⁓ Well, it's interesting. I remember in high school, I graduated ⁓ high school back in 1986. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I liked computers. ⁓ I liked just being analytical and studying things. And I remember I was talking to a friend and I said, I don't know what I want to do. And he said, well, of course you're going to be a professor. And I thought, what? Now this wasn't totally out of the blue. My father was an accounting professor. So it wasn't a real stretch for someone to think that I might.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
go into academia, but I didn't give it any thought until my freshman year of college. I was sitting in calculus and I just remember watching the professor and thinking, you know, I think I would enjoy that and I think I would be good at that. ⁓ And I didn't know that being a professor was mostly going to be, not mostly, but a lot of it was going to be about doing research. You know, as a student, you only know about the teaching part of it. ⁓
and at a liberal arts college, St. Olaf College, the faculty are focused on teaching. But then if you want to be a professor, you have to go get a PhD and then you really discover the joys of research and digging into, you know, really whatever seems most interesting. And I have to say it's the best job in the world. ⁓ I am department chair, which comes with more administrative overhead, but like
You you have to spend a certain amount of a large part of your time teaching and then some part with the administrative part of any job. But then the rest of the time, you could just work on whatever seems like the most interesting, valuable use of your time. There's not a lot of jobs like that out there. So it really is the best job in the world.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, mean,
looking at your career, like you're a professor for supply chain management. Not a lot of universities have courses like that. So I really value what you're teaching out there because there are degrees on finance, there are degrees on marketing, but not a lot of courses and specializations or departments around supply chain management. So it's really good to see that you're one of the, have you always been in supply chain or has it evolved for you as your?
career as a board.
Well, you know, back to my undergrad, I took a class that was called operations research in the math department. And it was all about creating mathematical models of some business situation and trying to figure out like, what's the optimal thing to do under this simplified version of the problem. And then hoping that would translate to the real world. And I thought, I think I found what I've been looking for because we're using math to try to solve complicated problems.
And I always knew I was interested in the real world and the business world. And so I went to Northwestern University and I went to the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science. ⁓ And I was so lucky in so many ways because I had amazing professors ⁓ and also a bit of dumb luck. was such a large department. I went there thinking that I wanted to focus on some of the more mathematical
details of like network flow problems. And as much as I enjoyed working on those, I realized that I just didn't care. Like you could tell me somebody had a better algorithm and I just, I didn't care. But I realized that, you know, talking about warehouses and factories and distribution centers and the layout of the network, that was really interesting. And so again, I say was really lucky in that I didn't have to go.
Once I figured out what I wanted to be doing, I didn't have to go to a different university or different program or something. ⁓ And so my dissertation was Essays and Logistics, and it was the title I gave it. And then I came to the University of Nevada, Reno in 1995 to be a logistics professor. And you're exactly right. I mean, as you say, there are not a lot of schools that have logistics supply chain, whatever you want to call it, as a program of study. ⁓
You know, one of the great things the United States did 150 years ago was the Land Grant Act that gave states a grant of land and said, here, this and build a university. And if you read the original Land Grant Act, they wanted on applied things. They specifically mentioned agriculture and the mechanic arts, which didn't mean mechanical engineering so much as just making stuff. And so...
If you think how we make things now, it's all supply chain management. And the University of Reno, my school, is a land grant school. And so the whole idea of a land grant school is to meet the needs of the people of the state. ⁓ And Reno is a great distribution hub for the West Coast. If you want one warehouse for the West Coast, we're really right in the middle. We're very favorable tax wise and we're very business friendly.
So there's always been a strong interest in meeting the needs of the business community here at the university. And supply chain management has been a key part of that. So I am also very lucky in that way that I found a thing I was interested in and I've been able to spend a lot of time doing it.
And that's always, isn't that always great when you're able to do that, find your calling and then be able to spend the time that's needed. I could relate with a few things. Operational research, even I took that subject in my grad school. I went to a similar, like I think land grant school, University of Arizona Tucson. And, you know, operational research was more about, you know, simulations, five wise, understanding ⁓ how exactly things are moving through. So I, you know, as you were speaking, I was.
reflecting back on that coursework. yeah, I mean, that that coursework really applies and intersects well in the supply chain world where you can actually apply it in a real world where you're trying to see the movement of goods, the reverse flow of goods, setting up processes that scale with humans, technology and processes, That cross section of three people coming together and building. So in that time, as you're training the supply chain professionals of tomorrow, how, what,
What do you see ⁓ as the biggest lesson that you want the people who take your courses to get out of when they graduate? Is there a particular ⁓ industry you train them for? What exactly are the future roles of people who graduate?
