Logan Ensign: 1:52
Zach Horton, welcome to Shelf Life. Good to have you. Thank you so much for having me, Logan, To get us started here. Zach, for the folks listening, we'd just love to hear more about your background and what you're up to today.
Zach Horton: 2:05
Absolutely. I have an interesting background. Today I'm leading a supply chain team in a startup environment, but before that, you know, some of my passions are actually in creative fields. I went to school for photography. Really enjoyed that time of my life, had my own small photography business for multiple years and you know, kind of going back, my mother was a painter and grown up in a creative environment. So really just think creatively and always trying to find solutions for different situations that come up.
Joel Beal:: 2:32
Well, that doesn't sound like your typical supply chains background, although, zach, I would say in my experience very few people have almost traditional backgrounds. In the space, we see a lot of people with certainly a variety of skill sets and backgrounds. Curious how in the world did you go from the arts to supply chain?
Zach: 2:52
Yeah, you're totally right, joel. I think a lot of people fall into supply chain logistics For me. I joined Ember at a time when we needed customer service support, so that was my very first role was customer service boots on the ground, really listening to customers, fielding questions and really taking in what their feedback was, and at the time, we didn't really have a logistics team. This is way back in 2016, 2017. For me, I was always interested in kind of the A to B, the movements, making sure that our customers were getting things fast. Back then, it was really when Amazon was starting to be extremely competitive in how fast they could deliver goods to customers, so we always had that in the back of our minds how can we take things to customers fast, whether it was response times, emailing customers, but also getting them their orders?
Zach 3:37
Also, at the time of the company, we were learning what our customers wanted, what they didn't like, what they liked. So, taking that feedback, a lot of customers were sending us products and saying, hey, try this. Or reporting different issues that they were experiencing, and kind of the youth of our product too. It was really important for us to take that to heart, and so one of the first things I was doing while I was on the CX team was really taking in customer returns, reading through the reported issues and diagnosing the product and trying to figure out what was wrong with it and, you know, creatively, like kind of just like taking the mug apart, looking at the printed circuit boards and, you know, getting really specific about what the actual problem was.
Zach: 4:15
I'll be completely honest, a lot of the things I was taking from really really smart electrical engineers didn't always understand it, but I knew what to do to kind of, you know, check a box and make sure that it was you know A or B issue. So it was fun and in reporting through that, I think you know, at the time we had a young COO who was looking at people across the company for opportunities and he saw me kind of tracking these issues and really, you know, organizing what was going on and he said, you know, look, I want to give you a shot. We need logistic support, we need to kind of build a supply chain that can support a global presence At the time it was just the US. So he gave me a chance and really hooked me up with a great team of leaders at a 3PL that we still use today, and that was kind of the start.
Logan: 4:57
What stage was the company as all this was going on?
Zach: 5:00
I assume it was pretty early, Super early you early, less than $1 million revenue at the time. Brand new, Our first product was in the market for six, seven months at the time. So we were really trying to take as much input from customers and clients and things as we could to try to apply that at a later stage.
Logan: 5:19
And at that point were you selling purely online.
Zach: 5:22
It was online. We did have a footprint within Starbucks stores back in 2016, 2017. So that was really like our domestic US retail opening was Starbucks. We were in at the time. It was 5,600 Starbucks stores across the house. Yeah.
Logan: 5:38
Okay, so Starbucks online. And were you the only person doing kind of that support function when you started? Yeah, we had four total support people.
Zach: 5:47
So I was kind of veering off and doing the shipping related issues and customer feedback related product diagnostics. So we all kind of had our little hat within the CX team.
Logan: 5:58
I find people are quite fascinated with the startup environment and what that means. I think sometimes that gets romanticized on something that's so exciting and you're building as you go and so much opportunity. But would love to just hear from you your experience at a company with a fast growth trajectory, kind of what was that ride like and what's it been like for you?
