Purchasing in an Age of Disruption

Welcome, everybody. My name is François Doyon. You can call me Frank. I’ve been with genius about eight years, and today’s session is about purchasing in an age of disruption. This is a presentation we’ve done in the past, but we’ve upgraded it with recent events that’s been really, I guess, hindering everybody’s process in the recent years. Let’s head right away to our agenda and start this off since it’s a pretty crowded session. Okay. So again, thank you for joining. I want to reemphasize on that. It’s fun to see that amount of people joining today. Thank you very much. The agenda today will first go through a little background on who we are a genius solution. Then we will be discussing what we call the evolution of purchasing. We’ll make it a bit cartoonish, but we’ll go through different ways of dealing with purchasing. We formed that into a way where we can see it as an evolution, but this is basically bringing back a lot of the experience of things we’ve seen in our customers to formulate different environment of work and how it takes place.

And then we’ll make sure to hit on the topic of even more disruption. So this is the topic today. We want to make sure we discuss about the recent years and how it hindered our process and what are we going to do to make our life better. And then we’ll head into a demo to see how can genius help? How can GeniusERP put a system in play that will guide you and help you do that purchasing or supply chain process? All right, let’s start. So who is genius? It starts with a We’re a good team. So GeniusERP is build for manufacturers. So at genius, we do build the software, we develop the software, and we also implement it. So everybody you talk to a genius is a genius employee, basically. And the software is designed, again, for manufacturers, all sorts of manufacturers, but most precisely, people that are in custom building or make-to-order type industries. Genius It was founded 30 plus years ago in ’89. And back then, it was a few engineers giving out consultation in industrial engineering, basically. Then it started taking form into different modules that were programmed to give a first release that was old-ish-looking in ’95 that really took a turn somewhere in between those two dates there.

But really in 2006, we took a better approach to all this, and we really targeted key customers of in the manufacturing business with a really complete solution to get us to today, and tomorrow, I guess, where we have hundreds of customers using our platform successfully. I’ve said it, 30 years in the business, We’re looking at serving manufacturers. We’ve been having 100 plus employees. It’s been more than three years now, I think. It’s been a while already. Ten thousands of customers, and that’s the number here, 96% retention. Potential. Proud to say, our customer, join us and stick with us. If you compare it to the industry, probably you’d see lower numbers. Pretty proud of that one. That one is maybe… I’ve been reusing a slide a little bit here. So 95 % Compoundent growth, it’s probably more 20-ish, smaller than 25 this year, but still, we’ve been getting out of the crisis pretty good here. Again, we said it, we’re built for manufacturer, but custom manufacturer, so engineer, configure, make to order. We have a few things that makes us unique, such as the quote to cash, CAB to BOM integration, really managing the project all the way from engineering to to conception and productions, manufacturing.

We have a leading edge scheduling tool, and we also have a lot of business intelligence and dashboard that will help us move through the different challenges that we need our ERP to help with. Now, here’s a quick page that will tell you a bit of what does consist of genius ERP. You’re going to see a lot of the core functionalities on top right, a few of our latest features on the left, such as warranty management, field service, portal. We’ve got a lot of mobility also that was added in the recent years, and a bit of the technology and all this on the right. Again, if you want to know more, I’ll show you a few links later to go and dig in other functionalities. We’ll concentrate today on procurement. A few of the delivery method, how can you get Genius ERP? I can buy it, then install it wherever I want, or I can rent it, still deploy wherever I want. So it could be on my server, on my own hosting. And we can also, at Genius, offer the whole shebang, meaning the service, the hosting, and the application, everything on our environment. All right.

I said there’s a few differentiators of genius. I mean, we can be talking cat integrations, smart scheduling, project management, live transaction, tracking, all that. There’s a lot of these topics that are covered in our previous webinar. So if you’re looking to find these, same place you probably registered for today, you can find it on our website under the Resource section, under the Webinar section. And then there’s a lot of quick tools to search through different topics. We can just scroll through the list. They’re all there available and recorded. All right, we’re getting to our topic. So the evolution of purchasing in the manufacturing industry. We’re going to be looking at different eras. We’re going to be looking at Stone Age, Antiquity, Middle Age, Contemporary period, and leading for sure to the solution being GRCRP here. You notice I plugged in a little something in there in between our two last period. That’s going to be also part of our main topic today. What this is meant to be, we’re cartooning it if you want, but basically we’re trying to bring you visibility on everything we’ve learned, talking to the prospect, visiting customers and looking at how they do things today.

And we’ve segregated it into a few example, leading to a point where there’s no system to the point where we’re a bit more under control. So let me get you through these different areas, and we’ll get to a point where we discuss the continuous age. So at the start, and you thought discovering fire was difficult. So we’re at the Stone Age, where we do have people making the business, meaning that we have different roles that are super important for our business to strive. But then each of these persona are each doing their own thing. They’re in silos. My engineer will design, then he’s going to turn around and purchase for his project. While my estimator probably called on a supplier, got some pricing, and perhaps the engineer is buying from the same one or they’re maybe so segregated in their activities that he’s buying from somebody else at the end. Again, everybody’s doing their own little thing. R&d turns around and probably looks at inventory. Oh, it’s there. I’m going to take it, use it, and then production comes around. Hey, look, last night it was there. It’s not there anymore. What are we going to do?

