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The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
To create an ecosystem that connects leaders of all kinds – industry, community, student, educational, civic, investment and entrepreneurial – to help overcome Omnichannel Retail barriers through exclusive, insight-rich content.
The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 135 - Weaponizing Supply Chains to Crush Competition
What if your supply chain could both thrill customers and quietly kneecap competitors? We sit down with Rod Thomas, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management and former retail operator, to unpack how logistics design becomes a decisive competitive weapon. The conversation moves beyond cost cuts and into bold moves that reset expectations, accelerate growth, and force rivals into bad choices.
We start with a standout story: Lowe’s reengineers distribution centers to handle major appliances and flips from shared direct-to-store shipments to daily flow. The result is higher in-stock, faster turns, and a strategic squeeze on Home Depot, which must either ship air or accept slower replenishment. From there, we explore Delta insourcing aircraft maintenance to regain scale and service, Shein compressing lead times with small-batch agility, and Amazon setting the bar on two-day delivery and effortless returns, proof that service, speed, and certainty are the new product.
The strategy extends upstream. Tesla’s early bets on batteries and minerals and Apple’s ownership of critical components show how locking constrained inputs stabilizes your business and destabilizes others. Then we dig into owning the demand signal with connected devices, subscriptions, and loyalty apps. When printers reorder ink or tractors schedule parts before failure, customers never feel a pinch point and competitors never see the demand.
You’ll walk away with a clear playbook: escape shared-resource traps, raise service bars competitors can’t match, secure capacity where it’s scarce, and build direct data loops that predict need. Do it ethically and deliberately, and you’ll deliver better for customers while quietly reshaping the field.
If this conversation helps sharpen your strategy, follow, share with your team, and leave a quick review, what supply chain move are you planning next?
Hello everyone and welcome to Doing Business in Bentonville. I'm Andy Wilson, and it is so great to be back. I have got such a great guest today, and we're just going to jump straight away to it. Rob Thomas, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. I will tell you, um, Rob and I go back a ways, and and uh we, as I mentioned, he's he's uh been here before, and I just talked to him before the show. Hey, you got to come back again. We haven't done this one yet. So anyway, so Rob, we you have got a great career. And uh, you know, one of the things that I really enjoy about you is reading your articles, and we're gonna get into one of his most recent articles today. And I'm uh I'm not gonna spoil the headline because I want him to tell you the headline, but talk about your current role at the University of Arkansas. I mean, you you associate professor of supply chain management, correct? Yes. Talk about what is that? What do you do?
SPEAKER_00:It's the best gig on earth. I I get to work with students. Yeah. I get to teach the next generation of supply chain talent. I get to research and write and explore ideas that interest me. Um I get to work with great industry partners. Uh big part of what we do is finding a fit between students and employers, what each is looking for. It's very rewarding. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you you know, we have such a great university here in Northwest Arkansas, and um it's you know, it's just just a great, just a great school. And um, and we have several other uh uh professors that are that come in and do part of uh articles and and reviews on doing business in Bentonville. But one of the things that's interesting about you, before you became a professor, you were in retail. Yep. See, that I love that. You know, I love that. Talk about you and uh you were with a great company.
SPEAKER_00:So talk about that. So um my industry experience was with Michelin IBM and Lowe's. So Lowe's home improvement retailer. Yeah, I did a lot of the merchandising ops, um, logistics merchandising, um, loved retail. Yeah. Uh I would go back to retail tomorrow if being a professor wasn't such a good gig. And I still dip my toe in retail. I mean, that's the cool thing about being a professor is I could still talk to all these folks. Yeah, I can consult, I could do projects, I could dip my toe in it. And then that makes me a better researcher and a better teacher going back into the class.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. You know it does. And, you know, when uh say with me, you know, when I spent almost 30 years in Walmart and in retail, and you know, what we do here doing business in Bentonville, we in the IMD Channel Space. And, you know, with AI and all that all this was going on, everything from supply chain, you know, that I'll I lean back to that real live experience every day. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Okay, let's talk about this article. Because this is a great article. Now, for everyone uh that's watching and listening, this article will be on our website. So you can go to our website. Our course the podcast is there, and then with the article, with the podcast, this article will be attached. Okay. So start with the name because that's what got my attention.
