 Hey, good morning, everyone, or good afternoon. Again, my name is Carl Melville. I'll be your moderator today for CPA annulagies, How to Strengthen Trust with your CPG customers. We have a full house today. A few are still struggling in, but I believe we're going to get started right now. So this is an interesting topic, and it's probably never been more timely than it is right now, as this is a rare, not a rare, but a valuable commodity, and given the changes in the industry becoming ever more crucial. Today we're going to hear three success stories from three subject matter experts that have taken this combinations of best practices and technologies, and you'll see what they have done with them. So if we can get started, let's look at an agenda. We're going to begin with a little bit of housekeeping, get that out of the way, and then we'll have a number of brief introductions. After that, for the sake of this call, we're going to all agree on what trust is and make a few comments about trust, so we all know what we're talking about. And then from the CPA State of the Industry Report, 2018, we're going to give a few market trends. I think you might find interesting. And we've chosen trends that speak to the merits and necessities of ever-increasing levels of trust between CPGs and brands, or excuse me, between brands and co-packers, co-packagers. So after that, we'll look at the challenges that our panelists have faced. They've submitted those in advance. We'll take a look at that list. Then we're going to ask you, in a brief poll, to vote on the challenge that you are having the most issues with in terms of strengthening trust, and we'll share that information with you. After that, we're going to get into three success stories from Johann Pot from Crescent, Steven Masternak from DHL, and Serge Pelladou from Anasha. So I really think you'll like these. I got a sneak preview of them yesterday, the final form, and they're pretty exciting stuff. After that, we're going to do a brief summary and a Q&A. So let's move into that housekeeping if we can, Vicki. By the way, you'll hear me speaking to Vicki, although you won't hear her voice. She's shy, but she's the one that made all this possible. She's one of the secret weapons over there at New Ligie. So this webinar is being recorded, and everyone that is listening to it today and has registered will have it mailed to them. I still recommend you take notes, because there will be a lot of good content today. There will also be time for Q&A afterwards, as we noted. If you look on your far right, you'll see a question box. In real time, just type in any questions that you have. Among other things, Vicki will be curating those throughout the webinar today, and she'll be giving them to the panelists as well as myself, and we will answer as many of them as possible following today's presentations. Also, we're going to give you at the end a brief survey. Actually, I think it'll be mailed to you afterwards. We really encourage you to take a moment and do that so we can continue to improve on these. There'll be a series of these New Ligie webinars. I should say there are a series of them, and they're excellent, but they're always looking for ways to improve them, as are we with the CPG webinars. Excuse me, CPA webinars. Okay, so if we can move on. Yeah, this is where I need to talk about myself. So let's get this out of the way. My name is Carl Melville. My company, the Melville Group, has been helping contract packages and contract manufacturers grow. That's our mission. We've been doing that for nine years. We do revenue enhancement branding exercises, lead gen media, PR work, we do a lot of web work, enterprise value work, and then industry research, as well as competitive intelligence, been doing this for about 25 years and have been with many of the major contract packages and contract manufacturers in the industry, usually in the role of like VP of marketing. Today, I do a lot of speaking and advising and writing on the subject and I'm also a strategic advisor to the CPA. You'll be hearing more about the CPA today and those of you that aren't members. And I keep an office in Chicago where I'm from and I live in San Diego. So now let's talk about CPA. And the CPA has been the voice of our industry now for 26 years. It has grown up with the industry. I remember going to one of their first meetings 20 years ago. And it was appropriate for the size of the industry then and it has matured with the industry. It's a great association for those of you that aren't members and are on the fence, I would encourage you to take a look at it. If you were a member in the past, I would encourage you to take another look because it really adds a lot of value. It's the largest and oldest trade association in the industry. And it is totally focused on the health and growth of our members as well as the entire industry invest heavily in member education. There's also a great lead gen program. But members rate the number one takeaway is the networking that they get as well as best practices. They do publish a fair amount of research. We did the 2018 State of the Industry report, for example, which has been an extremely successful report. It's only been out about two months. And we've sold quite a few copies of it. More importantly, we've got a lot of good feedback on it. You can find out more about the CPA and all of this at contractpackaging.org. So if we can move on slide, there we go. And I need to talk about Nulogy, the ones that have made all of this possible. If you're not familiar with Nulogy, it's a cloud based agile platform. It allows customers and it allows the consumer brands to respond with ease and speed to volatile and complex retail in the volatile and complex consumer environment. It is optimized for end to end contract packaging operations and enhanced collaboration between consumer goods companies and their contract packaging providers. Their solution leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive continuous improvement in the supply chain. That's what they wanted me to tell you, and it's all true. I will also tell you that I had the benefit of speaking at their annual conference this year. And I've worked with a lot of technology companies over the years. These guys are really a class act. I really admire what they've done, plus they're totally focused on our industry. This is what they do. Next slide, which is another Nulogy slide. They are now a global company. They're on five continents, 12 countries. They're in multiple languages. And again, they're still focused on co-pack in food, beverage and consumer goods, life sciences. Also, they have off to the side here, their tower, because they're proud Canadians that they can stack pallets up 91,000 CN towers, which I thought was kind of an interesting stat. Vicki, that's it for Nulogy if we can move on. I want to talk now about trust and then some marketing trends so we can move into trust. That's a word we throw around, and it's a heavy word, but yet when I ask what it means, I get, I would say, a variety of looks from people and a variety