Inventory Control Made Mobile

Patrick Daly:

Hello, this is Patrick Daly and welcome to Interlinks. Interlinks is a program about connections, international business supply chains and globalization and the effects these have had on our life, our work and our travel over recent times. Today on the show, we will be talking to Ellen Malfliet, who’s the head of marketing at Ventory, a Belgium based software company that provides innovative SaaS or software as a service applications and solutions for the management of field inventory. So field inventories are notoriously difficult to manage, track and control for all kinds of business and organizations such as utility companies, hospitals and field service and maintenance companies. Field inventories often lie outside reach of conventional ERP systems and their warehouse management and inventory management modules making it challenging to achieve last mile inventory visibility. So Ventory solves that problem and I hope in this conversation that with Ellen we will discover just how it does that. So welcome Ellen, and thank you very much for being here with us today.

Ellen Malfliet:

Thank you, Patrick, and thank you for having me.

Patrick Daly:

You’re very welcome. Delighted to have you. So to kick off, and maybe before we get into the substance of Ventory, perhaps you could tell me a little bit about your own background and how you came to be the head of marketing with Ventory.

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, for sure. I joined the founding team of Ventory about a year ago now. Prior to that I spent five years in the aviation industry, specifically trying to enable drone traffic as part of our daily lives. And before that I spent a decade marketing and selling ERP systems. So when Vishal, who is the founder of Ventory, reached out to me about his new adventure he was embarking on, I didn’t hesitate twice. Also for me it was fun to be back in the world of supply chain and logistics.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. And when we talk about field inventories, what are some examples of what we’re referring to and why are they so notoriously difficult to manage and control?

Ellen Malfliet:

If I look at the way the world looks now and the supply chains look now, and I compare it to back when I started, let’s say around 2006, 2007, you really see that there is a push where inventory is moved to closer locations, a lot closer to the customer, but a lot further away from the control and visibility that you have as a central party. So a large part of the difficulty there is that because your inventory is in locations that you can’t control, is maybe managed by third parties, is in very fragmented, very small locations, it becomes really difficult to work in a standardized way. So that’s the gap where we eventually want to jump into to help our customers.

Patrick Daly:

And what are some of the issues or the undesirable effects of that fragmentation and lack of visibility and control that company’s experience?

Ellen Malfliet:

I’d say it’s just human nature. People want to be able to do their jobs, they want to make sure that they have the tools and the materials that they need. So what happens is you basically get a whole lot of gray stock and a whole lot of gray knowledge because people want to kind of hoard the stuff that they know they’re going to need later on. And because you don’t have the visibility from a central position in the company, it’s super difficult to keep track of what even is in your inventory. You can see that you have it on your P&L, but you can’t see it on your daily life.

Patrick Daly:

So what are the consequences then for a business of not managing these field inventories effectively, and likewise then what are the business benefits of rolling something like Ventory out?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, for sure. I would say the main thing of course is a huge lack of efficiency. You are working super so optimally if you have all these fragmented bits and pieces everywhere and you’re missing the global view. Secondly, you also that way get a lot of waste because a lot of your stuff is actually close to expiring. It may be damaged, it may not be in location when you need it. So that alone would be a massive wind. Secondly, I think another location where we find a lot of wind is basically the usability of the solution. So often people in the warehouse, engineers in the fields, nurses who are traveling around with patients, they get encumbered with so much extra work and so much stuff that they need to do to just keep administrative track of the stuff that they’re using. It bogs them down and it takes them away from what should be their key focus.

Patrick Daly:

And what types of companies and organizations benefit most from these types of field inventory solutions?

Ellen Malfliet:

I would say any organization that has stock, that is either in itself inherently valuable or stock that is time critical. Imagine if you’re an infrastructure company and part of your infrastructure breaks down, you want to be able to send people out straight away and get everything sorted in the shortest amount of time possible. So even if you have a piece that is not in itself super valuable or pricey, just being 100% sure where it is and getting it to where it needs to be is a massive benefit.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. And how does the system work in practice? How is it deployed and how do the people in the field actually use it and interact with it?

Ellen Malfliet:

The Ventory platform is a combination of a web application, a mobile app that works on any smartphone or any device such as, for instance, Zebra scanners and an API. So an integration part, which we connect into our customer’s existing systems. So basically we enrich the data that they already have. We let them very flexibly configure additional workflows that the bigger systems are not able to cater to. And that way we have a bunch of very small tasks. We divide the larger task of cycle counting, which can be difficult and very cumbersome into super easy small tasks where we guide the people on where to go, what to scan. And our system uses multi barcode scanning to basically suck all the difficulty and complexity into the system and make sure that they transfer it into the legacy systems to get more out of them.

