[Webinar] SkuVault + Flxpoint: Connecting 3PLs & Brands to Automate Operations for All

Below, you will find a transcript of the webinar.

Travis Mariea:

All righty. Looks like we’re 2:00 Eastern on the dot. Awesome. We got a lot of people already joined right now. I’m sure we’ll have a couple more trickle in over the next minute or two, but Caroline, Kate, if it’s okay with you all, let’s say we get started. Sounds good? All right.

Caroline Crouch:

Sounds good.

Travis Mariea:

Great. I’ll start by sharing my screen. All right, thanks everyone for joining today. As most people know, if you made your way here, you know we’re going to be talking about 3PLs and brands and automating the operations really on both sides, from both the 3PL side. If you’re a 3PL today joining, maybe you’re on SkuVault already, using your SkuVault as your WMS to manage your 3PL business. If you’re a brand or even a retailer maybe and you’re joining today, maybe you’re using SkuVault for your internal warehouse, maybe you’re using Flxpoint for your distributed order management system. Whatever it might be, I really do appreciate you taking the time.

Travis Mariea:

This should be for just about everyone so you can see on both sides of the spectrum how we can really empower brands. Typically, it’s most often a brand working with 3PL, but even if there’s some resellers out there and retailers that might be working with 3PLs, how you guys can automate your operations as well.

Travis Mariea:

With that, I’ll go ahead and just jump right in. Today’s about giving a high-level overview of what we see in the industry, but also we’re going to showcase, Kate on her side is going to showcase the business hub functionality, which is a really exciting new functionality from SkuVault. We’re going to talk a little bit about how Flxpoint interacts with SkuVault and allows this more powerful order routing and inventory management system when combined the two.

Travis Mariea:

Cool. Like I said, my name is Travis. I’m the CEO of Flxpoint. We also have Kate here as a senior sales engineer on the SkuVault side.

Travis Mariea:

I want to start with, really, what we’ve seen and some people might have seen this recently and I posted it just on LinkedIn, but there really has been a rise in 3PLs. If you’re a 3PL here, you might have just started in the last two, three, four years because we’ve seen such an increase in direct to consumer brands, ecommerce in general, but really this need to outsource software. I’m sorry, outsource the logistics and the software that follows it.

Travis Mariea:

With this rise, we’ve seen more 3PLs show up, more brands show up. As a 3PL, you’re seeing more and more different kinds of brands. We’ll talk about the different fulfillment methods that they might look to employ. In general, the space is not mature yet. There is companies like ourself and SkuVault looking to tackle and solve these challenges. There are some archaic, really old school players in the space that a lot of 3PLs gravitated towards originally. The new SAS software model for 3PLs is really just getting going, if you ask me, because the market size has blown up in the last couple of years.

Travis Mariea:

On top of that, a lot more ecommerce-enabled 3PLs. Traditionally we’ve seen 3PLs take in the B2B side of things, the receiving in and the selling and pick packing the shipping of freight items and larger pallets for B2C and direct to consumer as well. That’s really taken off the 3PL market. It’s a really exciting time. You can see in this chart here that we put together just really how much it has taken off.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, there we go. I’ve got some animation. How do you scale? The reason that we talk about how it’s grown so much… If you’re a 3PL listening, you’re like, wow, I can’t believe the last two years have been insane. My business, one, I’ve converted to an ecommerce enabled 3PL, or I’ve doubled or tripled the amount of orders I get in per day, per week, per month, whatever it might be. As most you know, how do you scale that? You need to automate in some cases. You can’t just throw bodies at it. That might work for a little bit, but scaling really does mean automation, it really means streamlining your processes and getting the right systems in place so that you’re not just doing a lot of repetitive work over and over again.

Travis Mariea:

So, when it comes to what you need to automate and what the expectation is, you’re a 3PL or you’re a brand. On both sides of the relationship, what are you expecting? One, you’re expecting easy onboarding. You need to get up, get your physical items within the 3PL in a fairly seamless way. You need to integrate your store. You need to do all this kind of stuff in the first 30, 60, 90 days, whatever it might be, but you’re really expecting it to be somewhat seamless. You’re not looking to make another project. You’re looking to automate things, you’re looking to outsource things.

