43:03
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
supply chain, dc, pl, customers, people, manufacturer, talk, kurt, fulfillment center, business, damon, technology, questions, reggie, manufacturing, e commerce, linkedin, logistics, folks, product
SPEAKERS
Dyci Sfregola, Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson
00:01
Okay.
Curt Anderson 00:03
Hey welcome, everybody. So, Happy Friday. My name is Kurt Anderson and we are absolutely thrilled Welcome to stop being the best kept secret. And our goal today is manufacturing e commerce success. And as before I introduce our amazing incredible guests and I hope everybody’s sitting down for this one. Be great, Damon, we just want to We missed you last week, buddy.
Damon’s father has been ill and he’s visiting his father. So we’re he’s doing this program on the road this week and so little tech challenges but Damon, you’ve been in our thoughts, our prayers, your entire family. So we wish you the best and, and we’re thinking about you, buddy. So thank you for coming on today. Hey,
Damon Pistulka 00:44
just I’m happy to be here, Kurt. And just Thanks a lot. I really enjoy doing this. And I’m really excited for the presentation today. But thanks for the well wishes.
Curt Anderson 00:53
Absolutely. So Alright, so no further ado, we’re gonna do our introduction. So in DC, I’ve been practicing this all week. So it is here it is. I can’t run my tongue. So DC Mads fragola How am I gonna re go Thank you. Thank you. So folks, DC is absolutely amazing. She’s one of these folks, you have a conversation whether you feel like you want to run through a wall. So huge, huge laundry
01:20
laundry went through well and good in a good in a good
Curt Anderson 01:25
you know, with the concussion protocol kind of way. You know what I mean? So for DC welcome. And if I look down, I see somebody in your arms who’s with us today.
Dyci Sfregola 01:33
Um, little Alessandro is here sleeping. So hopefully he’ll he’ll sleep through the rest of the time.
Curt Anderson 01:42
That’s absolutely wonderful. So God bless you. This is great. So So guys, just a quick introduction on DC. So she is I have like so many notes. I will I’ll take up all day talking about DC but supply chain, evangelist enthusiast, digital supply chain enthusiast, she’s a connected planning evangelist, and a status quo challenger. And this one DC I love a multi potential light. Those are in quotes. Love that.
Dyci Sfregola 02:10
So if you’ve never seen the TED Talk, look it up.
Curt Anderson 02:13
Look at exactly. So um, long history you have your bachelor’s is in Spanish from Georgia, you have a master’s in engineering management. So, so kudos to you many awards that you’ve won, how did you get into supply chain? And like how did you and you call it this is your your passion and your calling? How did you end up in supply chain,
Dyci Sfregola 02:36
I ended up in supply chain through sales actually. So when I went back to get my second bachelor’s in industrial engineering, I started working as an account executive for a three PL that service small and medium businesses. And strictly on like the logistics side transportation side, getting product from point A to point B. And in learning about logistics, and being in school learning more about supply chain, I started to understand that this is actually pretty interesting and pretty fun, pretty cool. It’s one of those fields that I don’t think get some kind of like a sexy rack per se.
When it comes to, you know, fields to go into. I actually talked to some students, maybe back in March or April, it was kind of it was early COVID disruption, being at home time. Um, and I was very curious, like, why are you guys studying supply chain management? And I said, Well, I heard that, like one CEO that I really admire, did supply chain. So like now I want to do it. So I think supply chain is definitely one of those, you know, under under estimate it really cool careers.
Curt Anderson 04:00
Absolutely. So we’re bringing supply chain sexy back is that
Dyci Sfregola 04:04
yeah, that we’re bringing it back or just bring it never left,
Curt Anderson 04:09
right. And in order. And on top of that GC, you have an incredible international career. So I saw you, you know, school in Argentina and Billy’s you’ve lived in Italy in Germany. So how does that so you have a nice global scope and obviously, you know, through COVID a lot of sub supply chain disruptions with your international you know, background and scope. How do you what do you bring to the table internationally with that experience?
Dyci Sfregola 04:36
You know, I really think that supply chain is a people industry. It’s a people feel there’s a lot of focus on technology and industry 4.0 industry 5.0 digital manufacturing, etc. But I just really believe that at the heart of everything, it’s people, especially with supply chains being global. You have your extended Partners, it’s not just within the four walls of whatever your company is you have your suppliers offshore, you even have maybe tips working offshore. And there is a lot of cultural consideration that has to go into running a supply chain, especially globally. So whether it’s languages, whether it’s just understanding what words don’t have the same meaning and every culture.
