Digitalization CollABorative April 2023 - Meet the Member with Rudy Goedhart of Spencer Technologies

IFS Digitalization CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Improving Business Agility through Digital with Rudy Goedhart of Spencer Technologies

Date of Meeting: 19 April 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Rudy Goedhart & Spencer Technologies Background:

• VP of Business Systems and Digital Transformation at Spencer Technologies
• About Spencer:
  • All-Inclusive Technology Provider
  • Founded in 1972
  • Global Operations
  • 200+ Active clients
  • 500+ Jobs / day
  • 100,000 sites under maintenance
• On the road to become a more holistic MSP (Managed Service Provider)
• Wall to wall support for all of the technologies to make sure that if they are launching a new store, we take care of the construction, the project management, IT deliveries whether it is purchasing procurement of network equipment, point of sale equipment etcetera. We install it in the stores, once it's installed, we supported right up until that store closes or renovates or moves or anything else.
• End to End Solution - Customers calls, help desk, service desk, integration to their ticket systems to our system. Project management team. Field technicians from a logistics both forward and reverse point of view. Staging production forward, logistics, shipping, inventory, repair, production and staging procurement secure services, such as key injections to payment devices and custom packaging.
• Technologies
  • BI – IFS Lobbies, Microsoft SQL, Power BI, Oracle Netsuite Dashboards
  • Business Systems – IFS, JourneyApps, ADP, Boomi, Oracle Netsuite
• Customer & Partner Integrations – ServiceNow, Service Channel, SysAid, BMC, SolarWinds, Dynamics 365, FedEx Express, UPS, DHL.

