How Ag Leader Freed Millions in Working Capital

Watch the Video View Transcript

Learn how Ag Leader used AI-driven PO automation to increase on-time delivery, reduce inventory risk, and keep production moving—despite constant change.

And we’re live. Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us. We’re going to give it another minute or so and wait for some additional folks to log in. 

I know people are still joining, so bear with us and we’ll start momentarily. Mm-mm. How are we looking, Colby? Looking like we still have a lot of people joining or is it kind of leveled out? 

Let’s give it about 30 more seconds. Sounds good. Okay. All right, what do we think? Good to go? All right. Well, good morning or good afternoon, as it may be, if folks are on the West Coast. 

Hello, everyone. My name is John Kill. I am a strategic account manager here with Epicor. I’ve been with Epicor for over 15 years, serving manufacturers as customers. 

And I would like to officially welcome everybody to our webinar today, where we will be sharing with you how Ag Leader freed millions in working capital by using SourceState. 

Before we get started, I have a couple of housekeeping items I want to go over with you guys. First off, I want to point out that if you like what you see today, you can book a meeting directly through the webinar. 

There should be a link in the upper bar that says sign up for demo. If you click that, that’ll take you through the process to sign up for a meeting. 

Next, all participants are muted at this time, but you can ask questions in the box below the video or by clicking ask a question on the top row. 

You can enter a question into the chat, and we’ll be monitoring those and either answering them in line during the demo, or we will pick them up and try to answer them at the end of the webinar during our Q&A, during our opening Q&A session. 

You can adjust the size of your video. You can use the icons and the buttons to adjust that to full screen if you wish to help see better. 

You can also adjust your audio with the controls on there. And lastly, all audience members will receive an email with the link for the on-demand so that you can go back and watch this or share this with your colleagues. 

With that out of the way, I am excited to be joined by a panel of great presenters today who will be sharing their insights and experience with you. 

Ryan, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan Witt. I work for a company called Ag Leader Technology. We’re dead center in the middle of Ames, Ames in the middle of Iowa. 

I’ve worked for Ag Leader for just under 30 years. So I have had my entire career here. Played quite a few different roles, everywhere from building cables when I was in college to engineering and designing a lot of our products. 

And then I also led our mechanical design team for 17 years. So about three years ago, I decided, hey, it’s time for something different. 

And we had a supply chain manager position open. And I was like, hey, that sounds like fun. Let’s do that. And yeah, that’s how I got to meet SourceDay. So it’s been a fun time. 

So Ag Leader, Ag Leader creates… systems for row crop farmers. So anything that’s planted in a row, corn, soybeans, cotton, you name it, we give them a full suite of tools that help them manage their business. 

Everywhere from software to displays in the cab that controls the whole machine to can modules, lots of harnesses. 

So very much our industry is definitely that electronics, electric electromechanical and software. So happy to serve, you know, that community as they grow the food to feed the world. 

Excellent. Hello, everyone. My name is Jim Fry. I’m a solutions engineer for Epicor Software. My career spans 40 years now serving manufacturing companies, 12 in a manufacturing company as a project manager, two years in supply chain collaboration, and I’m now in my 26th year as a solutions engineer. 

So it’s a pleasure to be with you today. And Colby. All right. I’m Colby Young, VP of Alliances here at SourceDay. I’ve been with the company for about 10 years. 

Last three to four years, been fully focused on our strategic partnerships. And my brain is 100% focused on Epicor. So we are an official Epicor ISV partner as of May of last year. 

We officially signed that agreement. And what that means is that if you want to partner with SourceDay, you actually would purchase SourceDay officially from your Epicor customer account manager or channel partner. 

on your current Epicor contract, so very easy to engage. It also allows us to collaborate with the Epicor product folks to continue to enhance our integration, align our roadmaps, so a very tight partnership. 

But I do want you to know, while the official partnership is new, we have been supporting Epicor clients for about seven years. 

We’ve done about 100 implementations, so not new at all to Epicor, just that official partnership is new. 

We’re really excited to be part of the family now. All right, so I’d like to start off with this slide. And like I said, I’ve been with SourceDay for about 10 years. 

And kind of pre-COVID, the theme of supply chain was just-in-time manufacturing, right? How do I hold as little inventory as possible? It was all about lean manufacturing. 

Now, COVID hit, and that pendulum swung 180 degrees the other way to all hold a year of inventory, years of inventory, because you didn’t know when you’re going to get your product, right? 

That was a real strategy of the time. Over the last few years, CFOs have really gotten focused on how do I get back to inventory optimization? 

How do I start to increase turns again? But everyone’s still dealing with constant supply chain chaos, right? Supply chain disruption after disruption. Unfortunately, this is really the new normal that we live in right now. 

It’s just constant chaos for manufacturers. Uh, Ryan, you know, with your long experience at ag leader i’m curious you know tell us some of the impacts these disruptions um have had on aglio over the last many years here. 

Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, honestly, I think that each one of them actually hit us, uh, and that It’s a real challenge. 

To be honest, it’s kind of hard to revisit some of those years. It was a really hard life. We had a lot of customers that were wanting and needing our products, and it was a frantic time of trying to figure out how we were going to move forward. 

