Wanner Engineering

Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here this afternoon. We still have folks rolling in, so we’ll give everyone a couple more minutes to join and then we’ll get started. We’re right at noon central time, still seeing people file in. Give it about sixty more seconds and then we’ll jump in. Thanks for being here and for your patience before we get started here. Okay. About thirty more seconds. Again, thank you everyone for joining on our lunch hour and we’ll get started here momentarily. All right. We’re two minutes past the hour. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Thank you all for being here. I know it’s an investment in your day to learn here from Source Day and more specifically Sour. So we will jump right in, but before a couple housekeeping items, if you’ve not used this platform before, there’s a number of functions that you can access. I do want to point out to specifically the book a meeting or sign up for a demo function up at that top row at any point, you can put in your information to book a meeting directly with SourceDay. Also, ask a question. So in the open box just below the videos or click on the ask a question on the top row, Please ask questions throughout. We’ll be answering some of them live, some of them at the end of the presentation. So please take advantage of that function. You also can rearrange your view. You can enlarge the video, enlarge the PowerPoint, kind of make that screen your own. If you need any sort of audio adjustments, you just adjust the volume controls on the video. And then lastly, everyone in the audience will receive a recording of the webinar today. So be on the lookout for that for on demand. Awesome. Well, let’s get started. Thank you for being here to learn how Sour increased on time delivery by 39% in just six months. I’m Colby Young. I’m VP of alliances at Source Day. I’ve been with the company for about ten and a half years. The last four to five years, I’ve been fully focused on our strategic partnerships and my brain is a 100% Epicor and our Epicor ISV or independent software vendor partnership. For those that don’t know what that is, Epicor has vetted our technology, our roadmap, spoken to our customers, kind of been watching our success for a number of years and chose us about eighteen months ago to be their strategic specific partner to solve this supplier portal PO management challenge. So that’s my role and responsibility here is managing that partnership and working with great folks like Sour to take advantage. So I’d like to welcome our special guests here, Kyle Wilson, if you’ll say hello, introduce yourself, and a little bit about Sour Compressors. Sure. Thank you, Colby. I appreciate the introduction. My name is Kyle Wilson. I’m the strategic sourcing manager for Sour Compressors. I’m in The USA subsidiary of that group, so we have purview over North America, Canada, and Mexico, as well as The United States. Sour Compressors is a leading provider of high pressure compressor and gas compression solutions. We cover a variety of markets, including industrial, marine, energy, and specialty gas. What we like to say is our product can handle any pressure up to 7,000 PSI. So some of the highest pressure systems you might see at a manufacturing facility of different processes within their facility, whether it be laser cutting or bottle blowing, there’s a variety of industrial aspects as well as the traditional industries for marine and for ships for their starting air or their breathing air. Awesome, Kyle. Impressive stuff. And again, thank you for being here today and sharing your knowledge. All right, I always like to start with this slide, you know, kind of the history of supply chain a little bit. Like I said, I’ve been with SourceSafe for about ten and a half years. And pre COVID, working with manufacturers, everything was all about just in time, right? It’s just in time inventory, just in time manufacturing, how to hold as little inventory as possible, get it right when I need it. And that was a beautiful world back then, right, for supply chain. COVID hit, the pendulum swung 180 degrees the other way. Right? It was how do I increase my warehouse space? I’ll hold years of inventory. Right? I don’t know when my suppliers will be able to ship, if their factories are gonna shut down. Right? It complete chaos. Well, and that was a strategy for them, right? But over the last few years, CFOs have said, you know, we can’t keep operating in this bloated inventory fashion. We need to get our arms around inventory, really think about turns again. But the reality is, is we keep dealing with supply chain disruption after disruption, and there’s really no end in sight. The new normal that we’re dealing with in supply chain is constant disruption, constant variability, but we need to be smart with our inventory and figure out how to manage all of that. So we’re in a tough spot right now and we really need to think about automation technology to get through this and stay on top of it. To to share a little bit more information, about global supply chain, SourceDate represents one of the largest direct spend datasets really in the world. We process about $8,000,000,000 of direct spend every quarter. We have about 125,000 supplier users engaging on source day. We represent about a 100,000,000 purchase orders changing every year. And with all this information and data, we analyze it every quarter to put out some insights about what’s going on in the global supply chain. So this first graph is really looking at how much change is happening on purchase orders, right? We have supplier initiated changes, buyer initiated changes there in green and the total in blue. And the point I wanna show here is that over the last few years, purchase orders have been changing between 3050% of the time. And on average, they’re changing two to three times. When I talk about a change, I’m talking about, you know, Kyle’s my supplier, I send him a purchase order and he needs to change a date, quantity, or price. Or after I issue that PO, I need to adjust a date, quantity, or