Joining us, so we’ll get started in just a few moments. We are excited to kind of dive into today’s topic. And as we’re waiting to launch, just take a moment to look at all the icons on your screen. We’re gonna have some dedicated time at the end of our webinar to address any questions that you may have. So on your screen, there’s a Q and A box. Go ahead and type in any questions and our team will address those live during today’s webinar. And if you’re joining us and watching this on demand, we will get those questions and we’ll be able to address those via email. So please make ample use of our question and answer box today. Looks like we’ve got a great group who have already joined our webinars. So let’s go ahead and get started. I’m gonna turn this over to Clint. He is gonna introduce today’s topic and our speakers and walk you through what you can expect during today’s webinar. Clint, all yours. Thank you, Lisa, appreciate it. Well, welcome here today, excited that you’re here to join us. Really excited to tell the story of LATRUM and how they’re adopting Source Day for their application. My name is Clint McCree, I’ll be the moderator for the day. Before we dive in, just to reinforce what Lisa just said about the questions, we hope you do have questions, we wanna hear your questions and if you do, put them into the Q and A section of the application on your screen and we’ll be sure to get to those before we wrap up the webinar. All right, so really excited to tell Latham’s story today and I’m really excited about the two guests who are gonna help me do that. So first I’ve got Steven Fisher from Lathrum and Tim Rancourt from Guide. Steven, will you please introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, Steven Fisher, work for Lathrum Machinery, the planning and procurement supervisor here. Been been here for about three years now, and excited to talk to you about Source Day and Latra Machinery today. Thanks. Appreciate that, Steven. Tim, would you, please introduce yourself to the office? Yeah. I’m Tim Rancourt, I’m the Business Unit Manager over at Guide Technologies specializing with XA in integration and training in all forms of XA. Awesome, you guys do the XA, I know you’re very involved in XA but Guide also does I think what CloudSuite Industrial as well, that’s another one of the ERP’s. Perfect, awesome. Well appreciate the introductions guys. So let me dive right in here for the audience. So we’re gonna be talking today about your supply chain and where SourceDay fits in that world in areas that maybe we can help you, but we’d love to at least help you understand it and explore it. So today’s supply chains are built for predictability, but they live in a world of chaos. And Source Day is in a really unique position, we have a unique data set of information that helps us sort of see what’s coming around the corner or things that are impacting our customers. And what we are seeing is with this trying to be predictable is a lot of events that have been happening going back since COVID that keeps disrupting supply chains. And it seems like, I I used to run a manufacturing company, Steven’s doing that and Tim’s support customers are doing that. And it seems like there’s always something going on with your parts, your suppliers, getting things in the door. And today we’re dealing with major events that are also adding to that level of chaos And so it seems like every time we turn around it’s like well if we can just get past this event, get past the war in Ukraine or factory fires or most of you have been dealing with terrorists recently, but like what else is around the corner and what is truly next? As I mentioned, we have this really unique new dataset, we have millions of purchase orders that flow in and out of Source Day every single year and that has allowed us to create something that we call the Source Day Supplier Volatility Index. And what you need to know from this particular slide is we are starting to see and you are probably feeling it in your business that supply chains are beginning to increase in volatility to the same levels that we saw back in twenty twenty two. And so Stephen, looked from Hold on, sorry, jumped ahead there. One of the things that this data, so kind of the so what moment is we have this incredible data set, but what we are seeing is we’re seeing that purchase orders for customers are changing in a very rapid pace. So most customers are seeing that over half of their purchase orders are changing. And what’s changing? Well, what’s changing is due dates are changing, pricing is changing and quantities are changing. And that can be quite disruptive for your company. So this is where I wanted to go to you, Steven. So I’d love to sort of understand from your perspective, a fifty percent change align with what your team was experiencing or is experiencing? Yeah. I mean, fifty percent change may even be low, for what what we’re used to, between pricing, and delivery time frame. Got it, yeah. So one of the so now you have this data set that tells you that things are becoming more volatile. One of the reasons One of the impacts to that is well, with all the volatility you have lots of change that you’re having to manage, purchase orders are changing. The other aspect of it is that all that change for most companies is being managed outside of the ERP. And this is where when you think about what you’re doing with your ERP, it’s really trying to take those stakeholders in your own four walls, your own company and tie everybody together so everybody’s playing from the same sheet of music, have all the same data driving the business forward. But suppliers are also very key stakeholders in the mix here for you in your business and for most of you, they’re very disconnected. And so you have lots of volatility, you have change happening to your purchase orders in a world where we’re expected to do things more real time, take care of things much quicker than we ever used to and that can be really disruptive to a business. Stephen, love that today you’re on we’re going to tell your Source Day story, but before that, what was life like for LATROM in managing suppliers outside the system and sort of disconnected? I mean, the the biggest difference in in is gonna be how much we can trust the