How RS Hughes is Scaling PO Collaboration in Infor CSD Without Scaling Headcount

Watch the Video View Transcript

Join RS Hughes to hear how they took the first steps toward scalable supplier collaboration in Infor CSD—reducing manual effort, improving visibility, and laying the groundwork to support aggressive growth without adding buyer headcount.

Welcome everyone. We will give everyone a few moments to join us and we’ll get started in just a moment. All right, everyone. Well, welcome. Welcome to the webinar. We are excited to be here with you today. 

I’ve got some exciting guests that I’m going to introduce here in a minute. So hopefully you’re here to learn a little about how RSUs is scaling PO collaboration without scaling headcounts. 

So before we dive into the introductions and get into the webinar, a little housekeeping for everyone. 

First and foremost, Q&A. So if have questions throughout the the webinar we definitely want to field those questions for you. 

And the best way to do that is in your is inside your uh your webinar screen there. There should be a q a button just click on that and ask your question. 

We have moderators that are monitoring that and they’ll get those questions over to us to answer. So that’s the best way to do that. The second thing, recording. So if those of you have registered and if you like what you’re seeing and you want to get a recording, don’t worry, we’ll be sending out a recording to everybody after the webinar is completed. 

All right, well, with that, let’s dive right in. I’m super excited to be joined here today with a couple of guests. First, let me introduce myself, and then we’ll let the guests introduce themselves. 

My name is Clint McCree. I am co-founder and chief strategy officer at SourceDay. Been in the Infor ecosystem for over 20 years now. I was first a customer for about 10 years, And then I have been with SourceDay the rest of the time. 

So been around the Infor world for quite some time. So very excited to be here. Joining me is Jim Gearhart. He’s the Director of Supply Chain at R.S. Hughes and also Brandy Alderman, Director of Product Manager specific to Cloud Suite Distribution at Infor. 

Jim, would you do a little bit more of an introduction, please? Sure. Thanks, Glenn. Appreciate that. My name is Jim Gearhart, Director of Supply Chain for R.S. 

Hughes Company. I’ve been with the company about three and a half years. A little bit about my background, pretty extensive global supply chain. 

I’ve led global supply chains, managing thousands of suppliers, hundreds of thousands of active SKUs from countries all around the world with hundreds of millions of spend. 

So glad to be with you today. Thank you, Jim. Appreciate that introduction. Brandy, will you please introduce yourself? Yeah. Hi, everyone. as plant mentioned, I’m Brandy Alderman. 

I am the director of product management for CSD. I’ve been with m4 for about a year and a half now, but i have been in the csd and sxc space for 25 years. 

I spent most of my time in a customer, in a distributor, a couple of distributors working, you know, in the trenches, trying to solve business problems. 

And then I spent some time at a partner doing CSD implementations before I came here. And I am a big fan of CSD and what SourceDay is bringing to the table. 

So I look forward to talking to you guys today. Brandy, that’s incredible. I mean, I know you and I’ve talked beforehand, but 26 years is quite impressive. 

Yeah. Kudos to you, right? I mean, it’s amazing. Appreciate the introductions, everybody. And again, I think this audience is going to get a lot out of what you guys are sharing today. 

So let’s dive right in here. I want to set the stage sort of where we’re going to talk about directionally today. And we’re going to be talking about supply chains and specifically supply chain disruptions. 

And sort of as this slide speaks to, we have been dealing with supply chain disruptions for quite some time, going all the way back to COVID days. 

And it seems like year over year, that there’s something new. More recently, for a lot of you, you’re dealing with tariffs, and those have been quite disruptive. 

And we certainly don’t believe that this is going to change. We’re going to get in a little bit about what we’re seeing from a volatility perspective here in a minute, but it certainly feels like we’re just in this time where predictability and supply chain chaos is just something that’s just going to be there day in and day out. 

And Jim, I want to go to you real quick, just You know, you are a supply chain expert, right? You’ve been doing this for a very long time. I know you’ve been with RSUs for a short period of time, but just, you know, you’ve been in supply chain since COVID. 

Like, how did you handle that? How did you get through those tough times? Yeah, well, I mean, it wasn’t easy. I mean, if you look at COVID, boy, if you’re in the supply chain field during COVID, it was very challenging. 

I think we all know that. Certainly for me and my team at the time, in a prior life, we… we were managing multiple products from multiple countries globally during that pandemic. 

And we were lucky enough that in the company I did work for, we had electronic communications between our suppliers, which really streamlines communication, takes out a lot of gray. 

And that’s really what you need, especially during times of not only COVID, but to manage your supply chains as well. 

Multiple emails that you cause confusion, there’s time delays, there’s misinterpretations, et cetera. 

So the electronic communication really has helped us streamline and become more efficient and ultimately improve the customer service at the end. 

