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My name is Katie Keane and my title is Vice President, Transportation Services for Big Lots.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your company and your role?

A. Absolutely. Big Lots is the nation's largest closeout retailer and we have about 1350 or so stores across 48 states in the U.S. We are a broadline closeout retailer, so we sell branded closeouts to customers. We have very close relationships with our vendors as well as our customers. Our customer comes to our stores not with a list or something in mind, but 80% of them come for the excitement of the treasure hunt and finding an excellent value, and so we try to cater to those core customers in providing excellent closeout values every day.

Q. Tell us about your role and responsibilities.

A. My role is Vice President of Transportation Services and I manage all inbound and outbound domestic transportation for the company. We manage approximately 3000 loads inbound and outbound a week on the domestic side, and I'm also in charge of vendor compliance, so bringing that new process up for Big Lots-it was new to us from a couple of years ago-and enhancing that process to partner with our vendors to make sure that goods move quickly and efficiently through the supply chain and get on the shelves as fast as possible for our customers.

Q. What makes Big Lots' Supply Chain business model unique?

A. Our challenges is one of managing regular goods where we always have 'never outs'-you'll always find toilet paper, you'll always find bleach, paper towels-some of the basics. And we manage that supply chain in a replenishment fashion. However, the bulk of what we manage are excellent closeout deals, so we could have a vendor tell us tomorrow "I have a hundred truckloads of Broyhill furniture that need to move from five warehouses across the country into your 1350 or so stores." We have to manage that. And "Oh, by the way, we need to get it off of our dock within a week so we can meet quarter-end." We have to figure out how to get a hundred truckloads in and out and delivered into our DCs in a week oftentimes with some of our vendors. So we don't know where the buy is coming from, we don't know when the closeout is coming; we have to be poised and ready to manage that throughout the supply chain and get it onto the shelves of our stores as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Q. What specific business challenges prompted you to seek out a solution that included Inovis?

A. We have an initiatively corporately which we're calling the 'Flow-Through Project'. We have decided that-and it makes logical sense-that we want to eliminate dwell time in the supply chain and get the goods to the stores as fast as possible and on the shelves, as I've mentioned. So our flow-through initiative encompasses both floor-ready merchandise that can expedite through our supply chain and we don't have to re-ticket it and we don't have to have the store associate really manhandle it. What we're gonna do is get the goods on the shelves in PDQs or previous display boxes, things like that. On the vendor end then, we want to not touch the goods-we want to touch the goods as little as possible, so what we do is we work with the vendor to create the right product often or get it in a format that can go through the supply chain; then we're gonna manage that flow where we are pre-allocating the goods. When the goods hit the DC, we can immediately turn that around and get it out to stores without having to put it away in location like a warehouse. So we're gonna manage flow-through like that. The reason that we chose Inovis to work with is because part of the success of that program will be the partnership with the vendors and vendor compliance. We absolutely do not want a vendor compliance program that is a profit center; what we want is to partner and collaborate with our vendors to make sure that the goods meet our standards to get it to the store shelf as quickly and efficiently as possible. So is the documentation there? Classic compliance programs. Do they send an ASN that is accurate? How is the order fill on the P.O.? Were the goods received damage-free? Was the packaging damage-free? Did we need to re-palletize? All of these types of observations about the goods that when our goods are, in fact, meeting all of our standards, the vendor then will become flow-through eligible and we will not audit them for infractions to the vendor compliance; we'll pass that through and their goods then will immediately move to the shelves so we can buy less goods, we have faster inventory turn, and the goods are for sale more quickly to the customer. So it's kind of a win for Big Lots, a win for the vendor, and certainly a win for the customer. Inovis could offer a web-based program and a very flexible program where we could create scorecards, measure the vendor, share it with them real-time online, provide documentation with pictures online-things that if the packaging was damaged or it needed to be re-palletized, we'll take a picture on the dock, immediately upload that and send it to the vendor that night where they can view that, get back to their warehouses, and let's say they were sending a hundred loads; they sent one, we found a problem, they can make sure the 99 others come in damage-free and work with their warehouses and their manufacturing locations to make sure that happens. So the goal is scorecarding, flexibility, online availability of our vendor compliance system, attaching documents, accessing it via the Web, and really making it easy to partner and collaborate with the vendors rather than just submitting a deduction and having that go through their system-no one wins that way.

