TECSYS Inc.

Everyone, welcome to the Texas Third Quarter Fiscal 2022 Results Conference Call. Please note that the complete third quarter report, including M, D, and A financial statements, were filed on CDAR yesterday. All dollar amounts are expressed in Canadian currency and are prepared in accordance with international financial reporting standards. Some of the statements in this conference call, including the question and answers period, may include forward-looking statements that are based on management's beliefs and assumptions. Actual results may differ materially from such statements. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded on Thursday, March 3, 2022, 8.30 a.m. ET. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Peter Brereton, Chief Executive Officer at Texas. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Joining me today is Mark Bentley, our Chief Financial Officer. We appreciate you joining us for today's call. In the third quarter, we delivered excellent results, fueled by strong demand for our solutions and the continued success of our transformation. Our customers are not only... Pardon me, staying with us. They are growing with us and transforming their own businesses. In Q3, I'm thrilled to say that we continue to deliver another great quarter with double digit ARR growth, solid backlog and a strong pipeline across all industries. We continue to solidify our mission of equipping our customers with supply chain excellence. Although we did experience some delayed projects due to Omicron, I'm very proud of the work our team did by closing of the quarter strong, expanding on the depth and breadth of our platform and as always, investing in our people and culture. Today, I'll start by providing some additional color on the results, and Mark will walk us through the financial results in more detail. And finally, I'll share what I'm looking forward to this year and beyond. We'll follow that up with a Q&A session. There are two key indicators that I'd like to highlight, which despite currency headwinds, are contributing to our track record of solid growth. Revenue, where I'll touch on growth and quality, and our pipeline, where I'll touch on market conditions. First, it's important to note that we have had consistent consecutive growth on a quarterly basis for the last three years. As we continue to emphasize, SaaS revenue is scaling up relatively quickly due to our ongoing strategic shift to SaaS in all of our markets. As we continue to mature this SaaS revenue model, we will increasingly create greater revenue visibility and improve the long-term quality of our revenue. This leads to my second point, our pipeline. This strong revenue performance is fueled by the continued strength of our pipeline. Companies in every sector are working diligently to digitize their supply chain to maintain competitive advantage, and we are there for them. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that the supply chain is absolutely critical. Companies are now taking this knowledge and bolstering technology to become nimbler in the face of new potential future uncertainties, and we are seeing the effect of that trend not only with new prospects, but the growth and utilization from our existing base of customers. With that said, we continue to invest in innovative solutions to further drive benefit to our customers, and we've realized a significant milestone in the introduction of an AI-driven augmented cluster building application at our customer Werner Electric. This application intelligently groups together picks of various orders and simulates multiple pick paths and then chooses the optimal combination to reduce travel time and boost efficiency. We expect to see a 15 to 20% cost saving just in travel distance alone. We believe this to be very timely as our customers continue to be challenged with labor shortages. As we mature our AI strategy, we see ample opportunity to take full advantage of the data our system generates to create customer value. Our momentum is strong, and to maintain this, we realize the people of Texas are the most critical asset we have, and we are allocating higher expenses for retention as well as recruiting efforts in attracting new employees. Mark will now provide further details on our financial results for the third quarter and the first nine months of our fiscal year.