price, just to define change. So we’re living in this world of constant PO change, and those changes are impacting the MRP, right? Dates and quantities, those pricing changes impacting AP. So getting our arms around the constant variability of change and is that change rate gonna go up or down? We have no idea, but what we do know it’s fluctuating and it’s happening. The next stat I wanna show you here is how that is impacting on time delivery. As you can see, on time delivery and the purchase order uncertainty or changes are pretty correlated. We saw a kind of steady increase in on time delivery through ’23 and into ’24. And then we saw a big dip again. We saw a significant rise up to the start of ’26, and now we’re seeing another dip. And the reality is, is there’s so many geopolitical issues. There’s so many things that are impacting change and variability and the supply chain disruption that accounts for on time delivery that it’s hard to predict where it’s gonna go. We don’t know if it’s gonna keep rising or go down. We just know it’s gonna fluctuate, and we’ve gotta do what we can to put our best foot forward to increase on time delivery as much as possible. The last data point here is around price changes. So this red line here is representing the purchase order lines that are having price increases. And right now, over the last three years, we are seeing the highest rate of price change that we have in the last number of years. 25% of all purchase order lines are experiencing a price increase. When those price increases happening, you’re paying more than expected, accounts payable isn’t gonna match and we gotta go fix that. And again, what the amount of inventory you’re gonna hold, the value of that inventory is gonna shift. So huge downstream impacts with all of this variability. And it’s, you know, how do we get our arms around all that? Kyle, you know, I know we’ve talked a lot in the last month or so. You know, this volatility really is the enemy of predictability, as you know, saying in supply chain. How has SAUR navigated this environment over the last few years? Yeah, Colby, you nailed it on the head. We’re in an uncertain environment. We have to adapt. And what we like to say at SAURE is that we’re trying to deliver the ultimate customer journey, and this volatility has created a situation where it’s made it difficult. We named four parts of that ultimate customer journey product, which is outside of scope for this session, but structure, processes and people are the other three. And those ones come directly home to what we’re working on here. So what we’ve had to do is we’ve had to increase supplier engagement. We are often engaging with our vendor partners to ensure that there is visibility and alignment between our production processes, planning process, and so on. And then also we’ve had to increase our collaboration internally. My position finds itself at the intersection between engineering, sales, and supply chain. So we’re working with those three groups on planning processes both at the executive level and at the execution level for this product, SourceDay, those allow us to improve our Source To Pay process. So despite the volatility, we have to constantly adapt and SourceDay provides us that platform to be able to adapt to that volatility. Todd, I love that customer journey, right? At the end of the day, it’s all about serving your customers better, right? We’re here to serve you better as a client. You’re trying to serve your customers or everyone on the line, right, is trying to serve their customers better. So that’s a really great tenant of your organization. And one of the reasons that it is so difficult, right, through that customer journey when it comes to your inbound inventory, that unfortunately suppliers, we believe one of the most important stakeholders of the whole supply chain, if not the most important, right? They’re providing you with all your inbound inventory to keep your production lines up. They’re disconnected from Epicor, right? They don’t have a window in Epicor. They don’t have a room in Epicor. They’re kind of like across the street. And because of this disconnect, there’s really a black hole when it comes to your purchase orders and inbound inventory between your ERP and your suppliers. And to bridge this gap, right? It’s emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls, disparate siloed communication tools, right? Or in 2026, not far from 2027. And this is not the way to keep up with that customer journey and manage all of that disruption. Kyle, when we talked, you said something that really stuck with me and that was that dates matter in quotes, right? Those are your words. Why are dates so important to making MRP work so production runs smoothly and the customer journey is successful? Yeah. No, that’s a great question, Koli. From a sour compressor’s perspective, the concept of MRP was always an awareness, but it wasn’t integrated into our ERP system. So when we went live with Epicor, that was a new paradigm for us, and we needed a system like Source Date to allow us to align those dates, because dates matter because everything depends on it in the planning perspective. So our investment in SourceDate, our investment in planning professionals, as well as project management professionals to ensure that any exception to our process gets addressed is helping us drive our on time delivery up from below 50% to much better these days, partly because, mostly because of the source day investment. So it’s not something that’s necessarily intuitive for all those that haven’t used MRP before, but for those of us who have in our careers and bringing it into a new organization, the combination of Epicor’s system of record and Source Day’s ability to reach out to the supply base makes it possible for us to see around corners, to have an ability to get ahead of things. That’s great. You know, it’s this black box, right, between Epicor and suppliers, you know, where when don’t have an automation solution in place and, you know, you’re flying blind and unable to see around corners, We kind of joke about this