ChainTech Demo Day July 11, 2024

ChainTech Demo Day on July 11th, 2024. So as you know, ChainTech is our showcase of the latest solutions and startups in the field of supply chain technology. So I hope you're going to enjoy it and you're going to be excited about all those new solutions coming to market. Again, with a focus on what is coming in the APAC region. Today we're going to have 2 solutions, 2 very innovative, very interesting solutions coming up. One is from Ems, and the second one would be from Loveware. We're going to hear from both of them. Each of them will have around half an hour to quickly present their company, run you through a quick demo, and also they will take your questions. So if you have any questions at any time, you can put your questions using the Q&A tab button located at the bottom of the screen, and then they will take your questions during the Q&A at the end of each demo. You also— just to let you know, this could be a very interactive event, so we hope that we can get your questions and we can have some good discussions around the solutions. So without further ado, I would like to bring up Patrick Van Genn and Paul Van Nierop. from Ems. First, Patrick will give us a quick presentation, and then Paul will take us through a quick demo and also answer all your questions. So let's welcome Ems, and with Patrick van Gentiaen.

Yeah, thank you, Max, for your kind introduction, and hi everybody. I would say on the other side of the of the globe. I'm actually based in the Netherlands, calling to you from Amsterdam. So I will start to tell you that I am a little bit disappointed after our match yesterday. The Dutch lost from the UK guys, so that was a hard blow. But today we are ready to present to you our great solution and introduce our company to you. I'm the co-founder of the company and executive board member, and I will lead you through some introductionary slides, then bring it over to Paul, who will provide the demo for you today, as Max already told you. So, Paul, you can go to the next slide, and this is just a brief introduction on AIMMS. I guess you're interested in supply chain technology to leverage your most precious part of the business. Most of you supposedly are working in the supply chain area, you're supply chain experts, and you're basically managing the spine of your company, making sure your products and services are distributed, delivered to your customers' doorstep. And that's not an easy task, and we know that. And that is why we are supporting customers. Most of our customers are part of the Fortune 500 list. There's also a lot of local heroes, and they are using to— they're used to bring AIMMS to their supply chain front for planning and optimization. That is the core of our business already for 35 years. Every minute, business decisions are made around the globe by AIMMS technology. It's supported by companies like Woolworths in Australia, DKSH in Singapore, McDonald's in China. Billions of dollars are saved or cashed in, and the expense of our licenses are most of the times already recovered in months after they start using AIMMS. Gartner recognizes AIMMS also in their Magic Quadrant for supply chain planning. And we have a lot of people in our company that can support you worldwide. Also in Asia, we have our local people, local office working out of Singapore. We have offices in Europe, offices in the US. So it's a full global network. And apart from that network, of our own people, we are also supported by great partners. The likes of Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, BCG, and some local service providers easily support you in bringing our applications and our software to your systems. And when you're choosing for AIMMS, you're ensured of the best possible support, not only by these partners, but also by us. You will have a supply chain buddy as supported by to by our expert people. One of the experts is luckily with us today, my colleague Paul that will provide the demo. Also, we have Saran in the call, our VP of Asia Pacific. He overlooks the region from his office in Singapore. So guys, please fill me in. If I miss out on something in this webinar. Next slide, please, Paul. So what I show you here is the offer that Ames has. So Ames is a company that is specialized in optimization. The core of our business is optimization, and from that platform, we brought a great product forward, and that is the pre-configured SC Navigator. SC Navigator is an application that will be shown by Paul today. It helps you to do a network design to optimize your network over the globe. And we are supporting our customers with a platform that is a second line of business where you can basically develop your own supply chain applications such as S&OP and IBP, so sales and operation planning, or integrated business planning. And all that can be done based on a platform that is solidly developed already over 35 years. And the SG Navigator product is now already in the market for over 8 years, and we are supporting our customers with that application worldwide. Paul will show you all the the use cases later. Paul, next slide, please. And then here, for just showing a little bit more about our range of products and the 2 lines, the 2 main lines of products that we are supporting your supply chain with. And on the left-hand side, in the green, you see the SE Navigator product and all the functionality that it supports. So it's not only network design, but you can do greenfield analysis, there's cost-profit optimization, Even carbon optimization is a functionality that is part of the solution. All the other functionalities speak for itself, and obviously it makes sense that not only bottom line but also top line optimization, like new product introductions and launches, can be fully optimized as planning is concerned. And on the other side, you see The other product is the AIMMS platform, and the AIMMS platform is basically an optimization platform supported by a CPLEX solver, and it's enabling you to optimize any node or challenge that you have in your supply chain, whether that is blending in a manufacturing site or production scheduling to transport route planning. Our partners are building great applications on that platform, and we are running over our customers are running over more than 1,500 applications, different applications on that platform worldwide. And most importantly, obviously, we support our technology through cloud technology. So it's fast and secured and an agile way to provide the functionality and share it with your team. Next slide, please, Paul. And so basically, for today, we are focusing on the SC Navigator. SC Navigator is a product that enables you to visualize your data, to visualize the optimization, to visualize your network design picture, as you see on the left side. It's clearly that data are important, but if you cannot visualize those data, you cannot communicate. You cannot communicate internally in your teams. You have to also communicate to your management, and especially the C-level management have to take quick decisions. And if you visualize your supply chain and you visualize your solutions for the network design optimization cases that you are working on, then it's so much better. if you have a picture, and that's why we are excelling on that side. The other part, the core of our technology, also provides scenarios, so scenario planning on strategic and tactical level. Basically, that enables you to compare scenarios. Let's say if you have the profit, cost, service levels, and carbon emissions optimization, You need to really clearly define your scenarios and also compare those scenarios to see whether you can solve your challenge and you can save your budgets by combining, let's say, going to optimize your profit, but also optimize at the same time the carbon emissions while enhancing your service levels. And that is a very intense and very complex challenge. And that's why AIMMS is the best platform to help you and support your teams to run those scenarios and also make finally the decisions. And last but not least, obviously, and why we do all this and why it's so important to optimize on strategic and tactical levels, because it can save you a lot of money. And especially if you run scenarios, you understand what you're doing before you are actually doing it. And that is how you can make sure that the impact of your decision is also clearly done by an investment that will be won back after the fact, which is super important. So Paul, I think this is the brief introduction to your demo. Floor is yours if there's questions for all the people that can be asked after the demo, Paul.