We need to turn around and purchase again. So a silo environment with everybody doing their own little thing. What are the caveats of this situation? There’s no way you can forecast expenses. Everybody does their own thing without necessarily warning somebody else. So I’m thinking about people in payables trying to reconciliation all that. I got an I’m going to have a invoice for three of these. Is it you? Oh, no, you purchased one, and then it’s R&D, the other one, and then it’s the engineer. Okay, how can we get back and have proof of whatever happened or reconciliation that information? It’s a nightmare. So many people to train. If everybody’s doing purchasing, one goes by voicemail, the other one goes by email, the other one goes perhaps even still by fax, I don’t know. And then reconciliation that information is super tough, or trying to train everybody to do it in a certain way, but now you I’m trying six person. That doesn’t give you a lot of negotiation capability. How can you negotiate if you’re buying one at a time? Whereas if we were to combine the need, we said it earlier, it could have been purchasing three times the same component.

We could have gather the needs together and giving us more negotiation power. So again, no common visibility here. This is why we’re leading to the next era being Antiquity. Now, in Antiquity, and they call it ancient rules, I like to do the connection here. Stone to runes. I mean, a bit better, but maybe not that much. So what’s happening? We do have six person. They’re still there. They need what they need, I guess. But what we figured out is, let’s put a system, let’s put something We’re putting in place. So we’ll create a new role. Here comes the rise of the purchaser. So there’s a new position that appears in your company structure, for example, but we still need to suffice to the need of everybody. These key roles are still in your business making it go around. What we’re doing is we’re bringing all of these demands centralizing it to one person so that person can be more efficient as to purchasing. Is that a good solution? Let’s see. Now what we have is everybody taking their demand to one person, and that person is trying to queue everything in a certain order. Now that means instead of sending a fax, an email, I don’t know, a voicemail to your different suppliers where they get that in all forms.

It is Mike, my purchaser. I’m going to call it Mike, by the way. It’s Mike that gets all of these email fax and everything at in his office now. Are we better equipped? Well, I guess it leads to a place where everybody’s yelling, everybody wants to go first. And now our purchaser, Mike, just became Mike, the fireman, firefighter. Because he just extinguish his fire all the time, gets yelled at. And in that situation, we have the engineers that start releasing something, sends in a file. We have the R&D that turns around and once a piece, it’s not please purchase it. I left you a post it on your desk, don’t you remember? And now everybody’s coming up Mike in every direction. Now, what happened and which demand goes first? This is exactly the type of environment where Where? There’s an expression that says, Squeaky wheels always gets greased. Or I like to call it, probably heard that one more often from customers as who cries the loudest that gets served first? Actually, to that, I would say those that are more used to that type of vermin would learn that I don’t have to yell the loudest.

I just have to yell last to be the first to go. But anyway, a joke aside, this is an environment where people will try to find their way, squeeze in all the activity from Mike to get the advantage. Also, Mike, when he turns around, there’s no system. Everything comes, again, paper, file, voicemail. There’s no efficient way to deal with this, except maybe doing transaction by transaction. That request came in from engineering. I’m going to call from that steel supplier. I turn around production’s asking for the same steel. All right, I’ll issue another PO. And now at the end of the day, I issued four PO to the same supplier. But I got no way to consolidate that info throughout my day. The only thing I’d say is that file is taken care of. Let’s put it on the other corner of my desk. And for sure, with no consolidated view, there’s no way for me to forecast or to force in my demands. This is where we get to the next era, the middle age. In the middle age, it’s only a flesh wound. Even without a leg, I can do my job. Okay, so joke aside, we see armor, horses.

We’re going to start to bring in science into all this and try to build some system. In this era, I still have all my roles. I will have one buyer. What I want to bring into this era is what system started appearing to help our purchaser and everybody else work together. The first thing that comes to mind was Kanban. So somebody thought of at some point to go look at a pile of components that we use on the shop floor, and they put a card on it. When it gets to a certain level, we take the card, we bring it to Mike, and Mike sees all the specs, so he knows exactly what to replenish, what to order. Now, we make sure that that pile has always sufficient quantity to to be used. And that’s super cool. Kanban works great if you’ve ever done it, but it works great in a stable or repetitive demand environment, meaning that it If my pile is getting low and I replenish it, it’s because I know we’re going to use it in the near future. I don’t want to replenish a pile that will just be cashed in the on-schelve for months.

That’s not the purpose of Kanban. So again, trying to make a statement here, bringing a new system or destroying it right away, I guess. If you’re in somewhat of a repetitive environment or some of the company can be Kanban, that’s a great solution. Then the other system I’ve seen around there is Excel files. Then we start having, for example, in Excel to manage our inventory. Let’s start putting together all of our component, quantity available, and then as soon as somebody picks something, he has to go in the file, change it, or feed Mike with that info, and he’s supposed to keep that up to date. That’s a lot It’s not a clerical transaction. So again, maybe two good examples of system I’ve seen, but usually, even when we start having that, they’re still yelling. There are still things coming from all over. I mean, sales is still going to come in and say, You know what? I needed two. They were on the shelf. I took them. And then production will turn around and say, Hey, I had them yesterday. They’re gone. We have none left in the shelf. Who stole them? Again, it’s not stealing.