Yeah, that customer service is key, right? Like the last thing that you ever want to tell your customer is you can’t ship something to them or fulfill an order because it’s something that’s going on in your supply chain. 

Like that’s like an unacceptable answer, right? Yeah, and it is. That’s a good point because If you don’t have product, the customer just cares about getting the product, right? 

I mean, eventually you’re gonna get to the root cause of what happened to the customer, but at the end of the day, the first thing is the customer’s really concerned because they don’t have product. 

So you have to be able to be proactive, be proactive in the way that you expedite, how you communicate with your customers to get the product in before they know it’s even an occurrence that they need to be concerned. 

All right, very good. Yeah, that’s great, great feedback. Here’s what I’ll, you know, just setting the stage, what we’re seeing from the first slide to this slide is there’s really no end in sight for the volatility. 

And, you know, today’s reality is that global events are affecting pricing. Global events are affecting delivery and volatility. And so one of the things that we look at through our data set at SourceDay is something we call the SourceDay Supply Volatility Index. 

And what is this? So we sit on a really interesting data set of supply chain. And this comes from the fact that we have over 100 million purchase orders, over 100,000 suppliers, and over 10 years of transactions that have gone through our system. 

And it allows us to get a really specific lens onto what’s sort of going on into the supply chain and how volatile it really is. 

And so the bottom line with this particular slide here is what we’re seeing here on the far right is volatility right now is starting to ramp up to the same level of volatility that we saw back in COVID days. 

So we’re down here at the bottom here, right? Volatility is the highest rate since the pandemic. So we’re starting to see an increase in that as we move forward. 

So that’s an interesting time for us. What that means for you is you’re like, hey, Clint, so what? You have a supplier index and a volatility index. What does that really mean? 

Well, for you as operators of businesses, what it really means is that half of your purchase orders are changing. 

And for you, it’s probably creating a tremendous amount of chaos for your organization. And we’ll get into sort of how that’s being addressed probably by most of you. 

But this is a big challenge for a lot of organizations. And Brandy, I’m going to go to you real quick. Because I know that for you and where you’ve been in your career, I’d love to sort of hear from you from a volatility perspective. 

It can be the enemy of companies in trying to run a predictable business, service customers on time, do what you say, say what you do kind of thing. 

So how does Infor see that and how is Infor helping customers with managing volatility? Well, it really would be nice if everything in business was predictable. 

That would be great. But as you mentioned, for the last five or six years, we’ve lived in a world where that’s not possible. 

So CSD has always had functionality, flexibility in it to help our suppliers to manage some of that. 

So we have flexible replenishment methods that include seasonality or different usage algorithms that they can tailor to either a specific product or as we’re entering a market that is more volatile, they may want to do those calculations more often or look at smaller, you know, instead of looking at six months of history, they’re looking at the last three months and looking at those current trends and bringing them into the algorithms. 

And we’ve offered that flexibility in CSD for our customers to utilize and also pricing. you know, you mentioned how costs change. So within CSD, we want to make sure that you can dynamically change pricing as those costs increase and including tariffs in those costs and making sure that we’re staying ahead of those requirements, knowing and being able to predict, okay, this is how the landscape is changing. 

Let’s put some of this into our system to be able to track that volatility. As lead times grow and shrink, our system will be able to look at those lead times and say, hey, this is taking longer. 

Is there an alternate vendor that you could source this from? Because your supply chain may be experiencing a shortage soon. We’re now looking at ways that we can integrate AI into that process. 

So we have these algorithms already there for CSD. Now we’re looking at ways to integrate AI into that to be even more flexible and even more predictive for our supply chain managers who need to have that 360 degree view of their products. 

Oh, man, Great answer. Thank you, Brandi. I was just sitting here listening to your response and just getting even more excited about our partnership, which we’re going to get into here in a minute. 

But, you know, being able to connect the suppliers directly to CSD and directly to your customers to be able to leverage, you know, lead time adjustments and price adjustments almost on a real-time basis, I think goes a long ways to accompanying that story that you just told. 

So thank you for that. One of the, you know, when you look at the prior slide of change, right, we talked about You know, volatility is real. 

It’s not going away. It looks like it’s starting to increase. That means that 50% of your purchase orders are changing. And by the way, we know that your purchase orders are changing at a rate of 50% because, again, it goes back to our data set. 

We actually see that across all of our customers, across all of our suppliers. So it’s a real thing. And for most customers, that’s something that’s managed outside the system. 

And so the reality of it for most organizations is, suppliers are disconnected from your business. And when you invest in an ERP, when you invest in cloud suite distribution, the whole idea, right? 

We wanna buy one solution that all of our key stakeholders will leverage to drive the business forward, to make good business decisions, be profitable, drive revenue, deliver on time, et cetera, et cetera. 