Patrick Daly:

Okay. And so for example, I could be a maintenance engineer with a van and it’s the infantry that’s in my van, for example.

Ellen Malfliet:

Yes.

Patrick Daly:

Or it could be a small depot that’s deployed in a neighborhood, maybe in a utility company to service an area, stuff like that.

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, absolutely. Or even a combination thereof. Imagine you and I are colleagues, we’re both driving around with our vans. I need a certain spare part. With Ventory, I can look on the map and see where the closest is. It may be that the depot is the closest location. It may also be that you have three in your van that you’re potentially not going to use today, so then I can reach out to you and we can swap parts wherever we are. That saves an awful lot of time and driving.

Patrick Daly:

Yes. And how does it interact then with the business systems that most companies would already have? So they’d maybe have an ERP system, there’s probably an inventory management module there that might even be a warehouse management module. How does Ventory link in with that?

Ellen Malfliet:

Precisely. So we use a standardized way of connecting with all these systems because basically if you look at it, what it always comes down to fields are expected for data to come in and fields are there for data to come out. So what we do is we are agnostic as to what system is used, if it’s SAP, if it’s Manhattan, if it’s Microsoft, whatever system that the customer is using, even if it’s a homeroom system and we basically look at what fields is this solution expecting and then we map onto these fields.

Patrick Daly:

And why is it that those systems can’t do this? What’s lacking there? What’s the reason for that?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s also something that we asked ourselves or that a lot of our customers ask us or say, “It’s not possible that something like this does not exist yet.” Actually, if you look at Ventory is kind of at the intersection of several technologies that are quite mature that actually exist today because you have excellent scanning tools and capabilities. I’m sure you’ve used them in the supermarket, but these are not designed to work on an enterprise level and to be able to deal with several kinds of workflows. For the most part, the expected workflow is things come in, things go back out, and that is the end of the story. The part where we come in is it potentially things are coming back. They may be used as spare parts. You may want to dismantle them, you may want to sell them on, you may want to do something else with them.

So that variety of workflows is really something that most systems can’t handle. And then also on the other side, if you look at the WMSs, the ERPs, et cetera, there are awesome solutions, even open source solutions on the market today that do really well what they’re intended to do, but they’re quite difficult to work with. So what we want to do is make it user-friendly and provide the people in the warehouse, the engineers on the fields, the nurses in the hospitals or in their cars traveling to patients with only the data that they need rather than having to sift to all these fields and areas.

Patrick Daly:

And how long does it take to get set up and rolled out and how does the charging model work? We mentioned in the intro that it’s SaaS, so it’s software as a service, but how does the charging model actually work?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, so I would say in terms of a rollout, because it’s a fully configurable solution, so there is no coding involved, you could do it as quickly as 10 minutes. Of course if you know what you’re doing and your data is already nice and clean because with all of these things, it all comes down to the quality of the data. You can also do it quite gradually. So rollout entry for let’s say just one location or just one product group or maybe just your most expensive products, it may be that it doesn’t make sense or there isn’t a business case to keep track of everything. So you can do it very, very quickly.

You can also do it gradually and for the most part you don’t need engineer assistance or you are able to configure it quite by yourself. With regards to the pricing model, we work on a location basis because we want as many people as possible to be using our solution because that is when you get the best view of everything, you get the best granularity when you have a lot of people who are using a solution, even if it is only for the parts that are relevant to them. And that way we can stitch together a complete picture.

Patrick Daly:

And without betraying any client confidentiality, what kind of use case examples would you have that you’d be able to share with us?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, for sure. I think a really interesting use case is DHL who were our first customer where they are a 3PL. So most people when they think of DHL, they immediately think of the packages. It’s not the packages side of DHL, it’s the service logistics side. Basically what they are doing for their customer is delivering materials to the customer of their customer across several countries and regions. And the specific difficulty there was that you have a varying sizes of warehouses. Some of them are massive manned warehouses, some of them are quite small, some of them are even just pick up drop off locations. And what they wanted was a standardized way that would enable the people across all these locations to keep track of what they were delivering to the customer. That way they could also share those insights with their customer and to do it in such a way that it didn’t require a lot of onboarding because if you have people who are only going to use a solution occasionally, you have this learning curve over and over again.