So being able to understand that fact, you know, just starting off that communications could be a lot more complex than what you might be used to. And that could be from translations that could be just cultural connotations to different to different sayings and things like that. So having worked and lived in different countries, and having done that also in different languages, definitely provides an added benefit for me to be able to serve my clients and help them to think about those types of considerations, as they are embarking on like a startup to supply chain to Grand supply chain.
Curt Anderson 06:15
Exactly. That’s who wants to grow up anyway. Right. But I love So you said people so. So folks, so people have joined us here on remote, run LinkedIn, live Facebook, live Twitter live. So I want to give a couple of shout outs my good friend, we have a couple of wisconsinites Here we have Greg and Kevin, my friend Reggie from Chicago’s on Tanya, Valerie Winnie, Winnie sending my love to you, my dear. So great crowd and glad that you brought up people on DC because I know if you guys feel free to drop your LinkedIn profile in the chat box, I put desease LinkedIn profile on there, and her website,
I strongly encourage you please connect with DC on LinkedIn, check out her website, TCU had a couple of great things. So like your, if you use like a digital, a lot more than just supply chain, a digital transformation is kind of like the way I feel that you preach. And what’s great, you talk about data ready readiness, people readiness and process readiness. So like, you know, let’s talk a little bit about that people process. You know, how do you say, manufacturer, sometimes you run into that resistance or dip folks or You talk a lot about different departments in different silos? How do you bring that communication gap? How do you pull those people together?
Dyci Sfregola 07:32
Yeah, definitely. And I’m actually I’m gonna share my screen. Because I put together and I don’t know, if you guys are gonna see yourselves, which is totally awkward, no one likes to see themselves. Just quickly at you know, as you mentioned, that kind of like the the people, the business transformation, the data readiness. So just as a quick background, probably in true millennial fashion, you know, they say millennials ruin everything. And true millennial fashion, I basically said, like, I’m just gonna make my own career my own way.
So I am doing kind of years of software implementations, what I was seeing was what you just mentioned, like the need for more collaboration. And especially as we went into the COVID disruption, I started to see a lot of like, just kind of buzz words, which I consider digital transformation, like one of those buzz words, resilient planning became like really big. And I started to see that there were also people that were posting on LinkedIn, like, okay, so if I don’t have hundreds of 1000s of dollars to where I can, like implement these new tools, then where do I even start?
Like, what can I do to improve my supply chain right now and make it more resilient. So that’s why I really started Nugent architects was to be a thought partner for technology driven business transformations, which I say instead of digital transformation, because what you really find out is that once you want to start implementing these technologies, you realize that it’s not the digital transformation piece that needs to happen is the entire business that needs to be transformed.
So that might mean new processes, new ways of working. And and, you know, in addition to what these software supply chain implementations with being, so I do that with small and medium businesses. But again, going back to being a millennial, and I’m just going to do things the way that I want to do them. I also work for a company called Kerris. And what I’m able to do with Kerris is to leverage like their global network so curious as a global leader in data intelligence. Digital consulting and business transformation.
They’re also an anaplan Global partner, which I used to do anaplan implementations, I’m a certified model builder, certified trainer. And through them, we service enterprise customers. So customers that are ready, budget wise for, you know, implementing a new tool, but they still need help with those processes. So I want to make sure that we’re on the same page when we say supply chain. And I’m interested in you know, people who are on LinkedIn, Twitter Rico, right now, what they consider supply chain, you know, when they think about working at their jobs, or working at their organizations, if you were to ask someone at your company, what supply chain is,
I have seen a lot of people that might say, Oh, it’s logistics, its inventory, its purchasing, its procurement. It’s the actual just manufacturing of products. So the breakdown and collaboration and communication, I think happens right from the beginning, when you say that supply chain is only one of these things that you see on the screen. So what happens and you know, this is kind of what you and I talked about, many, many weeks ago, is that as you’re starting to get into manufacturing, and thinking like we want to go ecommerce, we want to digitalize, we want to, you know, begin our digital transformation journey as well.
People say, okay, like, we’re just going to do this piece of manufacturing, without thinking about all of the other pieces that are also involved in that. So you have to collaborate with manufacturing and finance, and the marketing team and the sales team and the data team to understand if you have the analytics that are going to be able to inform and give you actionable insights into what decisions to make, when to meet you factor, what to produce, when to produce it, where to send it, once it’s you know, are you going to have a different warehouse, things like that. So those types of questions and decisions have to happen with everyone involved in the organization.
