Diego Pantoja Navajas: 0:03

it is basically using the capabilities of Amazon Q a Generative AI Power Assistant that is really going to help our customers to summarize and be able to highlight, key risks and visualize, very critical questions. You know, what's happening in my supply chain. Why things are in the way they are, correct. We, we like to ask what questions. Then the, the next natural question is why and what ifs.

Tom Raftery: 0:33

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to a special episode of the Digital Supply Chain. This episode is sponsored by AWS Supply chain. Thank you very much, and my special guest today on the show is Diego. Diego, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 1:03

Hey Tom, thanks again for having me in your podcast. Yeah, definitely. My name is Diego Pantoja Navajas. I am the VP and GM for AWS Supply Chain, cloud native application that we launched, year actually, the market.

Tom Raftery: 1:18

Superb. And Diego, I really should have said, welcome back to the podcast because this isn't your first appearance on. You were on about a month ago or so, and you did at that time, tell us in, in detail, all about AWS Supply Chain, the the new platform that you've launched. But for anyone who might have missed that episode, can you give us a quick 101 on what actually is AWS Supply Chain, and we'll go on from there afterwards to talk about some of your new announcements and so on.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 1:48

Yeah, definitely. And, and thank you very much for having me again. It's, it's great to be back in your, in your podcast, Tom. And, as always, collaborating with you. It's, it's a pleasure. So, well, let me tell you a little bit more about. Let me contextualize some areas and then we can tell you why we went in that direction and, and, and, and the reason of why we invested in, in this application, and why we are so convinced about the impact that it's gonna have or is having already in the market with, with customers and others. So if, if, if, if we think about, you know, the complexity of supply chains, you know, the complexity of supply chains really started pre pandemic, that, that was really fueled by different supply chain challenges that started, as a result of how the shift of supply chain and economics, in supply chain and the scale of supply chain and how basically, the economy went from, from a push to a pull side of demand, side of economies of scale. What I mean by that is basically today, the world, drives, by demand driven supply chain. If you just wanna simplify that, the concept is basically just count how many amazon.com boxes packages have you received over the last 72 hours. And that's basically what it is. We're, we're, we're, we're demanding more products, we're demanding more products at, at any time. We wanna make sure that we get what we want. And definitely supply chains are more and more needed, for companies to be able to differentiate themselves to be able to serve their customers better. So the investments in supply chain have changed significantly over the years, but as, as investments in supply chain also have changed over the years because of how applications were built, either on premise or now applications moving to the cloud. That really created a bunch of, a bunch of other complexities. So if you think about today, in, in the world, today, it, it's really a complexity in terms of the data. And we have data that is scattered across a vast network of systems. some of them are ERP, some of those, some of them are more point solutions. But all of them store data in different formats, and the data is constantly changing. And that is impacting, how our customers are able to become more resilient and, and and, and be able to get, a single source of supply chain truth and the complexities. If you continue to think about what I just said, a couple minutes together, not only all these different systems, were built to work in a way independently, but as you try to put them together and stitch all that data together, you start building custom integrations and you start having a lot of, complexities in terms of seeing really the, the analytics, the data that you need to be able to solve, problems in real time for, for supply chains. Okay, and, and that was one of the major concerns that we have. So when we build this application, we wanted to make sure that we build the cloud native application that really provides our customers a unified view of all the supply chain data coming across from all those different that I, different systems that I just mentioned and, and really be able to help, our customers, with their data. Data is the genesis of today's world. And we need to make sure that the, the data that customers are use, it, it has to be in a way where you don't have any more time to start putting all that data together, stitching it, and going into, you know, multiple years of, of implementations and integrations that are really a vicious cycles of, these type of systems. And, and that's how the system and how, that's how the market has worked for, for multiple years. So with a data first approach, we build, we build this application to get all this data into a unified, data model, a canonical model that really what is doing is helping us to get the data into a data lake. And from there we're able to help our customers to get better visibility into their supply chain network. We are able to provide better, demand forecasting and insights to what's happening in their supply chain. And customers have loved, the approach that we have taken in our application. And, and that has been the foundation for, for it. So we came from a, from a two-prong approach of building the right foundation, making sure that the data is in the right place at all times for our customers. And then using that data and making that there's a unified data from all these different systems that we can aggregate. And then from there we started to build different capabilities to help customers forecast demand, to be able to, for, for, for our customers to have a better inventory visibility, to be able to get ML power insights, because that was always something that we were very focused on. Leverage the you know, 20 plus years of AWS and Amazon investment in machine learning and AI. So we can also bring that and productize that and, and put it, in, in front of our customers. So that's really the, the, the foundation of the, the product. And now with that foundation, it's very easy for us to continue to expand in multiple directions, based on what customers want us to solve. So I'll stop there a minute to make sure that that makes sense.

