Preventing Loss and Driving Revenue with Operational Analytics

[00:00:00] We make huge investments in customer support. We want to make sure that we never lose a customer. It's easier to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. And once we keep them, we need to make sure that we're working with them as partners. And I want to be a partner to my customers. So it's all about the people. You have all the people that are interacting with customers or working with inventory or whatever it might be inside of a store. You've got to make sure they understand what they're doing. Hello and welcome to the Next Level Supply Chain with GS1 US, a podcast

[00:00:28] in which we explore the mind bending world of global supply chains, covering topics such as automation, innovation, unique identity, and more. I'm your co host Reid Jackson. And I'm Liz Sertl. And welcome to the show. Hello and thank you for joining us. We appreciate you making time in your day for our podcast. Have you been giving any thought to data analytics? Are you having trouble with loss prevention? Are you looking to improve your day to day operations in any way, shape or form? Well, we have the right

[00:00:57] guest for you today. His name is Russ Hawkins. He's the CEO of Agilence. And they're a consulting organization that focuses primarily in food service around grocery and restaurants. But over the last 10 years, they've expanded into other industries as well and continue to grow their business. We talked about loss prevention. We talked about data analytics. We talked about hidden values

[00:01:22] within data that you probably already have today. And maybe some data you're not collecting that you should be collecting. It was a truly enjoyable conversation. I hope that you appreciate the information as much as I did. Let's jump right in. Russ, welcome to the show. We are so excited for our conversation today. Well, thank you so much, Liz. I'm excited about it as well. Yeah, we're data geeks.

[00:01:47] So I think this whole conversation is going to be amazing. Before we jump and dive into it, can you just give us a quick snapshot of your background, your company, and the kinds of the retail and the consumer businesses that you work with most often? Sure. Well, my background is I've been around for quite a bit of time. My professional career began in the telecom industry, actually, way back before the breakup of the bell system. So that'll give you some context of my longevity

[00:02:17] here. And I spent many years with the various mutations of AT&T, and then was recruited out into a startup environment in the mid-90s. So this is my third technology company. The first one I went in as a sales and marketing VP. And my background prior to that, I think, is mostly sales. I like to think of myself as a sales guy, but some people think that that's a negative. I think it's a positive.

[00:02:42] But I became the first company. I moved from being a sales and marketing VP to becoming the CEO. And then that led to two subsequent CEO positions. And that's what I've been doing here at Agilent. So Agilent is a contraction of agile intelligence focused on bringing data analytics capabilities,

[00:03:06] putting it into the hands of the actual non-techy operators inside, primarily of grocery stores, grocery chains, both hard and soft retail goods, restaurants. And more recently, we're starting to do work with hotels. And so we're talking, generally speaking, quite large companies.

[00:03:30] We've got about 200 companies today. And on average, they have about 650 locations. So we're not necessarily a single location or even a small multi-location company. We're dealing typically with larger organizations. We operate on a global basis. We have a team in Europe. We have customers, many, many in the United States and Canada, and then customers around the world in

[00:03:58] Australia, South Africa, the Middle East, the Nordics, Russia, should be Pakistan. We just got our first opportunity in Pakistan. So we'll see. We're the shoe retailer in Pakistan, of all things. So we have a lot of shoe companies, especially in the United States. And so that's been an area of great interest for us. But we build a data analytics product. It's very, very broad in its set of

[00:04:23] applications. We started primarily in the loss prevention area. That's kind of how we entered into it. But by listening to our customers, which is one of the key characteristics I try to drive in every one of my people is you got to listen. We have learned about all kinds of other areas we can have impact on. So I'd like to think of ourselves as kind of operational analytics more broadly. But there's still a strong flavor of loss prevention and asset protection in what we do every day.

