Stockpile Reports Featured on The Future of Supply Chain Podcast

Author: Stockpile Reports

Stockpile Reports Featured on The Future of Supply Chain Podcast | Stockpile Reports

In case you missed it, David Boardman of Stockpile Reports was featured on The Future of Supply Chain podcast. Hosted by Santosh Sankar of Dynamo Ventures, David and Santosh cover:

  • Using advanced image processing to help bulk materials companies eliminate that year-end surprise (1:14)
  • How bulk materials companies used to assess their inventory (5:53)
  • Interpreting pixels captured by smartphones, drones, and more for attributes of a stockpile (9:38)
  • Sample use cases for image acquisition and data integration (13:00)
  • Attitude shifts in inventory management in 2020 (17:37)
  • Offering a bundled option compared to a white label option (19:35)
  • Focusing on a problem to solve and partnering to provide a complete solution (23:23)
  • Projecting the future of Stockpile Reports (25:22)
Listen to Full Episode Here

Introduction:
Welcome to the Future of Supply Chain, where each episode we’ll sit down with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry veterans to discuss innovation technology and the most exciting opportunities in trucking and logistics as we build the future of supply chain together. Be sure to head over to podcast.dynamo.vc to keep up-to-date with our latest content, or subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice. Now, let’s get into the show! Here’s our host, Santosh Sankar.

Santosh Sankar:
Hey, ladies and gents. Welcome back to the Future of Supply Chain podcast. I’m your host, Santosh Sankar, and joining me today is David Boardman, co-founder and CEO of Stockpile Reports. Welcome, David.

David Boardman:
Oh, thank you very much. Good morning. It’s great to be here.

Santosh Sankar:
Yeah, great to have you here. And we’re going to get into the wonderful world of supply chain management and bulk goods, but before we get there, I’d love for you to give us the high-level on Stockpile Reports so our listeners have an understanding for what you and the team are building.

David Boardman:
Sure. At Stockpile Reports, we started off focused on helping bulk materials companies eliminate that big year-end surprise. Anybody who’s tried to manage bulk materials and who’s had it on their balance sheet knows the long, long history of having a really hard time tracking your assets, your rock sand or gravel, or whatever it is. And then you’d have a third party come in and assess your inventory at the end of the year. And the way they used to describe it is, you do your best, you sandbag all year, the third party comes in and does the count. You go to church on Sunday, say your prayers, and then you see the results the next week and hope you didn’t have a big write-off.

And so we learned about that problem. Our background is in advanced image processing, and when we were turned on to this problem, it was like, “This is a problem worth focusing on, and this is a problem worth solving.” Because it literally is a problem for every bulk materials management company on the planet.

And then, as we solved that problem and companies started to count and value their inventory more frequently, quarterly or monthly, that started to get the attention of the logistics managers. And the operations managers said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re telling me I can get good information at my fingertips on my bulk materials? And I can do it very low-cost and easily? Wait a minute, I could use that for operations and dispatch and supply chain management.”

So in the last two years, we’ve really shifted more from valuing assets and helping the finance group and the CFO to really start to shift and see our biggest growth coming from VPs of logistics and operations managers and folks running dispatch centers in solving supply chain problems.

Santosh Sankar:
You mentioned your background in image processing. I’d love to jump into how you got into founding and leading Stockpile, practically, because I think that outsider perspective can be very unique when tackling a lot of the problems in and around supply chain.

David Boardman:
It’s definitely been an outsider’s perspective and a journey. So, our founders and our board members, and even our investors, have been working on image processing for 20-plus years now. In some cases, even careers longer than that. But we were working on large-scale rapid mapping, taking 60-to-80,000 high-resolution images and turning those into maps and models within hours. Doing that in the 2000s, way ahead of the industry time.

And in 2011, we wanted to see, how could we take this technology and these algorithms to the commercial markets? And spent about a year really looking at all the different problems out there in the market, looking at how we could cut the times of film production, video game production. Looked at use cases in healthcare, believe it or not, looking at, could organs fit during a transplant? All these different use cases.

