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377- ERP Without the Nightmare w/James Dean Miller · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome, everyone. Back to dissecting popularity Nerds. Today, talking with James Dean. Jim Miller, Executive President, cio, cto. You have a lot of roles going on, but I think what may be more useful to the youth that may continue on into. Into the IT world or possibly even security is your background. And maybe just tell us a little story, because stories are always great. And I think the best podcasts are like a series of stories all strung together. So how did you get.
• 0:38
  Speaker B: And what do you prefer me to.
• 0:40
  Speaker A: Use as your, like, where you are working? Because you have some really cool stuff. I mean, you've got like an ammunition company, which is awesome. Then we've got cybersecurity. I mean, where should we go with just all of the above?
• 0:53
  Speaker C: So right now, I am the CIO of Migra Ammunitions, an ammunition manufacturer for waterfowl and waterfowl hunting. So ducks. Geese, that kind of thing.
• 1:05
  Speaker A: That's pretty niche. That's pretty niche, actually.
• 1:08
  Speaker C: Yeah, it is. Well, there's actually. There's actually three ammunition companies that I work with. So one is for personal defense, the other's for military ammo, and the other's for hunting. As part of the manufacturing process. We do call quality control. So we actually have our own small range behind the factory. We also store the bulk of the gunpowder because it's explosive outside of the factory. We only have enough in there for the production that we need for that. That shift. But we do have our own live range where we measure muzzle velocity and then the expansion of the pattern of the shot because we have patented technology that makes the ammunition go further than our competition and still kills the. The target.
• 1:53
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:54
  Speaker C: So it's kind of like NASCAR drafting. We, We. We put the bigger projectiles front, and then we have the smaller projectiles that are along for the ride, just like NASCAR drafting. So they, you know, they go further and then that the smaller shot is what typically kills the bird.
• 2:12
  Speaker A: That's okay. So me being a. I, I grew up in Maine. My best friend growing up, his name was Jason Gilpatrick, who will probably never listen to this. He's still.
• 2:26
  Speaker C: He's still up in, like, you know, remain innocent until.
• 2:30
  Speaker A: No, he's still like up in. Probably up in rangely or. Or somewhere right now on. On four wheelers and hunting and has learned to live like, the good life that he's never left. And like, I think he hated every corporate job that he ever had and eventually opened up his own company, you know, delivering and fixing, like, healthcare, mechanical beds and stuff. And, you know, probably has Everyone else running that right now. So he can either be fishing hunting or four wheeling or snowmobiling or looking at what new snowmobile he's gonna buy for next season along with what jet ski he's gonna buy tomorrow. It's. It just. He was like the friend that I always was, was a really great friend growing up with, but he always had way cooler stuff than I did.
• 3:14
  Speaker C: He was really, really good to have. You know the, you know the best kind of boat to have is somebody else's boat. Best kind of jet ski to have is somebody else's jet ski. I mean he always insurance you just you know, pay for a little bit gas, you know, have a good time.
• 3:26
  Speaker A: He, he just. And he knew how to fix every engine thing and like you know that's a problem with this intake or that or. And yeah he was, it was a lot of fun. And speaking of ammunition, they. His dad was president of the bank and he had, when he was building his house, lowered the old bank vault into his basement before in the foundation. So he had a mini like bank vault. Basically a massive safe. And he was a gun dealer. And I mean this is typical Maynard. Like there's two types of people in Maine and this is like the main type. So like every bullet was reloaded.
• 4:06
  Speaker D: Every.
• 4:07
  Speaker A: You know it's like we, I think he had like 52 guns. Like we used to joke around like oh imagine someone trying to like rob this house. Like they would be like, you know, it would be really bad. It would be a hostel good.
• 4:19
  Speaker C: It's a good friend to have. You know when the crap hits the fan, he'd be the one to go, go, go partner up with. You know, it's like hey, I'll do. You do the hunting, I'll do the cleaning and cooking.
