Name: Building a Smarter Digital Shelf: Lessons Learned
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T16:16:07.082Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Building a Smarter Digital Shelf: Lessons Learned

Transcript for "Building a Smarter Digital Shelf: Lessons Learned": Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining our webinar today on building a smarter digital shelf and the lessons learned from our speakers. Today, we have Maya Ramboi, the director of digital shelf and channel strategies from Skoll Specialty, and Kelly Lacroix, the digital asset manager at Skoll Specialty as well, and myself, Vody Yoon from Aprimo, VP of marketing, and our co moderator, Robin Parisi, Adavire, the director of digital strategy. So very excited that Primo and school Adavire, can, be a part of this session as we work very closely on this implementation and are thrilled to share school specialty success story with you all. And, before we kick off, the conversation, there are a few housekeeping items to go over. Please make sure to submit any questions you have throughout the session in the q and a box, and we will answer as many as we can get to you at the end of the session to follow-up with those who we may not get to at the end. And in regards to agenda for today's session, we'll go over introduction of each of the organizations and also share where, school shift specialty story begins, the impacts, and the results they've seen, and then also, of course, go over the questions for the panelists and then wrap up by talking about the takeaways in the end and also what's on the road map for everybody next. So quick overview about each of the organizations, that we are part of and represent. So School Specialty have been doing amazing work supporting schools for over sixty years with everything from classroom supplies, furniture, stem, arts, curriculum, professional development. They are doing some amazing work and, paving the path for the next generation of and, Aprimo ourselves, we're recognized as the leading vendor for innovation as a smart digital asset management solution. So everything from, like, future proofing approach to content strategy, planning, collaboration, personalization, and delivery. And Avaya is the leading provider of our DAM Consulting, DAM Consulting, vendor selection, implementation, migration, and optimization services. Very proud to announce that Avaya was nominated the partner of the year, with a primo for 2022, 2023, and also this year, 2025. So transitioning into the really great meaty part of what everybody's really interested in, I will let Robin take over and introduce something that, a quick overview of what we'll gather from this webinar. Thank you, Lily. We're really excited to be here with School Specialty. We've had a long journey together, and that was very fruitful for all, learned a lot. So what we want you to walk away with from this web webinar is know when to pivot, how you can listen, and how touch points your organizations to that you can pivot, and how to manage that. Engage and align how to strategically drive across your organization and then achieving operational fitness. Building those muscles that you're going to keep fit on to move forward. So let's jump in. Is everybody ready? Yes. So, Maya and Kelly, thank you for being here. And you know, having stepped due to school specialty with a program that was ongoing and took a lot of effort to be approved and was really run by IT and a lot of different, you know, professional services, existing, you know, technologies. You know, how is that to be brought in to an implementation that was basically in flight? Yeah. I think, Kelly and I both entered, the org at different times, both of us during, in flight process of this journey. Mine was quite a bit earlier, because as a part of standing up dam, a Primo dam, which was, by the way, School of Specialty's very first dam. We did not have one before this time. So that was part of a major digital transformation for the company. And as a part of that, our company, which has historically been a catalog company, leadership decided that we really wanted to have a more digital focus. And so with that, we approached it from the standpoint of people, process, and technology. You'll probably hear me say that a few times throughout this discussion. And, really, it was, you know, I was brought into the organization to kind of guide a lot of that. Some of these, I'll say vendor interviews were underway when I joined the organization, but I was fortunate enough to be part of doing some of that vendor selection, which included both a Primo as well as Avaya as their implementation partner, and then kind of, you know, move forward from there. I'll I'll actually let Kelly speak just a little bit about what part of the time she was brought into the to the organization a little bit later and maybe, in hindsight, a little little later than me. Yes. Thank you, Maya. So, yes, as Maya said, I was brought in a little bit later. I came in in, oh, gosh. I have to remember my years. March 2024? Yes. And, so I came in after DAM was already implemented and, migration of assets had already occurred. So but it was it was really great. And, I was able to kinda jump right in and start learning about school specialty and the dam and kind of kicking off that, general