Supply Chain
Technology Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Supply chain, software adoption, user experience, data integration, digital adoption, remote work, ROI metrics, generative AI, immersive learning, single sign-on, ERP systems, technology innovation, cultural barriers, solution providers, digital platforms.

SPEAKERS

Scott Mears, Matt Palackdharry

Scott Mears  00:00

Do supply chain organizations often overlook user experience design when implementing software?

Matt Palackdharry  00:06

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  00:06

Do supply chain organizations often underestimate the time and resource needed for software adoption?

Matt Palackdharry  00:13

Thumbs down.

Scott Mears  00:14

Interesting. Have you ever felt you were living the reality of the movie Groundhog Day based software implementation?

Matt Palackdharry  00:21

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  00:22

I appreciate your honesty. Welcome to the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. Scott Mears here, Senior Marketing Manager at Roambee and your host. We thank you for joining us today. In this episode, we speak with Matt Palackdharry. Matt is the Chief Strategy Officer at Apty. We first dissect the unique challenges of software adoption in supply chain. We then identify strategies for driving adoption in different geos and with remote employees. Lastly, we outline the top three areas for solution providers to drive further adoption. Welcome, Matt. It’s great to have you on the episode today.

Matt Palackdharry  01:07

Thanks, Scott. I’m excited to be here.

Scott Mears  01:11

Yeah excited to have to have you on. You know, it’s really good to get one of your expertise because we can really dive into the tech side. You know, really the detail where, you know, maybe our customers and our target accounts, and, you know, the industries out there maybe struggling when it comes to integrating all these innovations, you know, we they all now have these innovation hubs, and they’re looking for, though, the latest tech, and they, you know, love all the, you know, the presentations about them. But when it comes to the integration, it can be very complicated. If you’re not you know amongst it. So it’s, I’m going to be very interested in picking your brains throughout this episode, and interested in what you’re going to say today.

Matt Palackdharry  01:51

Well, I’m looking forward to the topic as well. And certainly the tech landscape is changing by the moment. In supply chain, it feels so I would say I’m deep into it, and even I have troubles keeping up with it at times. So I can only imagine, if you’re not staring at the changing tech landscape every day, how hard it would be to to keep up with the evolution of this market right now.

Scott Mears  02:14

Yeah it’s crazy fast, but I want to hit with a fun icebreaker first. And you know, I always like to learn a bit about our guest first. And, you know, I’m going to go into a fictional land, you know, I’d like to ask if, if you could implement a fictional technology from a movie or a TV show into the real world of supply chain operations. Which one would you choose, and how do you think it would revolutionize the industry?

Matt Palackdharry  02:43

Yeah wow. Well, that, that’s a good question. My, my gut initially goes to Iron Man, actually. And Iron Man is not, not so much all the weapons on it, but the the digital interface that he has inside the mask where he’s monitoring what’s happening, and all the different components and and when, when failures happen in one part of the Iron Man suit, you kind of have to readjust in other areas and the augmented overlays. I i would have to go that way, because right now, there’s so many new tech components coming to the space. If you don’t have this centralized command center that can control it all, it kind of, each part by itself isn’t really the strength. It’s when you bring it all together and have that central command so I’d probably go with the Iron Man suit.

Scott Mears  03:36

I love that. I think that’s, I think that’s quite a unique choice actually. I, you know, I thought you may have gone other ways. Maybe, you know, flying of Superman, or, you know, maybe freeze of the from The Incredibles to keep it, you know, you know, sensitive goods cold, but that’s an interesting one. I like this, you know, and especially of the Apple Vision coming out, you know, that almost seems close to it. So, you know, it might not be too far. It might not be too far.

Matt Palackdharry  04:03

Absolutely the the augmented reality tech, I think over the next couple of years is going to be very interesting to see what happens. Because it It’s been talked about for some time, and it feels like it’s just about here and now, with all these technology solutions, I think something’s going to happen.

Scott Mears  04:24

Yeah, it really is. And for me, I would happily jump into more fiction, but we’re going to stick to the topic. So we’re going to the topic of the really diving into, you know, how? You know these industries and companies out there can integrate the new innovation. So really, first, I want to understand that the landscape, you know, let’s get to understand what the landscape is first. So, you know, this might, some of these questions might be a bit meaty, but, you know, we’re looking to get, you know, unique perspectives and maybe different information to what you know. Maybe you know, the our industries out there are learning from events, and it’s associations and other places they’re learning from. So in your view, at the moment, what would you say are the unique challenges that arise when implementing software solutions in supply chain operations, particularly considering the intricate independencies and varying degrees of technological maturity across different segments and supply chain?

