The Startup CPG Podcast

Cory Hebert
Yeah, the goal of product like synthcore and our company really is to make it easier on our customers so that when you're buying products, when you're selling products, that it's as smooth as possible. That's why we have the ability to create purchase orders, download sales orders from integrations like Shopify and Amazon, integrate directly into an accounting software like Quickbooks so that you can upload those invoices, pay your bills, really just simplifying the process, making everything more efficient so that you're not manually recreating something in one system and then replicating that in another.

00:45
Daniel Scharff
Welcome CPG ers, to the startup CPG podcast. I am super excited about today's topic of inventory management at the beginning of your company, especially if it's the first time around, you might not think about it, but you will quickly start wondering about inventory management when you start producing more, working with commands warehouses to filling orders, trying to figure out your p and L. So on Today's podcast we have Corey Hebert from Sin Seven Core, our startup CPG inventory management partner, and also Jamie Valenti Jordan from Catapult, Slack MVP on the Ops channel, who has worked with so many brands as they scale up. In the episode, you're going to hear a pretty good overview of what is inventory management. When do you need to start thinking about it? Who is a software solution right for?

01:26
Daniel Scharff
And I think you'll also enjoy cringing as you hear about some nightmare scenarios that we've all lived through. Just a reminder, if you wanna sign up with SiN Seven for a free demo or trial of their software, we have a startup CPG exclusive discount. Not only do you get the first month free as the trial, but you get 50% off the first three months. If you wanna sign up, go to their website. It's sin seven.com startupcpg syn, like Cincinnati and then the number seven.com dot. So sin seven.com startupcpg. Hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I did. I learned a ton. Enjoy. Welcome to the startup CPG podcast.

02:08
Daniel Scharff
Today I am joined by Corey Hebert from Sin Seven, our partner for inventory management software, or IMS, and Jamie Valenti Jordan, our reigning Slack MVP, all star of the Ops channel, and generally just your if you got an ops problem, yo, I'll solve it kind of guy. Today's topic is all about when you're launching your product. You need to track all the ingredients, the production, your leftover ingredients, your finished inventory across maybe even multiple warehouses, and then reconciling it over time with all the orders that are coming in and retail and shopify and everything. And you can imagine that's gonna get tricky to do in excel for too long, but a lot of people do that. So today we've got both these guests on to talk about the world of inventory management for early brands.

02:54
Daniel Scharff
So I think we could just start with some intros. Maybe, Corey, you could go first. And then, Jamie, just mind giving everybody your quick spiel before we dive in?

03:02
Cory Hebert
Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. My name is Corey Hebert. I am originally from South Florida. I've spent the past eight or nine years working with CPG companies both big and small. Started in the three PO industry, third party logistics, and then about two years ago, I moved over into the software side, where I've been with citizen seven, dealing mostly as a product trainer. So training a lot of our employees to better assist our customers on how to use the product.

03:27
Daniel Scharff
All right, now, Jamie, the man who needs no introduction but should give one anyways, just in case.

03:31
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Well, you know me, I'm always willing to talk about myself. So, no, I think a lot of people that are listen to this podcast regularly have heard a lot from me lately. Apologies for that, but here we go. Anyway, so I've been in the industry for about 20 years now, all food and beverage with Campbell's soup, Dalwani Foods, and just which is actually how I met Daniel years and years ago. Six years ago, I started catapult as a way of kind of doing the work that I love to do of solving technical and operational challenges for brands that are getting out there and scaling, but without being necessarily bound to a single brand.

04:03
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Which means that I can bring all my friends and experts that I know in the industry over the last 20 years and leverage their expertise and talent to build a future for our food system. So with that, I will stop talking about myself so we can talk about what we actually came here to talk about. Inventory management.

04:19
Daniel Scharff
Yes. All right. But I will need you to talk more because going back, I was very happy to stay connected with you after the Hampton Creek, just days, just from having been in some meetings with you there. Game recognizes game. I was like, this is a smart dude. I need this guy's help for our whole community. And you've been an all star helping everyone with. I've never seen you stumped. So just to start on this journey, because when I was the CEO for beverage company, you were the one who helped us along this journey and told us, you know, who are the good platforms to work with. And yeah, we ended up using the sin seven core just based on your and the community's recommendations.

04:51
Daniel Scharff
But just generally, like, you've worked with hundreds or thousands of brands, how does this usually go from, like, day one? You've got your product formulation ready to go, you know you're going to make a go for it. You think you're expecting good orders to come in and you got to order your ingredients and start tracking all that stuff. What are people typically doing at that stage?

05:11
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Typically, they're about two days short of scrambling to realize that they need to track how much they actually ordered and how much used and things like that. So I think when people are getting started, they're just trying to really kind of put things together into orders. If they're smart and they've done this before, they'll know that they need to track exactly how many pounds were ordered. If they can get the bill lading and seeing how much was actually delivered, making sure that matches with how much they actually pay for things like that is really kind of where you start. And then depending on whether or not you're using a command or running it yourself, you need to look at how much is going to be used up. And it's not a one to one ratio.

05:49
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
There's always a yield loss associated with ingredients when you're going through and developing things. Let's start with the simplest example, just to kind of illustrate the point. When you're draining a tank and putting it through a pump and you have to put it through a pipe to get it somewhere else, well, you can't get all of that product out of that pipe. Right. So there's going to be some loss every single time that you make a production run. Is it significant? Well, it depends on the size of your production run. Right. You can't get 100% out. So being able to track not just one to one input to output, but also those yield losses will allow people to kind of look at what's the financial impact of running in these smaller runs.

06:26
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But, yeah, they start out at that excel level of, hey, we've ordered sugar three times and we run three times and we consume twice as many batches worth of sugar. Maybe I should call somebody on that and figure out what's going on.

06:38
Daniel Scharff
So even in that very early days, you know, you're ordering your general ingredients, and I think that first point you highlighted is an important one. You might not get what you were expecting. I've seen that a ton of times. They send the wrong amount, they short you without telling you. And so reconciling like, what did I get? And is that actually going to be enough for my production? That sounds pretty important. And the yield point as well. You know, if I think about something like sugar, if you're making a product with sugar, you probably have a ton of sugar, but especially on maybe some of the flavors or expensive but lower volume ingredients. Oh, it can be really bad if you have more loss from yield or you don't have enough.