Life was chaotic. You were juggling so many balls, so many late things. You didn’t know when you were getting them. Production was inconsistent. You know, a lot of companies just didn’t have the manpower to create a predictable, you know, delivery schedule. 

And it was really hard. It was normal life for us to wait until the deliveries, morning deliveries came in, figure out what came in, and then figure out, hey, what can we build? 

And then having team members, you know, waiting to jump on that. So, Also tons of extra coordination meetings. What can we ship? What finances can we count on, you know, for end of year sales and things like that. 

And, you know, the reality is our on time shipping was, was in the toilet. It was awful. Um, and the truth is it burned a lot of us out. Uh, it was really hard work. It was hard to get answers. 

Um, and. My opportunity for this role was a direct product of a prior team member just getting burned out. 

It’s a tough, it was a tough time, no question. And Jim, I know you speak with customers in the Epicor ecosystem all day long. 

Does this resonate with what you’re hearing as well? Indeed it does. I participate in quite a few value exchange workshops with Epicor customers, and they mirror some of the sentiments that Ryan has just shared. 

Bottom line is that these challenges are real, and it’s important that we come up with solutions to help overcome them. 

Yeah, absolutely. You know, now that we’ve looked at some of these events, right, now let’s really get into the data. 

So SourceDay has a very unique data set when it comes to global direct spend. One of the biggest in the world, actually. Like I mentioned, I’ve been here for 10 years, really since kind of the beginning of source day. 

And over that time, we’ve been able to accumulate over 100,000 suppliers in our solution. And over that time, processed over $60 billion of spend, we’ve seen over 100 million changes and messages happening within the solution. 

And so what we’re able to do is really synthesize this information to put out a quarterly what we call a source-day supply volatility index. 

And it’s looking at what are price risks, so price changes. It’s looking at order uncertainty, so how are dates and quantities changing. 

It’s looking at its impacts in on-time delivery. And analyzing all that data to look at what is the volatility of global supply chain. 

And as you can see, the volatility is nearing highs in the post-COVID days. Some of the highest rates that we’ve seen In the last five years, global supply chain volatility is inching up to that. 

And this puts a real risk on supply chain, and it’s problems that folks are actively looking to solve and figure out as they continue to grow and maintain their business. 

And kind of double-clicking into PO uncertainty, we’re talking about changes. And just to kind of define a change, I’m talking about A PO is delivered to a supplier, and you need to change it as the buyer, or the supplier needs to make an adjustment. 

That’s what we’re talking about, a change. And as you can see, the change rate on purchase orders is, again, nearing up as high as we’ve seen in the last five years, and it’s surpassed that 50% mark again. 

So half of all purchase orders are changing, and they’re not just changing once, they’re actually changing on average three times. 

And when you have all of this change and all of this volatility, that puts MRP at risk, right? It actually puts your invoice match rates at risk, your purchase orders not matching your invoices. 

You have all of this change on so many of your purchase orders. This is just what we’re all dealing with right now. You know, Jim, I hear this quote a lot of times, volatility is the enemy of predictability. 

I’m curious, you know, how is Epicor specifically looking to help manage some of this volatility? I think first and foremost, the graphical depiction really tracks well with what I’m hearing in the field from Epicor customers. 

All of the post PO activities that they engage in require a tremendous amount of time. It’s usually very high volume and difficult to manage effectively. 

So those solutions are a long time coming and recognizing that purchase order generation is a necessary step, but it’s not the end game. 

a lot of coordination that needs to happen there in order to effectively manage the supply chain. Absolutely. So let’s talk about kind of why this problem exists as well and why this is so difficult. 

And, you know, what you’re looking at here is the disconnect between, you know, your erp and your supplier network. 

And it’s just the reality of uh of the system is that inside your four walls, Epicor is as good as it gets. 

MRP, all of the data and workflows, and everyone within your organization has what they need to do their job, their business, right? 

You think about manufacturing, production, finance, purchasing, right? They can use MRP to cut those POs. But once those POs are created, the supplier network, they don’t have a room in the Epicor house, right? 

They don’t have a window. from the time that PO is created in Epicor to the goods received, there’s this gap in communication with your supplier network. 

And that gap creates risks, that gap creates blind spots, and it makes it extremely difficult to manage all that volatility that we were just talking about, right? 

And so the result is the supply chain crisis really is happening in everyone’s inbox every day. And we’re in, you know, we’re in 2026, and buyers and suppliers are left to manual disparate siloed communication tools to manage all of this change, all of this volatility, to try to keep MRP accurate, to try to keep production lines up. 

Ryan, I know that when we talked, this really resonated. How did Ag Leader deal with this problem before Sourcebed? Yeah, so that was a really… it was hard for me as an engineer coming into it. 

I created systems that basically worked outside of my email and it was really tough to go through. And, you know, as, as I stated before, like we had all these different emails that go back confirming, when is this due? 

When is that due? Emails going back for, Hey, when am I going to get the next delivery? You know, and it wasn’t even the part that we actually needed, but they responded to it and, things just go around and around in circles. 

Uh, and it’s really hard to untie. And, um, I mean, we had lost POs, uh, you know, we would, we would send a PO and we were so busy and everything was flurrying so fast. 

