Global Retailing Summit - 2021

Hello and welcome to our discussion today on the next generation of merchandising, product development, and collaboration technology. I am your host, Chris Walton, and I am the founder and the editor-in-chief of the popular retail blog OmniTalk, and also the former vice president of Target's Store of the Future work. And it does— it is also my great pleasure today to come back to my home state of Arizona, at least virtually, for this great conference. With me on stage today virtually is Luke Wang, the CEO and founder of SureFront. Luke, it's great to be here with you. How are How are you?

I'm doing well. Thank you, Chris. We're all big fans of OmniTalk, your show, and blogs.

Thanks, man. I appreciate you say that. No one ever does that right out of the gate. So that's very, very nice of you to say. I'm looking forward to our interview as well. I do want to make one housekeeping note for everyone watching us now live. Today's interview is meant to be really organic. So if you have any specific questions that you want to ask Luke, just go down to the Q&A section that you'll see at the bottom of your screen, enter your question, and I am going to try to put those questions into the conversation as best as I can as they happen. And if I can't do that, then I will try to ask them at the end of our conversation as well. Should be old hat for many of us now. We've all been working at home via Zoom and Google Meets and everything. So please, please do your best, ask Luke whatever questions come to your mind, and don't be afraid to put him on the spot. All right, Luke, let's get started here. You know, we are here at the, you know, University of Arizona. Now you've been somebody that's been actively involved with the Terry J. Lundgren School here for quite some time. You've been sponsoring students both at the U of A and at other universities. You know, tell us about that and why that's something you felt was important.

Sure. We are a sponsor of the Terry J. Lundgren Center at the University of Arizona. And we work very closely with Scott Hassell, the director over there, and we sponsored 2 student teams in the past at the Retail Innovation Laboratory. And the project is a capstone project for senior students in their last year, lasted about half a year each time, and mostly the students help us to map out the merchandising workflow, merchandising technology, data workflow in the large retailer supplier. You know, Longwood Center is a hub connecting to many major retailers. So those connections help the students to go into the retailer to understand their workflow. And those projects really helped SureFront as we build merchandising technology. So great experience.

Interesting.

Got it.

So some of the work that was done at the U of A helped inspire some of what you guys are looking at with SureFront. Too. That's going to be cool to talk about. But it's not just U of A, right? You guys have been, you know, working actively with students. Haven't you worked with students also at Carnegie Mellon and places like that?

Yes, at CMU or Carnegie Mellon, we sponsored several student programs. They're a different level at master's students for science department of CMU, you know, one of the best in the country. Uh, it's a program, uh, you know, also capstone for master's students And we sponsored probably 4 or 5 years ago. Those prototype program, you know, and the design the student came up with actually became the early, you know, version of SureFront.

That's fascinating. So that's— wow, that's a cool approach.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't hear a lot of startups talking about that, you know, approaching the market in that way. So that's cool to hear you guys doing that. Well, tell us, okay then, so you've mentioned it a couple of times. Let's maybe get right, cut right to the chase a little bit. Let's start talking about SureFront, but before we do that, I think let's also talk about you and who you are and what you're bringing to the table here in terms of SureFront and its technology. So start us off by telling us a little bit about who you are.

Well, I have both a retail and technical background.

Okay.

In college, I majored in engineering and minored in computer science. Somehow I got fascinated by earthquakes, so I went to study earthquake seismology, got my PhD over there. You know, I did a lot of programming solving differential equations. Later on, I founded engineering companies building seismic instruments and of course providing analytical software, you know, along with instruments. So those paved the foundation. Later days, you know, I founded SureFront, a software company. In retail, my background was because I was the owner, you know, of two home— one is home furnishing company selling to major retailers. Okay. The other one, it's an online, you know, sporting goods company. So it was by operating those two companies, you know, I witnessed the interaction between regular suppliers, you know, buyer and salespeople, and learn about merchandising, product development, and of course identify, you know, the problem I'm about to solve. You know, as a serial entrepreneur, you know, I invest my own time, had resources to solve my own problems. So this was, in a way, a personal journey, you know, personal challenge, you know, but Working with students, universities, on the best technology in retail somehow shaped my perspective of merchandising and product development, which is the center of the talk today.

