We literally have used it at a very tactical level, maybe improving integrations. We have used it in the commercial arena for things, like roster management and even for sales forces that might not fit into a traditional CRM model. We would have build-time front-ends for small groups who have a unique way of doing things. We will write back to the back-end CRM database. Then, we have deployed it quite a bit on the finance side of things. There is really no limit to how we have been able to leverage it. 

It's a great platform for business process improvement. The fact that you can connect to any data source really provides workflow approvals, etc., in a very timely way. This has really empowered us from an organizational perspective. We have incorporated hierarchy information so we can route things that need manager approval within the company. It has really facilitated a lot of business processes, where sometimes the core applications only get you about 80% of the way there.

We have built a guided buying application that guides people through the requisition process, which is just an easier experience than a lot of other things. The fact that it can connect to just about any data source has been a huge benefit for us. 

We helped our finance group with the management of POs, so people could get some visibility in terms of how much money was left on a PO, e.g., if they needed to close a particular PO or request another owner for a PO. The area of the procure-to-pay process was an opportunity for us. We used VINYL to develop a PO management app that has really helped facilitate and create transparency for people from a self-service perspective. With a click of a button, people can see the POs that they own, how much is left on them, and then take some action on them, whether it is closing the PO or requesting a different owner.

We have used it on the IT side of things just to help facilitate integration. Where we didn't necessarily build an app, we would move data, leveraging VINYL, from one system to another if we were having trouble with the integration. The ability to connect to a lot of different data sources in an easy way has really been a benefit both for building applications, but also for our infrastructure team when they are building integrations from point to point.

We use it for business process improvement things, like equity trade requests, where it is a one-off need but there isn't really a core application for it. Sometimes, a lot of those things prior to having an application in which to store everything, things could be stored in email and you have to go back and search for things. So, it can improve compliance and really just about any aspect of things. You don't need to do things out of the system. For a lot of the things that people do a lot of times in spreadsheets and organizations, VINYL is a great tool to eliminate a lot of that siloed data that ends up on somebody's hard drive that you can't find anymore. For us, it's really been invaluable. That is why I have used them for so long across both at my current organization and even at prior companies.

We leverage everything through an SSO provider. Depending on people's rights, they will either have the application within the VINYL tile within our SSO provider or they won't. The data is encrypted. It's really a comforting experience, which is very important nowadays with all the security risks that are out there.

It has just made us a more efficient company. It has even made us a more compliant company. We have been able to build business processes for things that could introduce compliance risk. Being able to do that quickly and efficiently without having to spend a lot of money on a custom solution, and the fact that it plugs into our infrastructure at this point and works across a variety of solutions, just works well for us. It has dramatically positioned our time to market.

VINYL has sped up the app development process, enabling us to release a public version of the app much quicker than we would expect from other app developers. Communication with the app team has also been excellent.

As mentioned above, we are not using VINYL as an enterprise app for our associates. The app itself has not greatly improved our operations in ways that it might for other VINYL users.  However, we are excited about VINYL's potential to help organize and analyze our dog ownership data and general Mobile Dog user data under the admin portion of the application.

One of the applications that we developed, and was completely custom, with the Zudy VINYL platform, was an integrated hub and integrated portal for our sales force. So, we have about 300 people as customers. We have essentially built a single point of entry for information, various applications, and subapplications that are also built on VINYL. But, the entire sales force can go in and have customized information, specific to the sales force and sometimes specific to them, right at their interface. Some of the things that they can do is receive specific communications that are categorized across different areas of marketing. They have access to custom applications, such as a digital detailing aid, that we used when we were still trying to stand up our CRM in the wake of the COVID transition, where they could access materials and detailing aids that they would put in front of their customers. They are also able to update some of their employee information, which integrates with our ADP system, as well as access videos and presentations, which different areas of marketing put out for them.