[00:04:51] So excited for this conversation. I knew I was going to go like deep when you first said telecom background. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I kind of grew up in that space a little bit too. AppleTalk, Banyan Vines, token ring, way back in the day before Cisco, and then was with Cisco with IP telephony and IP protocols,

[00:05:16] you know, in the 90s. And love the sales side of it as well. Unfortunately, everybody's selling. I mean, everybody's in sales, but some people don't know it. You know, I mean, whether no matter what you try to do, even if you're, you know, if you're trying to impress that girl, or you're trying to get your parents to let you do something, or you're selling, you're selling, you're selling something. It's better to recognize it and then figure out how to use certain techniques to your

[00:05:43] best advantage. I think it's always good advice. Certainly, it's one that I've given my kids. Yeah. And the thing that I've come to realize as well is sales and customer service, they have to go hand in hand. Because if you don't have a good customer experience, right, you can have the best product in the world. But if you don't have a good customer experience. So my first question off the bat here is, you know, at a high level, looking at these organizations that

[00:06:09] you're just describing shoe companies and groceries and chains and organizations are trying to solve when they turn to data, what are they trying to solve when they turn to data? What is it better operations? You mentioned loss prevention. Is it both? Is there another, you know, leg to the stool? What are the big rocks that they're trying to solve by leveraging data? At the end of the day, they're all trying to do the same thing, right? People are trying to

[00:06:37] increase the top line revenue. They're trying to maximize the margin that they're making on that top line revenue. They want to efficiently spend money from an expense standpoint, and they want to improve the bottom line. So, I mean, at a very, very high level macro, those are the things that we're trying to do. Now, depending upon the segment that you ran and the way that you're distributing your business, you have, you know, all kinds of different knobs to turn to make that successful. But we like to

[00:07:06] think of it in three kind of broad areas. First one is around revenue enhancement. So how do I improve my revenues? How do I improve my margins? Using data, how do I learn about the way we're operating today that may be preventing that or may be aiding that? And how do you do more of the aid part and less of the prevent part, right? Second major area is cost and expense control. So that's

[00:07:31] where our roots in loss prevention have become very important. So, you know, most organizations' boats are leaky. They're leaky one way or the other. And so you need to identify where those leaks are and then figure out how to plug them, whether it's by, you know, changing people or changing process or whatever it is that you need to do. And there's also, obviously, in the cost and expense control,

[00:07:56] there's this idea of managing cash and managing spend, you know, variable or discretionary spend. And when you're in a large organization, there's lots of people that can spend money and do different things. And so being able to understand that. So that's number one and number two. And then the third area I like to think about is compliance. And there's two areas in compliance from my perspective. One of them is external compliance. Am I staying out of the crosshairs of law enforcement? And in our

[00:08:23] business, it can be things like age verification if you're selling liquor or cigarettes or those kinds of things. It can be another external thing would be money laundering, which, you know, you can get into money laundering issues at $1,000. And people always find ways they come in and they buy, you know, they buy gift cards and it's just a way of them kind of laundering money. So that's external compliance. But I think the more important thing in an area that I'm getting more and more interested

[00:08:51] in over time is internal compliance. And by that, I mean aligning the stock room with the boardroom. We sit up in our ivory towers in headquarters and we develop strategies and we develop processes and we develop initiatives that are all tended to produce a certain result. And one of the first issues there is making sure everybody knows what those things are. What are the objectives? What are the processes? What are the procedures that are appropriate for our business?

[00:09:21] And does everyone down to the person that's interfacing with the customer, are they aware of these things and are they following them? Are they aligned with what we're trying to get done? So that compliance thing can get very broad when you start thinking about, you know, frontline employees and ensuring that they know what they need to do and then ensuring that they actually do it. So it's those three broad areas, revenue enhancement, cost and expense control, compliance. Those are kind of the three things that we bucket everything.