We didn’t even recognize they never confirmed it, you know, via email. Uh, and, you know, trying to expedite parts, uh, you know, for, for lost POs was just horrendous. 

Um, you know, with, The other thing with the lost POs is lost parts, late deliveries. A lot of our, we sell through a dealer network. A lot of the dealers started to lose confidence on if they could make that sale because that sale was pending them getting installed before the season started. 

So definitely huge there. We paid expediting fees like crazy. To be frank, I was too scared to ask. what our UPS red charges were that were charged to our account. 

To this day, I feel like a coward, but the emotions were real. And what really happened was we just got crazy bloated inventory. We had too much of one thing, not enough of another, and we couldn’t fulfill the customer’s orders. 

And a lot of our systems are multi-palette sort of systems that have 200 to 300 parts. you know, that we actively manage thousands of actual parts. 

And, you know, one missing part, that pallet can’t go. And it just played that scenario played over and over again with different parts. 

And, you know, of course, everybody’s frustrated. Production team is frustrated. Luckily, I work with a lot of very gracious people. But man, those are just hard times. 

You know, feel for you and glad, you know, we could we could support And this is kind of what that future state looks like, right? 

So source Day exists to extend Epicor to the entire direct spend supplier network to make sure that every touch point, every purchase order down to the line level is truly managed between procurement team and suppliers. 

And I want you to know, everyone, that we’re not changing the way you use Epicor. We extend Epicor when its automation stops. using MRP, PO suggestions, however you’re getting your POs created, once it’s approved, pulling that into source day, digitizing them, and you’re actually going to get to see some of this from Mr. 

Fry today. And every touchpoint, right, is managed, and then we’re updating Epicor down to the line level as any changes are approved, driving that accurate MRP, right, driving the accuracy inside the ERP. 

So, John, you know, Jim, I want to ask you all, you know, from your seat at Epicor, can you tell the audience more about our partnership and really why Epicor chose SourceDay to be a strategic partner of yours? 

You know, you just mentioned MRP. Ryan mentioned MRP earlier. You know, one of the things I hear all the time is how important it is to be able to trust But MRP is very much garbage in, garbage out, right? 

And without accurate PO data, customers feel handicapped, like they’re flying blind. So, you know, APICOR is only as good as the data you’re feeding it. 

So, you know, being able to get better data, more data to complete the picture is really important. 

I would add to that in terms of some of the challenges that you’ve already identified, Colby, and clearly Ryan has experienced these and felt the pain that comes with that. 

You know, the delays, the redundant communication and error correction cycles. It’s a very reactive management approach from working with other Epicor customers that have leveraged SourceDay to help manage all of those post-PO activities. 

they’ve seen a tremendous improvement, an uptick in both operational efficiency and financial performance. 

So some of the planning tools that John made reference to a moment ago are augmented by some of the results that we’re seeing from source data. 

So it’s pretty exciting to watch that transformation. Good. Awesome. Well, appreciate you all. And, you know, we’re excited to get into further discussion with Ryan on some more experience that he’s had. 

So, John, I’ll let you take it away here. Yeah. You know, Ryan, as a strategic camera at Epicor, I’m talking with customers every day and I love hearing about their experience and successes. 

And, you know, we talk about, you know, first, what are the challenges? We try to align solutions for that. This ag leader story is, I think, is as good as it gets. 

You know, I want to ask you, Circling back on your strategic drivers for Source Day, one of them was the objective to reduce inventory. 

So has it helped? What helped to make that happen? Yeah, I mean, like Jim was saying before, getting the right data in MRP so that MRP can work is huge. 

Like, it’s just nothing works without it. You’re You’re shooting spitballs at a target across the room that you can’t reach. 

It’s like, hey, when is this going to happen? I don’t know. Like, oh, and we need to know these six parts stacked on top of each other. 

Like, it’s really hard. And frankly, managing your inventory goes along with that. The reality is your inventory can get incredibly bloated because you can’t stage. 

And, you know, Ag Leader, we’re a very seasonal company. You know, we will sell 90% of our product, you know, basically in season. 

So that season passes that sale gone for at least a whole year and you just gave your competition a whole nother year to chase after it so it it’s a real challenge. 

I mean, we reduced our inventory by 35 percent uh from the peak that we hit in those, um, you know, pandemic years. 

Um, and the reality is, is our executives are elated. Um, What also happened during that same time is our company saw a pretty significant downturn, you know, in business. 

If you’re in the industry, you know, if you’re not, you know, you probably heard a headline or something. 

But, you know, the ag economy is literally at the lowest point it’s been, or for row crop farming anyway, the lowest point it’s been in decades. 

One of the people that I watch was actually comparing the profitability of row crop farming right now to the same level that it was in the Great Depression. 

So we’re kind of hitting some unprecedented times. What was awesome in that story is we freed up all that capital. Reducing our inventory by 35% made it much easier for us to make the choices we wanted to make for a company looking longer term. 

So it was huge. It was a really big deal. Proud I got to be a part of it. And you said 35%, but just putting a dollar figure on that, if my notes are right, that’s about $7 million, right? 

I mean, that represents about $7 million. Yeah, that’s a lot of capital to free up. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. For a small company like us, for sure. Jim, did you have anything that you wanted to add on that? 

