Time To Value: Innovation That Puts Customers First

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I am joined once again by Alan Wizemann. He’s the Chief Digital Officer at Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. And while you may think that Southern Glazer’s is a distributor of beverages in the United States.

[00:00:20] Tessa Burg: We are gonna jump into how Alan is leading the digital practice at Southern Glazer’s to redefine what it means to be a beverage distributor in 2025 and beyond. Alan, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:35] Alan Wizemann: Oh, thanks. Good to be back.

[00:00:38] Tessa Burg: So. It feels like it’s been a while, but it’s actually only been three months.

[00:00:42] Alan Wizemann: Three months.

[00:00:43] Tessa Burg: And yeah, we covered off on a lot in our first conversation, and I think the feedback we received is people were very inspired by your boldness in change leadership and pleasantly surprised to hear all the ways that Southern Glazer’s was investing in data and technology to improve the experience for their clients and customers. And it’s really something leaders are still struggling with, like, but before we jump into your framework, the lessons you’ve learned where you’re at, I would love to know, give us an update what has happened at Southern Glazer’s in the last three months, especially as it relates to Proof and some of the other, um, enhancements you’ve made to how Southern Glazer’s goes to markets and serves its customers.

[00:01:36] Alan Wizemann: Um, yeah, it was great. Wells. Thanks for the feedback first of all. Um. The last three months have actually been pretty busy, which, you know, isn’t anything sort of abnormal here. Uh, we’ve been really focusing on a lot of improvements. You know, our, our big, I guess, season is coming up, which, you know, October, November, December, which we just call OND, um, mainly ’cause that’s the largest selling period for us ’cause the holidays and everything for the year. Uh, and so we’ve been really gearing up and leveraging a lot of the things that we’ve been building throughout the year. Um, not only expanding on the technology and data platforms that we have, but also just features for our customers. Uh, some of the biggest really are around just improvements that we’re doing around the Proof platform.

[00:02:15] Alan Wizemann: And so what we’ve learned around a lot of the AI products that we have to make our recommendations better, that we spoke about last time, um, a lot of the experiences that we’re building to allow our customers to effectively find products easier and, and shop better, all coming to light. And so we’ve got, you know, although it sounds small, a new homepage coming out, which is really what our customers see after they log in, that’s very personalized to what they do, including a lot of the newer recommendation systems that we’ve built.

[00:02:42] Alan Wizemann: That homepage also allows us to do a lot of really great flexible personalization. And so depending on what customers coming to the, you know, the site and what they’re looking for, uh, we can help them really build orders quickly, you know, help find lists of products that they might not know about. Uh, because the hundreds of thousands of SKUs that we have can’t really be discussed live from our sales consultants, we’re really trying to make sure that the Proof platform unlocks a lot of the relationships that we have with our sales consultants and the customers are really exposed.

[00:03:10] Alan Wizemann: Those products to them. Uh, we’ve done a, a lot of work as well on a, on mobile development. So we’ve got a new app coming out for our customers that is way beyond just sort of a new version or a different version of what Proof is. We’ll, we’ll be actually including even more personalization down in messaging, understanding, you know, making sure.

[00:03:28] Alan Wizemann: That customers understand delivery, timing, um, which is pretty important. Uh, you know, what’s on the truck, what they’re getting in their next orders, um, and also insights of what we feel they actually should potentially use within their business based on what we know about them, um, what we sell, you know, how they’re purchasing products from us.

[00:03:45] Alan Wizemann: Uh, internally, we’ve done a, a tremendous amount of work, not only from just looking at how the platform operates, you know, how we measure what that operation looks like and how we’re unlocking a lot of those features. But there’s some large scale projects that are happening across the company to really modernize and, and for that matter, revolutionize what we do from a supply chain standpoint.

[00:04:06] Alan Wizemann: And so we’ve got two warehouses now live with what we, uh, just call Lumina. Uh, which is really, uh, bringing in a lot of technology into those warehouses so we can get better at not only understanding what our products are, where they’re at, um, but also to how we can effectively build deliveries better, um, from using AI and a lot of our routing to also using drones that, um, actually check our shelves and help find where things are.