Thanks, Peter. As indicated at the beginning of the call, our financials and MD&A are available on CDAR. I'll focus my summary here just on a few of our key metrics and areas where I will provide some additional color. We're pleased with our strong performance in our third quarter ended January 31st, 2022. Total revenue was a record $35.4 million, 11% higher than $31.9 million reported for Q3 of 2021. As many of you know, a significant portion of our revenue, about 65%, is denominated in U.S. dollars. As a result, movement in currency exchange rates has an impact on our reported revenue and growth. During Q3 fiscal 2022, currency exchange movements negatively impacted our reported revenue as the value of the U.S. dollar was weaker compared to the same quarter last year. In fact, on a constant currency basis using fiscal 2022 currency rates, our third quarter revenue grew by about 16% compared to the same quarter last year. We continue to experience strong and diverse revenue streams underpinned by a 49% increase in SAS revenue, which was up from 4.7 million in Q3 2021 to 7.0 million in Q3 2022. On a constant currency basis, SAS revenue was up about 56%. I also want to note again that we're at the precipice of a significant milestone in our transition as a SAS business, with our SAS revenue currently representing 46% of our total recurring revenue streams in Q3 fiscal 2022. And we have line of sight to SAS crossing over the 50% threshold within a matter of months. That's about a three-year timeframe into our SAS transition. Our annual recurring revenue at January 31, 2022 was $59.5 million, up 17% from $50.8 million at January 31, 2021. On a constant currency basis, that increase was about 19%. Professional services revenue for the third quarter was $12.9 million, up 5% from $12.3 million reported for the same quarter last year. Again, currency movements created headwind on revenue growth here, which would have been 9% on a constant currency basis. Moving on to bookings in the quarter, SAS bookings are reported on an annual recurring revenue basis and increased by 133% to 2.3 million in Q3 2022 compared to Q3 2021, which was at 1.0. Bookings were highlighted by the addition of a new hospital network as well as significant base business from our customers across all verticals. We also signed another new hospital network in the first days of Q4. Professional services bookings were 9.3 million, down 11% compared to 10.5 million in the same quarter last year. We had some professional services bookings slip into Q4, about 4 million signed in the first few weeks of Q4. This highlights, again, the lumpiness and impact of timing on reported quarterly bookings. We still like this as a metric because, over time, we believe it provides a good leading indicator of business performance and growth prospects. SAS remaining performance obligation, also known as RPO or SAS backlog, was $78.5 million at the end of Q3 fiscal 2022, up 36%. from 57.6 million at the same time last year. On a constant currency basis, that growth was 37%. SAS backlog was up 8% sequentially compared to the second quarter of fiscal 2022. That's 6% constant currency. The increase was driven by significant multi-year SAS bookings during the quarter. Professional services backlog at the end of Q3 fiscal 22 was 29.5 million That's down about 22% compared to 37.8 million at the same time last year, and down from 33.1 million at October 31st, 2021. As noted above, timing, especially on large deals, can have a pretty significant impact on reported backlog at any point in time. Our professional services backlog remains robust, and we expect our delivery team to continue to be very busy in the quarters ahead. For the third quarter, total gross profit was $15.2 million. That's down $0.2 million compared to $15.4 million in Q3 of 21. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin was 43% compared to 48% the same quarter last year. That decline was a result of unfavorable exchange movements, changes in the revenue mix, and investment to support growth. Net profit for the quarter was $0.9 million, or $0.06 per fully diluted share, compared to $1.8 million in Q3 last year, which was $0.12 per fully diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.7 million in Q3 2022, compared to $4.0 million in Q3 2021. The decrease in profit in adjusted EBITDA compared to the third quarter last year was primarily due to an unfavorable foreign exchange impact. of approximately $1.6 million. Turning now very briefly to our results for the first nine months of our fiscal 2022, our total revenue was $102.9 million, up 13% compared to $90.7 million in the same period last year, and that's up 19% on a constant currency basis. SAS revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 22 was $19.2 million, up 41%. from 13.7 million in the same period last year. And that's up 49% on a constant currency basis. Our SAS bookings are up 23% compared to the first nine months of last fiscal year. Our profit for the first nine months of fiscal 22 was 1.9 million or 13 cents per fully diluted share compared to 5.2 million or 35 cents per fully diluted share in the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $8.4 million in the first nine months of the current fiscal year compared to $12.3 million for the same period last year. Foreign exchange movements had a negative impact of approximately $4.6 million on profit in adjusted EBITDA in the current nine-month period compared to the same period last year. We ended the third quarter with a strong balance sheet position at January 31st, 2022. We had cash and cash equivalents in short-term investments of $36.9 million compared to $45.9 million at year-end. And we had debt of $8.7 million compared to $9.6 million at year-end. Cash provided by operations was $0.9 million in Q3, and our DSOs, or days sales outstanding and accounts receivable, remained reasonable at 58. versus 47 at year end and 45 at the same time last year. Recall that our Q4, so that's next quarter for us, tends to be a high point for cash from operations due to some seasonality in our non-cash working capital, in particular related to annual tax credit refunds. I'll now turn the call back over to Peter to provide some outlook comments.