SPEAKER_00:I might screw it up, but I I know the beginning was weaponizing supply chains. Yes, right. Right. Um but what's the form of well?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, let me give you a quick story. Um I I follow Rod on LinkedIn and you know, and he up this popped up, and this article is weaponizing your supply chain. This is what got my attention. How companies can disrupt their competition. Well, being a competitor, I thought I have got to read this. Seriously, within five minutes after I ride this, I'm texting Rod and I'm saying, I just read your article. You've got to get back on doing business in Bentonville. We've got to talk about this. And here we are.
SPEAKER_00:So uh it was a fun one to write. Um, a lot of times I teach strategy. I teach supply chain strategy. A lot of times in business, our strategies are focused on how do we make ourselves better? How do we drive sales? How do we drive our own internal margin and whatnot? How do we give a better customer experience? All those great things. But there's a different branch of strategy. If you go to the military, a lot of times people win or lose wars, not by what they do, but by cutting the opponent's supply lines. Um, I'm a former sports guy, right? Nick Saban was the greatest coach in college football ever because he took away what the other team did best. They were very attacking with their strategies. It was it was almost a function, it reminded me of like if we went bowling or golfing, I don't have to golf really well to beat you as long as I get you to golf worse than me. True. And that would be easy. I'm not a golfer, but but you know what I'm saying? You can there are times in our supply chains where we can do things that help us in a traditional business sense, but also stick it to your competitors. So one of my favorite examples, go back 25 years when I was at Lowe's, the largest category we had was major appliances: stoves, refrigerators, washers, dryers. Those things are a logistics nightmare to move around. If you try to fork them, sometimes you puncture them. If you try to squeeze clamp them, sometimes you get accordions, it takes highly specialized equipment. We didn't want to mess with it for the longest period of time. So what we did was we had store direct deliveries. Whirlpool would fill up half a truck, ship it to us, that store would get a shipment once or twice a week. The other half of that truck, guess whose products were on there? That big orange albatross that we were competing with yesterday. I was gonna say right across the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly where it's gonna be. A Whirlpool truck would come, drop off our stuff, and then go across the street or a mile or two away too. Right. And that's how we both replenished major appliances. We finally said, This is silly. We have distribution centers, they don't. Think about that for a second. We have distribution centers, they don't. We retrofitted our DCs. We spent tens of millions of dollars updating our equipment, uh, revising the layout, training people, whatnot, so that we could run appliances through our DCs. Well, here's what that did. Once we flipped the switch on that overnight, we didn't get one truck per week or maybe twice a week. We had daily replenishment to our stores on major appliances, the biggest category in the company. Service level went up. We didn't have to have big shipments, we could send them just what they wanted because we weren't trying to fill a truck anymore. Right. Because those things were riding along with everything else that we had. It made our service better, our in-stock better, our inventory turns better, our sales, everything. Traditional business sense, tick, tick, tick, tick is great. Now, the added side benefit of that was what happened to Big Orange? They had to make a choice. They could either ship half a truck of air, which is really expensive, right, or they could wait twice as long to replenish their stores. We made a functional change in our supply chain that improved our supply chain performance and crippled our biggest competitor at the same time. To this day, even though they have hundreds of more stores than Lowe's, Lowe's dominates in appliances.