[00:09:51] I'm always saying to my teams when we're presenting something new, whether it's internal, whether it's external, and you know, if we're selling an idea or something, I said at the end of the day, companies do three things, make money, save money, or be compliant. Those are the three things that they're doing every day, all day, every anything outside of those three things is personal preference. They want to be philanthropic, they want, you know, like they want to do anything other that that is personal preference. But

[00:10:20] when you boil it all down, you either need to increase how they make money or decrease how they're spending money, or help them be compliant. And if you can hit all three, you got great product to sell. So I love the validation. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's absolutely true. And of course, those are all those three areas are very rich, right? There's all kinds of ways to impact every one of them. And then that's where the rubber meets the road,

[00:10:48] right? And, and it varies widely by the organization, you know, we deal with companies, as I mentioned, that are in the restaurant business. So you have one set of kind of procedures in QSR, quick service restaurants, other things that become important in table service, in retail, hard goods and soft goods, you know, soft goods are the things you wear, hard goods are things that you buy, there's lots of different drivers there as

[00:11:12] well. And we're now learning about hotels, and hotels are, are very, very interesting. And it's a real learning area for me right now. You know, many hotels all run restaurants and hotel chains, they run restaurants, and they have retail. But when you start looking at property management systems, and you start looking at the, the way you manage your inventory, when you when your inventory is essentially a room, you know,

[00:11:37] time bound room, things can get, can get very interesting. And I'm learning a lot about that now with the as we have new new hotel customers. So many variables, like in all of those different businesses, and then in the businesses, right? Like I didn't even think about hotel, it's food service. It's retail, hard and soft. I mean, and it in hospital, it's crazy.

[00:12:03] It's a services environment, they run events, they do okay, it's all kinds of crazy stuff. And some of the ones that we deal with are adjacent to resort areas. So now, now you bring in, you know, amusement parks and water parks, and all kinds of, you know, extraneous things that all can have an impact on your bottom line. Can you share with me how total retail loss or loss prevention, like what tends to drive that,

[00:12:32] especially you've got so many different businesses that we just kind of touched on? Is there a thread that goes between all of them? Are they different from a loss prevention perspective? Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I think so people tend to think of loss prevention, at least I used to, and I think a lot of people do is that, you know, you're trying to catch bad guys, right? That you're, I used to, I used to say that many of the kind of old school loss prevention folks think their job is to tackle

[00:13:03] thieves in the parking lots, which that is one of the holes in the boat. Yeah. And you do need to find a way to plug it. But when you think of total retail loss, I mean, we're really talking about any event or outcome that is negatively impacting profitability, or that makes no positive contribution to making revenue, to driving income. And so when you think of it that way, you can think of it

[00:13:27] across, you know, a very, very wide area of things. I mean, I'll just pick on, I'll pick on discounting for a minute here, right? Companies create discount programs, they create loyalty programs, they have a theory about what the value of those discount programs, whether it's $5 footlongs, or buy one, get one, or whatever it might be. There's a theory of what that impact is going to be on the business. And usually, it's kind of the

[00:13:54] variation on the theme of a loss leader, right? I'm going to do something with lower margin, and then I'm going to get a benefit with the broader margin. And, you know, one of the critical issues is getting the data in a timely fashion, right? And so the people, historically, anyway, and I think this has changed dramatically today. But when I started in this business, it was, you know, somebody at headquarters would define one of these systems or one of these ideas,

[00:14:22] and then it would be weeks before you actually knew whether it actually produced a result. And so the idea, one of our main ideas is to get that, bring that analytics value from the days and weeks down to the hours and minutes. And, you know, the ultimate goal is to get to real time, which is very, very difficult to do. I mean, it's much easier, frankly, in the e-com area. If you're purely an e-com company, it is possible to make real time decisions about a particular transaction,

[00:14:52] right? So you can look at patterns about where these orders are coming from. Are they coming from the same IP address? Are they coming from the same geographic location? Are they coming from multiple different places and being shipped to the same location? Is the same card being used in multiple environments? And you can make some decisions that are real time there. In bricks and mortar, it's a little bit different. You can do some things you can, you can, one of the things that we've seen is in the returns business. So returns is a huge issue, right? In the last 10

[00:15:21] years, we've gone from essentially, you know, you have to have a receipt that you have to bring it into the store to basically free returns all the time, no matter what you want. Do you want to order six dresses to try them all on and return five of them? No problem. It's all free to do it. And that's coming to an end now, because it's turned out to be so expensive, but being able to essentially score people. So for