The integration is a huge accelerator into enabling new business processes. As a small company, we have a few different systems that otherwise couldn't talk to each other. We recognize, from an IT perspective, the value that data and change in status of certain data in one area could influence the ability to take action in another. With these integration points, we are able to essentially create that communication from one system to another, letting system B know that something has been completed or is ready in system A. That allows our users to know that they are ready to complete a task. Without that, we would be relying on a lot of manual communication. We would be relying on individuals sending emails, saying, "Hey, by the way, this is ready in system A." Now, we have the system recognizing it and shooting that email off automatically, with all the instructions necessary.

I like to think that the Zudy VINYL product is the perfect middleware for the different applications that we have scattered around our infrastructure. What I like about it is that we know how to use it to get one system to talk to another or pull information from multiple systems into one view for dashboarding, metrics, or reporting. Its ability to integrate with those various systems, and fill the white space between those systems where business users have needs, is really what has made it a differentiator in our organization.

We are using Zudy VINYL to fill white space between some of the existing business processes happening in systems that are already standing up. So, to say, "Is it running? Is it fully running back-end processes in the office?" We're not using it for that purpose, but the overall capability of the tool has certainly demonstrated it. Whereas, if we really wanted to jack up the amount we're putting in there, the sky is really the limit on what we could actually pull into VINYL and processes.

One way that Zudy VINYL has improved the way our organization functions is a very simple, but just incredibly helpful aspect: workflow. It has given us the ability to have different stakeholders involved in different projects and to have visibility through the dashboard and have automated emails that they can mark "approved" or "not approved." That way, there is a log that everyone has signed off. And it gives us some very easy dashboard reporting. Instead of having to search for information, it gets delivered to you. That's been a really big game-changer for us. Efficiencies are higher, revenues are better. It's been really positive. There is not a single negative thing to say about it. It's stuff we've always wanted and we needed to find the right partner to make it happen. We're glad we did.

It has also, absolutely, decreased our go-to-market time. It has increased our ability to get things to market faster, without a doubt. I'd be guessing, but I'd be fairly confident saying that it decreased go-to-market time by at least 25 percent, anecdotally. It's a significant amount. To get 25 percent of our business to market faster would be a significant change for us.

The solution also allows us to run a variety of back office processes without coding. And that has very much to do with the integrations that we've built into place, that Zudy VINYL is able to handle. It's allowed us to make faster, smarter decisions, which is really important. Because systems didn't talk before, because they weren't integrated, just getting data was a bit of a challenge and it slowed the process down. That part is really important.

It's also allowed us to re-examine our business during the pandemic. It's given us the business intelligence to really look at all of 2019 and then pivot to what our 2021 plans are, with what COVID has done to the events business. It really gave us a chance to step back and have time to look at the business, instead of just continuing to run event after event after event, just because it's what we do, it's how we generate revenue. It's given us a chance to really dive deep and model out what the future looks like for Entercom.

Overall, Zudy VINYL has increased development speed. It's given us the data we need to make decisions quicker. It's given us the business intelligence we need to do some short- and larger-scale modeling. And it's also allowed us to look at using the Zudy VINYL platform in other departments that may have the same challenges.

We have a lot of events. With our Jingle Ball events we have 12 concerts all over the country over the Christmas season. There is a lot of advertising across those and sponsorships as well. It's really complicated, operationally, to manage. It was historically managed in spreadsheets and Google Docs. We were able to move everything into a VINYL application and it's helped us understand more.

It has helped us standardize some processes that were very haphazard. It has helped us put some more rigor and clarity around certain things that were done very manually on Excel spreadsheets regarding processes. Now we know what local markets versus national might be selling in terms of assets against the events. And it just gives us better business intelligence.

The key thing is not that it did anything that you couldn't do another way. It was more the fact that it was very easy to get this built up and running quickly, and it's not a headache to maintain like a lot of other traditional IT platforms are.

In some cases, it's not a question of whether VINYL does something that other software doesn't do, it's a question of how it does it and the ease with which it does. With Zudy's consultancy, we were able to go from an idea to having a proof of concept in a couple of weeks, to let everybody see what we were going to do. That would have taken a lot longer using traditional coding technology.

