Digitalization CollABorative April 2024 Session

IFS Digitalization CollABorative: Think Tank – Meet the Member with Lance Schultz of KLN Family Brands

Date of Meeting: 16 April 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time

Lance Schultz Presentation:  

Slide: Who is KLN Family Brands?

• About KLN Family Brands. We're based in Perham, Minnesota. We were founded in 1964. A family owned company and we really have kind of three unique business units. I'll talk about each one of them just for a couple minutes in not in too much detail, but we've got facilities that creates pet foods and then we've got some that do food for humans as well. We're on both sides of the aisle. A little bit from manufacturing perspective and we're really focused on our community. So, our ownership does a lot of different things with different companies, whether that's dogs that we put into hospitals, whether that's have a training facility located in a suburb of Minneapolis that does Soldier 6 training for veterans and people that are suffering from PTSD and different things. We spend a lot of time and effort giving back whether that's in our community, whether it's our hospital here, our school here, our Community Center, we're heavily involved in all of those sorts of things. But really, a family owned company that spends a lot of time giving back and that's a huge part of our mission as we move forward here and into the future.
• So we’re really broken into three business units. We've got Kenny’s, candies and confections, Tuffy’s pet foods. Those two facilities are located here in Perham, Minnesota, and then we have a facility in Delano, which is about 20 minutes out of Minneapolis where that was Green fielded a few years back, brand new facility that does both treats and it also has a cannery facility there.

Slide: Corporate Architecture

• Some of the brands that you may or may not be familiar with is Sweet Chaos, Wiley Wallaby, which is on the Kennedy side. That's a liquorice brand that is nationally distributed. Nutri Source, that's our super premium pet food. Finley's, etcetera. That that we produce from a branded perspective.

Slide: Business Snapshot

• Our business as a whole for 2023, we did just over 120 million in sales. Branded sales accounts for about 70% of our business. So, we're a mixture of branded, but then we also do Coleman manufacturing for other in private label for other companies that we can manufacture for. Our mission is it starts with our people. We employ just over 900 folks and it's a big mission of our ownership to make sure that we're heavily involved in making everyone's life a little bit better. So, we spend a lot of time with our people and making sure that we're doing the best for them along with what we do from a production perspective.

Slide: KLN IT

• Our IT department is broken into a couple different chunks. We have 9 folks on our team here. I'm the director. I've been IT Director for 15 years. On one side, we've got our infrastructure and hardware with Todd Ziemke our IT manager. That's our tech side where we've got all of our hardware support and level one and level 2 techs, and we've also got a system admin there on the hardware and server side. We've got our application side where we do development, Drew Johnson's our applications manager and then we've got an analyst that reports to him that's in house development. That's all of our IFS applications as far as customizations, custom events, fields, all those sorts of things fall under the business application side. We have web development for Greg Petitto and then we also have Ron Berns who is an EDI / ERP admin that does all of our permission sets and or all of our upgrades etcetera. So 9 folks on our team and we just added actually Colton who just started this week. We just had a recent addition there to help us out on the tech side a little bit.

Slide: Kenny’s Snapshot

• So, just talk about Kenny's a little bit here though to understand what they do. Our largest Brands, Wiley Wallaby has been growing very rapidly. You'll see in places like Target, Menards, different box retailers. It's now the number 2 liquorice brand, and convenience stores continues to grow up over 20% last year. I think this year running over 10% growth on the Wiley side. Our facility here is about 215,000 square feet. We have two production facilities. They're basically across the parking lot from one another. One does liquorice. We've got supplements in there. We do some panning and just some other gummy things that we'll do in that facility. And then our other manufacturing facility across the parking lot does popcorn and salty snacks. We also got a couple extruders in there where we do some crunchy curls, but a lot of different manufacturing processes and change that happen in those facilities every day. As we move to different products and are able to change capabilities, so a lot of flexibility and those two facilities we've got thirteen production lines and about 380 employees and those two plants.  We're also #48 on the America's top 60 candy companies and growing.

