Welcome everyone to the webinar. Today we are here to discuss things about distribution edition at Acumatica. I am Stacy Writes, the Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager at Acumatica, and I will be your webinar moderator for today. And this webinar is meant to be interactive. So please review all of the resources that are located in the resource list to learn more about today's topic. And also if you have any questions about this webinar, submit your questions in the Q&A box. This Q&A box is located on the bottom of your screen. We will then be able to answer many of your questions questions towards the end of this webinar. But if we happen to run out of time, don't fret because we will reach out to you after the webinar ends as well. And lastly, we want to let you know that your voice matters. So please submit the very short webinar survey so that we could better understand what you would like to see in the future. And with that said, I'll pass it off to Kelly Squizzara. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining today. I am Kelly Squazero and I am the Senior Product Manager for the Distribution edition at Acumatica. And I'm Munsel Randall, I'll be your pre sales engineer demoing person for today. OK, well, let's get started. We have a great agenda for you today. I am going to kick things off with a brief review of how we see the market for distribution and the challenges that distributors are facing. I'll then take you through a very high view of the product from a PowerPoint perspective. Months will actually be demonstrating the product, but I wanted to kind of give you a sense of the breadth and depth of the product because we have limited time today. We have created about a 15 minute demonstration and Munsel will focus on demonstrating the user experience. He'll take us through some role based dashboards, he'll share a little bit about our artificial intelligence anomaly detection and and he'll also take us through the sales order process so that you can see that flow. OK, so let's jump right in. So to kick things off, let's talk about the challenges that distributors are facing. And we have about 1400 customers using the distribution edition. So we talk to our customers regularly to understand their businesses, but we also talk to a lot of prospects and businesses that are running on older solutions and what they're facing. But what we are seeing in the market, certainly there is a tremendous amount of disruption in the supply chain. And as distributors are smack in the middle of that process, you know they're looking for help in managing the disruptions. Whether you know, there's there's things going on in terms of global conflicts, there's economic instability, you know, there are natural disasters. These are the things that are real world challenges that distributors have to be very nimble and respond quickly to. Another key area of a distributors business where they face challenges around managing their inventory. Most of this is related to the fact that they're managing thousands of skews. Depending on your business, it could be 10s of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of skews. And without technology or with old technology, distributors are struggling with ensuring that they have the right products when they need them. And if they don't, the impact it's having on losing sales and and the cost of all of of the disruption that they're dealing with. Another key challenge for distributors is managing their profit margins. Distribution is generally a very tight margin business. So you know, and, and distributors are facing very tough competition. So they're constantly evaluating their pricing strategies. They're looking for more ways to reduce costs in order to maintain an acceptable margin. Another challenge that we're seeing is around technology businesses that are running on older solutions. Some are still manual, you know, they're, they're looking to, they want to remain modern, they wanna stay current with technology. But these older systems are making that very difficult. Businesses, distributors have solutions kind of that they've kind of plugged in together over the years. They have very fragile integrations that they're dealing with. And so they're looking to technology companies to say, hey, listen, we need some help here. We, they always want to be current and, and that is an issue with the systems that they're currently using. And lastly, it's customer retention. Distributors do a great job in servicing their customers, and that is their focus because they don't want to lose their customers, right? It takes a lot of money to get a new customer. And once they get it, they need to make sure that they're always providing the best service, that they always have the inventory their customers need, and that they get product delivered on time. So this is a major focus area where again they're turning to technology. So and that's basically where Acumatica comes in. We designed a solution that helps distributors overcome these challenges. All right, this is a depiction of our offering. It is a comprehensive end to end solution, all right, it is a web-based application. It is built for small to mid sized businesses on a future ready platform, ensuring flexibility and longevity. All the functionality distributors require is available within a single application and