With Cleo Integration Cloud, the engine at the heart is all about business process automation. That's a little different from some of the legacy technologies that are out there, and that's the process. And that's what Cleo captures. And it's the process that gives companies their differentiation. One of the reasons that there's value to be added because two different companies can use CIC and can engage with Corsica, but end up with two totally different outcomes that match their business. Right? And that's where there's true value. Welcome back to Unraveling IT Expert Tech Talks. I'm Peter Rodenhauser, Chief Revenue Officer at Corsica Technologies. And today, we're taking a hard look at what it really means to be a great partner in the digital supply chain era. If you've ever tried to manage business relationship that spans departments, systems, and continents, you know it's not just about contracts and KPIs. It's about trust, ownership, and the art of keeping promises. In today's interconnected world, relationship management isn't just a buzzword. It's the backbone of growth and resilience. Joining me today is Frank Kenney, who leads market strategy and industry solutions at Cleo. Frank's seen firsthand how the right approach to relationship management can transform not just supply chains, but entire business models. So today, we'll uncover how effective relationship management transforms business partnerships, streamlines operations, and drives growth in today's interconnected digital landscape. Whether you're a supply chain professional, a business leader, or someone who's tired of chasing down answers across departments, this episode is for you. Let's jump in. Relationship management, that's a big topic. So, you know, maybe maybe we start there around a definition of, you know, what what does that mean in the realm of supply chain and ecosystem integration? Yeah. I I I think that it's always very helpful to think about any IT terms, and, you know, this is what frustrates me about all of the discussion around AI, but that's another podcast. Right? Whenever you think about any IT term or any IT trend or anything else like that, relationship management or anything, I think it's important to relate it back to the real world, the world that we live in. In any relationship between two individuals, two companies, or whatever, every relationship is based on a set of expectations. I expect you to do this and and carry yourself this way. You expect me to do something and carry myself that way. And in IT, the relationships are also they also have expectations. So you may have a retailer that says, well, I expect things to be on time within an hour of drop off. Right? And you can't come more than an hour before. You can arrive more than an hour after. That kind of thing. Right? And I also expect what you told me you were shipping me, I expect that to be what shipped. So this OTIP on time in full is a perfect example of an expectation that you'll find retailers have from their suppliers. Now there are other types of expectations, expectations on everything from where you're sourcing. Are you sourcing ethically? How are you pricing? Are you you're not gonna take advantage of, you know, some weather event that's happening and gouging it and those types of things. There are also expectations around privacy and the things that you're doing. But in a nutshell, when we talk about relationship management, we talk about the collection of those expectations and ensuring that you meet the collection of those expectations. On one hand, you wanna meet those expectations because a happier partner is a partner that buys more. Right? And that's when you get into things like NPS scores and, you know, how happy are my customers with me. They they buy more. Those things do matter. Those surveys do matter because that tells them where to fit and where they may be slipping. From a very fiscal perspective, the lack of compliance to an expectation, right, or the violation of that expectation usually results in chargebacks, which is a wonderful process in which the money that you owe someone, you can actually lower the amount that you owe someone by charging them a fee because they didn't meet those expectations, chargebacks. And if you think about retail CPG and you think about how tiny those margins are, you don't want too many chargebacks because you lose a good customer and they're paying you just what you spent, so it really hurts the pockets. So the idea of relationship management from an IT perspective starts to become a very top level consideration as it is the representation of the relationship you have with your buyers or your sellers. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you bring up, you know, chargebacks. When I when I first got into the data integration space back in the early two thousands, I was doing implementations for, you know, retail suppliers. I learned about chargebacks very quickly. In in terms of what they mean in the business and and how to avoid them. And, you know, in in the realm of relationship management, you know, I I think in today's world, it's it's one aspect of the relationship. Right? And and that to me is is what I've seen evolve. I mean, you know, in chargebacks, it's a rather draconian way of of managing a vendor. Maybe an important way. You know, I I think some some looked at it as maybe a revenue source or a discount source. But some were truly looking at it as a way to to drive, you know, compliance. And and I think, you know, compliance is a is a big is a big part of this, you know, relationship management as as well. As data integration and and and supply chains have evolved and and become more digital, how are you seeing that change and and evolve relationship management? When I'm tracking compliance to a set of expectations, when I've tracked enough, I can start to establish trends, and I can start to establish, well, what are the habits and what's being done. I can pull efficiency out of that. Right? Or sometimes I don't have to pull efficiency. I can change what my expectations are. So especially in any sophisticated supply chain, I'm going to have multiple suppliers. And there are gonna be some suppliers I use for some things and some suppliers I use in other situations. I think situation that that's currently happening in in in the US is a perfect example of that. You know, we've watched tariffs be very high when it comes to doing business with China, and at the same time, in in other nations and in Asia, those tariffs are lower. So you're buying the same thing, but maybe you'll buy from that partner. And maybe that partner, you can't hold to a higher standard because, you know, maybe the the the port situation or the logistics situation that's happening in country, in places like Vietnam or Laos or or, you know, some of some of the countries that may not be as logistics savvy as, you know, what you're seeing in China. Right? So the expectations change, but you can start to address the fragility of supply chain that that that you can start to achieve agility as things change in the tariff situation and also understand what that impact is gonna be because you've been measuring compliance to a relationship. You've been measuring what are the things typically they do. They can't help it. It's always x amount of time late. They can't help it. It's always ten units short. You can start to establish those things. And I I tend to think, Peter, when you're dealing with expectations, you're not dealing with good or bad. They just are. Because if I know this, then I can have a conversation with the consumer that this is going to occur. So it's not a matter of of of good or bad, and I agree with you, chargebacks, kind of an old way of thinking. Right? Because then compliance becomes a bad dirty word, and and I can't use it to give myself strategic differentiation. I can't use it to really sell myself in a better way or or say I'm a better partner, etcetera. But relationship management and compliance and expectations, again, not good or bad. They're just new data inputs that you can use to get the most out of your supply chain and have the supply chains that you wanna build are predictable, are consistent, are dependable. And to achieve all of that, you need the same thing. You need to understand what's going to happen. You need a good prediction of what's gonna happen, good, better, and different. So relationship management is, I think, another set of data that you can use to improve relationships and and improve the facilitation of commerce. Yeah. I I I couldn't agree more. And I I I wanna get into how the the Cleo platform, Cleo Integration platform really addresses it and powers customers. It's it's more rigid. But, you know, at Corsica, the approach that we've taken and and going to market with is is to help its size organizations manage their data integration environments. And and, of course, we struck a partnership with Cleo about a year ago, and and it's been great. And, you know, something I've I've noticed as as supply chain and the integration has evolved from what I would call a traditional, you know, linear model, right, where where you have, you know, your your supplier, distributor, manufacturer out to the retailer. It's much more network now. It's it's much more dynamic. And, you know, I'm I'm seeing the the management of that dynamic network much more feasible in the the Cleo platform itself for for our customers as we've transitioned over to more legacy traditional EDI, you know, software applications into the Cleo Integration Cloud. So as it relates to to relationship management, can can you talk a little bit about how the Cleo Integration Cloud is is addressing that and and really empowering the customers to take advantage of. Because I'm I'm seeing what we're seeing for our customers, we onboard them, is that their eyes are getting very big and and open to the art of the possible. Yeah. I thank you for that. And and, you know, again, congratulations to both teams for, you know, what has been a successful partnership. At the heart of what we have here at Cleo with Cleo Integration Cloud, the heart, the engine at the heart, is all about business process automation. That's a little different from some of the legacy technologies that are out there. Legacy B2B technologies have always concentrated on doing field level, EDI level transformation. So this is my namespace, and I'm gonna pull from here and put it to here. This is my delivery date, so I'm gonna pull it from this document and put put it to here. And I think that that's okay, and that was very necessary, and maybe they pushed it to some a s two somewhere. And but when you