Great, thanks, thanks Patrick for the introduction. And do you hear me well?

Yep.

Very good. Good morning, good afternoon everybody. My name is Paul van Nierop. I'm the product owner at AIMMS for Supply Chain Navigator. This is the out-of-the-box tool that we that we build to support strategic and tactical optimization of the network. So I will give you a quick demo to give you a sense of what that looks like. And then we will take some Q&A after that. I will share my screen. And I will just checking everybody sees my screen with the little application icon.

Yeah.

It's all good.

Yeah.

Very good. So let's start at the beginning. Our software is deployed on the, on the cloud. So as Patrick mentioned, it's made to support strategic and tactical planning and optimization. And we build these applications, but it's cloud native and deployed as a software as a service. So as a user, you come to the landing page with an internet connection, you launch the application, and you start seeing your supply chain in the browser, basically. So what we're looking at here is the main landing page of the SC Navigator application. Companies use this firstly to model their base case, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. But just to give you a sense for which supply chain we're looking at here, because it also gives you a good sense of what the scope of the capability is. In this supply chain that we're modeling here, It's a solar panel company, and goods start off at raw material suppliers, so either raw material suppliers or finished goods suppliers. And the raw material suppliers provide their raw materials into production facilities. So these are the red dots on the map, and you will have a bill of material model here that converts raw materials into, into finished goods. So what you see here is the make-buy part of the supply chain, and then on the other side you've got the distribution. So in this particular example, product flows through 2 central DCs, one in Paris and one in Bucharest, and then through a network of local DCs. So these are the green dots on the map. And finally, to customer. And in this example, we're modeling customers at the city level. So this is typically with network, strategic network design, there's some level of aggregation that happens, and demand is modeled either at the city or the zip code level. So this is the visualization of the supply chain, and coupled with the visualization, is the KPIs that are associated with that. If I click on the bottom of the screen here on the KPI summary, there's a few KPIs that we track when we do these optimizations. This would be a base case. You've got a profit KPI. This is an approximation of the income statement with the revenue and the different costs associated with it and the resulting profit. You've got service KPIs. What's the demand fulfillment? Am I fulfilling all my demand? What's the average drive time that it takes to reach my demand, what's the average cost per unit? These are the service KPIs, and then we've got custom KPIs. A very common KPI these days that companies are modeling with on top of the cost profit objective, which is always there, is the carbon emissions objective. You can start modeling with carbon emissions in your supply chain as a custom objective. This is typically the first step of scenario modeling. You represent what is happening currently in your supply chain, you visualize that, you validate that against the KPIs, and you say, well, okay, now I've got a digital representation of my supply chain. Now I want to start running some what-if scenarios. I want to know what happens if demand increases. I want to know what happens if I were to optimize. And so essentially, the, the tool is made— if you see the workflow over here— to be a scenario planning tool. So we start with data. So for example, if I click on this, it gives me a data dashboard showing me what the, the data structure of my supply chain looks like. But now I want to run a what-if scenario. So I click on the Customer tab and I see my demand that I've assumed for my base case reflected here. But now I want to run a scenario. So I'm using the filters over on the right here to say, well, what about if just for my retail customers? So I'm clicking on the retail filter here. I want to run a simulation where I increase the demand for my retail customers by 20%. And if you, if you watch the numbers in blue, those will all change. So, so, so what's happening here is the, the numbers that are in blue are editable in the browser, and as a user, I can interact with my data directly through the browser to create this, this what-if scenario. And then I can run an optimization. So I'm heading over to the control panel over on the workflow on the left here, and I'm going to hit the the optimize button on the bottom right. So if you see under my mouse hovering over the little Ames logo bottom right, I've hit the optimize button there. And what's happening is now it's taking that new data that I configured with the increased demand plus all the other data in the datasets, and it configures that as a MIP, as a mixed integer linear program, which is a mathematical optimization formulation. It passes that to the CPLEX solver up on the cloud. So we use the IBM CPLEX solver in the backend to do the optimizations. And once it's done the optimization, it brings back the solution so that we can inspect that in the browser, take a look at how that looks. So it's done with the optimization. It said based on that new demand, this is the optimal way to do that. It's given us a new KPI, summary. So, so, and it's also giving us a, um, a visual on what this optimization looks like for the new demand. So just to, just to, um, show you how it works, because it's really about scenario comparison, we will call this the base case. So I've pre-saved this as a base case, but what I will do now is run an optimization case. So I'm heading back to the, the control panel here And I'm going