⁓ you know, I think one of the things that's probably always been true, but never been more true is that there's just no way to know what the world is going to look like tomorrow, much less five, 10, 20 years from now. ⁓ and so as we're trying to help prepare students for their careers, there's no way to know what they're going to need tomorrow.
And I'll use AI as a perfect example. ⁓ Because when chat GPT came on everybody's radar screens, what was it? Three, going on four years ago, three years ago, ⁓ it just seemed like, my gosh, we have computers that can think and it's amazing and we're all gonna die. ⁓ And we've come to realize the limitations of large language models. ⁓ And as employees are hiring new graduates, they think, ⁓ okay.
Listen, college kid, you know about AI, right? Here, come teach us how to use AI. ⁓ And so, you know, I'm emailing with my colleagues, just, you know, today, like every day, trying to talk about what should we be teaching them with regards to AI? ⁓ And what's tricky about that is that, choose whatever industry you're in. ⁓ People are still trying to figure out how do we use AI?
And what should we use it for and where does it really not work very well? ⁓ so industry is trying to figure out what skills students need and then the Professors we need to learn those skills so that we can teach them and then we need to learn how to teach them ⁓ and so I mean to we can talk more about AI later if you want but really In a lot of ways the most important thing for you to learn in college is
how to teach yourself new things. Because yeah, you're learning accounting or finance or whatever your major is. ⁓ And the course that I most often teach is operations management where yes, I kind of smiled when you mentioned 5S, ⁓ know, or ⁓ yeah, all those great things of Six Sigma. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, I'm teaching them all those skills, but that class is really about continuous process improvement.
which is what every company is really trying to do. You're trying to satisfy your customers better. ⁓ And so you have to learn, you have to learn how to learn new skills. ⁓ And so part of what we're trying to do is help prepare students for that.
Makes sense. I ⁓ we should talk about AI for sure, like how the curriculum must have been changing right now. When I was graduating back in 2015, there wasn't really lot of mention about AI. And the major I did was machine learning. And I feel like machine learning is a foundation for learning AI. If you understand machine learning, then you can understand AI much better. ⁓ At some point of time, machine learning was the interreplaceable word for AI.
I feel like in the supply chain world, because so much of the data is relational format, a tabular format. Machine learning algorithms that learn on the ground truth and then predict the next outcome or predict the right route, predict the right pricing. I think that's a good foundation, I I felt like is for anyone who's trying to adapt to AI today. Like LLMs are great, but it's like if you directly start learning LLMs, you've missed the entire foundation that was built over the last 30 years, starting from data analysis.
business intelligence, predictive intelligence, machine learning and segmentation, whatnot. And then we kind of came to LLM. So it's like drinking directly from the fire hose if you start your AI career today from LLM. So I'm guessing as a supply chain degree, your students must be getting a lot of training and assignments around data analysis as well, like how to analyze ⁓ a large amount of data to be able to predict outcomes in supply chain.
Yeah, one thought back on LLMs. A colleague of mine who's now retired, Henry Amato, ⁓ he was the one who introduced me to neural networks late last century and about what you could do with them. And now that we've got large language models, all these uncountable number of layers and ⁓ complication, they can do so much.
I really like to show students this story that was in the New York Times back in 2023, I think, just about how if you start with a very simple one and it has very little training, just trying to predict the next letter, the next word. And I feel like that really helps them understand, you know, it's just trying to predict what should come next. with a smart enough box behind you, it really does seem very intelligent. So what
We are on the data analysis part. I teach a class on data visualization. And one of the things that I'm really trying to help them understand is that you have to understand why you're making this data visualization. What is the story you're trying to tell? What is the conclusion you're trying to make just obvious for your viewers, your readers? Every season, they're yes, no. We definitely need to, you
build another, I don't know, factory or buy more trucks or do this, whatever it is, you ⁓ you have to figure out the why of what the stories you're trying to tell. And then, and then once you're curious about that and now you have some reason why you're trying to do this thing, that makes it easier to, you know, to deal with, you know, the spreadsheets and the tools and the different kinds of visualizations. Cause you know, it's all, it's all about.
all about storytelling and trying to get people to understand what it is that you're trying to do. ⁓ And on the AI side, as far as doing analysis, a basic thing to be teaching in an operations management course is linear programming. ⁓ And so we're doing some linear programming. ⁓ And students will think, why do I have to learn how to do this? The AI can do this for me. Well.
