All right. Good afternoon, everybody. How are you doing? All right. So we are here to talk about empowering team member mobility and solving mobility management challenges, and how you can use AI to help you deliver a superior customer experience. My name is Shash Anand. I'm the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at a company called SOTI. I've been with the company for over 14 years, and something unique about me is I've been to NRF for the last 14 years, and the technology has changed completely. It's really nice to see how people are embracing it, so never have I been more excited than where we are today with where things are going. With me is Glenn Allison. Glenn, can you introduce yourself, please?
Sure. Hi, everybody, I'm Glenn Allison. I'm with Tractor Supply Company. We're the largest rural lifestyle retailer in the United States, with over 2,200 Tractor Supply stores and 200 Petsense by Tractor Supply stores.
Wonderful! So, first off, how many of you guys know who SOTI is? A few. And how many of you know who Tractor Supply Company is? Okay, Glenn, I think you got me beat, so, I'm gonna start.
Okay.
I'm gonna say that, SOTI is a software solution. So what do we do? We help companies with managing mobility. We've got an integrated suite of products that help you with diagnosing, troubleshooting, setting up all the different mobile devices that you have. We have solutions to help you manage not only anything on Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux, but we've got a platform that also helps you manage printers, helps you build mobile applications. So maybe you've got paper-based processes today, and you wanna automate them or build mobile apps out of them. We have a no-code tool that helps you build all those as well. SOTI has been around since 1995, well before iOS and Android devices, and all we have been focused on is managing mobility. We have over 1,800 employees around the world.
We're managing millions of devices, over 22 million devices in total. We do this with an ecosystem of partners. We have over 4,000 partners, such as manufacturers of mobile devices like Honeywell. But once again, we do this on all different platforms. To give you an idea of some of the challenges that we solve, Delivery Hero is a food delivery company. One of their biggest challenges is they... You know, when you order food online, it goes to a tablet in a restaurant. They provision these tablets, and it was taking them about 4.5 minutes to provision a device. You know, turn it on, get all the apps and everything ready. With SOTI, we took that 4.5 minutes down to seven seconds with a simple scan of a QR code.
Askari is a sporting equipment retailer in Europe, and their biggest challenge was around the returns process. It was an entirely paper-based process. So what we did with them was we leveraged SOTI Snap to help them build a mobile app that digitizes the entire returns process, and we helped them reduce that by over 50%. Coop is a tool, a company, it's a grocery chain in Europe, and what they do is they have personal shopping devices that they give to each customer, and they can now scan all the items themselves. Their biggest challenge was managing these devices.
They were getting lost or stolen, the batteries were getting drained, and they wanted to upgrade these devices, and they were doing it one by one until they came to SOTI, and we helped them do that all over the air, just immediately in a few seconds on a regular basis. So just some examples of the challenges that SOTI helps to solve. Glenn, what about you? Can you give a quick overview of Tractor Supply Company?
Sure. So we, we serve a lifestyle, we call it Life Out Here. Our Tractor Supply stores are primarily located in rural communities. You know, we've got over 2,200 Tractor Supply stores and 200 Petsense by Tractor Supply stores. You know, our customers typically have land, they have animals, and we sell the types of products and services that help, help our customers live that Life Out Here. You know, we've, we've just recently celebrated over 85 years in business, and there's a bright future ahead. You know, with our Life Out Here strategy, we're, we're about a $180 billion market opportunity-
Wow!
-and we're Fortune 300 retailer. And we've been, you know, continuing to grow and kinda execute on our- There's literally a bird. That's Life Out Here.
Out Here. There you go. Good timing.
So, you know, we've got a wide range of products. You can see here, you know, clothing, tools, feed, you know, to, like dog food, cat food, poultry, you know, feed. But the commonality across all of this is really just, again, that lifestyle, taking care of our customers in the local communities that we live and, and serve.
Wonderful. Obviously, we're at a retail show, you're talking about technology. Can you talk a little bit about mobility and what you're doing to help it with that customer experience?
So, we wanna create an integrated experience for our customers, so whether they shop through the consumer mobile app-
Mm-hmm
... our website, tractorsupply.com, or coming into store, and we wanna integrate, you know, the physical and digital channels, so we have a seamless customer experience, enabling them to shop kinda anytime, anywhere, any way. So, I'll give you a couple examples. So, like with the consumer mobile app, which we've now got over 7 million downloads with iOS and Android.