Because if not, then you can’t execute on the demand plan. And people are wondering why but it’s not the technology, always the technology might make it faster. But it’s the actual process of making sure that this information is shared with the next team. You can’t use the sales team and the demand team has to consider the production capacity before they say, you know, yes, customer, we can fulfill this order. Because then you can’t fulfill the order because you don’t have the capacity and the customer is upset, and everyone’s pointing fingers at the other person. So you really have to collaborate and that
Curt Anderson 13:10
when you and I first met, you know, with back months ago, and we had a casual conversation, and you just crushed it with we’re talking about e commerce and you’re talking, you know, like, you know, put folks in sales in customer service can’t get mad at the people in shipping, if they’re not prepared for this whole ecommerce strategy. And I just thought it was so brilliant. And I was like, DC you got to come on our program, you know? And what I’m, you know, and, you know, tying in with your program here another great takeaway I saw in our conversation and on your website, having a prior prior a priority policy.
Right? Yeah. prioritizing your policies. And I just love how like, sometimes we’re just kind of like winging it. And just like, you know, throwing caution to the wind, which if you’re a small business, sometimes we need to do that. But in a more structured business, we need to have that healthy communication, exactly what you’re describing here.
Dyci Sfregola 14:03
And to that point, you know, you can be a small business and have big business processes in place. So I like I like to work with the small businesses, because there are things that can be done. And there’s a lot of value that the small and medium businesses are able to get out of it when they might look at themselves and say, Oh, well, you know, I’m not coke or I’m not Nestle or you know, I don’t have all this money or unlimited resources. Not that these companies do have unlimited resources, but you can still achieve a lot of productivity. higher margins have happier customers, longer, you know, time customers loyal customers. If you implement some of these processes.
Curt Anderson 15:00
That’s that’s perfect and go I don’t know if this is off program a little bit I love your background in three PL so let’s just talk about that for one second. So we our program is tailored for manufacturers. So in a lot of times are a little uneasy or you know, hey, we ship truckloads we ship pallet loads, we’re not prepared to ship the ones and twos or go that direct to consumer.
With your three PL background, what would you say to a manufacturer of like, Hey, you know, you could outsource this, you can still live in that truckload, pallet load world, and bring that pallet to a three PL and let them do your fulfillment. So for someone that’s brand new to three PL, what would you kind of tell them to kind of break that overwhelm or that resistance on like, that’s a real viable solution for you?
Dyci Sfregola 15:45
That’s a really good question. I’m actually gonna go to the next slide. Just because it falls into some of the questions that I would recommend that, you know, if as you’re going on this ecommerce journey, kind of, as you mentioned, you’re going to be maybe doing smaller packages now, as opposed to the big pallets and you know, truckloads or you know, LTL. Two things there. First off, there is a book that I wrote a, I wrote a chapter for that specifically answers a lot of these questions. And I will give you the link so that you can share it with people, it’s demystifying logistics. And the chapter is specifically about logistics service providers.
And at what point do you decide if you are going to handle your logistics in house with your own fleet, if you are going to use a three PL or if you bring down leverage a four PL, depending on what you need? So what I would recommend for people to do is I actually have a question here. How are you going to manage? So right here in the middle and know if you can see my cursor? How are you going to manage new lead time to delivery destinations, as you go on your e commerce journey, and then what are the profit margins and cost considerations going to look like?
So when you are thinking about going on this journey, at the end of the day, you want to serve your customers, you want to get more customers, you want to get new customers. And if you consider your three PL or four PL options, what their service level agreements are, what their costs are, it might make sense. But you also of course, have to weigh the pros and cons. If you go to three PL four PL you could lose some visibility, depending on what you know, their system, their system maturity is you might lose some control.
So you have to weigh those possibilities. But there are lots of three peels out there that are actually specifically the three people that I work for, focused again on small and medium businesses. And what they were able to do is that you as one individual company, cannot access the prices of you know, bulk shipments and things like that. But pulling together, all of the other customers that this repeal serves, you’re able to access, you know, shipping rates and freight rates that are actually very beneficial to being able to serve more customers, and be able to gain more market share through serving the e commerce sales channel. So it’s definitely something to consider.
