The Treasury Update Podcast by Strategic Treasurer

Episode 215

Adding Value through Treasury Technology at UPS

Having a treasury function is necessary for any business of a certain size to manage money and financial risks, but it’s also important to turn that treasury function into a strategic asset for the business. Doing this requires accurate data and expertise. In this podcast, Craig Jeffery talks with Nicolas Garcia of UPS on a strategic view of treasury and technology. They look at having a proper mindset, developing a digital strategy, and applying the latest treasury technology to solve existing problems.

Host:

Craig Jeffery, Strategic Treasurer

Craig - Headshot

Speaker:

Nicolas Garcia, UPS

Nicolas Garcia - UPS
Episode Transcription - Episode #215 - Adding Value through Treasury Technology at UPS

Announcer  00:04

Welcome to the Treasury Update podcast presented by Strategic Treasurer, your source for interesting treasury news, analysis, and insights in your car, at the gym, or wherever you decide to tune it.

 

Craig Jeffery  00:18

Welcome to the Treasury Update Podcast. This is Craig Jeffrey, I’m the managing partner of Strategic Treasurer, and your host today, I’m with Nicolas Garcia, who’s the director of treasury technology at UPS. Welcome to the Treasury Update Podcast, Nicolas.

 

Nicolas Garcia  00:32

Good afternoon, Craig and pleasure to be on your podcast.

 

Craig Jeffery  00:38

I know we’ve been on different webinars and talked at different times. So this is this is good to have this type of conversation. Our title today for the podcast is “Adding Value Through Treasury Technology at UPS.” And really what we’re going to be exploring is applying the latest treasury technology to solve existing problems as everyone knows there’s significant challenges problems issues in every treasury department, particularly because there’s so much changing. And this is a process. It’s not a single event. So that’s really the part of our discussion today. Nicolas, maybe we could begin if you would give an elevator pitch or a short introduction to your role and career that brings you to this point at UPS so people know your background?

 

Nicolas Garcia  01:25

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m director of treasury technology with UPS have been with UPS, about a year and a half. Now, I’m responsible for setting the treasury technology strategy, supporting the global treasury function at UPS. I’m responsible for supporting our existing systems, for implementing new systems and technology. Also, to ensure that the technologies we’re using are really what’s needed to support our treasury related processes. Before UPS, I spent five and a half years as a consultant with PWC, with their treasury practice, worked with a couple of dozen different corporates in the United States across industry.  I worked with these clients to help them take their treasury function to the next level.

 

Craig Jeffery  02:24

So working with a number of companies, as a consultant, and then moving into ups, I suspect most people know what UPS does. But I also wonder if you could give a just a brief overview, maybe some interesting statistics, something that you find interesting about UPS’s reach or scale that will help those who may not know some of these facts.

 

Nicolas Garcia  02:46

I think most people are familiar with the big brown trucks that deliver packages on a daily basis, we are the largest shipping company in the world, over 500,000 employees globally. We operate in over 60 countries. It’s a fairly well known company, but even to me, I didn’t even know the scope and scale of the stuff we do. One of the things that I found most interesting is the way we supported the whole COVID efforts in terms of helping you know, the various government agencies and healthcare providers, etc. Just shipped vaccines all over the world, you know, when helping them with, you know, all these supply chain constraints that are there are there are still present. But UPS has been at the center of that we literally help the world move.

 

Craig Jeffery  03:41

Yeah, I’ve heard. Yeah, the medical shipping. Yeah, really, really important for the health of the country and the world. Let’s move on to the strategic view of treasury and technology. We had some discussion about this, in preparation for today’s talk. I’d love it. If you could describe how you think about how treasury adds value to the organization with a particular focus on on tech.

 

Nicolas Garcia  04:07

you can think about the value that treasury provides at various levels. Right. So I think, you know, when you first think about treasury, it’s about managing bank accounts. It’s it’s funding them. It’s making sure you can, you know, make payroll. And so it’s very transactional. It’s very, it’s in some ways operational. And that’s absolutely necessary for any company, you you need a treasury function. But I think the key question is, how can you take that to the next level and make treasury a strategic asset to the business, right, and the way we think about it is, we want to be the cash stewards, meaning we are the voice at UPS that’s always thinking in terms of cash. Everybody knows cash is important. But I think treasury is especially well suited to talk about that and really bring insights into how to maximize your cash flow, everybody wants to maximize their cash flow. But in reality, that’s hard to do. But treasury, you know, has the visibility into all the ins and outs, especially suited to look at working capital from a more strategic lens, specially suited to analyze how your different projects or investments across your organization really return cash to the business. And so in order to do that, well, you need you need data, and you need expertise. And for both of those, you need to acknowledge, you know, for a company like UPS, we have over 1000 bank accounts, you cannot do this manually, right. So technology is at the center of what we’re trying to achieve, or where we see our mandates, points to bringing the right technologies and ensuring that people can leverage those technologies in a meaningful way is really key to to the finance function, but also to the organization as a whole.