data. Right? So previously, I mean, you send out a PO that’s a a PDF. The supplier looks at it, hopefully, closely, goes through their own information, and then creates some sort of, reply back, whether that’s an email, another PDF that has nothing to do with what you sent, and then we have to also interpret that into our own ERP. So there’s a lot of handholding, a lot of trust that somebody is is doing their part, and there’s a lot of, potential for accuracy issues. So previous to source day, I mean, there were a lot more clicks, and and because of that, there is some real opportunity for accuracy issues there. Yeah. You know, we kinda call it the swivel chair. Right? The data comes in on one system, one screen, you spittle over and you input it in the other screen. And I don’t know about for you, but my experience not only in running a company myself, a manufacturing company, but also just dealing with customers over the last two years we’ve been dealing with source data. It’s that everybody will agree that the data is changing, but it’s really difficult to get the data into application where it’s needed the most. So Tim, I wanted to go to you and just to see if you feel the same way. Is that do you feel like your customers are sort of dealing with the same thing and what’s the impact to them if they’ve got disconnected supply chains? Yeah. So the biggest one is when you’re and Steven hit the nail on the head there on trust of the data, you’ll the buyers will send out open order reports or trying to view, hey, when am I getting my information? They’ll send it back in that same spreadsheet and that buyer doesn’t want to go in and spend hours typing every single new date in or quantity change. So a lot of times get pushed off to later in the day when they actually have time to do it. And then they don’t have time to do it and it gets pushed off to the next day and then the next day and then they send then they resend the same exact report out to get new updates. And it’s just that never ending circle, because everything is changing so rapidly. They just there’s just no time. And then the planners, the schedulers and everyone starts saying, I can’t trust the data, so I’m not going to use it. Right, I mean, that’s so important, right, in the world of these ERPs, if we get to the state where we don’t trust the data, then people you know start doing more and more things outside the ERP and that problem just gets worse and worse and worse. You know, when I first started Source Day, one of the interesting stories that I came across is I was working with a company and they had one person that they had like five buyers, but they had one person that her role and job was to make sure that the ERP had all the latest and greatest PO data updated and she would always do that after hours, like after five o’clock she would sit there for however long it took and sit there and do that. And I remember when she first saw the demonstration of first aid and she could click a button and update all those POs immediately she was like I can go home. Yeah, their company was strict, that data had to be updated, some companies were more lackadaisical about it, but at the end of the day it’s such critical data to be updated. So for most of you out there, this is one of the areas that where the real crisis lives. It’s actually in your inbox and you know I know from experience that buyers get hundreds of emails every single day and somewhere in that email is probably something, some bad news, right? A day change, a price change, a quantity change, can’t deliver it and because it’s buried in emails of hundreds, sometimes several hundred, it can be lost. Maybe you have the company picnic announcement or maybe you’re gonna do the happy hour or whatever and it’s surrounded by an email that says boom, we’re gonna really be impacting your production. And so Stephen, I’d love to just get your perspective before you’re a source of a customer, like your how are your buyers, how is your company sort of dealing with managing all this, you know, information and data from your suppliers? Previous to Source Day? Yes. Okay. So, I mean, it’s it’s just as you’re you’re describing. Right? You’ve got an email that, it’s probably an attachment even better. So you open up your email. You open up your PDF, and, hopefully, you can read their handwriting where they printed it out, put any annotations on there, and scanned it back in. So it is that that swivel chair that you’re describing where on one screen, you’ve got your PDF, and on the other screen, you’ve got your RP. And we didn’t have a great hit rate, to be honest, in getting that all updated. So that’s where source study kind of came in. Steve, like what would how would you describe some of the downstream impact? Like, I mean, someone might be out there saying, yeah I’ve got a know, I got a due date changer or something or you know something in my inbox. They’re like okay, but what’s downstream impact like for you guys and you know just trying to help educate the audience on what it really means if you can’t, you miss something and you’re not getting that that information in your system. Well, I mean, if we’re speaking about a a manufacturing facility, we’re a high mix, low volume, lots of little parts, from all over that go into large assemblies. Right? And it turns out if you if you’re missing, you know, one of a thousand parts, really shouldn’t be proceeding to make that. So now we’ve got shorts, but if you don’t have accurate data, you don’t know that that’s coming until all of a sudden, your techs look up on the floor and say, well, I don’t I don’t have the part. Right? And so now it’s a firefight. You’re scrambling. It turns out that maybe the buyer just didn’t see the email, and we should have had that kind of, upfront information to be able to act upon, whether that’s resourcing, talking with planners about moving stuff around, etcetera. But if if it’s on the floor and, you know, half built, you’re kinda in it now, and that’s where the firefight, continues. You know, the two things that used to frustrate me the most is having our assemblies being held up for like a zero five dollars crew, right? That’s so frustrating because the PO got missed. And then the other one is you’re expecting a part to come in the door and