Matt Palackdharry  05:23

Yeah, well, I’m going to start with an area I think we’ve gotten really strong, and I think that will pull out the areas that that we’re still weak in. I think that from from a pure functionality perspective, and what can happen with the different technologies in this space, we’re getting extremely strong. If you want lots of choice at your disposal, and you want different solutions that can do anything, you can really dream from, from an operational perspective, we can get there. And that’s, I think, the really exciting thing about the technology landscape in supply chain right now. But what I will say is that there’s two really big barriers that constantly come up in every implementation, really, of any tech in this space. And I would say that the first is, is data. So every one of these platforms runs on data. You’ve probably heard the analogies of of garbage in garbage out or gold in, gold out right. And so getting the data right has been a challenge in this space for a very long time, and you’ve seen a lot of organizations do things like set up a supplier portal or buy data from a Dun Bradstreet. And all these things have led to problems that that make the center tech component not produce the results you want on the end. Now, in my opinion, I think this is being solved right now with a lot of the generative AI pieces. I think that now, with large LLMs, you you’re able to wade through a lot of data, get the data that you want without doing a bunch of research. So I have a feeling that as we continue down this path, that one will continue to be eliminated. The second is an area that I personally am trying to solve right now, and that’s around adoption. We have really great technologies, but you could have hundreds of them, and we don’t have times to go learn hundreds of different pieces of technology, you need to know exactly how to use the platform the moment you get into it. And so solving the adoption component is something I think every organization needs to speak to be thinking about. If you went you just spent a bunch of money on new technology, and then you don’t get the return on that that technology. It really jeopardizes any of the other recommendations you bring forward as well. But on the flip side, if you go and you implement a piece of technology and you get anywhere near the software benefits that you thought at the beginning, you’re just going to be able to continue to iterate on top of that and build a really best in class procurement tech stack. So those are the two areas right now that I think still have some room to be solved. And then me, specifically, I’m focused on the adoption component.

Scott Mears  08:08

Yeah, it’s good to, you know, hear you bring, you know, this up, especially around the adoption, you know, I think, you know, saying a bull in a china shop. You know, they can get attracted to all the shiny items in the shop. And it can be very attractive initially, but that integration piece, that, or even just the adoption you’re saying, the adoption piece, which is much bigger than the just the the integration of in the systems, you know that can be a much more complex piece. And I think this is a really interesting one you bring up, and one that I hope we dive into further in this episode as well. So I wanted, like, identify the barriers so to adoption. So let’s dive into this. So what would you say, and maybe some often overlooked cultural or organizational barriers that hinder successful software adoption within supply chain operations, and how do you feel companies can address them?

Matt Palackdharry  09:10

Yeah, well, I think I my opinion on adoption has changed over the years. At the beginning, I thought we just need to make adoption fun. So I would rush to things like gamification, and I think that’s where we certainly saw some cultural aspects get in the way of gamification. You would have the younger generation, for example, really into the gamification. They’ve, you know, lived their life on video games, being brought up, and then trying to get new achievement milestones, and the older generation hasn’t right, and so the gamification did nothing for them. And as I’ve continued to think about the adoption problem, I think I’ve realized that the largest piece of the adoption problem, in my opinion, at least, is it’s it’s really core learning problem. It’s how do we learn most effectively? And when I think about how most organizations go about teaching people how to learn new systems, if you’re installing new systems, you’re probably installing several a year at least, to teach everybody how to use those, how do you do that the most effectively? I think people want to use the new software. They see the functionality coming out of it, but we need to make it as easy as possible. And most organizations have rushed to traditional learning tactics. They’ve gone through and and they’ve stood up a learning management system and put in many different courses, or they’ve written how to guides, and all those things are fine, but I think now that we know more effective ways to learn, one of the easiest ways to get people to truly learn software better is to have something in line where you can ask a question. We have natural curiosity as humans, where I can ask a question and get the answer immediately, and when I just follow that simple process, then people will be able to learn more effectively. If you get into a traditional classroom setting, for example, and you have a question and that question isn’t answered until three hours later, everything that happened between the time that you had that question and that question was answered, you’re not going to remember, because none of it was taken in context of what was actually getting in the way of you at that moment. And so I think one of the real promising things that’s coming up, especially some of the things that we’re trying to build in digital adoption, is exactly that, where, if I can come on screen and I have, say, an AI assistant with me at any time, and I can ask a question, and it will guide me to whatever platform I need to do, use, use the platform within the processes, read the procedures that the the organization wants me to follow, and then show me on screen. Well, once I do that a couple of times, I won’t ever need to do it again. And but with so many platforms, I think the immersive learning experience is going to be a better way to go than the traditional classroom setup, because I just don’t think that people have the time to go through the deep, rigid courses anymore. And so I do think this is theory, so I don’t think it’s proven yet, but I do think in the education world, if we just extrapolate that, I think in education, you’re seeing that learning by doing is far more successful than the classroom setups. And when I see more and more of this interactive stuff start getting into the colleges right now, I think that that we should be doing similar things in the corporate world.