No, I think one thing that resonated with me as Ryan was sharing some of the concerns and the downturn in ag over time, that’s not unlike a lot of the industries that our customers are based in. 

So I think that message resonates with a lot of customers, both on the call today and in our existing customer base, right? 

We’re in unprecedented times in terms of manufacturing challenges and supply chain challenges. And so I think regardless of the industry that you’re in, there are benefits to be gained through optimization of that supply chain. 

The next topic I want to kind of shift to Ryan with you is on-time delivery. So it’s obviously a critical part of keeping customers happy. 

So let’s talk about that a little bit. I remember you mentioned a pretty impressive improvement in OTD to customers. Tell me about the improvements there. Yeah, no, our on-time delivery, you know, when we didn’t know when parts were coming, we didn’t have, we just didn’t have enough people to chase with all of our suppliers. 

You know, we were looking at a monthly delivery of 76%. Uh, and that that’s way worse than we ever had before. Um, so with source day kind of digging out of the hole and everything else that we did, um, you know, we are consistently at 99%. 

Um, it is, it is fantastic to be there. Um, one of the challenges that we also have is that a lot of the parts that we manage, you know, these, these are electronic components, circuit boards, LCD panels, displays, cable parts. 

Um, you know, a lot of them have six to 18 month lead time. Some of the components on the circuit board, literally 18 to 24 month lead time, managing that whole supply chain as that goes through. 

And we initially, you know, in the pandemic time, we were telling our people eight days, but of course we weren’t hitting it. 

And that doesn’t build customer trust. We were able to take that down take our lead time down to five days. So things that we’re managing lead times, literally two years out, we’re delivering product in five days. 

And then actually here in 2026, we’ve had so much success in that and doing it consistently. We actually shifted our goal. So starting this month, we shifted to a three-day lead time. 

And so far, that’s going really well. Not perfect. We’re fighting a little bit, but it’s going really well. No, that’s awesome. John, let me just emphasize one point that I heard Ryan say. 

Increase in on-time delivery performance, OTD, of 23, 24 points from 76 to 99 while simultaneously reducing your inventory carrying cost. 

Did I hear that? Absolutely. Absolutely. And both at the same time, literally. But it was because we had the confidence of what parts were coming when it was coming and that broader visibility, you know, we would actually – push out deliveries of some parts to help mellow things out. 

And, um, it was, yeah, yeah. It, the confidence that it brought was incredible. Those, those metrics are something that I’m sure all of our Epicor customers can get behind. 

Yeah, that is a, that is a huge impact just in, in that year and with more to come, you know, sometimes the hardest part of a transformation like this is convincing the organization, convincing executives, convincing, people in the organization to invest in that change. 

How did that go for Ag Leader? How did you persuade your leadership and your teammates to move forward with an investment in SourceDay? 

Yeah, for sure. From the executive perspective, a lot of it is they saw the inventory dollars and like, we’ve got to do something. 

They weren’t sure, but they had a strong sense that it wasn’t right. And they had a whole lot of money sitting in that and our warehouses. 

They also believed that it was fixable and that we could do it. The ability to streamline and also just our company’s focus on that on-time delivery, all those things kind of came together to make it really just a very confident decision that we made. 

As far as implementing it, It was quite easy, frankly. You know, they had a great, SourceDay has a great team and a great, I call it a program because, you know, they just run you through this series of events to implement. 

Initially, I was concerned that it wouldn’t integrate. And then, you know, it would be difficult or hard. You know, so many customers cleared that way before. 

It was a blip. IT had no problem. It was easy for them. And the team, the team really enjoyed it as well. Yeah, it was an easy change. It was an easy change. That’s always good to hear. 

When you start to embark on something like this, you have your eye on the goal. But if you can’t get there, then it becomes very frustrating. 

But knowing that it’s easy to adopt, easy to roll out, sounds like it really unlocks more time for the people in the organization to focus on work that’s actually strategic and value add. 

So yeah, that’s fantastic. The implementation, you said, is very easy, very streamlined. You know, a program, I think you called it, to walk you through it. 

You know, that’s great to hear. Jim, you’ve been with Epicor for a long time and seen a lot of customers deploy Source Day with Epicor. 

Is Ryan’s experience pretty common, or is that an outlier? What other stories are you hearing from customers that have made this move? 

And I think Ryan’s experience aligns well with other customers with whom I’ve worked over the years. 

One of the things that I guess I would just double click on that Ryan made reference to in terms of the executive buy-in, some of these metrics that we’re referring to for on-time delivery performance and inventory buffer stock reduction, those are certainly metrics that we can hang our hats on. 

And other customers have been successful in that approach as well. So I think overall, you mentioned the fact that we can shift from reactive management to more proactive control, those elements, I think, speak to themselves, right? 

I know I’m going to project here a little bit, put on a hat of an audience member, but I’m guessing that more than one of our audience members are thinking it. 

So I’m going to say it. The elephant in the room is probably the question, yeah, but will my team and will my suppliers actually use it? 

So, Ryan, tell us what that’s been like for you. What percentage of your direct spend has been adopted into the system? Yeah, absolutely. So proudly, I would say we had 100% adoption of our strategic suppliers. 