of definitions. So if we can, just for the sake of this call, even if you have a different definition, we're going to lay down some markers. My definition of trust is that it is an assessment that someone makes, that someone else will take care of their concerns in the future in a manner that is acceptable to them, whether they're looking or not. It's why we put kids on school buses. It's why we get on airplanes. We believe that someone will take care of our concerns in a way that we find acceptable. And the more that is done, the more trust is built. Again, if you have a different definition, awesome. That's a working one that I use. The purpose of trust is another one that gets people kind of sideways. They get all sorts of rosy reasons about why we want trust. And there's a lot of great reasons, but for me, the business reason for trust is because it lowers the cost of transaction. The more you trust someone, the less structures you have to build around them. The more transparent things are, the more agile you can be, the more you can collaborate together. If you go in the other direction, as you lose trust, costs go to infinity. When what do you say? You say, I can't trust that person or that company, so you can't do business with them. There's always two parties in trust, even when there's multiple parties involved. There's always a two-directional flow of trust. The components of trust, and you can look this up in the dictionary, there's only three. There is capability and then dependability and then sincerity. The first two are your ability to do things and your ability to get them done on time, and those are always situational, right? So you can say, you know, he's really good at providing a lead program, but I wouldn't let him do open-heart surgery on me, even if he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But, because that's situational, but the third one is the tricky one. That's the one that has to do with sincerity. Once someone lies to you, you know, you all domain, all domains, it isn't situational. Across the board, you don't trust them. But the tricky thing is, and we've all run into this, the customer is the one that gets to decide which of those three you broke. So you could very much be, wow, we messed up on competency here, but the customer is, yeah, that was a sincerity thing. They don't use that word, but they feel they were lied to, and now you have a huge problem, and the cost of repairing and rebuilding trust is not insurmountable, but it is never low. And it's usually never the same. So that's a little bit about trust. Everyone has their own definitions. I wanted to set those up so we can move through today. We go to the next slide, Vicki. Okay, so this is a lot of this comes out, and we're not, we have a whole two-hour thing we do on this, and we're going to do it in five minutes. But this is some of the data that came out of the 2018 State of the Industry report, and it came out of some of the concerns and trends and drivers that are going on in the industry. And we're going to talk about them from a trust perspective, and then you're going to hear these success stories, and you'll be able to see how they are dealing with these issues. The first one that we get a lot is skew and format proliferation. It's a huge problem for brands, yet they feel they have to continue to do it because of marketplace needs, and it is rippling through the supply chain, so co-packagers are dealing with it in a very big way. Customers desire for superior quality, whether they're willing to pay for it or not, seems to be a question that goes back and forth. They certainly have a need for it more so than ever, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. Customer co-investment, most of our, we interviewed 120 CEOs of this by the way for contract packages and contract manufacturers. Most of them are of the belief that customer co-investment is going up, but that the new arrangements are much more complicated than they've been in the past. The two-way commitments and the levels of performance that need to be hit. There's also greater in vendor innovation. This has to do with something we call the 3G effect, which we'll get to, and the waxing and waning of purchasing department influence. There's also a drive towards turnkey, which we'll cover in a moment, and then the desire to have fewer vendors that do more. Now this has been a 20-year odyssey for brands to do that, but we're actually seeing them now beginning to do that in some real ways. So we'll talk about that a little bit. Vicki, if you could advance the slide. The first one here is relationship structures. This is one that surprised us when we did our data today, about half. Actually, if we ran it again today, this was about six months ago, it would probably be over 50 percent, 51 percent. But the majority of new relationships are coming out in a turnkey model. Tolling as a percent is dropping and cost plus as a percent is dropping like a rock. Most CPCMs we spoke to believe, and we did interviews, that this is a better vehicle for containing the complexity of the relationship. So as these relationships become more and more complex, we're seeing more and more turnkey models, and we expect that to continue. Slide. Measuring customer satisfaction. This is something else that's going through a major change, and it has a big impact on trust. So I'll cover it here. About, there used to be 100 percent. The way you measure trust is you call up your customer and you say, how we're doing. And the CPG would say, hey, we're doing okay. We need help here. Today, about two-thirds of the measurement takes place with much more sophisticated tools. About 15 percent, as you can see from that purple slice of pie, is actually technology tools that are being used. But the rest are a variety of tools that are being used. It's because there's so many more players involved. Relationships are so much more complex that in order to manage that trusting relationship and to measure it, much more complex tools are being fielded. Now, this was a big change from a year ago, and I bet a year from now, when we redo this, the numbers will be higher. Slide, Vicky. Okay, this excited young woman, isn't it, there it is, is trying to tell us that almost all CPCMs that's contract packages and contract manufacturers now earn well over half their revenue from long-term contracts. Now, you might say, Whippy, that's great, or you might not care, but here's the deal with that. The churn rate has gone down. This is what our data shows us. However, when those churns happen, the holes that are blown in your volume is much, much bigger and they're taking longer to replace. So, where you might have lost three or four small deals in the past, you'll mainly lose one at the end of a contract, but the hole that it blows in your capabilities or in your capacities is more significant and it's taking longer to fill that. So, this is where trust becomes even more important. These relationships are longer, they're more complex, and at the end, hopefully you're in a position where you'll be able to refill that based on