07:16
Daniel Scharff
Because wouldn't it be the worst thing in the world to be paying a command for a day of production or a couple days of production, and you have to halt the whole thing because your key flavor, it turns out you had less of it at their warehouse than you thought because the yield ended up being lower than expected on the last run or something like that. Is that a one good nightmare scenario?

07:36
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Oh, it's even better when your excel spreadsheet is telling you, hey, you've got six pounds of this product remaining, and it only takes a pound to run. And the command says, oh, I can't find it.

07:45
Daniel Scharff
I've been there. It's bad. It's. Or the warehouse says they sent it, or the command says they have it in the warehouse. Yeah, but they can't see it and now everything's in jeopardy. And maybe they've already started putting some of the ingredients in the tank and they're all going to go bad.

08:00
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Exactly. I mean, honestly, it doesn't matter which ingredient you're short on. If you're short an ingredient, you can't make your product, period. So that type of understanding of input inventory is really important for being able to understand how your production's going to go.

08:15
Daniel Scharff
Isn't it horrifying? I just remember the ops manager, lovely guy from my last company, where he just would always get the worst part of it of just like they said it was there, and they sent like, a photo of it saying it was there, and now it's not there and the whole thing is screwed up as, oh, God. And, yeah, and, yeah, poor guy. Just like managing so many different inputs and tracking things and like we've talked about before, I think ops often is one of the last bastions where there really are a lot of just handwritten things around and, like, notes on tanks and notes on ingredients, and that's not always flowing through to a system. So, oh, man, if you're not organized, it can go real bad. Okay, so that's through to just kind of managing your ingredients. Right, for production.

08:58
Daniel Scharff
And then let's say, okay, you've made the production and you're expecting orders now to start coming in from retail and probably shopify. If you're doing d two c, what's going to start happening there? Complexity going to flow through to, let's say, a excel spreadsheet.

09:13
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Oh, here's the best part. So when you go to run your next round, based off of ordering, let's say, a second batch of sugar. Right. Making sure that your command is doing a first in, first out, and keeping track of which batches gets which lot number of which ingredient is key. For being able to understand from a traceability perspective, if your sugar supplier calls you up later and says, hey, got a problem? You need to recall everything associated with this particular lot number. You may end up having to recall twice as much product as you intend if you don't keep good records, which, by the way, is required for fismA. So what's fisma? Yes. Thank you. I used an acronym and did not define it. The Food Safety Modernization act. It's a series of legislations passed over a while.

09:59
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
I can't recall whose administration it was, but it's taken probably, like, 1012 years to roll through. But it requires that we understand where each batch of our ingredient goes into, all the way back to the ingredient supplier, in many cases, back to the field where it was grown, in some cases, in order to be able to understand if there's a systemic issue that's discovered later, like E. Coli, then we have the ability to isolate the affected product in the food chain, wherever it may be. If it's in the hands of consumers, that's the worst case scenario. But many times, it's in either a retailer or a distributor.

10:33
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
And so we want to be able to isolate it so that we can get it out of the food chain so it doesn't hurt anybody first, and then destroy it, if that's necessarily what needs to happen to it. Next.

10:42
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so fisma, new acronym. I like it. It sounds kind of friendly, kind of like gizmo. It sounds a lot better than words like E. Coli and Listeria and some of the things that can go wrong. But that makes a lot of sense to me. I've also been in the situation where the Coman, just no matter what you told them, ended up using an expired ingredient. Guys, it says it on the thing. Why did you use that one tiny expired ingredient? But at least we had the records to know what it went into, and then we could go to the manufacturer of it. Fortunately, we got an extension on it, and there wasn't any kind of a food safety or quality issue.

11:16
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So.

11:17
Daniel Scharff
But that could have been another nightmare scenario. Oh, the fun world of physical products. You look at a can or a package of food on the shelf and you're like, people have no idea how many things can go wrong with this. That can ruin year.

11:30
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah. And so at the end of the day, for a brand that's out there, you can very quickly imagine, okay, one, two, three runs. I can manage all that on Excel. But once you start doing monthly runs and you've got, let's say, three months worth of ingredient they could be pulling from, you need to check batch sheets and everything else like that. All of a sudden, that Excel spreadsheet that you're imagining is more complicated than Excel is physically capable of handling. So you got to be real careful to understand the scalability of your tracking system, especially if you've got, let's say, 1520 ingredients in there. It can be a nightmare scenario very quickly.

12:04
Cory Hebert
Yeah.

12:04
Daniel Scharff
I actually remember when at our just days, I was the modeler basically for the company because I was a former management consultant. I felt like, okay, I can build a model for anything. And then they tasked me with building then, of course, a master spreadsheet that would incorporate our forecast and our formula and tie everything back to how much were producing across multiple facilities, how much was sitting at the warehouses and tying it back into, like, our actual orders and, yeah, the forecast and all of that. And I got lost. Honestly, I remember showing it to the product manager, and he was like, I just need a button that says when I need to order the ingredient. I was like, you know, honestly, I can't even explain the model to you anymore. I'm so lost in how to do this.

12:48
Daniel Scharff
And, I mean, I'm not the best in the world, but I'm pretty good. And so it's. Yes, it's complex. I think maybe Excel could have handled that model, but Daniel could not handle that model. So what happens typically, okay, let's say you're still doing this on your own in Excel, and you're better than I am, maybe, at doing that. And then orders start coming in and, you know, they're getting fulfilled out of your warehouse, let's say, or your three PL shipping to consumers. What do people do to reconcile that stuff if they're not in some kind of a software? Are they just kind of keeping a total of what's left and, like, eyeballing it? How does that work?