But there really are key stakeholders that are disconnected from their business. And those of course here are represented by the suppliers. And for most organizations, managing purchase orders and change in suppliers is completely external to the business. 

I’m sorry, external to the ERP. And so for most, PO changes are handled in emails, spreadsheets, open order reports, posted notes, voicemails, I mean, this is where all of this information is being kept and managed and tracked. 

And probably the biggest risk or the biggest concern is all that change, that 50% of PO change, is not actually being captured inside the ERP. 

And that’s where businesses can really suffer because you will let down customers, not deliver on time, have stock outages. 

I mean, all those type of things can happen when you’re not keeping the ERP system up to date and accurate. 

Jim, I want to go to you real quick. So how did RSUs, you know, prior to source day, right, how did RSUs sort of handle this particular problem statement? 

Yeah, Clint, exactly what you’re showing on this slide. We have thousands of suppliers and many, many ways of communication, and it is not standardized. 

So what you’re showing is really how we used to run before source day. And you can only imagine how gray some of the answers get and how it’s tough to get back to customer service for some product availability at times. 

So, yeah, exactly what you’re showing here is exactly what we were going through. Yeah, and you, when we talked prior, you talked about some of the challenges with, you know, getting expediting suppliers. 

And you also talked about, you know, sort of measuring and managing on-time delivery. Very difficult for you when everything is sort of external to the systems. 

Yeah, absolutely. Measuring those with accuracy, very difficult. And it’s very hard to hold suppliers accountable when you don’t have good data, right? 

And that’s really the toughest part. We’re trying to manage a supply chain like this because you don’t have all the accurate data. 

So with SourceDay, we’re able to expedite the suppliers with alerts, with the common platform. We can measure on-time delivery. of those suppliers, how many times do they change your purchase order and the purchase order lines? 

All that can be measured and then ultimately that goes into our supplier scorecard as well. That allows us to leverage with our suppliers as well because the suppliers that are performing the best is kind of where you want to try to consolidate where you can, right, to make everyone’s job easier when it comes to a supply chain perspective. 

And ultimately that leads to the customer service, right? You’ll see the improved service on the customer side once you can stabilize and have a consistent flow of information on your supply chain. 

Yeah, I appreciate that feedback. One of the things that I think you’d mentioned to me, I’d love for you to elaborate on, and hopefully I’m not catching you off guard here, but we talked a little bit about buffer stock. 

And when you’re dealing with some of the challenges of communicating with suppliers, just things being sort of unpredictable, One of the ways RSU has, we’ll say, bridged that gap is through buffer stock. 

And, I mean, obviously that’s not ideal. So I’d love for you to speak to that a little bit. Sure. Yeah, in many cases with our company, when you don’t have a stable supply chain, you’re not exactly sure when a product’s going to come in. 

You want to add a little bit to your inventory. You want to provide that cushion, right, because the last thing you want is to be in a situation where your customer is out of stock for whatever reason. 

So you err to the high side on inventory. Well, with SourceDay, you’re able to determine when the product is in. You have live updates from their platform right into InforCSD. 

So you have live data of what’s going on, and just that will allow you then to eliminate some of your buffer stock because you have much more accurate information. 

Yeah. Yeah, perfect. Thank you for that. Yeah, I think that’s one of the things. I know for me of being an operator back in the day, is we lived off when we had problematic suppliers, and we solved that a lot of times with over-driving demand, buying more material, sitting on stock. 

And the risk of that sometimes is that becoming obsolete. So there’s a lot of risk with that. I mean, everyone here probably knows that. But certainly, anytime you can reduce buffer stock, it’s good. 

Brandy, a question for you on this. Your customers invest in clousy distribution specifically. customers buy, you know, all types of info ERPs. But when the data sort of lives outside of the ERP, sort of what is the impact to the customer when it’s external to the system? 

Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard the quote before, but without data, you’re just another person with an opinion. 

And I like to think that without the right data, your ERP could just be another system with a wrong opinion. 

And that’s exactly what happens when all the data that we need is outside of the system. You can have the best analytics in the world, but if your data is wrong or there’s a big portion that is missing, you’re just not going to get those real accurate results. 

And that’s one thing with Source Day because there is that direct connection with the supplier. Now we’re getting the accurate data. We’re getting the information directly from the source, right? 

and being able to feed it into CSD so we can create those better insights. Because in the past, you’d see due dates on POs or expected dates on POs, and you wouldn’t know if that was accurate or not. 

That could just be something that a buyer put in that they guessed it would be, and so then you ended up with people not really trusting the system. 

And it’s really important that you trust the data that’s in your ERP. And also, you know, you think about our buyers, our supply chain managers, they’re working by gut instinct too. 

They’re getting the data in CSD, but they also have a gut instinct of what’s going on. By providing them more and more data, they have the opportunity to trust the system more. 

And once they start trusting the system more, they’re making their decisions based more upon that real data about the truth rather than what they think is the truth. 

