Maneet Singh Of Odyssey Logistics On What We Must Do To Create Nationally Secure And Resilient Supply Chains

An Interview With David Leichner

We need to diversify our sources. The pandemic taught us that it’s not sustainable to have only one place to get critical materials. A resilient supply chain would be able to plug in several source alternatives if a primary source failed.

The cascading logistical problems caused by the pandemic and the war in Eastern Europe, have made securing a reliable supply chain a national imperative. In addition, severe cyberattacks like the highly publicized Colonial pipeline attack, have brought supply chain cybersecurity into the limelight. So what must manufacturers and policymakers do to ensure that we have secure and resilient supply chains? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights from their experiences about how we can address these challenges. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maneet Singh.

Maneet Singh is the Chief Information Officer at Odyssey Logistics, based in Charlotte. He has over 20 years of experience in IT, with responsibilities spanning strategy, project delivery, M&A, risk management and leading global teams. As CIO, Maneet is responsible for Odyssey’s technology and cybersecurity strategy, managing global IT operations, and leading major IT transformation projects to support the company’s strategic growth initiatives.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I was born and raised in a small, remote village in India. To give you a sense of life there — they only recently have access to electricity. My father was the first engineer to come out of that village. I was the second, 30 years later. My grandparents were farmers, but they had a vision. They believed in education. And any money they could save, they put towards their children.

My parents had the same idea. When my father got his job, we moved to a small industrial town that had a major focus on education. I remember our town was way over-represented in attendance at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. It was the kind of school where there were 400,000 applicants each year across the nation but only 2,000 got in. Our little town always had about 40 kids at that school. I got in, and my bachelor’s degree was in metallurgy. My first job was at a steel plant, working with a big blast furnace that ran at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually, I moved into IT — where there’s air conditioning! And since then I have gone through several changes throughout my career, but the constant factor has been learning and adapting to new things — be it technology or people.

I was steeped in a culture of learning starting at a young age, both in my family life and in the world around me.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

After moving from India to the States, I did my MBA in St. Louis. At the end of the program, there was a case study competition where we formed a team and mock run a company. They hand out profiles for each company, and you and your team get to choose one — each company had specific strengths and weaknesses. I was the CEO, and I chose this company that had the most terrible fundamentals. It had been doing poorly for years but it had the most customers. My intuition said if we have the customers and we retain them, we can make the necessary business changes.

Once our team got aligned, we developed a plan and got to work. The competition usually lasted two and a half days but after only a day and half, the school ended the competition because my team had pulled so far ahead of our classmates that we had basically clinched it. The professor said that in the last 15 years, no team had been able to turn this company around — it was a losing profile.

This experience stands out because it formed my foundation for how I approach business. Sometimes, certain ideas seem stale until we live through them. For me, that day in my MBA was the day I learned that putting customers first is the most important tenet in any business. Customer care is truly everything. If you have customers on your side, you can accomplish great things.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?
Can you please share a story or example for each?

It all starts with resilience. There have been a lot of changes and tests from where I started to where I am today. The only way I could weather all of them was by cultivating a drive to persevere, no matter what. It’s one of the most important things a person can learn or teach. I’ve had to uproot my life several times in pursuit of my goals. It wasn’t easy, but it made me stronger. I don’t fear change anymore and as they say, in life, change is the only constant.

I also really believe in continuous learning. I think I’ve really been served in life by an insatiable desire to learn. For me, when I was in school, I didn’t care about getting a degree, necessarily — I was just trying to learn as much as possible. But you must develop the right attitude towards learning. Learning should be about being a student, not a follower. We have to be able to take lessons from people without trying to become them. Learning is about learning to become yourself.

Finally, I think it’s important to know what your core values are — and live them. For a lot of people, values are what they naturally absorb from their environment. This can be good or bad, but it’s not conscious. About 15 years ago, I made an effort to choose my own core values — it was an intentional process that I went through over months. I realized that I’m all about contribution, learning, humility, integrity, and fun — that’s what I’m made of. Once you know that, then you can look at your behavior and see whether it aligns with who you are, or who you want to be.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

As a continuous learner, everything is exciting to me! But yes, I’m new here at Odyssey Logistics, and we’re working on a lot of big changes. As the CIO, I’m currently assessing how our company uses and thinks about technology — where are the opportunities for improvement? How are we thinking about TMS, for example? Or ERP? These are big questions that have big changes downstream of them, depending on how they get answered. My vision for technology at Odyssey is getting to “connected systems with integrated data”. I want us to have systems that are best for us (not necessarily the best of breed) and have them all connected to each other and working together. Of course, this is going to involve AI. Logistics in general is on the cusp of applying revolutionary technologies to its functioning, so it’s a good time to be doing what we’re doing.

Can you help articulate what the weaknesses are in our current supply chain systems?

I feel a slight pang when answering this question because the answer to it is the same now as it would have been few years ago — showing the need for better tech to support our industry. Let me break this down into five problems, which are all related to each other.

First, our biggest weakness is visibility — or the lack thereof. We just don’t know easily where things are moving. Look at all the inventory problems we had during COVID. The common denominator was not able to see the whole shape of our business. And this leads to inefficiencies.

This brings me to the second weakness — inventory management. The industry has really struggled in finding the middle ground between empty shelves and overstock. This is connected to visibility, of course, but it’s a problem on its own merits too.

Weak collaboration between our tech is also a culprit here. We have all these systems supporting our work, but can they communicate with each other? Or do they add up to some vague and disconnected archipelago posing as a tech stack?

