00:00:00 10-year anniversary welcome and studio introduction
00:05:00 Early hurdles: manual workflows, data team creation, need for scalable tools
00:10:00 Choosing Lokad: people-focused partnership and long-term technological fit
00:15:00 Planning leap: from 7–21-day spreadsheets to nightly-refreshed dashboards
00:20:00 AirPro growth: doubling hose output, detailed planning amid supply-chain shocks
00:25:00 Firefighting vs. foresight: smoothing processes to free teams for innovation
00:30:00 KPIs under scrutiny: redefining metrics as strategy and data evolve
00:35:00 Resilience stories: COVID shutdown, restart, and AirPro 2.0 roadmap
00:40:00 Closing thoughts: results, advice, and looking ahead to the next decade
Summary
In the ever-evolving domain of aerospace business, the decade-long partnership between STS Component Solutions President Timothy Russo and Lokad CEO Joannes Vermorel exemplifies resilience and strategic foresight. Built on mutual respect and shared vision, the collaboration transformed STS from manual operations to a robust data-driven enterprise, integrating Lokad’s advanced supply chain tools. This alliance underscores the significance of technological agility and nuanced solutions. Both leaders emphasize the importance of bespoke metrics over standardized ones to navigate market dynamics effectively. This enduring partnership stands as a testament to innovation, strategic alignment, and the power of collaborative progress.
Extended Summary
In the realm of business collaboration, few partnerships stand the test of time, particularly amidst the tech-driven and fast-paced world of aerospace. Yet, the alliance between Lokad, spearheaded by its CEO, Joannes Vermorel, and STS Component Solutions, under the adept leadership of Timothy Russo, has not only endured but thrived over a decade.
What stands out from the onset is the mutual respect and admiration each leader holds for one another’s organization. Timothy Russo’s appreciation for the culture and technological prowess of Lokad is matched by Joannes Vermorel’s recognition of STS’s pioneering spirit in the aerospace sector. Both leaders emphasize that their initial collaboration was born out of a shared vision and the foresight to address challenges specific to their industry, laying a foundation for a relationship grounded in mutual benefit and growth.
Timothy Russo recounts the evolution of STS from its manual operational roots to a data-driven enterprise, underscoring the transformation brought about by integrating Lokad’s advanced supply chain planning tools. This narrative resonates with a recurring theme in the world of business: the necessity of adaptability in the face of constant industry change. The dynamic interplay between technology and organizational adaptation defines the success trajectory of modern enterprises. Russo highlights how STS navigated these changes through a culture of technological innovation and active team engagement, adopting Probabilistic Forecasting as a strategic advantage.
Joannes Vermorel echoes this sentiment, articulating the agility required in aerospace—a domain characterized by rapid feedback loops and global responsiveness. He contrasts this nimble approach with the often sluggish adaptation seen in larger corporations, pointing out the need for bespoke solutions that cater to the intricate demands of inventory and customer needs, a philosophy deeply embedded in Lokad’s offerings.
At the heart of this partnership’s success lies the concept of supply chain scientists, a novel approach championed by Lokad and embraced by STS, emphasizing precision and adaptability over standardized enterprise solutions. Vermorel rightly notes that the role of these scientists is crucial in managing subtleties, a reflection of nuanced operational needs rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy. This approach fosters innovation and strategic alignment, effectively positioning STS at the forefront of aerospace distribution.
Both Vermorel and Russo discuss the importance of performance indicators, acknowledging that metrics like inventory turns are important yet require constant reevaluation to ensure they accurately reflect the organization’s strategic intent. Here, Vermorel stresses the need for continual revision of these metrics, a process that prevents complacency and reinforces innovation.
Looking forward, Russo shares ambitions for further integration with AirPro 2.0, exploring demand across sectors—a move indicative of STS’s commitment to growth and deeper market engagement, all underpinned by Lokad’s methodologies. His advice resonates with pragmatic wisdom; while trusting Lokad is central, there is merit in ongoing evaluation and exploring alternatives to reaffirm the evolutionary path of technological integration in supply chain management.
