Reid Jackson: 0:03

We're doing a lot of research around computer vision and we're very bullish on it. But here's one thing that computer vision can't tell you. Batch, lot, and date expiration can't tell you. Unless it's stamped on there and where is it stamped? But it can be encoded and is encoded today into your barcode.

Tom Raftery: 0:22

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. everyone and welcome to episode 380 of the digital supply chain podcast. Quick announcement before we kick off. This is one of the final episodes of the digital supply chain podcast. I mentioned this in the previous episode last week. It's not because I'm stopping podcasting though, rather I'm rebranding the podcast. So starting next Monday, January 22nd, the podcast will launch, relaunch under a new brand. I'll share more details about that with you in the next episode. In the meantime, on with today's podcast with me on the show today. I have my special guest, Reid. Reid, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Reid Jackson: 1:23

Yeah. Thank you very much, Tom. I appreciate you having me on today. My name is Reed Jackson. I'm the Vice President of business development for GS1 US. We're a not-for-profit neutral body in the standards space. As I like to say to my family and friends, we're the largest identification organization you never heard of. Here in the US some people will say it's kind of like the BASF commercials. BASF doesn't make the products, they make 'em better. Well, we do with identification. And so most people know us from the UPC barcode, or your global trade item number. We also, help with the serialized shipping container codes. And it's a quite unique way of how I ended up here. Cause I spent 25 years in IT, developing cutting edge technologies like IP telephony way back in the nineties before it was mainstream. I. And then moving into machine learning and unsupervised machine learning solutions within data centers and security along the way. And a whole bunch of really cool things. And then there was an innovation opportunity position at GS1 US and an old boss of mine introduced me to my current boss. And so it's, been quite the road, but been here the last five years.

Tom Raftery: 2:41

Interesting. Interesting. When one thinks of standards Reid, one doesn't often think of innovation . So

Reid Jackson: 2:51

Ah, that, that's,

Tom Raftery: 2:54

tell me.

Reid Jackson: 2:54

that's quite interesting. I,

Tom Raftery: 2:56

I mean standards by their very nature, the word means standard. It means kind of set in stone it, you know? So talk to me about standards and innovation and you know, what, what you're doing there.

Reid Jackson: 3:13

I, I, I really appreciate that perspective on it. And I would say that you, you are right. It's kind of like, you know, oh, boring standards stuff, like, not exciting type of things, but I will say that without standards, we wouldn't be having the conversation that we're having today. So right now we're using TCP/IP as a standard internet protocol for communication. And then on top of that there are stacks for audio communication and video communication, but they've been standardized. When I got involved with IT, in the nineties it was Apple Talk, Banyan Vines, Token Ring, Novell Networks, all networks that were great, but they didn't talk to one another because they had their own language. And then, so TCP/IP comes out and really changes all of that. So that's a standard that was very innovative, right. And when we think of like barcodes and UPCs, I will tell you when, when I was introduced to GS1 US, the person that introduced me, I said. Are, are you playing a joke on me? Like, first off, it's a, not-for-profit company. Second, it's barcodes, like this is 50-year-old technology, but when you look into it, it's really a lot more than that. So yes, we work with barcodes, we work with QR codes, we work with RFID, we work with computer vision. Right now, I'll tell you, our innovation team is doing a lot of work around DIDs and, and VCs. So it's, Verifiable credentials, right? Digital identity and verifiable credentials. So when you hear people say DIDs and VCs, digital identity and verifiable credentials. So building off of blockchain and, and other types of things. So when I came on board five years ago, blockchain was a big thing we were looking at, computer vision was a big thing we were looking at, artificial intelligence. How do we work through all of this stuff? And like a lot of complex things, you really have to have a strong foundation underneath it. Can't move on to calculus without doing multiplication, division, subtraction, addition. You have to have those foundations underneath you. So when we talk about standards and and innovation at GS1 US, we're constantly looking at where's the technology going? Where are the trends going? Can we be applicable? Do we have to change? Do we have to start a new conversation to add new things on? Or can we leverage what we already have and just reapply it to new environments, which is really what we've done with barcodes. 2D barcodes. We've added some new things like, we're working on some digital receipt work right now, so that you can see what's fully there. We have a, a standard that came out about four years ago now called Digital Link, which enables you to webify your identification and leverage 2D barcodes or QR codes as most people, are commonly referring to, which is kind of like saying Kleenex or Xerox. They're kind of like the industry leader at, at, at that time. But we see, like I said, with RFID in, in the early two thousands, a lot of supply chain folks were moving into, especially like Walmart. I was working for Symbol Technologies at the time, and they were saying, Hey, anything coming in on a pallet needs to have an RFID tag in it. Okay, so how do we take barcodes and put them into RFID tags? And so that's the innovation work that we do. As a couple of examples here at GS1 US is how can we take what we have leverage so that not everyone can, not everyone's forced into changing. We can have the early adopters, mid adopters, late adopters work into it.'cause as we all know, it, it, it's a billion shades of gray out there with everything that we're all involved with.