Vinyl has been a game changer in how we can now quickly deploy key features and new products. We no longer need five or more programmers taking months to complete a task. We can now say "we move at the speed of now" thanks to Zudy Vinyl. Our customers are impressed with how quickly we can make custom changes or customer-specific feature requests in days, not months.

Our employees love Vinyl as it is easy to use, and they see how our customers react with quick turnaround on feature sets.

It has removed many manual processes and allowed us to automate. It has reduced paper connected with things we do in our stores, such as alterations and made-to-measure customers. Not only does it help with efficiency for the employees, but it's also a better experience for the customer.

It has really been an evolution for the organization. We didn't see it as just a project where you do the project and stop. We're always looking at how do we continuously improve parts of our processes and operations. That's really the way we continue to approach it: How can the tool keep helping us to innovate and drive new solutions in other areas?

We can take basically any manual data entry process that exists in the organization and replace it with a much easier-to-use Vinyl app.  

The data collection and reporting are much more robust than team-shared spreadsheets. Raw material receiving, quality auditing, and equipment utilization are all examples of processes greatly improved by Vinyl apps. We can even integrate with our ERP system by APIs and replace clunky ERP interfaces with much better Vinyl interfaces.  

I get constant feedback from users that it has made their life easier to use the Vinyl apps instead of the previous tool they used.

Our company recently made the change from another low-code platform to increase functionality and support for our infrastructure. Zudy helped us make all of these changes and more, increasing the speed of our processes many times, as well as being available for constant support and weekly calls to ensure that our product is behaving as expected and helping to fix any bugs that are reported. Efficiency has skyrocketed thanks to Zudy. 

Reports and queries that used to take hours for us now only take minutes. In the consulting world, efficiency and effectiveness are key and Zudy has helped us to realize our visions of becoming the best in the industry when it comes to these. 

We've had a great ability to get proofs of concepts up very quickly, within a couple of hours. From there, we just embellish and enhance them until they get to a more robust state. It's been nice and quick to get some proofs of concept out of the door, to get user feedback on them, and to keep iterating until we get something that's really useful for the team. One example would be a business travel tracker. We developed an application that lets our employees have the ability to put in a trip request and have the hotel, airfare, and trains all specified and figured out.

The breadth of the solution’s data integration abilities through its data source connectors and API integrations has been really great. There are so many different plugins that they've created. We use SQL quite a bit, XML, JSON, and REST APIs. They keep adding different functionality and we keep taking advantage of it as we can. The more functionality that is available to us, the more we're able to be creative with our solutions. When Zudy announces a new feature, we usually keep an eye out to see if it will help spark the creative juices. There are so many problems for business that we already know about, and we're always looking for another solution to help us develop an application and get some great functionality to our customer, quicker.

Overall, it's helped out tremendously with certain departments. We have been able to turn manual processes, where we were working with spreadsheets or working manually with emails, into workflows. We're saving a lot of hours by doing that. Although I haven't run any calculations on the hours saved, it's definitely in the hundreds.

It allows us to have a ton of different interactions between the various data sources and databases, and it simplifies things for us tremendously.

We're always trying to develop the functionality and get it to the customer as soon as possible. We have a process in place where we look at requirements of the application, and then we say, "Right, this is going to be a good fit for Zudy," and we'll jump in and start coding. In those instances, we know that it's going to be the quicker product and the way to get things turned around faster.

We're in a digital age now, so we're just taking advantage of that more frequently now, with respect to how information is captured. We have been able to take a lot of organizations that were using paper, to being paperless. We're just leveraging all of the abilities that we have found to be easier to do inside of Zudy.

An example of a custom application we have developed with the solution are dashboards that we are working on where certain KPIs are going to be displayed, disseminated, and captured by the end-user at the touch of a button. When it comes to being able to report out the impact or the work that's being done, it's easier now for the end-user to get the information that they need, disseminate that information, and deliver that information to those that need it. If we didn't have Zudy, this development would have been doable, but it was easier [with Zudy]. It was easier to lay out the designing and planning because of their process.

