00:00:00
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:00:07
Speaker 2: Hi everyone, this is Lee Klaskow and we're Talking Transports. Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host, Lee Klaskow, Senior Freight Transportation and Logistics Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Bloomberg's in-house research arm. Before we dive in, a quick favor. If you enjoy the podcast, please take a moment to follow, rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. Your support helps us continue bringing you conversations with leaders shaping transportation and logistics. And if you'd like to connect, You can find me on the Bloomberg Terminal, LinkedIn, or an ex at Logistics Lee. Today's conversations ask a deceptively simple question. What actually makes a great supply chain? Joining us today is Laura Ciceri, founder and CEO of Supply Chain Insights and one of the industry's leading independent voices on supply chain strategy. Laura recently released the 2026 edition of Supply Chains to Admire, her research examining which companies have actually improved supply chain performance over the past decade, and perhaps more importantly, why so many have not. Today, we'll dig into those findings, the trends Laura is watching, what companies are getting right and wrong about AI and supply chain investments, and where she believes global supply chains are heading next. Laura, welcome to Talking Transports.
00:01:30
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm excited. Let's get into it.
00:01:33
Speaker 2: All right. So just let's get off on the right foot so people know who you are. Maybe not everyone's familiar with Supply Chain Insights. Can you tell us about the firm? and what you set out to do when you founded it?
00:01:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, Supply Chain Insights was founded in 2012 when the supply chain industry consolidated. I had been an analyst in the industry for about 12 years. And just so people know, industry analysts try to figure out the questions that should be asked, whereas consultants know the answers. So an analyst is quite different. We do research. We look at macro trends and analyze data. And I write in front of the firewall. I share a blog and share reports openly through LinkedIn. And I'm followed by about 350,000 people globally. I feel very honored to have that kind of readership.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's about 350,000 more than me. So that's pretty awesome. You know, so you spent you know, a number of decades studying supply chains. What kind of attracted you into the freight and transportation markets?
00:02:49
Speaker 1: Just sort of happened. I was a chemical engineer. I managed distribution centers and manufacturing and was always curious about how do we make it better. And that led me to look at technology, which had me then work for technology companies and then kind of evolved. So I spent 15 years with hands-on operations, about 16 years building software, and now about 25 years in the research analyst world, which means that I'm an old gal kicking around in the space for a long time.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Well, in the intro, I kind of referenced a report that you guys recently released, the 2026 Supply Chains to Admire. Can you just tell us what makes a supply chain one that people admire?
00:03:34
Speaker 1: So a supply chain... that I admire, which, you know, different people have different standards, is able to balance growth. And to me, the supply chain team is an enabler of growth while managing operating margin, inventory turns, and return on capital employed. The old hierarchy of, you know, I'm going to make trade-offs between customer service, inventory, and cost is not adequate because we are not looking at asset investments. And I also believe that a supply chain to admire drives growth while improving customer reliability. So the ability for customers to know when something's going to arrive and that it has the expectations of the customer when they open the box or have the usage. So reliability and the ability to deliver balance sheet performance. And based upon my research with Georgia Tech over the last two years, I found that the metrics of growth, return on capital employed, inventory and operating margin have a strong correlation to market cap per employee. It's about 50%. And that, you know, while we don't have a good metric for customer service across the industry, I think it's balance sheet reliability, customer service reliability, and the ability to help companies grow.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: And your study is looking over a longer period of time, I believe 10 years, and only 32 of the companies outperform their peers. Can you talk about these companies? I don't know if you want to name names. We're happy to hear who they are and kind of what separates them from their peers.
00:05:29
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I think that many supply chain leaders don't recognize the negative headwinds that each of the industries are facing. And so the first thing I would encourage people to do when they look at the reports is to look at the patterns at the intersection of operating margin and inventory turns and the fact that we're going in the wrong direction, right? We're going backward, not forward. And there is a belief that we've invested in teams and technology and leadership and that we've improved inventory turns and we've improved operating margin, but that just isn't true. The second thing is that large companies do not perform as well as small regional companies. So in the building of the global multinational, We did never redefine the architectures to move from regional functional silos to be able to manage the global multinational and to be able to clearly delineate what should be a global decision, a regional decision, a divisional decision. And so there's a lot of politics and a lot of issues around process latency of how we make decisions. So those are some of the insights from the report. Now let's talk about who does it well and why. The companies that outperform typically have a close relationship between product innovation and services innovation and growth. Supply chains do better peddling uphill than downhill. So in growth environments, they typically will do better. So if we look at companies like AbbVie and Pharmaceutical or Intuitive Surgical or PACCAR or NVIDIA or TSMC, there's a close tie between engineering innovation and supply chain innovation around the development of processes and technologies. Companies that don't do well are companies that are struggling to be able to deliver that brand promise on product and service innovation, and they focus on functional cost. And when we focus on functional cost, we throw the supply chain out of balance, and we actually are not able to drive that improvement at the intersection of operating margin and inventory turns. Does that help?
00:07:56
Speaker 2: It does. You know, the ones, so the ones that I guess are underperforming, could you just give us a little more insights into, you know, what else they lack or what they're doing maybe wrong and maybe how they should turn the ship, if you will?
00:08:12
Speaker 1: So a lot of people believe that Procter & Gamble is the standard of supply chain performance. And Procter & Gamble is marketing driven, not market driven. And it's spent a lot of money to not grow. And so One of the issues we have, if you look back at the mergers and acquisitions, they've not done it well. They've spent a lot of money to basically buy assets and we've churned a lot of talent and assets, but they haven't grown. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that marketing driven or a marketing plan doesn't necessarily translate to market driven. which is really, you know, back to A.G. Lafley's guarantee at the four moments of truth of was the customer delighted when they bought that? Was it available? And how did we do on that customer reliability? The other thing is, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, we have a lot of old companies with traditional products. beliefs in supply chain and traditional supply chain processes aren't best practices. And these companies are sitting with 22 percent margin and really not innovating. A lot of people that are sitting on supply chain legacy at companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers and really need to innovate at that intersection of product delivery, and the market. Also, if we look at the automotive industry, the automotive companies really struggle to be able to deliver performance. They're struggling with a lot of geopolitical issues. The cost of inputs have risen, and they're not demand-driven. They're not looking at the cars we want to buy. They're looking at the cars we bought, which may not be what we wanted, right? And so there's a big difference between market-driven, marketing-driven, and functional alignment to be able to drive global balance sheets.