Tom Raftery: 7:15

Okay. And you mentioned that you're an identity standards organization, how does that connect to barcodes or does it?

Reid Jackson: 7:27

Yeah, so when I say we're an identity standards organization at the core of what GS1 Global does, and we're GS1 US. So we're, we're a federated organization of member organizations around the globe. So roughly about 114 of us. So you have GS1 US, you have GS1 Germany, you have GS1 Ireland, GS1 Canada, and and so on throughout the globe. And the reason it's done that way is because of regulations, rules, legislation in countries are a little bit different, so you need to support your members a little bit differently. But fundamentally, GS1 at a core does three things. We identify companies, we identify things, so products, and we identify locations. And then we've put a standard together where we work with industry. And the, the biggest industries we work with today are retail, grocery, healthcare, everything within the supply chain, all the way through to the point of sale. And we are taking these numbers, putting a standard of contextual understanding to it. I'll give you an example in a second so that it can be used ubiquitously throughout the globe. So if I have a global trade identification number I have in the United States, I can use it in Germany, I can use it in China, I can use it in Canada, I can use it throughout. And so it's recognized and incorporated into a lot of supply chain environments. Now, when people say barcodes. Barcodes are a technology. GS1 was involved with helping develop them. You know, the, the most common is the straight, black and white lines up and down that most people know.

Tom Raftery: 9:17

Sure.

Reid Jackson: 9:17

That's what we call a 1D barcode. It's one dimensional, 2D barcodes are like your QR codes or your digi marks or, you know, other types of technologies that are out there. And they hold different amounts of in, of information. And some are very big physically, some are smaller physically, and they're limited from the amount of data they can hold. Like a memory stick, if you will. But the contextual piece is important because you can create your own barcode today. You can go on to Excel and create barcodes within that environment. You can go into Word or other solutions out there and create barcodes and just put a number on it. But that's your number. So if, if, you know Tom, if I have a warehouse and I wanna label everything, I can create my own numbering system.

Tom Raftery: 10:08

Sure.

Reid Jackson: 10:08

The challenge there though, is maybe you created your own warehouse, you know where you are, and you're using the same numbers, but they're for different products. So now when you and I go and take those and put 'em into the global environment and the global supply chain, what we're gonna have a conflict. Is that Reed's product or is that Tom's product? And so that's where, you know, with GS1, they uniquely identify everything. No numbers are reused and they're not recycled. It's kind of, if it's applied to you, it's applied to you and, and it stays that way. And so we build that on. So from the contextual standpoint, I like to use the example of dates. If I said, here's a date, zero one, slash, forward slash zero two, forward slash 2024. If you're in the United States, you're like, yeah, that's January 2nd, 2024. But if you're in, if you're in Europe, if you're in Europe, that's February 1st, 2024. That's very, very different days.

Tom Raftery: 11:10

Yeah.

Reid Jackson: 11:11

Very different days, but it's the same numbers in the same pattern. But you need to have the contextual understanding so that the computers and the databases and the systems can all interpret it the same way. And so that's part of the standard and how we kind of pull those things together.

Tom Raftery: 11:29

Okay. And. You mentioned digital IDs as well. Is that part of the standards for, you mentioned places, you mentioned things, you're not bringing it down to the the people level, are you?

Reid Jackson: 11:46

That's correct. We do not do the people level. There is a big association with things in companies and people. There's that correlation. But we work with a lot of other environments for that. So like custom and border control here in the United States. We work with them. And how can we you leverage some of our standards and other standards in the in the globe for communicating and tying things together. So that correlation. There have been some asks. I can tell you I've been here at GS1 US for five years, and I will say that this conversation comes up quarterly. If not, you know, more. And it's typically from the outside saying, Hey, why don't you just identify people and humans. And we have not done that yet today. I don't think that there are any plans because we do leverage other things that are already in place. We're seeing things like in Europe, your your Digital Product Passport, which is some new legislation that's come out around batteries right now.

