Bindiya Vakil is Keeping the World's Goods Moving

The pandemic was an unprecedented disruptor of the global supply chain. Bindiya Vikal, CEO and co-founder of Resilinc, is in the business of supply chain risk management. She talks about the challenges she's overcome, and what she's learned during Covid.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to Made by Women by the Seneca Women Podcast
Network and I Heart Radio. At a moment when businesses
face some of the biggest challenges in recent history, we
bring you inspiring stories, practical insights, and shared learnings to
help you successfully navigate in today's environment. I'm Kim Azzarelli,

(00:26):
and thanks so much for joining us. Today was an
unprecedented year of disruption. The pandemic dramatically changed the way
we look at even the most simple tasks like buying
household essentials at the grocery store. Today, we'll be talking
to a CEO who can give us a unique perspective
on that huge disruption. She's been Da buck Hill, founder

(00:48):
and CEO of Resilink, a company that focuses on supply
chain risk management. Now you may not know supply chain
risk management by name, but you definitely felt its impact.
During the early days of the pandemic. Everything that you
depend on to get through your day depends on a
supply chain, from toilet paper, to food to essential and

(01:08):
nine masks. Each supply chain was pushed to its limit
as the world reacted to the new challenges of COVID.
That's where Bindia and Resilin come in RESI Link is
helping companies reimagine supply chain management through software that takes
into account the impact of issues ranging from natural disasters
to strikes to yes pandemics. I met Bindia through Springboard Enterprises,

(01:31):
an organization that for twenty years has worked to accelerate
the growth of women led companies through access to essential
resources and experts. I recently spoke with Bindia about her
struggles and her triumphs in bringing supply chain management into
the mainstream. Her perspective on resilience provides a lesson for
all of us. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bindia.

(01:54):
Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for
having me so tell us a little bit about supply
chain risk management. I think for our listeners it's really
interesting to know what it is and why it is
such a crucial topic right now. Supply chains have been
around since humanity has been around, and supply chain management

(02:15):
has been just as important today as you know the
earliest days. I think we all have probably heard some
of those from that little limerick about how for want
of a nail, a kingdom is lost. Um. I think
that I would say was probably the humanity's first documented
case of a supply chain disruption, So it is it's

(02:40):
always been important. I think why supply chain is more
critically important today or what has changed in the last
ten day, twenty years, is that we now have a
global supply chain. We take advantage of suppliers um overseas
in lots of different countries. We ourselves are global, certainly

(03:02):
all of our suppliers are global. So we are now
more vulnerable in some respects than ever before. Do these
things that happen in countries that we are our suppliers
operate in, and a lot of times we don't have
enough inventory because we've also taken a lot of inventory
out over the years to become more cost effissient. Well,

(03:26):
we've all experienced a little bit of that firsthand during
this pandemic, and we'll get to that. But tell us
a little bit about what your company does. The biggest
thing you need to fix in supply chain in order
to manage risk effectively is to get information. The two
things that you need to know are I buy five
thousand parts, which are the countries or what are the

(03:49):
global sites that make those? And I know it seems
so simple, right but because suppliers change, because the tools
are different, there's a lot of dynamic dynamic shift going on.
A lot of companies over time lose this visibility to
that global supplier base where their parts originate. That's the

(04:13):
first problem. And the second thing is what are the
things that are going wrong or things that are happening
in those countries or those cities or towns which might
affect my ability to secure the raw material I need
to build and ship my own products. If we had
this little two bits of information, then we could be

(04:35):
a little more proactive, a little better prepared. We could
predict what could potentially go wrong and manage it a
little more effectively. And so you created res a link
to provide that solution exactly we were created. We created
a digitalization of supplier data solution before digitalization was a thing.

(04:59):
So I started wrestling. I mean, it was still early
days for digitalization. I started wrestling in. The idea was
to take data that was out there in people's heads,
in the suppliers laptops, not in any kind of RP
system sitting in rows and columns, bringing it all through

(05:19):
our network and our platform into a digital footprint up
in the cloud, where many many companies could need collaborate
exchange this information seamlessly with each other. Well, we'll get
into how it all works and some of the data
science behind it, but let's start with your early days,
your personal journey. Did you always want to found a company?