The fourth problem is rigidity — a lack of flexibility. Perhaps owing to the complexity of our business, we’ve tried to design inflexible systems to tame the beast, so to speak. But this is a false sense of security — supply chains are dynamic. They need dynamic and flexible systems to capture their complexity and deliver the most value.

Finally, this lack of flexibility also means that data often gets siloed, or fragmented. Siloed data can’t yield insights, and with no insights, there’s no possibility of improving our systems. We must find a way to bring all the data we shed together in one place — to tell one story about our business, what we’re doing right, and how we can do better.

Can you help define what a nationally secure and resilient supply chain would look like?

Security and resilience are interesting terms because, in a way, they imply a sense of stasis, or immobility. But in the case of a secure and resilient supply chain, precisely the opposite qualities are needed. Such a supply chain needs to be dynamic, flexible, and constantly willing to improve itself. Complacency is out of the question.

It’s not enough to be good, or even great — the public expects perfection out of the supply chain. When we’re working as we should, we essentially become invisible, supporting the idea that consumers can imagine something, and it will appear in their hands. To me, this is a beautiful dream. So, in one sense, a secure and resilient supply chain would, to the public at least, not look like anything at all. We’re simply an extension of their own wants and needs, able to bring it back to them instantaneously. Sustaining this level of service requires constant innovation and drive.

What are the “5 Things We Must Do to Create Nationally Secure and Resilient Supply Chains” and why?

First, we need to diversify our sources. The pandemic taught us that it’s not sustainable to have only one place to get critical materials. A resilient supply chain would be able to plug in several source alternatives if a primary source failed.

Second, we need to invest in tech — secure supply chains require mature technology to support them. How do we get cutting-edge solutions to suffuse every aspect of the supply chain? It’s been said that every company nowadays is a tech company. Logistics leaders are not exempt from this principle.

Third, we need to be collaborating and communicating more across the industry. Remember, I’m all about continuous learning — but the only way such a state can be supported is if information and insights are being freely exchanged. This kind of communication will also help with the diversification problem.

Following on this last point, we also need to streamline regulation and government intervention in the industry. Government support is important, but a lot of collaboration gets stymied by various regulatory frameworks that actually keep people from talking to each other, and from accomplishing things.

Finally, we need to get ahead of risk and compliance issues. This runs the gamut from cybersecurity to ESG. I’m not convinced our industry-wide responses to these issues are robust enough to prevent major issues down the road — issues that could occur much sooner than we’d like.

Are there other ideas or considerations that should encourage us to reimagine our supply chain?

I know I’ve already said this, but this industry is colossally complex. It’s like playing chess on a board that is constantly rotating. But there seem to be a few emergent but stable factors that should encourage us to rethink our playbook.

The first is continuing instability at a geopolitical level. Between global conflicts in Ukraine, dynamic relationships with China, and global pandemics, we’ve witnessed several major shifts and challenges to current world order. These don’t appear to be anomalous. In other words, it looks to me like instability will become the norm, which means we can’t take a business-as-usual approach to the supply chain.

Changing technology is another consideration. New technology shapes consumer behavior and expectations. Ecommerce is a great example of this. We must keep up. We can’t afford to lag so far behind technological innovation. Tech asks us to constantly reimagine our processes. It’s an invitation we should accept wholeheartedly.

Sustainability is also an important factor. The supply chain is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and we should be thinking carefully about how to trim the fat in our processes. This not only helps the environment, but it just makes good business sense too.

One final thought on this. I’m a tech guy. But even I know that what keeps the board from spinning off its axis is, ultimately, talented minds, talented people. A new crop of leaders is the best bulwark against stagnation.

We need to be proactively searching for the next generation of leaders in logistics, not just waiting for the right people to show up at our doorstep. Experience is great, but what’s more important is drive — a drive to learn, to make the supply chain better, to contribute something. And drive is an experience-neutral quality. In other words, there are some people I know in this industry who still wake up after 20 years with the same burning desire to make things better. I’ve hired new people recently who have that exact same burning quality. It’s passion that keeps people engaged in this business, and all the experience in the world can’t make up for it if that fire is out. The people in this industry should want to be here. I’ll train scores of people from the ground up if they have that fire. Pretty much everything else is a nice-to-have.

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I think everybody should have more than one book on the go at all times. Life feels short, but there’s actually a lot of time within it, and a lot of opportunities to learn new things and bring more of the world into your own understanding. Life gets richer the more we understand about it. And there’s so much to learn and know, far more than any individual could cover in a lifetime. But it’s worth a try. Education is what unlocks purpose in life, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be education from some accredited institution. My books have taught me just as much as my teachers, and they’re usually more readily accessible.

Stats show that most people have a 2% retention rate after reading a book. I think this is because we have so many blinders up — we’re really only attentive to information that confirms our priors. Learning is just as much about unlearning as it is about adding new information. Start by unpacking your biases — otherwise, you’ll only read things to confirm your biases. This is not learning, it’s tribal thinking.

This shows the limitations of learning as a goal unto itself. Think about the end in mind — we’re learning to understand the world, not to make it smaller by confirming the views we already hold.

On this same note, I would like if people lived with this question always on their minds: Is this moment better because I am in it? In other words, am I living with purpose, making a contribution to those around me? If all of us were perpetually asking ourselves this question, I think we would see some radical shifts for the better in our world.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maneet/

Readers can follow Odyssey Logistics on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/odyssey-logistics-&-technology/)

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.