• 4:27
  Speaker A: You know it was, we learned, I mean we know, I mean we were reloading like I think like 38s with like we would just reprime them and then we had fill these bullets with wax. Like we had, we had like what we thought invented this wax bullet. So we had like I. People would think we're crazy like because if you went into like you know, you wouldn't let your 12 year old kids like you know, play around with like a 38 revolver and reloading 38 shells. But there was a revolver sitting on the like you know, shop bench downstairs. Yeah, and we're like re priming 38 shells and then filling them up with wax that we were like melting down from. His mom's like canning stuff. You Know, and he.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: They had like an old.
• 5:09
  Speaker A: One of those old wood stoves down in the basement that you would. You would. It was like a wood stove oven, like with the little spring things. I don't know if you know what you're talking about in the round things. So he'd heat up an old Maxwell House can full of canning wax, bend the. Bend the can and then we would pour wax into 38. And the only thing powering this bullet was the primer, which was plenty enough. It shot. It would. So it would shoot out these wax bullets.
• 5:33
  Speaker C: That's like Poor man's eight ball. Sounds like main hakes. Exactly. Main Paintball. That's what it is. Oh we've got paintball stories too. We have paintball stories. The coloring. And then you get evidence that you actually got hit, you know.
• 5:44
  Speaker A: Right. You know, when my kids tell these stories, they're like, tell us another Jason story. Tell us another Jason story from going up to three autos. A lot of them. Yes. Yes. So anywho first divergent into it. Into the IT world. But it's. What's interesting is a lot of people that have been in in or are in it right now are ex military. Unless it's just. There's a lot of people in ex military everywhere. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's. Maybe I'm not drawing a correlation here at all. But let's get. So let's get back to the story. How'd you get. How'd you get into this whole mix? Like how'd you get to, you know, CIO at ammunition and being in the Navy and all that stuff? What's the. What's the tech story growing up?
• 6:22
  Speaker C: Started out on computers way back with the old Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64 TRS 80s. The original Macintosh black and white was our school school newspaper. Was published in the original IBM PC with the dual five and a quarter inch disk drives one you booted up on. The other was for programs and data.
• 6:42
  Speaker A: That was my wish. That was my dream at Sears. Was sitting out in Sears. But I never got that one. I ended up with Apple IIc, which is fine.
• 6:49
  Speaker C: Apple IIc, Apple IIes and the computer lab. And I just really got into computers and I rapidly figured out a whole lot of things. And then the teachers were asking me how to do things right so they could teach classes on this stuff and did some programming. Did some programming on my Commodore 64 and got published in Apple Bike magazine and Nice 364 magazine a few Others.
• 7:14
  Speaker A: Can we still look that up? Do you have it? Do you have a copy of that?
• 7:19
  Speaker C: I probably do.
• 7:20
  Speaker A: We need a picture of that. That's like vintage.
• 7:22
  Speaker C: Yeah, I still have my original tape drive. You know it was. Cassette tape is before, before disk drives.
• 7:29
  Speaker A: And call it an lp. Is that officially an lp? Is that what we call that?
• 7:33
  Speaker C: We, we just called it data. I can't remember. It was tape. It was a data tape drive. And then we got 1541 disc drives which was five and a quarter inch. And you could cut the little notch with the, the of course hole punchers and you could flip it over and use the other side. It was really cool. Before they were, before they were dual, dual sided and then matrix printer original. What was it? 9600 Baud modem was the starter. Audi. They slower than that. But I had 1200 and went to 9600 and you know, off the races after that. But so when I went to, I went to school, went to College at the U.S. naval Academy in, at Annapolis, Maryland. Of course when you do that you join the Navy. So that was 1985. They did have a computer science major then. There was only one. Now there's, you know, big data, AI, you know, programming, project management, you know, a bunch of other majors nowadays. But so that, that's where I studied. Was a Navy nuclear submarine officer for a little while I worked at Jim's.
• 8:33
  Speaker A: Wings and I worked at Jim's Wings also. And now as a, you know, worked. I also knew a Navy sub dude.