it’s past its due date, you start hunting it down, talk to the supplier and the supplier said, Hey, we never even received that PO or we don’t have record of that PO on our side. And like today’s day and age, that just can’t happen anymore. But I know for probably a lot of the audience that are managing supply chain and POs in their inboxes, that kind of thing happens all the time. So it sounds like that was something that you guys were dealing with as well. Tim, I’m gonna throw it to you, like give us a bigger perspective from like the customer base to you. What do you think is the impact that you’ve seen to production and inventory and sales and all those kinds of things when suppliers let you down or you just don’t have that acknowledgement? Yeah, from the customer base, it’s just a lack of trust in the information in the system. So if it happens once, okay, if it happens twice, well, I’m going to start questioning it. It happens three times. Now, why am I using that information? It’s never right when I go and look at it. So it’s a trust issue And with all of the new information coming down with AI and everything, everyone you need to have trusted data and have it the right data. And if you don’t have it, the customers that we’re working with can’t really rapidly grow and expand into those newer capabilities out there. Yeah. And nobody wants to be that person where the owner or a manager comes to you, know, they look at the system and they see a purchase order was issued and it’s due, you know, five days ago and you have to, and they go to the buyer and say, Hey, what’s the status of this part? And then the buyer doesn’t have a response or they figure out then that it was lost in the email or supplier never received it. Just don’t wanna be that person who missed that because especially for parts that are mission critical and it’s something as simple as I said earlier, screw could completely shut down your factory or assembly of that particular part. So, having that accurate data is so, so important so everybody’s on the same sheet of music as I said earlier. Appreciate that guys. All right, so you can see where we’re going with this, This is really where Source Day plays. So we painted the picture of volatility creates, there’s a lot of change going on with your purchase orders but most of that change is happening outside and managed outside your system. So what Source Day is doing is we’re the layer, the connective tissue that connects your suppliers to your ERP and your ERP to your suppliers. So now when purchase orders are cut, when purchase orders are changing, that information is contained inside one system that also ensures that your ERP is up to date and accurate. And so regardless of what suppliers are doing, we’re capturing that data so that you can ensure that your entire team has the best information forward to help you make better commitments to customers, help you ensure scheduling for production and all that stuff is right. In a lot of ways, drive down inventory if you’re using safety stock and gap stock to overcome supply chain issues. So a lot of those things improve when you have better communication with your suppliers and getting that information into your system. One of the things I wanted to cover and Tim, I’m gonna go to you here in a second is I talk to a lot of customers who look at solutions like SourceDay, you probably have implemented supplier portals in your career. And there’s a lot of concern about will suppliers adopt a solution like this or this might be a major IT lift, it’s gonna take a long time to get something like this up and running. And I’d love from your perspective, what really stood out to you in terms of this project and getting it off the ground and live with Forletra? Really what stood out to me was the speed in which we were pretty much fully adopted at the end by the suppliers. Usually what we see in rolling out, supplier portals, throughout our businesses and our customers is we’ve got six months to eight months of integration, training, getting the customer up to speed on how to use it, get their work instructions, get everything working. And then you got another four to six months of rolling out to your key suppliers, and then you have another couple of months plus to roll out, batch rollouts to other suppliers to really bring them all on board. What really showed out to me on this point is it was, I think, and Steven’s going to have to correct me, about four months and they were fully up and running from the time we said go to supplier adoption. Yeah, that’s amazing. And you could probably speak to this probably better than anybody on this call Tim, it seems like to me that customers are either in one or two phases, right? They’re either about to upgrade their ERP or just upgraded their ERP and very nervous to take on any new projects because of that, right? There are always some sort of state IT projects fill up the whiteboard but some of those take so long to really realize the ROI. I think a lot of people today more never really care about that time to value. So that’s something you’d agree with? Yeah, and the big thing is working with Latrum and how they wanted to integrate, it’s release agnostic now. So as the new releases for XA come out, they’re going to be there’s no there’s no, what we would say, custom integration if you would. It uses the full integration suite of SystemLink and it really allows them to not be afraid to, hey, if I have to do this and upgrade to r eleven coming out, has already dropped. If they want to go to r eleven, they could with and it would have would have minimal, if any impact to the upgrade. Yeah, one of the nice things about PO data is it’s probably as old as dinosaurs. So there’s very little change that happens in ERPs as it relates to PO data. So the integrations are pretty stable after you get it up and running. All right, Steven, I wanna go to you on this. And so this is obviously your baby, your big part of choosing SourceDay and you’ve touched on it a little bit, but I’d really like for you to unpack a little bit more like what was your top motivation for you and Latrum and going forward with a solution like Source Day? I mean, we just had such a big need for that accurate data. Keep coming back to that, right? And mix that in