Slide: Core Competencies

• So just some of the competencies we do, liquorice twists, popcorn, drizzled popcorn. If you see things that have chocolate coating on them, we do different private label things, whether that's M&M's or Snickers, things like that, that will put into popcorn. We do some gummies and fruit snacks. We're really one of the recent ads as dietary supplements, so we'll be launching some Brands there that will be both human and pet. On the supplement side, that will be gummy type supplements that will have bottled and distributed right in the middle of new launches there. And then we do some other extruded stacks on the crunchy curls that I mentioned.

Slide: Tuffy’s Facility Snapshot

• Tuffy’s facility. We make about 190,000 tons of pet food. They're annually. We've got 4 Extrutech extrusion systems. Three of them are your standard extrude tech and then we have one that's a higher meat capability, that's your real high-end product. That's your $100 bag type pet food. That's 30 to 40% protein in meat inclusion in their so real high-end stuff on that 4th extruder. But we've got a lot of capability in that plant as well. We can do small and large bags, so a lot of flexibility, whether that's a 5 pound bag or a 30 pound bag, 50 pound bag etcetera. We've got a lot of automation in there too with our palletizers. So basically, the product comes off the pack line, rides on a conveyor and then no one touches it. It's all palletized, stretch wrap comes out the other end, so not a lot of human intervention, except for just the pack line setup in general, but a fairly automated process that our toughest facility. We've got 20 available proteins, so other it's kangaroo or bison. All the exotic things, duck, et cetera.

Slide: Core Competencies

• We're able to have that capability to produce that in our facility here, so we do dry dog kibble, dry cat by meat diets, which I talked about, and then a lot of alternative grains too.

Slide: Treats & Cannery Snapshot

• Our Tuffy’s treat facility in Cannery got a lot of different capability there. We've got two extruders there that do your higher moisture smaller run treats, and then we also have a three line pack facility there where we can do four cans. So, we make our can product there, both small for cat and larger for dog and our cannery, we've got some different capabilities there with ovens and kilns where we can cut things and make longer or shorter treats, whether they're crunchy or higher moisture facilities. And that's also a very automated and flexible facility, whether it's stand up or sealable pouches, bulk cans, different things we can do and capabilities we have there.

Slide: Core Competencies

• So talked about this semi moist and crunchy treats. We have the Pate, which is our canned items strips unique shapes and then we'll be working on supplemental chews here in the near future.

Slide: IFS History

• Just touch on her IFS history a little bit. We've launched in 2019. I was the project we moved over from a product from Epicor called M2K. That was going to be sunsetted in the next few years and we had an opportunity from a business perspective. We sold off a couple business units and our business was a little bit smaller at that time. So, we have the ability to launch and then take on the whole ERP process at a smaller scale. We knew we were going to grow from there, so it was the right time. With the sunsetted and the size of the company, it took us about a year from the start of the product project to get it up and running. We launched our first facility and then three months later we launched our Kenny’s facility and this was prior to our Tuffy’s facility being Tuffy’s treats facility being built. Then we went live. So, we're currently running Apps 10, update 18. We're about 490 users strong currently and with IFS we use the full suite of products. We do some unique things. We use MRP of course, we use demand planner heavily at our Tuffy’s facility. We're looking at expanding that now into some other areas. We use advanced Planning Board somewhat in our Tuffy’s facility. We use time keeping across all of our companies. We're in the process of launching maintenance, so it is stood up and running in most of our facilities, but it's not fully integrated yet. So, a lot of the inventory items and some of the automated work order stuff has not been included yet, but we're in the process of doing that migration. We'll be 100% on maintenance hopefully within six months here in all facilities.  We will do document management for all of our food safety documents are SOP etcetera. Those are all kept within IFS, and then we also use project, whether that's R&D projects or just overall capital projects that we're doing when we're expanding our facilities, that's all completed within the IFS application.