Yeah. And you touched on something there too, Brandi, that I love that you said. You said trust the system. I feel like I hear that so often where people make these major investments in ERPs and then ultimately don’t trust the system. 

But it’s never an ERP functionality thing. It’s a data thing. And the data is generally, for most companies, you know, created by a human entered by a human. 

And so, you know, uh, so if there’s mistakes there or, or, you know, think things are not being kept up, then the outputs of that data is, is inaccurate. 

Um, and so that’s, that’s a real thing. And I think a lot of people can relate to that, right. Where they just don’t trust the system, but it’s not, uh, an ERP thing. 

It’s like, you know, I’ve even heard, well, we need to go to a different ERP because we don’t trust the system. 

No, no, it’s a data problem. Right. I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Absolutely. Yeah. And it is important for us that we want our customers to be able to trust the data that they are getting from CSD. 

And we’re hoping that by adding to what’s available to us, bringing that data in from source day, they can see that, yes, you know, now I can move forward. 

I don’t have to think about is this right or is this wrong? I just know that this is when my PO is expected. This is how much is coming in. And, you know, freeze them up to do other real work. 

Yeah, when you’re not, and I’ve used this word before, when you’re not sort of babysitting your purchase orders and babysitting your suppliers on just transactional stuff, it frees you up to be far more, you know, strategic. 

You know, this slide here is, so, you know, transitioning to this slide. For those of you who don’t know, SourceDay, this is where SourceDay lives. 

And before I sort of go through this quickly, just imagine this, right? Today, we all have smartphones. I can pick up my phone. I have two sons. I can take my phone and I can Venmo them, you know, 20 bucks for lunch money and they get it right away. 

And I know they get it right away. But you as organizations will actually issue millions of dollars worth of purchase orders in your ERP today or this year, as soon as you release those purchase orders, you lose complete visibility as to the status of that purchase order. 

So in the palm of our hand, we have very easy technology to track things, but for most of you, you’re not able to track millions of dollars worth of purchasing. 

And so this is where SourceState comes in to sort of like bridge that gap. And we integrate into CloudSuite distribution. We also integrate to other in for ERPs. 

But CloudSuite distribution is one that we do integrate to. And the idea here, of course, is that we connect the suppliers to you and to your ERP. 

And so now, with this connectivity to the suppliers, and we won’t get into the all specifics here today, but things like purchase orders being lost, that doesn’t happen anymore. 

All the data that goes back and forth, all the collaboration that goes back and forth between your buyers and suppliers is captured in a platform that gives you complete visibility as to what’s going on exactly with every single purchase order and every single purchase order line. 

Changes, day changes, quantity changes, and due date changes. We know all those change all the time. And for most organizations, that data never makes it back into the ERP. 

With a click of a button in SourceDay, all that data gets pushed back into the ERP through the integration. 

Source Day is really here to help you drive a lot more value out of your ERP by keeping it up to date and current. 

And, you know, real important here, and Brandy said something about AI. As you start to unpack AI strategies for your organization, it is paramount that you have accurate data because there’s no sense in rolling out an AI strategy if your ERP system is not accurate. 

And so let’s face it, what is more important to your organization than not understanding the status of your purchase orders. 

And knowing when materials are coming in and when products are coming in is paramount in order to be able to better service your customers. 

So that’s what source day is really here to do. Yes, we eliminate manual processes and yes, we make your buyers way more efficient, but we also help you keep your promises to your customers, protect that revenue, ship things out on time, all those real important things, lower inventory. 

And we’re gonna get into that here a little bit more in a second, but I definitely wanted to share that with you. 

So, Jim, I want to go to you real quick while we’re sitting on this slide. You were working through an evaluation process that’s been relatively new, so it’s probably still fresh in your mind. 

We’d love it if you could just sort of walk the audience through your evaluation process of SourceDay and other solutions and what you were trying to do and accomplish. 

Sure. Ultimately, what we want to try to accomplish is getting rid of all the complexity that you saw on the prior slide, right, because we were going through a lot of that. 

And given my experience, we had to come up with a way to better automate our communication to our suppliers and make sure things were accurate, like supplier approval on the quantity, the cost, the delivery date was just paramount for us to be able to really take the next step and improve our customer service. 

So we started with a cross-functional team. We had a third-party consultant along with myself, given my background, and our IT department was heavily involved as well. 

So we had a good cross-functional team internally where we started the research process, source day being one of roughly nine that we looked at. 

Then we narrowed it down to three, and then ultimately chose source day. So it was a cross-functional effort. I ultimately made that decision, but it was really a consensus decision. 

by the cross-functional group when we were finished and then presented that to company executives. So, and again, a few bullet points that we felt with SourceDay was they just have a niche. 