• 8:39
  Speaker C: And yeah, I also worked at Pizza Hut as a delivery driver at one time was an assistant, was an assistant manager. Got offered to be a regional manager. I was like, I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my life. Computer science was much more, much more interesting and lucrative. When I got out of the Navy, I worked at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in their construction equipment division. So they make panel boards, switchboards, you would call them breaker boxes in your, in your house and related electrical gear. Got promoted a few times there as, as an IT programmer, analyst, senior programmer analyst, project manager, that kind of thing. Got promoted, went to corporate at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and, and the great city of Pittsburgh, the home of the Steelers and the Penguins and the Pirates.
• 9:23
  Speaker A: Pittsburgh is underrated. I love Pittsburgh. I've been to Pittsburgh. It's kind of this weird, interesting like I mean you think like bloody knuckles, fights and stuff when you're driving through the city. At least what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you think like kind of you know, this city's almost in black and white.
• 9:39
  Speaker C: It's a great city. It was a great city. I, as a single guy, I lived there. I loved it. A break sports town, very clean. It's it. When I moved there in the, in the 90s, ultra clean, beautiful skyscrapers and, and, and Pittsburgh is Three Rivers coming together. And of course Three River Stadium was there before they made, made the new one, but absolutely beautiful. Surrounded by hills and valleys, beautiful bridges. They had these cool things called inclines. So think of it like railroad, but it, it goes up and down diagonally. Kind of like a, kind of like a cable car, but on, on tracks. But wonderful, wonderful city.
• 10:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, big and. Yeah. I mean, if you had to choose between that and Philly, I mean, I'm, I'm going, I'm going Pittsburgh if you ask me.
• 10:23
  Speaker C: Oh yeah. No disrespect to the Philadelphia Eagles.
• 10:27
  Speaker A: If Phil shows up beat up tomorrow.
• 10:29
  Speaker C: Then, hey, they won the super bowl. So you know what's up.
• 10:34
  Speaker B: At dissecting popular IT nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is Internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing Internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your Internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending. From unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever, ever cost you a dime. Due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have. Behind the scenes of dissecting popular IT nerds, let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes. And we use our 1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you're not left calling 1-800gold pound sand to enter in a ticket number and wonder why. Why is my Internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted who understands your needs, your frustrations and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we're still human, but we are some of the best and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it and what's on your roadmap. All you need to do is email Internet popularit.net and say I want help managing all of my Internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we'll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.
• 12:54
  Speaker C: But yeah. So I worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation and it they got acquired by Cutler Hammer. Work worked for them. Cutler Hammer's headquarters was in Cleveland. Spent a lot of time between the two and their. Their parent was Eaton Corporation. Eaton's out of Milwaukee.
• 13:10
  Speaker A: Really hit that. You hit up all the, you, you hit up all the town places, man.
• 13:14
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And they offered me a, a nice, nice job at, in Milwaukee at corporate it there for Eaton. You know, Eaton's in big time in electronics and electrical and automotive. A very, very large tier one automotive supplier. But man, I went up to Milwaukee and during my corporate visit, minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit snow up to the door handles on the car. And I was like I'm not sure I want to do that. So I went to work for another Fortune 500 manufacturer, Oneida Industries, headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina which is my current home. And we were a multinational manufacturer and distributor of apparel. Clothing. So we, we, we were in the textile business and the apparel business. So we made our own cloth. We. We burned cloth on the knitting machines and then we cut and sew and bleached and dyed our own clothing and sold to all the major retail chains and private label apparel firms.
• 14:15
  Speaker A: I think it's safe to say you've had a good manufacturing journey. Yes sir. A little, A little bit of pizza with a little bit of pizza thrown in there which is good.
• 14:23
  Speaker C: I like pizza.
• 14:24
  Speaker D: Yeah.
• 14:24
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 14:24
  Speaker C: So that.
• 14:25
  Speaker A: What of all of this though? Out of all of this sinking back and even you've been around since the dawn of the computer pretty much.