start to think about all aspects of everything from the transformation, if this is here, then do this. Right? That's a microflow. And you start to think about, well, with this purchase order, there needs to be an acknowledgment. So now you have a very explicit process that exists. And after the acknowledgment, there may be some type of status update. And then after that, there may be some type of inventory instruction. Hey. Pull this and and do that. And then after that, there may be some type of load tendering. Alright. Let's get the truck in there. I mean, status update, status update, status update. And then you have delivery and proof of delivery with the BOL. Of course, I'm and I jumped over. There's an advanced shipping notice somewhere. And then that leads to a set of invoices. And and that's the process. Right? And that's what Cleo captures. And it's the process that gives companies their differentiation. And so we have an incredible tool. Corsica has the knowledge, the best practices, and the expertise. So we've just given you a more flexible and more agile tool for you to ask your customers questions that they're not used to being asked about things like, okay. What happens if this doesn't work? Well, we can build an exception for that. Right? And we can build an exception for those exceptions. Oh, what happens when you have to go take a look at, I don't know, a credit score? Well, Corsica can take that transaction, and because it's a set of flows, build another flow that goes out to one of the credit scoring agencies for for logistics, like a carrier for four eleven to find out what the status is. Or it could go to, you know, a Hoover or an Equifax or whatever to find out a credit score of an organization, and then bring that back in and include that in the package that goes to an ERP. So you can customize processes that give your customer uniqueness because of the extensibility of of CIC, and and because CIC is more so focused on the process, right, every aspect of the the process, which includes integrating two points because that's how you build the process out. So I I think that's one of the reasons that we're seeing success and one of the reasons that there's value to be added because two different companies can use CIC and can engage with Corsica, but end up with two totally different outcomes that match their business. Right? And that's where there's true value. What has given us to relationship manager, which is really, really interesting, is because of the way our platform works, we can track volume. We can track how many of these processes, how many of these purchase orders have you taken in and have you done, and there's value to that. And because we have processes that do some transformation, right, we can understand and pick out those processes that represent physical values like units or more important money. So this purchase order is this much, is worth this much. These purchase orders from this partner that came in today have a value of this much attached to them. And that's incredibly helpful when you think about from a sales perspective. That's incredibly helpful when you think about from a handling perspective or when you do have exceptions, you know, how severe is is that exception that you need to handle. So volume and value, but also disposition in terms of did the process execute or did it not execute? And that's incredibly important, especially when you're talking about issue resolution and you talk about operations and where should I start to look for why things didn't happen? And if I can get a disposition before my customer knows that it didn't happen, then I proactively can let them know, and that is incredibly valuable. And then finally, because we can see the time it takes from one event to another event, because we can see that value of time, we can now say, okay, how long should it take? And our technology allows you to go in and customize this is how long it needs to take. And if it takes longer than that, let me know. Execute this process. Right? And if it's not, then it's all green across the board. And the opportunity to move that scale so that you have an expectation of how long that process should execute. And so we're talking about how long does it take from the time a purchase order comes in to the time you send out a shipping notice? How long does it take from the time that you get a load tender that you ship out an acknowledgement? Additionally, if you've got a company that says, I need a carrier check because carrying automotive parts, I need a carrier check that happens every fifteen minutes because ultimately, this part is gonna end up going to a mechanic and that person is sitting in the waiting room, so we need to know where that part is. I need a carrier check every ten minutes. You have the opportunity to see that, hey. It's coming up to eight minutes, and we haven't done this. We need to do that. We need to take action so you can be very proactive. Again, that's all around managing the the relationship. But this idea that we understand volume, we understand value, we understand disposition, and we understand time because we're built on processes is very, very, very useful, and it's something our our customers are finding differentiated and and something that really helps them become indispensable to their customers. That's so