when you’re talking about having a one out of five on the on the team you’re referring to earlier, and that’s all they did. That that was that person’s job was to make sure that acknowledgments went into the the ERP. We were kinda felt, you know, standing in that same that same area, right, and saying we gotta do something so that this always goes in. And rather than being able to easily find buyers, and onboard them, we’re we’re losing headcount. You know, that there’s that employee churn. And with that, we looked up and said, you know, how how can we better manage that? And, we we actually ran across source day at at one of the in power events and started saying, hey. This this really does look like it. It could provide that, where we can actually trust the data, and we can act earlier instead of instead of those firefighting tendencies we’ve we’ve gotten used Yeah. And if I’m not mistaken, you were kinda falling into this, which a lot of people do, probably everybody does, is like, you’ve gotta do more with less. I think you told me you were you guys were buying X amount more parts, a lot more going on there, and you had to do that with a shrinking team, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, everybody’s doing that, but we’re we’re adding more lines, more buys, more suppliers, all all while watching our our buyer headcount, at at best stabilize, if not, decrease for a little bit. And there’s no way that we’re gonna be able to keep up without a tool like this. Yeah. You know what, it’s funny. Like I oftentimes when I’m doing a more of a live presentation in front of an audience, like the physical face to face kind of thing, I’ll tell the story about, you know, our our iPhones, right? We use our smartphones to send money back and forth like my kids, send them Venmo money, things like that. But for the vast majority of manufacturers in the world, they still rely on an old way of managing like their POs will cut millions of dollars worth of purchase orders every year and have really no visibility into what is going on because as soon as it is issued and leaves the ERP, it’s kind of in the dark. And I think you had mentioned source, they felt more like a modern way, right? Is that a good way to describe it to the audience? I wouldn’t describe it as old school by any means. This is super helpful to be able to see what’s going on, what’s outstanding, and and, who owes you some better information. Yeah. Alright. So, Steve, I’m gonna go to you this next question, and, you know, this is like the the million dollar question, you know. Because what I find sort of funny about the world in which ForeState lives in which is supply chain and purchasing, we deal with buyers every day that buy, as I said earlier, millions of dollars worth of parts and components all year long. But when it comes to buying a solution like SourceDay that they can agree would really make life better for them and for the organization help in the ways that we’ve described, They’re really not accustomed to or know how to get something like this approved inside their own organization. So I just would love to go to you on this and from a persuading your executive and getting this approved and getting this run through, like, how did you do that? Would love just to give you some if you could give some highlights of that, that’d be great. Probably a couple fold on that. One, we’re very manufacturing heavy, environment. So a a high percentage of our headcount here is manufacturing. So there’s a lot of visibility when things go well and maybe when things, end up in that firefight. The the good news is when I when I hired on I hired on underneath the the previous procurement and planning supervisor, who then moved over to systems, who helped us integrate, and and be kind of on the operations side of of bringing Source Day on board. So, I think within operations, and when we were looking at systems, we we had a little bit of a window of time that we could, go ahead and get this installed and integrated. And at the same time, I think we were able to to make that sell. Hey. If you wanna if you wanna be in the game of manufacturing things, there’s a few paths forward. One is we go with source day, or two, I need two more heads, to be able to handle emails. And that’s all they’re gonna do is stare at one monitor and data input on the other. And and that doesn’t tend to be how it goes these days. So source data is a is a pretty easy decision once you once you pitch it that way. Yeah. I was actually gonna ask you that same question is that at one point was adding more headcount to solve this issue in play for you? It sounds like that’s not, I mean you’re so right. I mean the looking at one screen, swiveling to another screen and adding the data is definitely not what anybody would call strategic anymore. So it’s not like you guys came to that same conclusion. Appreciate that insight. Well cool, let’s move right along here. So for the audience, if you’re not familiar with SOARCEDay, one of the things I want to share with you that we think is very important and one of the reasons why we’re not only we’ve made our customers successful, but of course Source Day has been successful, it’s the way that we approach suppliers. And for those of you who have ever thought about a supplier portal, maybe building one in house or buying one and then integrating it to your ERP, one of the bigger hurdles is how am I going to get my suppliers to do this? Is probably a question that you have and I will tell you, I’ve been in thousands of meetings as it relates to source day and that’s the number one question we get. So we like to just tackle it head on. And so this is where we do this with this slide. One of the first things that most customers are surprised to hear is that suppliers don’t actually have to log into a portal to be in the SourceDay system. They can continue to remain in email. So not to get into the details of that, but essentially Source Day is able to send and intercept emails back and forth between your suppliers and we grab that data and update Source Day which then in turn updates the ERP. So as long as your suppliers are willing to use email, which most likely they all are, then there should be no problem with them being able to send and receive those same emails