Hi everyone, welcome. Welcome to the webinar today. Excited to have you guys here today and we’re going do something a little bit different which I’m very excited about. Today we’re going to walk everybody through a customer success story. So on the call joining me is representative from Sportsman Boats and today they’re gonna talk about how they took control of their supply chain given all the chaos that has been going on. So if you’re not familiar with me, my name is Clint McCree. I’m co founder of Source Day and and chief strategy officer. Most of you probably know me. I’ve been around the ecosystem for a very long time. Joining me is Cole Wilson. So he is the representative of Sportsman Boats. He’s the systems manager there and has been a Source Day user, and his team has been a Source Day user for quite some time. So asked him to come on here and see if we could just kinda talk through a little about his world and how he’s using and leveraging source day to day to control that chaos. So, Cole, welcome to the webinar. Excited to have you. Thank you. Excited to be here. So before we we dive into all the the q and a and and everything that we’re gonna go through, I’d love it if you would just tell everyone a little about Sportsman Boats. I mean, it’s obvious you guys were doing boats and that’s probably super fun, but would love to know a little bit more about your business. Please share. So Cole Wilson, Sportsman Systems Manager. As Clint mentioned, we started the company in twenty eleven before I got there and built the first boat in twenty twelve. So we make center console, family friendly center console boats from twenty one feet all the way to forty feet. And we just started a sister brand in Phenom Yachts that makes thirty four feet to forty three feet yachts. And that one’s definitely a lot more custom than a Sportsman brand, but both both make great boats. So making about fifteen hundred boats last year and kinda on track to do about the same this year as well. So definitely a lot of challenges in that. Nice. Nice. Well, until think you might have said it, but where are you headquartered? We are in Summerville, South Carolina, so it’s just about an hour outside of Charleston. So not too far. All right. Very good. Well, probably the most important question I’m gonna ask you all day is do you get to actually test drive any of the boats that you guys build? I’ve I’ve written on a few of them, but some people get more opportunities than others, but definitely try to take most employees out if we can. Man, that sounds so fun. What’s your favorite boat that you guys build? Oh, it’s got to be our first model, our two thirty one, so our twenty three foot boat. It’s the first one we ever came out with. It’s the most popular boat that we build and it’s the workhorse. It’s the one that we sell the most of and it’s just a more price friendly definitely, but still have the option to get the open model, the two thirty two, which is more fisherman friendly as well. So it’s got more live wells and got more options for the ******** fishermen too. But yeah, I love that twenty three foot boat. Nice. Well, it sounds like a lot of fun. I bet it’s a lot of fun to see those boats being built out there, especially considering, you know, the growth that you guys have had is is super exciting. I I mean, I don’t go to I’m not around it a lot. I used to be around boats a lot more, but certainly see sportsman boats just it feels like just just everywhere these days. So super exciting. Well, very cool. Well, before we dive into the next question, I or the, you know, the the the question about your supply chain, just for the audience, I’d love to know, for them, on your ERP. So you you guys are an in four customer. Right? Yes, correct. Tell us bit about your ERP, if you know how long you’ve been using it, just so the audience has a sense for it. Yeah, so we’re In for Sightline Cloud Suite. We’ve used it for eight years now. I think twenty seventeen is when we first implemented it and then began using Source Day six years ago. So not too long after we implemented Sightline here. Very cool. Well, the audience you don’t know, I’m one of the co founders of SourceDay here. But before SourceDay, I actually was an In for customer for over ten years. So very familiar with Sightline, very familiar with In for, been around the ecosystem for for a very long time. Well, Well, thank you for that introduction. So let’s let’s hop into it. So for for the audience, for you, Cole, and for the audience, the supply chain has been in a really crazy state for for actually a very long time. Almost since the beginning time of Source Day, really, we’ve been seeing this craziness. I mean, today, we talk a lot about, you know, tariffs. That seems to be the the main thing. But if you go all the way back to COVID and you start looking at the timeline, there has been a tremendous amount of, you know, of of things that have happened in the world that have led to unpredictability and a lot of chaos in the world of supply chain. And so I’d love to Cole, if you could just talk a bit about what’s it been like as Sportsman Boats during this time? So I actually started with Sportsman in March of twenty twenty, which is when world started to shut down. Lucky you. Yeah, that’s the truth. And I think every day for the first year, my boss at the time told me this isn’t normal, this isn’t normal. And it became the new normal. So we had to adjust and get used to it and pivot. You know, I think most people had planned big vacations in twenty twenty and they got all their money back, got the refunds back from their flights and then decided to put their money on