Okay, hello everyone and thanks for joining us today for the webinar. My name is Jeff Pace and I'm the Marketing Manager for E-Emphasis Technologies. And yeah, thanks for joining us for the Dealership of the Future webinar. And I'm just going to go over a few introductory slides and set up the topic before passing it to Sri Rajagopal, who is our Vice President of Product Management at E-Emphasis. And like I said, our topic is the Dealership of the Future. And in this webinar we are going to talk about the digital transformation, especially how it impacts the equipment distribution industry. And as you'll see, this – the future is nearer than you think. This is the business paradigms for equipment dealerships. And you'll see that the use and adoption of some of the technologies that we're going to go over in this presentation has become the new norm. These things may seem like they're far away, far off in the future that, you know, these are five, ten years down the line, but you'll see that many dealers are currently leveraging a lot of the technology that we are going to discuss in this webinar today to create a competitive advantage in this competitive environment. Okay, and just to start, here are a few examples of digital disruption that have happened, you know, over the years in other industries. So the first example, the slide rule versus the digital pocket calculator, that's a very simple one. Another one, the Polaroid instant camera versus digital cameras. Now today, you'll see everyone is using digital cameras so they can upload, you know, their images immediately. They can share them with friends and family in real time over email. It's just this, you know, increase in technology has created such an improved user experience. Another one, Nokia mobile phones versus the Apple smartphone. Ten, fifteen years ago, you'll probably remember everyone was using Nokia phones. They didn't have access to the internet. You could basically call, text, and that's it. And now, it seemed like almost overnight looking back, now ten years later, everyone is using smartphones to get real time access to not just text, phone calls, but making transactions, calling, Ubers, everything you do in your life now basically revolves around one piece of technology that was not even available ten years ago. So you can see how fast the digital transformation has impacted basically all of our lives. And we see the same thing happening in the equipment industry. Another one that has a lot of parallels to the equipment distribution industry, traditional taxi companies, and now we see Uber coming into that market and basically dominating the taxi market to the point where it's not unrealistic to think that taxis could be out of business in the very near future. And another one that's very relatable to, you know, equipment is the traditional combustion engine car versus electronic cars. We're seeing those on the road now and in the next few decades, you know, combustion engines may be obsolete. And now, the first specific example of digital disruption that we'll go over is Uber. And now, if you look at the old traditional taxi business model, what do you need to be a taxi driver? You need basically a car and a license and that's it. So they have nothing that's proprietary, nothing that's differentiating them. So Uber came up with the idea of, hey, everyone has cars. You know, everyone has access now to smartphones. So putting those together, we can create a better user experience by allowing our users to have real-time access to transportation. They can just get on their phones and call a car. You can even watch as it arrives. You know exactly when it will arrive. It creates a sense of security, a sense of trust for the user, and, you know, creates a much better user experience. And now, we see that traditional taxi companies maybe got a little cocky. Maybe the customer service was not great with them. They felt that they didn't need to improve their business offerings. And now, we're finding that more and more taxi companies are becoming obsolete. And there are parallels with this, for example, in aftermarket sourcing of spare parts. It's not hard for other companies to come in and offer these to your customers. Also, we found this in service. Now, there are, you know, third-party service technicians that can work on equipment. There's nothing that's proprietary in there, except the only thing that can set you apart is the customer experience and using technology to improve that for your customers. And in the few later slides, Shree is going to touch on specific ways that you can improve your service offerings, improve the customer experience in relation to the service department. Another example that has direct ties to the equipment industry is Yard Club, which is a recently purchased by Caterpillar, you almost say it's the Uber for heavy equipment, provides peer-to-peer rentals via web and mobile apps. And that's something you'll see that we touch on a lot, is that customers now are expecting everything to be available in real time on their phones, on their computers, so that they can access it when they want to. And that's what Yard Club has been able to do, is kind of cut out the middleman and allow for people to rent their equipment just from their phones. And as we go over a few other things, you'll see that the rental business is going to be even more important in the years ahead, and improving the customer experience related to the rental department. It's going to be key to gain a competitive advantage over customers in an ever-increasingly competitive market. Now the next thing we'll go over is changes affecting dealerships, the mobile world. Today 65% of the world's information is now consumed by mobile devices. And you'll see more and more as both our workforce and our customers are younger, that people are not digital migrants now, they're digital natives. They've grown up with this digital technology, grown