in the source date world. Of course, there’s also a platform, so for suppliers that want a more enriched experience, things like open order reports, past due reports, see all my purchase orders in one place, you know ASNs, shipping information, buyer scorecards, all of that experience is embedded inside the SourceState platform. And so, it is free for them to use, obviously email’s free, accessing SourceState is free for the suppliers to use as well. So we often encourage them, hey, if you really want to get your arms around your customer and their POs, you can log in to Source Day and see everything that you ever wanted to know about those purchase orders. And of course, we also support API integration as well as EDI. And those really come into play for customers that have suppliers that are quite large. So some suppliers really don’t wanna have any sort of human interaction, they just want it to be system to system and that is something that we do support inside the platform. So Steven, wanted to go to you. I mean, tell us a little about when you were evaluating Source Day, was this part of it important to you And, you know, what was your strategy for getting suppliers to, you know, engage in the source day system? I mean, that’s the biggest question. Right? Once you’ve identified you need to do this a different way, what’s what’s your take rate actually gonna be with with your suppliers? And EDI sounds, lovely, but when you’re working with a whole lot of suppliers and some of them smaller shops, they’re not gonna be doing that. So, you know, you you hit the nail on the head between the platform itself, which really is the the the high value end of it, or if they just click on that email, that cobranded interactive email you see referred to. You they they click on that. They’re able to say, yes, no, you know, change the date, change the price, change the quantity, and it’s really straightforward. That’s that’s where you’re gonna be getting that eighty or ninety percent of your suppliers actually on onboard with using Source Day, where some of those other systems, I don’t think you’re gonna be seeing that rate. And if you do, you’re gonna have to work a whole lot harder to get suppliers onboarded like that. Yeah, for sure. Supplier engagement, as we call it, some call it supplier adoption, but we really call it engagement because we’re not really requiring them to adopt anything, more or less just be a typical user. And so that’s been important for us. So Tim, I want to go to you. You’ve been around the space, you’ve got hundreds of customers. I’m sure you’ve been around portals a long time. What’s your perspective in terms of what you see in the ForeSee capabilities with supplier engagement versus what you’ve experienced with some of the other portal or homegrown things like that? Really the thought that was put into both the UI. So when a supplier goes in and can actually use the platform to see everything as well as understanding the suppliers. There are suppliers out there that are not going to ever touch the portal. So having that idea of the co branded email to have them interact with it and send the information back to Resource Day, I thought was really what’s going to really change the adoption rate. Having that integration through the email, I think, really drives to those, what I would say, lower mom and pop type shops that a lot of our customers utilize. Yeah, they have their big suppliers that they use for what I would say probably like fifty to sixty percent of their sourcing, but then they’ll go down to a specialized shop or something that it doesn’t have potentially not even have a full ERP system. And they’re just looking for email. Yeah, I got it. I’ll get it to you. Here’s the price. Here it is. You’ll you’ll get it in a week, you know? And and that is really, I think, one of the good good drivers to adopt the, well, to interact with. And then the UI on the on the on the customer side, so the buyers, is a very good enhancement to In for’s RE purchasing module. It enhances the capability, gives you that extra BI layer, and it’s real time live data. And that’s the key. Tim, one other question for you because I know you spent a lot of time in the, we’ll just say the ones and zeros, the integration aspect of it. Like how was that experience for you and someone that had to integrate an environment into Source Day? Like I would love for you to just touch on that for a sec. So integrating Source Day into XA. So XA is its own beast that many people know. It has its own nuances SourceState is using the modern, JSON type, integrations and we were able to work together with, Latrium to build their solution. They were very very diligent in what they want, what they want to see, with that collaboration. And we were able to build out the integration to act as a real time data flow system rather than a lot of these systems. They’re usually a sync system that syncs like once a night or might sync once every couple of hours. But when you’re syncing, what is happening in between? So when we with the real time data updating, if you make an update to a PO in source state, it updates automatically in for. If in for you update something in in for, it automatically updates the source state. So it’s a back and forth real time. So there’s no once it updates, it triggers and it’s updated. Yeah. I love that. Appreciate that perspective. Steven, I’m gonna throw you a curveball, but I’m curious about this. There’s probably a lot of In for customers on the webinar today and Source Day is a partner of In fors. I don’t remember asking you this beforehand, but was that important to you at all that Source Day and In for are partners in terms of your decision? Yeah. It makes it a lot easier. Right? Seeing seeing Source Day literally at Empower, and then this obviously already works. Right? And Right. You you guys are here to help support our ERP specifically. Yeah. That that’s a that’s a big, green flag there. Yeah. Appreciate that. Tim, I’m I’m assuming from your perspective since you’re kind of supporting all representing all In for customers, that’s a pretty important detail I would imagine. That’s one of the things we’re really proud of, but you know, you’d agree like that. Making sure we’re partners is pretty important. Well, when