(05:41):
It's very interesting, UM. One of my mentors, you know,
she was the first person to interview me here when
I came here in two thousand and to the United States,
And in the interview, she always tells this story that
I asked, Vinthia, what do you want to be? What's
your ambition? And I that apparently I told her I
wanted to be the CEO of the company, and um,

(06:05):
so she said that inside she was laughing. But that
was ten years later I was the CEO of Resilink.
So she, she says, apparently you wanted to you just
never realized it. So I knew that I wanted to
be at the top of whatever field I chose, but
I didn't really know that the paths to getting there

(06:27):
would be through starting my own company. So I know
it's a long answer to a fairly simple question. UM,
but I will say, no, my ambition was not to
found my own company. Um. But that's the path I
ended up taking to accelerate it a lot. So take
us through the early days of resling. How did you

(06:48):
get it started? And you know, were there any obstacles
in your way? The journey of wreslink, or the journey
of any founder, I should say, is riddled with obstacle
that you overcome, as you know, uh, and each one
makes you stronger. You know, whatever doesn't kill you make you,
makes you stronger. It is very true, and it's certainly

(07:10):
very true for us. UM. It started for me. It
started with being at Cisco where I was in working
in the supply chain risk management space in procurement and
recognizing that someone needs to start a company for this
solving this problem because we were building some tools in
house and couldn't find any company that had a plug

(07:34):
in play type of solution. And so that was kind
of the German Nation of this idea that there I
had stumbled upon. It seemed, um that I knew something
unique and different about a space that no one else
was really tackling, and it was a little bit of
a niche space, supply chain risk management UM. And I

(07:57):
ended up becoming one of the experts in this space
just because of my passion for it. Risk just appealed
to me. Doing something about risk became my um purpose,
you know. So it was somewhere deep inside of me
that I really believe that what I had, uh to
my my solution to this problem was real, unique and

(08:20):
could solve a very large problem for the industry. Um
And from there on I was I will admit, the
day I started wrestling, I was a much naive procurement person.
I had never thought about being an entrepreneur. I knew
I wanted to start my own company, but I had

(08:41):
no idea what to do. What is the first thing
you do when you sit down you've quit your job?
And uh, it was this profound moment and I still
remember I sat staring at the screen for ten minutes
thinking what am I going to do now? You know? Um,
But that from that moment on, you know, you just

(09:01):
talked to a lot of people. You never look back.
You tell people why you want to do this, and
they From there it takes on a life of its own,
but it is definitely riddled with a lot of nose
for every yes. And I don't want to mince my
word words there I have said it many times that
for every yes that I got, I got sixty notes

(09:24):
that I had to you know, write, overcome, overcome yes,
and those I used to call myself. And sometimes I
still feel like humpty dumpty. You know. I walk into
a meeting sometimes and I feel like I just got pounded,
and then I have to kind of put humpty dumpty
back together, put a smile on my face, and go
pitch it again to the next person, or the next investor,

(09:47):
or the next customer. Well, it's so interesting that you
say that, because much of what you said I feel
like the universal experience of entrepreneurs, you know, looking at
that blank screen after you quit your job and and
saying to yourself, now what, but then pushing through and
then facing all those knows. I know, you know, we've
talked about this a lot, but this idea of getting
comfortable with hearing no seems so critical because if you

(10:10):
can't hear no, it's very hard to get to they s.
So how do you deal with that? That has been
one of the most difficult things that as a founder
I have had to get overcome. You know, it's it's
it comes from a deep place. So so here's the thing.
It's not just to know that you hear from friends

(10:31):
or family or someone. This is a know that comes
from people who are extremely successful, extremely rich. They've been there,
done that, um started and sold a large company. You know.
These are people who are your potential investors. These are
people who are your potential customers, people who you would
look up to or respect. And when those types of

