Welcome to What the Duck?! A podcast with real experts talking about direct spend challenges and experiences. And now, here’s your host, Source Day’s very own manufacturing Maven, Sarah Scudder. Thank you for joining me for What the Duck?! Another Supply Chain Podcast, brought to you by Source Day. I’m your host, Sarah Scudder, and this is the podcast for people working in the direct materials part of the supply chain. I’m @SarahScudder on LinkedIn and @Sscudder on Twitter. If you are new to the show, make sure to follow this podcast so you don’t miss any of our direct materials supply chain content. Today, I’m going to be joined by Stephanie Schrader, and we’re going to discuss how to improve the data in your ERP. If you work for a manufacturer and are struggling with data integrity in your ERP, then this episode is for you. Steph runs the direct procurement department at a gaming company in Vegas and deals with all types of commodities. She’s also a woman of faith and a proud first-time Grandma of the cutest baby on the planet. She is absolutely adorable, has the cutest outfits, and I want to say matching bows almost every single day. So, it’s been very, very fun to follow your grandma adventures on social. So, welcome to the show, Steph. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here and always excited to to talk to you, just in general, about life as well as work things.

I want to go back in time, and let’s let’s talk about the very, very beginning of your career. So, sure, years ago when you were figuring out what you wanted to do for your career, why procurement, and how did you get your start in the industry? Okay, so like most of us, I think that you’ll hear when you ask that question to people in procurement or supply chain, they’ll say, “Well, this is never what I envisioned or where I started or where I wanted to be or thought I’d end up.” It’s the same with me. So, it’s the same story. I worked for a company, a Fortune 500 company, right out of college that was in a small town outside of Nashville. And it just so happened that along, I started in accounting and then moved on to customer service and did some management of their customer service team. At the same time, they knew that I was a little bit more outspoken and vocal, and they were starting a new company within the umbrella of another Illinois Tool Works or ITW company, basically. And it was called ITW Cargo Safe, brand new. We had no experience in this industry, but we had hired two people that did have experience, and they came over and they said, “Okay, we have to have a purchasing person.” And so, the general manager of the company looked at me and said, “You’re purchasing.” And I’m like, “I’m not purchasing, I’m customer service.” You know, I’m the sales customer service side. “No, you’re going to be purchasing.” Because the one thing that stood out to him is he said, “You may not know how to negotiate, but you don’t take no for an answer, and you’re not afraid to ask.” And I think any of us that are in procurement, sourcing, supply chain, when it comes to dealing with suppliers, the biggest failure, I think, is that we just don’t ask. “Oh, I can’t ask for that, that’s too much.” He knew that I would get on the phone with China, with Korea, with wherever I needed to be, you know, down the street in Tennessee, and say, “Oh, that’s too much, you know, we can’t pay that. Come on, what can we do?” So, you win, and we went. So, I ended up in purchasing, greatest thing that ever happened to me in my career. It started very small, and then it grew bigger and bigger, and it became warehouse management, and it became planning and forecasting side of it. But I loved the actual procurement part and the sourcing part. And so, that’s really where, over the years of my career, I decided to focus, and that’s what I would say is my expertise. I can do all the rest, I can do the SNOP, I can do the short-term planning, you know, I can do the logistics and international side, domestic side. It’s not my love. My love is the actual buying, setting up the processes, developing supplier relationships, negotiation. And I’ve just never looked back. It’s a great career. So, you stayed at this company for a little over 11 years, which is in my world a very, very long time. Why did you stay so long?

A couple reasons, so one, I was new in my career to begin with. And back in, so when I graduated from school, times have changed since, you know. Now, if we flash forward to where my kids will keep a job for a couple years, and then they, we jump, and we move, and we shift, and what’s better, and what’s gonna get me to where I want to go? Really, if you think about, you know, 15-20 years ago, it was more, “Where can I go and where can I be of value and where can I learn?” And I was all about that sponge mentality of soak it up, learn as much as I can, as much as I can. I got lucky that in a small rural town outside of Nashville, there was a Fortune 500 division company there out of Chicago. So, I got the, with the procurement side came the trips to Chicago to corporate, the China, the all-over-the-world trips to be able to negotiate and to see how things were done in mainland China, you know, in different places like that. So, it ended up that it took me years, through the accounting, to the customer service, and then the longest part was in the procurement and supply chain arena with this company, with the ITW company. And it was a growth that I knew, being from a smaller town, having young children at the time, it was a good fit. Everything worked: the money, the opportunity, the learning, the people I was with. It was just the best way that I can think of that anybody could start their career, right straight out of college. So, I just stayed. I loved it. And, in all honesty, they’re not there anymore. They’ve kind of moved into different segments. But, in all honesty, I probably would have stayed longer had I not had another opportunity through someone that left this company that said, “I’m taking you with me” kind of thing. I probably would have stayed even longer. So, the company you left to go to was Mapa Professional, and what was the, what would you say is the most important lesson you learned there?