slide as we talk about the whole supply chain disruption, but the real kind of crisis is in your procurement team’s inbox, all the email folders and email flags and open order report spreadsheets, right? Trying to figure out, right? What’s around the corner with all this manual process. Does this kind of look familiar and kind of this ring true, maybe get a little PTSD from days before source day? Absolutely. And again, it’s always a journey of continuous improvement. That’s what we promote within sour compressors, continuous improvement. And yes, there’s some trauma there from what you’re showing on the screen, but we’re evolving every day, especially with our critical suppliers, you know, due to the investment in Source Day that’s making us a better supply chain and better able to meet the ultimate customer journey. That’s our objective as an organization. Perfect. Kyle, so where does Source Day fit in? Right? We’ve been talking about how we’ve been helping you bridge that gap. And what you’re looking at resembles what we’re doing as Epicor’s ISV, right, go to partner to solve this challenge. And it is extending Epicor to the entire supplier network. So we are bilaterally integrated with Epicor, right? Our implementation, our integration has been vetted and approved with Epicor. It’s been built with Epicor. And we are picking up those POs when they are approved, extending, delivering, and all of the, we call it purchase order life cycle, right? PO created in Epicor until goods receipt happened in Epicor, all that visibility and management. So Kyle, when it comes to choosing a partner, right, to invest in this continuous improvement, like you said, how important was it that Source Day was, is Epicor’s ISV certified partner in making that decision? Yeah. Coley, I’ll give you a little bit of context before I answer the question. We went through a full RFP RFQ process and looked at multiple competitors. So we went and ranked them. And your ability to integrate with Epicor, our system of record, was what shined brightest of all in our review process of our internal stakeholders. So the reality is we need to, in an operation sense, we’re trying to drive all of the critical data into our ERP system while trying to keep it as the best quality data as possible. So the ability for it to talk back and forth was a critical aspect in our decision making process to select source day with our Epicor instance. That’s great. And just for the audience, right, ability to talk back and forth, right, I mentioned pulling the POs out of Epicor for communication with suppliers. We’re also updating Epicor in real time at the line level to make sure all those dates, all those quantities, right, all the pricing is always up to date. And that’s, again, striving that accurate MRP and all the full visibility inside your system of record, Epicor. Kyle, let me ask you, you know, we talked about MRP. Right? PO accuracy. Also, you know, everyone talks about it, right, ERP, Epicor’s only good as the data feeding it. And that’s especially true and important when companies are looking to be better with automation and specifically AI. AI is a big buzzword right now. Is Sour starting to leverage AI in your business? Sure. Something we built from the beginning of our Epicor journey and then our SourceState journey was master data governance. We put that front and center and worked really hard to stay as true to the out of box experience in both Epicor and in SourceState. But to drive that home with AI, like you said, we can’t really get good analysis out of our systems without good data. So there’s a consistent message across our supply chain. We want the best data we can to get the best decisions and best execution possible. So areas that we’re kind of getting into is helping us digest large documents and understand summarization. I’m using it to look at, you know, where we might need master data fixes, where things don’t make sense, like a lead time says this, and we’ve got this report from source data that says this. How do we rectify those? What kind of uploads into Epicor do I need to make or what type of adjustments in our source data settings do I need to make? So we’re able to use Epicor’s DMT tool to then make quick decisions and quick switches when we see something inconsistent because the AI is comparing those large data sets for us. So those, you know, I wouldn’t say we’re deep into it, but we’re using it as best we can. We have, you know, dedicated tools that our organization has selected and it’s leveraging all of the data that we have between Epicor and SourceDate to give us the best supply chain in the industry. It’s amazing, Kyle. You know, data, data, right? Everyone talks about data and it’s real. And the data, it’s changing so much so quickly, right? Lead times, what it was six months ago might not be what it is now, right? This just we talked about the supply chain disruption. So having that data at your fingertips and making those fast decisions is so critical right now. You know, folks might be looking at this. We talked about integration into Epicor, you know, POs coming out in the Source Day updates going back in. So there is an implementation here, right? There’s an integration effort. Kyle, how would you describe the Source Day implementation to folks? I’m sure we have plenty of IT on the line as well right now. Yeah. No, you captured a good quote. I said it was as smooth as butter. So it’s, again, that might be my Midwest roots, but hey, it fits. And what was beneficial is that there was two sides of the implementation, the technical side and then the cultural or change management side, and both were excellent and top notch with SourceState. So I think that we breezed through the technical side of it, the tables match nice, the BAQs and other underlying things worked great. Our IT team helped us, but a lot of it was managed by us operational users. Between myself and then the procurement team, we were able to, you know, identify how we had learned Epicor up to that point and then implement the technical side to make sure, you know, source day was working well