to relax some constraints to give it room to optimize. So I'm going to relax production capacity constraints, warehouse capacity constraints. I'm going to, instead of doing a minimum cost, I'm going to do a maximum profit solve. I'm also going to allow it to unfulfill certain demand, and I'm also going to allow the number of warehouses and production facilities to change. So I'm enabling the open-close decisions. over here. And then I'm going to optimize, optimize again. So what I'm trying to illustrate here is through the control panel in the data section of the workflow, you've got the ability to set the parameters for your what-if scenarios. So this is saying, what if I could optimize? What if I could open, close? What if I could have extra capacity at different facilities, etc.? And I will, I will let this one run in the background and just show you how that looks Once you've got these scenarios. So every scenario can be saved and then they can be compared side by side. So I've chosen the UK here, even though they beat us in the football last night. But if you see in the base case over here, the UK is being serviced out of a London DC and there's a DC in Dublin. But in the optimized case, the London DC has a much bigger footprint even. Sending product back, back across. And you can also then compare in the KPI summaries, you can compare side by side, all right, well, where is the value coming from in this, this optimization? And you can do that at a very high level in the KPI summary, and you can also do that at a very detailed level. For example, in the, in the, in the transport report, I can see on a lane-by-lane basis, all right, what changes from the base to the optimized. So for example, on this lane from-to combination, volume's dropping from 660,000 down to 200,000. So this optimization has run through, but what I showed you previously is how you compare scenarios. But this is back to the optimized scenario, and we can start drilling down and looking at some dashboards which show us what that solution actually means, because it's nice to have the high-level numbers, But there's always a detail below that. So for example, this is the warehouse dashboard, and if I click on a particular warehouse, it will show me how those volumes change through time on the top right. The top left is a red-orange-green dashboard saying, well, actually, for these— this warehouse, there's, there's capacity violations in red. There's yellow bars mean it's close to capacity. Green means it's, it's within capacity, and gray means it's it's not being used at all. And you can also visualize that through a map. For example, this is the warehouse footprint. So everything in black, the optimization is closing down. The green ones are running within capacity. The red ones are running at overcapacity. So lots of dashboards that give you the ability to drill down into the results. And also, of course, for the analyst, always the data that supports those dashboards A couple of other— I won't go through every dashboard. I think we have the time for that. But good to mention there's a cost to serve report. So this gives you the ability to drill down into specific customers. So if I click on a customer, it will give me the cost to serve at a very granular level per product and per customer for what that looks like. And there's also an end-to-end report where you can start visualizing how product flows through the, through the, um, through, through the supply chain. So for example, this customer in Birmingham, you can track the raw materials all the way back to the source, uh, in, in Italy. Uh, watching the clock, I want to mention 2 other things and then we'll pause for some, some, some Q&A. I think the first thing to mention, and I won't do the, the runs right now, is that there's a center of gravity capability. So, and this, this supports greenfield analysis. So if you're looking at your supply chain and you're wondering where I should establish the next warehouse, where should my next factory be, you can run a center of gravity module that then recommends locations for, for greenfields capacity. So that's a key part of the, the workflow and the process. And then the last thing I want to mention to you is the, the ability to, to do the multi-objective Modeling. So here in the control panel, you see the different objectives, including cost and carbon. But I could— in this one, I've maximized for profit, but I could also, by deselecting the cost metrics here, I could optimize this network for carbon. So you get the ability to optimize for carbon and show me the cost. You get the ability to optimize for cost, show me the carbon, and more importantly, as Patrick mentioned up front, find me the sweet spot. So, for example, you could say, well, treat carbon as a cost, it's emitted in tons, but let's assume that every ton is worth €60 of cost. So, if I combine the carbon emissions with— at a carbon pricing weight factor, it effectively becomes a multi-objective optimization. I'm going to stop it there, watching the time. So, we've got 6 minutes before the half hour.

Yeah.

want to respect the colleagues as well.

So thank you, thank you, Paul and Patrick. Okay, so you have— we have a lot of questions for you guys. Maybe we'll take one by one. Just try to keep your answer as short as you can so we can cover most of them. Let's take the first question. What's the difference between SE Navigator and AIMMS platform? Are they 2 different products?

Oh, shall I take that one, Patrick? Yeah, SE Navigator is out of the box and it's built using our AIMMS platform. So think about AIMMS platform as an optimization toolbox where you can build optimization applications. So a lot of companies want the toolbox and they build something very bespoke and specific for their needs. AC Navigator, we use the same toolbox ourselves to provide AC Navigator. So it's completely generic and out of the box. So the same application is used by customers across the world.