Mm-hmm.
See, the thing is you have to know if the answer's right or you have to know if the answer smells fishy. Just like, you you can't just have the AI write something for you and then just trust that it's good. You have to read it and edit it yourself. And so, you know, we'll teach the basics. We'll do some things. And then we'll say, okay, let's see what a chat GPT can do with this. And most of the time it's gonna do an amazing job, but not always. Sometimes it doesn't understand.
the constraints. So I just take the slide that I put on the screen, show the students, we came up with an answer, we solved it using Solver in Excel. We got an answer. Just feed that into ChatGPT and see what it does. And usually it does, it usually does very well. Misses a couple things here and there. ⁓ I have not had as good a luck with Copilot, unless I'm just using it, you know, directly on the website, but inside Office, hasn't worked out as well.
Yeah, that makes
sense. mean, especially on the data visualization piece that you shared. Yeah, it's really important to already have a story in mind, the story that you're trying to tell, and then you're filling up the numbers to kind of support that story instead of analyzing a lot of data, because that's almost like finding a needle in a haystack. And that's one thing I...
Well, but sorry, because what I was thinking about, I sometimes, like the whole idea of Six Sigma is you've got this process, and I'll spare you the acronym, okay, DMAIC, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. And the first step is looking at the data to figure out, what really is the problem here? Because in general, it's easy to think, I know the answer, and you go off to try to solve that problem, but it turns out that wasn't actually the problem, and so your solution isn't going to improve anything.
But yeah, usually we do have a pretty good idea of where the answer ought to go because we've already, you know, we didn't walk up to this problem blind. We've been dealing with whatever situation for quite a while ourselves.
Yeah, I mean, it's good that you kind of shared that kind of a mental model with students because I had to learn it the harder way. Like I had to be in an industry, analyze a ton of data and then realize that if you start as you're analyzing data, you have to have a hypothesis in mind that what are you trying to prove with it versus I'm just looking and I'm going to just drive insights out of it. Really interesting. I want to make a segue into your work with the Reverse Logistics Association.
Yeah.
And
I see that you joined them in 2008. What was RLA like at that time? Was it pre-recession or was it during the recession or after recession?
Well,
one of the nice things about doing an interview like this from home is I have all these props behind me. So really it starts back in 19, I guess we finished in 98, early 99. My friend and colleague Dale Rogers was a colleague of mine at the University of Nevada here back in, well he hired me back in 95.
And Dale said, ⁓ I've been here maybe a semester, and he said, hey, I'm going to work on this project on reverse logistics. Do you want to be involved? And I said, yes, absolutely. And then I asked, what's reverse logistics? Because I don't really know, but it just sounded interesting. as a brand new assistant professor, if anybody proposes anything, you think, yes, yes, OK, let's do this. ⁓ And so Dale and I spent the next couple of years going around talking to people.
⁓ And we wrote this book and ⁓ I don't speak Chinese, but my book's been translated into Chinese, which I think is very cool, ⁓ by a friend of mine in China who said there were bootleg translations floating around and he just thought there should be a real official translation. We thought, sounds great to us. ⁓ And so we... ⁓
really nice.
We wanted to just read like a book for the lay person, not an academic book filled with theories, but just a book that a business professional could read and get a basic understanding of the challenges, the issues, potential solutions, pitfalls, roadblocks, whatever. And so we really tried to write the book that we had wanted to read before we got started. And yes, we're professors. So yeah, there are...
There are results of some studies that we've done, but it really is written for the lay person. And you can't buy copies anymore. There's some used copies you can find on Amazon or Libris or wherever, but you can find the whole PDF online. So just read that. ⁓ And so we wrote that. then logistics ⁓ is an applied art. ⁓ And we were working with a number of companies. ⁓
Mm-hmm.
And ⁓ one of the companies that got involved was Tony Sciorota, who at the time was at Phillips Corporation. And he suddenly found himself tasked with just being handed, hey, figure out what to do with all these returns. And he thought, well, I don't know what to do. And I've heard him tell this story. He is the executive director of the Reverse Logistics Association today. And so I've heard him tell this story many times about how he ran across a copy of our book online.
And he printed out all 200 and whatever pages just on the laser printer in the office and took it home and he read it and he thought, wow, okay, this is so helpful. So ⁓ Dale had started an organization called the Reverse Logistics Executive Council, R-L-E-C. And we used it ⁓ to work with industry to get ⁓ their thoughts and also ⁓ we would work on projects and get students working on projects ⁓ to meet their needs.