for us. So we did do a couple if then type statements, which didn’t get… Would help everybody know what to send and what not to send to source day in case there needed to be some, you know, review process. And as far as the cultural side, the transition to that is excellent. You know, if we don’t have the buy in from the buyers and have an ability to explain it at every level of our organization to our vendor partners, our executive team, that was taken into consideration in a source based model. So the reality is it’s not just the technical side, which they made very fluid, very smooth, but then also the cultural change to help us think about how do we engage all these stakeholders to show them it makes their life better. Whether you’re a buyer, a supplier, or so on, that’s the message that we’ve been able to send to our critical suppliers and has made excellent success within the SourceDay ecosystem. That’s great, Kyle. And let me ask you, as an operations leader, there might be other operations leaders on the line here, right, that are thinking, God, you know, my team can’t take on another ERP project. Right? I know they’re overloaded. You know, what would you say about that, you know, concern that might be prevalent out there? I’d say this one’s gonna amplify your supply chain. It’s not gonna be a drag. The IT lift is going to be manageable. It’s gonna be the implementation teams are strong in their abilities. And the reality is that this is an investment in visibility, adaptability to go and work in this uncertain environment where volatility is the norm. And by doing that, you’re getting that benefit. So I don’t necessarily look at it as an ERP project per se, but let’s say it’s an investment and having better information and better ability to make decisions that allow you to give your customer the ultimate customer journey, in our words, to ensure that they keep coming back for repeat business. Great. And to use your words, it was as smooth as butter. No hiccups. Kyle, sometimes the hardest part is convincing executives, right, to invest in change and a transformation. How did you persuade your leadership to invest in SourceDay and get the project approved and move forward? Yeah, I think Source Day is extremely good, Colby, at helping build the business case at an executive level. So I want to applaud Source Day for that. That was very helpful to me, the process that you support in that effort. And basically at the executive level, I did go through all the things that it could do for the day to day users. But when you’re working at the executive level, you also have talking about how can we deliver on time? What is this visibility going to do to meet that aspect of say a COO’s responsibilities? And that’s the critical one. If the sales team makes a customer promise, both engineering and operations and all those in the supply chain have to make that happen. So that was the big part of it is there’s numbers that we put against this, but the reality was is we can build this as a foundation for building the ultimate customer journey. We can build this as the foundation to deliver on time, which is our number one KPI in supply chain organization at Sour Compressors. That’s great. So important, right? The customer journey, on time delivery, and it all trickles down from your suppliers. That’s great. Kyle, so everything sounds wonderful, right? The elephant in the room always is, you know, will my team, but more specifically, right, will my suppliers actually use it? So tell us what it’s been like for Sour, you know, and what percent of direct spend supplier network within your org and your network are engaging on SourceDeck? Yeah. I would say 90% to 100 of our strategic suppliers. So again, we’ve had very high adoption. What I found is that it takes consistency. You have to have conversations. And SourceState gives you the tools to have those conversations in a consistent manner. That was key. So the reality is we can reach our vendors in a consistent way, make sure they understand we’re measuring them all the same, and that we do set high standards because as we talked about earlier, Colby, the dates matter. And yes, we’re not gonna be perfect, So there’s buffers that are allowed within the SourceDay system to give a little bit of grace, but we chose as an organization to keep that tight. The reason we did that is because we wanted to set a baseline level of continuous improvement that we can show over years to come. That baseline is meant to be hard because we want both our vendor partners production schedule and our own production schedule to start to blend, to start to share that visibility. Sourcethnic gives us that ability to do that. And this is how we got to those adoption rates, is we had to have those conversations about you’re a partner. This is how we achieve the ultimate customer journey and get repeat business. And it’s gonna help us understand where the partners stand and their commitment to the sour compressor’s ultimate customer journey. So it’s an ability to help us measure that. And nothing’s easy in life, but this is worth it. This is what the foundation of our entire integration of our suppliers into our system and SourceDay is that foundation along with that Epicor integration. That’s great. And really this is what I’d call the Sourcetay secret sauce. So on the right, you’re seeing all the various ways in which we’ve innovated on our product to allow source suppliers to engage. They don’t have to use a portal. That’s Sourcetay platform down there. We have about 30,000 supplier users that engage in that portal for the right volume, the right type of supplier. The intelligent document processing is a newer capability we have that allows us to ingest a purchase order acknowledgement or updates from the suppliers that get generated at their system automatically. We’ll grab those documents, read it, match it to the PO, get the information in source day. We also allow suppliers to engage directly from an email, right? So they don’t even have to have a login, right? Like an embedded order in an email. We have API capabilities. We can