the trust you built more quickly. So, it's having a big impact. It isn't good or bad, it just is. Vicky, next slide. We talked about skew pluripharation already and this cuts across a lot of different areas about trust and you'll be hearing some of that just a bit from our panelists, but the brands continue to grapple with this and it is a great opportunity, but it's also changing the way cope hackers work. My favorite poster boy for this is Oreos. When I was a kid there were four Oreo SKUs. I haven't had this verified, but I've heard two different people tell me that currently there's about 180 Oreo SKUs. So, you can imagine the havoc that reeks on supply chains as opposed to turning on machines and letting them run forever. So, this is having a big problem and because you have the relationships are longer lasting and more complex, but the projects are shorter and more intense. So, it puts new stresses on trust and your ability to do what you'll do when you say you'll do it. Vicky, talk about three trends here and again we have the whole sections on this in the report and we have whole presentations we do on this, but very, very briefly, three megatrends that are driving change. The Walmart effect has been going on for what going on 30 years now and continuing to remake our industry. It's showing no signs of stopping. It was in the Walmart down the street here the other day and they have just put in the lockers which a lot of you already have for home delivery pickup or home pickup rather. There are all the changes that are rippling across the supply chain. The Amazon effect much newer. The brands are still figuring out how to deal with it. What I know for sure about this one by the way is that the brands have to have a seat on that bus. They cannot afford not and I call it the Amazon effect even though it's all e-commerce. Amazon is getting almost 50 cents on the dollar out of every e-commerce transaction. So, it's fair to call it the Amazon effect, but the brands have to have a seat on that bus. They cannot afford not to. So, they really need co-pack. They don't know exactly how the game is going to end yet and they don't know what success looks like, but they need all the help they can get and a lot of co-packers are positioning themselves to be in the right position at the right time for this. The 3G effect, again this was happening long before 3G was on the scene, but the resources available to brands compared to what they had a generation ago, 10 years ago, is significantly more constrained. So, they are looking for innovation. They are looking, we spend a lot of time doing innovation shows for contract packages, contract manufacturers that work with brands because they're looking for all the innovation they can find and that requires another level of trust is that value chain becomes more complex. Vicki? Lastly, we interviewed CEOs and we said what are the customers top five criteria when they work with you? And this is the order they came in and I won't belabor it for time, but I will point out that number two is cost is always number one, right? But quality safety has always been important, but with everyone having a video in their back pocket, their telephone, that they can post on YouTube, the need for and the level of risk involved and the level of trust required is higher than it has ever been. So, and trust can apply to every one of these in a pretty big way. Vicki? Now, we're going to talk very briefly about the challenge of strengthening trust. Vicki, go to the next slide. This is actually from our panelists today, who you'll be hearing from in just a moment. We asked them to not to rank, but to list the challenges that they face when they're strengthening trust and they'll speak about these in their case, in their case histories here in just a moment. But as you can see, and I'm going to go over these and then we're going to ask you to take a moment and list your, out of this list, which one you are having the biggest challenge with. The SKU problem that we talked about, which is, or, you know, I'm sorry, KPI, KPI problems are inconsistencies, or as a skew proliferation, is it product and package complexity? And that's slightly different from skew proliferation. Then we have just, there just isn't enough time for all the things we need to do to build trust. Then it's the recovery. When there is a breakdown, you know, we're spending a lot, it's a huge challenge for us when something goes wrong to get back to ground zero. Or is it just an overall lack of visibility and transparency? Vicki is going to bring up the poll, and if we can take a few seconds and vote on that, just pick the item that you feel is your biggest challenge. Okay, Vicki, if we have enough respondent check, go ahead and show that data if you feel you need to wait a little longer. Go ahead. Okay, I didn't see those numbers come up, Vicki. So if you get those, we can bring those up, perhaps at the end. Let's keep going. Let's move into the next slide here. Oh, here we go. All right, folks. Well, we have just about a three-way tie. So everyone agrees skew proliferation is a problem. None of us have enough time, and boy, it takes a lot of time to recover from breakdowns. Our panelists will touch on all of these within their individual success stories. So it'll be interesting to hear how they deal with this, and perhaps it'll give you some ideas to take back. Vicki, can we move on here? We may be having a little lag here today, folks. So bear with us just a moment. And now I would like to introduce Johann Pot from Crescent, and he has a pretty exciting story he'd like to share with us. Johann? Thank you, Carl. Well, hello, everyone. My name is Johann with Crescent. A little bit about Crescent. We were the 2018, oh, next slide, Vicki. Thank you, Vicki. We were the 2018 Noology PacStar Quality Excellence Award recipient. As such, what we're talking about here over the next few minutes, we'll have a fairly heavy focus on the quality aspect and how it's important in strengthening trust with our customers. Crescent was founded in 1850. We're a fifth-generation family-held company. We focus strictly on contract packaging as our sole core competency. We're in seven operating sites in four states with about 1,500 employees, and our mission is really to focus on building trust and delivering value through competitive and customized solutions that are engineered to meet our customers' growing needs. We developed a strategy that resulted in a leadership play book that we call the Crescent Way. And we'll spend a fair amount of time kind of delving into that just high level. The Crescent Way is probably best described as a mindset for how we think about service delivery for our customers. Next slide, Vicki. So the Crescent Way, as you can see it here, is it's about doing it right, doing it safe, and doing it well. That'll be kind of the recurring theme here for Crescent as we talk about strengthening trust. And it relies on nulogy to enhance our service, performance, and results. It's our methodology, our brand, to guarantee high quality service by aligning our