The data integration features streamlined things. I saved hours and manpower in getting things done. What we've been able to deliver, on behalf of the end-user, non-profit housing counseling agencies, actually replaces a person. It allows that person to be able to focus on other things, in terms of automation. At the push of a button now, or by clicking on a certain feature, items that were on an outside platform are now automatically transferred in real time into our platform by just answering a question "yes" or "no."

The ease of use is an 8.5 or nine out of 10. It's "night and day" for our end-user, when we compare it with our old platform which was great, but clunky. Now, we have taken all the guesswork out of, "What am I supposed to do next?" You don't even have to ask a question. Where they had to follow instructions in the old platform, they basically click on the button that addresses the question that they have to ask to be able to perform a certain function in the system.

Zudy does a great job of continuing to improve features and communicate those feature improvements throughout. There has not been a week that has gone by where I have not read about, or gotten an email about, or not been able to get access to one of the improvements. It's not only through the normal communications, but also just the dialogue I've had back and forth with the account managers and the design team that had been working on projects for us. We started out with one product build, an application, and we've added two more, with two more to come. It's extremely important to continue to improve the product because of what our current environment [is]. The shoreline has changed in terms of how anybody, any organization, is going to be doing work. They're going to need to take advantage of technology and using less paper but getting more data, because that data is what is going to deliver the results that are going to be needed to be able to continue to do this work.

An example of an improvement that they've made to it recently is the ability to capture information of what, in the industry we call an "intake." A lot of organizations may still use paper, and I keep referring back to that, but now we've automated that process to the point where the end-user can deliver an access portal for the individual client to be able to get introduced to the agency, provide documentation, and for the aides to be able to follow up with the individual, based on information that they provided. That's now been streamlined. Before, this process may have taken days or weeks to get to the point of being able to deliver a solution to the clients that they serve. Now we can do it in a day.

Another example of how they've improved the process for us is in the key performance measures or reporting modules that we've requested to be built. The individual agencies can pull the reports and data at their level without having to request it through us.

Time to market definitely has [de]creased. For example, today we got off a call where we were going over some things that we needed to have delivered. By the time we wrapped up the call, they said, "We'll be able to deliver something to you. Because today we're approaching a holiday, on Monday we're going to be able to look at it, to be able to push it to market."

Zudy has increased development speed. What would take us months to be able to complete, we're getting done in a matter of weeks. I have a number of projects that we were working on that I thought that we'd [only] be able to get completed by next year. We've already completed them and we're still in the year 2020.

VINYL has improved the way that our company functions. Primarily, the first impact was user satisfaction. The majority of our employees at NXC imaging are not in the office. They're out in the field covering the territories that we serve so prior to VINYL, they had to log in or they had to find Wi-Fi, then log into a VPN. Then they had to connect to a terminal server. Then they had to open up Microsoft Dynamics AX and then navigate to their schedule. What VINYL has given us is the ability to serve up all of that information on their phone, so now they're free to do their jobs. They're pretty happy.

VINYL has given us the ability to really improve the speed with which we deploy releases and respond to the good ideas that our people have.

Another thing that this application has allowed us to do is to bring value to the business very quickly. The benefits or the impact on the IT organization is a big morale builder or booster for us. The real benefit is that our IT organization now has the confidence to say yes to requests as opposed to no or have significant delays. The team is motivated to field requests, work on improvements and rollout changes. It's very easy to roll out a change. It takes a couple of minutes depending on the app that we're we're talking about. It's pretty easy to keep my team going in the right direction.

Prior to VINYL, we were working within a Tier 2 application that took a very long time for us to change. It's very, very expensive. Our burn rate for making changes in VINYL is about a tenth of what it was in the other platform and we can do it in a tenth of the time.