boats. It really blew us up. So I think the RV industry and marine industry both exploded and everybody wanted to do something at home. Everything took off and we tried to jump up in production as fast as we could and that was something that was a daily fight for us. Yeah, I was saying it sounds like that was unprecedented. But what but what I hear you saying is is that while it was chaos for everybody, it was really good for your business. I mean, you guys were growing during this time of of chaos, which is great. Absolutely. So I know we came out of that first couple of months thinking that what’s going to happen. We kind of started off slow, said we’re going to start at thirty two boats a week, let’s see what happens. And then had to slowly ramp up to forty boats a week and ended up, I think almost trying to touch forty five a week and just trying to do as much as we can and supply chain couldn’t handle it obviously. And everybody ran on toilet paper and everything else in between. We just trying to get parts in the door and make adjustments and it was something that we had to make adjustments for every day. Yeah. So it was a lot of chaos for you guys. Even though your company was growing, it’s still have to, you know, you have to run a business, then you have to be profitable and service your customers. So even though you’re growing, it’s it’s complicated. Yeah. Great great information there. So another thing that I want to explore with you. So this is something that most customers or companies that are not yet SourceState customers that when we start introducing this idea of where in the world is SourceState play and where do we fit in your world, it really kind of starts with this as the main concept. Fifty two percent of purchase orders that your company issues, and I say your, meaning the audience, will change. And of those purchase orders that are changed, most of them will change on an average rate of two and a half times. So that is the that’s an interesting concept for most companies to to take in because they do realize you know, we know there’s a lot of changes between, you know, my buying organization and my suppliers, but really very few have actually put pen to paper and understand the magnitude of it. What’s unique about SourceDay is because of our solution, millions of purchase orders flow in and out of the application every single year. And so we’re able to see these really interesting trends. And so a couple things about about this change. The change that we’re we see happen are the things that you probably think about every day. Right? Price changes, quantity changes, and the most the most change that we see are the changes to dates. Right? Pulling things in, pushing things out, that sort of constant going back and forth. So the other piece of that that’s probably is more important than understanding that fifty two percent of your purchase orders change, which is kind of madness. But what the the biggest issue there is that for most companies, especially if you’re not using an an application like SourceDay, they’re managing all this change outside the system, if at all. So what that means is your ERP, like, you know, you mentioned, Cole, you’re running an In for site line, that change is in somebody’s email. It’s on somebody’s voice mail. It’s in a spreadsheet, and it’s up to somebody to manually go, you know, update the system, if you will, with this change. And for most organizations, that’s gonna be really challenging to get that data in all the time because it’s constantly changing. So we’d love to know from from your perspective, Cole, like, you know, this this metric here, what was it like for Sportsman Boats before source day in handling all this change? I don’t think we did it well. And, just talking to, people that were here before my time, it was it was difficult. You know? It’s whole process of emailing over PO, waiting for the confirmation, waiting for either an order acknowledgment or a sales confirmation. Something saying, hey, we agree with your date, we agree with your price, or we disagree, and then having to figure out, okay, let’s go back and see if that’s gonna be good for our schedule. Is that gonna meet our needs? And so it was very, very, very manual, and Source Day changed that for us a lot, I think. I think with everything that we did, everything became automated for most of our suppliers that are on source today. I’ll give you a good example. When I first started five and a half years ago, I was the only buyer at the time. We had a purchasing manager and it was me handling most of everything coming in. So with COVID, we were trying to change orders, update orders, get get more of everything in the door as quickly as we could to keep the plant moving. And I missed a couple of the order order acknowledgments, kind of put those on the back burner. I just kind of hoped and prayed that most people would make adjustments for us and help us out and missed a couple orders. I had reached out to suppliers that weren’t on source today and said, hey, what’s going on with this order? Where is it at? And they said, oh, if you would have looked at our order acknowledgement we sent you when you sent the order over a couple months ago we said we’re not going to get it in on time. It’s going to be an issue for everyone. Again if they would have been on source day I would have been able to see that a easier than seeing that email when, you know, we’re getting hundreds of emails a day, trying to filter through those and make the changes. And the volatility of everything is just insane at the time. So Source Day really, really helped us out with that, I think. Well, that’s great. I’d