In this episode of Interlinks, Lisa Anderson, President of LMA Consulting in Los Angeles and I, discuss some of the supply chain effects of the geopolitical and international trade tensions that have been ongoing for some time now and that are expected to continue as the new US administration under President Donald Trump takes up the reins of power in Washington DC.

Tariffs, inventory stockpiling, and supply chain diversification are some of the effects that we are seeing flowing from these tensions and while many of the most forward-looking companies with extensive international interests are ahead of the trend on this front, many others are not.

We are already seeing some non-American multinationals setting up operations on US soil to get on the right side of any future tariff barriers and some American companies bringing operations home, closer to home or to more geopolitically safe and sustainable locations in Europe and Asia.

Keeping up with all the multidimensional challenges to supply chains across several interconnected domains such as geopolitics, compliance, cyber and security is a competency and skill set ever more in demand from companies large and small across all sectors of the economy.

Lisa and I touch on all of these topics in a wide-ranging conversation that I hope you enjoy as much as we did.

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In this episode of Interlinks, I talk to Pratik Baral who is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer based in the Los Angeles metro area in California and has become somewhat of a regular guest on the Interlinks podcast due to his ongoing work at the cutting edge of AI applications in business. Pratik has accumulated a lot of knowledge and insight into the use cases for Generative AI technologies in real world applications and shares these with me in a wide ranging conversation.

Pratik had just returned to the US from an eight-week sojourn in his home country, Nepal, when we had this conversation and so we spent a couple of minutes at the start chatting about the social and economic environment in that country and it looks to hold its own in a region dominated by the two geopolitical giants of India and China.

We then went on to talk about some AI applications in diagnostics, the concept of making content "Chat-able", search agent displacement and the multi-modal input/output capabilities of the latest iterations of some of the GPT models, the pros and cons of LLM's inherent feature of hallucination, the current relative plateauing of LLM capabilities and the emergence of other AI architectures in the future.

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This is part two of a two part conversation with my colleagues from the Global Supply Chain Think Tank (GSCTT) where we discuss some of the ways in which the application of AI technologies can and will enhance supply chain performance for manufacturers, distributors and logistics services companies across multiple domains, including:

• Demand Forecasting and Planning
• Inventory Optimization
• Logistics and Route Planning
• Supplier Relationship Management
• Risk Management and Resilience
• Predictive and Prescriptive Analysis
• AI-Driven Automation and Autonomous Systems
• Ethics, Privacy and Compliance

My guests for this discussion are:

• Antonio Zrilic from from Logiko Consultants in Zagreb, Croatia
• Lisa Anderson from LMA Consultants in the Los Angeles metro area in the US
• Elizabeth Warren from San Pedro in California, also in the US

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is part one of a two part conversation with my colleagues from the Global Supply Chain Think Tank (GSCTT) where we discuss some of the ways in which the application of AI technologies can and will enhance supply chain performance for manufacturers, distributors and logistics services companies across multiple domains, including:

• Demand Forecasting and Planning
• Inventory Optimization
• Logistics and Route Planning
• Supplier Relationship Management
• Risk Management and Resilience
• Predictive and Prescriptive Analysis
• AI-Driven Automation and Autonomous Systems
• Ethics, Privacy and Compliance

My guests for this discussion are:

• Antonio Zrilic from from Logiko Consultants in Zagreb, Croatia
• Lisa Anderson from LMA Consultants in the Los Angeles metro area in the US
• Elizabeth Warren from San Pedro in California, also in the US

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Interlinks show we will be talking to Frankie Bates, CEO and co-fonder of Prodensus, a Dublin-based start-up software company that helps customer navigate the complex world of international freight procurement.

Among other things, Prodensus' software tools enable clients facing challenges in their logistics procurement to:

• clean and analyse data very rapidly that they can then trust
• understand their own current baseline
• run complex procurement processes and RFQs
• save significant sums of money on multimillion dollar international freight procurement

Frankie, by his own admission, loves logistics and supply chain data, as well as computers and negotiation, and this is what originally fueled his desire while at a global company to work in sourcing and build procurement software.

Now he is doing it in his own startup, where agility and creativity are paramount to keep abreast of the needs of clients and their multi-million dollar international, multi-modal, freight procurement challenges.

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In this episode of Interlinks I talk to Doctor Michael Drayton, executive coach, organisational consultant and clinical psychologist.

Mike is an expert in leadership, resilience and mental health at work. He is an Executive Coach on the Executive MBA programme at the Saïd Business School (University of Oxford) and a Fellow of the Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College.

This is the second time, that Mike joins us on Interlinks when we discussed in some detail on his new book Leading Hybrid Organisations. I have asked Mike back to delve deeper into the topic of his previous book which has no less a fascinating theme – the unconscious.

This book is titled: The Saboteur at Work: How the Unconscious Mind Can Sabotage Ourselves, Our Organisation, and Society – and deals with topics such as Repression, Impostor Syndrome, and Defence Mechanisms.

This is a fascinating topic and one that is very relevant today at a time when families, companies, and societies need to maximize the potential of people while maintaining equilibrium and equanimity through the cut and thrust of everyday life.

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In this episode of Interlinks I talk to Craig Maginness, who joins us from Denver, Colorado in the US.

Craig is a Managing Member of Exln Asset Management which is a firm that helps business people become better at what they do, in particular as regards taking their business to new international markets.

In his own words, Craig "help people look at problems from a different angle so that they can see the solution that’s been eluding them. Sometimes that involves diving into the complex and making it simple. Sometimes it involves highlighting the subtle complexities in a problem that was being over-simplified. It always involves viscerally understanding what you hope to achieve, what success looks like, and then shining some light on the path there."

Craig is also author of the book “Go Global – The Definitive Guide to Success in Entering International Markets” and has also created the Well B-ing – Aligned Practice Accelerator online training.

Craig brings a wealth of knowledge and experience of the world of international business to a fascinating conversation that I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

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In this episode of Interlinks, I talk to Stelian Ciorogariu, Country Manager for Romania and Business Development Manager for Central and Eastern Europe for Slimstock.

Slimstock is a Dutch company that operates worldwide specializing in supply chain optimization and inventory management software which provides tools for inventory forecasting, demand planning, sales and operations planning and supply chain management.

Stelian has been instrumental in leading Slimstock’s expansion in Romania and coordinating the company’s activities to support local businesses with supply chain solutions.

The Eastern European region is a highly diverse region with many languages and cultures and is one that, despite challenges and difficulties since the fall of Communism, is developing fast and offers many opportunities for business in these times of geopolitical uncertainty and supply chain realignment.

Stelian's home, Romania is a fascinating Eastern European country with a romance language and Latin culture akin to Italy, Spain, and Portugal, that joined the European Union in 2007. As a consequence, Romania is now emerging as a location with many advantages for nearshoring manufacturing and service operations within the European Union in these time of geopolitical tensions and supply chain realignments.

Among other advantages, Romania has a highly educated workforce with good language skills, possesses good rail and road connections to the rest of the European Union, and has huge resources of under-exploited fertile agricultural land.

It is not surprising therefore, that there is great interest in Romania in best practices in supply chain management and Stelian Ciorogariu is very well positioned an en experienced supply chain professional at the centre of that development.

In this conversation, Stelian shares with me his perspectives on all of these angles.

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