Comparing where we've been to where we are now in terms of the technical platform, it's incredibly easy to make changes, and it's incredibly easy to approve. From being able to deliver value to their business from a user perspective, it's really cool as an IT leader to be able to say yes to requests and deliver them in a timely fashion, as opposed to saying no, or coming up with reasons to delay or to give them a long term "it depends" answer.

We are a startup, and this product will not be for internal consumption. This is going to be a product for sale that we're building. It solves an industry problem today where there is no management of data, and it's just spreadsheets emailed around. So far, people in the industry who have seen what we are doing like what they see.

An excellent example of the way Zudy VINYL has improved our business is that we can now report on the actual cost of moving a load. We didn't have all that data because it was in too many different places so that we couldn't do a good report without a lot of manual effort. Now it's straightforward. We get a simple report, and this is how much it costs to move this load. And then from that, we can determine profitability. We can now report quickly on the cost of loads. Pulling in costs, for example, such as doing the cost to get a permit if it's an oversized load. We now can roll that in with the rest of the cost of paying the driver and the fuel and whatnot.  

VINYL has improved our ability to deploy apps quickly. If you're talking about some of the things that used to take weeks to accomplish, we can now do them in days. The projects that would take months, now we're looking at weeks.

VINYL has spawned a whole new section of our IT business. It hasn't really focused it, but it's created new ones. Whereas we wouldn't have been attacking these problems before, we now are because we now have a tool we can use to fix things.

The ability to build apps quickly by connecting to almost any data source, while having workflow and routing, really give you the ability to enhance more static systems and drive value to the business.

The way Zudy has helped my organization function is that it's the first time that someone was able to actually pull off my dream, the vision that I've had. Even working with some of the guys, everybody looks at what Quote Kong does and they think that because it looks simple, therefore the programming must be simple. It's not. I've had far too many people assume that it is.

Everybody wants to say they can do it. I've tried all kinds of different platforms and Zudy was the first one that not only could pull off the back-end data modeling and the backflips and the crazy things that I needed it to do, but it could also handle the front-end well enough. It's not a beautiful front-end, but it is good-looking. I'm happy with it. It looks good. There are some other solutions that I liked on the prettier end, but they couldn't handle any of the back-end data. I found other database back-ends that could handle some of the database stuff, but they didn't look pretty at all. This has been a great balance of a good-looking front-end and all the power and the complexity that I needed to handle on the back-end. It's been a dream for me. It's been so exciting to finally get Quote Kong out there for people to start working on.

And when talking about time to market on new capabilities, it's absolutely sped me up. The last big charge that we made at trying to build out Quote Kong, we were three and a half years in development and we could not get it to function because of all the complexity. With VINYL, we were able to do that in eight months. And every single new thing that we're adding is going to be quicker, easier, more integrated. And I don't feel like I have to pull out another massive budget to try and add my next feature, because the next feature is going to be quite simple to be able to add, and I'm very excited about that.

The best thing I can tell you is that what took me three years and never did get finished—we got it close, but I couldn't edit a lot of things and I couldn't import a lot of the things I needed to. It was still not working right on different systems and different devices. It would work here, here, and here, but over here, it wouldn't. And then of course, if they opened up this browser, then that wouldn't work. I don't have any of those problems. I went from thinking, "I don't know if that is ever going to get finished"—even if I had another two years, maybe we wouldn't have gotten finished—to eight months and it's ready. How do you beat that? How do you explain the speed of that? And even in the eight months, we have more features and more things that I wanted to include in the first iteration than what we had after three and a half years of building.

VINYL allows me to be able to play with a lot of the back-end data and to link all of my databases and to understand where all my tables are sitting, much better than what I was ever able to do with any of the other platforms or the other services I was working with. I'm able to handle many-to-many database connections. Zudy explained a lot of that really well, if you take the time to do their course which was included with my subscription, although I don't know if they include it for everybody. The ability to understand everything that's out there in my system is critical because there are so many minutia and so many little micro details. I'm very excited that I get to go in and pull out all the details. Just last night, I was pulling out all the different database tables and all the connections so that I could see them separately and make sure that they were all where I want them to be. I'm very excited about that.