Okay, cool. Is your network design solution fully cloud-based?

It is fully cloud-based. Yeah, we don't have any desktop versions or on-premise solutions. So in terms of modern architecture, that's the, the direction we've chosen. Fully supplied as software as a service. So we supply the cloud environment, the application, the CPLEX solver, the data lake, the Parquet files in the backend. Everything is deployed by us software as a service.

Okay, someone is asking, I see a lot of maps of US and Europe. How do you support network design in Asia?

Um, well, we have our customers in, in Asia. So Patrick mentioned some of them, BlueScope in Australia, DKSH in Singapore. We also have customers in, in Brazil, uh, and in Mexico. Um, so, so the, the solution is, is, is geography agnostic. So it's, it's got the, the, the, the, the maps in the, in the background cover the globe. It's OpenStreetMaps, and we, we've got a location service, a GIS service to get road distances and geocodes called LocationIQ, which also supports global mapping and global trip times and distances and global geocoding. So absolutely no problem.

Yeah, Patrick, feel free to step in if you want to add anything. Can— okay, another question here: can the lines on your map be replaced by the actual transportation routes?

Yeah, it's a great question. So visually, the lines are just drawn as straight just to get the big picture. In the background, it's using the actual road distances and travel times. So the data in the back is actually using the actual road routes and distances and times, but the visualizations, we just do that with straight lines just to make it a little bit cleaner and a bit more easy to visualize.

Can scenarios— okay, hold on, let me take it. Can scenarios support logistic disruption like natural disasters, port strikes, etc.?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the great uses that we see for the tool. So once you've modeled your supply chain and you keep this model up to date and live— and we're not talking live every 5 minutes, but at least every month or every quarter updating or refreshing— you have this digital representation which you can run scenarios. So a very good example is one of our customers, Intel, had to shut down their Shanghai warehouse because of COVID And a very easy scenario to run in Aimzia— you open your application, you force close the Shanghai warehouse, you hit the optimize button, and it does, it does 2 things. Firstly, it tells you what's Plan B. So where am I going to service those customers from? Where do I need extra capacity, maybe an extra shift, which customers will I not be able to service? I can, I can call them. So it tells you Plan B, the contingency plan, but as a recommended action, but also tells you the impact. How much money will I lose? How many customers will I not be able to serve? What's the impact on my carbon emissions, etc.? So using this for, for disruption planning is a very common use case of, of scenario planning with SC Navigator.

Patrick, a quick question for you. Uh, you talked about support. How support your customers during and after the implementation?

Yeah, that's also a very good question. For SG Navigator, we actually have no implementation needs, so we do a customer onboarding, as we call it. Paul can explain that maybe much more if we have more time, but our onboarding is really quick. It's a month to 3 months of handholding coaching of your team. And our Supply Chain Navigator is a configurable app, so there's no implementation needed. So that's how we do it. So it's short and crisp, and all our partners are equipped to do onboarding as well if necessary.

Yeah, so that's it. I think Patrick summarized it well. So the implementation is we just deploy the software. What you— what customers really do is, is bring it to life through the data work, the datasets that they import. And we coach customers and we show them how to do that. We train them, etc.

A related question: how many weeks or months do you need to get up and running with the solution?

It depends a lot on the, on the data availability, of course, but typically our onboarding program is 3 months. But, but often in the first week, customers already have maps of their supply chain, not perfect, But that's okay. It takes probably a month to get a decent data set and start running some scenarios. And within 3 months, customers are typically autonomous and can, can work, work on their own and run the scenario. So anywhere between a week and 3 months, I would say.

Okay, we have a lot more questions. Maybe let's take 2 more. How far upstream does your analysis go? Are you looking at supplier geolocation and taking into consideration programs and the various fluctuation costs related to pre-carrier CFS charge versus FCL, et cetera?

Yeah, all of that can be modeled and the scope of the modeling is really up to you. So we showed an example from supplier through to customer, but you can also model tier 2 suppliers, tier 3 suppliers, tier 4. Some people want— companies want to do that. Others want to just do the outbound modeling. So it really depends on the scope you want to model, but from a technology point of view, it's completely upstream and downstream scope is possible, and all of those cost elements can be modeled here.

Okay, let's take probably another one. How are capacity constraints defined for warehouse and for transportation lines?

You as the user input them. So there's a data template where you capture your data. You can either do that through Excel, or you can use Parquet files in an Azure Data Lake integration in the backend. But as the user, you specify all those numbers. So it's just data that you provide to the system.

Okay, we have a few more questions. I think maybe we'll take— yeah, I think we can stop here. If we have more questions, and if you do have more questions for Eames, keep asking those questions. We will answer them after the event. We will then share the response through email after the event. So don't worry, you can go ahead and ask your question. We have a special offer. Maybe, Paul, you want to talk about it?