Digital Transformation at Spencer Technologies

• Creating APIs to customer systems to reduce manual work, redundant work, double entry and delays. Also allowing customer to see real time information removes a lot of manual communication.
• IFS Customer Portal – Asset management, shipment tracking information, inventory management, real time insights (because we tied the power BI dashboards to it), order management, customers are able to create orders, requests, specific services, request specific products, run reports, basically do anything that they would otherwise have to ask people for.
• Using data to drive Excellence & Continuous Improvement Examples:
  • Review every Friday the past weeks changes to the organization and what's coming next week (Dispatch Task Lead Times). We take a look at what is scheduled for next week. Do I have all my technicians locked in from a project point of view since project is about 50% of our business, we want to make sure that the project, the construction technicians to renovations to relocations to large rollouts, that's all scheduled.
  • Regular KPI Reviews.  E.g. Part needs by promise date (Internal Warehouse Shipped on Time). We want to make sure that 90% of all shipments leaving our warehouse leave on time.  On time with the right parts, on time complete.
  • Customer Reporting.  Here's our current SLA. Here's how we've been trending for the past week/month. All of our clients have access to their own dashboard so they can run at any time. We don't hide our performance from them. They can pull this at anytime and hold us accountable for the service delivery that we promised them.
  • Meaningful Insights. High level overview. It takes a look at all of the KPIs within one department and how we are doing.
• Scheduled meeting regularly to hold both the business accountable for the current data, the current state of the business, but also the continuous improvement. And we're staying on top of them and saying how can we get better? We're striving to get to 80%, how can we get there? What else is happening, which then results into more meetings and sprints for improvements.
• Example: Reviewed Quote to Cash Process
  November 2022, Spencer onboarded new COO Johan Claassen and he's striving for better excellence within the organization.
  One of the things we did is we launched Project Phoenix.
  So what we did is we reviewed the entire quote to cash process in the organization, how this work comes in. How does the business development team sell it? What promises do they make? What templates do they have? Do they have a standard service offering? Do we have tiered services? How can we improve upon that? Once it's sold, how do we get it into our company? Once it's in our company, and the operational team on boarded, how do we process the incoming work orders from the clients? If we need to do any type of procurement, how do we take care of that? If we need to our scheduling, how do we make sure that work is properly planned? We've given sufficient notice to all of the departments responsible for the work so that we can be successful, not always. Firefighting left and right. Production repair triage when we need to do that, what do we have? Shipping tech onsite, receiving, storage and inventory control, invoicing and ultimately cash receipt.
  We took a look at the entire organization's workflow, mapped out who did what, where do we currently see trouble areas? What is the noise that we've heard from our clients and what part of the process does that fall in with that and with all of the leadership presence, we then prioritized which areas of the company, which areas of this process need innovation badly? Where are our biggest gaps right now in service delivery to be better in that.  We've identified 5 areas.  Onboarding planning wasn't as strong, meaning that the service delivery team wasn't set up for success. The scheduling and the planning, it was always at Hawk, where we really lived in an escalation state where everything was constantly an escalation and needed immediate attention. Trying to get away from that with proper planning was hugely successful to both the morale and the quality of the work that we deliver to our client’s technician on site.
  We received some complaints that technicians didn't really know what to do whilst they were on site. They didn't have a clear understanding of the expectation, what deliverables, what work they needed to complete and given that we basically say yes to any type of work that needs to be done pertaining to the area that we sell, every store is different, complete different technology, complete different expectations. That needs to be very clear to the technician because every store is different. For example, when you step into a trader Joe, you're not allowed to call the manager or manager. You have to call him a captain because that's the Trader Joe culture. You step into the manager's office, you step into the bridge. And you will receive escalations if the technician called them a manager by accident. That is unacceptable. But those type of communications need to be very clear to the technician for them to be able to be successful.
  RMA / Reverse logistics is complicated, especially when you're not working with your own product. If these were all our own manufactured products, we knew what it was, that would be one thing, but we're dealing with customer equipment which is about 200,000 unique parts of 75 common manufacturers in their warehouse, 12 million parts altogether quantity wise, it's hard to keep track of that. And we don't always know what comes back. So, receiving RMA was a huge gap.
  Inventory control as a result of not being able to receive cleanly and properly and fast. That was a problem.
  But we identified the areas of opportunities which allowed us to really drill into it. So, I'm going to focus a little bit on receiving our because it's a pretty decent example of what we did.
  We identified that through analytics through dashboards that we showed that the amount of packages being received onto our doc every day was greater than the amount of packages that are receiving team could bring into the organization. So as a result, the backlog and receiving kept getting higher and higher and higher to the point where we had about 300 pallets of equipment unreceived. Then you start getting customer escalations, I'm about to start a project, but you don't have the inventory in stock yet. We weren't successful in what we were trying to do there.
  As a result, what we did is we looked at the dashboard, we recognized, OK, we're getting more items in than we are able to process. Should we hire more people or is there a process problem?