SPEAKER_02:You're right about that. And it's obvious in their marketing, uh, how they marketed it. And uh, I was noticing in the Black Friday at how uh how their appliance, I noticed Lowe's appliances versus because I'm I still look at all the all the ads, right? Yeah, and uh and uh I noticed they were dominant in that category. Yep. As it's a big ticket, um, I would say fairly profitable. I don't, you know, lower margin. Yeah, top and then but uh sort of like food at Walmart, yeah, but the volume and the dollars is there. So that's the basis then of this article about how how you basically can disrupt your competition. Interesting thought. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um tons of examples. So um one of the major airlines, um aircraft require a lot of maintenance and repair and specialized type stuff. They were using third parties. A lot of airlines use third parties for that. Um Delta came back and said, you know what, we're gonna start doing this in-house. We're gonna really build out our capabilities ourselves. We're gonna quit using this third party. It was initiated to drive their own service and improvement, drive down their costs, internally integrated into their operation. At the same time, as soon as they did that, they took all that massive volume away from those third parties. And then the other competitors that were using them, the Jet Blues, the Alaska Airlines, and whatnot, they didn't have the same level of service. They didn't, they couldn't leverage the economies of scale that Delta gave them. Right. Right. So again, it crippled one of their competitors just by doing something better for themselves. It was a dual benefit, right? Most of the time in business, we think of how do we drive our business better through strategy. This is a dual benefit of we make ourselves better and make our competitors worse. Um, you could look at uh Sheehan, they're a fashion retailer, an upstart. Yeah. Um, they're really they're digital, they are hyper fast lead times. Typically, um, most garment manufacturers do these long production runs. They got to do stuff uh months in advance. They get this big slug of inventory and then they push it out to stores, and then whatever's left over goes on markdown. That's why we never go buy blue jeans at full price. You wait till markdown, right? They do just the opposite. They do very small runs. They constantly are looking for demand signals. They'll modify and adjust what they do. They probably pay a little bit more up front, but they're not incurring markdowns on the back end. So for them, it's great. For their competitors, they can't keep up. They'll pick up on a trend within days or weeks, and then they modify it. Maybe it's a different color or a different cut or a different style. All their competitors have nine months of inventory in the pipeline that they're sitting on that's probably obsolete or not as cool or not as trendy. Right. Their supply chain is differentiating them in a way not only that it helps them, it's hurting their competitors because they can't keep up. Um, the other one, near and dear to our hearts. Think about when Amazon came out with two-day delivery. That was unheard of. Nobody did that. Amazon has made a living off of logistics service quality. Their products aren't cheaper, they're not different, they don't have their own products. Sometimes their products are more expensive. A lot of times they're more expensive. Exactly. But they tap into art as a consumer that uh preference for convenience, speed, ease. I can order from my couch. I don't have to get up and go to the store. And increasingly, they're getting it where I can order from my couch, it'll get to my house before I could get off my couch and go to the store and take it up. Yeah, right. Right, right. But it they are competing 100% on logistic service quality. When they did that, they chopped everybody at the knees. Nobody had the infrastructure in place to do that. And it's taken years for anybody to even come close to offering that same level of service. So those are examples of controlling the flow where you're using your supply chain as a weapon, you're driving your own performance, but you're also pulling back on others. I think those are excellent examples.
SPEAKER_02:I really do. And um, you know, just a bit about Amazon for a moment, because I thought I think it's interesting you bring that up. Uh as potential suppliers, retailers are listening and watching us, and they're thinking about their how to grow their business. What what you're talking about is you really can grow your business to the supply chain consistency network and how you think about that. And um, you know, because when I go to Amazon and order from Amazon, I do it if they have the item I'm looking for. Are you allowed to do that? I know I shouldn't be saying this in my Walmart friends, right? But I am. But if they have the item, there's two things. What I'm going to get it, and it's easy return to. They've got that logistic card down, you know, because uh I just took a couple things back to Whole Foods and the returning. Simple, easy, because the returning is a hassle. So that's part of their back part of their supply chain, is that they have figured that out, not only the front end that you just spoke about, but there's also figured the return back end piece of it. Yeah. And to make it easy, easy. So that's a win-win for the consumer. Sure.
SPEAKER_00:So and again, reverse logistics is part of the supply chain. Right. They're not competing on product, they're not competing on our typical merchandising lovers. Product price, um, assortment, it's all pretty generic. Yeah. It's they are a logistics company, a logistics service company, and that's what's driving it. Yeah. A lot of the competitors right now, they're struggling with the return piece, they're starting to charge for that. Right. Right? Right. Well, those that don't have an advantage. Those that have cracked that supply chain code where they can deal with those returns, are winning. Yeah. We talked about flow. Think about inputs. Okay. Um, Tesla. Tesla was one of the early car companies to say, you know what, batteries are a big part of what we do. Rare earth minerals are a big part of batteries. We're going to lock down supply, right? We're going to invest in that. We're even going to bring battery production in-house. They were trying to make sure that critical component, which has limited capacity and limited availability, they had control over. So they were doing it to drive their own supply chain performance. But by doing that, anytime the market gets tight, what happens to their competitors? They're without batteries. They can't get those rare earth metals that go into that. By vertically integrating, they gave themselves an advantage. It was initially a risk and resilience move, but at the same time, it's shopping their competitors at the knees. Yeah. And they just don't have access to it. You could look at Apple. Apple, um, they had uh one of their big power unit suppliers, one of the only ones in that industry. They finally said, you know what, we're just going to buy them and bring them in-house. And what they were doing was making sure they had adequate supply of a critical component that goes into all their products. At the same time, by pulling that limited supplier out of the market, what did that do to all their competition? They didn't have access to as many suppliers. They didn't have access to the same capacity. They effectively made the lead times longer for their competitors. Right. They made their service levels drop. They made a supply chain design decision with big strategic ramifications. Right. So it wasn't just tactical improvement. It wasn't day-to-day, it absolutely did day-to-day improvement. Right. But structurally, these companies are changing the environment that everybody else has to operate in. And it causes problems.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's a rush, a disruption. Yeah. As you talk about in your article. Yep. That's what that's what it is. Yep. Yeah. And a competitive advantage. True. A disruption for the competitor for the competition is a competitive advantage. Yep.