awesome to hear because I you know, when we think about cloud platforms and cloud products, you know, so so much has been made. And I think in the initial moves to to the cloud was around, you know, one of the v's that you mentioned, visibility. But, you know, everything you articulating there is about how the Cleo Integration Cloud or or the CIC is driving value. Driving value is something so you know, what historically has been so straightforward as a as a business transaction. Maybe it's purchase rate. It's an invoice. Maybe it's a ship notice. You're talking about, you know, through the platform, packaging up, delivering more value. And the power of that is as a supplier in in the supply chain ecosystem. Now you're not just checking the box saying, sure, manufacturer. I can provide you the these transactions electronically. Not only can I do that, but I can package up, provide more value? You know, as as we close out here, Frank, you know, one one of the things you mentioned are beginning, I wanna bring it back to, you know, vendor score carding and and and chargebacks. As you talk about the power of of the CIC, how is the platform helping, and and relationship management really helping Cleo customers manage and and track that that compliance and and maybe even violations of of some of those support. I would love to tell you a great IT answer that we're feeding information to the service desk and we you know, our customers are proactively able to jump in front of things and and make things happen and keep customers happy. And that is certainly a use case that our customers have found value. But, you know, interestingly, Peter, they found value in very specific ways, sales. So a sales manager that goes into CIC and goes into our relationship manager can very, very quickly see what's the volume and what's the value of things that are currently in the system that may not be processed by the ERP, but that are coming into the system. And, you know, I I expected $10,000 worth of orders, and there's only $5,000, and it's 12 o'clock. Maybe I should get on the phone. Right? Or going back in, and I'm getting a status update, and I'm pulling it back into my TMS, and I can see that this truck is going to be late. And the truck's not supposed to get there tomorrow, but I can see it's gonna be late. So maybe I can call and get an exemption from that violation so that it doesn't cost. And it's very interesting. You and I both know that the finance team only likes to get involved when it comes to signing on, you know, these deals and signing statements of work. Finance team wants to get involved with, hey. We were just told that there is chargebacks for these ten transactions, and there's nothing that we see in the ERP that would reflect that. Let's go back and let's see how long did these processes take. Did we actually break something? And it becomes almost a system of record for what's really happened. Yeah. Peter, the story I like to tell is back when we had landline telephones in our houses, and, you know, this is for the younger people, we used to have to pay for long distance. Right? It used to be really expensive. And I was out on a I went out on a a business trip, I took my family, and I came back, and I had a huge long distance bill. And I called the phone company, and I said, hey. You know, I've got a thousand dollars worth of calls that were made from my house. There was nobody here, and, you know, I I need them taken off. And you hear the clicking, the, you know, the tapping, and she goes, I'm sorry, mister Kenny. I'm showing that those calls did originate in your house. And I said, well, I can assure you no one was in my house, so they did not. And she said to me, sure. I'll give you a second to pull up your records of what happened, and then we can compare it to ours. And I said, I have no record of what happened because it didn't happen, and I have no I I understand what you're talking about. So the fun part about chargebacks that we've seen is that most companies are told that they have chargebacks. They have no way of proving that they didn't have them. And that has been the key use case for suppliers and suppliers of services, like carriers and brokers, suppliers of of products, raw goods. The biggest use case for our product is proving that they are compliant and being able to say to their finance team when the finance team goes and says, hey. This bill and this receipt, this purchase order, this this this invoice is not making sense, or this remittance is not making sense. They're saying we have chargebacks. No. Here is a an absolute independent system that we can rely on. We can fight those things. And that again, I'd love to tell you that it's IT, but it's other folks in the organization. We are giving the suppliers of these services in the supply chain a way to ensure that they're just not blindly being charged by an error because I think you know and you've been in business long enough that chargebacks sometimes are a profit center. Right? You try to get as much as you possibly can get. You know? That's why you're staffed accordingly. We're bringing some of that back into focus, and and that's been some of the rewarding stuff that we've been doing with relationships. Well, that's huge, Frank. I mean, that that's that's so huge because, again, we're winding the clock twenty