Yep.
With the mobile app, you know, customers can find the products they need, research, get information about products. You know, it's AI-enabled, so, you know, with, with search and also connectivity to the store with, like, in-store mode. So an example of this would be like if you place an order in the app-
Yep.
do, like, a curbside pickup, through Theatro, the integration that we have with Theatro, we can automatically signal to the store team member the customer has arrived, and then bring that order right out to them, you know, really quickly and easily.
Awesome.
Or if a customer needs, like, a propane refill on the side lot, we can with the app just automatically signal to the store team member to come out and assist the customer. We've put kind of chain-wide, like, a foundation in place. You know, all store team members, we've got Honeywell CT40 devices for mobility, team member mobility. We've got SOTI software that kind of manages the security of the devices, and then full mobile point-of-sale. So, like, we can transact on the side lot anywhere within the store, you know, take contactless payment, you know, PIN debit, EMV, wide range of kind of payment types.
You've got quite a bit of technology that you're using, and it kind of helps you scale quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit about some of the tech that you guys use?
So, like, mobile point of sale, you know, is foundational.
Yep.
We've enabled BOPUS, curbside pickup. Neighbor's Club, our loyalty program, with... We've rolled out chain-wide for Tractor Supply stores, as well as expanded that to-- for Petsense by Tractor Supply. Customers can earn rewards every time they shop. And then we're investing in new stores. There's an opportunity where we continue to open new stores each year. Last year, we converted all of the Orscheln stores to be Tractor Supply stores, and then we're doing store remodels we call Project Fusion, and we're remodeling the inside of the stores, as well as the side lot, and adding garden centers, which helps us introduce new products like live goods, as well as, you know, the merchandising in the store and the efficiency of the selling space.
Nice. And you kinda talked a little bit about this idea of a life out here strategy. What is that life out here strategy all about?
We're committed to being an integral part of our customers' lives. We want to be a dependable supplier of kind of out-here lifestyle solutions.
Yep.
It's a needs-based business. Like, customers count on us to take care of their land, their animals, and we want to support that lifestyle, anytime, anywhere, any way. And these are the strategic areas that we're like, we're investing for growth. You know, we want to deliver a legendary customer experience. We want to advance our digital capabilities. We're investing in the mobile app. We're investing in e-commerce. We're investing in store team member technology. We want to drive efficiency, continuous improvement. We're leveraging AI, you know, on the site, the mobile app. We're leveraging AI within the store team member technology and drive greater efficiency in support of the customer, and we want to take care of our team. And if we take care of our team, and we go the extra mile for our team, they'll take the best care of our customers.
You know, if we take care of our team, we take care of our customers, it'll help generate a shareholder return.
Wonderful. So I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about the idea of the business challenges. So what was life like before SOTI? You had a few business challenges, and I wanted to kind of educate the audience a little bit about that. So let's talk a little bit about devices. So you were using a prior device. You were using a prior management solution. So you tried to implement certain technology. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. So we've put in a foundation with store team member mobility, where all team members have a Honeywell CT40 device that's managed through SOTI, and that gives us the ability to quickly deploy new applications.
Right.
An example of that is, recently, we launched a generative AI capability called Hey Gura, which provides instant access to information, using Microsoft and OpenAI. We have trained AI models with Life Out Here knowledge. So that would be product information, ingredients in products, how-to information about, like, how to take care of your pets, if you need to do a fencing project. We're continuing to train these AI models, in leveraging generative AI to arm our team members with, information so they can come to help take care of our customers.
So I guess the idea of this, provisioning devices took a little bit of time for you guys prior to this solution, but with SOTI, you can kind of do this in a few seconds, set up every device. And then, of course, you can also kind of update all these applications. Now, you have the ability to say, "Hey, let's-- if we're gonna fail, we can fail fast, because it's not a worry. I can update all the apps in just a few seconds anyway." That's pretty cool. The other area that I wanted to talk about is printers. So I know that TSC, they use printers for printing receipts and printing labels. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you had around that?
... Sure. I mean, like, before, like, from a technical support standpoint-
Right.