[00:15:47] example, you know, you've got customers that potentially are doing a lot more of that. One customer is doing that a lot more of that than the other customer. It'd be nice to know those customers that have a predilection to doing lots of returns. And then you can kind of intervene on that early on and respectfully and without, you know, annoying people, but you can, you can kind of change, hopefully change some behavior and reduce that, that amount of cost that they might have. So

[00:16:13] that's, that's an example. Another one that I like to use is on upselling, right? Every company that I know wants to sell something extra at the point of sale. If you're Panera Bread, which one of our customers and you want to, somebody's coming in for lunch, you, you want to sell them some pastry or a few bagels for tomorrow morning, right? If you're a shoe company, as I mentioned, I have lots of shoe companies, right? And I'm going to buy a pair of shoes, but what else can I get? Well, I could buy

[00:16:39] some shoelaces. Maybe I could buy some shoe polish. Maybe I can do, you know, any other number of things. But so how do I know when that's happening and who's getting it done and who's not getting it done? One of the, one of the things that, that we can do is we can use the data. We can take the data. We can set up a set of circumstances where automatically, if a number of milestones or a number of elements come together. So this happens, that happens, and that happens all in the data,

[00:17:07] then I can make an alert on that. I can say in the example that I'm using here, let me know, tell me what every cash register in the business did in the last hour or yesterday or whatever it might be. And tell me how many of those transactions were upsold at the time. And then give me a report that tells me, spreads it out for me. Tell me the registers or even the associate IDs that are

[00:17:36] exceeding that objective and tell me the ones that are not exceeding that objective for, or maybe it's a standard deviation above the mean or something along those lines. So then, then as a manager, if I'm responsible for these stores and those people, I can direct my management attention to the underperformers. And I can explain to them why it's important that we do these expansion sales and what the impact is on the business and how that supports their bid, their, you know, continued paychecks and those kinds of things. So just a couple of examples of the way that you can

[00:18:05] use data to make differences. Liz, I got to go with two questions here and then a comment. And like, you got me, like, you are so in my bailiwick right now with where I've been, what we're doing, and data collection. And you just said something about, you know, like the, you know, cashiers and, you know, the agents that are working or representatives. And sometimes you'll find someone that's just really, really good at talking, right? They're really, really good at talking.

[00:18:33] But that's not good at a checkout line where it's like, Oh, Liz, I love your necklace today. And did you get your hair done? And, but that is very beneficial for customer support or another spot in the retail store. And so you're looking at like, why is this rep so much more efficient than this rep and their sales are higher there. We call it the whole upselling is you want fries with that. Right. There's a whole McDonald's thing that we've been saying for, for years. And we used to work

[00:19:02] in McDonald's. What about first jobs was working with McDonald's. Let's just talk about data collection. You mentioned it. Some of this is easy to get, right? It's inherent. It's in, it's in the digital systems. Some of it's not easy to get. I mean, I was thinking of our grocery stores. Some of it is very easy. It's there. We can splice it and dice it and do whatever. But how do you get folks that weren't collecting data to collect data? Because a lot of times they feel like it's micromanagement. Well, why are you asking for this now, Russ? Like,

[00:19:32] geez, you know, just let me do my job. I do a great job. Do you run into that? We run into it a little bit, but we are very, very data oriented. So we typically, so we start off with, we have the transaction logs. So we bring in, you know, the record of everything that was swiped, that every key that was depressed, every, we have timing. You know, we talked about the productivity of a cashier in a grocery store. And it depends on the philosophy of

[00:19:59] the business, by the way. You know, you go to Trader Joe's, go to Trader Joe's and they encourage the banter and the interaction. Whereas, you know, other grocery chains are more about the throughput and those kinds of things. So how you use the data has to light up with what your corporate strategy and philosophy and how you want to position. But most of the time we're gathering digitally driven data. So the transaction log, the e-com transaction log, we know the loyalty program.

