CONMED Corporation (NYSE:CNMD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Robbie Marcus: And does that include sort of normal market volumes, procedure volumes and I imagine at the high-end of the range full recapture of share?

Curt Hartman: Yes. I think that our view is similar to what you’ve heard from others that the environment is modestly improving, right? It’s stabilized. So, yes, inherent in this guide is that is, kind of, status quo — sorry, status quo for macro factors.

Robbie Marcus: Great. Thanks a lot.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Rick Wise from Stifel. Your line is now open.

Rick Wise: Good afternoon to you both. Maybe just taking the software implementation issue in the opposite direction. Help us understand, I mean, I think we all understand generally that having a software system or going to a modern system as opposed to a hand managed system, Curt, is impactful. But how do we think about the benefits? When you start to see those benefits? What kind of assumptions you’re making about them in terms of sales, implementation, cash on the financial side, cash working capital efficiency, et cetera. So what do you expect? When do we start to see the positive, not just the recovery.

Curt Hartman: That’s a great question. And it goes back to the reason you do these things. One is efficiency in the location efficiency in movement of product into the location, through the location and out of the location, whether that be to the end customer or international distribution centers. And that is a very tangible benefit. And as we sit here today, we’re already seeing some of that efficiency, our incoming receiving operations are materially more efficient than they were pre-implementation of the software. It’s one of the areas that we did get right on the implementation. And so we see those things more broadly across the entirety of the warehouse, which warehouse operations are about receiving, replenishing and then picking, packing and shipping.

And when we get all of these areas, lined up the way they should be with all of the requisite operational efficiencies and warehouse alignment, we believe we’ll see that. And hopefully as we go day-by-day, week-by-week, we see this efficiency gains more subtly. And we’re on this call a year from now and we’re proud of the system we have and we’re proud of the output that we have and it means moving inventory faster, which allows our manufacturing and sales ops planning team to do a better job with inventory management, because we’ve got better controls, better oversight, better visibility on the global inventory network. So those are all kind of the things we would go after when you put a system like this in place. Hard sitting here today for me to say exactly when, because we’re still working our way through some of these inherent issues that we ran into.

But again, as Todd said in his comments, we’ve got the backlog down to $10 million, we’ve made very good progress. As I said, the changes that have been required take comprehensive verification and validation and we’re trying to be very thoughtful to not make things worse as we’re trying to move forward. And I’d say we’ve been successful on that. Albeit a little bit slower than we had hoped.