• 14:38
  Speaker C: 50S.
• 14:41
  Speaker A: My point is if we really think it still blows my mind 380 episodes and people like Phil, would you stop saying this to think that I went to college and we still used. Had a bibliography and you still went to like the library and looked up things in a card file. And used the Dewey Decimal system to do your research. And you're using the Internet for research was kind of frowned upon, which is like using AI now for interest for. At first you don't use AI for all your stuff now with all of the, I mean you can, but you've got to like double check and you've got to make sure that there's no, you know, whatever false positives or whatever you want to call that. Yeah, the likes. What's the, what's the biggest, I guess of maybe top three. What's the biggest learning you've had along that journey as it comes to technology and making good decisions? Because our life is formed based on decisions and what follows after that? As technology is evolving so fast and you've made numerous decisions and been in leadership roles across the thing, what would maybe be the biggest learning that you've had along the ways, whether it be from. I learn a lot by making mistakes, unfortunately, I've learned by failing forward. I'm the fail forward definition.
• 16:19
  Speaker C: Hey, listen, if you're not failing, you're, you're, you're, you're not trying hard enough and you're not learning.
• 16:23
  Speaker D: Yeah.
• 16:24
  Speaker A: So I mean, what's. Give us something.
• 16:28
  Speaker C: Yep. Well, you know, I had, I told you about my Fortune 5, my Navy career and then Fortune 500 career. After a couple of CIO positions and Director of IT type positions and Fortune 500 buddy of mine that I worked for decided to form a consultancy and so he asked me to co found it with him. And so we formed CSS International and that was an IT consulting firm basically implementing ERP systems. So we implemented JD Edwards, Pinglesoft, Oracle E Business Suite, Oracle Cloud, erp and then you know, HCM and CRM and cx. I mean the acronyms have all changed, but the basic systems are the same. Epm and I would say that's where I learned all my big lessons in consulting you. Every customer has a new set of challenges. Every customer has a new niche in the marketplace of why they're successful. Their, their secret sauce.
• 17:32
  Speaker D: Right.
• 17:32
  Speaker C: Their, their market, their products, their services. So in IT consulting, you know, you talk about manufacturing experience. I've been in over 500 manufacturing plants and over 300, you know, large distribution centers with significant amount of, you know, automation in them as well. And I would say you asked what were the biggest lessons learned? Number one, partner with the business.
• 17:58
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 17:58
  Speaker C: You aren't doing it for the business if you aren't doing it with the business. And with the seed level suite on board with what are we doing, why are we doing it and what are we expecting to get out of it? You're in trouble. You're, you're just an IT project, you know, in the server room or you know, in, in your cubicles.
• 18:19
  Speaker D: Right.
• 18:20
  Speaker C: So partnering with the business, working alongside them, understanding their processes, how they operate, their challenges and what makes sense to, you know, leverage a system for and what doesn't, you know, that that is number one. Number two, I would say is change management.
• 18:38
  Speaker A: Well, before we move on, before we move on because I think we hear a lot about partner with the business a lot. It's not like, it's not like everything eventually becomes a new buzzword or a new just like single pane of glass or something or vendor neutral or non biased or like whatever it is that we want to say. But from your perspective, what does it mean? What did you learn there? I guess what went wrong? Or what does being a partner to the business really mean?
• 19:10
  Speaker C: Well, number one, C level or vice president level sponsorship. So not just hey, we approved the budget and hey, we occasionally get an update, but literally involve every week working with IT and the business on solutions, seeing demonstrations of the system, understanding what IT does, vanilla out of the box, understanding where we might or might not choose to enhance or modify that system. You know, if you, if you modify or enhance the system, you're not going to do it just once, you're going to do it every time you upgrade as well. You're going to have to look at that and you may have to reprogram that. But really understanding what the nature of the IT project is, what the team is going through and being involved enough to know when people bring an issue, escalate an issue, there are, they already know what's going on, they already know what we're implementing, they already know the scope of it. They know if this is a scope change or not a scope change, A big change for the business, a small change for the business. A big change for it. A small change for it. They really understand what's going on and they can make those, those decisions that you know, we want to empower the team to run with the day to day but bubble up to the top when it's like, look, this is something significant that newts an executive decision. So not micromanaging but understanding the depth of what we're going through and what we're implementing, what we're going to get out of it.