  We weren't receiving enough packages. It's very easy to keep beating up the receiving team. You need to do better. You're never meeting your goal every day, you end up worse than the day before. These people were busting their guts. They were working very hard. And they were doing a good job, but they couldn't keep up with the volume. That is not on them. It is so important that people understand what we're expecting from them. They need to have a metric that they can run against. With the old process, we were expecting them to process 50 RMAs a day or whatever it was, and as long as they meet that goal, you've got nothing to feel bad about. We don't have enough people in a process doesn't support the throughput that we require to be successful overall. And yes, we'll take your ideas and your feedback and communicate to us how you think you could do better. But no, you're not failing. As an employee, you were not letting us down or failing us, and that message should be probably most important of this entire process. We're in this together just because we're not performing where we want to be doesn't mean that you're doing a bad job.
  So, we all stood around the receiving team, watched what they did and we identified, look, you spent about 30 minutes per box identifying which item it can where belongs. I'm getting a box, there's no RMA number on it. There's no purchase order number on it. The content is foreign to me. Where to receive this to and they go well “we don't, so we kind of put it aside”, and as they do that 300 times a day that putting aside thing gets very messy and very chaotic, very fast.
  So, we build this project a process workflow, and some of the processing we identified when an item arrives in the box. OK, let's scan it. Let's have the system do to work for you, because if I have a tracking number on the box, I can use OCR technology or barcode scanning technology to take that tracking number and hit it up against our RMA system. Make sure I have a return merchandise authorization for this box, even if there's no RMA number on there. If I have the origin, the tracking number, the customer, I can do some research systemically.
  Without the user having to do it themselves. So huge opportunity for improvement. And with this we knocked about 20 minutes off the receiving time for a single RMA. So, right now the person can practically do twice as much work.
  Receiving was pretty good, but we tied it better into the stock arrival scan process because if for whatever reason it didn't work out, we're going to make it red and then a manager can handle it. But green and yellow boxes can be when it's deemed green, meaning I have an RMA number for this box even though it wasn't written on it. I can move forward and I don't need a veteran receiving employee to figure out what to do with this because it's our standard process, meaning we can really get people on board faster, train faster to be successful faster.
  And then put away process, which had a lot of opportunities. We stand in the warehouse, we see these people working and they're scanning every package five times. First, they scan the parts, then they scan the serial number, then they scan the barcode. For what bin its in. Then they put in the quantity. Then they put in their name and it's like. You're spending about a minute on every item you're putting away, just scanning barcodes. Why don't I have a single barcode and asset tag a QR code that takes all of that data instantly, and you don't have to do 5 things anymore right? At the same time the system should tell you where to put away these items instead of you looking up figuring out where in the warehouse that part is stored. Looking at previous inventory, you're spending too much time looking to how to do your job. Let's have the system recommend that. So we programmed IFS to update that, and now every time then a person is putting an item, picking an item up to put away on the shelves. After receipt they can scan it one time, single scan. They get all the information they need. System recommends what bin to put it into. And once they arrived to that bin and it's full or it's not what they thought it was, they have an escalation path right within the application, then they could move forward. So, we better work on letting them be successful, right? So we did not hire more people. We improved the process of the of the system, the technology to better serve the employee to make sure that they get what they need to be successful in their job and the efficiency the ROI has been, I mean pretty astronomical just on this one, but the process was really interesting.
  In that put away process, when we started this, what our process was on receipt, I'm going to put it in a put away location then that put away location people pick it up and put it in it's final destination, the good stock or the repair bin, whatever needs to happen. Because we don't want receivers to walk away from the desk through the warehouse so we have material handlers for that but, when we looked at the put away location and put away inventory stock location, we had 1.2 million parts in there dating back to 2018. That's a transactional location that should be empty at the end of every day, because there should be nothing left to be put away 1.2 million items of customer stock. So, when we're doing a physical count for the for the clients, we go well, our system said we had 600 routers, but are really only have 590 because ten were showing them put away. I don't know where those are. Whoops, sorry. It really puts into a quite peculiar situation.
  The way that we use BI to solve that, is also quite interesting. We mounted a general a monitor right above the receiving stock put away area and just with a number. Here's the total items in put away right now. So, if that item showed account of 20 and people are looking over them and be like well, I've got nothing left to put away, you immediately know the systems off. Somebody forgot to put something down. Somebody forgot the transact upon a movement, something went wrong so putting that visibility, that insight right above them showing it visually to everybody doing the actual work allows them to be successful, allows them to hold themselves accountable. At the end of the day, it creates a closing process. You just look at the screen that you look at the pallets. Frankly, if it doesn't match, it doesn't match and then what to do about it. But it sheds light on it. You visualize something that was previously hidden and an obvious black hole that cost us a lot of money.
  To summarize it back up. We look at the data, we share the data, we're not going to hide anything. We identify areas for enhancements. We all get together. We collaborate with the stakeholders, with the business leaders, we identify what could be better, what's inefficient today. We implement technology to make it better and then we keep monitoring the dashboards. And from a receiving point of view after this was implemented and I should have grabbed a screenshot of that. But after this was implemented we could see that the number of receipts now increased to a point to where the throughput exceeded the incoming packages. So now we're able to keep up and catch up without additional people, simply by enhancing the technology available to us.

