Balancing Cutting-Edge Shipping Tools and the Human Element with Avery Dennison | Episode 46

Hey, everybody. It's Patrick Escolas with another Banyan Technology Tire Tracks podcast. We're still here at Connect ‘24 in tropical downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Yes. Don't. Yes. I’ve had noticed in here –

I'm laughing about that.

No, I'm not here as Summertime Santa, which is what somebody called me when I started this three years ago. I have to give the reins over to Pat Murray here, the Procurement Manager over at Avery Dennison. How are you doing, Pat?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it.

Hey, it's fantastic to have you here. Now, we're going to start. We're going to get to real things. But I heard that this beard didn't exist like six months ago.

Oh, it's been more. It's longer than that. My daughter’s in marketing, and so she rebranded me as the bearded freight guy. That is now I'm the bearded freight guy. My wife has asked me multiple times, “Hey, you should just cut it off and start all over.” But now, with this kind of press coverage, this is great. I have to keep it.

That's a great excuse. Also, it's so funny. You came in here the other day, and I'm just like all I could imagine you is in a Hawaiian shirt and surf shorts and literally be like, “It's Christmas in July all of the time.” You just –

I do have an old Cadillac at home, and I do drive around in that, which is red with a white interior. I have a hat and a red sweat jacket.

That’s awesome.

I do ride around right before Christmas, and I'm just checking people.

You might have to add with the marketing that hashtag, Summertime Santa. That might be part of it.

I could do that, too.

That's a good one.

I could do that, too.

No. Pat, getting a little bit back to what we should be talking about here.

Of course.

Tell me a bit – Avery Dennison, I think probably anybody that's used an office supply or a copier printer in the past 15 years has an idea. When we started talking to you on the Banyan side, I go, "Oh, Avery. That's paper, right?" I know you're much more than that.

Yes. As a matter of fact, we don't do labels like that. We do a lot of consumer products. Actually, I'm going to read this, global materials science and digital identification solutions company with locations in over 50 countries. I'm on the materials group side. We make a lot of, as I call it, sticky paper. It's way more diverse than that, but I was brought on board a couple of years ago. We've been trying to right size the shipping profile for our company.

That's got to be fun.

It's neat, and kind of one of my main tag lines, what I do is talk to folks and say, “We need to make shipping a core competency of our company.” Our labels go everywhere. You can't swing a dead bottle around without hitting one of our products.

[inaudible 0:02:35] in Jacksonville back in the day here in Cleveland.

Yes. Really that luck. Anyway, but we have such a diverse product line, and we have such cool technology that we want to be able to make sure that we have all this great tech. It's my kind of passion to make sure we get that to where it needs to be on time.

Absolutely.

And that is it's been a super challenging event, and I love this company. I love to be here. It's fun. Every day's new.

Where do you come from where that's something that's exciting to you? Is this something you've done your whole life, or are you kind of jumping around and realizing, “Man, this is something I'm really good at.”?

I've been doing freight for probably over 25 years now in some version. Back to my army days, I got to move a big division back from the Gulf War.

Oh, that's some fun logistics.

It was fun. Then I've done everything from –

Didn't lose a Humvee at all, huh?

No comment. It’s classified. But I moved everything in my career from like pills to nursing homes with a courier, all the way up to gensets in Europe, in Africa. It's kind of a little bit different. I've had a big – I've had a broad reach. My goal right now is I've got a great team that works with me, and I'm just trying to teach. I'm trying to take all the lessons that I've learned in all these hard knock kind of environments and apply it to what we do at Avery Dennison. It’s a challenge, but it's fun. Every day is just what can we go get into. Every day, somebody comes up with something weird and new, and it's a great teaching point.

I guess is it funny as you said new, but also because you kind of get immediate gratification in the process changes that you put in?

A little bit. I always used the – a couple jobs ago, it was the hero to goat cycle. It's about 15 minutes, so you're like the scourge of the business. Fifteen minutes later, you've got something delivered, and you've solved the problem. Then you're the hero again. It's a quick turn cycle.