Slide: IFS Partners

• Some of the partners we have, several of them that we use heavily, Cedar Bay, which was recently acquired by Arcwide, we used their WMS application in all of our facilities. We use transaction builder, probably 99% of our transactions were built in transaction builder. They weren't off the shelf from Cedar Bay. Our group here has the capability with that tool to go in there and build that to our unique need and we do that frequently. So, a lot of different things there. We've recently expanded that into some of the maintenance things we're doing, but that's a big product for us and we use it heavily every day.
• Astra Canyon FastAP, that was launched about a year ago and that's been a good product for us. And we use that for all of our incoming AP and we'll be probably expanding our use of that product into other areas as we continue to learn and use it and see the benefit of it.
• And the Novacura, we use web portal, we use their expense app for all of our mobile expense tracking. And then we do some campaigns and deduction things on a one off basis that we've had them create for us to help our sales folks bring in different promotions that we do in account for those in a more automated process.
• We use Phocas for our BI tool and then Re-Quest is our Oracle management vendor.

Slide: Looking to the Future

• So, looking to the future or road map, currently we're in the process of upgrading to Oracle 19c and a little bit painful to be honest, but we're getting there. Our problem has really been around some of the coffee time. We were north of 40 hours to do the cutover on some of our test databases and we're just working through that now. We've got it trimmed down now, but it's really the first step in our move to cloud, so we've got to get Oracle instances updated and then we will start the IFS Cloud move project hopefully. That June, July timeframe, we've got a statement of work. We have a project team assigned to us and we're ready to go as soon as we get Oracle and a place where it's ready to go and the application can be built. So that's a big project for us and then you know this summer will be heavily involved in moving to cloud here and we expect that to take us anywhere from six months to a year. And our project plan will be really spending time at each individual business unit with experts helping us move over to the cloud screens and making sure we maximize use of the IFS software. It's been since 2019, since most of our folks have really had intensive training and they were just trying to survive the day, really honestly when we went live with IFS, so this will be another opportunity for us to make sure we're getting the most out of the IFS product and maximizing it, making sure we're all on the same page as far as the use of it, where the data is going, how it's being reviewed and used, and excited about that. So we really want to do that.
• The other thing we need to do is build training plans off that as we've had turnover and growth. We've struggled with some of the training and our intention is to really build out that training deck so that when we hire a new person, or someone moves into a new role, we can explain how we use IFS in the proper way to put all the information in the system. So that's the next thing on a road map.
• We're also writing the process of a CRM roll out. We chose Microsoft for that. We did look at the IFS product really for our perspective, the full integration with the Microsoft suite, we are a Microsoft Shop, so outlook teams etc. And we needed something that our Salesforce was going to be very easy for them to use. So, the Microsoft product with that full integration of their stack was a little easier to use than the IFS product. That's why we went down that route, but we will be tying information from IFS over to that CRM and from Phocas as well.
• We've got different paths, we're looking at using some APIs to pass information back and forth as we get that stood up and running here. We're also in the process of MES rollout at our facilities. Tuffy’s facility in Perham is probably about 90% done on the Ms side, we're starting it at Tuffy’s treats in Delano and then we'll move to Kenny's from there. But a lot of good capability will come out of that product where we're able to integrate with our maintenance stand up here. So, whether that's automated fault reporting, some of the run based PMS where we can feed that information from the MES directly into IFS to create action and be proactive about fixing our equipment and getting after downtime and limiting it and finding issues ahead of time. We're really excited about that and we're starting to pull some of that information back and forth.
• Another thing we're doing, I don't have the sheet here is we're doing automated clockings. So both the runtime of the equipment and the labor clockings, we're starting to automate through that MES product. So, before our operators would have to manually do that. Probably not the most accurate process in the world because hey, they got pulled away or they didn't start the machine when they needed to or start the clocking, so they needed to, or they didn't end it when they needed to do so. Our costing was not always the most accurate picture there. So now with this automation process in place, feel really good about that. You started it in 1 area. Tuffy’s and we're expanding it now into all of Tuffy’s and hope to have all of our shop orders automatically open and closed and clocked as a result of that. Some neat technology there.
• We're very interested in Falkonry.
• We've talked to them a little bit now that we've got all this data and there's a partnership with IFS established. We are interested in sending some of that information over to Falkonry to see where they can help us use AI to make our plans a little more efficiently. So excited about that and there's still some time there to get that full process integrated into the IFS stack. But we want to be in front of the line when we get there because we're excited about that.
• And then we've also looked at MSO a little bit. We're interested in finding more about that and as we get to cloud, starting to build that into our daily use and using the power of MSO to get us a little more accurate.
• We've talked about capacity requirements planning. That's another thing that our GM keep asking for is, hey, how much capacity do I have at my plans? Can the system tell me that we have some work to do to get our foundation set so that information is accurate in IFS? We've been working through that as well and we're hopeful that in the future we can use capacity requirements planning to help us there.
• And then we're also looking at expanding demand planner. We use it a lot at Tuffy’s in Perham. We don't use it at Kenny’s. We're working on that now. We're turning on some of the Ms level, one parts and some of the master scheduling capability and IFS on the Kenny’s side, running it in test environments, looking at our branded sales specifically to see where it applies. And then we're also going to do that in our Tuffy’s treat facility too. A lot of good things there and we're excited about being built into the application as well when we move to IFS Cloud.

