However, given our market opportunity, you should expect that Symbiotic will continue to modestly expand both of those lines looking forward as we scale our operations. And that will be in contrast to what we expect to be much stronger revenue growth. So, that’s the implicit high operating leverage we see in the business.
Operator: Our next question will come from the line of Derek Soderberg from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.
Derek Soderberg: So I think you are really on an ongoing basis, finding areas where you can speed up the deployment time lines. Can you talk maybe a little bit about where along the project you’re seeing — you’re finding ways to sort of speed up that process? And maybe if you could just quantify how long the average deployment takes at this point?
Tom Ernst: Maybe I’ll start with the quantification. And Rick, do you want to talk about some of the things that we see we can do over the long run. Derek, when we first became a public company. And we talked about those systems we are starting — we expect it to be around two years or so in terms of from the start of a project logo. We actually turned it up and customer took acceptance and began ramping full usage. Those first systems that actually went live were actually north of 2.5 years. And so what we’re experiencing now though is that where we’re hitting effectively on these systems or in or are going to hit on that two-year time frame and the systems that we’re rolling out now we expect to be under 22 months. So what we’re seeing progress in is we’re carving days out and occasional innovations are carving weeks out.
But we continue to see over the long run that there’s meaningful opportunities not only from a process standpoint or a partnership with endpoint, but from technology insertion that we can do over the long run that can meaningfully carve into that. So we look to try to drive that under 22 months total deployment time to — our long audacious goal is to get it under six months over the long, long run. But Rick, you want to talk about some of the things that we can do.
Rick Cohen: Yes. So I mean, some of the things that we’re doing is that as we — as our volume has increased, and that we’re able to continuously produce instead of starting and stopping. And so two things have happened our suppliers are getting better. We’re building and auditing quality into the products at the factory where they’re being built. And so that reduces the amount of inspection and installation time on site. And that’s a very powerful thing for us. And the other thing is that we’re able to just — we’re in the process now of building up just continuous flow of manufacturing so that we’re not building for specific sites. So we have a pretty good backlog. We have good visibility as to where it is. And so, we’re starting to build ahead not a lot ahead, but I had enough so that when we deploy at a site, we can sequence everything much more accurately than we could before.
And the other thing that’s happened, a lot of people have talked about it is we’re post-COVID now the supply chains are a little more stable. We’re still very proactive about making sure that we protect our supply chain, and we have multiple sources. But it’s just — we’re just getting much better at it, and we’re getting — and our suppliers are getting much better at manufacturing.
Derek Soderberg: Got it. Well, really appreciate the detail. And then as a follow-up, just as it relates to your outsourcing initiative, it sounds like the plan is to slowly keep expanding that network on an ongoing basis. But how many systems do you think today you can sort of concurrently deploy before augmenting or expanding that supplier base? I mean can you get to 50 or 60 with the current supply base? Can you help us sort of quantify the sort of that capacity that you’re at today that would be helpful?
Rick Cohen: So Derek, before we continue expanding our network today, we feel that we’ve already solved for growth for the coming two to three years in terms of our capacity of our existing network. So what we’re doing is actually solving for even longer-term growth and just creating a healthy level of innovation and competition and the increase in that data flow that we have to our network today.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Greg Palm from Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.
Greg Palm: Tom, congrats again on the retirement, and Carol, welcome to the Board.
Tom Ernst: Thank you, Greg.
Greg Palm: I guess really good results, not a lot to really pick up. So I guess I’ll maybe just choose one thing that I thought maybe could have been a little bit better. Systems gross margin I think you mentioned based on our math, up slightly quarter-over-quarter, even though a pretty big jump in revenues. What were we headwinds relative to what you saw in Q3 from a cost absorption standpoint? I mean I know it’s lumpy and over time, it goes up, but was maybe thinking it could have been a little bit better just based on the revenue jump.
Rick Cohen: Yes. Actually, Greg, we see a very ripe opportunity to be much more efficient in the cost and delivery of our systems. Some of those costs, our customers bear and many of the costs our customers don’t bear and these are the ones that you’re asking about. And so we’ve made the conscious choice to grow as fast as we are to put as much innovation as we have out in the field as we have — but very clearly, we spend a lot of our time as an executive team here at this company focused on exactly the point of your question, why do we have wasteful and inefficient and redundant costs at the gross margin line? And we know the cost because we’re moving so fast, but that is a focus of our intent effort as a team. And so I think as we’ve begun to plan process partner network and what we do as a leadership team, there are very clear and tangible things that are kind of just highly inefficient that flow into our gross margin line that we think we can improve on over time.
