Ultra Tool & Manufacturing: The importance of IoT, automation

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Andrew Loescher, Ultra Tool & Manufacturing Automation Specialist, shares the importance of #automation and #optimization of the shop floor. Andrew is a SuperNova award finalist for Constellation Research and tells his story to Editor in Chief Larry Dignan.

View the full case study here: https://www.constellationr.com/node/33436/vote/application/view/1068

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Full video transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript is not edited and may contain errors)

Hi, I'm here with Andrew loscher. He's Ultra he's an automation specialist at ultratool and manufacturing. So first off, congrats on being a supernova Award finalist. Let's just start a high level. What does Ultra tool and manufacturing specialize in? Sure, ultra tool and manufacturing specializes in on time, high quality metal stampings, sheet metal stampings. We also build high quality tools for the stamping industry as well as we provide a full fabrication department for customers who are looking for smaller runs of sheet metal goods. We also have a value added department that can add nuts, bolts, weld parts of the sheet metal, parts that we stamp. And how large is the company? So we're about right around 100 employees. We're right around $28 million in sales per year.

Okay, so I know you were trying to, you know, scale things up and, you know what? What were your challenges in doing that and just sort of getting the data you needed to optimize? We really started the journey about four years ago now. So what kicked off the journey was really just hearing a lot of the talk about IIoT right away. We had some conversations with a company at the time called cores engineering. They were bought by Plex was bought by Rockwell, but so they provided a solution for us. But really, even before they provided a solution for us, they helped us really figure out how we could benefit from smart technology. Plant monitoring on the floor as I talked with representatives from at the time Coors engineering about what you know, plant monitoring in general, can do for you. One of the most powerful things that they had said at the time was really it can do anything for you. It just takes a team of people who have eyes on the floor, who can see what the problems are, the inefficiencies are. And once you really have that kind of mindset looking for those inefficiencies, there's there's always a tool, there's always a smart tool, or some logic you can build behind the scenes to improve those inefficiencies and save money.

So did you have any infrastructure in place to, you know, measure these processes and manufacturing in place to begin with? Or is that something that you worked with Plex to kind of just integrate some of our machines are fairly smart, at least the stamping presses. They have mountains of data that you could pull from them. They all are driven by industrial computers, PLCs and we had Plexis ERP ahead of time, so we kind of had these two pieces. We had the ERP was working behind the scenes, and we had our machines, but we didn't really have anything tying them together. So really, the first time, I personally looked into one of our stamping presses to figure out what data we could pull from it, I was I was pretty surprised and very excited to be honest about what we could get from that machine and feed into our ERP system, or just create a dashboard for our own visibility. So Plex really provided that that intermediate piece to connect our machines to our ERP system, and that that connection was mostly a software layer, yeah, mostly a software layer. I really all we had to add was switches in any of our older machines that didn't have them, and we standardized right away how we were going to communicate. So we had stamping presses that didn't even have a PLC, that were just built off and relays all the way up to a new, new servo stamping press that has, you know, way more technology than we'd ever look at or need to deal with. The presses kind of come with a monitoring system that we just upgraded those across all of our presses. So, so really seamless implementation, because we just really needed to upgrade those boards on each press and then connect an Ethernet cable and you're good to go. So how has this changed your processes, and how you go about optimizing keep. Biggest change for us was, again, just getting into a mindset of what were our processes that were inefficient, first of all, and prioritizing which ones we felt we could make more efficient with this, with this technology, and then getting people on board and train to deal with that. So right?

The first step in the process was just getting our key players, managers, supervisors, together in a room and just kind of having a roundtable discussion on what everybody's problems are, what if, what inefficiencies were there specifically right away related to monitoring and recording production on the plant floor and interfacing with Plex. So we were trying to take away anything that an operator had to do specifically in Plex manually so that they could focus on making parts. Really just took away some processes, to be honest, like recording production, scrapping parts in the system, and printing labels. Have you been able to tweak the processes from your learnings initially, I guess, how often do you go and kind of tweak how things are done? I would say, from an implementation standpoint, the Plex engineers that take on the implementation are very hands on, very thorough, also very capable and interested in training people within our company to tweak background logic and parts of the automated processes, especially with our some of our machines did require fairly custom logic. So what used to be called Mach two and a Plex automation and orchestration has a pretty, pretty good set of templates, logic, templates and things that they've built out to work for customers. But with some of our machines, there was quite a bit of custom, custom building behind the scenes. Their engineers helped out with but I kind of picked up the ball and was able to learn how to build that logic behind the scenes, which was really helpful for us, and I know it has been for other companies that I've spoken with, so that, you know, even little things here and there that come up, they're able to build additional logic, or tweak logic, or use some kind of history of transactions to make make the processes even better. What? Um, what have the returns been like? What?