[00:04:34] Alan Wizemann: You know, you can imagine warehouses of million plus square feet. They’re, uh, stacked 10 12 pallets high. Um, our pallet shelves high. Um, it becomes quite a, quite a journey sometimes to make sure that’s all operation and working, and we’ve seen really great success in that. Um, we even brought in some robotics that actually help a lot of the pick, pack and shipping ultimately to really free up the manpower that we have there to expand our delivery hours and timing. Um, and also just efficiency in operations.

[00:05:03] Alan Wizemann: Uh, from a customer experience standpoint, we’re also looking at how, uh, getting closer to a lot of our, um, our markets and how they’re looking at launching either innovation products, um, how we’re expanding into, you know, if we get a new supplier in markets like we’ve recently done in California and, and New York, to help them drive sort of a unified sales message through our merchandising and digital marketing that happen across Proof and the platforms that really tie into what they’re doing in the field. And, and it’s been. Quite successful just in the programs that we’ve run there.

[00:05:33] Alan Wizemann: Uh, but you know, we’re, we’re still looking across multiple opportunities to really push what we can do for our customers. More importantly when, you know, everybody sees sort of, the industry is a little soft right now. It’s a little slow, you know, Proof is still growing at a record pace.

[00:05:48] Alan Wizemann: We’re actually eclipsed our goal for this year. We’re on on track to beat it and it’s, it’s nice sort of being that green beacon in, in the industry now. And I think a lot of our customers are actually seeing why, you know, ’cause we’re really focused on what they need, not just what’s best sort of for the business.

[00:06:03] Alan Wizemann: And we’re trying to make sure too, that we bring the technologies that we’re building to light through the lens of how they use things rather than just building something to see if somebody’s gonna use it. And that goes back to just how we build and how we look at, uh, effectively each initiative or project in a, in a different way.

[00:06:21] Tessa Burg: That is definitely a lot and I think. I was getting some visions of Amazon warehouses. You know, like I feel like people associate technology and technology advancements with how Amazon distributes goods and goes to market, but not so much what feels like a very traditional business.

[00:06:40] Alan Wizemann: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:41] Tessa Burg: Beverage distribution.

[00:06:43] Tessa Burg: Give us a little bit of insight. What is Southern Glazer’s overall vision? Like, what is the, why powering all of this innovation?

[00:06:51] Alan Wizemann: That, that’s a great question. So we have something that internally we just call our 2030 vision that we, you know, we’ve talked about it, a couple conferences and, and we definitely make sure that, you know, it’s understood by our suppliers and our customers.

[00:07:02] Alan Wizemann: But ultimately it’s to be the leading hospitality, sales, logistics, and insights provider. And a lot of under, what’s underneath that a lot is. The technology and everything we have to do from, you know, supply chain to managing data, to managing customers, to getting what they need when they order it. Um, it was funny, I was joking around with someone the other day.

[00:07:21] Alan Wizemann: We were probably doing next-day delivery before Amazon. You know, a lot of our customers get trucks every day. And so when we look through just how we have to do that. You know, if you walked into one of our sort of next gen warehouses, uh, I, I would say they might even eclipse some of the technologies that are used in large scale, you know, direct to consumer, consumer led companies like the Amazons and Targets and Walmarts.

[00:07:44] Alan Wizemann: Um, just because we, we have to move at pace, uh, our, our customers move at an an, an insane pace, and it’s not like, you know, we’ve got. Um, a tremendous amount of places to deliver to, but we definitely have to make sure that there’s a lot that has to happen for our hundreds of thousands of customers that are out there.

[00:08:03] Alan Wizemann: And if you look at the diversity. Of just our inventory. You know, we’ve, we’ve got some things that move on a daily basis and we’ve got some very unique, you know, allocated items that sit within our shelves that are very, very hard to find. And juggling all of that, and that diversity can be quite difficult, especially when it’s different in every single market that we’re in.

