Adar Hay: 0:03

it starts from supplier performance time that it takes them to get a quote and time that it gets them to actually deliver. Sometimes there are delays, so you can analyze, what kind of delays, did you get and really have more data about your supplier performance, which is crucial and diversify the supply chain accordingly

Tom Raftery: 0:25

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast. The number one podcast, focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host global vice-president at SAP Tom Raftery. Hi everyone, welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today, I have my special guest Adar. Adar welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Adar Hay: 0:53

Thank you, Tom. Thank you for having me. Sure. I'm Adar co-founder and CEO of Jiga. And Jiga automates sourcing tasks for manufacturing companies, and it helps them centralize their quoting and order data in one place.

Tom Raftery: 1:07

Okay. And just for clarity, Jiga is J I G A, correct?

Adar Hay: 1:12

That's correct. Yeah. So, the problem that we are solving is that today many manufacturing companies, they work outside of their digital tools. They work via emails and spreadsheets when it comes to issuing RFQs and managing purchase orders and supplier communication. So the purchase order itself is in their company system, obviously, but everything around it just stays in the manual tools. And it's very error prone, and it's very tedious, the way it works and especially in manufacturing with iterations happen all the time and naturally it results in major losses.

Tom Raftery: 1:48

Okay. So give me a typical scenario that might result in some losses, just so that we can, you know, give us a practical example.

Adar Hay: 1:58

Sure. So just think about the amount of friction that it takes for someone who wants to, for example, work with a new supplier. They don't have access to the data about what this supplier can do, what are his capabilities? What is the last thing that we did with him? And only this is something that results in major losses, just because of lack of better alternatives. Other than that, companies take a lot of time to just issue a purchase order from creating an RFQ. So just that results in major delays. And if you think also about mistakes that happen in the process. So just people that track the changes in revisions and changes in purchase orders via I don't know, I saw incredible things. I saw Google drive, I saw like people that just upload to various systems. It's leaves them a lot of room for mistakes and error and people talk to me about errors that cost them millions, literally. So only that part and the part of losing time to market the time of that takes the employees to do those things. So if you talk to engineers about working with suppliers and sourcing tasks, they waste a lot of their time on it, whether it's with the engineer or the sourcing manager. So all of these turn into, huge inefficiencies for companies.

Tom Raftery: 3:26

Okay. How does Jiga help with that?

Adar Hay: 3:29

So Jiga automates sourcing tasks for these companies. We specifically focus on manufacturing and the reason why is that for manufacturing? Uh, we have very specific workflows. So we automate a lot of the tasks, like issuing an RFQ and just doing that for multiple suppliers, getting the answers for suppliers in one place, helping the companies, analyze them and track all of these data in one place and also integrate into the company system so they can know that their data is all in one place and start getting also insights from that. It's also a collaborative space that helps people to know what's the newest data and not lose time. Sometimes there's, these issues that someone is waiting for another's approval and stuff like that. So, when everything is centralized and easy to understand, so people can move much faster.

Tom Raftery: 4:25

Okay. And is it just for the manufacturers? Or can the suppliers log in as well and see their side of the transactions and their history?

Adar Hay: 4:35

Exactly. So suppliers have their own interface, but there's literally like zero adoption and needed for that. They just get a link or they can even work with their existing workflow via emails. But they get their own interface where they can upload their data and update, quoting information and order information, so that companies can have more visibility and enhance the collaboration with their suppliers.

Tom Raftery: 5:01

Okay. And this is just a B2B environment? Correct.

Adar Hay: 5:05

Exactly. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 5:06

Okay. And why are you concentrating there?

Adar Hay: 5:10

Maybe I can tell the story of how we started and this can give you some context. So, I didn't come from manufacturing originally. And two years ago, after, selling my previous company and I went, to visit my friend Asaf, who was running a machine shop. And I was just, overwhelmed by the amount administrative work that my co-founder and his customers were doing in order to just communicate with each other. And then we started talking about this problem and we understood that the problem that he experiences is even bigger for his customers. And there's just huge losses there. We started just with when COVID started. So we started with putting parts in our living rooms and start delivering them to companies. So it was very manual at the beginning, but that's how we discovered this problem. And we understood as we did more research how big it is and actually like how interesting it is to help these companies for example, medical device companies in the COVID time to just deliver the products faster to market, which I think is very important mission.

Tom Raftery: 6:18

Sure. Sure. Sure. You were quite a young startup, obviously, if you just started at the start of COVID. So you're going about two, two and a half years. So what stage, are you at as, as a startup?

Adar Hay: 6:31

So we are in a very exciting stage. Today we help companies in various industries from medical devices, to chemicals, to robotics, to semiconductors from startups to large companies. They see massive savings in money and maybe more importantly in time to market. We raised funding from, Y Combinator and major Silicon valley investors. We're growing consistently. So, that's a very exciting stage for us.

Tom Raftery: 6:59

Okay, superb. And obviously it's you're cloud delivered, I assume. And you can integrate with the systems that people have. So you're kind of agnostic on what tools your customers are using?

Adar Hay: 7:12

Yeah, we saw that companies use various tools E R P systems. They sometimes want the software to integrate with something that we didn't know, but it's very straightforward. And the reason that, it is important is that companies want their data to be centralized. They don't want it to be scattered around in different systems. And that's why, it's crucial for the integration process to be very, very easy and straightforward.