(10:53):
people tell you and no, I do feel it is
a lot harder to take that fine that in our
why am I doing this? Is this really help? Going
to help? And and for me it always took. I
always went back to know what I'm doing is important,
and here are the three reasons why. One was I've

(11:14):
seen firsthand paying millions of dollars when things went bad
and we couldn't get parts. We were losing hundreds of
millions of dollars when those types of events happen. So
people who are saying this no today may not have
lived my life, and so they don't understand what I understand.
I am an expert in my space. They may be

(11:37):
an expert in something else, but in this space, I'm
an expert and go. That does not come easily. That
self confidence, particularly when you're younger. When you're not an
entrepreneur by by design. When you're not, you know, you're
just I will say a lot of times I say

(11:57):
I wasn't nobody when I started wrestling. You know, I
had no personal brand, I had no experience starting a business,
and so it took me a long time to really
put that note into perspective, find that deep place within
me where that spark was there. That No, what I'm
saying is correct. The world doesn't see it today, but

(12:19):
they will see it eventually, right, because you're breaking new ground. Absolutely.
In fact, I can I say that my biggest salesperson
today is our president are in the White House, because
he last week made it an executive order that supply
chain risk management is a matter of national security. We'll

(12:43):
be back with senecas made by women after this short break.
That actually brings me to what you've been doing during
this pandemic, because if anybody didn't under dan why supply
chain is important when you couldn't find toilet paper or

(13:04):
you know, other essentials in the early stages of the pandemic,
I guess that's a great example. So what has been
your experience with this pandemic? The pandemic was the disrupter
of disruptors UM. When I say I have been in
supply chain risk management for twenty one years now that
I have lived through earthquakes, hurricanes, obviously, the swine flu pandemic,

(13:28):
of all nine, multiple supplier bankruptcies, UM, multiple force major issues,
capacity problems, I've seen it all. But over a period
of fifteen years, twenty years, we saw covid bring all
of those things within the space of four months in

(13:50):
that's covid UM. So it was an incredible moment for
supply chain practitioners because it was the Black Swan of
ax Wan event and it moved on us. It started
in one region that was economically and very critical region
for our supply chain, which is the Hubei Province of China.

(14:11):
Wrestling AI picked up that initial alert on December twenty eight,
when the local Wuhan government asked the hospitals in the
area to be on the lookout for an unknown pattern
of pneumonia. We alerted our customers January fourth, and then
from there on, it was this unbelievable journey of alerting

(14:33):
our customers on a daily basis about what was happening,
assessing suppliers. When WUHAN shared down on January twenty two,
we had already launched a supply chain pandemic readiness assessment
out to twelve hundred suppliers. Now, remember it wasn't declared
a pandemic until Margie Leven. We weren't even calling it

(14:57):
an epidemic yet. When we created that assessment, and we
put out a maturity model, and we began doing these
bi weekly UM webinars telling our customers and the broader
community at large what to expect over the next few weeks.
What are the numbers to watch, you know, how will

(15:18):
the spread affected, how will media coverage, how will government react?
All of those things we began to talk about since
January twenty two, every two weeks, and sometimes we have
chose when we look back because all of those things happened. Wow, unbelievable.
Who could have imagined, as you said this, this would
be the disruptor of disruptors, but that you were so

(15:41):
well positioned to help so many organizations. I mean, you've
really been credited with bringing supply chain management into the mainstream.
How did you educate people about this? Yes, so, suppling
risk management, which is the space that I UH pioneered
a solution for our back into thousands ten um. That

(16:02):
was not as as we talked about there. There were
no solution providers as such in that space. There was
a lot of consulting and all of that going on.
Companies that wanted to do something in this space would
do some in house tools, using in house I t
um so and here I am UH. And at that
time I was the ten I looked ten years younger

(16:25):
than I do today. And again remember I was an
individual contributor at Cisco, had never started another company. So
when I started wrestling, it was a little bit of
a shock to me that the rest of the world
was not on the same page. I thought, we take
risks so seriously at Cisco. Of course, everybody knows that