Zach: 6:20
Yeah, it was amazing, like something that it's hard to compare to, you know, talking to friends or colleagues that aren't here anymore and just kind of validating you know what's. What are things like out there in the market. You know, back when I joined the company, I was coming out of a job that I really didn't like. I was bagging groceries and just trying to get a paycheck, you know, to be completely honest, and it was a time where I was just kind of grinding. So when the opportunity came up, I didn't really care what I was going to do at Ember, but I had met the people and I had met, you know, some of the leadership and it was just super exciting. So I was like you know I was, I was jazzed to join, just to be a part of the group of people.
Zach: 6:57
And then, over time, over really the first year, first two years, you get to know who's across the table from you and what really kind of inspired me was everyone's working super hard. Everyone has a ton of trust and really you feel engaged to work hard because you know the people around you are also in the same boat. We're all grinding towards the same end goal and so it wasn't isolating or anything like that. Everyone was kind of all hands on deck, rowing the boat in the same direction. So that's kind of the culture that that we've, you know, had for for many years now and continuing to kind of move in the right direction with just an outstanding amount of trust and, and you know, great people around. So it's fun to come to work.
Joel: 7:39
So what kind of person does really well in that environment?
Zach: 7:45
I think that the biggest thing one of my favorite you know made up acronyms to use is FIO. Figure it out, and I tell my team that today. And it's really just like don't wait for someone to give you direction. If you have an idea, bring it to the table, try something, you know, don't be afraid to fail, take a little bit of a risk. Obviously there's boundaries to that, but if you take a risk and you kind of have this, you know forgiveness, mindset, you can always say sorry after the fact. You know you're really going to succeed in a startup environment. And mindset, just because there are always too many things to do, the to do list is never going to be finished and we also don't really know what we need until it's too late. And so, like proactive, you know you're trying things ahead of time, you're kind of testing and learning before it's. It's really critical that we have that solution, you know, whatever it might be across departments. So I think, just go, getters willing to kind of step outside the boundaries.
Joel: 8:39
And as you've grown, have you continued to bring in people that I guess have backgrounds I don't want to say like you, but a diverse set of backgrounds, people that don't necessarily have a deep understanding of planning or logistics or these different functions or have you started to bring in people that have some of that, and so now it's a mix of both. How?
Zach: 8:58
has that looked? It's a good question. I'm going to answer this two parts. One will be very honest and one will be a little bit more political, but I think we've always looked for the same character traits, right, so someone you can trust, someone who's willing to be proactive and not wanting to wait for someone a leader, a manager to tell them do this, this and this. You can't really have handholding to be successful because we're just flying a million miles a minute handholding to be successful because we're just flying a million miles a minute.
Zach: 9:31
I think there's another layer of this which we've brought in leadership and middle managers with tons of experience from the likes of Apple, best Buys, the targets of the world. And it's interesting actually how it doesn't always translate to success, because we don't follow the process every time, and there are times when it's important not to follow the process because we just have to go get it done. And it's a really interesting balance of we're trying to grow out of the startup, but then there's still processes we don't have. So you have to kind of create them and it's not perfect for sure, but finding those people that are willing to just go for it and bring it up. And there's a saying you know say the thing, don't be afraid to hurt feelings.
Zach: 10:08
It's not personal and just be really honest and open, and I think that's been. There's a really strong core group of people at Ember who are willing to be honest without you know having thick, having thick skin and not, you know, worried about the emotions of it. We kind of say that, too, a lot of times in meetings. It's not personal, you got to get this done. These are the facts and let's figure it out together, but always a very strong team, team mindset.
Joel: 10:33
Yeah, we can appreciate that, being a startup ourselves, and that transition, as you're bringing in experience that can be so valuable at times, and other times, as you said, you kind of say, hey, there's a scrappiness that exists and we're not always doing it by the book, if you will. So I think that that's a transition that every company has to go through.