My poor food delivery guy, where is this dude? I can't believe it, all this food here. You're the greatest person I've ever met. Yes.

Exactly, yes. It's like I want to – my retirement job is going to be delivering either flowers or doughnuts because everybody's happy with flowers or doughnuts.

A hundred percent. I like that idea. As a young sales rep, I often brought lunch because it was really hard not to talk to me when I had food for you.

Exactly. And you have a captive audience until the sandwich is done, but anyway.

Exactly.

But, yes, that was kind of where it all comes to.

I guess a company as large as Avery, where it's got to be a hell of an undertaking, whether it's change management, putting technology for automation, as well as then educating and probably centralizing some of the rules and decisions. How do you start something like that? How do you begin to wrangle that when you come in day one? Is it you put a board out and throw darts and wherever that hits, that's where you're going to start? Or is there – I'm sure there's strategy to it, but what does that look like?

It's a little bit of herding cats. But the best part was is I had a great boss when I started. She retired, God bless her. I'm jealous. She gave us little awards when she left, and I still have it on my desk today. But it was basically do 90 days and see what's out there. Do a consulting gig for your first 90 days and find out where the low-hanging fruit was. We found a lot of opportunity in the contract work that we did, just some synergies. It’s simply opening up the freight network to everybody. It was very limited in how the process was before, so I rewrote the processes of how we go to market, how we present ourselves. Try to be very shipper-friendly.

I think there's still a lot of improvement we can do, but it was basically kind of sharing what we do with everybody and having meetings and just sitting down and talking. Everybody is very data-driven there. While I can be data-driven, I'm more into having a relationship. If you talk with folks about what you need and what the challenges are, you have a much better opportunity. That's what I've been trying to teach.

That's awesome, and it's funny because I probably say this on 75% of the podcast now is that the one thing that people outside of freight or logistics may not realize with all of the different moving pieces is how relationship-based everybody – everybody that's done this for their handful of years or longer, they harp its relationship. I'm not going – sure, I want to make money but not in a way that I only get to make it for a few runs, and then they find someone else that goes on the same thing and go, "Well, I got this penny cheaper, and you don't mean anything to me because you're just that cost."

The relationship is a common thread here. It’s something that coming from four years ago, not in freight, I don't think I would have ever thought of how relationship-driven it is. No, no, that guy will do me right. We'll make sure it all works out cost-wise at the end, but it's going to get where it needs to go. As well as you're talking about, hey, you're a shipper I like to use. Let's make sure you have the opportunity in a vast array of our freight department, not just the one person you've been dealing with in the past.

That's true. I mean, you get to the holiday weekend on a Friday, and you're going to find out who your true friends are because they're actually going to pick up the phone. They look at their phone and like, “Uh-oh, Pat. Okay, I'll answer the phone.” Then it's also following through. If you make a handshake or a gentleman's agreement on a rate that I honor that. I make that a very big point. I know a lot of folks like, “It's not in contract. It's not this. It's not the other.” But they helped you out. If you're going to help me out, I'm going to make sure that I take care of you, and I pay you what we agreed to. I mean, handshake is a written contract. It's the same thing for me.

You're only as good as your name.

Yes. It’s exactly it. I've got a bunch. I've had a couple of recovery guys that have worked for me that when everything went wrong – everything could possibly go wrong, and then a few things went wrong. But I could call this guy, and he was like, “Pat, I’m on it,” and literally it would be done. I could go home and know it’s done.

That's awesome.

He would put things in place. Those are the relationships you have to have. If you don't have those, you need to cultivate them really, really quick.

Not against from the relationship, obviously, a very biased lens that I see things through is the implementation of technology within that process. How does that play out at Avery? I imagine it's not like you guys were on stone tablets before you started coming in. But is there a push to more and more automation or use of technology in this process that you're trying to drive home to efficiencies?

Yes, there is. My quick plug for Banyan is we use the platform to do analytics and to go look for stuff.

I had to throw a bone.