Thanks, Mark. The positive growth trends are continuing for Texas as we move through fiscal 22. Our consistent strong financial performance, new accounts, and the expansion of our existing accounts, and most notably our solid pipeline are continuing. The market conditions give us confidence that we are well positioned to continue capitalizing on this opportunity. As mentioned earlier, we are laser focused on retaining the great people we have while attracting new talent to stay ahead of this changing market. We continue to see demand for adding additional talent and we are starting to see what appears to be some potential positive signs in the labor market after what has been a fairly choppy past number of months. We are mindful of our delivery capacity and we continue to invest on that front. We are also continuing to invest in our channel relationships. In both cases, we're taking proactive steps to manage for continued growth. While we're optimistic that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, it has taught all of us to be prepared for the unknown, and to be adaptable enough to overcome curveballs. Texas has never been in a stronger financial position to weather future sudden market volatility if it were to occur. In summary, I want to remind analysts and investors about our three key operational themes for the remainder of fiscal 22, which have not changed from our previous analyst call as we entered the fiscal year. First, we'll continue to maintain focus on developing and growing our SaaS revenue model. We will likewise continue to optimize our internal processes and resources to complement this shift to SaaS to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. Secondly, we'll continue to expand our partnership ecosystem. This is key for us to scale rapidly into the market opportunities that I mentioned earlier. We now have partners working effectively with us in both North America and Europe We'll continue to invest so that we can enable them more quickly. From accelerated training programs to improved onboarding tools, we are determined to continue to make our SI partners more and more successful. Thirdly, we plan on investing in all of our sales channels to exploit the momentum in the opportunities coming at us. We also continue to expand and refine our omnichannel business platforms to service evolving needs in our healthcare supply chain, converging distribution, and retail market segments. These efforts will help us to not only minimize customer return, which is already very low, but will also help us to expand revenue from current clients as we saw happening again this quarter. With that, we'll open up the call for questions. Thank you.

Thank you. If you would like to register a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press the 1 followed by the 3. One moment please for the first question. Our first question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather of Cormark. Please go ahead with your question.

Well, Hug, good morning. I thought we could start out on the health care side. And, you know, I think last quarter you referenced kind of the next 20 years being, you know, roughly identified and deals kind of being worked in the pipeline. I know those deals can be, you know, kind of unpredictable in how they move, but can you spread any color on, you know, how those deals are maturing and moving in the pipeline?

Sure. Like, overall, Devin, that Overall, the healthcare market is almost on fire these days. We are seeing a lot of activity in that segment. We're seeing a lot of deals moving through the pipeline. It's interesting. I feel like the biggest change in a way in the last year is we've moved from sort of management teams trying to convince the board that they need to do this and invest in their supply chain technology to now the shoe's on the other foot. The boards are asking the management teams sort of what they're doing about supply chain and how soon they're going to get a good platform in place. So it's turned around and accelerated. This quarter was weird from the standpoint that, especially for healthcare, to some extent across all segments, but especially for healthcare, this quarter was really only, you know, probably a little less than two months long. You know, the Omicron wave came through and it hit different areas of the country at different, you know, slightly different times. But basically, the bulk of our clientele in healthcare were massively distracted for anywhere between one third and half of the quarter. So we felt like it was, you know, it felt like a very short quarter from the standpoint of actually getting deals done. But the and you saw that in some of the deal slippage that Mark referred to, I mean, the So professional services bookings, a big chunk that signed in just in the first week of February, that normally would have been Q3 stuff. And even the additional network that signed in the first week of February, that normally would have been Q3 stuff. But it was all just sort of Omicron shortening up the quarter. But overall, to answer your question, the activity in that market is stronger than we've ever seen.

That's very helpful. And then maybe I thought we could zero in on the services side. And I know it's kind of the holiday quarter. And, you know, I think you referenced when you're impacting some projects. Do you have a sense of the amount of, you know, billings that may be slipped from your third quarter into future quarters? And should we expect to catch up there?

Yeah, we actually expect a bit of a catch-up. It's hard to quantify exactly how much slipped. I mean, if I were to put a number on it, I would say it was at least a million and a half or something like that. We just had too many projects where we suddenly got to mid-December or whatever and the customer calls and says, you know what, we're in the middle of Omicron wave, half our staff is sick. Everybody go home and we'll see you in a month kind of thing. So we just had a lot of that. Now, the challenge, of course, is you know, while we do expect some catch-up in Q4, to some extent, we can only catch up so much because, of course, we're capacity constrained. So, you know, we've added headcount in that, you know, on our professional services side, but, you know, the supply is not infinite there. So, we certainly expect a strong Q4 in pro services as, you know, as it largely seems like the, you It seems like whatever the vaccinations didn't get, Omicron got. So it seems like we're kind of out of the woods on this now. But I would guess, Mark, I don't know if you would agree. I feel like maybe a million, maybe a million and a half. It's somewhere in that range.

Yep, I think that's reasonable.

That's great. And then maybe I thought we could just chat on the labs module, which commercialized, I guess, in January. We haven't talked about it a ton in the past. Can you maybe just walk us through how you think about the target market size, the distribution for that module, and overall just your thoughts on growth for that piece of software?

You know what? Sorry, Gavin. I didn't pick up which module you're referring to.