Tom Raftery: 12:47

Mm-Hmm.

Reid Jackson: 12:48

batteries and I think it's gonna be moving to toys and then it'll be moving to other things. But we're just starting this work here. 2023. 2024. You know, type of pilots that are happening, but that really affects, I mean, I'm, I'm holding up right now. I don't know if y'all can see it here, but this is an adapter. It's a USB-C adapter. Right. And that is for my headphones to go to my new iPhone because in Europe they actually passed a law where you have to have a standard connection to charge electric devices, electronic devices, and that's had impacts on manufacturers and other companies, be it Apple, you know, 'cause they're using that lightning cord for a really long time, which was proprietary. So these are some things that we're seeing, for the betterment, of industry and, and the environment, as well. And so right now we, we don't deal with people. I think the conversation is vibrant and bright. But there are a lot of other strong solutions out there, passports, driver's license, other identifications that are happening, within countries that we can leverage.

Tom Raftery: 14:04

Okay. I'm glad you brought up the environment because one of the big trends we're seeing now, we're seeing two big trends at the moment in supply chain. I gotta think one on the technology side is the rise of ai. The other is the importance, the rising importance of sustainability. So are these things that you guys are involved in as well?

Reid Jackson: 14:30

100%. Um, AI is something that I look at every single day. AI means something different to everybody. I will tell you at GS1, since we've been doing this for 50 years, we actually have an ai, but it's an application identifier and it's some coding that we've had in POS systems and everything else that says, Hey, here's the ai. This is what you should expect after the number. This is what this information after your identification number actually means. So there is some systems to that and when I came on board five years ago, I was like, you guys need to change this. And they're like, Reid, we've been doing this for 50 years, we're not changing that. But AI is, is really having a, a large impact, but we have to really understand what it is behind it. It's still databases of information, large databases. Some are are unstructured databases, some are structured databases, and this gets into your machine learning and algorithms and other aspects, but we actually feel that we're well positioned to play in that environment. Right. And we bring that in because why are people looking at AI? Speed, but really it's automation behind it. They're looking to automate things that are happening. Responses, exchanges of data between machines. That's really what we're, we're really looking at it within supply chains. And so I think that that actually justifies the use of more standards because the more it's standard. The faster all this adoption will, will, will happen, but with an application identifier, you can expand upon what you're trying to do, right? So, so AI is fast happening everywhere. and it, it, it's still a lot to be worked out. The sustainability part, I would say it's been around for a really, really long time. I actually got my degree in environmental science back in the early nineties and came out looking to work with industry and the environment. Right. My thing was to really bring the two together and be logical, the best we can for, for both sides, right. It's never gonna be perfect. Sustainability today I think back when, when I started in it, you know, the environmental aspect of things was really around pollution, and it's still around pollution today. There's no doubt about it. However, it's really about recycle, reuse, repurpose is a very, very big piece of it. And so how do we get involved with this? I will tell you, we're doing a lot of pilots today right now with different organizations around the globe, some around food, some around textiles, and general merchandise and apparel type of things. Where we're looking at what other information can we provide through the standard. And this is where Digital Link comes in for us. So Digital Link is a way that you can take your global trade item number, webify it and put it into a barcode, right? And in this case it's a 2D or a QR code. And what that does is it's okay, this is X, Y, Z product comes from PDQ Company and is at 1, 2, 3, location, right? Those are the things that we do on a daily basis. Company, things, and locations. But now, it's what are the raw materials that were included? This is information coming from the manufacturer. How should we recycle or dispose of this? Can it be thrown in the general, you know, waste, with garbage? Or does it have to be composted or does it have to be a special type of recycling? Because I'll tell you, in my house, it's a daily or weekly. It's really weekly. Going through the recycling can saying, this can't be recycled. That can't be recycled. And the common response is, but it's plastic. Not all plastics are recyclable. All right. I think the biggest thing that people miss, and we have a lot of companies, a lot of brands and manufacturers that have what we call a closed loop supply chain. They make their own product, they distribute their own product, they sell their own product, so they're closed loop. They can use a proprietary system, and they've been very successful at doing that for a very long time. And there's no reason for them to honestly change if they're staying in a closed loop. But once you move to sustainability. You become a part of an open ecosystem, you become a part of others' supply chains. So when you're closed loop and now you wanna incorporate waste and recycling and sustainability aspects, well now you have to be pulled into somebody else's supply chain. So now, if you're not using a standard for identification. Using proprietary, you're slowing the whole system down and you're adding complexity to it because now we have to do interpretations. This is product 1, 2, 3, 4. Is that Reed's product or is that Tom's product? Back to, you know, my earlier example of you having a warehouse and me having a warehouse, but if it's product 1, 2, 7, 9, 6, 5 4. And we look it up in the GS1 registry. Oh, this is Tom's product. It's actually coming from Spain. It was manufactured in Ireland.