even compliment EDI. So the point is what we’re able to do to meet suppliers where they’re at with technology and also not just providing a customer success team to help sour and the users through the change management of managing POS differently, we have an entire supplier success team as well that is there to be the partner with Kyle, to be the partner with the team in getting the supplier engagement adoption. And that’s really what I’d call the secret sauce. Very good. So Kyle, I really want to start to dig into your success because you’ve been live on SOURCE stages for six months and already realized some tremendous results. You mentioned on time delivery. You mentioned, you know, customer journey. Obviously, on time delivery is critical to the customer journey, keeping customers happy. So I remember you mentioning really an impressive improvement in your on time delivery. Can you talk about what those metrics are and what that improvement was? Yeah. We were really in a situation, Colby, where we had to act, right? We have hundreds of components in our compressed air systems. You know, we have a German parent company. We rely on the block of the compressor. In our industry, it kinda looks like a motor, but we have that block, but we put all the other pieces that go into the customer specified situation. So we were dropping below 50% on our overall contract attainment. And what we decided to do strategically is to make the change that we were gonna have Epicor as the source of the system of record and source data is the ability to interact with all of the suppliers, the vendor partners. So we’re well above the 50% now. You have on the slide here the 39% increase. That’s valid. I was just looking at data with my COO the other day, and when you look at early and on time, because like I said earlier, we were very strict on on time, which was plus or minus one day, and again, not expecting everybody to be perfect there. I have this conversation regularly with the suppliers. It’s how do we get better towards that? But then within that, when I look at early and on time, we’re over 70%. So the idea there is that there’s measurable growth, measurable improvement in on time delivery at the supply base. What we’re working on now is how to use that platform and that data to help align with our production schedulers, our planners, and our project managers to better ensure that the expectations are aligned. So by having a consistent supplier based dataset, we can have a better conversation with our interim team and say, how do we then schedule against those commitments? And then how do the buyers potentially find alternatives? You know, you’re not gonna have alternatives to every supplier, but there might be somebody that comes in with a date that we can’t work with, and we’re gonna have to look at other options. So this system allows us to realize that on time delivery increase and set a standard, set a clear benchmark on what we need to do, and it’s driving both internal and external change. That’s great. Accountability, standardization, right? It’s the only way to improve, right? You have to measure it. You have to baseline and hold everyone accountable and you’re doing just that. So, so applauds there. Kyle, let me ask you, so supply responsiveness, you’ve of course talked a lot about performance, big drivers. How’s your ability to manage the supplier changes and really just not respond or reach out about performance when something goes wrong, but like try to stay ahead of that and see around the corners, like you said before. Yeah. As in many organizations, Colby, we had a supplier scorecard. And as I transitioned to this role, I became responsible for that, and that was pre Source Day. And honestly, that system required a lot of data aggregation and manual typing. So we spent a lot of time typing. We were probably doing five or six good supplier scorecards a quarter, and we were really… You know, the quarterly business reviews that are so effective for us were not happening at the pace that we wanted to. However, with SourceDate, we have a scorecard available for every vendor within the Source Day system that has transactions and such. So that allows me to quickly produce this last quarter over 60 supplier scorecards and develop a conversation with 60 suppliers, including offering, you know, time to meet with me to go over the performance and have that quarterly business review. So we’re getting a high, you know, effective rate of having conversations, providing information, and we’re linking that scorecard to the entire process. We’re making sure pricing is checked quarterly to the best of our ability. We’re making sure we’re checking contacts between the organizations quarterly. So we’re doing a lot of that master data governance that I talked about a little bit earlier that allows us to interact properly with the right people in the supply chain at the right time and to allow those suppliers to respond both inside the SORD stay system, which is one of the KPIs that builds up the scorecard, but also, you know, in our regular human interactions. So it helps us bridge both the technology gap and the technology gaps and the people gaps to allow us to have these conversations and build that vendor partner relationship that’s going to drive us towards the ultimate customer journey and meeting that’s on time delivery commitments with the end customer. That’s great. And to use your quote on the screen here, right? You described it as a more bulletproof approach. You know, again, having the data, having the standards, having it all in front of you. Love that. Let’s talk about… You said in our prep, you know, you were you were down a buyer for roughly three months, and you filled the role with a more junior person. How did Source Day help the team through that transition, and and what what did that look like, Kyle? Yeah, that was a difficult time, Colby. Anytime you lose a senior person, you lose a lot of that knowledge, whether it’s tribal or technical or all of the above. We found ourselves in a position that the procurement manager and our staff had to cover