Travis Mariea:

Number two, number three, number four really are inventory visibility, automated order processing and simple billing and reporting. I wanted to hear Kate and maybe just pause and let you speak to what you see. I know you guys have a good amount of 3PLs on the SkuVault side of things. When it comes to these four pieces of it, what have you been hearing from 3PLs, and even on the brand side where they get requested from their customers? Where’s the pain points here when you’re starting a relationship with a 3PL?

Kate Mortenson:

Sure. Thank you, Travis. Usually what I’m encountering is two big categories of pain points. I think one of them is being able to have visibility and then being able to share knowledge about where your inventory is to multiple places. Part of that is sharing visibility and sharing inventory values with your clients. But also, depending on your service level agreement, you might be responsible for sharing inventory to their marketplace. So then, you guys are on the line in making sure that there’s integrity in that inventory and that’s SkuVault’s bread and butter. That’s what we’re really good at.

Kate Mortenson:

What we are also seeing is day-to-day operations for how do we bill our customers. Everybody’s billing is slightly different, but most of the time what we see is billing for transactions and for storage. Being able to get a handle on proven data to prove what work you’ve done when the work happened and how you had it accomplished is something that is an ongoing problem for 3PLs because it takes up so much time.

Kate Mortenson:

With SkuVault, we’re able to give you really dedicated reports to show what work has been happening for the clients. That helps you bill faster, which helps get cash in hand faster and can free up some time for you to focus on growing your business.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that’s super helpful and it’s definitely what we see as well on our side.

Kate Mortenson:

Awesome.

Travis Mariea:

If you ever attended a Flxpoint webinar demo, you know we like our diagrams, we like to show workflows. We really think… Everything we do is workflow orientated, and that’s really why you join a program like ours or buy our software is to automate these workflows.

Travis Mariea:

What Kate just mentioned, there’s enough complexity just in that, just in the onboarding and the syncing and the order, visibility and inventory visibility just in the single source, what we call the “3PL only” fulfillment brands. I sell watches, I’ve got my own brand of watches and I just want to outsource the fulfillment. I don’t want to start a warehouse, I want to go live in the Philippines or Thailand and live the ecommerce lifestyle. And so, I work with one 3PL and they’re on SkuVault so I can easily connect it. Kate going to show how that’s easily done.

Travis Mariea:

That’s easy enough, right? All the orders that come from my Amazon store or my Shopify store, they’re automatically sent to the 3PL via SkuVault connector. The inventory synced, obviously, so I don’t have a lot of stockouts and I’m showing the accurate quantities of my store. That’s simple enough. Tracking’s pulled back. You can see the 3PLs is on SkuVault, you’re on your own Shopify store and Amazon store. Not a lot of software, not a lot of needs, not a lot of complexity there. That’s great. No Flxpoint, as you can see. We don’t really add a lot of value here, admittedly. That’s not where we sit.

Travis Mariea:

However, when we get into what we call hybrid fulfillment brands, that’s really where Flxpoint comes in. It allows 3PLs to work with brands that have hybrid fulfillment.

Travis Mariea:

If you have not heard the term before, hybrid fulfillment really means what it sounds like, I fulfill in at least two different ways. Maybe three, maybe four, whatever it might be, but I fulfill for my 3PL, like we saw earlier which is on SkuVault. But I also have my own internal warehouse I just set up. I’m not the ecommerce lifestyle guy. I have a large brand and I have a large ecommerce business and I have an existing warehouse, but I want to leverage to 3PL because I wanted to test it out and see how it might work for me. I might have it because I only have an east coast warehouse and I want a west coast warehouse or maybe a different country, whatever it might be there. I might be getting a 3PL just for a different type of product that I don’t want to carry, like it’s a lot larger or whatever it might be. I don’t want to have to warehouse it. Maybe there’s some cooling refrigeration needed. There’s a lot of reasons why you might want to keep your internal warehouse and also work with a third-party warehouse.

Travis Mariea:

Then obviously drop shipping. That’s still a big piece, right? We see brands… You might think why would a brand dropship? How does that factor in? I mean, there’s a lot of brands that are starting to drop ship other goods to leverage other brands to bring in traffic to their website.

Travis Mariea:

We see companies… We know there’s an electronics company that we work with that sells a lot of their own branded iPhone cases and photography bags, a lot of modern electronics products, but then they also partnered with the large electronics companies to provide drones on their websites and high-end Canon and Sony camera equipment.