00:10:13
Speaker 2: You know, out of the 32 companies that outperformed, you know, you also mentioned sometimes smaller regional companies do better than larger. Are there like any small companies that maybe are not a household name that, you know, you're really impressed with their supply chain?
00:10:26
Speaker 1: Monster Beverages outperforms Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Diageo. And they're very focused, again, on innovation. They're delivering caffeine-spiked beverages to a new population. populace, and they've been very smart about their asset moves. And so, you know, they're an example of a small company that's outperforming. Church & Dwight outperforms in the household product sector because, again, you know, they're very focused on market signals versus marketing. And so, you know, it really gets down to really three basics. Market-driven, innovation, an alignment on that balance sheet.
00:11:12
Speaker 2: Got you. You know, I was really surprised to read in the report, you know, that you found roughly 80% of the industry sectors are performing worse than they did before the pandemic. You know, after all the investments that people have made in supply chains because of, you know, the shocks and dislocations that were created by the pandemic, I would have thought that would have been the opposite. Can you just talk about that and kind of were you able to kind of understand the why behind it?
00:11:43
Speaker 1: No, that's part of my journey in this research, just understand the why. And I think that because of mergers and acquisitions and a lot of talent turnover, and because of a lot of investment in traditional technologies, we've not really evolved. And, um, you know, that movement from regional multinational to global, and now, you know, we've kind of done a reset with what's happening in the geopolitical environment. Supply chains at a domain level of an understanding of what is supply chain excellence have gone backward, and a lot of the investments have been very much about keeping traditional technologies running.
00:12:27
Speaker 2: Got you. And in the report, you know, you kind of note that we may not have best practices as much as historical practices that need to evolve. Can you talk about what traditional supply chain practices companies most urgently need to rethink today?
00:12:45
Speaker 1: I think that rethinking demand management, inventory management, we treat all items like they're the same. We push them through the same optimizers versus our technologies allow us to look at demand patterns by demand stream and to be able to align models and optimizers based upon product characteristics. With the unchecked complexity that has happened with e-commerce, We have a lot more items that are lumpy with intermittent demand and we've not really evolved our demand practices to be able to look at how are items changing in the market and how do we best align technologies to drive insights. The second thing is the transportation market, technology market has moved faster in terms of technology and technology adoption and real meaningful use cases. than the supply chain planning market. And I think there's a lot we can learn there around agents and agentics and the redefinition of the semantic layer and the ontological layer that we need to redefine our source make and deliver systems. You know, we lack a common data model between distribution planning and transportation. We just really can't use the transportation insights that are coming from these new technologies. Those are opportunities.
00:14:10
Speaker 2: Right. And I guess on the subject of technology, you know, obviously, AI is a big thing. People like to talk about it. Some people are getting real world results like, you know, your C.H. Robinson, the transportation world. They've kind of leaned into it. You know, when you're looking at supply chains, can you talk about, you know, the benefits that companies have gotten from AI and kind of where do you think do you see that going in the near to distant future?
00:14:38
Speaker 1: I think the benefits that we're seeing on AI are in machine learning and data cleansing. It used to be all of our data had to be clean and pristine, and then it was loaded into rows and columns in relational databases. Now that world has changed as we've moved from Schema on Write to Schema on Read and our ability to use different data types. Our processes haven't really embraced how we use all those data types, but the technology allows us to use many more data types. And I find an opportunity is for companies to use a lot more of the data that they have. The second thing is that as the technology market has evolved in transportation, we are able to get a lot more signals around the transportation market. And transportation is actually a very early signal for demand. You know, today I was looking at the Cast Freight Index of 28 downward, you know, quarters of, you know, statements of, you know, I think we're headed into a recession as shipments are declining in North America. You know, and the average time for the average company to reset in a recession is three to six months because of the lack of the use of market data. But the transportation sector gives us really great data around global demand that we're, you know, an opportunity to use.
00:16:06
Speaker 2: And, you know, do you see a time where the supply chain function is outsourced to LLMs and AI and all that stuff?
00:16:15
Speaker 1: Oh, it depends upon what we talk about supply chain function. You know, supply chain has become much more narrow in my tenure with supply chain. And it was defined in 1982 as from the customer's customer to the supplier's supplier. As we've evolved technology, it's become more functional. And so the typical supply chain organization today might have planning or it might have distribution, but it doesn't really have source make and deliver together. In fact, I did a strategy day the other day where the supply chain team invited customer service and they're like, why are we coming to a supply chain meeting? Or manufacturing has been kind of let alone in a function. But if we think about source, make, deliver, working together and building supply chain strategy, I don't think we'll ever outsource that. I think it's the strategy that is really key. I think we will automate the transactions.
00:17:16
Speaker 2: And do you think companies are investing enough in technology as relates to supply chains?
00:17:22
Speaker 1: I think that the amount of money we're spending is okay. I think how we're spending the money we need to rethink. There's an awful lot of money going into maintenance legacy systems, and I think we're not questioning those investments and upgrades enough. I think we're not investing enough in talent for supply chain professionals to be able to have better discussions with data scientists. You know, the data scientists understand all of the new and evolving technologies associated with SQL and you know, different forms of learning. But the supply chain leaders don't know how to talk to the data scientists and the data scientists don't know really how to sort out the problems they should solve. And I think those are big opportunities.
00:18:14
Speaker 2: Got you. And just changing gears a little bit, you know, are there metrics that companies are looking at as relates to supply chain that you think they should stop obsessing over?
00:18:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that a lot of companies are looking at OEE or operational efficiency and manufacturing, and that throws the supply chain out of balance. I also think that companies are focused on functional cost, which also throws the supply chain out of balance. The supply chain is a complex, nonlinear system. And so if we focus on these functional costs and we align the bonus incentives to these functional costs, we will actually not perform as well on margin and inventory. And That intersection of operating margin and inventory is so key for driving market cap.
00:19:03
Speaker 2: You know, outside of the technology that we were earlier discussing, you know, what kind of trends are you watching most closely right now as it relates to supply chains?