They’re very, very focused on supplier communications. Some of the other companies was maybe a broader focus, a little bit more aggregate, where SourceDay just seemed to fine-tune their niche in that communications So that really stuck out to us. 

The other one was ease of implementation. You know, sometimes we get into meetings about a future implementation and we’re all led to believe it’s going to be really easy. 

So what we did as a team is we called a lot of source days, existing customers to ask them how easy was the implementation? 

Did they kind of get their hands dirty a little bit to help and do all the details that are needed to make sure that the implementation is successful? 

and there was consensus on that as well. And knowing that they were an approved integrator with M4CSD as well, because when you agree to all the costs or the quantity or the delivery dates, the system’s automatically updated. 

Okay, so other departments within your company can easily look at updated information in the system versus all the internal emails that you get as well on what’s going on with certain parts or what have you. 

So with that, we then ask ourselves questions. Can they support our growth as a company? RSU is a very aggressive growth company. And as we continue to grow, we have to scale and make sure that we’re working more efficiently. 

Do they have the ability to do that? And then with accurate data, we manage the numbers. And can they provide us with good supplier performance data? 

where we can start to manage that from a more strategic level. And they showed us examples of that as well, because ultimately what that’s gonna do is improve our customer service as well. 

So when we put it together, our internal ROI, just the way that we’re structured, most of the time savings, and you’re gonna gain great efficiencies on the purchasing side, but you’re gonna gain great efficiencies on the customer service side, because everything’s live, it’s readily available, so you can get with your customers and your response time will be dramatically changed and improved. 

Yeah, that accurate data really helps on that customer side, doesn’t it? Absolutely. It builds that confidence and things like that. The little curveball here, Jim, I can’t remember if we talked about this before, but I’m curious, in terms of one of the one of the things that we talk about from a source state perspective is yes, there’s a, an application, right? 

That you’re using, your team is using and suppliers are using, but also we have a team dedicated to supplier success and helping suppliers activate. 

And you went through the evaluation process, love to hear from you, um, sort of how important that was to you. 

And since you’ve been sort of going through that right now, how’s that going for you? Sure. Yeah. Great question. Extremely important because as you, as you present, the benefits of source day for final approval, right? 

You’re always gonna get, okay, give me the timeline and give me what the bang for the buck is really gonna be. 

So considering what is needed from the implementation side is very, very key. So far, it’s going great. We have hundreds of suppliers on source day right now under the RSU’s umbrella, and it’s going well. 

We have a dedicated service person that helps us. We have weekly meetings with him when we go through the details. We have different phases of implementation that we go through. 

But ultimately, yes, when we need something from source day, whether it’s a question or we have an issue educating a supplier, they’re right there to help out. 

Just like the references that we gather during the research phase, it’s coming to fruition as well. 

Fantastic. Appreciate that insight. I think that’s an important one. You know, it’s one thing to buy an empty shell software and and, you know, basically just be told, good luck, you know, hope it works out for you. 

That’s certainly not our approach. You know, we really feel like it’s important to go on that journey with you in terms of, you know, supplier success. 

So appreciate that feedback. All right. So this is going to go straight to you again, Jim. So a question for you here, you know, for the audience, right? 

If they’re considering, you know, a solution like SourceDay, considering making changes in their supply chain, because this is an area of business for many businesses that, doesn’t see a lot of investment historically. 

And so, you know, you, you have, you put together a business case and an ROI because that’s really what needs, needs to happen here. 

So I’d love for you to just, you know, we’d love to hear kind of how you persuaded or, or worked with your executives and C-level there at RSUs in order to be able to, to, you know, get them to approve to move forward in this direction. 

Yeah, sure. Selling it to, to the, c-suite folks was, um, will it and we’re a very aggressive growth company really focused on customer service. 

And how will this improve our customer service? That was the number one thing before we got into the the efficiencies on the purchasing side, how is it going to improve our customer service? 

So that was really focused on. And then from there, we went into the details of how that is going to improve our customer service. 

So having live information, definitely going to reduce your expedites, right? And in a lot more, or I should say a lot less, internal emails with product inquiries. 

Low-rate safety stock is you have good, accurate data. You’re not going to be so worried about inventory and inflating that inventory when you don’t necessarily need to, if indeed you do have that accurate information. 

And the PO administration costs, I can only speak for our company, it was kind of manual. way that we submitted our purchase orders to our suppliers. 

Now what we’re able to do is, um, you know, we click a button and enforce csd goes right in the supplier through source day, which makes it much easier for us. 

And what we did with with the roi is we did time studies. How do we do things now and we we did time studies from a customer service perspective. 

We did time studies from a purchasing perspective. We did time studies from an AP perspective as well. So that’s where that cross-functional group came in internally. 

We put the current time studies together, and then we went through the source day and were able to measure those benefits. 

