Transcript
We have a great update scheduled around our Velocity platform and a lot of exciting things that are going on in the area of supply chain mobile productivity. So without further ado, let me introduce our team for today. Thank you all for joining us. And we've got the Greggs you may know very well already, Gregg Henry, Gregg Berger, as well as Chris Bjornstad, our friends from the field. So appreciate our presenters being on. We're going to go through several bits of the Velocity platform in some good detail with some recent updates. We're also going to talk through the value you can get from different workflow optimization and a deep dive into what's really been the newest area that our customers have been inquiring about is the ability to get more of your legacy paper applications into digital form. So without further ado, I'm going to pass things over to Gregg Henry to get us started. So welcome, Gregg. Thanks, Rob. So welcome, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. We did a little survey, informal survey a couple of weeks ago, and just asked folks in the industry, what is Velocity? And we got a bunch of different answers, right? We got a mobile telnet client, we got a browser, something that goes fast. And so we recognized that, you know, maybe it's time to update everybody on what Velocity is today versus what it might have been 15 years ago. And with that, those answers, while they're all true, we really wanted to challenge folks to think about Velocity differently than we probably have in the past. And that is, you know, lots of folks think of it as either a web client or a telnet client. But really, it's evolved into a mobile application suite. And as we go through this deck, you'll understand that. And that suite is really, all components of it are really focused on improving worker productivity, accuracy, and safety. If you leverage the platform to its full capability, it really allows you to do even more than that. And it allows you to go in and edit existing workflows, improve those workflows to further improve user productivity, accuracy, and safety. And with that, we want to jump in and take you through the platform. So Velocity, you know, started, you know, we've been, Wavelink Avanti, we've been in this mobile computing space for 30 years. The first version of Velocity was a telnet client. And you know, it allowed our mobile users to connect to legacy WMS systems, ERP systems, and so forth. And soon after developing that, we then released what we call our Velocity Session Persistent Server. It does not get used a lot these days. You know, 20 years ago, Wi-Fi networks weren't as stable as they are today. And so you would have devices that would occasionally get disconnected from the server. And so we built this little piece of middleware that allowed you to maintain those connections without having to worry about resetting the device. Today, about 10% of our install base uses this server. It's a free download. So, you know, most people start out just going direct to the server. If they find that they have a troublesome environment, they might add this later on. After we developed telnet, we went and built the Velocity web client. And that is an industrial browser really focused on connecting mobile devices with any web-based enterprise application. And kind of the beauty of these two, and we'll, as we go to the next family members that were added, this is a single APK. So it's one program. You download it one time onto the device. And then you can activate these different modalities of it through the licensing. Once we did the web, we then built a voice capability into the device, which has proven to be the quickest and most cost-effective voice picking solution on the market today. And why we can say that is it's a software-only add-on. It sits all on the mobile device. We've got lots of customers that have voice-enabled existing workflows in under 30 days. So it's really quick. Only being a software component, it's cost-effective. And we find that it mostly fits really well in picking environments. And then we moved on to Velocity Forms, which is what the majority of this, today's presentation will be about. Velocity Forms is, you know, a digital forms tool that allows you to collect, to create and collect data or collect your own, sorry, and create your own forms to collect data from any kind of topic, right? And we'll talk a lot about this in the second half. But this is kind of, when you think about, you know, where we started 30 years ago, we were replacing paper picklists and put-away sheets, right? Warehouse workers were running around the warehouse with tablets, not tablet computers, paper tablets, and writing things down. And so we've been replacing paper, really, our entire 30 years of existence. And we're doing it really, and you'll see some really cool things in the next 40 minutes. From there, oh, and let me say, so when you think of it, when you think of those boxes there, that really is a product suite, right? You can download our client. You can run one or more of those individually and get the appropriate ROIs. When you start thinking about Velocity as a platform, that's where scripting comes in. And scripting is very unique to Velocity in that we've got the ability to, behind the scenes, go in and change workflows, modify those workflows. Again, all on the mobile device, so there's no malware. There's no, you know, any changes