00:19:13
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the waste in ocean shipments. You know, right now we've got 8 to 10 percent of our containers sitting on the water idle, you know, either through issues of, you know, schedule reliability or what's happening in the Middle East. And I'm also looking at the shipment data, and I'm looking at, you know, the market data that, you know, is in the channel. I'm really looking at market-to-market opportunities. And I think that is really key for supply chain leaders everywhere because most of our technologies are based upon known inputs to known outputs. And if we think about volatility, we've got a lot of unknown knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns, which really requires us to have different forms of architecture to be able to simulate and to do what-if optimization and to be able to develop scenarios that can help us through these unknowns.
00:20:20
Speaker 2: You know, earlier you mentioned geopolitical risks. Obviously, you know, we're dealing with that in the Middle East and elsewhere. Also in the United States, there's tariffs, you know, whether it's between the U.S. and Canada at the time of us recording that. There's a little tiff going on right now between the two countries. Kind of how has this all changed supply chains and how do you think it will shape how people deal with supply chains going forward?
00:20:47
Speaker 1: I think it's put kind of a grayness over supply chains and uncertainty. You know, every day it's like every something is changing. You know, we've got a new tariff. We've got a new TIF. We've got, you know, a blockade. So we have a lot more uncertainty. unknowns. It's sort of like the frog in hot water, right? You know, we got a lot of these unknowns that are happening and, you know, we're dealing and absorbing with the unknowns day to day. But I worry that we are entering a period where These unknown unknowns are going to cause major disruptions, whether it's in raw materials or it's in a downturn of an overheated AI market or it's something that's going to happen with war and we're just not able to respond because our supply chains are so tied up and the architectures for known knowns versus being able to do scenario planning You know, I really would love people to invest in systems, which I call the plan of plans, sort of like weather. You know, if you think about hurricanes, you know, we know that hurricanes are out in the ocean and they're coming in and we deal with that with multiple plans. And then as they get closer, then we are able to fine tune. But most companies aren't working on scenarios and what do they do under certain scenarios. And I think there needs to be more scenario planning and more alignment around the unknowns. Right.
00:22:27
Speaker 2: And so that scenario planning, do you think they're also restructuring or changing their supply chains just because of the new environment versus having alternative plans in case things arise?
00:22:40
Speaker 1: I think that we've become more conservative and more regional. And there has been, you know, in the last 10 years, there was more focus on global and people were trying to get the economies of scale out of global. I don't think we achieved that. And I think all of these unknowns have made us more regional and multinational and a lot of consternation in the organization about how do they deal with this level of unknowns.
00:23:06
Speaker 2: You know, there's, you know, what we're talking about, a lot of it's coming out of the federal government with relates to tariffs. Some other things coming out of the federal government are impacting the trucking industry where, you know, supply is structurally changing, capacity is coming out. Does that come into play when you're talking to shippers about how they should organize their supply chains? You know, the change in the trucking market and the reality that, you know, maybe rates might be higher for longer?
00:23:33
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, it's in the transportation department. But unfortunately, a lot of the transportation departments never talk to manufacturing or planning. You know, in my research, when I look at organizational alignment, few companies are having cross-functional discussions, and few companies are actually using their data well. And we're absorbing those costs, and we're absorbing... the lack of reliability, but we're not really using the data that well and working cross-functionally. Our ability to drive signals cross-functionally bidirectional is just not in our current systems.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: Got you. And, you know, when you talk to supply chain leaders, you know, in your day-to-day, what are they telling you about demand and inventory levels?
00:24:23
Speaker 1: It's very unpredictable that demand is more intermittent and that demand We've added a lot of planners, and they'd like to have better planning productivity. You know, when I look at inventory, when I used to implement supply chain planning in the 1990s, about 45% of inventory was safety stock. Today, it's about 15%. The in-transit inventories have grown and are not very well controlled with the delays that we're seeing in ocean and, you know, inland freight.
00:24:55
Speaker 2: And, you know, you kind of... talked about it a little bit before. You used the R word when looking at the CAS index. So, you know, is your outlook for the economy that, you know, the U.S. is heading into a recession?
00:25:09
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not an economist, and it's very hard to predict markets. Right. But it's definitely an unknown, and we need to be prepared for it.
00:25:20
Speaker 2: Got you. So, could be in the cards, but you don't, not quite sure. You know, just going back to the trucking conversation that we had. So, you know, we hear a lot more shippers are kind of looking at intermodal and obviously it doesn't work for everybody. But, you know, given the fact where, you know, diesel prices are, where trucking rates are, is that becoming more of a conversation when people are trying to plan their supply chains? You know, like maybe they weren't close to a railroad and that's becoming more and more important to them.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Intermodal is definitely more important, whether it's drivers or fuel or the ability to use containers as a moving warehouse. So intermodal is very, very important.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: So we've lived through a pandemic, as I mentioned, whether it's wars or poor congestions or shortages. We've seen a lot of dramatic swings in transportation rates. You know, how has the volatility become a kind of a permanent characteristic within global supply chains?
00:26:29
Speaker 1: I think it's become, you know, kind of a constant. And what we're not doing is using market data to try to buffer, you know, our ability to respond. I I often will laugh with supply chain leaders that every supply chain team needs a Dalmatian because they're like firefighters running for fires. And we're not using the data and the organization to try to prevent fires, nor are we rewarding the ability to really be proactive. And because we've had so much turnover of teams and because we've had so much hype around technology, People struggle for what's real and how to go forward.
00:27:16
Speaker 2: And with the advent of AI and machine learning, all that stuff, it's surprising that more and more companies aren't leveraging the data and the cross-department data that they have available to them. When you're going talking to companies, what's the biggest resistance to that? Because that seems like a no-brainer. Well, I think the biggest resistance.
00:27:38
Speaker 1: Issue is, you know, what's between our ears, the gray matter. You know, we basically grew up on structured data and schema on right architectures. And the processes that we think are best practices use clean and pristine data and transactional data. But if you look at, you know, 80 percent of the data that surrounds the supply chain is not used, whether it's rating review data or weather data or image data. And all of that data is very valuable, but it's unstructured and streaming data. And so our traditional architectures just can't use that data. And we don't have the semantic layer or the ontological layer to really be able to use the knowledge graphs to be able to drive, you know, better insights off of these new forms of data. And our processes haven't evolved and our Traditional supply chain leaders don't know how to really rethink these problems. And they're confused because every vendor uses the same language of AI and orchestration, and they don't know what's real.
