876: AI with Purpose: Designing Procurement's Next Chapter W/ Gaël De Martelaere

0:05Hi there, my name is Philip Ideson. I want to welcome you to the Art of Procurement podcast, the podcast that helps you, a forward-thinking procurement professional, position yourself and your team to proactively take advantage of the revolution that's taking place in procurement today. By interviewing industry trailblazers and sharing insights from our own experiences, my team and I pull back the curtain and shine a light on the strategies, tactics, and tools that procurement teams are using to elevate their impact. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Gael Dematolera. Gael is the Chief Procurement Officer at Hexion, a leading global producer of adhesives and performance materials following a 23-year career at Dow.

0:49I'm sure that I butchered your name there, Gael, but I did my English best. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. And the question I always kick things off with is, did you find procurement or did procurement find you? Oh, procurement found me. I was enjoying a great career in supply chain at Dow when all of a sudden I still remember the phone call. One night my boss called me, said, hey, we'd like you to consider a role in procurement. And my first thought was, what did I do wrong? Where did it go wrong? So I did make the move, thinking that perhaps I would be back in supply chain within a year or two.

1:38But I must say I found the love of my life, better than my wife, of course. But I loved it so much that I stuck around and I made it my dream job. yeah um it's it's funny how procurement does that to you i think that you know i i asked this question and 99 have the same story um and then and then we could never leave you know once it gets you you can never leave um i love on your linkedin profile you actually called yourself an inclusive entrepreneur and i just wonder if you could share a little bit about kind of what you mean by that and how that informs kind of your i guess your mindset you know as you're uh um as you're doing the role that you have today yeah sure so there's there's two words right it's inclusive and entrepreneur yeah i'll start with the inclusivity um you know more than anything this isn't about gender or uh race or or age or what have you this is this is much more around do you gather the right people around the room that can challenge you uh can complement you have different views, have a different, maybe different upbringing, but can really get you to get to the right answer or the better answer in the most constructive way.

2:56The last thing you want to do as a leader is just hire a whole bunch of people who just look like you and think like you. And so that's the inclusive bit. And it's not just enough to hire diverse people. It's very important to make sure that those diverse people can have a voice. And so that's the whole inclusivity. The intrapreneur is, I've always find myself to be a little bit of a rebel, you know, in a large setting. So I was always the one who was trying to get new things launched, who came up with, you know, sometimes bizarre plans. And in a large setting, really be a little bit of an entrepreneur in a very large company.

3:42So that's how it kind of got together. Interesting. Well, I love kind of the diversity of thought. I've always thought that, you know, I've been hired by people who hired me because I probably look just like them and thought just like them and have the same career background as them. And you kind of get groupthink as well when you do that. um so um um and you know taking that the entrepreneurship to another level like do you think about procurement as a as a business within a business like uh you know when you're thinking about how you project what the value proposition is and how you position what it is that you're doing for the business that we're not here because we have a policy or a process but we we have to kind of um um win permission if you will for our business to want to work with as last day called us to want to work with us?

4:33Yeah. So the way I look at this is I'm running a business of my own. Yeah. So I'm running around about a$1.5 billion purchase business. It's an interesting question. And last week I was at the World Procurement Congress. We talked about it a little bit before we started. One of the questions that still gets asked a lot is, is how do you get a seat at the table? One of the panelists answered that in a way that I have not heard it before. He basically said or answered the question with a question which was, who do you think bought the table? And so to me, it was a very interesting answer that kind of flipped the question around.

5:21Ultimately, what we do is we're here for the business. We enable the business, but it's not just enabling. I would say it's a lot more than that. Enabling to me is just, you know, you execute what the function wants or you execute what the business wants. I think procurement is a lot more than that. In fact, it's an engine, I would call it an engine, to innovation. You bring innovation through your supply base. It's an engine of working capital growth. It's an engine of value growth. So ultimately, when you do a good enough job, you're so deeply embedded in two things one is your business or functions and two is in your supply base that you actually start to connect the dots between what the business wants or what the business needs but your and what your supply chain can bring and and that's what the beauty the beauty of procurement to be honest yeah um i i love that kind of philosophy because my mind you know i grew up in procurement organizations that had taught me to think about it in terms of a mandate and policy and process and then i went on to the other side of the table and i worked for a procurement services company and that's for me when it kind of when when i had the epiphany from for my career in terms of we're just service providers now just just is doing a lot of word i don't mean just in a to minimize what we do but we have to earn the privilege and the right for for a stakeholder to want to come and work with us and that doesn't mean that we say yes to them all the time because that's kind of the worst kind of we're not here just to do the things and rubber stamp the things they want to do but how do we show up and provide them value that compels them to keep coming back for more and there from there on in that's really how i always thought about the role that myself and my teams would play that's how i look at it as well yeah um now you're on a transformation journey uh right now at hexing could you talk a little bit about that journey and where you currently are?