It’s not a one size fits all. But I don’t think that people should have apprehension about it. It’s just something you do the analysis. And you figure out if it makes sense, in the context of all of the other questions that you should be asking yourself, you know, how are you going to serve the customers in e commerce? How are you going to plan and manage the demand? If there are any new systems? Are people ready to use the new systems? And then at the end of the day, you want to get more customers? But how are you adding value to those customers? And are you considering the voice of the customer as you’re making these decisions?
Curt Anderson 19:18
That’s perfect and fantastic answer. Thank you and our good buddy, Greg mushu, and Madison, as so folks that aren’t familiar with a three PL I’m going to ask you to define that a little bit. And just so 100 years ago, I had an e commerce business and was kind of outgrowing me. And so what what we did to help us scale the business. We This is back in the 2000s 99 ish. We went to a fulfillment center, and that’s what they specialize. That’s what they focus on. They were much much better than me.
And it helped me because the amount of investment I would have had to make to you know, put out a full blown fulfillment center for my own company. Just it was cost prohibitive by me going to that fulfillment Center, it allowed us to scale. So DC so for maybe for folks that aren’t familiar with three PL or like fulfillment centers, can you just touch a little bit on, on what what we’re talking about here?
Dyci Sfregola 20:10
Yeah, so a three PL or four PL is a third or fourth party logistics company. And they do exactly what Kurt just described, they allow you to focus on your core competency. So if your core competency is research and development or production, etc, really having the in house technology in the in house skill set of doing network optimization, and lead time optimization, and like they have the transportation management systems in the software to make sure that you’re, you’re optimizing lead times and you’re optimizing costs, sorry, someone just woke up. You’re, you’re optimizing your costs.
And you’re, you’re serving customers in a way that is beneficial for both you and for them. So they might have certain expectations of delivery times. And you have certain guidelines and guardrails, from finance of what your freight you know, your freight costs can be. So what three peels and four appeals do is they allow you to leverage their core competency, which is transportation and logistics, they can also help with warehousing, they can help you determine where you should warehouse your products, they help you determine what is going to be the best shipping method for your products. If you are a small business or even a medium sized business, actually, I take that back.
They’re even large corporations, I’ve worked with billion dollar businesses that use three pills and four pills. Because their core competency is something else it’s really basic. I look at it as basic economics if you take an economics course High School, you know intro to college 101 all countries don’t make everything you trade. So if you are really good at making cars and I’m really good at farming, I’m not going to try to farm and make cars and you shouldn’t either will trade on that. So your three PL is kind of similar in that you can focus on what you do well, and the three PL can focus on what they do well
Damon Pistulka 22:28
Yeah, and I think in my experience, I’ve I’ve had clients that have done all three PL and I have clients that have done a mix of of three PL and in house and all in house. And I’ll tell you when you’re using the three PL The one thing that is nice if it’s cost effective, you can scale much faster because if you’re really good at at building your product or you know selling it product, those two things, but that whole getting it out to the customer in a timely fashion is what you’re not good at a three PL is awesome at doing that, because you don’t have to worry about it.
And when you’re starting this most people don’t understand that if you’re on a platform like Walmart or Amazon, you have to tell them how many days until you ship product and when you’re having trouble internally hitting that consistently it hurts your ratings on those plans.
Dyci Sfregola 23:21
And you sometimes you even get fined. I’ve I’ve worked with I worked with a client recently in December the beginning of December and this was a this was a you know, a large corporation, but just in the month of November they had $950,000 in fines for not meeting the service levels of like the grocery stores that they distribute them
Damon Pistulka 23:50
yeah, yeah especially into retail if you’re into retail and you do it you will get fined in those kind of things. And And to finish off what I was saying though, is that these these are an economic decision in some regards, but it also as you mentioned, DC is the the end result to the customers what you really have to be be planning for in this end give the best result to the customer because ultimately on a platform like Walmart Amazon or some of these other ones your ratings will affect if you’re going to be you know even shown or how high you’re going to be shown in a competitive field of products if you’re if you’re you know if I’m making a shoe like other shoe manufacturers and athletic shoe,
if I have much better service performance you will rate higher than then other suppliers of the same or similar products and and that can affect your sales tremendously.