Yeah, you sound a little bit like an academic at heart. I have to ask though, so how did an earthquake researcher end up getting into retail at some point? What happened there at that junction in your life where you said, okay, now I'm going to go from here to over here? What was going through your mind at that point in life?

You would call stochastic process, you know.

Okay, stochastic process.

I love it. That's the term we use, you know, to characterize, you know, earthquake, you know, in a technical way. Yeah. So I'm not sure that's by design, but somehow I got into it. Yeah.

Got it. Got it. So kind of a haphazard, just luck of the draw, luck of chance in some ways. That's awesome. I don't think I've ever used that word in an interview before, stochastic, but I love it. And okay, so tell us about SureFront then. So sounds like academic by nature, researcher by nature, engineer by nature. You mentioned a little bit, you're seeing problems, opportunities in the industry by way of what you were doing in retail, specifically in home furnishings, specifically in sporting goods. And that led you to found SureFront. So, you know, what were some of the opportunities that you noticed that, you know, potentially could be solved by technology?

Yeah, let me first just explain the name of SureFront.

Okay.

SureFront, you know, has two words, you know, Sure, S-U-R-E, you know, it stands for supplier, S-U, and R-E is retailer. So Front means supplier-retailer, you know, the front of their technology. So that's how we name it. You know, the problem identified is really to observe, you know, the interaction between the retailer and suppliers. You know, we can all build technology within our own company. You know, as a supplier, you know, I build, you know, internal ERP systems, you know, internal CRM system. But I realized no matter how much I do, I can only solve my side of the equation. Retailer, you know, of course they invest a lot of technology themselves, including merchandising, PD, PLM, et cetera. But those technology mostly benefit the internal use of the retailers. So when you go across between the companies, technology doesn't go from company A and B. One example is that we know that in retail, the movers and shakers are the merchants because they write purchase order in hundreds of million dollars if you are buyer at Walmart, Target, or you write tens of millions of dollars of purchase order per year at mid-tier retailers.

Right?

So that's a lot of responsibility. But their job is to collaborate externally with supplier from the other side. So whatever internal technology at the retailer will not help these buyers. Likewise, for suppliers, you know, I mentioned we develop technology, we use Salesforce, but the buyers won't be using it. So that gap is really what identified the cross-organization, multi-entity collaboration problem is the heart of the merchandising technology, which we're going to solve.

So is that a little bit like what, like what's an example of like that to put people in the right context? Is that a little bit like around like what Walmart has been trying to do for years and years? Like how does that stack up against what you're describing?

Yeah, that's a very good example. Walmart realized this problem probably the same from many other retailers decades ago. They started to build this big retail platform called Retail Link at least two decades ago. And they invested billions of dollars, hired tens of thousands of engineers. I always remember the moment I visited Walmart especially the David Klass Technology Center. Right. The whole atmosphere over there made me feel like that I was in Silicon Valley. Very different. So what Retail Link is doing is a common web-based platform for supplier-retailer to collaborate on product, on purchase order, on many aspects of the business between them. But Walmart is unique in that regard. Not all the other retailers have the same resource or started that early and could invest that much resource, human and financially. So but the good news is nowadays, with the cloud computing technology, it is possible to build something like Retail Link and perhaps to some extent even better using cloud platform. For the next generation merchandising and PV technology.

Right, something that fits better and works better for everyone involved, not just some big, you know, big national retail behemoth that can really have people do whatever it is they need them to do.

Yes, even a retail link in the benefit only within the ecosystem of Walmart.