[00:20:26] So we know the customers that have kind of declared a relationship with the company. We have all of the data, all the people, right? We have, we have their IDs of the company. We know history of them. We know what, how long they've been in the job. We know what the hours they're working. All of these things can be correlated. We know every item that that store sells. So if it's a grocery store, it's the 50,000 SKUs that they sell. If it's a restaurant, it's the 20 or 30 menu items that they might have. And even in the restaurant, we might even get down in some more sophisticated

[00:20:55] analysis down into the ingredient list. You know, what, how would the ingredients be actually put together? And then, and then we know the things about the store locations and most retailers include in their store file, they have some other identifiers. They might, they might actually, there are third-party services that do things like risk profile, or they bring in weather information. But we definitely know the, the longitude, the latitude, the specific point where that store is

[00:21:23] generally will know what the product mix is because companies keep a difference. So, you know, if you're in a, in a mall or standalone mall or a strip mall, or you're standalone, you know, we know, we know the positioning or the, the setting in which you're in. So all of that stuff is in the, is in the store information. And those are kind of the five things that we start with usually with everyone, but some of our customers have brought in many, many, many other things. So videos, for example. Now that's,

[00:21:48] that's not, it's digital, but you know, there's some, there's some new structure. There's, yeah, it's unstructured video. We have, we have audio. There's a lot of laws about audio. So we don't, we don't do a lot about audio. Most states don't allow audio to be collected surreptitiously. But, you know, video is just another data source for us. If I go back to when I came into this company way back at the beginning, we were more video centric than we were data centric. And I made a big transition

[00:22:15] over to, to broad, broadly speaking data and thinking of video just as another data source. And of course, technology has changed over time as well. You know, 20 years ago, when, when I started with this company, there wasn't high speed internet everywhere. You couldn't, you couldn't move video, you know, from the store to the headquarters and back and manipulate it around and cut it down and do all these other things. So we tend to be working with those kinds of stuff. Video analytics today.

[00:22:42] One of our most recent thing is RFID. And we had some of the things that are happening in RFID. We've built a, an RFID module working with, with one of our customers and, and their vendor to aggregate more and more of this tracking data around, around actual inventory and those kinds of things. And I mean, there's amazing things going on in, in product tracking from my perspective, and all of that stuff can come to us. And yeah.

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[00:25:36] Absolutely. Again, the website is connect.gs1us.org and the promo code is GS1USPOD10. See you there. This is my second part that I wanted to get to, which is where are you most often seeing kind of this hidden value? Like you're collecting all these data points, you have these five things you're going

[00:26:03] in, you have other stuff you're getting. Is there, you know, like, and maybe you just pick one industry or something, but is there, you know, is it expired inventory? Is it pricing decisions? Is it product placement? Is there a hidden thing that's common or it depends, Reed? You rightly point out the segments make a big difference, right? I mean, in restaurants, it's going to be very, very different than a grocery store, grocery chain, or a retail environment.

[00:26:29] So it really depends on that. It really depends on the organization and what your philosophy, what your strategy is from my perspective. But if I had to answer the question, kind of, you know, the highest area across all of these things, I would say getting the product in the right place at the right time is absolutely the thing. There's nothing worse than having outer stocks because you've lost that sale forever. That sale's not coming back. That person's going to go find it. Maybe they'll go to one of your other stores. If it's a grocery thing and you

[00:26:57] don't have what they specifically want, maybe they'll go to another one of your locations, but but, you know, why not capture it when you got it? Because there's also a very good chance they can go to your competitor across the street. So getting the right product in the right place at the right time is very important, I think. And that's become much more complicated in the post-pandemic timeframe here because what happened during the pandemic? Well, stores became very quickly

[00:27:23] warehouses or extensions of the warehouse, right? You had buy online, pick up in store, or BOPIS we call it, or buy online return in store, BORS. Many of those innovations from the pandemic now have become standard operating procedures. Some of our customers just, I mean, they're trying to manage inventory, right? But, you know, it used to be that if I needed, if I didn't have the product on the shelf, I'd go to the distribution center and it would be,