More so, that company, I didn’t stay as long there because, again, I was kind of recruited to another company. But I loved my time there, and actually, it was a sponge company, so I continued my sponge learning. But they were a cleaning retail cleaning products, and they were headquartered in Paris. And it was kind of unique because, again, I went this major corp global corporate route. My boss was Parisian, and it just was a fit where I could expand my growing more into the certification, the ISO certifications, and things of a facility that we didn’t do where I had come from. But one of the biggest lessons that I learned is the cultural differences and how to strategically work with one another. My whole management team was either German or French, and then I was working with a group in the United States. But the trips with them, the traveling with them, Europeans do business a little bit differently than we do. And it was so great because they are relaxed, to some extent, but when they work, they work hard. You know, we always hear that they play hard, they work hard. They taught me how basically to go about strategically setting up processes. Where I came from, we had just tribal knowledge. You know, you just… I was there so long, so you just did things the best way. If it worked, you just kept doing it. They taught me that you write it down. There are things called SOPs, and they matter, and it’s important, and it helps others to learn and to develop. They also also taught me just the basics, and I think a lot of our jobs these days is just being able to communicate with each other, to get what we want, you know, with our internal stakeholders, external stakeholders. And it was so good to deal with the French company on a different cultural level, see how they work, learn from things that they do that we don’t do, and I picked up on typical things that I would say. They did contracts in a different way. They did MSAs instead of just contracts. They did… They did a whole lot that I had never heard of or wasn’t accustomed to. And so, within those short years that I was there, I just basically got engulfed by a real different cultural experience. And that’s helped me to go to the next company and where I am today. So, your next pivot was to a company called McNeil Pride, and you were responsible for managing the ERP implementation for not one, but two acquisitions.

Yes, so what did you learn from this? Because I think almost everyone who listens to this show works in direct materials procurement and manufacturing, and in some way interacts with their ERP, and has probably lived through some sort of ERP implementation or upgrade, and it can be an absolute nightmare and train wreck and very, very stressful. Yes, yeah, so everything you just said is a hundred percent spot on. We’ve been on some, and I think I’ve actually been on some talks with you before where we’ve talked about things that can go wrong and things that can go right. ERP is critical to any business, especially on this side that we are on. I mean, you have to have something that, especially with a larger company, that helps you plan and helps you plan a little bit more accurately and ties in all the pieces from the financial to the planning team to the sourcing team, possibly to the procurement team, customer orders that are coming in, you know, everything just gets molded together when you try to do this with a new system or you move from one system. In our case, we had a system, an Infor product system. We were then moving over to Netsuite, to Netsuite, and trying to decide between do use both. That was done at a higher level, okay, higher than myself. It was done at the VP and CEO level. What I would say is you need to engage the stakeholders, people like me and actually the people that were under me that worked for me. They need to be a part of that decision because they’re doing the work every day. So, what happens is we decided that we were going to scrap Netsuite and stay within Infor, and we were going to roll that out across the company that we had acquired. In doing that without talking to everyone and seeing how little things would affect them, it was extremely painful. It took a long time, and in the end, they actually did not move forward with that. They went back to Netsuite. It’s one of those things that it’s worth it, it’s time-consuming, but I remember talking to a couple of people in the ERP industry and having them say, “Steph, you all are trying to do something in six months that Nike failed at in years, that Coca-Cola failed at.” And there’s books written on this. You know, it is important to do it slowly, do it right, and engage the correct people.