• 20:36
  Speaker A: When you go back to the executive sponsorship, what's your tricks to the trade for getting executive Sponsorship or getting really bought in? Because here's the theme after doing. It's not even a theme. It's a statistic that I would say 93% of the CTO CIOs that have a seat at the Executive roundtable are not necessarily seeing their executive team as the other CEOs. They still see their team as the help desk, the networking team. All of the people that they are in charge of, they see that as their team versus the executive suite as their team. And we see that as a problem here on the podcast, or we see that as that. That is one of the biggest communication gaps, and that is one of the biggest reasons why you're the last slide in the PowerPoint deck. Or you get a golf clap when you become Zero Trust Certified. Or you. Or you mean. Or. Or you become the department of.
• 21:45
  Speaker C: No.
• 21:46
  Speaker A: Or, you know, I mean, even though you. You have the. The title, it doesn't mean that you're sitting in the seat that you've earned.
• 21:57
  Speaker C: Yeah. Well, the, the worst place you want to be as an IT leader as, As a CIO or cto is a cost center. You're. You're a budget that needs to be cut and hacked and slashed and reduced every year. That. That, that, that. That is the death knell. You know, you. You are. You are just a cost that we want to minimize. That's. That's the horrible place to be. Where you want to be is not at the end of the PowerPoint deck when, okay, you had 15 minutes, now you got three, and lunch is being served. We're gonna grab.
• 22:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because we have. Because we have to appease HR and we have to treat it. Yeah.
• 22:34
  Speaker C: What you want to be is embedded in every single department presentation. When finance comes up, we are working with it on updating our financial management system and updating our forecast system. And we are modeling solutions now, and we will be coming up with a budget of what it's going to take to upgrade and improve our system so that we can, you know, comply with financial, you know, compliance and regulations.
• 23:04
  Speaker D: Tom.
• 23:04
  Speaker C: And speed up our reporting. We can close that. Our aim is to close the month in three days, Not. Not four, not five, not ten.
• 23:12
  Speaker D: Right.
• 23:13
  Speaker C: Our aim is to be able to do all the what ifs. If oil goes up to $80 a barrel, what does that do to our freight costs? What does that do to our. Our distribution network? What does that do the prices to our customers? We can look at this ahead of time and be proactive instead of reactive. And when the purchasing department comes up sourcing and purchasing comes up. We are working with IT to put more of our, more of our suppliers on EDI and more of our suppliers on our supplier portal of self service.
• 23:43
  Speaker A: You know we need to run with that etc. We, we need to run with that right now because this is one of the best suggestions. It sounds so simple. If you ever seen what up.
• 23:52
  Speaker C: What if you partnered with the business. Every single business department that reports to the executives are, is talking about what you're, what it is doing for them.
• 24:00
  Speaker A: Go to them. Well, here's, here's this. What can we do? Let's brainstorm this. We can go to them and we can say I need a favor from you. I'm going to give you what you want from the IT department because I'm already partnering with you.
• 24:09
  Speaker B: I'm going to give you what you want.
• 24:10
  Speaker A: I'm going to give you this. Can you give me one thing? Can you please mention my name on every presentation that you ever give ever again by name? And I would prefer a fight name like I don't know, James. The, the, the. I don't know, the, the. What do we, what do we want to call the James?
• 24:31
  Speaker C: The James.
• 24:32
  Speaker A: The Revenue drivers Miller. All right, if it wasn't for James we would be down 1% but we're up 3%.
• 24:39
  Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, and, and they don't need to mention me personally. Mention my project managers, mention my senior.