[00:27:49] you know, be shipped and I'd have it in a few days or whatever it might be. Now I can go into my computer, I can see what store does have it. And I can tell that customer right now, hey, I'm going to have it shipped directly to your house, no charge, and we have to have the size, the color and everything else that you want. So I think it's gotten very, very complicated. And it's gotten me very interested, by the way, in the whole supply chain and inventory management, which is one of the reasons why we've done this RFID stuff that we're doing

[00:28:16] more about expired inventory. We had a customer, very, very large customer, very, very large dollar store type of company that had an unbelievable amount of expired or near to expired inventory sitting in a distribution center. And they had no visibility into it. And loss prevention. Loss prevention because of process, right? Not loss prevention, they're the bad guys, not loss prevention because you've got sign with partners in your staff. It's loss prevention

[00:28:44] because your process isn't working effectively. And so you need a way to identify that first and then look for changes and then constantly monitor it and look at what's happening. So that's what I would say is number one. If you go to restaurants, I think probably pricing and promotions, probably the bigger thing because restaurants, it depends on what type of restaurant we're talking about here. I'm generally dealing with chains. So I'm dealing with QSR and fast casual.

[00:29:11] There are table service chains as well that we do business with. But you go to any mall or any urban setting, you're going to have a bunch of options for buying, for getting your lunch, right? And so getting that customer in the door, having the right promotional activity, the right advertising to get them in the front door. Often that includes this kind of loss leader kind of approach to things.

[00:29:38] Getting them in the front door is a critical thing because if you can't get them in the door, they're going to go across the street to that guy there. So it's hugely competitive and customers have tons of options. And so you've got to make sure that your pricing and your promotions and your advertising is driving that traffic in the front door. So I think that's more important in the restaurant business. I haven't quite figured out yet what the hotel stuff is.

[00:30:04] I think pricing is important there as well. But obviously geographic location, most people who are using a hotel have to be in that physical area, right? But the same thing, they have a lot of competitive options too. So we're figuring that out at this point. Are there operational challenges? We talked about inventory management that tends to show up regardless of industry. Absolutely. Inventory is a huge factor in operations. And when I would come back on the operations side, listen, at the end of the day, it's all about people. It's kind of like running

[00:30:34] my business. My business is all about my people. It's about making sure my people understand what is expected of them and what are the things we hold to be the most important things we need to do. In our case, it reflects back to what you said earlier, Reed, is customer success, customer service, and customer support. We make huge investments in customer support. We want to make sure that we never lose a customer. Now, I can't say that we've always been successful in that, but I can tell you that that is a mantra that I repeat over and over and over and over again,

[00:31:03] that it's easier to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. And once we keep them, we need to make sure that we're working with them as partners. And I hate the idea of being kind of a vendor. I hate that label. I want to be a partner to my customers. So I think the whole, it's all about the people. And then in the context of our customers, I'll harken back to what I was talking about before around internal alignment. You've got to make sure they understand what

[00:31:32] they're doing. You've got to have effective management at the first level, right? So you have all the people that are interacting with customers or working with inventory or whatever it might be inside of a store, a restaurant, the people that are cooking the food and those kinds of things. The key job is that store manager, getting that store manager to A, understand all of the strategies of the business, the strategies and tactics of the business, and that they have

[00:31:59] the personality and the capability of motivating people without beating them up too much. You don't want to beat them up. You want them to do it because they know it's the right thing to do. So it's an area of great interest to me. I think it's an area that I'm interested in. We do a lot of this today. I mentioned this alerting capability. A lot of the alerting capability is around store managers. I like to talk about Spirit Halloween, which is one of our customers. So Spirit Halloween

[00:32:26] is a really interesting customer. They actually have another business that they're Spencer Gifts is the same company. So Spencer Gifts runs about 600 or so stores. They're all in walls. You've been in them. They sell posters and black lights and those kinds of things. And then every August, they open up 1,500 Spirit Halloween stores. They use vacant store space. They hire 1,500 store

