Duncan Angove

Tell us a bit about you and your career so far 

I’m actually English, even though these days I sound more Australian or South African. From a very early age, I was always into coding. I’ve always had a very strong imagination and the thing I loved about coding was it was a blank screen with a flashing green cursor and you could use it to basically create anything, so I was writing video games from the age of 12.

I went to school at UCL and my first job out of university was with Andersen Consulting, now part of Accenture, which allowed me to use code to solve problems in the real world. My first project was putting in a warehouse management system (WMS) at Selfridges, so I was involved in supply chain very early, but always on the product and consultative side, which gives you empathy. 

From there, I went to a project at Littlewoods up in Liverpool where I wrote a forecasting and replenishment system and, from that point onwards, I pretty much stayed in engineering. I was very lucky to be at a bunch of different companies that, at various points in time, rode different computing transitions. I was at a retail merchandising company called Retek in the late 1990s and we rode the whole wave of omnichannel.com, going public in 1999 before we sold to Oracle. Then I went to Infor where we rode the transition of taking industry software to the cloud and we built the first industry cloud computing company. 

Now, at Blue Yonder, we’re riding the wave of AI, the rise of the data cloud, robotics and beyond. So, my career has always capitalised on an epoch that drives fundamental change at a business and society level. I get to wake up every day and reimagine the world of supply chain through the lens of AI and robotics – and we’re finally headline news. Everyone knows what a supply chain is now. 

What was it that attracted you to Blue Yonder? 

There’s a massive amount of business change going on in supply chains – the biggest we’ve seen for 30 years. Combined with the emergence of all of this new, revolutionary technology, you have this canvas for reinvention. On the business side, we’re experiencing what I’d call the age of uncertainty to a level we’ve never seen before. It’s being driven by climate change, labour shortages and the rewiring of the world due to regional unfriendliness.

What’s exciting about Blue Yonder is that we have the ability to step back and say ‘we need a new blueprint and new technology on top of which to reimagine it’. It’s the perfect recipe and we’re backed by an unbelievable sponsor in Panasonic that allows us to do unnatural, almost unfair things in the market – to invest in a cycle with this much opportunity. I’ve been in the supply chain space for 25-30 years, so I’ve been in and around Blue Yonder products for a long time and was used to competing with them. The opportunity to lead the company through the next phase of its journey was one I just couldn’t turn down. 

What does your role as CEO entail?

I travel a lot because we’re a geographically-dispersed company, so we have employees all around the world. This week, for example, I started my Monday morning in London, where you have the UK’s biggest brands running on Blue Yonder software rails. Then I went to Germany, where we have around 300 employees, before moving on to France. We have customers and associates all around the world, so that drives a lot of my time. 

When I’m not travelling, I have a very product engineering-oriented agenda. Our philosophy is that if you don't get the product right, nothing else really matters. You can have delightfully happy customers but they're not going to buy more if you don't have differentiated products that drive huge value for them. So, we spend a lot of time on product strategy, product investments and ask, ‘where can we drive step changes in value for customers?’. That probably consumes half of my time.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Every company has values and, generally, they include respect, empathy, inclusion and diversity – to us, those are non-negotiable. I don’t care how talented you are; if you don’t embody those values in how you treat associates and customers, you're out. However, I think it would be a very sad world if those were sources of differentiation in the market. If we're more respectful, that should not be a point of differentiation. 

We created something called Blue Yonder Superpowers which are a set of behaviours that form part of performance reviews. If everyone behaves in a certain way, it drives differentiation and becomes a core part of our DNA. 

Behaviours include having a ‘say-do’ mindset, which is absolutely critical. When we make a commitment, we follow through with quality-first every single time. It shouldn’t be a differential in this industry, but it is. 

Another one is ‘think big, act fast’ – challenge conventional thinking. This is an industry that’s full of incrementalism, where every company copies each other. No one steps back, thinks big and acts with urgency. The dirty secret of enterprise software is that there’s no ‘R’ in R&D; no-one does any research – they just do development. And, most of the time, that development is based on an RFP or a win-loss and it’s incremental. We’ve invested at scale in the ‘R’ in R&D and that doesn’t just mean dollars; it’s how people work, the extent to which they are willing to take risks. 

Related to that is the ‘be curious’ superpower. Be curious about your customer’s business and how they work; be curious about new technology; be curious about different ways of doing things. And with this comes an optimism about the role technology can play in benefitting businesses and the planet. 

Overall, our superpowers describe who we are, how we behave, what our DNA is and, ultimately, they become part of our brand. Ultimately, our brand is not what we say it is; it’s what our customers say it is and it’s exhibited by these behaviours and how we engage with them.

What technological innovations in the supply chain space are you most excited about?

It’s a remarkable time with the emergence of all these technologies. Having said that, I get frustrated sometimes because, suddenly, everyone’s an AI company and they’ve added dot-AI to their domain names. Quite frankly, it’s farcical. Most of these companies have no idea what they're doing, particularly in the supply chain space – the level of hallucination is really bad. 