In retrospect, these ten years encapsulate a journey of resilience, adaptability, and shared success. Amidst challenges like COVID-19, the partnership demonstrated robust collaborative spirit and foresight—a testament to the power of strategic alignment and innovation in sustaining long-term business relationships. This dialogue not only charts the historical arc of Lokad and STS’s collaboration but also offers a blueprint for leveraging the technological and human capital needed to thrive in an ever-changing global landscape.
Full Transcript
Conor Doherty: To mark the 10-year anniversary of our partnership with STS Component Solutions, Lokad was delighted to welcome in-studio their President, Tim Russo. Tim generously sat down with Joannes and me and answered questions on what exactly has made the project such a success.
So Tim, first of all, thank you very much for joining us in studio. Honestly, it’s a pleasure to finally have you here.
Timothy Russo: Yeah, thanks for having us in today. Yeah, appreciate it.
Conor Doherty: We spoke to you a couple of times on LinkedIn before, but this is the first time… Is this—I think this is the first time you’ve been in the office?
Timothy Russo: Yeah, first time visiting the Lokad office and really impressed with the office, the team, and thanks for having us.
Conor Doherty: Well, and I actually did check the records on this. Last month, I believe, was the 10… I believe, I know, was the 10-year anniversary of the partnership between Lokad and STS. We’ll get to the project in a moment, but if you could set the table a little bit, what is the size of STS Component Solutions operations just for people who might not know?
Timothy Russo: Yeah, absolutely. STS Component Solutions is an OEM distributor for 30 plus partners. We support the aerospace industry primarily, airlines and MRO’s globally, delivering parts in over 82 countries. Over 6,000 quotes a day go out from our system to operators globally and, it’s supported out of Palm City, Florida. But we’re also part of the larger STS Aviation Group with facilities in the UK, in the Middle East, and in the States in Melbourne, Florida where we’re doing heavy maintenance modifications, passenger to freight conversions, Wi-Fi, engineering, staffing. So part of the larger umbrella of STS Aviation Group.
Conor Doherty: Well thank you. And as I said a few moments ago, 10 years working together. Now, as Joannes, I’m sure, will say at some point, a really good solution starts with a good understanding of the problem. So Tim, we can go back in time a little bit. What exactly were the problems that STS wanted to solve, so this is before Lokad?
Timothy Russo: Sure. Yeah. And you know, when we look at the, the history of STS Component Solutions specifically, and as we continue to evolve and mature within the industry, you know, as we started to expand, we were doing a lot of things manually. Right, the planning processes, the processing of RFQs, the purchasing of material. And which at some point, you take a look and you say it’s, it’s not scalable.
We were growing, we were growing at a fast pace. And then, you know, one of the things we did early on, and if you go back to that 10-year point, is we invested in our data services team. So we had the foresight back before, you know, I think it’s a lot more common now to have a data team on your staff regardless of the industry you’re in. But we did that, you know, roughly 10 years ago understanding how important data was to our industry, how important it was going to be to make decisions to scale our business.
And we knew what we were doing, while it worked and the team did a really really good job, building the business to that point. We needed to find the systems, the tools to take us to the next level.
Conor Doherty: It’s an interesting way you framed that because again you said—and this is a point that I’ve, I’ve made before—you can still be success… you can be successful and still want to evolve. It’s not necessarily binary, like no, nothing works, we’re not doing it right. It’s things are working, but we want to go to the next level. Is that how you discussed it internally?
Timothy Russo: Well, I think, you know, within our industry, obviously everyone is coming off the heels of COVID and tariffs. The one thing that’s constant in our industry is change. That didn’t start with tariffs, that didn’t start with COVID, that is and, and as you build a business and as you build a team, you know, change is inevitable. Building your team to know that hey there’s always a better way, there’s always a more efficient way that the technology is changing at such a fast pace, to be able to scale and keep up with that.
But having that in as part of your culture of the organization, and keeping the team engaged with what’s out there, what could make our organization, run a lot more efficiently and what is the technology that, we were, you know, willing to invest in and embrace. And it was our data, it was the tools we use from not only forecasting but also the tools we use for KPIs and the tools, and the team that could help manage that.