Curt Anderson 24:47
And our good friend Jeffrey stern who folks if you check out Demon’s profile he went live with Jeffrey stern last night the owner CEO of voice Express, but Jeffrey so DC This is a great audience. product, he manufactures a little voice chip that maybe you’ve used with Alex, you’ve ever been to build a bear. And if that bear speaks to you, He is the full source for that bear. And he takes full advantage of using Amazon for his fulfillment. And it allows him to ship the ones and twos to the consumers for replacing also like if you bought Alex a bear, and hey, how’s Alex doing? By the way? He’s,
25:27
he’s kind of awake. He’s in and out.
Curt Anderson 25:31
Alex, welcome to the program. And you’re falling in love your phone and good good shoes here. It’s found moms. But so DC back to your program. You had a lot of great questions there. And we did have a question I think Reggie had cut off. But Reggie has if I’m a custom manufacturer for industrial users, can it still be useful to use e commerce to find customers? And are there any e commerce tools for b2b? So that’s what any any quick response I know Damon, I that’s all we talk about every day.
Dyci Sfregola 26:02
Yeah, David. David was really excited for this.
Damon Pistulka 26:08
Oh, man, this is this is like this is for me this is it’s really because a Kurt, you know, because Kurt, and using what you’re doing Reggie, if you have something that can go into some sort of a configurator. Or if you’ve got a as Kurt talks about in, in his book that I actually have. Thanks, Bob. So Bob, being the cat best secret, stop being the best kept getting for it.
There you go. Reggie configurators, or working around your process to sell standard products that are are just awesome ways of doing that. And and if you’ve got more questions, definitely connect with Kurt after that, because I think that is one of the areas where custom manufacturing, I used to run custom manufacturing companies. That’s what I did at sheet metal CNC machining, you know, and those kind of things. And there are tremendous opportunities there. If you’re innovative in the way that you can, you can give your customers what they want.
Curt Anderson 27:02
And so Reggie’s with the Economic Development Corporation in South Chicago. And so super exciting opportunities, what he has going on a lot of new Amazon fulfillment centers in his region. And so he’s a driving force working with iMac, the MEP in Illinois, I’m trying to help the manufacturers and this is why I thought it was so important to have DC on because that custom manufacturer again, you know, traditionally, they get a they get a an RFQ. And then, you know, hopefully they win the bid, they’re gonna make it, they’re making it for somebody else in the supply chain, they’re down the food chain.
So you know, now the problem is so like Damon’s in Seattle, if you’re an aerospace, and aerospace has really taken a really tough hit, or maybe you were in travel, or some of these industries have really been negatively impacted by COVID. And all sudden you find your sales down 50 60%.
Now, what do you do as a custom manufacturer? It’s hard to make exactly what DC preaches that change transformation. And how can we get an e commerce? And how do we, you know, my goodness, this is how we’ve always done it. This is how we have always shipped. And it’s that disruption of, Hey, you know what we’re going to put up in an e commerce store, or we’re going to bring in some new leads, or we’re going to take on some new challenges here.
How do we get it through the supply chain, you know, and so decent, that’s, you know, from our conversations, that’s why I felt like what you preach is just so, you know, we can talk marketing all day long if we don’t if we don’t have DC on board and deliver the product. You know, and our good friend, Kevin, who’s with Gen alpha, I believe, if he’s still on a call, he’s with Gen alpha, and they actually daymond they are e commerce provider, and they do a configurator. So, DC back to your Can we talk a little bit about your priority prayer prioritizing tips that you share? Can we talk a little bit about that?
Dyci Sfregola 28:54
In terms of looking for the dog?
Curt Anderson 28:58
To answer that for us? Now,
Dyci Sfregola 29:02
my my son is he’s I think he’s a late bloomer talking wise. So he says, Mama, those Oh, no, no, which is his grandpa in Italian and higher in English. He won’t be won’t be the great source to answer this question.
Curt Anderson 29:21
more languages than I do already.
Dyci Sfregola 29:24
So in terms of prioritization, or are you referring to like customer prioritization or demand prioritization, or supplier prioritization, or all of it is prioritizing?
Curt Anderson 29:36
How do you pick those priorities by the way you don’t? So let’s talk internally. Let’s talk about it from either people side or like, again, getting thing getting that flow through your system. You know, again, our custom manufacturers if they’re concerned and like, how are we going to get this through without bottlenecks or that type of thing? How would you talk to the manufacturer from an internal The team getting everybody on board. Lee, you know, you talk a lot about leadership. Um, you know, I guess from that aspect is what I’m asking. Yeah,
Dyci Sfregola 30:08
I always start with a business analysis and diagnostic, because it has to make dollars to make sense. So, you know, what is where? Where are you going to get the most impact financially? And then what do you need to do there. So in that impact financially might either be a cost reduction, or a way to increase profit margins, I don’t want to save revenue, because sometimes increasing revenue causes you to increase variable cost, and then you you end up you know, at the same point, so I always start with a diagnostic to understand and look at which processes are going to give you the most bang for your buck.
