 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We've got Kandy, that's right. I'm Lisa Martin in Washington DC at Boomi World 19 with John Furrier and John and I are excited to be talking next with the Chief Technology Officer of Kandy.com. Gary, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me, great to be here. So tell our audience about Kandy.com. Kandy, all that you want.com, cool stuff. It is cool stuff. It is the endless aisle. We used to go into the supermarket and it never runs out. It's absolutely perfect and that's actually how we started. Knowing that there was so much Kandy out there that people wanted and the lines just weren't long enough to put them in, no matter where you checked out and we started off being the online Kandy store, which was a foot in the door but it was a very small opening at that time. One of the things you said when I met you today, whilst eating Kandy that you guys brought, thank you very much for that, it was very appropriate, was that Kandy is recession proof? It is, it's good times, bad times. People are going to have birthday parties, people are going to get married, holidays are going to come. You've had a really great day, it's the Kandy bar. You've had a really bad day, it's the Kandy bar. It's just an impulse buy but it's an impulse buy with your favorite. I mean it's something that's a comfort food more than anything else. Exactly. And the technology side, talk about how you guys are organized, what are some of the challenges and how does Boomi fit in? Take us through the journey. Sure, when we started out, we thought how hard could it be doing data entry? We'll get the orders, they'll come across, we'll have some people enter them into the system, we'll start fulfilling them and then everything else will take care of itself and within about a few minutes we realized that was probably not going to work, it was not scalable because first of all, data entry is error prone. If you have someone actually trying to do it there, it's not going to work for you. So we realized that there was a mechanism out there with EDI and we went to a third party provider to help us with EDI and that's how we started with the first couple of integrations and it was good, it got us off the ground and it got us further into that door. So you started with how many different partners, trading partners, take us back to kind of the last 10 years of Kandy.com and how that trading partner network has grown. It's like the journey, it always starts with the first step. We had one that was interested, one that wanted to work with us and we started to do the work with them and figure out how to handle it but they had multiple divisions. So even though there was only one, there was three actual integrations that had to be done and being a traditional brick and mortar, it's very competitive. So once the word got out that they were working with us there was a couple others. So we had six pretty big ones lined up early on that we needed to have integrated and up and running very quickly. And from a digital perspective, what were some of the initial systems, applications that you implemented to start being able to manage and track those trading partner interactions to ensure that you're able to deliver what the Kandy, the Kandy demand that you need to fill. It was sadly a lot of CSV, a lot of email, a lot of phone calls back and forth. A lot of hours. It was a lot of hours and it was one of those ones where we would really just bring in temps and try to keep up with it. Did not really have a repeatable process or a good technical footprint of what we needed to do. We didn't know what we didn't know when we started and we very rapidly came to become aware of what we needed to do. So starting with ERP, NetSuite, brought NetSuite in. Correct. Two years ago. Tell us about that and what you thought, is this going to solve all of our problems? Well, NetSuite's a great package because it brought us both order management and it brought us ERP. And there were so many modules and so much technology behind it and they have a warehouse module. And there was like, oh, we could grow forever with this. It will never be bounded. This is going to be fantastic. But what we forgot is that it was only as good as the data in there. And if we're using it as a manual data entry, it's not going to meet our needs. We needed to come up with a better way and a more efficient way to get the data in. And this was still back in the day when we were trying to fulfill something within a week, much less where we're at today. Okay, so where does Bumi fit into play? We realized, unfortunately, that even when you have an integration up and running and as good as the integration is, some of your trading partners will have changes. They're going to give you a different reference number. They're going to give you a different requirement. They're going to make something that was optional, now mandatory. So we had problems because it wasn't just us that it was impacting. Everyone that was doing an integration with that trading partner had it. So if I had outsourced it and there was a hundred people that had that map, we were one of a hundred. Sometimes we were one and sometimes we were as far away from one as possible. And you understand that and you appreciate it because there's only a finite number of hours to get things done. So we understood that to be really profitable and get to the level of service, we needed to control the data. And that's when we decided that we needed to bring the EDI in-house. So when you were looking for the right integration partner, what was it about Bumi from a technology perspective and a business perspective that really differentiated it? First and foremost, the number one requirement is it had to talk to Netsui. It had to have a native Netsui integration. If it did not talk to Netsui, it wasn't even going to make it onto our plate because we weren't going to