IoT in the Supply Chain Post-Pandemic | Wesco's Akash Khurana

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Akash Khurana. I'm the Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, which is CIO, traditional IT, infrastructure, security, enterprise systems, data, et cetera, but I also have the responsibility of Chief Digital Officer, being a Chief Digital Officer where I help create new offerings, new digital products that we can consume internally as well as take it to our customers and our suppliers. Wesco is a Fortune 500 global distribution logistics and supply chain solutions company. We sell directly to about 90 percent of the largest companies on the Fortune 500 list as well as to the commercial and industrial businesses, contractors, government agencies, institutions, utilities, telco providers. So, we have a very broad set of end market that we work with. At the core, Ryan, we focus on helping our customers. That's what it boils down to. Get the essential products and solutions they need to deliver on their business objectives. That's the core focus for Wesco as a company.

As we think about IoT, it's all about getting better visibility from our assets, from our operations, and all the delivery processes that we have for our end customers. So bringing about the IoT stack is all about how well we can get our assets, individual assets that we have in our warehouses and our fulfillment centers, distribution centers, how do we get those individual assets connected? Get them sensorized, make sure that we have full visibility into the control systems. And that allows us to capture the data and provide the right level of insights for our own operations, which is critical to make sure that we understand where the bottlenecks are, where the inefficiencies are, and what actions need to be put in place to mitigate those inefficiencies. Of course, it helps us from our own operations, running those operations as effectively as possible, but what really matters is we deliver per our customers expectations and help them meet their objectives. So that's how I think about the kind of IoT as a technology stack and what it enables, what we do with it with that better visibility and what does that turn into in terms of our own benefits as well as what we pass down to our customers.

When I think about supply chain as, you know, literally a lot of materials, parts, equipments in movement, right? The first challenge that we see and especially it became very prominent during the pandemic where the supply and the demand got out of equilibrium. And what I mean by that is the demand in certain areas, especially in the end markets that we serve, skyrocketed and the supply of all the products and equipments, even including people, were not enough to deliver on that demand. And this is where IoT technology, like IoT stack, can really help provide better visibility and provide capabilities for the operational teams that we have within Wesco to take actions to prioritize where the demand is of utmost criticality, especially if you think about it from a pandemic perspective and take those actions so that we can not only deliver, but also keep our customers and suppliers well informed of where their deliveries are, where they're, the capabilities that they're looking for, the solutions that they're looking for, and when they can expect those to complete. Now, as we have transitioned out of pandemic, many will say there's still lingering elements of pandemic but especially for supply chain, what it has done is it has shifted that equilibrium. Earlier, it was demand, enough demand and supply shortages. Now, we have seen demand leveling off and supply has fully caught up. In many cases, it doesn't apply for all the categories, but it has caught up and how do you transition an organization that is, that was operating in that high demand and low supply more to a norm, which is more leveled, back to normal demands and supply catching up, right? So that's where we see technology again, especially IoT technology, playing a critical role. With better visibility and feeding that visibility to our team members who are boots on the ground to take those actions to adjust this shifting equilibrium.

I would put partnership at the highest level of importance for an enterprise like ours and ensuring that we are able to achieve success from these investments that we are putting towards the IoT capabilities. So we look to partner with a few different dimensions. The first, the most core to our partnership network is our supplier partners. We are in the business to help them take their products to the market, help their products drive best value for our customers. So we look to partner with our strategic suppliers to ensure that we have right technology components in place. Think about APIs, microservices, to be able to collect the data from their assets. That's number one. Second is the partnership as it's focused on the technology stack of IoT. And what that includes is all the edge devices, all the data components, all the security components that you need to consider. All the solution components, right? So all of this data with the right security protocols has to lead into a solution that can be consumed and can be deployed. So we partner with the various technology providers, whether it's from security, data, edge, infrastructure, cloud enterprise solutions, et cetera. And the third dimension of partnership for us is the deployment aspect. It's good to build a solution. It's good to test out the solution in a given environment. But every environment, every location, every customer situation is different. So you need a partner who's flexible, who's agile, who's nimble enough to be able to take the solution that you have built, assess the market, assess the customer needs, their unique challenges, and make sure that the solution is deployed in a right way so that it's adopted. The customer can drive benefits from that, and it's handling the change management aspect of the customer organization as well. So that's the critical part of our partner network. I can, I'm going back in summary, right? A supply partner, a technology partner, and a deployment slash change management partner.