The lab module, the clinical lab module. Oh, okay.

Sure. Yeah, I mean, that's still very early stage. I don't – I mean, I would say – you're probably not going to hear much from us about labs in any significant commercial way for probably another year or two. I mean, our focus is, at this point, is more continuing to gain traction in the pharmaceutical module, you know, for in-hospital pharmacy. In fact, our goal, if you look at what we're trying to get done, you know, we're saying... We want to get to 100 IDNs within the next few years, and we want to make sure that at least 10 of those IDNs are deploying our pharmacy module, because our feeling is that if we can get at least 10 of them deployed using our pharmacy module, That will sort of set us up for a second wave to go back through the entire customer base and add in the pharmacy module. So that's our goal. I mean, this market, as you know, is a pretty cautious market. So it's really, I would say, the pharmacy module that's taking up the bulk of our attention in terms of trying to get some real traction there.

Got it. And then lastly, before I pass the line, I know you've been doing work kind of internally to optimize your software for running on a SaaS delivery console. Can you just provide a bit of an update on that dev project in terms of timelines and maybe just touch on how that might influence your SaaS growth margins as that runs faster?

Sure. I mean, from the standpoint of the project to take our software to be sort of much more SAS native, that work continues. And there's a way in which You know, there's a way in which you're always wrestling with technical debt, right? I mean, it's just the nature of the software development space. It sometimes drives me nuts. Sometimes we have product that I still think of as brand new. You know, we developed the product, you know, within the last three years. And I start hearing from R&D that there's some technical debt that they have to go back and work through. And it's just it's the nature of the rapidly evolving sort of cloud space that some of this stuff changes all the time. But it certainly looks to us as though the heavy lifting will be done pretty much by the end of this calendar year. I mean, we've introduced all kinds of new security capability. We're shifting the underlying database to run off a much lower cost database so that we will be able to support the Postgres database in AWS. So, and we're, you know, we've added all kinds of scalability capability. We've got a very large go live that happened in January, over a thousand users at a single site. And it's, you know, performing very, very well in the cloud. So, so we're, we're pretty happy with where we're at on that. And we, as I say, we think the heavy lifting will kind of be done by the end of this, this calendar year. From the standpoint of impact on margins, that the shift in database will, over the next year, we think add somewhere around three to five percentage points of margin to our SAS numbers, but really only on new accounts. It'll take more time to move existing accounts over onto that. But still, we believe that'll start to show up significantly by the end of our next fiscal year. The other margin shift that I think you're going to see in the coming couple of years is we've probably only got another maybe six months, probably a couple of quarters. I'm going to ask Mark to comment on this when I'm done, but another couple of quarters of continuing to build out the bench on our cloud and DevOps support team. So that's what keeps suppressing the margins at this point, is even though the revenue is growing pretty significantly, you know, up more than 50% this quarter, constant currency, we're continuing to build out that bench and get a deeper and deeper bench of expertise and capability to, you know, operate the offering 24-7. We're a couple quarters away from having that pretty much done. So at that point, the cost, you know, starts to flatten out and the revenue just continues to rise. So... Mark, does that?

Yeah, I think that's right in the next, you know, I think that's right. You know, we've got, you know, this quarter and probably the first half of next year to get to that place. And the other thing that's going on in there is, you know, investment in security that will be going on over that time period as well. Of course, we're faced with some pretty difficult issues. you know, a pretty difficult hiring environment too. But so timing, you know, may be impacted by that. But I think that's right. You know, our plan is to bring in those resources and have the skill created by the first half of next fiscal.

Got it. That's super helpful. Thanks so much. Great.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Amor Eze of Echelon Partners. Please go ahead with your question.

Hi, it's Amor. Peter, Mark, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. My first one is on your capital deployment strategy. The stock's come off quite a bit since December, despite I think it's 12 quarters of record revenues now. You've got a decent cash position and under levered balance sheet. So, you know, like I'm wondering what's the board thinking on buybacks versus maybe increasing the dividends and M&A. Can you share some thoughts there?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, the focus of the board and our management team is basically hang on to the war chest and look for the right acquisitions. You know, I mean, we continue to generate enough cash to continue to slowly add to our cash pile as well as pay the dividends. But our, you know, a lot of that money was actually raised at 17 bucks a share. So, you know, even though the stocks come down from, you know, in the 60s, I mean, it's obviously come down along with everyone else. Misery loves company. So I try to make myself feel better by looking at other people's stock. But we feel like the opportunities for acquisitions are getting a little bit better. You know, the private equity market is not cooled off to the same extent that the public markets have, but there's still sort of a little bit more realism creeping into that side as well. So even though our stock is down, we think, you know, there may be some, you know, potential opportunities on the horizon. So it's really, you know, I know we've sort of sat on that cash for quite a while, but we do feel like it's, you know, it needs to be there to be ready to deploy for the right acquisitions.