spend the time to reinvent the wheel when obviously the wheel was out there. We had actually done that once before and it was successful but painful. And there's people out there who build a connection and work to silver partners like Bumi and the platinum partners that can go out and they can actually keep up with the release before it comes out and you're being proactive rather than reactive. From a business need, it was we can't drop data. We need to be efficient. We need to be timely. We need visibility and looking at Bumi, it met all those needs. We had a connection into Netsui. We had a reporting tool. We had error messages coming back. We had everything that we needed to manage our own world and take control of it or so we thought. Okay, so to get this implemented, what sort of opportunities does this start opening up? You talked about control there or so we thought. What have you been able to unlock where control is concerned in the last few years? Well, we didn't realize what we were doing is that we were just basically turning on everything and trying to run as efficiently and fast as possible and that was really the wrong approach to take. What we needed to do is add some governance to it, add some logic to it to not compete with jobs. There's a finite number of avenues into the backend system. You need to utilize it. But there was also tools that we found out inside the system that handled things like error trapping and retry logic and timeouts and stuff like that. And as we worked with the subject matter experts at Boomi, as we worked with the people at NetSuite and our account managers who would show us things and help us along, we learned a lot more about it. When we went live back in February of 2016, we were very excited. We did a thousand orders into our system in one day and we thought, how phenomenal is this? I mean a thousand orders. How many more orders could you actually look for? And we very soon realized that there was a lot more orders willing to come into our system if we could handle it. So when you first started with Boomi, went from some number to a thousand orders per day, what was that original number that you guys were able to handle when it was more of a manual process? It depended on how many attempts we could hire that day. Sometimes it was a hundred orders we got in, sometimes it was 250. It was really dependent on people. It was 100% dependent on people. It was also dependent on someone remembering to send us the spreadsheet. That sounds painful. Painful and not really easy to plan for. But you discovered pretty quickly, you went from, I won't say zero to a thousand, but somewhere in between. And then realized the capabilities though of the system was going to allow you to get to 20,000 orders per day. Where was the demand coming from? Was it coming from training partners? Was it coming from their customers? Was it coming from your internal team seeing, hey guys, I think there's a lot more power here than we originally thought. Well, success begets success because we were able to get an order in now in a timely fashion and ship it out there. All of a sudden they realized we were shipping orders within 48 to 72 hours. It wasn't taking 10 days anymore. So we had repeat customers, which obviously makes your numbers go up. And then as your experience is good and you share it because social media is the way of the world. And all of a sudden, if you tell two friends and they tell two friends, we start getting more volume. Then what starts happening is someone realizes they're losing market share at their brick and mortar website and who's fulfilling the orders for them if they're doing so well and we're losing business and they start knocking on the door saying, well, we'd like to work with you as well. And the other thing too is just timing. In the United States, it's pretty warm between April and October and the bulk of perishable and heat-sensitive product will ship through one of our warehouses because we have the thermal controls and the programs in place to give a good experience and make sure the product arrives the way it's supposed to be treated. Yeah, you were mentioning that when you were on stage this morning with Mandy Dalliwell, Boomi's CMO and Jason Maynard from NetSuite. There are obviously, if you order some chocolate, I want it to get there in the exact state in which I saw it online, right? But you've got to have a lot of access and visibility and systems to be able to help you facilitate that temperature control depending on the type of product. Absolutely, so we're very proud of the fact that we're temperature controlled, we're humidity controlled, we're SQF certified, we've done everything the right way to make sure that what we do is going to be the best experience and that your food is safe because paramount, the last thing we ever want to do is to give a product to someone who's going to make your child sick because you don't want anyone to get sick but the worst feeling as a parent is when your kid doesn't feel well. So we understand that and we have a phenomenal staff and our QA team will go through and we have changed ways to test the product to get to the melting point and we know different products melt at different temperatures and we determine what those temperatures are and we build those thresholds. We do calls out to get the weather. Now, if I'm shipping it from my location to you, what's the temperature of mine? It doesn't matter if it's cold at your place, if it's 90 where I'm shipping it from. So we look at what is it now? Where's it going? What's it going to be the next few days? How big is it? How much product is in there with it that isn't heat sensitive? And we have a pretty complex algorithm that we put in place that has really enabled us to handle the summer months and give a good product because a lot of people like s'mores but they don't want the pre-melted chocolate showing up at their house. I would