Scott Mears  12:42

I I like this idea, you know, it’s not one I’ve heard before, but I can really visualizing it. You know, obviously chatGPT, you know, become such a part of many people’s roles. You know, that’s just one of them out there. It’s one of the more famous ones, but I can really visualize that now, and having played with tools like this, I know I can visualize what you’re saying. So do you think, you know, how challenging do you think that would be for a company to implement, you know, because that, you know, I think would be really exciting. And I totally understand, you know, getting to the point to the answer that you want there, rather than waiting three hours. I totally understand, you know, I’ve been through university, it’s a lot of days of in your heads, in box about stuff you don’t want to learn, and then you get to that one chapter, like this is what I’m interested in. So, how easy or complicated Do you think that would be for a company to build something like this?

Matt Palackdharry  13:45

Yeah, so when I think about integration, I still do think about it really in two threads. I think about the data integration, and I think that oftentimes, especially it folks, they think about data integration first, and I also think about the the user experience integration. And so one thing that’s great about, you know, a lot of the digital adoption platforms that are out there is that we’ll have some solution for both, but we’re really talking more on the user experience side for for most of it. And the user experience side is really easy to implement. It’s it’s more as if you say you’re a central controller, and you know the types of questions your your your users will ask, you will be able to go and just click the buttons on screen and show people how to use any platform for any given scenario, that it won’t have a tremendous impact on some of the core data challenges at the beginning of the implementation. For example, you know, if you have multiple ERPs and you have different data structures, there’s not going to be a ton that we can do there. You’re still going to have to go through those complexities and integrating those systems. We can put data valid. Applications on screen. So for example, if you’re going there and the new data validation that you want to, you want the data to meet a very specific structure, so all the reports follow those structures, we can recognize that on screen and auto correct things into the structure that is needed. So those things will help the data but, but it’s not going to completely solve that data challenge. But I want to tell you actually an example here where you can make some of the large implementations, of course, systems significantly easier. And I’m going to start with one of the hardest examples, where you have multiple ERPs, and this happens to a lot of our organizations that are more acquisitive in nature, they will have bought different organizations. Each one’s on a different ERP and and getting those to one ERP over years sometimes can take many, many dollars and lots of effort to complete. But I want to take you through the user experience side of this right now, because one of our customers is doing something really cool. I think everybody should be doing this, but they started using digital adoption in their single sign on, which I thought was a unique place to start, because that’s where all of our applications are to begin with, and they have both ERPs, in this case, still available to the user. And so if you just follow a normal single sign on experience, if I let this need to submit time off, for example, I may not know which one to go into, but in this case, the organization built all their HR processes onto the new ERP sooner. So if somebody goes in and asks, Hey, how do I submit my time off? We know to then route them to the new ERP, because those processes have already been built. But if you need to go in to do something in supply chain, something that may be more complicated, I want to, I want to submit a new purchase order against one of our, one of our other budgets that haven’t been moved over yet. Well, if I type that in, we recognize the process is still on the old ERP, so I can take you that way. And when we control the user and the direction of the flow, then as an organization, we can take our time, build the processes over into the new ERP. We can do it the right way. And then, because we can control the direction of the user, we can take them when those processes are ready on the on the new platform, allowing us to decommission the old tech. And while this example is more so to decommission old tech when migrating to new tech, the same thing happens with new technology as well. So if I went in and all of a sudden I installed a new platform that performs some very specific activities. Well, if we start in single sign on, you don’t need to go tell everybody exactly how to use everything when they want to perform that action. Then they can type in and it will take you exactly to to what system can perform that action. And once you’re in it, can you actually teach you how to perform that as well? I think those reasons, the benefits that you give will actually reduce a lot of the complexity and how you can implement a lot of these systems, because you’re controlling the user experience, which I don’t think that there’s a ton of great answers for. I do think that there are a lot of solutions in theory, on the data side, and we’re so focused on the data side, but by marrying the data challenge with the user experience challenge, now I think you have a solution that can actually reduce the complexity of implementations over time.