It may be that if you’re using something on the daily, after a while it will become easy for everybody. The problem is if you have something you only use every couple of weeks, every time again, you have to get used to it. So the ease of use and the multi barcode scanning was super important because these materials were quite complex that they were delivering. So one box could maybe contain eight to 10 various components, and with Ventory they can scan them in one full swoop. So you eliminate the human error and obviously you greatly increase the efficiency of your personnel.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. And so then for Ventory, what does the future hold? Will there be new features and or will there be new products or services from Ventory in 2023 and beyond?

Ellen Malfliet:

In 2023, the main thing that we want to focus on is to improve even further on our usability version. We have already rolled out the latest mobile app, which has a much better user experience according to our users and also has more capabilities so you can scan even faster. It also validates what you are scanning directly on the device itself. So even without internet connectivity you know straight away if you are scanning the right bits and the tool really supports you in that. Another interesting part that we are definitely going to expand upon is the communication ability. Like I mentioned, imagine we are both engineers who are both using Ventory app on our phone. It is all the better to communicate with each other.

Imagine I’m counting inventory and I notice that somewhere there has been a leak or some things have fallen over or there is some case of damage, I can take a picture with the app, I can include my comments and then I can give it to my colleagues of the chain of commands to decide what has to be done with these materials. So I would say definitely usability remains our main focus and we have a couple of ideas on how to improve there.

Speaker 3:

93.9 Dublin South FM.

Patrick Daly:

And thinking about the future and maybe the strategy of the business, so you’re part of the management team of the business as head of marketing. So when you guys are looking at business strategy and we’re living in a world now, it seems where over recent years there’s been so much turbulence and unpredictability. So how does this affect how you and the management team think about your business strategy for the future? Does it make it more challenging or does the turbulence actually constitute an opportunity for you?

Ellen Malfliet:

It’s very much twofold. Back about a year ago when I would say the global political and everything was shifting very much, we were a little bit worried because many companies tend to be quite conservative in times of uncertainty. But on the other hand, this has also constituted a great opportunity for us because with the global shortages that you have of ships of rare materials, it becomes more and more interesting for companies to actually make the business case and keep track of all their materials. In times where everything is going really well, you can get away with performing suboptimally. It’s in times like these when everybody has to tighten the belt and look for areas where they can improve, it’s really nice to see that companies realize the low hanging fruit that they have by making better use of the stuff that they already have.

Patrick Daly:

So you’re based in Belgium?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yes.

Patrick Daly:

And your target market or your reach, where does that extend to and where do you want to be doing business?

Ellen Malfliet:

Well, we’re very much a global company already. I would say more by happenstance than by design. We follow where our customers are. So we have customers in Asia Pacific, we have customers all through the US. We have customers here in Europe as well. So I think from a practical standpoint and the fact that we’re only a startup and we’re only a relatively small team, I think our focus will be on North America and Europe. But we are definitely able to cater to customers who are situated elsewhere.

Patrick Daly:

And what about getting people and talent? How has that been? How do you do that? What are the challenges that you’re facing?

Ellen Malfliet:

I think there’s definitely a global shortage and a global war for talent. But on the other hand, I’m very much convinced that you can find awesome people by building an awesome team. We really believe in openness and creating things together and that is something that I have never encountered in previous companies. I really step away from meetings feeling that I’ve created something that I would never have been able to do it on my own. It’s the input from the colleagues and just having this culture where it’s okay to bring your true self to work and to be vulnerable and allow your colleagues the same, that really, really inspires us and also really attracts new talent like Vijaya, my amazing colleague who I otherwise never would’ve found.

Patrick Daly:

Yeah, this is the thing about which I noticed when she contacted me first. So we’re talking about the person who introduced us, who work works for you, part of your sales and marketing team, but she’s based in Algeria, right?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yes.

Patrick Daly:

So you have this distributed team that’s based all over the world, so people don’t necessarily have to be going into an office in Brussels or someplace, right?

Ellen Malfliet:

No, indeed. And I think that’s one of the key takeaways for me back in early 2020, I really hated it having to work from home. It was such a mind shift. I really had trouble coming to grasp with it and not seeing my colleagues in the office every day anymore. But now on the one hand I’m completely used to it. And secondly, it really opens your horizon so much you can work with so many people who otherwise could not conceivably come into the office. And I really find that we get so much more that we get done on a regular basis, both working alone and working in teams as well.