agree. That takes the fun out of the bonfire part, right? Exactly. So let's talk about the people transformation as you were saying, you were 100% dependent on manual, somebody even sending the spreadsheet let alone to start inputting data to process X number of orders per day went from almost zero to 1,000 overnight with Boomi then saw this capacity for 20,000. How has your team, has other business units within candy like finance? How are they benefiting from all of this, what I presume is massive workforce productivity gains that you're giving everybody? Absolutely, it was a great problem to have because as we got bigger and we started getting more and more orders, well then we got more and more invoices and we got more and more checks which we always think is a good thing but those checks need to be reconciled and they have to be reconciled against the transaction side of NetSuite. And it's no exaggeration that we would have pages printed out with a ruler going down and highlighting one by one on the invoice to make sure nothing was omitted. And we were spending, an individual would spend an eight hour day three days a week just going through to reconcile one invoice that was coming in and we would get two or three a week from them. So it was painful and again, also error prone and these people are very creative, very smart and they offer so much more to the business that it was a waste of their time and a waste of their intellect. So Dell Boomi we found out is not just EDI, it's phenomenal at EDI but it has all these other tools and one of the tools we had was to be able to take the remittance file from the financial institution, reconcile it against the invoices in the system and create a CSV import that would run that we have a script for that created a cash payment in our system that would actually close out the invoices and be paid so that we would take care of it. It was done and finance would basically get the file and email it to us. We would file it back and they'd run an import so instead of 250 hours a week it was five minutes of file. That's a dramatic saving hundreds of hours a month but also faster time to revenue recognition. That's a big one because when you try to get people discounts or give them breaks or if your terms are not there it's nice to get it in there and keep your systems clean because you also have to answer to the end of the month. You want to close the books and everything and in manual processes are one of the few things that you can't just throw more horsepower at. I'm glad you brought up though from a resource kind of reallocation perspective is these folks in particular areas of the business have value that they're not able before weren't able to really unlock and deliver and now with the technology in place they're able to probably focus on more strategic areas of the business or more strategic projects. I also imagine your sales we said faster time to revenue and revenue recognition but big boost to candy.com sales since you've implemented the technology. Yeah. Correct I mean the sales numbers have just grown. I mean as much as we do our forecasting and think where it's going to go we drastically underestimated this year. The summer was very very good to us. Our first year under Boomi we ran for 11 months. We did a little over 600,000 orders for that first year in comparison in June, July and August this year we did over a million orders. That's a lot of chocolate going on. That's a lot of candy. Most certainly is. Is that a busier time period than I mean Halloween's in a few weeks, Christmas is coming. How does that compare in terms of like the flux? We have a peak obviously at Halloween. Halloween is obviously the time but of course November 1st our orders are zero because everyone walks in with a pillowcase of candy from their kids to the office. So it literally goes from a million miles an hour to nothing and it's kind of eerie but throughout the summer we stay very very busy because a lot of the marketplace is don't have the facility and listen they're great. You know it's one stop shop and they have everything but everything is in a warehouse and that entire warehouse is not properly controlled to handle food products. So they decided it wasn't advantageous for them to ship you know during the summer and it's poorly monocled as a summer ship program because it's really more of a heat sensitive program because we'll add the thermal product to protect the thermal packaging to protect the product even in February. I mean there's some spots in Florida and Texas that are pretty warm that you want to protect the item. So it's a heat sensitive program that we're very proud of and we keep advancing and we keep growing and you know I have I'm very fortunate I have a great team. I mean you know we're not going to call out you know like Jim and Scott because that would be wrong to do but these guys have been with me from the start and they put the EDI in place. They put the scripting in place. The guys are just you know rock stars and I look good because of their effort and I'm very very proud of the team we've assembled that does this to make sure that your end satisfaction is always met. Awesome story. So I imagine you know when we hear like four out of five dentists recommend this kind. I bet is the fifth dentist recommending candy.com is that where that guy's been? Yeah he's got four kids going through college and everything so he figures candy.com's a good way to make the money to make sure those tuition's get paid. All right well Gary it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thank you for sharing what you're doing with boomie at candy.com we appreciate it and thanks for all the candy. Oh our pleasure and thank you very much for having us been a great couple of days I'm glad to be part of it. All right our pleasure. For John Furrier I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomie World 19. Thanks for watching.