governance, model, once I once I stepped in as dam manager. So, yep, that was really great. So would you say bringing in subject matter experts early on would be something you'd recommend? Or do you think, you know, just making sure they're brought on at all is the most important thing? I mean, definitely, you're gonna need a dam manager if you're gonna be implementing a dam, or even transitioning from an existing one. But, in in our experience, definitely would have wanted Kelly to join the organization upfront to be part of the discovery, the requirements gathering, all of that part of the process. I think we as an organization, the handful of us that had had experience working in dams before, able to limp along and and get us into a space that we feel comfortable, but, we definitely had some things to revisit once Kelly was brought on board. And thankfully, like any technology, nothing has set it and forget it, so we were able to pivot and make adjustments along the way. Yeah. So I'll I'll do I'll I was gonna say I'll second that. I I wish I was brought on a little bit early with Miami, but yes. Definitely. But I think one thing that's remarkable and to take away from our audience is how to stay agile as you're getting the subject back to your experts in and as well as just the moments across merchandising, marketing, and digital shelf when you're doing a big lift in our entire organization. Maybe you can speak to what if it's some of the moments with Zach and team from IT and marketing folks and merch did they all happen at once? Or was it kind of what would pop up and say, yeah. We need about that. Yeah. I mean, to your point, you need to stay agile during an implementation like this, especially something that's, gonna be an enterprise tool across the organization, and especially in our case where a lot of folks hadn't been a part of using a dam before. So there was a lot of we don't know what we don't know. And even with a great partner like Avaya guiding us along the way, Aprimo's so flexible. And so there was a lot of conversation that you can set it up however you wanna set it up, but there was a lot of folks who were like, well, I don't even know what that means. So we had to we had to kind of get into a temporary state. We really led with our digital shelf team being the ones that had the most familiarity with utilizing a dam, and then brought marketing and merchandising along as well. And as the different parts of the organization became more intimately involved and, you know, learning a little bit more about things like naming conventions and all of that good stuff, we we definitely had to go back and revisit some decisions that we had previously made. As you can see on screen, we have a very complex tech stack when it comes to, all of our assets and, product data. And so during that process, we did pivot quite a number of times of how our assets and how our product data was gonna flow through the systems because I think at the beginning, our IT organization was kind of guiding those discussions because they understood maybe a little bit farther down the path than what the business did. But once we started to get a little bit farther, we had some inputs that maybe edited some of the flow of our product data and our assets within our systems. Yeah. I'm wondering to keep in mind too for the audience that what you're looking at is a comp state and all the pieces changed almost at once. So it was lifting all the infrastructure that existed, and River Sand was a legacy system brought forward that had undergone a lot of changes before the rest of the ecosystem caught up with it. So going back to, you know, what was merchandising as a about now we have a dam? You know, because moving from theoretical to hands on, what was the different group's moments? Did merchandise have something different from the marketing team? Most definitely. I think some of the big moments well, some of the more common moments across the organization were, having not had a dam, most folks were storing their assets in a way that they could find them again. And we really had to lead them through the change management of assets so other people could find them, not even knowing they existed. Right? So you wanna make sure that all of your assets are available to all of the users, not just the ones that added the assets to the dam. I think another, key learning for all of the teams was how often we were maybe creating, building, seeking out new assets, that we already had. You know, as we went through the migration, we found a lot of duplication in our assets because merchandising was getting assets from a vendor. Marketing was also getting assets from the vendor just from different people. Different parts of the organization were taking new product photography not knowing that we actually already had some of those, because I think a lot of parts of the organization, you know, I'll say in the merchandising area, for example, the assets that were on the site were what they mostly had access to, or were storing within their own files. So I think there was just a lot of efficiencies that happened once we all started moving together versus working in our own silos for our own purposes. Kelly, would you add to that? Definitely. Especially to Maya's, first point where everyone was kind of working with assets in their own silos. They