7:20Yeah, there are, in fact, there's two kinds of transformation journeys going on. One is a transformation journey at the company itself, and the other one is a transformation journey within our procurement organization. So you mentioned it in the beginning, we produce specialty chemicals that go into a number of markets. Think about building and construction, mining coatings. We more specifically, we make, for example, the resins that go into wood boards, right? So MDF, all of that. What tends to happen, though, is that a specialty chemical tends to become commoditized over time. And so we found us in a situation where we needed to reinvent ourselves.

8:03And we do that by becoming, and this is going to sound a little bit salesy, but a total solution provider to our customers. And you have to think about this as you're thinking about like big mills that produce these large boards, right? This is a fairly old industry. And when you think of it, it's a fairly, I wouldn't call it simple chemistry, right? You basically have, you know, your wood chips and you apply pressure and the resin to it to make your boards. But what we now find is that there are a number of questions and issues that our customers have with producing that particular material that we can solve not just by resin knowledge, which we have, but we also complement that with equipment.

8:54We call it our smart tech equipment and an AI algorithm, which is our smart tech AI algorithm to make the best resin for particular conditions of the mill, what kind of wood it is and so on. And that brings real benefits to our customers, real benefits, right? So you think about like a 15 % improvement in yield at the mill. You think about a 10 % reduction in scrap, 5 % reduction or increase in overall productivity. So you're solving issues and problems that perhaps your customer didn't even know. And so that's really interesting. And there's a very significant sustainability angle to it because ultimately, and this is not necessarily all that great for our resin business, but these smart systems can save you up to 30 % of your raw material cost for those resins and the waxes.

9:44So we had to reinvent. So rather than just being a resin provider, now we are a resin provider. But we also provide the equipment and the infrastructure to essentially make our customers more efficient. So that then turns into what does that mean for our procurement organization, right? Ultimately, before we were basically a procurement organization that was focusing on getting the raw materials in the best possible way to produce our resins. Now it's gotten a lot bigger than that. We talked a lot about foundations, the foundation of procurement, and you've got a couple of really big foundations that have to be very strong.

10:31We cannot talk about AI, right? So if you build AI on top of weak foundations, which we have currently, not all of them, but we have a couple of weak foundations, then ultimately you're going to have a very broken system. So what we're trying to do in procurement now is you rebuild those foundations with AI in mind. So basically what we're doing with the team is take a look at all of these core processes. You basically break them down to the ground and you rebuild them back up with AI enabled. And that's a lot of work. And I will say it's a lot of adventure. It's a lot of entrepreneurship, going back to your first question.

11:15But it's a lot of fun too. What would you consider to be those foundations? So there are, first of all, you have to think about your data and how your data flows through the source to pay process and into the supply chain processes. That data is everywhere and nowhere. the quality of the data, and I'm not saying anything that's new to you, but there's always a question mark. How do you make sure that you rebuild your data process or your data and your processes in such a way that the hand of some of that data actually goes seamless versus being stuck in this particular tool or that particular tool?

12:01That would be, so data would be one. Another one would be your people, to be honest. How technologically advanced are your people? How good of a procurement people do you really have? Think about some of the basic things around relationship management, around negotiation. And I mean, the same concepts that were or the same skill set that was applicable 10 years ago still is applicable today. Not all of them, but the core principles are still the same. But more than a skill set, what I'm looking for is the right mindset. And we talk a lot about the Hunter mindset at Hexion on the sales side, but also on the procurement side, because you always need to be ready to find that next deal.

12:50And sometimes that will come through your strategic sourcing process, which is another pillar. Sometimes it just comes through your entrepreneurial spirit. And that's what we're looking for there as well. You know, there's a whole pillar around digital as well. And then there's a whole pillar around the process design, I would say source to pay process design. All of those pillars really need to be revamped. You think about just one example is market intelligence, because I do believe that the one who holds the power is the one who has the best intelligence. Yes. So market intelligence is is something that typically would have been done by a person.