And that’s really what created that. Yeah, fantastic. I think at one point, again, not holding your feet to the fire here, but we talked about the potential for millions in savings for a company like R.S. 

Hughes through reducing expedites, Obviously, safety stock is a big mover of that number, right? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And once you know the time spent on some of the complexity, like the slide showed earlier, once you understand how much time you’re really spending on that, then how much time you will, it’s pretty easy. 

It’s a pretty easy calculation then to understand your benefits. And for us, we’re a big growth company, and our biggest objective is, you know, as we grow, there’s other, you know, there’s potential to put other people in different positions in the company as we continue to grow and be more efficient in other departments as well. 

Yeah. And remind me if I, Jim, did you guys end up using our ROI calculator? Did that help you at all? We sometimes will use that. It did help. It did help in many areas, but other areas, we had to do some internal digging as well and to make sure we did the time studies because Looking at the source days, ROI was a good baseline for us then to put ours together. 

Because as you get into those ultimate presentations, you got to know the details right down to the amount of minutes that people are spending, at least the ROI that we put together. 

So we wanted to kind of do our own checks and balances internally when we created ours. All right. So we sort of, it helped, our ROI sort of helped with a framework of sort of where to start and then you could go from there, sounds like. 

That is correct. Yes. Excellent. Well, good stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, for those that are here that are interested in doing something with supply chain and ultimately may be interested in SourceDay, you know, for a lot of people, this is not an area where, you know, you’re accustomed to, you know, how to build out an ROI. 

And this is certainly, you know, something that RSUs did in order to be able to work with the C-suite to understand the importance of doing something like this. 

And we can help you, you know, with that as well. All right, so that is the last slide. I wanted to move to just more of a panel discussion with you guys, and just had a couple of questions here. 

And then we’ll see what the audience has thrown in here, and we can fill those questions. So Brandy, I wanted to go to you. So before I do, I wanted to just speak a little bit about the BN4 partnership and have you add on from your perspective. 

So as I mentioned at the top of the webinar, I’ve started SourceDay over 10 years ago. When we started SourceDay, we started in the Infor community. 

And we have sold, we have hundreds of SourceDay customers now that are also Infor customers, which has been really exciting. 

We’ve helped a lot of people transform their businesses and their supply chains. But really nothing is, you know, well, I shouldn’t say nothing’s made me more proud, but one of the things that’s made me very proud about what we’ve done in the organization is form the partnership with Infor. 

So two years ago, we officially became a solutions partner of Infor. We support multiple ERPs and work with a lot of different ecosystems and product managers and families and teams over there that we’re super excited about. 

The Cloud Suite distribution space for us in particular is a little bit newer. It’s something we’ve been doing for a couple of years, but it’s such a great space for us and we’re super excited about it. 

So with that, I just wanted to throw that over to Brandy. I’d love for you to just talk about, you know, the Source Day partnership and sort of what it means to you, what it means to Infor and Cloud Suite distribution customers. 

Sure, thanks. So for a while, we’ve had customers asking us about plans for a supplier portal. And whenever we have these opportunities presented to us from customers, we have the option, do we build or do we buy? 

And when I say buy, I mean partner with someone who is a best-in-class solution. So making that decision to build, you know, there’s a lot of this about domain expertise and how long it’s going to take us, and are we going to be able to present a best-in-class solution? 

So we start looking at partners, existing and for partners, like Source Day, and say, is there someone out there who does already have a best-in-class solution that our customers are already using, and it can help provide us the information that we need. 

It can enhance CSD, not just be an add-on, but really enhance the CSD for our customers. And that’s what we see in SourceDay, is that the data that SourceDay is providing us actually enhances the customer experience in CSD So not only are they having that direct relationship with suppliers and getting that data in a supplier portal, but we can bring that into CSD and we can use that information to make their ERP better. 

And finding a partner that’s been working with Infor customers for over a decade and is a trusted Infor partner and knows our ecosystem, was what is certainly a plus. 

And, you know, we’re only as good as the accuracy of the data that our ERP runs on. So we wanted to find a partner with a proven platform. And that’s what we believe that SourceDay brings to us. 

It’s that proven platform with accurate data that just makes life for our customers easier. And in the end, that’s all what we’re trying to go for is just give them solutions to make their lives easier. 

And, you know, SourceDay is filling that gap between our customers and their suppliers. And it’s highly approved by our customers, as you can see by talking to Jim today. 

And it just seemed like the perfect fit. Well, appreciate that. Well, I mean, as I said, we’re really excited about the partnership and working with you and expanding our reach to even more Infor customers. 

Um, Jim, I know you actually touched on this a little bit earlier, um, um, when you were in the speaking a little bit about source state, but in your evaluation of source day and the other solutions, I know you looked at the nine, which is that that’s incredible. 

Um, how important was the, uh, w was the fact that source day and in for our partners and love for you to sort of elaborate, unpack that a little bit. 