Scott Mears  18:35

I love how you put that, bringing the data challenge with the user experience, I think. And that’s, you know, having a real example like this is great, you know, I can again, it just takes out that stress, and it’s, it’s so smart how you’d be transitioning that, you know, that update through actually leveraging both platforms and just taking out that stress, and taking out all those tickets being open, because this isn’t working. That isn’t working. Oh no, I can just pin you to all the right spots. That’s really interesting. Yeah, I know our listeners will be perking up to that. That’s really interesting. Something I I’ve never heard that’s really quite interesting.

Matt Palackdharry  19:15

It’s cool, because 10 years ago, when I was building technology in the space there weren’t. We weren’t thinking like this at that time. It was just a what, what new features can I build into a platform? And in many ways, I think we’re feature abundant now where 10 years ago, we were feature lacking, and now it’s more so hey, we have all these features at our disposal. I’m getting lost in it, and so making it as easy as possible to take advantage of the tools that the organization has made investments is is actually the challenge today, in a way that it wasn’t a decade ago.

Scott Mears  19:51

And I wonder for the next question whether this kind of answers it because you mentioned. The biggest challenge to adoption is it’s a learning challenge. And you just presented a great example how, you know, we can look to get around this. And you know, my next question is around, you know, how can supply chain leaders effectively balance the need for technological innovation, with the risk of disrupting existing operations during the software adoption processes. Would that be, you know, what you’ve just answered that, I guess, you know, clears that up.

Matt Palackdharry  20:28

Yeah. I think that this is a very good way to solve the problem, because disruptions do happen in technology all the time, and especially for, you know, we had the cultural question earlier, the younger generation is going to be more nimble in switching different platforms. The older generation is not going to be more nimble. And we have to provide solutions for both in order to get to eventually decommissioning old tech or implementing new ones, and actually getting the ROI out of it. And some of these platforms now, because of the features, they’re so expensive, so to get the ROI out of them, you actually you have to make sure that you’re really getting the adoption up. And so here to minimize disruption, if we think about controlling the processes, and when somebody has a question or they, they know the task they want to do. We’re we’re pretty task driven in nature as as humans, and so we go in and say, I want to accomplish X. And as an organization, we control the journey. It really doesn’t matter what they’re trying to accomplish. We can get them directly to that. And the old way is, when you when you said, hey, I want to accomplish x, we would write 1000s of pages of policy documents that then you would have to go through. And that certainly was uneffective. And now we can read all those policy documents using the LLM technology and present radon screen exactly what you’re supposed to do and get it into the structure that you want, following the procedures. And when you do that, those line of events, event actually end up you doing the action the organization wanted when they purchased the technology at the beginning. And at that point, that’s when you’re actually capturing the ROI the solution. So, you know, I think the technology at the beginning was the first thing, but then solving the data piece is the second, and then making sure it’s a usable solution. Once you do all those three in nature, capturing the ROI becomes becomes significantly easier.

Scott Mears  22:30

And I am going to tap into the ROI piece a bit later in the upside I’m interested to help, you know, the companies out there to really understand how they can crack and understand, you know, the true ROI of these solutions outside of, you know, the cost benefits. But just before we do that, you know, remote work has become, you know, hugely popular, you know, to the point where now most people expect it. And of course, with remote work, this can cause challenges with software adoption, you know. So I’m really interested is, how do you feel companies can ensure consistent software adoption and utilization across, you know, various geographical locations and organizational units, when everyone you know or good portion of the of the company is working remotely. Have you got any examples or you faced this before?