they didn't know what all other team members have, and now we have this wonderful dam, that acts as, essentially like a a a central hub for all of our assets. And one of the kind of change managements, in that respect was kind of creating a metadata matters mindset, or maybe they hadn't been familiar with metadata before. They weren't really sure, well, why do I need to enter this information and kind of changing that mindset, to now think of assets instead of just how am I using them, how am I how is my department using them, but how how does the entire organization need to use these assets? So part of that change management is definitely kind of working with that mindset, getting out of kind of that siloed thinking and really kind of helping people to understand why metadata matters and, and then kind of creating, like, a an organizational wide viewpoint of these assets and why everyone needs to be able to locate them. Yep. You know, living in some theoretical to hands on in any implementation is difficult when nobody's used a dam or they have a dam that's still you know, not mature. It has changed dam has changed a lot over the years. What would you suggest as some of the things the company can do even if it their, you know, ecosystem isn't as complex to get from theoretical to hands on to that reality of what GAM can really do for you because you you don't know what you don't know as you just said a little bit ago. What are a couple of things you would recommend to our audience to do or to ask when they're in the theoretical to help push that along? Yeah. I think, our naming conventions conversation started pretty far down the path, and that is something I feel like we could have started, you know, prior to even vendor selection. We had multiple different departments using complete I mean, everyone had a naming convention. It wasn't like it was the wild, wild west, but it was it was each department was using their own naming convention. And that, to to come together on that was really challenging. And I think it wasn't that people didn't it wasn't that anyone was, like, you know, not trying to come along. It was just these kind of legacy ways of doing things that are are hard to break. I mean, everyone knows how hard change is. So, really starting those conversations earlier and help people understand the value. And I think, again, going back to something that I think Kelly and I both touched on is that we want this to be a partnership across all of the parts of the organization and be more efficient so that we're not creating duplicate assets because this department added it and this other department can't find it. And, again, never never pour intentions on the part of anyone within the organization. Just hard to change, something that you've been doing the same way for many, many years. But Well, I think complicated on that, Maya. I don't know if you wanna answer this, but the volume that is going on and how you're planning, you know, a year ahead of the lesson in some cases for your catalogs and how to get that to market. Do you think that added a layer of angst that, no. I have to do my job today. I can't break it, and, this change is hard for me to walk the bridge to. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, catalog building is a long process. Naming conventions, they're already in place. Another vendor partner that participates and and and helps us with building those catalogs had to be brought along as well. So it was a really, really long runway. And as you mentioned earlier, Robin, a lot of the things you're seeing on screen here were stood up at the same time. So we're trying to figure out which lever to pull when to make sure nothing breaks and everything goes smoothly because we were not only standing up at Primo DAM, but we were standing up Salsify as our syndication tool, and we are standing up Epicor as a product configurator. And everything is so intimately connected. Really, really challenging to pull it all together and make sure we are pulling the right levers at the right time. So, Lily, from your touch point on a primo drummers, what are early signals that in these kind of large major digital transformation projects have you seen that the audience might resonate with? Yeah. That's a great question, Robin. I think to sum it up, there's typically three top things, that become a kind of predisposition or signal for some digital transformation. And, Maya and Kelly highlighted it, initially too is the leadership team was the one that started talking about making some changes, and, that's pretty common. I feel the leadership mindset mindset shift in regards to talking less about the tools and, you know, how we need to actually, like, apply that to the strategic initiatives from a business standpoint and then understanding the gaps to then, achieving those strategic initiatives is something that pretty often and making sure that the internal team is getting the, tech stack that they need to help achieve those strategic initiatives that they have in place. And so I think it really starts with support from the the leadership team, and there's a lot of things that built to that point. And so the next few things that I typically see is when, an organization is in this point, this, scenario where the data pinpoints become very urgent. You know, if you start