Head2Head with Sheldon Mydat

I run Suppeco but have been in the procurement, supply and management arena for about 25 years. 

Before that, I was running businesses, I was 17 when I founded my first business and we could spend hours talking about it! 

So, 25 years of working in the supply chain enterprise space with companies going through divestment, mergers, acquisitions or just transformation. 

Over the years there wasn’t really any tech to do what we do now, the tech is still pretty new and is still evolving. 

We used to use spreadsheets to try and emulate subjective behaviour in the SRM space, I spent quite a lot of time creating these funky spreadsheets to try and get some measurable behaviour and it went down really well. 

There were spreadsheets and PowerPoints for several clients and a lot of them liked them and asked if they could have them, so I said sure and I did that for a number of years for many household brands. 

That got me thinking there is a market for this so I decided to develop it and between 2018-2019 we developed this software and launched it in 2020 and ran several pilots with companies and here we are today. 

To listen to our Head2Head podcast with Sheldon click the link below

What was the thinking behind setting up the business and what is your mission now?

I have always been a relationship person, it is quite an inherent thing I get it from my father actually, he was very successful at what he did. 

There is something in that and, for me, it doesn’t matter what kind of setting you apply that to that value is immense, people buy from people, people buy on trust. 

There are all these things that we know but there is a real meaning behind them. 

Why do we trust? We trust because there is commonality, there is an alignment of goals and all of that is what I have been about for all these years I have just cultivated that throughout everything that I have done and it has formed our mission statement. 

It is all about creating something that will become the go-to relationship platform for customers and suppliers everywhere. 

I am not suggesting that contracts are any less important, but you have a relationship.

 I always say that contracts keep the lights on and relationships create growth. That is my view. 

Tell us about what it is you are doing for your clients.

So we work with a variety of customers in different sectors and we essentially create an equitable space for collaboration within that relationship space. 

It is unstructured, so we take that space and break the relationship down and turn it into infrastructure. 

We create an infinite array of opportunities to provide value by creating workspaces and product lines within that infrastructure. And each of the workspaces that we create represents an omnichannel frictionless environment for the entire supply chain community to come together to drive value. 

To run product lines or services improvements it is about creating a space that supports actionable visibility, putting transparency to work so it is all very well inviting your suppliers in so you give them visibility of what it is you’re doing but the whole idea is to, BAE said it as one of our customers, their mission was to create a customer of choice environment. They invited their suppliers into the platform and give them a voice and empower them to help make a difference to step up their game and give them the ability to help the customer to improve. 

Giving them the ability to contribute to an improvement programme by taking an active and owned role in that service is quite unusual.

What are you seeing as the trends within supply chain at the moment?

Partnerships.

A lot of the trends are being driven by new challenges. 

The challenges are obvious, especially the latest challenge, which is the geopolitical situation, we have also got the ESGE, which is a very pressing challenge that is not going away.

One of the trends to support that is working in partnerships and working to create a partnering environment with your suppliers. 

Your suppliers are the ones that are going to bring you that innovation to meet those ESG challenges. 

What challenges are your customers facing at the moment?

Challenges at the moment, there are geopolitical challenges that are driving the need for additional resilience. 

One of the biggest trends is optimising and focusing on resilience. That has come out of the pandemic, we need to create agility in the way we run our operations. 

Again, with the situation in Europe at the moment, there is a need to address that and the ability to be able to focus on not so strategic but the 90-day horizon on tactical planning. 

At the end of the day, there is so much going on at the moment in terms of the disruption in supply chain. 

How do you plan for something that is disruption on disruption the way to do it is to double down on your QVRs and to focus on those 90-day radars.

You can’t plan for some kind of hardwired strategic fix. It is necessary to apply a semi-strategic horizon about what you are doing so you can be agile. 

All the way through the supply chain new partnerships are emerging, not necessarily typical bedfellows, but they are doing it to increase their visibility across the supply chain and go one step back from vertically integrating which is where you take complete control of your supply chain. 

There are some weird and wonderful allegiances going on right now. 

I think some of those are driven by the resilience issue the need for visibility and control and some of them are for the very important movement towards responsible buying and trading. 

These logistics are areas that wouldn’t have a customer-face are now visible to consumers and consumers want to see what is going on.

It is an interesting time. 