Yes. No, no. Anyway. But, yes, we use that to kind of test out rates, to do rate structures, to do things like that because the tools weren't really there. I would look to see how we did RFPs before and how we would go back and rate things. It would just be a slog to do. This is getting better. Unfortunately, it's uncovering things; account structure issues, some other kind of stuff. But we're getting there, and the thing is we have a clear path to success.

With Avery being such a technology-driven company, we're making progress. Things are opening people's minds. We're kind of starting some new stuff, trying to get more analytics into the thing, predictability. The supply chain has their things that they're looking for. Freight has their things. But, yes, the technology is out there, and we continue to make strides. There's some room for improvement always. But we're trying to lead the way and just teach and show what's out there.

A lot of it is the fields change so quickly that folks don't realize what's really out there. Being an old super user of a Banyan platform, I know what great looks like. I know what API does. Now, I'm trying to teach that within our own business of this is the neat stuff that's out there, and it is real time. With all the craziness in the world right now, knowing where everything is, is a big piece. That’s what we're trying to teach and leverage.

I mean, I think that goal has to be the goal because, like you said, if you don't know where it is, even if it's on time, you assume the worst until you know exactly where it is, whether or not everything went smooth. If you just don't know it, how can you think otherwise? As you were saying, as the technology has been used more, you have more of those questions almost, why are we doing this?

Or as you were talking before of synergy and people working together, were there situations where one department just didn't know the other department was doing this, and together they could have – if they had just popped their head out and be like, “Hey, I'm about to move this. Do you have anything to go?” Is it something complex to uncover in these internal questions on process? Or is it sometimes it's simple, but it's been the way they've done it for so long, no one has thought to change it?

That's mostly what it is. We found success in the way that we're moving freight today, and so it's good, and I want it great. That's the vision. We do have some – there's some folks that are really helping push those agendas. There is a very big push to bring everybody together. We started co-locating business units at the same distribution centers, which is a perfect thing to do. Let's leverage the space that we have.

But then you get into the like, “Who's shipping it? Is one group shipping? The other group shipping it?” Everybody's very, very unique from what they do. One division will do things on the commercial space that you go to a grocery store and you see every day. The other group, you never really know they're out there, but you see their finished product. It's a different mix, and each of them have different CTQs of what they're trying to accomplish and delivering you a customer.

Based on that, finding one solution is not – it's not impossible, but it's not easy either. That's what we have to go and understand what those business rules are. When we go to market for freight and we go for an LTL bid or a truckload bid, we have to understand what the end user wants.

And work backwards.

And work backwards to that solution. That's kind of where we try to pull together.

I think we – and this is a question here. As you try to, I think you said it, have one solution, whether that's technology or I guess I should say the ideal workflow, it's probably likely that an organization as big and differentiated in a different place that it's never really going to be just one. But you'll have a best practice for each of those needs within those different departments because what is true for building A over here is not true for Avery C that's doing a completely different thing over here.

That's true. Everybody has a different – it's all a different platform. There's not one solution that's going to fit all of the pieces. But in doing other roles that I've had in my career, I've always done the let's take the best and chuck the rest. One division may have something that works super well for them, but the other divisions never looked at it. We're trying to do that cross-sharing. It’s been very, very siloed in the past.

About a year and a half ago, the young lady that works for me, Olivia, super, super smart young lady, I can't say enough about her. But we started crossing over to other divisions to understand what they do. It’s a lot because what we do for one group, the other group says, no, we never do that. Trying to get everybody at least on the same LTL contracts has been awesome.

That's very important.

We've had a lot of – we've had support from our leadership. We've had support from the legal team. We've had just an amazing amount of support to do what we're doing and to drive these initiatives. Every division doesn't have to go out and negotiate an LTL contract. There's a dozen of them. Just we add an address and off we go.

You're using everybody's volume together to get a better negotiation leverage point.

True. We are doing that. It's kind of the one Avery thing. I never do that's what it was when I was doing. But now, we're doing one Avery. But, yes, it's out there and it's working. We can add locations. We're trying to find out who else needs help. I think I overextend myself doing that all the time. But it's like, “Hey, we have such great stuff going on here.” The foundation is laid for fantastic. We just have to go forward and get fantastic.