So moving it from a very manual keystroke entry, data entry to more automation and having the system and the tool provide the dashboard and the analytics for us to make the right decisions for our business as it scaled.
Conor Doherty: Thank you, Tim. Joannes, as you listen to that, how emblematic are Tim’s sentiments of aerospace companies in general because he seems very forward-thinking in his description and that goes back many, many years.
Joannes Vermorel: I mean first, the pace of change I think is kind of inversely proportional to the size of companies. You know, if you look at, let’s say, a giant like Honeywell, yes, things change but let’s be real, it’s not the same pace. That would be true for Boeing, that would be true for Airbus. So it’s, it’s obviously, the more nimble players that are growing who undergo the change the fastest, so it’s no surprise there. But still, you know, there is also a lot of small companies who do not grow and fail to change. So it’s not because you’re small that automatically you have, you are agile. Let’s say that being small gives you the possibility to be agile if you execute your business excellently. But it’s never a given, it’s never a given.
And also, I think aerospace is one of those businesses that is fiercely competitive. It is extremely competitive, it is global, so you are competing with companies from across many continents. The actors are also very, I would say, reacting very swiftly also. So again, that doesn’t pave the way for complacency if you are like, again, a very very large OEM like Honeywell. The amount of trust that actors have would kind of delay feedback but I think for a small company feedback comes very very swiftly, both positive and negative. So yes, I think that’s the changes have been have been enormous and indeed aviation is still rapidly changing overall, you know, as an industry.
Conor Doherty: Absolutely. Well Tim, again when we talk about the agility that Joannes just mentioned, I’m curious before we actually started the recording you mentioned about how, what you value most, it’s not just the tools, it’s not the technology, it’s the fact that you have a team that is able to leverage those technologies and those tools. So I’m just curious in your own estimation what is it about STS’s team that you think sets it apart in terms of adopting all of these technologies?
Timothy Russo: It’s the culture of innovation. It’s the culture of everyone executing at the highest level. You know, when you look at the technology that you put in place and you look at the automation, you look at what AI is doing and how we’re looking to embrace it. What that can’t do is the last 5%, which is critical, is the business aspect, the relationship, and the execution. Right, you know, the ability to still have a team out there in front with the customers. Technology is never going to change that. So when we look at our business, you know, from a culture perspective, continuing to expand, growing our portfolio of products, doubling that in time, you know, the ability for us to continue to execute comes down to the people that we have. It’s also the systems and the tools we provide them, right? They have to have the right systems and tools and that’s why, you know, we’re here. That’s, you know, one of the reasons that Lokad is ingrained in the infrastructure within STS.
But it’s also, you know, the ability to execute and the people we have and it’s second to none in our industry.
Conor Doherty: Well, that’s a perfect transition because again 10 years together, I’m just curious what was it about Lokad and the offering that 10 years ago made STS think, okay, these are the right… these guys in France… We’re in the States. These guys in France, these are the guys for us. These are our kind of people. What was it?
Timothy Russo: It, you know, there’s… we go back to relationships and we go back to people. You know, yes, we didn’t know about COVID, we didn’t know tariffs were coming, we didn’t know the industry was going to continue to have these challenges, but what we could tell early on was that these are the people that we would be willing to face those challenges with. You know, you can embrace a system, a tool, a piece of technology, but the one thing you have to remember is that technology has to evolve. It has to change. Our business is changing constantly.
We wanted a partner who wouldn’t just put a flashy dashboard in front of us but would know that in 12, 18, 24 months that dashboard might need to change. Our team did a good job evaluating the market. Distance didn’t scare us; we saw ingenuity and technology behind the systems, and we looked at best practices from other industries. Some might not have embraced that, but we see that as positive—a partner for the long term who’ll pivot with us.