Are there any trends around how businesses are collaborating more? How is what you are doing helping these businesses?

One of the big trends is working with data, using industry, for example, we typically live in the unstructured data space relationship as opposed to the systemic data which lives in the logistics down further into the operation. 

The further up you go in the operation the more unstructured you become in your data. 

It is conversational data, it is commentary, video, text, there is inherent value in all of that. 

We have introduced the technology to quality check that data and date stamp it all. 

We use a number of different algorithms to drive cadence in the relationships by extracting dates and values and refining the data. There is a lot of value in that relationship data. There is more value in the relationship space than in the contract space. 

Typical leverage is because of the lack of data retention and we are changing that and it needs changing. We are navigating through hazardous times at the moment and relying on a prebaked margin is not sufficient. 

We need to look into the relationship space to harness that data. We need to look at other ways to meet those value targets, contract management is not enough. 

We need to do things differently now.

What would you say to business leaders who are conscious that they need to be doing more in the sustainability area?

It is really interesting and I have seen the changes through the years.

Having worked with organisations that are going through divestment and through a checklist process, for example, ensuring that companies have environmental policies and it would be a tick in a box. 

Now it is a very different thing, things have moved. 

Echo Vardis, for example, released some information that said that 100% of suppliers they have assessed said that the CSR clauses that were pushed out into the suppliers ended up drafted in contracts, put in a drawer and had no effect whatsoever. 

You can’t impose these kinds of things on your supply chain. 

One of the things I would absolutely advise is to adopt a partnership attitude with their key suppliers and ensure they work together. 

Number one, the suppliers are typically the innovators, number two they will be able to if you work together – instil those behaviours further into the supply chain. 

Six per cent of businesses have full visibility end-to-end of their supply chain – that’s a scary fact; 43% of smaller companies have zero visibility of their inventory when it leaves the premises. 

Some of them have no idea who the customer is anyway! These statistics are very enlightening. They give you an idea of the scale of the challenge and, as a business leader, you need to break through that. 

To do that you need to drive collaborative relationships and create an equitable environment where they want to support you in your aligned goals. 

At Suppeco it is one of our two main use cases is driving social audit and compliance down in the footprint by creating this environment that supports product lines and service lines. 

But, it brings the community together so that collaboration can take place to get a service from a position of non-compliance to a position of compliance and we use a whole bunch of technologies in there we bring third party auditors in to drive traceability and validation of statements made.

It is not about providing trust because obviously proof is better than trust. 

We create the opportunity in the platform which consists of customers, suppliers, third party validators and auditors in a frictionless way. 

It is about breaking down the barriers and bringing the supply chain in and giving them a voice.

If you could give some advice to people, what could they be doing to enhance that relationship management?

Number one I would create a space in supply chain so the dynamic is changing we need something that can help accommodate ad support that dynamic. I think embrace technology number one. 

You cannot create everything you need without technology. 

Embrace partnerships, I would also say in light of where we are at the moment with the environment to create some reality around your short-term radars and alignment with your partners. 

Get some visibility going across your operations. Get some alignment going with your partners. 

We don’t know where this is all going yet but we can absolutely get some planning in place that is so important at the moment.

What is the best way for people to get in contact with you, Sheldon?

I am very active on LinkedIn so I am very happy to speak directly or to chat with anyone on LinkedIn. 

Or to one of the team, or just reach out through the website, tap on the ‘let’s chat’ button. 

I would say immediately we would help guide cadence in those engagements. 

You will see straight away with the technology it is built as an open API pin cushion we have created an orbit of partnership essentially to help us create a 360 view of an operation.

It is built as a standalone service. You can turn it on and go, you can get one of your team to start using it it will drive value the very same day. 

Or you can bring your whole team in, you can invite your suppliers in. 

I would say start talking, show your suppliers that you mean business and it will start to show and pay off. 

If you can do that your suppliers will come on board. 

Suppliers are better at collaborating than customers. 

It is worth remembering that, if you are a supplier and you have one customer that is saying give me another three points off the bottom line, then you’ve got and the and they say that annually and you have another saying ‘let’s collaborate’ which way would you go? 

There is no choice to make. 

When you introduce technology to help you really kind of do that across your entire ecosystem it is a win-win. 

You can’t do it without technology, it is the only way to do it.

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