00:28:49
Speaker 2: So, you know, ever since the pandemic, we've had one dislocation after the next. And I don't know if because of the pandemic, you know, supply chains has become sexy. I just did air quotes, by the way, for those listening. It's okay. You know, so before that, were there as many dislocations and people just didn't pay attention because supply chain was like not a priority for many companies?
00:29:14
Speaker 1: I don't know what you mean by dislocations, but, you know, unrest or variability. Variability increased with e-commerce as we had unchecked complexity and we had the evolution of the long tail of the supply chain. And we had a lot of investment in technologies that made e-commerce possible, warehouse systems, routing and delivery systems, and that really drove a lot of investments in supply chain to support e-commerce. And that drove growth and better information around customer But traditional supply chains and the traditional warehouses and the traditional channels did not get the same level of attention. And most of our architectures that were driven by that were really more traditional. And so as we think about the evolution of what is possible, I think we have to start by redefining our relationship with data. redefining our relationship with code and asking ourselves, how do we deliver supply chain excellence? When I ask most customers what defines supply chain excellence, they look at me like their head hurts, like they wish that I hadn't answered that question.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: So you've been doing this for a while. Are you talking more to the C-suite than you did before since the pandemic, or it's kind of, you've been talking to the same people or like, I'm just trying to like, has supply chain had, you know, we've hear that it's, it's, it's much more elevated. It's talked about in the C-suite, it's talked about in the board much more since the pandemic. Is it, are you kind of like getting invited more to those sort of audiences compared to I guess, pre-pandemic?
00:31:13
Speaker 1: It's about the same. And what I find is that we have a lot more supply chain experts and air quotes. You know, every consultant is an expert in the supply chain, but not really experts. And so we may be having discussions with air quotes, but I don't think we have resolution.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: So like, you know, Over the next 10 years, where do you think supply chains are heading? Like, what do you think we're going to be talking about? Or is it just going to be the same problems that we have today are going to be the same problems we have tomorrow?
00:31:47
Speaker 1: I think we're going to be talking about the redefinition of work. You know, I liken it to when I got the first computer in my manufacturing plant. You know, we had an IBM mainframe roll through and we got the first personal computers, which, by the way, the personal computer took three guys to roll through a doorway. But back then we had interoffice mail and we had typing pools. And, you know, the typing pools actually were a barrier to a lot of organizational efficiency or effectiveness. And interoffice mail took a long time, but we didn't have email and, you know, people didn't type their own letters. And you know, I think we're going to get the redefinition of work. I think right now companies have hundreds and thousands of planners that are there because our systems don't work very well. And I was talking to somebody at a conference the other day that says, well, I have a job with AI. And I think, yes, but just like my typing pool had to reskill, one became a DBA and one went into HR and one became a data coder. We have to re-skill, but I think the work fundamentally will change. We could never dream that we'd have email, and I don't like email, but inter-office mail went away, and typing pools went away, and I think this is similar. I think the role of the planner becomes an orchestrator, and I think business leaders get data directly to make decisions, and we're able to really tackle what I call process latency of how people quickly can an organization make decisions on data? Today, that process latency can be weeks and months when we really need to drive it to the cadence of business.
00:33:35
Speaker 2: Now, the answer, your answer to this next question might be the same answer you just gave, but I'm going to ask it anyway, just in case it might diverge a little bit. But, you know, What's one change coming to supply chains that you think most executives and investors, for that matter, are kind of underestimating?
00:33:54
Speaker 1: I think the talent dilemma. I think that the industry acumen and understanding of supply chain has gone down as we have churned through a lot of talent. And I think there is a need to build talent, both in terms of technology opportunities with new tech and, you know, the definition of what defines supply chain excellence. And I think people are underestimating how big of a need that is and how big of a challenge that will be. And the fact that we really are not in a good place to deliver that at an educational level across the globe.
00:34:38
Speaker 2: On the educational side, do you think there are any undergraduate programs or graduate programs that are producing really good folks that are getting into supply chains?
00:34:47
Speaker 1: You know, I was talking to the University of Arkansas the other day. I think they're really trying. I think that University of Wisconsin is doing some good work, particularly with their leadership programs. I wish there was more focus on, you know, challenging the status quo and, you You know, many of our supply chain programs are in the marketing department in business, and there's not as much focus on redefining our relationships with data, redefining our relationships with code, and thinking about the supply chain as a complex system. So I wish there was more rigor in many of our programs.
00:35:26
Speaker 2: Where do you think it should reside if it's not in the, I believe you said the marketing department of a college?
00:35:33
Speaker 1: I think it's at the intersection of business and engineering. And, you know, I think it's a multidisciplinary, but it's not, shouldn't be in the marketing department. The biggest gaps in supply chain functionally are between marketing and operations. And I think we need to be able to get a cross-functional understanding of how source make and deliver work together and what can we learn.
00:36:00
Speaker 2: Well, before I let you go, Laura, I always ask our guests a final question about, you know, a book that they might have read on leadership, supply chains or business that kind of influenced your career.
00:36:12
Speaker 1: Well, there's an awful lot of books that I've read. Good to Great was very pivotal to me, but unfortunately, The Good were not really great. You know, if I think back to Eli Goldratt and, you know, his constraint-based theory, I was an early student of constraint theory, and that had a big influence on me. And I think those are some examples.