And then that’s kind of where you start. And then once you figure that piece out, I look at a segmentation of like I said, the customers and the suppliers. And then you can decide, okay, do we start on like the sales SNP side? Or do we start on like the production planning requirement, material requirements, planning, Master production, Master production scheduling? Do we start on that side, but you you always define everything current state, you think about a loose guys, Greenfield, state, your ideal state, and then you understand the gaps between the two.
So once you understand the gaps between the two, and it’s, it’s always process people, technology and data, like it’s always all of those things. But from there, you can roadmap understand like resource capacity, resource skill, set, budget, timeline, business impact, business urgency, you consider all of those factors, and then you actually get started. So if you if you do any of that afterward, it’s just it’s an avoidable disaster. And it’s a lot of heartache and anxiety that you just don’t have to put yourself through.
Curt Anderson 32:14
That was so good that you get that recorded, Damon, man we got. We gotta like we listen to that. That was that. That was, Oh, god, that was so good. Let’s, um, last thing I want to talk about, you do a great job as far as like talking, you know, diversity, you know, women in manufacturing, you know, we’re really trying to go that direction. And this is a great quote. You’ve talked about tips for for promoting gender diversity, we are for manufacturers to say, Man, we just can’t find a woman to fill that position is no longer acceptable. Is that your quote? I thought I saw that on your website? Yes.
Dyci Sfregola 32:51
Yes. And that’s a general in any, and it’s not a it’s not an excuse,
Curt Anderson 33:00
to get t shirts. And you know, as a father of a teenage daughter, man, you warm my heart. I’m all you know, telling her, you know, there’s nothing that you can’t do. So let’s so manufacturer when they use, you know, we use that cop out, geez, we couldn’t find such and such to fill that position, how you you lay out some nice tips, what do you what do you tell those folks?
Dyci Sfregola 33:21
Well, the first thing is that I asked them to, I would ask them to look internally, I just personally and in my personal experience is obviously limited. So it’s not an end all be all I don’t I’m very aware that my personal experience is a little microcosm, or a small piece of the entire bubble. But I do know a lot of women in manufacturing from being a member of cscmp ascm, just from connecting with women on LinkedIn, and they have a challenge of being seen and being heard at work.
So you know, internally, are you truly considering the female talent that you have in house? Is there someone who has been speaking up who you have, you know, maybe just a subconscious bias, you’ve been overlooking them. So the first thing is definitely to be aware of any subconscious biases and look internally. The second thing is the pipeline. You know, we talked about the pipeline and just increasing the number of women that you have coming through the pipeline, that can be students.
Another good system is also there are a lot of organizations that work with women returning to work. So you know, maybe they they decided to take a step back so that they could focus on family or raise children. They want to get back into the workforce being out of the Corporate workforce and being in the home workforce is not a gap in work at all. So even understanding that maybe you have a subconscious bias there. So once you in and I wrote about this also is that once you get women in, you can keep them in. And this isn’t only focusing on women, I think that what we have seen with this COVID disruption is that parents in general, is just having flex work policies.
So one of the things that I love about being in technology, it’s not just about the technology, it breaks my heart, when I go into a company, and I see people working seven days a week, or they can’t go on vacation, they can’t take sick days, because they’ve got these old legacy tools that take, you know, weeks and days for them to do what you can do with technology, or even, you know, outsourcing to a three PL in five minutes, or a couple of hours. So they you get your life back. You know, when you get these technology tools, you you rescale you upskill you learn how to use them, you learn how to leverage them in to support the business processes.
And that allows for you to be able to create a more flexible work environment for women, for parents, for people who need more flexibility, the future of work is not eight to five, it’s not nine to six, it’s very much when you have time, you know, when the kids are sleeping, we do still have the limitation in supply chain, of course, with like the times that freight carriers are available, or the times that you know, we talked about retail that Walmart will will actually allow you to deliver the times that they’re doing order fulfillment. But I mean, I’ve even worked at warehouses that are 24 seven, you know, they’re running shifts, 24 seven, I haven’t worked at them personally, but I’ve seen you know, these these setups.