13:22
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Well, the nightmare scenario that I've lived through, but I can't mention where is that all of the inventory is tracked on a single Excel spreadsheet that is shared amongst all of the operations team where, let's say all of the individual cogs for the individual runs are also kept and stored for the sake of aggregating into a larger model elsewhere. What ends up happening 100% of the time is somebody rolls through that and doesn't see where inventory is sitting. You send pressure products that is rather than the closer to exploration product and you end up having to do write offs. Those write offs can be substantial if you're not careful.

13:59
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So one particular company I know of had to write off $1.7 million in product because they didn't keep good track of their own inventory in order to make sure that they had Fifo into their warehouse, which is a frustrating position to be in. But Ulti an addressable one. Excel will get you a ways and from a finished goods inventory management, especially if you got good lock code tracking and good tie back to batch records and things like that. Excel can manage kind of that, but we start talking about 10 million and having a team of people processing orders and processing shipments and things like that. That's too many people in a constant fluctuating file that two people make an edit at the same time, even with the best version tracking out there. This is the heart and blood of your income for your company.

14:47
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Don't allow somebody who may have access at midnight one night and have clicked on the wrong thing and deletes a line of inventory from your inventory tracker. That's not a situation where you want to find out three months later.

15:00
Daniel Scharff
All right, scary stuff. Okay, so Corey, let's tag you in here. You must have seen some stuff from people coming over from these kind of scenarios. Is this typically where you meet people or do you meet people who maybe have been through it before and maybe they have funding right off the bat so they decide just to go right out of the gate with an inventory management software solution.

15:24
Cory Hebert
Yeah. Thank you. Occasionally you see people coming over from another inventory management system, so they're very familiar with the process and have good procedures in place. Other times you have startups that are coming in, like you mentioned, some of those have good funding. Maybe it's their second or third startup and they know how the business works and they're going to come in with a lot of funding and go right into an IMS. But you also have a lot of companies that are, you know, they bootstrapped it for a little bit. They were using Excel or other types of software where they don't have all the visibility and all the tracking that you would get with an IMS.

15:58
Cory Hebert
You mentioned, Jamie, the tracking in Excel, sometimes you have someone make an error and a lot of times you're actually not able to see like all the granular detail of what was changed system that they use. With an IMS, you typically have a change log, and with core you can see who changed what they changed and when they changed it, so that you can of course correct any errors or anything that was done by mistake.

16:18
Daniel Scharff
So who is the person that can manage an IMS? Like going back to the Excel thing, by the way, I've made a mistake in Excel. Like one wrong formula that shifted things by a month or three months or a quarter or something when I didn't actually mean to. And oh my God, the ramifications were bad. But for using an IMS, like if could a solo founder use it, do they need to have some kind of training? Is it going to be hard for them to learn how to do it?

16:41
Cory Hebert
Yeah, really? Anyone can use it. I see a lot of supply chain managers take the lead, which makes a lot of sense. They're the ones buying, they're the ones tracking, inventory, forecasting, things like that. But you also see teams in accounting teams and operations and different areas of the business might want access to certain parts of the system where they all kind of manage as a team and a lot of platforms. Core in particular is very user friendly. You do want to go through training. We offer training. I imagine most IMS systems offer training as well. But for the systems that I've worked on, it's pretty intuitive. You can really just play around a little bit and kind of figure out how things operate.

17:18
Daniel Scharff
How much does sin seven core cost? And I know we do have a startup CPG discount, which gets people 50% off, I think the first three months, and you get a month trial, which is a pretty nice way to ease in. But what's like a typical rate for a startup that's going to dive in with core?

17:34
Cory Hebert
Yeah, that's a great question. So we have multiple pricing plans available with core, depending on the company's needs, what systems that they currently use that they would like to integrate with core. But you're looking probably around $300 for that base plan.

17:48
Daniel Scharff
That's not bad, right? And I mean, you're still going to need somebody to manage it. I was just thinking like, okay, if you're an early stage founder, maybe you don't even have like a full time ops person. You know, if you're like up for it, right. If you're the kind of person who's ready to get their hands dirty a little bit and just, you know, dedicate time to learning the platform, I imagine you can handle it. But, you know, it's not going to be like using chat GPT. Like make my ops go right. It'll be like, I mean, you need to spend time learning how it works and make sure you're putting in the right inputs so that the thing works, I'm guessing.

18:17
Cory Hebert
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it is pretty user friendly. But you do want to go through the trainings. You do want to watch the training videos and use an onboarding package where you get an onboarder to guide you through the entire setup process. Because even though it's user friendly, there are unique procedures that might not be as intuitive to everybody. So you want to make sure it's properly set up. Otherwise, down the line, you might not realize something is occurring until it's too late, till you run out of inventory, till you don't have the right tracking in place, all because of the setup was done a little bit incorrectly.

18:47
Daniel Scharff
And speaking of chat GPT and AI, do you think that gathering some of these inputs over time might become a little bit easier using AI? Like, maybe because so much of this stuff would be like a back and forth email from an Ops manager to the warehouse or the Coleman getting some stuff like that can be very manual to put into the system. Do you think all of that is coming more and more?

19:07
Cory Hebert
I do think you will see more and more. Core does have some automations in place where things can be done without any user being involved. But as far as something like chat GPT, artificial intelligence, I definitely see customers utilizing those to, you know, create product descriptions or product listings and things like that, and then those would be added into core on the product settings. But as far as coming up with all the terminology, all the wording that you can do at the push of a button these days.

19:32
Daniel Scharff
All right, so Jamie, just to push your buttons a little bit? Not really, but. So when you're talking to brands about inventory management software, I mean, first, is it safe to say if Jamie started his Jamie Sasko, when exactly would you start a subscription to an IMS? Would it be like before your first run? Would you try to, like, let's say you're bootstrapping this just based on your savings and you don't have a ton of savings. Would you try to get through the first order and then maybe like start the trial when you're doing the first run or would you even try to go further to be scrappy until you know you're going to need it? What do you think?