Matt Palackdharry  23:28

Yeah, I think the remote work is actually propellant towards solutions like digital adoption platforms, because before, when we were all in office, you could make the argument that a digital adoption platform wasn’t the best setup. Maybe it is best to have everybody in a room and do collaborative learning, and then, because you have four or five people in a group and you’re all learning it together, you’re learning from each other’s mistakes, we just don’t have that luxury anymore. And so instead, the what a lot of people have done is rush to standing up those, those traditional courses, and I just don’t see people taking them. And we’re also very accustomed to going through the process. Maybe we make sure people take the courses, but the retention is not really there, and even if you ask a question right after they’ve read a bit of what comes out of the LMS, the chances they retain that when they actually need it potentially months down the line is pretty low. And so just now, knowing everybody is behind a computer, everybody is separated, all of the learning needs to be interactive and and immersive in nature, I think that this expand extends beyond digital adoption, even it’s just everywhere in your business. I think about employee onboarding. You can’t go and have these long courses when you don’t have peers next to you to ask questions and collaborate with. Or where do you need your boss sometimes you need to go schedule 30 minutes. It’s at a time to ask a question, because that’s when they have their calendar block, not hey, I can just stop over when your door is open, or I catch you on the way walking to coffee to ask the 32nd question that I needed. And so that’s really the environment we need to replicate, is that 32nd question that people need to ask to get unstuck, because once you get unstuck and back on your way, I think that we are inquisitive enough to solve our own problems, but allow people to ask questions, answer them as fast as we can and get them back on their way. That concept is something that we need to master in all of our areas of the business if we’re going to really achieve the benefits of remote work that I think we can.

Scott Mears  25:49

No, I really hear you and you know that consistent theme of your answers is just becoming much more effective mentors and teachers in our companies, something that we really need to take seriously. And, yeah, I think these are some really interesting approaches to this. And moving towards the ROI piece that you mentioned a couple minutes ago, you know, what would you say? Some of the key metrics or indicators that Supply Chain Leaders should monitor to guage the effectiveness of the ROI of the software adoption, uh, beyond traditional measures, measures such as cost savings and efficiency gains?

Matt Palackdharry  26:34

Yeah, to me that this is a sequential line of questions, and certainly when I’m building technology, I ask these questions to myself, because the number one thing that I want more than anything else is to make sure that our customers are getting value out of the platform. If they’re getting value out of the platform, they will stay with us forever. They’ll help us innovate. They’ll tell us their biggest challenges, and we, we love, to solve those challenges. And the first metric for me is always, are they? Are the users logging in? Do we have enough people that are actually getting in and using the platform, or, let’s even just say, trying to use the platform at this point? And so that that is the first barrier, because you’d be surprised at how many organizations we go to where they spent a lot of money on a specific piece of tech, we go in and we analyze it, and no one is logging in. And so any of the change behavior, things that you want to do behind that doesn’t matter if you first don’t have the audiences in the platform. And so in order to do that, we need to do things like, you know, make it available in, in, in your single sign on, you need to do some education in the organization. Certainly, we have an answer to that, and having that AI assistant where you can just ask the question and bring you into, into the platform. But there, there, if you don’t have that problem answered, everything beyond it doesn’t matter. Once you have the user in the platform, then it’s, how are they using it? Are they using it for the intended purposes? It’s you may have bought a platform as an organization to address five critical strategies that you’re trying to deploy. Well, are they actually using it in line with that? Now I’ll use a very simple example here. We often will see a platform like zoom info be deployed in a way that it’s more marketing, doing research, and then eventually having sales people reach out if that’s what you bought it for, great. But then if somebody comes in is using it other ways. And here, sometimes we’ll actually see zoom info data being used to update data records in an ERP that will go to supply chain different use case you already paid for it. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it’s nice that you have found a different way to use it. When you see those other use cases, you need to then educate other people around it to then get more usage right. Just because you bought a platform, you may find that there are other use cases that come out of it, and then once you find the common use cases, are they using it in a way that fits your policy? And I deliberately use Zoom info here as an example, because there’s some real GDPR concerns, right? And so you you may have done that, and they have solved your problem, but because our policies would actually prevent that from happening, we may want to stop that. And so, but you need to follow the lines in order, and then once you get to the end and you have your policies and making sure that the procedures that are being followed in the platform are adhering to the policies we actually have, then you get that kind of the golden ticket at the end, where you’re going to capture whatever you’re trying to capture, if you solve those three and. And and so I, you know, I personally find that if we’re trying to get to the end point, we want to read all your policy documents using an LLM. We then want to then show you on screen how to use it, getting into the platform. We try that that single sign on example is a really good one, but there are lots of different ways to solve those three components. But you have to solve those three components if you’re going to capture the KPIs and and the value levers that you want to at the end. And we actually have in our organization, we go through every platform, we know that the common value levers that are trying to be solved when implementing this technology. And then we try to make sure that we’re measuring against those as well. So first, you kind of start with those adoption metrics. But if you’re buying, say, a reverse auctioning solution, well, how many reverse auctions are you going through? What was, what was the starting cost, and where you got it to, and if you ran x more auctions, how much would you say that’s a very savings based use case? You know, I personally think that we’re moving a little bit away from pure savings based use cases, which I think is great. I believe that things like supply chain risk and supply chain continuity, especially with some of the geopolitical risk around the world right now, is is more important to making sure that you have a sustainable business no matter what what happens. But if that’s no matter what the nkpis you’re looking for, if you if you get the three user behaviors leading up to the event, you’ll get the result that you want.