noticing fragmented content, the due lots of duplication, some type of, inconsistent data quality, and it becomes more costly for the organization and more time consuming for, the team members. And and in regards to actually implementing, or hindering the customer experience overall is when people typically work intrinsically, of, like, process changes. And I think the common challenge is that, like, when people have a challenge, they kind of find a workaround, and they, like, find a way to make it work. And that visibility is lost at times of, like, how big that challenge can be. For example, for, like, duplication, scenarios. Right? So I think at a certain point, there is a bubble that kind of pops a little bit to really high highlight that to the leadership team. And then the third thing is cross functional friction. You know, product marketing, legal, IT, they start kind of experiencing some bottlenecks and the delays in campaigns or product launches. That usually motivates, the leadership team to really kind of understand where can we improve these processes with the the tech that we currently have or tech that we'll need in the future. No. That's great. And it's a it's a good segue into how governance during the implementation process fits and is necessary. How you glow up, if you will, because we're all changing as we move together. And that was one thing at school specialty. Maya and Kelly, that was amazing at how we have representatives from every group, at least one or two that were the primary point of contact. But you also had full championship leadership. And then talk a little bit about how you created your governance structure and then how that morphed over time to even help you more. Yeah. I'll I'll, jump in here quick because we we started, what we call our dam council, pretty early on. And the dam council began with just some select leadership individuals across the different departments that were gonna be using the dam, in order to help guide buy in, adoption, etcetera, and start to serve up needs and requirements gathering. This dam this dam council also was instrumental in the interview process as we were looking for our dam manager because these folks were very intimately involved with the tool and how we were progressing forward. And fast forward through to today, and I'll let Kelly talk about the governance itself, but we have maintained that dam council that consists of both, members of leadership from each of the teams that utilize the dam, admins from each of the teams that utilize the dam, and then users as well so we can make sure that we get a really good cross section of folks involved in, you know, standing up new asset types or any other kind of business rules that change within the DAM. Mhmm. Yeah. Thank you, Maya. Yes. I was, very impressed with the dam council. When I came on, I thought it was an absolutely wonderful idea. It was a great cross section of different departments, different team. And like Maya said, we did expand it to, beyond SMEs and leadership to bring in some end users to get their perspectives. Right now, it's a biweekly meeting. So we have a regular cadence, which I believe is really important, because so many things change so fast in the world of digital asset management. Now, we, primarily kind of use this meeting to discuss, prioritize, review features, integrations, and enhancements, any touch points with end users on, any pain points that maybe they're currently experiencing or something new that they're reviewing that maybe they think can be handled a little bit better. We also are currently reviewing standards. And as Maya mentioned, we also use this meeting to go over naming conventions. You know, we kinda review and establish audit findings, as well, in this meeting. And we kinda we asked, our, you know, leadership and other members on this council also to help disseminate this, information back to the rest of their teams as well. So it's a great way to kinda get that information out there and then, you know, spread it across the rest of the user groups and information. So it's definitely a, it's definitely a group that helps manage change, and we kinda and it also helps to balance, different departmental needs and also help, avoid that siloed kind of usage of the dam. So would you attribute those, then during the implementation? I mean, you talked about that things were siloed, that the ecosystem, some of the the tools and systems you didn't have at all. Like, you didn't have a syndication engine, so Salsify was brought in. You didn't have a dam, dam was brought in. And then about that people process technology, do you think by shifting the implementation to from a team to a true digital council helped you be successful and get those higher health scores on a day to day basis, having people cohesively work together? Do Do you think that that was the primary catalyst between your start with the core team from IT, adding experts to that transition to day to day success? I think it was definitely a contributing factor, but something that you said very early on, Robin, was about agility. And I think, you know, having this council really, really contributed, to that and hearing about, you know, maybe somebody didn't speak up during some other requirements gatherings meeting, and we're able to still serve that back up in one of these calls