Joannes Vermorel: STS… I mean, again, I’m very grateful for that: you were part of the pioneers to try this supply-chain-scientist approach. At the time you were among the very first companies who trusted us, and the idea was kind of strange in a way. What we want is a technological stack that makes it very fast to roll out bespoke numerical recipes. So it is a little bit strange because, if you take it at face value, what do you have? Nothing. It’s just a blank sheet. Yes, yes—okay—so you’re essentially buying the commitment of an engineering team to craft and then maintain this numerical recipe to drive, let’s say, purchase orders, investments, and everything. But—and this is where I think you were visionaries for trusting this idea—the numerical recipes are contextual. If the market changes you have to dispose of the recipe you had and create a new one.
The applicative landscape of STS was also evolving: different versions of the same software, access to more data—some data whose quality was low ten years ago is excellent now. So it would be, frankly, dumb to use a recipe that was good ten years ago, when tons of data simply weren’t there, and still use the same recipe that ignores the much-enriched dataset we have now. Many things change: the business itself, the applicative landscape, the competitive landscape; it can even be regulatory stuff like tariffs and whatnot. The idea was to trust an engineering team that would constantly monitor the recipes and upgrade them so they fit your present need instead of reflecting the reality when we closed the initial deal six years ago—and this need increases over time.
Timothy Russo: If I look back at the process time, before COVID in 2019 we were growing rapidly. Our inventory-planning process was spreadsheet-based—we did use some tools—but it could take anywhere from seven, fourteen, even twenty-one days to plan a catalog of parts based on demand, which is actually quite fast by industry standards. Now, our planners come into a dashboard that refreshes every night based on the previous day’s demand, and it’s unbelievable. We expect change. Our job is not to see a challenge or a market change and then start planning; planning has to be embedded in the system. Whatever happens today, our buyers and planners arrive to a fresh dashboard every morning. We put automation in place so that, if certain criteria are met, everything flows hands-off to our OEM partners.
We shared that vision back then—what we wanted, where we saw it—and executed while growing our business. We’re changing the portfolio of products we distribute. We’ve expanded into rotable components and expendables, which require a whole different planning process. Being able to do that seamlessly as we continue to grow our partnerships in the industry was key. I’m excited about where we are, but I’m more excited about where we’re going. You can’t build your business looking in the rear-view mirror. Challenges will come, the economy will shift, but we have the right people, the right system, and the right tools to face anything.
Conor Doherty: Thank you, Tim. And speaking of people—Joannes, we talked about numerical recipes and STS Component Solutions’ team. From your perspective, how critical is the supply-chain-scientist role in progress, success, and evolution?
Joannes Vermorel: It’s super, super critical, and I want to emphasize that you need people who will spend a lot of time paying attention to all the details. From afar, one sin of enterprise vendors is approaching verticals in a very uniform fashion—“if it fits for this one, it fits for that one.” The problem is that, in supply chain, that yields a lot of nonsense.
Take STS AirPro: tubes, flexibles, cables. If you have 100 m of tube, is it one 100-meter piece or ten 10-meter pieces? If a client needs 20 m, you can’t just tie together two 10-meter leftovers. When you look at inventory, you need to know the exact split in stock and how demand is composed. If you naïvely say, “I have X km in stock,” it turns out much of it may be leftovers from small cuts piling up with almost no resale value because nobody wants them.
It’s a small detail but critical. Without a vision deeply in tune with these realities, it won’t work. The supply-chain scientist bridges the gap: paying attention to details that make or break the numerical recipe. That’s the difference between planners saying, “Nonsense, back to spreadsheets,” and planners saying, “Yes, this matches my understanding—approximately correct.” Demand is erratic and intermittent; lead times are too. Aviation is under pressure, OEMs are struggling to ramp up, delays are erratic.
Timothy Russo: But the details still matter. AirPro is a great case study. Twenty-four months ago we were in a different facility making about 2,500 aircraft hoses a month. We moved into our Palm City office and almost doubled throughput to nearly 4,000 hoses a month. Now we’re optimizing the planning process amid supply-chain challenges—lead-time changes, price fluctuations, tariffs—to increase throughput. To go from 2,500 to 4,000 hoses a month, the processes and planning are key, and the detail is immense. We expect to hit 8,000 hoses soon—constrained by material, of course—but having the systems and tools to capture that is crucial.