Logan: 10:54
And joining. When you did in the role that you did in kind of customer service, customer experience. It's probably fun to look back and recognize. You probably had a pretty big impact on the success of the company and on the products that you built, and so I'm always interested to hear about you know you talk about the voice of the customer and how you integrate that in at Ember. Could you speak a little bit more about that customer feedback, listening to the customer and your personal experience and how that helped, but also more generally how it's helped Ember get where they are today personal experience and how that helped but also more generally, how it's helped Ember get where they are today.
Zach: 11:26
Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, the customer is everything to a business like Ember. It's a consumer product. It's very giftable, so the word of mouth is very powerful. So someone that buys Ember loves it, often buys it for a significant other, a family member, a friend. So it's critical for us to have that relationship with our customers.
Zach: 11:46
But I think starting when I did it just gave me a foundation to understand the product. Because I was tearing them down, taking them apart, I knew what worked, what didn't work well. So going into the supply chain side of things and getting into the details of procurement and manufacturing and knowing what to watch out for was really helpful. It's been a fun ride, but I would not be where I am today without having started in customer service. I'm a huge advocate for, like I've always said, everyone should do customer service for an hour a week because you just get such a good baseline of what customers are saying, what people want. But also just the communication too goes a long way for the customer. So we've always been very proactive in communication, whether it's a product launch, whether it's just responding within six hours. You know things like that where people are often waiting. We've all had those tougher communications with companies in the CX world that you're kind of waiting, you're not sure, and so we've tried to mitigate that as much as we can.
Joel: 12:43
Yeah, we've all called into these customer service lines and reached out. How has the feedback that you've gotten? How has that influenced? You know, ember, I'm curious. I mean, does that impact when you think about product development? Does it impact other things?
Zach: 12:57
Yeah, definitely. I think the product is our bread and butter and so listening to customers using the product, applying it in their daily lives, we've learned a lot. I will say, like, original product design was really about enhancing your life and using it to the best application that you have. But like a couple examples I'll say first, like mothers heating up coffee and kind of running around in the morning with kids and not having to kind of worry about like I really wanted that moment to last longer with my coffee, things like that. But then when customers give us feedback, being a design-led company, depending on the situation, the product, the roadmap, there's times when we can apply it right away and there's times when, okay, that might be a year or two years down the line, and it's been fun to see what people will give us feedback about. And sometimes it's as simple as, hey, we want two lids in the box just to have options, and that's pretty simple, right, it's a plastic mold, you can kind of implement that pretty quickly. Sometimes it's hey, I want my 48-ounce Stanley thermos that also heats up, and there's power limitations, right. So you can't always do what the customer wants, but we've listened to customers.
Zach: 14:08
One of our newest products is the tumblers. That's a 16 ounce version. People always over the years ask for just more size and want a little bit bigger. But it's been fun to learn too from you know, the engineering side. There's clear limitations around what we can do safely with the battery inside of the product, heating and just the electricity output. Some of the technology has really advanced over the years, so it's given us a little bit more runway into bigger size, more capacity, longer life all those things which are really all stem from what customers have said and wanted, so it's been fun to see that growth.
Logan: 14:43
When you all kind of took the market by storm with your mugs. This isn't actually by design, but with these things here, right? So what we've also seen from Ember is actually a pretty significant expansion of the product lines outside of mugs, and I think that's been really interesting to see from afar. So you've moved from mugs into baby products, right? Could you talk a little bit about how that has worked, how maybe you were incorporating customer feedback and what you've learned about what works and what doesn't?
Zach: 15:15
Absolutely. I think that one of the better things about Ember is that there's a lot of patents that cover the portfolio of different products that we can apply the similar technology to whether it's heating, cooling, those types of things. So there's a broad amount of protection, let's say, and so we've tinkered with different ideas. But coffee is something that Americans drink every day, right In the morning. It's a safe space and I think, going into different markets and different products, it's been fun to think about the different iterations that we've gone through.