[00:32:56] managers. And they don't have time to train these people. They're only going to be working there for two and a half to three months. And they do get some repeat people, right? They get people that come back every year. So there is some knowledge transfer and knowledge continuation that happens. But by and large, these people are being expected to run a retail environment without a lot of context. And so what we do with them is we have this alerting function. We set up, it's about two dozen items,

[00:33:25] two dozen data-driven items that they need to keep track of. And the way they keep track of it is if the data shows that they're varying from what's expected in these particular couple of dozen areas, that store manager will get an alert that has a prescription in it. It'll tell them, and these are all created by the company. Spencer Gifts creates it. So we just provide the framework

[00:33:50] and the capabilities. And they will say, when this one of those two dozen things happen, here's what you need to do. Do A, do B, do C, do D. By the way, we want you to feed back into this alert what you actually did and make sure that it's done. And then that comes up. And then the managers, the district and division managers of these folks can then have data to feed back up through the chain.

[00:34:13] Now, that's a very unique requirement and a very unique company. But the concept of providing frontline team members with very clear instructions based on what's happening in the business, I think has a lot of legs. And it's an area that I want to go into it. I'm looking at both developing products and potentially acquiring companies in those areas. Russ, is there a spot where people invest in analytics and then it falls short? Absolutely.

[00:34:44] Like they just waste time or money or effort? Absolutely. We have this concept that's single user, weak manager. Now, I would never identify that with a company to you, but I can tell you that we have a lot of those situations where they're under-investing in the people they need to actually deliver on the analytics. And let's start with the first thing. The data accuracy is first and must be important. Now,

[00:35:09] that's table stakes. You've got to have good data. There's a lot of companies that don't manage their data very well. And it's kind of a secret part of what we do. There are whole companies that are built around data management and redo data management, but we're not upfront with it. It is part of what we do to enable the rest of our capabilities. So that's table space. And there's all kinds of systems that are feeding the data. And if it's not accurate, then you're kind of dead from the beginning,

[00:35:36] right? So you can do all kinds of analytics, but if the data, it's the whole garbage in, garbage out thing. Timing is important. I kind of touched on this with some of the stuff we talked about earlier where you want to get as close to real time as possible. An hour is worse than real time. A day is worse than an hour. A week is worse than a day. A month is worse than a week. You need to be able to get that stuff as quickly as possible. If you don't, that's a place where you could fail at this. And then dissemination is the other thing. We've touched on this already in a

[00:36:05] couple of ways with the alerting functionality that I have, but much of what we do is also driven by specific functional dashboards. So customers can customize the products so that a person, let's say they're an in-store loss prevention individual, or they're the store manager, or the shipping coordinator, or whatever they might be their responsibilities. You can set up custom dashboards so they can come in in the morning, they can quickly review the dashboard,

[00:36:34] they can identify what's hot or what's not. And it's all based on the current accurate data that's timely delivered to that company, and they can make a better decision. It comes down at time to value. And so you work all these things together. Every one of them has an opportunity to go sideways, and you're going to have buy-in. That's probably the most important thing is that you've got to have an organization that is convenient to getting the right data, getting it to the right

[00:37:00] people, and they've got to manage that, and they've got to reinforce that as a primary strategy. If you don't have those things, then there's lots of opportunity to fail. That's very insightful. I mean, it's a given. You need accurate data. The timeliness totally makes sense. And I really love the call out to dissemination. It's a little bit more than a dashboard. It's a little bit more than a static report. It's alerts. It's disseminating to multiple groups. I just started reading the book, Turn the Boat Around. The right data at the right point with

[00:37:30] the right people needs to be shared. Right. And when I talk about dashboards, I'm talking about interactive dashboards. So if you identify a problem or the dashboard highlights something, you could click on that dashboard and it opens up much more detail about what's happening. It's all actionable. The whole idea is for it to be actionable, not just information. So cool. This has been such an amazing conversation.