They were available and we needed them. So there’s still a missing common visibility for everybody to be able to work together. So in that environment, Mike is still a firefighter. More systems in play, but still we’re going to be fighting to get out of this. So some people are happy, maybe some of the Kemen is working great, but we’re still getting phone calls, still yelling. And again, that Kemen works if we’re in a stable repeat environment. And then we probably have tons of Excel. I gave you one example, but then engineering supplies there, Excel for every release or revision. Then maybe R&D or your inventory manager is coming back and giving you all sorts of adjustment in another file. And then you’re trying to compile that information into a third file. And then You didn’t even discuss it so far, but you need to give information back to everybody that’s asking for this. What’s the status of my PO? Are we going to be able to start production? So that information needs to flow back to them so they can align the entire company, basically. So again, a lot of challenges and Mike, my permit.

Here’s for my fourth and last era before we get into the solution here in the genius era. And can you dig it? So it’s the disco era or the contemporary period. What I’m trying to reflect here with my disco dancer is that we’re in a period where we need to be super flexible What is this period supposed to represent? What we’re talking about here is custom building. We’re talking of people in an environment where we need to do design to order, make to an order, configure to order, but an environment that is not so repetitive or with not so stable demand, basically. So what happens in that environment? Mike, not that flexible, what’s happening? Now, demand demand is even more firing from everywhere because every order that comes in is probably way different than the previous one. So where Kanban might have been efficient in my middle age with a more stable demand, Now, that proportion of material or thing that we’re reusing probably dropped a lot, and we have a lot of new components that are required. Might it be for R&D, for production, for anything, estimating the number of demand just increased a whole lot because now we’re always asking for new components.

So there’s not a lot of the history we can just reuse. So we’re getting back into a situation where Mike becomes a fireman again because whatever system you’re trying to put in place, it’s probably broken. So meaning that Kanban, if it was working in my middle age right now, can’t work or works for a smaller proportion of what you’re trying to manage. So we’re back to to phone calls, yelling, request for quote, even more than before. So again, with my firefighter. Now, I’m going to allow myself this because I’m an engineer, so I’ll put them in front here and say, It’s their fault. In a design to order environment, well, there’s a lot of new stuff or testing or tryouts or releases that are happening from engineer. So them most than anybody else, I guess, would would have to be very, very flexible in their environment. So that’s asking Mike, who’s not so boogie-woogie flexible, to also be flexible with them. And I spoke about engineers, but it could be a whole lot of other people in the company. So let’s take a quick look at this. So my engineers are supplying me with probably, if I’m lucky, a finally approved release so I can take around and purchase.

That’s if you don’t work with engineering that perhaps really a portion of your design and then later another portion to production and to purchasing. And that’s it. Then it doesn’t go to an eighth or a fourth, whatever revision or engineering change afterwards. So that’s already a lot of that disco dance I’m seeing that’s happening. Then we have our that comes around and tries to pick up something or maybe sells. Sales is probably working the same way. They turn around it, Hey, Mike, I look at your Excel file for inventory. We had two. There was two on the shelf. I I didn’t see anything else, so we sold them or we used them. But then production turns around, but I needed them. Three days later, we had a critical production coming on, and now nobody knew until three days later that we were in a bad spot. Again, centralized information would have been good here or a lot of other solutions that we’ll bring in the next couple of slides. We see all sorts of situation like this or comments like this from our customers when they don’t have a system yet. Whether it’s a system that can exist in this era without having an ERP or something to the liking, we probably have, again, a whole lot of spreadsheets, not so up to date inventory file or system.

And then we were probably living in between voicemail, Post-it, files on the corner. The last one I see that was super… I didn’t think it could happen that way, but an older guy, I guess, our engineer was just dropping a it’s being key to the purchaser instead of emailing or something. So I’ve seen so many forms of this. So at this point, we’re just down in a nightmare and trying to survive. And again, this is not just for the purchaser for Mike, it’s for everybody else. They’re trying to make their work. They’re trying to make the company profits and everything. But now they’re pulling on Mike. Mike is now their focus point for information, and Mike has to feed them back. So it’s not just It’s not requesting, it’s giving information back. So I already said that. So you know what? We see this guy sleeping. I’m really hoping I didn’t put you to sleep so far with all these different errors. So let’s do something. Let’s revive you a bit. I want to get your input. I’m going to put a poll on screen and ask you, where do you see your company today?