Okay, no, that's good, Kelly. And just to follow up on Gavin's question, you know, like Peter, you mentioned during COVID, there was obviously an increased openness and urgency to have conversations on supply chain management software and investing in supply chain. And I'm wondering, with COVID pressures easing, do you feel these conversations with new potential clients are still very constructive or is the strong level of activity we are currently seeing coming from conversations initiated, you know, like in the past few quarters at the height of COVID?

I mean, I think you're sort of asking sort of is the urgency accelerating or decelerating? I mean, it seems to us that sort of a whole generation of business leaders has just learned all about how important supply chain is and that in fact, your business can almost fall apart if you don't know where your stuff is and when it's coming in and have the ability to manage it in real time and react in real time and so on. So we're seeing, I mean, if we just look at our pipeline, like our pipeline is up massively compared to this time last year. And, you know, this time last year, we were already a year into pandemic. So it doesn't seem to be slowing down. It seems to be, if anything, accelerating. Healthcare is moving the fastest right now in that they seem to have already sort of said, okay, you know what, we can't wait for the pandemic to end. We just got to get this stuff moving. So there we're seeing actual deal sign and so on. In complex distribution and retail, we're starting to see more deals moving toward a close, but a lot of the activity is still top of funnel there, where it's companies that have realized that their existing platforms are not capable of dealing with what they now have to handle, but at the same time, they're looking at the you know, all the distractions going on in their business, not only directly COVID, but this completely screwed up supply chains they're trying to manage as we get through these next number of months. I mean, they can't access containers, cost of containers has tripled or quadrupled. You know, in some cases, their landed costs because of the cost of moving a container across the water, their landed cost is higher than their retail selling price. So So there's all kinds of issues they're dealing with. So it's not the time for some of them to also swap out their core operating platform. But they're trying to get ready to swap out their core operating platform because they can see it's not handling sort of the new world we're in. So we're anticipating, I mean, You know, I mean, crystal ballgazing is already always dangerous. But if judging by our pipeline, we're expecting sort of health care to be in the lead for another couple of quarters and then a pretty rapid acceleration on the complex distribution and retail side.

OK, that's all great. On professional services, I mean, three quarters running at record levels and you mentioned your capacity constraints. Can you maybe give us or remind us of your headcount and professional services and how much staff are you adding?

Let me pass that one over to Mark. We've got a lot of open positions, that's for sure. It's an interesting thing that after I think the first eight months of the year, our fiscal May to December, we really struggled to add heads. You know, we added some, so we had some waves of resignations come through and so on. A lot of people were restless and moving around and so on. And suddenly in January and February, that seems to have turned. And even as we're heading into March, it seems to be remaining very positive. So suddenly we're able to recruit, retain, and really build up those teams. So we don't know if the wave of restlessness has kind of just subsided or, you know, did we get smarter? I don't think it's really that. You know, we did adapt some of our strategies, but somehow something shifted in the market. And we're finding it's suddenly easier again to add talent. But let Mark give you some of the numbers there.

Yeah. So, Amber, we're at about 240, 245 professional services team size right now. And that would be up about 20 heads from the beginning of the year. As Peter mentioned, we had, you know, our quarter one and our quarter two were were were kind of bumpy you know um we had some we did have some some attrition you know we had people leaving we were hiring but our headcount growth was was you know kind of kind of uh slow in in the first couple quarters it almost feels like um you know kind of since even since the first of the year um that you know we've done some things we've reacted to that we've um you know we've we've looked at comp we've we've we've you know, become as, as competitive as we think we need to be to, to retain and hire the right people. Um, and it feels like it, it feels like the, the winds of change have stopped blowing there a little bit. And at least in, um, at least in the last couple of months, we've seen what, what seems like a more stable recruiting environment for us, um, and a more stable retention environment so that, you know, our headcount growth in the last couple of months has been out of pace with what we saw in the first, you know, sort of eight months of our, of our, of our fiscal. So reason to reason for some, you know, some positive, you know, positive outlook on our ability to scale up that business a little bit more rapidly in the coming quarters.

And where do you want to take that 245 number in the next couple of quarters?

Yeah, you know, we would drink, we would increase that by another, you know, 30 heads in a heartbeat, and then up from there.