Conor Doherty: Well, Tim, again, as President—bearing in mind this project has evolved a lot over the last ten years—how do you oversee the ongoing change management of such a large operation? You’ve got the team in Paris, you’ve got the dashboards—how do you handle all of that?
Timothy Russo: Well, I think the team does an amazing job collaborating. They collaborate weekly. We talk about the new partnerships we’re engaging with, and try to bring the team behind the scenes into the forefront from the planning process. As we engage a new partner, we’re excited about introducing them to Lokad because, as you mentioned, we have the ability and structure where every product line, down to the SKU, could have its own demand profile and we can plan around that.
We don’t paint with a broad brush. Every product line and part number could have its own profile to optimize the inventory we have. If we look at over time, being able to grow the business because our partners, similar to our customers, want you to have the right parts at the right time at the right location. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve. We throw all the complexity in the mix, but it’s ultimately ensuring that we have the visibility and the team.
Our team is constantly looking at what’s next. That culture of innovation and passion to find out what else is out there. They talk about that with your team on a regular basis, whether it’s technology or data points. These are things that the team is looking at today, which when we implemented in 2019, weren’t part of the equation. Today, they are. It’s impressive to continue and evolve and build that as part of what we’re doing together.
Joannes Vermorel: Yes, and I would like to point out that one of the key ingredients to have a team that is forward-looking is making sure they are not overwhelmed by firefighting. The typical supply chain team in your average company worldwide is constantly firefighting, even if nothing is happening. There are no tariffs; it’s just the humdrum of regular business, and they are fighting just because the systems they have, software systems, give them crazy suggestions. It’s like whack-a-mole; you prevent making a massive purchase order mistake, and bam, it creates another crazy purchase order, and you have hundreds of alerts every single day.
Sometimes, because there are so many alerts and exceptions to process, mistakes are made. People have to call back their suppliers, say, “No, it was a mistake, we need to revise that,” creating more firefighting. You cannot innovate and progress if you’re looking in the rearview mirror. Those mistakes and decisions that create so much firefighting make everybody a prisoner of problems that are backward-looking, trying to duct tape mistakes from last week. The key is to manage to get the process sufficiently smooth so people have the intellectual bandwidth to look ahead.
Even when there is no disruption happening, automated systems cannot respond overnight super smartly to a radical change, like a complete 180-degree change in tariff policies by a major administration. That’s difficult, but when it’s just the humdrum of the industry, then there is no excuse.
Conor Doherty: Yeah, well, Tim, that brings us to the question that I think everyone who’s watching has been saying: this all sounds great, but Tim, how do you know that this is all working? You can have all the great dashboards, a great relationship, and I am lovely to talk to, but how do you know the project is working?
Timothy Russo: As we continue to expand, obviously metrics speak for themselves. The data speaks for itself as we continue to grow. You want to continue expanding your operation, have the right tools to enable your team to execute, and ensure that for the partners we’re bringing on, we have the right tools in place.
When we look at our KPIs operationally and culturally, we ask: are these tools enabling our team to do their job, and is the partnership evolving with the industry? The data speaks for itself. We were talking about it earlier; I see the sales team out in the field quite often. They’re ingrained with our team, though the sales team probably knows less about what’s going on under the hood than the team in the office and the data scientists putting it all together.
It’s a family, a relationship. Over the years, they’ve worked closely together to where they know whatever we face in the industry, we’re going to have a solution for it. We may not know that solution today, but it’s the partnership that’s going to get us there. As I look at key systems and the ability to scale, it becomes a lot more apparent, especially when compared to the other competitors in the business.
Everyone has a place, and there are some amazing tools out there, but we continue to double down on our relationship with Lokad, knowing it’s leading in the industry. That’s what we’re focused on.
Joannes Vermorel: Yeah, I mean, also one thing that is also very, maybe, feels quite strange to people who are not familiar with the way Lokad works is that part of the role of the supply chain scientist is to constantly monitor and revise the very definition of the performance indicator. So it’s not just monitoring the performance; it’s monitoring what you monitor. Yeah, because, you see, it may be strange, but as your company evolves, you know, the strategy changes. And so, you have to really challenge routinely, not every single day, but routinely, what is it that we are measuring because, you see, again, another sin of, people in this industry, I believe, is to go for a metric and then leave it unchallenged for a decade.
