And we’re live. Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us. We’re going to give it another minute or so and wait for some additional folks to log in. I know people are still joining, so bear with us and we’ll we’ll start momentarily. How are we looking, Colby? Looking like we still have a lot of people joining, or is it kind of leveled out? Let’s give it about thirty more seconds. Sounds good. Alright, what do we think? Good to go? Alright. Well, good morning or good afternoon as it may be if folks are on the West Coast. Hello, everyone. My name is John Kill. I am a strategic account manager here with Epicor. Been with Epicor for over fifteen years serving manufacturers as customers. And I would like to officially welcome everybody to our webinar today where we will be sharing with you how ag leader freed millions in working capital by using SourceDay. Before we get started, I have a couple of housekeeping items I want to go over with you guys. First off, I want to point out that, if you like what you see today, you can book a meeting directly through the webinar. There should be a link in the upper bar, that says sign up for demo. If you click that, that’ll take you through the process to sign up for a meeting. Next, all participants are muted at this time, but you can ask questions in the box below the video or by clicking ask a question on the top row. You can enter a question into the chat and we’ll be monitoring monitoring those, and either answering them in line during the demo or we will pick them up and try to answer them at the end of the webinar. During our Q and A session. You can adjust your the size of your video. You can use the icons and the buttons to adjust that to full screen if you wish to help see better. You can also adjust your audio with the controls on there. And lastly, all audience members will receive an email with the link for the on demand so that you can go back and watch this or share this with your colleagues. With that out of the way, I am excited to be joined by a panel of great presenters today who will be sharing their insights and experience with you. Ryan, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan Witt. I work for a company called Ag Leader Technology. We’re dead center in the middle of Ames, Ames in the middle of Iowa. I’ve worked for Ag Leader for just under thirty years, so I have had my entire career here. Played quite a few different roles, everywhere from building cables when I was in college to engineering and designing a lot of our products and then I also led our mechanical design team for seventeen years. So about three years ago I decided, it’s time for something different. And we had a supply chain manager position open and I was like, that sounds like fun. Let’s do that. And yeah, that’s how I got to meet Source Day. So it’s been a fun time. So Ag Leader, Ag Leader creates, systems for row crop farmers. So anything that’s planted in a row, corn, soybeans, cotton, you name it, we give them a full suite of tools that help them manage their business everywhere from software to displays in the cab that controls the whole machine to, can modules, lots of harnesses. So very much our industry is definitely that electronics, electromechanical and software. So, happy to serve, you know, that community as as they grow the food to feed the world. Jim. Excellent. Hello everyone, my name is Jim Fry. I’m a solutions engineer for Epicor Software. My career spans forty years now serving manufacturing companies, twelve in the manufacturing company as a project manager, two years in supply chain collaboration, I’m now in my twenty sixth year as a solutions engineer. So it’s a pleasure to be with you today. And Colby. All right, I’m Colby Young, VP of Alliances here at SourceDay. I’ve been with the company for about ten years. Last three to four years been fully focused on our strategic partnerships and my brain is one hundred percent focused on Epicor. So we are an official ISV partner as of May of last year. We officially signed that agreement and what that means is that if you want to partner with SourceDay, you actually would purchase SourceDay officially from your Epicor customer account manager or channel partner on your current Epicor contract. So very easy to engage. It also allows us to collaborate with the Epicor product folks to continue to enhance our integration, align our roadmaps, so a very tight partnership. But I do want you to know while the official partnership is new, we have been supporting Epicor clients for about seven years. We’ve done about one hundred implementations, so not new at all to Epicor, just that official partnership is new. We’re really excited to be a part of the family now. All right, so I’d like to start off with this slide. Like I said, I’ve been with Source Day for about ten years and kind of pre COVID, the theme of supply chain was just in time manufacturing, right? How do I hold as little inventory as possible? It was all about lean manufacturing. Now COVID hit and that pendulum swung one hundred and eighty degrees the other way to all hold a year of inventory, years of inventory because you didn’t know when you’re gonna get your product, right? That was a real strategy of the time. Over the last few years, CFOs have really gotten focused on how do I get back to inventory optimization, how do I start to increase turns again, but everyone’s still dealing with constant supply chain chaos, right? Supply chain disruption after disruption. And unfortunately, this is really the new normal that we live in right now. It’s just constant chaos for manufacturers. Ryan, you know, with your long experience at Ag Leader, I’m curious, you know, tell us some of the impacts these disruptions, have had on Ag Leader over the last many years here. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, honestly, I think that each one of them actually hit us, and that it’s a real challenge. You know, to be honest, it’s kind of hard to replace some of those years. It was a really hard life. We had a lot of customers that were wanting and needing our products, and it was a frantic time of trying to figure out, how we were going to move forward. Life was chaotic. You were juggling so many balls, so many light, you know, late things. You didn’t know when you were getting them. Production was inconsistent. You know, a lot of companies just didn’t have, the manpower to create a predictable, you know, delivery schedule and it was really hard. It was normal life for us to wait till the deliveries, morning deliveries came in, figure out what came in and then figure out, hey, what can we build? And then having team members, you know, waiting, to jump on that. So also tons of extra coordination meetings. What can we ship? What finances can we count on, you know, for end of year sales and things like that. And you know, the reality is our on time shipping was was in the toilet. It was awful. The truth was it burned a lot of us out. It was really hard work. It was hard to get answers. And my opportunity for this role was a direct product of, you know, a prior team member just getting burned out. It’s a tough it was a tough time, no question. And Jim, I know you speak with customers in the Epicor ecosystem all day long. Does this resonate with what you’re hearing as well? Indeed it does. I participate in quite a few value exchange workshops with Epicor customers and they mirror some of the sentiments that Ryan has just shared. Bottom line is that these challenges are real and it’s important that we come up with solutions to help overcome them. Yep, absolutely. You know, now that we’ve looked at some of these events, right, now let’s really get into the data. So Sourcing is a very unique data set when it comes to global direct spend. One of the biggest in the world actually, like I mentioned, I’ve been here for ten years really since kind of the beginning of Source Day. And over that time, we’ve been able to accumulate over one hundred thousand suppliers in our solution. And over that time processed over sixty billion dollars of spend. We’ve seen over one hundred million changes and messages happening within the solution. And so what we’re able to do is really synthesize this information to put out a quarterly, what we call a source day supply volatility index. And it’s looking at what are price risks, so price changes, looking at order uncertainty, so how are dates and quantities changing, and so looking at its impacts of in on time delivery. And analyzing all that data to look at what is the volatility of global supply chain. And as you can see, the volatility is nearing highs in the post COVID days. Some of the highest rates that we’ve seen in the last five years, global supply chain volatility is inching up to that. And, you know, this puts a real risk on supply chain and it’s problems that folks are actively looking to solve and figure out as they continue to grow and maintain their business. And kind of double clicking into PO uncertainty, you know, we’re talking about changes. And just to kind of define a change, I’m talking about a PO is delivered to a supplier and you need to change it as the buyer or the supplier needs to make an adjustment, right? That’s what we’re talking about a change. And as you can see, the change rate on purchase orders is again nearing up as high as we’ve seen in the last five years and it surpassed that fifty percent mark again. So half of all purchase orders are changing and they’re not just changing once, they’re actually changing on average three times. And when you have all of this change and all of this volatility, that puts MRP at risk, right? It actually puts your invoice match rates at risk, your purchase orders not matching your invoices. You have all of this change on all on so many of your purchase orders, this is just what we’re all dealing with right now. You know, Jim, I hear this quote a lot of times, volatility is the enemy of predictability. I’m curious, you know, how is Epicor specifically looking to help customers manage some of this volatility? I think first and foremost, the graphical depiction really tracks well with what I’m hearing in the field from Epicor customers. All of the post PO activities that they engage in require a tremendous amount of time. It’s usually very high volume and difficult to manage effectively. So those solutions are a long time coming and recognizing that purchase order generation is necessary step, but it’s not the end game. There’s a lot of coordination that needs to happen there in order to effectively manage the supply chain. Absolutely. So let’s talk about kind of why this problem exists as well and why this is so difficult. And you know, what you’re looking at here is the disconnect between, you know, your ERP and your supplier network. And it’s just the reality of the system is that inside your four walls, Epicor is as good as it gets. MRP, all of the data and workflows and everyone within your organization has what they need to do their job, their business, right? We think about manufacturing, production, finance, purchasing, right? They can use MRP to cut those POs. But once those POs are created, the supplier network, they don’t have a room in the Epicor house, right? They don’t have a window. And so from the time that PO is created in Epicor to the goods are received, there’s this gap in communication with your supplier network and that gap creates risks, that gap creates blind spots and it makes it extremely difficult to manage all that volatility that we were just talking about, right? And so the result is the supply chain crisis really is happening in everyone’s inbox every day. And we’re in, you know, we’re in twenty twenty six and buyers and suppliers are left a manual disparate siloed communication tools to manage all of this change, all of this volatility to try to keep MRP accurate, to try to keep production lines up. You know, Ryan, I know that when we talk, you know, this really resonated. How did Ag Leader deal with this problem before source day? Yeah, so that was a really it was hard for me. As an engineer coming into it, I created systems that basically worked outside of my email and it was really tough to go through and you know, as I stated before, like we had all these different emails that go back confirming when is this due, when is that due, emails going back for, hey, when am I going to get the next delivery? You know, and it wasn’t even the part that we actually needed, but they responded to it and things just go round and around in circles, and it’s really hard to untie. I mean we had lost POs. You know, we would send a PO and we were so busy and everything was flurrying so fast. We didn’t even recognize they never confirmed it, you know, via email, and you know, trying to expedite parts, you know, for for lost POs was just horrendous. You know, with the other thing with the lost POs is lost parts, late deliveries. You know, a