SPEAKER_00:This that's creating that. Yeah. Let me give you one more type, and then we can talk about what you can do and how do you look for these things. Um demand signals, intelligence, and data. Think about Hewlett-Packard, Epsom, the printer manufacturers. Years ago, you'd print things out, all of a sudden it quit working. You go to a supply closet. You hope there was a cartridge there. A lot of times there wasn't, so you had to run out and go pick it up, or you'd be shaking the old one, right? Blowing on it, trying to get another copy out. What do they do now? Those things are linked online to the internet. They know the demand signal. They know how much they've used. And as you start to run down, they ship it to you before you even need it. So it arrives, hopefully, just in time as you need it, or maybe a day or two early. You change it out, you don't have that issue. Great for the consumer, great for them because they understand what demand patterns are. They don't have to forecast, they know exactly what usage is and they know how much is left there. So they can optimize their production schedules. And effectively, what does that do to their competition? They're boxed out. If I make it so convenient for you that you don't have to go through that hassle and shop around and all that, it's the exact cartridge that fits your exact unit just when you need it. They have effectively boxed out any of the other printer suppliers that would produce that cartridge. I mean, it's a genius business model.
SPEAKER_02:It is. That is such a great model. But the one that I find interesting, so interesting that I was reading about, and I dove even deeper into this was John Deere. Talk about that. Because this is yeah, I've there's a lot of disruption here for farmers having to adjust to the system. I read about that. But talk about John Deere, because I think this is very interesting. Yeah. Because this big dollar.
SPEAKER_00:Those are big dollar earth-moving processing equipment that requires a lot of maintenance, that has big expensive parts. Well, those things are all wired in now. The Internet of Things has reached out to that market. They track usage, they track they know a piston will work for 5,000 units or something like that. They track that. They monitor temperatures, they monitor performance. And again, they get out in front of hey, this part's getting ready to break. Or maybe it's not going to break, but it's going to go through its useful life. They ship that part to you ahead of time. They have a service tech ready to go. They schedule all that. They get it out for you because you can't be down for a week waiting on a part when it's time to harvest. Or a day. Or a day.
SPEAKER_02:Or hours.
SPEAKER_00:You'll lose it. Yeah, right. Right, right. So they're very proactive. They control that data. And that data signal, again, they don't have to forecast anymore. They see actual demand. So it becomes a planning problem, not a forecasting problem. Right. Their production's more efficient. They can more efficiently schedule things. They can more efficiently schedule service techs. The farmer doesn't go down. And at the same time, what are they doing? That farmer or that company is no longer considering anybody else for those replacement parts. Even though there's dozens of other competitors can replace that piston or brake pad or whatever it is. They've boxed them out because they own the demand signal. And They used it to make everything more convenient. A farmer wants to farm. They don't want to be a mechanic. Right, right.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. I think these are wonderful examples. Uh or your research. So talk to our viewers now and listeners about what what in your article you call the executive playbook. Yeah. I'm leaning in at this point, listening to what you're going to tell me I need to do. You know, how how to really use supply chain as strategically. Yep. So um tell us how to do it. Number one, look at these examples.