 

Craig Jeffery  06:14

As you talked about the breadth and scope of what’s going on and what needs to be done getting this done. There’s an element of it’s done by treasury by itself working, let’s say, connecting to those 1000 bank accounts. However, many dozens of banks or, you know, 100 banks across the globe, you know, any other elements there when you think about it from either a technology standpoint, or partnership standpoint, is there anything else that’s important here?

 

Nicolas Garcia  06:39

Yes, definitely, definitely. So I think treasury functions, you know, they’re all built differently, but they’re different, definitely some common elements where technical technology can can really be of great use. So we have a treasury management system, in my experience, it’s the core of your technology footprint, right? And, but then you have ancillary systems that are more, you know, fit for purpose, and that specialize in certain aspects, that enhances your TMS or your treasury management system, and allows you to really, you know, take full advantage of automation and advanced analytics.  We manage our bank connections. our core cash, funding, you know, cash pooling, data investments, we have a TMS that does that. But then for certain more advanced needs, we tap into many other technologies, you know, and there’s a lot out there, but there’s technologies that focus on trading, there are technologies that focus on particular FX exposures, there are technologies that help you with just accounting, there are technologies that help you with bank account management, and so forth. Right. So it’s kind of expansive, it depends on you know, I think of, you know, what are the type of activities that, you know, fall under, you know, the treasury purview? But ultimately, the way, you know, I think about it is, let’s focus on automation. One key thing to, you know, onboard any technology is, is it really helping me automate end to end processes? And is it actually helping me be more efficient at that, it’s not very useful if you automate only 10% of your process. And you can say, well, treasury is doing great, but then there are a ton of hands of two others in the organization, right. So we’ll look at it as, okay, let’s look at the end to end of this. And let’s look at how technology can help us. That’s one component:  automation. The second point is control, and just the management of just risk or operational risk. And it’s, well, technology is also great, just reducing the amount of handoffs, reducing the amount of time people spend just keying things into spreadsheets, or reading documents and things of that nature. So, you know, we take a look at that and say, Okay, are there processes where where mistakes are common or frequent? You know, let’s, let’s go for those. So that’s a key other aspect. And I’d say the third component is around data, reporting and analytics, right? And it’s okay, we have all this data, but it’s probably distributed across multiple systems, not very well integrated and very hard to make sense of, right. And so, the other I’d say, pillar of your why technology or why certain technologies over others is, does it really help us you know, make sense of our data, use it in a meaningful way, and do something with it, right. In today’s world data, the amount of data is not a problem. The problem is, what are you with it? Right, how do you create value of it? And so we’re trying to be smarter about, you know, how we leverage that.

 

Craig Jeffery  10:06

The way you look at it, it sounds like there’s a, there’s a process orientation. And you described it as end to end as opposed to a component. And the other was data, reporting, analytics. How do we how do we access the information that’s needed? and analyze it? Those are two, I guess, lenses that you’d look through as part of your, your evaluation support of the company. Is that accurate? Or?

 

Nicolas Garcia  10:30

That’s right. That’s right. I think that’s a good framework, taking care of the basics actually doing the work. And then the the next step to that is, well, now that we have all this kind of sitting there, let’s create value out of that. And let’s be sure we’re getting the right insights into the right hands.

 

Craig Jeffery  10:48

Yeah, there’s probably ultimately more value out of the data. But it’s extremely valuable to manage the processes well, in terms of a digital strategy, because I do want to get to some of the examples and initiatives that you’ve worked on are working on, I think those are gonna be quite fascinating for everyone who’s listening. But when you think about a digital strategy, technology strategy, is there anything else there? I know, we talked about? How do we decide what the flow is, anything else? Before we move into some of these initiatives?