In which era do you see yourself? So I’m going to launch that poll. You should have it on mainstream. So the Stone Age, again, is everybody works in silos. There’s no purchase or roll. When we get to Antiquity, we really start to have somebody that’s responsible for purchasing, but no real system around it. Middle age, There’s some system, but we’re really talking more about a repetitive type environment or more stable demand. And then we get to the contemporary age where we really have a custom design and releases. Thank you for those who are answering. There’s only two answers so far. Again, please feed me with some information. Oh, thank you. Thank you, everybody. Okay, that’s bizarre. Results were changing. So so far, I saw a whole lot on the a temporary age. Don’t forget, there’s a last place there where we can go. If you already have perhaps an ERP system, if you already have a certain form of something you’re using today, there we go. You can hit that last answer there. That’s great. Almost everybody answered, so I’m going to end the poll right now. But before then, I’m going to talk to you.

Before I do that, I’m going to talk to you about the results. What I’m seeing on screen is 70% of everybody who answered so far, and it’s almost everybody, are in the content period. So you probably have a purchaser, probably. You’re probably doing custom production, and you probably have some system, but they’re broken or they’re trying to I’m seeing also some people from the Middle East, so we do have a bit of people that live into a more stable world but still are fighting to get a system going. One in the inequity and one has probably already an ERP or somewhat of a system. I’m going to close that just for sake of information when I move to my demo, I’ll try to refer back to that information. Okay. Let’s go back to my slide. All right, so we went through my four errors before leading to the genius age. But before I get there, there’s a super important topic we need to talk about, something that I had huge impact on however anybody was working so far in the industry. And you see it, it’s COVID. So COVID stroke, stroke, strike, anyway, in 2019.

And then it was chaos. Nobody could have foretold what happened next. So a few impacts we can talk about. The first one is probably labor. So your supplier maybe had nobody to work for them or had issues with people going either in isolation or extended sick leave. And I mean, that pandemic really threw a wrench. So at that moment, we’re starting to see impact in between either how you can produce yourself or how you can get supplies from your vendors. Then came the border issue. Crossing borders, more regulated, less regulated. Some were confined, some were… So all of that through bizarre lead times or we’re forcing you to reshore your purchase, perhaps, or diversify where you were getting your products from. Each country was also dealing with these out-of-sync wave, which is still the case, not even between country, between states or provinces. You could see that, Hey, now, when Tara is going down, now it’s New York or whoever We could see that these wave were not impacting at the same pace. When you were striving, your suppliers were down. When you were down, your supplier were striving, then your inventory would go, Oh, missing.

No, too much. Oh, really hard to… It would throw a It’s not should anybody’s forecast, let’s just say. We quickly saw the impact on delivery and on pricing, pretty much in all essential industry. There’s a few example we can think of. The steel price was going up. Some key electronic parts were missing, and that just crippled a few industries like some of the car manufacturers or some of the OEMs. Really, that brought a new shift in the way people were managing supply chain. There was a study A report made by HSBC 2021 that stated that 29% of companies globally started diversifying their supply chain. People were trying to be more resilient. They were trying to fight back and try to find a way to stay in business, basically. Instead of relying on one top tier suppliers or a few top suppliers, they had to, and perhaps even all from the same country, they had to search for diversified source of replacement. And we also started hearing, and I think I’ve already voiced this, about reshoring and trying to buy more locally, and again, diversifying that. So a lot of industry where we’re also looking at, and I’ve seen this with at least one of our where they started to overstock like crazy.

So they were sure to answer their on demand. And in the same time, that specific one I can think of was also trying to become that ensure that local source to help not either, even competition, I guess, start a new site to their market, but be that local source for everybody else in their community. When things… Well, can we even say it calm down? I’m going to try to be optimistic here. So when things started calming down, then happened the war in Ukraine. I’m not going to act like I’m an expert of what’s going on there. But what I can tell you is, myself, the first thing I notice is I drove to a corner and tried to put gas in my car and my wallet cried. I can tell you, fuel raise was outrageous. And that impact also a lot of industries, products, throughout the market. The other thing that I saw in particular was some impact on some specific material that I didn’t even knew came from Ukraine or even Russia, where because of all the sanction and everything, it was harder to get these materials. For example, nickel is used for making stainless steel, and price of stainless steel varies again.

With all of these impact, and I can go on, but I’m looking at time. I want to make sure we have time for questions here. There were different studies that were done, and I’m going to bring one of the report that I saw on screen here. It was made by McKinsey & Company. It’s pretty much in line with what we’ve been saying so far in this webinar. When we try to bring in system to help us, well, we’re going to be centralizing supply chain planning, meaning putting a purchaser, somebody in the middle in charge that can actually manage to have power of bargaining and all that, have visibility. And then we’re going to also diversify our sourcing. So meaning we’re going to either nearshoring or dealing with more source of vendors or suppliers. And basically, it goes in line with what I’m presenting today. There was a really neat graph I wanted to show you where there was suppliers, you yourself as a manufacturer, customers, and then there were all sorts of cash low lines and everything, and basically it would just all go red because that impact cascades all over the supply chain. There was all sorts of continuous circle activities that would have been great to show you guys.