lot of our we sell through a dealer network. A lot of the dealers started to lose confidence, on if if they could make that sale because that sale was pending them getting installed before the season started. So definitely huge there. We paid expediting fees like crazy. To be frank, I was too scared to ask what our ups red charges were that were charged to our account. To this day, I feel like a coward, but the motions were real. And you know what what really happened was we hit, we just got crazy bloated inventory. We had too much of one thing, not enough of another and and we couldn’t fulfill the customer’s orders and a lot of our systems are pallet multi pallet sort of systems that have two to three hundred parts, you know, that we actively manage thousands of actual parts And you know, one missing part that palette can’t go. And it just played that scenario played over and over again, with different parts and you know, of course everybody’s frustrated. Production team is frustrated. Luckily, I work with a lot of very gracious people. But man, those are just hard times. Yep. Feel for you and glad, you know, we could we could support and this is kind of what that future state looks right, right? So SourceState exists to extend Epicor to the entire direct spend supplier network to make sure that every touch point, every purchase order down to the line level is truly managed between procurement team and suppliers. And I want you to know everyone that you know, we’re not changing the way you use Epicor, We extend Epicor when its automation stops. So using MRP, PO suggestions, wherever you’re getting your POs created, once it’s approved, pulling that into source day, digitizing them and you’re actually gonna get to see some of this from from Mr. Fry today. And every touch point, right, is managed and then we’re updating Epicor down to the line level as any changes are approved, driving that accurate MRP, right, driving the accuracy inside the ERP. So John, you know, Jim, I want to ask you all, you know, from your seat at Epicor, can you tell the audience more about our partnership and really why Epicor chose SOURCEDay to be strategic partner of yours. You just mentioned MRP. Ryan mentioned MRP earlier. One of the things I hear all the time is how important it is to be able to trust MRP. But MRP is very much garbage in, garbage out, right? And without accurate PO data, customers feel handicapped like they’re flying blind. Epicor is only as good as the data you’re feeding it. So being able to get better data, more data to complete the picture is really important. I would add to that in terms of some of the challenges that you’ve already identified Colby and clearly Ryan has experienced these and felt the pain that comes with that, the delays, the redundant communication and error correction cycles. It’s a very reactive management approach from working with other Epicor customers that have leveraged Source Day to help manage all of those post PO activities, they’ve seen a tremendous improvement and uptick in both operational efficiency and financial performance. So some of the planning tools that John made reference to a moment ago are augmented by some of the results that we’re seeing from SourceDay. So it’s pretty exciting to watch that transformation. Good, awesome. Well, appreciate you all and you know, we’re excited to get into further discussion with Ryan on some more experience that he’s had. So John, I’ll let you take it away here. Yeah. Ryan is a strategic candidate at Epicor. I’m talking with customers every day and I love hearing about their experience and successes. We talk about first, what are the challenges? They try to align solutions for that. This ag leader story is, I think, is as good as it gets. I wanted to ask you, circling back on your strategic drivers for Source Day, one of them was the objective to reduce inventory. So has it helped? Helped to make that happen? Yeah. I mean, like Jim was saying before, getting the right data in MRP so that MRP can work is huge. Like it’s just nothing works without it. You’re shooting spitballs at a target across the room that you can’t reach. It’s like, hey, when is this gonna happen? I don’t know. Like, oh, and we need to know these six parts stacked on top of each other. Like it’s really hard. And frankly managing your inventory goes along with that. The reality is your inventory can get incredibly bloated, because you can’t stage and you know, Ag Leader, we’re a very seasonal company. You know, we will sell ninety percent of our product, you know, basically in season. So that season passes, that sale is gone for at least a whole year and you just gave your competition a whole another year to chase after it. So it’s a real challenge. I mean we reduced our inventory by thirty five percent, from the peak that we hit in those, you know, pandemic years. And the reality is, is our executives are elated. What also happened during that same time is our company saw a pretty significant downturn, you know, in business. If you’re in the industry, you know, if you’re not, you know, you probably heard a headline or something, but the ag economy is literally at the lowest point it’s been for row crop farm anyway, lowest point it’s been, in decades. One of the people that I watch was actually comparing the profitability of row crop farming right now to the same level that it was, in the Great Depression. So we’re kind of hitting some unprecedented times. What was awesome in that story is we freed up all that capital. You know, reducing our inventory by thirty five percent, made it much easier for us to make the choices we wanted to make for a company looking longer term. So it was huge. It was a really big deal. Proud I got to be a part of it. And you said thirty five percent, but just putting a dollar figure on that, if my notes are right, that’s about seven million dollars right? I mean, that represents about seven million dollars of free Yeah, that’s a lot of capital to free up. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. For a small company like us, for sure. Jim, did you have anything you wanted to add on that? No, I think one thing that resonated with me as Ryan was sharing some of the concerns and the downturn in ag over time, that’s not unlike a lot of the industries that our customers are based in. So I think that message resonates with a lot of customers, both on the call today and in our existing customer base, right? We’re in unprecedented times in terms of manufacturing challenges and supply chain challenges. And so I think regardless of the industry that you’re in, there are benefits to be gained through optimization of that supply chain. The next topic I want to kind of shift to Ryan with you is on time delivery. So it’s obviously a critical part of keeping customers happy. So let’s talk about that a little bit. I remember you mentioned pretty impressive improvement in OTD to customers. Tell me about the improvements there. Yeah. No. Our on time delivery, when we didn’t know when parts were coming, we didn’t have we just didn’t have enough people to chase with all of our suppliers. You know, we were we were looking at a monthly delivery of seventy six percent, and that’s way worse than we ever had before. So with Source Day kind of digging out of the hole and everything else that we did, you know, we are consistently at ninety nine percent. It is fantastic to be there. One of the challenges that we also have is that a lot of the parts that we manage, you know, are electronic components, circuit boards, LCD panels, displays, cable parts. You know, a lot of them have six to eighteen month lead time. Some of the components on the circuit board literally eighteen to twenty four month lead time managing that whole supply chain as that goes through. And we initially, you know, in the pandemic time, we were telling our people eight days, but of course we weren’t hitting it. And that doesn’t build customer trust. We were able to take down, take our lead time down to five days, so you know, things that we’re managing lead times literally two years out, we’re delivering product in five days, And then actually here in twenty twenty six, we’ve had so much success in that and doing it consistently. We actually shifted our goal. So starting this month, we shifted to a three day lead time. And you know, so far that’s going really well. Not perfect. We’re fighting a little bit, but it’s going really well. Awesome. John, just emphasize one point that I that I heard Ryan say, increase in on time delivery performance, OTD, of twenty three, twenty four points from seventy six to ninety nine while simultaneously reducing your inventory carrying cost. Is that Absolutely. And both at the same time, literally. But it was because we had the confidence of what parts were coming when it was coming and that broader visibility, you know, we would actually push out deliveries of some parts to help mellow things out. It was yeah, yeah, it the confidence it brought was incredible. Those those metrics are something that I’m sure all of our epicour customers can get behind. Yeah, that a huge impact just in that year and with more to come. Sometimes the hardest part of a transformation like this is convincing the organization, convincing executives, convincing other people in organization to invest in that change. How did that go for ag leader? How did you persuade your leadership and your teammates to move forward with an investment in Source Day? Yeah, for sure. From the executive perspective, a lot of it is they saw the inventory dollars and like, we’ve got to do something. You know, they had a they weren’t sure, but they had a strong sense that it wasn’t right and they had a whole lot of money, you know, sitting in that inventory in our warehouses. They also believed that it was fixable and that we could do it. The the ability to streamline and also just our company’s focus on that on time delivery, all those things, you know, kind of came together to make it, really just a very confident decision that we made. As far as, you know, implementing it, it was quite easy frankly. You know, they had a great, Source Day has a great team, and a great I call it a program because, you know, they just run you through this series of events to implement. Initially, I was concerned that it wouldn’t integrate, and then you know, it would be difficult or hard, you know, so many customers cleared that way before it was it was a blip. It had no problem. It was it was easy for them, and the team the team really enjoyed it as well. It was an easy change. It was an easy change. That’s always good to hear. When you start to embark on something like this, have your eye on the goal, but if you can’t get there, then it becomes very frustrating. Knowing that it was easy to adopt, easy to roll out, sounds like it really unlocks more time for the people in the organization to focus on work that’s actually strategic and value add. So yeah, that’s fantastic. The implementation, you said it was very easy, streamlined, you know, a program, I think you called it to walk you through it. You know, that’s great to hear. Jim, you’ve been with Epicor for a long time and seen a lot of customers deploy Source Day with Epicor. Is Ryan’s experience pretty common or is that an outlier? What other stories are you hearing from customers that have made this move? I think Ryan’s experience aligns well with other customers with whom I’ve worked over the years. One of the things that I guess I would just double click on that Ryan made reference to in terms of the executive buy in, some of these metrics that we’re referring to for on time delivery performance and inventory buffer stock reduction, those are certainly metrics that we can hang our hats on. Other customers have been successful in that approach as well. So I think overall, you mentioned the fact that we can shift from reactive management to more proactive control. Those elements, think, speak to themselves, right? Yeah. I know I’m going to project here a little bit, put on a hat of an audience member, but I’m guessing that more than one of our audience members are thinking it. I’m going say the elephant in the room is probably the question, yeah, but will my team and will my suppliers actually use it? So Ryan, tell what that’s been like for you. What percentage of your direct spend has been adopted into the system? Yeah, absolutely. So, proudly, I would say we had one hundred percent adoption of our strategic suppliers. A lot of that is, you know, the relationships that we’ve built with them over the years, and how we’ve worked with them, and it it is it’s a big deal, and the suppliers really enjoy it. They enjoy using it because basically they want to serve us and they want to do the right thing, right? They’re inside salespeople, whoever’s managing the business and when you can go into source day and say, oh, let’s do this week. Do we have all this in