 

Nicolas Garcia  11:20

Yeah, I would say maybe a couple of additional things on how we think about this is one, it still needs to fit into the overall let’s say, corporate strategy, or even corporate IT strategy. So, you know, we we don’t operate in a silo, you know, every time we let’s say, we want to buy a new technology, we know, tactically, we have to go through the approvals, and the budgeting and all those kinds of things. But it’s important that it aligns with what the IT organization and what your strategy organization actually wants to do. Right. So, you know, we’re mindful that we don’t act alone, and there’s needs to be alignment. And so some of the tools we use in treasury are actually tools that are being used at in other areas of UPS. And now it’s our job to take the value out of those tools for our specific use cases. But leveraging what’s already there, right? We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

 

Craig Jeffery  12:19

What might be some examples of this, like a common tool set or data store?

 

Nicolas Garcia  12:24

So we use Google Cloud, for example, for you know, what we’re building in terms of, you know, treasury type data lake. Treasury is not the only one that UPS using Google Cloud. There are other functions that are leveraging Google Cloud in other ways. So what we do is, well, we’re not only using the tool right itself, but but there are a lot of opportunities to to learn and share experiences. And so you know, I might be doing something and maybe I’m stuck with maybe I’m not sure how to implement something specifically. Well, I know that down the hall, there’s the marketing team to just give you an example. That’s also doing amazing things, Google Cloud, totally different data sets. But but they have capabilities, they have expertise, they have people that can you help us out, right. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it’s it’s also about people, right? So you can only produce what you’re capable of. And the expertise that exists is limited. But part of the, let’s say the beauty of working at UPS is that we’re a big enough organization that if I have a question, I can probably reach out to somebody to get a little help. Right? So it’s, it’s yeah, it’s let’s leverage the technology is let’s not pay, you know, double fees, but it’s also let’s leverage all the knowledge that exists. And and let’s, you know, let’s make the best use of that.

 

Craig Jeffery  13:57

Right. That’s, that’s a core area and I think I cut you off before you started the, or as you were starting this, the next area.

 

Nicolas Garcia  14:04

Yeah, the last thing I was gonna say was, we’re in an environment where, you know, every investment, so to speak, needs to be explained, right. And so, you know, we try to create, you know, solid business cases, every time we, you know, buy a new technology or launch a new initiative. And we ensure that there’s a return on investment, right. And that is not easy to do. In many cases, the, you know, the benefits are, are not green dollars. They come in many forms, and they are in many cases kind of long term. And so you have to make some assumptions, but we try to be very careful about, you know, ensuring that we’re actually getting bang for our buck. And we have a couple of frameworks that we use that we kind of refine, but we are careful about you know, how we spend our money.

 

Craig Jeffery  15:01

Yeah, excellent. I guess another aspect of stewardship, right the your investment decisions on on tech, we’re really looking forward to talking about some of the initiatives you have. Some of these might be brief or longer. But why don’t we start with the payments and payment factors, maybe you can talk about your initiative there and what you’ve learned or learning?

 

Nicolas Garcia  15:21

Yeah, a key initiative for, for me currently working on an implementation of a payment hub. Our current setup is that everybody that needs connectivity to banks, not even just for payments, but also kind of for receiving statements is, is is very decentralized. So while treasury has specific needs, but we’re not the only ones that need interaction with the banks, for payments, we have, you know, the AP function, and we have various shared service centers that are constantly initiating payments for various reasons, we’ve got payroll, we have other areas that execute payments, and then for receiving statements, again, not just treasury, but we have accounting, or ERP leverages those for reconciliations, etc. So, you know, there’s a big need for streamlined connectivity with banks. And so our approach is, well, we’ve got to centralize this, you know, we can’t have everybody kind of managing this separately. So let’s put something that can be leveraged by the whole enterprise that is more sustainable, but also that gives us higher visibility into all our payments. And so you know, one of the things I said at the beginning was, you know, one of the things we think about a lot is, well, we want to be cash stewards, we really want to have visibility into all working capital related stuff. And part of that is payments, right? And so we really want to see, well, we want to see all our payments, right? We want to see every wire we’re making, we want to understand every transaction that’s going out the door, I mean, could we improve the terms in which we’re paying? Are we paying too much in fees? Are we doing too much cross currency transactions? Are we just using too many wires, and maybe some of those should be ACH type payments, etc. Right? So it’s about visibility, is it about it is about control. And so the rationale and the business case for for this payment hub initiative is, you know, we want to take ownership of that want to make sure it’s really centralized, because we want to give treasury the tools to really manage that process.