love to double click into that. So when you had that experience of, you know, these purchase orders were not acknowledged, which we’ll talk about that because that’s like a, you know, very basic workflow concept in dealing with your suppliers. But when that didn’t happen, any ideas of sort of what the impact was for you? I mean, I’m assuming that kind of went into fire drill mode. Would love to know what that was like. We did. We had to explore, start calling other boat manufacturers around us. We’re lucky enough that we’ve got two other boat manufacturers, high volume that are within a few miles of us, and then a couple more within thirty minutes. And we’ve got great partnerships throughout the marine industry, but we were calling them, seeing if they use the part, we were looking anywhere and everywhere for the part. We were trying to encourage our suppliers saying, hey, we’ll expedite fees, we’ll pay twenty percent more, just keep the line moving. It was doing what we could to get the parts here as fast as we could. So not only did it affect the cost of the part, but then ended up having to expedite shipping, and it just it was a whole mess. So it definitely hurts at the time. Well, yeah, I kind of asked that question thinking that’s probably where you’re gonna go with it. Know, again, I’ve I have some experience with myself, but dealing with so many customers, we hear that so so often about that purchase order acknowledgment. And one of the things that you know, just to pause on that for a second, purchase order acknowledgments is something that is so kind of basic to understand what it is, but so many companies really don’t actually have a good experience with it or just don’t execute very well on it because it still is a very manual process. You know, you send a purchase order to a supplier, you ask them to acknowledge it, and if they don’t, you know, somebody’s gotta remember to follow-up, somebody’s gotta remember to make that call or send that second or third or fourth email. And and if you don’t, you have the scenarios where you kind of run into it yourself. And so really thinking about ways that you can have a fail safe process to gather that acknowledgment, which of course we’ll talk about a bit about what source data is really critical, right? Absolutely. I think it’s one of those things where you expect a supplier to have the same lead time, you expect the pricing to stay the same, you expect everything to go smoothly, it doesn’t all the time. And another example of that too, I can give you is when we were sending out updates to suppliers with buyer changes and staffing changes throughout the company to send out three hundred, four hundred plus people. And unfortunately, you do that, you get blacklisted. And so we had a period of time where nothing was going out to our suppliers, even when we would send an email directly to somebody that we knew and worked almost daily, if not weekly with, they weren’t getting our emails and updates. And we didn’t know that until we called them and had a conversation with them and they said, we’ve got nothing from you. And so we had to navigate that situation. Unfortunately, everybody that was on source day, seventy percent the PARs that we have on source day, they were all still receiving POs, they were all still receiving updates, and everything was going well. But everybody that wasn’t, we hit a brick wall with, so it was a trying time, definitely. Well, that’s that’s a good, like, good education on business continuity. Right? Keep the business going. That’s right. You know, that’s so interesting because one of the things that that happens in the world of of ERP, You know, you guys are using In for Sightline, but, you know, really any ERP out there, one of the one of the challenges you have well, there’s many challenges. Right? But one of the challenges you have of your purchasing is when you issue that purchase order and you firm it, right, so you’ve now released it, firmed it, whatever terminology you use for it, and you email it to your supplier, your ERP actually doesn’t know that you got blacklisted or that the supplier is on vacation or that supplier doesn’t work you know, that person doesn’t work at that supplier anymore. So even though you you think you’re gonna get the part in two weeks, it might you know, in those scenarios, it might take two or three weeks for the supplier to even realize or you to realize that, hey. This kinda fell into a black hole. And so that puts sort of everything in jeopardy, but the ERP doesn’t know that unless somebody tells them. Right? That’s right. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for that. Good information there, I think. One of the things that so, you know, when we talk about the fifty two percent of purchase orders change, There’s a lot of change happening. And then we talk about the, you know, the data that’s inside of source day. One of the things that is unique, for us is because we can see that PO data, but also it allows us to put together something that we call a supply we call a supplier volatility index. And when you start doing the scale of of the amount of data that we’re looking at, so we’re talking about hundreds of millions of purchase orders going in and out of source day. We’re talking about sixty billion dollars in spend. We’re able to measure the volatility across really all supply chain. And one of the things that we wanted to illustrate here is today so the headline on this slide is today when you look at the far right, under trade uncertainty for, you know you know, January twenty twenty five, we’re seeing the same levels, of unpredictability or I’m sorry, volatility