Questions / Answers:

• Q: Is it like it looked like a lot of your stuff was all power BI? Is that pretty fair?
  A: Yes. Power BI. We've started relying on it much, much more. From a ‘what have I shipped last week’ transactional reports we fall back on SQL servers, Microsoft SQL service. But when it comes to insights and dashboards, we really fall on power BI.
• Q: What version of IFS are you running?
  A: FSM 6. As soon as the reverse logistics are fully supported in cloud, we will consider moving over. Now we're excited for it because the cloud product has great potential for us. But right now, we're using FSM.
• Q: We're a central IT service is organization to the business. We're a little less customer facing external. Our customers are internal primarily. So, we do a lot of the things that you do in terms of feeding back in monthly steering committees where we're at with our SLA’s. We have that transparency thing as well and a lot of work that we have to date, at least around improvements is improving our delivery to the business, which is great. One of the things that we're getting traction on, but sort of more slowly than I would like is getting their buy in on how it can help them to improve their own processes to their customers. And in your case, it sounds like the COO coming in was the driver of that change. We don't have that and it's complicated by the fact that we're actually multiple businesses with distinct management. So, any thoughts or any suggestions on how we might be able to kind of trigger that, if you will?
  A: So the first thing I need to clarify is that the COO was not so much to drive or of the change as much as he helped us clarify the priorities. When Johan came in, we already knew we needed to change. We already knew a lot of areas for improvement, but we were really stuck from a top down level, so from an executive level with busy work. Wants, nice to haves, need this need this, this is priority, this is priority.
  But what we never did is we'd never defined our true values in the organization. So, when the Johan came on, he said ‘Look client first.
  First and foremost, whatever improvement we make to the organization, whether it be digital process or whatever, we want it to be client first. So, let's get that focus on the client first quote to cache process, identify where we need to’. He helped us streamline the prioritization and knock back some of the busy work. As with the Johan stating, we are working on these priorities and this is what's important to the organizations, it basically gave me the ammunition to push back to the other executives and the other people in the organization to say, look, I get that you want this to be more efficient, but it doesn't actually associate to our objective of being better client delivery, therefore the priority needs to be pushed out. We'll keep it on our list. It doesn't get forgotten, but it's not for right now.
  So that's really where the COO helped and that prioritization, that level of focus within the organization has gotten us to be successful at doing some of these changes because in the past we were flying from escalation to escalation and from topic to topic and the best way of being able to explain that is if you're working on priority ‘A’, just one priority, and somebody goes wait, hold on, ‘A’ is important, but I need you to work on ‘B’ right now. You move to ‘B’ you forget about ‘A’, ‘A’ is kind of halfway done. You move to ‘B’, then they go, whoa, ‘B’ it's important, but I need you to look at ‘C’ right now. You look at C, right? And then halfway through ‘C’ to go, hey what the heck? Where's ‘A’? Well, you told us to work on ‘B’ so. OK, just go back to ‘A’. But as a result, it keeps cycling between these three priorities. You never, ever get anything done. The effort to get through A, B and C becomes astronomically larger than if you were to just focus on ‘A’ get it done.
  Get it into a busy, ready state, then move to ‘B’, then move on. So that level of prioritization is what got us to be successful, not the not the change in drive.
• Q: We actually do fairly well with the prioritization. For our more complex business units, I meet weekly with them say, hey, this is the stuff you got in there. You got to help me prioritize this right across the group. So, the tactical level like that, we're succeeding. But my bigger concern is that there's just, like, big picture things that are more fundamental. Right. And that's what I'm trying to get to here. So, if anybody else here has any kind of really cool ideas on how to make that happen, I’d love to hear it.
  A: The workshop that we did with all of the leadership in the organization, just get everybody together into one room and brainstorm on what we can improve. This accomplish 2 things. It helped us with that prioritization, but it also shared to the business that we're able and ready and willing to innovate. That communication also got people thinking, if you can do this for that department, what can we do for us? And that also helped big time.
• Q: There is a lot of power BI reporting that you guys did right and that's really a good thing because you can you have that visualization right now. Is IFS team assisting you there or are you just doing that independently?
  A: Power BI is 100% independent, but we have significant expertise in house of the data structure of IFS. So we really know where it all sits and where it all where it needs to come from.
• Q: That QR code scanning that you gave an as an example. So after the power BI report, you saw the details which is something that must be coming from your product team right? So that after that, you just collaborated with IFS team in developing that feature in the system?
  A: Absolutely right. Same with the stock arrival. Scan the put away. That's where IFS's business process automation capabilities are absolutely crucial. And then the tools that we use, like the journey apps, mobile application and we use it on our data logic scan guns. It's a visualization and input tool. IFS drives the logic, IFS drives the business rules, processes at all in the background. And yeah, it's absolute key to get that on board.

