The Platform Chronicles: 10 Questions with Cy Smith, President and CEO, ketteQ
On creating a portfolio of supply chain planning apps native on the Salesforce platform.
Welcome to The Platform Chronicles, a series designed to introduce readers to some of the most innovative Salesforce customers, partners, and employees.
This issue introduces Cy Smith. Cy graduated from Georgia Tech and has spent 30 years in telecommunications, technology, data analytics, supply chain, and in the finance sectors. He has created and managed two companies through exponential growth prior to exiting, making the Inc. 5,000 twice. Prior to becoming CEO at ketteQ, Cy was the founder, President and CEO of AirSage, the largest provider of consumer locations and population movement intelligence in the U.S.
10 Questions for Cy
Cy has been recognized as one of Georgia Tech’s “Outstanding Young Engineers” by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association and has received awards from the American Electronics Association for leadership and innovation in technology.
Fun Fact: Cy grew up in Kentucky. Cy and his brothers had a bluegrass band from middle school through high school. Picking and grinning is still a big part of all of their family reunions.
Curious about the origins of the company’s name? Kette means “chain” in German, and Q is for “quarterback” — Supply chain quarterback.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of our 10 questions for Cy.
Question #1
Cy, what made you decide to build your apps on top of the Salesforce platform?
Salesforce is not only the #1 CRM platform, but it’s also the #1 Platform as a Service.
We’ve saved years of development time for our Enterprise Planning and Automation platform by leveraging Salesforce’s development environment and robust and scalable features including security, user roles, workflow, collaboration, integration, configurable views, etc.
We’ve also been able to accelerate our market penetration by being on the Salesforce AppExchange, and by targeting our outreach to a select set of companies that are already part of Salesforce’s 150,000+ corporate clients.
Question #2
I’ve been in a lot of conversations with customers asking about Sales & Operations Planning. What makes ketteQ’s S&OP approach better than some of the legacy vendors?
No other S&OP platform effectively leverages sales opportunities to get more accurate forecasts than forecasts using only demand history. With ketteQ’s connected intelligence from the Salesforce CRM data as well as marketing, operations, and financial systems, ketteQ excels at aligning supply and demand, and providing the tools required for supply chain synchronization.
“We’ve saved years of development time for our Enterprise Planning and Automation platform by leveraging Salesforce’s development environment.”
Question #3
I know you have been working with one of the world’s best-known brands on a ‘supply chain control tower.’ Can you tell us more about your Control Tower?
ketteQ’s Control Tower provides executives with the visibility and management tools they need to align sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain organizations: a one-stop-shop look at demand and supply and their impact on all facets of the business.
Beyond visibility, however, the Control Tower delivers orchestration, analytics, and automation. This gives decision-makers historical, predictive, and what-if insights to:
- Improve performance with visibility and decision support tools
- Embed coordinated workflow with alerts and notifications
- Drive customer satisfaction in order management, from promising to on-time delivery and in aftersales service by aligning field technicians and parts
Question #4
ketteQ is unique among planning vendors because you can also work with companies to help them plan and manage their service parts business. What’s your secret sauce here?
The ketteQ Service Console, which is tightly coupled with Salesforce’s Service Cloud and ketteQ’s Inventory modules, is devoted to customer service, support, and customer experience.
“Beyond visibility, the Control Tower delivers orchestration, analytics, and automation.”
With an integrated console, agents can view information related to a customer case or a customer support incident from a single, easy-to-use interface. Service agents can increase productivity, minimize unnecessary visits, and improve first-visit resolutions and the overall customer experience with all the information they need right at their fingertips.
Question #5
Walmart just implemented tighter deadlines for On Time/In Full. How are you helping manufacturers deal with OTIF?