13:34What I'm thinking of doing, we're in the process of doing that, is how do you build an agentic structure maybe with that person who is the expert or by the person who is the expert who becomes a product leader now or a product owner of that agentic structure so that people in the sourcing organization pull from the structure versus pulling from the person. And so, but that's just an example of how we basically, we destruct our, or deconstruct our process and again, build it back up. Yeah. And when you think about market intelligence, now you can go and you can access the data itself, the intelligence itself from third parties.

14:16Well, you can access the data from third parties. You can do that using APIs or MCPs or kind of these different tools that can bring them into your data lake, so to speak, and then apply your systems on top of them to then connect dots that combine external market intelligence, internal data and forecasting. and all the things that you've got to really make that real for your situation. And it transforms it from, you know, I think about when I was doing market intelligence and it was a lot of, you know, going out and Googling things or you buying static reports to this being really real time. And that's just a snapshot, I think, of what's possible today.

14:56Exactly. As you think about the process redesign, do you look at this and say, okay so the world is changing i need to kind of go back to a blank piece of paper and redesign what procurement what the procurement process and operating model looks like or is it a little bit more surgical of here let's let's experiment with some use cases that will help us in certain areas but i'm not ready to go in and um you know and start from scratch because at the end of the day still got a business to support yeah that's the question isn't it um what we what we're doing is we're doing a little bit of both right so you have to what what uh what i've done now i've redesigned the operating model where in the past you would have like a people-centric which was your sourcing organization you would have still a people-centric um call it coe and then you would have like a global capability center, whether it's in a low cost country or you try to automate most of that process.

16:06Right. So those are word, the three, the three buckets. What, what we're now evolving to is you still have a human layer, which really is going to go, as we talked about before, deep into your business, deep into your markets. So, so you, you start to connect the dots better. Then you have what I'm going to do is an AI center of excellence. So a little bit what we talked about with the market intelligence, but it's not just market intelligence. You overlay risk on top of that. You do benefit report, all of that stuff. And then you would have a digital global capability center where you would do touchless P2P, where you would include, for example, autonomous sourcing, we're not there yet, but you would do that ultimately.

16:53Now, I'm hiring two leaders there. So I'm hiring an AI COE leader and I'm hiring a digital GCC leader. When I posted the AI leader role, I very specifically said, I'm not looking for somebody who is going to build me a three-year roadmap, because who knows what's going to happen in three years. What I want is somebody to dig in and take a use case, whatever it is, take a use case, figure it out, see if it works. If it works, go leverage. If it doesn't work, go find yourself a new use case. And I think that's much more important because with AI, AI is not, you know, SAP implementation or a Coupa implementation.

17:37AI requires experimentation. And only by experimentation are you going to find what works and what doesn't and and really draw lessons out of that to then go start doing something else and and that's that's what we're going to try to do to be honest um it's really interesting you're hiring for kind of an ai coe lead i'm sure that's it's a um i would imagine it's a very attractive role because um but it's you know when you think about candidates you're not necessarily going to find people that both understand procurements deeply and understand AI deeply. How do you think about the trade-offs of, you know, do you need that deep procurement knowledge or do you need that, I say deep AI knowledge, as deep as AI knowledge that anybody could have, but probably that mindset of experimentation and understanding at least of how tools fit together.

18:32Yeah, yeah. So it's a very interesting role, but I'm looking for a bit of a unicorn there, right? Because ideally, I'm looking for somebody who understands procurement processes really, really well and has maybe even built their own company, their own AI company, sold it, and wants to do something else. I am fortunate, I will say, because our CEO, Michael Leffenfeld, he has this vision of AI. We're becoming an AI company. And as part of that, we built an AI structure, an AI team, right? So we have a VP of AI. And so that's the team that really knows AI very well. So what I'm looking for is somebody who understands the process, the procurement processes very well, so that you can connect.

19:22So that's the game plan. We're almost there. um how do you um kind of think are the approaches you've taken in introducing ai to your team and encouraging them to experiment and to use it um so that it doesn't just feel like it's you know one or two people in a bubble that are um are experimenting because you need that digital literacy across your entire team when it comes to actually uh one breaking down the barriers of fear of using it, but two, being able to understand, you know, possible that, you know, how they get the most out of it. Yeah. So we, we have a skill program going on. So I mentioned the AI team.