So, like I said, in the end, they realized some of the issues and said, “Okay, stop, time out. Let’s just go back to the way we had it.” And ultimately, I think that’s working for them, and they’ve grown into acquiring many other properties and companies, and they’re doing wonderfully. So, I’m assuming it’s working. You know, what they’ve done is working for them. But they did, that’s one thing you have to know, we all have to know personally, professionally, I’ve made a mistake. This isn’t going to work like I thought. Instead of just charging ahead and forcing it on everyone, stop, back up, analyze it, you know, refocus, shift, and say, “No, this isn’t going to work for us,” and then tackle it a different way. And that’s what they’ve done. So, next, you went to a company called Pride Sports, and where they’re just about 15 years. I know them not only because you work there, but I’m based in Austin now, and Yeti, it was one of their big competitors. Yes, and Yeti is based in Austin and has a very, very large presence here in Texas. Yes, they do, they do. So, that was technically, so the MC Pride group engulfed that part of my career too. So, what I just spoke to was really talking about the company that was a competitor that we purchased, where we came in and said, “Hey, we’re going to switch over to the system we’re on.” And in the end, it didn’t work. It was a company like Yeti, a company like Orca coolers. They’re e-commerce based. We were using a system that was manufacturing based because we were a manufacturing company making golf tees and different products for the sports and outdoor recreation field. So, when we acquired, it made sense that, “Hey, just shift this little business that we’ve purchased onto what we’re doing.” And in the end, the software, the platform, ERP they were already using was more e-commerce based and worked better for them than what our product was. Okay, so that’s when they decided, scrap it and go back. But part of the same organization and part of the same time frame of my career.

So, one of the things that really stands out to me about you is I feel like you are a big advocate for supplier collaboration, more than most people I know. I feel it’s kind of a core to who you are as a supply chain professional. So, what did you do during your time at Pride Sports to foster relationships with your suppliers and then build out kind of a program or strategy company-wide? Because it is not easy to do. No, it’s not easy to do. And like I said, early in my career, I realized how much I… I started on the sales customer service side, so I loved customers, and I knew the old adage, the customer is always right. We take care of the customer. As we moved into procurement early in my career, and then as I’ve grown, one of the things that was put in place by a general manager that I had at ITW was, “Let’s start a three-deep process.” And what does 3D mean? We need to have three contacts, whether it’s supplier, customer, whatever GM, you know, it doesn’t matter, at the company that we are working with. You always need three contacts. So, I made that kind of one of my goals to always know, “Okay, so I’m dealing with you, the supplier, but if you leave that company, I’m stuck. I’m out of… I’ve got the relationship with you.” So, I always try to get to other people there, include them, so that I did have other contacts that felt comfortable with me. So, that was one of the strategies that I’ve always used, that it’s not just you and me, because if it is, if I leave, you’re in trouble. If you leave, then I’m in trouble. So, the 3D concept, as I call it, I think works well. I like people. There are many that you’ll hear old-fashioned stereotypical purchasing, you know, we’re just hard, and it’s just, “Give it to me. I’m the buyer, and I deserve this, and you have to do this for me.” It isn’t that way anymore. As a matter of fact, with COVID, it’s kind of the other way. Please, you know, please. I am needing this. I’m purchasing. Yes, I have the money. I control the money, but please, will you help me? It’s become more clear with COVID that if you don’t have good relationships with your suppliers, everything, everything can fall apart. You don’t get first priority. They don’t take your calls. And when it comes to a company like where I am now, in the gaming industry.