(16:46):
risk is important and it's an area that we need
to invest in. And I left Cisco started wrestling, and
it was the wild West out there. You know, everybody
was so driven by cost and cost reduction in procure
are men that they weren't really considering risk to be
a critical need. That they thought risk management was nice

(17:07):
to have a side project that we would do. And
I think for me that was a huge and rude awakening,
and from there began my journey of educating these very
seasoned procurement leaders and experts about the need for doing
this using data and um you know things like a

(17:29):
lot of times people say, well, I'll just build another
factory in another country, or will hold extra inventory. You know,
those types of things take billions of dollars in many,
many years, right, and your customers aren't going to pay
you ten dollars for what they want to pay two
dollars for. So how are you going to fund that factory?
How are you going to recoup your investment? Whereas having

(17:52):
a risk management program with digitalization and cloud based technologies,
that's nothing in terms of your investment and you can
use that to be resilient today. So explaining those concepts,
calculating that return on investment, convincing customers, using each event

(18:14):
as a learning mechanism to say, let's see how you
experience that event. How many millions did you pay in
expediting freights, are buying extra, paying extra for around materials,
and using each event as a learning tool to go um,
create that awareness. Well, we're so grateful for what you did,

(18:35):
because when this pandemic happened. As we talked about, you
were well positioned to educate people early and quickly, and
you worked with numerous hospitals from what I understand, to
step up and fill the PPE gap. Can you tell
us a little bit about that. Yeah. PPE is one
of those products that hospitals by um In terms of

(18:58):
what the hospital spend on PPE, it's three to five
percent of the total dollars of spend. But when you
think about the time you walk in as a patient
to your clinic to the time you exit, the hospital
needs PPE in order to treat, process you all the
way to discharge you. They need PP, which means the

(19:22):
huddent of the hospitals operations need PPE in order to
sustain themselves. Meaning you could have all the drugs, you
could have everything ready to go, but no PPE, and
it hampers your ability to admit patients and provide critical care.
So it's one of those products in supply chain that

(19:43):
nail that brings down the kingdom. This is a classic
example of supply chain disruptions on things we don't watch
carefully or care about. So the PPE supply chain entirely
relied on supply as predominantly out of China, where of
what we bought came out of various sites there. And

(20:07):
so when the initial disruptions began and ships began to
leave China with thirty percent full from various ports, that
PPE became a massive issue. And what ended up happening
in the US is the hospitals had disparities. You know,
some hospitals had and nine, others had K and some

(20:29):
had different sizes of and nine available some that they
desperately needed. And in the absence of that transportation UH
networks being available, what the local hospitals with and then
I say local, I mean nationwide. What we needed was
a way to find the ppees inventories that were available

(20:51):
between hospitals in country. And so what we did was
obviously wrestling being a cloud system hospitals. We have about
more than forty hospitals nationwide as our customers. We brought
them together and then invited other hospitals, created a free
digital almost like a matching matchmaking program where the procurement

(21:15):
expert could say, Hey, I have this size of n
N I'm looking for that size, and the system would
match a hospital that had that particular model or variety. Wow,
I mean amazing. I think what you've done in this
period is so critical, and as I said, we're grateful
that you started this business when you did, so you've
seen firsthand how hard some of these world disasters can

(21:38):
be and obviously the pandemic. What makes you optimistic in
this moment? I feel that there's always something you know risk.
The other side of risk is opportunity, right, That is
it's you have. It's all about the lens with which
you view a situation. And I always have been that

(21:58):
person that sees the opportunity in risks. Right. Um, I
feel that. Um, and again coming back to my point,
whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right, So I
feel that the world did learn from this. You know,
companies that have survived COVID and COVID related disruptions. Um,

(22:20):
we see this topic now, you know what, you know
that we we have an issue. When John Oliver is
talking about supply chain disruptions, ar no Noah is talking
about supply chain disruptions, we all percent of humanity experienced
a supply chain disruption in their personal and professional life.