up with smartphones, even iPads in some cases. So they're expecting everything to happen right away, real-time access to information, having it in a user-friendly setup on their mobile phone, on their iPad, so they have access to things such as equipment that's available, work orders from previous service jobs, all of that available to them, so that they have a better experience that they can improve their business operations. Another advance in technology that maybe some of you are already utilizing, but that we see a lot of dealerships utilizing, are RFID, or radio frequency identification devices. The biggest advantage of RFID over barcode is line-of-sight is not required, which increases efficiency, you can save time, you don't have to walk the yard to see what equipment is available. Many dealers currently are installing RFID-enabled gates to track movement of equipment to increase speed of operations. And a big place where this can come into play is, an example would be the rental department, where as soon as a piece of equipment is returned, you can set up RFID gates on your equipment yard, so as soon as that enters the yard, someone is notified that they need to go inspect that equipment. Once the equipment is inspected, maybe something is damaged, you can note that down, or maybe a service request needs to be initiated. All of this can then happen in real time, this allows you to automate many practices, reduces human error, increases efficiency, and ultimately gets your equipment back up ready for rent faster, which increases your revenue. This is also relevant in areas such as high-value parts, where we see some dealers report that they save hundreds of thousands of dollars just on preventing lost attachments because they are hooked up to RFID, so you can track those, know where they are, things like that. And then also now entire tool cribs are now managed autonomously using RFID tags. So that's just one example now where this is not far from the future, dealers are using this technology now and it is saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions of dollars in terms of efficiency, reduction of lost parts, as I mentioned, and increasing the uptime for equipment. And then perhaps the biggest digital transformation, the biggest single piece of technology that will affect the equipment industry going forward is the Internet of Things and telematics. And a good description of it is it's better to describe what it doesn't do than what it can do for equipment distributors. One example, equipment servicing and repair can measure things like temperatures, pressure, shaft speeds, vibration levels, metal content. And this is very applicable in areas such as predictive maintenance. Say you want to set up an alert when the engine reaches a certain level that, you know, this is critical, we need to check this out, you can set up alerts in the system to have someone either contact your customer or even, if you want, send a technician out when, say, a temperature reaches a certain level. And this, you know, increases uptime of equipment and definitely customer satisfaction. Another example, augmented reality. One of the biggest things we see when we go to any equipment dealer conference that everyone's talking about is the lack of skilled technicians in the workforce today. With augmented reality technology, you can, you know, a newer technician could be working on a piece of equipment and then get input from a skilled technician in the shop who can look and see exactly what he's looking at and provide guidance, which can, you know, improve the training of technicians and also increase that first-time fixed ratio. Some other examples, remote usage monitoring, and this can be, you know, very applicable to rentals. You can track, you know, if a machine is getting used more, track the hours to maybe charge for overusage in terms of rentals. Construction tools and equipment tracking, supplier replenishment, power and fuel savings. And basically, as we'll get into in more detail in some of the later slides, we see IoT and telematics completely revolutionizing the equipment distribution industry. And we'll go over a lot of more specific things related to that, but if you're not already thinking about some of these technologies, there are dealers today utilizing them and they, as we are going to go over, they will become the new norm. And if you don't keep up with these innovations and start utilizing them in your own business, then there's the danger that you could go the way of the taxi companies, you know, where Uber came in and revolutionized the industry. You see in the very near future similar things happening in the equipment distribution industry. Another thing that will affect equipment distributors directly is electronic vehicles. And a lot of studies, a lot of reports done believe that electronic cars will account for all new vehicle sales in Europe by 2035. Also, according to Stanford, electric vehicles will kill the global oil industry by 2030. And the combustion engine, for example, has about 2,000 moving parts, whereas an electronic engine, most of them have about 18. So you can see beyond just the global ramifications of this, 2,000 parts versus 18 for an electronic vehicle, how this is going to directly impact, you know, equipment dealers, where the parts and service revenue will decrease. So how do we, you know, leverage technology to stay ahead and a lot of that is going to be increasing the rental operations, for example. Another example is driverless vehicles. This is happening a lot in mining. There are currently also completely autonomous quarries that are being in development, in some cases already in use. For example, mining giant Rio Tinto already uses 45, 240 ton driverless trucks to move iron ore into Australian mines. OEMs such as Volvo and Komatsu, you know, are already utilizing this technology. In just one example, a startup called Otto, which promises to retrofit