I mean, think about it. Every single thing we touch in the gaming industry lights up. If it lights up, it has a chip in it. I mean, what was the talk for two years? It was, “There’s no chips. We can’t find chips. Chips that are two cents are two hundred dollars a piece.” Now, we’re still having chip issues today. Given, there’s still chip issues today, China challenges, and that’s scary. So, that could be a whole another podcast on what are you doing with your supply chain to take into consideration that they’re almost all made in Taiwan, and that’s where, you know, but there’s other pieces to that too. The Netherlands with one part of the boards, and it can get so big and so interesting. But as far as the suppliers go, you gotta like people. I like people. You’ve got to want to. And one of my favorite books is called “Vested” by Kate, and I’m going to pronounce her name wrong, this tacky, I believe. Phenomenal. It is this win-win relationship that we talk about, but it really, it really works. So, it isn’t just, “Hey, you want me on your podcast, and I want to be on your podcast.” It’s really, “Steph, look, this helps me if you do this for me.” And I say, “Well, you know what? This is great because for me, I get a message out about empowering women in supply chain or really understanding that your suppliers make the difference. And when you make that mind shift that it’s not about me, it’s really about them and what I can do for them, and then they come to the table with, “Oh, by the way, did you think about this? No, we never thought about that kind of monitor. Really? Can it bend? Can you do…” All of a sudden, that collaboration, it’s not just about, “Hey, you have X monitor that I need to buy for $500. Can you give it to me for $450?” It isn’t that surface. It’s, “I like you. I like what you’re doing. I’ve understood your company. I’ve come to visit you. You’ve come to visit us. We’re having regular meetings. I understand what our goals are.” And they then come to you and say, “I got a good deal for you” or “Did you think about this new product? Can I talk to your engineers?” Absolutely. So, it’s that way with everything, though, in life. You know, it’s the same thing. If you don’t put the effort in, you’re not going to get the effort out. And I just think that it’s so underrated, the supplier collaboration and relationship management piece. Very underrated, and it’s extremely important. So, you mentioned Kate V. I’ve actually seen her speak a couple of times at conferences, and very, very progressive and innovative about the win-win and the weaver’s eye and stop hiding behind a contract, start developing really quickly. So, definitely recommending checking out. Yeah, she’s great. I don’t actually know how to pronounce her last name either. We’ll make sure we drop that in the show notes. So, it’s perfect. Check that out. Yeah, she’s fabulous. So, Steph, other than supplier collaboration, which again is really kind of what I how I would describe who you are in your career, the topic of our conversation today is around improving ERP data, which has been something that has been a big focus for you throughout your entire career. Let’s face it, ERP data is bad. It’s hard to clean it up. And then if you are able to clean it up, it’s very, very challenging to maintain and keep that data clean ongoing. So, we’ll talk about Pride Sports, and then I want to also talk about ERP data in your current role. But at Pride Sports, what was your biggest data challenge from an ERP perspective? It was, it was more so the maintenance. You know, it comes down to the maintaining. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to get it correct to go in, but it was about having the resources to maintain it all the time. And in the end, if you don’t maintain the data, obviously, it just, like anything else, you know, it becomes dirty again, and then you’re starting all over. So, for us there, it came down to more resources to maintain. We understood the process to get it in. Nobody was there to totally keep an eye on it and keep it cleaned up all the time.

Is there anything that you did, given you had very limited resources and needed more to be able to maintain? Is there anything that you did at Pride Sports that worked in helping keep that data clean? We put some processes in place that actually helped us more on the front end than the end part, but yeah, we did put a few processes in place, and we did have some reports that were automated, that were created intentionally to show, “Have we typed in a company name with a capital versus not a capital?” That type of thing. In the end, before I left there, I actually hired someone that you know as well, Susan Walsh, the classification guru. But we did, we went outside, you know, we went outside for different things. So, in this case, we went outside for somebody to help, and we were able to run all of our data and got with it and got all of our data, and she went through and scrubbed it for us and gave us some simple solutions on how to keep it updated and what things we could put in the system that would prevent us from doing a supplier with a capital “C” versus a lowercase “C”. That was great, and we did those types of just, I’d call them small wins, cherry-picking, and they did help. But if you’re not still reviewing it all the time, this was a one-time with her. So then, if you don’t have the resources, then you get busy like we all do, and you come back and you look at the automated report and think, “Well, I’ll get to it next week.” By the time you have time to get to it, you know, we’re in trouble. Yeah. So, you have pivoted now into the gaming industry. You moved to Vegas a little over two years ago, and you are running a direct materials team there. Yeah. And when you and I were prepping for the call, you said the biggest issue you are dealing with right now is data integrity in your ERP, again, kind of a theme that’s followed you throughout your career.

So, yes, why is this such a big issue for you and your team? So, I would tell you that anybody that is in procurement, in sourcing, in the planning side, the demand planning, they’re going to tell you the same thing. Everybody is going to… Anybody that uses an ERP system, few exceptions, they’re going to tell you that it’s extremely difficult to keep the data clean all the time. It just is. There’s no foolproof method to do this. So, I… The company I work for is great. It’s a lot more robust system that we’re using. There’s so much intricate detail that goes into it that it really, really becomes challenging. Because not only can you put a supplier name in here, but you can embed it here and here. So, when it comes out on your report and you see it with a capital and a not capital, who did it? Where did it start from? Was it here, here, or here? Instead of just going one place and saying, “Okay, all of these are in one little place, go in and tweak it.” It’s not the same.