A lot of that is the relationships that we’ve built with them over the years and how we’ve worked with them. 

And it’s a big deal. And the suppliers really enjoy it. They enjoy using it because basically they want to serve us and they want to do the right thing. 

They’re inside salespeople, whoever’s managing the business. And when you can go into source day and say, oh, what’s due this week? 

Do we have all this in inventory? How do we do it? What’s our plan? Those that want to exceed, frankly, just love it because it’s a second look. 

You’re not deciphering things in the email or all that sort of thing. Now, the flip side of that would be our buying team. And they also really like it. They had some hesitations initially, but once they used it, they grabbed on wholeheartedly. 

It was one of those scenarios where, you know, we had a few that were software skeptical, I’m going to call it. 

But what happened was, is we actually took away all the conflict points of miscommunication in those relationships and, you know, We just talked about what was going on. 

We were talking more strategic business relationships, all that kind of thing. And it just really, it just made everything work so much better. 

Again, just getting that base data correct as best as you can through both companies, just starting at that point is a huge benefit. 

It’s difficult to do. Yeah, and I’ll just want to kind of piggyback as, you know, coming from source day. I would say it’s really kind of our secret sauce, you’ll call it, is we’re not just a software, but it comes along with service as well. 

And that is not just customer success to help Ryan and his team learn a new technology, right, get over some of that change tolerance that folks might have, but it’s also a supplier success. 

So we have an entire team here at SourceDay that works with your suppliers to onboard, train them, support them you know we’re we’re their lifeline for all support. 

It’s not on your i.t team. It’s not on epicore it’s not on the channel partner, right? That’s a source day responsibility. And that’s really why uh the solution’s successful and a big reason why epicore said, yep, we need to now partner with the source day after seeing our success with clients like ad leader for so long is the supplier engagement side. 

So it is really kind of the, the secret sauce of success that everyone gets. Of course. Just to dive on that a little bit too, I think one of my big anxieties of the software really was how do we teach all our suppliers to do this when we’re just learning too, right? 

And you almost need a supplier to practice with, to go back and forth and You know, being the engineer, the conservative-minded person that I am, you know, it’s like, okay, well, let’s deploy with one at a time. 

And the reality is that would have taken years, you know, to slowly move through that. And, you know, having the source day team there to be the trainers of your suppliers, it helped us get going so much faster. 

I mean, we would take bunches of tens of suppliers at a time. and deploy them. And hey, how did this go? Wow, that went better than I thought it was going to. 

And yeah, sure, there’s a few things to, oh, yeah, you need to do this, you need to do that. But if you’re comparing other pieces of software to source day, do not undervalue their implementation team. 

It is incredibly powerful and you deploy it and getting it going quickly. Yeah, it’s a real accelerator in time to value. Yeah, we were talking here about suppliers and external, you know, stakeholders. 

But internal change management is challenging too, right? I mean, especially for procurement teams juggling all the different balls in the air, the complexity of supplier collaboration. 

How did you find your buying team embracing Source Day? Yeah. You know, a lot of people that are in the buying field, you know, aren’t big risk takers. 

You know, they don’t necessarily take it. there’s always all the exceptions, but a lot of times, you know, they wanted their job to be easier and they wanted to do it better. 

And before we implemented, we were in a state where we just didn’t have bandwidth to confirm POs. We just didn’t know, therefore MRP didn’t work. I feel like I’m beating a drum here, but it’s so critical. 

So one of the things that I did was I really, I did it naturally before I even learned about source say, but I’m like, man, there’s gotta be a better way to do this. 

Like who makes something that fixes this problem of constant email communication, going back and forth, getting confused. 

Somebody typed in a PO wrong on their side, our side, you know, of course we made mistakes too. Uh, and then once mistakes start happening, it just creates a mess. 

So I was continually planning them and team might, Hey, there has to be a better way. And I’m going to start looking for something. Um, and, uh, so it was kind of one of those things where they were convinced they had a problem. 

They needed to be solved. You know, when, when we looked at source day, um, again, they were a little skeptical. 

Hey, how would this work? What would the relationship look like? Are they still going to expedite parts to us like they do now when we’re going through this other platform? 

But, uh, the reality was, you know, literally one month after. Uh, we were live and kind of the wheels were turning and we were doing it. 

I’m like, Hey guys, you know, if this isn’t working, like we can, we can turn it off. Like we, we can be done. And I kind of planted that ahead of time. Uh, you know, a little manipulation going on, but they’re like, no, no, no. 

Because it helps so much because you have answers. You know, when people ask you questions, when you’re trying to help out your teammates, You have answers. 

You know what’s going on. And that’s just, it’s super powerful to be able to lead your team through a change like that and to have something that works that well. 

It was a fun time to see because, you know, we all have these little, you know, gremlins on our shoulders saying, oh, this isn’t going to quite work. 

It’s not going to be as good as you thought. And this one really was. It was very… On that topic, Ryan, if you don’t mind, just 10 seconds or less, quick question. 

In my experience working with other Epicor customers, you hit on something there that I want to kind of dive into a little bit, and that is the relationship that your buyers have with the suppliers, right, and moving to a more automated process and the concern that maybe the relationships might be negatively impacted by that. 