Technology for the sake of technology has no meaning for us. So we always start first with understanding the challenges and opportunities that we can enable for our end customers, right? So that can be in the space of smart infrastructure, smart utilities, smart buildings, energy consumption, better tracking and tracing. So it always starts with our customers who are of the utmost importance to us, really helping them understand, helping understand what their challenges are and working backwards from that. And once we are clear on what the challenges and the opportunities are, really mapping out what process changes will be required, what technology components will need to be put in place, and IoT becomes a critical component of that. And then taking a lens of the three principles of design thinking, which I firmly believe in. The first one is focused on how desirable the solution is, right? Is it a problem that can be done with some other mechanisms or is there a true need of an IoT enabled solution? How desirable is that? Second is how feasible is it? Are we going to spend months and years building this technology stack and the cost that it will take? How feasible is it? Is it something that we can go to market in a relatively short time period? And the third is viability. Okay, if we have desire, if we are able to build it, does it have viability from a business case perspective, right? So, we take those three lenses to work out what will be the solution and a strong partnership with our customer to, as we go through the build out of those capabilities and as we deploy those capabilities. And I'll tell you this, every deployment we learn something new, right? So it's, no deployment is the same. As much as we want to standardize and put a framework in place, we always find unique challenges in each and every deployment. The core principle that we like to instill in is how do we make sure that we are learning from those deployments and how we are incorporating those lessons learned in the next deployment.

Where we focus on leveraging AI, whether it's AI capabilities that we get from our platforms that we use or AI capabilities that we build on our own using our own team members, is to drive actionable insights from the data that we collect at the edge. The data that we flow through IoT platform, the solutions that it enables and the output of those solutions that we provide to the end user, is there an opportunity to leverage AI to prescribe, to very specifically provide steps that the end user can take, which results into some kind of action. And that's where we focus on leveraging AI, and there's many technologies that we are experimenting with and especially now with Gen AI, leveraging large language models and leveraging traditional AI, deep learning, machine learning, doing all of that to really focus on which one for a given use case suits well for an actionable insight.

There's no one size fit all when it comes to IoT stack. There are various use cases, various versions of use cases that you can deploy using an IoT stack. The key thing to focus on is making sure that you have a right partner ecosystem. An ecosystem that really helps you mature your capabilities from an edge, from an individual asset to the transport layer, to the data aggregation layer, to the solutions layer, you have a right partner ecosystem to help you stitch that together. Second is ensuring that you have a flexible and agile architecture. Many times when it comes to IoT, what I have noticed is the team that's working on a particular solution gets logged in on one architecture that might work for that particular solution, that might work for a particular use case. You want to make sure that you are building enough flexibility, modularity in your architecture because the next deployment you go to, you'll find that you'll need, you need to adjust your architecture to be able to meet the needs of the customer or for your own operations. And the third which essentially ties to how flexible and how modular do you make your architecture is the focus on speed. The technology is there, the opportunities are there. You want to make sure that you bring the capabilities to the end customer, to the suppliers, and are able to demonstrate value with speed and agility. Once you're able to do that, it really shifts the customer's perspective or your own operations perspective to a completely different level where they are not looking at that as just another technology implementation. They really start to see value in a relatively short time period. And that's the biggest lever when it comes to change management as well, right? So those three, select the right partners, make sure that you have entire stack covered, make sure that your architecture is flexible, so you are able to pivot and shift based on the kind of opportunity and use case that you get. And the third, make sure that your team is laser focused on value and delivering that value with speed.

Yeah, they can reach out to Wesco team. We have a team that's focused on IoT solutions as part of our CSS organization, is Communication and Security Solutions. We have innovation center in Glenview, happy to post any of our customers there.

Great. Thank you for having me folks.