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thank you very much really grateful to see uh the numbers here both on the registration side as well as people that are actually taking their time out to join us live we know you have lots of different options as to where you can be and the fact that you made a decision to join us today we're very grateful that you did that and we promise that you won't be disappointed this is going to be a very lively interactive session i'm excited uh we've got some great panels here that i'm about to introduce and a lot of interesting content that we can get you through just a reminder this session is being recorded for those that are joining live um if you're coming to us um uh from watching the recording then thanks for tuning us in um just to kick things off uh my name is steve okan um i'm a vice president in the consumer industries division at rising for those who don't know rising we're a professional services firm dedicated to implementing implementing solutions for companies who run sap and as a moderator for this panel i have the honor of welcoming today's guest so to start with i'd like to introduce um martin stenzig as the chief technology officer for rising martin is responsible for driving innovative solutions that extend the capabilities of sap for our customers welcome martin good morning steve and our featured guest is charlie ifra and charlie is an entrepreneur he's the co-founder and chief product evangelist at intern welcome charlie thank you and we're about to find a lot more about intern today but in a nutshell charlie and his team and intern have developed a process as well supporting technology to optimize the inventory life cycle for product manufacturers so that's the title of this webinar that's what we're going to be covering here we've got a lot to cover we will be monitoring the chat so if you do have questions please type them into the chat and we have folks that'll help me to bring those out in the right time frame uh don't hesitate we'd love to make this session as interactive as possible and cover your questions um and if it looks like your question's coming up later in the in the discussion then i may hold them but uh but uh look forward to making this as interactive as we can so let's start with the basics so charlie here's a question for you um what are the problems that product manufacturers really face today and can you give us some real life examples of those problems yeah absolutely so access inventory is a business reality um many organizations lack the visibility to effectively do two things and one of them is in the area of inventory and mainly identifying what's going to become slow moving or obsolete and secondly the ability to manage that excess inventory efficiently so i can speak a little bit about the inventory so you know planning and forecasting never really eliminates slow moving in excess inventory um and it's due to many factors so i can give you a few examples um we've seen um in the fashion industry social media trends can completely make a product line obsolete or very slow moving we also see this with expiration dates in the cpg companies you also see in fashion seasonality there's also unfortunately unplanned returns and then what we've seen in during the covet pandemic where retailers actually went bankrupt and therefore um huge shipments were not delivered and therefore were caused were labeled as slow moving or excess inventory um an executive at a big cpg company told me recently that only eight percent of their innovation actually becomes um regular product line um and therefore the remaining inventory that's usually manufactured um ends up being slow moving or obsolete and those are um a lot of inventory reasons why reasons within inventory why uh companies will experience slow moving obsolete and excess inventory secondly uh there's the process um in in a pre-intern um when companies uh we're doing uh working with their excess inventory there is a lot of double selling that's going on because there aren't um systems of record a lot of the work is being done manually and therefore it's error prone it also causes very lengthy sales cycles because of a lack of historical insights it's very difficult to make data data-driven strategic decisions okay got it so definitely sounds like it doesn't matter how much planning you do up front nobody could have forecasted the pandemic it doesn't matter how much planning you do up front there's just circumstances that happen in the market in fact even the business of innovation in itself leads to the fact that you know you're going to have this situation and you need to solve it so let me ask you then so how does intern go about solving this this problem for customers so i'll start out by saying the centralized system and another big piece of this is the amount of team members or management that has to make approval decisions throughout the life cycle of selling this inventory um and we've seen over covet where many companies want remote and the lack of a system of record and visibility really really affects these teams and so having a centralized system really enables companies to work efficiently and teams to work efficiently and everyone has visibility into what each other are doing with different sets of inventory another part is our interim predict line and interim predict is our machine learning nai that it helps companies identify what will become slow moving and obsolete and this is a prediction algorithm that uses machine learning it helps them analyze their current inventory levels um and using historical sales and forecasts and trends and expiration dates and many more data points we're able to predict well before humans can what will become moving and obsolete um another point to talk about is more platform-based um and what that allows us to do or for our customers is we transition from spreadsheets to a real-time platform a spreadsheet is only a source of truth usually once it's generated but once teams start selling this inventory that source of truth is really um falls apart and so with the intern platform not only do you have accurate