Patrick Daly Interlinks Podcast

In this episode of the Interlinks podcast I talk to Keith Smith, President and CEO of Vonco Products, LLC located in Trevor Wisconsin in US. Vonco is a contract manufacturing company or CMO operating in the strategically critical medical devices sector with signicant business both inside and outside the US.Keith is an industrial engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by vocation with 25 years of industry experience with a fascinating story of learning and adaptation, some of it through pain and disappointment, to tell. He acquired Vonco in 2012 having had a life’s dream to own his own company.Prior to this and from 2005 Keith was General Manager of Carbonless Rolls and Security Papers for Appleton Papers, the largest division of that $1BN paper company.Keith also helps other aspiring entrepreneurs, through one-on-one coaching, to reconcile some of the competing challenges that the entrepreneurial life presents to people and he contrasts what he calls the Path of Force with the Path of Power which we will explore with him in our conversation today together with his insights into some of the challenges and opportunities facing exporting manufacturers in the US today.

In this episode of the Interlinks podcast I talk to Jesper Brandin, Chief Marketing Officer at Nowaste Logistics, based in Helsingborg, Sweden. Nowaste Logistics is a Swedish third-party logistics service provider headquartered in Helsingborg one of Sweden's major ports on the Oresund, the narrow stretch of water that separates Sweden from Denmark and joins the Baltic Sea to the North Sea. Nowaste Logistics specialises in tailored logistics solutions for a range of customer across a multitude of business sectors.Nowaste originated as the logistics department of Everfreash AB one of the leading suppliers of fresh fruits and vegetables in Sweden which then became an independent entity in a strategic move that has enabled Nowaste to provide tailored logistics solutions across various industries while maintaining a strong connection to its parent company.Both companies are part of Dole plc the world’s largest provider of fresh fruits and vegetables, which itself was formed through a merger of the US based Dole Food Company and the Irish company Total Produce that completed its acquisition of Dole in 2021. Dole plc in headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.Jesper has been with Nowaste for nearly 15 years and was with Everfreash for almost 4 years prior to that. He has had a fascinating career path rising from fork truck operator to Chief Marketing Officer within an innovative logistics services company that views applying automation technology and robotics to its operations as a key strategic competitive advantage in the market.

In this episode of the Interlinks podcast I talk to Michel Sprujit, President of Brain Corp International. Brain Corp is a San Diego-based technology company specializing in the development of intelligent, autonomous navigation systems for everyday machines focusing on machine learning and computer vision systems for self-driving robots such as autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).Applications range across various industries, including retail, warehousing and logistics, healthcare, and hospitality. Brain Corp is fundamentally a software system and works with robotics OEMs to provide the operating system or “brain for the robot” which in effect is a platform called BrainOS.This Brain OS platform enables the automation of tasks such as floor cleaning and inventory management, transforming manual operations into automated workflows.In his role as President of Brain Corp International, Michel Spruijt oversees partner support, team expansion, and operations across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regions, driving business development and fostering collaboration with industry leaders. Michel is based in the Netherlands from where he joined me to talk about the various applications of these technologies across multiple sectors.

In this episode of Interlinks I talk to Stephen Stynes, entrepreneur, coach, facilitator, soon-to-be published author, and a life-long student of human behaviour and potential. Stephen is an Irishman, originally from Dublin, now based in Barcelona, Spain from where he works with his clients through both Spanish and English. I have known Stephen for about 25 years, having met initially around the time of the dotcom bubble, and our paths crossed because we both have a long-running, personal and professional, connections to Spain. For all the time I have known him, and indeed more by his own admission, Stephen has been obsessed with people and how we can best grow and contribute, both personally and professionally. What Stephen says that he has learned in all this time is that while self-improvement is essential, real growth lies in the deeper realms of self-discovery and self-acceptance, and he now sees his purpose as being to accompany courageous business founders and leaders on that journey. It is this and other topics that Stephen and I chat about in this episode of the show.