Zach: 15:47
Baby bottles is a huge one and so we launched the baby bottle earlier this year and we've learned a ton. It's a totally different market, it's a different customer, it's obviously a different application of the product. I think that what gave us a lot of confidence in this year. The baby bottle has been developed over the last four to five years. So it's been in the works for a while, first product in the market, second product in the market.
Zach: 16:12
We did have some quality issues and we knew at the time it wasn't safe, let's say, to bring a baby bottle to the market, because it's a totally different level of quality and it's always been a top priority of members is to maintain quality.
Zach: 16:26
So learning through those mug coffee products, bringing the baby bottle to market was at a point where we're ultimately confident it's a safe product. It can be used in many different applications, whether the person's at their home, traveling. So quality was number one. But I think, just again, going back to enhancing that experience not having to rush in the morning, or, I will say, one of the most interesting and I don't have children, but we've learned from customers that you know, testing the warmth of, you know, the milk or the formula has been kind of a put it on your wrist, you know kind of application Does it feel too hot? And so there was never any technology behind validating the actual temperature and so knowing and trusting that it's going to be perfect body temperature every time very consistent was kind of fun for us to test through different market studies and people really bought into it. So we're really excited about the baby products. I think it's going to be a big game changer, different market, for us in the long term.
Logan: 17:24
Oh, and in some ways it does sound like. Of course the technology has a lot of similarities and it plays to your strengths, but different consumers potentially and also, I'd imagine, a burden to sell through, maybe different channels, different supply chain challenges how all of you kind of navigated that. Have you had to find new partners from a wholesale perspective? Adjusted kind of logistics supply chain? What does that look like? Adjusted kind of logistics supply chain what does that look like with this kind of second major product launch? Yeah, I appreciate that.
Zach: 17:52
I think, definitely from a supply chain perspective, the procurement quality becomes a higher priority, even if we were prioritizing that before, with all of the BPA testing and depending on different states, and so there's a lot of complications around.
Zach: 18:06
You know the actual materials and the plastics and things like that that moms rightfully so, are checking well before they buy anything and making sure that they're buying a quality product, Whereas if you look at our mugs they do have plastic in them and we weren't worried about the BPAs because you're not really coming into contact with the plastics. So it's been fun to release the baby bottle with truly a BPA-free product, regardless of what the materials are in there. So that's been fun, I think, from a distribution standpoint. Some of the same customers don't. Some of our retailers are very tech-driven but they might not have a baby space, so it's been fun to see the best buys, the targets, you know kind of lean back and forth a little bit to say where can we kind of fit this in, and most times they're bought into the product, they're brought into the company. It's more of just a placement and how do we kind of market this in the best way to our customers?
Joel: 19:00
What have you seen there? Has it been consistent? Because you're right. I mean, is this sitting more in the technology part of the store or is this placed next to baby it?
Joel: 19:09
is or a new vertical baby tech, which is going to be very exciting.
Zach: 19:12
Yeah, baby tech for sure and hopefully we kind of kick that off and start. You know there's a lot of different monitors and things like that out there, but I'll go back to when we first launched with Apple. This is our global distribution with the mugs, so this is back in 2018. And part of it was we learned Apple to work with a very high-end customer like Apple a lot of trust in the consumer market.
Zach: 19:37
Apple stores want your product to be part of the ecosystem, right. So the health kit how do you connect it to the phones and how does it kind of operate together? And so with the baby product, it's a great example of it's all part of Apple's ecosystem. But Apple's a very sticky customer where they don't want to sell too many third-party products in their stores but having it influenced by all the Apple products and applications and things like that, so you can track the feeding, you can report to your doctors, you can do all that data analysis within the ecosystem of Apple that they're totally bought into.