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a supply chain scenario modeling handbook, basically. So you can download that for free from our website. It just goes through some of the questions that were asked here. It goes through that in a little bit more, more detail and says, well, how do you, how do you do this, and why would you do it, and how do you get started, and what does the, the journey look like? So please, please take advantage of the, the offer.

Okay, great. Thank you very much. Okay, well, we might hear from you again towards the end of the event, but thanks again for the demo, Patrick and Paul. It was great.

Yeah, thank you.

Let's move on to our next solution provider. I'd like to again welcome Nigel Street and Paul Harris from Loftware. So welcome, go ahead.

Thank you, Max.

Hallo. Yes, thank you very much, Max. So good afternoon, everyone, and a warm welcome to today's webinar from me. Thank you to Max and ChainTech team for organizing the event, and thank you, Patrick and Paul, for a great presentation. And on the football, it was just an all too rare moment of brilliance, so there's going to be no gloating from an Englishman here. So we're really excited to be able to present Loftware to you today. My name is Nigel Street and I'm responsible for the global partner business, which spans 130 countries and counts well in excess of 1,000 partners as members of our partner program. I'm joined by Paul, as you saw there, Paul Harris, who's Director of our Partner Presales, and he has a team of solution architects and technical experts supporting the network globally. I'm going to be giving you a 5-minute introduction into what, who Loftware are and why you should be interested in us and what we do. I'm then going to hand over to Paul, who will tell you more about the how and provide an overview of our market-leading cloud platform. So Paul, can you move us on to the next slide, please? So let me tell you a little bit more about who we are. We're a market global market leader in enterprise labeling and artwork management solutions. We offer the industry's most comprehensive digital platform, which includes on-premise and cloud-based solutions for organizations of all sizes to support them with managing and printing complex labeling artwork and packaging. Companies partner with Loffware to help them meet regulatory mandates, improve time to market, support new product development, and mitigate risk with ease amongst a host of other benefits we bring. I'm just going to talk through a couple of the boxes you can see here. We've got over 30 years of experience in this field and are well versed in the challenges organizations face across the areas I just outlined, wherever in the world they're operating. We support them in being able to produce 51 billion labels a year and counting. Yes, 51 billion, that's a big number. There are 525, or more than that actually, we're growing every day globally, working in a hybrid manner. And our HQ is in New Hampshire in the US, and we have operational and development centers in Slovenia and the UK, and sales offices, as you can see, in the region in Singapore and China. Our solutions integrate with systems such as SAP, Oracle, Infor, and others, other business systems, to offer advanced workflows to optimize your business processes and deliver increased visibility into the supply chain. We count the world's leading print technologies as our partners, working together to create seamless integration to our platform to provide maximum performance around printing those 51 billion labels. Next slide, please, Paul. Let's talk to you a little bit about our customers, of which we're extremely proud in many verticals. Anywhere where a product needs to be identified through the supply chain, you will find us. I'd like to talk about 3 here. I'd start with Infineon, whom we've worked with for the last 6 years. They're a $4 billion leader in the semiconductor manufacture for power systems and IoT market. They've got position number 1 in the automotive sector. They've been successfully using our label management solution across their 17 manufacturing locations and their IT operations, whom we work with very closely. They're based in Malaysia, actually. Then moving into Toshiba Logistics, or T-Log as they now like to be called. They've been a long-standing user in the transport and land logistics market. They're headquartered in Japan and they've been working with our legacy solution for many years, Loftware Print Server, but they're rolling out our Loftware Cloud solution across the logistic hub around the world. And lastly, IKEA, the global retailer for soft furnishings and furniture, where we're helping them to globally coordinate their entire labeling requirements And I think of particular interest to this audience is the work we've been doing to standardize the labeling across the thousands of global suppliers. We're rolling out an IKEA-branded and Loftware-powered solution that the manufacturer supplier can download, obtain the latest label template, and integrate it seamlessly with their own business systems, as well as synchronizing with IKEA to ensure they're always compliant. It's had an enormous multi-million dollar ROI for them. And they're already looking at how they can go faster in implementing that solution across the globe. Next slide, please, Paul. So in summary, we provide solutions for companies of all shapes and sizes. And as we said, we have on-premise and cloud technology. We have industry— extensive industry expertise across all of those verticals that you saw and others. Vast partner network, alliance partners with hardware and software. You saw earlier Zebra, Videojet, Sato, Avery Dennison. Oracle, Microsoft, it's huge. Cloud innovation, we were the first to bring cloud to the market many years back and have been striving to drive the ever wider and more powerful capability that cloud brings into this important sector. And then we have our support organization, which is 365 days a year, 7 days a week. We can follow the sun with that model. We have extensive online training via our academy courses and a very comprehensive online knowledge base. We also have a substantial support team who are able— an implementation team, I should say— who can also help our partners as well to provide implementation services wherever they are in the world. Next slide, please, Paul. So why Loftware? Hopefully beginning to get a feel where we can really help businesses to optimize their supply chain, enable that consistent compliance, avoid fines. We've helped our customers avoid enormous fines, over £200 million and counting. The 51 billion labels that I keep mentioning that we're doing and helping our customers produce every day, and that extensive expertise that we have around the globe to support your customers, potential customers, and our partners 24/7. Next slide, please, Paul. I want to just very quickly— okay, very quickly, I'd like to plug an event for Shenzhen where we will be talking more about our offer to high-end manufacturers. It'll be live with customers and suppliers in Shenzhen on August 6th. So hopefully, please register, come and see us there. And now I'd like to hand over to Paul, who's going to tell you more about the how.

