AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Gregory Woods: Yes. And one of the biggest benefits is having it integrated amongst our different operations. So here in West Warwick, we’re very far through the process. It’s now a matter of kind of optimizing processes. We kicked it off very rapidly at Astro Machine because it’s here, domestic, it’s a smaller operation. So we expect to have that one done probably by the October kind of time frame. So that’s moving very quickly. And then we’ll move directly to the branch locations, Canada, U.K., France and Germany. Have different instances of NetSuite that they’ve had over time. So we just need to consolidate all of those, which that will be the focus after Astro Machine. So getting everyone on the same system clears up a fair amount of inefficiencies that we have to deal with mainly in the financial reporting side of the business.

But the CRM systems, having those integrated, because that’s also part of NetSuite, that just helps the whole sales and marketing team know globally what’s going on instantaneously.

Samir Patel: Got you. And I guess I’m excited to hear about e-commerce next time but probably wait for more data. As far as…

Gregory Woods: If you want to check it out, you were — was just going to say, just go to our AstroNova Product ID site and click on the Shop button, and you can explore it on your own.

Samir Patel: I will do that. As far as M&A, I mean, I know timing is kind of not within your control, but do you want to talk about the pipeline? Or are you seeing more opportunities on the Test & Measurement side, the Product ID side, both of them?

Gregory Woods: Yes. So it’s pretty good in terms of a number of elements. We typically have a handful — I’d say, have about 4 to 6 things that we’re looking at seriously both in Test & Measurement segment and in the Product ID segment. And there’s a few that look interesting. So it’s — you never know that, right? So it looks interesting. You start talking. And if we don’t like what we see, we’ll walk away. And you can see we’re kind of conservative in the type of deals we do. So obviously, if we find — if we can get one of those closely to the parameters we have for Astro Machine, we’ll be jumping on it. And we’ll have — you’ve heard about what’s going on with the balance sheet. So we should be in a good position to do a nice deal later in the year if we can get the right one vetted out from our diligence efforts.

Samir Patel: Okay. And Greg, I actually did what you said. I am on the e-commerce website. I’m only seeing the ability to buy printers and presses. Am I missing sort of the supplies component of that? Or is that a part of the website?

Gregory Woods: No, you can go in there. You can buy a label — all different labels. You actually can buy them if you were…

Samir Patel: Okay. I see it now.

Gregory Woods: Unfortunately, you bought a competitor printer. You can actually buy the label for that printer too to get better results.

Operator: Our next question comes from George Melas from MKH Management.

George Melas: A follow-up on Thomas Spiro’s questions about the quality issue. It clearly affected machines that are in the field. So it impacts supply sales. Did it also impact hardware sales? Was it just hard to sell the Trojan machines given the issues that you were having?