[00:08:23] Alan Wizemann: And so we, we have to use, uh, technology to really unlock a lot of that for us. But to get to that vision, to understand, you know. To making our sales better, to making logistics better, and to really driving the insights for the industry is where we want to be. And the foundation for all That is what we’ve been going after, and we’re starting to see some really great, I’d say, sort of cohesion or collaboration between those big points of the vision because they, they all sort of work together to unlock customer value.

[00:08:51] Tessa Burg: And I love that your emphasis is on customer value and prioritizing what you build to solve challenges that the customer is feeling. But this has to be like a ton of work.

[00:09:06] Alan Wizemann: Yes.

[00:09:07] Tessa Burg: No, like it’s like, yes, we wanna solve this problem, but you named off like four different large initiatives. How are you getting all of this done?

[00:09:17] Tessa Burg: And how many people are working against these initiatives? Uh, either inside Southern Glazer’s or with partners?

[00:09:22] Alan Wizemann: Um, I mean, just on the digital and technology side, you know, we’ve got 600 to 700 people that are working across all these main projects, products, and experiences that we’re building. Um, we definitely have gone through, I would say, some growing pains when we started the digital transformation just to align roadmaps, um, you know, figuring out where opportunities are to start either supporting things differently from a digital, um, lens, you know, and even a ways of working.

[00:09:51] Alan Wizemann: And that probably was the, the most painful part of it all, you know, because wasn’t. If you look at before digital sort of existed here, very project led, very project focused, and much like other companies, when that happens, you get things that are really built in silos and they don’t really think through of how they can go beyond sort of their due date, how they’re maintained, how they’re, um, effectively assessed and measured to.

[00:10:13] Alan Wizemann: Provide more value in what ultimately they were they were trying to deliver. And, and I still see a lot of companies struggle with that when we shift into the digital model, which is really focused around durable teams that are focusing on very specific either products or initiatives that they’re responsible and goaled against their success and, and what they’re measured.

[00:10:33] Alan Wizemann: You see a big shift in actually how this all works together and when roadmaps are actually aligned and we understand where. Either foundationally, you know, something could change underneath us by large scale initiatives of like ERP platforms and transformations, or if we’ve got, you know, different markets changing by bringing in more suppliers or different brands.

[00:10:54] Alan Wizemann: We also have to be able to react very quickly. And when you have a durable team model that’s under a ways of working, that’s very close to what a technology company does, which we hear just called digital, it actually. It kind of strengthens the muscle to do that, and so we’re, we’re able to really respond faster and the understanding of what’s happening across the company becomes much clearer, almost to the point of what we call a single pane of glass.

[00:11:16] Alan Wizemann: So we, we can see everything that’s sort of going through because we’ve unified all our tools, we’ve unified all our processes. From, you know, budgeting to how we track time, to how we track even the teams and their success. And without that foundation, it would be very difficult to move forward because you, you could have a breaking change from a project that could effectively, you know, take down either parts of our systems or even negate some work that teams are doing.

[00:11:43] Alan Wizemann: And so it was pretty important to get that in place first. But after it’s in place and starts to mature, is when you start to see speed and value come pretty quickly.

[00:11:54] Tessa Burg: I have to admit, like I haven’t, I just had a Google durable team model ’cause I was not,

[00:12:01] Alan Wizemann: yeah, it is usually called like a product team model.

[00:12:04] Tessa Burg: Yeah.

[00:12:04] Alan Wizemann: Effectively it’s a team that is, you know, fully funded. It’s dedicated, they’re not really tied to like a, a due date or when a project’s done, they’re specifically put on a task or a product and just run with it as far as they can and their goaling is specifically built to drive the success of the product itself. And so it could be increased revenue, it could be increased efficiency, it could be anything from, you know, making sure that. Deliveries happen faster, or call times are shorter. It, it varies wildly as you can imagine, but it’s that specific team that’s made up of all the disciplines that are needed to sort of get the job done.