inventory? How do we do it? What’s our plan? Those that want to exceed, frankly just love it, because it just it’s a second look. You’re not deciphering things in the email or all that sort of thing. Now the flip side of that is would be like our buying team. And they also really like it. They had some hesitations initially, but once they used it, they grabbed on wholeheartedly. It was one of those, scenarios where, you know, we had a few that were software, skeptical, I’m gonna call it. But what happened was is we actually took away all the conflict points of miscommunication in those relationships. And you know, we just talked about what was going on. We were talking more strategic business relationships, all that kind of thing. It just really it just made everything work so much better. Again, just getting that base data correct, as best as you can through both companies, just starting at that point is a huge benefit. It’s difficult to do. Yeah, and I’ll just want to kind of piggyback as you know, coming from Source Day. I would say it’s really kind of our secret sauce, you’ll call it, is we’re not just a software but it comes along with service as well. And that is not just customer success to help Ryan and his team learn a new technology, right, get over some of that change tolerance that folks might have, but it’s also supplier success team. So we have an entire team here at Source Day that works with your suppliers to onboard, train them, support them, you know, we’re their lifeline for all support. It’s not on your IT team, it’s not on Epicor, it’s not on the channel partner, right? That’s a Source Day responsibility and that’s really why the solution is successful and a big reason why Epicor said, yep, we need to now partner with Source Day after seeing our success with clients like Ag Leader for so long is the supplier engagement side. So it is really kind of the secret sauce of success that everyone gets. Of course, Dan. Just to to on that a little bit too, you know, I think one of my big anxieties of, you know, the software really was how do we teach all our suppliers to do this when when we’re just learning too, right? And you almost need a supplier to practice with to go back and forth and, you know, being the engineer, the conservative minded person that I am, you know, it’s like, okay, well, let’s deploy with one at a time. And the reality is that would have taken years, you know, to slowly move through that. And, you know, having the Epic or Source Day team there to, be the trainers of your suppliers, it helped us get going so much faster. I mean, we would take bunches of tens of suppliers at a time, and deploy them and hey, how did this go? Wow, that went better than I thought it was going to. And yeah, sure, there’s a few things to, oh yeah, you need to do this, you need to do that, but if you’re comparing other pieces of software to Sourcetay, do not undervalue, their implementation team. It is incredibly powerful in you deploying it and getting it going quickly. Yeah, it’s a real accelerator in time to value. We were talking here about suppliers and external stakeholders, but internal change management is challenging too, right? I mean, especially for procurement teams juggling all the different balls in the air, the complexity of supplier collaboration. How did you find your buying team embracing Source Day? Yeah, you know, a lot of people that are in the buying field, you know, aren’t big risk takers. You know, they don’t necessarily take it. There’s there’s always all the exceptions, but, a lot of times, you know, they wanted their job to be easier, and they wanted to do it better, and before we implemented, we were in a state where we we just didn’t have bandwidth to confirm POs. We we just didn’t know. Therefore, MRP didn’t work. I feel like I’m beating a drum here, but it’s so critical. So one of the things that I did, was I I really I did it naturally before I even learned about SourceSafe, but I’m like, man, there’s got to be a better way to do this. Like, who makes something that fixes this problem of constant email communication going back and forth, getting confused, somebody typed in a PO wrong on their side, our side, you know, of course we made mistakes too. And then once mistakes start happening, it just creates a mess. So I was continually planning on my team like, hey, there has to be a better way and I’m gonna start looking for something. And so it was kind of one of those things where they convinced they had a problem they needed to be solved, you know, when we looked at source day. Again, they were a little skeptical. Hey, how would this work? What would relationship look like? Are they still gonna expedite parts to us like they do now when we’re going through this other platform? But the reality was, you know, literally one month after, we were live and kinda the wheels were turning and we were doing it, I’m like, hey, guys. You know, if this isn’t working, like, we we can turn it off. Like, we can be done. And I kind of planted that ahead of time, you know, a little manipulation going on, but they’re like, no, no, no. No, don’t take away. It away because it helps so much because you have answers. You know, when people ask you questions, when you’re trying to help out your teammates, you have answers. You know what’s going on, and that’s just it’s super powerful to be able to lead your team through a change like that and to have something that works that well. It was was a fun time to see because, know, we all have these little, you know, gremlins on our our shoulders saying, oh, this isn’t going to quite work. It’s not going to be as good as you thought. And this one really was. It was very good. On that topic, Ryan, if you don’t mind just ten seconds or less, quick question. My experience working with other Epicor customers, you hit on something there that I want to kind of dive into a little bit. And that is the relationship that your buyers have with the suppliers, right? And moving to a more automated process and the concern that maybe the relationships might be negatively impacted by that, and in my experience working with other customers, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well, the fact that they spend less time working on the email corrections and follow ups, they have more time to spend on building those relationships and being more strategic in that relationship experience. So what have you experienced? What has your team experienced along