you’re a partner with SourceDay and you’re a partner with In for and you’re on and they’re supporting you as one of their key softwares of choice to move forward with, it definitely helps with the with the leadership buy in to, yeah, we can go with that software package. And from here, hopefully, we get all certified and you’re all certified into that integration. Exactly, exactly. Perfect. All right, well good. Well, thank you guys for that perspective. We’re getting close to the end here but I wanted to really where the rubber meets the road. So LateTrim was implemented, they’ve been live for a while, they’ve been live more recently and what I wanted Stephen to do is like if you could share, so it looks like you went live in December and here we are end of April. I’d love for you to just share what you’re seeing as sort of positive benefits for your business for going with SourcePay. Yeah, I think some of the bigger positives, a, we’re not sitting there doing the swivel chair thing back and forth in the same way. We’re we’ve got our buyers predominantly, while we’re sending POs out in XA. The rest of the upkeep and acknowledgments and everything else is is handled in in source day, and that that’s it. So we’ve got two systems, but source day is predominantly where we’re working, at this point instead of going back and forth, digging through emails, etcetera, etcetera. Our data is much more accurate. We’re able to generally trust that. You know, of course, you know, it comes down to can your suppliers give you the the accurate information? But that’s one of the nice things about the portal as well. Whereas we might have had some some suppliers previously that, things kind of kind of fall off, this basically creates a dispatch list for them as well that they can keep themselves honest much more easily. So I think we’ve actually improved where you see that on time delivery. They might have a couple, three, four changes on a PO line, but we have that information basically as soon as they’re able to tell us. So as a manufacturing facility, and servicing our own equipment, we’ve we’ve got a better idea of when things can, can actually come in and realistically be here instead of when we we initially hoped they would. The onboarding, was was pretty straightforward, with probably, like I said, eighty or ninety percent of of our suppliers. The suppliers that are really big and we with us, right, we interact on a regular basis, daily, weekly, monthly, that those are the easiest, and they’re they’re generally ready to work with you. And they say, okay. This is what what is this? You know, let’s let’s work through exactly how to make this work. And they a lot of them have given some real positive feedback on on how simple this is compared to, using emails back and forth. Yeah. Appreciate that insight. You said a word there that I just captured, hope. And I remember that running our manufacturing company and probably a lot of the audience has probably said this about their own POs and their own suppliers like, I hope they deliver on time. I hope they got the information we need. That’s certainly a word it sounds like you guys used to use, that’s now moved to now we know, right? That we have the data, we’re getting the data we need which is really good. So I’ll just quickly walk the audience through this just so you guys can understand, the audience can understand what we’re saying here. So we’re showing here on the outcomes is ninety six percent of PO lines at Latrum Cut is now going through the Source Day application. So what’s really nice about that is for all those POs, giving them one his team, his team a single workflow to work with them. Eighty eight point seven percent of POs are acknowledged. Now sometimes when I talk to people about acknowledgments, it can be sort of brushed under the rug but it’s actually a very critical thing that happens with your purchase orders. An unacknowledged PO is an opportunity for a major failure in your business and we’ve talked about a one cent screw not showing up but really having those POs acknowledged is really important because the ones that are not acknowledged are the ones that are going to hurt your business. Of the purchase orders that have been acknowledged, what we are seeing specifically in this sort of early data with Latrum is that we’re seeing an improvement of fifty eight percent in on time delivery. So knowledge PO on source day, that’s boosting their on time delivery by fifty eight percent. And meanwhile, that’s all happening with their POs are changing. So fifty three percent, almost fifty four percent of the late term purchase orders are changing. That goes back to our first couple of slides where we said over fifty percent on average is changes for everybody. And so we’re able to improve all these metrics while still dealing with that change. Change we’re probably not really going to be able to solve for as much as with all the disruptions going on, but it’s managing that change that’s really important and can we help the business? And that’s certainly what we’re out here to do. Tim, I guess I’m sorry, Steven, from your perspective and then I’ll go to Tim as well. Like, are you guys pretty happy with these results so far? Yeah. I mean, was pretty straightforward, I guess, from go live. So I’m I’m more on the operation side rather than systems. But once we were live, we were able to roll it out relatively easily, especially for that first, sixty, eighty percent of our of our PO lines and suppliers. Yeah, I got it. Well, I appreciate that. It’s been obviously great work with you and loving to see these results so quickly, and I know we’ll continue to build on that. Tim, going to you, I mean, again, bringing in sort of the industry expert here, you’ve rolled out supplier portals. Have you been able to see have you heard of results like this in some of the other projects you work or do you think this is fairly new to what we’re seeing today? I have never seen a rollout of a supply portal this fast. It was in the adoption to the suppliers. So, we can push supplier portals and get them working. You might have some some aspects of the portal working and going live and then rolling out other aspects of the portal. But this one was a very, very fast speed to market with the integration. It