[00:12:44] Alan Wizemann: And so if you look at any team that’s sitting on Proof as example, um, we will say on, on cart, like we have a carton checkout team. That’s all they do. That’s all they focus on. And they, they watch it on a daily, if not hourly basis, to make sure that. Features and functionality they introduce is matching their goals.

[00:13:01] Alan Wizemann: And a lot of the goals that we have across those teams look at customer satisfaction and how we’re actually providing better value for the customer, not just driving more revenue or driving, you know, company growth. Because to me those aren’t accurate goals. Like, um, I, I usually joke around that you shouldn’t have a revenue goal for anything because that’s sort of the, the outcome or side effect of doing something else, right?

[00:13:25] Alan Wizemann: And so what, what we see across a lot of what we’re building and, and really starting to take shape in a lot of markets is the value is coming out of the tooling and the way we’re measuring, and then the outcome of that value is we’re increasing business. You know, Proof, Proof is. Doing exceedingly well.

[00:13:41] Alan Wizemann: We’re, we’re already above our goal for this year, and we’re looking at, you know, growing even more. And when you look at the industry right now, as, as soft as it is, you know, we’re, we’re a bright, shiny green spot because we’re, we’re definitely increasing not only the value we deliver, but also just the value and the services that we’re bringing out to the customers and to the company itself.

[00:14:02] Tessa Burg: You, I knew you were gonna make a big statement, and I just like, you made some big statements in our last interview when you, you just said something that I think, uh, definitely made me stop and be like, Ooh, you shouldn’t have a revenue goal for anything. I mean, that feels scary, counterintuitive. I was just on a call.

[00:14:22] Tessa Burg: Our own, uh, R&D team and I’ll say like for agencies and services, when we start to invest and we’re investing a lot in AI. For us on that team, it feels, you know, uncomfortable.

[00:14:35] Alan Wizemann: Yeah.

[00:14:35] Tessa Burg: Because we are very used to being paid for the value we deliver right now. And you are proposing that in an age where the vision is bigger.

[00:14:49] Tessa Burg: Than just shipping a product, but it is actually deliver solving challenges for the people receiving the product and making their lives easier and making it more personalized and more scalable, and that there needs to be indicators that you are solving that challenge first, and then you know that revenue will come.

[00:15:11] Alan Wizemann: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:11] Tessa Burg: How do you prioritize, like, which of those problems to solve first or what, what is the bigger sized issue, customer challenge, and it feels like you have a lot going on in parallel, but I imagine you’ve actually stacked these in priority and are continuously kind of changing where you invest time and where you shift, and what does that look like?

[00:15:38] Alan Wizemann: Yeah. Um, you know, just to clarify too, like, the company always has revenue goals, but I mean, yeah. From a team and a product perspective is where I, I sort of throw the flag on, um, mainly because it’s a, it’s. Trailing indicator, you know, you, you don’t really see impact immediately off of revenue, but you can see impact immediately off different ways to measure the teams and when you know, they can equate to things that will create value and revenue and everything down the road is when they’re aligned really properly.

[00:16:06] Alan Wizemann: We, we do prioritization a little differently than I think a lot of companies probably do today. Um, it’s not something that’s totally unique. I know there’s other companies that do it, but we, we will re-look at our entire prioritization every quarter, especially across all of our digital products because of where you have a lot of.

[00:16:24] Alan Wizemann: You know, flexibility and agility built into the model, we can pivot them pretty quickly. And so we do these sort of impact reviews every quarter to make sure that what we’re working on is right. What we’re looking at from a team perspective and how we measure them is also right. But the number one thing that we look at is time to value.

[00:16:43] Alan Wizemann: Like what could we get done the fastest that would provide the value for whatever that team is going after? And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a revenue. It could be a customer satisfaction, it could be ease of use, it could be platform speed. But the idea is that whatever that value measurement is on the team, we will prioritize stuff that.

[00:17:03] Alan Wizemann: Effectively they can get there the fastest. Um, it’s not always the thing that wins. I think it’s probably like 80% of what wins. ’cause there’s also some really long tail either foundational or, you know, large scale changes that have to happen, which take up that other 20% to effectively unlock future time to value projects that have to happen.