Q. What specifically were you trying to accomplish when you partnered with Inovis?

A. We were trying to create a very flexible vendor partnership collaboration portal, if you will, or process, with a system to support that. So we wanted to create custom reporting; we wanted to create online 7x24 availability of system and information; we wanted real-time information to both feed all of us within Big Lots as well as feed downstream to our vendors to remediate any issues that we see that would prevent the product from getting to vendor to the store shelf. Inovis offered that solution for us. They have a robust package of deduction management. We have scorecards that we'll develop. We have developed a website where they can log on and see actually their performance every single day, or for the last six months or for the week; they'll see it in graphic format, they'll see their top five issues; they can drill down into each specific issue; they can request additional information from us. We will always upload a picture to the system so they can sign on and see what the issue was and pass that throughout their organization for remediation. They can interact and we can attach all documentation and conversations and e-mails back and forth historically for a particular issue-and it was very flexible. Inovis agreed to really work with us to create a collaborative for our vendors because we did not want to create just another deduction management process on the compliance side; we wanted to create something that was a partnership with, and collaboration with, our vendors so that when they become flow-through eligible, we will automatically ignore any deductions that come through in the future, but their goods then can turn faster, we can get them immediately to the floor and Inovis really will enable that collaboration with how they're working with us to customize this.

Q. Did the scope of the project evolve or increase after you began working closely with Inovis?

A. Yes. Not much because it was a pretty comprehensive scope, but given the things we have found the system that they-and the answer, the solution they provided to us-given what we have found it able to do, we have actually increased the scope. We're going to include some onboarding. We're actually bringing in other areas of the company because we can now-with a vendor contact database, we can offer surveys, communication, have different contacts within the database for the salesperson, the traffic contact, the vendor compliance contact, the production manager-all of this can be housed within our system, so we've expanded it for true vendor management and communication as opposed to just compliance. So some of the tools we're able to leverage in some of our other initiatives that we have.

Q. What were your criteria for selecting a vendor?

A. One of the things we looked at was the ability to have a Web portal to have 7x24 access for our vendors. We wanted to have robust reporting capabilities with drill-down capabilities, and scorecarding was our most important aspect-the ability for us to share performance with our vendors so that they could improve. It's not about deductions, it's about sharing the performance-everybody wants to improve when they have opportunities to do so. So that was our selection criteria from the business process side.

Q. What were some of the advantages over the alternatives that you explored?

A. Some of the advantages of Inovis over the alternatives was the flexibility of reporting and our ability to customize. In addition, they offered-with the Web, Inovis offered us to be able to have documents visible, interactions, communication visible on the Web for all of us 7x24. The scorecarding was superior in many ways, and the real live data online with the ability to drill down. So for instance, if one of the main issues a vendor's having is on-time deliveries, we will show them in a pie chart "On-time deliveries is 75% of your issue", they can click into that and they can see-they can drill down to all of the individual issues and purchase orders and events; they can find out if it's coming out of one DC of theirs or all of them, if it's a constant problem. So Inovis really offered a lot more flexibility from that than the other competitors.

Q. If you were asked about Inovis by others, would you recommend them? Why or why not?

A. Right now, I absolutely would recommend them. They have been incredible partners throughout our implementation process. They have been willing to customize, to help think through solutions that we had not previously thought about, so it wasn't in the scope of the project, nor had they; and we have collaborated and come up with some excellent solutions we feel will be a great answer for our vendors as well as for us. They have been very quick in terms of their work, in terms of returning results for us, in terms of writing integrations, in terms of giving us online demonstrations of how they're customizing the Big Lots vendor portal for us, and they've just been terrific partners to work with. They meet their time commitments, they meet their budget-in fact, they have exceeded all of our expectations up to this point.