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,