[00:17:22] Alan Wizemann: And so the, it’s a constant process that needs a tremendous amount of care in feeding, but one, you have that and understand the different metrics and measurements you’re going after across those teams. You can start to see prioritization a little cleaner and a little easier, uh, because you know very quickly on a quarterly basis if something’s working or not.

[00:17:42] Alan Wizemann: And so if it’s not, you can either dive into it and fix it, or you can. Get something else to actually go in front of that with the teams and then have them see if their time to value’s actually there. And it, it’s a, it’s a discipline that’s incredibly hard to build into companies that. Either have a very short-term vision and understanding of what they want to drive or a too long-term frame of a goal.

[00:18:07] Alan Wizemann: And so a lot of the times where I would come in and and effect effectively when digital transformation start is. You sort of attack those first just to make sure that, you know, things are moving in the right direction. And a lot of the times, and this is not unique to us, you run into this sunk cost fallacy.

[00:18:26] Alan Wizemann: Like, oh, we’ve been working on this for three years. You know, we’ve got all this money into it. We gotta get it out the door. It has value. By the time that much time’s gone into a project, the value has been erased because a, a lot of the times companies just look at either the cost of the vendor or cost of software.

[00:18:44] Alan Wizemann: But when you look at the amount of time that it’s been to create that project, how many people have been involved in it, and then who actually has to use it after that amount of time? It’s gonna have to be changed again after two, three years of development. And so most of the time I’ll stop those and we’ll break ’em up into parts to see what truly has the value of whatever problem going after and changing that solution to drive to much faster either adoption,value or or release.

[00:19:11] Alan Wizemann: And it, it’s something that. You know, I have had to do several times in my career, but it has probably the largest impact, uh, especially when you can get, you know, senior executives, CEOs to effectively take a step back and go ignore what you’ve spent, which is a very, very hard conversation, and look at what you were trying to get out of it and like, let’s see if we can.

[00:19:32] Alan Wizemann: Still get there with how the project’s running or if it’s time to sort of take a pause and see if there’s something else that can be done. Um, it’s a very uncomfortable conversation. I’ve had hundreds of them, but ultimately they, they start to show that if you don’t have the right framework and, and measurement to really get to that value that.

[00:19:53] Alan Wizemann: Making those decisions can become quite important pretty quickly because when you do see that there could be problems or you have that sort of sunk cost fallacy and, and start to erase it, uh, you can start to move things much quicker and actually see value much faster.

[00:20:09] Tessa Burg: Yeah, no, I, I’ve been in a couple of those conversations and it is really hard, especially when it felt like at the beginning the vision and the value equation was so clear and.

[00:20:23] Tessa Burg: Something that I’ve seen lead to projects going a very long time. Well, there’s a few things. One, you don’t, you might not have the right people with the right skills on at the beginning, meaning you have experts who really understand the challenge and the core problem you’re trying to solve. They’re awesome when it comes to alignment to the vision.

[00:20:48] Tessa Burg: They may have been an expert themselves, but you don’t have the data, the architecture, the scalable solution folks up front. And so we start with sort of a bloated feature set. Yeah. And not fully understanding like what data and what technical expertise it would take to bring that to life in a um, consumable timeframe.

[00:21:12] Tessa Burg: And the other one I see is just like people. Having a nephew in their basement with a great idea, or their wife had an awesome idea. I mean, it’s, it always blows me away when someone is being very sincere in that, well, you know, I had this experience, you know, in a different realm and this app can do this, and I think our app should be able to do that.

[00:21:37] Tessa Burg: And then you’re like, you add that in and you’re going off Yeah. In another direction. How do you manage. Those risks when you’re looking at trying to, I mean, what you’re really talking about is balance. You don’t want to be too skinny, you don’t wanna be too long. So what are some methodologies you sort of manage those conversations and those risks that enter in early in the project?

[00:22:03] Alan Wizemann: Uh, although this is not possible with everything, it’s, it’s sort of a. I wouldn’t even say a manifesto, but it, it, it’s something that I follow or at least try to get everybody to follow with a lot of fortitude, which is start small. Yeah. What, what’s hard, especially in companies that get very large like ours is you’ll have ideas that turn into business cases that turn into huge projects.