⁓ And after some time of that, ⁓ Dale realized, you know what, I don't really want to run a trade association. And in the meantime, ⁓ the founder of the Reverse Logistics Association had reached out to Dale and Dale thought, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore. Here, you can have my membership list. I'll help you get started. So really, Arlek was the predecessor to the RLA in a lot of ways. ⁓ And so...
insight.
once RLA got started, I wasn't involved really for the first couple of years. And so I guess it was 2008 when I maybe, I don't know. So I've been involved with RLA for a long, time.
Yeah, mean, your LinkedIn says around 2008. So it's been it's been it's like more than it's 18 years. ⁓ What has changed? So like, yeah, first off, I think RLA is an amazing organization that has now actually, ⁓ you know, it's good to see it taking even a bigger stage with the NRF organization, it kind of shows the importance of reverse logistics in the retail ecosystem. So I think it's all the hard work you guys did from that time to today.
which has kind of culminated into it being a part of an organization like NRF. But what was those initial days like? Have the topics changed? Because I'm guessing during that time, return rates were actually like 3%, 4%, depending on what category. But now we are looking at 30 % returns for apparel. And e-commerce is obviously booming. So it's obviously going to keep on increasing.
Have the conversations changed, the research changed and things of those nature changed since then.
You know, it's funny, I'm thinking of that old expression, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I love to go to used bookstores because there's just so many odd old weird books that you're not gonna find on Amazon or at Barnes and Noble. And so I like to read about history. so I've got in my office some old books about retail.
And if you go back to State Street in Chicago back in the like the 20s or the 40s They were saying the returns rate was about five six percent And that's still what the returns rate is for you know brick-and-mortar stores today If you would have asked catalog retailers like what's your returns rate and they might have said 20 30 percent and then you know at the
turn of the most recent century, everybody thought, I'm going to sell things online. And they had no retail experience. They had no catalog experience. Maybe they had retail, know, brick and mortar experience. But, you know, e-commerce was a brand new thing 25 years ago. And so these novices didn't have catalog experience and they didn't know they're going to get all these returns coming back, which any catalog retailer could have told you. ⁓ And so, you know, everybody was figuring out, you know, how to deal with that.
⁓ And so, you know, there was a ⁓ period, you know, 10 years ago where we started talking about omnichannel, where, you know, it's you want the retail or returns experience to be the same, regardless of whether you're on your phone or your tablet or your computer ⁓ or at the store, ⁓ trying to integrate all of those experiences to be the same. ⁓ And there were some, you know, some
some learning there. But in a lot of ways, a lot of the things that we're talking about haven't changed in a lot of ways. There's kind of the pendulum of how restrictive should returns policies be? What will customers tolerate? But it's really been, I think the biggest change over all these years in the RLA has just been seeing
how mainstream the idea of talking about returns is. Because when we started talking about it, people weren't talking about it. ⁓ And now everybody realizes it's part of the cost of doing business and that it's part of ⁓ maintaining customer satisfaction, customer engagement, customer happiness with the brand. And so you have to do it well. ⁓ So a lot has ⁓ stayed the same in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean the basics of it must have changed. I think the volume of the problem has increased for sure, like from what it used to be to what it is now. It has become more mainstream, like more retailers think of it as an impact on their bottom line versus being part of their business. I'm very excited to kind of share and learn about the particular topic that we want to discuss, which is the SQL12n Smart QR.
label? Like when did that, what was the inception of that idea? Like it's a brilliant idea, which is frictionless for data capturing or understanding product verification. So how did you guys come up with it? What was the inspiration behind it?
Yeah, ⁓ 12n or SQL codes are a way to put additional pieces of data into a single ⁓ data carrier. So we could talk about a QR code. We could talk about a different two dimensional barcode that you people have probably seen but not paid attention to called a data matrix.