SPEAKER_00:Look for anywhere where you are sharing resources with your dreaded rival. If you're sharing carriers, if you're sharing a third-party logistics provider, if you're sharing manufacturing, if your volume is subsidizing your competitor because you're sharing resources and it's propping them up, that might be an opportunity. Okay. That goes back to Lake Delowe's example. If we're sharing the same truck, can we get out of sharing? Can we can we buy our own trucks? Can we put it through our own DC? Can we do something differently to make us better and simultaneously pull them back? We're in a world where capacity matters, it's limited, it's finite. If you can control more of that in a way that your competitors can't, you can chop them at the knees pretty, pretty quickly. Um second one, customer expectations. Think the Amazon example here. If you have unique insight to what customers want, I don't know if customers even knew they wanted two-day, same-day, two-hour delivery. But this bold new disruptive company came on board and said, you know what, we're gonna do this. We're gonna change the standard and we're gonna do it in a way that nobody can keep up with us for years. Um, that might be another opportunity. Right. As consumers, right now, we like speed, we like convenience, we like infinite variety, we want everything mass customized just for us when we want it the way we want it. And if you won't do that, I'm gonna get online, I'm gonna look for five other suppliers who can. Right? We're spoiled as consumers nowadays because we have infinite access to information. Right? We can we can use our phone in any store and pull up what's the price at five other stores on the same product, who's in who's in stock, which what aisle is it on? Here so correct. Right? We're spoiled. Well, that's made us better logistician supply chain people, but not everybody could keep up with those demands. So if there's something you can do, if you could be more agile than your competitors from a customer service perspective, that's another great opportunity. The capacity thing, let's go back to that, the timing. Um, if there are constraints, if there are raw material constraints, if there are equipment constraints, the more you can lock that capacity up, the better off you can be. Um, whether it's long-term contracts through sourcing, whether it's bringing it in-house, there are certain critical components. And I've encouraged companies to figure out which ones are critical versus which ones aren't, or which ones have very few suppliers versus which ones have dozens, those those might be an opportunity. Because if everybody needs lithium to put in batteries for everything from cell phones to cars to computers, maybe if that's the choke point, if that's the bottleneck, maybe that's something we want to get into. Maybe we want to invest, maybe we want to buy that, maybe we want to own one of those mines or um, those types of things, which by the way, there's a big opportunity in Arkansas coming our way with that.
SPEAKER_02:So it is so so huge. And and if you're listening outside of Arkansas right now, you need to research that. Yep. It's it's gonna be huge. Yep. It's it's gonna have such an impact on the state. Yep. It's coming. Yep. Yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_00:But again, we use the term rare earth metals and focus on rare. Yeah, right. There's very few places in the world where you can get those. Companies that need those, like a Tesla, and need a lot of them, the more they can control that supply, the better off they will be, but the worse off their their competitors will be right. Um working with suppliers. If there are shared suppliers that keep components, finished goods, whatever it is, you need to really look at what's your relationship with them like. Are you their top customer? Are you their second, third customer? Like where are you in the packing order? And maybe you need to either find a different supplier for that if you're not getting privileged shipments, um, or partner with them, increase that relationship. Um, it's important to know who who's gonna ship you first when there's a shortage, right? I I have students all the time alumni, they could work for various CPGs, and it was interesting during COVID, right? When everything was short. Who are you gonna ship first? And the hearing the different policies on that was fascinating. I'm sure. Because some people said, Oh, we're gonna ship our biggest customer first, and then our worst customer last, and they didn't get anything. Others were very um egalitarian about that and gave everybody a portion and whatnot. And from a pure supply chain risk perspective, I want to know I'm first. And if I'm not, either I need to find a different supplier or I need to lock you down with longer-term contracts. Right. Maybe I pay a little bit more up front to write that in there. Right. So another opportunity. Anytime there's limited capacity, limited supply, limited, limited suppliers of key components, you gotta lock that down, either contractually, who you work with, whatnot. Okay. Um, the last one we'll go back to is the demand signals. More and more that that idea of information is powerful, is permeating throughout the world. Right. There's a reason every company wants you to use their app and whatnot. They're trying to collect information on you. Right. And whoever controls the information and that demand signal, that's powerful because I could build a supply chain around it. I could build a more efficient and effective supply chain around it. And if I have that information and my competitors don't, I win.