Right, right, versus getting scale efficiencies for everyone involved with everyone those people are involved with. So yeah, okay, I think, I mean, that to me, there's a there there somewhere. Like I think you guys are onto something especially when you start talking about how that can all happen in the cloud as well. Well, let's take a look. You've got a video here, we've got a video here that we're going to tee up that I think explains it a little bit more in a couple minutes. And then let's dig into exactly what SureFront is from a technology perspective a little bit more.

Technology is the competitive edge in today's retail. However, there is no platform for your internal merchandising and product development teams to streamline collaboration with suppliers, factories, and franchisees. This forces you to rely on decades-old tools like emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Finalizing a single product can take weeks or even months. The result is a chaotic process with delays and costly errors. Introducing SureFront's Unified Collaboration Management. The patented technology that enables you to easily manage merchandising and product development between internal teams and external partners. SureFront's centralized platform streamlines your entire merchandising and product development process, allowing your teams to effectively share product information and data with suppliers, factories, and franchisees. Giving you the power to unclog the bottleneck and accelerate your speed to market. With our unified collaboration management software, each employee will save 1 day a week of work, boosting a 20% productivity gain. Your organization will achieve a 10% efficiency gain with better assortment, sell-through, and better margins. The outcome is a 10x return on investment. SureFront, the only platform that transforms your merchandising and product development process through improved collaboration. Book your demo at SureFront today.

So Luke, there was a lot to unpack in that video. It's very cool to see, but boil it down for us. What are, what are the key elements? What did everyone just see there?

Sure. Uh, it's really about 3 elements. I'm going to break it down. Before that, I'm going to talk about merchandising technology, which generally known as the merchandising lifecycle management technology. At a retailer, it has many different components, including financial planning, assortment planning, allocation planning, product lifecycle management, order management, Supplier management, supply chain management, et cetera, et cetera. So many different components. But if you look at the really the process and data and communications of all the technology, the key 3 sectors are the one I mentioned, data, process, and communications. So we look it down and drill down each one.

Okay, good, because I was going to ask you that, because like I tell you, in my job, my line of work, I hear that all the time. I think everyone says kind of the alphabet soup of data, process, communication, but let's hit each of those. So like data, what does that specifically mean when you say that in the context of what we just saw in the video and what you're describing?

Yeah, the two common fabric of data in merchandising, in retail, especially the B2B retail between retailer suppliers, are product data and purchase order data. So product data typically includes product attributes. And they usually are coming from the supplier side. For vertically integrated retailers, for example, Gap, J.Crew, those type of retailers design their own lines. The product data may come from them directly as well. So the product data usually were entered from, you know, the supplier side via Excel, you know, a PDF, whatever coming from that side. And the purchase order data, order data were generated by the retailers. The retailer usually have a, we call the PO worksheet, purchase order worksheet. They upload that into their system. So that's what, where the data is. So those two common fabric were the deals between supplier-retailers, and that's the center of the merchandising flow. That's the single source of truth within the retail industry. And that's not—

Oh, and I was going to ask, but then that is not static either, right? It's always constantly changing too. I mean, especially when you talk about, I think, the companies you named, like Gap and whatnot too. It's not that they're just taking things off the line and getting data from suppliers and that's it. I mean, it's, it's, they might be sending information back and forth, need to coordinate different aspects of the design. Same with on the purchase order side. I would imagine that stuff's changing pretty regularly too. How do you, how am I thinking about that the right way? Like how did, how does that factor into everything?