00:36:38
Speaker 2: All right, great. Well, Laura, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:36:45
Speaker 2: And thank you to everyone listening. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to follow, rate, review, and share the podcast with a friend or colleague. Your support helps us continue bringing you conversations with the leaders shaping transportation, logistics, and global supply chains. We've got a great lineup of guests coming up, so be sure to check back for more conversations with CEOs and founders, shippers, regulators, investors, and other decision makers across the freight markets. If you'd like to learn more about the freight transportation and logistics, you can find our research on the Bloomberg Terminal at BIGo, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on X at Logistics Lee. I'd also like to thank our outstanding producers, Miriam Traore and Aditya Samani, for helping bring Talking Transports to life each week. This is Lee Klaskow signing off. Thanks for talking transports with me, and we'll see you next time. Bye.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:00:07
Speaker 2: Hi everyone, this is Lee Klaskow and we're Talking Transports. Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host, Lee Klaskow, Senior Freight Transportation and Logistics Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, Bloomberg's in-house research arm. Before we dive in, a quick favor. If you enjoy the podcast, please take a moment to follow, rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. Your support helps us continue bringing you conversations with leaders shaping transportation and logistics. And if you'd like to connect, You can find me on the Bloomberg Terminal, LinkedIn, or an ex at Logistics Lee. Today's conversations ask a deceptively simple question. What actually makes a great supply chain? Joining us today is Laura Ciceri, founder and CEO of Supply Chain Insights and one of the industry's leading independent voices on supply chain strategy. Laura recently released the 2026 edition of Supply Chains to Admire, her research examining which companies have actually improved supply chain performance over the past decade, and perhaps more importantly, why so many have not. Today, we'll dig into those findings, the trends Laura is watching, what companies are getting right and wrong about AI and supply chain investments, and where she believes global supply chains are heading next. Laura, welcome to Talking Transports.
00:01:30
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm excited. Let's get into it.
00:01:33
Speaker 2: All right. So just let's get off on the right foot so people know who you are. Maybe not everyone's familiar with Supply Chain Insights. Can you tell us about the firm? and what you set out to do when you founded it?
00:01:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, Supply Chain Insights was founded in 2012 when the supply chain industry consolidated. I had been an analyst in the industry for about 12 years. And just so people know, industry analysts try to figure out the questions that should be asked, whereas consultants know the answers. So an analyst is quite different. We do research. We look at macro trends and analyze data. And I write in front of the firewall. I share a blog and share reports openly through LinkedIn. And I'm followed by about 350,000 people globally. I feel very honored to have that kind of readership.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's about 350,000 more than me. So that's pretty awesome. You know, so you spent you know, a number of decades studying supply chains. What kind of attracted you into the freight and transportation markets?
00:02:49
Speaker 1: Just sort of happened. I was a chemical engineer. I managed distribution centers and manufacturing and was always curious about how do we make it better. And that led me to look at technology, which had me then work for technology companies and then kind of evolved. So I spent 15 years with hands-on operations, about 16 years building software, and now about 25 years in the research analyst world, which means that I'm an old gal kicking around in the space for a long time.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: Well, in the intro, I kind of referenced a report that you guys recently released, the 2026 Supply Chains to Admire. Can you just tell us what makes a supply chain one that people admire?
00:03:34
Speaker 1: So a supply chain... that I admire, which, you know, different people have different standards, is able to balance growth. And to me, the supply chain team is an enabler of growth while managing operating margin, inventory turns, and return on capital employed. The old hierarchy of, you know, I'm going to make trade-offs between customer service, inventory, and cost is not adequate because we are not looking at asset investments. And I also believe that a supply chain to admire drives growth while improving customer reliability. So the ability for customers to know when something's going to arrive and that it has the expectations of the customer when they open the box or have the usage. So reliability and the ability to deliver balance sheet performance. And based upon my research with Georgia Tech over the last two years, I found that the metrics of growth, return on capital employed, inventory and operating margin have a strong correlation to market cap per employee. It's about 50%. And that, you know, while we don't have a good metric for customer service across the industry, I think it's balance sheet reliability, customer service reliability, and the ability to help companies grow.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: And your study is looking over a longer period of time, I believe 10 years, and only 32 of the companies outperform their peers. Can you talk about these companies? I don't know if you want to name names. We're happy to hear who they are and kind of what separates them from their peers.
00:05:29
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I think that many supply chain leaders don't recognize the negative headwinds that each of the industries are facing. And so the first thing I would encourage people to do when they look at the reports is to look at the patterns at the intersection of operating margin and inventory turns and the fact that we're going in the wrong direction, right? We're going backward, not forward. And there is a belief that we've invested in teams and technology and leadership and that we've improved inventory turns and we've improved operating margin, but that just isn't true. The second thing is that large companies do not perform as well as small regional companies. So in the building of the global multinational, We did never redefine the architectures to move from regional functional silos to be able to manage the global multinational and to be able to clearly delineate what should be a global decision, a regional decision, a divisional decision. And so there's a lot of politics and a lot of issues around process latency of how we make decisions. So those are some of the insights from the report. Now let's talk about who does it well and why. The companies that outperform typically have a close relationship between product innovation and services innovation and growth. Supply chains do better peddling uphill than downhill. So in growth environments, they typically will do better. So if we look at companies like AbbVie and Pharmaceutical or Intuitive Surgical or PACCAR or NVIDIA or TSMC, there's a close tie between engineering innovation and supply chain innovation around the development of processes and technologies. Companies that don't do well are companies that are struggling to be able to deliver that brand promise on product and service innovation, and they focus on functional cost. And when we focus on functional cost, we throw the supply chain out of balance, and we actually are not able to drive that improvement at the intersection of operating margin and inventory turns. Does that help?
00:07:56
Speaker 2: It does. You know, the ones, so the ones that I guess are underperforming, could you just give us a little more insights into, you know, what else they lack or what they're doing maybe wrong and maybe how they should turn the ship, if you will?
00:08:12
Speaker 1: So a lot of people believe that Procter & Gamble is the standard of supply chain performance. And Procter & Gamble is marketing driven, not market driven. And it's spent a lot of money to not grow. And so One of the issues we have, if you look back at the mergers and acquisitions, they've not done it well. They've spent a lot of money to basically buy assets and we've churned a lot of talent and assets, but they haven't grown. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that marketing driven or a marketing plan doesn't necessarily translate to market driven. which is really, you know, back to A.G. Lafley's guarantee at the four moments of truth of was the customer delighted when they bought that? Was it available? And how did we do on that customer reliability? The other thing is, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, we have a lot of old companies with traditional products. beliefs in supply chain and traditional supply chain processes aren't best practices. And these companies are sitting with 22 percent margin and really not innovating. A lot of people that are sitting on supply chain legacy at companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers and really need to innovate at that intersection of product delivery, and the market. Also, if we look at the automotive industry, the automotive companies really struggle to be able to deliver performance. They're struggling with a lot of geopolitical issues. The cost of inputs have risen, and they're not demand-driven. They're not looking at the cars we want to buy. They're looking at the cars we bought, which may not be what we wanted, right? And so there's a big difference between market-driven, marketing-driven, and functional alignment to be able to drive global balance sheets.