Patrick Daly:

And are you guys a actively recruiting and building your team still at this moment?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We are currently finalizing our seat rounds, which we hope will be concluded shortly so then we can really start advertising the fact. But yeah, absolutely. We are recruiting, we’re mostly looking at this moment for salespeople because we’re quite happy with where the product is at. But we will definitely be looking for technical people as well as we expand our offering over the coming year. So anybody who wants to work for an amazing team anywhere in the world, reach out.

Patrick Daly:

That’s good. Excellent. Well, that’s a good call. So hopefully you’ll get some response from around the world. So just another question on strategy and looking at the world, so when you guys are looking to the future, what would be the main kind of considerations internally and externally that feed into your kind of thinking about strategy and what you’re going to do in the future?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the main thing is going to be to follow the customers. We’re still a very young startup. We’re still trying to figure everything out and we have a very broad potential customer base. Basically any company who has materials that are located in various parts that are either valuable by themselves, that are time critical in some ways that actually encompasses a great deal of industries. You have infrastructure, you have 3PL, but you also have parts of manufacturing, everything especially that has to do with secondhand and spare parts management. So it’s amazing to think how many opportunities are out there. So at the moment we are, on the one hand, we are partnering because I very much believe that an ecosystem of partners where each of the individuals bring their own expertise allows us to work together and to bring something to the customers that the separate parties would not be able to. So partnering with many potential partners who then each also bring their ideas to say, “Hey, have you considered this?” Or “I have this customer who is facing this specific use case. Let’s have a look together.”

Patrick Daly:

Yeah, yeah. When you start to think the possibilities are endless, really. So I can think of utility companies, I can think of maintenance companies, all sorts. So yeah, it really is an exciting prospect. I might just as we come towards the end, the last few minutes of the interview, maybe just shift gears a little bit and maybe just ask you one or two questions about yourself and outside of work and what kind of things do you like to do in a way of hobbies and other interests?

Ellen Malfliet:

I have so many interests and so little time to carol. First of all, I have two wonderful teen daughters, so I definitely love spending time with my family. We have two dogs, so definitely a lot of walking and a lot of cuddling is also involved. Then I have a horse with whom I like to spend time as well. And I have the opportunity to teach university course as a visiting lecturer in marketing. So definitely also something that I’m now trying to prepare some interesting cases for my future students.

Patrick Daly:

You’re a very busy person I see.

Ellen Malfliet:

I am. Yeah, I am. But I greatly enjoy everything that life has to offer. So yeah, I’m very thankful.

Patrick Daly:

And are you reading or listening to anything lately that you find inspiring that you might like to recommend to listeners?

Ellen Malfliet:

I’m mostly reading business related literature, so I don’t think that that could be all that wonderfully interesting. I’m also trying to keep up with Netflix. My children greatly enjoy me finally partaking in the Wednesday series that we’re trying to follow.

Patrick Daly:

Actually on Netflix I have a recommendation for you because you’re kind kind of in the tech sector, right?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah.

Patrick Daly:

So there’s a Swedish production called The Playlist, and it tells the story of the gestation, the conceptualization, and the founding founding of Spotify. I think it’s in six episodes. And each episode is from a perspective of each one of the different people, the founder, co-founder, the singer. It’s very good, very good.

Ellen Malfliet:

Oh yeah, I’d love to see that because I think they’re the only European unicorn, right?

Patrick Daly:

They may well be, yeah. They may well be. They may well be.

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, I find them fascinating. I have Spotify as well, so I’m doing my part.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. Yeah, highly recommend it. So where can people find out more about Ventory and get in touch with you guys if they feel either that they might be a client or they want to work for you?

Ellen Malfliet:

Yeah, that would be awesome. Well, they could always visit our website, ventory.io, so it’s Ventory like inventory, but without the in or otherwise, they can follow us on LinkedIn. And I’m also very active on LinkedIn, so they can follow me as well. And I would be delighted to hear from people.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent, excellent. Well, many thanks Ellen for being here with us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to chat with you, and I wish you the very best, both personally and professionally for the future.

Ellen Malfliet:

Thank you so much, Patrick, it’s been great.

Patrick Daly:

Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in again today and be aware that if you enjoyed this episode, you can find a full series of over 100 episodes of Interlinks on Spotify. Spotify, again. Apple Podcasts, Acast, and other major podcast platforms. So until next time, keep well and stay safe.