The data integrations from Zudy that have been able to help me automate business processes and workflows have been very instrumental for building what I've wanted to build. That is the majority of what Quote Kong is. It's a ton of automations which used to be 50 or 60 hours worth of manual paperwork, and we're able to put it into processes that substantially streamline that to down to an hour's worth of work. The future things that I want to build, anytime I go looking at the documentation, and look at doing things, I'll say to myself, "I'll be able to do this," whereas with other platforms, and other things that I've tried, we were not able to do it. This has been exciting for us.

The low-code functionality, and what I've been able to achieve with it, has been a massive amount—a magnitude of 10 times—easier than what it was previously. We tried to build this five other times, and failed. I'm talking about years of development and multiple attempts. The fact that the code is just there means that so many of the minutia are already all built out for me. I don't have to define the box, the line weight, and the size, and all the little details that I've had to do in the past. It's not that I don't have control over that. It's just that I don't have to think about it ahead of time. I also don't have to design for each iteration of iPhone, and iPad, and Android, and computer size. It just automatically adjusts. A lot of those features have been absolutely instrumental, and we've been able to add in integrations that we were not able to achieve on the other platforms. It's been wonderful.

VINYL has improved the way our company does business by streamlining and standardizing the processes that are critical for producing garments and altering them, getting all of our stores on the same page with the right processes and the right options that are available to really perform for the customer. 

With the solution improving our satisfaction and adoption of associates in our stores, they have then been able to focus on the customer more, and in turn, improve and increase customer satisfaction and focus on that customer in the store.

VINYL has really helped us speed up application development at a reasonable cost. Previously and with a lot of traditional models, you're talking twelve, sixteen months before you really see the results of all the work that goes in beforehand. With VINYL and working with Zudy, we're able to really go to market with a viable product in a matter of a few months.

Iteratively from there, it's weeks to months before we have new versions instead of another six months or another twelve months for another version. So, it has absolutely sped up things by multiple factors there.

VINYL has benefited our business in a big way and we are very capable of focusing on the customer's needs when using it. One of the benefits for the store associates themselves and working with made to measure was allowing them to have multiple pathways to enter an order for a customer.

Some associates might perform their duty with a customer in one method, but something we recently implemented was more of a customer wishlist function. Whatever fabrics they're interested in, we can set those aside for them in the system. Whether they want to develop a shirt or a suit or a sport coat now, or come back in six months, those are still on their wish list along with the products that they might have selected for that fabric.

Previously you had to start from front to back every step of the way without much flexibility until we said, "we need a more flexible way". Now they have multiple pathways to enter an order, which gives them the strength or the flexibility they need to not have the customer waiting around while they're clicking in a system.

Up until now we have had only certain functions supported across different databases, some 50 to 60 functions. We needed an option to create new functions. VINYL is helping us to add additional logic. It's making our work simpler at times.

The product has improved our organization's function through all of our management reports that we do monthly are now online, on mobile applications, and ready to be reviewed by executives weeks before they previously would have been available.

The solutions helped us identify where we have bad data within our organization and bringing that to the forefront so we can fix the root cause of issues that are happening. We use the solution to develop progressive apps as we are consistently iterating on what's already been developed and adding new capabilities and functionality to the apps that we're having developed.

Since we're still primarily on an AS/400-based system, any client-facing output has some limitations using output from that system. What has been a great process-improvement and improvement in business communications - giving us really good client-facing communication - is having our Zudy applications take information from our AS/400, consume that information, and make it look nice. It turns it into something that we're happy to send out to our customers, something that's a lot more contemporary. It enables us to use a little bit more graphic design and it looks new and fresh.

VINYL has improved the way our organization functions with our paper trail. What I mean by that is that one of our process workflows was all paper-based. VINYL was taken and replaced the paper trail with an electronic trail throughout, with audits, which we didn't have before. It's made things seamless and it's more efficient, and there's an audit trail where it wasn't there before.