Tom Raftery: 7:09

Sure, sure, sure. One thing you might have missed, Diego, is, I, I've published over 370 episodes of this podcast so far, and I., you are the first person who has come on from Amazon, and that's great and thank you for that. But the amount of times Amazon has been referenced on this podcast would be in the tens, at least, if not more. If not, if not, you know, a hundred or more times because everyone talks about Amazon and Amazon's supply chain. So obviously Amazon have not just got the machine learning, and the data lakes and all that, but Amazon have got a little bit of experience too in supply chains, no?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 7:50

That's correct. and at, at the end of the day, the day, our customers are very excited to understand how are we gonna merge these physical and digital worlds? Correct. Customers are very excited that everything that we're putting in front of them, it's been inspired in multiple ways in terms of how we solve our own supply chain issues. Now of course, customers can be also concerned that a lot of what we do, and of course our major supply chain is to be able to support our own business and a direct to consumer business. So. That foundation that we're using from that is also something in, in our case, as an application that we have, we have been able to, expand to serve multiple industries. So, not only we're learning from, from what we do internally for a specific industry, but it's easy for us to go from, from that foundation and our own learnings, to be able to put it in a product, productize it, and now select the right industries where we want to continue to expand and explore more opportunities for, for our customers and how we their issues and help them. But it, it is being, it is been critical for us. So, and, and that's great because, you know, when, when we go and say, Hey, customers we're gonna help you with, with our Demand Forecast. You know, Amazon has a huge, has, has, has investment significantly in, in order to be able to forecast our demand, and we have a bunch of systems on how we do it. So while we're not exposing everything that we do internally, we're able to, like I said get inspired from a lot of our investments in their different areas, that we can then use them in our own application and, and our customers can use it as well.

Tom Raftery: 9:40

Cool. And you're just back from Amazon re:Invent 2023. How was that? And you know, did you meet customers and get customer feedback? How did all that go?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 9:53