vehicles with driverless capabilities for $30,000, whereas the average trucker's wage is $40,000 per year. So you can see how this type of technology can represent huge savings in labor costs down the line. And then another topic that, you know, is all we see discussed in these dealer conferences all the time is, you know, millennials and the changing workforce. How do we relate to millennials? You'll see if you go to some of these conferences, that's always some form of that topic is always discussed. And baby boomers are going to be retiring, 78 million retiring in the next 10 years, which means that not only is your workforce going to get younger and younger, it's going to be filled with more and more millennials, but also your customer base, the people that, you know, take over these companies will be younger and younger. And as we talked about, people, millennials especially, grow up with smartphones in their hands, you know, that we expect things to happen fast, happen instantly. We don't want to use, you know, old 50-year technology on the job site. So you'll see now that as the workforce is transforming, as I said, millennials are tech dependent and this relates to both your customers, as we've said, your customers are going to want digital access to information. They're going to want online customer portals to where they can, you know, set up a work order or order parts online. And by the same token, your employees also don't want to use outdated technology. In terms of job satisfaction, they want to use the newest technology that's going to help them advance their career, learn new technologies and new skills. And help, you know, that helps both their satisfaction and contributes to their personal growth. And so why is this important? Now I'm going to let Shree take over and he's going to go over a few specific examples of how dealers are currently leveraging technology to gain a competitive advantage. And I'll hand over the presentation to Shree. Shree Rajagopal Thanks Jeff. Good morning everyone. This is Shree Rajagopal from E-Emphasis Technologies. I am the Vice President for Product Management for E-Emphasis. So Jeff did talk about a lot about what's changing in the technology world, how it's relevant to the equipment industry and why is it important for us? Why is it important for us as distributors? So I would typically quote Jack Welsher who was the former CEO of GE. You know, when the rate of change outside an organization exceeds the rate of change on the inside, then you should consider the end is near, which means that if you can't keep pace with the technology growth that's happening around you, you would soon be obsolete because you have to keep up with the technology. And the same thing happened with smartphones. And Jeff talked about it in his previous slide. Ten years ago, I mean as early as 2006, we couldn't imagine doing what we do today with our smartphones. And it's not even a decade, maybe about a decade now and we're doing – we do everything with our smartphones and we expect everything to be on our smartphones. And so that's changed significantly from where we were just a decade ago. So it is frightening in a way because any technology change, since it's exponentially growing, it's frightening and it's also exciting in a lot of ways because it gives a lot of power and a lot of efficiency to the workforce. But it also is frightening in a way that how do we go about implementing technology? But it is a new normal. So you've got to either innovate or we are no longer relevant. With the digital transformation, you know, you've got to find ways to embrace technology. And what I'm going to do in the next few slides is to show you that it's not as difficult as you think it is. It needs planning. It needs organization. It needs some level of understanding of technologies and also the fact that you don't want to use technology for the sake of it, but you rather want it to be relevant to what you're trying to do with your business and the business processes. So we're going to walk through some of those in the next few slides. I thought this was interesting because you either would follow the future or be extinct at some point. So it's important for distributors and dealers to be, you know, have something to differentiate. And they could use technology today. It's kind of the right time to leverage digital technology to be where you want to be in terms of being ahead of the curve, being competitive. And so one of the key areas that – or the four key areas that we would talk about is, you know, implementation of industry best business practices. A lot of times, you know, we basically have business processes that we think work well for the organization, but they're also business processes that have evolved around the systems that we have used in the last, you know, couple of decades. So it's time to kind of rethink those processes, is kind of to start a clean slate in some ways to know what really works for your business and kind of implement those practices which are kind of the best business practices within the industry. You also want to provide, you know, efficiency and visibility to supply chain, which is, you know, provide pretty comprehensive and robust interfaces with your manufacturers and suppliers so that you can get the information that you need, pass information that the manufacturers need in terms of warranty and in terms of price availability, price availability of parts, machines, configuration, things like that. That really improves your efficiency within your organization and also your output and turnaround time to your customers. You also want to start giving customers, you know, good access to their data because, like, you know, because your customers are also millennials. They're used to doing everything online. They're used to working midnight, late night, trying to, you know, solve a problem. They want access to data. They want to place orders real