where it's like, oh, this isn't working as expected. And we continuously today I mean, we've the dance, about eighteen months ago and still today, you know, we're revisiting decisions that had been made because now that they're put in play, you know, again, you you it looked good on paper. We all were in agreement, and then you start executing, and things aren't going as exactly as you anticipated. So it's really staying agile, and as you move through the process and your needs change too. I mean, we're not doing things the same way we did eighteen months ago. But I do think it was a huge contributing factor in making sure we had a voice at every level within every department that, you know, was using this tool and these other tools across the board. Yeah. And something you just said, this has sparked my memory of one of the conversations we had as we were going to turn on go live and moving from that theoretical to hands on The importance of documentation. So you can go back and say, okay. We agreed on this. Yes. It's working as expected. What can we do differently or better? Because it is not fitting the needs of that person now that they're in the dam using it, now that things are turned on. So did did that help having that digital council to support that transition and getting that feedback right away? And do you keep up your documentation? Yeah. Definitely from a feedback perspective. I'm gonna let Kelly take the documentation piece because she's the queen of documentation. Yes. Yes. I record everything. Let me do a few more. Yes. So we have a extremely thorough, Wiki documentation that we keep up, between, myself and some key IT partners that, are very tied into our integrations and our system architecture. So between the three of us, system architecture, you know, development, other IT members, and myself, are pretty much constantly updating our Wiki. So, that's a really key space for us, where everyone can access, how was this and, what updates. Kinda on that Wiki as well, I I don't believe in generally ever really deleting information. And so a lot of it will leave that historic information there in the Wiki so we we can come even if we need to check it two or three years, you know, from now. We can see that historic data and then adding updates, changes, enhancements that we've added to that in, to that Wiki as well. And then, working, one of my larger goals is putting it all into a really nice best practices documentation. So but just an ongoing effort right now, outside of the Wiki, but, that so definitely very strong on documentation. There's a lot of times you have to go back and reference. So And I think that took us right into key learnings and what's next. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that, Talia, or you wanna go first, Maya? I mean, key learnings my biggest one, I think, we've already done, which was hire Kelly sooner. I would love to have been here just from the beginning. For cloning, I think other folks are gonna hear this and wanna clone you. I think I think you should want to clone I think you should wanna clone her. She's great. Oh. She's been really, really good, at pulling things together. You know, like I said, we we we got where we got, you know, and and I think that bringing her in when we did, like, it would have been better sooner, but, you know, I don't think it was completely detrimental. But, you know, leadership buy in is huge. We touched on that already. I think we had very senior leadership bought in really, really early on, but kind of that mid level leadership, that buy in is really important as well because if you're gonna expect your individual contributors to execute a process, it's the people managers that really need to be bought in and making sure they're delivering the importance in that message. I think being, you know, being able to pivot, we've we've talked about that a little bit. We had some moments throughout standing up these three technologies that were kind of moving together where we had to pause on one and step on the gas on the other because the way we had mapped it out was not playing as well as we thought it might from the original plan. So there were some dependencies that we maybe didn't have in our vision when we first started this journey that changed kind of the timeline of some of these things. And, you know, from a what's next perspective, we're really looking forward to a Primo, elite, AI elite. That's something, we're very, very excited about launching. And that is definitely a huge part of where we're moving, and I'd be shocked to learn that other moving in that AI direction as well. It's something that's, you know, it's if you haven't done it yet, you're gonna have to get onboard because it's here and it's here to stay. So, I'm very excited that Aprimo has, a great team of people working on their AI technologies that are gonna help us move forward in this space. Yeah. I think something that's resonated, you know, you said it when you opened up, but it's it's about people process and technology. And your people is both your internal people, the vendor, your I have to plug a buyer, professional services, but we also had some other professional services and, vendors engaged to help us, like you say, take that foot off the gas at certain points and say, are we thinking about this correctly? Because we