Narrator:
Welcome to the supply chain visibility stories, the podcast for supply chain managers, brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider, Supply Chain Visibility stories is hosted by Bill Wohl, a technology industry veteran and enterprise software professional. 

Bill Wohl:
Thanks everyone for joining us as we continue our discussions exploring the intersection of technology and business. We're of course talking about supply chain. Our podcasts are designed to be brief and focused and we're hoping this format inspires you, our audience, to think about how technology impacts your organization and then how to engage with us. And I'll have information about this series and how to engage with our guests at the end of today's discussion. Hello everyone. My name is Bill Wohl and I'm honored to be the host of this series brought to you by ACSIS. I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by technology and with a focus on supply chain. Our podcast series topics have ranged from talking about macro trends to global systems integrations to so-called edge devices all around this focus on global supply chains. Today, we're going to bring our focus back to the technology solutions that power supply chain visibility. Known for being a leader in solutions that focus exclusively in this space, ACSIS is our sponsor and today's topic will give us insight on the latest updates to ACSIS's software offering. We welcome to the program two of the company's leaders, Daniel Castonguay, Chief Architect and a regular guest on this program, John DiPalo, Chief Strategy Officer. Daniel and John, welcome to the program.

John DiPalo:
Good to talk with you again, Bill.

Daniel Castonguay:
Hey there, Bill. How's it going?

Bill Wohl:
Hi, Daniel. Welcome aboard. Let me start with John. You know, often software companies upgrade their solutions because they have new features and functionality, but behind the new bells and whistles are often customer needs and changing market requirements that are driving software company updates. So why don't we start there? What are you hearing from customers about how their needs are changing and maturing?

John DiPalo:
Well, one of the things we do, you know, when you think about, you know, what's the kind of the voice of the customer today and what are they looking for? And we looked at our existing asset track software solution and what we wanted to do was build in significant additional flexibility, right? So ability to onboard new types of data. Ability to onboard data from different types of devices. Ability to stand this the system up very, very rapidly and then of course a whole new backend for analytics and business intelligence. So all of those things combined really takes us you know to the next level from integration capability from speed of deployment and from the ability to tie into all of the new IoT based devices that we're seeing in the market today. So it's a it's a step change from a solutions perspective that I think our customers will really be able to take advantage of.

Bill Wohl:
We're going to touch on some of those things in our short program today. But I wanted to comment about this being Version 3. It seems kind of crazy to only have a third version after 20 plus years of leadership in this space. So, congratulations because I know for customers, stability and solutions is really important. I've heard you and your colleagues talk about version 3 as the foundation for the next generation of supply chain technology. What do you mean by next generation?

John DiPalo:
Yeah. So when we talk about things that we're seeing in the space,  you know, we really are talking about how we can be very, very nimble across all of the different supply chain activities that we're talking about. So when we look at Version 3 of the software and this isn't software that you know has been with the company you know for the entire 20 plus years you know so  that's why you know kind of the Version 3 nomenclature. But you know, since we have migrated everything to the cloud, what we're really looking for in this new version is the ability to onboard any business transaction that you may be doing, extend that out across your extended supply chain. So to partners or potentially to customers or to service providers, you know, and and that is really, you know, kind of this next generation of being able to leverage the software to build this what I could call a virtual company across multiple entities and be able to bring people in and out of that because that's the way the world is going, right? You know, so we continue to see the need for rapid onboarding of partners rapid onboarding of new products, be able to respond to changes in the marketplace and this solution will allow all of that to occur and tie it back to your existing business systems just as we do on all of our systems today.

Bill Wohl:
So it's rare to get a chief software architect on a program like this.  Daniel, whenever customers hear about a new version of software, they wonder about the upgrade process. How will that work, and how tough will that be?

Daniel Castonguay:
Yeah, the upgrade process for V3 it's very simple. We have automated the process on our end to make sure that the customer doesn't have to go through any difficult manual processes in order to get them onto Version 3 of the software.

Bill Wohl:
Okay, that sounds good. Where the rubber meets the road for a lot of customers is sort of hands-on keyboard. So, I've heard the team at Access talk about version 3 having a new user interface. Can you give us some highlights as to what that's all about?
Daniel Castonguay:
Sure. Sure, you know, when we developed this version of the application, we were really, you know, looking to create a base for us as we went forward and we wanted something that was significantly more intuitive, a lot faster and thing a few different adjustments to the UI that would allow us to make it much easier to look across the entire system and work with the entire system much more easily than before.  So we've developed a new UI  based around some of the core components of Asset Track and the things that you can track inside of it.  It works very well for mobile devices now, which is a big plus. And I think that a lot of our customers will find it much easier to access things that previously took more time, and I think they'll find it much faster than our previous version two of the system.

Bill Wohl:
That's great to hear. John, when we talk about customer trends, there's no doubt that everywhere in the IT industry today, even in the business press, it's all about artificial intelligence AI is the the topic dour and now being described as one of those moments in the IT industry that will increase substantial investment and acceleration. It's playing a role everywhere in the technology stack, not just in supply chain. So what role is AI playing in the changes to the new version of ACSIS's solution?

John DiPalo:
You know, one of the things that we wanted to do as we launch this version, and you know it falls back to the comment that I made earlier around the new BI back end, right? So, we have significant additional capabilities to capture very very granular data as we've always done, but then be able to leverage that data for both machine learning as well as ultimately for AI around, you know, can I ask a question of my software to see where things are, where things should be, and can I have it start to do some predictive analytics and and other things? You know, kind of all centered around a more streamlined supply chain and having the value of the solution really drive, you know, kind of what your next move is in either moving products around or speaking with customers or speaking with suppliers and tying all of this information together and having the solution do all of the heavy lifting for that. So, there's a lot of capabilities and a lot of new things that are coming out that we're going to be able to plug into the system to take advantage  of this new information that we're capturing and then you know really turn the system into a solution that you can ask a question of and have it give you, you know, answers that assist you in the day-to-day running of your business.