Tom Raftery: 20:40

Hmm.

Reid Jackson: 20:40

Those types of things. So it's, it is, it's a subtle it, very subtle little thing, but it's a big aha moment for a lot of folks and we're seeing a lot of brands in, in the apparel space that are sig giving, considerate significant consideration to moving to GS1 standards to really be more involved from a sustainability aspect, which is what's being driven from their customers. Their customers are looking for sustainable products, and so they want visibility up and down and across their supply chains as well, but then beyond their supply chains, and then it also helps them, you know, these little things of digital advancements. When you have the QR code, you can be more engaged and more involved with your customer and your brand, if you will, through those. There's a lot more information you can share as opposed to the quick beep from a UPC code or generic 2D barcode, which is just, this is my number. Now the QR codes are like this is my number. This is who I am. Here's a digital product passport on me. Here is information about coupons. Here's information about things that will be happening in the future. Here's information about recalls. A lot more that you can get into.

Tom Raftery: 22:03

Okay. And from a practical perspective, if I am a manufacturer of widgets, how do I generate those QR codes to put on those widgets containing all the information that I want to put in there? The digital product passport, the, I don't know, take apart instructions or repairability instructions, or I'm using these kind of plastics, or this is how you recycle them, kind of thing. How do I, how do I generate that and, and encode that and put it on the, the, the widget.

Reid Jackson: 22:38

So what's interesting is a lot of that information is already maintained by the manufacturers, mostly because of legislation and rules in different parts of the world. They need to have, do you have any hazardous materials in this, you know. Is it harmful to anybody in any way? So they have a lot of this content already, but I think what you're really asking is how do they go about and digitize that and, and work through it. And so at g at GS1 US, we have a solution partner program, where we have over 120 partners today that join with us. They offer solutions out to the public to help with either creating barcodes, managing warehouse information and barcodes, labeling solutions. So there's lots of different angles you come from. There are companies out there today that specialize in, 2D barcode creation. With us being a a not-for-profit net neutral, we don't promote one over another. But there are a lot out there. If you do, if you do a quick search. But as I said earlier too, you can even create it on your own. You can create these QR codes and then encode them, within, you know, platforms that you have on your laptop today and open source material that's out there. Managing the server with the resolver we is typically referred to is a little bit different. You can outsource that, you can do that on your own, depending on the size of the company and the brands and what people are doing. You can truly outsource it and have a third party run it, as you know, as a service for you or you can do it yourself. We don't maintain any resolver outside of our own registry, so really what we're doing is just validating that this number was assigned to Tom, to his company and to his product. Outside of that, we're not handling anything else. What people are then doing is taking that information and then tying it back to whatever they want to share out. And there are a lot of different ways to go about and do it. The Digital Link standard is really just a standard to how to show folks how do I take my global trade item number, put it into a QR code, associate it with a website resolver so that I can add more information to it so that when a QR code, and we're doing this right now. You know, you have sunset of products, like we're gonna be sunsetting a product. And no longer supporting it. We're actually doing just the opposite. It's called Sunrise 2027. And what Sunrise 2027 is for us in the United States is really getting retailers to be able to accept and handle QR or other 2D type, barcodes at point of sale. So today, nine times out of 10, and I'm looking around to see if I have anything, and of course, oh, here you go. Perfect. That is a 1D barcode, a UPC barcode on the back of this book. You take it to the point of sale like you do at the grocery store, and it goes beep, and it tells you what the price is and you pay.

Tom Raftery: 25:47

Yep.