I mean, obviously, there are some, some, there are some fundamentals, you know, inventory turns is a very good thing to have a look at.
Yes, yes, yes. But then you have to pay close attention to many things because, again, if we go to inventory turns, for example, for the hose business, you have to pay attention to, suddenly you’re going to, because it’s hose and you can split your hoses when you sell them, you can have things that rotate for a SKU and parts that do not rotate. And you, so you see it may under the abstraction of “I have one SKU and this amount of stuff in stock,” it may hide that some a fraction of your inventory is not rotating at all.
You see, so again, that’s a sort of work from the supply chain scientist to really see, okay, my performance indicators tell me a story. Is it like the whole story? Yeah, there is obviously another danger, which is to have a wall of metrics. So you have so many numbers then that it doesn’t convey any story at all; it’s just confusion. So it’s a balance, and, that’s, that’s something that we are doing is to revise those and challenge those performance indicators with your teams. So just to simply ask, do you really think that’s the best number that Lokad can produce? If you had, you know, a dream metric, what would it be? Can we think of something that is even more, that speaks even more closely to your intent, your strategic intent?
Timothy Russo: Yeah. And, and one of the things that I didn’t mention earlier, but as, as, as you talk about it, the teams, the teams that work together have a great relationship where they challenge each other, right? We’ll make a, we’ll submit a recommendation on something we want to incorporate, and, you know, the data scientist will often maybe have a, have a different opinion and say, “Hey, maybe we should look at it this way. Maybe that’s not a data point you want to,” or, or maybe we’ll take a recommendation and say, “Well, our business is a little different,” and I think that you have to be level, you have to be comfortable, you know, challenging, you know, the team that you’re working with.
And I think the relationship over time, they work together well because, you know, if they don’t understand it, they want to, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll dig into it a little bit more, but they’re not just blindly, you know, accepting the change. They want to understand why we want to make it and then maybe offer something different if they think there’s a better way. And, and we appreciate that, right? We’re not the experts.
Joannes Vermorel: Yes, and, and, and also there is, in fact one of the key reasons why we do that is that I think for, for enterprise software folks like Lokad, I would say probably the most difficult challenge is a little bit subtle; it’s maintainability. You have a piece of software that keeps growing. How do you keep this complexity under control? You see, because the, the danger is that you can have sedimentation, you know, we do STS, 2015, that’s the logic, and then we have STS, 2016, another layer of logic, and then, you know, it accumulates, it sediments. And the danger is that, fast forward a decade, you can end up with a monster, you know, something that has, like, all the complexity of all the stuff that ever happened to your business, including the ones that are now completely irrelevant because it’s, it’s gone; you’ve moved the factory from one place to another. The old location is gone, you know, all the logic that was related to this thing is completely pointless. But we need to maintain that.
So what Lokad does is that very frequently, when we challenge, it’s just, the idea is to make really sure are we, is our understanding, that’s, that’s first a way to challenge our own understanding. You know, do we really understand what you’re asking from us? So because, for example, if we make a suggestion and people say, “Okay, no, you completely missed the plot, you’re not even in the realm of what we mean, let’s recommunicate on that,” that’s very important. So that’s a way for us to make sure that we kind of understand what is being taught to us. But also, it is a way to, kind of preserve the overall complexity, what we call the technological mass of the solution.
We need to, because again, if you want to stay agile and you have 5 million lines of code that you have to maintain, you’re not agile. It’s going to take months to revisit all that. So how can we keep, you know, the core of STS within something like 10,000 lines of code so that when something big happens, we can, within days, possibly weeks, rewrite portions to really fit the new version of STS? Because now that would be my closing thought on that, it’s, it’s, it’s something very, very strange in this industry is that nowadays it takes more time to, for example, if you move from one warehouse location to another, it takes more time to migrate the software very frequently than it takes to migrate the stuff and the people and the machinery.