But basically, Basically, what we’re seeing is, and let’s go back again to this effect on labor and everything, your force or your stability of producing is in play. Now you’re going to try to get source from different person. But if we can think about it earlier And later on, your customer maybe doesn’t rely on you that much and also wants to diversify what he’s buying from. So he’s also perhaps looking at somewhere else. So a customer that might have been giving you orders, and I’m thinking about some of you that answered that you were in the middle age, more repeat and stable demand, perhaps that’s not your reality anymore. And most probably that stability of what came in as a demand from your customer and how you can get supply is completely disturbed. So you’re almost getting to the same place as the custom manufacturers are today. So really unstable environment for everybody. And also that probably impact a lot of the lead time on some items where there’s no diversifying source. There’s probably only a few key people that supplies us. So then lead times are going up where we had a certain relationship, but they can’t guarantee it anymore.

So more and longer lead time items. And then we get to price. I don’t know if some of you can still get quotes that are valid a few days. I don’t see a lot today. So price or quote have no lifetime. So we’re pretty much in a world of RFPing all the time. So whatever you need, request a price, because if you quoted it one month or two ago, it’s not good anymore. So diversifying no lifetime of quotes and pricing more long lead items. Again, we’re back to basically the nightmare page that I showed you before, and this is where I want to go back to. So It all leads to a point where we need a system. We need something to get out of this. So what’s the dream? Where do we want to be where Mike can sleep with his eyes closed and no nightmare anymore? So we really want Mike and the entire set of people that are in relation with Mike to be kumbayana or joyful. So we want to have that peace of mind where we can still have our business striving, but have people efficient. So the point here, the objective that we’ve bullet point here for you is that we’d like to have everybody centralize their demand in one place so we can have visibility and we can have bargaining power.

So again, we don’t want to have Mike doing one PO in the morning, another PO in the afternoon, another PO at night, and then figure out it’s the same supplier where we could have just grouped up demand and maybe could have also insisted on getting better delivery on the first item since we’re giving him the two other one, or we might go somewhere else. Again, that’s bargaining for and not getting transaction by transaction in the system. Key indicators or business intelligence here, what do we mean by that? Well, if you’re going to start diversifying from who you buy, you need some proper information to know where you’re buying from or where can you buy from. A system that can give you that will be key in this environment. Who do I buy from? How much do I pay it for? If you wanted to know how much, it’s either I have traceability to the last request for quote or see the contract price right away in the system or have an easy way to issue RFP to multiple vendors. For sure, some basic functionality that a lot of the ERP will have, such as Kanban, restocking methods, long lead time, item management.

So all of these, again, are still in play for a lot of the different business out there. How do we get there? Well, by genius. All right. I have to say it. It is the genius era that comes up next. Yes, this is where I will talk to you about what genius can do for you and what system it brings into play to help in this disruptive era that we are in. The first thing I want to show you is this is a bi-directional arrow. It’s information going to centralize, going to Mike, but also going back to all of the key roles in the company. We want the team to be able to tell Mike what they need, but we We want Mike to be able to react on that, but also give feedback back to the team, or that system should be giving feedback to the team. How do we get there? This is where we get to a GenieCRP demo. Let I’ll walk into the system and show you a few things. Now, the first thing I want to show you is that centralized information. Here is the environment where we see the work orders in genius.

I have a job. Again, this is probably a place where if somebody puts in an order in genius for placement parts, it would reserve material. My engineer is doing my design or R&D, could come in here and just add a component, reserve it so we know it’s needed. For example, here we can see this component here is a filter. I require one, and right away I have visibility. I don’t need to go to Mike, I don’t need to go to an inventory Excel file, and I have a visibility on how many I have on hand. I got 26. Wait. I know that I need five already for other projects. What are they? I can expand this little tuggle here and see every jobs that need it. I need one here, two here. These are orders or job for these different customers. The system is telling me that I already have five, that if I steal them, I’m going to be in a bad spot. So the system tells you available, you can use 21. Perfect. I come around, I need 20. I’m not hindering anybody. I can actually take them, and we’re going to still have one free in the system.

So picture for everybody to see. Now, let’s go to maybe something else that has a bit more activities on it. Oh, and again, we’re talking about pictures or visibility, I mean, to say for everybody. Let’s say I’m a production manager wondering, Can I start working on this? Well, you can see that some of these components have an exclamation exclamation point on it, or I hope you can see, perhaps it’s getting a bit small on your screen. If I click on this component here, you’re going to see this little exclamation point means that it’s in shortage. I don’t have enough to get this job out there working. We’re short. Actually, if I look at the bottom, I don’t have any on hand. I need 10 on different jobs. That means that I’m at minus 10 for the moment. But I do see that I I have upcoming orders for six, but I’m still going to be short four. You can go see what is that order for. It’s coming from Delco Electrical Supplier. It’s due to arrive on April 22nd. Again, I have visibility on what’s going on, but in this case, I am short and I’m going to need to take action.

I’m going to need Mike to do something about it, but I don’t need to tell Mike. I don’t need to leave him a Post-it or send him a USB key on this corner of his He’s in the corner of his desk, half joking here. Again, I put in my reservation, the quantity I need for my job, and that information will flow to Mike. Another thing, Mike is not going to come in here. He’s not going to go job by job So it’s not like he’s again handling one Post-it and then the next Post-it and go to work. That’s not the point. We want to make it easy and fast, efficient for John to react. So John will go into purchasing Ingenius, and he will hit this recommended reorder with it. What is that? Well, it’s a two-portion screen where I have a shopping cart on top and a shopping list on the bottom. I’ll have whatever I need on my shopping list and I’ll be able to drag it to my shopping cart. All right, so how does this work? If I hit the filter here, it will load the screen with everything that will fall short.