I think re:Invent was such an amazing event. We had, over 65,000 people coming to our event. The energy was very, very exciting across all the different keynotes and our CEO, did a wonderful job on kicking, kicking off the, the sessions and, and, and the event, giving us a, a really good idea about Gen AI and the power of Gen AI and how is that going to work with us in multiple ways. We announced Amazon Q, and Amazon Q is going to be, a really important tool. And, and the customers are going to be, be able to use to, to basically leverage our Gen AI investment leverage Amazon Bedrock and be able to now understand that when we talk about Gen AI, we're talking about using Gen AI in your own data, you know, having the right, guardrails, making sure that this is a secure way to, to use Gen AI for your company purposes. And, you know, all the results and all the, all the learnings that come from, from, from Gen AI are only use for your own company and your benefits. So, having that and explain that, how Gen AI and Amazon Q is gonna work for applications like connect applications like AWS Supply Chain, and others and how, you know. Also builders are gonna be able to, to leverage an AI to build, new applications. So to build, yeah, to build new applications and be able to get, in a very easy conversional way results, from their own data. And see those capabilities and be able to leverage our machine learning investments, to provide a very intelligent way to respond to analysis, and logical, reasoning for, for not only supply chain, but multiple other industries. I, I think that customers have appreciated our investments and very excited about that. Besides that supply chain is, it was a very hot topic. You know, the world continues to see a, a bunch of, different disruptions. Companies are still not very happy with how resilient their supply chains are. They're trying to find new ways to, to, to, to solve those issues. And I think what I will say again is customers really love the simplicity of our product. Customers love the, the approach about how we handling data, and how they, they all these enhancements that we did in the, in, in the last six, eight months, and, and also we were very excited that we announced, four new capabilities as well, during this event. And, and that really resonated very well with customers because now customers can understand that our investments in supply chain are not only in downstream processes, our investments in supply chain are also to combine those downstreams downstream processes with upstream processes so we can really provide customers a single source of truth in terms of how we are able to manage product from manufacturing all the way down to the final destination point for, for that product. It could be a finished good, it could be a component, and those capabilities really resonated well with, with, with the market, with the customers. And so we are very excited that, re:Invent is going to continue to push us even further in our expansion in the market, and being able to work closely with customers, being able to answer their problems. And at the end of the day, have a lot of learnings from here because, it's about that. It's about learning every day with, with customers and, and, and solving their issues. So we're very excited about the future, for the next, you know, 12 months as we continue to expand the application in other areas. But we have a really solid foundation.

Tom Raftery: 14:31

Superb, and you mentioned four announcements around AWS Supply Chain. Do you wanna go through those?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 14:37

Yeah, definitely. So, the first, the first announcement that we did it was, Supply Planning, and really offering very specialized models to accurately forecast, and plan purchase of raw materials and components and finished goods, to really improve the in-stock rates across our customer supply chains. So if you think about the investment that we have done in our product last year, well, this year, we're still this year, this year we announced demand planning, which really helped us to get that demand sensing from our customers. And that really came very helpful for how we were using the other module that we released earlier this year, which was, Inventory Visibility. And Inventory Visibility had a lot of great capabilities, and one of those great capabilities is how can I rebalance my inventory based on that demand? And that demand now it's, is that demand forecast. If you think about that, is the forecast that is coming out of Demand Planning is really an input, into Supply Planning. Of course you need other, other more data components, but is is, it is an input into that Supply Planning so we can really plan accurately, or, or more predictably, how are we gonna be able to move material components and finished goods to replenish, those locations, that are needed to be closer to the consumers. Correct. So, we're, we're closing that and that, that's been really great because now we, we, we can, we're able to close that loop and it was very important for us. Now.

Tom Raftery: 16:16

Cool.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 16:17

As I said, we're gonna move upstream processes. One of the biggest challenges that customers have had over multiple years is how can we really are able to connect customers beyond their or their suppliers, our customers, suppliers, beyond the first tier. Correct.