OTIF is so much more than a delivery record. It reflects an organization’s entire supply chain efficiency from end to end: sales, sourcing, manufacturing, shipping, and activities all the way through to delivery to the customer. New performance requirements demand a level of supply chain integrations and synchronization that few companies have today.
ketteQ’s OTIF offering provides time-based event tracking, what-if scenarios, simulations, and cross-functional performance measurements — complete with easy-to-use dashboards that let suppliers keep an eye on trends and predictions.
ketteQ’s advanced and predictive analytics allow users to see root cause identifications and cause and effect correlations. The solution is accessible from multiple devices and connects the entire enterprise with the supply chain.
Question #6
OTIF could require integration with a host of third-party apps including ERP, warehouse management systems, and transportation systems. What’s your integration strategy?
Data powers everything we do. According to a report by Cloud Security Alliance, on average, a small to mid-sized organization today deploys 22 applications with very little integration. Siloed data not only contributes to poor communication between departments and inefficient processes but offers only a partial view of the business.
“New performance requirements demand a level of supply chain integrations and synchronization that few companies have today.”
ketteQ leverages the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and other integration tools to make it easy to connect to any system. Hundreds of prebuilt and reusable connectors mean companies can reach peak levels of connected intelligence in weeks or months instead of years — all in a secure, reliable, and scalable cloud environment.
Question #7
The topic of ‘supply chain visualization’ comes up in a lot of customer discussions. What’s your strategy?
One of the biggest challenges for most organizations is the lack of visibility throughout their supply chain and across the ecosystem. This often causes reactive responses to changes or unexpected issues. Our Control Tower not only provides visibility into what’s happening now but continuously runs predictive analytics to highlight and alert stakeholders to potentially disruptive events: e.g. spikes in demand, inventory shortages, late orders, etc.
We’re excited about our next release of the Control Tower that will take supply chain visibility and business intelligence to a whole new level. We’re integrating our dashboards and analytical engines with Salesforce Tableau to deliver state of the art data visualizations and reporting capabilities.
Question #8
Cy, what are some of your product and company growth plans that you can share with us?
I’m a big believer in the automation of anything and everything. Continuous advances in cloud computing, data storage capacity, networking and integration technologies, AI/Machine Learning, and the exponential growth of data and sources of data make many things feasible that were not feasible even 3 to 5 years ago.
“One of the biggest challenges for most organizations is the lack of visibility throughout their supply chain and across the ecosystem. This often causes reactive responses to changes or unexpected issues.”
Our development roadmap sets a path towards the “Self-Driving Enterprise” that is lean, efficient, and effective. In Q4 2020, we’ll release our new Control Tower with some significant elements of this vision.
Question #9
Cy, you’ve built a very successful and active Supply Chain Automation affinity group on LinkedIn. How did that come to be?
I started the Supply Chain Automation group last April to bring together like-minded professionals that proactively look for ways to improve. There is so much expertise and experience out there with millions of supply chain professionals. In addition to the posts, the roundtables have been a great forum for tapping into some of the best minds in the practice.
Question #10
Last question: You’re a customer and a partner, what would you like to see Salesforce do with the platform to make life better for you and your customers?
First, we deal with significant amounts of data; typically more than Salesforce can handle economically so we’ve built a sync engine with AWS to optimize the storage and processing between the two environments. It would be good to understand if others run into the same issue and what plans, if any, does Salesforce have to address this.
Second, we would welcome the opportunity to partner more closely with Salesforce on a Go-To-Market strategy for manufacturing, high tech, CPG, retail, and other relevant industries.
Finally, for certain features and capabilities, we’ve found that Skuid and other UI tools have more flexibility. Our dev team would prefer to use Salesforce if improvements could be introduced.
About ketteQ: ketteQ is a technology company headquartered in Atlanta and focused on creating a new paradigm for planning and operations — beginning with Demand Optimization. Our suite of microservices offers incremental improvements to simply fill in the gaps of legacy systems, or upgrade to a fully integrated and automated sales and operations planning platform built on Salesforce. Founded, developed, and supported by successful sales, finance, and supply chain experts, ketteQ is creating a new normal for businesses by streamlining the flow of information between organizational functions.
