[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hey, guys.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Hey, Adam.
[00:00:06] Speaker C: Hi.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to Distribution Unpacked.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Thanks for having us.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Our brand new podcast.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Glad to hear it.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: I know. We’re so excited to have you. So, you know, we spend a lot of time talking to customers and, you know, and our supplier partners, but we’re kind of taking a peek behind the curtain to spr. So, you know, Suzy, you’ve been with us now how long? Coming up on three years and supply chain. Leading our supply chain.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Supply chain, yeah.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Fascinating. Supply chain it is right now.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: That’s right.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: And. And Lindsey, seven, almost eight years. Eight years. And like supply chain and now content. And most recently a whole new change for you.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Pricing as well. So very excited about that.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Super exciting. So exciting.
So, Susie, obviously, you know, supply chain is always in flux at, you know, nothing more than what came out of COVID and stuff like that. But it’s been a little bit different the last couple of months. Let’s what’s, you know, obviously changes in the industry.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: What’s going on?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah. This has been a very, very busy time for our department.
When you think about the huge sales boom that we’ve had in recent months. Obviously we need a lot of inventory to fuel that. So I think probably starting with the big news back in September, our team really started ramping up inventory levels to try to make sure that we were ready to support, you know, this huge chunk of the industry that we hadn’t tapped into yet.
And now we’re kind of fine tuning. So while we got a lot of inventory in, we got a lot of customers on board and operations is working extremely hard now we’re making sure really we have the right stuff in the right place.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: And we’re kind of poised for the long term. What are the right inventory levels, what are the right strategic partnerships with vendors, etc. So the team has worked really hard.
I’m really proud of where we’re at today. We have a ton of room to go, but it’s all very exciting.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: It’s always great when I come over to your side of the building now and I hear all the excitement in the movie.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: People are high fiving.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And there’s all this excitement. There’s whiteboards with numbers and fill rates and all that. So it’s super exciting. Great stuff you guys are doing over there.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: I think it’s been really fun to see the team get excited about sales.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Usually the supply chain folks aren’t as in tune to sales, but I’ll have people come up to me and say, did you See sales yesterday for the first time in years.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Right?
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: And I think you’ve recently. I saw somebody said to me this morning, well, there was a snow day yesterday, guys, like, we’ll get through it. It’s okay. Like, you know, it’s kind of fun stuff. And Lindsey. So content.
But it’s more than that. It’s more than just making sure we have, you know, the right bullet for the right item.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Absolutely. I mean, content impacts everything. Right?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: So if you have something set up at the wrong unit of measure, that has downstream effects on Purch operations, on our customer satisfaction.
So I’ve really encouraged my team to focus on how do we get the data correct the first time, and that way we don’t have to deal with the cleanup downstream.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: And a lot of new things you’ve instituted over the past year, anything customer facing that would be of interest to them.
[00:02:56] Speaker C: I think the biggest thing that customers can see is just more accurate content. We have a lot of customers who report to us of content errors, and we appreciate those errors. We appreciate that feedback, but we don’t. That’s not their job.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: It’s not their job to identify errors.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: But they’re the best. They’re the best to find.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: They’re very good at finding errors, but we don’t want them to have to do that. So how do we be proactive in auditing our data, cleansing our data, and automating how we receive data from our suppliers that customers don’t have to do that digging and cleanup for us.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Right. And so recently, the big promotion overseeing, taking the pricing team, obviously it’s brand new and it’s new. What are you looking. What are you looking forward to? Kind of getting in the weeds with. With. With pricing?
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Really thrilled. Because there’s a great team of pricing, and my plan is just to spend the first 30 to 60 days listening to all of the current state of the union, hearing from sales, their feedback on pricing, hear from customers, their feedback, and then figure out how we can simplify the pricing world. Right now, we have so many contracts, so many price lines, and it just takes a lot of time and energy to maintain those monthly and quarterly price fil.
