Recommerce is temporal: every item has past and future

Karri: Second fundamental which is that everything is temporal or time-dependent.

Tuomo: When we enter this model where items are unique and in the subject of the or kind of in the context of the merchant, items might have been out a few times as part of a rental or they might have come in as a buyback but they've gone through a more complex and dynamic article life cycle so they might have gone through multiple inspections, multiple grading processes, multiple rentals so you kind of start to accumulate a timeline or table of events for that specific item and all of these events have certain information that is valuable and it's valuable in terms of it helps you and some of these events might also be in the future so if you get a future booking for an item that event might be something that happens maybe in a month so that table of events has a lot of monetary value in it because it tells you what's the utilization, what's the availability of this item and it tells you a history in terms of inspection and maintenance so if you want to do profitability analysis of an individual item or aggregately over your whole operation those tables that store these events are the source of that and that's why in re-commerce this aspect of temporality is how we call it or the time dependence or this kind of time table is so important in many aspects.

Karri: And I guess it's also bringing a little complexity also into the software or commerce OS world where you might want to actually check the status on this certain point of time rather than having like always checking like the real time like what's happening now in my inventory you might want to see what's happening in a week exactly.

Tuomo: So you start to be in an operational world where you have well like the simplify if I want to optimize my business I have questions and I look for answers for those questions from a commerce OS or whatever system and in terms of re-commerce many of your questions tend to be such that they're questions about the future can I give this item for a customer in two weeks of time is it available that's a question that has a time component built into it how many times have this item been used at the end of this season if I want to estimate the value of my inventory at the end of a rental season or for example how much money I've spent in repairing this item so all of these questions have a certain temporal or time dependent component in it and that kind of that guides quite a lot the needs behind the system that we're also catering towards maybe to simplify many commerce systems help you answer questions and it tends to be so that in re-commerce many of the questions that you would like to ask have a temporal or time dependent aspect to it or a variable in those questions.

Karri: And probably also like when you're looking looking at back and want to analyze like how did this season go it might be that the same items are used for multiple seasons so you want to have a snapshot of hey this pair of sporting equipment or something produced this amount of revenue and maybe even do some calculations like how much of the maintenance and everything happened during a period of time.

Tuomo: And I think a kind of a sanity check of when these kind of capabilities might be useful come to play well or every time you kind of start to think about I need to understand a life cycle of something better that usually means that you're looking for a solution that helps you understand that time dependency what has happened and might happen in the future so recording what has happened it that's kind of keeping log of stuff and then the more you keep log of stuff in a granular level the better software is export looking forward and forecasting what might happen there there are kind of future data points that we can be super certain of if you get a booking in for example for rental if you get a booking in two months in advance we can be quite certain that that data point will happen then but we can also look backwards into that look that has happened and try to think like estimate that even though some events have not yet happened based on the data we can be pretty certain that they will happen you know skiing season will you know will be at the same time this year also so we can start to forecast demand for example based on your the log that you've had and the more granular the data has been recorded and thanks to software you don't have to yourself handle all of the complexities but the more granular data you have the more granular forecasts you can have of the future.

Karri: And that probably also can help you for example plan maintenance so let's say that you get data that hey this item breaks down after 10 rentals so then it might if you get that data point somewhere you might want to maybe service it before it actually breaks down maybe after eight rentals on average.

Tuomo: Definitely and it might be also that you need to inspect something after every 10 maybe it's a regulation thing if you do I don't see plans you probably want to have some kind of a security measurement where after x amount of usage or x hours of usage you need to you need to kind of check that whether it's safe to use still when it's temporal and there are events then you also have that log that you can kind of go back to and make sure that everything is in order and yeah it's kind of an auditable history of everything and that's also how it connects to re-commerce maybe that if you want to turn this inflow of product returns or buyback or whatever into resellable items you probably also want a little bit of an audit on what happened in between of that item entering your ownership and before it gets sold out or restocked to be sold out so the inspection process who did it what did they do how long did it did it take was their costs connected to those some of those might be internal I mean it might be a third party partner but you kind of you need to log that aspect both from business perspective and then just like almost like legal covering your ass perspective that if something doesn't work out you might want to go to the audit logs and say that well we have the log that says that we did all of these things that this is just like a unhappy accident unfortunately but we have a process in place where we made sure every item has gone through these inspection processes.