20:06Yeah. Part of this is, you know, I see a lot of companies that go like, well, we have CoPilot or we use ChatGPT or we use Cloud. At Hexion, we have it all. So we're experimenting just like that. We have given replet licenses. We have MS co-pilot studio licenses, and we let them experiment. But it's not just experimentation because it starts to get heavy and expensive on the token side of things. So we need to kind of guide and have a little bit of governance around it. But essentially what I'm doing is every single person in procurement is going through an AI course. And it's not just how do you prompt in the best possible way.

20:52This is how you build an agent. How do you use Replit and build dashboards? How do you become a lot more productive in what you do with ultimately the idea that if you let your people go and build your tools that actually help them, you're going to have adoption of that tool set. And hopefully you can leverage to other sourcing managers, other people in P2P, whatever it is. Because in the end, I mentioned the World Procurement Congress last week. A lot of the focus was on how do you drive adoption? And there's a couple of things that there's technology that you probably want to buy. And that is basic infrastructure, but it's also just commoditized infrastructure.

21:38Think about, for example, Spend Analytics. Spend Analytics is something that you've got multiple solutions out there. Probably doesn't do you all that good to go build yourself a Spend Analytics tool. At the same time, we talked about market intelligence. Is that something that you want to build upon? So you do have the APIs and what have you. But how do you use that to get the best insight from that information that you have? and maybe even turn it into possible actions that you can make. So that to me is more of a build situation. We're starting to get a lot of momentum all the way up to the point that I have a couple of associates, our employees, we call them associates, that have exceeded their replic budget in only two weeks.

22:29So we're going to have to do something there. But I'd rather see that enthusiasm than not at all. Yeah, I think, you know, building, giving access to Replit is really interesting because then you're actually building, you're not just, as you say, kind of prompting an LLM, but you're thinking more structurally around how do I scope something? How do I work with, you know, an underlying LLM behind Replit, but to build something, you know, that actually has an output that helps me to do my job better. And then the trick, as you say, you need the governance around it because you don't necessarily want a sprawl of agents everywhere going and doing their own thing it's like how do we make sure that this is all still in service of what our operating model is so that there's some level of control but you can also take the best of what's been created and then scale it um to the rest of the organization yeah i'm a very strong believer that we still need uh maybe five years from now three years from now that'll be different today we still need to have the human in the lead and we talked a lot about human in the loop last week we talked a lot about human in the lead because ultimately if we're honest AI still spits out a lot of crap and if you use that crap to make an independent decision based on the data it has access to that brings a lot of risk with it so I think governance around how we use AI is going to be incredibly important.

24:05But I also think there's still people today who don't use AI. And people who resist using AI will soon be replaced by people who will use AI. I am absolutely convinced with that, because the productivity gains that you can have by just using your Claude or your personal AI assistance, you cannot argue against that. And still today you see that. Yeah. I think that that's what I try and whether it's on our team or with folks that we talk to from a procurement perspective is like the hype is real. And yes, AI isn't the AI of three years ago when you may have used ChatGPT and struggled a little bit and thought, well, I don't need to worry about AI because it can't it's hallucinating all the time with every single release it gets so much smarter and and you know exponentially so sometimes like I think about the end of last year how much things changed with the new cloud releases like the anthropic releases and what you could do versus what you couldn't do before and so you need to understand that even if and also what I think about is I always approached Mike like when I was a practitioner, I was more, it was the outsourcing wave.

25:25So I was heavily involved in outsourcing. I actually lived in India for a year running a captive shared service center. And I always had the philosophy of, I want to try and outsource my job because when I do that, I'll become more valuable. And so it's the same kind of thing now is how do you outsource your job, so to speak, to an agent to get it to do as much as you can do, because that behavior will always be rewarded and there will always be opportunity for those that do that, because that's essentially the direction of travel but it takes a lot of um yeah trust sometimes to feel comfortable and feel like you're in a safe space to go and do that yeah ultimately if you um again with that training for example that is actually going on right now um with that that training you might ask yourself well do you make your team more valuable so that maybe they can go outside and get the to me that's not a question.

26:15The responsibility of Hexion and any company is to make sure that your employees are in the best position to be successful. And whether that's somewhere else or at Hexion, we prefer them to stay at Hexion, of course. But that at some point in time is irrelevant. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of the promise between you and the team is that you'll be developing them and hopefully give them the opportunities that they can evolve here but um um when you think about buying i think right now the market is becoming very uh crowded um with um providers who talk about ai who legacy providers who will be embedding ai to new agentic companies who may have a single use agent and it's really hard to make sense of the market.