No. It sounds like you're extremely passionate about it, which it has to be a part of it for something that's kind of big that you've – a Pandora's Box that you've kind of opened into. Until you're done, you're going to keep at it and probably drill deeper until you're like, “All right, I think I've gotten to rock bottom. Let's finish cleaning it all up now, the wake of questions that I've left behind.”

Yes. I've been told multiple times, “Pat, quit opening boxes.”

That's a next-year question, Pat. Calm down.

Yes, yes. We're not going to open that other box. But, yes, I've been told, “Don't open any more boxes.” But, no, it's been amazing. The cool part about this whole thing is I think sometimes in the freight procurement world, you get siloed into what you do, and you don't talk to very many people.

A hundred percent.

But this has been neat because every time we do something different, there's a whole bunch of new people. As a matter of fact, we did an onboarding called this morning with a warehouse, and there are people on the screen I've never even seen before. Of course, the warehouse rep that I've been dealing with, their vice president, he makes fun of me for the beard again.

I was going to say, they're also wondering who is this guy.

Yes. It's like the bearded freight guy. But, anyway, so we get this. I met all these new people, and what they do is so diverse from what we normally do. It was like, “Wow, I never thought of six different things because of that.”

Now, you're the – yes. That's going and you're like –

We're not sleeping again tonight. It’s okay, though, but it's fun.

It is so cool. Everybody who I've met at Avery Dennison has been a fantastic human being. I have just – I really feel like belonging here. That's an amazing feeling.

We've always done it this way. But my joke with everybody is you have a cell phone, right? You don't have that princess phone on the wall for everybody who's not as old as I am. Your mom had a princess phone, and you thought you had a 20-foot cord, but it ends up being 150 feet because you stretch it all over the house. But we all have cell phones now.

That's right. Or wear your CDs.

Stop it.

Yes.

Leave my CDs alone.

Do you still have them?

I have CDs. Leave me alone.

I have a beer that I drive around. I have the one CD. I think right now, it's either Billy Idol or J. Geils I have in there, and I'm just like, “This is perfect.”

I'm not allowed to put on that music when my wife is in the car, God bless her. I love my wife to death, and she looks at me sometimes and just shakes her head, but –

That's what wives do to eccentric people like us.

Yes, freight guys. She's a doctor, so it's kind of interesting to go to those doctors events with her because it's like, “Oh, Dr. Murray.” I'm like, “Nope, I’m not, but she is. I'm just a freight –” But anyway, it's all good.

No, that's – and how long have you been doing this at Avery? How long is this process here?

Two and a half years.

Okay.

It’s been two and a half years, but a lot of people changing over, a lot of new people coming in, a lot of new ideas. Have you done it before? What are you trying to do? Where are your pain points? How can we solve this? But, yes, it's been a very, very – and it just happened out of the blue. This role just kind of crossed my path at one point, and it was kind of [inaudible 0:17:40].

You’re right on edge about it. Yes.

I'm remote, but so is my team is remote. I think I talked to Olivia more than I talked to my wife some days.

Which your wife is probably grateful for.

She's very grateful for. I get to work with my dog, Lou. We converse about freight every once in a while, too, but –

He makes some great points.

He does. He's good. He’s a good thing. But, yes, I mean, it's been a great experience so far. It’s been – I feel we've had an impact.

That was going to be my next question. How quickly did you start to feel an impact? I don't want to put a percentage on it, but are you halfway there? Are you close? I know I'm just looking at you. I know you'll never be satisfied with it.

True.

But if you had to pick a line of success, how closer to you and how quick did you get a noticeable impact from the changes you were making?

We had some pretty solid financial savings the first couple of years. I joined in June, and then the budget cycle starts. It’s kind of an annual thing on the calendar. We had some pretty good savings. We had some pretty good savings. I think we're, I would say, about 20% there. Again, I can't say enough about what we’ve done.

That's not bad for as large.