[00:22:28] Alan Wizemann: And they sort of know what it’s gonna be before it’s even built. And that’s sort of the, the first warning sign, um, that I see. And so it’s really just think about it in a small way, like how can you prove that either the business case or the idea has merit? And one of the things that we do here, which I’ve done before, is effectively pilot, you know, build small teams just to see if there’s true value there.

[00:22:54] Alan Wizemann: Pilot with. A customer, you know, a couple customers, a couple users, and just interview them, talk to ’em, see, see if it’s true. And this could be from an internal piece of software to something that’s used by, you know, a company’s customers. When you do that, you start to show not only Proof and what’s going after from a business case perspective, but also you start to see who the experts are and who you can truly create as a subject matter expertise or expert within that small scale project.

[00:23:25] Alan Wizemann: They’re the ones that can probably scale it out and think a little differently. You know, most of the time you’ll see that in good product leaders where they want to test and learn, um, it’s big, big phrase that you’ll hear a lot in a lot of tech companies. Um, most large scale companies don’t adopt that.

[00:23:40] Alan Wizemann: They, they still have the large scale project, you know, which took a year just to even figure out, and then a couple more years to build. And in the fast pace of technology these days, that’s already antiquated. But even by the time you get it out the door, um, you know, obviously there’s a few things that don’t fall into this, but a majority do.

[00:23:59] Alan Wizemann: And I’ve seen some companies and just some of the, you know, peers that I’ve talked to, they’re now approaching even the things that you’d think wouldn’t fit in that model. Um, like changing out finance systems, you know, changing out warehouse management systems in the same way. It shouldn’t be a big project, it should be a small, let’s just see if it works.

[00:24:18] Alan Wizemann: Let’s just demo some software or let’s see if we can build something ourselves. And most of the time those are wildly successful compared to the large sort of big bang approaches.

[00:24:30] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I know I said this before the call, but I was literally just meeting with our product team right before this and we were trying to figure out how to approach some really, really big challenges.

[00:24:41] Tessa Burg: And I love that mantra of just start small and test and learn. And another pull quote I just think is so powerful is to be cautious when someone already knows what it’s going to be before it’s built.

[00:25:01] Alan Wizemann: Yeah, we had a very, we had a fun joke at, um, a company I worked at previously that if you took all the business cases and added up the sort of final slides, which shows like how much either revenue or, you know, potential growth, that that project would be, the company would be 10 times the size.

[00:25:18] Alan Wizemann: Because they’re never really true. It, it’s all part of the game of, you know, getting things funded and all that fun stuff you deal with, but I just find it a lot easier rather than just spending the time doing all that, that research and building those business cases. It’s just start, you know, there, there’s a tremendous amount of people at companies that actually can start to participate and move it forward.

[00:25:39] Alan Wizemann: But when you build it into the model where you have effectively flexible resources that can. Cobble together real quick as a team and say, okay, run after this for a couple weeks. See if there’s something there. If it is like, let’s dive into it and then let’s actually turn it into something.

[00:25:55] Tessa Burg: Yeah. So some of the things that you’ve launched, do you replace things people used to do, like in the warehouse example you were giving or, or maybe they, they can’t fly like a drone, but they were definitely trying to get their arms around the inventory coming in and out.

[00:26:11] Tessa Burg: And now through the combination of robotics and software and tech there, your operations. Are flowing in a way that humans only could not have done, but it does introduce other challenges and other types of risk. How are you monitoring to make sure, like once you’ve rolled out a new tech solution, a new process that it is working as expected and if anything, getting better and better as it learns, um, and trains itself.

[00:26:43] Alan Wizemann: Yeah, I mean, a lot of things that we’ve done, if you looked at ’em from the outside, you would think that they were done to drive efficiency on like, you know, production of headcount or you know, looking at things that, oh, we’re replacing people with technology or robots, but that’s actually not the case, and we don’t even look at that as a value measurement.