you have to make to your host computer. It's all done on the mobile device. This is a game changer, and we'll give you a couple examples of how people are really leveraging that. And this runs across the entire product suite at the top. The next component in the family is the Velocity console. This is a really nice user interface that goes and allows you to quickly edit, modify settings on the application itself. So things like, you know, turning on barcode scanning, what kind of preambles and post-ambles do you want on your data being collected? A lot, you know, there's 100 different settings that allow you to quickly go in and configure a device to get exactly the performance you're looking for. And finally, we have an on-premise license server. This is how we manage on the licensing, and the same server supports all modalities as well. All right, so that's kind of the background there. To give you a visual how the Velocity, you know, in a Telnet world, you've got your enterprise server, might be an AS400, might be some Unix box, right? It could be anything that's been built over the last 30, 40 years. With the Telnet client, you can communicate directly to the enterprise server, or should you need that persistent server installed, you simply drop that on your network, reconfigure the device to talk to the persistent server, which then connects back to the enterprise system. If you're in a web world, you can go directly from your web client to the enterprise server. So you've got lots of variability there, and we can, you know, ensure that it runs in a broad array of environments. Why an industrial browser? So we get a lot of folks, you know, talk about why should I buy Velocity Web versus using Chrome? And the real big difference here is, yes, Chrome works for many applications, but it doesn't give you the best experience. We've built in the ability for, in our browser, to know when you're in contact with your Wi-Fi and you're out of range. And if you go out of range, we literally notify the user, we stop the application, we notify the user that you're out of range. And we do this because, you know, web applications are interactive, and you can't be talking, you need to have that connection in order to secure those transmissions. We've also built reconnect scripts that you can go ahead and, when you find yourself out of range, immediately try to reconnect. We've got custom keyboards, we've got all kinds of scanning control. It really takes Chrome to another level and allows, you know, to lock this all down. Again, all of these things are shared across the platform, regardless of which modality you're running. And that's, I'm sorry, that's the key to this thing, is to not think about it as an individual application, but a suite or platform product. And why I say all this is because what we really built is an enterprise application launcher, where you can launch, from a single application, any Telnet or web-based interface. And so rather than having lots of icons all over the screen and users needing to know which application to click, and they're going in and out of different applications, we can deliver that one interface that allows you to intermingle Telnet sessions, web sessions, and now form sessions. Again, looking at ways to improve user training, improve productivity, and just make that work environment a little bit easier for the worker. Scripting, we want to take a real look at scripting, because again, scripting is the magic behind this platform. You know, we've got customers and partners that are using the scripting to do very, very clever things. And we'll share a couple of those with you right now. So, you know, kind of the first introduction to scripting folks do is, if we're using Telnet as an example, you've got your traditional Telnet screen here. What I might do is just add some branding to it. And so in this case, I dropped my company logo in there. I could also drop a phone number, a support line number on there, for example. You know, if you're having trouble, contact extension 3416 as an example. So you can put some easy, consistent interface stuff to the screens. Or if you want to go full-blown modernization, you can actually take a Telnet green screen and modernize it so that it gets a complete GUI over interface replacement. These are actually the same application running on the device. One is the traditional Telnet green screen. As you can see, the text-based stuff. And on the other side, we've modernized it. Again, through the scripting engine, we've been able to go in there and change the screens that the user sees as they're being presented on the device. No host changes were made to do this. No middleware has been added. This is all done on the device and makes it really, really easy for customers to upgrade their interface, mobile worker interface, without, again, having to touch the host or make any investments in back-end architecture. The other thing, and this is one thing that we see a lot of folks doing, is traditional legacy applications weren't necessarily built with a mobile device in mind. And so many of the applications you run into look just like this, where you'll get a screen and you're asked to perform a function. In this case, you select one to do a warehouse. That then brings up a submenu, which if you're looking to do some tasks on this, then you'd press number two. That brings up another level of questions. And in this case, I want to