Travis Mariea:

So, a lot of reasons why you might be a hybrid fulfillment brand. Just sending and connecting into your single 3PL on SkuVault might not make sense, and that’s really where Flxpoint comes in.

Travis Mariea:

Whether it’s just coming from your B2C channels or even if you’ve got B2B resellers, the orders can come in through Flxpoint, route to SkuVault. Only send the orders that make sense to your 3PL that’s on SkuVault, not overwhelming them with items that might not be something that’s in their warehouse and causing that complexity like we talked about in those four bullets earlier about, making it easy for them to fulfill not harder.

Travis Mariea:

Sending fulfillment requests also dynamically generating purchase orders if it’s in the case of a dropship supplier. That’s really where we sit and how we fit in the equation. I just want to paint that picture with our infamous diagrams here on this webinar.

Travis Mariea:

Cool. That’s what we’re talking about today, that’s what we’re going to be demoing, so I want to give you that background. That’s Flxpoint plus SkuVault. That’s where we fit in the equation and where SkuVault fits. From there, I’ll kick it over to… We’ll come back to this one. We already touched on it, but I’ll kick it over to Kate here on SkuVault demo, the business hub functionality.

Kate Mortenson:

Awesome. Thank you, Travis. I’m going to go and share my screen, guys. What we’re first going to look at is what the view in SkuVault looks like. We’re going to talk through how to establish the data sharing rules, and then we’ll wrap it up, looking at the portal, which is what you would be sharing that invitation out for. I’m going to go ahead and share this screen.

Kate Mortenson:

What SkuVault has done, we’ve built secure data sharing. It’s a network so that you can invite people in to see your inventory. If you are connected in a hybrid model, like what Travis is talking about, and where we can really partner with Flxpoint to be dynamic for you, you can actually have paid instances of SkuVault or two SkuVault accounts connected sharing inventory as well because really the name of the game here is visibility for your whole supply chain, that whole network that needs to be interconnected. That’s what we’re doing here.

Kate Mortenson:

We can also just invite our clients in to see our inventory based on a couple of rules, which is what we’re looking at right here. This is business hub where we can see the connections that I have established and the direction that the data is flowing. You can have people sharing their inventory with you to be able to have visibility on it and then also share that inventory out with certain people.

Kate Mortenson:

To add somebody in or to invite them in, you would go into your SkuVault account and go into add this connection. The company information is who are we going to be talking to? This is the point of contact that you need to be sharing with. I’m just going to type some stuff in here. When you are inviting somebody in, you’re actually using a rules engine that we’ve built to establish what information needs to be shared with who. We’ve actually also designed this so if you wanted, you could just share catalog data with somebody saying these are the SKUs that we’re managing for you, and you can also choose to share inventory values. You can choose to share just one or both of those.

Kate Mortenson:

Let’s say we want to share both. I’m going to say establish a rule name so that I can identify and edit it later if I need. From there, this is where we’re using some attributes that you can use in SkuVault to determine how we’re going to share information.

Kate Mortenson:

One of the biggest ones that we’ve invested in for 3PLs is the client identifier. As a 3PL, you guys know when you are doing work, like I talked about earlier. You want to be paid for it, right? You’re not going to do labor if you’re not going to be able to bill for that. In SkuVault, you can associate client ID with a particular SKU or catalog of SKUs for your client. Every time you interact with that SKU with the system, we’re cataloging those interactions in an event stream that you can then bill for later.

Kate Mortenson:

That’s also used, though, to share inventory like we’re seeing here. Here, if client contains here’s one of my clients, then I can choose to share inventory. I can continue to add conditions as needed. If brands contains… Let’s say I just want to share Adidas with them, I have that ability to really be precise about what I want to share.

Kate Mortenson:

If these parameters are satisfied, then I can share inventory. The way SkuVault works, if you guys are familiar with our software, we have IMS and WMS, inventory management and warehouse. Flxpoint really comes in with that order routing piece to give you a full business picture.

Kate Mortenson:

What we’re seeing here is the ability to share IMS data, the inventory that we’re managing, and then WMWs data, which is more of where exactly that inventory is. Here, this “if-then” statement is “if my warehouse contains…” These are the list of my warehouses. I pick the warehouses I want to share then I can choose to share on-hand inventory, incoming inventory and available inventory.