 

Craig Jeffery  17:40

Sounds like it’d be great to do a check in again, maybe six months or 12 months, as you go through the process to see what you’ve learned as you you’re retooling your your payment factories and information aggregation. We spoke about reporting and data lakes is a big term that people use not everyone in treasury knows what that means. But everyone understands analytics quite well. Maybe you can talk about what you’re doing from a reporting standpoint, I’m gonna be listening and probably asking you about reporting that might be more focused on operational needs and activities. And those types of reporting and analysis that might be more strategic or analytically oriented. So what do you what are you doing here? What’s What’s your initiative,

 

Nicolas Garcia  18:23

We’re setting a treasury data lake, right. And so what that means for us is, you know, current state, we have a number of systems, right, the TMS is one of those, but but we have several others, and they all have certain data. Some of these systems are better reporting than others. But the truth is, it’s it’s very hard, in some instances for for certain users, to have visibility into a consolidated set of the data that’s consistent across these systems, and then have that in a way that’s easy to report on. What we’re trying to do is we want to consolidate the information from these various sources, we want to reconcile that information because we don’t want discrepancies that would only you know, create confusion. And we want to bring that into a data lake kind of massage that you know, have, you know, aggregate the data in such a way that’s organized that’s labeled, that there are no empty records or things like that. And then on top of that layer in a reporting tool, nowadays, there’s just so many, you know, good good systems out there, you know, we use Data Studio, but we are, you know, we’ve also kind of explored Power BI, there’s a Tableau you know, there’s so many right and so, these reporting tools kind of sit on top the data lake and allow us to create dashboards and really, very cool and interactive dashboards and reports and you you can give this to, you know, not just treasury people, but even outside treasury, you know, with a few clicks, a few kind of drag and drops type of functionality, things like that you really get access to the core data to the insightful stuff. And it really empowers people to make decisions. And it just improves the way people have access to the data, you don’t have to wait a day or two till somebody produces a report by then it’s too old or whatever, or maybe they give you the information, but it’s on a spreadsheet that God knows who created it. But the idea is to make this as user friendly as possible. We, as I mentioned, before, we’re using Google Cloud to kind of build this data lake, I’d say we’re, you know, at the early stages to put something like that together, but some, some aspects of it are already live. And we’re really excited to be able to give, you know, provide these tools to to a broader set of users.

 

Craig Jeffery  21:00

So So a question on that. So you described it as a treasury data lake, treasury, you know, has quite a bit of information on its own and multiple systems in a global organization like yours has quite a bit there. Is this treasury only? Or does this also tap into other areas of finance, other areas that may provide information for forecasting, working capital needs, requirements growth? Is that a potential future? How is it how do you draw the walls around the shoreline of of a data lake? I guess?

 

Nicolas Garcia  21:35

Yeah. Now, that’s a great question. And so right now is mostly treasury specific, I would say 90%. Treasury specific, because we are focusing right now on the on the operational part of treasury, right. So you know, we want to make sure people understand cash balances, etc, etc. Our vision is to bring information outside of treasury as well, we’ve already started working on that. There are some enterprise initiatives already underway at UPS that are somewhat higher level of what we’re doing. So we are already building those data lakes that are more cross functional. And so from that perspective, treasury is going to become more of an input to that, let’s see more enterprise data lake vision, right. And so that’s where we see in a couple months, maybe a couple years where everything would integrate. But not everybody is going to care about all the granular detail treasury data. And so kind of in parallel will building our own treasury’s specific data lake that can really make use of the vast amounts of data that we that we use on a constant basis. And so I think, you know, it is a combination, we are building this, let’s say one step at a time. But our full vision is to have a full blown data lake with all the relevant data kind of integrated and fully reconciled and available to the whole enterprise.

 

Craig Jeffery  23:11

Excellent. So I think that’s a that’s another concept to think about. Right? There’s a everyone talks about a data lake, but there’s oftentimes multiple data lakes as these grow. And it sounds like you’re starting off more on the operational side of that information, and then expanding to more and more strategic, longer term vision is that, am I capturing that right? That’s exactly it’s and that mirrors so much. What organizations have, you know, from reporting bases reporting was almost always operational, and then anything that had to be done a strategic basis of planning basis, people are running things more ad hoc, not necessarily in rigorous systems, the reporting was much more manual. And so we see that two taking place in the in the data lakes, the the ability to manage this type of reporting analytics, we build we grow and and then start to leverage that data. Excellent example and discussion there. robotic process automation, or RPA, is another area that that you’ve been working on, didn’t know if you had a ability to give us a quick thumbnail sketch of what do you use that for? How is that how is that working? How does that fit into not only your overall strategy, but where are you leveraging that most heavily in treasury?