What have been some of the benefits you've been able to quantify? Yeah, so right away, the ROI for me was really just in recording, production and printing labels. So just on our stamping floor alone, we have 13 stamping presses. 10 of the 10 of them are automatic. And some of those, some of the, some of the jobs that we run, I mean, we're making parts anywhere from really 20 up to 200 strokes per minute, parts per minute. So we have some people that are making, you know, hundreds and hundreds of boxes every day. So for that person, have to walk up to their computer and type in how many parts they've made, and then, you know, click through a couple of screens in Plex, which, you know, Plex is great, but it's still all extra work. So they're trying to record production, print a label, apply a label. And I would say, probably in at least a third of our jobs, they're stopping the machine to have to do all that. So now all of that is done, recording production, recording scrap, printing labels, all that's done automatically, so an operator just can walk over, quick, pull a label off, slap it on a box. So the return on investment. On that process alone, paid for, paid for the mach two product, but Plex ano product for us, just in one year's time, if we have all of our machines running on our shifts, and again, it kind of depends on the job, if it's if it's one where the press is stopping or not. So we're really saving money. We were seeing returns upwards of $48,000 a year just on label, printing itself and production recording. Now we're also planning on building, building a lot, quite a few other initiatives out. We have some pretty good ROI numbers for some additional logic that we built in house to track track setup time for machines, so if an operator z is struggling with a setup previously, we didn't really have very good real time visibility into that to have a supervisor go out and assist. So. Something maybe turned into a five hour setup on a machine, maybe a complex setup where now we can track what's going on there via machine statuses and send out the correct people to assist the operators so they can get a machine up and running faster. So we saw a really good ROI numbers on that as well, and decreased setup times because of that.

So the How long will this scale out take? We've had the product or about two and a half years now. We've just done stamping the build out, wasn't it was probably over a couple months. So our the way we did it was, let's roll this out on two machines to start out with. So we just get our feet, our feet go on, and we get people seeing how it's working. Because once you kind of build out the one or two machines, especially with us in our stamping facility, our presses are mostly the same. So we were able to build out just, really two, two machine templates that we could then apply to the rest of our presses. So after we had those two kind of done and taken care of and running well, an implementation for another one was less than a day. It's really just applying that template to another work center, testing it out for an hour or two, and then just kind of letting her rip. We do have, like I said, we have our full fledged fabrication department and a value added department with spot welders, welders press brakes, whole bunch of different machines that we also plan on implementing at some of those implementations will be simpler. For example, our spot welding machines, we plan on also recording production, and that's kind of already something we've done. So applying that to another work center is just a matter of really getting one piece of data from the machine. Hey, am I stroking up and down? But in addition to that, we have we have other initiatives that we are going to get going. We plan on building a dashboard to track cycles on all of our spot welders, so that we know how many times a consumable, like an electrode on a spot welder, how many hit sets, how many strokes it's made because they wear out.

So that can be a problem if we have, if we're not changing those in a certain time frame, then you might start getting bad parts. So now we can have a dashboard with real time visibility into how many, how many, how many strokes a machine has made, so that we can be proactive and change machine consumables when we need to. All right, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Larry.

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Workforce Management ShortList SpotLight: ADP

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the&nbsp;cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.&nbsp; Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization &amp; Innovation&nbsp; Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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As #enterprises face longer and more flexible working hours, they need help tracking time, scheduling attendance, and managing worker attendance. Leaders need tools to help their operational managers make better #workforce management decisions. #ai is also changing enterprise #automation substantially. Vendors need AI-based automation in the core workforce management automation areas – with tangible success.

💡 With this context in mind, Holger Mueller highlights his Workforce Management Suites ShortList and why ADP made the list! Watch below ??

View the full ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gVnH6M2t

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: This transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)

Hello everybody. It's Holger Mueller Miller here from Constellation Research, here to speak to you about two things which are near and dear to my heart, which are the hard things in HCM and the things which make enterprise move farther faster. The hard thing in HCM is payroll and workforce management. We're going to speak about workforce management today, and we're going to start about constellation port lists. What are constellation shortlists? All about?

