Deidre Cusack of Dematic shares key lessons from business mentors, and how she sees automation and customer behavior evolving supply chain.

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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I’m Danny Gonzales, and today I’m joined by Dee Cusack who is the chief technology officer at Dematic. Dee, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Dee:

– Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Danny:

– Well the pleasure’s all mine here. I’m very excited. For the audience who’s watching, we had a very lively pre-recorded discussion that we’re going to wrap in, and I’m excited to get into it. For those who are unfamiliar with Dematic right now, who’s Dematic, and what do you guys do?

Dee:

– Dematic is part of the KION Group. Dematic has actually been in existence for 203 years, and we are essentially the engine that goes behind ecommerce. We do supply chain automation, started in the early years with simple machines like conveyors and racking and so forth. Today we really are a very complex solution provider, full integrator in the supply chain automation space with obviously a big impact on software and robotics and all the latest technology. That’s what we do.

Danny:

– Excellent. Well ecommerce has done nothing but absolutely exploded. It was a huge growth trend before this thing called Covid came along, but then certainly afterwards it’s just been this massive explosion. I’m sure that we’re going to get into some more of the insights and different things that are happening in the industry with that a little later on in the episode. Right now I would love to get to know a little bit more about you. I’d like to know more about Dee. Dee, tell me, how did you get into this space? Take me back. Is this something that you said, “Hey,” —maybe when you were a kid? “I want to go into supply chain; I want to get into the technology space.” How did this all come about?

Dee:

– I’d love to say that I had this vision when I was four, but that would be stretching it a little bit.

Danny:

– You were six. Okay, I got it.

Dee:

– No, but I started my career in R&D. I have a couple of engineering degrees, and I’ve always been interested in how to apply technology into markets, and particularly market niches to help a business grow in a rapid and profitable way. I started my career in R&D. I then went into business development, and then more on managing entire businesses, P&Ls that were global for a variety of different markets. I did that for about 20 years and decided to come back to my roots a little bit more. A friend of mine, a colleague of mine that I used to work with called me up and said, “Look, there’s this wonderful company that I’m working with called Dematic; we’d love for you to come in and look at some of the opportunities.” And so the opportunity to go and lead the technology in a meaningful way, particularly with the software that the company had and to really develop a strategy to help the company grow in a sustainable way but also bring our solutions to the next level was really compelling for me. As I started to learn more about the company and the industry, I started to get more and more excited about it. And just coincidentally, you said ecommerce exploding, I joined Dematic just about the time that the lockdown started with Covid. I can tell you, it’s been an exciting ride, really trying to keep up with the pace of the market but also the changing demands in the marketplace since being part of Dematic. I just can’t say enough good things about the industry, the company, and some of the path forward and what’s coming ahead.

Danny:

– Wow, it’s fascinating that you jumped on right before Covid. What a time to jump into a company like Dematic at that time because we know that trends were clearly pushing towards ecommerce and the need for automation, robotics, AI; all this technology was coming in. There was a need for it and a clear growth trend, but then certainly thereafter, I mean, nuts. It just went crazy. So lockdowns were in March; you started in February, March-ish?

Dee:

– I started in March; that’s right.

Danny:

– Oh, my gosh.

Dee:

– Just about the time that the lockdown started so as you said, a lot of the trends were present before Covid, but what happened with our customer base was that everything got accelerated. The need for, how do you work? Everyone was putting demand on ecommerce, and people were working remotely, so we had to figure out how to do a lot of things remotely that we used to do in person, at the same time enabling new capabilities for our customers so that they could then service their customers. It was a very challenging but very fun time to be part of the business. You had to be very agile, very nimble in terms of your thinking. I mentioned earlier, Dematic is 203 years old. We’ve been doing certain pieces of the business for a long time, but it was a very conservative business. Now all of a sudden you interject this crisis, and now people need to apply their thinking in a slightly different way. It was really exciting to see it come together.

Danny:

– Absolutely. Well, and slightly, and then in other areas completely radically different. As you mentioned, it was interesting; internally from an organizational standpoint, having that thinking shifted, and you mentioned–the whole work from home idea and how do we transition that? But at the same time, in an industry where your customers are—how do we shift that for them as well, and then also oh, by the way, I think the numbers were saying in 2020, ecommerce growing by 40%. You have segments that have never really done this, or they were starting to pilot programs, and then said, “We have to accelerate this.” Exhilarating to say the least.

Dee:

– It was; it was. But I would say one of the cornerstones of Dematic has always been an entrepreneurial spirit, so I think everyone approached it in the way of, well, how can we make it work? China is still closed to a lot of travel externally, so a lot of things that were normal ways of doing business, we had to find different ways to accomplish the same criteria. How do you lend expertise? Now you do it virtually. Now, people start seeing on the screen the same picture, but through virtual goggles. It was just a different way of experiencing it. It taught everyone how to be a little bit more creative in terms of how do you accomplish a task?

Danny:

– Absolutely. I love how you said the entrepreneurial spirit. That’s something that’s not—when you talk about bigger organizations, corporations they tend to trend opposite, actually the exact opposite of that. I think that’s definitely a great silver lining of something we’ve learned, but that was already part of the culture to begin with. There was a lot of insights and innovations that came because of that that was already instilled in the culture. I don’t want to dwell too far too long on the whole Covid change and everything. I’d like to learn a little bit more, too, about you and your background. One of the questions that I love hearing answers from executives is just the—throughout your career journey you’ve obviously seen a lot. We were just talking about, obviously, some big changes. Throughout your journey, typically there’s a lot of people that have big influences on your career, both positive and negative. We’re going to focus on the positive side. Could you share a story of somebody that has made a measurable impact in your career? I know there’s a lot, probably. Maybe if there’s just one, I’ll even say two that come to mind that you can share with me.

Dee:

– Sure. So many people have had an impact on me in a positive way, and I tend personally to always look at an experience and try to learn something from it. Even just sitting in a conference room, I’ll look at who’s effective and who’s not effective with what they’re doing, and I’ll try to learn from the people that are effective, but also from the people that aren’t effective. I think as this is going on, and I replay it later on–– which is, how can I apply some of those same learnings to me? One person that I’ll call out—and I could call out 10 easily without thinking about it—was a leader of mine. I worked for him while I was at ABB. I worked for him for a number of years. He was masterful at not only the way that he interacted with customers, but the way that he interacted with people in general. If you met him, you would say he just enjoys people, and he’s so effective at building teams and building common alignment around the people. He was such a positive influence with me, and one day I said to him, “Not everyone has your same gift to go up and to compel an audience with such ease. It just comes so naturally to you, and you’re just so good at it.” And he said to me, “Yeah, what you didn’t see is last night in my hotel room, I was practicing for six hours.” He basically taught me through a number of different lessons as I learned with him watching how he really helped align his teams. These were all pretty strong leaders that all had very unique ideas, but what he taught me was, this doesn’t happen—nobody gets there by accident. What it takes is hard work and alignment and really getting the right people and understanding how they can work effectively together. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned through playing sports as a kid and so forth. He really brought it home and applied it in also a corporate environment where, again, there are people who are good at it; he was masterful at it. He had a tremendous—and he also was the most giving person. I had a women’s network that I had started at ABB, and I had asked him to participate in this network a couple of times, b

Episode ID: 1000583501007

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Release Date: 22/10/2022, 05:00:02