You’ll see in a moment, I’m also including, and you can see here, a little minimum. I’m also including those with cam and or minimum levels where I need to replenish inventory in there. There’s quite a lot in there. Let me just filter some things out. Here we go. We can look at that mounting plate that I was showing you earlier. If I click I’m there. You can see on the right, this is the one where we were still missing four. I have zero, I need 10, I have six coming on PO, and I needed four. When do I need the four? It’s a good question. Yes, the system will tell me, but let me show you step by step how I would do this. I can go to a forecasted timeline of my inventory. By hitting that little button here, let me put this larger. You can see I have a projected timeline with every inventory fluctuation coming in. First of all, we’re going to be receiving the PO on the 22nd. You can see purchase order coming from Delco. We’re going to be increasing our inventory of six. We read zero, six. Then on the 28th, we have two things happening at the same time.

We have two jobs that we’ll be using two and four, dropping our inventory to zero on that date. But that means when do I need it? I’m going to fall below zero if I don’t get anything prior to May third. Look at this here. Shortage date, May third. Again, we’re giving visibility for Mike to explain what’s happening in the system, but the system is already calculating all for you. All right, so now what happens? Well, I want to order these. I can just slide it to the top. I’ll come back to what appears on top in a moment. We’ll add a bit to it before we go in there. But now we know our mounting plate, quantity four has been added to that section of thing. We were talking about Kanban or replenishing or restocking activities. If I look at plate, for example, here in the plate, we I have a minimum and a maximum quantity, 5 and 10. If I go back to my inventory widget here, I can see I have zero on stock. I need five, so I’m minus five. We already have a PO for six, so that means we’re going to have one left in stock.

If I wouldn’t have minimum on there, everything would be okay. It wouldn’t show up in my list. But in this case, I’m saying whenever something happens, I want to always keep five on shelf. The system says I would have one left, so you can see my shortage is minus four. It’s suggesting that we purchase four. If I slide that to the top, here we go. We just added the line for four so we can reach our minimum level of five when all of this is done. All right. So very easy to figure out the needs and drag and drop them to the top. We do have other functionalities in there. We could push it to have economic quantity, multiple size, like it’s a box of 25, for example, or even unit of measures. Let’s keep it simple for now. So centralize information with visibility on everything. Now, we need to make the clerical portion super easy for Mike That portion of thing could be taken care of easily, and then he can put his energy on something else like nurturing relationship with new suppliers, diversifying his supplies, and maybe managing your vendors and doing bargains or stuff like that.

What’s next? Actually, we were talking about diversifying vendors. Let’s look at this plate here. It said that we’re going to buy from Knife Powertronic, sorry. If I look here at the bottom, this genius gives us all the options or all suppliers that we’ve used in the past. Really giving us insight of who we can choose or who can we call upon to help us. Now, our Priority one vendor, you can see priority one and two here. We have defined who should I use first? And look, it’s nice power trying. So automatically, if I pick a line and I throw it on my shopping cart, it will use my preferred vendor. But I can see the other guys, the second preferred vendor, and then I have 99. What is that? Any time I use a vendor, it will be added as 99. So genius will always keep the history for you in case you’re wondering, Where can I buy this again from? Those that you want to rank as preferred, you can go and rank them like this. It also gives you ways of comparing lead time, prices, giving you maybe some other statistics on average sales, average delivery times, and all that.

If I would want to pick my second or third vendor, I could have just clicked here, thrown it to the top, and it would have went right under the proper vendor name. Okay, let’s do something here. I’m I’m going to add a few things to my request there on top by adding a few components, dragging this upward, and now we’re starting to feel that page here on top. Now, I can review what I’m about to issue as PO. I could sort by vendor. You can see here I have a few. I personally like to group like this, and then I can see that I’m about to issue POs for five different vendors. I’m about to issue five POs. Again, it’s regrouping all of the demands. Now, that’s a good Whatever I’ve been adding so far to my shopping cart is purchase to stock. Now we can have default location, we can have serial tracking, lot tracking, all sorts of things in there in Genes, too. But I did hear that 70% of you guys are in a custom environment. So if you’re in a custom building, you probably have a lot of these components that don’t even have a place on the shelf to go to.

When it gets in-house, you’d like to have them brought to the proper area of work, to the proper whip or project that’s ongoing. We can definitely do that in genius. So if I go, for example, on these, a mounting plate, maybe this is not something we usually order. It’s very special to an order. I can click on it and generate the relationship between my purchase and all the jobs. See that little toggled appear? I can click, and I know that from the four, two are going to this job and two other ones are going to another job. I’m able to create that relationship I’m going to change it. That means later on on the PO if I want to and later on at receiving, the person is going to know right away, oh, this is not going on shelf, ABC or something like that. This is going for a job number 10 307 and 10 312. I can do this in one swoop. I could multi-select and hit that button. Pretty easy to work with. All right, so let’s create our purchase orders. As I said, I’m about to create five different purchase orders, and this is where by grouping, I could have seen maybe I’m saving if I would group this item a loan on one of these PO to another vendor and try to save on freight, perhaps.

