GAINS On Podcast S2 Ep.6: Benco Dental’s Continuous Improvement with GAINS

Sarah(00:04):

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

Paul (00:11):

Thank you very much for having me. 

Sarah(00:12):

So what’s happening, I think this is your fifth Summit. 

Paul (00:15):

It is, yes. 

Sarah(00:16):

Talk to us about this year. How’s that going? 

Paul (00:18):

I think it’s been great so far. We just came out from a really interesting speaker talking about some very deep topics, and I think one of the things that’s really been cool about this year is really the focus on the new tools, the AI, the machine learning, and I think it’s getting us all excited to hopefully start using some of it. 

Sarah(00:37):

Go back to your teams, tell them what’s possible and get started. 

Paul (00:41):

Yeah, exactly. They’ll be very excited about it. 

Sarah(00:43):

Love that. Love that. So tell everybody who you are, what you do, maybe what your company does, and a little bit of a background on your journey in supply chain. 

Paul (00:53):

Yeah, so my name’s Paul Benhamou. I am the director of supply chain for Benco Dental. So if you’re not a dentist or a dental practitioner, you almost definitely don’t know who Benco Dental is, but we are a dental supply company, so we’re the third largest dental supply company in the United States. We’re the largest privately owned. Our larger competitors are both public companies. And really what we do is we sell our products, we sell dental products to dental practitioners throughout the country. So if you go to your dentist’s office next time and you sit down in the chair, anything you can see in that room, they can buy from us. So the gloves, the mask, the goop in your mouth, you know the chair, the light, the cabinets, everything. 

 

Sarah:

Right

Paul (01:34):

So that’s really the business that we offer. We have a pretty large supply chain team. We’re actually up to 58 people now. 

Sarah:

Wow. 

Paul:

Company is coming up on a billion dollar company, and so you know it takes a lot of people to run that supply chain. So we’ve got two kind of distinct parts of our business, which is our consumable side, which is really your inventory planning, your fast moving gloves, masks, the things that practices are using constantly. And then we have an equipment side, which is really more project based because if you’re going to go out buy, yeah, you’re going to go buy a Ferrari or something, you’re going to shop around, you’re going to take your time. I mean, some people probably have enough money, they don’t have have to do that, but most people are going to take their time. And so the sales cycle is different. And of course the inventory planning is different as a result.

Sarah(02:22):

Yeah

Paul (02:22):

So a lot of times people are building new offices and so it’s really a lot more project based. So there’s a lot of depth to the work that we’re doing in variation. 

Sarah(02:30):

Awesome. Well, you’re the director of global supply chain, so what does that role look like and what have you done in the past? 

Paul (02:38):

Yeah, so I mean, my role is really to, I guess if I really distilled it down, to set the tone and the rules and kind of the business processes that we’re going to use to move our supply chain forward, make sure that, so to speak, the dials are turned correctly so that we’re balancing our inventory with our turns and making sure that we’re interfacing with our vendors and building relationships and trying to give ourselves a chance to grow what we’re able to do and make beneficial relationships with our vendor partners. Before Benco, I worked for Xerox Corporation for 13 years in a variety of different roles. I’m not going to bore you to tears with what I did with Xerox because definitely it’s less exciting than dental equipment. So that tells you something. 

 

Sarah:

Wow. 

 

Paul:

Yeah. But it was a great opportunity. It really started me in supply chain. I like to tell people the day I started, I didn’t even know what supply chain it was.

Sarah(03:36):

Right, like most of us. 

Paul (03:37):

Right. Most of us, if you’re not part of it, you’re like. Now since Covid, your aunt Agnes knows about supply chain. But 20 years ago, nobody knew what that was you know. 

Sarah(03:47):

But also some people are in supply chain and they don’t realize they’re in supply chain. 

Paul (03:52):

That’s true too. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a very broad, it’s very broad. It encompasses a lot of things, but it’s been really good to me and it’s given me an opportunity to learn so much and grow so much over a couple of decades. 

 

Sarah:

Awesome.

 

Paul:

I can’t believe a couple of decades went by already. 

Sarah(04:07):

Well, from what I understand, continuous improvement is really important to you, you’re a strong advocate of that. What does continuous improvement mean to you? What does that look like in your role? 