Yeah, yeah, you're, you're definitely, you got a retail background. Yes. That's exactly, these data, you know, what the common fabric, however, you know, to really provide a shared technology platform for the tools decide to share the data so there's no data entry, data reentry, there's no data error. It's really difficult. The reason is if we build one platform for many retailers, many suppliers to collaborate, each of them will have their own data hierarchy, data management, right? So retailer will have, you know, Walmart has a thousand categories. Oh yeah. Target may have 500 categories. Suppliers, they may sell multi-different lines to many different retailers. Each of them, they have different departments, category hierarchy. To build one platform to take care of all of those, it's very difficult. Also within the e-commerce space, we have tremendous data field than before because consumer data is part of the equation. How to really build The foundation of data to encompass, you know, all these variables is a huge technical challenge. You know, we're lucky that we invented, you know, we call multi-entity, multi-hierarchy collaboration technology. You know, we hold the patent of how to build this type of complex structure, that complex data structure. That—

yeah, it's like you, you got— you, you almost brought back some nightmares for me. I mean, I can remember in my retail career where just even in the even in one retail organization, the item hierarchies for.com were different than stores. And now you're saying, if I heard you right, that you have patented technology that enables you to basically understand all the different elements or all the different hierarchies across all the different retailers and be able to handle that for any given supplier that might be working with any of those. How do you, how do you, how in the hell did you do that?

By writing millions of lines of code, you know, my team did it. You know, to give an example, yeah, what you're saying, you know, at a large retailer there could be several thousands of different spreadsheets to cover all different categories. So how do we have a bulk upload function, you know, to so that each category can have its own data field? We call the user-defined field.

Okay.

It can be shared internally and sometimes even shared externally with suppliers. So supplier will see a different data field each category. They can fill it out and supply, and retailer doesn't have to do the double, you know, data entry. So now one common platform to have one single source of truth. To host all different type of data. That's the foundation and that's the innovation. And that's what I call the next generation of merchandising and PD technology.

Yeah, and that's really interesting. I hope people hear that too. Basically what you're saying, if I play that back, is, you know, a retailer can put information in one way, the supplier can put it in their way, and it all comes back in a way that they each can read to how they each run their business, even though they actually might be in different languages as they're translated back and forth, or different hierarchies as they're translated back and forth. That's super cool. Okay, well, that, that leads me to my next question then, which you mentioned before was process. So that sounds super cool, but like, how do you actually process-wise make sure all of that is done in the correct way and in the correct steps?

Yeah, the process between the retailer and suppliers, it's really the merchandising and PD workflow. The workflow, including the buyers, you know, send an RFQ to suppliers, supplier submit a quotation, you know, buyer review the quotation and negotiate, you know, on color, size, material, sample around, you know, negotiate on pricing, finalize assortment, you know, and generate purchase order and also negotiate in terms of purchase order revisions, and then eventually, you know, to delivery. So that's a long process. Sometimes, large retailer, it takes several months to finalize one SKU. We heard it from the videos, right? And also by your personal experience. So that's the process SureFront has to build into its software. So the two sides, supplier-retailer buyers and salespeople and PDE, they can collaborate on one platform.

Got it. So actually, that's good. So question coming in then actually from the audience. So I think this is Jermaine right here asking the question, for the retailer, let's say, is it required that if anyone's thinking about using this on the retail side, SureFront, is it required that they onboard, that any suppliers they onboard have to be using SureFront or is there flexibility there?

It can be flexible. There are retailers and there are suppliers using SureFront for their internal collaboration. Which is already a big help internally. But the biggest ROI are the one, the retailers, suppliers are able to collaborate externally with their suppliers and retailers. So it can be both ways, but better ROI is that we enroll more parties.

If everyone's connected in this manner. So I kind of mentioned this before and you alluded to a little bit, but I think talking about it more overtly now, How is what you're describing similar to or different than, say, just buying off the line from a B2B marketplace? There's many of those out there. Many of them, they're doing quite well, but it feels like you're describing something inherently different because of how much process is involved and how much coordination is involved. What is that difference for everyone?