Scott Mears  31:42

I like that you broke these down, and I just want to go through them for our viewers. So I so there’s one you say, the engagement, you know, from just tracking, you know, the login, if it’s if it is a platform that you can log in, or any other engagement metrics to understand, you know, especially if these guys are working remotely, are they engaging in this new solution? Then another one you mentioned was about not just the engagement, but also the I think I’ve missed it actually, if I could give you the other two so then I can be clear on them, for the for the audience.

Matt Palackdharry  32:18

Yeah. So the second one are just the use cases, how people are using the platform.

Scott Mears  32:23

Yeah, and does it matches our policy?

Matt Palackdharry  32:26

Yeah, does it match our policy. Because you will see, you will see more use cases come up, which is good, and most of the time they’ll be okay in your policies, or they’ll have to tighten a policy. There will be something that that people are using the platform. You’re like, I really don’t want you to use it that way, and you’ll have to block that. Yeah, either way, it’s good for you to know, but yes, first engagement. Two, then once they’re in there, how are they using it? And then three, is it in line with the policies that you have?

Scott Mears  32:58

Okay, yeah, I think that’s really good to just even take that as a takeaway. It gives you good insight on, you know, how to not just approach the adoption, but see the ROI outside of the cost savings and efficiency gain. So that’s a really interesting takeaway for our audience there. And I want to ask a question on the solution side. You know, we’ve done a lot of questions for, you know, the consumers of these softwares, but I want to understand, you know, what can the solution providers do? So, you know, I’m gonna say three things, but it’s okay if you have four or five or maybe just one. But you know, I’d round it up on three is, what would you say are the key three things that solution providers can do better today to improve the adoption of technology and innovation as well.

Matt Palackdharry  33:50

Yeah, a couple of them are really obvious to me, because there are, there are players that do this really well, and there are players that do this really poorly. And if I look outside of our space, sometimes the answers become clear. By nature of supply chain, I feel like we’ve had investment come to our area a little bit later than some of the other areas of the business have gotten. And some of these challenges have actually been solved in other areas. So, you know, we can kind of check our answers here against what have worked for other lines of business. But the first and foremost is that the the technology providers need to make the solutions easier to integrate. And it’s probably pretty obvious to some of the listeners here, but there are when you when you think about making your platform as sticky as possible. There are two lines of thought. There’s the line of thought where, once I have you on my platform, I need to make it as hard as possible for other things to get into my environment so I can sell my own things to you. I won’t name the player. But I think that some of them are pretty obvious, and I’ll use an example here, of like, you know, the old iPhones, where you had to have the new charger that they have that no one else has, and even if you bought it from a different manufacturer that then it would break way sooner. You know, they’re doing that thing, those things deliberately to make more money. And I I think that we’re at this point now where we really need to make sure that that doesn’t happen, that we make sure that there’s kind of interconnective ways to make sure that solutions that allow our customers even to buy the solutions that really drive their business forward. There is so much functionality available to to the to all of our buyers in this space right now. And really you should be choosing the technology that has the functionality that fits your business, not somebody putting a power play out front. So that would, that would be the first one. And there are some players that do that really well, by the way. Two, I think that there is some ability to help cure the data problem. So you know that an answer that doesn’t work for me, and I think it’s a pretty obvious one, is everyone standing up their own supplier portal, everybody, every technology player in the space for a while was saying, oh, you know, I have a data problem. Your suppliers will come in here and input their data, and then it will work. They don’t. And so if your platform, if the linchpin of that is that you’re going to ask every one of the suppliers to come in and update update their data on whatever frequency you need and and whatever level of data you need, I think that is a recipe for failure, and so tying into something where you can proactively get that data, whether you’re using an LLM, whether you’re using a data foundation, whether using even down in Bradstreet, right? I still think that’s a better example or better solution, rather than going and standing up a supplier portal to gather all this information. And then the third, which really is my space right, is that we need to make the platforms interconnected. We need to be able to make sure that when you perform a task in one we make as user friendly as possible, and then that same action can be brought into another platform, because the the functionality of each system is getting deeper in different areas. The reality is we’re not going to have one platform go and solve everything, and so you need to make it usable cross platform. You need to be able to grab data from one screen and maybe put it on to another screen. Those are all things I think you need an overlay type solution for. And you see a lot of providers right now actually taking what we do a digital adoption platform and pre installing it for their users, because they know it makes it so much more effective and and in fact, on for our side, over half of our business so far this year has actually come from solution providers that are pre installing this for their customers, because they know it just makes the platform so much more usable now that can it still combines you just to that platform if you do that. So you know, I definitely like the enterprise route, because you to make it truly effective. You want it to be across all your different platforms. But it’s a start, right? We need to make platforms as user friendly as possible. People need to be able to get in, do what they want, and get out as fast as possible. That you do that, and you’ve designed a very effective solution.