Slide: Challenges

• Some of the challenges. AI, of course, which is I think on everyone's radar constantly. How do we use it? When do we use it? Where can it have its biggest impact? Where do we start with it? We use some of it today, but really there's so much of it in the market now and trying to cut through the noise to find where the best use and spend of our money is to put.
• To work for us from an IFS perspective, a daily thing is, we tried to use IFS first where maybe it doesn't fit that we do it in house, do we use other vendors? How do those other vendors use some of the IFS data? Do we pass it back and forth? We struggle with that. I get a lot of questions every week about hey, we looked at this product and I'll say well, IFS offers that or we could do that in house instead. At the end of the day trying to get everyone aligned on using our core systems and not bolting on a lot of things to make our life more complicated. Obviously, IFS has a lot to offer and that's our first answer. We try to start there and fully vet what the product has to offer before we move on to other things. But that's a daily challenge and something we struggle with that. And it's always something I'm dealing with to try to communicate to people so they understand the capability and what we're trying to do here from an overall strategic vision, to try to keep things in one place and our source of truth.
• IFS security, we spent a ton of time and money and effort on security in the last two years and we're getting better. We still have a way to go, but really it's that balance between keeping us safe and giving folks the access they need, it's a constant struggle between, hey, you took that away from me and I needed it for this reason, right? But here's our security risk with it. So, giving access to IFS for example, it fits within that right when we're on Prem shop trying to give access out to people without VPN et cetera, but still keeping our systems not exposed to hackers. Something we talked about we struggle with, a lot of work has spent there and we're staffing up and buying products to keep us safe every day.
• Training growth and turnover. I talked about that a little bit, just making sure that we've got our library of training built, which we don't have today, so that we can get someone in the door they can feel comfortable with their first few days at work and understand how to use the systems we present to them in a meaningful way and understand how it fits in the big picture and give them the proper training materials.
• So that'll be a big focus of ours as we move to cloud creating those decks and that plan, and then the move to cloud for us, obviously a big step. It'll be a major change, more fairly new to the IFS world. So, a lot of people went through the launch and the go live to IFS, and now we're going to change how they do their work every day and really working through that change management, managing expectations. Maybe there are things that are going to be taken away like sticky notes that the use every day. And understanding the benefits of moving to cloud and what the new capabilities will bring versus some of the detractors that may be there in the change, in the screen setups, et cetera. So that's definitely something we see. We're excited about it, trying to build some momentum. We'll have a lot of people at Unleashed because we think that's a good tool as well so that they can see how the product is progressing and some of the benefits of the cloud environment and we're hopeful that that will help some of that change management as well.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: I'm looking at one of your challenges. You're deciding IFS versus other vendors. I’m wondering what is driving those discussions? What is? Why?
• A: I’ll give you an example. Let's take our marketing team. They do a lot of campaigns. They want to track their spend versus the impact it has on our market share and our sales. So they'll come to me with, hey, I found this marketing program that will manage our campaigns, that will give us some results on how effective they were, whether that's pulling information from social media and activity there. And they'll come to us and say we want to buy this and I'll say, well, do you want to see sales? Because if you need sales, you have to get those out of IFS because that's where it is right. So it's that's an example of someone coming to me and saying, hey, I created this. There's a lot of 1 off things that happen in our factory floor too, or they'll say they have got this Excel spreadsheet which creates this bar graph for me and I'm hand keying these things right, and we'll say, well, we've got the ability to do that, whether that's through the Ms off equipment burning that into IFS to be able to display that for you. Those are some of the daily battles I just had that one last week. The marketing one was two weeks ago and for us it's saying, well, do we build something in house that bridges? Maybe it's a one off application on the floor that brings some of the information in, then blends with IFS data, blends