20:07
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So Jamie Sasko is going to be an amazing brand, by the way. Its led by me, who is great at all the things out there. So we would definitely want to engage at some point. I think id want to understand where my pain points are in my relationship with my contract manufacturer. So lets talk strictly contract manufacturing for a second. Even if youre doing self manufacturing, sometimes it can feel like contract manufacturing. But what I would do is I would definitely get an understanding so that you can respect the value that an inventory management system is going to bring to the table. Then I'm going to talk to the command and see whether or not what my business represents is a meaningful enough engagement for them to bring on a new system or if they've got an existing inventory management system.

20:51
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So this is, you know, brass tacks about how relationships kind of drive business decisions sometimes. But I would definitely look at what's out there already and then evaluate that from an ROI perspective. So return on investment.

21:04
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so one thing you just brought up that I think is important is if you're evaluating inventory management systems, let's say you already have a command in place, is understanding if their system can talk to the system you're using and.

21:16
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Honestly send seven talks to about every system out there. So that's been my experience with it. The ones that it can't speak to would be things where they only receive orders by faxes. Kid you not, there are a lot of commands out there that still only receive orders and go out and do manual counts only and things like that on inventory because they don't honestly know what's in their plants. But that's another discussion for another day.

21:37
Daniel Scharff
I don't know how to send a fax if you do. If someone asked me to send a fax, I would not know how to do that.

21:41
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Now if you absolutely have to. Guys, there is a service out there called efax. It's like $10 a month. You can send faxes from your email. It's the only reasonable way to do this because anyway, Jamie, give me your fax number.

21:55
Daniel Scharff
I'm going to start pranking you using that service. I'm going to send it.

21:58
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Not going to happen. No. That's a big no.

22:02
Daniel Scharff
Okay, great. Since seven core talks to most of them, if you're looking at a bunch of different ims, you think they're like varying levels of success, whether or not those ones will be compatible with your average Coman or you have to get an integration. What does that typically look like?

22:17
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So when you're looking at a broad spectrum of services, there's a couple of key things you want to hit before you even talk about whether or not it talks to the commands. First of all is does it do both ingredient and finish good lot tracking? Those are absolute requirements in today's day and age. Yes, anybody can build a SQL based database now for tracking things. The moment you have to start tracking individual lot numbers, the whole thing breaks down. You want a system that knows what food and beverage is and what it is not. So where there are yield losses and understanding of scrap rate and why, you might want to see that in a dashboard. So the system is necessarily organized to be able to look at those type of losses as a function of your supply chain.

23:01
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Also tells you when it might be time to invest in solving those. The other thing you really want to make sure is that it can handle quality documentation. Quality documentation is insane. If you haven't had to deal with it, you are lucky. In many cases you will need 17 documents per ingredient depending on the type of certifications that you're trying to get on your product and things like that. That quality documentation, having that in a system that is at your fingertips to be able to address questions that come up will save you hundreds of hours. And I believe having worked with the CIN seven folks recently on an implementation, that there is a cin seven element that allows you to attach the quality of documentation that goes with your particular ingredients along the way. And should a, and should somebody change that information?

23:46
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Because you would think, hey, I've got all the quality documentation for this ingredient, I'll never need to go get it again. You're wrong. You'll get new information every six months. Sometimes when they are changing how they're building things at the ingredient supplier, but at the end of the day, having that information accessible and available along with, let's say, looking at your release micros. So what I mean by that is in many cases before you release product from the warehouse to go further into the supply chain, you'll run a micro test on it, microbiological test, to make sure that it's not grossly mishandled. It saves your consumers and your distributors from having to recall stuff.

24:19
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But having the ability to land that release micro information directly into the system and have that trigger the release for downstream orders to be able to pull from that inventory stock is incredibly valuable and will save you honestly, almost a full time equivalent or one money person worth of time and effort. So when you start to look at the value of a well designed and well integrated ims to be able to handle the realities of food and beverage manufacturing, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense.

24:50
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so Corey, coming back to you. So on the sin seven core side, what do you hope that the user experience will be like then? What is it going to feel like if you're in there and it's going well? And what are the kind of day to day things that somebody's going to have to go in there and make sure they're doing well so that it works? Yeah.

25:09
Cory Hebert
The goal of product like sync seven core and our company really is to make it easier on our customers so that when you're buying products, when you're selling products, that it's as smooth as possible. That's why we have the ability to create purchase orders, download sales orders from integrations like Shopify and Amazon, integrate directly into an accounting software like Quickbooks so that you can upload those invoices, pay your bills, really just simplifying the process, making everything more efficient so that you're not manually recreating something in one system and then replicating that in another. I mentioned the sales orders just downloading directly from Shopify. So there's not really any management that would need to go in place there. Once those orders ship, that tracking can go right back into Shopify and notify your customers that the order ship and provide them with our tracking number.

25:56
Cory Hebert
But of course, some of the things that they're going to need to do would be creating purchase orders. So as theyre seeing their inventory numbers dwindle, maybe they get a low inventory notification trigger within core and they can then place that order, submit that over to the manufacturer so that they never run out of inventory and run into backorder issues.

26:13
Daniel Scharff
So thats a good topic actually to understand also is lets say that somebodys having a problem in core, what are they probably doing thats causing that? Like if theyre getting wrong numbers or stuff is, you know, theyre unexpected. When they reach out to your team, like help us, what is it typically that's happening?

26:29
Cory Hebert
Yeah, sometimes it might be an original input error. So when they're first bringing stock in during the initial setup, I've seen some customers forget to bring in their costs and then down the line as we're looking at cogs or something like that, it doesn't quite match up. That would probably be the main thing that I see. But that would really only occur on that initial stock. Take this, take place.

26:49
Daniel Scharff
And so pretty much if you're, like, not seeing the inventory that the system says that you have, sounds like nine out of ten times it's going to be about an input error.

26:58
Cory Hebert
Yeah, I would say so.

26:59
Daniel Scharff
Got it. Jamie, anything on your end that you see people having trouble with, whether it's core or another IMS that is maybe user error or like a system error or something that people usually raise their hand about?