Great. Then maybe one last one. I mean, you guys touched on margin and a couple of moving parts over the next few quarters. OPEX has flopped from last quarter, which surprises me. Wondering how we should be thinking about your investments in the business going forward, as well as, you know, like you guys spoke to inflationary pressures. specifically on the next couple of quarters with a good sort of number of teams?

Yeah, we think, you know, we think we're going to continue that, you know, that investment that you've seen. I know it didn't change a lot in the last, you know, in the last quarter, but it has been inching up, you know, quarterly across the year. And, you know, as we look ahead and think about what we're doing and, Think about, you know, investing in the product and investing in the sales and marketing team and programs. You know, we expect that part of the OPEX to, you know, to continue to tick up like you saw in earlier quarters.

Great. I'll pass the line and congrats on our strong quarter.

Thanks, Amber.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Nick Agostino of Laurentian Brand Securities. Please go ahead with your question.

Yes, good morning. I guess first question, just to make sure I heard correctly, Peter, did you say that… Yep. Sorry, yeah.

I think Nick… Sorry, can you guys hear me?

Yes, we can.

Kind of breaking up a bit, Nick.

I'll try to speak closer to the mic. I just want to confirm, it was one IDN win in the quarter and then one follow-on IDN win after the quarter.

That's right. That's right. Yeah, we had thought there was going to be two. But at the last minute, there was, again, some distraction in one of the IDNs we were about to sign, and it slipped into the first week of February. So there was one truly in the quarter and one just outside the quarter. Okay, great.

And then on the commentary you guys made earlier and in the press release with regards to Omicron impacting December and January, you've given the colour on the healthcare side Was there any, were you observing the same impact on the other segments of the business or was that commentary totally skewed just to healthcare?

No, it was right across the board. Like, you know, one account, for instance, in the sort of Detroit region where, I mean, there was a full six weeks in the quarter where they were just, I mean, they could barely keep the lights on. They had so many people out with Omicron. So, you know, that whole project, you know, slowed down massively. So it was pretty well right across the board. I mean, I'm not sure anybody was spared. I mean, the further south you went in the U.S., the less the impact was. There's no question. But still, I don't think there was a single sector that was spared. Our retail clients were the least affected. But, of course, retail is still a pretty small segment for us.

Okay, that's good color. And then going back to the commentary you provided, you said the focus is on the pharma module and getting traction there. First, just to make sure I heard correctly, you said you hope 10 of the next 100 IDN wins include pharma module, or was it 10 of when you get to 100 IDNs? that you hope that, that, that initial a hundred includes those 10 or includes 10.

Yeah. It's when we get to a hundred, you know, we're currently sort of just blowing past 50 kind of now. So, so if, you know, we're hoping that by the time we get to a hundred, we'll have, you know, at least 10% of them will be running the pharmacy module. Cause we're, we're really seeing, I mean, we look at this overall market and we say, okay, there's, you know, 311 IDNs we're directly targeting. So, you know, $120 million AR market, uh, as we look out over the long haul, we're kind of saying, it's probably not reasonable to expect that we'll win more than half of the market. So it feels like the market ceiling is maybe around 150 IDNs kind of thing. So we want to make sure that as we sort of get through that effort to take a big chunk of that market for the rest of the supply chain requirements, that we've got a second wave to go to, you know, ready to roll as this wave starts to sort of wind down, whatever that would be five, six years from now kind of thing. So we're saying, you know, let's make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that we want to have a solid pharmacy base within the next few years so that we can start that second sort of path back through these networks, you know, following, you know, the wave we're in now.

Okay, but I guess maybe if you can just expand on, is there an overhang here, so something that is stalling, maybe the take-up on that pharma module? You guys have certainly been developing the product for quite a few years. The commercial rollout, I think, is at least one year on, has been in existence for about one year, getting close to one year. Is there a sense that things are maybe stalled out for a certain reason, maybe it's the pandemic, or is the observations you're making on the pharma side very similar to what you would observe on the med-surg side, so we should expect a similar type of adoption curve?

I think you're right on both points. It is similar. When we first got into, for instance, OR, We were three or four years commercial before it started turning into any kind of a wave. Everyone wanted to see it running for a couple of years before they were ready to adopt it, so we had to get the first couple of networks up and live. you know happy and saying good things uh and then even then it took a couple more years before people were ready to to adopt for themselves so it is following that same pattern at the same time there's no question that pandemic has affected it uh you know the our second pharmacy client uh that uh is was you know is rolling out the pharmacy module uh the pandemic has delayed their project by probably 12 to 15 months uh so you know the pandemic is definitely affecting it but it Overall, it's following the same kind of pattern we've seen in the past.