We could do this with RFID, but QR code is the thing that everybody's most familiar with and comfortable with. so ⁓ this 12N, that's the designation that was given us by the ANSI body that certified us as a national standard. And ⁓ the motivation behind this project was someone we knew at Intel in Europe was
getting laptops to be repaired and then sending them to China for repairs. And when they got to the repair facility, many times the paperwork had been lost. And so the repair technicians needed to run all these tests and then make all over again and then make their best guess as to what needed to be repaired. And ⁓ on our contact at Intel, wanted to just put some kind of sticker on the laptop that couldn't get lost, that would easily list off, okay,
These were the tests that were run. This is what the results were for the test. And then this is the solution that should be taken. So that was the motivation for this project. ⁓ Unfortunately, by the time we had a solution prepared, ⁓ our advocate at Intel had taken a ⁓ buyout and wasn't at the company anymore. But really what a ⁓ 12N QR code lets you do is,
put a lot of information into one QR code. And what's different about that is every QR code you've ever scanned in your life, most likely, it just had one payload, one information field. And that information field probably was a web address, HTTP, colon, blah, blah, ⁓ a menu or information about a hotel or whatever. ⁓ And so,
What the 12N standard lets you do is lets you put multiple pieces of information inside the QR code. So the QR code is just a bunch of letters that have been converted to dots. So there's a couple of letters that say, ⁓ that tells your scanner, your app, what the next piece of information is going to be. Like this is the name of the company. This is the name of the product. This is the serial number. This is the UPC. is, you know, whether it is lead free or whatever information.
you want to put in it.
So if I understand correctly instead of just having one payload in other words like having one set of information you can have multiple set of informations within a single QR code and that information can be You know disposition information You know like refurbishment information like all kind of is it is it can can somebody think of it as In a layman terms if someone's you know QR codes are very popular
⁓ with food menus when we go to restaurants. So can somebody think of it as in simpler terms, that you're able to save 12 different menus in one QR code and you're able to select which menu you want to open? Or are you able to kind of do it this way that this is the first course, second course, third course, fourth course? Sorry for oversimplifying it or using a bad analogy, but I'm trying to kind of make it simple for someone who doesn't understand the space, understand it.
Yeah, so that's certainly something you could easily do. ⁓ And ⁓ so one thing I do want to point out is that ⁓ that information, that payload, it might be just all self-contained. Like if it's a phone number, you don't need web access for that. I mean, the QR code could just have the phone number in it. ⁓ It could just have the serial number in it. But if you're going to have a menu, you're not going to have all those letters and numbers and everything jammed into a QR code.
to get to the menu, need to have a web link, a URL that somebody could click on that then is gonna go pull the menu from the server, whatever you want. ⁓ An example that I always thought would be really helpful is ⁓ like on the back of a TV, for example. There were many years where it seemed like every time I went to visit my parents, there was some issue about between the DVD player and the...
the old VCR they had and the stereo and the cable and the speakers, just something wasn't working right. So I'd always be peering around at the back of the TV, trying to read all those little jacks, the black on black plastic and you can't read anything. And so what I thought would be great is if we could just scan a QR code and then you'd see a menu with like 10 options and one would be like, do you wanna just look at the wiring diagram on the back of the TV to see all these jacks are? Another link that could take you to like, do you wanna call customer support? Just click here to call or click here to go straight to the.
the text support page or click here to go to the FAQ. Or if this is beyond your ability to fix, click here to have the good guys come and, ⁓ no, the geek squad. Have the geek squad come and fix it. Or if you can't be fixed anymore, click this link to find out what can I do with this. ⁓ Can I throw this in the garbage? Can I take this to household waste recycling? Like what should a responsible person do with this? And so you can have those series of links.
And some of those, like the phone number, that would just, the phone number is just right there. ⁓ Or the link to the customer support page or the link to household waste disposal, that's going to take you to a webpage somewhere.
Two questions pop up. One, like you mentioned that you can store information over there without being connected to the internet. Does that mean that whatever the QR code has is static? Like, you change it? Like, for example, maybe a new ESG compliance came in and now you cannot dispose of a TV like the way that you used to do till today. Can that be updated in real time into the QR code or is it static per QR code?
⁓ Absolutely, things can be updated. ⁓ And ⁓ again, you think of it, just, it's like the letters, the English letters have been translated into the language of dots. And so whatever dots are on the sticker, those are the letters that are on the sticker. ⁓ And so ⁓ a company would want to be smart about how they create those links to external sites. ⁓ And so...
information, know, hazardous waste disposal rules. Yes, those are something that will change. ⁓ And so you would expect a company to put a link on there that's going to take you to information about this product. And now you're just pulling up a web page and the company can easily update that web page anywhere, anytime they need ⁓ in order to be able to be able to put the most recent information. And then also
In order to every the more letters you want to have on the QR code, the more dots you're going to need. And then depending on how good people's cameras and things are, the sticker might have to get bigger. ⁓ And so you don't want to have your the web address someone's going to for the information. You wouldn't want it to be like.