27:09
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
There's always some interesting onboarding things that happen when people don't necessarily understand the system and start loading in data. But more importantly, I do like systems because there's usually checks and balances. So the errors that you'll get kicked out are going to get kicked out before it actually impacts your operation. And so what I mean by that is, hey, we've got somebody who just picked up two pallets. We went to go report that they just picked up two pallets. Doesn't say that we have two pallets to ship. So the pallets can continue moving forward. Right. They can continue in the truck going to their next location.

27:42
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
You can invoice for them and things like that as soon as you can get the system to acknowledge that there are two pallets worth of material to sell while you do root cause analysis inside the system, let me paint a different situation where you just have it in excel. Excel is going to tell you have negative palettes because that's what it does. Okay. But what do you do with the negative palette information, especially if you never see it? So if you haven't set up the right reporting in your own dashboarding and things like that, which is very difficult to run in excel, to get all the different dashboards that you want because you have to manipulate the data so many different ways.

28:14
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
It's nice to have a system in place where you can kick out those kinds of errors and you can still continue to make a product and make money while finding what's going on because, yes, user errors are going to happen.

28:27
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. Okay. So, Corey, coming back to you mentioned the quickbooks integration, and I think that would be a really key benefit for a lot of people. How exactly does that work? So, like, when you, let's say, get an order that comes in and it has price attached to it, and then is it like, okay, once that gets fulfilled, like, it's going to be maybe automatically updated in your system because you're connected in with the warehouse, and then it's going to trigger an invoice automatically and track that when it's delivered. How exactly does that part of it work?

28:59
Cory Hebert
Yeah. So there's an automatic sync that can occur between QuickBooks and a product like Syn seven core. If you create a purchase order, you can have that automatically uploaded into Quickbooks and then see that you need to pay the bill. Last thing you want to do is ruin that relationship with your supplier because you're late on those invoices. So getting those into QuickBooks, that way your accounting team, your accounts payable team, can see those and get those Ach payments sent over is a great benefit. And then also those sales orders, having those uploaded into Quickbooks, of course, want to be able to get those bills in there. But you also want to see that revenue, too, right? I'm sure every accountant's looking for the revenue. Every business owner is looking for all the revenue.

29:35
Cory Hebert
So there is a lot of customization that can be done if you want to have certain fields mapped to others. If you want to have quickbooks kind of be the source of truth for some things, or core be the source of truth, and then they can communicate back and forth with one another.

29:47
Daniel Scharff
So in the instance where, let's say you're getting paid by unify or cahi, something like that, and at first you're going to get the sales order from them, I think is the word that you used for it, and it's going to say a certain quantity, and then there's a price that's going to match to the quantity. We also know that sometimes they'll, like short pay you for deductions that came in previously. Hopefully, they give you some detail on that. It sounds like you would be then taking their po that comes into you for a distributor and then putting that directly into sin seven somehow, which is then going to reconcile the quantity and everything and tell you that you're good to fulfill it, then you're going to fulfill it.

30:23
Daniel Scharff
And then at some point, when they actually pay you're going to then reconcile that against the po that you had, I think, and then probably sort out the deductions are going to come into play somehow. Hopefully, you have a way to kind of run that up against which products it actually applies to, and then maybe promotions, but maybe not always. Or can you give me a little bit more detail on how that works?

30:42
Cory Hebert
Yeah. So when you're going to be buying product from one of your manufacturers, they may request a purchase order from you. You'll create that in core, send that over to them, what product you want, what the quantity you want what the pricing is. Have the payment terms listed right there, and of course, the shipping address that you want them to send that product to, which is really helpful if you have multiple warehouses or distribution centers. Once that inventory arrives, you can either modify that invoice if you received a partial shipment, but most importantly, you can determine how much of the product arrived. Your team on the receiving doc can inspect it, make sure everything arrived, edit that purchase order as needed. Once you've marked it as received, that inventory is now in core.

31:20
Cory Hebert
It's part of the available and on hand inventory that can then get sent over to Shopify or Amazon and update the system there so that product is listed as available to sell. And then, of course, your customers are going to be purchasing that product. Those sales orders are going to download into core. You can go through the whole fulfillment process on there, but ultimately going back to that purchase order, once you have invoiced it, at that point, it will upload into QuickBooks so that you can pay according to those payment terms you've set.

31:47
Daniel Scharff
Got it? Okay, Jamie, anything that you've seen some color that you could add into this order to cash, I guess. Discussion.

31:54
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So, I mean, at the end of the day, there's a few things that happen along the way here. So one is necessarily, as you are growing from, let's say, ten to 100 stores now, you're going from like three to ten retailers to 15 retailers, and each of them are sending you orders in different formats and things like that. Eventually, you get into discussions around EDI, and as those orders are coming in, it can actually be a challenge. If you're getting orders every other week or every month for different quantities going to different locations where it's not a consistent amount. And yes, you can manage ten points of sale or ten distribution points relatively straightforward. You could probably handle 15 to 20.

32:38
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But the moment you have 75 different places ordering from you at various times of the day and various days of the month, and for different quantities and things like that, it is a ticking time bomb for somewhere in your system for things to break down. If you don't have something sophisticated, you can't just print off every single order and tack it on there. We know. We tried for 50 years and we did all right until we realized that, hey, this is getting a little nuts. So from a cash flow perspective, you want to be able to know that your inventory went out the way that it was supposed to, because its one less point of things to check when you get those inevitable deductions. Because one of the major distributors out there decided that they wanted to pick up hot dogs from your dock.

33:24
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But you dont make hot dogs, you make cookies. Thats great. They will freely admit their error, but it can be somewhere between 90 and 180 days to get your money back for that pallet of hot dogs that you didnt deliver because you shouldn't have had to worry about it. Those type of things, all those deductions and being able to understand some of that information flow is made easier by an inventory management system because you've got the documentation to push back on them without having to go through and do photographs of every palette that went out and date stamp and all that stuff improve that way. That's a really annoying way to do business.