Bill Wohl:
As I work with a variety of technology companies, one of the things that strikes me about AI is its ability to take complex topics and software and expose answers to regular business users. So, the in this particular instance, the concept of AI being a valuable tool to supply chain leaders is great, but do you envision AI making it easy for a a business user, someone outside the supply chain to just literally ask a question of the solution and get input without relying on on the supply chain experts to always fashion a specific report?


John DiPalo:
Yeah. So, you know, I think of things like if I'm a production supervisor, right, just as an example, and I am, you know, in the chemical industry, and I have returnable containers that I put my product into. What if I could just ask my system, do I have enough returnable containers either heading into my facility or within my facility to run production order XYZ? And it would come back with an answer that says you can run two-thirds of that production order, but you are going to run short on containers at this point in time unless you do something. Would you like me to fix that? And when you get to the that type of a system, which we can get to because we have all of those inputs with between the combination of the data that we capture and our integration capability. You know the reality is that allowing the system to speak in a more natural language and utilize some of the tools that are now available is really the next evolution of having this level of information available.

Bill Wohl:
So that's kind of shifting from an exception report being issued once every 24 hours or once every 36 hours to letting the users of the system make inquiries at the moment that they want it and the system being responsive to that.

John Dipalo:
Correct. Correct. So,  it's an interesting time, you know, and the tools are now starting to become available, and the data that we're capturing will help those tools, you know, make those decisions. And the more information that we can gather, obviously, the better the responses are going to be. 

Bill Wohl:
I want to go back to Daniel. One of the things I've learned about ACSIS working with your business over the last couple of years is that your software is always and most often sitting on top of big ERP solutions in the back end and the an entire industry has been set up around providing innovation, functionality, flexibility that the ERP solutions are not designed for by industry, by segment. So, integration to the ERP solution is really important. What can you tell our audience about how version 3 integrates with ERP solutions in the back end?

Daniel Castonguay:
Yeah. So, we still have our ERP integration that I think is a core tenant of ACSIS, and you know, we understand that customers have different use cases for our software, and often times we're storing a lot of information that isn't in the ERP system. or the customer doesn't want it in the ERP system. But we still need to get data back and forth between the ERP system, whether it's updated in our software first or whether it's updated in the ERP system first. So all of our existing integrations that we had in the prior version of the software, it's still there, you know, we're not getting rid of any of that. And we've streamlined some of our SAP ERP integration as well to provide us with a faster path to integrating more custom requests that customers have.



Bill Wohl:
Daniel, given John's comments earlier about the need for a solution that can very quickly adapt to new partners, new customers, and extend the solution in and outside a company. This concept of integration is not just related to your customers backend, but it's all it's also about having the necessary integration and I'm assing APIs to allow you to have the solution connect to any nber of different solutions for different players. What's your philosophy there to be able to have version 3 connect to any type of system?

Daniel Castonguay:
Yeah, I mean, I think that the most interesting application of that is kind of what John was talking about in terms of where we go next with artificial intelligence. There's a lot of sources of information out there, and as you know, as our program does right now we're ingesting a lot of that information already, but we're looking to ingest more from other sources and provide additional intelligence to our customers. I think you know our software right now does a lot of informing the customer about things that they wouldn't know and you know things that they can do to improve their business, but what we're really looking to do, I think, as we move forward is be able to tell anyone kind of like you were saying, any anyone in the business, regardless of their knowledge of the underpinnings or the inner workings what they can do or what they need to be aware of as they go about their day.

Bill Wohl:
Quite quite interesting. John, as we start to think about wrapping up today's programs, customers may who are current ly customers may be wondering how should they approach an upgrade. We often talk about projects and road maps to success, starting small, choosing the right partners and so forth. As people think about the upgrade to Version 3, what's on the list for success in that project?

John DiPalo:
The list for success really centers around ensuring that the user community understands, you know, kind of the new UI. Now, the UI is very intuitive. It's easy to deal with the structure, its very similar to the T7 from a macro perspective, but there is you know a little bit of change management like every upgrade. So really, the key is you know an early adoption from a user perspective you know making sure that the users understand where the new features are and and kind of how to navigate through the solution, which as I mentioned will be very intuitive for them. The upgrade itself is really push-button, so we're going to be able to take them from one version to another, and then, of course, you know to test as you do with any upgrade in order to make sure it is functioning as expected.

Bill Wohl:
Guys, visibility, flexibility were the watchwords of this conversation. Exciting to see the latest version of what ACSIS is doing in software supply chain visibility. Daniel  John, thank you both for being on the program.


John DiPalo:
Thank you, Bill. Been a pleasure as always.

Daniel Castonguay:
Yes. Thank you, Bill.

Bill Wohl:
Our thanks to Daniel Castonguay, Chief Architect, and John DiPalo, Chief Strategy Officer, for joining this discussion about ACSIS's latest version of its supply chain software. You can, of course, learn more about ACSIS at their website. That's acsisinc.com. As always, our thanks to everyone at ACSIS for making this podcast series about supply chain possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. You can engage with us at the official ACSIS Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. So, please be a part of the discussion. I'm your host, Bill Wohl, and for everyone at ACSIS, thanks for joining. We look forward to our next podcast. Talk soon.

Narrator:
Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Visibility Stories brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Visit us on the web at acsisinc.com. That's acsisinc.com. Or join the dialogue on social media. Look for Inc. on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time for supply chain visibility stories brought to you by ACSIS.