• 24:46
  Speaker A: IT person for James and the, the, the, the network autopsy, Johnny Smith. And everyone on your team needs a fight name from now on. Everyone. That's the suggestion.
• 24:56
  Speaker C: Give them the credit. I mean, I don't need the credit. I mean they know they work for me, so we're good. It's just really important. And then if you look at your IT stack, you think of it as a, as a wedding cake, right? You've got foundational things like this. You got the network, you've got the Internet, you've got your, your on premise servers, right? This is kind of, you know, basic, the foundation of things. Then you've got your applications. Some of them are on premise, some of them are cloud, some of them are, you know, homegrown.
• 25:24
  Speaker D: Right?
• 25:25
  Speaker C: So you've got all these systems. Every single system that you have has an expiration date on it and either needs to be upgraded or replaced with something better.
• 25:36
  Speaker A: And you don't want to get a, we don't want to necessarily get a divorce, we just want to get a.
• 25:42
  Speaker C: Some plastic surgery sometimes, sometimes they're minor upgrades, sometimes they're major upgrades. Sometimes they're full wholesale replacements, right? Sometimes. And there's always integration. They've got to work together, reduce duplicate entry mistakes, you know, speeds. You know, increase the speed of information between systems. So all these things need to be maintained. Everything has an expiration date. You cannot possibly upgrade them all at once. So these things need to be staggered as to, you know, when they're taken on as projects. And some of them, you know, they're so old and antiquated, they need to be thrown away and replaced with something way, way better, way more modern.
• 26:17
  Speaker D: Right.
• 26:18
  Speaker C: So, you know, when you look at everything you own, you know, you need to plan for its retirement. Don't wait till it's dying to replace it. Wait till it's starting to get too old.
• 26:29
  Speaker D: Right.
• 26:29
  Speaker C: But, you know, so all of these, and, and everybody is a customer of some or all these systems, right? The financial management systems owned by accountant.
• 26:39
  Speaker D: Right.
• 26:40
  Speaker C: The purchasing and sourcing, that's owned by, you know, the purchasing sourcing, you know, manufacturing, inventory management, sales, hr, payroll, you know, all manufacturing, logistics, warehousing. All of them have one or more customers. And so you're always talking to them about little improvements that could be done as projects. Obviously, we're not talking help desk bug fixes and password. We're talking about improved functionality and support of the business. And then some of these are major investments.
• 27:09
  Speaker D: Right.
• 27:10
  Speaker C: So you're constantly planning and shuffling the deck as to what needs is prioritized by need or by age.
• 27:19
  Speaker D: Right.
• 27:20
  Speaker C: So that is that. So that wedding cake, that those layers are constantly being replaced.
• 27:26
  Speaker A: I'm absolutely loving that. And Greg and production team, that is going to be the infographic for this, for this episode. It's going to be the wedding cake infographic. It's going to be tasty. I love it.
• 27:41
  Speaker C: The icing on the cake is the, The. The. The biggest bang benefit for the, for the company.
• 27:47
  Speaker D: Right.
• 27:48
  Speaker A: Love it. Okay, so moving on.
• 27:52
  Speaker C: You asked about big lessons learned. I'm going to share one more go. Change management, organizational change management. When you're changing systems, improving systems, upgrading systems, people underestimate the effort that is required in change.
• 28:10
  Speaker D: Yes.
• 28:11
  Speaker C: Not just end user training. It is policies and procedures for the organization.
• 28:16
  Speaker A: Oh, God.
• 28:17
  Speaker C: It is job descriptions for hr.
• 28:20
  Speaker A: Oh, help me.
• 28:21
  Speaker C: Okay, so you've. You got to hit the Tribeca, right? Sure. There's end user training. Absolutely. People need to know how, you know, they used to do it this way, now they do it that way. No, no problem. But with improved systems with improved capabilities that can help change policies and procedures for the Organization and your customers and your suppliers. So that needs to be addressed and it changes, like I said, job titles and roles.