three-piece, purpose, process, and people. And the Crescent Way protects our brand, as well as the customer's brand. RSW, or do it right, do it safe, do it well, is now the way that we get stuff done. So there was intentionality behind those words with doing it right, referring to quality, doing it safe, speak for itself, and doing it well is all about efficiencies and productivity. And all three of these do's, they represent a commitment to improving our customers' competitive advantage. Next slide, Vicki. So in reviewing our successes this past year, you know, we saw the same five core components, time and again, as contributing to how we strengthen trust with our CPG customer base. And we clearly saw the three do's in quality, safety, and technology, and that were bookended by, as you can see, strategy and our culture. So just to kind of go through each of these and give you some, some insight as to what it meant to Crescent. So first was how we had taken the time to develop a detailed company strategy that was modeled after the three-piece purpose, process, and people. Now strategies are commonplace, obviously, with successful organizations. They're modeled after different structures. The purpose, process, and people model fit us very well. So all three of the P's are aligned to guarantee high-quality service performance. So purpose, which is the what, you know, is defining our customers and our company's true needs and our commitments to performance and quality. Process represents the how. So it's how we deliver high-performing service and how we deliver performance and quality. And then lastly, people, the most important part, the most important resource, it's the who. So these who delivers on our customers' needs by delivering performance and quality. So the strategy naturally emphasized the very first of the three do's, which is quality or do it right. Now what was important to us is that we made quality central to our purpose, which is our very reason for our existence. So if you were to look at our play book today, you'd see that our purpose is defined as we exist to improve our customer's quality and competitive advantage in their markets. Very simple, very clear and to the point. So this is the definition of our purpose statement, and we share it with customers. But just as importantly, we share it with our people. We'll talk about this in a minute, but this is how we integrate quality into our culture. So next, and as the second of the three do's, is safety or do it safe. So in addition to openly sharing all safety KPIs, we ensure that customers' physical products are safe. So safe during inbounding and receiving with secured yards, personnel, safe in storage, safe throughout the production cycle, as we report damages and scrap and cycle count data, and also safe during shipments, which means that we ensure we ship the right finished goods to the correct destinations on time. So in short, we ensure that each customer knows and believes that their brand is safe with us. So technology represents the third of the three do's, do it right, and PAC manager and QCloud are powerful tools that help our people deliver on these high quality standards that enable full transparency, and they really are the key drivers for an overall positive brand experience. PAC manager and QCloud enable Crescent to provide real-time information on demand, but as well as weekly or monthly for our customer meetings. And they also serve as the driving force behind our continuous improvement initiatives, like increasing total company process accuracy to 99.7 in 2017. So then lastly here, number five, all of this rolls up into the most powerful driving force of all, which is our culture. And the development and roll out of our strategy actually highlighted a key deficiency in our business when we first set out on this journey. And that was our culture. It had to change. So we had to transform our culture into one that drives and rewards people to adopt the Crescent way, as we had defined it and as we had delivered it to become our mindset. The way to get stuff done, if you will. So needless to say, anytime you're talking about a culture transformation, that is a journey. And we started it almost two years ago now. It's one that will continue for many years to come. And as we like to say around here, we're a long way from where we ultimately want to get to, but we've made positive strides that have resulted in strengthening our trust and collaboration with our CPG customers. Next slide, please. So the benefits of what this all means to, obviously to us, but certainly to our customers of strengthening trust for Crescent. I think first and foremost, the positive impact that it's had on Crescent service culture can't be underestimated. With the recent labor forces and the different areas that we're pulling from and making sure that our plans are staffed and have the right resources, having the ability to use our culture, to use the Crescent way, to use it to recruit, attract, hire and retain and recognize talent has been tremendous. The other benefit of strengthening trust for Crescent is that quality becomes a lot more than just a set of rules, just a set of layered audits. It becomes a mindset. This also goes back to the culture once again, because of course, it does not happen overnight, but it has been tremendous to see the improvements that have come out of each of our plants as a result of strengthening trust. Now, the other thing that's done for Crescent is that it's allowed us to reinvest in the Crescent way, not just to protect, but also to grow our brand and more importantly, our customers brands. Next to last here is that a tremendous benefit has been preferred customer consideration for new or expanded operations, as everybody knows on the call when new business is available as an opportunity. This is a time when showcasing what you've done internally through your culture, through the Crescent way and tools like that really collects on the rewards of those benefits. Last but not least, we've had the opportunity and the encouragement from some of our customers, and it's really been an indirect outcome of customer trust, is their encouragement to invest in social responsibility. And one such indirect outcome is Crescent Cares, which we launched almost two years ago now, and has really been a secondary benefit of how this impacts our people and our culture as we live out the values that we claim are important to us. So Crescent Cares, we have a partnership with childhood food solutions using Crescent people, Crescent facilities, equipment to assemble food sacks to battle childhood food insecurity. That's used for disaster relief engagement, local food drives, and in generally just positively impact the community in which we work and live. And that's it for the Crescent success story. Thank you, and Vicki, back to you. Excellent, Johann. Thank you very much. That's an exciting culture story, too. I really love that. Now we have up next is Stephen Masternak from DHL, who has some, I would say, from a different perspective, another very exciting story to share with us. Stephen? Steve? Thank you. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Let me give you a quick overview of DHL. DHL supply chain is most commonly known for the logistics service that we provide to our customers all across the globe. We employ over 150,000 people globally and over 40,000 in North America alone. We're the world's largest secondary packaging provider with 40 sites in the U.S., seven locations in Canada, and 106 sites additionally in the rest of the world. Our goal is to assist customers in the process of getting their products to the market in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Let's take a look at our location in Brantford. We've been operating in our Brantford facility since 2005, and it has grown to 110 DHL employees and up to 350 seasonal staff per day. We create promotional products for our customer, and we ship those products to all of Canada from the one single location. My name is Steve Mastronach. I'm the general manager of the Brantford site and have overall responsibility for the packaging operation, which includes fulfillment and materials management, focusing on delivering the business, enhancing synergies with our customer, reducing costs, and creating streamlined processes. I led the implementation of Pack Manager back in December of 2012, and it's been instrumental in properly managing our inventory levels, handling product recalls, and tracking production efficiencies. One of our largest challenges is the small footprint in which our packaging operation exists in Brantford. Having a reliable system like Pack Manager eliminates waste in our processes, increasing quality, productivity, and most importantly for us at this facility, capacity. We managed to increase our capacity by 35% on a consistent basis, which allowed our customer to consolidate the entire packaging for Canada in the one location without the expense of expanding the operational space. So let's talk about how we made this journey possible. As Carl stated earlier, one of the major challenges in packaging is the variability, that the proliferation, the complexity of packaging, which makes delivering on our customer promise a consistent challenge. Trust is built over time and studies have shown that it takes 12 positive experiences to negate one negative experience. People always remember the things that they don't like. Not being able to deliver on our promise breaks down trust quickly and takes a very long time to reestablish that trust. So having reliable systems in place is critical to improving our customer relationships. Our lean objective is simple. Reduce or eliminate waste whenever and wherever possible. By using our lean tools and staying disciplined to the process, our customers experience higher than expected sales along with increased quality and safety results. Using team building and organizational skills, we've managed to change the culture of our team into one that strives to over exceed on a regular basis and treats the customer's business like it's their own. The attitude was imperative in successfully implementing Pack Manager and establishing new productivity standards and expectations, pushing the company into new areas of growth. With the management team and our associates, we've created an environment that consistently over achieves and continuously improves through innovation and dedication. Let's have a look at some of the results. Using Pack Manager's WMS capabilities and its productivity reporting tools, we've made strides in improving in our ability to deliver the business. We're now in our fourth consecutive year of delivering 100% of all customers, products and stores on time and have been able to significantly reduce the amount of materials on hand. Having visibility into production requirements, ordered materials and material statuses, we can make better business decisions to drive speed to market while reducing cost. Basically, last order lead time for materials and increased predictability of production output has enabled better speed to market for our customer's product. So what was the overall impact of this? Of course, the main goal in in-contract packaging environment is to renew the business with your customers. Our brand first set has been successful at renewing for the fourth consecutive time and the biggest driver to the renewal is the trust that's been developed by consistently delivering on our promise to the customers. By doing what you say you're going to do when you are saying you're going to do it and for the price you said you would do it for trust in the relationship is built and it starts to turn into a true partnership. The partnership we created has led to the consolidation of the Canadian business into one location increasing volume by 25%. It also allowed for partnered innovation ideas that led to us being able to produce 15% of all of our materials on site just in time. And we're looking to increase that to about 45% the next three years. It's also led to new business opportunities with our customer that we did not think was in scope before but they had asked us to pursue. The success of our operation led to our customer recognizing Pack Manager as the solution for all of its North American business across its seven locations in the US and Canada. Being awarded the strategic partner award from Nulogy was really great recognition and validation to the partnership that we created between ourselves and our customers. And using that we continue to find ways to improve and innovate in conjunction with Nulogy and our customers. Thanks very much. I will pass it back to Carl. Thank you very much, Steve. That was excellent. Brought up a lot of questions to hopefully we'll get some in the question box here in a moment. We have our next speaker is a Serge Pelladou from Anasha and I think he's going to come going to come at this from yet another angle. So Serge, it's all yours. Thank you, Carl. Welcome everyone. A little bit about Manasha. Manasha was founded in 1849, privately owned seven generation company. Currently have two divisions, the Orbis Division with manufacturers, plastic containers and other plastic products as well as Manasha packaging concentrating on the co-pack and the corrugating side of the business. The packaging division operates out of 50 facilities across North America, 11 of which are in Canada and nine of these facilities use Nulogy's pack manager in Canada and we have also implemented 19 sites in the U.S. over the last few years. We hire 5,200 full time employees and over 8,000 associates on a on a daily basis work at any of our facilities and the packaging industry. Health and safety, quality and innovation are at the heart of everything that we do at Manasha. A little bit about me I'm senior operations manager for Manasha packaging. I've been in with the business 13 years in the contract packaging and I was in charge of leading all the nine implementations including two new openings for the Canadian facilities. Moving on to the next slide. Manasha came to Canada and acquired two companies to strengthen their position. They came to Canada with one of our