 

Nicolas Garcia  24:28

A year ago or a little bit over that, you know, we started looking at at our processes, right and realize that a lot of these processes were just, you know, very intensive in terms of manual efforts, relied on spreadsheets a lot, require a lot of handoffs, and we’re very prone to where and they would just take time to execute. And then you know when you can add up all the hours spent So, in executing those processes, you realize, geez, you know, this is a very expensive process, and, you know, this person, you know, that’s an amazing accountant or, you know, expert on trading, and I have them just playing around with spreadsheets, there’s going to be a better way to do it. We started kind of outlining, okay, what are these processes that are just not efficient enough, what comes out of that review is that there are a lot of steps that are involved that are just very repetitive, that are also very rules based, right. I mean, there’s not a lot of, let’s say, human judgment required in order to execute. And so we started exploring, you know, tools out there to help solve this problem. And so, came up with with RPA, we use UiPath, there are other tools out there that are great. And they really help in automating those processes that are repetitive and rule based, right. And it really allows people to, to just basically stop doing that, you know, in reality, it’s very hard to remove entirely people from the processes, because you still want to maintain a decent amount of control and oversight, as well as even just for kind of backup purposes, you want to make sure that people you know, don’t forget what the process is about. But the truth is, a lot of things can be done by by these robots. You know, we looked at these processes, in many instances, we discovered that the processes themselves were kind of wonky. So we went kind of back to the drawing board. And okay, let’s let’s think about how this process actually needs to, to work. And with a few tweaks with with the few kind of decisions in terms of redesign, we come up with more streamlined processes with sections of them that are prone for automation. And so that’s where we layer in RPA. For example, processes that require every day banks are sending me X number of reports to my email, and literally, all I need to do is download those reports out of my inbox and type that into spreadsheets. Or that takes an hour every day, a bot can do that in like five minutes or less, you know, those type of activities, they’re very rule based and very sequential, are very easy to automate, basically, processes where there are a lot of hand handoffs of files that need to be moved from one system to another, or to one database to another and performs or checks or controls over those. Those are, you know, pieces of the process that are somewhat easy to automate. And that really save a lot of time. So so it’s been a journey, you know, again, we’ve only started working on these initiatives recently, I do think that we need to work more on rethinking the processes end to end. But once that works been done, and there’s a good understanding, and we feel good about how the process actually work, we’ve realized that there are just a lot of opportunities to to embed RPA. We’re currently saving, you know, a good number of hours for our people on a daily basis. And while there’s more work to do, we’re really excited about the potential of this technology.

 

Craig Jeffery  28:42

I have a couple of quick follow up questions that so who’s building the bots? Is that someone in treasury? Or is that another area that you’re working with? Someone in treasury is working with someone else to develop those?

 

Nicolas Garcia  28:53

Yeah, so So there’ll be in house in house. So you know, we kind of have a couple guys that got certified on UiPath recently, the tool is surprisingly easy to use, there is a learning curve. But people can learn to use it relatively quickly. And, you know, get on building bots. So we’re doing this internally at treasury, we still need to comply with some policies and some parameters out there to ensure that, you know, everything’s under control. But we’re building the bots ourselves.

 

Craig Jeffery  29:30

Yeah. So another question. So when we think about your point about understand the entire process, and using something like a bot versus perhaps a system that integrates the process has pre formatted pathways. How do you distinguish between a let’s let’s call it a more fully automated approach, and the use of bots, how do you make the cutover to say, we want to put this in a business process this sway, or we want to use a bot to streamline this, like, for example, those files from your emails, like you get these files they download, they need the data. How do you determine you let’s use a bot to get this done versus using SFTP, or an API, or some other method of getting that data? How do you make that cut off or that decision?

