’s using tools like artificial intelligence, A.I. or RPA, robotic process automation, which allow you to take information that you that is found on an on a on a document or on a page or on whatever the content is and kind of fill in the blanks. So RPA, for instance, just in in the shipping logistics industry, there’s a lot of manual data entry over and over again on the scene, for instance, House bill, because you have to keep on filling it in.

[00:17:42] One system may require the information, in another system may require the same information. And there’s not necessarily a tool that allows you to do that then seamlessly. So a process like RPA would allow you to using robots, say, fill in the blanks here, fill in the blanks here. You found a slight one, right? The other. OK, I extracted this date on the page sitting in from me November 7. But I need you to fill it in here, here and here and that we might person doesn’t have to go in and type in a loving site or maybe in potentially maybe in three to four format. Yeah, right. So rpe does that that all for you on the fly. So what it does is it eliminates those manual steps. I love what one of the rpa com companies told me. They said that when I’m going and talking to a customer I’ll give them the first RFP process for free. I’ll come in. I’ll do the heavy lifting. I’ll give it to him and I’ll let him play with it for about six weeks or eight weeks. I’ll come back in and say, so what do you think?

[00:18:35] This is almost always the conference, as I have as an idea. Yeah, the conversation is OK. That was awesome. Let’s go to the next one. And he said, I you know, it’s like fishing. Verusen. You know, reels them in. And so another one, you know, is is is A.I., which is are tools that allow you or allow the software to learn, you know, different different aspects of the content and documents that actually learn. Yeah. And actually, I mean, it it continues to improve its body of knowledge. And every time it sees something. That’s exactly right. So A.I. then would allow you to take that unstructured content and in construction document and and over time learn what it is so that maybe after the third. Okay, I’m making this up, but maybe EFT the third time it sees his documents as I know this. OK, yeah. Go grab these 10 things off this one and I’m gonna move them move these three things over to an RPA process because we need to fill in the blank and I need to move these these these three things over into a workflow. So all of these things, they all tie together. They’re all, you know, related. They’re related. They’re maybe not cousins and they’re cousins. They’re maybe not for the faint of heart, because these are also you know, it’s not like you install the scene, you flip a switch and they they go, all right. I mean, there’s some it’s getting there yet.

[00:19:47] I mean, it it it is A.I. and blockchain solutions like that. I mean, they are already becoming commoditized, right? Because some are in some cases very strong business cases where. Have identified. This is where you need to use it. And you can pre-build a learning device. That’s correct. And then employ it for your specific need. But but it it addresses a very Jenny or a more general type of business problem. Right. Right.

[00:20:13] And it’s interesting in that I mentioned this earlier. That’s where some of these software guys that are building these smart tools are. Some of them have a consultative business practice where they’ll go in, they’ll look at it really big ecosystem and say, we can do this here, here, here. And other guys are coming and saying, no, I believe in a prescriptive business practice where I know this is what you’re seeing. And I notice what you’re doing. And to have this built. So then there’s some guys that are kind of blending the two and just based upon, you know, opportunity. But then there’s also price. So prescriptive, which tend to be MBP a little bit less because very prebuilt versus consultative where I’ve got to build out more stuff. Right. You’ve got to build the learning mechanism. Right. So we’re looking trending and all the you know, all those different things. Really, the reason we’re here is about explaining how Fujitsu can be a part of a digital transformation strategy. But also, there’s partners that are here that we work with in being able to tell that story to a broader audience about how all these capabilities come together now standing in a highly more connected world.

[00:21:12] Business world. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And these tools are not they just don’t have to be internal. Right. And that’s one of the ideas, is that we can surface this content and make it external to your, you know, your your supply chain partners and ultimately to your customers. Customers want access to data 24 by Sarah Jonathan Townsley. Yeah, they were transparency.