inventory levels you also have accurate product information there's rich product content and images and it removes all the manual work and really helps teams automate and be streamlined um another part of the intern platform is uh helping customers negotiate with their retailers and um having a negotiation process that's systemized and automated and again back to the system of record really allows companies to make data-driven decisions for the next time they go to market with their um set of the different sets of retailers that they work with great thanks and i'll just pick up on a few of those points he talked about process automation you talk about the selling system itself ways to negotiate and all those types of things and i'll just ask and i don't want to belabor the point but it feels like um you know retailers or retailers but also product manufacturers have um automated a lot of these processes so what's the gap with respect to access inventory that you see in the market yeah that's a great question thank you for that um brands are usually optimized for mainstream selling um and those processes are very optimized and there are systems and and tools in place for that when it comes to um the sale of access inventory companies usually see their inventory as a loss and therefore they don't invest too much into it and they're trying to get things out the door and sometimes they're even even ignoring the problem and you know at intern what we usually tell our customers is we turn that problem of excess inventory into an opportunity and our tools really reflect that okay starting to make sense to me now so they've got the coverage of that process for regular price to inventory but when it gets to that back list and it's just sitting in the warehouse gathering dust that's where the problem really resides and it's a different process that's needed in that case that's absolutely absolutely correct um and and for many reasons i mean uh excess inventory slow moving and obsolete inventory is negotiated upon and in many cases on both price and quantity and their the intern platform supports all of the different negotiation um techniques or ways that companies go to market in a very streamlined automated way and user friendly i might add great okay that's that's exciting so what made you decide to partner with sap i know that um we have some folks that are probably joining us on this call from sap today and i'm interested to understand what uh what was the inspiration behind that partnership so um it's a two-way street um we we built a really nice relationship with sap and uh what we realized is that many many many most of our customers are using sap um and um we find that there are um very uh it's almost obvious that the internet platform and the sap platform should have integration um and therefore sap recognize what we're doing for our customers and i would say our shared customers um and in meeting with the sap team and in building our relationship with them um we actually achieved the um status of being an sap endorsed app um which if i'm not mistaken there's like under 20 endorsed apps in the sap app center so we both recognize that there's real value that we could bring to our shared customers and it became very obvious that integration um and that recommending our customers to integrate the two systems um is is a really good idea okay that's great and that leads me to a question for you martin so i want to bring you into the conversation here so um you know a lot of people and i myself think of sap as really a world-class supply chain system so doesn't it already solve this problem isn't this something that's within the realm of sap today and and you know is is you know intern trying to take over that space or is there overlap help me to understand that yeah we don't think so we think that sap in its core is covering very well the core selling processes but in turn identified the clear white space in the sap ecosystem which they're attacking and they're going after and that is completely in line with sap strategy you know manage manage the core processes but for white spaces that sap can't or will not invest in uh use partners to fill that white space and i think that's what the interim partnership shows here um and it's completely in line with what we understand sap strategy to be got it okay okay so because it's specialized on the focus of access the inventory that's a bit of a white space for for sap it makes sense to bring the partner in and like you said sap is trying to build that those partner solutions to cover in those specialized areas um absolutely correct steve got it okay it's starting to makes a lot more sense to me so um from the perspective of the integration with sap how does it work and i'm sure there's going to be people that are more or less technical on the call but can you help me to understand um how what is what does it mean to integrate intern to sap what are the points of integration yeah we we try to keep it really simple and and uh charlie has already mentioned what what the intern platform needs you know so you need product information uh you need pricing information and you need inventory by location so those are the three core components that we continuously feed into the intern system in order to give it enough information to make its decision but also facilitate the process once the sale has been done then we're posting the the sales order what we consider the sales order or from an sap perspective back into the sap system a real time so that you don't have any delays you don't have any any excel sheet building that you mentioned before but it's a real-time process that ties um the the internal platform together with sap in the sap ecosystem it's considered you know as sort of a side-by-side extension which is the new term of what we're doing in the cloud but but intern is the best example for one of those okay can you talk more about that side-by-side integration like what types of sap technologies are and used to make that happen absolutely um we use three components really to to make this work and it's core it's the business technology platform