33:57
Daniel Scharff
So it sounds like if you're not using an ims of some kind and you're probably just like, okay, you have somebody who's seeing how much inventory is sitting at Amazon, like okay, yeah we should be good for a while right? And then like, okay, we have enough inventory at this warehouse more or less given the kind of orders that we've seen coming in, right. So probably they're just like eyeballing a lot of that stuff before they get to the point where they feel like, okay, you know, this straw broke the camel's back. I've got to get some software to like integrate everything so I can have the total visibility. So another question I had for you.

34:26
Daniel Scharff
I remember back at our just days, they decided to implement this thing called Netsuite, which I call not suite because, you know, we did it, but it seemed like this very over engineered thing. They had to hire multiple people to try to implement it. But also like, those are the guys who email me relentlessly, trying to sell to me on LinkedIn and like in my inbox and stuff. And like, I don't know, I would always tell people like, you don't need that. Like for sure, unless you're like Mars chocolate or what do you think about that stuff?

34:59
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
From my perspective, Netsuite, SAP, other things in the same general genre are helpful for when you have multiple classes and categories of products, not just, let's say cookies and brownies and plant based milk and things like that. But now you're talking about selling to government entities who require a special packaging format and five years of shelf life with different layers of documentation needed for different product lines and things like that. Those type of systems are helpful for leveling the playing field so that business people who don't understand the food industry can understand what's going on because you need that many layers of management in order to run a business that is that complex. So SAP and Netsuite are very effective tools when you get to that point.

35:44
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But so long as you're focused in a series of brands and business units within your own organization, I don't think you need to go down that route. As someone who has been a part of Netsuite and SAP implementation, both of them are really trying to force everybody into doing business the same way and viewing the data the same way. As much as theyre custom building it, all theyre doing is custom building it so that the people at the top can see it. No matter which organization theyre a part of, they can jump to the next one and see the same sort of data to understand where their business is at. So they can pull, my opinion, the same levers to try to make their business better and make their mark. So do I think Netsuite has value? Yes, absolutely.

36:19
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Do I think SAP has value? Not so much anymore. I think.

36:23
Daniel Scharff
I mean, dish and the gossip here. I love it.

36:25
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
The real talk, SAP was cool back in the eighties, but that was almost 50 years ago. So I need to point out that SAP was developed before Windows was, and it's still running on the same architecture.

36:38
Daniel Scharff
I love this. Who's down with SAP? Not Jamie. So, okay.

36:42
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
My dad was actually part of the development team many years ago for SAP, so I have no problem slamming on it a little bit.

36:50
Daniel Scharff
All right, so. And then just bringing it back to something like core since seven core you mentioned before, like, okay, you were working on an implementation with one of the companies you worked with. And just for anyone doesn't know, JME and catapult commercialization services, they work with tons of early brands to get you going. So I worked with him many years ago. We were both full time people. But then when I launched the beverage brand, I reached out to Jamie, please help us make this thing. So we worked with him to go from the formula that we had to then sourcing the ingredients, getting the organic certification, finding the Coman, producing with a coman with all the right documents and everything. So he definitely knows his stuff for getting through that process and helped us get to market very quickly.

37:28
Daniel Scharff
So you mentioned working with somebody on the implementation. Now, does that mean they needed your help in some instance to do, like, you know, core or another company? Because ideally, like, core and all the other stuff is so simple that somebody who just is willing to roll up their sleeves and obviously pay attention to the inputs and learn the software can do it. Like, how often do you actually see that being the reality versus a founder just being like, yeah, I know I need the software, but, like, let me get somebody on board to help me actually manage that now, because I just don't have the passion or time or interest for it.

37:56
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
I would say most people try to go at it because they believe themselves to be relatively intelligent, which is great. I would say, always see if you have a passion for this type of work and this type of interface. There are some people that look at a spreadsheet and fall over asleep. And so the idea of understanding a system that is data driven and requires data linkages and understanding of data, not a fit for everybody. And that's okay. We all have different skill sets. Creatives are incredibly valuable to the food industry because they help consumers know what experience to expect before they experience it. That's an incredible skill. You don't have to be good at managing data to participate in this, but sometimes you need a translator.

38:39
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
The system is necessarily built a certain way with the intent of being able to link things together. But sometimes founders and brand owners don't know anything about Fisma, so they don't know how to interface with the needs that Fisma imports onto the Cin seven framework. Sometimes you need to learn in order to learn why the system is valuable. So that's where we sometimes get involved. We also, in the process of scaling folks up, we'll say, hey, you're sourcing this ingredient from this location. Have you looked at this location as an alternate? Because good systems out there will be built to be able to accept alternates, so that when prices fluctuate, say, ecuadorian chocolate versus african chocolate will have different growing seasons in a particular year, and so those prices will change.

39:24
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But if your brand doesn't depend on where exactly the source is coming from, you can play the market and have alternates built into the system. So as prices change, because they always change, that's the one constant, is change, then the system can self select for your lowest cost of goods over time. Trey.

39:41
Daniel Scharff
Jamie, I was just, like, hearing how much you know about this topic. I was just wondering to myself, like, if I, as a brand founder, just have general nightmares about ops that wake me up in the night. You, with all you know about ops, what business nightmares do you have?

39:56
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Well, that's a deeper question than I think you meant to ask, so I'll answer it honestly. I have a lot of team members that I work with, and to keep them all busy takes a lot of work. And so the things that keep me awake at night are how do I continue to help the brands that need the help when they can't afford to pay, to employ the expertise that they need, even on a fractional basis? And the answer is many cases we do extended terms and things like that. Fine. Waste work. When your seven a comes in, you can pay us then things like that, which has led to a situation where we have a lot of money and accounts receivable and not a lot of cash.

40:34
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So cash management remains even a problem in my position in order to try to make sure that we're continuing to help people and not necessarily, well, putting my house at risk, honestly.

40:46
Cory Hebert
Yeah.

40:46
Daniel Scharff
And, well, everybody pay, Jamie, first of all, and second of all, I mean, I think. Good to hear that. Like, you have the same challenges a lot of the brands have around the payment terms especially, and people who just don't pay you when they're supposed to and you have to chase them down, which is probably the least fun thing around. I just, I remember one of my, just a friend of mine teaching me that lesson early on in life of, like, if you owe somebody money, like run up to them and pay them, don't make them come and ask you for it. It's just such a crappy thing to do to somebody. Like you're going to pay it to them eventually. I mean, obviously, if you have no money and you're running out of money as a brand, it's a different situation.