But we've right-sized the contracts. We've made them fair to both sides of the table. We've got terms and conditions under control with all the cyber stuff going on. We've made the –

What a fun topic.

Yes. The legal team has been nothing but fantastic. I would say that we've been laying the foundation now for the past two years and –

Now, you're starting to drive.

Yes. I'm looking forward to the next step. As we kind of broaden our horizon a little bit on what we're trying to do, we'll understand the business needs, and then we'll drive towards it. But I think the foundation is pretty solid right now. Our contracts are – we've ferreted out all the weird stuff. But, yes, I would say 20%, and we'll go from there.

That's awesome to hear. Good for you, Pat. I'll say I'm proud of you, but that's weird coming from a younger version of what I hope to be with a beard one day. Yes, I know. What advice – and then as we close out here, somebody that was coming into maybe not as large as Avery Dennison but somewhere that was coming to a similar situation or realized the need for a change in process. What's your advice to them, a few bullet points? If someone goes, "I need to do something similar. Where do I start,” what do you have to say to that person?

Yes. I would say you want to find some quick successes, improve that what you're doing is the right path.

Great, great. Love it. Just hanging fruit for the win.

Yes, I hate that term. But, yes, sure, low-hanging fruit. But find a couple of wins and then come up with a one-year plan. Come up with a two-year plan. Then celebrate the wins with your team because you may have only moved – like the first set of contracts we did, we moved the needle a chunk. It was like let's go out and have lunch. I mean, it sounds kind of goofy, but you have to celebrate the wins.

Then the other one I would do, I would really strongly suggest is use all your PTO because you – I'm sorry. I just –

I know.

I need to lead by example, and I need to do better. But you got to take the time off. I think in the roles that we're going into that are so intense and 12 hours a day. I joke with my wife, “I'm only working half a day. It’s 12 hours. The other 12 are mine.” But you've got to take time to stop and think.

Is that time off to let it digest without being at the top of the [inaudible 0:21:20] but –

A little bit.

Or is it just burnout prevention?

It's burnout prevention because there's so much to do, and you get crazy like a kid in a candy store like, “I want to taste everything,” and you just can't. But you need to take time out to truly contemplate what you're doing. Look at your goal list, and we have a – we've got this. I don't even know how many it is. It's huge. But we have this – it's like what's in process, what's WIP, what's an idea, and what's complete. We focus on what we have that we're doing right now.

Still has to be done.

But you're kind of at your computer at 10 o'clock at night, and you can't sleep, and you go through that. I like to go back through there and look at what we've actually done.

Find the wins and see how productive you've been.

Then you can't give up. You can't quit. You have to work through.

See it through.

You have to drive through. It’s like running a race. You just have to drive through the pain. But on the better side, you're going to be better off on the other side. That's what I would do. Use your PTO. Contemplate things. I joke around that I do Michelin radio all the time. It's a plug for tires, by the way. But it's driving your vehicle without the radio on and just think.

I've had those multiple times. Yes.

You have to think and make sure that what you're doing, you have to do a compass check every once in a while.

Because, otherwise, you'll just go point to point because you have it scheduled and thought it made sense before.

You're going to ping pong ball around. You're going to lose focus. I know that we do that once a week. We sit down, and we'll get on a conference call, and we'll just talk about what we've got to do, what's the next thing, and then we try to do some planning. We put in place a procurement calendar, so we can kind of go out like, “Yes, we can do all this. We can conquer the world.” No, we can't.

I screwed that up this year, and I fully admit my over desire to open more boxes, and I'm not doing that anymore. But that's what you have to do. You've got to take time to focus. Really, take your time off. Go do something fun because then you get rejuvenated.

Yes. Recharge the batteries and shoot –

Recharge the batteries. Absolutely. Just celebrate the wins. Take time off and contemplate your path.

Pat, thank you so much for joining us here at Connect 24. To everybody watching, thanks again, and I hope to see you at the next Connect conference. Patrick Escolas with the Banyan Tire Tracks podcast episode, stay tuned.