They are about us looking at a number of vendors in the space in the workforce. Managers paid about 30 or 40 vendors, which we typically speak at least twice a year. In many cases, like the ones on the shortlist, we go to their conference. We go to their analyst events. We speak to them almost on the monthly level. We help customers to select software and selection processes for their offerings. So we're very intimate, familiar depending on the frequency and popularity of the solutions.

So what is relevant for that is that it helps you as an enterprise, when you listen to us, to accelerate your software selection and enterprise acceleration is near and dear to my heart. It's my research area. How can companies become faster, move faster, become more agile, accelerate overall return, better shareholder value, create better employee experience, better customer experience. All these things are crucial part of enterprise. Explorations and shortlists are important part because you need to select software and be on top of that software.

So let's look of the shortlist which we published just in the space about workforce management suites, and let's look about what are the critical capabilities there selection criteria which we look into. So first of all, everybody has a strong time and tenants management, it's basically the building blocks of any workforce management solution. If you do not have that, then you're not able to run workforce management has to be complete, has to be easy to use, has to be mobile, has to be available for all employees and also gig workers. There has to be strong scheduling. That's where the rubber hits the road. If you don't have strong scheduling capabilities in a workforce management product, your managers will struggle, your schedules will struggle, not a good position to be in.

So this is why it's critical to have strong scheduling capabilities and at least three or more of the following five areas, workforce planning and forecasting, compliance management, reporting, payroll interface, because that's where and ultimately, your employee satisfaction hinges on and because you're no longer working with just normal employees, strong gig worker support. So additionally, there's geographical and adoption parts. There has to be support for more than four continents. It has to be more than six and a half 1000 customers and more than 2.3 million users, and everybody's working on a smartphone in 2024 everybody is having that in their pockets. Your employees and gig workers do that as well. So very strong mobile platform support is absolutely essential and critical.

So what are we talking about? One of the shortest vendors, and congratulations. Here is ADP workforce management. What is setting apart from full length criteria? What's setting ADP workforce management apart from a capability perspective compared to the other products which are also on the shortlist, and everybody has their own differentiators. So first of all, it has a strong full capabilities and time in 10s, as well as absence management, as I said, very critical to make it part of a working workforce management system that will legal the input box are really working, and they do for the ADP solution here, you have to have good enough scheduling, and scheduling is super critical to make basically workforce management really work. You have to support your managers and schedule as well to make this a successful offering overall. All the other components can be great. If scheduling doesn't work well, then it's critical ADP does good to very good scheduling in what matters also very much in a very modern, compelling user experience. And that is so important, because people don't want to spend too much time figuring out how to schedule things. They want to be able to use things right away and actually successfully. From that perspective, reuse templates, find people who are the right people, easy way of fashion.

And ADP has done, like in general, across the ADP solution, a very good job on the user experience for that which differentiates it compared to the other members of the shops. ADP has very strong labor forecasting, which is not a surprise to a certain point, because labor statistics are very close to ADP. ADP is better at many governments at forecasting labor trends because they have so much payroll data. And the integration of the two are very, very strong in terms of the labor forecasting capabilities in the ADP workforce management product. And, of course, table stake for ADP, nobody surprised, but still worth mentioning, one of the best, if not the best, payroll integration from all the workforce management products. That sums it up. From my perspective, what's also important is not. Forget it's not only about the technology, it's about the mix of people and technology. You have to get that right, select the right workforce management product, which we're helping you with.

The shortlist for Workforce Management. ADP is a very strong content out there. Check out the overall shortlist to have a look. I mentioned the differentiators for you, but you also have to think about the people on this so otherwise you won't be successful. This is Holger Mueller from Constellation Research. Thank you so much for watching. What you think about the shortlist? What do you think about ADB, workforce management? Please don't be shy. Reach out to me. Love to hear from you. Thanks for watching you.

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Revenue Platforms: AI and Focus on Full Journey Are Changing the Game

Martin Schneider

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Martin Schneider has had a unique career that has spanned both analyst and marketing practitioner roles, focused on high technology and related industries. The unifying factor has always been both a keen analysis of go-to-market trends, while also having achieved success as a marketing leader. Schneider started his career as a journalist covering B2B technologies, and quickly transitioned into a leading analyst covering application software for the 451 Group in NYC, where he specialized in CRM, marketing automation, and business intelligence/analytics technologies. After analyzing various go-to-market strategies of dozens of technology vendors, Schneider made the move to the vendor side, where he led successful go-to-market teams for several startups and established tech providers,…...