time using an online portal, for example, or using a mobile app. You know, they're used to going up with eBays, with Amazons. They're looking at distributors to provide that kind of features and ability for them to do business with. They want to pay the invoices online. So you've got to give access to your customers, to their data, and you make them more sticky. You make them more, you kind of capture them, they are a captive customer for a long time if you start doing, you know, start giving them what they need from a distributor perspective. You also want to provide, as Jeff mentioned in his previous slides, you know, provide the distributors, your end customers, a better service in terms of keeping their equipment uptime to the highest levels, and that can be done by predicting failures and downtime on the machines. And a lot of IoT innovation is going around those areas. And in fact, it's already in use in certain areas to predict component failures so that you could reach out to the customer or your rental machines and, you know, take proactive decisions and actions to ensure that you not only have uptime for the machine, but you also improve customer satisfaction, meet or exceed the expectations. So predictive analytics is a very key portion of your business going forward, and you're seeing a lot of manufacturers and OEMs actually having significant investments in the IoT and telematic areas. And you'll see that growing exponentially in the next few years. So it's not just a competitive advantage anymore. It's also actually a cost of doing business. So all this that I talked about is, you know, it's actually going to be so relevant to you, to distributors going forward, that it's going to be the norm, as I said earlier. And so it's a cost of doing business. You've got to provide these functions and features and services to your customers. There are a few things that you could, you know, as a dealership, you face challenges, and how could you leverage technology to work around those challenges. There is, you know, increased competition. There's changing expectations from the customers, those external pressures or challenges that a distributor typically faces. The increased competition is because there is a lot of dealers that work in the same region and territory. There are competing products from different manufacturers and brands. The customers, as we mentioned earlier, are also changing. They are millennial. They expect more quality services from their distributors. And the internal factors are shrinking margins, obviously, as the economy and other things change around you. The margins shrink. The workforce dynamics change, just like your customer dynamics have changed. Your workforce dynamics changes as well. So you could leverage technology in various ways. One is with increased competition, you should be providing more quality services With increased competition, you should be providing differentiating services. So something like, you know, self-service e-commerce that we talked about, better interfaces with the manufacturers, providing intelligent pricing calculators. An example of that could be, you know, you could have the system provide dynamic rental rates based on the rental utilization of machines. So if it's utilized, if you have 99% utilization, then you want to give probably a 10% discount. If it is only 50% utilized, you want to probably, you know, give higher discounts. If it is 100% utilized, you probably don't want to give any discount but bump up the prices. So just like the typical airline and the auto rental industry. Now, I'm not saying all this is possible in all territories and all regions with all customers, but those are the areas that you might want to start leveraging technology and looking at areas that you could leverage in a distributor organization. In terms of changing expectations, as I said earlier, you would want to provide predictive analytics to your customers so that you are proactive in the way you maintain the machines, whether it's for a service contract, whether it's, you know, PM maintenance that you want to do on your rental fleet. Providing that kind of visibility and improving those operational areas will, you know, help you meet and exceed your customer expectations. The customers also expect today, some larger customers or distributors expect data interchange. So they want to create, they want B2B kind of interfaces and coordination. So if your end customers create a purchase order, they want the purchase order to be a sales order in distributor system and then transact the two and keep the links between the two all the time so that it's more seamless in the way you work with your customers. And they expect that today from, you know, from distributors. In terms of increasing your, you know, your shrinking margins is you want to do more with less and that's how you would probably be more profitable going forward. So you have to have, you know, the best practices, as I mentioned earlier, efficiency at all task levels with every employee that you have within the organization. Customer support and service is going to be a big differentiator and automation. So you want, as I said, you want to do more with less. So, you know, deploying a very comprehensive document management system where you can access, you know, your documents, your brochures, your pictures, inspection reports, all on a real-time basis very easily would help, you know, increase your efficiency and thus, you know, you could reduce your cost and increase your profitability. In terms of workforce dynamics, you want to move from a people-centric process to a people-centric organization to a process-centric organization. You want to leverage knowledge base. You know, dealers have been running their operations, some of them for over a century. So there's a lot of information and intelligence within the organization that could be leveraged, that could be harnessed as a part of, you