it with their MES. Do we bring it into MES and display it on a dashboard from IFS right on the marketing side? Do we buy another bolt on application and then link it in? Do we see what IFS could offer on the way? Because they have campaigns in the application, right? Those are all things I have to vet and go through on a daily basis to understand really what the end users looking for and then what blend of solution we can put together for them. That makes the most sense, and from a security perspective keeps us safe. I don't want someone we've got. For example, we had someone yesterday. They're creating Python programs and we get errors on our CrowdStrike. Hey, there's an executable that's been installed. Someone who's out there, one offering a report in Python, and that's a risk for us. So, then we talk about how do we do that using one source of truth? And do we do the build it into IFS and maybe it's in focus with the BI report that we have. So long answer, but that's a bit of what I get asked for every week.
• F: The reason I asked is it's very similar conversation. My team looks very similar to yours. Nine people. You have a very narrow availability to really support as many applications as you do with yourself, and then the eight people underneath you, right? And that's the same place we're at, where we get different leadership. The turnover is murder. It is absolutely murder, especially higher up in the organization, anyone coming in says I used to work in Oracle. Oracle is great. Let's switch to Oracle. Next person comes in. I used to work in SAP. Let's switch to SAP, cause IFS never really heard of them, right? So, we get those battles just about every week, too, and it always feels like I'm defending in one way or another, IFS. But where I practically do believe it's the best solution for the company.
• R: For me, what I always fall back on is, it feels pretty good when we're able to do things. I was just telling the store team the other day we had a unique need where we've got this manufacturing process. We've never tried to do outsourcing, some of the bottling, et cetera, and I've never been in a situation where we are as agile as we are now. We're able to quickly create a web page that completes a whole bunch of transactions and IFS from a third party logs into a web portal. And because all of our systems are aligned right and we spent all of this time and all this effort and all these battles, we can now do this at a very rapid pace and our business will benefit as a result of it. The business is really impactful when we can limit what we're doing into certain areas that provide us the most efficiency and we don't have to sit here and think and understand where the data is all the time.
• F: As you were talking about that constant demand, but we need this. Can we bolt on this? Can we do this and then also you anticipating the change management that you will need to do moving to cloud, right? I was thinking of a couple things that we can send out to the group after and you know you can have a look and see if they might be helpful. One is an interview that I did quite a while back with the gentleman that leads it at Cimcorp and they were I think the first company that moved to IFS Cloud. But the interview is less about cloud specifically, but more about, why it's important for them to simplify and streamline their landscape. And he made some really good points. That sometimes it's just helpful to have someone else saying the things you're trying to say, if that makes sense. The other thing is a presentation that I was working on a while back on technology debt and the idea of it, they just might help you think through different basically, internal communication messages that you could build out these themes that you want to continue to reinforce. So, security is 1 and that's very clear, but there's this idea of the value of IFS cloud is Evergreen right and being able to more easily adopt innovation and this presentation I was working on is meant to help illustrate the benefit of that versus the benefit of having everything customized the way you want it or having all of these extra things. It's a choice, but there's some real evidence to support the importance of not only streamlining the landscape, but putting yourself in a position where you are maintaining more agility. And then the other thing is when you have these core themes, you can then take that example you just shared and use it to reinforce. So here is an example of how we've been able to be agile and why and showcase those wins or those successes to reinforce these messages that you're constantly having to remind people of. There's no shortcut to it, right? There's no way around doing it, but maybe these resources would help you frame some of those conversations you're having to have a lot internally and as you move to cloud thinking about not only what does our continual improvement process look like, but what sort of the ongoing change management plan to not only do the initial transition, but when these requests come up, make them hopefully easier to navigate over time.