And after about a year, year and a half of market discovery, that’s where we found this business problem that met the criteria, which was a hundred-million-dollar business problem that C-level executives care about that would require lots of imagery. And so that was our journey. We really just followed our nose. Seasoned entrepreneurs, been around the block a few times, made enough mistakes to know what to look for and the problems to focus on, and the value of focus.

So, at our heart, we’re heavy on computer science and computer vision, advanced technologies, but we’ve been following our nose. And honestly, we wore our first steel-toed boots and safety gear back in 2012, when we first stepped foot on a quarry, and then in 2013, again, we launched it. So, big believers in “follow your nose, follow the market, find problems to solve, and then apply your technology to solving those problems.” That’s how we got here.

Santosh Sankar:
Indeed. That’s a great story. So, shifting to the business, you’d made mention… Bulk materials. And when we say bulk, we’re talking about things like cement, minerals, dirt, metals, anything that somebody might dub maybe dirty or dangerous. But I’d be curious, how has this been managed, the inventory specifically, in the industry? Like, I’ve heard of different ways using lasers, things like that, that you might be able to ascertain how much rock you have sitting in your yard, but how have you come across the management of this problem before Stockpile was built?

David Boardman:
Sure. Well, there are two ways to slice it, right? There’s, what are the technologies and processes, and methods that professionals use to value their assets? And historically, I’d say 5-10 years ago, when we first started looking at this, that was a once-a-year activity. Maybe it was twice a year. So there’s a whole set of processes, policies, mechanisms, technologies that people use to do that.

Prior to image processing technologies, it was a lot of GPS-based equipment, where people would have high-precision GPS and they’d walk over bulk materials. There were lots of very defined processes using, believe it or not, chains and measuring tapes to try and compute the volume of a pile of something. And then, yes, laser scanners. Laser scanners were fantastic, but they were still a hundred thousand dollar investment, plus a lot of training, and literally 45 minutes to an hour just to capture the data on a single stockpile.

So you could do all those methods once a year to value your assets, but to do it on a daily basis or a weekly basis? Not going to happen. So the best thing that people could do is do their best to count trucks or count loader buckets, or just get somebody who’s been there 20 years to go out and guess really good, to try and make sure that your perpetual inventory isn’t getting too out of balance. Because, again, you’re looking at the inputs to the pile of material, you’re looking at the outputs, and in theory, you’re tracking those and that’s your perpetual inventory. But that error builds up, and then every once in a while you have to go out and true up your perpetual.

We always say, “you have to count the cereal boxes in the grocery store every once in a while.” But in bulk materials, that perpetual inventory is way off. It’s not uncommon for inventories of bulk materials companies to be 30-to-40% off. And people don’t believe that! It’s true.

Santosh Sankar:
And where does all this data sit in such an environment? Are there specialized inventory management systems that have been built to cater to this industry? Or is this all sitting in spreadsheets?

David Boardman:
Well… Yeah, all of the above. So, it still slices on the two sides of that axis there. So data sits in finance systems, with respect to perpetual inventories. But again, that’s lower-frequency updates. So that’s one home for it. And then the other home is in different operations systems, depending upon the industry and depending upon their position in the supply chain. If they’re producing the material, or transporting the material, or consuming the material, there’ll be different operating systems where they have a view of the inventory as well.

So that’s one of the opportunities we saw early on in the marketplace, is there are no systems in place to act as that authoritative record for the assets that are bulk materials. There are asset management platforms for hardware, for things in boxes, things with barcodes, but there is no asset management platform for bulk materials. And so that’s how we think of Stockpile Reports, is filling that gap. A lot of people think of us as the measurement technology, because that’s what’s new, that’s what shiny, that’s what’s sexy. But at the end of the day, it’s just being that new, trusted barcode and that system of record for your bulk material assets.

Santosh Sankar:
And so where does Stockpile Reports come in? How are you enabling customers to measure and manage their bulk inventories? Because it sounds like there’s a whole lot of opportunity here.

David Boardman:
There is. And some people get wrapped around the axle thinking of the different measurement methods, but at the end of the day, we have algorithms that are crunching away on pixels or pictures to compute attributes of a stockpile. And the most valuable and common attribute is its volume, but there’s also lots of other information about a stockpile that’s important to running the business and supply chain as well.