those lines? Yeah, I don’t know if I can answer it in ten seconds, but I’ll do my best, Jim. No, I think the reality is the so much of the confusion crossed wires, you know, communicating back and forth, you spent so much time untying those, you know, and getting everything straight that you actually had time to be proactive and talk about, what’s coming up next. What are we doing later? The strategic part of it, you know, is huge. You know, we’re doing a much better job of sharing forecasts with suppliers now, talking about that ahead of time. They’re prepared, we’re prepared, they’re able to pull in easier because they have all their materials and or labor. And the truth is there’s more time for a little chitchat too to build those relationships and talk about gardening, talking about the bears, you choose what you want it to be and what your relationship is, but those things are key. And I think one of the really important things is just remembering that real people are on the other side just trying to do a good job. And this is a tool that helps them. So excellent. Thank you. Ryan, thanks so much for sharing a lot of your insight there. Great to hear from a person who’s been through the challenges on the front end, implemented a solution, and now coming out at the back end real success stories to tell about it. So thank you for sharing all Yeah, absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Hopefully, helps somebody else. Great. Well, know, you know, we’ve had a bunch of great questions, so keep, putting them in there. Someone did ask where we get to see some of the products. So, you know, Jim Fry, if you want to launch that up and show some folks a little bit of the UI and then obviously we can show everyone more, but we’ll give everyone a little taste here by Mr. Fry. Excellent. Thank you, Colby. So now that you’ve kind of heard some of the supply chain collaboration concerns and why optimization of that supply chain matters, let’s bring it to life now and kind of show some of the blocking and tackling that typically transpires between buyers and suppliers. So with that in mind, I’ve got Epicor Kinetic open, I’ve got multiple widgets for supply chain management turned on. Obviously all of the performance indicators that you’re seeing here are available to Epicor customers through either dashboards, BAQs or grow business intelligence. In addition to that, there are a host of metrics that are available inside of the source data collaboration platform. So more on that as we dig deeper. One of the things I wanted to make sure that we spent just a couple of moments on in terms of setting expectations, and this is really dovetailing on one of the questions that Ryan addressed earlier, and that is the supplier adoption, right? Typically, the supplier collaboration topic in general succeeds or fails for one primary reason, and it is supplier adoption. And so it only works if the communication string is easy and consistent and fluid between buyers and suppliers. And so the illustration that I’m sharing with you here is intended just to give you a sense that there are multiple ways in which a supplier can communicate with buyers on a day to day basis. And so you’ll notice here the email based workflow platform access is the bidirectional integration inside of the platform, and then of course, you have the ability to leverage some of the API and EDI connections for more of those higher volume type relationships that you might have with your suppliers. These are not mutually exclusive, by the way. So the relationship that you have with your suppliers could be a combination of these tools. And so in terms of adoption, what I’ve seen a lot of suppliers encounter or a lot of our EpiCore customers encounter with suppliers is that we start typical in a process of call walk run similar to the EpiCore implementation process where we start with the email and kind of progress from there. And so with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how all of this materializes so that you can see the collaboration and ultimately the benefit in the optimization between buyers and suppliers. So first and foremost, you’ll notice that if I’m interested, I can jump right into PO suggestions. This is where most of our demand is going to flow, here or the buyer’s workbench of course. I’ve filtered this particular suggestion screen for a specific job order just to focus on a very specific scenario here where we may have demand flowing from jobs forecast or from requisitions, from RFQ conversions to purchase orders, all roads lead to the PO suggestion queue and or the buyer’s workbench. From here, the buyer has the ability to create their purchase orders. This is nothing new for Epicor customers. You process your suggestion that generates a purchase order in the background and the supplier receives that via and let’s go ahead and take a close look at this one via email, right? You’re using most likely you’re using advanced print routing today to send those purchase orders directly to your suppliers. What I’m going to share with you here is that when we create a purchase order in Epicor, you have the ability to go through an approval process of course, you have the ability to update your due dates and all of the things that are typical in the blocking and tackling of creating purchase orders. And the element that I wanted to share with you, I think the difference that from a takeaway perspective is that once you approve that purchase order and that gets sent off to your supplier for fulfillment, the confirmation or acknowledgment of that purchase order is done manually and it’s typically done through picking up the phone or shooting an email and we’ve already talked about the constant string of communications that go back and forth. So instead of having to do that, once the purchase order is created, the supplier would receive that purchase order via email. And you’ll notice in this particular case, I’m now putting on my supplier hat and there’s a few different directions that we can take this conversation, but just to kind of acclimate you with where we are, we may as a supplier, and in this case I have the ability to look at all of the lower level details for each one of these purchase orders that just got received. I can open up a particular purchase order and I can review the details accordingly. So when I talked about the email platform as one value stream that can be leveraged by a supplier, this is the scenario