So the technology enables us to be able to provide more flexible work environments, not just for women, but for parents in general. And I i’ve never talked to a company that said, dang, we shouldn’t have hired as many women as like, I’ve never talked to someone I was like that, you know, hiring all these women was really a detriment. I mean, if you if you look at like the research shows that the statistics show, you know, if you look at the abita, like the actual bottom line of organizations that have diverse workforces and diverse leadership, they perform financially better than companies that don’t like it is what it is.
Curt Anderson 37:53
Right? DC You are such an inspiration, folks, you’ve got it. So I have her LinkedIn profile. I have her website, please connect with her check out her her posts, DC I’m gonna we’re gonna close out with a question for you. So our dear friend of ours, Allison afford, she’s a super tight with myself and Damon.
And she’s actually doing so we’re doing a big e commerce program at Illinois, the Illinois MEP this week, she kicks it off on Tuesday, but she preaches and has taught us how do we make the our customers the hero of our story? Okay, so I know like you just you just crushed it with that with diversification with diversity with supply chain, you are just an expert and authority on all these subjects? How do you help your clients be the hero of your story?
Dyci Sfregola 38:41
Oh, that’s a good question. How do I help my clients be the hero of my story? I think I would say it goes back to just making their lives easier. So when I see that their lives are easier. And they have achieved that. And it’s always hard Change is hard. You know, I never walk into a client and they’re like, yes, we’re gonna change all these processes and take all these recommendations. And tomorrow, like we’re gonna get started. It’s always a long, it’s a painful journey. But once you get on the opposite side, once you really get the output I mean, it’s it’s amazing. So when I see my customers actually achieve what they were looking to achieve.
I and especially it’s both sides. So on the like tool readiness and implementation readiness, you see them be prepared to go into an implementation. If it’s actually an implementation, I’m doing the tool configuration like seeing them actually using it on the back end is you know, or on the on the backside back end, I feel like is very focused on like data. But you know, on the other side once they come out and they have achieved what they’re looking for. And the tool is behaving the way they expected it to. That That makes me feel good. And that makes them the hero of my story of just seeing that things get easier for them.
Curt Anderson 40:12
What if you are a gem that would have awesome standing ovation though everybody standing ovation, virtual virtual. This, I’d say when we, when we have our conversations, man, I just I’m just glowing. It’s just you are just such a ball of positive energy. You’re You’re just such a gift to talk with. So, TC, thank you for your time. Any anything that you want to close? So we have your LinkedIn profile, we have your website, how can folks connect with you or find you or reach out to you?
Dyci Sfregola 40:42
Yeah, actually, I’ll flash it just because I was going to share my email, and everything with you guys. So I just put this since we’re recording in case anyone needs me. So that’s my direct line. You can text me You can call me. You can send me an email. You can find me on LinkedIn. This is my personal, LinkedIn DC man straggle on. And we also have new Gen architects.
So every week, we don’t post much there. We don’t stock people. We do a tech tip every week. That’s literally just for like tech, if you’re going on a technology implementation journey. These are some things to consider. So we post those once a week. And then again, for enterprise customers that are looking for just like data intelligence, digital consulting, then you can find me accurate.
Curt Anderson 41:41
That is awesome. Man. You are such a blessing. So guys, we’re going to hear on remote, we’re going to head back over to the table. So please check out you know, stop over and talk with dc, dc. Please tell Alex, thank you for joining us today. That was such a. And both were here. Next Friday, we we are talking about how to dominate SEO for manufacturers next Friday. So you definitely don’t want to make that. So Damon, we send our best to you and your family that and the code is there that everything is going well, dc in our prayers. You’re in our prayers in DC again, my eternal Thanks. Thank you for joining us today. And this was just this was wonderful.
Dyci Sfregola 42:21
Thanks for the invite. It was really fun. great conversation. Thank
Curt Anderson 42:23
you. Thank you. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you at the table bit.
Damon Pistulka 42:27
And we’re going to be going we’re still live on LinkedIn. I think everyone there thanks for listening. Love the comments. We got got several good comments there. If you got any questions, we’re here every Friday like Kurt says, we’re going to go back to the tables if you want to join us and be able to talk before and after the event. With the people that you see here. You can always come to remotes in the the registration is in the event on LinkedIn. So you can do it then talk to you soon.
Curt Anderson 42:55
Thank you, everybody. Thank you, DC.