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The #revenue platforms market continues to evolve rapidly. This is due to several factors—namely that most businesses are continuing to transform their #business models to better support a “retention-focused” economy and that businesses must rethink their #growth strategies in the wake of this development. Revenue platforms, which previously focused solely on sales actions, need to accommodate more stakeholders along the journey, including #customer-success in addition to other postsale departments.

This means that revenue platforms are evolving to include more datasets, and data sources, to better support a full-journey approach to growth. In addition, the workflow capabilities need to expand to support more end-to-end processes and experiences—incorporating task management that spans #Sales, #Marketing, Customer Service, and Customer Success.

And finally, just as in many other sectors, artificial intelligence (#AI) is changing the game. AI can bring more predictive insights to revenue teams as well as streamline productivity by automating many of the more mundane and low-impact actions sellers and other revenue stakeholders perform on a daily basis. Also, generative AI (#GenAI) tools can help build revenue platforms into more intelligent full-journey tools that ideally help better orchestrate engagement in such a way that no potential growth opportunities get lost in the shuffle.

Enjoyed the preview? Access the full report here: https://www.constellationr.com/research/revenue-platforms-ai-and-focus-full-journey-are-changing-game

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)

Hi. This is Martin Schneider, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Wanted to talk to you really quickly about my new market Overview Report, which is called revenue platforms, how AI and focus on full journey are changing the game? One of the reasons why I came to constellation is because there's this really interesting transformation happening around a big area of tech, around sales automation, rev ops automation, and even, you know, just CX in general, where we're really transforming from these kind of commoditized and very transactional systems of record to really transformational, really supporting a full journey growth optimization strategy that companies need to have to remain competitive in this day and age, right?

So what we're really seeing is tools like AI are making not just smarter systems, but really joining up with workflow and other capabilities to create this kind of just in time, joined up full journey concept where we're really, you know, able to kind of predict how our growth is going to happen in ways that we really couldn't before we went from a big focus on kind of net new sales and really leads and the pipeline and conversion metrics and things like that, being the KPIs that matter to really looking at this full journey, holistic growth concept, it's very new, and not a lot of people have mastered it yet, and that's why, and kind of that's why I'm here.

But really, you know what we're talking about is there's some new kind of buyer requirements and new challenges we need to be thinking about when we look at our revenue platforms, and which ones are really platforms, rather than point solutions. I go over the vendor landscape and look at about more than a dozen vendors in this report, and really how they kind of hash out in terms of that platform scalability, as well as that full journey and AI focus that's really needed to be effective moving forward. And then I talk about a lot of best practices that you can be thinking about when you're either deploying a revenue platform for the first time and making that selection, or trying to optimize existing tools that you may have among the shortlist that also recently came out for revenue platforms that I just put out last week.

So check out on the Constellation Research website. Grab the report if you can, and if you remember, if you're not, become a member, because this is some really transformational stuff, and it's just the beginning. So I'll be talking a lot about this and writing a lot about this. Thank you. Applause.

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Why Internal Candidates Matter | SuperNova Interview with Peraton's Cari Bohley

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Peraton, a next-generation national #security company, is continually searching for talent including employees with high-security clearances. But the real win for Peraton has been courting internal candidates.

The company is an integrator and enterprise IT provider for the US government. Peraton provides #cybersecurity, #digital, #cloud, operations and #engineering services for #space, #intelligence, homeland security, health and #defense, among others.

In Peraton's Supernova Award entry, the company noted it saw internal job board applicants increase 9.8% and more engagement overall. Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights, caught up with Cari Bohley, Vice President of Talent Management at Peraton, to discuss the Supernova finalist entry in the Future of Work: Human Capital Management category.

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Access the full video transcript here: (Please note this transcript is not edited and may contain errors) 

Hi. I'm Larry Dignan for Constellation insights, and we're here with supernova Award finalist Carrie Boley. She's a VP of talent management at paraton. Hi, Carrie, thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. 

So I guess let's just start from the top and explain what paraton does. It looks like you all have some cool projects you work on. Yeah, we are a government services contractor. And really what that means is that all of the work that we do is for the US Federal Government. We are really a national security company. Is a good way to describe the type of work that we do for the federal government. Work on things like launching rockets in the intelligence space, collecting and analyzing intelligence, data, maritime security, it modernization, I mean, just a lot of really cool projects for the federal government we're getting now into space exploration, space resiliency. So a lot of exciting projects and exciting work that we do really to keep our country and our nation and its citizens safe.