I’m referring to. I can easily just respond to this email to my customer and you’ll notice the related purchase order four thousand six hundred and ninety five line one release one, the product that’s being supplied due dates, etcetera. I can also hit the review and accept button, which now launches me into the supplier platform and I have the ability to look at this purchase order in more detail. So now I can see the history of the PO over time. I can dig into the items that are present on this purchase order and then I can also suggest or propose changes to due dates, quantities, and cost if I’m unable to support this request. So for example, in the interest of time, let’s just go ahead and do a couple of quick changes here. We’ll push this one out. Let’s say this won’t be available till April tenth. Cost is going to be changed from fifty dollars to fifty five dollars and the reason we’re going to have plant shutdowns or something along those lines, blah, blah, blah. So now you’ll notice I’m going to go ahead and hit the submit button here which is going to respond to my buyer that requested that we fulfill this purchase order. Before I hit that button though, notice that I also have the ability to propose split lines. So it’s quite common for suppliers to say, well I don’t have all fifty on this day for example, or twenty in this case, but I can give you ten tomorrow and the balance next Tuesday. So I can recommend split lines which the buyer would then be able to review accept or reject. So in this case, I’m gonna go ahead and submit that. And now that response is sent back to the buyer. So far what you’ve seen is the ability to receive an email as a supplier. I can certainly reply to that email or more advantageously I can drill into that purchase order through the platform and respond in that fashion. If we elevate this discussion again for just a moment, let’s go back into Epicor. And now that I’ve got that purchase order that’s been accepted, I’m going to do one of two things. Certainly I can go look at the status of that purchase order and I’ll do that for you in a moment, but I’m also going to drill into the buyer view for just a moment here. So what the buyer might do in addition to leveraging their let’s go and change this. Essentially I’m changing hats now and I’m putting on my buyer hat and I want to be able to see all of my purchase orders to all suppliers. So as a buyer, this is my dashboard. This extends, I think I saw a related question in the chat in terms of what a buyer might see and how they might relate to different suppliers. This is the view that extends the embedded Epicor capabilities to see across all of those different suppliers and respond based upon action messages, right? So we’re segregating our response. So in this case you’ll notice that I’ve got from this buyer’s perspective I can look at supplier proposed changes, I can look at all risks, and the risks give me the opportunity to drill in using some source day artificial intelligence, right? And so if I see a risk related to lead time, I’ll make this very brief and I’m running out of time here, but essentially you’ll notice that the purchase order is at risk of being delayed due to a high risk lead time. So in this case, the requirement is two eleven, our history and artificial intelligence suggests that the lead time is going to fall somewhere between two seven and two twenty five. I can message the supplier or I can view the lead times applicable to this particular part. So we’ll put a pin in that and we can jump back into that at a later time. In this case, let’s look at the supplier proposed changes. So now you’ll notice that the purchase order that was confirmed by the supplier requesting a proposed change is available here. So if I click on the proposed change, I can see that they’re requesting a change to the price going from fifty to fifty five and the delivery two twenty five to four ten. In the interest of time, I’m just going to go ahead and accept propose a change to that. This gives me further visibility as a buyer in terms of what the supplier is looking to do here in response to my purchase order demand. And now I get messages which confirm that. Now that’s being written back to the supplier record and it’s falling off our list here. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we’ll go ahead and refresh this purchase order. All of those changes that have occurred, and let’s go back up here, look at PO four thousand six hundred and ninety five which is the one that just came across, you’ll notice that I have confirmation of that purchase order and if I drill into the line release detail, my new promise dates are identified here associated with that and the line itself contains the new unit price. So bi directional communication in just a few seconds, we’re able to request the purchase order, send it to the supplier, supplier responded with alternative or proposed suggestions to which the buyer can confirm. All of that data is being updated in the corresponding purchase order and now I’m moving on to my next task which might be more strategic in nature. And so with that, I know I just wanted to spend three or four minutes to highlight the user interface, give you an idea of what that might look like inside of Source Day and how Epicor and Source Day works in tandem to optimize that supply chain, and at this time I’ll pass things back to the team for any remaining Q and A. Yeah, thank you Jim and that was great. Now for everyone on, really meant to be a high level overview. There’s a lot of good questions in here about functionality, highly recommend, you know, let’s connect, let’s learn a little bit about you know, your current processes, we can dive deep into functionality. We’ve been an organization for ten years, very, very deep workflows, certainly too much for a webinar. So glad you’re able to get a little bit of your eyes on the solution and now we will open it up for audience Q and A. We have a bunch, we only have eight minutes left so we’re gonna answer some. I will personally make sure anyone who does not have their questions answered directly will be in touch with answers. So John, if you want to queue up I think I can consolidate a few of these questions into sort of one overarching question and that is, can you talk a little bit about how long Source Day has been working with EpiCore customers? I know that the partner relationship is pretty new, but I know that prior to that being an