Erik Gershwind: Yes, Ryan, look, I think you hit the punch line, which is basically it’s sort of the most extreme form we have around our solutions offering of being a Mission Critical partner with the customer. We’re actually putting one or more full-time people inside of our customer. Typically Ryan, this is — this is also — it’s more than just a person, it’s accompanied by inventory management system, whether that’s vending or VMI, it’s accompanied by a regular cadence of visits and audits from our technical folks doing plant improvement reviews. But the cornerstone is definitely that we’re putting people in full time. What we’re seeing Ryan is, high value-add for the customer, particularly now the labor shortage is still as extreme as ever.
And so all of our customers, this is sort of one of the two or three biggest things we hear at almost every customer visit. So we’re helping satisfy a big need there by putting our people inside. And what it does and when our people are in there, they’re doing everything from procurement to helping out with operations and improvements and it’s freeing up our customers labor to focus on higher value add activities on the manufacturing process. So the win for the customer is clear. The win for MSC has been clear. Typically what we see, Ryan, when we put a program in place, either this will be in the case of a brand new customer, where it’s part of our pitch or an existing customer, where there is a share of wallet capture. And we see — in the one to two years that follows program inception, a really healthy growth rate, extremely high retention rates and you can imagine that the profitability of the program really improves as we start to leverage the fixed costs on volume.
So it has — it’s been exploding. Based on macro and micro factors again, I would expect it to continue growing at a healthy clip.
Ryan Merkel: Appreciate that. That’s helpful. And then you mentioned continuous improvement will be part of the DNA and the Mission Critical has gone very well. Can you just give us some examples of how you’re thinking about that? And I don’t know if you want to give a soft goal today, but how might that look going forward?
Kristen Actis-Grande: Yes, I can take that one, Ryan. So we’ve been doing a lot of work to improve execution up to this point of Mission Critical. But I’d say it’s only recently where we’ve really shifted, really trying to educate the organization on lean principles and drive continuous improvement philosophies through the company and we’re definitely in the early innings of that effort. One thing I’ll add that I’m really energized by having our new COO on board, who is a huge believer in these concepts and she is going to be a great partner in helping us drive this through the organization going forward. So, I would hesitate to put a number on it again at this point, but I really see it being the engine for Mission Critical 2.0, whether you’re talking about targeting OpEx savings, whether you’re talking about targeting cost of goods sold improvements, working capital improvements, this kind of becomes the mechanism or the motor that fuels all of that.
Early wins we’ve had, I’d say a lot of the work that we’ve been doing to unlock working capital through the value streams right now have come this way. But again, it’s really early innings of what a more energized and excited by is there’s a ton of parts of the organization that you’re not really seeing any material benefit yielding yet. So, I’m really excited about this and I think it’s a big step in the future of MSC and Mission Critical 2.0 specifically.