[00:27:02] Alan Wizemann: What we look at is how effectively we can optimize time for an individual, because most of the time. A large part of their day is fighting with technology that it doesn’t even even work or, you know, they could be doing better things that provide more value to the company. Um, one of the great examples I have there is that we’ve brought in a lot of technologies and built a lot of stuff in house just to help process documents, um, support emails, you know, things that.

[00:27:30] Alan Wizemann: Used to use human intervention, but the people who were doing it I would say were way overpaid to do that kind of work and could be doing something that’s much better for the company. And so when we look at things like, you know, the drones and the warehouses or, you know, bringing in, um, you know.

[00:27:47] Alan Wizemann: Machine learning to read planograms of stores. It’s not to replace the people that were doing it, it’s to really unleash that from the burden that they were dealing with so they can focus on things that actually provide value to the company. Um, a lot of the times too, especially from a supply chain standpoint.

[00:28:03] Alan Wizemann: It’s to look at how we can actually improve what we’re doing for customers. Not necessarily, you know, making operations cheaper or, you know, driving efficiencies to lower costs. I mean, you bring in drones and robotics and you know, things that are completely automated. They’re not cheaper than people, right?

[00:28:21] Alan Wizemann: They can just do things faster, better or with lower error rates. And so when, when you take kind of look at a different lens of that through either that customer value or ultimately like safety and things that you can do in a warehouse, it gives you a different sort of sense of purpose around a lot of that work.

[00:28:40] Alan Wizemann: Because one thing that is really unique to Southern that I, I truly value, and one of the things I love working here is we, we really value our people, but more importantly, we value the relationships that we’ve built. ’cause it’s a relationship business. You know, we’re, we’re in hospitality and so anything that we can do to free up our sales time, our delivery driver’s time, you know, even in the warehouse, to actually focus on making that relationship stronger and better. You know, giving salespeople more time to actually do those interactions so they’re not punching in data every couple hours. It provides just a better service. And so when we, when we take a step back and go, you know, to a time to value conversation.

[00:29:20] Alan Wizemann: It’s never like, oh, how many people can we free up to, like not have anymore? It’s what busy work can we take away? What? What things should be automated? So the person that has that job should be doing that job and not all the other things that they have to do to effectively get done first, to then do their job.

[00:29:38] Alan Wizemann: And so it, it’s a, it’s a different way of looking at things, and I think because of the culture here, it’s a lot easier, um, because of the relationship structure and you know, that, that sort of relationship and hospitality culture that we have. But I, I don’t think it’s unique to any other company that’s out there.

[00:29:53] Alan Wizemann: You know, I, I keep reading headlines. Um, actually there’s one today from. Salesforce. They’re like, oh, we replaced 4,000 engineers with AI. It’s like, well, they probably thought about that in the wrong way. You know, they, they could have had those engineers do something different. And when you, when you start to look at augmenting, uh, a lot of what people do on a day-to-day basis with technology like that.

[00:30:14] Alan Wizemann: And you can replace them as like, they were probably not doing the best job to begin with. Like there, there could be other things that they could be doing that really look at value considerations, you know, pilots, other projects, other things they can go after. And so a lot of what we do, especially from a customer standpoint and how we can support them, is all around that philosophy is, you know, how how can we move that, that busy work, the stuff that drives people nuts on their day-to-day jobs so they can truly do what they should be doing.

[00:30:42] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I, I love that vision. It’s one we share as well is it’s not about replacing people. It’s more, or it is all about how do we maximize the value we deliver to customers? Because there are, we’re all passionate in whatever profession we’re in about what we do. I mean, we spend so much time at work and I always have this list of things I, I wish I could have done.

[00:31:08] Tessa Burg: I wish I could show the client this, I wish this would work this way. And that’s really the fuel to productive innovation as opposed to, oh my gosh, there’s this meaningly task, I’m gonna automate it. And then that person is gone. It’s like,

[00:31:23] Alan Wizemann: no. It’s like, no, you just, you just remove that so now they can focus on more stuff that is better.

