Speaker: Richard Sandall, Chief Supply Chain Evangelist
Tell us about yourself (where you are from, interests, and hobbies).
Richard Sandall: Hi, I am Richard Sandall, Chief Supply Chain Evangelist at Innovapptive. I was born in Manchester in England, moved around a lot, lived in lots of different places and spent 10 years of my career at Malaysia, with the family - living and working in Southeast Asia. I've got three adult Children. Two girls live close to me in London and my son lives over in Australia. In terms of hobbies, I guess it's mainly around sport, very keen footballer in my younger days, played for Forest Green Rovers. I think that was the highlight of my career before they started their rise of different divisions of the English league and they're now playing the fourth tier of English football. More recently, it's tending to be around the gym and swimming as football injuries have taken their toll. When you tell people you come from Manchester, the next question is always are you a United or City supporter? Well, I've always been United and I followed them through the good times and the bad and I'm hoping the good times return soon.
Tell us about your role and your team at Innovapptive.
Richard Sandall: Well I go by the rather grand title of Chief Supply Chain Evangelist, which was the title given to me when I joined Innovapptive by our CEO Sundeep Ravande It has grown on me over time and I think it nicely encapsulates the different areas that I get involved in. So I do support the pre-sales team on selling our connected worker platform, which integrates frontline industrial workers with the back office. My particular area of expertise is supply chain management. We have a product called mInventory which is used in warehousing. It integrates with barcoding solutions and the back-end SAP system to improve productivity and give real-time visibility of operations. So we're helping companies improve those important warehouse processes from goods receipt, puts away, picking, goods issue, and cycle counting. We particular target asset-intensive industries like mining, oil & gas, and the utility sector. I also work very closely with the marketing team looking at top of funnel activities. So we're always trying to populate the pipeline with new opportunities. We do this through a lot of digital marketing. So I help with white papers, webinars, and speaking at conferences.
What are some things you have enjoyed about working at Innovapptive?
Richard Sandall: Throughout my career I've worked for both large and small organizations. On balance, I prefer to work with small organizations where you can have more say over the future. Strategy and decision-making processes tend to be faster. When I first joined Innovapptive five years ago, I worked in lots of different areas, from selling projects to delivering those projects to actually helping set up our initial customer success function. More recently, I worked with clients, helping them address their challenges in the warehousing and supply chain area, and helping them developing solutions to meet those challenges. And if we can beat the competition and sell the project at the end of the day, then that's very satisfying. I've also had great opportunities within Innovapptive to learn new skills. So digital marketing is an area that I've never done any work in the past. I'm active on LinkedIn and really enjoy publishing original posts. I even get involved in helping our user interface teams develop new mobile apps where I can bring my operational experience to bear.
What is your mission at Innovapptive and how does it contribute to Innovapptive’s overall mission to connect workers?
Richard Sandall: At Innovapptive We have a very simple mission to simplify the lives of frontline workers. If you think about it over the last three decades, many corporations have invested millions of dollars in the enterprise resource planning systems, but frontline workers remain bogged down with paperwork. Take warehousing as an example, if you're expecting your warehouse staff to use paper pick sheets and inventory count sheets, then you're not going to get high levels of productivity. And warehouse staff are going to waste a lot of time processing transactions in the office. Using our mInventory solution for warehousing and inventory management, we integrate with all the different scanning solutions and barcodes. We provide real-time visibility of operations and drive improvements in stock accuracy and also productivity. One of the areas where I'm doing a lot of work at the moment is trying to break down the silos between different parts of the maintenance, repairs and operations supply chain. So, for example, maintenance engineers in the field can view inventory in the warehouse using our mobile solutions and also even place orders with suppliers, the parts that they need. So our systems really are all about driving operational visibility and improving plant up time.
What makes Innovapptive exciting looking ahead?
Richard Sandall: Over the past five years, we've moved from being a startup organization to scaling up very rapidly. We're focusing on a really exciting market, the frontline industrial workers who have largely been forgotten by previous rounds of innovation and technology. We already have a great base of clients, including Shell, Newmont Mining, Dupont and UNICEF. We follow a land and expand strategy. So we target developing new business with existing clients as well as securing new logos. As a software as a service business, We need to be lean and agile and respond quickly to new client requirements. We have deep product roadmaps which reflect changes in technology. We're constantly evaluating new technology, looking at what are going to be the winners for the future and what we should include into our product. It's a super exciting time to be involved with Innovapptive. And I'm really looking forward to the next few years to see how this business continues to grow.
