Tim Hassinger
Analyst · Stifel
Good morning and thank you for joining our call. With me on today's call is Brian Ketcham, Chief Financial Officer; and Lori Zarkowski, our Chief Accounting Officer. The objective of this call is to discuss our quarter one results. Before we go to that overview, I’ll make a few introductory comments. Our Foundation for Growth initiative was internally announced 12 months ago on this week, and it continues to progress and create positive change for Lindsay. As you've heard me say several times on these calls, my direction when we launched this initiative was for the company to simplify, then grow. In these past 12 months, we've taken a lot of actions to simplify our company. To name a few, we streamlined the leadership team structure, changed the portfolio through four divestitures, closed a manufacturing facility, announced shared services consolidation plans, made our vision and values more impactful, moved to the implementation stage in several of our value-creation initiatives, and improved several internal business processes. This list is important because it says that we've achieved a lot of the initial steps of the simplify, then grow direction. Although there are areas we are still working on to further simplify our organization, our focus to grow the company has expanded this past quarter. On this point, about putting more focus on growth this past quarter, I’ve emphasized since I came to Lindsay the importance of technology to the company's future and how I wanted to see Lindsay become a more disruptive force in the irrigation and infrastructure space. Two immediate opportunities to achieve this are through the rapid adoption of Road Zipper and FieldNET Advisor. Although we don't provide guidance or give specific product information on these calls, I want to provide you with a view on why I continue to be optimistic on what we can achieve with these two market differentiating offerings. For Road Zipper, we recognized the need to address the lumpiness of this business. Our position is to address this need through growing the business and increasing the leasing percent of the total sales. We had a record sales year in fiscal year 2018. And given the long lead times associated with projects, my comments here will focus on fiscal year 2020 and beyond. We are on target with increasing our leasing portion of the business and we have expanded our global reach capability with Europe being a good example of where our project pipeline is increasing. A key change we’ve made in our sales approach is that we’re focusing on customer needs earlier in the project planning, design, and procurement process than we have done in the past. We track our pipeline based on projects with a 50% and 75% probability of success, and in both cases our pipeline is showing good growth. Although this business is difficult to change direction in a short time frame, given the length of the time needed for these projects, the data strongly indicates that we’re moving in the direction that we have outlined in prior calls. FieldNET Advisor continues to show strong growth and we’ve successfully leveraged this differentiation to attract customers. We've seen a good response from larger accounts that recognize the water, energy and labor savings created by FieldNET Advisor can make them more productive and profitable. One customer in the Midwest added FieldNET Advisor to over 250 pivots this past season, and we have also confirmed a large customer in the Southwest region who will add FieldNET Advisor to more than 160 of their pivots. Both large growers run multiple brands of center pivots in their fleet, so the fact that they chose FieldNET Advisor is representative of the value that our solution creates and the potential of the platform. Road Zipper and FieldNET Advisor represent the change that is occurring at Lindsay, more innovation, more differentiation with a focus on margin expansion. This organization is focused and committed to the goals we announced last year and the necessary steps are being taken to achieve the 11% to 12% operating margin goal for fiscal year 2020. We are fully focused on gaining margin expansion in these four primary areas: Our manufacturing footprint, G&A, the shared services activities, sourcing and commercial. My summary on the Foundation for Growth initiative is we are right on track according to the plan we laid out one year ago to the Lindsay organization. So now, let's move on to our Q1 results. For that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.