today that we were seeing back in the COVID days. Nicole, you and I talked a little bit about it. You guys are a little bit smoother right now, but love for you to speak to sort of what your volatility looks like today. Yeah, I think you can see by that graph is a great example. Back in twenty twenty, all the way up until twenty twenty four, really, we had a lot of suppliers that were updating prices and supplying things monthly. I mean, difficult to keep up with for our team. Source Day definitely helped with a lot of that, but it was still very, very difficult. It finally evened out. It has evened out over the last year or so, but we’re still seeing a lot of knee jerk reactions to the tariffs. We’re seeing a lot of difficulty with a lot of them too, and it’s been a little unfortunate. We do have some suppliers that are a little bit more reliable saying, hey, we’ll wait. We don’t think this is going to be a permanent thing, they’re kind of eating it right now and keeping us in the loop obviously because we’re not naive to what’s going on in the world. We’re keeping up with it as well. But I think it definitely has evened out a lot and we’ve been able to keep up with it with definitely with the help of Source Day and everything we’ve got going on here. Yeah. That’s great. Well, we kind of skimmed over tariffs, right? That seems to be the real big buzzword today. You and I were about this leading up to this this webinar, and you guys have been able to navigate the tariffs pretty well. It seems like from if I remember from our conversation, you know, because we we wouldn’t be doing a good job out there if we didn’t talk about tariffs. Why don’t you speak, if you don’t mind, to speak a little about how tariffs are impacting you or not, because I know the audience would love to know or sort of know what you guys are doing there. Absolutely. So a lot of it has to do with, I think, our buying group. We’re part of a partnership with the American Footbuilders Association, and they help us navigate with those suppliers that are dealing with a lot of things overseas. Lot of our parts do come from overseas, but we’re trying to monitor it weekly and keeping up with it. Really, a lot of our suppliers have been great and they have said that we’re not going to react as quickly as it looks like we should and we’re will hold off until these trade negotiations truly go through. That’s where we have seen these delays and we have seen these ninety day pauses and sixty day pauses with current administration. Just continue to monitor it honestly. Some suppliers have implemented some tariffs here and there, but I think the ones that have implemented those increases also held straight the last two years, so they’ve really not had any true knee jerk reaction. So I think it’s a little mix of both honestly at this point. Yeah, no, that’s that’s good. I mean, you know, good for you guys. Been able to navigate that pretty well. Hasn’t been too much of a thing for you yet, right? We don’t know. We don’t really know where where things are going with these tariffs, but but at least you so far so good. Perfect. Well, so one of the things that I wanted to share with the audience a little bit, know, really want Cole to tell the story about how they’re doing certain things. SOURCEDay is certainly a part of that story, but we are not the story in all cases. Sometimes we are, sometimes we’re not. But I wanted to just kind of explain sort of where we fit for the audience if you’re not familiar with us. So when you think about your world, right, you you’re running a manufacturing organization or maybe you’re a distributor or maybe you do a little bit of mix and you’re using an ERP application. And so you invest in an ERP. Kohl’s company has invested in SightLine, so you’ve invested in a, you know, SightLine. And the idea there, right, is that we we want one single application. It’s mission critical, and we use it across the entire organization, right, from, from sales to production to purchasing, APAR, etcetera, bringing everybody on the same page, and really trying to help the stakeholders like Cole run the business in a way that’s, you know, best, most profitable performance for the organization. The the thing that the reality though for most organizations is that there are key stakeholders that are really disconnected. And, of course, and this is being illustrated by this this graph here or this this slide here as your suppliers. So you have your suppliers who are very key to the success of your organization. We all need them. We need to have them to help run our business, but they’re, you know, disconnected. And so most buyer supplier relationships are a manual, you know, workflow for them. There’s emails that keep them in communication. There are spreadsheets that go back and forth. There are phone calls, voicemails, Post it notes, and all these things. And in today’s environment, it is very, very difficult to keep your business up to date and current, keep your ERP update and current, when you have a disconnected stakeholder like your suppliers. And, you know, an easy example, you know, I’ll just, you know, throw my iPhone up here. When we all today can take our phones and use Venmo or Apple Pay or whatever you use, and you can send money directly to your kids. So here’s five dollar allowance or go buy well, maybe more like twenty dollars today. But here, go buy yourself some lunch. And I know exactly when the money was sent and when exactly when the money was was received. But for most companies who are gonna issue millions upon millions of dollars worth of purchase orders year over year, you have this very little to zero visibility