Lenny Marano: 0:03

And all of those things, whether it's waste reduction, whether it's reducing sample size, reducing carbon footprint, all of that also has a very meaningful impact to our customers bottom line. So not only is it the socially conscious thing to do, it helps drive profitability for our customers.

Tom Raftery: 0:20

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 27 of the sustainable supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and I'm excited to be here with you today sharing the latest insights and trends in supply chain sustainability. Before we kick off today's show. I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of this show's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping the podcast going. And I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about sustainability and supply chains. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support will make a huge difference in keeping this show going strong. To become a support for you simply click. On the support link in the show notes of this or any episode. Our visit. Tiny url.com/s S C pod. In today's show, I'll be talking to Lenny Marano from Lectra. And in upcoming episodes, I'll be talking to Barry Bradley from Crisp we'll be talking about the retail space. Dario Ambrosini from Propel and John Sicard from Kinaxis. So don't touch that dial. Those shows are coming up really, really soon. But back today's show. As I said today, I'm talking to Lenny Marano from Lectra. Lenny. Welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Lenny Marano: 2:00

Sure. Thank you very much, Tom. Lenny Marano. I'm president of the Americas for Lectra. We are a technology solutions provider to the apparel, furniture, automotive, and other industrial value chains. We provide equipment and software from planning all the way through production with post services, as well as industrial intelligence behind it,

Tom Raftery: 2:24

Seems like a diverse set of customers, Lenny. How does that work?

Lenny Marano: 2:28

You know, it's, it's very interesting. When you look at all of our customer base, they have one thing in common, they all work with flexible materials. So when you take a look at the shirt that you're wearing, the chair that you're sitting on, the car that you ride in to work on the, you know, the airbags in it, your sofas at home the Boeing 787 that you fly around in, everything has a series of patterns that are sewn together. And that's kind of the thread, pardon the pun, that, ties all of our market segments together. So we have, we started as a a company that was in really CAD CAM, the design of those patterns that gets sewn together, and then the machines that cut those patterns before you, you bring them to the sewing machines. But we've evolved into a, a technology company that serves all aspects of the value stream. So we have a, a platform that has a product life cycle management tool, a product information management tool. We have competitive intelligence tools. We have a traceability platform that we acquired two years ago that gives our apparel customers visibility from the, field all the way to the consumer we have a marketplace management tool for online e comm, so it's, we've really diversified out of that CAD CAM market to be a real integrated solutions provider to the markets that we serve.

Tom Raftery: 3:50

Interesting. Interesting. When I was a kid, my mother used to make her own clothes. I remember going into a shop in the city centre, Roches Stores, she'd buy patterns in there in packets and she'd open them up at home and spread them out on the floor, spread them out on yarn and then along the kind of dotted lines she'd cut out the yarn according to the pattern and then she'd sew them all together in her sewing machine. So that's, that's, you guys were making the patterns, the kind of patterns that my mother bought, is that it?

Lenny Marano: 4:24

Sure. Yeah. I don't know if going back then, if it was digitized or CAD based, but yes, in, in, in,

Tom Raftery: 4:31

was paper based. Go Oh,

Lenny Marano: 4:33

So, we, we were on the CAD side and that process became digitized. That's where, where electric came in. Actually, you know, Lectra itself means in French, it's a, it's a combination of two words to read and write, and it's to really write those patterns in a digitized way.

Tom Raftery: 4:52

fascinating, fascinating. And how did the industry's shift from analog to digital transform your view on kind of the potential for innovation and textile manufacturing? Was there a pivotal moment that guided you to focus on digital transformation?