And in my experience working with other customers, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well. the fact that they spend less time working on the email corrections and follow-ups, they have more time to spend on building those relationships and being more strategic in that relationship experience. 

So what have you experienced? What has your team experienced along those lines? Yeah, I don’t know if I can answer it in 10 seconds, but I’ll do my best, Jim. 

No, I think the reality is so much of the crossed wires, you know, communicating back and forth. You spent so much time untying those, you know, and getting everything straight that you actually had time to be proactive and talk about what’s coming up next. 

What are we doing later? The strategic part of it, you know, is huge. You know, we’re doing a much better job of sharing forecasts with suppliers now talking about that ahead of time. 

They’re prepared. We’re prepared. They’re able to pull in easier because they have all their materials and or labor. 

And the truth is, there’s more time for a little chit chat, too, to build those relationships and talk about gardening, talking about the bears. 

You choose what you want it to be and what your relationship is. But those things are key. And I think one of the really important things is just remembering that real people are on the other side, just trying to do a good job And this is a tool that helps them. 

Excellent. Thank you. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing a lot of your insight there. It’s great to hear from a person who’s been through the challenges on the front end, implemented a solution, and now coming out the back end has real success stories to tell about it. 

So thank you for sharing. Yeah, absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Hopefully it helps somebody else. Great. Well, I know, you know, we’ve had a bunch of great questions, so keep putting them in there. 

Someone did ask where we get to see some of the products. So, you know, Jim Fry, if you want to launch that up and show some folks a little bit of the UI, and then obviously we can show everyone more, but we’ll give everyone a little taste here by Mr. Fry. Excellent. Thank you, Colby. So now that you’ve kind of heard some of the supply chain collaboration concerns and why optimization of that supply chain matters, let’s bring it to life now and kind of show some of the blocking and tackling that typically transpires between buyers and suppliers. 

So with that in mind, I’ve got Epicor Kinetic open. I’ve got multiple widgets for supply chain management turned on. Obviously all of the performance indicators that you’re seeing here are available to Epicor customers through either dashboards, BAQs, or grow business intelligence. 

In addition to that, There are a host of metrics that are available inside of the source data collaboration platform. 

So more on that as we dig deeper. One of the things I wanted to make sure that we spent just a couple of moments on in terms of setting expectations, and this is really dovetailing on one of the questions that Ryan addressed earlier, and that is the supplier adoption, right? 

Typically, you know, the supplier collaboration topic in general succeeds or fails for one primary reason, and it is supplier adoption. 

And so it only works if the communication string is easy and consistent and fluid between buyers and suppliers. 

And so the illustration that I’m sharing with you here is intended just to give you a sense that there are multiple ways in which a supplier can communicate with buyers on a day to day basis. 

And so you’ll notice here, the email based workflow platform access is the bi-directional integration inside of the platform. 

And then, of course, you have the ability to leverage some of the API and EDI connections for more of those higher volume type relationships that you might have with your suppliers. 

These are not mutually exclusive, by the way. So the relationship that you have with your suppliers could be a combination of these tools. 

And so in terms of adoption, what I’ve seen a lot of suppliers encounter or our EPCOR customers encounter with suppliers is that we start typical in a process of call, walk, run, similar to the ethical implementation process where we start with the email and kind of progress from there. 

And so with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how all of this materializes so that you can see the collaboration and ultimately the benefit in the optimization between buyers and suppliers. 

So first and foremost, you’ll notice that if I’m interested, I can jump right into PO suggestions. This is where most of our demand is going to flow either here or the buyer’s workbench, of course. 

I’ve filtered this particular suggestion screen for a specific job order just to focus on a very specific scenario here where we may have demand flowing from jobs or from forecasts or from requisitions, from RFQ conversions to purchase orders. 

All roads lead to the PO suggestion queue and or the buyer’s workbench. From here, the buyer has the ability to create their purchase orders. 

This is nothing new for Epicor customers. You process your suggestion. that generates a purchase order in the background And the supplier receives that via, and let’s go ahead and take a close look at this one, via email, right? 

You’re using, most likely you’re using advanced print routing today to send those purchase orders directly to your suppliers. 

What I’m going to share with you here is that when we create a purchase order in Epicor, you have the ability to go through an approval process, of course. 

You have the ability to update your due dates and all of the things that are typical in the blocking and tackling of creating purchase orders. 

And the element that I wanted to share with you, I think the difference from a takeaway perspective is that once you approve that purchase order and that gets sent off to your supplier for fulfillment, the confirmation or acknowledgement of that purchase order is done manually. 

And it’s typically done through picking up the phone or shooting an email. And we’ve already talked about the constant string of communications that go back and forth. 

Instead of having to do that, once the purchase order is created, the supplier would receive that purchase order via email. 

And you’ll notice in this particular case, I’m now putting on my supplier hat. And there’s a few different directions that we can take this conversation. 

But just to kind of acclimate you with where we are, we may, as a supplier, in this case, I have the ability to look at all of the lower-level details for each one of these suppliers. 

purchase orders that just got received. I can open up a particular purchase order, and I can review the details accordingly. 

So when I talked about the email platform as one value stream that can be leveraged by a supplier, this is the scenario I’m referring to. 