Reid Jackson: 25:48

Well, a QR code or a 2D barcode will have a lot more information in it. If you take it to a point of sale at a retailer today, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And that's a lot to do with the software translation and coding happening at the point of sale. But you want to be able to have this ubiquitous experience where, okay, we're moving from UPC barcodes to 2D barcodes and be able to put it across the point of sale. And at the point of sale it goes, beep. Here's your price and here's the GTIN that's incorporated in there, and the computer knows what to look for. Contextually understanding extrapolates that and says, okay, this is 5 99. But if you take your cell phone and you put it on that QR code and it says, what do you want? You want the price? Do you want them a menu? Do you want a coupon? Do you want to check up recalls? Do you want to see if it's a recyclable or... that is up to how the brand wants to project it back. And even beyond the brand, the retailers will have space in there too, to work with their brands. And sometimes the retailers have their own brands, right? You know, it's store brought brand. And they can incorporate a lot of different things into it.

Tom Raftery: 27:01

Sure, sure, sure. I was having a conversation recently when I was in a, in a restaurant because restaurant happened to have QR codes and it's it, yeah. Yeah. And it, more recently now I'm seeing restaurants with QR codes, not just for the menu, but QR codes specific to the table so that you can then start ordering directly from the QR code and it's specific to the table. So, you know, this is a way of, making sure, I guess, that you're, you get the order in quickly. You don't have to be looking around for a waiter, you just order directly off your device and it knows that it's associated with that table and it just comes to you. But where I was going with that is, I was having this conversation because we were talking about QR codes and the fact that suddenly they're everywhere and it, I got a thing has to be in large part because of Covid, because of lockdowns, because of restaurants going away temporarily. They're back now, but away from physical menus to digital ones for sanitary purposes and suddenly QR codes, which were kind of out there and everyone kind of knew what they were, but no one really used them. It went from that to suddenly everyone knowing what QR codes were and everyone knowing how to use them. So that's got to have been a huge change for, for you guys.

Reid Jackson: 28:29

Well, it it, it absolutely has. And, you know, QR codes have been around for quite some time, especially in Asia. They've been used to, you can exchange money, pay. Last night at a restaurant, with a bunch of folks, we were splitting a bill and there were three separate. receipts that came out and two people put in their credit card and the other person said, I'm good. And the two people looked at him like, what do you mean you're good? You, you got the, you got the whole crocodile arms. You're not putting your, your hand in your pocket to pay. And he, and he said, no, I, I already paid. I, I leveraged the QR code. So they're used for a lot of different things. And I'll say, before I came to GS1 US. I was working with, QR codes in IoT environments, so Internet of things, and it was really for the programming of them. You'd open up a, you know, a smart plug, a smart camera, you know, and then really encode them and it would say, okay. This is all the things you need to do. We, we see it with Netflix. If you go to an Airbnb or something and you put on Netflix and it's like, do you wanna sign in with your own account? Either go to this website or hit this QR code. So it's, it's really just programming, it's contextual programming. It's this algorithm, that is just put into a 2D space. But Covid has absolutely changed the trajectory of innovation, and things. I will tell you it was it was January of 2020. I was in San Francisco with a colleague at an AI conference, and it was really around walk-in walkout type of retail. And it was how they were leveraging computer vision and other things and aspects and stuff. And so we've been reporting on innovation to industry, like, Hey, here are trends that are happening. These are things, this is how you can leverage... you know, when blockchain came out, everyone thought it was gonna cure cancer. And when you really look at it, it's uh, it's really an advanced database, but it's still just a database and it's, it does other things and enables automation and enables, you know, more security. But it's still a database, right? It's still a, a ledger. It's what it is. It's a ledger, right? No different than writing a physical paper with a ledger. It's just a little bit different with security. But what we were seeing is these trends and covid hit, and my first reaction when Covid hit was. It took me back to 2000, with uh, 2000 was the millennia and everybody, I was working for Cisco Systems, the internet company at the time, and I remember we were told you cannot go out and party on New Year's Eve. Literally we were told like, you are on call. Everybody had their pagers 'cause we had pagers back then, you know, had cell phone too, but you had a pager and a cell phone. because texting wasn't really out in the United States then it was just starting in Europe. but everyone was afraid of what was gonna happen. And then right after that, which was fine, right after that, we had the.com bubble burst and the economy tanked and a big pullback of money, and venture capital. So when I saw this, happening with Covid. I was like, oh my gosh. Like what? What's gonna happen with the economy and everything? And what we actually saw was all of the innovation conversations we've been having that were five years out. We're talking to CIOs, CTOs, CEOs, CFOs, like the whole C-suite, and just asking them where, what are you thinking? What are you doing? We're seeing this. We're seeing that, oh yeah, that's still five years out. We're projecting, you know, we're gonna see in some early adopters, all of it was pulled in. All the money sitting on the sideline was in put in, because if you think about buy online, pickup in store was being used at some retailers.