Paul. Great, thank you, Nigel. And yeah, thank you everybody for your time this afternoon. So what I'm going to do is just give you a very kind of quick look at what we've— Nigel's given a really nice view there of who Lofware is and how we support our customers. And just before we dive into the live demo, I just want to give you a little bit of context, a bit more about what is it, what does Lofware do. And when I am explaining to my, to my 4-year-old and she says, Daddy, what does your company do? How do I explain it to her? Well, very simply, and actually tied up nicely with Patrick and Paul's presentation, we make sure that the right information gets on the right product So it gets where it needs to be at the right time. And that varies from actual direct marking on products, printing very small labels for bottles, vials, for actual physical machinery parts, as well as things like soda cans and food items, through to boxes, cartons, pallets, and also shipping documentation. So really everything that you might need to ensure that your products are getting shipped out to your end customers on time and to the right location, but also, as Nigel said, in the context of the IKEA solution, actually ensuring that your suppliers can get the right products to you and that when they arrive that they have the right information on there, that they can be quickly sorted and placed in the right location in your warehouses, really starting to reduce that friction in that inbound receipt processing as well as your outbound delivery kind of throughout the entire supply chain. So as I said, talking about our Loftware Cloud solution and really what is it, what does Loftware do, what are the capabilities of Loftware Cloud. I'm not going to talk through all of these today, but just wanted to kind of give you an introduction and overview of the depth and breadth of our solution. Really kind of want to focus in on a couple of areas, um, one of which is the leading integration that Nigel's already talked about. And what this means is that we're not having to hold and retain data ourselves. We're sourcing it from the existing source of truth, whether that's an ERP, an MES, a WMS, uh, or an MDM, any other data solution. That really making sure that we're pulling that information at the right time from the right place. And that can actually be from multiple sources as well. If you're saying to us, I have this product and I have different sets of information from different parts of my environment, we can ensure that all of those bits of data get tied up together correctly and placed onto those labels and placed onto those products. We're also going to have a little look at our label design capability, which is really where the power to empower your business users comes through. One of the, the really big things that we see a lot of our customers is saying, we love how we don't have to go to IT anymore. We don't need to rely on an IT person, someone with coding or development skills, to develop my label layouts and templates. It's all actually sat with the business owners, the people in the supply chain side of the business, because they're able to make those changes. They're able to roll them out, whether those are changes that you need to make to your own labeling requirements to meet changing regulations, or if you're using customer labels to ensure that you're complying with their requirements as well and ensuring that the right information is on there. All of that backed up by very strong workflow capability, role-based access control, and in a solution that is cloud-based and built to scale globally. So we're going to have a look at a use case. I'm actually going to look at an automotive manufacturer. Really, this could be applied to any manufacturing company regardless of the type of manufacturing or any sort of real-time where you're looking to distribute any product. But it's just quite a nice one because I think it highlights a few of those key areas that we've just been talking about. So in this scenario, we're looking at production data being source from ERP. So as an end user, what I am doing, I am preparing products that have been manufactured to go out to shipment. So I'm at the distribution center, I've picked, I've packed, I'm now shipping my products out. We're ensuring that the right serial numbers are being attached to there and that they're coming from the relevant system, and we're using that information that's coming from our ERP to ensure that we're going to get that printed out. So if we have a look now, we're going to start actually off in the application itself, and this is an application that's been built within the Loftware solution. So we have the ability to, to build configured applications. Nigel mentioned there the IKEA solution, which is an IKEA-branded Loftware-powered solution for their suppliers. This is a prime example of that. So this is a screen that has been specifically built to support this company's requirements, and the same is something that we would be able to do for you. And this is really designed to give a very comfortable UX and user experience, something that for an end user they feel like they are working within their existing ecosystem. Quite often when customers are migrating to Loftware, they may have an existing platform that they want to bring across. They may have elements they wish to cross. That is absolutely something that we do support. But we also can design these from the ground up. If you're looking to really go about delivering a business transformation, changing the way that you're sort of having this operational side of the supply chain work, we do also support that and can do that level of development and configuration as well. This is one way we output labels. The other way, of course, is actually through a direct integration, so completing a transaction in, in the ERP and then having the label get printed out. But in this example that we're looking at, we can see that I've been able to select the relevant label that I need to print out. There's a big selection of them that are all available, and the ones that are available to me are the ones that are latest version. I'm not having to go to a different disparate shared folder, try and pull them up, try and input data manually. They're all there, they're all available. And really based on the selection that I make, it's going to make sure that the right data is getting filled in. That data, as I say, there's an aspect of it that's coming from my ERP that's being preloaded and that's being driven— can be driven by my login, by my user account. Also by the orders that I'm processing or which orders I've said I need to process today. We do also have then as well the ability to load in additional variable data if there is some specific information that we need to enter. Again, in the context of suppliers, quite often there may be specific information that they have that they need to provide to you. Rather though than giving them just a blank sheet or a blank label and say, fill this in every time. What this can do is say, well, actually, you're just going to have a row, a typed box. You're going to fill that in or you're going to scan that information in and then it's going to print it in the right place on the label and it's going to be fully compliant with my requirements. As you can see as well, there's extensive support for many different types of barcodes, fully GS1 compliant, and that's 2D, including 2D barcodes as well, QR codes, data matrix codes. Because again, in a modern supply chain, what we're seeing more and more is lots more automation, which means we need to have lots more information be packed into those barcodes. So where we need to obviously have the human-readable information on our label, actually this barcode down the bottom here is going to be holding a lot of that data. Because what's going to happen when this arrives at the destination, that's going to get scanned and that's going to automate a lot of the kind of receipt process. Again, at that destination. So it's really about enabling you to utilize existing technology that you have, existing printer hardware, existing scanner hardware, to actually bring in a level of automation that isn't currently within the business. As I say, this is all underpinned by a really powerful label designer. And if I just pivot to that, this is actually one of the elements of the solution which optionally can be installed locally on a computer. The central solution is managed via a cloud platform. We'll see that in just a moment. But this is just a way that if a user is working locally, they can also do this design themselves. We do also have a cloud designer. But on here I can see it's a what we call a WYSIWYG design. So how I lay out my label here is how it will print out. And it's actually showing me based on the printer that I'm currently connected to. So right now to an A4 printer, it's saying this is what it's going to look like on the label. So it's showing I mean, kind of where my data is going to sit and ensuring that if I am designing this to test for a specific print set, I can make sure that it's going to print correctly. Then I can pull in what are called different variables. So really that data-driven side, which is about, as I say, not inputting data manually, but actually pulling that data in automatically, adding in additional functions, being able to pull together concatenated data, to go into those barcodes, to go into that information, and also add any prefixes or affixes that we need to when necessary. Can also perform a certain level of calculation if we need to do that to bring data in to make sure that it's getting correct. But crucially as well, for an end user or a business owner, they're able to take ownership of this. This is a designer that does not require that coding. It doesn't require you to be modifying a technical XML file. It's all done in the solution. And when you approve this and when you save it and check it in, this will then become the label that you print. So the last thing I want to show and make sure we have some time for questions is a little bit about the kind of printing and the history and the analytics that we get. So as well as enabling end users to design, to print, and to ensure that data is getting to the right place, it's also really important to know what's being printed where and when and by whom. And that is something that we really give you that insight into. So moving over into what we call our Loftware Control Centre, which is the kind of beating heart, the central data and document management storage of the solution. This is where we are holding all that information. This is also where we're storing all of our templates, all of that being saved in the cloud. Securely backed up, no need to do that locally for you. It's also where we can see, as I say, that printing history. So we've got under here, we've got a history of all that printing that's occurred through our system. We can see how it's been printed, who it's been printed by, any errors, any alerts that have come through, and actually also just kind of track all the activity. We can also do some analytics on this information just natively within the solution. So really looking at, you know, what labels are we printing the most, which printers and which groups are we utilizing the most. So getting an idea of across our network, across the hardware that we have today, what's actually getting used and is there room perhaps for optimization? Do we have hardware that's being underutilized? Do we have some redundancy that we can remove? All of this data all coming in and the more, as you saw, the amount of tables that I just said that we're printing a year. All of that has a huge amount of data that all of our customers are then using to feed back in to, as I say, to their sort of decision-making processes, to their operational processes, and to their more strategic thinking. How are we actually going to be optimizing our supply chain moving forward and really seeing that interconnectivity of not just printing out a label and putting it on a box, but actually, as we say, ensuring that we're getting the right product to the right place at the right time. That's everything we had to present.