I can easily just respond to this email to my customer, and you’ll notice the related purchase order, 4695 line one, release one, the product that’s being supplied, due dates, et cetera. 

I can also hit the review and accept button, which now launches me into the supplier platform. And I have the ability to look at this purchase order in more detail. 

So now I can see the history of the PO over time. I can dig into the items that are present on this purchase order. And then I can also suggest or propose changes to due dates, quantities, and costs if I’m unable to support this request. 

So for example, in the interest of time, let’s just go ahead and do a couple of quick changes here. 

We’ll push this one out. Let’s say this won’t be available until April 10th. Cost is going to be changed from $50 to $55. And the reason we’re going to have plant shutdowns or something along those lines. 

Blah, blah, blah. So now you’ll notice I’m going to go ahead and hit the submit button here, which is going to respond to my buyer that requested that we fulfill this purchase order. 

Before I hit that button, though, notice that I also have the ability to propose split lines. So it’s quite common. for suppliers to say, well, I don’t have all 50 on this day, for example, or 20 in this case, but I can give you 10 tomorrow and the balance next Tuesday. So I can recommend split lines, which the buyer would then be able to review and either accept or reject. 

So in this case, I’m gonna go ahead and submit that. And now that response is sent back to the buyer. So, so far, what you’ve seen is the ability to receive an email as a supplier, I can certainly reply to that email, or more advantageously, I can drill into that purchase order through the platform and respond in that fashion. 

If we elevate this discussion again for just a moment, let’s go back into Epicor. And now that I’ve got that purchase order that’s been accepted, I’m going to do one of two things. 

Certainly, I can go look at the status of that purchase order, and I’ll do that for you in a moment. 

But I’m also going to drill into the buyer view for just a moment here. So what the buyer might do in addition to leveraging their, let’s go ahead and change this. 

Essentially, I’m changing hats now and I’m putting on my buyer hat. And I want to be able to see all of my purchase orders to all suppliers. 

So as a buyer, this is my dashboard. This extends, I think I saw a related question in the chat in terms of what a buyer might see and how they might relate to different suppliers. 

This is the view that extends the embedded epic or capabilities to see across all of those different suppliers and respond based upon action messages, right? 

So we’re segregating our response. So in this case, you’ll notice that I’ve got from this buyer’s perspective, I can look at supplier proposed changes. 

I can look at all risks and the risks give me the opportunity to drill in using some source day artificial intelligence, right? 

And so if I see a risk related to lead time, I’ll make this very brief. I know I’m running out of time here, but essentially you’ll notice that the purchase order is at risk of being delayed due to a high risk lead time. 

So in this case, the requirement is 211. Our history and artificial intelligence suggests that the lead time is going to fall somewhere between 27 and 225. 

I can message the supplier or I can view the lead times applicable to this particular part. So we’ll put a pin in there. that, and we can jump back into that at a later time. 

In this case, let’s look at the supplier proposed changes. So now you’ll notice that the purchase order that was confirmed by the supplier requesting a proposed change is available here. 

So if I click on the proposed change, I can see that they’re requesting a change to the price going from 50 to 55 and the delivery to 25 to 410. 

In the interest of time, I’m just going to go ahead and accept or propose a change to that, This gives me further visibility as a buyer in terms of what the supplier is looking to do here in response to my purchase order demand. 

And now we get the messages which confirm that change. Now that’s being written back to the supplier record, and it’s falling off our list here. 

Ultimately, at the end of the day, we’ll go ahead and refresh this purchase order. All of those changes that have occurred, and let’s go back up here. 

Look at PO 45, 4695, which is one that just came across. You’ll notice that I have confirmation of that purchase order. And if I drill into the line release detail, my new promise dates are identified here associated with that and the line itself. 

contains the new unit price. So bi-directional communication in just a few seconds, we’re able to request the purchase order, send it to the supplier, supplier responded with alternative or proposed suggestions to which the buyer can confirm all of that data is being updated in the corresponding purchase order. 

And now I’m moving on to my next task, which might be more strategic in nature. And so with that, I know I just wanted to spend three or four minutes to highlight the user interface, you an idea of what that might look like in source day and how epic or and source day works in tandem to optimize that supply chain. 

And at this time, I’ll pass things back to the team for any remaining Q and A. Thank you, Jim. And that was great. And for everyone on really meant to be a high level overview. 

There’s a lot of good questions in here about functionality. Highly recommend, you know, let’s connect Let’s learn a little bit about your current processes. 

We can dive deep into functionality. We’ve been an organization for 10 years, very, very deep workflows, certainly too much for a webinar. 

So glad you’re able to get a little bit of your eyes on the solution. And now we will open it up for audience Q&A. We have a bunch. We only have eight minutes left. So we’re going to answer some. 

I will personally make sure anyone who does not have their answers questions answered directly we’ll be in touch with answers. 

So, um, John, if you want to. Yeah, I think i can consolidate a few of these questions into sort of one overarching question. 

And that is, can you talk a little bit about how long, uh, source day has been working with epoch or customers? 

I know that the partner relationship is pretty new, but i know that prior to that being an official partnership, um, you guys had Um, sold and worked with epicore customers using source day. 