• 28:52
  Speaker A: It's a, it's a massive trickle down kind of effect or butterfly ripple in the force type of thing that can happen. Especially if you have a lot of, yes, vendors, resellers, customers, whatever that are even plugged into your systems. Yep, yep.
• 29:09
  Speaker C: And you know, give you a simple exam example. You know, modern ERP systems have item master records, right? We, we sell this cup, right? We manufacture this little plastic cup and it has a SKU number and we sell them in cases, yada, yada, yada. Well when, when you put that together is what's the item, what's the description, what's the unit of measure, how much does it cost, what do we sell for at price? What are all the different, you know, tiers of pricing, discounts, etc. What's it made of, what colors and sizes do we make it in? Right. All these, all these attributes, you know, what type of plastic is it? And you know, you may sell it in a catalog, so it belongs in a section of your catalog. Well, no one person knows all those attributes of the item master. Some of them come from sales, some of them come from procurement, some of them come from engineering, some of them come from manufacturing, some of them come from accounting. So when that item master record is put in, no one person knows all the fields. So what happens? Someone starts the shell, other people fill in all the pieces and then you have a complete item master record that works for all of the departments. So in the old days, you know, you had a data processing department, somebody filled out a paper form and sent it around, it routed around and then all the things got, then some data processing DP clerk entered that into the system and created the item master. We don't do it that way nowadays. Now we get the, you know, someone will start the shell. It can be sales, it can be procurement, it can be engineering, typically. But then we use the system to route it around in a workflow and different people put into things and guess what, it can be done simultaneously. We don't need to single thread it. It can be multi, threaded, right? Everybody put in their stuff and when that, when it's all done, you've got a complete record. So the point is these used to be businesses, used to be very siloed. We own this, we own that. Don't touch it, right? Unless it's yours, right? Nowadays it's a lot more collaborative and a lot more open. You know, systems can have, you know, they can share the visibility but still have ownership of, of things. But the speed of IT being done is, is much, much greater and it is much more complete because of workflows and, and error checking and things like that.
• 31:27
  Speaker A: Last time I checked statistically from serving. I don't like the word survey, but surveying IT leaders in the top four in no particular order, one of the biggest frustrations, problems or concerns that every single IT director has ever dealt with is antiquated silos. Yeah, it is in the top four. If you don't have it, if you didn't answer it, you know what the second, the second number one was? The second one was training, teaching, explaining technology to end users. Yeah, those two go hand in hand. They almost go hand in hand and that.
• 32:18
  Speaker C: And those actually go fit right into organizational change management. Organizational change management includes the departments in the organization.
• 32:28
  Speaker D: Yeah.
• 32:29
  Speaker A: And then the third one, which is probably no surprise to anybody. I'm probably stating the obvious. It's just that no one ever came at it and said it. Maybe I should do. We should do this top four. This should be also a pain. The, the pain infographic of some sort. I don't know. We need a metaphor for this one. Vendor communication or vendors that don't vibe with your team. I. E. Partnership. There's no partnership. So if you had a really bad vendor partnership, say with an ERP vendor, I can see that going really bad for your change management. The last one was taking decision direction. Which brings me on to probably my next question. Unless you want to hit on some more change management stuff.
• 33:18
  Speaker C: I think that, you know, I think there's a very good diagram. Can I share an image on this thing?
• 33:24
  Speaker A: You should be able to. Hold on. Yeah, let me see. You should. I mean you're a co host of some sort. You're learning this new thing with me as well. And then we're probably going to migrate to a different platform anyways and it's all going to go out the door to integrate back with Zoom. You should be able to click Share screen. You should be able to click Share screen.
• 33:42
  Speaker C: Okay, let's see.
• 33:44
  Speaker A: Bottom, middle, arrow square thing.
• 33:46
  Speaker C: Yeah, let's see there. Well, this isn't the most high res diagram. So your, your video editors can.
• 33:54
  Speaker A: Okay, it'll go, it'll go in. It'll go hand in hand with your, your video.
• 33:58
  Speaker C: Can you see this? This is the change. This is the change cycle, right?