But if you look at AI in general, it really came out of the supply chain space. At first, it wasn’t really AI – it was integer programming, linear programming, solvers and optimisation, all the way back to the beer run and the travelling salesman. Linear programming came out of the Second World War and was a function of the complexity we had to manage for the logistics of war. It was originally called operations research; you’d go and get an OR degree and you’d go and join a supply chain company. 

We’ve had more than 500 patents granted and pending in the history of Blue Yonder and the vast majority are in the supply chain space: how do you optimise the routes that lorries take? How do you optimise inventory so you don't have food spoilage? Every day, we do 20 billion machine learning predictions in the cloud. And, by the way, when you look at the trading result of a large supermarket, that’s what we’re doing. We’re using AI to optimise demand and fulfilment at the shelf to drive results and we’ve been doing it for at least a decade. You’d be surprised, because it’s not like 50% of the world’s grocers are using ML to drive on-shelf availability – it’s probably less than 5%. 

In the field of generative AI, we took our domain knowledge that we've established in MLOps and we’ve applied it, asking ‘how can Gen AI help improve the supply chain?’. There are lots of little use cases, but then there are bigger ones like developing supply chain agents that will help augment and drive the productivity of existing supply chain professionals. 

Take a warehouse operator, for example: how do we pair an agent to a warehouse operator to help manage the chaos that undoubtedly unfolds every day inside a building? You’ve got a million square feet, 2,000 people, tens of millions of dollars in robots and automation and conveyor belts, hundreds of lorries coming in and going out, all of this product flowing through and if you’re in grocery it’s perishable. Every day, things go wrong. You’ve got employees not showing up, a broken conveyor line, you realise you’re going to miss your service-level agreements on shipping to certain stores – a warehouse manager has to deal with all of that. 

The idea of a warehouse agent is that it’s trained on all the knowledge of how the warehouse works. It’s connected to all the people because they walk around with scanning guns; it’s connected to all the robots and conveyor belts; it can see the lorries coming in and out; it can see all the work that needs to be done in terms of orders going to stores; and it helps the warehouse operator see everything and orchestrate it in real time as an agent. 

But, crucially, the agent is connected to smart technology. It’s like giving Gen AI a calculator for the supply chain – that’s our solvers, our predictive ML. We’ve married the two and connected it to the systems it needs to help manage, so you get closer to what looks like an autonomous supply chain and, in this case, an autonomous depot. That's the big opportunity around AI for us, but these agents have to be trusted because tiny mistakes in the supply chain have huge consequences. 

Amid turbulent times, how are you and Blue Yonder helping clients prepare for future supply chain crises?

We’re helping our clients harness AI to dramatically optimise their operations and drive the effectiveness of their people. But, stepping back, the other big part of what we're doing is giving them a supply chain system that's more joined up that allows them to be more agile and responsive to risks and opportunities driven by this age of uncertainty. 

Two things fundamentally determined how companies architected their supply chains over the last 30 years. On the supply side it was leveraging China as the factory floor for the world, powered by globalisation, coupled with just-in-time supply chains. All the shocks of the pandemic, climate change and regional conflict have proved that it wasn’t a very resilient architecture. On the demand side it was the emergence of digital technology, e-commerce, personalisation, the preference for ethical consumption, and that dramatically changed the way supply chains have to operate. They were built to efficiently ship pallets to stores in the last mile – not individual parcels to a customer's home, not to mention the billions of pounds worth of merchandise coming back the other way. 

Those two things exposed the supply chain architecture as almost like the emperor having no clothes: not resilient, not efficient and certainly not delivered in a sustainable way for the planet. But it also triggered an opportunity for us to rethink it all. As strange as it sounds, supply chains weren’t architected to be joined up. Stakeholders don't have good visibility – even cross-functionally inside a company – of what people are doing. The people managing the lorries aren’t really understanding the decisions that someone in a warehouse or a store is making. And it’s the same thing on the supply side: you don't really know what your transportation carriers or suppliers are doing. It's not built as one end-to-end system that provides both full visibility and cross-functional decision-making. That was the central thesis for our product strategy almost three years ago: the systems that support supply chain should be built to facilitate real-time visibility in an enterprise and across a value chain, as well as cross-functional decision-making and orchestration. 

What are your goals for the next 12-18 months?

It’s a cliché, but, ultimately, the true measure of what we do is customer happiness and the value we create for them; it’s helping them to harness the billions of dollars in investments we're making in product and people to unlock value – both for them and their consumers. I sometimes say our brand equity is the aggregation of our customers’ brands, their level of happiness and the value they get. That's a big barometer of success for all of us at Blue Yonder. 

We continue to invest at a crazy pace. We’re talking unbelievable innovation, truly differentiated, applied AI solutions and a lot of cool stuff in the robotics space. I couldn't be more excited about what’s to come.

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