I think the differentiation has to do with the market segmentation. For larger retailer, major ones, you know, we're talking billion-dollar retailers, they have to have product differentiation. You know, they cannot be simply a reseller of certain brand because they're going to compete head-to-head with other retailer having carried the same brand. So they end up in a very costly price war and cost of reputation as well. So how do you have internal preparatory product. It's up to how you collaborate starting from the marketplace. That's the starting point, not the finish line. Exactly. Find the SKU, innovate, build upon that to create preparatory merchandising assortment. And then that gives you better margin, better reputation. You know, a lot of the You know, we saw the department store especially, you know, in the past decade, you know, were declining. A lot of the reason were because they were simply the reseller of major brands, right? So not their own identity, not to have their pure internal organic preparatory, you know, assortment, right?

So you're saying that's the point of differentiation. I mean, I think that's true. I mean, I can think back to my days running e-commerce for home. There was a lot of market available goods that we sold, but that really wasn't the point of differentiation. There might've been some volume there, but that was a me too game and it was basically predicated upon price. But you're saying the secret sauce is what can you do in and around that is completely new and unique to you. The trick with that though is always communication. And I think amid this pandemic, we've seen how we have to communicate with each other differently. Is Surefront in what you described changing the way we communicate with each other within that workflow as well?

Yes, that's a huge part of it. The communication between the two sides, you know, primarily business-wise, is done in writing, which is done in emails. Of course, come with email tags also, along with, you know, big attachments. Could be image files, could be Excel, could be PDF, or right, it could be videos, variety type of forms, you know. And nowadays, uh, you know, during the pandemic You know, people also communicate by Zoom, by Microsoft Teams, potentially by Google Chat, by Slack.

Slack.

So different newer ways of communicating. But that communication is based on agnostic technology, not technology specifically built for retail industry.

Hmm.

Prime example is that all those communication, whether emails, or Zoom meetings, any conversation, communication about the specific product, what we call the collaboration object, whether it's a purchase order, quotation, RFQ, anything they collaborate on, the conversation, communication, not tied and saved into the same database along with a specific product. So buyers are very busy people, you know, they deal with a lot of product, a lot of different suppliers. So that when they switch attention to a different one, where were my conversations with the other one? Very difficult to find them. They're buried in all different places. So we don't— we call that non-contextual communications. Huh, okay. So in SureFront, our innovation is to build contextual communication. So all those communication, whether messages, shared images, shared files, organically saved along to the product. RFQ, purchase order, quotation, the two sides collaborate. So the UI shows that if you click on the product, here are the conversations. You don't have to go back to Slack and email and try to find them. So that's also huge. You know, when the retailer have internal transitions, so one buyer shift category to a different one, you know, it's very hard to inherit all the prior knowledge. Between the predecessors, you know, the buyers and the suppliers. It buried in all different emails, so it's almost lost forever, the institutional knowledge.

Luke, you're like bringing up years and years of nightmares now. You brought up one before, now I think you're bringing up another one here. But I never thought about that though, but all those chat tools, all the fancy chat tools, Slack teams and all that, in a lot of ways they're no different than Excel in terms of, like you said, they're just exogenous to the process. And so you're always having to correlate that back. Yeah. And I can remember the nightmare you described, which was, oh my gosh, some buyer left the company, some buyer on my team got promoted. And even though I was happy for him or her, the biggest question was always, oh my God, where are all his or her documents? So I know what the heck is going on as we transition to this new person and we don't lose any momentum. And so what you're saying is you're trying to tie, you're trying to tie all that together so that that type of communication trail isn't lost throughout this process. I got it. Yeah, it makes sense, man. Well, okay, let's get down. Let's close this out. Let's talk brass tacks. Now, I always like to do this at the end. Where's the ROI? I mean, you guys had some claims in that video as well, but like, what's the ROI to this tool? Why should people use it fundamentally in terms of improving the dollars and cents of their business?