Scott Mears  38:45

I like that. Get in and get out quick. You know, everyone’s getting busier and busier through life, and we’re expecting everything to be much more efficient. And, you know, we get stressed so easy now if, especially if technology, if it doesn’t work, you know, even if my laptop, you know, has a bad day, you know, you lose your mind with it. So it’s interesting that, you know, that’s sort of the consistent theme, you know. You know, we need to improve the way we we teach that we within organizations and make and really, at the core of that, you’re saying it’s the speed and efficiency in giving them that information, and it’s same here. You know, that’s the efficiency of the UI. And I might just add one final question is, what would you say for the solution providers? Is maybe at the core of that, of why they’re not doing that right now, you know, the three that points that you mentioned, you know, you mentioned with Apple, you know, that was, you know, I faced that problem. You will have faced that problem. You know, we all have, you know, the Apple users, you know, would you say it’s, you know, solely a monetary problem, or would you say there’s something more at the core, maybe, maybe not really, truly understanding, you know, how this, these softwares, should be built? What would you say is, maybe at the core of it?

Matt Palackdharry  40:01

 Yeah, I would group these problems really into two different levels based on the size of the organization. So, you know, if we take the really large providers that are established in this space, I do think it is a little bit more of a monetary game. And I, you know, I read these business cases all the time, and even from the VC community, where I’ll go and I’ll give some advice on whether things are good investments or not, and I see these things in the business plan, right? So I don’t, I don’t think people should be thinking about designing solutions that way. I think it is a recipe to fail in the long run. And I traditionally, I try to build things for the long run versus the short run. So the big players, they could make it easier. Some choose not to deliberately. Some choose to make it easier. And so if I were buying some of the larger platforms today, the ones trying to make the data challenge as easy as possible, trying to make it easy as possible for you to integrate other solutions, and trying to increase the user experience. If you’re doing those three things, I can believe in the continual innovation that you will have. Now I want to switch to and I want to, I’m going to go to the startups, or, you know, let’s say organizations that have less than 50 million in revenue. I think in that case, it may be more so that they’ve rushed so much to feature functionality on specific use cases that we didn’t really think about the dependencies that lead up to it. And I’ve been guilty of this, so it’s one of the reasons that I I’m bringing it up, because you think about, oftentimes, when we’re building new solutions, we we have great sponsors that, that we have built relationships with, that we’re actually designing these solutions for, and we think about the end point first. But we don’t always necessarily think of the things that will get in the way. We just think the way. We just think, hey, let’s get there, and we’ll keep solving each challenge as they come up. And there are some consistent challenges that get there, that get in the way, rather, and the big guys can help solve this for the small guys. And I’ll go to Apple, for example. You know, if you’re an app, there are 1000s of great apps now in the App Store, and the App Store makes it easy to solve some of the data challenges, the integration challenges, even some of the user experience challenges, right? So they have done that specific component really well, and it’s made it easier for the small guys to put together a point solution that will make the iPhone more user friendly for you, and so those big guys that have a platform type experience will make it easier on the startups. But if you’re a startup and you can’t play within the larger platform environment, I do think it, it puts a burden on the customer, and it puts a burden on the customer because they want your solution. You’re designing the solution for them. There’s a lot of really great innovation that comes through startups, but if you’re not bringing it into the overarching ecosystem, that’s where it becomes a challenge. And to solve that, I do think there’s either the big platform play like, like, what we’re talking about here, or it can be solved through a digital adoption platform where you’re kind of doing a screen interfacing and maybe copying things on screen and then putting it into the other applications that you need proactively. So there are two different ways that that can solve there, and the reality is, you can also do both. It doesn’t have to be either or, but depending on whether you’re a large organization or a small organization, you’re going to get a different answer to that question.