• Q: I have a question regarding your information landscape because I see your regimenting not on functionality from other applications. We have a integration strategy or information how do you do handle the schema between the application? Is there a method and information highway or how do you treat that part?
• A: First of all, we use a lot of IFS partners. So that highway has been defined with that partnership, but we don't have that highway defined, we use standard and what we've been doing is focusing on we know that we're going to cloud. So we've been working heavily on rest APIs because we know that is the connection of the future and we know as we move, we don't want to have to redo those connections. So, we've been working on that, but there definitely struggles there and it's things we work through every application is unique. I think now, we try to limit them as much as we can, the CRM will definitely be something that we we're focused on doing, not excited about having to move data, but it's just part of the project and it's what we have to do for our sales folks. I'm very blessed to have a solid team here and on our application development side we've got two really good individuals that understand how we're doing that. They do it consistently the same way and I have a lot of faith in what they're doing. So, I wouldn't say we have a schema or a plan because I think it varies, but we try to use the same process over and over again where we can and keep it consistent, I guess is the best way to say it.
• F: Because I think it's a challenge to keep track of who is most, so which data you're never talking about, and you have to be quite strict.
• R: I mean what we do is we fall back to IFS as right the source of truth. There's a little bit of other data out there. I'll give you example on our focus tool. We bring in some retailer data because our salespeople actually calling on retailers, we don't sell to retailers. We sell the distributors on the Tuffy side, so we blend it in on the focus side. But that's really one of the only places I can think of where there's a lot of the MES. Obviously gathers its data, but between those two sources, there's not a lot of external data that we have out there. We try to limit it as much as we can.

• Q: The other question I have, and it's partly about the MES system, did you evaluate IFS in a partner or because I think the responsibilities or what?
• A: Yep, we will be. So currently we so long story here, I'll try to shorten it the best I can. Our MES vendor that integrated ignition for us also does all our controls in most of our facilities. We already had established ties through Chariot, which is Cedar Bay's IoT connector. That's how we pass data back and forth. So, just to give you a feel for what we did through some of our batching and control systems, whenever we complete a shop order, the issue is the completion of that shop order on their equipment is automated through that IoT connector. They pass information back and forth, so they'll say we use X pounds of this. We create problems of this, right? So, they added already established connections into our ERP. So, as we move into MES now, we are pulling information back and forth. I'm at a higher level because they've already got those connections established, so whether we're putting information on HMI that says a shop order complete, what was the downtime codes, some of the clocking things were doing, that's all a back and forth process. We are going to start now looking at some of the connected factory capabilities. So some of those KPI reporting’s that are available and then of course on the maintenance side, we'll pull information back in. That's where we're focusing on pulling information from the mess into IFS to create action from it moving forward.

• Q: In terms of demand planner and how you use that and I'm really keen to understand how do you find it? What do you get out of it? How do you find support of it? What are the benefits of it? The reason for the question is at the company I work for, we work in Aviation MRO. We repair, maintain, overhaul aircraft engines. Part supply for us is massive and the ability to use demand planner to look at historical usage of specific components or parts that we need is crucial and we're really starting to try to implement demand planner and I'm keen to just get a feel for how you find the thing.
• A: So, what we use it today for is for branded product and just to give you a feel on our history, when we launched IFS, we purchased demand Planner. I talked to Steve Ross last week. We are heavily involved with Steve. He's our expert in North America to help us. He guided us through the setup of demand planner initially, and he's wonderful resource and definitely got our folks comfortable with utilizing it. What we use it for on the branded side is prior to IFS. Prior to using demand planner, we would have sheets that would print out every day that showed orders coming in and we had a scheduler that went through a book that was inches thick every day to look at incoming orders and he would plan his schedule for our branded products to say we always want to minimum stock, we need to have so much on the floor so that when someone places an order they can get it. But he would guess based off his history and knowledge of what we would do. When we implemented demand planner, we took that historical piece of a demand planner and it would show us even including seasonality. What we need to produce and we jumped in the pool. We went for it. So we lit all of our branded stuff up. I can tell you we cut $2,000,000 out of our inventory in the first six months and everyone was scared because it was such a drastic change and how we produced, did we pad the numbers? Absolutely, because we were scared, but it was still significant in the cutback and inventory because of the accuracy we were able to achieve using demand planner. And now, today, we need to expand that because of those benefits on to some of our other facilities, the Kennys facility uses safety stock. They set up a safety stock number. Where we've had the challenge there is our growth in some instances, and sometimes on a seasonality swing too, our growth has outpaced the safety stock or we've just continued something, or there's been a seasonality swing where we've overproduced as well. So, we've seen both sides of it where now using demand planner, we can have an accurate representation of what we think that will do. The other thing we've actually looked at and we're starting to look at this even further is where we make 100% of 1 of our private label customers product. We can actually use demand planner to say, here's your forecast. We think it's better than what you're giving us because we've got all the history of what we produced for you. We can show you what we think we need to make, and we can make it for you. So, lots of places we use it. I'm a big fan of demanding planner. It takes a while to set up. You need expertise. You’ve got to have the data in there, but the juice is worth the squeeze when you get in there and start really using the product.