that's a new new name for what sap called in the past sap cloud platform that's our vehicle that we use in order to make everything work and frankly it also helped us build the application the initial product very very quickly on top of that we're utilizing the the integration suite in order to facilitate the back and forth of the business processes but another key component that we used is the cloud application programming model that allowed us to very quickly add and extend and enhance business logic that we needed as part of the integration so those are the two or three components that we're using all of them being on the business technology platform allowing us for a quick innovation cycle within the sap ecosystem okay so if i'm understanding correct i can have a cloud-based or an on-premises version of sap that doesn't matter but what you're seeing is um you know you've got a cloud-based system which is intern and you've got a cloud-based integration component that connects using standard sap technologies from that intern system through to the sap system whether it's in the cloud or on-premise is that correct so you have you have the sap system regardless of where it is and regardless of what edition it is so it might be on premise it might be cloud might be full sas clouds doesn't really matter you have the integration portion portion in the middle which is based on the sap business technology platform which allows customers to spin it up very quickly but also leverage the existing investment in sap in sap software and then you have intern as a classic sas solution or software as a service solution the middle piece commercially can be handled in various different ways you can buy it as a quote unquote and software and deploy it onto your existing business technology platform or in turn can go as far as you know enabling the the hosting for you so that all you need to do is essentially establish the connection because we use a lot of standard functionality in the back end in your s4 or ecc system um we don't have to do a lot of modifications if any at all to your backend systems so we can deploy this rapidly also because it's a very configurable solution so we build it in such a way that most of the functionality can be configured rather than developed which then helps us with the initial enablement of you as a customer once you decide to go down the internet path got it okay i'm going to come back and talk about that i'm not sure i'm totally convinced that i'm ready to go to do that integration quite yet but but it certainly sounds like you used uh some pretty good thinking in terms of what technologies from scp could you use to get there i'm charlie let me switch back to you um on a question just related to the real-time inventory um that you talked about how important is it to have that kind of real-time view within interns so that you can run some of the models that you talked about earlier um and really get the best results like is is real time critical and why is this integration so important yeah absolutely real-time inventory is very critical and uh it goes back to the point about double selling um we have customers that have um teams of sales people working in different regions and they're presented with inventory in spreadsheets that they then break down to curate and present to their retailers um in many cases there is a lot of double selling happening and it's only able to be reconciled um once the different sales team members are you know putting in their orders and they're seeing that you know quantities that they already committed are being fulfilled with other retailers by different sales people so that visibility real-time visibility of inventory levels um is extremely important to not double sell your inventory um and it's extremely disappointing for both the sales reps and the retailers when they have to go back and do that it's also extremely time consuming you go to market you negotiate and then you can't fulfill the order the warehouse management in general the warehouse management people are also part of this equation so um they're filling orders and then they have to unpack and then repack for different customers um and so there's a lot of um not only manual work but work that shouldn't have been done in the first place and so those are all reasons why um real-time inventory is so important and um having that visibility across all the different business channels um you know there are customers that we have that have um you know ecom and outlet and retailers and having the visibility into what's going on where and when that when those sets of inventory need to move down to the liquidation into slow moving and obsolete is extremely important yeah and it sounds like you're talking about inventory by location for something that has multiple different places where this inventory might exist and having visitors absolutely and that plays a big role uh we see this art our tool helping customers very much in the cdg space when it comes to perishables um and expiration dates where you can have batches of the same sku that have different expiration dates and they're sitting in different warehouses across the country and having the visibility and identifying what's you know what's what product has what shelf life before presenting it to your customers is really important um and that's a something that intern plays a big role in yeah that definitely sounds like a pretty significant challenge so i'll just put a quick public service announcement out there so just a reminder for those that might have joined a little bit late if you are joining the live session welcome and um this just a reminder this session is being recorded so if you're watching the recording we'd still love to hear from you but if you happen to be here live and you have a question don't hesitate to put it in the chat and we'll try to work it into the conversation here i'm going to switch now to just ask you charlie based on what you've seen so far working with customers on this for those product manufacturers what kinds of benefits are they actually getting like let's make this real for people um you know