[00:31:28] Alan Wizemann: Right? Or at least brings them more enjoyment. You know? I don’t think anybody wants to just punch keys for a couple hours to get whatever data they need into something so they can then do their job. Uh, that’s the stuff we wanna get outta the way.

[00:31:40] Tessa Burg: Yeah, yeah. Or I’ve given this example on previous episodes.

[00:31:43] Tessa Burg: I started in, um, I guess my little career in a warehouse, uh, company. My uncle owned using a toothbrush to clean, um, repurchased and refurbished keyboards, and there is nothing more motivating. To advance your career than standing for hours and scrubbing keyboards. So it’s like, I don’t think anybody wants to do it.

[00:32:08] Tessa Burg: And if somebody was like, Hey, will you work with us to figure out how to do this differently so that we can serve our customers faster, better, smarter? I would, my hand would’ve been up first. I’d be like, absolutely. My wrist is killing me

[00:32:20] Alan Wizemann: there. There’s actually a quick little story that I heard coming outta one of the warehouses where we brought in some of the automation around the.

[00:32:27] Alan Wizemann: Like pick, packing and shipping. ’cause not everything we send is a, what we would call a full case. Like we break cases and so someone could order like two bottles of something and three of this. And that used to be all hand sorted in a lot of warehouses. It still is. But part of what we’re doing with a lot of the automation is to do some of that with technology.

[00:32:45] Alan Wizemann: The, the. A guy that effectively was doing that in one of the warehouses that we brought technology in is effectively the subject matter expert. Like he knew where to put boxes. He knew where like, you know, he could effectively stage things so he could make his job faster. And so he became part of what trains all the systems and then was then responsible for actually redesigning the staging areas.

[00:33:07] Alan Wizemann: And he, he elevated his career. He’s now effectively the managing all that for. Some of that work because of the knowledge that he had and how he, you know, single-handedly sort of figured that out himself. And, and I, I, I love those sort of examples because if you, if you look at what some of the automation and technology can bring in, you know.

[00:33:28] Alan Wizemann: Tech is dumb out of the gate. And so you have to really make sure that there’s always that, that people aspect in it. And, and it’s in those sort of relationships that are exist between that. Especially in a lot of what we see in supply chain. It’s, it’s vital to have a lot of the, you know, humans in the loop, what it would called to make sure that it, it actually works the the best way it can, and then it’s continually improved upon.

[00:33:51] Alan Wizemann: And you have to have people there to really figure that out.

[00:33:55] Tessa Burg: Yeah. Well, Alan, we are at time, but I, again, I really enjoyed this interview and thinking about digital transformation and AI projects and initiatives as a way to redefine the how people work, how they show up for their clients and customers.

[00:34:12] Tessa Burg: How to we faster, better, smarter. I mean, it’s. You’ve given so many great examples on how it’s really an unlock and not a replace. Um, so thank you so much for your time and if listeners wanted to get in touch with you, where can they find you?

[00:34:27] Alan Wizemann: Uh, well, I’m pretty much all over the place like LinkedIn. Um, they can also just drop me an email.

[00:34:32] Alan Wizemann: It’s pretty, pretty simple to figure one out, but I have a shortcut for it, which is [email protected].

[00:34:39] Tessa Burg: Perfect. And if you wanna go back and look at this transcript because you need to pull some nuggets or copy and paste the transcript into the ChatGPT and ask for some summary points, I highly recommend you do that because this is a playbook that all companies need to start looking at, which is.

[00:34:57] Tessa Burg: Not just about cutting costs, finding efficiencies, but finding that right balance, prioritizing on time to value, and really focusing in on how you can use AI and digital transformation as an unlock to improve the relationships and careers of the people that work at your company, as well as the relationships with your clients.

[00:35:18] Tessa Burg: So. You can find that at modop.com along with all of our other episodes. That’s modop.com. Until next time, Alan, we might do a part three. Sure. We’ll talk to you later.

[00:35:30] Alan Wizemann: Thanks very much. Always a pleasure.