know, training your employees as part of the knowledge base that could be leveraged by your younger workforce. So there's a lot of knowledge within the organization that is unexplored today because of the technology, you know, obstacles. But if you have the right technology, you would basically take that data that you have, which is very, very intelligent as well as very, very comprehensive, and then utilize it to help your millennials, whether it's on the service side of the business, the sales side of the business, to help them harness that information and improve their productivity. And that's how you would, you know, tend to retain them and also recruit them with the user. So how do we become, you know, from a people-centric to a process-centric organization? There are, you know, systems as well as technologies that distributors are using today to run their business. One of the most common pain points in most occupant distributor rental companies is, you know, providing one uniform customer-facing organization across locations and departments. And in almost all cases, you know, the business processes in the organization have been defined based on the business system that they've used in the past. So most business systems would basically be very rigid so that the organization would have to adapt to the business process defined by the system. And so, but we know that all distributors are different in many ways, so one size does not fit all. A lot of process, a lot of times the processes are discussed and finalized in the management boardroom, but what happens in the field in the shop is completely different. And so, because there's no effective way to enforce the processes systematically among the workforce. But with modern, you know, technology-based business systems, the business processes can be defined as a part of the business system. It can directly integrate to the business application. There is segregation of duties and roles and responsibilities that you can create. And you can enforce this, you know, across your entire organization. So it eliminates the gap between what you define as a process and how we can execute it in the field. So these business processes can be defined. They can be used for various purposes for training new recruits that join the organization and the organization can help. It's a very interactive training environment because it's directly linked to the application. It provides a very handy tool for any ISO or Six Sigma certifications that you might have. So it provides all these features in addition to ensuring that your business processes are what you would want your organization to function rather than the system dictating those processes. So it's very important to move from, you know, people-centric to a process-centric organization allowing you to be scalable and be more, I would say, consistent and predictable both from internally within the organization as well as to your customers. A couple of things that would drive this is, you know, as I said earlier, you could define those responsibilities, but you also have to provide your users or the employees a very effective way to perform the day-to-day activities. Traditionally, if you looked at distributor employees, they would have to hunt for information in the system. They would have to rely on a daily report that comes up every day in the morning. So we want to move them from being more reactionary to more proactive to incidents and events that happen within the organization. And so these kind of dashboards or what we call the to-do task list allows or enables the employees to be more proactive. As you see in this example, it's a typical, you know, operational dashboard for a rental coordinator where they could view their list of tasks to be performed during the day. And this is all real-time. So as transactions happen within the system, they show up on these dashboards having the users to review it and take some actions through it, drill down to details of the transaction from these dashboards and resolve those incidents or events. So some of the examples here would be that, you know, you would have a rental contract, maybe a demo of a machine to a customer, and the customer, for 24 to 48 hours, but the customer doesn't come back with the return back to the machine, you want that to be alerted to your sales reps, to your rental coordinators so they could follow up with the customer and get the machine back. Or, you know, extend that to a regular rent-to-rent or an RPO, rent-to-sell operation. So the analogy here is it's very similar to your inbox, your email inbox. You get unread emails, and those are the action points that you follow up, and eventually and ideally you would want that number to be zero, like unread emails to be zero in your email box. And the same concept here is as things come to you based on your role that they get assigned to you, at some point you want that to be all resolved and taken care of. So this kind of helps you prioritize those activities. There's also alerts. So there's some things that you want to prioritize within your things-to-do list, and alerts would help you prioritize that because those exceptions. So you have a regular things-to-do list, but you also have exceptions that help you manage any management exceptions or operational exceptions that happen within the system. For example, in this case, if you had the sales price is less than the cost price and the order is blocked, but you want someone to look at it earlier than later, and so those would be kind of exceptions to your things-to-do list that you have. So it helps you prioritize things based on your role within the organization. Document management is very key. We all know that we spend a lot of time searching for information. In fact, some studies have showed that, you know, on an average, 15% of the employee time is spent searching for information. It's kind of the number one efficiency killer within the