[00:37:56] And unfortunately, we have to wrap up, right? Which is unfortunate because we could go deeper. So Reid and I end our conversations with two different questions. I'll take the first one. So whether it be in your personal life or your work life, what is the favorite technology that you are using right now? The only way to answer that question is AI at this point. I mean, it is both incredibly exciting and

[00:38:21] creates a tremendous amount of anxiety in me. Because it is so broad. It is going to be so pervasive that it's scary. I don't know if I can keep up with all of this stuff. I mean, I think, I talked to my CTO last week because I keep talking about, we're trying to get everybody to use AI in every part of their business today, every part of their job relation. And with the underlying,

[00:38:48] we're a relatively small company. No one's going to lose their job in my company because of AI. I don't think. It can be applied in so many areas. And I was talking to my CTO and I said, well, we should do some trading. We need to do trading. And he's like, well, no, I don't think you can do. Just use, let the AI be the trader. And I said, well, they need to know what it can do. And he said, no, that's not, that's not right. He said, the fact is, it can do pretty much

[00:39:14] everything. And it's, it's the, the minority thing is what it can't do. There's, there's very little that it can't do in terms of information workers or people working on screens and, you know, coders and those kinds of things. So I am feeling way, personally, way behind the curve. Every time I have a conversation with my CTO, he tells me something else that I never thought of that I could use the technology for. So, you know, I mentioned my, my, the wedding this past weekend with my daughter, my friend Claudia helped me, right? My, my virtual friend Claudia helped me

[00:39:44] write a good father of the bride speech, which, you know, I mean, it wasn't all Claudia, right? It was I mean, I've been, I learned a lot of it and I did a lot of things, but it made me a bunch of But you had an English professor tutoring you along the way. Exactly. So we're using it in marketing. We're using it in our coding where, you know, where the world is changing in the, in the software development area, where you can basically hire

[00:40:09] a bot that never has to eat or sleep. They don't have to take breaks. You can get an army of bots that are equivalent to kind of, you know, mid-level coders and they can work all night and you can come in the morning and review their stuff. And so it's really changing the nature of the, the way we develop products. It's in marketing, it's in merchandising, it's in the sales area. It's in any time we have to make a speech. And that affects both my personal life and my business

[00:40:36] life. And I'm in awe of what is the possibilities. And again, I'm also full of some anxiety. I mean, I've been reading a lot of listening to a lot of podcasts about what the impact of this might be. Yeah. No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Exciting times. So I think I might know the answer to this one, but the question we always ask is what do you want to learn? What's something new you want to learn in the near future? Well, I'm going to throw baby, throw a little bit of a curve here. I mean,

[00:41:02] A, I did give you the AI answer to that as well, which it's probably what you were expecting, but I'm going to tell you that it's Mahjong. Oh, okay. All right. I do absolutely nothing about Mahjong. So my wife has become just a maniac, a Mahjong maniac. And she keeps trying to- And you're tired of losing. Yeah, that's right. So she keeps encouraging me to participate and get along. And I don't think

[00:41:29] I'm going to be able to avoid it no matter what, but I do want to, I want to learn about it. I want to figure out how to, how to play the game. And I, you know, I'm getting the clear direction that this is a very social game and it's taking off. I think Mahjong is the, is the new pickleball. I agree. Yes. Yes. It's so funny you say that. Cause I heard that exact same expression. No, I thought I created it, but okay. Yeah. Well, we'll give you credit here. We'll give you credit here.

[00:41:58] Okay. Good. Well, listen, Russ, thank you so much for your time and your insights. Russ thoroughly enjoyed the time with you today and we wish you much continued success. Well, thank you, Reed and Liz. Thank you so much. I really, I really did enjoy it. You know, I come into these podcasts, sometimes I'm a little anxious that I'm going to not do well, but this one felt very natural and very, very straightforward. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Thank you for joining the next level supply chain with GS1 US. If you enjoyed today's show,

[00:42:27] you can subscribe to our feed or explore more great episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to share and follow us on social media. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time.