Zach: 20:10
It's been interesting to see that and, going back to, we wouldn't have learned about the ecosystem without having the coffee products with Apple first, and it just depends. I think the price point is a little bit different as well. So, depending on what retailer it is or what customer is different placement and kind of priority within stores. Obviously, at the end of the day it's all about sales, but also having kind of a trusted and well-known brand, you know, in line at stores is really important for a lot of these big retailers.
Joel: 20:38
I assume you also have a customer that's doing quite a bit of research before buying. I mean, you talked about the reference aspect of it, which makes sense. You know it's a product people find. They get excited about it, they gift it or tell someone, but it's a somewhat new type of product, as Logan mentioned. At the beginning. You pioneered this space, so I'm curious how that looks, if you're able to track that. Are people researching online and buying in store? I? I mean, I'm sure there's still a lot of online sales as well yeah, it's, it's been fun.
Zach: 21:10
I think the the really big part for ember is, let's be honest, it's an expensive product the coffee products. It's an expensive coffee mug, it's an expensive baby bottle. We've really pushed to show the value of that purchase. It's not necessarily the product, it's's the time saving, it's the enhancement to your daily life, and so it's more selling that value to the customer versus just buying a consumable product that you're going to use every once in a while. You're using that every day and we're showing that value. I think that, going back to testing and learning and seeing how customers are clicking through our website, what they're looking for there's a great amount of data from Google, seo and how we can trace it. So our marketing team has always been partnered at the hip with sales and with operations to make sure that we're getting their feedback, they're getting our feedback, and so it's a huge collaboration. We have to know what customers are wanting and how they're kind of operating amongst the World Wide Web today, which has grown to be pretty substantial in all of our lives.
Logan: 22:12
So, absolutely top of a lot of people's mind right now is how do you forecast based on historics? Right now, we had a global pandemic. We now are trying to make sense of what's happening next and I think you have a great vantage being in the space. So we'd be curious can you talk a little bit about how you think about forecasting and planning and how you've sought to kind of improve forecasting at Ember? We'd love to hear more about that.
Zach: 22:48
Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is critical to many businesses forecasting, you know, done products, consumables, but also just services and different kind of genres of planning. I think Ember has learned a lot and, I'll be honest, we were not good at planning in the early years. We were guessing and and, a lot of times, building too little, and so we were really conservative with our forecasting. Before taking over demand planning, we always needed more inventory, so it was always a supply chain issue. It was always an inventory issue. That was the problem and the one thing we all know about a forecast it's never going to be right. So how far away you stray from it is really what matters. So last year 2022, following the pandemic, which was a huge spike for many e-commerce brands, we had to really tune up the process and really bring in a sales and operations planning process to the table, making sure teams are involved, able to deliver feedback, and it really took weekly meetings on different parts of the business to get that collaboration, get that communication, going, and so I think communication is at the baseline of planning and making sure you have the right inputs. I think, too, the accountability is a big part of it, so having a person, a team accountable for inputs and accountable for providing a forecast, providing marketing assets or anything really. It's a matter of getting those inputs in a very consistent way so you can compare week over week, month to month.
Zach: 24:18
Really, what I've learned this year is that consumer demand drives everything. So for a brand like Ember, our revenue is based on the deliveries to the customer. But if we just stuff any retail channel with inventory, it's not selling. It's going to be a one-time purchase, and so understanding consumer demand has been at the baseline of our forecasting patterns for the last couple of years. So we report and track every single week a forecast and an actual number against what consumers are purchasing at a target, at a Best Buy. We're not getting revenue off that, but we need to know that information to make sure that our planning for sell-in is really validated and proven, that we're giving them the right amount of inventory, we're encouraging the retailer to buy at the right times, and so it's given even our retail partners and planning teams on the other side a lot of information as far as we're kind of projecting 13 weeks out.