Mm-hmm.
www.mycomputercompany.com slash manual slash this slash yada, yada, yada, yada. Because somebody might be trying to access this QR code five, 10 years from now, and you've rearranged all the files on your directories on your server and now you've got a dead link. So the smarter thing would be to use some sort of short code like a bitly type thing. So it's just bit.ly slash and then whatever. So A, it's much shorter and B, it's future-proof as you make
changes not only to the content of a webpage, but just the structure of the webpages themselves.
⁓ That's really good to know that somebody can update that in real time. The second question I had was, you described the application of it from a consumer endpoint of view, that where a consumer is consuming the information from the barcode. How do you see it applying in the reverse logistics in a facility where these goods are getting returned? I'm guessing you're seeing applications over there as well for it.
For sure, but before we get into that, there's one other application that we're quite excited about that I do want to mention. I feel like if I don't say it now, I'll forget because we'll get going on all these other things. And a place where we really think it has a lot of potential is in just the point of sale retail ⁓ terminal. ⁓ Because right now, particularly in the form of ⁓ extended warranties, which a lot of people, I usually don't buy one myself.
100%.
But sometimes I'm buying a printer or something where I think, yeah, I want a warranty on this one. ⁓ The process has to be that you scan the UPC, the regular linear barcode, and that's how the point of sale terminal knows that this is a brother, whatever that printer is right over there, ⁓ and how much it sells for. ⁓ And then it's also in a, if it's a self-service checkout sort of environment.
It's going to look up the weight so it knows whether the thing you set down there is consistent with the weight of the UPC you just scanned. So you need the UPC to know pricing most importantly. But then if you decide you want to buy the extended warranty, they're going to want to know the serial number so that if you try to come back with a warranty claim, they know that this is really the item that you purchased on this day at this store in this year. if you, you know, like if you're
Your brother-in-law, if you buy a drill and then your brother-in-law has one that's five years older and his dies and you're trying to do fraud by bringing it back in, we want to know that you really, you know, we have the right drill here. So to do that, we need the serial number. And so you could put the serial number on the outside of the box, but still somebody's got to scan that serial number. And so that's an extra step. And with the 12N QR code,
you could put the serial number and the UPC just in one very small QR code. So the point of sale terminal could capture the serial number of every item that has a serial number. Not everything has a serial number, but if you ask me, we're more likely to move in a direction of more things having serial numbers rather than less. mean, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have thought that the wired...
cell phone, headphones you plugged into your iPod 25 years ago, those would never have a serial number, but now your left and right earbuds have separate serial numbers. ⁓ So as more and more things are serialized, ability to capture serial numbers at point of sale ⁓ has a lot of value just for inventory freshness ⁓ and being able track and seeing what's going on. ⁓ It also will help deter theft because...
If you have no record that this particular drill was never sold at any store and someone walks up wanting to return it, you say, I'm sorry, sir, we don't have any record of this being sold. Now, if you bring your receipt though, you know, we'll take care of you. So we really think point of sale capture ⁓ is going to provide a lot of benefits. ⁓ But on the reverse side, ⁓ well, I mean, if you've captured the serial number point of sale,
Now we have more information as the product's coming back. ⁓ And ⁓ there's lots of possibilities on the reverse side as well. ⁓ One issue ⁓ with, ⁓ say, computers and devices ⁓ is when they get refurbished, ⁓ somebody buys a refurbished laptop, and then they may try to reach out to the original manufacturer. If that's a Dell or Acer or HP, whoever.
and they're gonna be told, no, no, we're not your warranty people for this laptop. You didn't buy it from us, you bought it from these other people that refurbished it. And with one QR code on the bottom, like I was saying earlier about the TV, you can scan it, you can see, ⁓ this is who I got, this is the customer service information I can call. And actually this remanufacturer may have given it a new serial number and that's all right there available to you right there on the QR code.
I want to touch on the POS system before we go into the reverse. I think that's super insightful. So the QR code is able to provide customers the information to how to diagnose what is wrong with the, how to kind of take care of the product. At the same time, it helps with preventing fraud during POS. ⁓ It's insightful to kind of, and that's a huge problem and that's a growing problem, returns fraud.