need to cause this output, not that, and how everybody seamlessly work together, I think, was remarkable. I learned a lot together. Yeah. I think one of the things, Robin, you and Avaya helped us with along the way is when we were standing up, a Primo Dam, we were also standing up a Primo Productivity. And, all the complexities and the other things we have the other technologies we were working with, we we put a pause on productivity at some point to just say we really need to focus here because it's a lot of the same people involved. People have their day jobs to do. Right? This is like these technology projects are, like, our little side hustles. So we really, decided to put a a a short pause on that and did a productivity as a fast follow. But now we're we're definitely live with both and, you know, we appreciate the partnership along the way because it was definitely helpful. Thank you. So, Lily, is there any focus on where a proven federal math and school specialty aligns and any recommendations you have for future ready, you know, transformations for others? Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, like Maya was mentioning, Primo AI Elite is really focused on, the next level, right, of, providing predictive metadata to decrease the manual work and increase accuracy by automatically filling, like, metadata fields, some smart action reviews to make sure that the human rev reviewers are getting additional support and preventing any type of, like, back and forth between different departments, by making sure everything's following a line with the branding or digital rights, for your assets. The most recent exciting thing that, is on our road map, is our, feature ready content operations launch. And so, that includes 11 new capabilities across our DAM solution, intelligence, and our plan solution. So, as an example, predictive metadata dashboards showing AI generated metadata, admin edits, and confidence scores, and also, trigger production agents from any system via API or rules to just transform that assets automatically and at scale. So lots of work like Maya was mentioning in regards to, like, AI of implementing that to help the day to day and overall business goals. And really excited that we get to work with some amazing customers like Maya and Kelly to be able to bring a lot of the, the needs into fruition for our customers. So as you're looking, Maya and Kelly, at the future and your health scores are super happy right now, all of your, you know, distribution points are turning. What are your goals with AI? Is it to increase or enrich things different, or is it really about internal day to day operations and streaming some things into automation or all of the above? It's kind of all of the above. Yeah. I'll I know what Kelly is I know what Kelly is excited for, so I'll just repeat the the other things. And and, actually, Kelly, why don't you chime in first? Because I I mean, you Sure. We're aligned on those. That's Yeah. Definitely definitely excited about the predictive metadata. I I see that being, very helpful, as well as the smart transform as well. So those are two big key things that I'm excited to start working on with the AILD in in DAM, definitely. So you can't help me out with why. They might not wanna know why. Why are you excited? Oh, sure. What else do we need to find it? Yeah. With, predictive metadata, so it's whatever, you know, we have end users uploading assets. There is the bulk edit capability, but you put in descriptions or keywords or other few things. Of course, you know, it takes additional time getting the getting that all filled out and then into the DAM. And so it'll be really nice to help kind of reduce some of that manual effort from our end users because anytime you can tell anybody you have less work to do is is is good. So that and then the smart transform as well, I could see that kind of reducing some of those, hours for some of our graphic designers, having to remove backgrounds or any other work there. And so I just it seems like it could streamline things, make things a little bit more efficient, you know, create some more automation into the system and, that's gonna make everybody happy. And how do you handle internal education? Does your day to day digital council I know you have the oversight from the digital council and then you have your day to day operations. How do you educate, stakeholders across merchandising marketing and the digital self? So, what I kinda like you to do is, you know, identify the problems or opportunities, like, for, say example, AI Elite will address, such as, like, predictive metadata kind of taking some of that burden off of, users to manually update all of that, kind of align those capabilities with, AI Elite and organizational goals, you know, which will you know, sample of the faster asset approval process, which means faster time to online publication, possible improved compliance. Then, like you had mentioned, you know, bringing it in front of the damn council. That's generally one of our first steps. You know? So bringing it in front of the damn council, and we involve our key stakeholders there. I get to most you know, there's multiple departments involved, kind of a different levels of, of, you know, of our leaderships needs and then end users. And then from there, you kind of develop a communication