database. Having everything in one place streamlines the processes, it reduces duplication of data and it enhances overall efficiency. It also simplifies the reporting and decision making, leading to better control and visibility across the organization. So let's take a key look at some of the capabilities of the distribution solution that you see around this wheel. All right, I'm going to start in inventory management. As I said, distributors are going to manage many, many skews, all of them being, you know, essential to their business. These items can be quite complex. Some are non stock, some are stock items, some are serialized or lot controlled. We have customers using matrix items, they're doing kitting and so they're managing kits and the components. Acumatica's inventory management system equips you to handle the complexities effectively. It ensures that you make smart inventory decisions and that you keep stock readily available when needed. So we'll move into sales management. Acumatica's sales management improves the customer experience. With our embedded CRM and flexible order management, Acumatica supports comprehensive pricing capabilities including promotions. It offers flexible inventory allocation, streamlines invoicing, it links purchase orders to sales orders. It keeps real time tabs on stock and it's so much more. I can't, I don't have the time to go through everything today, but I think you can see it's a comprehensive sales order management solution. In terms of procurement, we offer an automated inventory replenishment system. This is designed to ensure optimal stock levels, reducing the risk of stock outs or even overstocking and ultimately to improve efficiency. We also have a distribution requirements planning module, or DRP, and this solution optimizes inventory levels by using forecasts and real time demand to ensure the right products are in the right place at the right time. The requisition process supports electronic vendor bill bidding to streamline the procurement process. Acumatica supports both centralized and decentralized purchasing. So whether you're centralized purchasing for better control and bulk discounts or decentralizing it to empower local branches, Acumatica will ensure seamless coordination and cost savings. And again, as you can see, there's a lot more to the procurement process. With the distribution edition, you can manage your warehouse more efficiently. So we have a warehouse management module. Using barcode scanning, you can guide staff to the right locations. We support automatic packing and seamless integration with carriers for shipping. Acumatica's WMS solution really is the perfect solution for small to mid sized businesses looking to reduce errors and improve productivity in the warehouse. Often times our customers are experiencing warehouse management for the first time when implementing Acumatica. Acumatica offers multiple commerce storefront options like integrations to big commerce and Shopify for seamless business to business and direct to consumer experiences. Integration between commerce and Acumatica ensures synchronized item data, stock availability and sales orders. Acumatica also connects to retail point of sale system supporting Omni channel distribution. Acumatica's financial handle everything from accounts receivable, accounts payable and general Ledger to cash management, taxes and payroll. Acumatica also enables the creation of custom financial reports and integrates with Microsoft Power BI for advanced analytics. With Acumatica's built in AI and machine learning, users can analyze anomalies in areas such as sales order margins, purchase order costs, and accounts payable bills. Anomaly detection is incredibly valuable because it helps businesses identify unusual patterns or deviations from the norm that could indicate potential issues or opportunities. For example, with Acumatica, you can analyze anomalies and accounts payable bills, uncovering duplicate payments, uncovering fraudulent activities or billing errors. This helps maintain financial integrity and ensures that the company only pays for what it has actually received. And later on in the demonstration, Munsel is going to take you through another example of anomaly detection. I'd like to finish up with a brief review of our technology platform. So Acumatica is built on in the cloud and it was designed as a cloud based solution from its inception. So this cloud, this robust cloud platform leverages the latest technologies to provide scalability, mobility and consistency. Availability. It is built and on it's it has built in mobility. So the platform supports mobile access, ensuring users can manage their business operations from anywhere, enhancing productivity and collaboration. The platform offers tools that allow users and developers to customize workflows, screens, reports, and dashboards without extensive coding. Acumatica provides AP is enabling seamless integration with other applications and systems, allowing you to extend and tailor the ERP to your specific needs. And Acumatica offers tailored solutions for various industries, including distribution, manufacturing, construction, retail and professional services. And many of our customers, and I'm sure you probably see this in your own business, they kind of cross into different areas. So the beautiful thing about Acumatica, it's all in one