do pick to tote. So in order for me to get to where I wanted to be, I just had to do three key presses. With the scripting engine, what we're able to do is take those three keystrokes and bury them behind an icon. So in this case, same application, user comes in and says, oh, I need to do tote picking, presses that icon, and behind the scenes, what we've done is entered the appropriate keys to the server, to get it to the appropriate screen that the user wants to use. One of our clients took 14 steps out of their workflow and improved productivity by 24%. If you walk the floor with a user, I guarantee you're going to find that they're pressing keys to do things that can be eliminated. And our real focus is every second counts. When you're doing these repetitive tasks, especially in a warehouse, any time you can remove a second from a process across lots of people over multiple shifts, those kinds of savings really, really add up. And so this is where we find the folks that get the best ROI out of our products are the folks that really leverage the scripting capability. And then finally, we're able to connect new technologies to your mobile device. So we've partnered with companies like 615. They do heads-up displays where in a day they can take an existing application and present it on a heads-up display glasses literally in a day. And they add some scripting calls that take the screen data, format it, push it to their device. We've got folks that are using these scripting tools to connect to wearable scanners, scales, RFID tags. We're actually talking with robots in some cases, video cameras. There's really no limit to how you can exchange data between the mobile device and some of these alternate technologies. I want to do a really quick shout-out for Velocity Voice. So like I said earlier, Velocity Voice is a plug-in for part of the Velocity family. Again, it's really focused on improving user productivity, accuracy, and safety. Whether you're doing small parts picking and you need the ability to be hands-free, Voice works really well for that. It also works really well in environments where folks are moving large items, tires and things like that where you absolutely need to have both hands-free. So if you've got customers with picking environments, this is a natural no-brainer. And I encourage you to talk to folks in your picking stations and explore this technology because it really does produce good ROIs, low, low risk. You can turn it off and not use it if you have a problem. So it's kind of passive if it needs to be. But again, really, really nice voice solution. And so when we talk about the Velocity Value Equation, it really comes down to incremental productivity, improved accuracy, and safer environments drives better business outcomes. And at the end of the day, that's what we're all here for, right? We're here to drive better business outcomes, improve business functionality, workflows, and so forth. And with that, I'll turn it back to Rob, and Mr. Berger will talk about Velocity Forms. So thanks, Greg. I appreciate that. And hi, everybody. I get to talk about the fun stuff today, the new stuff, and that is Velocity Forms. We've been kind of kicking around with Velocity Forms for a little over a year or so, but we released it to the cloud this year, which makes it so much easier to consume, and we'll talk a little bit about that. So I love this slide. This made me laugh when I read this. It made me think of – I can't remember whether it was a commercial or whether it was a public service announcement, but it's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? Well, it's kind of funny because the warehouse is kind of like that when it comes to forms. And this really speaks to two different questions that Velocity can provide the answers for. One is your blank forms. You know, there's things like weird one-off incident reports and things that have to be reported, a damaged barcode or a vehicle's down or there was an accident or something like that, and somebody's got to scramble around and go find where the form is in order to fill it out. They're not carrying it around with them. And so Velocity can quickly give them access to those forms on a device that they're already using. The other is once the data has been completed, where's my data on a completed form? And so Velocity gives you the ability to route that information automatically, store it securely in the cloud, or share it using web services to another application that is already in use. So it kind of addresses it from both angles. So, again, you know, why would you want to switch to digital forms? I mean, some of this is obvious. You know, we just talked about speed of capture and routing of the information and avoiding the lost records. You know exactly where your data is all the time. But, you know, a lot of these projects, in order to really get them kick-started, there's got to be an ROI, right? I mean, yeah, sure, it's convenient, but am I saving money? Well, when you start talking about things like chargebacks and selling claims for things like damaged goods or maybe you need proof of delivery or proof of condition, there's real money, you know, tied to that. You know, those chargebacks can be brutal. The other thing is compliance of mandated data, whether it's, you know, inspections or safety checklists or things like that. If you get audited and you don't have that proof that you've been doing that