Lenny Marano: 5:08

I think there was, you know, if you look at it, it was really four pivotal moments, you know. You may have heard the term industry 4. 0. And you know, industry 4. 0 was a term that really came out of Germany to talk about the fourth industrial revolution. And when you look at the first three, it's very easy to equate to the textile business. The first industrial revolution was the mechanized loom. The second industrial revolution was electrifying the sewing machine. The third was using computers to control equipment. And if you look at Lectra, right, we're celebrating our 50th year now. They say the third industrial revolution started about 1970 and our first cutter was sold in 1968. So we led the way into the third industrial revolution. And then in 2007, before industry 4. 0 or IOT was even a thing, we started connecting all of our systems to the internet and that's allowed us to, to accumulate data, to, to understand customer patterns of usage, how they're, how they're utilizing our, our machines in their production, but also be very predictive in the way that we maintain and support our machines.

Tom Raftery: 6:22

Okay, nice, nice. And of course this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. So what does any of that have to do with sustainability?

Lenny Marano: 6:31

Well, actually it's, you know, sustainability is the thread throughout all of our solutions. you

Tom Raftery: 6:36

Pun intended.

Lenny Marano: 6:36

you look at, yeah, exactly. If you look at the. If you look at all the buckets of the value chain that we serve you know, starting with, let's say competitive benchmarking, we have a tool called Retviews that is a AI based tool that allows our customers to go and monitor what their competition is doing. You may say, what does that have to do with sustainability? Well, it allows our customers to produce products that are actually going to be sold and don't end up getting destroyed or, or in a dump. If you look at you know, the apparel space, you know, there's a statistic out there that says a dump trunk of apparel is destroyed every minute because it's, it's unsold. So between competitive benchmarking tools, between product life cycle management tools that allow you to understand what products are selling, where they need to go, when they need to be there how they need to be priced. That all prevents products from being destroyed and, and sent to the landfill. As you get into the, the product development side, when you're developing those actual patterns, you know, people may not realize this, but to make a shirt you know, between a brand and a manufacturer that's actually producing it, there's dozens and dozens of samples that get shipped back and forth between the brand in New York and the factory in, in China, you know, the, there's the carbon footprint of shipping it back and forth, but then also the material waste itself. A lot of that is being done in 3D. So that helps drive sustainability. When you get to the, you know, when you get to the factory floor itself and, and actually producing the files for the material to be cut, you know, then it becomes really a material optimization exercise. So we have web based tools that allow you to nest those patterns together in a way that allows you to get more out of the material. So if you have 10 yards of material and you were getting 10 shirts, we, we have a tool that makes you get 11. So you're producing, you're producing more out of the material you have, which helps reduce, which helps reduce waste. On the machine side, having you know, the highest technology machines that allow you to cut it in a way that reduces your material waste also drive sustainability, but also the carbon footprint of the machine itself is like, it's a electricity usage, things like that. That's all ingrained into the design of our products and drive sustainability. And all of those things, whether it's waste reduction, whether it's reducing sample size, reducing carbon footprint, all of that also has a very meaningful impact to our customers bottom line. So not only is it the socially conscious thing to do, it helps drive profitability for our customers.

Tom Raftery: 9:15

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a theme that I've addressed on the podcast a number of times it's, if you're embarking on an efficiency project, you are de facto embarking on a sustainability project because you know, the two things go hand in hand when you are, when you are making more with less, that's a sustainability win.

Lenny Marano: 9:37

Exactly. And you know, when I'm 10 years into this business now and 10 years ago, people used to talk about sustainability because it was the cool trendy thing to talk about. Now they talk about it because one, they have to do it from a bottom line perspective, from an efficiency standpoint, and two also the regulatory environment is changing as well. And that is a driving factor behind in addition.

Tom Raftery: 9:59

You, you come into Lectra from a mergers. Is that right?