because i'm almost convinced at this point but i'm not quite there yet can you help me get to the final point yes absolutely so um the benefits are both in um okay so i'll actually outline a case study um this is a case study from one of our cpg customers um which is unilever um and um so we'll start with just talking about like file manipulation so i was talking about real-time inventory levels um the need for new files to be generated reconciling your data across all your sales members we through the internet platform we're able to reduce the inventory file manipulation by 75 in time savings um we also analyze um with our customers all the steps that they do in order to go to market in their selling process we've been able to remove 29 reduced 29 in manual steps um from their selling process um there's been a 36 decrease in offer duration so and that's really one of when an offer is from the time that it's been created which is a curated set of products that's going to be presented to a buyer um or a retailer and all the way until the deal is closed um so we've been able to measure uh before and after and we've seen a 36 decrease in the duration of an offer and then there was an increase in year-over-year sales uh over a six-month period of 6.5 million which is pretty substantial um just to give you an example or some background on unilever going to market on the intern platform um they've um they've done close to 300 transactions on the intern platform to date it may have exceeded 300 at this point but it's close to that and through all those transactions and being able to measure exactly how efficient they are and how effectively they're going to market we were able to identify these results wow so that's um i'm just going to try to recap that make sure i fully processed all that because that's a lot of data that's really interesting so it sounds like there's they're going to have some reduced you know manual labor so it probably reduced their actual physical manual labor costs to handle this inventory which again if you're selling below cost then you know any labor reduction is obviously going to have a significant impact on your bottom line for this area and then you're also seeing you're shrinking the time of the selling process which means that the inventory is sitting there for less time so you're not carrying it for as long which probably means you're not touching it as often and so the duration's going down and ultimately you're increasing the sales so you're dealing a larger volume that must mean and you're doing it faster and and you're also reducing the manual effort so it's quite a lot of benefits from and this is actual live data from you know not as like obviously unilever's a sizeable enterprise out there exactly and i just would add that um this is it's it's a it's a real efficiency tool for our users and um you know like i was describing how sometimes there's so much extra work that these use the users would be doing without this platform um and what the platform allows them to be is to be efficient and focus on the proper areas of their job instead of doing things that are just really wasting their time in many cases so it's really our our users love the platform we put a heavy focus on user experience um making it very intuitive to use and very easy to use um and and and it's really all of these um you know metrics that i outlined earlier just shows the efficiency in how we're making these companies efficient um skipping steps that they don't need to do helping them get the insights that they need to make the right and informed decisions and that's done through data and some machine learning ai and automation amazing okay so you got me there i'm convinced this sounds really good it's obviously working for some pretty big clients so um if i'm ready to make that next step um what's what do i do to get up and running on the platform and how long does it take uh to get there so we've had customers on board in uh four weeks so which is a pretty neat um yeah it's a pretty neat achievement and you know our our client operations team usually will meet with our with the customer and really make sure that we understand all of their needs so that the implementation is done properly and uh to solve for all their use cases i will i also want to add one thing that while i did speak about cpg and apparel in in what we do that's the majority of our customers our cpg companies and apparel um but we're also in in in many other verticals um so i just want to point out that we are a a software platform that's designed in a vertical agnostic way and which really is in line with sap we all know that sap solves for any vertical and the same applies to enter okay great so if you have access to inventory you can still give us a call right absolutely okay great um yeah four weeks i um i i manage a lot of sap projects and i can't i can't point to one that we were able to get done in four week time frames so so that's pretty impressive so martin let me turn that back over to you then from an sap perspective and anyone who's implemented any part or any sap module a four week you know implementation time seems untouchable so how's it possible to make a complete integration um you know you alluded to some of this earlier but how's it possible to make that complete integration from end to end with sap in that time frame yeah i think i think you hit the nail on the head four weeks in an sap ecosystem always sounds ambitious at best improbable and so um i think the the key ingredients of that are several number one i think i mentioned before we're leaving the sap system pretty much untouched which you know prevents you from having to go through all kinds of regression testing you know approval processes um and concerns on the customer side that you're doing something with their core asset being sap um that you're touching it or modifying it that you know what to to the point where you shouldn't do that the second part is all the extensions and and enablements we're doing we're doing in the business technology platform as i mentioned before um a side-by-side extension paradigm which allows us to