Zach: 25:12
A lot of these big retailers are kind of short-sighted, so it's been important for them to see how far we're looking at building trust in those relationships as well. So now, when we encourage a retailer to purchase for a list of reasons, it's not just out of left field, it's really proven and validated. This is why we've seen this last year, and the historicals are a huge, huge part of it as well. But every year is different. Especially the last couple of years have been very different. So it's an ebb and flow. For sure. I think it's been a blast. But the economy, you know, obviously has been a challenge this year. So trying to project that is near impossible, but we're trying to. You know, kind of 80, 20 rule, right, you want to be as close as you can be. Can't be perfect, unfortunately.
Joel: 25:55
And were you the first person to kind of kick off more of a formal planning process internally.
Zach: 26:01
So I was spearheading the S&OP process at Ember last year and so it was a really kind of a milestone for us. Before that it was, you know, demand planning was part of sales and so there really wasn't this healthy headbutt that you need to kind of validate and prove. So it's been fun and I think having a positive mindset in those conversations make them less hard. You don't have to. You're not pointing the finger at anybody, it's just we've got to be realistic as a team, and so having the S&OP process has been really fun and encouraging for even sales team members to know we're not far off, we're close, and if there's risks or opportunities, everybody's aware, so there's no confusion. One of my biggest goals as a team leader is just to avoid surprise, and so if you can avoid surprise, you can all work on the solution together. You can all work to chase opportunities together and push things forward.
Joel: 26:54
And what does your S&OP process look like? I mean, it seems to look a little different at every company you came and implemented it. I'm curious, you know kind of, yeah, what's a rough outline of how you?
Zach: 27:04
run it. Yeah, there's so many variations, right, I think. As a small company we have a pretty small team, and so we didn't want to do a 12-step process. We kind of honed in on the four key areas that we needed to inform the company. So we start every month with a weekly demand review. We're typically releasing a demand plan in the first week of the month. What's changed? Has anything come up?
Zach: 27:29
Sales is providing their inputs as far as all the customer communications. That ultimately provides the input to supply, to go bring it to the manufacturing teams. Procurement can we build it? Can we get the inventory in time? So week two is a supply review, which is just supply chain on the manufacturing side, and so we kind of look at this is what sales is saying, what can we do right? Can we make it happen?
Zach: 27:48
When we have those two conversations, we kind of bring in a third week of every month back to sales and it's kind of an integrated planning review. So you sales, you asked for this. We talked to our manufacturing partners and brought our procurement team in. We can achieve 90% of it Right, and so there's this kind of back and forth with well, we need to make sure, we support and we totally understand that there's obviously limitations at every step of the way, every company. So that's the third week.
Zach: 28:16
We're kind of doing that integrated back and forth. Sometimes we call it allocations If there's finite inventory, where do we want to put it? And we let sales hold accountability for that. We don't want to make decisions for them. More of a collaboration.
Zach: 28:31
Fourth week of the month is really to update any executives and making sure that the executive team is ultimately signing off on inventory purchasing and so our supply plan and our POs that go out to our suppliers, but also that they're aware with our trajectory, whether it's revenue, profitability, on-time deliveries, performance all those metrics are provided at the end of every month, kind of looking back a little bit but also looking forward, typically anywhere from, you know, 12 to 18 months pretty accurately at this point. So it's been a learning experience for myself but also our team as a whole. And you know, I think we've grown quite a bit and and that's kind of thinking about growing out of the startup a little bit more process oriented, have these consistent meetings. It's cadenced and so we can kind of follow that trust that we can talk next week. We've got a plan for it, so it's been great.
Logan: 29:21
Well, zach, you may not have grown up in supply chain, but I think you said earlier S&OP that process has been really fun. So I think that you were built for supply chain, because I don't know if everybody would share that sentiment, but it sounds like you guys have really matured that process. I'll say today it's very hard to talk about forecasting and planning without also talking about AI right, ai applications today to improve that. But also, hey, what is the future of planning as AI technologies develop and are adopted? So we'd love to hear from you just your point of view on how AI is implemented today at Ember and how you think about it, but also just from your vantage, how it's going to change things over the next five, 10 years.