Kate Mortenson:

Just to briefly explain that, incoming is the inventory that’s inbound to you, on hand is the inventory that’s physically in your possession and available inventory is the inventory that’s still available for sale. If you guys are familiar with SkuVault, generally the rule of thumb is orders come in and we send inventory back out, accounting for those items that are on sale. We call that pending inventory. On hand is physically what I have, pending is what’s sold and then available is on hand minus pending, just to briefly explain what that is.

Kate Mortenson:

From here, I would send that invite out. My client would get an email letting them know that they’ve been invited into their inventory. Once they follow that… I’m going to stop my screen share and show you the portal. Once they click on that link and they accept the invite, they would be able to view this portal of inventory.

Kate Mortenson:

The page that they actually land on is the network page. This data sharing rules, these pages, if they wanted to upgrade to be able to share inventory out to another place, they would get SkuVault. But where they would land when they first accept the invite is this network page, which looks pretty similar to the page we were just on. You would see your invite here, they would click accept. From there, it would be an active connection for them. Here you can see that I’m providing this portal with my inventory.

Kate Mortenson:

From this page they’d also be able to view their inventory and catalog that you’re managing. They’d be able to export that information out. What they’d be able to export is the SKU data. So, SKU, barcode, title. That information, as well as those inventory values that we talked about. Also, if for some reason they needed to, they could disconnect that connection.

Kate Mortenson:

What we’re also able to do is offer them a chance to provide a profile where they can describe what their business is. That’s really useful for us in knowing what to build next and how to better service them. As 3PLs you guys understand that industries have very specific needs and us and Flxpoint are catering to those various needs to make sure that nobody gets left behind.

Kate Mortenson:

Next, we’re going to go into our catalog so that you can see what they would be able to view. This is very similar to the Skubot catalog that you guys are probably familiar with if you’re Skubot clients. This is our single source of truth. I also like to think of it as a global inventory view because we’re able to see all the types of inventory that you need to keep track of.

Kate Mortenson:

What they’re seeing here is SKU data, all of the different ways that we can categorize and classify it, as well as our inventory values. Here, I don’t have any inventory incoming for these SKUs, but I do have inventory on hand and I have my available inventory here as well.

Kate Mortenson:

This is view only at the moment. So they’re not able to do much more than just view the inventory. We’re providing a window into the warehouse so they can stop calling you guys at midnight wondering what inventory you have on hand. They can come here, look at what inventory they have and decide what needs to be sent to you, which can help them make better business decisions about where to invest money and where to send stuff.

Kate Mortenson:

Under the admin piece, they’re able to import their own catalog if they wanted to view that. They could see that product information in the catalog themselves. From here, they can also reach out to our support team. As you guys know, as a business starts outsourcing labor, part of that outsourcing is outsourcing software. You’re not just buying warehouse space, you’re buying a team of people to do work for you. Part of that’s going to be software.

Kate Mortenson:

I just like to mention that they’re not on an island by themselves here. We’re still available to help support things as needed. Maybe eventually they’d want to get a SkuVault account too, and then they’d be able to share even more information back and forth.

Kate Mortenson:

Travis, I’m going to go ahead and kick it back to you. Thank you so much.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, perfect. Thanks, Kate. I always love to see your guy’s accounts, your specific accounts. It makes a lot of sense when you showed that demo there, so I appreciate that. Caroline, I’m going to go ahead and just talk a couple minutes here on this question and just share one more slide and then we’ll kick it over to you for your demo of Flxpoint.

Travis Mariea:

All right, I will share my screen. Kate, I might need your help on answering this question.

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. You can probably see the question currently.

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah, yeah. I was wondering… I was going to wait for that one, but I’ll go ahead and answer it now if that’s okay.

Kate Mortenson:

Onboarding SkuVault, generally, we say it takes about four weeks, four to six weeks. SkuVault’s incredibly data driven, so when I say 4-6 weeks, you can break that into three main categories. Good data in means good data out. SkuVault’s got a lot of reporting. Part of it is this portal that we just talked about. How do I make sure that my data is clean enough so that I can share it with confidence?