platform. So if you consider yourself a distributor, but you're also doing some manufacturing, you have the option to take on that capability within our solution. And lastly, again, the artificial intelligence, our platform supports AI. At Akumatica, we are committed to providing practical user friendly AI solutions tailored to the needs of small and mid sized businesses. All right. And here's a quote from our CEO talking about our AR strategy, because we take this very seriously and we really are looking for opportunities to enable small businesses to take advantage of these technologies so that they're better able to compete in the market. And with that, I want to pass it over to Muscle, who will do a product demonstration. All right, fantastic. Let me go ahead and bring up my screen here. And there we go. All right, just a like it's you you're seeing right here the the sales manager dashboard. I'm in Acumatica at this particular point in time, just to give you a little rundown on things, Acumatica is a role based system. So you heard Kelly talking about the roles, you heard her talking about the dashboard. So I'm going to kind of try to walk you through some of that. So couple things, just the kind of the lay of the land here. So you definitely, I'm logged in right here as admin. So everything that I'm doing here is assuming that I have complete privileges. Acumatica does support roles and logins and security. So never fear that anything that I'm showing you here that looks like it's something that you would only want certain eyes to look at, you can certainly control that over on the left hand side. It also controls this, this the menu bar as to what functionality you have. Now, I'm showing you everything, all of the tools, all the goodies that Acumatica has. But in reality, I would be focusing today mostly on say sales orders a little bit looking at inventory purchases. These are some of the things that have to do with the distribution edition. Also just to kind of just show you how easy things can operate. A lot of times people get they, you know, when we deal with small to medium sized distributors and manufacturers and construction companies, one of the things that's very obvious is that people wear a lot of hats. People don't just do one thing. So I can put all the various different things that I do. Let's say that I spend some time doing inventory planning. Maybe I also spend a little bit of time looking at payables and receivables. I have all of that information. I can personalize the system for me. Each user can control what they look at. So if we were to kind of focus our attention on this main screen right here, you would see that I am at the I'm at one of our dashboards. This happens to be called the sales manager dashboard. Little teaser up here in the corner. I want to be I'll wrap up and we'll talk about those anomalies that AI functionality that Kelly alluded to earlier. So we'll talk about how important it is to manage those margins, but also look at all the other information that's readily available. I can see my total sales teams bookings, I can see E customer growth and let me emphasize that none of this is coded. This is all each user or can be done for a group of users. This can be this is personalization, this is not coding and this is not programming. So just kind of want to emphasize that you got a lot of little goodies here, obviously like you know, how are we doing with year to date sales quota, nice little speedometer chart to kind of see how we're doing there. So let's jump into something that is kind of near and dear to everybody and that would be looking at say sales orders. And I'm going to walk you through a couple different kinds of sales scenarios here. So for example, maybe I have a sales order that's being sold to my customer, Alta Ace place the sales order the other day and here's when they want it. And it's for a laptop and laptop and a grill. So I'm getting ready to have a cookout and I'm going to have a cookout and I'm going to do a little work at the same time. Couple things to draw your attention to here down in the details. I'm going to draw your attention to the fact that I've got my laptop and I've got my little grill here, and we're going to emphasize a little bit on these areas, this related items. So throughout Acumatica, I can define and say, so the Acer laptop, maybe that's the thing that I'm the customer is asking for. But this little related items pops up and it says this item has to be substituted. Click this button to select a substitute item. So I set that up when I created my item, I said this happens to be a substitute item and it's telling me I've got to pick the Dell desktop instead. So, and it happens to be something that I've got to make that choice. I've got to swap out if I tried to actually because of the example here. I I I configured this so that if I try to place a sales order for the Acer laptop. It's going to force me to switch over to the Dell desktop. It's won't even allow me to ship the product. So that's a perfect example of a little bit of a strong ARM approach. You could also just have it give you a warning. That's all completely configurable. Nothing again, is coded here. This is all personalized. Another example might be something that is an upsell. So here I've got my Charbroil Classic, but really what I want to I'm recommending is I want them if