Zach: 30:08
I think AI is I relate it to like the ocean or space, right, we've only discovered and kind of explored a very small percentage two, 3% of what it can do. And thinking about it from a consumer perspective, there's definitely the inputs and the different platforms. You can kind of test and try different things and, you know, use algorithms to think for you. It's interesting Ember does not currently apply much AI. We've done some quirky things of what are Ember's 10 values and ask questions like that, which have been really interesting and surprising how much they align with what our targets are. But I think consumer products everyone today has a phone in their pocket and so how can that learn? I think Tesla is a good example of their cars, like taking photos of the roads and kind of building up a catalog over time of value and data. Our phones are doing the same thing. We're constantly kind of tracked in locations and you could track consumer purchasing habits. You could track where are people going, how are people going, how are people getting there with some of the AI stuff. So I'm really interested.
Zach: 31:14
I think over the next five to 10 years it's going to explode and right now it might feel a little bit foreign for me personally, to be honest, and I think 10 years from now we'll look back and kind of remember hey, you remember when chat GPT came out and we were all asking funny questions. But it'll be much more integrated in work life, kind of across the board. You know, I'm hopeful that it doesn't take away jobs. I think there's still the human aspect of oversight and decision making at times. But it could be really really interesting and curious to hear you know, joel and Logan, both your feedback on you know curious to hear you know, joel and Logan, both your feedback on you know Alloy being such a key software for us and how can it really apply to the future of planning and forecasting and data driven approach.
Logan: 31:58
Yeah, you know, I think we're all trying to figure this out, I guess a little bit together. And you know, if you look at the trends in AI, a couple of years ago it was all about machine learning and how that can be applied really more to forecasting models, at least in our space. But, as you mentioned you know the topic the last 6-12 months has all been on the more generative AI and you know, I think over the years what I've seen is there's kind of this idea of I'm going to wake up in the morning and I want AI to like tell me what I should do. It's like these are the three things you should work on today and for a long time. I mean, the machine learning models didn't didn't help with that. You know they could help you build maybe a more accurate forecast and things of that nature.
Logan: 32:41
But yeah, it's kind of once we, if you layer generative AI on top of a lot of the things that we have, I mean it's pretty darn good at being able to summarize what it's seeing. So it will be interesting. I mean, I think of it as it's kind of going to be all of our analytical assistant that they're on the side. I think we're still going to have to drive, but it's hopefully going to remove a lot of that busy work, that the combing through spreadsheets, and it can hopefully highlight some of the key things to kind of dive more into. But it will be interesting to see it play out. We're doing some exciting things internally, trying different things, and I you know, as you said at the very beginning, when it's it's like we're all in this big startup, it's a lot of trial, there's a lot of error, you know we go down the wrong directions, but then there's some really cool things that that we're all discovering and I think that's going to get flushed out here in the coming year or two.
Logan: 33:34
We have another podcast with Lhasa, our head of engineering, talking about this concept right, but I think AI it's a means to an ends right, and so you need the technology, the AI technology, but you also need the data and you also need the right application right, and so there are certain applications that we feel like really benefit from AI, and I think, envision it really accelerating a lot of things. But you typically in the equation, also need the underpinning correct data as well as the technology to make that happen. So, anyway, it's a fascinating topic and I think it's going to be a developing story. Well, zach, we really appreciate you putting the time aside to meet with us and thank you for joining us on Shelf Life.
Zach: 34:23
Yeah, it's been fantastic. Thank you, joel. Thank you Logan. I appreciate the time as well. It's great to get to know you guys and I wish you the best and continued partnership. All things, thanks.
Logan: 34:32
Zach, appreciate it. You've been listening to Zach Horton, senior Director of Logistics, supply and Demand Planning at Ember. That's all for this week. See you next time on Shelf Life.