organization. By adopting, in a document management system, comprehensive document management systems which are seamlessly integrated to your business systems, distributors are today able to review the documents along with the system records. So if you're looking at a machine, for example, you can look at all the brochures and machine pictures, inspection reports, any warranty damages, all that that's linked in context to the machine can be looked at in the same screen. And this helps increase your efficiency of the users because they're not hunting down cabinets, they're not hunting down paper files to review that information. It's all within the system. Similarly, you've got, you know, customer insurance certificates or customer invoices and customer letters that all could be part of the customer digital filing that you could use. And just like Google, you could search through your entire enterprise, you know, for related documents. For example, if you want to search for all engine-related documents, I could just search throughout the enterprise, you know, where are the engine-related documents or where are the transmission-related documents. And all that could be obtained very easily. The other advantage is you can store the information for any number of years, so you're not archiving it, you're not putting it into a file and, you know, in a garage or somewhere. It's all there in the system with the historical records. So with technology changing, and hard disk and server space and storage becoming cheaper and cheaper, it's easy for you to store years of information in the system and easily accessible without impacting the performance of the system. What we have seen is as dealers and distributors have been using the system, they have seen real-life, you know, of using these technologies. You know, we have seen in some cases about 38% improvement of fill rates on their part site with a lot of, you know, search and other capabilities being fast in the system. You're able to reduce the labor cost. You're raising obsolescence by about 20%. And in the end of the day, you know, it's all about retaining customers, acquiring new customers. And we have seen a tremendous growth in that with our experience with, you know, using these technologies with distributor and rental companies. The next piece is to do with, you know, how can you take very, you know, critical decisions based on, you know, based on your data that you have in the system. And, you know, I go back to, you know, what Peter Drucker has said. What gets measured gets improved. Because if we don't measure things, obviously, you don't know where the improvement lies. And so, one of the key areas that you want to do is start defining KPIs within the system. I mean, try to understand what do you want to track? What are your key performance indicators that you want to track to monitor the health of your business? Now, typically, most dealerships, you know, struggle to get this information in a timely manner. And delayed information is a tail. It does not help in strategic decision making. So the key part of this is to have the ability to monitor this on a day-to-day basis. You don't want to wait for a week, a month, or a quarter to actually get this information. So, you know, the key portion is that you want to have all these business intelligence and reporting embedded right into your business system and have real-time exceptions like if, you know, if the margins are going below a certain number, you want notification out to, you know, all the stakeholders so they know how the business is performing on a day-to-day basis. If your rental utilization is below a certain threshold, you want again notification alerts going out to the rental department and to the equipment inventory department to know that. Also very important is how do you consume this information? And a couple of ways to consume this is using, you know, mobile phones. So all this should be accessible to you on your mobile device. You have better adoption of these tools. And also it allows timely action to be taken based on any exceptions that happen within the system. So if you are on the road or you're in a field, you get this information accessible to a phone device, through your phones, whether it's an iOS or an Android phone, you want that to be accessible so it can improve the operational visibility of your organization. The other thing, important aspect is, you know, self-service. So you want all of these to be easily manageable by the distributors. You know, you don't want – if you want changes to the dashboards, you want that to be managed by the users of the system and not having to depend on your vendor. So I call this a self-service BI or self-service business intelligence that allows you to create your own dashboards and own reports. You also want to employ – empower your employees in the office and the field. And a couple of ways that you could do that is provide them access to information wherever they are. So, you know, because, you know, employees get motivated if they provide the tools that help them generate more business. At the same time, help improving, you know, customer satisfaction. For example, if you have a sales rep visiting a customer, having visibility to real-time inventory information for sales, for rentals, for parts, they help the rep to provide answers and responses with the customer while he or she is in front of the customer, not having to make a phone call or, you know, say you want to get back, you want to do all that. So ability to search all that information is very critical, customer history, transaction history, getting real-time view of all the problems with the customer, whether they're not paying on time, whether they have outstanding invoices, whether they have – they owe the credit limit, for example. You want them to know this information before they meet the customer so they can be quite relevant in what they talk to the customer and