Paul (04:17):

Sure. A lot of people say, let’s work smarter and not harder. And that’s true, but it’s also, it’s just a platitude if you don’t actually have any real ideas on how to do that. So for me, it’s about time is the most precious resource we have and how do we use our time more wisely? And so in my role, and I’ve had the opportunity to take on new teams along the way, and really the way I like to look at it is what do we spend our time on and which of those things requires our personal expertise? 

Paul (04:54):

So when you look at the work you do, inevitably you always end up doing a lot of stuff where you’re just kind of going through the motions and you don’t need that person to do it. It just so happens it’s their job. So really what we’ve tried to do and the way we’ve improved ourselves is to look at the way we’re spending our time and say, let’s take everything to the extent that we can, but let’s take everything that doesn’t add value, that your personal expertise doesn’t add value to, and let’s figure out a way to either stop doing it or automate it or get someone else to do it who isn’t a supply chain expert. And so that’s kind of been the core of what we’ve done, and it’s allowed us then to take the time we gain because if you gain time, but then you’re sitting at your desk on Facebook or do people still use that MySpace? Let’s be more current. If you’re on MySpace instead, you don’t really gain anything. So the way that you gain something then is by taking that time that you’ve gained and then reinvesting it in growing yourself, making smarter decisions, taking the time to really use the expertise that you have to benefit the company. 

Sarah(06:05):

Yeah, well and innovate. Be creative. Be more strategic. Right? Bring ideas to the table

Paul (06:10):

Yes. Yeah exactly. Don’t rush through what you were doing because you don’t have time. Take the time to evaluate the work and really bring what you bring to the table. 

Sarah(06:20):

So talk to me about transforming that mindset and culture because when we think about technology implementation, taking on new technology, the technology is only 20% of that. The rest of that really has to do with change management and the team, mindset, culture. What has that looked like for you and how has GAINS supported you in that shift and bringing people together? 

Paul (06:47):

Yeah, it’s a good question because when I first started with the team, they had had GAINS for quite a while, and they had leadership that had the foresight to say, this is a great tool and we can do a lot with this. 

Paul (07:00):

But that was sort of executive leadership and their first level. I’m certainly not naming any names, I’m just saying that their first level leadership really was more focused on here’s where you click, just go and do the thing. So a lot of the thing I talk about a lot is the why, which seems obvious, but when I came on board and I had a manager at the time who was really in the trenches with me, with the team, is just trying to help everybody understand why am I doing this? It’s not just I go in, I click here, I click there, and that’s really where we were. And through no fault of their own, it’s a great group of people, it’s just that no one had invested in them to say, when we teach you why, when we professionalize you, when you understand what you’re doing, you see the opportunity to do things better and you then see the results of your work and how they impact the company. And so I think at the end of the day, everybody wants to feel a sense of purpose and a sense of value. And so if we can give people those things, that changes the mindset. People go like, wow, what I’m doing is so important. And then they invest greater in doing it better and better and better. 

Sarah(08:14):

Yeah well, and then they adopt ways that they can, like you said, do it better. 

Paul (08:18):

Yeah, exactly. 

Sarah(08:19):

But then also leaves them space to be part of the team and bring ideas and do all of the things that they aren’t usually able to do without that support. 

Paul (08:29):

And to that point, maybe for the first six months to a year, we were like, Hey, we want you to do this differently. We want you to do that differently. But eventually, I don’t tell anyone how to do anything differently now. They come to me and go, we want to do this differently. This doesn’t make sense. We don’t like how this works. We need you to help us support making those changes. But we came up with the idea. And I love that. I mean, that’s when you know you’re humming. 

Sarah(08:53):

Yeah, absolutely. Now talk to me about the collaboration on that, because I think you’ve been working closely or your team’s been working closely with GAINS on some of the challenges that you have. You’ve brought them to the table, GAINS works on a solution. How does that work? How does that happen? Give us some insight. 

Paul (09:14):

I mean, it’s evolved a little bit over the years depending on who we are working with at GAINS. But from an overarching perspective, we, first of all, the team has gotten a lot of training from GAINS. GAINS has not only at the GAINS facility, but we’ve had them out to our facility a couple of times, when we were in the facility regularly, although things are evolving there too. But anyway, so really, I always felt there was huge value in them literally looking over your shoulder while you were working because people don’t have a tendency to say, people don’t have a tendency to know what they don’t know. So they’ve come to our facility, watch people, Hey, we could be doing this differently, and while we’re here, we’re also going to provide you with some additional insight into this screen and how you can optimize your use of this screen or this feature that you’re not using. And so GAINS has been really great with doing that. Our rep, Gabi is really helpful to us. We have a biweekly meeting where we bring our challenges, and then of course we don’t expect her to have a solution on the spot, but she’s going to go back, she’s going to work with her team, and then she’s going to come back to us and say, Hey, here’s how we can do this differently, or here’s your options. 