41:19
Daniel Scharff
And hopefully you at least communicate that to people.

41:22
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But otherwise, just be a good friend.

41:23
Daniel Scharff
Be a good partner, pay the thing on time, don't make somebody come and ask you for it.

41:27
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
And that's the trick is communication, right? Nobody's going to try to squeeze water from a rock, right? We know when folks run out of cash that they don't have cash. We're not going to beat people up, not going to sue people, because that's a waste of time. We'll sit around and wait. But communication is key to understand that there is a plan, right? Others have to plan cash flow. And this is not just true of consultants, this is true of ingredient suppliers, this is true of your contract manufacturers, this is true of your packaging suppliers. Everybody has these needs. It's really about that communication that saves the relationship and builds a stronger one. Because you may find out, for example, your contract manufacturer has an existing shipment that they're sending to Kroger and they happen to know the buyer for that category.

42:09
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Shoot, you didn't know this, but they can make an introduction for you and maybe get you into a small region of Kroger as a test market to see whether or not it flies. Right. These are the types of things that the food industry has that they're not easy to define how these relationships play out from a meta perspective. So you dont know how everybody continues to add value and how communication can be a driver for enlisting others to be on your brand that are outside of your email domain, frankly. Okay, very helpful.

42:37
Daniel Scharff
So I guess just as were closing out here. Corey, back to you for since seven core, who do you think its really right for? And are there any people that you think it isnt right for? Like hey maybe if youre this kind of a brand or product or offering, like maybe this isnt the best solution for you.

42:53
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah, great question.

42:54
Cory Hebert
Really. I would say the only share of the market that I would say it's not right for is those conglomerates.

42:59
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right.

42:59
Cory Hebert
I think you mentioned Mars, the Mars company at one point and we talked about SAP and Netsuite. Once you reach the point where you need an ERP, then it makes sense to move beyond a system like core.

43:10
Daniel Scharff
What is the difference between IMS inventory management system and ERP enterprise resource planning?

43:16
Cory Hebert
The ERps are much more robust. They're going to come with full custom configurations and they're also going to cost a lot more money.

43:24
Daniel Scharff
And that is the main driver there. Core and Omni.

43:27
Cory Hebert
The other product cin seven offers sits in the market that's more affordable to those small to mid range, even large CPG companies and other industries as well. You don't get the full customization. The product is built and designed entirely for you, but it comes with a lot of plug and play, a lot of configuration, and a lot of different workflows that you can use to match the type of business and the type of operations you have while still saving you quite a bit of money in comparison to an ERP.

43:56
Daniel Scharff
All right, so I'm going to come back to you both in a second with a question around just final closing. Any top tips for inventory management for brands? But first, core, I wanted to ask you, are there any big upgrades or improvements that you hope to see in core and the IMS world over the next couple years? You know, in addition to the kind of AI stuff that we talked about?

44:17
Cory Hebert
Yeah, the AI definitely is an interesting path that things seem to be going, all the automations that can be done. I think that's a great thing that we could see in the future where there's less user work, less manual work involved. Core does have quite a bit of automations, a lot of syncing with the external parties like Shopify and Quickbooks and all that. But the more and more artificial intelligence, we see machine learning, where we can free up people's times to focus on other tasks, I think that can really change the industry.

44:44
Daniel Scharff
Okay, and then any general last words around inventory management from you, or just things you want to make sure people remember about core?

44:52
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah, really?

44:53
Cory Hebert
I just like to want to say that as you're starting a new business, you might be bootstrapping, it might be using Excel, but you really have the ability to become more efficient, more accurate. With a system like core where you can see everything in one place, you're not running a report from three different softwares to see what your total sales are for the month. Everything's in one place, along with your purchasing, along with your inventory numbers. So it may seem like a daunting task to make a change from something like Excel, but once you factor in all the efficiencies and accuracy improvements, less headaches in the future, it really seems to be worth it for a lot of companies.

45:26
Daniel Scharff
All right, and Jamie, one last question for you before I go into this ones actually, which is ive seen or at least heard of a couple brands getting pretty scrappy with hiring offshore supply chain help finding somebody, lets say in the Philippines for example, for like 1015 bucks an hour, who has just tons of ops experience and can be really good and could handle, let's say, maybe the inventory management side or be the point person for something like core. Do you see that at a lot of brands? If so, or if not, would you recommend something like that versus having somebody, you know, us based in the team, in the office, that could maybe have a different skill set or a broader skill set, maybe, you know, who knows? But also be more expensive?

46:07
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Yeah, that's a good question because I have seen that in a few different places, but usually that only lasts for six to 24 months and then they move on to a different setup. I've never asked why they did that, why they moved to a different setup. All I know is that they did not continue to grow in that model. I can make a hypothesis, and that is that somebody sitting in your location that can physically see the inventory and do an additional role of spot checking might actually be additional value add, especially if they've got the tools to do their job more efficiently. So I dont know that its necessarily a cost savings move to bring that back in house or not, but it certainly begs a good question. Ill ask next time I talk to somebody who did that I could see.

46:53
Daniel Scharff
It maybe just for the control.

46:55
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Right.

46:55
Daniel Scharff
Like, okay we need to be extra sure nothings going to go wrong. Like you mentioned, they can go and take a trip to the warehouse or the coman facility and kind of maybe just play a bigger part in the team as its growing and just needing to have that person more like fully part of a team available.

47:12
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
It also comes down to firefighting with it being asynchronous. Being halfway around the world can be challenging if you've got a truck sitting there waiting to carry something else. So you end up having to fill that kind of emergency response role internally anyway.

47:25
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I mean a lot of them can work us hours just if it works for their lifestyle, which is cool. But yeah, I mean it may feel a little bit too distant when you have that stuff, which will always happen. I think that's the one guaranteed thing in Ops is that stuff will go wrong and often on a daily basis that you have to problem solve creatively. Right.