accommodates all aspects of the purchase order lifecycle. One of the big areas here at Latorm required was ensuring that they can split lines if the line isn’t if the supplier needs to split lines, if they need to go into what they call quote unquote a blanket purchase order. And in XA, it’s somewhat difficult. Some people say impossible to do it after you roll it out in an integration. That was all handled, all taken care of within the utilizing with information from Source Day and the knowledge base from our technical team and we were able to support all aspects of what Atrium was looking to do. Yeah, love that, thanks for that response. And I should mention to the audience, there’s probably a lot of XA customers on the webinar. We work with pretty much all of the In for ERPs for manufacturing and distribution. So even though we’ve had a lot of XA talk, same results and the same solution applies across all of In for ERPs. All right, well I think we’re back to the Q and A. Lisa, I’m gonna go to you and see what you have for me in terms of the first question. Absolutely, I’m so glad Tim you talked again about integration because we’ve gotten a couple of questions about people like, did I hear you say it was weeks? Kind of questioning that so I’m glad that you brought that up again. One question though, I think is really kind of gets at where people are struggling is, do you think Latherm could have achieved these same results simply by adding more people into the procurement team? In my opinion, no. Yeah, I don’t think so. More bodies wouldn’t been the answer, right? Right. Yeah. That’s often I hear why they’re asking that, right? That’s often our first go to, but go on. I don’t think there’s you know, eventually you’re trusting that your processes are a hundred percent. Your people are, able to carry that out. Nobody gets sick. You have to have a backup for your backup. Right now you’ve got a dispatch list of what the supplier says is gonna change and somebody can go in there relatively easily and take a look and see if that is a supported change and push it to your ERP relatively quickly and easily. Well, I’m gonna go back to this slide right here because I think this is important. You have it like here we have eighty eight point seven percent of those POs acknowledged. Like for what we call that sort of in source data is like those are happy path POs. They’ve been acknowledged, the suppliers have them received them, they’re on board, they’ve entered in their system, etcetera, etcetera. What you really want your buyers doing is managing the eleven point three percent of POs that are not acknowledged. Like those are probably where you want your buyers spending their time in which it’s not strategic necessarily to follow-up on, hey did you get my PO? Yes I did versus, you have not acknowledged this, I’m getting concerned, I wanna make sure you’re gonna hit your due dates. Like that’s a much more strategic role for a buyer to be in to help keep that business going. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that it’s just very difficult to do with people. Absolutely. A couple of questions about supplier adoption, which you’ve shared that it went really smooth and quickly that there’s multiple ways for our suppliers to interact, which I think is really important, but can you talk specifically or elaborate more either Tim or Clint about how Source Day was able to communicate with international suppliers, such as our suppliers in the Asia Pac region. Like how do we reach those in China and how can they really collaborate using Source Day? Tim, you want me to take that? Go ahead. Yeah, you want that Clint or? Yeah, so I’ll just hit it high level and then you can kind of talk about it. So what’s one of the questions we often get is we have international suppliers who buy a lot from China etcetera, etcetera and Sourcetage is universal in that way. We have suppliers all over the world that are inside the supplier network and use again either emails or portal or EDI and APIs to communicate back and forth. And so we talked today about the functionality that we have to support suppliers, but the other part we really didn’t spend much time on which I think might be important to Steven, maybe you were gonna say this, is we also have a team here that’s dedicated to helping suppliers become successful with you in terms of source day. So there is training involved, there’s support involved, a lot of things there that just helps remove that burden from customers like Latrium and feeling like we have to do it all with our suppliers. Source Day is right there with you doing that. So Steven, I’ll turn that over to Steve. It was a partnership in that in that rollout, go live. You are gonna have a lift. You’re gonna have to tell your buyer or your suppliers rather, hey. This email is coming from us, and it you know, that that is new. It’s a different, looking email, and we’ve gone live with a a new system, and that but that is us. Beyond that, you need to have vendors that that can click an email. And if they can click an email, then you can you can onboard this with them. So you you end up capturing and in fact, I would say a lot of our Asia Pacific vendors have probably been some of the easiest to onboard. So, no concern for me on that one. That’s great. Thank you for that insight. All right. We talked a lot about the PO collaboration, the back and forth and making sure that all of your systems are set up and in sync. And we’ve gotten some questions about visibility into shipments. So Clint or either of you, can you talk about how Source Day pulls in information from the supplier or buyer inputted regarding shipment data, like tracking information? Is that another system? How does that all work with Source Day? Go for it. Yeah, I can get a little bit of the nuts and bolts on that one. So as again, the supplier has to acknowledge that it has been shipped and generating a shipment ASN, and that goes in and communicates into XA’s ASN capability, native capability, and it has it staged, ready for receipt. So when material receives through the dock, you receive it in and from that ASN in the native XA capability in any of the other In for softwares, it will utilize ASN, receive those parts in under those purchase orders, under those