Has it increased my productivity? Yes, when I'm allowed to actually code in VINYL. But when I'm not in VINYL then it doesn't, obviously, and not everything can be switched to VINYL. We have to have buy-in from upper and lower management, whoever the users are.

We definitely have used the solution to bring more than one data set together. We have an IT dashboard checking system that brings together DNS, DHCP, WINS, SUS, Alertus. There are about fifteen different data sets that come together on one visual to see whether people have something installed on their PCs or not. It gives our help desk visibility across a person's PC as to what they're missing or what they have.

It has allowed us to implement processes and governance where we previously had none. It also has allowed us to peel away from large, enterprise products that dictate specific ways of doing things; ways that might not match the business need/process in place.

It makes things more modular. We're able to get information from our data that we were not able to before. We can get the data faster and aggregate more easily ways and in more visible ways.

In one group, we created an application which helps provide insight into profitability per salesperson. For each of their orders/customers, where is the best profitability? Where are the low margins? This has been transformative.

It gives us an accurate idea of where we stand as a business, on many different levels. It also gives our sales department more of an idea of how they are doing for the month, every month. And it gives us more capabilities within our systems to pull information out. It's just a better, more accurate, and faster system.

This is like having an application within your business and it's a totally different premise, rather than having to go in and have all this coding done, which just takes so long. And everything else is done by spreadsheets. You don't want to stare at a spreadsheet all day long, because there are a million of them and there could be errors. The idea of there being errors is less likely than it used to be.

The greatest benefit that this product has had for Cal-Maine has been to empower our developers to very quickly be able to produce applications. This is very important in today's time frame.

To me, the most important piece is going to be the funding, the reconciliation, because right now it's a very manual process, and this will automate it. It's going to make it a lot more streamlined. It's going to be a lot quicker for people to process it and, therefore, get money back. It's efficient and I like that. They'll be able to just take a snapshot of the receipt and upload it into the system, and then it just all gets submitted. It's cleaner and it will be a lot smoother process.

Zudy has created a platform that will make us much more efficient, with everything in one place. It's a much better way of reporting out. It leaves less room for any human error. I think it will be great. The piece that I'm talking about, specifically, is the funding reconciliation, but in general, all of the other things that they've done so far have been super helpful.

It has been very beneficial. We have quite a few people using it who would always rely on the finance team to merge Excel spreadsheets, merge data from multiple sources, and then provide a final report to them for whatever turnaround period was required. But now they're able to just go to the website and see what they need right away. If it's data they want to download instead of just seeing it in a final report, they can do that.

Overall, "numbers on demand" has been a really big change for us. VINYL has been able to pull information from a couple of sources, and stuff that would end up just being in giant Excel spreadsheets otherwise, we're able to have it available immediately.

It's also helped the accounting department, specifically, for our month-ends. We still have to validate all our numbers manually, but we compare our numbers now to VINYL and make sure all our manual calculations are in line with VINYL. It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting.

It has made us clean up our data too, to make sure VINYL can read it. We have to make sure we're consistent with how we input our data and categorize everything. We've been able to really expand our reporting and see net margins in so many more ways than we were able to before.

In addition, we've been using a distributor that will send us just giant spreadsheets weekly, of all the data, of all the sales, item by item. The biggest value for us has been the ability for VINYL to do massive revenue recognition for us, every day. That's been the biggest advantage for us, being able to pull this data in every day. Previously, this was something we were only doing at the end of every month.

Often times, the expression "spreadsheet hell" is thrown around our walls, and people get too entrenched in sharing, emailing, creating, and saving spreadsheets just to share information. The Zudy product, Vinyl, has really allowed us to get out of spreadsheets and start to build dashboards for information which needs to be shared. In that sense, we have grown as a business in directions which are scalable for us in the future. 

The tour managers are able to view their results - versus having to wait two times a year to get their results - they can review them in real time. They're also able to instantly receive their schedules versus having to manually send them via an Excel grid. It's also able to distinguish what type of guide we are using.