• Q: I've used Cedar Bay when I worked in the UK. For years, big fan of the Cedar Bay guys and the product. I’m not sure how it’s been impacted by the acquisition, but in terms of transaction builder, again I think we purchased the module underutilized in our business and lots of potential I believe. I'm interested that you have Cedar Bay transaction builder and you use Novacura. To me, it feels like you're doubling up a little bit, but my question is how do you find it? How did you learn it? I spent a bit of time with Chris, who you would know if you know transaction builder and learnt it and understand it and I get it, but I've never really been able to evolve it and I don't know whether it's because there's a limit on the documentation or there's a limit on what's possible, but I'm just keen to understand how you found transaction builder?
• A: So definitely, we worked with Chris a lot. We got two very gifted developers and one of them came from the plant floor, so it was a pack operator here. Had some IT background and we've trained him to a point now where he's kind of a unique blend of plant floor understanding and the program. So that's a really nice kind of person we have on the team here. We've worked with them a lot where we've got different things, where we push the limits, we create probably 99% of our transactions, we built in what we’re running on the floor today. One of the last things we just built which I thought was awesome, we took it from a concept and were able to work with the Cedar Bay folks and launch it. When you walk in to pick up a load, one of our trucking companies walks in the door today. They have a kiosk and they have a TV just like at an airport that shows them all the loads that are being loaded currently in the facility. The percent that's loaded. So they'll see their load displayed. They'll know it's 80% loaded. It's done. Once it's done, they hop on the kiosk. They electronically sign. They print out all of their paperwork. They get an email if they want it. That says, here's the paperwork with your signature, and they're out the door and we can put trucks, load them, put them out in our lot. And that truck driver can show up at 2 o'clock in the morning, hook on to that truck, get his paperwork. No one ever has to talk to him, so it's been a real process for us and we worked with them to do the electronic signature, to set up some of the kiosk stuff program, all of those screens. I'll create the displays that we have out there a lot of great capability in that product. And I think once you get in there and spend some time, we just had the luxury of putting people on it and said, go figure it out, and we did so.

• Q: You talked about Astra Canyon FastAP. Was there a conscious decision not to use Pagero, or was that just because they're locally based?
• A: We looked at both, we got demos on both of them, at the end of the day, it's our finance teams call. I think we liked it. I think it was an easier move from what we had been using before the FastAP product. They were similar, with some benefits, and the Pagero is a good product. It was just a lot. There was a big quantum leap right where you offload everything to the arrow, this is more where we get the sheets in, we're able to scan everything, they've got the smarts to identify all the fields, and we process it through. So very different products and our finance team was more comfortable with the FastAP product. I think the Pagero products great, though I really do.