Scott Mears  43:55

No, I enjoyed you clearing that up, you know, I think it’s eye opening for, you know, companies that are currently looking for new software at the moment, know, it gives you good insight into into the different size companies and really where the problem lies. So I think that gives our audience a really good insight now into both what they could be doing and also, you know, they have more insight into who they’re actually going to be working with. So we really like to finish off with a thumbs up thumbs down segment. It’s a fun segment the yes or no questions, so I will ask you a question and only give it give us as a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And if you could also say thumbs up or thumbs down for our audio listeners, that would be great. Okay, awesome. Okay, do supply chain organizations often overlook user experience design when implementing software?

Matt Palackdharry  44:50

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  44:53

Have you seen supply chain software adoption fail due to insufficient integration with existing systems?

Matt Palackdharry  45:01

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  45:03

Do supply chain software vendors adequately address industry specific regulatory challenges?

Matt Palackdharry  45:13

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  45:15

See some of these can be difficult. Sometimes, yeah, have you encountered supply chain software adoption, which has been hindered by a disconnect between headquarters and local operations?

Matt Palackdharry  45:29

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  45:31

Do supply chain organizations often underestimate the time and resource needed for software adoption?

Matt Palackdharry  45:38

Thumbs down.

Scott Mears  45:40

Interesting. Interesting. Have you ever felt you were living in living the reality of the movie Groundhog Day based software implementation?

Matt Palackdharry  45:50

Thumbs up.

Scott Mears  45:52

Yeah. I appreciate your honesty.

Matt Palackdharry  45:57

You know, some really cool questions in there. And, and I, I had some hesitation on some more. So because I see, I see the potential that’s coming, and, and I, and I know it’s coming. And in fact, in some areas, I think it’s already here. And one of the bigger challenges now, I feel is that some of these solutions can be solved significantly faster than what organizations even know, but they’ve gone through many years of failure because things like LLMs weren’t available yet, because things like digital adoption platforms weren’t available yet, And you mixing those things together is making the implementation so much more successful and reducing the cost significantly. If you were to ask me that some of those same questions five years ago, I think it would have been thumbs up across the board, but I’m personally very excited about some of the technologies that are coming, and I still think we’re just at the tip of the spear. I think it’s going to really come quickly here over the next several years.

Scott Mears  47:06

Well, you’re firing me up about this, and I know our audience is going to be getting, you know, really excited about this, to hear it from you. And you know, we got a lot of intelligence today, and I know the audience is going to enjoy this one. So I do want the audience to know if they have any questions. Where can our audience find you, Matt?

Matt Palackdharry  47:25

So you can find me at apty.io and my email address is matt.palackdharry, which is on screen here @apti.io.

Scott Mears  47:36

Wonderful. Yeah, so please do contact if you’re looking for I’m sure that they have many more questions. So yeah, thank you so much, Matt. We’ll just give a little wave to the camera together and just say goodbye to everyone.

Matt Palackdharry  47:49

Bye, everyone.

Scott Mears  47:51

Hi. My name is Scott Mears, and I’m one of the hosts of the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Roambee. On this podcast, we talk to supply chain heroes from around the world about everything, ranging from the disruptions related to supply chains, their personal experiences with tracking technologies, strategies to build resilience, and much, much more. We already have some recommended videos for you to the side of me, and if any of this sounds interesting to you, do subscribe to our Youtube channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss another Roambee video. I’ll see you next time you.