 

Nicolas Garcia  30:21

Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And I think the answer is, it depends on the use case, right? I think we’d have to evaluate each one separately. But in my experience, RPA is great when you’re working cross systems. And there’s no good connectivity in between them.  Let’s say, I have two systems. And there’s a great API that connects them both. Most likely, I’d say that’s not a good use case for RPA. Well, I’ll just do the API and do what I have to do in one system. But when I have to jump system to system, and what happens is that you have someone doing that manual manipulation of the information cross system, that’s where RPA is so valuable, because you can always think of, okay, let me deploy an API, but that is actually more complex, you probably need more specialized IT people to do something like that. With UiPath, you don’t need it people, you know, it takes like three weeks for a treasury person to get certified. Yeah, they have to like technology and all these kinds of things, they can start from zero. But it takes only a few weeks to get certified in something like this. And these type of processes, like moving information from one place to the other, or just clicking on let’s say, a web browser, right? Like, you open a web page, you click on three places, and then download something move that somewhere else. Well, I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways to automate that, but but there’s probably too much, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s probably bringing, you know, fighter jets to light up your your grill, you know, you there are ways to do that much faster. And I really think RPA is better suited for those type of activities. You know, the point you’re bringing, I think it’s very interesting, which is, well, how do you decide which technology to use, you know, apply for rpa, but it applies in general. And it’s, well, you have to have, you know, good good frameworks and good parameters and kind of rail guards to make sure that, you know, you’re really using the best possible technology for that particular problem. Because or else, you end up in a worse place that what you started with, and then now you have to maintain all these random systems created by so many people they break, nobody can, you know, troubleshoot them. And that’s probably worse at the end of the day. So there’s got to be a framework. But I would say that, you know, in our case, we’re careful about where we deploy our PA, but I think we were happy where we are

 

Craig Jeffery  33:05

Good explanation. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the fighter jet lighting a grill. But that’s a vivid image, right? I know, people use examples of like, you don’t need a laser to cut a tomato, right? It’s like, there’s, there’s a million of these handoffs. And it’s great to say future state, we’ll use API’s everywhere, or streaming, you know, streaming connectivity using Kafka or whatever. There’s so much to be done. And it takes a while. And this is a great tool to move forward. So really, really good example. Thanks for let me poke at at some of the nuances because it’s good to be talking to tech experts. I know we wanted to talk about cash flow forecasting, but we’re going to need to, you know, move to final thoughts, any final thoughts or advice, as people look to add value through treasury technology at their organizations, any key point that you would want to make sure that is left in their minds?

 

Nicolas Garcia  33:57

Sure, I think everybody’s getting more tech savvy, digital, and that just kind of a fancy term out there. But everybody’s talking about it. They’re just so many tools. These days, technology advances so quickly. And it’s hard to make sense of all that, you know, and also, it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest. It’s hard. There’s just so many amazing products out there that do so many amazing things. And then as well, how do you pick and choose? As a final thoughts? What I want to share is, you need a strategy, you need to have some core statements around, you know, what are those principles for, for deploying technology, right, where are those priority areas? Right? How do you evaluate new technologies, etc. I think that’s important. The second component is well, you need people you know, and and, you know, in my case So, my role is very focused on technology. But I’d say that most of the best ideas don’t come from people that are only doing technology. You know, it’s, it’s people in the business, you know, working through multiple types of processes, and they are coming with great ideas, with creative approaches and how to do things. And I think that’s what’s important is ensure that the people you work with, they’re all knowledgeable about technology, people are informed people have a good understanding of what’s out there. Because I think that’s helpful in ensuring people understand what’s what’s possible, and then come back with ideas. And so, you know, I see myself also as responsible for making sure that the people stay somewhat up to date with what’s going on, being able to share what’s the latest in the treasury technology landscape, and ensuring people that are aware that so so it’s not just kind of a treasury technology kind of thing, but making sure that people understand what are some of the capabilities that exists. Finally, I’d say it’s about having a mindset in which you’re allowed to, to try things, maybe some things don’t work out perfectly. Having leaders that understand, you know, it takes time to build things, there’s a little bit of trial and error, getting things to work perfectly, it’s always challenging that back and forth is is acceptable. And in this world, you know, thinking in terms or, you know, a good way to think about it is kind of through the agile approach in which you build small things and then kind of scale from that. It’s a positive mindset to have because it allows to keep moving forward, really bring new things to the table. And don’t expect that you know, one single technology is going to solve all your problems, but really thinking more incrementally, thinking about you know, innovation driven by multiple people as opposed to just the department head.

 

Craig Jeffery  37:05

Excellent. Thank you so much, Nicolas. Really appreciate your time.

 

Announcer  37:12

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