Tom Raftery: 16:33

Mmm,

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 16:34

And that's been one of the biggest challenges. And now we're very excited that we release this protocol, or capability called N-Tier Visibility that really is helping our customers to publish all those forecasts and, and be able to work in a real time basis, with their suppliers beyond the first tier, you know, multiple tiers. That's why it is an N-Tier Visibility product. And providing accurate planning and execution process of those, purchase orders or any sort of, collaboration that is needed, between them and, and their suppliers. So with that, if we can get accurate information coming from their suppliers, the downstream processes are going to always benefit from better data, real time information. And, and of course, you're gonna be able to plan and size your operations to what you know is gonna come in. And what's gonna be injected into your supply chain. So you can, your outputs are gonna be much, much more accurate. And that's, that's gonna have a significantly impact on reducing operational costs across the board for customers and be able to serve customers better because we're only pushing in for what we need. And then we are responding to that demand driven supply chain that we discussed a couple minutes ago, in, a much better way. Something that customers have, been asking us for a long, long time is, Hey, we, we need to be more careful about the, the future of this planet. We need to be more careful about understanding, and a and auditing, not only how we are processing, multiple, components in our supply chain, our carbon emissions. So with that mindset and that mental model, we release Supply Chain Sustainability capabilities. And we're very excited about that because provides a single auditable way to request carbon, carbon emission data from our, from your suppliers, or internally from your own manufacturing plants, from your sites. And, it, it's important because in that way, now we can provide different reporting, and I can aggregate all that carbon emissions data so we can provide scope one, two, and three reporting to our customers. And, and that's very exciting. So, and that this is opening a bunch of new other capabilities in terms of compliances and how we're gonna be able to support our customers, as this sustainability topic is gonna become more and more required, by multiple industries. Correct. And, and we see a, a, a lot of these coming in the next couple years in Europe and in the US and, so we're very excited that now we have a very, very robust engine that can provide a way to aggregate all that, all that, all that sustainability data or carbon emissions data. Audit that in information and provide reporting that is very important. And then the last one, but not the least, but the last one, is really Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain. And that one is coming soon. That this is, is, this is coming soon in early 2024. And it is basically using the capabilities of Amazon Q Generative AI Power Assistant that is really going to help our customers to summarize and be able to highlight, key risks and visualize, very critical questions. You know, what's happening in my supply chain. Why things are in the way they are, correct. We, we like to ask what questions. Then the, the next natural question is why and what ifs. So, you know, as we are able to answer these scenarios, we're helping our customers to really, really optimize their supply chain decisions.

Tom Raftery: 20:28

Hmm.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 20:29

In a faster way. The great thing about this is that we built the foundational components for Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain to work because we have all that data in our supply chain data lake. The supply chain data lake is the key component of our application and our strategy. So as much as we bring more and more structured and unstructured data into our supply chain and we generate outputs from all these modules that really feed into, into the supply chain data lake, the answers and the responses, and the summarization of the data that we can provide to our customers is really wonderful. And, and in just a couple of questions you can drill down to a scenarios of what if, what if tomorrow there's another event in, in my supply chain. What if tomorrow I have 50% capacity? What if tomorrow, you know, events that are preventing you to operate in a normal way. So, as long as we can generate all those scenarios in advance, when that scenario happens, now we have an answer. And that's the beauty about Gen AI. Correct? So, oh, we saw very similar results, when these variables happen in my supply chain, therefore now I am a I'm, I'm in a position to provide you an answer, that can really simulate that scenario and provide you guidance so you can react to it. And then also be able to adjust the different parameters that you need for that supply chain to be able to, be optimized and, and be at the end of the day more resilient to provide the right results to, to your customers. So. Very exciting four modules and capabilities that are combining really well with what we released early this year. And, and really customers can see now that we're able to provide them a really good set of capabilities to be able to move products from manufacturing all the way down to the final destination point.

Tom Raftery: 22:23

Cool. And I gotta think there's gonna be some very close linkage between the N-Tier Visibility and the AWS Supply Chain module no?.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 22:33

Yeah, the N-Tier Visibility is something that we're very excited. This is some, some ideas that have been brewing for multiple years. The biggest issue is like most companies have really, I would say, a decent visibility into their first tier. Okay.