strategy, you know, so the message can be delivered out to, like, a larger group. I always find it's helpful to, identify, change champions or your power users, you know, kind of in each of the different teams and areas, you know, who can help aid bringing, you know, these new functionality, you know, into the wider groups. And then, of course, kind of hand in hand with change champions is, anticipate any kind of historic resistance points. With any kind of change, it's going to be resistance points, of course. And so, but kind of just kinda understanding what those historic resistant points are so you can and anticipate, you know, those users' needs, and try to, you know, find solutions for them ahead of time so you can kinda answer those questions. And then I especially with coming in with AI Elite, I'd really like to or kind of visualize, rolling out these new functions kind of in smaller batches, just so we can have a little bit greater control over them, make sure they're functioning the way that we intend, and that we want. And then also so we don't overwhelm users with, you know, way too much, way too fast. And so, and then reinforcement by, you know, leadership and managers, for adopting all these new changes. And then, of course, updating our current very robust, training materials. We have a whole 13 module list for training for the dam. So updating all those materials, all the videos, and we have a lot of strong, documentation that we save in our, we call it the locker reference collection. So all of all of that really great documentation lives in there for everyone to access. So then, yep. And then, generally, always end up doing, you know, either group or one on one, you know, q and a sessions and regular check ins with our end users, making sure they're feeling comfortable, watching some key metrics, making sure the adoption's going, you know, the way that we want it to. So it's a process. Yeah. And if no one caught that, we've nicknamed our dam the locker. Oh, yes. And it is just like at school. It keeps all of our assets safe. Yes. So, Kelly and, Maya, is there anything we expected expected to talk about today that we didn't get to you or anything on your mind you wanna share with the audience? No. I mean, I think we've covered it really well. I like I said and or I think like I said, like, you led with Robin is the agility when going through a process like this, pulling in your leadership, getting that buy in, driving that change management. It's all of those things. And and I would say, you know, nothing's gonna go exactly as planned. You're gonna fall down and scrape your knee along the way, but, just document those those things and and make sure that you're reacting appropriately. And, yeah, it's been a really fun journey. Mhmm. Excellent. Lily, I think it's, your next slide. Yes. Yeah. And just to add to that, I love that y'all named it the walker, by the way. We we voted. Yeah. Okay. That's that's even better. Everybody voted on the Yeah. They put it through the process. I did everything else. Well, that is important too to know that, you know, branding your dam does help with change management, everybody's participation. Mhmm. You know, a lot of folks in twenty years ago would name their first down with the vendor's name. Today, it's definitely good to have that brand identity that resonates with your users because it does help with that change management discussions and excitement. Do I get a t shirt at some point that says locker? I'm like, I don't know. I would love a t shirt. I would love a t shirt. Okay. Let's put that on 2026 budget. There we go. Yeah. But, yeah, definitely kudos to y'all because you're you've got a really great press, process that you're updating and really great, team. And, it sounds like y'all are continuously evolving that, so that's great to hear. And so kind of highlighting what, Maya and Kelly both mentioned, you know, there I'm sure there are people on this, webinar that are thinking like, hey. You know, we're at we're at the very early, early stages right now of even considering AI or leadership isn't even really considering it or, have had it be a focus for us. Or maybe you're kind of in the early earlier stages of evaluating, experimenting. And so, one of the resources here that you can see is the CMO's guide to AI driven operations, and, it's really impactful. It has, some great questions that you can share with your leadership team, have everybody go through this work, workbook, and then come together and analyze where the team feels like they should be able to focus on some gaps in their process and then help kick off those conversations, with leadership around ways they can ways that you can implement AI as a part of your progress to help, achieve your company goals. So, feel free to scan that QR code. We'll also share it in, as well, the chat, and then, feel free to, scan the resources in the session notes, section as well, as the buyer has some great content, to share as well. Perfect. So now we'll go over to the, q and a portion of our session. And just kinda going through, first question, I believe it will be for Maya and Kelly. We're constantly updating product content across Amazon, Target, and our own ecommerce site. How did you manage to keep content consistent without creating more manual work? Yeah. So, this one for us