Yeah. Great question. Um, it was important, as I mentioned earlier, we had an internal cross-functional team. And our IT team was part of that. So as we were looking at viable solutions to create purchasing efficiencies and customer service efficiencies, being an improved integrator within 4CSD was definitely part of that decision-making as well. 

So it wasn’t the only. We felt that, again, that SourceDay had a niche with how to best communicate with the suppliers and have a platform that’s kind of easy, too. 

It’s a point and click. It’s easy for the suppliers to understand. But it’s also good to know that the integration between Source Day and InforCSD being an approved integrator, it’s good to know that as well. 

It played a big part. One of the things you had mentioned to me was also that you thought the partnership was going to help you with time to value. 

Do you remember that? Just the speed of which that, you know, we could get it implemented. It’s proven integration. I don’t know if that That rings a bell, but that’s one of the things that caught my notes. 

Sure. Yeah, time to integration was key. When we put the return on investment, we had a less than a one-year payback after we’re implemented. 

And so far, so good. Again, we have quite a bit of support. You know, you’re always going to run into a couple hiccups along the way, but you just work through those, and you keep moving the needle forward, and it’s going well. 

So speed to implementation. We hope to be a large majority implemented here. We went live late last year and hoping by the June timeframe, we have a considerable amount of our overall spend within a source day umbrella. 

And last thing I caught in my notes was, and you and I have had some offline conversations about the connectivity options for suppliers, you know, email, portal, API. 

And we don’t need to get into specifics of everything, but how important was it that we were offering your suppliers that flexibility? 

Yeah, good question, Clint. Yeah, that paid a big portion, too, because it has to be a flexible system. Not all suppliers are the same. Some are going to demand EDI communications, right, especially if they’re a very big supplier. 

Some email is just fine, and some are portal activated. So that played a huge part in that. that flexibility to be able to get the vast majority of your spend under the sourcing umbrella, it has to be a flexible platform. 

Yeah, got it. Yeah, I know that was real important for you and your evaluation. So definitely wanted to hit on that. Awesome. Well, thank you guys both there. I think now, and I’m just kind of looking at the clock here, I’m probably running a little long. 

I’m sure my marketing department is going to say something here to me. Audience, let’s get to the audience Q&A. So let me look in here. We can hear some of the questions here. 

So I can answer this question. So the question is, does SourceAid communicate with international suppliers, such as suppliers in China? 

So let me take that one, because I think I can answer that. Yes, the short answer to that is yes. We actually have customers all over the world. But those customers, their supply chains are all over the world. 

Dell is one of our customers, and they were sort of an early customer for us, and they specifically brought us into China like almost right away. 

So we have suppliers in China and have had that for quite some time, but we have supplier users all over the world. 

I’m trying to see if there’s any questions for him. These look like they’re all for me. So do suppliers have to log into the portal or do they have other options? 

Well, Jim, actually, I’m going to throw that to you because we just talked about that literally just a second ago. 

So they have the options, right? Like email and the portal? Yes, they do. They have the options. to communicate through SourceDay. So it isn’t just email. That’s one of them of the options that you have. 

But communications can be held through EDI as well because some suppliers are set up that way and others portal directly to their portal communications as well. 

Perfect. It is not a one size fits all platform. Yeah. Yeah. So really, when you look at the supplier side, so the optionality is very important for them. 

We give them several ways that they can sort of activate themselves within the source day world. And it just depends on the supplier. If they’re a small mom and pop, they might want to do email. 

If they’re quite large and they’re an enterprise distribution company or manufacturer, they might want to do APIs or EDI. 

So we can meet the supplier where they’re at, depending on the needs for them. And also recall, we do have that supplier success team. We also help them with the onboarding, with the training and the support, et cetera. 

So this is going to go to Brandy. This is a question for you, Brandy. How important is it for Cloud Suite distribution customers to have access to a solution like Source Day? 

That’s a great question. I believe it’s very important because so, you know, Certainly, our customers have used CSD for years without a supplier portal. 

But as we discussed earlier, a lot of the data that they have is just guesstimates. They’re not getting that information directly from their suppliers. 

They’re estimating. So decisions they’re making are based upon flawed information. So it’s really important for them to have a solution that has that real-time availability from their suppliers, their suppliers going in and updating that information so that as it’s read into CSD, it is trusted and accurate. 

We talked about trusting the ERP. If, you know, without a partnership or integration to a product such as SourceDay and the partnership we’ve developed, our customers may go out there and try to find their own solutions. 

And certainly that’s viable. However, they could spend months and sometimes even years to try to get it effectively integrated. 

And that could fail because of limitations in the solution they choose or just a general lack of understanding of CSD. 

And they may never see the benefit to a package that they’ve gone out and purchased. So we want our customers to have this information available and we want to be providing a solution that they can start getting the benefits from on nearly day one. And that is why having source day and the partnership with between us is really important to our customers. 