All right. Again, every information in orange in that screen, you can change to your liking before you process these through POs. Now, this will bring me back to my purchasing screen with all the POs created in different tabs. I have my POs here. They’re also highlighted here on the left, the one we just created. If I go in the first one, for example, you can see that toggle is It’s still there. I can still review the fact that it’s going to different jobs. All right, so now very easy to process through. Let’s say even Mike’s not available one day. For the hell of me, Mike would take vacation. Well, that’s half a joke. Somebody are not replaceable. Now, in this case, the knowledge of what vendor to use, what’s required to be purchased, just slight knowledge on that window, and you can suffice. The other thing that’s fun for Mike is I can just click email, punch in. I want my purchase order to go out, and it will bring up my email tool with the proper contact and you can have multiple contacts in the vendor tag to receive. I can have somebody different receiving my purchase order than my request for pricing, for example.

It will fill out the contacts, already have the form attached to my PO, and I can just send it out. Again, making it easy for him. He doesn’t have to remember every contact or go scrolling into his contact box and his personal stuff. It’s all in there. Mike has done his portion of the job so far. How can information flow back to your team? Again, we’re not looking at Mike creating emails or saying, I’ve done this. Yes, I’ve done that. He’s taken action. There’s now a status in the system. The system will reflect that for him. If we go back to, for example, work order here, where I had these different demands and this one was in shortage, we now have taken action. If I go to a page like Material Planning, let me explain what this is. On this page, I have all of the material, all the requirements components or so that were required for this job. Now I view the status. In red, it was short. In yellow, we had a plan going. And in green, it was available in inventory already. Color-coded I’ve got to keep availability quick to the eyes.

What happens now is we just did a purchase. If I refresh this because my purchase order is ongoing, some of these are going to turn yellow. Here we go. Let’s say we look at that mounting plate we just ordered. Well, I can see that it’s now in yellow. It’s saying in time, and I can go see where it’s going to be coming from. I’m a production manager wondering, Can I start on this? Well, some of these components are in there. Oh, this I’m taking a risk, it should be in on time if my supplier respects the date, and it’s this supplier coming on that date with this quantity. I can even pop the PO open from here if I want. Again, visibility throughout the company. We do have dashboard showing the same information for multiple orders at a time. So bi-directional feed of information. All right, so easy, clear-code stuff taken care of, visibility for everybody, a centralized way of issuing purchase, issuing material needs to everybody. And what am I missing? Oh, we said there’s no price or quote lifetime today. We’re probably going to be living in a request for quote world. Let me show you that.

It’s That’s really important. If I go back to the purchasing, I did start a request for quote here that I wanted to show you. In this case, I’m going to open this up, we were requesting price on three components. What I’m going to do, I’m going to go into our request for quote portion of this where I can tell genius which are the suppliers that I’m asking price for. If I click on any one of these, I can ask which are the qualified vendor. Same thing at a toggle that we had earlier, it will show me who we’ve used before with order priority. In this case, I got only one. Then maybe these are new components. Most of you are in customized making, so perhaps a lot of these, you don’t have suppliers for it. It’s the first use and it’s maybe a one-off. I can just hit that add button and select from any other vendor I’ve used in the past or that I have in the system. You can see as I double click, they’re being added in the background. Let’s go all out. I’m going to put three in there. Let me I’m going to go to the full screen.

Now, what I can do is say, you know what? This guy’s going to supply everything. Google manufacturing, well, they don’t do Gearbox. Let me untick the Gearbox. Then I’m going to go with these guys and maybe they don’t do the cooler filter, for example. When I’m ready, I can save, hit I hit the Send email button. Do you realize here I can have 100 items in there. I just selected a few vendors, and when I hit Send emails, for every vendor, it’s going to pop one email with the proper contact again and their an Excel file. You just told me, told the system, which of these items you’re going to be asking price for. Each of them, I can hit Send, we’ll go away, and then the next email for Google manufacturing comes up, contact for Google, their an Excel file, and then the third vendor comes up again with their own Excel file. Now, I just said it, Excel, Excel. In that Excel, they can give you pricing, their own catalog number or item number, and pricing, sure, delivery time. In this case, I got three. Maybe I’m just picking up the phone and calling them.

I can import the file back. If they’re fun enough that it would fill out your Excel file through, you can actually import it back with the Import button here. In this case, I’ll just go by hand. Let’s say it’s $45 in five days, and these guys can do it for $50, but they can get it tomorrow. Well, speed is of the essence, I can pick a winner right here. Once we have When the winner is selected, I can hit that Convert to Purchase Order button. All of this section is kept as history, and now I will create another purchase order for each of these vendors, and we’ll keep a link in between both. We can always trace back to, why did I choose Google manufacturing back in April 2022? Well, you’ll have this on file, so you’ll be able to compare again and view why you chose one or the other. Again, a lot of ways to help for request for quoting. These type of request for quote can be issued from this material listing, shortage listing, or it could be issued even from, for example, engineer that are drafting, they could select some of the components they just drafted, not necessarily We’re going to release the production.