In this episode we talk to Richard Martin, president of Alcera Consulting in Montreal, Canada.Alcera is a strategic advisory firm specializing in exploiting change to build individual and organizational resilience, ensuring market dominance and excellence in public governance. Richard spent almost 26 years in the Canadian military, of which 20 years as an Infantry Officer including operational command in Bosnia and staff appointments in Kuwait, national headquarters, and the Directorate of Army Training.He is the author of Brilliant Manoeuvres: How to Use Military Wisdom to Win Business Battles. He is also the developer of Worldview Warfare and Strategic Epistemology, a groundbreaking methodology that focuses on understanding beliefs, values, and strategy in a world of conflict, competition, and cooperation.This conversation was recorded on 24th February 2025 to mark the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In this episode of Interlinks I talk to Brian Murphy, who is the co-founder and COO of @Customs Windows a provider of Customs declaration & compliance software that automates & simplifies customs datasets for cross border trade. Brian is also the Managing Director of Global Trade Limited, an advisory firm focusing on customs and international trade facilitation.Brian has over 15 years global experience working in supply chains in over 100 countries, and extensive knowledge of both inbound and outbound supply chains and international customs formalities.The Goldilocks period of globalization and free trade that we had all become accustomed for the ten to fifteen years either side of turn of the century has taken a definite turn in another direction over the last decade or so. With Brexit, the Trump presidencies, trade wars, the COVID pandemic, shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and growing economic nationalism around the world, the challenges for all businesses of formulating, implementing ,and managing strategic Customs plans to ensure effective, efficient, and compliant international supply chains are growing all the time.In this conversation Brian and I will be exploring what companies should be doing to guarantee ongoing trade compliance in their international operations and commercial activities. Along the way we will also hear about Brian's career and how he has built his technical expertise an business acumen over time.  

In this episode of Interlinks, Lisa Anderson, President of LMA Consulting in Los Angeles and I, discuss some of the supply chain effects of the geopolitical and international trade tensions that have been ongoing for some time now and that are expected to continue as the new US administration under President Donald Trump takes up the reins of power in Washington DC.Tariffs, inventory stockpiling, and supply chain diversification are some of the effects that we are seeing flowing from these tensions and while many of the most forward-looking companies with extensive international interests are ahead of the trend on this front, many others are not. We are already seeing some non-American multinationals setting up operations on US soil to get on the right side of any future tariff barriers and some American companies bringing operations home, closer to home or to more geopolitically safe and sustainable locations in Europe and Asia.Keeping up with all the multidimensional challenges to supply chains across several interconnected domains such as geopolitics, compliance, cyber and security is a competency and skill set ever more in demand from companies large and small across all sectors of the economy. Lisa and I touch on all of these topics in a wide-ranging conversation that I hope you enjoy as much as we did.

In this episode of Interlinks, I talk to Pratik Baral who is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer based in the Los Angeles metro area in California and has become somewhat of a regular guest on the Interlinks podcast due to his ongoing work at the cutting edge of AI applications in business. Pratik has accumulated a lot of knowledge and insight into the use cases for Generative AI technologies in real world applications and shares these with me in a wide ranging conversation.Pratik had just returned to the US from an eight-week sojourn in his home country, Nepal, when we had this conversation and so we spent a couple of minutes at the start chatting about the social and economic environment in that country and it looks to hold its own in a region dominated by the two geopolitical giants of India and China.We then went on to talk about some AI applications in diagnostics, the concept of making content "Chat-able", search agent displacement and the multi-modal input/output capabilities of the latest iterations of some of the GPT models, the pros and cons of LLM's inherent feature of hallucination, the current relative plateauing of LLM capabilities and the emergence of other AI architectures in the future.

This is part two of a two part conversation with my colleagues from the Global Supply Chain Think Tank (GSCTT) where we discuss some of the ways in which the application of AI technologies can and will enhance supply chain performance for manufacturers, distributors and logistics services companies across multiple domains, including:Demand Forecasting and PlanningInventory OptimizationLogistics and Route PlanningSupplier Relationship ManagementRisk Management and ResiliencePredictive and Prescriptive AnalysisAI-Driven Automation and Autonomous SystemsEthics, Privacy and ComplianceMy guests for this discussion are:Antonio Zrilic from from Logiko Consultants in Zagreb, CroatiaLisa Anderson from LMA Consultants in the Los Angeles metro area in the USElizabeth Warren from San Pedro in California, also in the US