years ago. Right? And, you know, a a chargeback notice would come in, and and you'd have the finance team come over to the EDI administrator and say, hey. You know, we we we owe this this retailer this amount of money because they're saying we didn't provide, you know, this data. And it would take the EDI administrator, had to be, you know, fluent in parsing and understanding x twelve or any fact, whatever the standard was, be able to read it and be able to say, you know, yeah, your name on on whether or was set. Maybe they have communication lines. What you're talking about, you're talking about empowering that audience, even enabling them to actually go in and and look at the data themselves. So that that's that's absolutely absolutely huge. That's huge. You and and the Cleo team, you know, provide that. It's it's really, really cool. I know I I said I was gonna wrap up with that topic, but no podcast would be complete in in 2025, '26, without talking about what technology topic, Frank? AI. So let's let's talk about, you know, how how is AI going to, in in your opinion, going to impact and change relationship management in in in the supply chain? I think the challenge that that, you know, there there are a couple of things that that are happening with AI because we're seeing it all over the supply chain. There's certainly the usage of AI, the way that Cleo is using it, us quickly resolve tickets and resolve things and provide to our customers. They have full control of the configuration and the operation of our cloud based platform, and and that's incredibly unique. But things happen. Hiccups happen. Certificates don't get refreshed and updated by partners. Right? They get revoked. Someone spills coffee on the SAP server. Right? Those types of things happen, and you get tickets. And you look at this, and it's very technical. And when you can start to use AI to make it human readable, but even more importantly, you a set of solutions that are based on thousands and thousands and thousands of similar situations on how to resolve some of these things in a step by step, very executable way. AI has really just decreased the amount of calls that we're getting into our service center, our help desk, and the the types of calls that we're getting in are the types of calls we should be getting in that are multidimensional, have a lot of different contacts, and and in many cases, have a time constraint because you're dealing with a high priority customer that you have a strong relationship with. So I I love the use of AI for for that. I think that always with supply chain and forecasting and those things, and I think that we've had predictive AI for quite a while, and we've been able to do that. I'm one that I believe there are a lot of other things that we have to start to think about when we think about, especially, agentic AI in the document exchange or the selling and and the buying process. AI is a technology that wants to learn, that wants to consume, that wants to understand. And so today, EDI X12 based inventory request, how much do you have in stock, is a very structured request, and you get a very, very structured answer. An AI agent asking you the same question is going to get more information by asking your one AI agent talking to another AI agent is going to ask much more much more general set of questions to not only understand the stock, but understand maybe some other key attributes And may ask you just as a matter of query as opposed to asking you to you know, because I'm getting ready to send a purchase order. I'm asking you because once a day, I'm supposed to ask you because I wanna track your trend. Right? So I may be asking you multiple times a day. I think that one of the things and this is the same thing that we had to figure out with APIs. One of the things we have to start to think about is governance. So the 2026, when I think about AI, I think about the conversations that customers are gonna have around we need to probably hold on to our data a little bit tighter. We need to ensure that we are governing the rules of engagement in a more consistent way. I think we'll see a lot more MCP type MCP based environments to at least limit and authenticate and control and meter these interactions with AI agents so that we are very well aware that we have someone that is hitting hitting us up fifteen times a day asking for inventory. And it could be a partner that may have the best intentions, or it could be a partner that is modeling out our secret sauce, our supply chain, and monitoring out monitoring out when they can get best pricing because that is how we wanna start to look at generative AI to start to get into that that world. So, you know, as Gartner and the rest of the analyst firms, you know, predict, we're kind of coming to the the trough of disillusionment where that we're going down the end where we're trying to say, well, it won't do everything for us, and it can't make toast. Right? That kind of thing until we start to figure out where we can be productive and get to that productivity, and that takes time. In the supply chain, it's going to rapidly head down, and I think that we're going to see the result of lots of heavy AI uses that are being used in an uncontrolled and ungoverned way, we're gonna see some surprising impacts to supply chains of of maybe folks that