47:43
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
I know I've done a lot of.

47:44
Daniel Scharff
That with you specifically.

47:46
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
So.

47:46
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And then just getting back to that last question I have, which is any overall then final inventory management tips for people from Jamie the pro, I would.

47:56
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Say I encourage everyone to take a swing at it first on their own. Unless you already know that is not one of your strong suits. But understanding Ops in a meta perspective, rather than just expecting a software to solve everything for you, the answer is the software is only going to help you with things that you're already doing right. If you're doing things wrong from an ops perspective, you need to see that firsthand before you kind of scale into that. And so from my perspective, you know, yes, when we talk about targeting small businesses, that's great. That does not mean we're targeting small hobbyists that are looking at doing sub one hundred k a year type of sales. Right. Because they're spending more money than they're making. Right. It's a hobby.

48:42
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
When you're talking about a business, you're actually making enough money to not only pay for all of your inputs, but actually pay yourself something too. That's a business. That's when you want to start looking at what is taking up all of your time. Because for those of us that have started things, there's different things that take up our time every day. And what we do is we institutionalize some things to make our lives easier. To free up more of our time, we bring on additional people to free up, make more time literally. And so over time, you build this kind of self reinforcing structure, but you start out by just leaning two poles together and hope they stand up right. And then over time, you lean more up against it and then youve got a real teepee going.

49:21
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
But youre going to have to go back and replace some of those early sticks with larger pieces of wood. And its a building a structure thing, right? So yes, you can absolutely get something propped up with Excel for a little bit while you go figure out how your product is actually going to work, where your document storage is going to be and things like that, but you're going to come back to that. So never think that you've ever finished with the upgrades to your business and the systems that you're using to operate it. You always come back around and look for new functionality, new upgrades, new instrumentality and things like that. The good thing about folks like sin seven is they can get you a long way down the path. If your goal is to be general Mills, you will outgrow them one day.

50:00
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Also, I'd like to know how you're going to get to be general Mills, but I mean, we all have a place in this industry. We're all trying to help each other out. That's the end of the goal. And so I think being able to speak intelligently about what your needs are makes it easier to make the decision for who your right partner should be.

50:17
Daniel Scharff
All right, well spoken. And thank you, Jamie and Corey, for being in the TP with us today here on the podcast. And just for anybody, thank you for the virtual high five. I appreciate that. And for anybody who wants to follow along with you guys, do you mind just, and I'll give the sin seven trial details here in a second, but maybe do you mind just telling people the best way to kind of follow along with you, whether it's LinkedIn or maybe Corey, if you want to start.

50:40
Cory Hebert
Yeah, LinkedIn would be a great place. If you want to hide my profile.

50:43
Daniel Scharff
On there, happy to connect. Okay, perfect. And Jamie, same question to you.

50:47
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
I think everybody out there knows they can find me on the operations Slack channel. Just drop my name and I'll pop right up. But if you want to see what else I'm putting out there for the industry and for the community, always drop by my LinkedIn profile as well, same name. And I post all kinds of stuff up there, webinars that we're hosting, all sorts of stuff that's free to the community to use, other conferences we're going to and stuff like that otherwise, check out our website@catapultserve.com. C A T A p u l t s e r v as in victor.com dot. We're always out there to give you guys a hand.

51:16
Daniel Scharff
All right? And that makes me think maybe we need like a Jamie Jeannie lamp that people can in the ops channel can rub. And then Jamie appears and answers your three operations, wishes or nightmares, whatever it is.

51:29
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Well, luckily we actually have a couple of those days coming up where I'm being locked in a room and not allowed to leave all day.

51:35
Daniel Scharff
So that's right.

51:36
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
13Th we are hosting startup Cpg day where I have cleared my entire calendar and I'm only working with folks that book time with me on startup CpGs via startup CpG Slack channel. You'll see the post in there from a couple days ago if the time's all filled up. I will be doing more of these in the future. I'm not sure on what frequency, but yeah, just here to help.

51:57
Daniel Scharff
That's awesome. That's a huge opportunity for people just to get to fire a bunch of questions at Jamie. So no wonder that it filled up that quickly. And then for anybody wondering about sin seven, we are really grateful to partner with them. The reason that we do it is because they were far and away the ims that was most recommended by the community, by Jamie and his team, other Ops consultants that we trust, who said this is a really good fit for early brands. It's a good price point. And all of that on top of it being already a pretty good price point, we have an exclusive discount from them for the startup CPG community, which is 50% off the first three months of syn seven. And you actually also get a free one month trial and you can even combine those things.

52:36
Daniel Scharff
So that'll be a pretty good first four months for you. If you want to register for the demo to start a free trial, you can go to their website. So cin seven, which is c I n like Cincinnati, and then the number seven. So it's sin seven.com, startup CPG. And that will get you set up if you want to just see a demo of the tool or if you want to go ahead and get a trial going. And if you have any questions that we didn't answer today, you can email Matt Morrison, that's Matt Dot Morrison seven.com. Or just pop a question into the slack and Jeannie will appear and answer it for you. So thank you again to both of you. Thank you to cin seven for the partnership and supporting our community.

53:22
Daniel Scharff
Thank you to Jamie for answering everybody's questions, saving collectively decades, eons of time, whatever, for everybody. And thank you very much. And thanks everyone for listening. All right, bye everyone.

53:34
Jamie Valenti-Jordan
Thanks.

53:35
Cory Hebert
Thanks Daniel.

53:38
Daniel Scharff
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast today, it would really help us out if you can leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I am Daniel Scharff. I'm the host and founder of Star up CPG. Please feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn. If you're a potential sponsor that would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnershipstartupcpg.com and reminder to all of you out there, we would love to have you join the community. You can sign up at our website, startupcpg.com to learn about our webinars, events and Slack channel. If you enjoyed today's music, you can check out my band it's the super fantastic on Spotify music. On behalf of the entire startup CPG team, thank you so much for listening and your support. See you next time.