Tom Raftery: 22:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 22:53

But beyond that, it's really difficult to get this information. And it's not because the suppliers don't wanna provide this data. It's because technology was not a available, well, while it was available, it was not put it together to be able to solve this issue. So we being able to really leverage our cloud investments, our cloud capabilities, our supply chain expertise. And you know, some of the things that you've been, you and I have been talking about how we are able to work as a supply chain and be able to be more effective is because we have that visibility and we have that collaboration with our partners. So while we are able now to give those capabilities to our customers, our, ocustomers are going to to be able to collaborate with, with their suppliers and supplier suppliers in, in a way that they have not been able to do it before. And, we're very excited that we just, the, the initial customers that started to use the application, the collaboration and, and the easy to use has been wonderful. And, and, and we're, we're excited that, that this is going to help us to rethink in a couple more years different ways of the different networks that we're gonna create in each of these industries. You know, I can tell you why I'm very convinced that there's gonna be an N-Tier Visibility Network for retail, N-Tier Visibility network for automotive, an N-Tier visibility for, for energy companies or health companies that are going to start collaborating because the more data they, they they share, the more information that is available. Customers are gonna be able to make better decisions and be able to decide who is the best vendor out there to serve them better, to provide accurate forecast and confirmation of orders as they need it. And that's going to be the way that the world is gonna continue to evolve, because at the end of the day, we need better visibility. We need transparency. We need to know that we're handling or we're working with the right supplier that is also aligning with the company's own policies and, so it is very important. And of course the sustainability layer here is very, very important because companies wanna make sure that they're dealing also with suppliers that are aligning with their own corporate requirements and how they see the world and how they want to be able to make a better place.

Tom Raftery: 25:18

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm glad you mentioned that kind of one to two year horizon there, because we are now, you know, at the end of 2023, coming into 2024, what do you see as you know, it, it, it's it's that time of year, Diego, when everyone does predictions. So , what are your predictions for the supply chain of 2024 and you said a one to two year horizon, so we won't limit you to 2024, but in the next year or two, where do you see things going?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 25:48

That's fascinating. And, and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. I, I think that 2024 is gonna be a, a very important year for us both on, on both ends of the spectrum, meaning vendors, cloud vendors, or application vendors like our, like AWS to really understand how Gen AI is, is going to help businesses to evolve. I think we're gonna see a huge evolution in the next, in the next 12 months. I'm even, predicting that, that the hockey stick learning curve on how supply chains are going to evolve and, and become more resilient. It is going to, we are gonna start to see that trend because the more data, the more data we have, the more intelligent supply chains are, the better we're able to answer those questions that I just mentioned a couple minutes, a couple minutes ago. We're gonna be able to visualize complex scenarios and companies are gonna be able to make the right trade-offs to decide, okay, between this decision and that decision. Now I have the data. Now I understand it. So there's gonna also be a, a, a continued evolution about, hey I need to, to be more... so prediction one. The usability of Gen AI is gonna be, be critical, and we're gonna see a lot of that and we're gonna see the real impact in in supply chains. Two, at the same time, people are gonna understand that the more data I'm able to combine and bring together. And the more attention I pay to that, the more The better results I'm gonna get from, from Gen AI. So we're gonna see, much better investments from companies in trying to bring all that data together. I, I think companies are starting to see that, that's critical. I think we also that for, for multiple years, but now we have the right technology, the capabilities to do that. So I think that's gonna trigger a lot of interesting companies to say, I need to move on. I need to break those, those chains that I have before in terms of not doing those investments to bring that data together. So we're gonna see a lot of investments from companies to try to get that data together and bring it to, you know, solutions like ours where they can have a, a complete visibility and aggregated view of their supply chain. So we're gonna see a lot of that today at the same time. I also see as a, as a, as a third trend that we all know that supply chains now, and, and we knew it for a long time, are, are very essential. So, I think that, and, and this is not a new concept, the, the, the merge between the digital and physical worlds are gonna continue to evolve. We see customers that while they're very interested to continue to invest in their physical supply chain, they're also coming together and then say, okay, well I understand my physical world. I don't understand my digital world and I don't understand you know, if how the analysis of the, the different variables are affecting me. So we're gonna see a lot of digitalization of those supply chains because now more than ever, we know that disruptions are you know. It's something that will not stop. You know, we recently saw how now the Panama Canal is becoming a disruptor in, in terms of supply chains because they're having some issues, in the Panama Canal and there's some droughts. And now, the, the amount of ships that they can go through the canal has reduced almost by 50%. That's 1 1, 1 example, we saw more natural, natural events happening. We saw more conflicts in the world. So what I'm trying, trying to go with this, while we understand our physical world and we know our, some of the restrictions, companies are gonna try to have or use technology to be able to simulate the physical world more in a digital world so they can understand how or where are the right type of leverages that they have and what are gonna be the trade offs that I'm, they're gonna take to, to make sure that their decisions are, are more accurate and they're gonna be able to build these complex scenarios. But at at the same time, they're gonna be able to solve them without having to impact that physical world without knowing if the decisions and the trade offs are the right ones. So those are the, the three main predictions that I have for, for next year. Gen AI, for sure the investments, in, in bringing data together, and making sure that scattered data across multiple systems are are a critical, investment from companies so they can leverage better the information that they have so they can make the real decisions in real time. And, and also the, the, the merge of the digital and physical worlds. And, and for that, I think that that's gonna be a lot of investments in the, in the next 12 months and I am very interested on, on helping customers solve a bunch of these issues and with Amazon Q and AWS Supply chain, with the foundational investments that we did in our application and components that we have now, we can solve number two and number three, it's is where we are gonna see a lot of investments. And that's exciting.