Lenny Marano: 10:04

Yes. So, I joined Lectra in 2021 through their acquisition of Gerber technology. And you know, Gerber and Lectra were the, the number one and number two technology solutions providers to the markets that I described earlier. And, you know, Lectra, I'm sorry, Gerber had gone through two rounds of private equity ownership after being a public publicly traded company, and Lectra ended up being the, the right home for it. So the number one and two players in the space, you know, came together and it's, it's been a very successful and complimentary acquisition. So if you look at if you look at it geographically, you know, Lectra based in, in Paris, France was very strong in Europe. Gerber was based here in Connecticut. Gerber was very strong in the Americas. We kind of split APAC from a market segment standpoint. Gerber was a little bit stronger in apparel Lectra was stronger in automotive. We kind of split the furniture market and then Gerber had this other industrial business like aerospace and defense. So it's been very, very complimentary. And then, you know, with, with Lectra, the acquisitions didn't stop there. You know, I like to say that, you know, we've grown. Since 2021 to be double what we were in 2020. So, Lectra is about a half a billion dollar company with 3000 employees. You know, it was about half of that in 2020. Obviously Gerber was the big acquisition, but since then I had mentioned we acquired Textile Genesis, which is a traceability platform. We acquired a CAD company called Gemini. We just acquired this year Launch Metrics, which is a brand management tool for those in the fashion and accessories space. So it's been a, you know, it's been a, a build over the last several years through acquisitions, but also Lectra, we're a technology company. And when you look at the benchmark of any big technology company, they put about 10 percent of their revenues into R&D. So we have the inorganic growth through acquisition, but, you know, as a half a billion dollar company every year, we're, you know, internally investing over 50 million a year in R&D as well.

Tom Raftery: 12:08

Nice, nice. What would have been some, let's say, unexpected lessons you learned from implementing digital technologies in, in textile manufacturing? And are there any experiences there that shape your approach to innovation?

Lenny Marano: 12:22

That's a great question. That's a, that's a great question. You know, with the diverse set of markets that we serve, you know, we always run into things that are, that are a little bit unexpected, but one of the things that we really focus on is customer centricity, right? So we, you know, we have a, a team, you know, in the Americas alone, it's, you know, about 300 people in our customer success division, and we stay very, very close to the customer. So, you know, we have a continuous mechanism of, of feedback that goes, that goes back to our product marketing teams that feeds back into R&D and how we can constantly improve. You know, any good, I think, innovation company doesn't necessarily say, Hey, we're going to listen to the customers when they tell us exactly what they want, but we want to understand what their, their pain points are and where their struggles are. And that, and that is what really feeds our, our innovation. And it's not just about, you know, the products, it's not just about, you know, a CAD software or a you know, piece of equipment. It's about understanding the process. And a lot of the tools that we've launched over the last, you know, year or two being cloud based platforms that help our customers manage their process from ERP through from ERP order ingestion all the way through production. So it's not, you know, I would say one lesson, it's just making sure that we stay close to the customer, understanding their processes, you know, on our customer success team, the average tenure of our team is actually 21 years. So we have a lot of street credibility. We have a lot of expertise from an application standpoint that allows us to very effectively share that feedback with our R&D teams.

Tom Raftery: 14:18

And apart from just listening to the customers, are you also listening to their machines? Are they connected? Are you getting data back from the machines that you feed into R& D as well?

Lenny Marano: 14:28

Oh, absolutely. I was mentioning, you know, the, the industry 4. 0 journey for us started in 2007 when we first connected the machines to the cloud. And since then, we've been accumulating all of that data. So, yeah, it allows us to understand usage patterns of the machines that feed R&D, but also really be predictive in maintenance. So, you know, everybody talks about AI, right? You know, where's, where's AI going? People now are talking about generative AI, but Lectra has been doing machine learning AI since 2007, right? So, by the data that we have, let's say if there's a motor in a machine. And we see that it's been running at a certain temperature for three days. And we know if it runs at that temperature for five days, it's going to fail. We'll ship out the part proactively and people will go, Hey, you just sent me this motor, why do I have it? Well, because we think yours is going to fail. So that's the kind of thing that you know, we've been able to do by having our machines connected for the last seventeen years.

Tom Raftery: 15:25

Nice, nice, nice. And talking about the likes of on demand production, how did your experience with on demand production change your perspective on reducing waste and improving efficiency in manufacturing? Are there, are there pivotal moments that led you to advocate for this approach?