Tom Raftery: 32:29

Mm-Hmm.

Reid Jackson: 32:30

Now it was being used everywhere. Grocery stores had to have it, restaurants had to have it. it just like, it was forced in. And for grocery stores, this was a huge, huge, huge shift. Because you have to understand, everyone forgets grocery stores. The customer is the employee,

Tom Raftery: 32:48

Yeah.

Reid Jackson: 32:50

eh, because you walk into the store, you walk around, you pull all the stuff off the shelves, you put it in a basket, you take it and you check yourself

Tom Raftery: 32:57

Mm-Hmm.. Mm-Hmm.

Reid Jackson: 32:59

I mean, that's what's happening most of the time. So like you're, you're, you're kind of, it's like self-service all the way through. Well, now they needed online, and I can tell you there's a lot of grocery stores that were getting, you know, 36 flavors of ice cream, but they're all labeled as vanilla or chocolate. Now take that to a computer and put it online. How do you get your mint chocolate chip or your rocky road or you know, whatever your pistachio flavor is that you're looking for? As a human walking in, you see it all in the shelves. Okay, I have what I need. But you would be surprised at how many folks in 2020 are still using paper orders, and sheets, and it's like, well, we've been doing it for so long. It just becomes like . It's unconscionable. It's like you have a relationship with your distributor. Hey Tom, you need more ice cream? Yeah, yeah. We're low on, it's seasonal, so everyone's into mint chocolate chip. Okay, no problem. And they put down 32 gallons, but they don't put down what's really what, and they're like, yeah, we'll put a couple extra gallons in of, of mint chocolate chip. And, but we know vanilla and chocolate are always being sold, type of thing. And that's. That's just human nature. It's just the way it goes. But when you need to automate that, it's, it's a big, big shift.

Tom Raftery: 34:18

Cool, Reid, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. 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 be aware of?

Reid Jackson: 34:31

Honestly, no. I, I've really enjoyed the conversation and, and you know, the questions you had are, are really big topics today. These are the ones we're all talking about. I will leave you with one little thing. As I mentioned earlier, 20, it was 2020 January, and we were sitting at that AI conference and I introduced myself to somebody and he was asking what I do, and he's like, oh my gosh, computer vision has already killed you guys. Like, you're, you're done. Like you, you should just go, go find a new job right now, Reid. And I said, well, that's interesting you say computer vision. Why? Why do you say that? He goes, well, nobody's gonna need a barcode anymore because computer vision is so much better, so much faster. It'll tell you everything you need. And I said, you're absolutely right. We're doing a lot of research around computer vision and we're very bullish on it. But here's one thing that computer vision can't tell you. Batch lot and date expiration can't tell you. Unless it's stamped on there and where is it stamped? But it can be encoded and is encoded today into your barcode. So barcodes are gonna do a lot more, and as people quickly learned. Computer vision is fantastic. RFID is fantastic. Barcodes are fantastic. There's no one silver bullet. It's, it's a combination of things that you're gonna use, depending upon where you are in your journey of your supply chain. You're going to use it for different reasons at different times.

Tom Raftery: 35:53

Fantastic. Reid, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Reid Jackson: 36:03

Well, definitely if you wanna find out more about what we discussed in the podcast, you can go to GS1us.org. That's the company that I work for. If you go to GS1.org, you'll go to our Brussels headquarters, our global office, and they're kind of a little bit different. You'll find more things relevant here in the US and pilots we're doing, and a little, a little more customer service to the, to the US department. You can go to any of the other countries as well. GS1 canada.org and GS1 Germany do and, and other environments. I would really encourage you to go to your country's location to find that out. I am not a huge, I, I think this is really defining my age, but I'm not a huge social media person, but you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can correspond. I, I don't check it as often as I really, really should. I. I just struggle. I struggle to keep up with everything. I've been the gadget and IT guy in my family for 50 years and plus, and everyone still comes to me, but I, I, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, text, phone, email. I, I, I really, um, but I do, I do check it, but not as often as I should.

Tom Raftery: 37:16

All right. Cool. Cool. Great. Reid, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Reid Jackson: 37:22

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Tom Raftery: 37:26

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.