work, you could get fined. And so, again, there's a real ROI tied to that. And then there's also a prevention thing here. So if we're doing, like, a four-truck inspection, maybe you're going to catch a problem before it occurs so that a worker isn't halfway through their shift and breaks down in the middle of the warehouse. So, you know, certainly it keeps the equipment in good shape. You can notify people quickly of a problem. Again, the automatic routing could be something as simple as an email. So I've basically recorded something. We use some automation in the back end. We automatically route that to an email, and somebody instantly knows about that. We don't have to go find a phone or pick up a walkie-talkie or travel to talk to somebody. That information gets to them quickly and easily. And then, finally, improving safety in the warehouse. You know, as we started getting into more customer conversations, we found out about things that I didn't even know about, near-miss reports. So not even just that there was an accident but that there was almost an accident. So you can report these things really quickly, and, again, you're doing it from a device that the end user is already using. So, again, more reinforcement to get you thinking about these things, things like damaged goods, whether it's inbound or outbound, you know, freight failures. Again, this is maybe outside the four walls now, but, you know, containers have issues and things like that that could get flagged and pulled out of service and things like that. Again, inspection reports on the trucks. You know, you load up a trailer and they go down the road. The next thing you know there's a DOT stop and the trailer fails because there's something wrong that didn't get addressed and it could have been taken care of. And then we also just talked about the, you know, incident reports when it comes to, you know, worker safety injuries and things like that. So, so many processes, paper-based. You know, one of the things that I miss when I went from being an SE to being a channel manager is I used to get to walk the warehouse all the time and see what was going on in those warehouses, visiting customers. And if you walk that warehouse, you're going to see there's paper all over the place. So we're not trying to boil the ocean here, but there's really no limit to what we can create in terms of a digital form. But to help you be a little bit more focused, we've created over a dozen pre-built forms that you can start with. And Chris, when he gets into the demo portion, I'm sure he's going to touch on, we've got a really simple HTML form builder that you can literally, a novice user can basically touch this tool and produce a working form in just minutes. It's really simple to do. I'm not a programmer and I've created a bunch of different forms and it's super easy. And then you go to the next step and we'll talk about integration and things like that as well. So let's give a couple examples. This is really a really easy ROI type application for introducing digital forms. Whether it's proof of condition when you're shipping product or recording of damaged goods when you receive product, we've got the ability to launch the camera and take a picture and make that part of the collected data. We can do signature capture as well. You can prove that a load was good when it went out, so that if something happens down the road, you can look elsewhere for that insurance claim, things like that. And for the damaged goods, obviously, everybody's got to deal with that kind of thing. And so it's really easy to report. And it's the ease of collecting the data and then also the automatic routing, the storage, and so you reliably know where your data is all the time. Checklists and inspections, again, we kind of touched on this. We did a trade show a couple years ago and we put a great big ELO tablet up with an example of forms on there and it was a fork truck inspection. And I can't tell you the number of people that came and said, oh, are you a fork truck inspection company? I mean, this is a real thing that we can help automate very, very easily. So incident reports, again, it could be a safety issue. It could be a collision or accident. It could be just damaged labels on a pick location or maybe a damaged rack or maybe a stock outage. You know, there's mistakes in the WMS that say, oh, there's product in this location, and sure that's going to get addressed eventually in a cycle count or maybe a replenishment order or things like that. But this gives you the ability to notate it immediately and send an e-mail to somebody without actually having to get onto your e-mails to let somebody know that, hey, you got an important order that's not going to be able to ship today because there was a shortage in a particular location. So incidents can be many, many things to many different people. So, again, the integration is key. So one of the real differentiators with our digital forms compared to anybody else in the market is it's integrated with Velocity. So, first of all, the form is right there on the device that they're already using in the client that they're already using. We've got the ability through our scripting that Greg talked about to actually pop up a form. If it's a mandatory form, we can actually interrupt the workflow and bring the form up and force them to fill out the form before they can continue on with the rest of whatever they happen to