And I just think we can do it in an easier, more streamlined fashion so that we can again, get the data right the first time. So it ties into our theme of, like, simplifying complexity. How can we simplify pricing, make it fair to our customers, and also keep growing our business and Easy to understand. Easy to understand. Yes.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Well, I think it all sits on Top of it. If you’re working on unit of measures with content, do we have the right pricing and all that kind of stuff? It’ll kind of make sense. And then is Suzy bringing it in at the right uom that we can put it in the right spaces so it all kind of sits on top of each other.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Yeah. Actually one of my team members from pricing Alex came to me today and she was thrilled to like get to know the content team better so that they can problem solve how to fix those um, issues instead of her having to clean them up down the line.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: And that’s been a big trend the last couple of years. If you think about breaking down those silos, working closer together and understanding, well, to your point, how does this impact, this impact, this impact that. So that’s exciting. You know, one of the things we’ve been doing is when we have these conversations with our colleagues is, you know, you’ve been here a couple of years. We’ve all kind of been there probably less than 10 years, the three of us. But what keeps you. What is the one special thing about sp? I asked some of our colleagues earlier, like what’s a fun fact about sp And I’d love to get your guys perspective on it.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: I think for me, I come from a lot of big box retail stores that are kind of big, you know, huge corporations.
What brought me to SP and what keeps me at SP is really every day you have a chance to solve really tough problems but make a really big impact.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Huge problem.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: So I think huge problem.
But every day it’s what we do professionally, we solve problems and you can feel the impact of that on the customers, on the salesforce, on the cross functional partners instantly where you really can’t anywhere else that I’ve ever experienced.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: And for me, I think the
[00:06:10] Speaker B: seeing
[00:06:11] Speaker C: the investment that CNG has put into spr, going from an SPR where we were not invested in and we felt like we had no future. We now have CNG as this parent company who is investing in technology, investing in people. We hired like over 600 people last year.
They are personally getting to know everyone in headquarters. A new employee was just shocked that the president was walking around getting to know everyone at headquarters.
So having that true care and investment from a parent company gives me hope that we’re going to continue to grow and thrive and just dominate this industry.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, from my perspective, I think for me it’s all about our people, but also it’s the relationships. I mean, Lindsey, I’ve been to your wedding. I was, you know, gone on the journeys with both of you during your pregnancies and stuff like that. And maybe number two on the way. It’s exciting stuff. And we’ve had those moments together where we’ve bonded or we’ve shared positives and, you know, sometimes sad moments when things happen in families and stuff. And I think that’s what kind of keeps SP alive. And it’s real when we think about all those fun things and we laugh about things. I mean, some of my favorite moments are when we were in the leadership Academy, Lindsay. We were just, you know, in a week of craziness, we shared the world’s one of the pre World Series. It’s a sporting event.
It was something to do with sports. And then, you know, when you and I traveled and there were wolves at another leadership program.
We can unpack that later. That’s a whole different podcast for us. Yeah, that’s a whole different one. Hopefully they’ll probably show a photo of a wolf attacking me and all that. But it’s exciting because not only is it us internally, but also our customers as well, and our supplier partners. I mean, when we do these events together, it’s always we see people we know. We. I don’t know, we’ve spent years with them. Now you become part of their lives.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it’s so interesting in events like this when now I think this is my third national sales and operations meeting. Now I look around, I’m like, I know 90% of the people in this room. It doesn’t take long, and we don’t see each other that often. But the fact that we work together every day and then we get these opportunities to come together is so fun.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: No, it’s so true.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: Same thing with the customers, too, is a customer calls us and we are familiar with that customer. We are familiar with their challenges and their strengths, and we know what to expect, and we know that they can reach out to us and have us fix a problem that they have in a big box store or company. You don’t have that personal connection with the customer either.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Thank you, guys.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Thanks for joining. Yeah, awesome.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Congrats on the podcast.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: I know, right? It’s gonna be fun.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: New career.