Other Comments:

• We have lobbies we have power BI. We use Boomi for our integrations between systems. We don't do too much on the reporting side with that but we have internal tactical daily lobbies. Typically our lobbies tend to be more at the transactional level such as customer service and so forth. And our power BI's tend to be either more complex stuff that takes multiple data sources including IFS or sometimes it's IFS, but we want to present it to a group of people in a different way, whether it's executives or finance. And we find that you have to make it look like Excel, otherwise they don't understand it, so we have to go down that road.
  We don't have NetSuite on the financial side although we are in the process of implementing a different financial forecasting, planning and reporting tool. I think using the right tool for the right job is that the only best practice I would say. If you've got the data in IFS, our approach is to deliver it within IFS too. And whether it's just to save search or whether it's a lobby, something that's interactive inside of there. And if it's bigger picture, then you start looking at power BI or Crystal reports or something else. And we try to use the right tool for the right job. And we have levels of complexity. If it's this, we start here because you don't want to build something big and complex. And if it's very simple data, why would you complicate that unnecessarily?

Sarah’s Insights:

• When we think about agility, to me, we're really thinking about taking insights we have and making them very consumable to different stakeholders in the business. And one of the important things is remembering that the lobby, the data, the visualization, the report that ties into the overall objectives are going to look different for different functions, different roles. And so, I think Spencer has done a really good job, not only on the reporting side, but I know we talked about like for instance in the warehouse you have screens that show how those teams are tracking against their KPI. So, there is a real time visualization of how everyone is performing in a way that, makes things very clear. Here's where the company is on the companies objectives, it's here's where your team is on its objectives, which feed into this overall objective. And so, it makes it personal and makes it very easy to understand. It's real time, so they always know how they're doing and how it's in line with what the company is working toward. And I think that's a really good process.
• Keeping in mind, how do you breakdown silos of information and make sure that each of those groups, KPI and metrics are not only clear to them, but are tied into the overall objectives. They're not being measured on something that doesn't really serve the purpose of what the businesses working on.
  I always think about the fact that there's a lot of research that shows that generally speaking, employees want to do well, and one of the best ways for them to succeed is to know what the expectation is and to how they're performing against that expectation. So having that insight visible makes it easy to accomplish that and celebrate the wins, that sort of thing and dig into the areas that aren't going as well as you want.
• This is a little bit off topic, but it also stands out of my mind. We also have to be careful to not de-incentivize our employees by passing along the stress of the top line metrics, if that stress isn't related to their performance. So, whether it was COVID related stress or whether it’s economic conditions, leaders tend to get very hung up in not hitting this objective, but if that objective has nothing to do with the fact that your warehouse employees are coming in every day and working really hard, making them feel personally responsible just adds a lot of stress and angst into their roles that can lead to higher turnover, etcetera.

Next Meeting: 30 May 2023 11:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Digitalization CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Future Proofing Tactics

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