So at the end of the day, we always say, “Hey, what’s the fastest, cheapest way to get imagery of all the bulk materials?” And some days it’s where we started, which was using imagery from an iPhone. And it’s having your site workers or your truck drivers or whoever it is pulling the phone right out of their pocket, palm, or purse, and walk around that stockpile and get the images that way using our app. That’s a fantastic way to get it.

But if you got to get a bunch of stockpiles that are maybe in a production yard, where maybe, if it’s a landscape materials company, they might have 200 stockpiles on one site, you don’t want people walking around 200 stockpiles with a phone. So in that case, we say, “Hey, let’s get pictures from above.” And with Stockpile Reports, you just say, “Hey, I want aerial images,” and then we figure out, “Hey, can that be a drone? Or does that have to be an airplane?” Again, what’s the fastest, cheapest way to get those pixels?

And then, for supply chain management, you need that every 15 minutes or every five minutes, and that’s where we introduced measurements from installed cameras about two years ago. So at the end of the day, we just say, “We need pixels.” And we will continue to innovate. We’re working with some cable cameras now. We’ve been experimenting with putting some cameras onto front loaders. It’s just, how do we get the images of the bulk materials as frequently as possible, as fast as possible, and as cheap as possible?

Santosh Sankar:
And with Stockpile Reports, did I hear that right? You can get it as frequently as every 15 minutes?

David Boardman:
Well, that’s how our installed cameras are set up today. Right now the threshold is 15 minutes, but we don’t see any reason why in the future that can’t be every 15 seconds.

Santosh Sankar:
Yep. And I was looking at your website, and if I remember right, your solution can also work indoors, and I believe you can use a Skydio drone in order to apply vision for inventory measurement and management as well?

David Boardman:
Yes. We’ve been really pleased with the Skydio. That’s been a challenge for a long time, is maybe you’ve got a large warehouse and you don’t need that data every single day. Maybe you just need it once a week, maybe you need it once a quarter. And does it make sense to install the cameras with the overhead of that? Boy, it sure is great when you can just take a drone in there and it pretty much flies itself and it can get the imagery that way. So yeah, if we’re looking at lower-frequency data collects of an indoor area, maybe a warehouse at a shipyard or a port, the Skydio’s working fantastic. We’ve been really pleased with the technology, and even more importantly, we’ve been really impressed with the company and the leadership and the management, and they’ve been great partners.

Santosh Sankar:
So, if I’m an organization, let’s say a quarry or in the world of cement, how would my experience look like once I sign on to the Stockpile platform?

David Boardman:
Sure. So, depending upon the role in the organization… Your view and your interaction with Stockpile Reports as a dispatcher is going to be very different than someone sitting in finance or somebody operating the plant. The most important interface with Stockpile Reports is access to the data. People need to see the data when they need to see it to make a decision. So most people never even see how the data’s collected. They’re just working with the data on the assets, the stockpiles.

Now, there are going to be some people in the company or at the quarry who are going to have to think, “Hmm, how are we going to get the imagery, as frequently as possible, as fast as possible, as cost-effective as possible?” And so those people are going to be interacting with the service as a drone pilot, or as somebody walking around with a phone, an end-user, or somebody strategically deciding where to install cameras.

So depending upon what the person’s role is, they’re going to have different interfaces and interactions with Stockpile Reports. But to be honest with you, at the end of the day, as an enterprise asset management platform, we don’t want customers in our system. We don’t want users in our system. And that sounds kind of funny, but ideally, we’re just that backbone, that enterprise-trusted barcode that all the other systems in the supply chain are accessing to give them great, up-to-date information on their bulk materials. So I don’t want dispatchers coming into Stockpile Reports. I want dispatchers living in their dispatch tools that are being fed with great data from Stockpile Reports behind the scenes.

Santosh Sankar:
Yep. So there’s, it sounds like, a pretty substantial value-add around integrating a lot of the siloed systems that might sit within an organization. And a lot of those systems have their own specific purview that they help with.

David Boardman:
That’s right. And that’s where supply chain use cases are really driving change, especially in bulk materials industries. In terms of digital transformation, construction and bulk materials are at the bottom of the stack. Shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody listening. And so all the innovation that happened in manufacturing and retail and anything that you could put in a box with a barcode, that hasn’t come to the world of bulk materials.