Lenny Marano: 15:43

I think it was a shift in consumer trends that allowed us to advocate for this approach. And, you know, actually the jacket that I'm wearing now is a good example of, of just, you know, on demand made to order. It started as a trend where consumers wanted more personalized, more customized garments. And that led to the development of our on demand platform for fashion and also for furniture, right? If you look at the furniture space, more and more furniture is made to order. It's, it's not making a thousand couches isn't putting them in containers anymore. It's, all being custom. And the on demand platform that, that we have in, in fashion, again, it's, it's very process oriented, allows, customers to get measured at a retail store. The, the clerk or the worker at the retail store can input that into their terminal or into their ERP system. Those measurements go through the cloud into our CAD software where the patterns are generated and altered based on the consumer's actual measurements, the markers are made, and then it's sent over to production. And, you know, we've seen that in, high fashion, goods or, or informal wear, but in the Americas where it's pretty cool. And it's also developed a niches in the protective wear. So like fire suits, bulletproof vests, gloves, protective gloves. A lot of those are, are customized based off of the fit because they got to, they have to securely fit in order to be effective. And it's been a little bit of a niche that we've carved out with fashion on demand, you know, here in the U S. And I think that was kind of a, a pivot that nobody, nobody really expected. They designed something for, for couches and for men's suits. Then all of a sudden you're, you're producing firefighter uniforms on it. And it's pretty, pretty neat how that evolved.

Tom Raftery: 17:33

Sure, sure, sure. And you mentioned the transparency platform that you guys bought two years ago, I think you mentioned. What, what was the moment that, you know, made you realize the importance of transparency and accountability and production? Have these, have these values influenced the practices you've implemented?

Lenny Marano: 17:53

Yeah. I, you know, there's, there's the, internal view of it and then there's the external view of it. So, internally CSR has been ingrained in our DNA, for the last 50 years. But it's certainly become, I think, more prevalent as the world has been talking about it, you know, over the last several years. As a publicly traded French company, we joked that our financial report has to be this thick, but our CSR report has to be that thick. And so there's, you know, there was that aspect of it, but when you look at the apparel space, you know, we're dealing with the biggest fashion brands and apparel manufacturers in the world. And, they've been talking about it because they're getting a lot of regulatory pressure, whether it's, Jinping cotton coming in, whether it's making sure that their products are made in factories that use responsible labor and have, have good labor practices. Having the visibility into how that cascades down from, the field where the cotton is, is procured through the textile mills, where the material is, is woven through the factory floor, through, you know, the, the sewing process back to the, back to the distributor, they have a need for it. From a, again, from a social responsibility standpoint, but also being able to show customs, Hey, I got this from the right place. You wouldn't believe the apparel manufacturers that we talked to and say, you know, I have millions of dollars of inventory being held up at the border because I can't justify where it came from. And I can't, I can't prove that I sourced it responsibly. So you know, as that environment has evolved, that led to the acquisition of Textile Genesis.

Tom Raftery: 19:35

Interesting. Wow. Yeah. On the resource efficiency front, can you recall a specific instance where improving resource efficiency led to unexpected benefits for your team or your company or your customers even?

Lenny Marano: 19:50

Yeah, actually. So, we have a customer and. There's a, there's some good videos out there called Leisure Creations. Leisure Creations, you wouldn't believe how, how big of a business this is. Does umbrellas for resorts and hotels around the world. And

Tom Raftery: 20:08

Handheld, handheld umbrellas or are the kind of ones you sit under or both?

Lenny Marano: 20:11

The kind that you see like next to the lounge chair, you know, is when you have your pina colada by the pool and you're, you know, trying to try and avoid the sun and not get cooked those umbrellas. And it's all custom, right? Whether it's a Marriott or a Sandals resort or whatever resort is, they all have their own colors, their own brand scheme. So it's all made to order. And they were all manual, all manual from a pattern generation standpoint, from a hand cutting standpoint. And they went from manual, like driving a, you know, a, a 1970 Ford to two furniture on demand production platforms implemented into their, into their workflow. So they're from like a Ford to a Ferrari like that. And. You know, they were able to essentially triple their production output in the same amount of time going from manual to, to on demand processes using the automation.