And the company was built by mergers and acquisitions, yeah. Well, Paraton itself started as a spin off of a company called l3 back in 2017. I joined the company in 2022 and at that time, we had just gone through quite a significant amount of M and A activity with the IT Services Division of Northrop Grumman, as well as the acquisition of the entirety of a company called perspecta, which in and of itself was the legacy of several different mergers and acquisitions. So here we are, almost three years later, and we're about 19,000 employees, and in doing really well, it's a really exciting time, because really, even though we've been around since 2017 and if you can, if you count the legacy of all the different companies, we've got people that have, like, 30 years of tenure, but because of years of service, but we're really just a young company, you know. 

So we operate as a young company, being only about three years old, as this talent pool built, built, I recall in your application, you know, you need some way to filter through the talent. Can you walk me through the project and what aI had to do with it? Yeah, so, like many companies, I mean, there's, there's a lot of great talent out in the industry, but the market is very, very competitive. And so when you open up a requisition for a job, the competition is fierce, and we've got some very, very unique requirements that we're trying to fill. So to really parse through, really effectively, parse through all of that information. It takes a lot of time and effort, so without having something like AI to really look for some unique information and indicators, it's really difficult.

The other piece of that is looking for what we call passive talent. So not everybody's always actively looking for a job. So you know, like many companies, we're also looking for people who aren't necessarily looking for a new job. And an AI helps us identify who that talent is. Helps us look across different areas of the internet to find who that talent might be, people who maybe have written white papers, people who have, you know, a profound on LinkedIn or other social media sites, people who don't use social media, but, you know, maybe they presented at a conference and presented something really interesting that we may, we may want to get in touch with. So we've got different ways to find individuals who may be somebody that we want to talk a little bit further with.

When did it hit you you needed AI as a front end or what? I guess, when did it hit you that the scale of finding talent was challenging?

Um, you know, in 2022 we've worked with this company. We've worked with seekout for a few years. A lot of companies in the space, a lot of companies across multiple industries, work with companies like seekout. And it wasn't until we've, we've recognized that we needed to have more power than just, you know, trying to find this passive talent and that the type of work that we were bidding on in the government was much more complex, much more complicated, and the level of effort that it takes to submit proposals for the government, because that's essentially how we work, was becoming increasingly complex, and part of that effort requires being able to put together things like staffing plans, so without having a tool in place to help us that could leverage AI that could again go through large amounts of data in short periods of time, it really handicaps what you're able to do. 

And so when we look at, you know, all of the different tools that are out there, when we looked at the relationships that we had already in place with seekout, it just made sense for us to explore some of the expanded capabilities that they already had that we weren't taking advantage of. And that's really when we started putting two and two together. And it's like, you know, it just makes sense to go further down the road with them. And then, in addition, we were also looking at, you know, we can bring talent in the door. How does what seek out offers also play into our retention strategies and that's where we started looking at some of their other modules around career development and career growth, and it really played right into what we were trying to accomplish from a career development standpoint for our employees. Really played right into the data that we were seeing from our employee engagement strategies, and it really complemented what we were trying to do and help our helping our employees build their careers, so they felt that they had a place to stay with paraton. They didn't have to go and look someplace else for a job.

What were some of the main business metrics you used to justify the project?

Turnover is the biggest one. So retention, yeah, retention and being able to ensure that we could keep our employees within the company and that we could so retention is the starting point, and then mobility is another. So not only do we retain our employees, but we have a place for them to grow their careers so that we can move them throughout the organization. And if we were able to do that, then we could bring in, you know, new employees from outside the company and staff programs from the bottom, and help build employees' careers throughout the organization. 

So, I mean, it's, it really becomes an end-to-end process for helping our folks build their careers within the company, starting from when they when they sign on with us. You know, they can look and see that hey, you know, it's not only just this project that I, that I started with, or this job that I started with, but there are other places where I can go. I don't have to stay in this one position and be here for the entirety of my time with paraton, I can move around to different types of jobs and different types of opportunities within the organization, but being able to create the picture that you know, we can reduce turnover, we can increase engagement, we can increase mobility and staff our programs internally, instead of having this churn of people coming in and having this revolving door of employees. I mean, those are the things that are the metrics that our leadership team paid attention to, what roles are most difficult to hire and retain in our industry, it's really highly clear talent. These are the people that are doing top-secret work for the government. And there is, you know this, you would think that it's a pretty big market, but it's not. 

