Video: How Decks Direct Optimized Inventory & Efficiency with GAINS

Sarah (00:04):

Hey everyone. Sarah Barnes-Humphrey here of Let’s Talk Supply Chain at the GAINS Summit with Jon. Jon, thanks for joining me.

Jon (00:11):

Morning. Thanks for having me.

Sarah (00:12):

So how are you? What’s the Summit been like for you? Talk to me about your experience.

Jon (00:16):

Sure. So this is my first year here, my second year for my team. So unfortunately I had to miss out on last year. We had some other business things going on, but we’ve enjoyed it. Learning about the new services coming available in GAINS, just meeting different people. I think I made it to the semifinals last night and the ping pong tournament. All of that was good. Yeah.

Sarah (00:38):

Wow. So you’re a ping pong shark.

Jon (00:41):

I’m okay. Yeah.

Sarah (00:44):

Alright. Why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you do and a little bit about the company that you work for.

Jon (00:49):

Sure. So I’m Jon Newman. I’m with Decks Direct. We sell to retail, the DIYer, mainly. Any kind of decking supplies, including steel framing. So you can build, buy a complete deck from us online.

Sarah (01:06):

And you’re the VP of operations, what does that mean?

Jon (01:08):

Yeah, so I’m the Vice President of Operations, so I’m over procurement, I’m over order management and the distribution center, which is based out of Indianapolis.

Sarah (01:17):

Great. Alright. So now you’ve been with Decks Direct for about two years from what I understand, but you’ve also worked in various roles. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that journey has looked like and how your diverse experience kind of brings a unique perspective?

Jon (01:34):

Yeah, sure. So at 18, I enlisted the Marine Corps, spent six years in the Marine Corps. Great management program. So once I got out of the Marine Corps, I joined a company called Lundstrom. So it was a fastener company and it was about 12 million in revenue. When I left there in 22, we were a little over 300 million.

Sarah (01:52):

Wow

Jon (01:53):

So I just worked my way up in the company. Yeah so sales, procurement, operations, bit of everything,

Sarah (01:59):

A bit of everything. I like that. I kind of have that in my journey as well, and it does, it gives you a unique perspective and really helps to put things into perspective when you’re working in a new company or working with a new team, that kind of thing. So what were some of the challenges that Decks Direct faced before partnering with GAINS? What was the impact of these challenges?

Jon (02:24):

Sure. So the biggest thing was time consumption. We weren’t really good with time management. We had a lot of time invested in spreadsheets. All of our work was done that way, which is very popular within companies. You’d be surprised. I mean, I’ve been doing this a while now and we’ve been using spreadsheets for 25 years. So that was the biggest challenge. We had a lot of overhead in people and it’s not exactly, you’re working off a spreadsheet, a lot of times it’s a guess.

Sarah (02:53):

Well also upload, download, what version are we on?

Jon (02:57):

Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah. Constant problems. Yes.

Sarah (03:02):

So was that one of the only challenges or did you have any others?

Jon (03:06):

Yeah I mean, inflated inventory, incorrect lead times. I mean, we had a lot of different challenges. That was probably the biggest.

Sarah (03:17):

And I think you’ve also seen significant growth, which I’m sure has translated into that.

Jon (03:23):

Yeah so this year has been a bit of a struggle, but last year we did. This year because of GAINS actually kicking off GAINS, it’s really helped us build some more capacity as far as how much inventory we can carry. So our past products, the inventory levels have gone down, which has given us an opportunity to bring in new products this year, which has been great.

Sarah (03:47):

That’s amazing. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about that. How has GAINS helped you manage some of that growth? And you talked about how it helped improve forecasting and some of those issues. Talk to me about that.

Jon (03:58):

Yeah, specifically, I mean, the forecasting, as I said, it was done through spreadsheets and in the past. So GAINS has a number of algorithms. It picks from the best to give you a better forecast than what we’ve had. I mean, it’s night and day difference. I can’t say how big this has been for our company. It’s huge.

Sarah (04:19):

Now you’ve brought automation, I believe, to Decks Direct as well, to help improve efficiency, maybe some decision making. What impact has that had on your operations?

Jon (04:31):

Yeah, like I said, time is a big thing for us. So it’s improved. It’s reduced the amount of time we have to spend on the actual procurement part of it. We still review SKUs daily. The number of SKUs that we get to look at, GAINS helps us reduce that. So we’re looking at outliers now versus big, huge buckets of parts.

Sarah (04:55):

Right. Well, and also it probably helps bring all of the data together so that you’re not, and that it’s not all over the place.

Jon (05:04):

Without a doubt. Yeah, it’s centralized. We were looking at specific vendors. Our turn ratio looking from one vendor and repeating, looking at the SKUs from that vendor was anywhere between seven and 14 days. We’re looking at that daily now and reacting from the day prior. So

Sarah (05:21):

That’s a huge difference that takes it from two weeks to daily.

Jon (05:26):

That’s correct.

Sarah (05:27):

Wow. So I think that real time data has helped with a lot of the agility. You said reacting. We can be a little bit more proactive and more agile. It’s not taking you two weeks to make decisions. You’re kind of making those decisions on a day-to-day basis. So how have you leveraged some of those data analytics to improve the decision making, to stay ahead of that demand?