SPEAKER_02:Well, they have a relationship now with their consumer or their customer. I think all of us are connected to the suppliers or customers uh directly with the app because we do that because we get we get such early notices on things. We get great, they take care of us. Yeah. Uh it affects returns at times. And but they but I am communicating, it's like I'm bypassing the seller. I'm almost about because they're sellers too now. Sure. So it's like I'm direct. That's what you're saying, right? Yeah. Just yeah. Um for the customer. Amazon and Walmart. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Their loyalty programs. Yeah. They give us a lot of that stuff for free because they're getting our data. And they have a better insight into what we want. They know you're a large and I'm a 2X guy. They know that you need shampoo and I don't, right? Um they they're using that information, that understanding of each of us, yeah, individually but at a mass scale to craft their supply chains better.
SPEAKER_02:So what I'm so if you're on on this on the side, you're talking about what you're one of the competitive advantages is building that relationship with your consumer, direct consumer, right? Yeah. Build that relationship. Get that data. Yeah. With the data, right. It's not a, hey, let me take you out to cloud. No, no, but it's the data. It's the data. But it's a win-win for the consumer and the manufacturer, whoever. It's a win because of the service, right?
SPEAKER_00:The service. So the logistics service, the other thing they get out of it, there's a marketing benefit. We get bombarded with a bunch of garbage ads. I I don't need shampoo ads anymore, right? That's right. But if they have an understanding of me, they give me very targeted advertisements of just what might appeal to me or to you, or more importantly, to my wife, who falls victim to any one of those ads.
SPEAKER_02:This is great. You you have uh uh what also in your article, uh, you talked about delivery, disrupt, dominate. Yeah. And you shared some of that. What else would you talk about? What else would you say about that?
SPEAKER_00:We want to deliver on the promise that any supply chain should give. Be efficient, be effective, be in stock, meet our delivery windows, all those basic logistics-y things that we promise implicitly to our consumers, to our end customers. The disrupt piece is prevent the other guy from doing it quite as well. Right. Right?
SPEAKER_02:Right. Okay. This has been awesome. Yeah. This is you've given us such great advice. So I think there's two or three things we just want to summarize to bring it all together. Okay. And I think it what you do, you have some great questions at the end of your article, you know, FAQs. And, you know, and you talk about, there's actually four. You talk about what does weaponizing a supply chain really mean? Summarize that.
SPEAKER_00:That's where we're going to make our supply chain better and we're going to make yours worse. We're going to disrupt you. Yeah. Right? We're going to make it harder for you to do the basic blocking and tackling of a supply chain, either by pulling a supplier or owning capacity or owning the demand signal in a way that you no longer have access to. And by the way, if we can ambush you with it, it's even better. Yeah. Like that go back to that appliance example with Lowe's.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They Whirlpool didn't see it coming. Yeah. Home Depot didn't see it coming. And we knew it would take them years to replicate our distribution network. Even if they were gonna be willing to spend the billions, plural, billions of dollars to buy those facilities, they didn't have the know-how to run them because they were a direct, they were they were masters at LTL and store-direct shipments.
SPEAKER_02:Um your other question, the other second question is isn't this just aggressive risk management? No. No, it's not just real. I thought that was interesting, your answer. Talk about that.
SPEAKER_00:Some of those examples were to prevent risks. Tesla going after rare earth minerals, yeah, it minimized their risk, but it also boxes out their competition. They don't have access to as many suppliers at that point on the most critical component in an electric car. Um, and there's not a lot of suppliers of that. Right. You couldn't do that same thing on windshield wipers, right? I'm guessing there's hundreds of suppliers of that component, and it's really not that critical. Um, so no, it's not just risk, it might start as risk management, but if you do it well, it can disrupt your competition. And the reality is probably look for some of the riskiest items. That's probably where there's an opportunity to do this.
SPEAKER_02:I thought too your line in this area was you talked about redefining service expectations so others can't compete on your terms. That's a very powerful statement. Yeah. I spent a moment thinking about that.