biggest customer Unilever Carl mentioned a little earlier that customers are trying to find less and less vendors and want to make sure that they deal with one particular vendor. So they wanted to go North America so they came to establish themselves in Canada and also acquired two new companies. One company specializing in Corgan and the other company specializing in contract packaging. When Manasha first entered and came to market there were several challenges because there's three companies trying to work together and they're all working on their different system different processes. So there was a challenge for the first year to integrate and see which systems we're going to use to best suit or the business. So everyone was talking different language. There was no possibility of moving work from one facility to another because we would have had to reset all the customer base into the new system. So we had to come with solution and very fast. Moving on to the next slide that solution was basically converting all kidney and facilities on to pack manager over 15 months period. There was a lot of challenge. Our ISS team was in the US and we're also implementing some pack manager into their facilities in the US. So we had a great team coming up and helping us do the kidney and facilities over a 15 month period. The benefits was talking about the flexibility of moving people from site to site because they no longer needed to learn other systems. So we were all operating under one system and also the biggest benefit was the US support that we could get since all our US teams were fluent in pack manager so they could come and help us specifically on new openings of sites. Also another benefit was standardization in our labor coding. Again, three different ways of working three different processes. Customers from one facility to another quotes were not the same. So it gave us the opportunity to also align with the US pricing because we are now we now have over six of our customers are North American so we needed to standardize that as well. And also the data being centralized so we can use information like I said between the US and Canada. Next slide Vicky. One of our biggest success story at Panasha was for sure our Unilever customer that we on boarded a few years ago. And NewLogy was a big part of this with the Unilever integration where Unilever went from 13 co-packers and over 50 vendors to only one that being Menasha. One of the key contributors for Unilever awarding the full turnkey business to Menasha was around what we're offering in terms of our traceability system and processes. A little history about that is back in 2008 describe a strive group which was Menasha legacy company implemented the first pack manager system in the Alberto Culver facility. A few years later in 2010 Unilever acquired that company planning to integrate the Unilever model in that facility but after reviewing our processes and what our pack manager was able to offer chose to build the rest of their co-packing business around that model. On the next slide we can see a few of the achievements that we were able to accomplish. Cower mentioned a little earlier what the top five customer criteria's were and this customer was no different. They were looking for total cost saving speak to market as well as simplification all of which were able to achieve in a short period of time with the support of our our newly G partner. So on a closing note I'd like to all these great improvements were made possible with the support of our newly G partners and also the great Manasha ISS team that's been awarded the MVP award last May. So congratulations to all and thank you. Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for that, Johanna. That was excellent. Excuse me, Serge. I'm sorry. Thank you for that. That was really helpful. I like the way you tied that together at the end too. We've got some questions coming into the box here but I think we have Vicki, we have a summary of our platforms here. Okay, thank you. Here we go. System was running slow. Here we go. So in closing for those of you that are not familiar with that are not yet familiar with newly G and I know there's a mix of folks on the phone today but we've just covered three diverse business cases and customer situations and each of them expressed in their own way how they benefit from higher levels of trust both between them at the brand and the CPG and how that trust needs to flow both ways because you have to count on the customer being able to do what they'll say they'll do when they're going to do it so that you can deliver what you need to for them. So it definitely flows both ways and it also requires a level of communication that is much more onerous than it was in the past. So using technology to improve by the way if you just automate a mess you end up with a faster mess but by going in with smart technology tools you can do things that are simply impossible a few years ago for example we wouldn't be able to hold this webinar a few years ago. So this is what the new energy platform is focused on and while there are many out there that are in the SaaS area theirs is totally focused on the on the COPAC business. So we've heard from a lot of our presenters today about this platform and how they've been able trust with their customers if you'd like to learn more about new energy they're holding these little mini webinars that are really neat because they just go in there they don't take a big time commitment you go in you know what the topic is they cover it so it's tell them what you tell them tell them what you told them that they're very straightforward. I've seen some of the outlines from them I'm looking forward to sitting in on them myself. If you go to newogy.com slash mini webinar series and that's hyphenated I believe you can check them out there. Also I'm going to ask Vicki if she wouldn't mind to email all the attendees that link as well. So that's a little bit on our summary here today. Oh there it is there's the URL right on the screen excuse me. So Vicki do we have any questions coming in yet? I know we have a few here let's see this one actually is for Johann but it would probably be appropriate for all three of you guys if you'd like to comment on it. Johann will start with you because this is who they asked for but if we could comment on how do you communicate the need for trust, communication, and collaboration throughout your organization internally through your culture which you talked about at GrayLink. How do you communicate and how do you keep it fresh? That was a good question I think the most honest answer is that's a work in process. I think for starters as part of our stepped up efforts around recruiting people at all levels of the organization from line workers to forklift operators line leaders production supervisors administration project managers and right up to the executive suite we spend a lot of time formalizing that onboarding process so whereas really not all that long ago we did not have a lot to offer from that standpoint people were quite commonly hired briefly onboarded