27:06I just wonder like how you think about trying to make sense of the complexity that exists right now in the ProcureTech market as you're looking at what solutions out there exist that would that may help us to bring inside. You know I'm an engineer and I'm a bit of a nerd I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to this type of technology. So I was around at the expo last week, going from booth to booth, just learning about all these new AI capabilities. You are very right. There is a mushrooming of companies out there, but they tend to all try to solve one use case. Yeah. And then the question is, well, if it's just one use case, wouldn't you rather build it?

27:54Yeah. There are. There are a couple, I think what what we all need to think through is what's really important, what's going to change how we work. Right. So think about orchestration. You think about spend analytics. You think about our effects technologies. You probably are not going to build that yourself. Right. But even orchestration, you might say, well, maybe I do. Maybe a simple app might actually do the trick. The question is, and I'm sure you're thinking about that too, is ROI. Ultimately, I'm going to have to defend why I'm buying all these tools and what kind of money I'm getting back.

28:40And so that's the question that we're going through right now is what are we buying? What are we building? We have a pretty sound strategy for that. I would say the buying part is easier because again, you want to buy your core capabilities and that's easy to identify. The build is really, as I mentioned before, with that AI leader coming in and then our own organization just getting excited about AI, that they just start building themselves without necessarily having a push from my end or from my leadership team. So that's a little bit how I'm looking at it right now. Do you see a future for single use case tools?

29:22And I ask that thinking that on one side of the equation is orchestration enables you to bring real deep individual use case tools that are called upon at the time of need that may be more capable than anything you can build on your own and more scalable than anything you can build on your own. But on the other hand, as we're going towards kind of buying the platform, so to speak, and perhaps looking at building our individual use case technologies, then maybe that's the case against the smaller kind of tools. I just wonder kind of, is it a use case by use case? Or do you see a direction of travel?

30:05Because I see the same. I see so many different individual use case tools. And I just question the viability of a lot of those in the long run, because they just become features of something else. I think we need to allow ourselves to stay curious. Yeah. And I know that doesn't necessarily answer your question. But if we start as leaders, if we start just discounting single-use cases, just because they're single-use case, I think we might miss an opportunity. Because a single-use case, you would think also is a lower kind of investment. So, again, thinking about ROI, you might very quickly win that back.

30:50Yeah. um i i in fact i skipped one i'm not gonna say which one but i skipped one booth because i was like well i don't need that and then later on um you know one of the associates over there came to talk with me and i was like we had a really really really good conversation and it it changed my mind around what they do and and actually would it may it makes it made it to one of the most interesting conversations that I had. In fact, I'm probably going to follow up with that particular. So again, I think we need to just same thing on LinkedIn and let that not be like a massive invitation to send me all kinds of single use AI cases.

31:33But I try to follow up. I try to follow up. But there's so much going on to your point that it's a little bit overwhelming over time. Yeah, I want to kind of finish on just a couple of questions. One, we've talked about building a lot during the conversation, how kind of building this, you know, taking advantage of the opportunity in front of us to build kind of a new future for procurement, build new tools, new capabilities. I think that not everybody can become, wants to become a builder. And, you know, you alluded to the fact that, you know, to understand AI to have a future, and I don't think just in the world of procurement, I think in the world of work or certainly the world of white collar work.

32:24What are the tool, what are the skill sets do you look for in kind of when you think about the future model of procurement aside from the builders? Yeah, I think so. This is a really good question, one that we debated on last week as well. Curiosity. I mentioned that before. Curiosity is something that we're going to have to continue to have because AI is great at a couple of things. It's great at analysis. It's great at structuring. It's great at detecting signals, giving us recommendations. But I think humans will continue. This is why we always talk about the human and the lead piece is they still own the accountability.

33:10yeah you send you send you send crappy information now you're still going to be accountable you can't say well my agent told me um humans are really good at judgment so having almost like common sense i don't know if that's a skill set but yeah i would say that's that understanding context influencing is a skill set that i think is going to become even more important and then the relationship piece whether that's a supplier relationship or a business relationship or whatever relationship with your stakeholder is going to continue to be very important. If you take those two together, I think you're going to, you can see accelerated decisions.