00:10:13
Speaker 2: You know, out of the 32 companies that outperformed, you know, you also mentioned sometimes smaller regional companies do better than larger. Are there like any small companies that maybe are not a household name that, you know, you're really impressed with their supply chain?
00:10:26
Speaker 1: Monster Beverages outperforms Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Diageo. And they're very focused, again, on innovation. They're delivering caffeine-spiked beverages to a new population. populace, and they've been very smart about their asset moves. And so, you know, they're an example of a small company that's outperforming. Church & Dwight outperforms in the household product sector because, again, you know, they're very focused on market signals versus marketing. And so, you know, it really gets down to really three basics. Market-driven, innovation, an alignment on that balance sheet.
00:11:12
Speaker 2: Got you. You know, I was really surprised to read in the report, you know, that you found roughly 80% of the industry sectors are performing worse than they did before the pandemic. You know, after all the investments that people have made in supply chains because of, you know, the shocks and dislocations that were created by the pandemic, I would have thought that would have been the opposite. Can you just talk about that and kind of were you able to kind of understand the why behind it?
00:11:43
Speaker 1: No, that's part of my journey in this research, just understand the why. And I think that because of mergers and acquisitions and a lot of talent turnover, and because of a lot of investment in traditional technologies, we've not really evolved. And, um, you know, that movement from regional multinational to global, and now, you know, we've kind of done a reset with what's happening in the geopolitical environment. Supply chains at a domain level of an understanding of what is supply chain excellence have gone backward, and a lot of the investments have been very much about keeping traditional technologies running.
00:12:27
Speaker 2: Got you. And in the report, you know, you kind of note that we may not have best practices as much as historical practices that need to evolve. Can you talk about what traditional supply chain practices companies most urgently need to rethink today?
00:12:45
Speaker 1: I think that rethinking demand management, inventory management, we treat all items like they're the same. We push them through the same optimizers versus our technologies allow us to look at demand patterns by demand stream and to be able to align models and optimizers based upon product characteristics. With the unchecked complexity that has happened with e-commerce, We have a lot more items that are lumpy with intermittent demand and we've not really evolved our demand practices to be able to look at how are items changing in the market and how do we best align technologies to drive insights. The second thing is the transportation market, technology market has moved faster in terms of technology and technology adoption and real meaningful use cases. than the supply chain planning market. And I think there's a lot we can learn there around agents and agentics and the redefinition of the semantic layer and the ontological layer that we need to redefine our source make and deliver systems. You know, we lack a common data model between distribution planning and transportation. We just really can't use the transportation insights that are coming from these new technologies. Those are opportunities.
00:14:10
Speaker 2: Right. And I guess on the subject of technology, you know, obviously, AI is a big thing. People like to talk about it. Some people are getting real world results like, you know, your C.H. Robinson, the transportation world. They've kind of leaned into it. You know, when you're looking at supply chains, can you talk about, you know, the benefits that companies have gotten from AI and kind of where do you think do you see that going in the near to distant future?
00:14:38
Speaker 1: I think the benefits that we're seeing on AI are in machine learning and data cleansing. It used to be all of our data had to be clean and pristine, and then it was loaded into rows and columns in relational databases. Now that world has changed as we've moved from Schema on Write to Schema on Read and our ability to use different data types. Our processes haven't really embraced how we use all those data types, but the technology allows us to use many more data types. And I find an opportunity is for companies to use a lot more of the data that they have. The second thing is that as the technology market has evolved in transportation, we are able to get a lot more signals around the transportation market. And transportation is actually a very early signal for demand. You know, today I was looking at the Cast Freight Index of 28 downward, you know, quarters of, you know, statements of, you know, I think we're headed into a recession as shipments are declining in North America. You know, and the average time for the average company to reset in a recession is three to six months because of the lack of the use of market data. But the transportation sector gives us really great data around global demand that we're, you know, an opportunity to use.
00:16:06
Speaker 2: And, you know, do you see a time where the supply chain function is outsourced to LLMs and AI and all that stuff?
00:16:15
Speaker 1: Oh, it depends upon what we talk about supply chain function. You know, supply chain has become much more narrow in my tenure with supply chain. And it was defined in 1982 as from the customer's customer to the supplier's supplier. As we've evolved technology, it's become more functional. And so the typical supply chain organization today might have planning or it might have distribution, but it doesn't really have source make and deliver together. In fact, I did a strategy day the other day where the supply chain team invited customer service and they're like, why are we coming to a supply chain meeting? Or manufacturing has been kind of let alone in a function. But if we think about source, make, deliver, working together and building supply chain strategy, I don't think we'll ever outsource that. I think it's the strategy that is really key. I think we will automate the transactions.
00:17:16
Speaker 2: And do you think companies are investing enough in technology as relates to supply chains?
00:17:22
Speaker 1: I think that the amount of money we're spending is okay. I think how we're spending the money we need to rethink. There's an awful lot of money going into maintenance legacy systems, and I think we're not questioning those investments and upgrades enough. I think we're not investing enough in talent for supply chain professionals to be able to have better discussions with data scientists. You know, the data scientists understand all of the new and evolving technologies associated with SQL and you know, different forms of learning. But the supply chain leaders don't know how to talk to the data scientists and the data scientists don't know really how to sort out the problems they should solve. And I think those are big opportunities.
00:18:14
Speaker 2: Got you. And just changing gears a little bit, you know, are there metrics that companies are looking at as relates to supply chain that you think they should stop obsessing over?
00:18:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that a lot of companies are looking at OEE or operational efficiency and manufacturing, and that throws the supply chain out of balance. I also think that companies are focused on functional cost, which also throws the supply chain out of balance. The supply chain is a complex, nonlinear system. And so if we focus on these functional costs and we align the bonus incentives to these functional costs, we will actually not perform as well on margin and inventory. And That intersection of operating margin and inventory is so key for driving market cap.
00:19:03
Speaker 2: You know, outside of the technology that we were earlier discussing, you know, what kind of trends are you watching most closely right now as it relates to supply chains?