thrown into the role and quite frankly as the business continued to grow and expand when you do that you end up with a mix of results and we had some in all honesty some painful results as we we ended up with operating models that resembled more of a very autonomous looking structure that so say for instance you ended up with a new plant manager at one of our new operations and rather than understanding this is all pre-crescent way we ended up with the the John way or the Sue way or the Jack way or whatever it might have been and it created distortion it created communication problems but most importantly it almost immediately damaged trust that we had with this in these cases new customers so what we've done to address that and to communicate the importance of trust we've revamped that onboarding process we've established playbooks we've got something called the Crescent way playbook we've got the Crescent safety playbook each playbook comes with videos that we've produced that accompany all of the literature pieces and we now take our time so as part of onboarding new people into Crescent there are mentor roles established there are customer visits set up supplier visits as part of the onboarding process and these books these playbooks that we have now are just terrific guides we've written them ourselves they've improved a number of ways we've already begun and started on editing them because as we continue to grow and and drive new business that happened so yeah I'll stop it there but that onboarding process and formalizing it and developing tools has been key for us excellent thank you Steven or Serge do you have anything you'd like to add to that or expound on that yeah actually I'd have to echo what Johan said about the culture it all starts with the culture and it does take a long time to build that you do have to work at it it is always a work in process but the more open you can be the more trusting you can have the more total employee involvement that you can generate from your people there's a lot of superstars that everybody has working for them and sometimes you just have to really tap into that potential to get it and you know the customer recognizes that when they can walk on the floor and they can talk to the people and the reaction on the customer's face when they see how passionate the staff is to work on their business for them it gives them that sense of of trust that I trust that this is going to get done I trust that they're doing what they say they're going to do and it really does it really is beneficial for everybody but it does take a long time to build point thank you Serge anything you'd like to add to that I mean I'm probably going to echo what Steve and Johan said but the culture is really key I mean I've said it before we were three companies that tried to merge into one a few years ago and we were really struggling with that with that culture where we all speak in with the same voice that's very critical and in front of the customers so there were some a lot of struggles on that that we live in a fast space environment and onboarding is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind we just want to make things happen and deliver to the customer but it is a critical piece we were lucky enough to have a we have a like I mentioned a little earlier and a team that's dedicated for the pack manager training that was probably one of our key things that we had for Menasha which we had a dedicated team that spent really time so at least for that portion of the business we were good but we're working on on our onboarding processes as well and making sure that everybody speaks the same language and we all go towards the same direction okay excellent thank you that was an internally focused question and I thought those answers were great we have a lot of energy around an externally focused one now people are asking you know what what do you mean by the 3G effect I'm going to answer that briefly just to clarify it but then I'd like you guys to weigh in on how it's impacting your businesses because there's a lot of energy here around it there's three questions four questions on it so we call it the 3G effect it's been happening long before 3G was on the scene and it's simply the ongoing constant reduction in costs as the mature brands who are under incredible earnings pressure look for ways to cut costs and some of what they cut isn't necessarily fat some of it is bone and muscle so a lot of the resources that they used to have internally they're now looking to their value chain for and you guys are three valued vendors in various parts of those value chains for those vendors how are you seeing this play itself out any of you can take that I can give a few thoughts here I think just generally speaking not over generalizing but the 3G effect impacts our most important resource the most and that's our people support group so the way we see that manifested within our customer base is either the reduction of overhead changes in the structures and organizations that we correspond with primarily on a daily basis and changes in those positions may or may not be backfilled if they're backfilled their new resources quite often they are resources that don't have the depth of experience and training and in those cases what we see is an increased drain on the resources that we have to in part educate to in part help help those new team members familiarize and acclimate to the to the business relationship that's one of them on the other hand where it creates a vacuum and potentially and other individuals is required to pick up multiple roles that in and of itself can lead to even greater concerns and it's you know it's where if that individual might be overextended or that a team might be overextended extended by the requirements of executing the business which means things can fall through the cracks not every proverbial T is crossed or eyes dotted and then it might create you know rush patterns now it's we do see it as an opportunity as well because what it means to an organ organizations like like DHL Monash and Crescent I think and I can speak for all three of us you know we do like having the opportunity to become of more value to these organizations so we do recognize that those moves are important they're maybe necessary in order for the CPG customer to remain competitive in their market and as I mentioned earlier that is crafted into our purpose statement you know to grant them and to ensure that they maintain that competitive advantage so not a necessarily a menu of options here to pick from when it comes to how we address that but through having the right people going back to culture going back to people that all three of us have touched on you know making sure that we have the culture in place that allows our people in full transparency in trust to voice to our management teams and say well this is what's happened this is where I need support here's where you may need to redirect but does kind of come back for us to people and culture excellent thank you Steve or Serge anything you'd like to add to that we've got a