Tom Raftery: 21:07

And, and whatever, but the time they saved, were they also saving material?

Lenny Marano: 21:14

Well, yeah, the material savings alone justified the ROI of the machines. I mean, you know, this is a, it was a pretty significant investment, right? You know, you're looking for, for two machines, around seven figures and, to have a ROI be less than a year on material savings alone is pretty, pretty wild.

Tom Raftery: 21:30

That's impressive. All right. Yep. Yep. And, what about AI? Cause that's the topic de jour these days. Have you, I mean, you mentioned you've been using it since 2007, but how did your initial encounters with AI in textile manufacturing transform your understanding of its potential? And are there any pivotal moments or challenges which helped you realize the full scope of AI's impact?

Lenny Marano: 21:58

Sure. I, When you look at the machine learning AI that we've been leveraging since 2017, and you look at how I mentioned, we're trying to understand customers processes and pain points, downtime for a customer on the production floor, one, one hour of downtime in a, in a high production environment could represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. So being able to leverage the, machine learning AI to perform that predictive maintenance just ended up providing a tremendous amount of value to, to our customers. And you take a look back and you say, okay, well, if, if the machine learning AI can provide that much value, you know, what's the next step. And that actually led to the acquisition of RETviews, which is an AI based competitive intelligence platform. So if you're, you know, let's say you're a auto wear company, right. Or, you know, for mountain hiking gear and the customers are like LL Bean these aren't our customers, but, but, but brands in the space, you know, LL Bean, REI, Patagonia, Columbia, right. If you're one of those four brands and you want to say, okay, what are quarter zip fleece pullovers going for, what are, you know, hiking pants or hiking shoes going for, what's the assortment, what sizes, what colors are being offered where are they, where are they being stationed? What kind of discounting or pricing strategies do they have? We leverage AI to pull all that information from the, the internet and display it to our customers in a way that provides actionable information for them to manage their assortment and their portfolio. You know, when you look at our R&D staff we have 500 people dedicated to R&D. A majority of them are working on software solutions, all of which, you know, the next evolutions will have some AI embedded into it.

Tom Raftery: 23:52

Okay. Okay. Interesting. And I got to think consumer desires are shifting as always, but more recently there's more of a a desire for sustainability, for only buying from firms who seem to have, who seem to be, working with a purpose. Can you share a time when adapting to changing consumer desires posed a significant challenge? Or can you talk about learning from overcoming such an obstacle and has it informed your current strategies?

Lenny Marano: 25:07

Sure. You know, I, I go back to the on demand piece, right? Yeah, the, the on demand platforms that we launched were a result of shifting consumer trends for more, more customized, more tailored goods. I think it was really ahead of its time, quite honestly. So, you know, knowing that the process of producing a one off. You know, if you have a factory that's doing a hundred jackets an hour and they're the same, patterns, you know, four different sizes to go and do a 50 tailored fit long jacket for a order quantity of one is very, very difficult. So understanding the difficulty that, that the customers had in shifting from mass production to on demand led us to the development of, of the, the fashion on demand platform. And again, that was really a product of the shifting consumer needs. And on the furniture side, you know, I had mentioned the furniture on demand platform I, I always joke as a consumer myself, not just being behind the scenes as a, in the business, but as a consumer myself, you know, you get your first apartment, you go and you buy it like a job lot, you buy your furniture at like a job lot and it's kind of mass produced and they, maybe I'll get five years out of it, then you go into your next house and get a little bit nicer. And then it becomes more, affordable, but, but tailor made to what, to what you need, you know, as a, a husband and father of two young girls, two dogs, you know, we have very specific needs of durability reliability, but we also want it to look nice and fit within the, the form of our, our home. So having something that's affordable, customized come together to be something that we could acquire and readily order without having a, a crazy lead time. You know, we allow our customers to facilitate that for their customers.