The first ROI is always about time. Each of the user using Storefront can on average save 20% of their time or 1 day of a week. You know, that's a lot of liberation. They can spend that extra time, you know, on actual product, with it, you know, stores, you know, to visit starting competitions, start a newer trend, and be very strategic rather than bury the time on keyboard. So that's the first and foremost. We monitor usage data, and we know that using Storefront, for example, a product development person can develop hundreds of products by sending an RFQ to dozens of suppliers, you know, within a week. That's many times faster than using old outdated tools. And time to market is a big advantage in retail.

And that makes sense. But like, if I put on my CFO hat, you know, and I get really like, hey, I see all these, you know, pitches every single day and as a CFO, where do I want to invest my money in terms of new technology, or CEO in terms of new technology? Like, you know, time-saving is one thing, but what about more the harder-hitting financials in terms of the revenue gains or the cost savings that I can explicitly expect from something like this? Where are those coming from?

It comes from at least two areas. One is the saved time. It would translate to individual productivity gain, which I mentioned some of the examples early. But to the organization which has many employees, that would be a huge gain of organization efficiency. To retail specific, that means better assortment, better sales crew, and newer opportunity. Financially, it can mean tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars to major, major retailers.

Probably better inventory turnover, the whole nine yards there in terms of how you're just operating day to day. I got to think too, correct me if I'm wrong, but I have to think engagement's a big thing with this. This too, because it allows people to work remotely. There's probably even some sustainability things in this too, when I start thinking about sampling and that type of thing as well. But I gotta think it's, and it's easier for people too, that they're not having to use so many different tools. Like, are you seeing that in a lot of, you know, kind of the early stage implementations as well with SureFront that, you know, people just like it better and so they're happier, which is also an important factor in some of the decisions we make around technology?

Yes, yeah, work from home, you know, it's probably a bigger norm even in the future, right? We probably likely will have less in-person meeting, you know, less travel, even though when we return to some form back to the office. So Shorefront, you know, it's a web-based solution accessible 24/7 anywhere anytime. So you can actually work from home, you know, the same way as you were in your office. Accessible, you know, access to all, you know, product information, you know, have communication with the suppliers by having a browser, you know, on your computer. So what we've seen that usage data, you know, people are use SureFront definitely 24/7. There are many, you know, users among different country, you know, during the day of course we see the East Coast and then the center of the country and the West Coast people starting, you know, SureFront and then At night would be all the European and then Asian-oriented suppliers, Vietnam, Singapore, China, Philippines, etc. They're jumping on Shorefront to communicate.

Yeah. I never thought about that too. Yeah, that's an interesting point too. It's not static files that are being transferred, so there's not the time gap that happens as all these different people around the world can be working on things. Well, you kind of summed it up. That's usually how I— I was going to ask you, how you think people are going to be working differently based on all of this, given what we've seen over the past year. But maybe I won't ask you that. Maybe instead I'll ask you for some predictions. As you look, say, 5 to 10 years out, what is it about what you've been describing, or what do you think it is about technology in general that's going to propel this type of vision that you've been describing forward?

In the software world, especially related to the retail, What's going to happen, I predict, would be the multi-enterprise collaboration.

Okay, multi-enterprise.

Supplier, you know, cross-organization people can now collaborate. Before, large enterprise company, they build solution for the retailer alone, for supplier alone. Again, technology doesn't go across borders. But now with cloud computing, you know, it's possible. To use the next generation merchandising and PD technology to collaborate, you know, within multiple organizations. Each has multiple hierarchies. Got it.

So things can be coordinated across multiple partners like you're describing versus an internal— which is, I think, something we've been seeing consistently with technology is that there's less of an internal focus. At least this next wave of technologies, it's less about the internal focus of improvement but on the external focus of how everything can work together. So 1 1 3 as you're trying to do all this work together. That's the real kind of secret sauce of this next wave technology frontier. That's cool. That's an awesome way to close this out. All right, well, let's do it. Let's kind of move. We've got humming along here. Let's hit the Q&A. We've got some really good questions. So like I said before, please submit your questions through the Q&A box. On your screen, and I will take a look at them and ask you— ask Luke those questions as they come in. So let's see here. First off, all right, number 1, Luke, how does the shift of consumer purchases towards e-commerce affect SureFront's usefulness?