Okay, and then maybe just some commentary. You alluded to expanding the SIs, supporting the SIs. Can you just give us an update on where things stand with the workdays with the KPMGs as far as how much of their pipeline they're contributing as it continues to grow? And if you've seen, I believe Workday has been historically more healthcare centric and KPMG, I believe has been more retail centric. Has either one been successful or showing signs of cross selling or crossing over to other markets specifically on the Workday side?

No, I would say Workday is still predominantly healthcare. and has remained, it's actually remained more healthcare focused than I thought it would. But, you know, we're now seeing activity in a number of accounts again with them. In total, our total pipeline is up to about 27% now partner influenced. Interestingly, we looked at the last year and we can see that we entered the year with about 21% partner influenced in our pipeline. And yet, if you look at closed deals, 30% of the closed deals were partner-influenced, which again sort of highlights that fact that when you have a partner involved in the account, your win rate goes up. So your percentage of won deals ends up being more partner-influenced than your pipeline actually is. But we're seeing good headway there. We're still, I would say though, most of our active partners are either in healthcare or or in pure retail. You know, we're having really good success with Rise now in the healthcare space. You know, we've mentioned accounts, you know, companies like Deloitte and KPMG that are working with us in health care. And we've got and of course, we've got the workday relationship. And we recently signed a partnership agreement even with Infor. You know, Infor used to be sort of more of a competitor to us in the in the health care space. And we signed a partnership agreement with them to cooperate in the space. So so that that is going very well. Retail, we've always had partners around the world, European, North American, even Asia-Pac partners there. The complex distribution space is the space where I think we still lag in terms of partners. And it's something that our partner team is putting a really focused effort into is to try to build out more of an SI network. around complex distribution. So we're probably, I would say we're two years behind healthcare in where we are in complex distribution.

Okay, I appreciate the colors. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for the responses. That's fine. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andy Nguyen of Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question.

Hi, this is Andy. I just want to start with questions on if there's any metrics you can share that show the impact of the investment in sales and marketing, as we're not seeing the significant impact on the earnings and yield count yet.

Yeah, I mean, Andy, I think probably what you want to focus on there, what we focus on is really around SaaS ARR bookings. And those are up 23%. this year compared to last year for the nine-month period. You know, so once you start looking at enough quarters there, sort of the lumpiness goes out and you kind of start to see the trend. So that's number one. Number two, and Peter mentioned this during his comments a bit, you know, we're seeing some really robust pipeline and pipeline activity. And, you know, we invested quite a bit, you know, particularly in healthcare and our sales and marketing. bringing in AEs for healthcare, et cetera. And we are starting to see these, call them the newer AEs, successfully closing deals. We've had a couple closed in a couple of recent quarters from newer AEs that have been around for less than two years. And if we look in our pipeline right now and focus on who's in those deals in our pipeline and where the growth is coming from, we see a great penetration from the new AEs that we've brought on within the last few years that are driving a nice chunk of that pipeline growth. So it's building. We see it. We see it in growth and pipeline. And we're seeing it in results in SAS ARR bookings.

Yeah, thanks, Mark. Just touching on that pipeline point, What percentage of the pipeline is influenced by the partner?

Yeah, I think Peter mentioned 27%. I think it's actually slightly. Maybe we're rounding there, but I think it's slightly higher. It's 28% right now, and that's up from low 20s a couple quarters ago.

Yeah, thank you. And my last question is, so I'm looking at the free cash flow year to date. And I know I think you guys touch on the primary reason for the decrease in free cash flow is the timing of the AR. But I think year to date is down by 76% compared to last year. So I'm just wondering, like, why is it down so much? And we expect you for to be muted as well.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think if you look back and you see those DSO numbers that I quoted, and you look back at our history there a little bit, you know, there was, you know, a year ago, we were in these, we were in this sort of, I would say, unsustainably low DSO level in the, you know, kind of in the 40s. And so we, in order to go, you know, before that, we were at DSOs were up and, you know, six months before that, uh, three quarters before that DSOs were up in the, you know, in the high sixties and into the low seventies. So you saw last year that that kind of decrease in DSOs went from, you know, 70 down to, you know, the mid forties. So you had this kind of one-time influx, um, of cash and that's, that's the comp that you're looking at. You know, that's the last year comp you're looking at right now. Our DSOs are in the, in the high fifties, which is, which is, you know, I mentioned it, I called it a reasonable, um, level. Um, you know, we'd like to bring, we'd like to see the number down in the low fifties rather than in the, in the mid high fifties, but it's just still a reasonable number. Um, but it's grown up from, you know, from the mid high forties up to the high fifties. And so that's, you know, that's consumed some cash along the way. We don't, we don't feel like we have a, uh, any kind of an AR problem. I know as we look at the, As we look at the balances and our expectations for collections and our write-off history has been just phenomenal. So we don't see any issues there. Like I said, I would expect that DSO number comes back down into the lower 50s. That's going to create some less strain on usage in working capital. And then the seasonality of our Q4 is such that it tends to be a high. a high cash quarter for us, both around our billing cycles, but also because of our tax credits and the cash flow, the one time a year cash flow that comes from those tax credits is in our Q4.