Or it could be an estimator, for example, that’s asking for a price. In our estimating section, they can also create these request for quote for the purchase or to handle. That’s my walkthrough I’m seeing time is flying. Let me go back to this presentation. Trying to summarize what we just saw that Genes can do for you. Well, again, it’s centralizing everything in one place so people can put in their demand and Mike stopped doing transaction by transaction. He can handle a bundle of requirements, again, making sure he doesn’t drop the ball on anything and also giving him bargaining power into combining all of these needs to your different suppliers. Now, life being what it is recently, you’re probably trying to diversify or you have no choice of finding new sources of replenishment or of suppliers. In that case, all that intelligence about seeing the alternative vendor, maybe it was not part of your I’ve seen this functionality before, but now you’re forcing it, we do have these functionalities. There’s no limit to the numbers of these alternate vendors you can have in there. You saw it, you can have minimum level to help manage restocking,, we do have the bill of materials, long lead management.

I didn’t talk too much about the long lead. We do have a very nice feature. If you’re really into these longer project where design can happen for many weeks before we start doing production, well, it could be also a few before you even see the color of the first couple of materials that you need. We do have a capability of drafting a long lead time or critical item list that can be purchased early. Then when engineer really release their work breakdown, you’re able to match them up together so they’re not managed duplicately. All right. At this point, I’m pretty far down my presentation. What am I missing here? Oh, well, the new life of the purchase. I guess we were trying to wrap things up from a nightmare going to a place where Mike is going to feel more secure, more in control. He’s going to have power to negotiate. Basically, what we’re trying to say is there’s good impact that’s going to cascade throughout the company to everybody, not just to Mike. Payables will have visibility on all that information, where it came from, from which request for Christ, from which job. And then I can put more energy, me as Mike, on things that really matter, like negotiating relationship with vendors, like making sure vendors are on time, or maybe better qualified vendor.

We do have tools in genius that can help you view on time rate, delivery rate, or view nonconformity rates from your different So there’s quite a few other tools we didn’t even go into that will help you improve and scale what can genius do for your company. So this is it. I can go on, but I’m going to stop. You can see a We’re pretty passionate what we do. So at this point, I’m going to put the question page up. Please write down your questions in the Q&A from Zoom because we can make sure we follow up if we don’t have time today in the question session. I do have one. Give me a second here. I’ve got some of the information is on screen, blocking me from seeing the question. There it is. All right. So I have a question asking me if genius can show me back orders and PO follow up for sure. Yes. How can I follow up on PO? That’s what I’m understanding here. It could be back orders PO, it could be late POs. We do have, well, right away, the screen for the purchase order is a really nice place I can filter and get that information, or I do have a really nice PO follow-up report that would pop everything on screen.

Some of our customers actually use it for alerting or asking updates from their vendor. That answers that question, I think. It’s not a lot of questions. Go ahead, fire at me. Perfect. Thank you. That’s a very fair question here. I have somebody that’s been using a lot of our system. I’m not going to throw names here, but there’s somebody saying, We’ve used some other ERPs in the market. What’s the with this one. Remember on the first couple of slide, I was talking about some of the difference our smart scheduling, our CAD to BOM. We’re really more in line with people that are trying to do custom building, meaning that we’re going to have a lot of ways to synchronize what’s happening with engineering with ongoing production. Not a lot of ERP will allow you, once you start fabricating clocking time, for example, to update an ongoing job with new designs. A lot of our customers will even have concurrent engineering happening with production, where they’ll start working with an empty word breakdown, releasing some section in there. While they’re working, continuing work at updating it or pushing your releases forward. That’s already a big differentiator of ours, I guess, compared to some of the ERP you mentioned in your question.

What about supplier evaluation? This is what I just mentioned earlier. No worry, I can repeat. There’s a There’s two studies we have out of the box there that you can measure on time delivery between your different vendors. There is also nonconformity tracking. If you leverage that, you will have a ratio of conformity to your vendor. We do have these out of the box in the system. All right. My pleasure. It was thank you notes and not new questions. So thank you, everybody. Again, don’t hesitate. If you didn’t have time to write your question in there, I don’t want to be not listening to you. So there is three different ways I would recommend for you to reach out to us. If you’re already in contact with one of our sales representative, please go through them. They will have the most expedite answer for you. Then you can write directly to me. There’s my email right here, or you can write at sayhello@ go@GeniusERP. Com. A lot of ways to reach out to us. Again, if you want to look back at this webinar, it will be available soon on our website. If not, there are also other webinars that are super interesting on our website.

You can also visit our YouTube channels where we have a few insights of different functionalities and also the Geniusolution channel where we have case studies for you. Thank you very much for joining. I see some people are starting to drop off. Thank you for joining today, and I hope to see you soon on our next webinars. Have a great day, everybody.