Yeah, that’s a great point. And to add on to that, one of the things I think is important for your customers is you had mentioned you’ll look at, you know, a homegrown solution or buy another solution. 

And, you know, you can maybe build it one time, but the upkeep of something like that can be a lot of overhead and, and working with, with, with, uh, source data and for working together with our product teams, uh, we’re staying up to date and current on your roadmap. 

You’re staying current on our roadmap. We’re making sure the integrations don’t break. I mean, there’s a lot of value into, uh, into this partnership that goes just beyond, you know, what you see, you know, in front of you on a screen. 

So, um, something to consider. One of the things that, one question we were asked is, does SourceState integrate with, or I guess work with, server-based Infor, or is it exclusive to cloud-based? 

I’m assuming that means on-prem, Brandy? I’m looking at you, is that what that means? I believe that’s what they’re referring to as on-prem, yes. 

Okay, so the answer is yes, we work with both, and that’s XXE, right? And then there’s, you know, okay, CSD. So I’m just making sure I’m saying it right. Yeah, we work with both of those. 

I mean, Cloud Suite distribution is one thing. Again, all the ERPs with Infor, we support both their on-prem and as well as their multi-tenant cloud version. 

Let’s see what else we got here. One of the questions here is interesting, Brandy. I’m not sure we can answer it really accurately at this moment, but I’ll throw it out there and we can see if we can tap dance around it, okay? 

Sure. It says, wondering about AI and how Infor and SourceDay work together to help customers use AI to optimize Infor CSD. 

I mean, to me, it sort of starts with, we’ve kind of talked about accurate data. Yeah, that’s right. So, coming out with our April release in CSD, we are going to have our Gen AI Assistant, which is, you know, think of a chat GPT, a place that you can go and ask natural language questions. 

And just like with any AI model, it’s only as good as the data that it has available to us. So having all of the information that is available then in SourceDay to form better answers is going to help produce those better answers, produce more predictable answers, more predictive answers for our customers. 

And it’s just, the data, think about as we move towards, and I say move towards because we don’t have AI available currently in our inventory management, but that’s what we’re looking at right now. 

And as we move towards integrating AI into some of our algorithms, think of the more accurate information we’re going to be getting on lead times and due dates and, you know, you know, supply chain disruptions and being able to look at trends and being able to pull all that information in, again, using the data that is going to drive our AI queries to more accurately provide responses to our customers. 

You know, it’s something that we are working on now. And it’s just, it’s as as time goes on, those are just going to get stronger and stronger as we integrate more and more AI within the application. 

Yeah, and I’ll just add on to that from a future perspective. We actually are also investing quite heavily in AI, helping organizations understand risk, trying to see patterns of risk that we can flag things early like lead time risk, delivery risk, just really trying to enable organizations with exception-based information to help them understand really what’s going to be the impacts to their business. 

So we can do a deeper dive for anyone that’s more interested in that, but that’s certainly, there’s Infor and Source, they are both investing heavily in the AI perspective. 

All right, well, that’s all the questions there. I know we’re getting really long on time here, so we’ll wrap things up here. 

Um, Jim, I’m going to go to you with one more question. I like to ask this question at the end of these type of webinars and. Um, you know, you, everyone in the audience out there is, is contemplating, you know, is this something that we should explore is, is, is using a solution like source, say something we want to do with cloud speed distribution. 

And I love from your perspective, you know, now that you have, you know, purchased solution and you’re on your journey, like knowing what you know now, what would you say to somebody out there who’s on the fence? 

Yeah, the first thing I would say is if your information coming back and forth from the suppliers is complex, like the slide that was shown earlier, whether it’s an Excel file, whether it’s an email, and it’s a complex way of communication, I highly recommend coming up with an integrated solution because it really helps align the messaging back and forth through the suppliers. 

Eliminating a lot of gray creates that accurate information and data that we’ve been talking about through the meeting and then ultimately improving your customer service. 

I’ve been through this with more than one company and the amount of efficiencies it creates internally and the improvement in customer service as well is it’s a big deal. 

It really helps transform the company. Fantastic. Thank you for that. Well, we have reached the end of the program. So Jim, I want to thank you, uh, for jumping on here and sharing, um, your knowledge, uh, as someone that’s been in the supply chain expert for a field for a very long, long time. 

Um, Brandy also want to thank you as well. I know you’re, you’ve got a busy schedule over there, uh, doing all things CSD. 

Uh, if you have questions about source day, um, you have questions about cloud suite distribution and, um, need some help. 

I have my email up here for Source Day. I’ve got Brandy’s email up here for Infor and Cloud Suite Distribution. We would love to hear from you, so please reach out to us. 

With that, we’re going to end it and say goodbye to our guests. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Brandy.