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Interview with Emilia Jevakhoff

Emilia Jevakhoff
Emilia Jevakhoff
CEO
Winddle
Winddle

Achieved +100% growth in 2019-2020
Winddle is the first SaaS platform with a collaborative approach to supply chain monitoring from order to delivery. CEO of Winddle Emilia Jevakhoff discusses with Paulami Chatterjee how this collaborative supply chain management platform works, the specific client-side requirements needed to connect with the platform and future industry collaborations Winddle is aiming at.

What is the background of Winddle? Who are the founders of the company?

Winddle was created in 2015 by a team of sourcing and supply chain professionals, following a simple observation: in a market where people need more and more agility and real-time visibility to be performant, it is not acceptable to still rely on fragmented and manual purchase orders monitoring with a low ability to anticipate issues and a poor data quality. The vision built by the operational founders Emilia Jevakhoff (CEO) and Guillaume Grenet (CTO) is simple: how to leverage technology and business expertise to get rid of the existing operational black box that exists in many supply organisations and efficiently support the alignment of physical and digital flows.

The real challenge with Winddle is to structure and organise the various objects linked to purchase orders management from creation to delivery and their relations (products, PO, deliveries, shipments…) through a user-friendly but still performant experience.
 

How many companies are using your supply chain solutions worldwide? What percentage of them are textile companies?

Currently, more than 3,000 supply chain professionals (buyers, supply teams, suppliers, forwarders, etc) are using the platform around the world on a daily basis, with a large majority of them from the textile industry.

What is the average time taken from a company approaching you for a solution and actual implementation of your solution?

Thanks to a team of experts dedicated to the implementation of each Winddle project, which accompanies our clients at each step of the roll-out (from needs analysis and scoping, to the solution configuration, to the integration with third-party IT systems, to the users onboarding), an average roll-out takes 4 months from kick-off to go-live.

How does your collaborative supply chain management platform work?

The solution connects -- through a unique web-platform -- all parties (internal and external) that need to collaborate on a purchase order, from its validation to its final delivery. It organises all their daily monitoring and information sharing thanks to powerful business modelisation and in-house algorithms to push real-time alerts and automatically calculate potential impacts of changes such as dates updates, delivery split or transportation change.

With Winddle, operational teams get rid of manual reminder-sending, ERP updates, excel follow-up and multiple entry of the same data to focus on their core mission: ensure that the purchase orders are delivered in a timely and optimised manner. The solution brings an end-to-end and real-time visibility that enables all the operational teams, suppliers, and forwarders to make better decisions and increase their service level rate.

Beyond streamlining daily operations, the solution supports supply chain strategy, providing a lot of detailed and precious KPIs on suppliers and supply performance both in terms of timings, quality, and costs.
How does your collaborative supply chain management platform work?

There are so many supply chain softwares in the market. How does Winddle differentiate its solution from the others?

The supply chain softwares market indeed covers a lot of various solutions: from planification issues to last mile delivery, use cases are all related to supply chain, but pretty different! It's important to specifically understand what are the challenges and pain points tackled by each software.

Our focus with Winddle is really to simplify and optimise the purchase order daily monitoring, with a solution dedicated to sourcing and supply teams, suppliers, and forwarders.

On this segment, Winddle makes the difference with its extended collaborative vision, embracing both traditional supplier portal and transportation management systems. Supported by a powerful and unique native data-centric approach, the solution provides reliable and objective data to all the stakeholders.

Besides, the platform combines a user-centric and flexible interface, which ensures a quick adoption of all users, the ability to easily connect the platform to other systems (ERP, partner's systems...) and a detailed management of each client's custom needs.

Please elaborate more on your partnership with SAP where you would be integrating the SAP- centric app alongside 7 other startups. What are the programme's deliverables?

Winddle is a valuable complement to both SAP ERP's solutions and Ariba platform, and can be connected within various modalities, according to each customer environment and business needs, from our standard integrations referenced on the SAP store (in progress) to complex two-way custom interfaces.

Joining SAP.io was a wonderful opportunity for us. It enables us to benefit from business and tech experts from SAP and their worldwide network, through a highly appreciable hands-on approach.
Please elaborate more on your partnership with SAP where you would be integrating the SAP- centric app alongside 7 other startups. What are the programme's deliverables?

The Covid pandemic has disrupted supply chains worldwide. How can your supply chain solution help in such a situation?

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Winddle is particularly valuable to manage highly fluctuant and constrained supply chain flows. Indeed, optimising the supply chain's daily run maximises the time and the resources our customers have to focus on exceptional operational priorities. Besides, being able to maintain a direct and fluid collaboration with all the chain stakeholders in a disturbed context, is of crucial help to quickly communicate supply updates in an optimised and efficient way and get the visibility required to anticipate issues and mitigate risks.

What are the customer-side requirements? Do they need any special technology to use your solution?

Basically, when we are talking about connection to the platform, it refers to two different options. Every user has the possibility to access its own Winddle account with a login / password, without any tech requirement, except from an access to the internet. The interface will have the same basis for everyone, but will depend on one's activity scope, custom settings, rights, and authorisations, to ensure a focused user experience for everyone. The second option to connect to the platform is through IT interfaces: Winddle can be connected to any third-party systems (clients' systems such as ERP, but also suppliers' or forwarders' systems), in two-way data exchanges and various formats (API, EDI, FTP…). For project roll-out, a dedicated Winddle team supports customers at every stage of the project, so that the solution deployment is simple and agile.

What has been your growth story in the last one year, and prior to that the last 2-3 years? What are your future plans?

Winddle is in a strong growth phase (+100 per cent growth in 2019-2020) with dynamic business development, both in our historical consumer products market and in new sectors such as industry. This ambitious strategy is combined with an intense product roadmap to continue to be one step ahead of our customers' needs, with new releases planned on carbon tracking or forwarder invoice management for example.

Any new collaborations in the pipeline?

We are about to start collaborations with clients in new sectors for us, such as the construction industry or the global freight forwarding field. Even if our historical core business is related to the fashion industry, our platform aims at bringing more visibility and agility to any organisation operating in the supply chain area that needs it. The global transformation of the sector, in terms of digitalisation and new consumer trends, encourages us to diversify our target markets to globally support supply chain professionals in their daily missions. 
Published on: 19/03/2021

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.