that gap. And what Source Day allowed us to do is to be able to bring in some of our remaining experienced people to and cover the gap while they worked on the hiring process for the new junior person. And that new junior person was able to take on responsibilities much quicker. So I like to say it might take… Our procurement manager has fifteen years experience. It takes fifteen years to build that, right? But when we have to bring a new junior person or a new junior buyer on board, we need to have them as helpful as possible within the first week, two weeks. And what Source Day allows is a structured system for them to help us immediately because it’s exceptions based and it allows for that visibility that we can train them on those exceptions to say, how do you address those? Here’s how you address those so that you’re helpful week one, two, three, and beyond as you build up your years of experience with the organization. So I think that’s the meaningful aspect of this is we can bring productivity on board much faster and that junior buyer can feel like they’re contributing sooner, which helps us with retention and the ability to maintain stronger team cohesion over time. That’s great. Really, really transforming your organization there, Kyle. With the ability to onboard more efficiently, right, do their job more efficiently, free up time, What is your most experienced professionals been able to focus on now that they aren’t handling all the follow-up and chasing of orders, right? All that manual work that they have automation for and how has Source Day really helped enable the next phase of your growth and supply chain maturity? It’s really allowed them, Colby, one, to be more proactive. So the buyers are our best. These senior people are our best problem solvers. And of course, there’s problems every day in supply chain that you got to work through, some bigger than others. And that’s where we’ve been able to get those senior people to be able to focus on those. We’ve been able to start a pathway to looking at how we can manage by category or commodity basis so that we can build this expertise up faster because we have probably 10 main commodities that we put into our compressed air packages, and each of those takes time to learn. So we’re hopeful then as we can help divide that out and help these people learn two or three at a time, and as they work their way up, they do that. So what Source Days allow us to do is in the short term of those experiences, put them on higher value add, higher impact work to do more prevention rather than firefighting, more fire prevention. And then also set us on a state where we can have better vendor management, better commodity management to ensure that those senior people become even higher level problem solvers than today. So that helps build a strong team, strong cohesion, and overall, I think it helps everybody understand how they contribute at whichever stage in their career they might be in. It’s really great. Just developing professionals, allowing them to advance their careers and investing in them, you know, as humans and professionals. That’s really, really awesome, Kyle. Thank you for sharing all of this. We have a bunch of questions, so I do want to make sure we have plenty of time for Q and A. So I’m going to jump in here and we’re just going to start from the beginning. We’ve got, like I said, a number of questions and some all answer Kyle, some are gonna be for you. First question is here is how are you measuring on time delivery to promise or commitment date? So I’ll just say from a source day perspective, you can grade them however you want, right, within the settings. You can grade them on the date you have originally on the PO. You can grade them to the date they acknowledge. You can grade them to the latest date they provided. So at the end of the day, is up to you. But Kyle, how how are you grading on time delivery? By by which which date are you holding them accountable for? The first one that is confirmed. We really we really, Colby, what sold us on sources, right, it’s a collaboration platform. And the extension of collaboration is consensus. That consensus between the buyer and seller is what makes this solution very powerful. So we set it based on that first commitment. We know as an organization that if they can’t commit to a date that helps with their production schedule, we may have to look at alternates. And we’re growing in that ability. We’re not there yet where we wanna be, but it’s a continuous improvement effort. So I think the reality is, you said, SourceState provides flexibility and we try to provide the fairest representation of that in our opinion. Then we also try to have the conversations, whether they’re positive conversations, which is what you prefer, but sometimes you have to have those tough conversations. And by having access to this system and the platform to measure this consistently over time, and I can explain to people, everybody’s measured the same way. We’re taking this a very equitable way to say that, and then the conversations about continuous improvement are real. We’re not looking to let a supplier go because they’re not hitting it today. We’re looking to develop that supplier partner, vendor partner relationship over the long run, and that’s how we do it. So we took the approach to provide all the information to our vendors of how we score them. So within the SourceDay system, you have all your settings. Basically, I took screenshots of the settings that we determine, and that becomes a document for onboarding that we use to support any suppliers past, you know, our original, go live date with Source Day. So we’re really trying to be transparent, really trying to build that bridge between us and the supply base that allows us to execute that ultimate customer journey where we’re delivering on our customer promise, and that is gonna lead to additional growth and repeat business. That’s great. And there was a follow-up question. I think you really answered it, but how are you using that data to strategically improve your on time delivery? I mean, you mentioned, right, it’s, you know, being transparent with the settings, right, how they’re being graded. Are you doing like full sit down QBRs? Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, how you’re working with the suppliers with that data to help improve. Yeah, I would say we’re averaging about 10 QBRs a quarter now. So again, I’ve tried to develop processes to get that information out. So I think last quarter I got at least 60 emails out with all the data and then a meeting link within that to schedule the QBRs. And the intent here is to be more intense on getting those to happen in the future quarters. You know, like we said, six months to nine months in, we’re trying to go from education to execution a little bit. So I think we’re going to be having more of those quarterly business reviews. It’s a regular conversation at every level of our organization on how the performance needs to improve and how they can increase those grades on the scorecard. That’s great. And just so everyone knows, right? We also believe the way Seller is doing it is best practice. We give the option, but grading on their original acknowledgement date is what we’ll hold for grading. But just so everyone is very clear, as those dates change, we are of course updating the due date in Epicor, which is driving MRP. You’ve got to know when it’s gonna show up, but holding that original acknowledgement date to grade off of. We also believe that that’s best practice, but there is flexibility. So thanks for talking through that. We had a question here about punch out. So does Source Day enable Punch Out with suppliers like Mastercard? So specifically Punch Out buying, we do not. We’re not… Don’t have Punch Out capability. But we have, like I mentioned, over a 125,000 supplier users. We have very large distributors that manage, you know, 100 plus Source Day customers in the system and have a lot of different ways, right, for their suppliers to engage. But specifically, punch out functionality is not part of the solution. Let’s see here. More questions. We’re still see, more oh, on time delivery. Again, you talked a lot about the on time delivery already. I just question for you, Kyle, maybe someone next is what ERP system do you run? What version are you on cloud on prem? Tell us about your current instance there. Sure. So we’re at a… I don’t know the exact number, but we’re Epicor Kinetic. We have an on prem solution, so we are on prem. And we went live with it probably about not even a year before we did Source Day. So Source Day was our first big supply chain project after the Epicor go live. And as I talked about earlier, it’s foundational to what we’re building for our supplier interactions and meeting our customer expectations. Great. That’s perfect. And just so everyone knows, right, we do support both on prem and cloud. So it doesn’t matter. Sour happens to still be on prem. Right. But we have, again, the Epicor ISV partnership has validated our implementation and integration into all those various versions. And we support any migrations from on prem to cloud as well, if and when that were to happen. So does Source Day help with shipments? If yes, how does that work? Great question. So we do help with ASN visibility with suppliers. So we do have ASN advanced shipping notice workflows where we can get shipment detail right, tracking, carrier, bill of lading, whatever you might need from those suppliers to make sure that you know what PO lines have been shipped and the associated information and even visibility, right, as those updates are happening in transit. So we do have that capability. Kyle, I think you had mentioned that was maybe a next phase you were wanting to get to but not yet using the ASN capabilities, correct? We a little bit of use in the ASN, and that’s probably something I… If I could turn back time, I would have started that earlier because we’re noticing challenges at our receiving dock. I look… My work covers the entire Source To Pay workflow. So when stuff gets stuck at receiving due to lack of documentation, lack of visibility, that means that we can’t produce, right? Because it’s not coming through doors very quickly. The solutions you have developed with the barcoding and packing list development are something I’ve been working internally right now to determine how we can then take that externally. So that’s my learning from this, is ASN tool is very powerful. I think it’s gonna help us. I just wish I would’ve started sooner, but we’re gonna get more involved in that ASN aspect of it to help our entire source to pay workflow. And our customer success team, right, is here to help you through that journey and help make sure you’re thinking about it right, implement it and get the change management. We did have another question is, do you support other ERPs? And at the end of the day, we are ERP agnostic, you know, so a lot of customers of ours have multiple ERPs, we’re able to support them all, right? So we are, at the end of the day, can integrate to any ERP system, right? Integration into ERP is pretty stable stable stakes these days. What’s different, right, with Epicor is the official partnership that we’ve embedded by that ERP system. Perfect. So I think we’ve got a couple more questions. How long did the rollout take? And what did did IT… Let’s just talk about the the rollout for you. About how long did the IT process take until you were live, Kyle? I I recall it being less than two months, to be honest with you. The comments throughout the process from your teams were that we were ahead of schedule, so we were always, you know, on queue. So I think we… I think the IT version, four weeks at most… The IT part of four weeks at most, and the change management, you know, outward facing aspects, more than four weeks. So it was pretty quick. I remember January to March being kind of that timeframe. And we took an approach to go with our biggest suppliers first. So again, we’re trying to make the impact. We didn’t go for an all in one type execution. We worked our way up from largest to smallest, and eventually, you know, almost 200 suppliers on there