33:50And then I don't know that, again, it's a skill set, but governance is going to be important. Because if you think about the data you give to an AI agent, for example, you have to ask yourself the question um came up last week too would you give a human fresh out of college access to all the enterprise data you probably wouldn't so the same question really applies to every agent that we're going to deploy yeah um it's a um an offshoot to that question because it's really about the agent but it's something that just triggered my mind about training i think there's a perception that you can you hire the agent and the agent will do that just do the work and doesn't the training itself but you actually need to train the agent as much as you need to train a human for it actually to be effective and you don't just plug it in out of the box and expect it to be you know the world's foremost expert in a particular process yeah and i think skill set wise um humility and being humble and admitting when you've made a mistake because again you're going to experiment and as you experiment you're going to make mistakes or have failures that's okay.

35:01Yeah. One thing that comes to mind is because I think about tools like the information, the insights, the tools that are available to people. There may be those who are true deep subject matter experts in their particular category. You know, one of the leaders in the world in buying what they buy. And oftentimes in my experience, they may be a little bit slower to take advantage of the opportunities around them to get even more insight because they've, they're calling on their experience but all that we've talked about today taking advantage of that when you already have that deep expertise is you become even exponentially more impactful exactly you know that a journalist and I was a journalist can take advantage of all this these insights in terms of how we try and influence and make decisions and and we can be more effective than what we were without it and where we're naturally we were probably naturally called to take advantage of these things to help deepen our knowledge base around a particular category or whatever it is.

36:03But when you're already an expert, like you say, you become exponentially more impactful if you really open your mind to take advantage of all this, the new data and the insights that you can as a result of these tools. Yeah, back to curiosity. Yeah, exactly. And just to wrap up, there'll be a lot of procurement leaders listening today that are not as advanced on their journey. I think that it's interesting times at the moment because we always look up and think somebody else is more advanced than we are. And you sometimes don't necessarily sanity check of, well, I'm actually pretty advanced versus the rest of the world, what I'm doing.

36:41But you're always looking up wanting to be further along than you are. For those who maybe feel as though they're not as far along the journey as what you are, do you have any advice or tips on just how to start thinking about how can I go on this journey? What are the baby steps at the beginning that they unlocks, that make some of the things that you're doing today or that you're planning to do tomorrow kind of possible? Yeah. Nike has a really good slogan, right? Just do it. And I think a lot of people may still think that they're behind. I would say I don't think you're behind. I think we're all still trying to figure it out.

37:21many times when you see companies come out with here's great success with AI, here's great success with agents and I will say we are getting a lot of really good traction and seeing a lot of really good use cases but still it's limited if there is one company that says I've figured it out I think they're lying it's AI washing or I don't know what you would call it But I think what is important is you just go try it. Don't overanalyze it. You choose versus decide because every choice you make, every decision you make typically is reversible. That's what my boss keeps saying. So just do it. Yeah.

38:06Yeah. We talked about this off mic before we started. We're in this world where we don't necessarily know what the future is going to look like. And that's kind of what makes it exciting as well. but um we're on this journey together of figuring out like how do we best leverage the opportunities that are in front of us and the new tools that are in front of us and um and thinking that you have all the answers is probably a dangerous place to start yeah very true look we there is you mentioned it before to start too is there's never been a better time a more exciting time to be part of procurement yeah we are we have an ability as a procurement community to completely reinvent how we do things and i think it's it but you what you will see is those that will do it will be ahead um and it's not going to be five years from now it will be a very short period of time yeah um no speed's important i have something stuck above my monitor which reminds me every single day about how fast uh you know one how fast the world is changing but how fast I need to embrace all the change around me for my business and I think that's the same for everybody that's listening is we can't just sit on the sidelines and kind of watch because the divergence between the haves and the have-nots will be real and then that's ultimately what will create that competitive advantage for our companies is how do we use all these tools you know the you talked before about build versus buy and it's like a lot of the fundamentals you can buy and everybody will get to the same place eventually.

39:35But what's going to differentiate you versus your direct competitor is how you end up using these tools and how you apply them. And that's not something you can necessarily just buy off the shelf. No, that's exactly right. All right. Well, Gail, I really, really appreciate your time today just to talk through kind of the journey that you're on at Hexion, but also, you know, just talk about the curiosity, the vulnerabilities, the fact that we're on this journey together and just give some insight into how you're approaching it. So what I'll do is I'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in our show notes for today's episode.

40:10If anybody would like to reach out and get in touch, those will be at artofprocurement.com slash podcast for anybody listening who wants to go and check that out. One last time. Thanks so much.

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41:02You can do that at artofprocurement.com slash subscribe. That's artofprocurement.com slash subscribe. Thank you for joining us today and I look forward to seeing you again soon.