00:19:13
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the waste in ocean shipments. You know, right now we've got 8 to 10 percent of our containers sitting on the water idle, you know, either through issues of, you know, schedule reliability or what's happening in the Middle East. And I'm also looking at the shipment data, and I'm looking at, you know, the market data that, you know, is in the channel. I'm really looking at market-to-market opportunities. And I think that is really key for supply chain leaders everywhere because most of our technologies are based upon known inputs to known outputs. And if we think about volatility, we've got a lot of unknown knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns, which really requires us to have different forms of architecture to be able to simulate and to do what-if optimization and to be able to develop scenarios that can help us through these unknowns.
00:20:20
Speaker 2: You know, earlier you mentioned geopolitical risks. Obviously, you know, we're dealing with that in the Middle East and elsewhere. Also in the United States, there's tariffs, you know, whether it's between the U.S. and Canada at the time of us recording that. There's a little tiff going on right now between the two countries. Kind of how has this all changed supply chains and how do you think it will shape how people deal with supply chains going forward?
00:20:47
Speaker 1: I think it's put kind of a grayness over supply chains and uncertainty. You know, every day it's like every something is changing. You know, we've got a new tariff. We've got a new TIF. We've got, you know, a blockade. So we have a lot more uncertainty. unknowns. It's sort of like the frog in hot water, right? You know, we got a lot of these unknowns that are happening and, you know, we're dealing and absorbing with the unknowns day to day. But I worry that we are entering a period where These unknown unknowns are going to cause major disruptions, whether it's in raw materials or it's in a downturn of an overheated AI market or it's something that's going to happen with war and we're just not able to respond because our supply chains are so tied up and the architectures for known knowns versus being able to do scenario planning You know, I really would love people to invest in systems, which I call the plan of plans, sort of like weather. You know, if you think about hurricanes, you know, we know that hurricanes are out in the ocean and they're coming in and we deal with that with multiple plans. And then as they get closer, then we are able to fine tune. But most companies aren't working on scenarios and what do they do under certain scenarios. And I think there needs to be more scenario planning and more alignment around the unknowns. Right.
00:22:27
Speaker 2: And so that scenario planning, do you think they're also restructuring or changing their supply chains just because of the new environment versus having alternative plans in case things arise?
00:22:40
Speaker 1: I think that we've become more conservative and more regional. And there has been, you know, in the last 10 years, there was more focus on global and people were trying to get the economies of scale out of global. I don't think we achieved that. And I think all of these unknowns have made us more regional and multinational and a lot of consternation in the organization about how do they deal with this level of unknowns.
00:23:06
Speaker 2: You know, there's, you know, what we're talking about, a lot of it's coming out of the federal government with relates to tariffs. Some other things coming out of the federal government are impacting the trucking industry where, you know, supply is structurally changing, capacity is coming out. Does that come into play when you're talking to shippers about how they should organize their supply chains? You know, the change in the trucking market and the reality that, you know, maybe rates might be higher for longer?
00:23:33
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, it's in the transportation department. But unfortunately, a lot of the transportation departments never talk to manufacturing or planning. You know, in my research, when I look at organizational alignment, few companies are having cross-functional discussions, and few companies are actually using their data well. And we're absorbing those costs, and we're absorbing... the lack of reliability, but we're not really using the data that well and working cross-functionally. Our ability to drive signals cross-functionally bidirectional is just not in our current systems.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: Got you. And, you know, when you talk to supply chain leaders, you know, in your day-to-day, what are they telling you about demand and inventory levels?
00:24:23
Speaker 1: It's very unpredictable that demand is more intermittent and that demand We've added a lot of planners, and they'd like to have better planning productivity. You know, when I look at inventory, when I used to implement supply chain planning in the 1990s, about 45% of inventory was safety stock. Today, it's about 15%. The in-transit inventories have grown and are not very well controlled with the delays that we're seeing in ocean and, you know, inland freight.
00:24:55
Speaker 2: And, you know, you kind of... talked about it a little bit before. You used the R word when looking at the CAS index. So, you know, is your outlook for the economy that, you know, the U.S. is heading into a recession?
00:25:09
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not an economist, and it's very hard to predict markets. Right. But it's definitely an unknown, and we need to be prepared for it.
00:25:20
Speaker 2: Got you. So, could be in the cards, but you don't, not quite sure. You know, just going back to the trucking conversation that we had. So, you know, we hear a lot more shippers are kind of looking at intermodal and obviously it doesn't work for everybody. But, you know, given the fact where, you know, diesel prices are, where trucking rates are, is that becoming more of a conversation when people are trying to plan their supply chains? You know, like maybe they weren't close to a railroad and that's becoming more and more important to them.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Intermodal is definitely more important, whether it's drivers or fuel or the ability to use containers as a moving warehouse. So intermodal is very, very important.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: So we've lived through a pandemic, as I mentioned, whether it's wars or poor congestions or shortages. We've seen a lot of dramatic swings in transportation rates. You know, how has the volatility become a kind of a permanent characteristic within global supply chains?
00:26:29
Speaker 1: I think it's become, you know, kind of a constant. And what we're not doing is using market data to try to buffer, you know, our ability to respond. I I often will laugh with supply chain leaders that every supply chain team needs a Dalmatian because they're like firefighters running for fires. And we're not using the data and the organization to try to prevent fires, nor are we rewarding the ability to really be proactive. And because we've had so much turnover of teams and because we've had so much hype around technology, People struggle for what's real and how to go forward.
00:27:16
Speaker 2: And with the advent of AI and machine learning, all that stuff, it's surprising that more and more companies aren't leveraging the data and the cross-department data that they have available to them. When you're going talking to companies, what's the biggest resistance to that? Because that seems like a no-brainer. Well, I think the biggest resistance.
00:27:38
Speaker 1: Issue is, you know, what's between our ears, the gray matter. You know, we basically grew up on structured data and schema on right architectures. And the processes that we think are best practices use clean and pristine data and transactional data. But if you look at, you know, 80 percent of the data that surrounds the supply chain is not used, whether it's rating review data or weather data or image data. And all of that data is very valuable, but it's unstructured and streaming data. And so our traditional architectures just can't use that data. And we don't have the semantic layer or the ontological layer to really be able to use the knowledge graphs to be able to drive, you know, better insights off of these new forms of data. And our processes haven't evolved and our Traditional supply chain leaders don't know how to really rethink these problems. And they're confused because every vendor uses the same language of AI and orchestration, and they don't know what's real.