Kate Mortenson:

So, we’ve got data analysts, we’ve got a data team that can help you with that. That’s the first step of getting set up in SkuVault, the database. Getting your catalog established, creating virtual warehouses, all of that information.

Kate Mortenson:

The next phase would be what we call the usage phase, or what I call the usage phase. That’s where we’re designing your day-to-day workflows and pressure testing the system we just built to make sure that it’s bulletproof. Because honestly, if you guys work in tech, you understand that technology breaks and coming back from that break is what sets you up for success, so that’s what you’re doing with your onboarding coach here at SkuVault. From there, you go live. That’s the last step of the process.

Kate Mortenson:

Again, like I say, four to six weeks is pretty average for us. Keep in mind, if you had data that was really messy, it might take a little bit longer than that. Or if you guys are really ready to go, I’ve seen people get up and running in a week and a half. I’d say a month is pretty fair.

Travis Mariea:

Got you. Awesome. Yeah, there was one here, another one specifically that I was keen to answer before moving onto ours. This one, it says, “Would you say that SkuVault in Amazon FBA should be fine with just SkuVault? We’re having a tough time getting those two channels to work with Shopify.” I’m not sure. I guess, my thought would be you’ve got some inventory, right? Let’s go here real quick. So, you’ve got some inventory and SkuVault and a 3PL. Maybe it’s your internal warehouse, maybe it’s a 3PL you’re working with. And then you also have what I would consider FBA. It’s like another 3PL to some extent. I feel like that’s a good case where Flxpoint might make sense but, Kate, do you guys handle FBA routing between SkuVault and FBA today or do you guys solve for that today without Flxpoint?

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah, we can. I would say, if you’re just running with Shopify and Amazon as an FBA, you could probably make that work. Where we would really want to rely on Flxpoint is if we need to make decisions about where orders need to be fulfilled.

Kate Mortenson:

If it’s a used case where it’s if I don’t have the inventory in my warehouse, then I need to kick it to FBA. We’d probably want to rely on Flxpoint to help us with that decision. If, however, you have very strict, these orders are going to be merchant fulfilled and these other orders are FBA fulfilled, then we could help solve for that.

Travis Mariea:

That’s great. I appreciate that clarification. That’s really where… I mean, if you have overlap, is the way we describe it, do you have the exact same product in two different locations and you need to make a decision on where to route it, right?

Kate Mortenson:

Exactly.

Travis Mariea:

And then it runs out. So, yeah, if it’s too distinct, appreciate that clarification, Kate. It sounds like SkuVault can handle that. If you feel like at any point you’re going to keep that exact same inventory in both FBA or your own warehouse, that’s where Flxpoint, that’s really why we exist.

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah.

Travis Mariea:

All right, cool. I will stop sharing and I’ll kick it over to Caroline.

Caroline Crouch:

Okay. Perfect segue. Everyone, I am our partner’s manager. I’m just going to go into the app a little bit to really walk through that use case that was asked.

Caroline Crouch:

Basically this is our app here. You can easily integrate with SkuVault and setup those integrations as well as any dropship suppliers, like Travis gave the example earlier. We do have a brand that we’re working with that has all of the photography and technology accessories, but they also want to sell those high price items on their site like a drone or a Sony camera. They might have this set up where they have a dropship supplier as well as their SkuVault warehouse or SkuVault 3PL.

Caroline Crouch:

For those use cases where you do have SKU overlap, like Travis had mentioned through that question, Flxpoint can show you that. I set up filters here to say this can be based off virtually any use case you can think of, but maybe we need to look at which SKUs we do have overlap between. The number of inventory links is greater than one is what I set up here. Now, you can look into any of these products to be able to see that information.

Caroline Crouch:

We have Flxpoint set up at the source inventory level, product catalog level and then channel listing level. All those diagrams showed you can have it on a Shopify store or any other… the marketplaces that we’re integrated with or, of course, any other custom sales channels. The power of the order routing, being able to make the strategic decisions is going to come into play between that SKU overlap.

Caroline Crouch:

Looking out one of these products as well, anything that you want to be able to import, whether that be from your 3PL, if it’s estimated fees or shipping costs, you can take those into consideration to help strategically price all of your items on your online store or marketplace as well as strategically be able to account for that when sending to dropship suppliers.