into the status of those purchase orders because your suppliers are completely disconnected. And and that is where that’s where Source Day fits. We are we are the glue between your ERP, your business, and connecting your suppliers into the loop. It’s essentially into the loop of communication, collaboration, to be able to service them, you get to them, distribute to them, purchase orders, data, information that they can use in order to better service your organization. And this is exactly where Sportsman Boats is today. They are have been leveraging Source Day for for six years and and seeing, you know, lots of success with it. And so so Cole, I’d love for you if you could, love just to ask you a little bit about your your experience, maybe early days with Source Day. So, you know, for example, when you guys what what was the what was the kind of the main thing that you guys thought or main things that you guys decided that you needed to use Sourcetix for your company? Because I’m taking you way back. I don’t know if that if you remember that, but if you don’t remember, that’s fine, but hopefully you do. Yeah, so I think a lot of it had to do with communication. That’s the story that I mentioned about order acknowledgments. I think that dealing with those and looking through everything manually, as you spoke to, the Post it notes, the emails, spreadsheets, everything. I mean, it all gets to be a lot. And doing that beforehand, just a pain, keeping up with it all, making sure you don’t miss one, making sure when you check off an email, however you maintain your emails, if you delete them, don’t delete two by accident and delete the wrong one and end up losing an acknowledgment. So that was a big part of it for us, just the ease of communication and then being able to see consistency in the platform too because I think a lot of people are quick to say no I didn’t see that and I say well you acknowledged it you know you look back through the software and it gives a timestamp well at three forty two pm you acknowledge that PO so being able to say, hey, you said you were going do it. This is the price you said it was going to be at. That’s been a huge help to us. Doing everything beforehand and manually coming through everything I think was definitely difficult. But Source Day has helped improve that immensely and being able to go back and say, hey, this is where we were good. This is where you confirmed the PO. This is what you confirmed it at, the quantity, the price, the date, etc. It’s been great. Honestly, it’s helped our business a lot. Whether it’s been instead of us covering the expedite fees, having the vendors or suppliers covering that, I think has been immensely helpful for us too. Not trying to blame anybody, but it’s definitely nice having that backup when you’re looking into something like that. Yeah, that’s really great. I appreciate that. You know, one of the things that organizations don’t think about when you think about email, right, because most most everybody out on this webinar are they’re, you know, they’re gonna be probably using emails to to manage their suppliers. And but what we don’t think about, right, is in our in our inbox is a lot of noise. Right? There’s yes. There’s there’s information from your suppliers, but there might be I don’t know. You might have an invite from your uncle for the barbecue event on Saturday or, you know, your movie tickets or who I I don’t know. Right? But, you know, the thing is for a buyer, there’s nothing more important than getting immediate visibility to any sort of change on a PO. You know, some are minor and some are not, and some are are major. But the the point is you really wanna be able to, you know, know that. And I think that’s one of the things that you were kind of mentioning there is that once you went to source day, it was really able to eliminate a lot of that noise and know exactly what’s going on with every single purchase order, with every single supplier, so you didn’t have any, like, gotchas. Is that is that a fair statement? Yes, absolutely. And if I if I had a dollar from any logistics company that reach out to me daily, I’d be a very rich man. So I think everybody goes through the the purchasing world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. How important when you guys were evaluating source day, how important was it? And I know this was kind of before you, so maybe you might not know this answer. Or maybe you know it today. Like, I’m just curious for you today, how important is it that your ERP has accurate information? You know? You know that you can click a button in source day, and it’ll update all your POs for you automatically versus someone having to manually go do that. How important is that to you and why? Oh, it’s immensely important because I think it goes back to the old saying of garbage in garbage out. I mean, you’ve got bad data, then you don’t have anything. That’s something that was definitely a big part of the evaluation in the beginning. Speaking to some of my colleagues that helped with the implementation, they said that’s a huge part of it. It’s something that you’re giving inaccurate data to everybody in the company, as you said, the stakeholders, the people that are counting on boats going out the door. If you’ve given inaccurate data, they’re also giving inaccurate data to our dealers and to our customers. And you don’t want that, obviously. Having correct data coming in is immensely important and being able to trust it. You right. I’m so glad you said that. I hear that so much. You know, we you know, people, organizations invest sometimes millions of dollars in an ERP application, and