how they pitch to the customer. So that's something that you want to provide your employees to be motivated and also use the technology to help them produce better results. Same thing on the service operations. You want to schedule the right tech, the right job. So you want a graphical – replace your whiteboards, right? Typically, all the distributors would have, you know, whiteboards on their – in their shops where they would assign techs to work orders. And it works fine as long as you have five, six, seven technicians that have to start growing and you have 20, 30, 40 technicians. It's very difficult to manage that. And the graphical scheduling helps you to basically provide a very good dispatching system to ensure you've got the first-time fixed ratios. You deploy the right tech, the right job, the right time. And you in turn get high technician productivity and efficiency within the operations. The same thing goes for your technicians where they – you want them to be also efficient on the field. Provide them information of all the orders that they've been assigned to. Allow them to view, you know, the equipment details, the warranty information on the machine. See what parts are required. You know, add parts from the service man and service truck. Check the service truck inventory, for example. So you want to do all that as part of your mobile technician where you're giving them access to do routing where they can use the maps on their phones to route the time to the job site, the travel to the job site. Make notes. Obviously, you know, the technicians are not great in spelling. They don't write too well. So providing them voice activated, which means voice to text conversions so they can speak freely and register all their notes within the system helps them to be more productive, more efficient, and also be more motivated to do their job right. So this is some of the things that you may want to provide your mobile technicians or field technicians with also, in this case, uploading pictures, you know, annotating them so that they can be used for either warranty purposes, getting a sign-off report from the customer real-time while they leave the job site so that there are no disputes after the fact. So before they leave the job site, they could take a sign-off from the customer of the job being performed. The objective of these tools is to, you know, increase the efficiency of service operations, increase the cash flow because you have a quick turnaround time to invoicing after field job is done. Typically, if you look at industry averages, you know, you have the field jobs get invoiced maybe 15 days to 20 days after the job is done because it takes time for technicians to come back, fill up their work, provide it to the administrator, and that would, again, involve re-keying all the data and then invoicing the customer. By using these kind of apps, you're going to kind of bypass all that and increase your invoicing time, decrease your invoicing time, but also increase your cash flow from there on. And, of course, you want to improve your first-time fill rates, provide better visibility to the parts inventory, both on your vans, service trucks, as well as your main warehouses. And we have seen real-time results with this. You know, we have seen, you know, at least a 20 percent increase in the first-time fixed rates. We have seen 21 percent increase in technician productivity, reduction in warranty leakage because you've got all the information you need to efficiently file, you know, warranty claims to your suppliers. Well, one of the last topics here is, you know, the IoT. And we have talked a lot about that in the previous slides. But, again, you know, you really want to move from a reactive or proactive to a predictive mode of engagement with our customers. You know, you want to predict failures. You want to predict based on actual data what's going wrong and what might go wrong in the future. And IoT and telematics helps a lot in that process. One of the examples here would be if you had telematics sensors on a machine, you know, and that emits out critical errors, warnings, or cautions, then those could be processed to a rules engine and could be sent to the – to a mobile app of the technicians letting them know that there is a problem with the machine that might happen in the near future or that's already happening. And they could attend to that problem and provide the feedback to the manufacturers or suppliers with what were the real problems. So sometimes there are false alarms. Sometimes it's a problem that, you know, it says the transmission is faulty. But when you go and look at it, it shows the hydraulics. And so providing the feedback loop within the organization of what the problem was supposed to be as a complaint, but the problem could have been something different. And this connected world or connected technologies helps you track and monitor that. You also, as I mentioned earlier, want to provide your customers easy way of doing business with you and providing the portals to them, online information is very critical, whether it's, you know, placing parts orders, creating repair orders, providing information of their machines and rented and owned machines, providing order status updates, invoice reprints, paying off invoices. So providing as much information as you can to your end customers, you know, keep them quite sticky with you and loyal, and of course improve their customer satisfaction, be able to transact with you more freely and easily using these technologies. So technology for the future. So this is all that we are already using today, but what's the technology for the future? And it's already around the corner, it's not like, you know, got to wait for the next five years for that. So we already, you know, are seeing a trend of moving from a mobile tech to a connected tech, which means you're going to work with variables, you're going to work with, you know, smart