Sarah(10:30):

Absolutely. Now let’s talk about forecasting. I think you’ve been able to do some process improvement when it comes to forecasting adjustments. Can you talk to us about how GAINS has helped you to improve that efficiency and also help you maintain fill rates? 

Paul (10:47):

Yeah. So let me talk first about the functionality that came from GAINS initially and then how we built on that and improved it. 

Sarah(10:56):

Yeah, we would love that. 

Paul (10:57):

So the first thing is GAINS helped us to generate what we conventionally call the month to date, which means nothing to anyone except if you are there on the floor. But basically what it means is we used to cycle our forecast once a month because of course you don’t want to be doing too much churning. But what they built for us is the opportunity to say, okay, if reality differs from your forecast by this percent, at any point in the month, we’re going to show you those items and you’re going to decide whether you want to make an on the spot alteration, basically. So that alone is incredibly useful and it’s something that came from GAINS that we didn’t obviously have before. The way we then built on that was going back to the first conversation is, we’re doing the same thing over and over again. Over time, we got into the rhythm of, okay, just to pull a number out of my ear, it’s halfway through the month, it says 50, I’m going to make it a hundred. And so ultimately what we said was, okay, there’s a lot of SKUs and this happens a lot. So we’re spent investing a lot of time in making those changes, but really it’s kind of repeatable and it doesn’t really require your specific expertise, although it may add value in a few key places. 

Paul (12:14):

So we used what we call an RPA, robotic process automation tool and our supply chain analyst, and we give him a shout out Bruce Zhang, which who is just incredible called Bruce. Shout out to Bruce. He built an application that basically ingested the data and spit out what we studied it over a period of time, what would everyone have done in this scenario? And it spit out what they would’ve done and it inputs it for them automatically. So number one, a couple hours a week per person times 11 or 12 people not doing this anymore, and you get busy, that’s the first thing that goes by the wayside. You didn’t have time to do it. So now we’re actually doing it all the time without actually having to do it. So it’s actually improved our forecasting too, because we’re paying attention without spending the time to pay attention. 

Sarah(13:04):

Well, and that’s kind of the magic 

Paul (13:06):

Exactly. 

Sarah(13:07):

Automation. 

Paul (13:08):

Yeah. I mean it’s super powerful and it’s something that, I mean, I was really, really proud of him and the team when they did that. 

Sarah(13:14):

Now cybersecurity is I think the number one, number two threat to supply chains at the moment. And I think recently you may have seen a spike because a competitor had a cyber attack. Now, this is a great example of this and people really need to be very diligent about cybersecurity, especially in supply chains, but this is a good example of what happens on the other side when that happens to somebody. So can you tell us how GAINS sort of gave you the flexibility to be able to scale up that quickly to be able to meet that demand?

Paul (13:48):

Yeah/ The interesting thing is when something like that happens, it happened, but you don’t really totally understand the impact because are they going to be back online tomorrow? Are they going to be back online in a week, a day, a month? So we were kind of in the dark other than little bits that we were hearing. And so what GAINS really, we started to see our demand increase because people couldn’t get products from them. And what GAINS really gave us the ability to do is to really hone in. I think we could have really gone by the day even, but we really went down to the weekly level because again, if they’re back online next week, they’ll take back some portion of their customer base week over week. So we don’t want to go out there and say, Hey, let’s invest in three months worth of inventory today just because this might last that long. We were able to drill in and say, and even at the item classification level for A items, for A and B items, the really fast movers, the stuff people aren’t going to be able to do without until next week when they get back online, 

Paul (14:48):

Let’s increase our forecast by this percentage point and it cascades across all the items. And so nobody, other than a very brief intervention by myself and by the GAINS folks, no one really had to do anything. It just became sort of transparent to us. And again, we could manage that down to the week so that we could adjust as soon as things seemed to normalize. 

Sarah(15:10):

So a part of your experience in supply chain has been using manual processes, Excel spreadsheets like the rest of us. I mean, we’ve all grown up in supply chain and technology necessarily at this stage of what it is, has not been available to us until recently. And so a lot of us still even use Excel spreadsheets. How important do you think it is to adopt from spreadsheets into the new day?