Gotcha. Thank you. I'll come back to that. Thanks.

Thank you. As a reminder to register for a question, please press the 1-4. And at this present time, actually, we do have one question. It comes from the line of John Sheo of Financial, my apologies, National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. I just have a quick question on the heart rate revenue. 17% quarter over quarter increase. That looks really decent. So I'm just curious, how should we read about this quarter over quarter increase given the fact that The supply to hardware is still fragile today.

I missed the very beginning of that, John. Were you talking about a revenue line there?

Hardware revenue, the 17% quarter-over-quarter increase. How do we look into that number?

Yeah. It's a tricky one, John, and it's a tricky one for us to call. That was a big... That was a big outsized quarter for us. If you look at our history, that was a large outsized quarter. We still have some pretty robust pipeline there and some pretty robust backlog there. Some of that stuff is we do have some trickiness with supply chain getting this stuff. The vast majority of what goes through there is is third party stuff. We do have a little bit of proprietary stuff that we put together and sell there. And we have supply chain, you know, some supply chain issues on that. So it's kind of hard, you know, it's kind of, it's even hard for us to determine with the level of accuracy when that backlog is going to ship. So I think, you know, long story short, I think that what you saw in that Q3 was, was an outsized hardware quarter, but we do have some pretty reasonable backlog for that still today.

Thanks. The other question on the gross margin, 43% for the quarter, which is down from 45% from last quarter. So I'm just curious, how should we see the trend of the gross margin in the upcoming quarter? And how much is this quarter's gross margin decline related to the FX?

Yeah, yeah. So a couple of things there, like that 48, 43% sort of headline gross profit margin number compared to 48. So there's a 5% swing compared to last year. So I dissect that in a couple of different ways. Number one, if you look at our SaaS maintenance support and professional services margin, it it was about 47% in that quarter. So just like in an absolute sense, it's a, it's a, it's a higher number, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a more robust number. That sort of level I think is probably, you know, we're still, we're still sort of investing there. So, you know, I don't think that's an unusual margin level for the, for the near term there. What is going to make the thing move around, you know, with the mix. So that, Our headline number was 43%, but our SAS maintenance support and professional services number was 47%. So the hardware number, which is the lower margin number, is diluting that profit margin down to 43%. And then number two, if you compare the 43% to the 48%, there's like a five percentage point swing in that headline number. And as I mentioned in the comments, There's three things in there. There's FX, there's mix, and there's investment. Like there's cost increase investment. And if you look at how those contributed at 5%, FX is about 2% of that 5, 2 percentage points of those 5. Revenue mix is about 2 percentage points of those 5. And cost investment is about 1 percentage point of those 5.

Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate the call.

Thank you. As a reminder to register for a question, please press the 1-4. And at this present time, no one else has registered for any questions. Please continue with your presentation or closing remarks.

Thank you. Well, that concludes the question and answer session. Just one overall comment to make, I think, with regard to a number of these questions. The stock market has continued and the investment community has continued to sort of shift priorities from growth to profitability and with probably more recent emphasis on profitability and maybe less on growth and so on. That sentiment tends to move around a little bit. We continue to run a long-term game plan here. that calls for a heavy emphasis on growth, investing in growth as much as possible to drive a solid growth in the top line and particularly solid growth in the SaaS numbers. while trying to respect a reasonable level of profitability. So that continues to be our strategy. We continue to hold the line on that. And certainly, you know, as you interpret these numbers and look forward to future quarters, you can know that that's what we're trying to do. Sometimes there's lumpiness, gets pushed around a little bit, but the goal is primary emphasis on growing that SAS number, but maintain profitability at a reasonable level. Okay, but that concludes our call, and thank you for joining us. And as always, if you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to give Mark or I a call. Thanks, and have a great day.

Thank you. That does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please...