be doing. And then if it's something like that stock outage, because we've already seen the location, we've already seen the product ID, we know what the quantity is supposed to be, we know who the user is, we can pre-fill a lot of that data on the form by data that we've already captured during the telnet session. So they're not doing duplicate entry and just having to enter the same data all over again. So, you know, a lot of benefit of having it being integrated with your either TE or web client that the end user is already using. So at this point, I've kind of laid the groundwork and I want to turn it over to Chris Bjornstad now for a live demo. It should be working out great. Thanks, Greg. Let's see. I need you to stop sharing and you did. Thank you. The screen. All right. So what I've done is I've signed into Avanti Neurons, which is our cloud-based platform that supply chain forms lives in. I am on the forms section. And these are the forms that I'm currently managing. That can mean that they're actively used forms. So they're being, they're already published, or that they're kind of in a draft mode. I'm editing them. I'm playing around with them and I haven't published them out for use on the mobile devices or as a form launcher. Also through this view, I can see how often my forms are being used. You know, when the last time it was submitted, how many times it's been used and I can actually click on that form and look through all of the different submissions and see. And that's one of the methods that you could as an administrator, just see what, what kind of feedback you're getting on those forms. A couple of different options here to create a form. I can either add a form, which allow me to do one from scratch or use a form template. And I can edit an existing form. And if I edit this form, you can see how easy it is. So these are all of my different options that I can use. And I can just take one of these options, drag them over, rearrange. You know, those, those different, the kind of the, the, the way that they're shown I can go in here and edit existing forms. And then I can give them component IDs, auto-fill information, these things. And if you ever have any questions about what the different elements do, you can select over here and it will tell you all of the different options and what they do. So you don't have to go to a separate help document to do that. And then I can either save it and publish it or save it as a draft. It will save as different versions. So if I have multiple versions, I can always go back to a previous version if I'm unhappy with something I've, I did in the past. Form templates are a way. So these are the 13 forms. We currently have 13. Greg said we had over a dozen and he wasn't lying. So we currently have 13 templated forms that you can use either as is, or you can, for example, select one, we'll do a hazard report here. And I can then edit this report right through here and make any changes that I want. If I didn't want to use the one that's here, for example, I don't have an indoor outdoor, so that doesn't matter. So why don't I just get rid of that, but I do want everything else. And now I would save it off, give it its own name, and be able to publish that. The last piece here is a form launcher. And as we talked about earlier, form launcher is a way for you to give the ability to launch applications that do not require a host connection. In this instance, I have built up five different forms that I want my users to have access to at any point, even if they're not connected to a host. So, and I've given them icons, I've changed the color scheme, and I've published that out through the Velocity console as a, another connection type, which I will show right now. So here is the Velocity client, and I've got two demonstrations for you today. One is that available reports, and the other will demonstrate the other two methods of launching a form. One is automatic and one can be selected from the, from the associate while they're using the application. So we'll go into our Wavelength WMS first. And this is using the modernization that we showed you earlier. I'm going to be doing a short, I'm going to do a short pick for you today. So I'll go ahead and go into Tote. I will scan what I'm doing. I will then scan where I'm at. And now I need to pick 27 of these cooling fans. All right. To give you an idea what this looks like without modernization, you can see I've got my task, I've got my location, item, quantity. And this is all important information because I'm not showing it to the user here. But if I select short, now I'm, I'm automatically getting a short form. And I've filled in that information for the, for my associates. So all I'm really wanting them to do is give me the reason why. They can even add a comment if they wanted to, you know, maybe the box, it was there, but it was broken or, you know, the items were broken. And then they can submit their form. And then they're right back to working where they, where I want them to be. Their other option, like I said, for launching a form is they can go to our context menu, which we can load up with any form that we want to have available to them at any point. And they can launch that through there. And now I've got my hazard report form where I can go through and again, fill out that information. You'll notice indoor and outdoors here because even though I edited it earlier, I didn't publish