Caroline Crouch:

Looking into the order piece here, you do have abilities to filter and manage all of your orders. When you open up one of these, you’ll be able to see the line items that are included and then the purchase orders or fulfillment requests that we’ve sent over to the 3PL, your internal warehouse or dropship supplier. In some instances, if those need to be split up because of the strategic routing orders that you set like Kate was mentioning, you maybe send this one fulfillment order to your warehouse and then one to FBA, we can do that per each order that comes in.

Caroline Crouch:

Just to show you an example of some of these rules. In our order routing settings here, you can basically set up priorities based on all of these listed. Lowest cost takes it to consideration the estimated fees that you can set; single source is just preferring that it comes from one location, which is usually going to make shipping more affordable and order just much smoother; and then preferred sources, you can enable which sources you prefer.

Caroline Crouch:

If it is a specific use case, for instance, you can set up rules for any of these order routing settings. If the country code is a certain code or if the brand is a certain brand, we’re always going to try to fulfill from our 3PL first. Any of these data points can set up those rulings, and then you can enable which sources you prefer.

Caroline Crouch:

We also have closest in margin functionality to be able to take that into consideration especially if you’re working with different 3PLs in different warehouses that you have across the country for shipping. But basically, that order routing allows you to be strategic and take advantage of that SKU overlap, as we call it, in an automated fashion.

Caroline Crouch:

That’s pretty much the condensed demo there. Do we have any questions or anything, Travis, that you’d want to touch on?

Travis Mariea:

No, I think that’s right. In general, I think the big thing there is looking at the order routing. A lot of times it’s a very simple setup in a prefer lowest cost. You touched on it a little bit, but one thing that we do a little bit better than what I’ve seen in other automated systems is you’re going to look at the lowest cost, you then go look at how close is it. Is it within a percent margin you get set? If it’s only a difference in a dollar or whatever it might be, then you can move on to the closest. Because you’re not only trying to drive efficiency and optimize for profitability and things like that, but if it’s a dollar or 0.50 cents different, if you route it to this warehouse, in other warehouse, you just go to the closest and make sure that gets there as quick as possible.

Travis Mariea:

There are a lot of different factors you can tweak there to make sure that you’re optimizing for both cost but also customer happiness. A lot of times the closest is going to be the cheapest, anyways, but we’ve got all that in there.

Travis Mariea:

Single source is really just making sure no matter what, that you might have some interesting kind of use cases. But we’re always going to prefer that and then move on to the next one and then check for closes, check for [inaudible 00:29:35]. So, it’s not like it’s a pick which one here, it’s look at all of these and optimize. You’re basically building an algorithm here to make sure you’re shipping the best way possible and it’s checking across multiple things.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, I just want to touch on that. But, yeah, in general when it comes down to high volume of orders and you have several different decisions, that’s really what the order routing here is for.

Travis Mariea:

Cool. I think from my side, I think we might be ready for the questions. Let me just check. Yeah, let me go ahead and share real quick, Caroline. I’ll do just a quick wrap up on our side, and then if you want to look in the questions queue and see if there’s anything. I’ll just wrap up with this last slide here.

Travis Mariea:

I touched on this slide a little bit here first, but just to bring it home, your client, if you’re the 3PL, you’re going to be using SkuVault. You may already be using SkuVault as your WMS and IMS in managing all of your 3PL business and other business as well when it comes to your physical inventory.

Travis Mariea:

Kate showed the SkuVault client portal, the business hub side of things. This is where your client can really come in, look at real time stock levels, get their billing reports and things like that, get the billing reports emailed, really interface with. As Kate mentioned, not really going to be emailing you in the middle of the night, calling you in the middle of the day, things like that. That’s that main use case.

Travis Mariea:

In that same client, just to be clear, they would be the one using Flxpoint. When they’re using Flxpoint, they’re using that to publish their brands, products up to their Shopify store; sync with their Amazon store, Magento, BigCommerce, whatever it might be; sync the inventory across multiple different fulfillment sources, and then also routing the orders when they get in, as Caroline showed, to either generate the fulfillment request into your internal warehouse or route the drop ship suppliers for the purchase order.

Travis Mariea:

So yeah, that’s where things sit. I know we had a couple questions coming in already and I think we had some more here as well.