Previously, it was a challenge kind of supporting the solution. You know, with SOTI, we can, you know, access the devices remotely, we can manage the devices. And so it's, it's given our technical teams a lot more efficiency in being able to support as we're expanding and we're putting more mobile devices, and capabilities into the store, just the support of the solution. But, I mean, you know, those printers, and you visited the Thompson's Station store.
I did, yeah.
You got to see all of this kind of in action, but, like, when with if you're doing a propane sale on the side lot, as an example, you know, we've got full MPOS functionality. We wanna be able to give the customer a receipt if they would like one or an e-receipt.
Yeah, I think the cool thing about using our printer management solution is you don't just, it doesn't just manage a single type of printer manufacturer. We manage 10 different manufacturers, actually. So you get a single pane of glass, which means you can pick the printer solution that you like, the printer manufacturer, we can help manage all of them. We work with all the different printer manufacturers. And the big thing about upgrading printers is you have to physically go in, normally, you have to physically go in and touch every printer, but with SOTI's solution, it kind of automatically does this across all your printers instantaneously, or you can schedule the updates. Let's talk a little bit about compliance. It's really important. You mentioned buy online, pickup in store, their mobile POS systems.
Compliance has to be a big issue, security has to be a big issue. Can you talk a little bit about some of those types of challenges?
Yeah, absolutely. So... You know, with SOTI, we're able to manage those devices remotely. We can administer security policies on the devices, we can manage kind of what applications are installed on the device, as well as making sure just, you know, patching, security compliance, that all of those devices are updated. And then also, it, you know, in the event one a device is lost, we're also able to manage those remotely from a security standpoint.
Yeah, and, and they're shared devices as well, so, they have this concept of single sign on. They can sign on to any device, anywhere, which saves a lot of time. And, then the apps that, they use on those particular devices are, are automatically there. So it saves a lot of time, and you're compliant. All the data is encrypted. So Glenn, what about troubleshooting? So I know prior to using SOTI, you, you had devices that were shipped back to a support center.
Yeah, so I mean, with SOTI, we're able to remotely access the devices. That's greatly helped kind of troubleshoot. You could see exactly what the store team member is seeing, if there was an issue, like with a particular application-
Right
... or access. And so, you know, that's really sped up our support process and just taking care of, you know, store team members. And then also just the... With the printers, we just didn't have the visibility. So now we've got full visibility to kind of the health of the devices and can remotely troubleshoot in most cases. So, like, in most cases, we're able to remotely fix the issue quickly and then eliminate the need to do more costly kind of replacements with Store Depot.
Yeah, I think that kind of is, caters to this last point here, which is around total cost of ownership. You know, 80% of the cost of the device is perceived to be—or sorry, 80% of the cost is usually perceived to be the device itself, but in fact, 80% is the issues that arise from these mobile devices, things like performing maintenance, support, battery, so all of the troubleshooting that you have to do, a lot of the cost around shipping devices back and forth. So these are the additional costs that a lot of organizations don't see. They might just purchase the device, say, it's a little bit cheaper, but you actually want, you know, a, a rugged device that's gonna last in different temperatures. They're outside, they're inside, they get pretty hot, pretty cold.
You got to think about all of these different things when you're choosing the device, but also the entire issues and how do I avoid downtime? All right, is there anything you wanted to add around that?
No, I just, you know, end-to-end-
Yeah
It's been a transformation, like in support of our store team members, our customers. You know, having mobility for the store team members and kind of integrate, you know, from a consumer technology, you know, customers are using the mobile app, they're shopping on the web, they're coming into the stores, just integrating the consumer technology with the store team member technology. We wanna deliver a legendary experience. And then the AI is really transparent to the customer.
Yeah.
You know, we're arming our store team members with the Theatro, with Honeywell, you know, and, and all these capabilities with the apps. So being able to, you know, quickly deploy generative AI apps like Hey GURA-
Yeah
... you know, having that foundation in place, we can move very quickly in support of the team member and the customer.
Wonderful. So one of the things that we do at SOTI, which I really absolutely love, is we wanna go and see what the customer experience is like. And so, this is a picture of not Glenn and I going golfing. These are actual, carts that they sell, and if I zoomed in on that picture, it's a very good price of only $9,999.99. But no, what, what I wanted to just say is that Glenn was fortunate enough to give us an actual store visit. We thought we would record this, and maybe, Glenn, you can walk through a little bit, a bit of this store visit, and I think you can see some of the tech that's being used.