SPEAKER_00:Think of the Amazon example then. Yes. Right? Yes. They came out think 20 years ago. Yeah, more than 20. 25. Yeah, I mean, we're getting older now. Think 30 years ago. Yeah. We'd go through a catalog. Yeah, yeah. A paper catalog, and you have a 1-800 number that you'd call, and you hope they got it right. And maybe three or four weeks later it showed up. And if not, maybe you'd remember to call them and oh yeah, it's on delay. There was no update on what was happening. Yeah. Right. And then this bold technology company comes out and says, Hey, we're gonna get it to you within two days, and we're gonna tell you exactly when we receive your order, when it's been processed, when it's been picked, when it's been packed, when FedEx picked it up, when FedEx went to their term, and you you see all this information. It stops away.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:As a supply chain professor, it's fun to dork out on my purchases to see where they are. Now they zigzag across the country, and then they'll tell you if there's a delay.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That's powerful stuff. That's a big change. Here's the thing I got from Amazon this week. They said your item was delayed, and they wrote me an apology. We know, you know, this is important to you, and we apologize. And you know, by them apologizing and writing me, I went, no big deal. I mean, really. Yep. But just that communication, apologizing, knowing they knew it was late. I didn't have to tell them. Yeah, they apologized for it, and then they told me when it's going to be there. But that's that is huge in communication to your customer. I love that. The next question I thought was very interesting, and all these are how can a company start without alienating partners or regulators?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, all this disruption stuff, you got to do it in a legal, ethical manner. So you can't do anything illegal. And none of these examples were illegal. They were genius, they were savvy. Um, don't do anything where it's predatory behavior in that sense for the regulators. Your partners. Whirlpool was not overly happy with Lowe's when they did that because that kind of impacted their relationship with Home Depot. We were okay with that because we weren't their top Home Depot was their top customer. Had that been one of the other major manufacturers, we might have had to think differently about that. So you got to be aware of those relationships with critical suppliers, with critical partners in your supply chain, especially the ones where there's not a lot of options. Right. That's where you really do need to partner and collaborate. If there's hundreds of options to choose from, yeah, you don't need to focus on that relationship as much. And quite honestly, there's probably not as much opportunity to disrupt the supply chain there, anyways.
SPEAKER_02:Well, your last question. Yeah. What does the strategy matter now? Why does it why why does the strategy matter matter now?
SPEAKER_00:Alluded to this a little bit earlier. Consumers and customers, whether it's B2C or B2B, are more demanding than ever before. They have higher expectations than ever before. Speed is more important than ever before. Service, um, because customers and consumers have all that information to compare and contrast and make informed decisions, we've got to get our supply chains right. Right. Um the broader world is more aware of supply chains now after COVID. I no longer have to explain what a supply chain is or what I do. Oh, right. Because everybody felt it. Yes. And when supply chains are working and they work really well the vast majority of the time, you don't notice it as an afterthought. But go back to COVID where you're like, am I going to be able to get milk tomorrow or bread or medicine? It's a date. Yes. Yeah. Um. So that that awareness combined with the market environment characteristics, combined with there's limits on capacity, there's limits on resources. Those have always been there. They're just more amplified now in this environment. Right. So whoever controls those things wins. That's what I tell students all the time: supply chain management is the ultimate form of competitive advantage now. Yes, absolutely. Right.
SPEAKER_02:I think I think what you've talked about today is is very much about how you how you win with your customer. And you've given some great advice. So the article, Weaponizing Your Supply Chain, How Companies Can Disrupt Their Competition. Rod Thomas, it's such a pleasure always to have you here. Thank you. I learned from everything that you write, so keep doing that. Okay. And I want you to come back. I know you're working on a lot of other things. So when you can release those things, I'll be watching. And uh and I wish you to come back. It's it's just a pleasure. You have you have really brought great wisdom, knowledge, information to our viewers. Thank you for that. Thank you. So, Rob, is as I mentioned at the front end, he's a professor at the University of Arkansas, supplying management supply chain management. And um you do a great job there. And um again, you're always welcome in doing business in Bentonville. Awesome. Okay. Thank you. To our viewers, thank you very much. You know, uh because of you, you can we just continue to grow and we thank you for that. Continue to share, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Andy Wilson on LinkedIn, and uh I answer your questions. Because of what you're doing, we're now in over 100 countries being viewed and about 2,000 views a day. So thank you for that. And we really appreciate your uh all that you do and your support. Rob, Thomas again, thank you. Thank you. Okay, goodbye, everyone. Thank you.