It's a very, very small market. There's several companies that do the type of work we do, but it's really a very small industry, very small. And so trying to find the right talent to do the work that we have to do to keep our nation safe is challenging and that's the that's the talent that that we use, you know, our partner and seek out, that we use them to help us find what were some of the surprises with this project? 

See, some of the surprises was, I would say at the beginning, it was really creating a business case that resonated with our leadership team. In hindsight, it's like, oh, it makes so much sense to just pick out these couple of metrics, and that's what everyone is gonna buy into. But in creating the story that was a strong business case, and making sure that we had that business case in place, is something that it's a, it is it is an effort to do that, so that you do it. Well, certainly not impossible, obviously, because we did it, but making sure that you've got a strong business case so that you can get the buy in that you need, and having a sponsor to help you with that is incredibly important. And I.

Yeah. And I think probably the most surprising thing for me was that when you have all of those things in place, it becomes much easier to position a project like this and an investment like this to an organization. What does seek out to sit on top of is it sit on the HR system or, I guess, what? What's it? What's it integrated with? Yeah, we integrate it with a couple of different systems. We integrate it with our talent acquisition system, our ATS, we integrate it with our HRIS system, we integrate it with our learning management system. We integrate it with it's not really an integration, but we input our career development framework into it so that it understands all of the different job families and things like that. So it really is like a hub that sits on top of all of these different tools and systems, so that, depending on what we're using it for, it gives us, it gives our employees the information that they need.

You know, for example, on the talent acquisition side and on the career mobility side, like it knows all of our open positions, so that you know, if I'm an employee that's looking for a new role, I can see what all those roles are. And because we feed all of our HRIS system, it knows who I am, and because our job families are in there, it knows what what is next in line for me, if I were to go on a kind of a step by step approach, but also because it sits with our on our HRIS system, it knows other people who are like me in the company, who have maybe gone down a different path, and it aggregates that data so that it gives me good recommendations that Maybe are things that I haven't thought of before. So it's not just a traditional career path of if I were in finance, moving, you know, finance analysts, 123, but maybe I want to go into data science and I, or maybe I hadn't thought about going into data science, but because, you know, there's some overlap between skills, between finance and something like data analytics, it will show me those different career paths that maybe I hadn't considered before, and so that opens up a whole world of opportunity for our employees. And then it'll also feed me from our learning management system, the type of training that maybe I haven't had that will help me develop in that area, so that I become upskilled, and then can start to apply for those types of positions.

What are some of the differences between sourcing talent internally versus externally? Quite if there's a few differences. I mean, internally, we know our candidates. We know you know where they're coming from. We know the types of projects that they've worked for. You know, we know what their performance has been on. So, you know, they're a known quantity. When we're sourcing candidates internally, you know, versus externally, when you know it's we don't have that level of data. There's not fidelity in the data on that individual and those candidates that are out in the external to the organization. So it's, you know, when we're looking for, especially for more strategic positions, it really helps us to be able to source internally when we've got so much more data on our employees and on the individuals that are that we're trying to position for those types of roles in the organization.

From an external standpoint, you know, looking at Canada candidates externally, there's also, you know, if they're, if they're posting for a position with us, they can also be posting for a position with, you know, five other companies. So they're much less committed to a position than somebody who's already within the organization. They're already on our payroll, they're already getting our benefits. So their stickiness, if you will, just doesn't exist. So from a value proposition standpoint, if we can source our candidates internally whenever possible, then you know, that's, that's what we want to be able to do now, with a company like ours, where growth is part of our strategy. It's not always possible, it's not always desirable, but when it makes sense, where we can do that, that's part of our strategy. What? What advice would you give HR, leaders, going into AI?

You have to go into AI. You don't have a choice. It is, it is part of our future. One thing that there are a couple of things. One is that AI is going to be one of your best employees. It's going to be an employee. I use AI a lot because I have a very lean team, so I use AI in a couple of different ways. When I'm going through a lot of data, when I'm trying to develop a new training module, when I'm looking for ideas on how to further a strategy, I use AI because I don't have the people resources to do so.

AI also helps me with my team in terms of giving them new opportunities. So there's really a lot of, you know, there's a lot of ways to apply AI that we hadn't thought that we, you know, haven't been doing traditionally in an HR in an HR role. So it's not just for the tech folks that are out there. It's really for all of us to take advantage of. And honestly, if you're not ready for that yet, it's really time for you to start doing some research, reading up on it, and time to get ready for it. Otherwise it's you're just going to be left behind. All right. Thanks for joining us, and congrats on being a finalist. Thanks so much.

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