Tom Raftery: 31:37

Interesting. Interesting. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Diego. Is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 31:50

I love when you asked me that question because it really puts me, we change roles for a minute and, uh, and it's lovely how, how, how you, you do it. I, I, I think that the, you you asked me the right question, I think we're where I would like maybe re reinforce my message today in this podcast, is that we're really entering into a new era. And I know this year Gen AI became a very hot topic in the market and everybody started to respond to, to that new trend and, and capabilities. I am very excited that, really these Generative AI assistant power, tools like, you know, Amazon Q, are gonna help us, and gonna really help us be more productive, are gonna help us be more resilient. They're gonna really help us as, as, as supply chain leaders or finance leaders, or you name it, it doesn't matter. The, the industry are gonna help us to have that intelligent layer that is difficult to manage, not because we're incapable, it's just because today we have too much data and we have too many systems and we have a lot of information and some, sometimes we don't have the right tool to be tailored to our businesses. Correct. So, and visualizing all those scenarios is difficult. So. I am excited. I'm super excited. I've never been, well, I've been excited a lot, you know, previously, especially when, when cloud became a hot topic, in the earliest 2000, and companies started to think about how we could start migrating to the cloud, and of course, AWS and others players started to support that. But I think this is, this is an area where we're gonna see new things and as somebody that loves to build new applications and solutions and work with customers to help them, this is, this is another level of motivation that I think we all have in the industry. And, we're going to, like I said before, be able to help our customers to be more productive. And be able to help them in a very natural way with natural language interface and processes rediscover and discover new things that maybe before we we were not focusing on. So I think there's a lot to learn in 2024, and it's gonna be exciting next 12 months. So, anyway, I'm, I'm just super, super, super pumped for, for all the things that, AWS is doing for, for, for the industry and for our customers. And, and, and being able to help our customers to have a much improved way of thinking, and supporting that mental model is gonna be fantastic. So anyway, very exciting and, I'm looking forward to give you more updates on how things are progressing and how customers are really taking on, on all these new capabilities. So, looking forward to seeing you soon, Tom, and being part of your podcast again.

Tom Raftery: 35:10

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. And if, if people would like to know more Diego about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 35:18

Look, I think the best place is, to connect me through, social media LinkedIn, and, connect with me and I'll be more than happy to answer any questions. And if I don't have the questions to really guide them to, to, to connect with the right person within AWS.

Tom Raftery: 35:35

Perfect, perfect. Diego, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Diego Pantoja Navajas: 35:40

Thanks again and happy holidays.

Tom Raftery: 35:42

Okay, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of the Digital Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, over 3, 000 supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose our guests or a personalized 30 second mid roll ad. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of the digital supply chain. Thanks. Catch you all next time.