You also see that same thing being sold for e-commerce. For POS, it makes sense that you're physically present over there. You're somebody they were to scan. But do you think the QR code can also have an application for the e-commerce returns where things are coming back where you don't have a customer in front of you. You've already accepted that, I am taking this return back. But maybe there is information to be captured. know, Tony has a, I'm a big fan of Tony and I've listened to a lot of his podcasts and he has this thing that
You don't collect a lot of good data on the front end of returns, from customer. Customers would always give you, you know, like stupid reasons of returning. They would always choose the first three options of what that reason is. But the real reason is always from the back office. So like, can QR code help collecting that more important piece of data where, okay, somebody returned it, but this is the real reason so that that can be collected as it's, you know, supplied back to the reverse ⁓ network.
sure. mean, anytime that it's worth putting a sticker on something, why not put a sticker that has more information? ⁓ And so, back to the motivating project that started this whole ⁓ 12N. ⁓ Just one quick thing. So, I keep calling it 12N. ⁓ We were calling it SQRL, Smart QR for
Well, actually for a while we called it SQRRL, Smart QR for Reverse Logistics. And then we thought, no, you can use this on the forward side too. So we called it Smart QR for Logistics. And then we had this little green squirrel, because you know, SQRL, that's like squirrel without the vowels. But Tony Sheroda, he thought that didn't sound very professional. So he didn't want us calling him squirrel codes. So I've trained myself over the last decade or whatever to call him 12N codes.
Okay.
Thank
It would have been easier for the consumer to remember though. Like squirrel makes it easier for a consumer.
I know, I know.
I haven't given up, know, in my fantasy, someday people will just, yeah, we'll just scan the squirrel code. ⁓ But, you know, we'll see if that, we'll see if I ever have to worry about that. ⁓ But as I was saying, ⁓ anytime that it would make sense to put a new sticker on something, ⁓ why not put a sticker on there that's gonna have more information? Now, if that item,
It's just going to be traveling around in your own facilities, in your own network, going to your own, you know, sorting facilities, wherever Amazon or someone may put their own kind of license plate sort of, you know, ⁓ unique identifying number on it. And then anytime they need information, use that sticker to retrieve information, you know, from their servers. ⁓ But if you're going to then be sending it off to other partners, you know, if other people are going to buy, you know, truckloads of sweaters or, you know,
external hard drives or headsets or whatever, ⁓ why not put the results of all of that analysis? Like if it's a phone or something, you've run a bunch of ⁓ testing on it, electronics and you plug it in and you check the status of the battery and the memory and all this kind of stuff or the processor speed or whatever, and you've got a bunch of test results, why not put that right there on the sticker so when somebody else later could scan and say, I see that this
batteries got this kind of life on it. I mean, it could really take a lot of, it could make, take a lot of friction out and really make life a lot easier for the people that are, you know, gonna shine these up and sell them off somewhere. And then you've got the further provenance that this test was run by, you know, choose the Amazon or whoever. And so this is their test results that said this device has, you know, whatever kind of results.
So like I said, if it makes sense to put a sticker on it, why not to put a sticker on there that has ⁓ as much useful information as this might be useful down the road.
100 % like instead of having like multiple stickers, why not have a single sticker, single SQL code that you can use to collect a lot, lot, lot more data because you're able to have multiple payloads versus one payload. ⁓ I'm curious to learn like ⁓ are there like retailers or like brands that have tried to use it in their like real world operations?
That's where we've run into trouble. We started with Intel. QR codes were invented by Densowave, a company in Japan ⁓ that wanted a ⁓ fast-to-read sticker to put on automotive parts as they were producing them. ⁓ We were working with Densowave, the North American ⁓ subsidiary of Densowave, about using ⁓ 12N.
QR codes on ⁓ transmission cores down in Southern California. ⁓ But unfortunately, ⁓ the pandemic got in the way of that. ⁓ so we, like ⁓ one of my other hats, sit on the Postmaster General of the United States has a committee called the MTAC, ⁓ Mailers Technical Advisory Committee. I...
I represent the interests of people sending back returned goods. That's what I'm supposed to do, speak out on behalf of return companies across the country. ⁓ But honestly, the only reason I was interested to participate with the post office was to try to sell them on using 12N codes. ⁓ Because I have a picture that I will show of a flat envelope I received with something in it.
and it had like three or four barcodes. And then on there, one of the stickers just has my cell phone number just printed right on the sticker. And I think, well, that doesn't seem very secure. So one thing that I neglected to mention earlier on, and it should have been one of the first words out of my mouth talking about 12N, is that anything can be encrypted, anything can be password protected to whatever extent you want. So for example, my phone number, you know, it be pixels, and if you scanned it,
you'd have had to a password or something in order to be able to get my phone number. ⁓ And so ⁓ at one of these meetings in Washington, DC, I identified the proper vice president or whoever who I wanted to make my pitch to about 12N codes. So we got a meeting set up ⁓ with ⁓ that vice president and some of her technical people. And the technical people are asking a lot of really good questions that we had.