(22:40):
And so this to me is that moment of transformation.
It's that tipping point where risk no longer became a
nice to have. It not only went in the business
world from being a nice to have to a compliance
issue to a national security issue. And we see this
more and more across more and more country days over
the next couple of years, that governments will prioritize certain

(23:05):
sectors where mandates around compliance in transparency should be coming out. Obviously,
the executive order came out from President Biden creating four
industries um and this is very critical and quite frankly
asked you, and I've said this years ago in I

(23:28):
did a webinar where I said that semiconductors have the
potential to end the life as we know it because
every device today uses semiconductors from medical devices too. As
we go into a more electric vehicle world, there's all
these routers and switches in consumer electronics. Heck, Nike shoes

(23:50):
have electronics in them, right. So this is this one
little minute sized part that is now of different types
obviously that has applications all over and there's fast pace innovation,
which means you need to bring up expensive capacity, clean
room dependency, the need for continuous water and power in

(24:13):
the manufacturing process. Billions of dollars to bring up a
way for fat and this is a single point of
failure in the global supply chain today. Well, that's fascinating,
UM and scary at the same time. My last question
would be, I mean, obviously you've accomplished so much, and
you've really shared some great advice for us, especially around

(24:34):
you know, having the resilience to hear No. Is there
anything else that you would tell women who are just
getting started, who have a dream, who want to go
after it, especially these difficult times, anything you would impart
on them. I will say a few things. I mean,
I think from a COVID standpoint, I feel very strongly
that COVID was very rough on women in general in

(24:55):
the workforce, UM, in particular especially women who had children,
and we saw news about how record women dropped out
of the workforce to take care of children. So I
just and I have tremendous empathy um for the struggles
every day UM that women face in keeping things moving

(25:16):
in their personal lives and their professional lives. And the
nose will always outweigh the yeses UM. I feel also
that women as in general, and I don't mean the
general life, but I do feel there are people men
and women who take their personal confidence, who derive their
personal confidence from what others are saying about what they

(25:41):
believe in UM. And I think that in that moment
when you're down, when you're struggling, you are hearing those nose.
Remember there's a yes right around the corner. Keep walking
towards that, because every no brings you closer to the yes.

(26:04):
The question is are you willing to keep walking towards it?
And there was one very profound interview that I read
several years ago during my lowest point that said that
I will remain the CEO of wrestling until the day
that I give up. Until that day, I will be

(26:25):
the CEO of wrestling. So just in your personal life
and your professional life, you are the CEO of your life,
and just wait for the yes. Don't let them know
stop you from taking that next step. What's a no?
A no is just you know something. You put yourself

(26:46):
out there, and you put yourself out there, you got
to know your you got to try again. You're no
worse off when you ask for what you want then
where you were before you asked it. So just keep
on asking. You know, ask different people well, and you
need one person to say yes, don't stop. Such great
advice really super important, and I think that's something that

(27:08):
all of us can learn from entrepreneurs, not entrepreneurs, but
particularly women entrepreneurs who are trying to move their businesses forward.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Thank you
so much for having me. Best of luck and best
wishes to all of the listeners. I'd like to thank
Bendia for such great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Here are

(27:31):
three things I took from the conversation. First, we shouldn't
be afraid of getting a no. After going all in
and starting her own company, Bendia pushed headlong into the process,
never looking back. As Bindia says, for every s she
got sixty knows and even though at times she felt
like vote humpty dumpty, she just put on a smile,

(27:53):
pulled herself back together, and went at it again until
she got to yes. Second has been your points out.
We should have confidence in our own experience. Others may
not share your experience, but you need to trust your
firsthand knowledge. As bn Da says, look deep inside to
find that spark of confidence. The world may not know
what you bring to the table yet, but they'll see

(28:14):
it eventually. Finally, perspective is powerful. As Bendia told us,
there's always some risk, but on the other side of
risk is opportunity. It's all about the lens through which
you view a situation. You can find opportunity inside most challenges.
It's just a question of perspective. Made by women. Is

(28:35):
brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and
I Heart Radio, with support from founding partner PNG