they decide that they want to the the Charbroil Classic, what we're recommending is try to find a way to upsell them to the the 18 piece stainless steel set and case. So that's just a simple example of the kind of functionality that we embed in Acumatica to just those little things that make such a big difference in how you interact with your customers and how you just better provide them better customer service and allow your team to be more efficient. So that's just a simple, a little example there. Let me switch gears here and talk a little bit about something that we just recently added in and that is the ability to do lot and serialization. So Akumatic has always had a lot in serial tracking, but what we've added now is the ability to add attributes to that. So for example, I have this little button here says add a lot or serial number right on a sales order. So we have the we have another sales order here for the same customer. Here's my here's my Alta Ace is my customer and I'm trying to and I want to get sell them some iPhones. I do some refurbished iPhones, but as I refurbish them, let's go ahead and follow that. I assign lot numbers to each one of them because each lot number, each iPhone is unique and has its own unique characteristics. So you can see over here I have maybe you know what is the color of all of these. I have a lot number for each one of these. So here is a specific lot number with a specific manufacturer's serial number for an iPhone 12. It happens to be midnight color, it's 128 gigabytes, and it happens to have an excellent screen and the battery is in good case. So here's an example of when we received it in. We did lot traceability on it and we assigned some attributes to it and now those are searchable. So let me show you how that's searchable. I've got this search box up here, right up here and I'm going to say you know what, my customer is on the phone and they want a red 1. So I just go ahead type in red right here and all of the red serialized iPhones pop up. They specifically want an iPhone 13. So I think this one right here looks out now it has some minor scratches and they said they want only the good ones. So here here is they want an excellent. So here we've got we've got this iPhone 13, it's 128 gigabytes, it's read, it's excellent condition and the battery is in good shape. That's the one that they that they want and that's the one we want to supply them. So we'll just go ahead. Just click here. We're going to add and close and a second, it's going to automatically add in a third line item. So this particular customer is getting one iPhone 12 and two iPhone 13. Each one of these are serialized. So that's serialization and also with attributes associated with that. So that's a powerful functionality that Acumatica supplies to you. Let's go ahead and take a look at one other example. I'm just looking at our time here. Just want to make sure that I provide you with a, a good example. Oops, I didn't say that, but that's OK. Let's go ahead and take a look at another sales order. I'm going to go to the sales order list here and I'm going to show you an example just quickly with replenishments and then we will wrap up and talk a little bit about our anomalies. Akumatica does support full replenishment planning. Couple things, couple things. Notice right off the bat here I placed a sales order for a changing table, a baby changing table. Notice I'm getting a warning message and if I put my highlight cursor over that saying, hey, you don't have enough of those Akumatica throughout way down here at the bottom. Draw your attention to that way down here at the bottom. It's always telling me what the on hand quantity is and what is available to ship. So from here I can run a replenishment functionality and the replenishment functionality will give me a recommendation as to what I need to purchase and what I need to acquire to satisfy my my my needs. So here you see, here's the changing table, here is the quantity that I have on hand, here is the quantity that's on demand. And it's telling me here's how much you've got coming in. Looks like I don't have any inventory coming in. So it's making a recommendation, says you always want to maintain a safety stock. So here's what you should be placing an order for and it's giving you that recommendation here. And then I can actually process this. And by processing this, it will actually prompt me to create the necessary purchase orders. So it's a powerful functionality there. Let's talk a little bit about something that is recently been added to functionality, the Accumatica. And this is some of the AI functionality that Kelly talked about a little earlier. It's so important with those margins. Those margins are so tight, you want to, you want to satisfy the customer, you want to get the business, but you don't want to sell something at a loss. That's so important. So one of the things that we've added is this functionality to do anomaly detection. So here is saying I've got 30 sales orders that have some anomalies with them. Let's go take a look. We'll go ahead and click in on that. It'll automatically bring us up to one of our inquiries, and in our inquiry, it's going to highlight for us that it's detected some anomalies. We have the ability to keep track of here our anomaly severity, whether it's medium or significant. I've got a doozy here. Look at this