is really having, the right syndicule, because we set up our product data. We kinda collected all of our endpoints rules. You know? What does Amazon expect? What does Target expect? And we try to kind of combine all of that, marry all that together, and see what could we solve for across all the best way we could. And then within our tool, we were able to create mappings that edited piece that where we could edit pieces that needed to be different. So where the bulk of our content starts all the same, we then go within our syndication tool, which is Salsify to, edit the pieces that where the requirements are different or we're trying to solve for a slightly different algorithm. Awesome. Great. That's great to hear. Thank you, Maya. Any any suggestions for me and Kelly? Nope. No. Maya nailed it. Awesome. I wanted to add one thing to that, Maya, that you might wanna speak on is that you have a true ecosystem. So everything talks to everything else for product and non product data coming together, and you're agile to how you need to deliver it with the construct you set up and picking the right tools that can then syndicate that out and make the changes as they come about with those retailer or distribution channels rather quickly. Absolutely. Because we all know they're they change rather quickly, some more than others. Next question we have is, says we actually tried to dam roll out last year, but the integration with our systems didn't stick and adoption stalled. What would you recommend to avoid that happening again? Yeah. I think that is really that robust requirements gathering ahead of time. We did quite a lot of that before we started with vendor selection so that we knew what kind of questions to ask of our potential vendors as well as our potential implementation partners. So it's really important to get that, you know, across the organization, anyone that's gonna be utilizing the tool. You can run into challenges in a situation like ours where there wasn't an existing dam. So there a lot of the questions being asked, like I said earlier, people don't often know they don't know what they don't know, and so some of the questions kinda fell flat. But I think it really is about getting that requirements gathering underway well in advance of of of even starting the technology project. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really great question for you too, Robin, from your experience. Mhmm. Yeah. And I do think people do need help with that. I mean, that's one of the key rules that a buyer likes to play is creating that bridge for sustainability from the start. Yep. Absolutely. Hopefully, we're successful at school specialty. Well, we're sitting here today, aren't we? Talking about our request. You know, it's a village. It really does take a village. And as Maya, you said it's never done. Right. That's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm not sure always. Alright. I think we have time for one more question. For existing or premium customers, how do you recommend phasing in new capabilities without overwhelming teams that are already busy? And I think you kinda touched on this at a high level earlier, but and you Yeah. Absolutely. I think it, like, it it it kinda hit us, from the side as we were trying to stand up them and productivity at the same time. And so knowing that it involved a lot of the same people within our organization, it just became a little bit taxing, and to the point of the question. And so as we're moving forward, you know, our next step is AI Elite. And now that we're running pretty strongly with DAM and productivity, and then, you know, making sure we can kind of get that one down and and rolling smoothly before we look at kind of the next module. And to to Kelly's point earlier is how do we roll out even pieces of that functionality in phases so that, users can get accustomed to the piece the smaller pieces? You know, you don't wanna try to boil the ocean. Right? So you gotta Yes. You gotta take it in smaller chunks. Yeah. Makes sense. And you need a Kelly, a clone of Kelly. I need three honestly, yeah, three of me. That'd be great. Wonderful. Anything else to add? No. Nothing from my end. This is great. And, obviously, if anyone has any other questions, feel free to reach out. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. So we are at the near the end of our session, and just wanna say a huge thank you so much to Maya and Kelly for joining us today and sharing their insights and learnings. I'm sure everybody will have some really great takeaways to help their teams as well, and then also Robin as well for co moderating and sharing her knowledge with everybody here. Just a quick overview for everybody. A premium specialty and fire, we will all be at HSAM New York, and, school specialty will be speaking at the events. So, please do reach out. Connect with Maya, Kelly, Robin, myself. I'd love to meet you in person if you're attending, and then also meet you at their session. It's gonna be a really great one. So, hope to see you there, and please do connect with us, on LinkedIn. And, yes, if we for those we weren't able to get to at the end, with questions, we'll make sure to follow-up with you all. But, yes, thank you so much again everybody for your time, and I will see you in New York. Thank you so much. New York. Thanks. Bye. Bye.