Max?

Yeah, thank you all.

Thank you, Nigel. Okay, we have a number of questions for you, so let's get started. Nigel, someone is asking, Bartender versus Loveware, advantages?

Well, I don't like to talk about specific alternatives in the market. What I would say is you know, we are regularly compared favorably to any alternative that's available. And chiefly what people are interested in— Paul, I mean, touched on a number of the topics— but integration, integration to business systems in the way that is seen by the customer as the most important way to do it for them, and our ability to then to conform to that and to be able to facilitate that. You also saw the Designer. That's a browser-based designer, which is new in the marketplace. You do have the opportunity to also download a thin client if you prefer, so you've got both ways of working. And the other thing I'd like to draw out is the extensive service organization that we have that supports our solutions globally. We have people in every part of the world, including in Singapore and China, who are able to configure our solutions to the customer's specific requirements or support our partners in doing that.

Okay, next question. We are SDN partner with Oracle NetSuite using mostly Honeywell hardware. Is Loftware integrated into NetSuite for simple ease of template design and execution from a handheld device?

Yeah, we do have a NetSuite integration. So what it will be is The actual— and the handheld device is actually quite kind of the standard demo we look at when we're demoing the Oracle solutions, so from a warehouse management position. So all of the kind of ease, the template design, that would all sit within Loftware, and then the actual execution is going to happen on that handheld device. And from an end user, they will execute the transaction. and the label will print directly through that Oracle integration.