Caroline Crouch:

Yeah. I can walk through and direct these questions to you and Kate. First question, how would I connect my 3PL that isn’t on SkuVault? Travis, do you want to take that one?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, exactly. The benefit of the SkuVault and Flxpoint relationship is that we have this direct API integration. We fully evaluated and re-evaluated the API as things come up or change. We pull in all the data. We pull in cost data and things like that from SkuVault so you can use it all in that rule set that I showed earlier, Caroline showed.

Travis Mariea:

It doesn’t stop us from also integrating with a 3PL that’s not on SkuVault. If they have an FTP transaction process, we can set that up. We have a self-service portal that allows you to do that. Our team can help set it up as well. No extra charge when it comes to just doing an FTP connection. There’s API integrations. We can integrate to their API, they can integrate to our API. It really just comes down to who wants to build. That’s obviously easy to do and we’ve got a full team that can help there.

Travis Mariea:

And then, yeah. I mean, it just depends. Are they on another platform that we integrate in? Maybe they have a Shopify connector? We’ve even done that with a couple 3PLs, which is interesting. The 3PLs on an archaic WMS that doesn’t have an API. Whatever it might be, they’re like, well, we pushed everything to Shopify anyways, so why don’t you just pull from there? We got a prebuilt integration into Shopify to pull inventory out.

Travis Mariea:

As you can see in this diagram, all we do is look to connect with your supply chain and integrate it to your sales channels. Integration is definitely core to what we do. We can help really in any possible way.

Caroline Crouch:

Thanks, Travis. I think you touched on this in that answer, but complex point allow me to send the cost to my customers. If you just want to-

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, it’s a good point. I did talk about we can pull it from SkuVault. If you’re the 3PL, it sounds like this person’s a 3PL, you might have every pick pack fee for certain types of items, if it’s certain size or whatever. It might have a fee associate, it might just be a blanket fee. We can pull that in and we can send that up to the brands as well and those brands can leverage that in the rule set Caroline was showing earlier. It definitely can pull in more of that metadata which is nice when you have the SkuVault, the Flxpoint connection.

Caroline Crouch:

Thank you. This one for Kate, where does SkuVault come in the touring process?

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah, thanks. I did see that question and I was a little confused by it. I don’t know if we can get any clarification. But touring process, maybe I have [inaudible 00:34:30] what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a demo, a full demo of SkuVault, we’d love to do that with you. You can reach out to us and we can get in touch and schedule one of those. If you want a full tour of the process or the software, if that’s what you’re looking for. I apologize if I didn’t answer your question, but if you can let us know in the chat if that helped or if you need something else, I’d be happy to answer that.

Caroline Crouch:

Thanks, Kate. Yeah, feel free to send in a followup question to that one. Another SkuVault question. I guess it’s both, so we’ll see. In SkuVault, where would Flxpoint be connected? Through the channel accounts? Can we have multiple Flxpoint connections, one per client?

Kate Mortenson:

I could take the SkuVault side, if that’s okay, and then I’ll kick it over to you, Travis. It’s actually going to be set up on the Flxpoint side of things. Flxpoint built to us, so you’re not going to go to your channel accounts page to establish that connection. You would work through Flxpoint to set that up.

Travis Mariea:

Okay. Yes, that’s definitely a good point. Really, when you set the sources, the first piece that Caroline showed with all the sources there, you would go and actually select the connection and then you select SkuVault as the connection type and you choose either to pull inventory, send orders, pull tracking. In this case, you most likely will select all three. Yeah, I would assume that would be the case at least if you’re just doing one.

Travis Mariea:

If you had multiple clients, I would imagine that… I think there’s a warehouse key. We could definitely follow up on this, but I do believe that there is probably multiple client scenario, I don’t know. Kate, do you have any, maybe, insight into how we might configure that? I do know we could pick specific warehouses, but I don’t know if we could pick specific channels or something along those lines.

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah. I don’t know that the client ID is a shared value between your routing rules and the attributes we put on our SKUs here, but I think we’d be able to create a virtual warehouse for the client and then set that as a routing rule. I think that’d probably be the easiest way to establish it.