glasses like Oculus, you know, not only in terms of, you know, providing information to the technician, but also helping them upsell and gain more business. For example, if a technician is in the yard of a customer and he's just walking past a machine, if the machine could, you know, provide information of a pending PM or a delayed, you know, maintenance on the machine, it could help the tech go back to the customer, talk to them and, you know, and provide information that there's a PM on the machine, and could we get that done while I'm here? You know, that helps to increase your opportunity to upsell to the customer. And also helps the technician's safety. For example, the technician's entering a mine site, you know, the variables are aware of the location, they're aware of the needs of safety for that location, for the mine site, and they could prompt the technician to use certain gears, safety gears, before they enter that job site. And so, some of these things are already in use, may not be as dominant as the other technologies, but it's not too far before this will be a standard usage among a lot of technicians. One of the things that we just touched upon in the past is, you know, with mobile tech, we can also start using virtual reality or augmented reality, where you should be able to, you know, have video conferencing with your managers, so technicians could, you know, take a view of the problem and communicate with their back-end managers or service, experienced service operators. So, you're kind of not only training your employees, the younger techs, but also ensuring that the job is fixed the first time. They don't have to come back and leave the job site and go back to the job site. So, it kind of builds a very good knowledge base within the system that could be then leveraged by other technicians as well, and thus improves the productivity of the technicians. So there are quite a few of these technologies we talked about, and real-life use cases as well, and how it's being used today, and what's in store for the future. Just the conclusions to all this, you know, we are in a very competitive market, and we need to stay ahead. And so there are a few things that you want to do is obviously improve your customer experience by offering, you know, portals, by offering creative maintenance within your service operations, mobile applications for your sales and your technician workforce. You want to increase efficiency in terms of providing real-time reporting, using analytics to help manage the health of your business, and also deal with exceptions very proactively. So these technologies are all there. They're right now for you to leverage. And as I said earlier, you know, it is the time to innovate. It is the new norm. You've got to, you know, adopt this technology sooner than later to be relevant. So with that, I would like to conclude it and hand it off to Jeff, and maybe answer any questions that you might have. Okay. Thanks, Sri. And I see that there are a couple questions already up in the screen. But if you came up with any questions during the course of the webinar, you can go ahead and either type those in now or reach out to us, and we'd be happy to answer any questions you have. And just to conclude, as Sri was saying, in a competitive market, it is necessary to evolve to stay ahead. And a lot of these technologies, dealers are already leveraging them. So we think it makes sense to maybe evaluate your own business, see what technology you currently have in place today, and maybe this presentation gave you some ideas about, you know, technology that you could implement that you would see immediate return on investment for your business. And hopefully you've seen that it's not that difficult. It's not five to ten years in the future that these technologies are available. They're available right now, and they are easy to implement. And I would also suggest partnering with a technology provider that you can trust that also has a vision for the future. I'd bring it back to the Nokia example. Don't choose a technology provider like Nokia that's already outdated. You want to find a provider who, you know, has a vision for the future, a roadmap using modern technology that will continue to grow as your business grows. And yeah, that should conclude the webinar. I see we have one question already that I'll pass over to Sri so he can handle that one. Yeah, the question is on the mobile technician slide. The question is, is this an example of a specific app, or is this a tool that's a part of the business system being used? Now, this is an app that is being used with some of the current business systems that allow the technicians to be mobile, both in the connected as well as in the disconnected mode, which means offline. So this is an app that's being used by a lot of distributors today, and it can link to any of the business systems. It's not bound to one business system. Any other questions from the group, from the audience? Yeah, the question that's come up is, what is the name of the app? It's actually called Extend Service Tech App. And if you want more information on that app, you can go to e-emphasis.com. The name of the company is e-emphasis, and that's where both me and Sri, both are part of e-emphasis. And more information on that specific app, you can find it at e-emphasis.com. Okay, it looks like that's it for this presentation. We're open for questions for now, but if you want to rewatch this or come up with any questions at a later time, you can reach out to either me or Sri, and we'd be happy to answer any questions you had. But anyways, thanks for joining us, everyone, and I hope you got some value out of the presentation. Enjoy the rest of your day.

dealership of the future

digital transformation

equipment distribution industry

technology adoption

customer expectations

mobile apps

RFID

Internet of Things

equipment failures prediction

process-centric organization