Well, e-commerce surely become a big part of our, you know, normal everyday life. And, you know, e-commerce, you know, people call it a quarter, 20% of the retail nowadays, right? And for e-commerce, you know, the major challenge is data. You know, I mentioned before with consumer data necessary in the retail, it really double, triple, quadruple the data amount. You know, people want to know everything about a product when they see it online because they couldn't see it physically. Especially when I want to buy a large high-ticket SKU. So to enable that, the data attribution, data integrity, very important. How you build complex category electronics, I have 100 data field. When I sell apparel, there will be different, another 50 different type of field. So how to address the data integrity and data attribution, that will be a huge part. And you don't want to— because suppliers may own the data, how to have supplier enter the data for you so that you don't have to double entry it. And when you want to modify anything, supplier would be first and easier for them to modify. So those all call for the common platform, a shared platform to collaborate. So yeah, I mean, it definitely is an enabler.

That's a great question. I'm glad— thanks for asking that question out there. I think, yeah, if anything, I think it says that this type of thing is even more important because of just the sheer amount of data and how accurate it has to be as people are deciding what to purchase through that channel, so to speak. All right, well, it looks like we've got time for one more question. This is Frank— this is a good question. This is frankly the one I got a lot when I told people that I was doing this conversation today, and that is, What's the difference here inherently between just a PLM system? Do I still need a PLM system if I have SureFront? Luke Wang, I think you've talked about this a little bit, but just because the question's still out there, you know, separate PLM from what SureFront does.

Uh, let me explain the similarity and also the, the difference. You know, I'll let you be the judge and decide. SureFront definitely covers a lot of the features of the common PLM system. I would call SureFront, it's a more comprehensive, complete PLM system. First, the PLM system by name, product lifecycle management, right? So it's really about a product. So usually, the users are the product development department. And the other side will be some of the users from the suppliers. So it is a one-to-many system, meaning one retailer using it, many suppliers using it, but it's not a reverse many-to-many because each of the suppliers using the PLM system, they can communicate with only one retailer specifically. When they collaborate with another retailer, they have to log in to a different PLM. Even to the same PLM, they have to have two logins. So for them, there's really no benefit. It's more a headache. So that's one aspect. Second is that PLM, it doesn't finish with the transaction. PLM is about a product, right? The PD people use it, but the buyers actually make the real decision in the end, right? So they don't use PLM themselves day in, day out. They still rely on the old, you know, decade-old email communication with suppliers. So they also, when they write the purchase order, they jump onto an order management system. Different from PLM. So the PLM is only part of the equation, but not the comprehensive equation. You know what we envision, you know what SureFront can do. And also a big part, you know, of SureFront is that we have a lot of the communication tools I told you about. In PLM, you can only leave a comment. In PLM, you still communicate by email, right? So we have the contextual communication, you know, in addition to the product lifecycle management. So on the short front, I would say has a lot of similarity. We have the key feature of the PLM, but we are far more comprehensive beyond PLM.

Right. Yeah, there's a lot of complementarity in terms of how it's all working together.

Very cool.

Makes sense. All right, Luke Wang. Well, that was a wonderful discussion. We covered a lot of ground there. It was my absolute pleasure. To share the stage here with you today at the University of Arizona. Thank you to everyone for tuning in and submitting your questions for Luke. Luke, last question. If people want— if people are watching today and they found the content interesting and want to learn more, like, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

First is surefront.com. Second, they can always reach out to me from LinkedIn, send me a message.

Awesome, perfect. Love when people say that. Yeah, the direct communication on LinkedIn always seems to be one of the best approaches. All right, on that note, again, thank you so much, Luke Wang. Thank you to everyone in the audience. Hope everyone has a great close to the rest of the week, and most importantly, stay well.