we thought had a tighter supply chain and who are their suppliers for different components, different electrical components, different car components, different battery components, all of those things start to become much more public. Or we start to see the clone of those things. You start to be able to go to different marketplaces and get the same product that was sourced with the same with the same materials that made it assembled much, much cheaper so you get a different type of knockoff because of all of the shenanigans that can go into reverse engineering your supply chain. So I think companies need to start to think about, you know, what is truly the value of my product? The value of my product is not only how I build my product, right, how I build a a YETI cup, but it's also the the materials that I use to build it and the pieces of the material and the the composite alloys that I get from the different materials. When you can start to reverse engineer those types of things, then a huge chunk of your differentiation starts to be out there in the wild. So, you know, I think the conversation that we talk about AI is AI and governance, and how do we achieve that? And the genie is already out of the bottle. So not just how do I stop everyone in my company from using ChatGPT and Copilot and Gemini, but now it's how do I stop these agents from my bonafide buyers from doing too much? How do I stop giving them too much? Right? Because I don't want my my secret sauce to accidentally slip out. And that requires us to start to look at our supply chains and how we do business and how we manage relationships as truly being secret sauce. Yeah. It's it's interesting you say that, Frank, because, you know, and and thinking about AI and AI governance, we almost have to go back to data governance, which which most companies have data governance place, not not all, but, you know, most do. But but how we look at data governance is a little bit different. Right? Because who is accessing the data? Well, we as as people, maybe there were some, you know, system accounts. Well, now those system accounts are actually, you know, AI agents, say, that are are not the same as a programmatic. So, you know, going back to that data governance model and making sure that it's like, you're arguing that you know, making sure that that it's tight on to protect that data because once that data is in the hands of the AI agents that are, you know, less controlled, then, you know, then the genie is truly out of the bottle. Right? Yeah. Peter, think about it from this perspective. If Twitter or X and Reddit said no more free API connections because our business model is built around advertisement, and the APIs give too much information with no advertisement. So when you have these two huge social platforms, shut those interfaces down. Well, guess what? More often than not, those are the same interfaces that agentic AI will leverage. And so we hear about X and we hear about Reddit, but I'm gonna ask every supplier that's out there. Right? And we know there are millions of them. All of the APIs that you've opened up and all of the AI initiatives that you have in place, imagine if companies that that don't even realize that their agents are doing it, they're just trying to get some result. Imagine if you're letting your IP slip through there, the way that you make money slipping slip through there. So it happens with APIs and, you know, magnify that times a thousand, and that's the danger of agentic AI. It's not bad, but you know as well as I do, Peter, anything ungoverned is going to be an issue because it is going to impact your money. It's going to impact your revenue and what your value can be because it's gonna diminish it when everybody can do the same thing that you do. Yeah. It's fascinating when you think about through the lens that you just provided, which is through the entire supply chain, which is massive, almost almost infinite in in nature. It's amazing and scary all at the same time. Yeah. Well well, Frank, this has been an awesome conversation. So thank you so much for for taking the time to chat with us today. And Thanks for being a great partner. Thanks for continuing to to be a great partner in in doing this stuff for our joint customers. I I I love the opportunity to reach people that we don't traditionally reach from both sides. So thank you for, this initiative. Really appreciate it. Likewise. Appreciate it. Alright. Thanks, Frank. That's a wrap for today's special episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. Huge thanks and shout out to Frank Kenney from Cleo for sharing his insights and helping us rethink what it means to be a great partner in a digital supply chain era. If there's one thing to take away, it's that relationship management isn't just about technology or tools. It's about strategy, ownership, and building partnerships that last. The companies that get this right aren't just more resilient. They're more innovative, more agile, and better positioned for growth. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with your team, and leave us a review. It helps more leaders discover the show. And remember, technology moves fast, but great partnerships move faster. I'm Peter Rodenhauser, and this has been Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. See you next time.