then you start asking around and everybody’s saying, well, we don’t really you know, the system is fine, but we really don’t trust the data in the system. And and that’s not an ERP problem. Right? That’s not a that’s not because ERP is bad. That’s just because the people that are feeding the the machine, if you will, the ERP, you know, make mistakes or don’t update it and it’s not accurate, it’s not current. So I’m glad you said that. So, you know, Source Day, I mean, do you feel like you can trust the system more now with with Source Day helping you with that? One hundred percent. One hundred percent. I think that’s that’s something that we can definitely hang our hat on when we One of the first things we look at when we go back to our system, we go, okay, I know it’s a source day supplier, so we’re good. We can trust that date and it’s ninety nine percent accurate. The ship date, the due date, So something that’s been very reliable for us, think, with everybody, all the buyers that we have now and everything that we go through, definitely. Awesome. Well and I didn’t ask you this before, but I’m just sort of curious about this. You know, when you start looking at accurate dates and do you guys have planners or how do you guys do that when you when you’re, you know, setting things up for production and scheduling? Is that a planner that does that or somebody else? So we’ve got a schedule that sets the spray dates for everything, all the boats. We got reports that feed off everything else within our company. So we do almost all of our fiberglass parts in house and we build our consoles, our lids, our T top frames, just about anything you can think of. Try to build in house if we can. And so everything feeds off that initial spray date and we have some things built into the background, estimated days of build time, but each cell and everything like that. So everything feeds through into Sightline and once that happens we’ve got two main buyers that run their planning and obviously In for SiteLine does most of that work for us. They may do a little bit of analysis, make sure everything looks okay and then place the POs. It’s all pretty seamless and then that’s where source day obviously comes in. Once the POs get sent to Spires, it sends through source day and they get that fun notification and source day notification saying that there’s a new PO or there’s an update and that’s where the process really starts between that communication. So it’s nice having source day doing most of it for us, really. Now for those that maybe everyone else knows, but I don’t know. So for me, as a newbie, a spray date is a? It’s the gel date. So a boat is built backwards from a car. I think most people think of a car when they’re No, yeah, tell us about that. I don’t know that, yeah. So a car, you know, you’re building from the inside out and, you know, you’re building the frame first and then eventually your last step is to paint the car, right? A boat actually starts out with a mold and it’s what they call gel coat. It’s a different type of paint, really. But gel coat goes on and it’s built from the outside in, really. And then there’s layers of fiberglass and resin that go into it. Then eventually it’s pulled from mold and it’s fully assembled into what you see on the water. Interesting. Yeah. I had no idea. Of course, it makes sense. Right? You need the actual boat to be able to, you know, bolt things to it. That’s right. That’s right. Make makes makes tons of sense. Well, very cool. So now I’m gonna just do a I wanna do a little we’re done with kind of the slide piece of this. I just wanted just to share people sort of where we fit and where you fit and how that you we’ve seen. I would love one of the things that you had mentioned to me, I think the audience would love to know, is you’d mentioned to me that there was a mandate when you started in this role about reducing inventory. And, you know, doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Everybody has sort of that same goal. Very few actually achieve it, and you guys have. We know Source Day was a part of that. We know we weren’t the only story there, and I think the audience would get a lot of value out of just sort of understanding, you know, that mandate and how you guys accomplished it. Yeah. So during COVID, I think everybody upped their safety stocks and we’re freaking out a little bit and rightfully so. We all didn’t know when we were getting everything. And in the last two years or so, we’ve really been, it’s really been put on our shoulders to try to become more just in time and we felt comfortable with about a week’s worth of safety stock here and that’s something that we’ve really driven home in the last really year and that’s something that we’ve we’ve accomplished and and really gotten to a point where inventory is the lowest it’s been in years and that’s something we’re very proud of because we’ve been able to trust Source Day and like you and I’ve talked about, the dates that come through Source Day are very, very accurate and we’re able to communicate with our suppliers through Source Day. And granted there are some suppliers who aren’t on source day and we’ve been really pushing them to get to that point. Some of you and I have talked about trying to encourage them more and want to incentivize them as as we can. Obviously, being the customer with these suppliers at the end of the day. But no, really Source Day has streamlined that communication. As you mentioned today, that predictability with due dates and pricing and all that fun stuff. It’s something that we’re very proud of. We’ve accomplished that and gotten down to about a week’s worth