couple minutes left here I think that was a great explanation by Johan I will say that in order to really try to combat these as well with the way that it's that the business is evolving is you do have to have this trusting relationship with your customer because a lot of times where we're finding now that we can provide value is not necessarily in the space they've asked us to play but it's more in managing and looking at their upstream business and their processes and helping them find ways that we can jointly eliminate and sometimes it's with activities that don't even involve what we're focusing on in the co-pack but more of the upstream generation of that work or the sourcing of things or even transportation items but with the way that it's going you have to have a trusting customer you have to have that relationship and have built it otherwise it's like putting up walls there's no receptive communication there's no production productive talks that actually happen if they just put up a wall and they say that's my business you don't know what you're talking about but the more that you can build that trust and earn it then you can actually work together to try to provide even more value you know if we currently bring Excellent thank you well hey I want to honor our time commitment so we have one more question here that it's from Steve or for Steve it's about your Pellet program there seems to be a lot of interest but before I ask that question anyone that needs to or would like to drop off I want to thank you so much for your attendance today you'll be getting a copy of this webinar and please take advantage of that survey question it means a lot to us for those of you that want to hang on for the for the Pellet question for Steve please do so because I know there's several folks interested in that so thank you to everyone very much Steve this question is can you discuss the Pellet Reduction Program in a little more detail was this just for improving planning or was it also to help reduce your customer's safety stock as well absolutely thanks Carl it was actually both what was happening was we had a very high level of inventory because our customer was operating in all of their brands operated in silos they never talked to each other their design teams designed based on individual requirements so you would have the same type of display across three different brands and they'd all be using unique individual part identifiers and it became very difficult to manage so there's a lot of things that went hand in hand with it which standardized colors you know depending on the keep your brand color but aligning the brands to to different to to make sure that we're all on the same page so for example there was at one point we actually found that there was 16 different blues that became the standard branding and it became unmanageable and very expensive so what we said was hey let's get it down to two blues we got the brands to align to it let's start making common parts let's design the displays using much more common integrated design so that we can if one doesn't execute we can swap with another so that was kind of the start of the process the other thing that was really critical that that new legy helped with was being able to link the materials together and not keeping them on an island like they were so once you know what parts you have you can start ordering based on the part requirement you need rather than ordering for the finished display or finished unit that you're going to produce we managed to drive down our skew count from 5,000 unique skews to just over 2,000 we do have a goal to actually reduce our number even further from what it is we need to get it down to about another 55% and that's why we've started doing a lot more production just in time so it literally we produce the corrugate inside the facility rather than ordering it from the vendor the reason for that is typical customer lead time is a heck of a lot less than what your corrugate vendors have so your corrugate vendor would look at three, four, five weeks to deliver customer wants it in three days how can you line those two things up so it was really also working with the vendors to have on your fast moving your everyday available skews to make sure that your vendors are holding the materials not bringing them in-house agreeing on min-max levels it was a lot of conjoined work that we did not just with our customer but also with our customers vendors that we were being directed to purchase from and really seeing the levels drop seeing this program that we put in place work it could not have been it could not have happened without the level of trust and partnership that we created it was daily meetings daily communication it was support from our customer to push their vendors to where they needed to be to basically tell the vendors you need to do what they're saying this is we're on the same page I'm aligned to these goals it improved quality it improved speed to market setting up lots of standard deliveries when things are expected when they're not expected we actually were managed to reduce NPI from levels that were about I think four years ago we were about two million dollars in NPI a year that was being scrapped we're just closing out sorry last year when we just closed out last year and we were just above the $600,000 mark so it was a huge decrease in that level as well still not where we want to get the goal is zero but we're actively working towards it it was a very big program but when you're looking at your on hand materials you need to look at why you have it what else can I use what else can I do with it if I can't use it for that and then the world's moving to just in time so we need to start pushing our external vendors to start being more just in time you can get something in Amazon same day now if you order it well it shouldn't take me four weeks to get anything so we need to get on the same page with how that happens and really getting our customers to understand that was critical in driving this down excellent it was a great narrative on that program thank you well guys we are flat out of time so a couple of things one is a best practice if I can recommend that if you heard anyone that you liked today and you would like to keep that fresh in your mind please reach out to any of our panelists or me on LinkedIn I know I will accept the link and I'm sure they would as well one more thing on LinkedIn Nulogy runs an awesome group there as does the Seek Contract Packaging Association that one has over 4,000 members all of whom care greatly about the subject so if you're a brand or a CPG or a co-pack I'd recommend it so I want to thank everyone one more time for all of their great participation today and that also goes to our attendees we had a full house this was really good and I look forward to seeing you all on another one whether I'm in the audience or speaking so thank you very much and with that I think we'll adjourn gentlemen do you have any last things otherwise I think we're done I think we're good all right guys thanks a lot thank you everybody thank you