[00:21:31] You know, it’s always on the up and up and anytime to your point, you know, when executives get up at 2:00 a.m. because they’ve got that burning, they want a response and service visibility right then. Right. Right. Kind of as we start to bring the interview to a close. Any any other trend. When you look at what’s going on across the Supply chain universe, anything else really stick out more numbers right now. Sure.

[00:21:56] You know, obviously, mobility is a big one. And even with our products there, still there are some mobility elements. Everybody wants to be able to run things off their smartphone, off their tablet. And even Fujitsu, which has or tried and true, take a USB cable plug in from the scanner plugged into a P.C. even. We realize that’s not the direction that the world is going. So we’re starting to build tools where we can drive an entire scan capture process from your smartphone.

[00:22:24] Still utilize the device because a phone is good to take, maybe one, maybe two pictures of a of a document. But if you’ve got a stack like this, I’ve got twelve pages in front of my hand. Try to scan that with your phone. Yeah. Good luck with that as a sample light. I did it right to try. It took me 30 minutes to get the lighting and shadowing. Correct. And they still didn’t look good. Right. And then there’s tools that we have that we can actually deploy out in the cloud now where we can clean up those shadows and bad images. So, you know, we’re looking at building up tools where you can initiate a scan from a device, scan the entire batch, and then have it end up in the you know, it in the cloud or on prematurely cleaned up all all Froome initiated from from your phone. So we think that from a supply chain perspective, at any time, content needs to get into a system we can take. We can pretty much take it any, you know, any place, anywhere, anytime, day fast that we could.

[00:23:19] This could be a six hour episode. And I’ve got your fingers. A lot different things. But how can folks learn more where to folks go to learn more about the company and how can they connect with you?

[00:23:28] Sure. Yes. So our company website is w w w dot F for Fujitsu, C for computer, P for product, A for America dot com. So FDCPA dot com. There’s a lot of information, a lot of white papers, a lot of case studies. You know, there’s gonna be a. Right. And then as far as a meat can connect with the unlinked in just a search. Rob, Robert Turner on, you know, Fujitsu and I should pop right up. And I think I’m the only Robert Turner EFT jitsu. So this should work out. What’s the chance of that? One hundred and thirty thousand employees. Yeah, no kidding. There’s another Turner, but not to Robert or Robert as he related. No, not related. 20 to Robert L. Turner’s My High School Class. And so if people used to laugh as a, you know, like brothers and like, get brothers from different mothers. Yeah, that’s all we’ve been talking with.

[00:24:20] Rob Turner, partner alliance executive with Fujitsu. Really? Hurley. Good things about your breakout session. Thanks for taking some time with us. To the Sheer as much as you can. In a nutshell, it’s tough to cover and it’s 25 minutes time. But thanks for sharing all of that. Thank you. Greg really enjoyed this interview. Our coverage continues here at this event, this events. And in a class all to itself.

[00:24:47] It is. You know, I think I said this in one of our other discussions as you come to these events. They can be really, really very strong, content wise and. Learning opportunity wise and or they can be not nearly as strong, this is definitely one of the strongest ones I’ve seen and I’ve been to a lot of these type of events really have a joy to our listener.

[00:25:08] Stay tuned as we continue our coverage. Own DFT Logistics CIO Forum, which is now Gregg. It is now a Reuters event. Kudos to the EAFE team to grow and grow and grow. And to your listeners, you can also check out our other upcoming events, replays over interviews, other resources at Supply Chain Now Radio dot com. Greg, where can they find us? They can go to YouTube or wherever you get your podcast from. That’s right. Apple podcast. Sorry. That’s OK.

[00:25:37] And the cronut. Yeah. I think that’s where we vote. That’s where we overlap. Yeah. Apple podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud cast.

[00:25:47] There are hundreds of them out there now. But wherever you get them from. That’s right. Listen up.

[00:25:52] On behalf of the entire team here. This is Scott Luton wishing you a wonderful week ahead. And we will see you next time. Owen Supply Chain Now Radio. Thanks. About.