of safety talk. Some items are a little bit longer lead time and we need to extend that a little bit further, but we’ve had a lot of success with it. I think stakeholders and decision makers at the top have been happy with that for sure. Oh, bet. And when you guys were looking at ways to reduce inventory, source day was a piece of that. What was another Were you guys trying to reduce the amount of suppliers or increase the amount of suppliers? I’m just curious what other sort of things that you were looking at to do for the audience. Yeah, we kept our suppliers the same for the most part. We obviously explored a lot of it, a lot of different suppliers with, I think COVID really encouraged everybody to have a backup supplier for everything because God forbid something went down like, I think it happened in Texas within twenty twenty one where all the pipes froze down, froze over and it froze a lot of the resin plants down there and the foam plants as well. That put a strain on the marine industry for sure during that time. So really encouraged that secondary supplier and really trying to strengthen our relationship with our current suppliers and see if there’s anything one off that we were getting here and there and seeing if it was an opportunity to go through our normal suppliers on normal routes. Because I know a great example is one of our suppliers has a warehouse here in Somerville fifteen minutes down the road from us and they keep a lot of our stock there just in case, God forbid, something goes wrong or we have, like we said, bad data, garbage data. So if we have something bad in the system, somebody mistyped something, we can get ahead of that. I think that’s really where our relationships come in handy. I think our relationship with you guys has shown through that too. I think the changes that we’ve made and the improvements that we’ve made have been amazing in the last few years. Well, I certainly do appreciate that. Look, know as well as I do. You’ve been doing this long enough, and I certainly have as well. We all know fires are gonna happen, and it’s really not about, you know, being able to eliminate all the fires, but it’s about what are you gonna do when one comes up, how fast can you react to it. You know, that’s just that’s just the nature of the business. Mean, you you might have, you know, inventory on something that you need for, you know, five year boats. You go to use them and realize they’re bad quality, and now you have a fire drill. Right? That has nothing to do with delivery, but, you know, the quality things. So there’s all kinds of of of things that happen that can can change the world. So couple just a couple of quick questions and and then we’ll we’ll call it here. But I would love for you to share if you know this. Again, I know you were you came a little bit later. But I know today we probably still onboard suppliers for you. So what what’s the experience like for you? You know, one of the things that source SourceDay does is we really try to help our customers with suppliers. Right? One of the first questions we always get is supplier adoption. How do I know my suppliers are going use SourceDay? And I’d love for you to speak a little bit about what your experience has been like to help the audience understand. Yeah, I think that SourceDay has made it very seamless to work with suppliers. I know one of the first things that I did initially was ask for a walkthrough of what the supplier side of things looks like, because obviously there’s gonna be a little bit of difference. Well, at least I thought there was, and I started looking at it and it looks eerily similar to something And it was good. It was a good thing. I just wanted to be able to say, hey, I see what you’re looking at if I needed to walk through it. But really, ninety nine percent of the time, I would just refer to someone at source day and say, hey, XYZ is having trouble with function or this feature and got a response within an hour usually unless it was super early in the morning or super late in the evening. But really source day was great to help out with and provide training resources and do everything that they that would help help a supplier get through the software. So I know I had one supplier, a good example too, is who always complained about source to issue. He said I don’t like it. It’s too much work and I said, well, what are you looking at? What’s the problem? Why do you hate it? There’s no reason to hate it. I said, it’s a software that helps us out immensely and explained to her the benefits on our side too. Well, get that, but this is why. And I said, well, let me walk through it with you. And looked at her side. We did a Zoom call like this and talked through it all and she said oh well I was just doing it wrong I said well yeah you just got to ask the question. I said come on it’s it’s not that difficult especially in the world we’re in today and the support that you guys have it was was easy I mean you guys were willing to hop on a call with us and explain what was going on, how to make it more seamless. Granted, we did lot of parts with them, so if we had a lot of changes, they got a little upset about that. But that was more on us. They were going to have to deal with that anyways if we didn’t have source day. Yeah. That’s right. Right? I mean, it’s it’s it’s we think we think it’s it’s easy to fall back on our crutch. Well, let’s just do this in email, but then we lose all the visibility. I mean, you’ve mentioned at the very beginning the the visibility you have to the audit trail of a PO. If a PO changes six times and you don’t like the resolution, if you’re using only email, you’ve