Sure. So this was taken at our Thompson Station store. So Shash and the SOTI team came, visited us. That was our 500th Fusion store remodel. So, you know, we remodeled the inside of the store, the side lot, and then we added a garden center with live goods. So you can see we're in the outside of the store. This is just right before Christmas that we visited the store, so you see it set for holiday. This is the consumer mobile app, the in-store mode, the ability to, you know, signal if you need a propane refill or your curbside order, and you're picking up. You can see there on the side lot, we've got a drive-through where customers can just drive through, pick up their curbside order, and we bring it right out to them.
So that integration, like with the app, the AI, Theatro, you know, we can take care of that customer very quickly. Here, we've got the Honeywell CT40 in the printer. Gabby, who we met at Thompson Station, was giving us-
Gabby was awesome.
overview of kinda how she's using mobile point-of-sale.
Yeah.
We can do that propane refill right on the side lot, take care of the customer. We can take EMV, PIN Debit, Google Pay, Apple Pay, contactless, you know, forms of payment, and then also, if they'd like a receipt, we can just print it right there and just take care of the customer. We're now walking from the side lot into the garden center. So we've got the ability to sell, you know, seasonal products. So at the time we were there, it was we were set for holiday.
Yeah.
And, you know, in the spring, we'll have garden, you know, products, a lot of live goods. And then here, we're walking through the inside of the store. You can see the types of products that we sell, like dog food, cat food, lots of feed, like chicken feed, and then-
Mm-hmm.
I guess that's kind of the video.
Yeah, I think one of the best parts that I enjoyed is new employees. So we weren't able to record actual live people in the store, but what I was impressed with is all of the new employees; they were extremely knowledgeable because of your Hey GURA artificial intelligence solution that they had. So they knew about everything that was going on in the store, out of the store. They could make... And this is somebody that just started, I think, within 30 days. So that was pretty impressive. I would love for you to talk a little bit about-
Sure.
-HeyGura.
I mean, there's AI throughout the store. You know, when you look at the types of products that we sell, we use AI with RELEX to do inventory planning to make sure the types of products that we have in the store, like, we've got product availability, and we're making sure we support those customers in the local communities. We've, you know, it's a needs-based business, so-
Yeah
... it's important. We've got, you know, T posts, fencing, you know, feed to take care of animals. The store team member is all powered by AI. You know, we've got the integrations with Theatro, so for curbside pickup, for, you know, propane refills, it's all enabled through the app with in-store mode. We've, through SOTI, been able to push out applications very quickly to the team member devices. So it's not only doing mobile point-of-sale, it's doing trailer rentals, it's doing applications for our TSC Visa Card, neighbors club, product inventory, scanning, and a number of other applications. From a generative AI standpoint, we were able to move very quickly in the retail industry in enabling GenAI solutions for our team members. Hey GURA is an example of that. We're leveraging Microsoft Cloud, OpenAI.
We've trained the AI models with our Life Out Here knowledge, with the expertise of over 50,000 team members we have accessible through GenAI and being able to take care of customers. So with Hey GURA, team members can get immediate access to information about products, training information, you know, inventory information, where are, like, products located within a store. So it's an assistant to kinda help them take care of that customer.
Right.
We wanna have that legendary customer experience.
Yeah. Thanks, Glenn. So now the question is, where are we going? Where are we going together as a, as a solution? And so from these kind of store visits, we're able to understand, you know, SOTI is a solution that's really behind the scenes, right? And we are focused on the cost, complexity, the downtime. So where we're going is we're introducing some new capabilities with Tractor Supply Company. Glenn talked a little bit about remote control and being able to troubleshoot. We wanna provide more advanced diagnostics. So when you are troubleshooting an issue, our solution, SOTI XSight, allows you to not only remote in and help a user in real time, but now it's embedded into a ticketing system automatically. And what that means is I can do other things.