Paul (15:41):

The new day yeah. Now, no, knock on spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets too, and I use ’em a ton.

Sarah(15:46):

But like version 58? No one needs a version 58.

Paul (15:50):

And it’s much more responsive. It’s reactive instead of proactive. And so I learned how to buy in spreadsheets years ago with a former company. And there’s some value to it, because now you have to understand, so you have to create the business rules by selling if equals if yada, yada, yada. But it’s really much more valuable and much more important that people get into a tool that like GAINS, that allows them to have continuous processes throughout the organization and make sure that everyone’s doing the same thing. And that’s really where it comes down to, because your spreadsheet’s going to look different than my spreadsheet’s going to look different than another guy’s spreadsheet. 

Sarah(16:35):

Somebody tweaks something and everything’s off. 

Paul (16:37):

Right? Exactly. 

Sarah(16:38):

Spell something wrong. 

Paul (16:39):

Sure, saves it incorrectly. I mean, there’s so many things that can go wrong. And again, they’re all created by the user, whereas the beauty of GAINS is it’s created by this huge team of mathematicians and experts who are delivering algorithms to you that with all due respect to most users, you’re not going to come up with on your own. 

Sarah(17:00):

And I think customer satisfaction is important to you. We just talked about that cyber attack you had spike in demand that’s not easy to manage while also managing customer satisfaction. So nothing leaves a negative taste in their mouth. Talk to us about how you balance that and maybe how GAINS helped to balance that growth with the customer satisfaction. So you’re able to keep those levels.

Paul (17:26):

Sure and the cyber attack and the thing we talked about with the RPA tool and stuff, they’re great examples of the end result is customer satisfaction because at the end of the day, customers want what any of us want, which is, I go in, I order my stuff, I know when I’m going to get it, and it shows up when you say it’s going to show up. So being able to use those tools to be much more responsive and to adapt to, in the case of tech, maybe rapid growth, but also have a sense of adjusting quickly even to long-term and incremental growth. If you were doing it in a spreadsheet, you’re going to use the same formula this month that you used last month, but as you evolve and as your business evolves, you’re able to adapt seamlessly to changes and GAINS is going to pick a new algorithm for you that’s going to indicate growth on that product that you would not have done if you were doing it on your own. 

Sarah(18:24):

Seeing the things that you’re not necessarily seeing. 

Paul (18:26):

Exactly. And so at the end of the day, like I said, it’s just people want their stuff. That’s what it is. We all want our stuff. I go in, I order my stuff, I want my stuff. And so how do we adapt quickly to that and make it seamless to them and not disappoint? 

Sarah(18:40):

Because also, I mean, if you are not delivering, some dentist office is down and has to cancel all those appointments for that day, potentially if it’s a safety concern or 

Paul (18:52):

Surgeries, they schedule surgeries last minute and they need their products to deliver to execute that surgery. 

Sarah(18:58):

Yeah, I always say supply chains are the life blood of not only the economy, but human nature or human beings as well because they’re so important. 

Paul (19:09):

I say the same thing, maybe somebody will start listening to us at some point, but basically, yeah, I mean we’re basic. 

Sarah(19:15):

Agnes is listening. 

Paul (19:16):

Agnes knows now, but we want everyone to know everybody. 

Sarah(19:20):

Yeah. All right. So final question. Benco has been working with GAINS for 15 years. How has that relationship evolved? Where do you see that going into the future? 

Paul (19:32):

Yeah, I’ve been with Benco coming up on eight years. I can speak really to the last eight years. I know prior to that it was a lot of getting the system going and helping users understand the nuances of the system and how to use it. I’m sure there was more to it, but I wasn’t there to speak to it. Since I’ve come on and started working with GAINS, we really, we worked on having that kind of getting us to a point where we are continually improving to bring us back to our first conversation, and getting us to a steady state where we feel like we’re getting value every day. And I think where I really see us going now is they are introducing a lot of really exciting new tools the AI, the ML things that we’re going to be able to take advantage of and are really exciting, I think are going to help us to constantly evolve and grow our business, which is really what I want to do. So I’m really excited about the stuff that they’re introducing and I can’t wait to get, you know sink into it. 

Sarah(20:33):

I can’t wait to see what you do with it. 

Paul (20:35):

Me neither. 

Sarah(20:37):

Alright, well thank you Paul for joining me here at GAINS Summit. 

Paul (20:40):

Thank you.