perfect answers to if you ask me. And they seemed pretty interesting. And at the end of the meeting, we asked, hey, could we get some contact information for some of these people? And we were told, ⁓ don't call us, we'll call you. So unfortunately, the post office didn't work out. then we had, then somehow that led to the people in the European postal union found us. ⁓ And that looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but we're still.
we're still chasing down a lot of leads because part of the problem is, ⁓ you know, it's sort of like building a fax machine. just one, you need a lot of pieces of the puzzle ⁓ to work together. ⁓ And so ⁓ we mentioned the RLA history, you know, a little bit before, and you mentioned that the RLA is now part of the National Retail Federation. ⁓ And another thing that has not changed over all my years in reverse logistics is that
Reverse logistic still doesn't get the attention or the respect that it deserves. It's the sales out the front door. That's what everybody's focused on. And now they've realized that, yeah, returns are important. But so our friends on the RLA board that have seen for years the value and the importance of these 12N codes.
But unfortunately, they're not the ones that everybody wants to pay the most attention to. So you've got the returns person saying, hey, we should put these stickers on. And people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're just the returns people. don't want to, I want to talk to the marketing people. And so now that the RLA is part of the National Retail Federation ⁓ and the NRF really has ⁓ much more attention from the C-level ⁓ executives.
⁓ We're hopeful that some of our friends might be able to help us make some more progress there, but we'll have to see how that all works out.
I mean, I just want to share a personal story. ⁓ I created ⁓ a customer segmentation model when I was working at Amazon and it took me like six months to build it, like day and night working. And I presented it to my leadership and it was like, yeah, it's great work, but it did not get adopted right away. So I got really frustrated by that. I was like, why did I waste my six months into building an algorithm that you guys are not going to use?
And my leader at that time told me that, sometimes good work doesn't get immediately accepted, but it does get accepted because it has the value. has the application because it's well thought. So I mean, I would use the same analogy. Sometimes it might take 12 and some more time to get accepted. having looked deep into it, I feel like it's an exciting technology that can actually make a difference. A lot of times.
these tech, you know, these kinds of technologies are not interoperable. Like you can use them in one ecosystem, but you cannot, but looking into SQL, 12 and it's really hard to kind of remember the entire thing, but 12 and smart smart QR label. I feel like it has a very good application which can be applied. So I'm bullish on it. I hope the NLF picks up at picks up on it and you know, it reaches more years. ⁓ And you know, that's what I'm trying to do with the podcast. So I really appreciate the time you took to kind of share all of that with me.
Well, thank you for having me on. I can relate to this story, your Custer resegmentation project there. I ⁓ started working on this when my daughter was in high school, I guess. ⁓ And I had a dream that someday she'd be in college and her friend would be like, you know, I didn't know what to do with this old printer, but I scanned this QR code on the back. And did you know?
it'll tell you and that my daughter would be like, oh, please, I've been hearing about these QR codes for years. Well, my daughter's out of college now and I still don't have any manufacturers putting these QR codes on the back of printers. So, I really do think it makes sense. QR codes, they sort of popped into our awareness more than a decade ago and then they kind of disappeared. But they really do.
Yeah.
They're not the solution for everything, they're a great tool for the right environment. And now GS1, the big conglomerate that controls all the UPC codes, they have their own version, essentially. And so at the end of the day, people have a choice. They can pay GS1, and GS1 will charge you every time you create a new one.
Or they could use 12N, which is an open system. No, I'm not making any money off any of this, or even if you do it, a company uses it, it's free. It's an open system. It's an open source. And at the end of the day, that's, I feel in company's best interest. So yeah, I agree. think the day will come and we just keep plugging away. We have, I don't know, I have a conversation next week with a couple other companies that looks promising.
We'll see where it all goes, but I very much appreciate the chance to ⁓ talk about 12N. I'll talk about 12N to anybody who wants to hear. So if people are looking for me, just shoot me an email.
Yeah, definitely. Where can the viewers find you? Like any email where they can contact you or LinkedIn?
⁓
so, you know, I'm Ron Lembke, L-E-M-B-K-E. Just Google me. I'm easy to find. I'm at the University of Nevada. My email is r-o-n-l-e-m-b-k-e at unr.edu. ⁓ there's a silent B in there, but I'm easy to find. Shoot me an email. ⁓ I'd be, I'd be happy to talk to you.
So thanks a lot for your time Dr. Ron, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot.
you're welcome. Thank you.
Awesome. I'll just hit.