I can take a screenshot, I can record a video, and all of this gets embedded into a ticket automatically. I can also do things like record a video with the user describing the problem. So when I'm troubleshooting an issue, I want to focus on first-call resolution, and the only way I can do that is if I can grab as much data about that device as possible. We also thought about the idea of collaboration. So maybe the end user can draw on the screen, maybe I can draw on the screen, and we can easily draw together to pinpoint exactly what that problem is for that end user, because there might be a language barrier. All of these things are available to you in terms of advanced diagnostics. What if the problem's a little bit more complicated? Maybe the app developer needs log files.
Normally, to get a log file from a device, you've got to plug it in, run a command prompt. With SOTI's technology, we actually have the ability to just press a single button, and we grab all the log files from the device automatically. It gets embedded into the ticket. Now I can actually troubleshoot and look at the logs right there in real time, understand exactly what's happening. Maybe it's just a simple missing a picture, missing an image. I wanna give them a new version of our application. I can do all of that, all in real time. Once again, our focus is really on first call resolution. What else are we doing? As you start using these Honeywell devices, the CT40s, you're gonna start realizing that the battery becomes very, very important. Today, what companies do is they replace all the batteries.
Glenn might have mentioned they're swappable batteries. You might replace all the batteries in all your devices because you wanna avoid downtime. Some of these batteries eventually don't last a full shift. So with SOTI's technology, you're able to actually provide a prediction engine. So we've built some AI capabilities and algorithms to get you historical data, and then we can predict future behavior around when your batteries are gonna go bad. And you'll see in this blue here, that's the prediction engine that's running. So what can I do here? I can simply tap on the batteries that are going red, which means they're going bad, and then I can see which particular batteries are bad. More importantly, I know where they are.
If I simply tap on that particular battery, I can see exactly where that device is, where that battery is, what devices it was in prior to where it is now, because these swappable batteries go in and out of different devices all the time. In addition to that, we also work with the manufacturers, such as Honeywell, to actually go much deeper. I can find out things like the battery age, the capacity of the battery, the battery temperature. Is it getting too cold or too hot? Which applications are causing the drainage of the battery, your charge pattern, all this kind of deep information. So if you're looking for analytical insight, we have all of that information available. And lastly, it's about something called SOTI XSight Live View.
Live View is a new capability that integrates data across all the different business applications that you have and gives you a single pane of glass to see everything. What you're looking at is a map, and imagine these are drivers that are driving. They've got a mobile device, and they're using different applications inside that device. Well, I can map any business data to this icon. This icon's got a marble, a disk, and a ring, and what I can do is I can say, "Okay, red means bad for this particular business value." To give you an example, I'll just kind of click on one of these devices, and the device will show me more information. I'll pick on the one that's red, and so red means that it's bad. Why? In this case, it's the delivery status. The driver is behind by 25 minutes.
When I tap on this particular value, I can see the chart, a chart that shows me a two-hour window of all of the historical data related to that particular problem. I can do this for all business data. In this case, I'm also looking at, say, the delivery status and the speed, and now I can go back in time. I've got this wonderful time machine that allows me to go back in time and correlate all of the data across different business applications and help you solve and troubleshoot problems in real time. So in this case, the delivery status is behind. Why? Because there was a massive increase in the inventory on the truck for fridges. So now I know a little bit more about what's going on, and this is visibility that I'm getting across all my devices in real time.
So to end off here, SOTI offers a complete mobile and IoT lifecycle management solution. What do we mean by that? I can help you rapidly provision devices. SOTI can help you diagnose solutions. If your devices are getting lost or stolen, we help track all your assets and give you historical data of up to 12 months. We help collect data so that we can actually predict behavior, future behavior. We do this across all different types of devices: Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome, macOS, any type of devices that you have. In addition, we also do printers, scanners, robots, Raspberry Pis. Anything you can think of that's got some type of connection to the internet, we can manage. We can help you build mobile applications as well.
So if you're looking at paper-based processes, we help you build mobile apps, convert these forms, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets. You don't have to use all those things. You can build mobile apps to help you automate, and automate your workflows. And finally, we do this in a secure manner. Security is of utmost importance. We wanna make sure that the right people are accessing the right devices at the right time. If you're interested in kind of seeing a live demonstration or learning a little bit more about Tractor Supply Company or SOTI, we're both at the booth at 6221, just over here. Otherwise, if you guys have any questions, we're open to answering any questions right now. Otherwise, thank you guys very much. Any questions? All good? All right, thanks, everyone. All right, thank you, guys, very much.