So the organizations aren’t positioned to make these big centralized decisions around technology and enterprise architectures yet. There are a few leaders that are starting to, but that part of digital transformation still needs to happen. They need organizational structure, infrastructure, processes for dealing with large-scale technology deployments. And that just hasn’t been something that most bulk materials industries have a lot of experience with yet.

Santosh Sankar:
And I noted that Vulcan Materials is one of your early customers. How have they benefited from adopting Stockpile?

David Boardman:
So, Vulcan is very visionary, and they’re working very hard to make it very easy to do business with Vulcan. And so they really think about their customers’ experience and how to simplify that and remove the friction from buying rock from Vulcan. And we’ve had the opportunity to work with them, to look to see, how can we make the delivery of aggregates to ready-mix and asphalt plants easier for their customers? How do you make it easier to buy rock from Vulcan?

And so we’ve been providing the data to Vulcan logistics and Vulcan dispatchers so that they can make sure that the customer has absolute confidence that they’re always going to have the rock on hand that they need to keep their plants running smoothly with confidence. So by using our technology, we’re able to install cameras at the delivery locations and have that data feed the systems that allow Vulcan to make much better decisions about how to continue to meet their customers’ needs and make sure they remain satisfied.

Santosh Sankar:
Have you seen any attitude shifts amongst your customers in regards to how they manage their inventory this year? Because we’ve all seen that that’s been top-of-mind regardless of industry.

David Boardman:
Yeah, it is different by industry. Very different. We service many, many different industries, and even within industries, it’s different. For example, landscape materials. Big boom in consumer use of landscape materials right now, because everybody’s been in stay-at-home. But then the commercial landscaping has dropped, as offices aren’t as important and people are working to shave budgets. So it’s been a little different by each industry segment, so it’s hard to just say that there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to that.

In general, people have been more hungry for good data on their bulk materials so that they can make better supply chain management decisions. I think people got a little bit fat and happy over the last five years as the economy was super strong. It was just, make as much as you can, as fast as you can and just keep the trucks full. And there weren’t enough drivers, so the focus on inventory was just, have a lot. And I think now it’s shifted and changed, as people are a little bit more nervous about the financial future and trying to make sure that they have a good plan on hand so that they’re not spending money, they don’t need to spend. So, I’d say, has been the biggest change. We haven’t seen a lot of change in the volumes that people are keeping, but we’re seeing a lot more scrutiny on the data and a lot more people really running through lots of different scenarios at different production levels and different inventory levels. That’s been the biggest change.

Santosh Sankar:
So, shifting gears a little bit and thinking about company building, I’d be curious… Somebody like Vulcan can purchase your solution in a white-label format, and they can then power an initiative or a business unit. How did you and your team think about making that decision, whether to offer a white-label option or not?

David Boardman:
Yeah, well, it’s actually a, maybe a slightly different variant than that. So in the relationship with Vulcan, you can go to their website, you can go to their YouTube channel. You’ll see that they’re offering Vulcan-managed inventory as part of an overall digital solution strategy, along with improved fleet management and order status. Also being able to take the daily inventory management off of their customer’s hands. So if you look at that, and you’re a customer of Vulcan’s and you get it, you still do see Stockpile Reports. So it’s not completely white-labeled. I don’t think anybody’s under the assumption that Vulcan developed the solution. But we’ve partnered extremely closely with Vulcan, and now we’re bundled into their solutions. So it’s not completely white-labeled.

People know Stockpile Reports. They see our logo when our installers show up, on our shirts. If there are support questions that come up, we’re involved. So I wouldn’t call it completely white-labeled, but we saw it as a great… Really, really liked Vulcan’s vision for where they’re headed. And as a growing company, it’s great to get attached and swim alongside companies with a strong vision for the future and to grow with their success. And so we’ve definitely lined ourselves up with Vulcan, to help them succeed and to, in return, make us successful. But it’s not purely just white-labeled.

Santosh Sankar:
How does somebody like Vulcan… Or really, pick your customer. How do they think about buying and implementing inventory and logistics software in this world of bulk freight?