official partnership, you guys had, sold and worked with Epicor customers using Source Day. What versions are supported? And can you talk a little bit about after the purchase, when the implementation, who is involved between Epicor and Source Day and kind of talk about what that looks like a little bit. Great questions. I think I can hit all of that. So we’re about a ten year old company. We’ve been supporting Epicor clients for seven years. We’ve done about one hundred implementations. So yes, as John said, new partnership but tons of experience supporting Epicor clients. Our integration has been validated right by clients over and over and over and it’s now even extra stamp of approval by Epicor themselves. As far as versions go, we do support both cloud and on prem and we support on prem versions back to all the versions of nine. If you’re older than nine, let’s get you updated. But yeah, we support both cloud and on prem. Like I mentioned at the beginning with the partnership, you would if you choose to partner with Sourcetay, right, you purchase from your Epicor account manager or channel partner. SourceDay does the implementation with you, right? We are experts in the implementation. We’ve done it over and over and over. So we’re your partner in implementation and the ongoing support. That’s Awesome. You remembered every leg of that multi tiered question there. The next question is a customer or one of our audience members said, I’m in a different industry than ag leader. Do you have any case studies for other industries or maybe a broader question of what all industries does the SOAR stay work with and are there some wheelhouse industries? Yeah, great question. I mean, at the end of the day, we support all discrete manufacturers is why Epicor partnered with us is a big focus on that discrete manufacturing. But absolutely, if you go to our website, we have a bunch of case studies on there that you can read and check out from all different industries. But our focus is, you know, if you are a discrete manufacturer regardless of specific industry, absolutely and we have happy referenceable clients just like Ag Leader in those different areas. So happy to chat with you more about that. Awesome. Another question, this one’s directed to Ryan and or Jim. Can you tell us in detail what Epicor was lacking in regards to supply chain processes where SourceDate provided improved visibility? So a question about sort of what were the gaps in the sort of the out of the box epicure that Sourcetay provided, a solution to interesting. Yeah, I’ll take it and then you can you can enhance. So the one of the key things that I said very quickly earlier was we did not have supplier confirmations. So we would send a PO, and it would go to our supplier and they might send us an email back saying, hey, this is confirmed. We can make that date. But we didn’t put it in Epicor and we didn’t have any tracking on what that was. The nature of three, four years ago was the fact that I would bet you probably seventy percent of our POs were late. It was just a matter of how late and oftentimes we had POs stacked on each other. So the confusion was immense as far as when it was coming. We literally didn’t know. We would have to pick up the phone and the reality is when you have fifty of those conversations a day, your memory starts to lag. You need to get it into a database because you just can’t remember, what the last conversation was and it takes too much to look at your handwritten notes. So I think that’s the main data that we get, you know, from that that we were lacking before. And I would just add to that very briefly, having only three or four minutes to present this solution, I tried to focus on where I saw the biggest value for the procurement practitioner, right? Obviously the company benefits notwithstanding and they are significant. And we can certainly get into more detail on that, some of the metrics and Ryan made note of a couple of those, On time delivery performance, reducing inventory, etcetera. But you watch me walk through that presentation. Once the purchase order was created without source day, you’re just waiting now for that purchase order response to come back. And so I guess my supply chain dad joke question related to that is why do buyers love real time supplier collaboration? The answer to that is because sending an email to a supplier that says just checking on this is not a strategy. I’m glad we got a dad joke, Jim. Appreciate it. I appreciate that. So I think part of what Ryan said too is be sure to if you have questions about SOURCEDay and how it might fit in, reach out to your cam. We can set up a conversation and no strings attached conversation about source day with Colby or someone else from source day. And if it seems like a good fit, we can move on to a demo and really show you all of it right from soup to nuts. I think the last question of the webinar then as we’re rolling up on about one minute left for Ryan, knowing what you know now, what is one piece of advice that you’d give someone implementing or thinking about implementing Source Day? Yeah, I think the biggest answer that comes to me is you can do this. Sometimes deploying things like this is hard. And you know, the reality is with with the SourceDay team, you know, you have to put in your time, you got to do the work, but they know how to make it happen and know what to do, and know how to help. They’ve even helped me. How do you approach some of your suppliers that are gonna be difficult? All those different things like it, their advice worked really well, and, I highly recommend, you know, you take a look if you have some of these problems, no question, SourceDay is a good solution, and you can implement these new processes. It’s not as hard or as scary as what I saw when I was looking at SourceDay, that’s for sure. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Ryan, we really appreciate you. Here’s my contact information, Jim Fry, John Kill right there with Epicor. Reach out if you have questions. I know there’s some more Q and A. I want to be respectful of everyone’s day. We are at the hour mark. So we will be in touch answering more questions in more detail. Thank you all for your time. I know it’s an investment. Hope you found it beneficial. Ryan, appreciate you. Jim, great chatting with you, John. Thank you and everyone have a great rest of your day, great rest of your week. Take care. Take care, everyone. Thank you. Bye.