Travis Mariea:

Yes, certainly. I do know we will support this and we don’t today. I mean, that’s the whole point. We’re going to have more than one client on Flxpoint, hopefully. And so, yeah, there’s no doubt. Simon, if you want, we’re happy to jump on with a sales engineer on our side and maybe loop SkuVault as well and talk through that. It should be possible today. If it’s not, we can easily make that configuration change. So, happy to answer that. If you wanted to follow-up from here, feel free to reach out to us. Caroline, we can always share emails and things at the end. Cool.

Travis Mariea:

It looks like this last one is for SkuVault.

Caroline Crouch:

Yes. Last question for Kate, can SkuVault create parent-children relationships for products?

Kate Mortenson:

Yeah, thank you. Nick, I need a little bit more information about what you need for parent and children. If we’re talking about the way data gets set up like in BigCommerce, you can have a parent SKU that houses all the SKU information like title and then price and all of that, and then the children is just for your variance, for your size run.

Kate Mortenson:

It’s not quite like that in SkuVault, but if we’re talking about… Hold on. Before I move on. It’s not like that in SkuVault because each unit, each widget needs to have its own SKU. You’re not going to have a parent SKU and then related children underneath it. Those children would need their own SKUs as well.

Kate Mortenson:

If, however, you’re talking about a kit relationship where you have one identifying SKU that says this item will contain X number of SKUs, then yes, we can help support that.

Travis Mariea:

Just to piggyback on that real quick. As Kate mentioned earlier, SkuVault truly, and IMS, WMS, if it comes to actually maintaining a product catalog, that’s really where we can excel and augment that relationship. If it comes to adding a variation structure; parent t-shirt, that is a t-shirt, it’s Dwight from the office t-shirt. We like Dwight, as you can see from the presentation, but it’s in yellow, green and red and it’s also large, medium, small, whatever. We maintain that with all the images specific to the variant and the images that show on the parent.

Travis Mariea:

If you’re referring to more of a catalog-type structure and maintenance of a catalog, we do act as a [inaudible 00:38:55] to some extent, even a product listing tool listing up to storefronts, like Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify; creating the products up with the images, custom fields, attributes, variations, all of that. Hopefully that’s helpful.

Caroline Crouch:

Following up on the previous question, it was a typo, the touring process. He meant routing process. Where does SkuVault come in in the routing process?

Travis Mariea:

I could touch real quick on that and maybe pass it to Kate if I don’t explain it correctly. It sounds like it does… We sit upstream, maybe to go back to this one. We do sit upstream. In most cases, if you feel Flxpoint is necessary, and we talked about it’s probably necessary if you have multiple different fulfillment options, one being an internal warehouse or 3PL and then drop shippers. If that’s the case, we’re typically upstream here in the middle and we’re splitting off orders that only SkuVault should receive.

Travis Mariea:

If it’s your internal warehouse, it’s only the things that you have in stock. If it’s 3PLs, it’s only things they have stocked, whatever it might be. But it sounds like even if, for some reason, you don’t have complex needs and it’s just simply you have two different lots of inventory that always are in your FBA or always in your warehouse and you don’t need decisions to be made, I think SkuVault does split and route, from what Kate was saying earlier.

Kate Mortenson:

Yes, that’s exactly right. Flxpoint is the brain that taps SkuVault to do the work. That’s the way you can think about it. That’s where we have fallen there.

Travis Mariea:

Perfect.

Caroline Crouch:

Another question for Travis, do you work closely with inventory source?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, we certainly do. When it comes to dropship suppliers, we’re connected directly into inventory source and we will pull any inventory source supplier in the inventory source directory. We have a prebuilt integration the same way we have prebuilt integration with SkuVault or the Shopify connection I’ve talked about earlier. We have a prebuilt integration with inventory source so we can pull in any inventory source data, route orders, send tracking all that kind of stuff with them as well.

Caroline Crouch:

Thank you. I think those are all the questions that have been submitted, so I think that’s everything for today.

Travis Mariea:

Awesome. I appreciate it, Caroline, for putting this together. Kate, thanks so much for your insight and the demo of business hub. I know we’ll be sending this recording out and posting on our YouTube, all of that. Yes, replay available. Will be. I think everyone here will be getting a replay, a recorded version. If you’re not already, subscribe to us on YouTube. Just find Flxpoint on YouTube and subscribe there. I’m sure SkuVault may have a channel as well and it’ll be posted there as well. That’s it for me.