I’m in a different ball game. I just went to the big leagues. And so, it isn’t just our company. I just want to make sure that I’m clear. It isn’t just our company. Everybody’s dealing with this same thing. And whenever I get on a talk like this, it’s always, “You too? Yeah, you too.” So, there’s several things that we’re dealing with and trying to combat right now. One of them is COVID, and we all had run through a two-year period where you lost employees, you lost processes. You didn’t use a system as much. You kind of worked around to do some things outside of the system, or you changed your whole business structure to deal with, think chip allocation, you know, spot buys here that maybe we didn’t put in the system. And so now the system doesn’t have all of the information even that’s needed. So, I think many of us are dealing with those cleanup challenges that wouldn’t have necessarily been there if we hadn’t gone through what we did. But we’re going through the typical thing that has followed me and it follows almost all of us in this field. It is getting the data right to begin with and then maintaining it. In my case, I’m dealing on a much larger scale, and there are many larger departments. So, it is collaborating, pulling the right people together with it to be able to say, “Okay, is the best solution on, let’s just pick something like payment terms, we can have payment terms here, say net 60, and for the same supplier here, say net 90. How do we match that? Do we put it in one or the other? What process will we put in place that’s going to foolproof that, that now we’re not putting it in two places, we’re putting it in one place, and here’s the primary person that’s going to do it?” Something else that we’re looking at that I recommend for any company, if you have the money to do this, the resources, is that we are looking at an actual department. And department can be one or two people. Okay, I don’t mean hiring 50 people, but, you know, looking at designating a couple of primary people to be the ones where we centralize and funnel a lot of the information and data flow through. So, if it’s a new part setup, if it’s a supplier setup, you know that there are some checks and balances put in place. So, we’ve made great strides since I’ve been there, and other people already starting to do some of this prior to me, and I just come in because I love it and just want to jump right in and help. But, yeah, we’re doing some great things, but it’s going to take some time. ERP cleanup doesn’t happen overnight. It takes buy-in from the top, which we have, and it takes a lot of work and a lot of hours. And generally speaking, Sarah, you need the people that are doing the work to do the cleanup. We can hire from a temp agency clerical people to come in and just keep punching things, but if they don’t understand where they’re putting it in and what effect that is going to have on the order entry team, we got a problem.

So, it’s a very, very delicate balance of how to do it, how to do it correctly, and then who’s going to keep it clean going forward. The first time somebody leaves and had the process in their head and the next person comes and doesn’t keep it clean, all of a sudden we’re over-ordering, we’re under-ordering, you know, we’re not meeting expedited rule that’s in the system. There are so many things that can happen. It’s critical. It’s probably up there with me with the supplier collaboration, is making sure that you can trust for business decisions what’s in your system. Nobody likes to go to their boss and say, “God, I’m sorry it took me a week to get you this report because I had to vet all the data.” You don’t want to be in that situation. So, it’s critical, and it’s critical for the people above me and the CEOs. They want to know what they’re looking at is correct. They don’t want you to come back after they’ve reported on something and say, “Oh wait a minute, hold on, we just found out that we left out this information because it was coded to a different warehouse.” That’s a job killer for some of us, so you don’t want to go there.

I hosted a panel last month, and I had four different types of people on talking about ERP data accuracy. Susan Walsh, who you mentioned, was one of the panelists. But one of the ladies who was on, named Julia, who’s a CIO, she said one of the things that she’s done at her company, which has probably had one of the biggest impacts on keeping the data clean in their system, is they’ve actually developed a form which everybody at the company has to fill out if you want anything added to the ERP, whether it’s an order, whether it’s a supplier, and that all the responses funneled to one person, and they are the owner, and they go through and review, edit, approve, tweak. And they said that has really helped clean up a lot of the challenges that they’ve had. Now, you have to have resources to have a person who’s owning that right company-wide, and you have to have buy-in from the executive team that says if you do not fill out this form, your order will not happen, and/or your supplier will not get set up. But I know that’s done wonders for them. Yeah, and that’s where we’re headed. And we talk every day about, “Hey, we really need a new part setup form.” So, we’re headed down the exact road that she’s already gone down, and it’s working for her. I believe it would work for us too, and we’ve done little baby steps towards that, but I believe that’s where we’re headed as well.