Tom Raftery: 26:58

Sure, sure, sure. What about shifting customer demands for materials? And if I'm, if I'm asking this, it's because you mentioned the furniture section and we're seeing now, for example, in automobiles, a lot more automobiles have the likes of vegan leather, and we're seeing more demands for kind of organic cotton and, you know, all these kinds of things. Does that impact you at all, or is that something that your customers worry about?

Lenny Marano: 27:26

Oh, no, it absolutely impacts us because we have to be able to manage our, our portfolio to accommodate those different types of materials. The vegan leather one is a, is a great example. So if you look at our product portfolio, we have I think the, you know, what's the industry standard for leather cutting CAD cam machines in the Versailles. And we've sold those to furniture companies, to automotive companies for over, over 10 years. As you know, vegan leather, which is really, it's just synthetic, right? Synthetic material that comes together. It looks like leather. It's expensive. People don't realize how expensive that material is, right? It's going into Mercedes. It's going into Volvo's, you know, it's going into higher end cars. And it's gotta look nice. It's gotta be durable and reliable like leather, even though it's, even though it's synthetic, but it's expensive. So, you know, in 2019, we launched a product called the IP series for automotive cutting that allows the material to be cut in a way that reduces the space in between the patterns. And that drives material savings for our customers, but vegan leather, or that, that synthetic material could be very, very difficult to cut at those, you know, it's called a buffer, the space in between parts at low buffers. But the IP was specifically designed to do that, to drive material savings while still maintaining and improving efficiency from a throughput perspective from our customers. So, you know, you talk about. You know, industry trends. We saw the kind of the vegan leather thing coming. We knew that material was expensive. We designed the machine to really, and it'll cut other materials too, obviously, but vegan leather is expensive and it's difficult to cut.

Tom Raftery: 29:15

Interesting. Nice. Okay. And where to next? I mean, we've talked about the rise in automation, in industry 4 technologies, in AI, you know, has that finished? Are we going on to the next thing? Or are we just getting more of that or where do you see the trends going in the industry?

Lenny Marano: 29:35

You know, the, whether it's executives in the apparel space, in the furniture space or automotive or, you know, other industrial markets, there's a term that I hear a lot and it's digital thread, it's the digital thread. It's the passing of data. And again, no pun intended, but it's the passing of data through all the different processes that they, they undertake within their value stream. So for us being able to manage that digital thread while maintaining the fidelity of the, the information is, you know, is paramount to what we do. Right. It's not just a piece of equipment. It's not just a piece of software. It's managing that, that process and tying it all together and, using our platform of connectivity to do that. So, you know, what's next, I think we'll, you know, we'll continue to enhance the tools that we have. We'll leverage, you know, artificial intelligence as, as our product evolves, but figuring out what other areas of the value stream for the markets that we serve, or we can help manage that digital thread. I think that's what's next for Lectra.

Tom Raftery: 30:42

Okay, great. Great. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Lenny. Is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Lenny Marano: 30:55

I think, you know, I think we covered a lot in the, in the half hour that we had Tom. I hope I answered the questions and shared some, some good information with your listeners and showed how you know, sustainability is really ingrained into everything that, that Lectra does and all the products that we offer in the markets that we serve and also how we manage our, our business internally.

Tom Raftery: 31:16

Great. Lenny, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Lenny Marano: 31:24

I would direct them to Lectra. com. You could follow us on LinkedIn. You could follow us on, on Facebook. You can connect with me directly at LinkedIn under Leonard Marano. And look forward to hopefully getting some, you know, and getting some good communications from your listeners, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 31:39

Fantastic. Great. Lenny, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Lenny Marano: 31:44

Thanks for having me, Tom. It's been a pleasure.

Tom Raftery: 31:46

Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.