Jon (05:54):

Yeah so we’ve only been live for about three months, so we’re still working through that process right now. So I would say on the analytics side, we haven’t really dove into that piece yet. We’re getting there.

Sarah (06:07):

Getting there. But you’re excited to,

Jon (06:09):

Super excited

Sarah (06:10):

For it.

Jon (06:11):

I can’t absorb enough knowledge on this. I mean, you know our account manager and Jack who helped implement it, I’m sure he’s tired of hearing me by now, cuz I’m constantly wanting to learn new things.

Sarah (06:23):

Well, and talking about supply chain operations, it’s really important right now that operations are flexible and adaptable. Can you talk to us about how you’ve been able to do that at Decks Direct?

Jon (06:35):

Yeah, I mean, one of the big things for being flexible again, is being able to see our SKUs, our velocity of those SKUs, which ones are more popular, and being able to react to that so much quicker. So we might realize that there’s a SKU that we’re not carrying enough of. And that sounds very simple, but when you’re looking at 5,000 SKUs, it’s way more complex than you think.

Sarah (07:07):

Yeah, exactly. Well, and you want to make sure you’ve got it in stock or at least on the way, because customers don’t like it when it’s out of stock and they need it.

Jon (07:15):

Neither do salespeople. We have an inside sales staff. So the same thing. I would say on that front, it’s the right SKU. Sometimes you can be out of SKU and if you only sell it once a year, that’s fine, but you don’t want to be out of the SKUs that you’re selling two, three times more than that a month.

Sarah (07:31):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. No, I hear that. So what does success look like for you? How do you measure that success? Do you have any metrics or KPIs?

Jon (07:41):

Yeah, so we’re still developing a bunch of KPIs for fill rate. We have fill rate that we’ve used historically through spreadsheets. This allows us to reinvent the wheel. So we’re working on some new KPIs, maybe change the way we measure fill rate. Instead of you got a bucket of 4,000 SKUs and you’re out of 60. Measuring it that way, measuring whether it’s a monthly, this is what historically our sales have been that month. Are you meeting that demand, not just the here is the plan.

Sarah (08:13):

So then let’s look into the future a little bit. What’s next for Decks Direct in terms of supply chain innovation? I know you’re on this journey with GAINS right now. What do you want that to look like?

Jon (08:28):

Yeah, so we’re two step distribution for a lot of our products. So of course, we’re always looking at expanding that, bringing in maybe some white label programs, things like that. Offshoring products

Sarah:

Exciting

Jon:

Yeah, it’s really exciting. My last business, that’s all it was, was imports. So I’m very used to that. So I’m excited about bringing that knowledge over this team and helping out.

Sarah (08:50):

Yeah, my background’s in imports.

Jon (08:52):

Oh, really?

Sarah (08:52):

I mean, you got a lot to take on there. There’s disruptions that have been happening

Jon (08:56):

There is yeah I’ve heard about this strike supposedly this weekend, right?

Sarah (09:00):

Yeah. There’s a lot going on the import side, but it’s really fun. And if you can teach your team to be able to do those imports and bring in different products, I’m sure you’re, not only your team, but your customers are going to really like that

Jon (09:14):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Sarah (09:15):

Awesome. So what advice would you give to anyone considering working with GAINS, considering that you’re going through an implementation right now, what would you say to that?

Jon (09:27):

So I would say we signed, I think in July of last year, and we just went live a couple of months ago. I would say number one, two, and three is probably clean your data up.

Sarah (09:36):

Okay.

Jon (09:38):

When you think it’s clean, do it again. So that’s right. Yeah. So we still have issues, but they’re very small now. Easier to correct. I would say two. Another one would be buy-in from the team. One of the reasons we’ve been successful is I made the team a part of the implementation process the whole time. So getting buy-in, getting, listening to their input, putting those things into place. There’s been a lot of tweaks in GAINS we’ve asked to be done, and it’s turned out great. The team’s bought in and I can’t think of another way, they’d all complain if I took it away today.

Sarah (10:17):

Well, that’s good to know. And what has it been like working with the team at GAINS? I’ve been hearing a lot about how they’re hand on, they’re really there to support you. Has that been your experience?

Jon (10:29):

Absolutely was. Yeah. So when we did our due diligence, that was one of my concerns was like, we’re going to implement this and you’re on your own kid. And that didn’t happen. They’ve been in there to hold our hand the whole time. We had daily calls there for a couple of weeks. So it’s been great.

Sarah (10:47):

Well, and also you mentioned the customized portion of it too, which I think has probably been essential too, because not everybody, everybody’s supply chain is unique.

Jon (10:57):

Yeah. I think we were one of the first, maybe not the first, but one of the first groups to do the API for uploading to the ERPs on POs. So that’s been great as far as when we get truck discounts and container discounts sometimes. So that process used to take us three or four hours to do, selecting the correct SKUs, and now we can do that in a matter of seconds.

Sarah:

That’s a big deal.

Jon:

Huge time saver. Yes.

Sarah (11:25):

That is a very, very big deal. Well, thank you so much for joining me here at GAINS Summit and sharing all your insight on the implementation and what you’re going through and how others can get involved with GAINS.

Jon (11:39):

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you bringing me, thank you.