What versions are supported? And can you talk a little bit about after the purchase and the implementation who is involved? 

Um, between epicore and source day and kind of talk about what that looks like a little bit. Great questions. I think i can hit all of that. So we’ve got a 10 year old company? 

We’ve been supporting epicore clients for seven years. We’ve done about 100 implementations. So yes, as john said, new partnership, but tons of experience supporting Epicor clients. 

Our integration has been validated by clients over and over and over, and it’s now even extra stamp of approval by Epicor themselves. 

As far as versions go, we do support both cloud and on-prem, and we support on-prem versions back to all the versions of 9. 

If you’re older than 9, let’s get you updated. But yeah, we support both cloud and on-prem. Like I mentioned at the beginning with the partnership, if you choose to partner with SourceDay, right, you purchase from your Epicor account manager or channel partner, SourceDay does the implementation with you, right? 

We are experts in the implementation. We’ve done it over and over and over. So we’re your partner in implementation and the ongoing support. 

That’s a SourceDay responsibility. Awesome. You remembered every leg of that multi-tiered question there. Okay. The next question is a customer or one of our audience members said, I’m in a different industry than Ag Leader. 

Do you have any case studies for other industries or maybe a broader question of what all industries does Source Day work with? 

And, you know, are there some wheelhouse industries? Yeah, great question. I mean, at the end of the day, we support all discrete manufacturers is why Epic partnered with us is a big focus on, you know, that discrete manufacturing. 

But absolutely, if you go to our website, we have a bunch of case studies on there that you can read and check out from all different industries. 

But our focus is, you know, if you are a discrete manufacturer, regardless of specific industry, absolutely. 

And we have happy, referenceable clients just like Ag Leader in those different areas. So happy to chat with you more about Awesome. Another question. This one’s directed to Ryan and or Jim. 

Can you tell us in detail what Epicor was lacking in regards to supply chain processes where source data provided improved visibility? 

So the question about sort of what were the gaps in sort of the out-of-the-box Epicor that source data provided a solution to? 

Interesting. I’ll take this one first, Jim. Yeah, I’ll take it, and then you can enhance it. So one of the key things that I said very quickly earlier was we did not have supplier confirmations. 

So we would send a PO and it would go to our supplier and they might send us an email back saying, hey, this is confirmed, we can make that date. 

But we didn’t put it in Epicor and we didn’t have any tracking on what that was. The nature of three, four years ago was the fact that I would bet you probably 70% of our POs were late. 

It was just a matter of how late and oftentimes we had POs stacked on each other. So the confusion was immense as far as when it was coming. 

We literally didn’t know. We would have to pick up the phone. And the reality is when you have 50 of those conversations a day, your memory starts to lag. 

You need to get it into a database because you just can’t remember what the last conversation was, and it takes too much to look at your handwritten notes. 

So I think that’s the main data that we get from that, that we were lacking before. And I would just add to that very briefly, having only three or four minutes to present the solution, I tried to focus on where I saw the biggest value for the procurement practitioner, right? 

Obviously, the company benefits notwithstanding, and they are significant. And we can certainly get into more detail on that, some of the metrics. 

And Ryan made note of a couple of those, right, on-time delivery performance, reducing inventory, et cetera. 

But you watch me walk through that presentation. Once the purchase order was created, without source day, you’re just waiting now for that purchase order response to come back. 

And so I guess my supply chain dad joke question related to that, is why do buyers love real-time supplier collaboration? 

The answer to that is because sending an email to a supplier that says, just checking on this is not a strategy. 

I’m glad we got a dad joke, Jim. Appreciate it. Appreciate that. So I think part of what Ryan said, too, is, you know, be sure to, if you have questions about source data and how it might fit in, you know, reach out to your cam. 

We can set up a conversation, you know, no strings attached, you know, conversation about Source Day, you know, with Colby or someone else from Source Day. 

And if it seems like a good fit, we can move on to a demo and really show you all of it, right, from soup to nuts. 

I think the last question of the webinar then, as we’re rolling up on about one minute left, for Ryan, knowing what you know now, What is one piece of advice that you’d give someone implementing or thinking about implementing SourceDay? 

Yeah, I think the biggest answer that comes to me is you can do this. Sometimes deploying things like this is hard. And, you know, the reality is with the SourceDay team, you know, you have to put in your time. 

You’ve got to do the work. But they know how to make it happen and know what to do. and know how to help. They’ve even helped me. How do you approach some of your suppliers that are going to be difficult? 

All those different things, like their advice worked really well. And I highly recommend, you know, you take a look. If you have some of these problems, no question, SourceDay is a good solution. 

And you can implement these new processes. It’s not as hard or as scary as what I saw. when I was looking at Source Day, that’s for sure. awesome well ryan we really appreciate you um here’s my contact information. 

Jim Fry, John Kill, right there with epicor um reach out if you have questions um i know there’s some more q a um want to be respectful of everyone’s day. 

We are at the hour mark, so we will be in touch answering more questions in more detail um thank you all for your time. 

I know it’s an investment. Hope you found it beneficial. Ryan, appreciate you. Jim, great chatting with you. John, thank you. And everyone have a great rest of your day, great rest of your week. 

Take care. Take care, everyone. Thank you.