Now, one of the other things you mentioned to me when we were prepping for this about the bad data in your ERP is ordering excess inventory that you don’t need, ordering too much. Why is this happening, and what are you doing to resolve it? Because I think this is something that’s pretty common for manufacturers.

So, it’s unique to the company as far as the way that they plan and the way that they order. For us, there are several things that come into play, and it can rely on different departments too. So, the department that I run, the procurement department, I can tell you when I came back a year ago, we weren’t actioning the ERP exceptions as quickly as we needed to. So, if planning had put in a forecast and we’ve got our hard orders coming in (and I won’t get too technical and all that here), but if all your demand is coming in and you see it, and things have changed, your demand has, let’s say, dropped, and you’re getting actions that say move this out or cancel this, you have to really jump on those things quickly to be able to limit the inventory that is being built on a hard PO. You have to update your suppliers as well. We have an internal sheet that we send out, it’s kind of a consolidated MRP that we send out to our suppliers each week, so they can kind of follow with us. “Hey, yes, we do have these purchase orders down here on you; however, the system is saying we don’t need it this week, we need it this week,” or the opposite, “We don’t need it this week, we need it tomorrow.” So, they can kind of follow along with us, and that helps us somewhat on that.

Some of it is a forecast is just a forecast. So, when we go to sales and we get that number, and there’s no way to make that 100% accurate, you know, we can all try and it doesn’t work. So, we could be overdriving based on higher expectations that we hope. Maybe it’s a new platform where you’re going to really go heavy, and in our industry, maybe one platform does better than another unexpectedly. So, all of a sudden, you have PO coverage out there based on a forecast, based on expectations, and it’s fairly significant. And within a matter of a couple meetings, you know, six months later, it’s like, “Oh, let’s pull this down 20%, but this one’s going up instantly.” Then we have to go back on our side, talk to the supplier, and say, “Okay, wait, big changes. Now we have forecast meetings with suppliers, and we do all of the right things. But if you’ve had a PO on a supplier for six months, and now you think you’re going to be able to cancel it or reduce it, that becomes a challenge, and it could cause excess inventory.”

And we’ve gotten smart about things, maybe do not produce everything for us at once. Maybe hold parts and then produce, you know, closer to the time, so that you don’t have labor involved if you would have to cancel something. You just have the parts.

Maybe we could use the parts in something else, maybe we could sell them, help the supplier sell them, so we get very creative on the things that we do. But overall, there’s no way to prevent excess. It’s a matter of, in my mind, limiting the exposure. How do we get it down to where it’s really manageable? And it is difficult, and it takes all parties, all teams. It takes planning to put it in and be able to update their demand more quickly. It takes us actioning from procurement quickly. And then it takes us getting with our sourcing department to say, “Hey, guys, guess what? We’ve got to cancel something, and they already have some parts here. Can you help us negotiate how to handle this better?” So, full collaboration on trying to keep the inventory levels and very challenging in the industry that we’re in because everybody wants the latest, greatest. It isn’t a purse or a handbag that you’re going to carry for, you know, a year and be happy with it. It could be six months, and then, “Hey, what’s the new one? We want the best. We want the shiniest, the glitziest one in Vegas.” You know, we want all the cool bells and whistles. So, you can very quickly kind of hit a roadstop where you need to go with something different, and it does pose challenges. But we handle it. We handle it pretty well.

Well, thanks for discussing how to improve the data in your ERP with me today, Stephanie. Where would you like to send people to find you? I am at Stephanie Schrader on LinkedIn. That’d probably be the best place. If you missed anything, you can check out our show notes. You can find us by typing in “What the Duck?! Another Supply Chain Podcast” directly in Google. To have optimal search results, make sure to add “Another Supply Chain Podcast” at the end to ensure you don’t miss a single episode. Make sure to follow this podcast and subscribe to us on YouTube. I’m @SarahScudder on LinkedIn and @Sscudder on Twitter. This brings us to the end of another episode of What the Duck?! Another Supply Chain Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Scudder, and we’ll be back next week. Thank you.