Episode Transcript
Host: Hey, it's your host, Tyler Seybold, and you're listening to the Levy Inspiration Grant Program podcast, where we share stories of business students following their entrepreneurial passions to every corner of the world. Through the program, students at the Kellogg School of Management can travel to any country of their choosing to immerse themselves in a particular topic. When they return, they sit down with me to reflect on the experience and share what they learned along the way. Alright, let's get into today's episode.
Cammie: Logistics for most people is just a really boring topic of conversation and just probably the driest thing that they could ever consider. But right now, last mile is not only the shortest part of the supply chain, but it's the most expensive and the most complicated, which is also just like one of the most fascinating parts about it.
Host: That's Cammie Merten. Her love for organization and all things data started from an early age, and was only amplified when she began her career and learned more about the world of logistics. As a quick primer, Last Mile Delivery refers to the final stage of the complex and multi-step delivery process for a package to get from its origin to its destination. If you're the type of person that keeps a close eye on the tracking info for anything you order online, guilty as charged, this is typically the leg of the delivery journey between a package being marked "out for delivery" and arriving on your doorstep.
Once Cammie was introduced to the world of logistics, and particularly Last Mile Delivery, it became a strong area of interest for her. To go deeper into this subject, she used her Levy Inspiration Grant to travel to several countries in Asia to explore their infrastructure, from macro observations regarding each country's unique culture, to the minor details that go into each piece of the logistics puzzle, all with the hope of uncovering ways to improve and innovate around how items move from one place to another.
This is her Inspiration Grant story.
Cammie: My interest in last mile and logistics and all things supply chain actually stemmed from probably some interest when I was a child. Both my parents were really involved in STEM, and my aunt has an anecdote that I would organize my blocks by color before stacking them as a kid, so I've always had an element of, organization and process. As I grew up, I became really interested in computer science and statistics, ultimately starting my career as a data scientist, really interested in algorithms and the way that we kind of drive processes, how Netflix works, how city maps are created to kind of create efficient flow of vehicles or traffic.
And then if you think about the world, how are we able to, with one click of a button, get food delivered, makeup delivered, basically anything nowadays in the U.S. And I thought that was pretty amazing, so I wanted to look at: how is that possible around cities in the world and not just the U.S.?
So I selected four key cities in Asia to travel to for my Levy Grant. I chose to travel to Tokyo and Singapore as my two developed markets, and then I traveled to Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City as my two emerging markets.
Tokyo and Singapore, I think, are world renowned in terms of their infrastructure. I wanted to see how that translated in terms of their efficiencyof moving people to efficiency of moving goods.
I wanted to look at emerging markets as well, looking at how, even though they might not have a strong of infrastructure, what are their creative solutions to having the same types of efficiency in a completely different way. I chose Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City as those two places to travel to.
Both are just probably world renowned for some sense of like, a seamless chaos as some have described it to me. If you've ever been to Ho Chi Minh City, once you step foot there you understand it's like a motorbike freeway there's kind of like a seamless lawlessness to it, if that makes any sense. Everybody is going in whichever direction, yet it works. Bangkok is similar, but with a huge river running through it and a bunch of canals that also make it kind of interesting in terms of its urban sprawl.
What I thought was really important in my exploration was seeing as many different urban centers as possible given that, even though the problem is inherently the same, each urban center is uniquely challenged and there's going to be no two alike in the world. And so the more that I can see different situations and different people and environments, the more that I can start to understand patterns and behaviors.
One of the first things that dawned on me was, I was in Tokyo and it is just incredibly orderly. And the best way I can kind of like bring that to life is: if you're in a subway system the way in which people line up on the escalators and wait for the subway is unlike anywhere I've been in the world.
The U.S. certainly has order: we obey traffic laws very well, there's a sense of like, if I'm in a line, I will follow that, etc. But in Japan, the amount of order and systemic structure and respect that is just existing there is world class. I think that plays into their efficiency of their last mile.