Tom Raftery: 7:39

Yep, of course. And, is this something that helps with visibility as well because we're seeing a lot now of focus in organizations around things like resilience and visibility and the two obviously go hand in hand.

Adar Hay: 7:55

Of course. So think about it. If you know more about the status of your orders and where they are and what happens with them. So for example, we integrate with delivery services as well. So you know where your parts are in a much better way this helps you reduce a lot of your risk and knowing that parts are going to arrive, you also have a lot more data about your suppliers, about their allocations, about updated the certifications. So you also know for example, if something happens in a certain country or like you have the much more updated data, because a lot of activity just gets back into the company systems.

Tom Raftery: 8:32

Okay. Super. And you mentioned analytics as well. What kind of analytics are you producing?

Adar Hay: 8:38

So, various kinds, it starts from supplier performance time that it takes them to get a quote and time that it gets them to actually deliver. Sometimes there are delays, so you can analyze, what kind of delays, did you get and really have more data about your supplier performance, which is crucial and diversify the supply chain accordingly. Stuff like that, as well as like just, analytics about your spend and about your variance of quotes that you get. Maybe you can identify savings in a better way. Maybe you can identify opportunities for speed. So just many areas where you can analyze your activity and do some forecasting and stuff like that.

Tom Raftery: 9:21

Okay. There's a large increase recently we've seen in things like a focus on supplier diversity and also there's going to be an increasing demand for reduced carbon in supply chain as well. Are these things you can help companies with?

Adar Hay: 9:39

Yeah, we actually operate a supplier network that companies that want to discover new suppliers, then they're using our tools. They can also access the supplier network. And there are filters that you can filter by also minority owned sustainable businesses and stuff like that, that you can actually diversify your supply chain in many ways that that include these filters basically.

Tom Raftery: 10:05

Okay. And is it possible for suppliers, for example, to report their carbon emissions for their products, or is it possible to filter based on carbon emissions, if you're a manufacturer so that you reduce the amount of carbon in your supply chain?

Adar Hay: 10:21

Well, that's actually a good idea, Tom. We don't have that right now in the product, but definitely something that we can consider. I think that would probably help some of our customers definitely.

Tom Raftery: 10:30

Fantastic. You heard it here first folks. Lovely. And can you talk to any big customer success stories you've had.

Adar Hay: 10:42

Sure. So, customers definitely have different kinds of problems that relate to RFQs and purchase orders. But I think that one thing that I do see a lot is I can give you an example for a chemicals, a company that it took them like a month to just issue a purchase order. And by using Jiga, they were able to issue a purchase order in days. Only this thing was monumental for their business. And I think that these are the kind of things that really drive major impact for an organization because you waste so much time on this red tape and manual activities just because you have processes, you have collaboration that's needed to be made and in emails, it's just not the right way to do, it's just manually just so error prone. There's so much moving parts. You just cannot manage it without some automation. So reducing the time to market is one. And many case studies also include like companies that we're able to just find that they're wasting like over 30% on their parts. And we're now able to reduce that to an optimized amount just because of comfort, it's comfortable to work with a specific supplier all the time, but if you reduce that friction to more competition, so you can drive major impact.

Tom Raftery: 12:04

Okay. Super. And we've heard now that you are going to add carbon reporting to Jiga but what else is coming? Where to from here?

Adar Hay: 12:15

Wow. So, there's a lot to do. I think that supporting various processes and making our product more and more customizable and giving the manufacturers more and more data, you know, Tom, the interesting thing about what we're doing in manufacturing is that we are very vertically focused and this focus really helped us drive tremendous value for manufacturing companies. So think about we have all of this data about quoting and about supplier performance and about prices in the industry. So obviously we don't reveal data of our, customers, but we can give intelligence tools to our customers that can really serve them in a, in an interesting ways. So these are kind some of the stuff that we're thinking about, and we are already, some of them are on our roadmap, just data and making the workflows work better for companies.

Tom Raftery: 13:08

Okay, super we're coming towards the end of the podcast now Adar. Is there any question I haven't asked you that you wish I had, or any aspect of this, we've not touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Adar Hay: 13:21

So I think maybe we can talk a little bit about vertical software, because I know that we don't have a lot of time, but, vertical b2b transactions, I think are very interesting. And what I foresee is that companies in different verticals are going to work with software that matches their vertical, just because there's just tremendous value to give these companies in their own vertical. The workflows are so different. It's not just about getting a quote and buying it's about so much more and so much collaboration that happens there. You can make so much of that, more efficient, serve more data and just automate a lot of processes. So that's what I think. I think that companies that work in specific verticals, yeah, they have like software that can do horizontally. It can take care of their processes but the vertical aspects of specific workflows is very interesting. And I think that people should notice that trend.

Tom Raftery: 14:18

Okay, superb. Adar, if people want to know more about yourself or about Jiga or any of the things we talked about in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Adar Hay: 14:30

So, first of all, our website is jiga.io is J I G A. I O so it's very easy to type and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can shoot me a message. I'm Adar Hay. It's A D A R H A Y. I'm very open there to answer any questions.

Tom Raftery: 14:46

Fantastic Adar. That's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Adar Hay: 14:50

Thank you for having me Tom.

Tom Raftery: 14:54

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sap.com/digital supply chain, or, or simply drop me an email to Tom dot Raftery @sap.com. If you like the show, please, don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application at choice to get new episodes, as soon as they are published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.