quickly innovate and that's sort of what sap had in mind when they came out or when they when they sort of pushed the business technology platform let's do things quicker let's do things um in a faster fashion to get to market faster which you see here this is the best example four weeks from essentially the decision-making process to going live to benefits realization is something that we in the sap ecosystem always wanted to now what the business technology platform from sap does is it allows us to make it real and then the last bit that we've we've touched on before is we kept the integration a configurable solution so we didn't we don't have to redevelop the wheel quote unquote every single time we were rolling out one of those intern customers but a lot of the functionalities and features that you have with an intern and specifically the integration are configurable so we can flip switches to determine what information is being transferred depending on your business decision um how it is transferred how the calculation is done etc etc so um intern relies on the standard data in sap but essentially can then play up its own power with the calculation of excess inventory and and handle that process as we discussed the other thing that i want to bring forward is is this point that that charlie has made before i think real-time processes are becoming the new norm for years we have had processes that sort of ran once a week or were managed by excel sheet and i think that will go away and what what covet has done is has sort of illuminated those shortcomings of those processes and made sure is that everybody is seeing and having a better understanding of the the timeliness of the business process is really important it's not any more about just following steps one by one it's also about how quickly can you execute and run through this process end to end because you have people waiting for toilet paper or pasta or you know flour you know all of those ingredients are there and i think that's sort of the change we're seeing in the industry and and that's where sap with the business technology platform and then intern with excess inventory optimization is really there to help you out yeah if you told us in advance that this was going to happen we never would have believed it so um yeah you you hit the nail on the head there's certain things that just you you can't predict so um that's great so um we probably have some time to take any questions from uh the audience that is live with us today so just one last call for if you have questions throw them up in the chat i don't think there's anything in there now um so i'll let you noodle on that folks that are out there um well people are potentially typing their questions in um charlie i'll just ask this has been really inspiring um i'm curious what's next for intern like how do you see this process evolving where where are you taking this next yeah we um we're gonna be focused mainly on data machine learning ai and it's all in an effort to make our customers as efficient as pos possible we think that information is really everything and being able to surface opportunities based on machine learning we believe is the future and um that's really where our focus is going to be um our we have a lot of interesting new features in the pipeline um that are coming and um we're an ever-evolving application so our company is um you know constantly learning from our customers and understanding what problems they're encountering and we're figuring ways to solve for them um but i think that to answer your question um directly is um you know making sure that our customers are as intelligent and informed as as possible using data um and the way we're doing it is going to be with machine learning and ai okay so continuing to double down on the reduction of manual effort continuing to reduce the time to get the sales and continue to drive more volume through the platform by identifying the inventory earlier um getting the offers to the right people and then closing the deal yeah and a lot of this really all has to do with margin recovery um you know the earlier you can identify that you're going to have an issue um the smarter decision you're going to make on what to do with that inventory it doesn't always have to stay out go to the interim platform um but at least we're informing you as to what will become and it's all predictability and it's all using really uh it's it's using historical data and forecasting data um and so we're making the customer more informed and more intelligent in their decisions and surfacing opportunities sooner than they might do as just like as a human okay amazing well thank you very much um uh i will take any questions that anybody has if anybody is brave enough to unmute themselves if we have that capability um or raise your hand or put a question in the chat we'll take your questions um while you're thinking about that i'll just let everybody know reminder that it's going to be recorded anybody that did register for the event you may have come through this way and that's how you got to this point um they will receive a copy for those that are watching live you'll get a copy of the video if you want to review and we would love to get your feedback on today's content and to hear more if this is a problem that you're you're facing um how we might be able to help um but it's very exciting yeah from my part i just want to say thank you very much to everyone who participated um and um i i invite you guys to um to reach out to us and uh i'm i'll be happy as well to answer any questions if anyone reaches out to us and participate in the discovery of what intern is all right fantastic um so on behalf of rising on behalf of intern and our partner at sap i would like to thank you your esteemed guests and panelists and all those who were able to make the time today to to come out and join us looks like we got you there a little bit early i hope this has been an exciting and informative session i certainly benefited from from hearing the answers to these questions this is fantastic and thank you both charlie and martin for your contributions today