00:28:49
Speaker 2: So, you know, ever since the pandemic, we've had one dislocation after the next. And I don't know if because of the pandemic, you know, supply chains has become sexy. I just did air quotes, by the way, for those listening. It's okay. You know, so before that, were there as many dislocations and people just didn't pay attention because supply chain was like not a priority for many companies?
00:29:14
Speaker 1: I don't know what you mean by dislocations, but, you know, unrest or variability. Variability increased with e-commerce as we had unchecked complexity and we had the evolution of the long tail of the supply chain. And we had a lot of investment in technologies that made e-commerce possible, warehouse systems, routing and delivery systems, and that really drove a lot of investments in supply chain to support e-commerce. And that drove growth and better information around customer But traditional supply chains and the traditional warehouses and the traditional channels did not get the same level of attention. And most of our architectures that were driven by that were really more traditional. And so as we think about the evolution of what is possible, I think we have to start by redefining our relationship with data. redefining our relationship with code and asking ourselves, how do we deliver supply chain excellence? When I ask most customers what defines supply chain excellence, they look at me like their head hurts, like they wish that I hadn't answered that question.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: So you've been doing this for a while. Are you talking more to the C-suite than you did before since the pandemic, or it's kind of, you've been talking to the same people or like, I'm just trying to like, has supply chain had, you know, we've hear that it's, it's, it's much more elevated. It's talked about in the C-suite, it's talked about in the board much more since the pandemic. Is it, are you kind of like getting invited more to those sort of audiences compared to I guess, pre-pandemic?
00:31:13
Speaker 1: It's about the same. And what I find is that we have a lot more supply chain experts and air quotes. You know, every consultant is an expert in the supply chain, but not really experts. And so we may be having discussions with air quotes, but I don't think we have resolution.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: So like, you know, Over the next 10 years, where do you think supply chains are heading? Like, what do you think we're going to be talking about? Or is it just going to be the same problems that we have today are going to be the same problems we have tomorrow?
00:31:47
Speaker 1: I think we're going to be talking about the redefinition of work. You know, I liken it to when I got the first computer in my manufacturing plant. You know, we had an IBM mainframe roll through and we got the first personal computers, which, by the way, the personal computer took three guys to roll through a doorway. But back then we had interoffice mail and we had typing pools. And, you know, the typing pools actually were a barrier to a lot of organizational efficiency or effectiveness. And interoffice mail took a long time, but we didn't have email and, you know, people didn't type their own letters. And you know, I think we're going to get the redefinition of work. I think right now companies have hundreds and thousands of planners that are there because our systems don't work very well. And I was talking to somebody at a conference the other day that says, well, I have a job with AI. And I think, yes, but just like my typing pool had to reskill, one became a DBA and one went into HR and one became a data coder. We have to re-skill, but I think the work fundamentally will change. We could never dream that we'd have email, and I don't like email, but inter-office mail went away, and typing pools went away, and I think this is similar. I think the role of the planner becomes an orchestrator, and I think business leaders get data directly to make decisions, and we're able to really tackle what I call process latency of how people quickly can an organization make decisions on data? Today, that process latency can be weeks and months when we really need to drive it to the cadence of business.
00:33:35
Speaker 2: Now, the answer, your answer to this next question might be the same answer you just gave, but I'm going to ask it anyway, just in case it might diverge a little bit. But, you know, What's one change coming to supply chains that you think most executives and investors, for that matter, are kind of underestimating?
00:33:54
Speaker 1: I think the talent dilemma. I think that the industry acumen and understanding of supply chain has gone down as we have churned through a lot of talent. And I think there is a need to build talent, both in terms of technology opportunities with new tech and, you know, the definition of what defines supply chain excellence. And I think people are underestimating how big of a need that is and how big of a challenge that will be. And the fact that we really are not in a good place to deliver that at an educational level across the globe.
00:34:38
Speaker 2: On the educational side, do you think there are any undergraduate programs or graduate programs that are producing really good folks that are getting into supply chains?
00:34:47
Speaker 1: You know, I was talking to the University of Arkansas the other day. I think they're really trying. I think that University of Wisconsin is doing some good work, particularly with their leadership programs. I wish there was more focus on, you know, challenging the status quo and, you You know, many of our supply chain programs are in the marketing department in business, and there's not as much focus on redefining our relationships with data, redefining our relationships with code, and thinking about the supply chain as a complex system. So I wish there was more rigor in many of our programs.
00:35:26
Speaker 2: Where do you think it should reside if it's not in the, I believe you said the marketing department of a college?
00:35:33
Speaker 1: I think it's at the intersection of business and engineering. And, you know, I think it's a multidisciplinary, but it's not, shouldn't be in the marketing department. The biggest gaps in supply chain functionally are between marketing and operations. And I think we need to be able to get a cross-functional understanding of how source make and deliver work together and what can we learn.
00:36:00
Speaker 2: Well, before I let you go, Laura, I always ask our guests a final question about, you know, a book that they might have read on leadership, supply chains or business that kind of influenced your career.
00:36:12
Speaker 1: Well, there's an awful lot of books that I've read. Good to Great was very pivotal to me, but unfortunately, The Good were not really great. You know, if I think back to Eli Goldratt and, you know, his constraint-based theory, I was an early student of constraint theory, and that had a big influence on me. And I think those are some examples.
00:36:38
Speaker 2: All right, great. Well, Laura, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:36:45
Speaker 2: And thank you to everyone listening. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to follow, rate, review, and share the podcast with a friend or colleague. Your support helps us continue bringing you conversations with the leaders shaping transportation, logistics, and global supply chains. We've got a great lineup of guests coming up, so be sure to check back for more conversations with CEOs and founders, shippers, regulators, investors, and other decision makers across the freight markets. If you'd like to learn more about the freight transportation and logistics, you can find our research on the Bloomberg Terminal at BIGo, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on X at Logistics Lee. I'd also like to thank our outstanding producers, Miriam Traore and Aditya Samani, for helping bring Talking Transports to life each week. This is Lee Klaskow signing off. Thanks for talking transports with me, and we'll see you next time. Bye.