one right here. Just this one I'm going to highlight right here -163% margin. Yeah, we, we better jump on that one right away and find out what's going on with that one. Here is another one that's not so not so a bad the margin, 16.39. The margins supposed to be 20%. We put a note in there that's lower than expected. So again, you can update that and then you can actually review these as well. So if I were to drill down into one of these, let's go ahead and just show you that I would have drilled down into this particular sales order. Another thing that pops up that we want to draw your attention to and here happens to be the offending. It's a Little Tikes, bold and bright table and chairs. Looks like somebody manually updated some price and notice there you go. It's telling me your minimum gross profit requirements are not satisfied. So we have throughout Acumatica, we have settings in, in our particular example here, they're walking through, we are showing you how it gives the salesperson a warning, but it doesn't necessarily stop them. Now you could, you could tailor Acumatica to where it would completely stop them from being able to override the price. That's entirely up to you. But we just want to show you the flexibility and the way to catch that. So where do you want to catch that process? What leeway do you want to give your salespeople to be able to be flexible to get the business? It's entirely configurable up to you now. Notice also it's showing you there's that estimated margin and it's got a big discount associated with it as well. So we could fix this, go back and potentially then update our anomaly detection and catch maybe something else. So we can catch it upfront via the, the mapping and the approval process and even just the configuration or we can catch it with the anomaly detection. But the whole point is we want to make sure that we get that product. We want to satisfy that customers demand, but we also want to make sure that we we we do need to make a profit off of that. So that's just a, a little bit of us. Some of the highlights of Acumatica and some of the highlights of some of the things which we talked a little bit about the the related inventory. We talked about how you can do lot attributes and how you can use that for searching on your sales. We talked a little bit about the replenishment process and then we wrapped up talking about the anomaly detection. There's some of the highlights that we find that our customers like to see and I think you would find them beneficial as well. So with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Stacey and Kelly and I will stop sharing. All right. Thank you so much Manzo for your demo and thank you to Kelly for sharing your insights. And with that said everyone, if you haven't already done so, please submit your questions to the Q&A box. All right, so it looks like we have quite a few questions to go through. And with that said, I will read off a couple of the the questions. All right. So number one, can Acumatica help me manage my seasonal inventory planning? I'll take that one. That's a great question. Yes, certainly Acumatic can help you manage your seasonal inventory planning by it with a couple different things. We have tools for time phase inventory planning and we also have forecasting capability. It we can assist you in generating those forecasts based on historical data that can take into account your seasonality. You can also use those forecasts to to inform inventory levels. Also. You heard Kelly mention it as well. Akumatica supports distribution requirements planning that kind of Sir that can ensure very precise supply planning, inventory planning, generation to match your supply and demand. So to make sure that you have the right inventory, but you don't have too much and that you don't run out and have stock outs. So just that getting that sweet spot of the right amount of inventory at the right time to satisfy your customers. All right. Thank you so much man. So for answering that question, and here's another question, it says I have multiple companies and deal with multiple currencies. Can Acumatica help with that? OK, I'll take this one. Yes, Acumatica does support multi company, multi currency you can do. You can run that business within the same instance of Acumatica. So it is very easy to set up in terms of, you know, these people are working out of this company, maybe other people work out of a different company. Maybe you want to share inventory across these two businesses. We'll take care of all of the intercompany accounting that that needs to take place. So you'll have full visibility across the business. And from a currency standpoint, absolutely. We have many companies using the product globally, buying and selling from various parts of the world. And so yes, very much so. We are a multi company, multi currency solution. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kelly. And with that said, everyone, if you asked a question during this webinar, we will get back to you after this webinar ends. And if you are interested in learning more about Acumatica Distribution Edition, please submit a request for a demo. We'd like to talk to you and remember to check out the resources that are relevant to today, to today's topic as well. And with that said, everyone have a great rest of your day. Take care. Thanks, Cologne. Thank you.