Okay. All right, next question. If I understand well, Loftware helps shippers to customize new kind of advanced labels, but can my 3PL use them? Good question.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, so okay, no problem.

I mean, we're working with many of the 3PL providers out there either directly Or as Paul says, with customers who then want to, you know, have their own approach to working with them. Massively flexible is what I would say. What do you need to do? We can address it.

Next question: Does Loftware support RFID labels beyond the traditional printed ones?

Yeah, we do. And a wide range of RFID printer types as well.

Okay. All right. Next question: Are those labels internationally recognized even in Asia?

Yes, they are. So the labels that are designed are designed— we can provide some standard templates, some standard labels, but it's also about giving you as an end user, as a customer, being able to configure those to meet the localized and geographic requirements. So we see quite a lot in Europe as well as Asia-Pac that there will be geographical regulations that we need to comply with, but that is all capable. That is all— if you really look at the label template I showed, you could design that from just being a blank sheet, added everything that you would need to be compliant, and also really be able to easily change. And that's really where we start to see the power coming through is not just in that initial label design, but in actually being also able to make those changes really, really quickly and easily.

Okay.

Can I just chime in that Unicode and double-byte are fully supported, as you might expect? So that's also completely covered.

Next question: what are the capabilities to give access to your vendors so they can print labels in the format you have decided on?

One for Paul.

Yeah, absolutely. So the print application that I showed, what you would do is you would actually onboard your vendors as a user within the solution. It's what we call role-based access control, or RBAC, which means that you can configure a profile for them which is very limited, but they— to only essentially be able to go in and print labels and have no other level of access. But they would be able to run a thin client on their end, connect it to their local printers using our printer drivers, and then load up through that login, load those templates that you've designed. And you will be able to specify, again, based on who they are and where they are based, exactly which templates.

Okay, next question: do you need special printers to use Loveware?

No, over, I think, 6,000+ printer models, Nigel, and we develop and build our own drivers in-house. And many of those printer manufacturers that you saw actually utilize drivers that we've built as their standard.

Okay, can I just add that there's continuous inkjet, laser devices, thermal transfer printers, as well as MFPs, multifunctional print devices. We support them all.

Okay.

And do I need direct marking as well? So marking, mimage, that type where you're spraying onto the bottom of a can, those not conventional printers, but we do also have support for those.

Follow-up question, do I need print node?

Honestly, no, you don't need anything additional.

All right, next question. Can we have QR codes instead of a barcodes. Also, from a food perspective, expiry would be critical. Can these be incorporated and linked to an ERP/WMS for FIFO management?

Yes, absolutely. QR codes, all types of PDF data matrix barcodes, all supported. Completely understand that from a food expiry, we're seeing that is really a key area where we're seeing QR codes get used as well, actually, as in being able to kind of add a link out to more information. So we've seen a very large customer actually using it to drive a loyalty scheme where they were putting a unique QR code to be able to track every product that went out and every person would be able to buy it, would be able to scan that and sign up to a loyalty scheme. And on the FIFO piece as well, first in first out, yes, absolutely. It's connected to that ERP, that WMS to drive that paperwork.

Okay, last question. How does electronic shelf labels work compared to normal labels, which now Walmart is adopting for 2,300 stores?

Okay, so electronic shelf label is an interesting one because that's obviously more of a digital kind of view. We would still be able to look at connecting into this. I'd be interested to actually explore that use case a bit more. I've had some experience with electronic shelf labelling and that kind of end user price tag side of it. And we do have some customers that are doing it, but really the key thing there is going to be about what the difference is going to be. You're not printing a physical label out, but you are still driving the right data down because that's really what's important. You're making sure that you're getting the right data for all their products.

Okay, well, yeah, Nigel, you wanted to ask a No, I was just going to say we have use cases, as Paul indicated, to it. It just depends on the— how understanding how the data flows within the customer's environment is critical to how we would accomplish that.

Okay, great. Thank you very much again for all of you for sharing your insight, giving us a glimpse. Oh yeah, we have a special offer for from Loveware. Nigel, Paul, do you want to comment on this?

Yes, it just gives you some more insight into how you can look at your own labeling operations. Hopefully we've, you know, teased you enough today to want to look further. There's some information that we'd like to make available to you. You can download it now from our website, dig into it, and then please come back to us and we'd be very happy to add any further detail that you would like. And thanks very much for your time.

All right, with that, thank you very much again for attending this GenTech Demo Day, July 11th, our summer edition of GenTech Demo Day. So I hope you enjoyed it. We had some interesting look on those solutions. Thank you very much, Patrick, both Paul and Nigel, for sharing your insights as well. So if you missed some of the session, part of you arrived late, We have recorded the session and we'll be sharing the recording to you after the live event. And if some of the questions again have not been answered, we'll be sharing the answers on the follow-up email that you will receive. So thanks again and we look forward to see you next time.

Thanks everyone. Have a great day. Thank you.

Bye-bye.