David Boardman:
That’s a good question. I don’t think I can speak to an authoritative position on understanding how companies are making all these decisions. I can tell you, in bulk materials, they’re almost being drug into making decisions in many instances I’ve been involved with. Because consumers’ expectations are through the roof for delivery of materials, with Amazon. So, I mean, especially at this time, everybody’s just able to see something online, click on it, you know exactly when it’s on its way, what time it might be there, where it is in the process.

And so you see these bulk materials companies now getting a lot of, a lot of heat from their end customers when they say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to have a load for you maybe next week sometime.” “Well, what time are they going to be here?” “I don’t know.” “Well, where are they? You said they’re going to be here an hour ago.” So there’s just a lot of expectations, I think, from the consumer marketplace, and from more of the boxed material supply chains world, that people are expecting that of bulk materials. And they’re just nowhere close to being able to provide that.

So companies are just making their initial steps into this new world, and I’d say they’re trying different pilot projects to see what works. I’d say we’re very early-stage for really, truly digital supply chain management solutions in the bulk material space.

Santosh Sankar:
You know, we frequently find founders who have a great technical background or have a deep experience in another industry, and when they turn to things in the supply chain, they’re always looking for a framework as to how they can understand what’s going on so they can solve problems. How did you go about this, with your background? Are there any kind of tips or tricks, so to speak, that you might be able to share, as you ramped up into this world?

David Boardman:
Sure. So, I think one thing that our business is really good at is focusing on the problem to solve and knowing our space in the solution. We’ve been very successful by saying, our mission is to give people great information on every pile, any time. To solve problems and finance operations and logistics.

David Boardman:
So I know, honestly, I’m not the person who’s going to solve the complete supply chain problem. Our company is not… We know that our responsibility is to give people a trusted, authoritative answer on their bulk materials. That data is going to be leveraged by people who have been working in this space for 50 years, who understand supply chain, they understand dispatch, they understand logistics. But now we’re making their solutions better, and we’re opening the doors to a new market of bulk materials, where maybe historically they’ve had 30 years of growth in working in manufacturing and distribution, retail of things in boxes with barcodes or RFID tags, we’re opening up markets for them to go do this with bulk materials now.

So the secret for our success has been knowing what the big problem is the end customer wants to solve. What’s our unique play? Which is solving that problem that nobody’s really solved at scale, which is great information on every single pile at any time. And then knowing what partners to cozy up to, to provide the complete solution.

Santosh Sankar:
Yep. Makes sense. Makes sense. So here, kind of wrapping it up, I’d be curious as we look ahead. 2020’s quickly coming to a conclusion. I’d be curious, where do you see Stockpile Reports as we think about the future of supply chain, whether it’s a year, two, 10 years ahead?

David Boardman:
It gets back to… We see customers getting more and more appetite for good data on every single pile across their company. And for some of these bulk materials, that means every pile across 90 countries, across the planet. For them to have the ability to make great supply chain or business decisions. So for us, I see us quickly becoming the standard, and the accepted standard, becoming the trusted barcode of the industry that people can integrate their apps on to ensure that they can empower these solutions that folks need in supply chain.

And we’re going to be driven by incredible innovation that’s happening in augmented reality and is happening in robotics, that’s giving us even lower-cost sensors, it’s giving us breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms, that we can combine with our computer vision expertise to make it even cheaper and even faster and even better to get information literally every second of every day on every stockpile.

David Boardman:
So our mission is clear. We’re just going to keep at it. We’ve been at it since 2013, we’ll be at it another 10 years. It’ll be great, if we talk 10 years from now, to see how much technology has changed and how much the supply chain has just been transformed in bulk materials.

Santosh Sankar:
Yeah! Well, we can certainly arrange for that, David. It’s been great having you on here, sharing the Stockpile story, and we certainly look forward to seeing how you and the team continue to build on your leadership here in bulk inventory management. Cheers!

David Boardman:
Oh, thank you. My pleasure. And I’m always happy to work with you or anybody who might be listening to help figure out what the future holds for all of us.

Closing:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a five-star review, tell us what you liked, and be sure to head over to podcast.dynamo.vc to keep up to date with our latest content, or subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice. Until next time!

If you are interested in learning more about Stockpile Reports, please contact us!

Stay In the Know

Be the first to know about the latest Stockpile Reports news and features.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.