To build, and, and that’s, that’s kind of strange because normally, you know, electrons move pretty fast, except when software it’s like, “Let’s have this multi-year, ERP upgrade just to manage a new site.” That’s, that’s really the one thing that we’re paying really, really attention to, is again, back to my initial point, maintainability of the software. Yeah.
Conor Doherty: Well, Tim… I teach philosophy in my spare time and one of the things that I, and a bit of psychology, one of the things I know is that you can’t choose what other people value or the things that really resonate with them. So I’m just curious on a personal level: Is there anything in particular, because I know you’re a people person, is there anything in particular about the project, over the 10 years, is there any moment or achievement or accomplishment that really resonates with you that you’re proud about?
Timothy Russo: You know, I think we’ve, we’ve touched on a few of those moments, right? When you, when you look over the last 10 years, you know, no one had a crystal ball during those, those first days. You know, I think about the team that evaluated bringing Lokad on; I think, you know, we had a goal during those early days, right? Create more efficient ways to plan as we were continuing to grow. You can’t predict what’s going to happen. But when you know, you look at the challenges that we were faced with, having to essentially shut down our business through COVID, make changes, ensure that the systems we put in place essentially are, you know, shutting down, you know, the ability to eliminate essentially fill rates to a certain point and then turning them back on and, you know, having to adjust. I, you know, you know, the, the team is really resilient, you know, and, and I think that word comes up a lot, you know, and you have to be in our industry.
But specifically within the organization and I think when I look at the working group, they’re, they’re resilient, they’re innovative, you know, and it’s something that is the DNA of the success of the relationship, right? It’s ingrained in our business, it’s ingrained in your business. And I think that creates the great platform for what’s to come, right? We don’t know the challenges we’re going to face; we know there will be challenges, but I’m confident we have the right team to face those challenges.
Conor Doherty: Well, you just mentioned what’s to come. I’m just curious, what are the next steps in the project?
Timothy Russo: You know, we, we talked to AirPro, you know, we’re doing AirPro 2.0. We’re getting, we’re getting them more ingrained. We’re looking at, you know, we talked earlier about STS, Aviation Group, right? How are we able to take a look at the demand that’s happening within, within all sectors of our business, from MRO to interior mods, and how are we able to look at the data from our other business units and incorporate that into, into, you know, our one view, you know, putting those tools in place and then, you know, the ability to share that with our customers is, is really important, right?
And, and when I say customers, I also mean our partners that we’re distributing their parts because you’re right, they are large, they don’t have the ability to move quick, but they expect their partners to have that ability, right? And to be able to show them the tools we have in place, that no, the planning for your product line is very different than the profile for this other partner we have. And these are the reasons why I know our portfolio will continue to grow; I know our business will continue to expand. And to confidently say that I know I have the tool to be able to handle that is really important. It’s really important as we grow our business, and we look at, you know, the next chapter for the relationship.
Conor Doherty: Well, I have only one last question, Tim, and I appreciate your time thus far, but last question. Obviously STS were very forward-thinking again, 10-year relationship. What would you say to other people today who are still, let’s say, on the fence about embracing the kind of probabilistic technologies that have been the standard at STS for a decade? What advice would you give to those people?
Timothy Russo: I, well, I think every you have to constantly, evaluate the systems and tools you have in place, right? And I think the openness to do so now, you know, we are confident Lokad is the right tool. It doesn’t mean you’re not being approached to look at other things, look at other software, look at what’s out there. And, and that’s what, you know, when we look at the tools we have, best in industry, best-in-class for the work we do. And then I would invite them to look at the results that those systems and tools have yielded. And, you know, I’ve shared them with frankly, with everyone from our competitors to your competitors. And so, you know, I’m confident with what we have in place and that it’s the right tool and it’s a tool for the future and it’s a tool that’ll continue to evolve with the landscape of our industry.
Conor Doherty: Well, Tim, thank you very much. I don’t have any more questions, and I know Joannes and I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us.
Timothy Russo: Oh, well, thank you for having us in the office today, and I appreciate it. I look forward to the next 10 years.