those settings. So those are the two methods of launching a form when you're connected to a host. The other option you have is just having forms available at any time. So as I showed you earlier, here is a list of those forms. And again, I can just go in and select any of them, do my, do the necessary features and submit it. And with that, that is my very high-level demo of the form solution. Yeah, that was great, Chris. Thanks for that. So we have a couple of wrap-up slides. Here we go. So again, you know, differentiators of Velocity Forms compared to some other products that are out there on the market. First and foremost, what we want to stress is it's basically integrated into the Velocity client so that end users don't have to go looking for another application or launch another application. And because it's basically integrated, we've got the ability through scripting to do a lot of the automation that Chris just demonstrated, including just popping up the form automatically, you know, giving you the data so that you're not duplicating your data entry. And then the handling on the back end, we touched on a little bit. We've got the secure storage in the cloud for all of your collected data. And then we've got a number of ways to share that data, including sending emails, doing web services between other applications. So we can build a connector to take that data and put it wherever it needs to be. So for those of you who are salespeople on this call, you know, what are the questions to ask? And like I said before, the best thing you can do is walk the warehouse with your customer and take a look at those disruptive activities that require paper and say, why are you doing that? I guarantee there's paper forms in the warehouse that are being used and they probably somebody's got to go get the piece of paper. And when they're done, it probably sits in an inbox waiting for somebody to come collect it at the end of the day. That's not efficient. You know, so how, how easy is it for your workers to get those forms? Where are you keeping that information? What kind of compliance is tied to that? Are you mandated to be collecting and storing this information? And then, you know, photos. It's funny because for years, ever since we moved to Android devices, I've had customers and partners come up to me and say, Hey, Velocity, can I use the camera and take a picture and send that picture to my AS400? Well, you can take the picture, but the AS400 couldn't do anything with it. You know, that's terminal emulation. There's no way to send a picture. And even a lot of web pages aren't designed to receive things like photographs and things like that. So not only are we giving the ability to access the camera, to be able to do things like signature capture, but we're giving you a platform to be able to manage that data. Once you've done that, which your WMS or ERP system wouldn't be able to do for you. And then another interesting question to ask is you may have a customer that's already using digital forms for some other reason, but maybe it's just not built for that Android device that your end users are using. So they may already see the value. They may already be invested in digital forms, but they're not able to leverage it in the warehouse. And so now that gives you another vehicle to basically be able to give that same process to them for their warehouse workers. So the last thing I want to point out, whether you're a partner, whether you're a customer, if you want to either take down this URL or take down this email address or scan the QR code, the QR code code is literally that URL. This is a really easy way to schedule a request, a presentation for Velocity Forms. Okay. So love to get your requests and start showing you the product and how it can work for you. So Rob, at that point, back to you. Okay, great. Thanks, Greg. A lot of great stuff shared by the team here. You've seen a lot of what's coming out in the product already. There's a lot on this Velocity platform that's just cranking up the power. A couple of things, a little teaser about what, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're hearing from from end customers and our partner community about what's, what are the next things that folks are looking for? So these are technologies surely you're familiar with in, in, in, you know, in, in some, some use cases across your organization. Yes, we are. We are investing in, in these technologies to expand the, the functionality of the platform. But what is always important? We always want to hear from you. What else you're looking for feature-wise? If you're familiar with our platform or if you're exploring our platform, what are you looking for next? Where's your head at? So if you're a, if you're a partner or an existing customer of ours, you may be familiar with our, with our, Innovators Hub, which formerly known as Avanti Community. Now the Innovators Hub. We have a form to collect all that in there, but of course, the invitation is always open. Whether you're new to, new to working with us or have an existing relationship with us and our partners, reach out to Greg Henry, Greg Berger directly. We want to hear from you with where your eyes are at in terms of looking at your 12 and 18 months and further out, where you're looking at optimization, what technology is going to help you get the next level of productivity you're looking for across your supply chain operations.