right now. So we’re working really hard to keep the engagement and the, you know, the implementation went very smoothly. That’s great. Yeah, so it sounds like our average is, right, it’s about six to nine weeks is the quote. So it sounds like you were right, right at eight weeks there. What about IT resource time? And I know, you know, you’re not in IT, but do remember how many hours or how much effort it actually was for IT? Because I wanna be very clear, it’s not eight weeks of work for IT. Right? It spans over the eight weeks. But any idea about how many hours they were invested in getting this live? Yeah. No, we budgeted for this. Right? I talked to the IT manager. I made sure he had… Think we budgeted twenty hours of their time, and I believe they came under that. So again, he had to do a lot of work I didn’t see all the time, but he was on the group meetings when we had to come together as a group. So I couldn’t quantify every hour he put in, but I had very positive feedback from him verbally that it was a good investment of his time and he felt that it was not a big lift from what he has with the skills with Epicor. That’s great. That’s great. Yep. I think it’s, you know, about twenty to twenty five hours is what we quote. And often it is much less than that with SourceDay’s IT and integration team doing the majority, right, of the work behind the scenes. Really good question here. Are there any additional technical capabilities with the Epicor partnership? So really, really good question. There’s a couple things that I will point out. One is we do have a direct integration to Epicor’s MRP for all the PO change suggestions. So our ability to read from Epicor, write the open POs that MRP is suggesting to move in, move out, cancel, make a quantity adjustment. So we can help eliminate a lot of that noise and get those critical adjustments over to suppliers when you want them to. Some are gonna be ignored. There’s also really nice filtering to make sure you’re focused on the important ones. So that’s a great one for Epicor. Another one that is, you know, disclaimer on our roadmap, we’re working directly with Epicor on is a integration for those ASN, those shipments to input that data into Epicor. So being able to move the shipment detail into Epicor for visibility, to help with container management, to help calculate Atlantic cost, right? There’s a lot of critical data there. So that is because of our partnership with Epicor. We had to collaborate on product roadmap and make the integration deeper and better. And that’s an ongoing process with our partnership. Great. So another question here is just about suppliers and I’ll answer is, you know, is there a cost to suppliers and how much is it? So the answer is no, there’s no cost to suppliers. SourceDay is here to be, again, the supplier success partner to train any supplier on the portal if they’re a portal user. Right? Help make sure that emails are accurate for email users, set up the IDP, right, for the reading of the documentation. So there’s no cost for the supplier, no barrier to entry there. And they can have as many users as they want, right? The engagement with our clients is all the suppliers. Right? So so no cost there. And again, little to to zero barrier of entry based on the engagement model that they they choose to use. Really great questions. Look, we’ve got, you know, nine minutes left. So if you still have more, keep keep coming. RFQs. All right. Does SourceState track all RFQs sent out from various buyers, including what documentation was sent out for quote, timing of when the quote will expire, all the bids, costs, price breaks, lead times, no big… Great question. So we do have an RFQ product. It is your ability to, you know, import all your vendors, import all your items, organize your quotes and have full visibility into the RFQs that have been sent out, have visibility into which suppliers have responded, set the time limit or expiration date. There is document sharing, so you can see what documents have been shared along with that quote. There’s frequently asked questions along with the RFQ and side by side comparison, of everything that comes back. So we do have an RFQ system, of a, you know, standalone product, and we are also continuously innovating on that as well. So that is a product offering that we do have. Let’s see, I don’t see any more questions. So I think the last one we’ll give everyone about five minutes back, but Kyle for you know, you’ve given so much, so many people, so much great information right here. For those that are on who have looked at Source Day, maybe haven’t been forward or haven’t looked at us at all, knowing what you know now, what would you say to them or any kind of last advice about SourceDay and your experience? Yeah, Colette, that’s a good question. I think what you want to realize is that you’re gonna save time and money. But if I could leave everyone with just one thought, the companies that win over the next decade are not gonna be the best at… Have the best ERP or the best AI. They’ll be the organization to have the most trusted data. So that you’re gonna need the strongest supplier relationship and the ability to make decisions faster. And Sourcetay offers you that. So again, building that foundation of a trusted data source that supports supplier relationships and the ability to make decisions faster to stay on time, SourceDay is your solution for that. That’s great, Kyle. Really, really good advice. Thank you so much for all of your time. Thank you so much for all of your wisdom and, you know, applaud to you, Kyle, for your leadership transformation. It takes motivation and it takes a strong leader and you are that. So they’re lucky to have you there at Sauer. Here’s my contact information. Anyone who would reach out directly to me, again, you can book a demo or meeting, reach out on our website. We’re here to talk to you. Kyle, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and everyone have a great rest of your day and hopefully you’re able to get some lunch during this hour. Appreciate everyone’s time. Thank you. Take care.