• Q: You talked a lot about training. And you said you've got Apps 10. And you've got Arena. I'm assuming you're not using Arena? What are you using to develop training content now? Have you got anything? What are you doing?
• A: So we've looked at ClickLearn, but I think right now we've been using a product called Scribe, which is an AI backed tool that helps you create parts. I mean, it's not real high end, but it does some automation of taking PowerPoints and screenshots and building a deck for you. That's where we're currently thinking we will go.
• F: Yeah. OK. Because we use ClickLearn. We used it heavily in Apps 9. We’re in the process of upgrading to cloud and we're in the process of thinking, OK, what are we doing? Are we revamping everything? Like rebuilding in ClickLearn? ClickLearn has gotten heaps better. It was not great, but it's a lot better than it was.
• R: So I'm definitely interested in that because I've talked to people about ClickLearn and what I've heard about ClickLearn and tell me if you still feel this way about it, is it is a super powerful product, but you have to use it or people have to spend a lot of time and they're using the system to get the benefit out of it. And I was worried because training seems to be, I need some now and then I won't need some again for six months that people would lose their knowledge and not use the tool.
• F: Yeah, we're doing an upgrade now. We did it coincidentally. We got a project team of about 30 that we're doing the upgrade with. So about five or six IT guys and girls and 25 or so SME’s from across the business. We canvased them today on what we thought of ClickLearn because we were like, OK, we're going to spend a load of time rebuilding click learn from 9 to cloud. We're going to redo the screens. And the question really was, is it worth it? Is it worth us putting the effort into rebuilding, clip them because it does take a lot of time and I think ClickLearn is good from a perspective of you can take a process from A to B and go there. That's how you do it, right? What ClickLearn doesn't tell you is if you're going from A to B and you come across C what do you do? It doesn't give you that. What happens if you go off the tangent? And I think that's something that you need to build. One of the things we were thinking and as a group we thought, we felt like the YouTube generation is like a video thing. Shall we generate a load of short clips and make them easily accessible? And we were thinking what we'll do is in cloud, we'll create little command buttons and link them to training. And we thought that's neat. You're in a shop order. How do I report operations? There's a button that takes me to a ClickLearn video. There's the button and we're like, yeah, we probably do that. But the feedback from the 25 people that I would call our core users, was videos were not for them. Probably not the answer which really surprised me like and that was today. I was thinking that was going to be the way to go, but a lot of them were like, no, we want the guides, we want the technical descriptions. We want to be able to read it. We want to sort out what to do at our own pace. So, I don't know. We're really on the fence. We use Articulate. We created a brilliant e-learning platform for cloud because we've found in the last six months the biggest difference between 9 and 10 is probably similar and cloud if you get over the hurdle of the UX, it's the same right? It's the same thing. So the e-learning that we did was really about, let's just get people over that hump of where your eyes are looking. Your eyes aren't looking for right mouse buttons. Your eyes are looking at command buttons, your eyes are looking here. And we honestly believe that if we can convince the end users to just train their eyes, train their eyes to go there or there and look out. These are the things to look out for, the processes the terminologies are the same. The fields are the same. The processes are the same and so we are, as I said, right on the fence of what to do. So that's what sort of gathered my interest in your statement on training.

• Q: You talked about CRM, you chose dynamics. I'm assuming Microsoft over cloud over IFS. I'm assuming you're comparison was against cloud, not apps 10?
• A: Yeah, we had some experience in Apps 10. I'll be honest, I've been trying to implement CRM for five years. I've had trained here. We've gone through it. It's just been a battle and we get halfway in and with CRM that’s a recipe for failure. So we had to start fresh and I think the IFS products good. I don't think I would have been able to get it in if I'm honest with you. Just because there are enough things there that just built up over time.
• F: I think to be honest, we did the same. We ended up putting in dynamics because we were like ohh it's the lesser of evils. Like the sales guys they are their own animals and so let them deal with a piece of software that they're real comfortable with. You can park it. You can integrate it. We use Boomi to integrate between. If you don't have an integration platform you happen to be an AWS customer, Boomi are doing a pay as you go model with AWS, which is far, far more effective commercially than going with a Boomi annual subscription. And when you get to a point, you'll probably switch. But if you want to just try it, it's like buttons. It's like 90 dollars a month and you get unlimited connectors, whereas if you go Boomi on a subscription, it's like 5K a connector and you burn connectors. You look at Boomi and you're like I've lost five connectors, right? So if you don't have anything, it's worth looking at their AWS pay as you go model.

Podcast:

Cimcorp’s IT Strategy for Working Smarter - https://www.futureoffieldservice.com/2021/05/12/cimcorps-it-strategy-for-working-smarter/

Next Meeting: 13 May 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
IFS Combined CollABorative: Tech Talk Session – IFS x Sustainability 

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