On a completely different note, I think something that was very interestingly juxtaposed as I went to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam was the motorbikes are just fascinating. There are about 5 million cars in all of Vietnam and there are 65 million motorbikes, for context. You sit at a stoplight, if there's even a sitting at all, and 50 motorbikes go first, and then maybe a car, and then another 25, and then traffic is going. There is just this amazing sense of movement with these motorbikes.
I think something that dawned on me in terms of this movement was how the motorbike usage is both their greatest strength, but also their greatest weakness. You think about how fast they're able to get through traffic and how they're able to efficiently navigate really narrow streets, which makes them pretty efficient. The inefficiencies come from the fact that there are actually so many motorbikes. How do you get a large amount of food delivered to restaurants, to a grocery store? And so I found it really interesting that it is both their just greatest strength in terms of an efficient scene being able to get around the inefficiencies that are existing there, but also creating inefficiencies for them.
Cammie: I think the big overarching takeaway of kind of the differences between the developed and the emerging markets is the availability of data to go off of. In terms of trying to understand what the constraint is in each of these cities and then being able to kind of leverage the data that's required in order to kind of fill the gap in that constraint or work around I think is really important.
Like something that you need across any system is ability to kind of predict the traffic patterns or the weather patterns. In Ho Chi Minh and in Bangkok, where there's traditional monsoon seasons, I anticipated, the fact that they are just solely based on motorbikes, the rain to kind of shut them down. It doesn't. People put on a poncho and just keep going for it. That in and of itself is really interesting in terms of like, how can we gather data around the rain patterns but then also like how many delivery drivers are suited for the rain when it comes?
And then I think another data point is consumer expectations. How have these companies trained their consumers to have a certain expectation and how does that impact the last mile? Amazon has trained us to have two-day as the end-all, be-all if we don't get it in that timeframe, it’s late or we’re gonna try to search for it in another way, which is just crazy. Whereas in other places, if they tell you 9-25 days, which is still very fast in terms of how you can get something across the ocean in some senses, if you set that consumer expectation, that allows them to then be aware of that and go about their day in such senses.
I think the next step for me is to really start to explore the data that is available in such places, but also try to come up with ways to gather different data. How can I be hacky and maybe start to pool things together based off of information that's available?
What if I could get my hands on some of this data in order to kind of start to paint a picture of, what does a city look like in terms of its data? And actually curate a pool of it in order to then sell to companies to make their logistics better. They can just basically say, we need the Bangkok data, and they get this full fledged package of things available, whether it's traffic, storage centers, the availability of real estate for infrastructure, all of these various things that kind of play into a larger picture that will help them run a business efficiently. And if they can get the similar data set, but obviously different data points for a Tokyo or something else, is that a viable business or is that something that people are interested in?
If you think back to human innovations throughout time, we've constantly been creating inventions to save us time in order to innovate on something else down the road. And that's always kind of like fascinated me. Think about like when we first invented the wheel, all of a sudden you need one person carrying goods across the town instead of having to have every single person carry a little bit across. That saves people time, we can do things faster.
Nowadays, we've evolved in a lot of senses, but last mile delivery and efficient delivery and the ability for me to say, "Hey, I'm going to actually order my groceries to my house" and have that delivered by somebody, as opposed to me having to go to the store, is a way people can save time and therefore give back to themselves, which I think is kind of like this next big invention that we're having. And the time that we're able to save will create some space for us to do something different down the road. In who knows what way, what will shape, but that's what efficient time management through supply chain can have for us as a society.
Host: The Levy Inspiration Grant Program is made possible through the generous support of Larry and Carol Levy and is managed by the Entrepreneurship program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. To learn more about the Levy Inspiration Grant Program and other ways we support student entrepreneurs, visit our website at kell.gg/entrepreneurship. That's kell.gg/entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Thanks for listening.