got to go dig through, who knows, hundreds of emails to be able to recreate the story of what happened to that PO. On Source Day with a click of a button. We tell you everything you need to know about who did what, when they did it, and in those scenarios if you don’t use a solution like Source Day, you don’t have that accountability which is super important. Alright, last two questions. Last two questions. I know we’re getting long here. So would love to know what was an unexpected benefit for you? Like when you became a SourceState customer today, like love to know what what that what this has been like. Have you seen anything unexpected that you weren’t expecting was gonna happen? Yeah, I think honestly in the last six years it’s been the improvements that SourceDesk made. One of the biggest things that was a big deal for me is the digital PO, and it was something that was implemented, want to say two or three years ago. Can’t remember exactly when, but those suppliers that don’t want to use that, you know, they want to call it a portal and they’re they that word. That’s a bad buzzword. Everybody. They said, no, we don’t want deal with a portal so that provided an option for them to say, hey, you don’t have to go into anything. All you have to do is hit this button in the email and it’ll take you to the same screen. It’ll still do the same communications through Source Day. And it was something that was highly encouraged by me. Then really now we have the, what is it, the supplier dashboard that we have, the item dashboard that’s recently been implemented. It’s something that we’ve kind of been exploring and trying to encourage our guys to use a lot more. I just, I feel like SourceTech keeps making improvements and we’re very happy with everything. And you would think that we would see a giant price increase for this and get nickel and dimed here, but it’s something that I know you and I’ve talked about. It’s something that we haven’t seen. It’s been a true partnership, I feel like between the two companies. So it’s been great. Yeah, appreciate you saying that. I mean, do try to always be innovating and and add that, you know, functionality to our customers to make them better. And you had mentioned to me as well, like, of the things that you saw was at at one point we were talking about, you know, your your uptime of your lines. Like, you haven’t had any production downtime and you know again, not saying that’s an all source day thing, but I know that you feel like it’s a contributor, so I’d love to just you know, is that you mean that I think I remember you saying that. Yeah, that’s something we’re definitely proud of that missing parts hasn’t been a hindrance to the line. The lines kept moving and we’ve been able to adjust and source data has been a huge part of that, as you said. I mean, the dates that we’ve had and with the updates that we’ve been able to provide our company and to our stakeholders here, I don’t know what we would have done, especially with the uncertain times we’ve had over the last five years. I mean, we’ve been in the water and I know a lot of companies have experienced that. They’ve had to send people home and they’ve had to make changes on the fly. And I’m sure do the same things we’ve had to do, run around like chickens with their head cut off. It’s not fun. Like you said, there’s going be fires all the time. It’s just how you react and how can you be as proactive as possible. And source day has been a big part of us being being proactive, fortunately for us. Well, awesome. Well, I appreciate you you saying those things. Okay, so last question. We know the audience and, you know, people out there have looked at SourceDay before. We’ve talked to a lot of In for customers, a lot of sideline customers over the years, and also new new people who are being introduced to SourceDay for the very first time. And so last question for you is, like, knowing what you know now and using SourceDay, if you were to meet one of those those those companies or, you know, an employer at one of those companies, knowing what you know about SourceDay today, like, what would you tell them? What would your what would be your statement? I would encourage them to do it and go forward with it. Just one statement, I’d say do it. Obviously do your due diligence and make sure it’s the right solution for you, but I’ve had nothing but positive reviews from from the people, the buyers under me that have used it and and everybody throughout. I’ve had nothing but positivity throughout, so I would definitely say do it. It’s it’s worth it. Awesome. Well, very much appreciate it, Cole, let me throw up here this last little slide here. Alright, so Cole thank you very much for sharing your information with us today. You you work at a really fun place, and I need to come over there someday and see y’all see y’all’s operations. Come on over. Appreciate you sharing your story today. For those out there, if you’re interested in learning more about Source Day, if it’s something that you wanna explore, you would like to see a demonstration of Source Day or, you know, just learn more, here’s my email address. Please copy it down. Shoot me an email. Just let me know you’re interested or just wanna have a conversation. Be happy to to speak with you. I’m always around as well. I mean, I I’m good. I get to a lot of the events. You probably see me wearing a green coat, and so I’m pretty easy to spot in in a in a in crowd. But, anyways, appreciate everybody joining us today. Cole, thank you very much. Hang on tight before you go and we’ll just say bye to the audience. Thank you guys very, very much. Thanks. Appreciate it.