releases, update the entire system and source day all simultaneously and brings everything back in and brings the whole thing into one click. So when ASNs were received in, you just need a scan in the one ASN and it receives in all of the product. Love it. Well said. Thank you, Tim. We have a lot of folks who are focused on AI capabilities and what’s next. Can either of you or any of you talk about how In for and Source say work together to help our customers utilize AI and optimize In for XA? Yeah, I can speak a little bit to that. So for those of you who are Burst users, these are the type of conversations we’re actually having with the product team to tie in more of an integration to get your data into that BI tool, which is really exciting if you’re leveraging things like ConferOS and Data Lake and etcetera, etcetera. From an AI perspective and the Latron team is fairly new so I’m not sure they’ve made it this far yet, but we do have some AI capabilities that reaches into the data of Source Day to help sort of navigate your day to day. So for example, we’re constantly looking at lead times and how we are when you cut a purchase order in source day, we are measuring how accurate we think or what’s the probability we think that that actual due date will be hit. Once we establish that maybe this is a trigger, this is a risk and we actually call them risk as source day, then we can surface action items. So you okay, based on what we’re seeing, we think this is at risk and this is the action item that we feel like you can take. The other things that we are doing that are fairly new but we have customers that are using them is setting up automation. And so a lot of the AI surfaces suggested automations that can tell you, okay based off of the last five hundred transactions, you’ve done the exact same thing every single time or ninety percent of the time, So we believe you should just set up an automated workflow to just handle that task for you. So then we’re beginning to let the system start to take action on its own based off of workflows and automations that you’ve approved. Of course, there’s a lot more to our AI strategy, we can’t get into all of it here but those are some of the key ones. I wanna step back on that and your AI is the only as good as your data and the Source Data Platform is taking the actual data out of XA and feeding that back into the AI. So when a receipt comes in, it is also recorded in source state for those tracking capabilities and that’s all fully integrated that we worked with Laterm to build that all out. They’re ready. When they’re ready, it’s there for them to start utilizing those Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, right, Tim, like accurate data and you really can’t get much value out AI or anything, data lake or anything if the data is not accurate. So I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, that was beautiful. Last question before we let everyone go, How important is it for customers, especially XA customers, to have access to a solution like Source Day? Well, I don’t think I should answer that question. That should probably be a Steven or a Tim question. I mean, it it probably keeps us around well, XA is a great solution for discrete manufacturing as an ERP. Right? And and it really is that it it’s hard to beat for handling our business as as it does. That said, there there are some requirements that the that the business has that just XA doesn’t do out of the box. And that’s where Source Day kinda comes in to help the whole suite, the whole package be that much more useful in today’s today’s manufacturing age. Right? I I would agree with with Steven on this. The software companies focus in on what they are good at. XA is a discrete manufacturing software package. I don’t think it was really ever intended to go outside of that area to expand to the supplier or whatnot. So then you have these external companies, Source Day as one of them, partnering up because that’s where your expertise is in. So if you partner up and you do the integration appropriately, it’s looked at as one solution and you’re good to go. Yeah, I mean, you know, such a valid point. I mean, ERPs have a lot of responsibility and a lot of areas to cover. This is all we do at Source Day. We have a solution that acts very similar to a supplier portal but is much more like a supplier network, integrates Street ERP and this is all we do day in and day out. Appreciate that. All right, before I let you guys go because I know we’re getting close on time here, my last question for Steven and I like to ask this question to wrap it up and I’ll put up my email address up here too as if people wanna reach out to me, if you wanna explore SOAR State, please reach out to me, love to be able to have a conversation with you. My last question to you is, there’s probably people on this webinar who’ve seen us before, we’ve talked to before, there’s obviously some new faces on here. But I would love to hear from your perspective, like knowing what you know now. So were business as usual, we worked with you on a modern way to change the way you do it. So what advice, what would you say to those folks who are on the fence about doing something like Source Day? Both Source Day and Guide made this an easy integration and go live. And since then, operations have been smoother through procurement. I it took us a little bit on the fence. Wish we had been able to sell it a little bit faster, frankly. So appreciate y’all. Yeah. Appreciate you. Okay. Well, guys, Steven, thank you very much. Appreciate you sharing your story. Tim, thank you for your support in this and supporting your story as well and your support with Guide. Appreciate everybody who’s joined the webinar today. This is my email address. I think it’s recorded so we’ll probably get it out. But if you would like to discuss Source Day, explore Source Day, look, I’ll just leave it like this, probably everybody here on this call, anybody who listens to this webinar is having some kind of supply chain issue. I’m not sure we can solve it but I’d love to have a conversation with you to see if we could. With that, I’m gonna we’ll exit this and tell everybody thank you and have a great day. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Sean. Thank you. Bye, guys.