• 34:04
  Speaker A: Oh, denial. Yes.
• 34:05
  Speaker C: In the very beginning there's, there's denial, then there's anger, then there's bargaining. Then there's depression and then there's. Oh, okay.
• 34:15
  Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
• 34:17
  Speaker C: This same stuff happens in it projects every single time. Every single time.
• 34:22
  Speaker A: All right, so what's at the denial stage that we don't need to change?
• 34:26
  Speaker C: Oh, it's.
• 34:26
  Speaker A: What's the denial? We don't need a new ERP system. We're fine on our AS400.
• 34:31
  Speaker C: We. We manage this forever. We know it like the back of our hand. It does everything we need it to do. Well, then why are you so.
• 34:39
  Speaker A: Sears was in denial. Sears was in denial. Then they got angry, and then they didn't even bargain anything. They just.
• 34:46
  Speaker C: Well, if we're going to do this, can we at least do it this way? Can we at least bastardize the system to look just like the old system we love? That's a good one.
• 34:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, I like it. Okay, so what's the depression phase? Okay, we got to do it.
• 35:00
  Speaker C: Okay. I guess we're going live. It's going to be hell. But, you know, we. We'll try to manage through it. Oh, it's going to be.
• 35:06
  Speaker A: So why is the acceptance phase look happy. It looks sunburnt and surprised.
• 35:12
  Speaker C: Yeah. Like I said, this isn't the best diagram. I've got better ones, but I just did a quicker. I've got some better ones. And. And they're much more colorful. But that might have to share.
• 35:24
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 35:25
  Speaker D: I.
• 35:25
  Speaker C: To share a better one for you.
• 35:26
  Speaker A: But anyways, you actually use this. I mean, do you actually use that for like. That's the type of thing that's for, like, guy.
• 35:31
  Speaker C: We use them. Yeah, absolutely.
• 35:33
  Speaker A: I think I'm in the wrong business at that point. I'm like, I don't know if I want to work here anymore more.
• 35:38
  Speaker C: I'll email you a better one. I'll put that on my.
• 35:40
  Speaker A: Where's that. Where's the. I quit. Where's the. Where's the. The quit, quit portion? I mean, yeah, I'm somewhere in between. You know, I'm at the depression stage right now.
• 35:50
  Speaker C: We talk about people being on board with change. So you. There's kind of four quadrants. There's. There, there's the people that say they're on board and they really are. Those, those, those are your. A.
• 36:01
  Speaker D: Right.
• 36:02
  Speaker C: Then you have people that are. Say they're not on board and. And they will let you know. You know, those are your naysayers. And, you know, it's very, very clear.
• 36:10
  Speaker D: Right.
• 36:12
  Speaker C: And then you've got your people that say they're not on board, but they're convincible and they're okay.
• 36:21
  Speaker A: They're actually, yeah, if I have to. I'm not in charge here anyways. I'm not there. I'm not the big guy.
• 36:24
  Speaker C: But if you're a worth. The worst ones are the ones that say they're on board, but they're saboteurs, they're sabotaging, they're put, they're poking holes in the Swiss cheese. They're, you know, they're rabble rousers. You know, they're constant complainers. And look, you know, if, if there's an issue, bring the issue. Absolutely. It, it, it is. If it's legitimate, let's bet it out, let's understand it and let's make sure we address it.
• 36:51
  Speaker D: Right.
• 36:53
  Speaker C: But don't and, and bring suggestions, bring, bring ways that we can tackle and solve it.
• 36:57
  Speaker D: Right.
• 36:57
  Speaker C: That, that's a good team player. I, I have no problem with people that bring issues to the table, but have some suggestions on how it might be solved. But the worst of the ones that don't bring the issues to the table and you know, just, just want things to, to go horribly so that they can be right.
• 37:14
  Speaker D: Right?
• 37:14
  Speaker C: That's, that's horrible.
• 37:16
  Speaker A: It's like we want, we want, we want Trump to fail.
• 37:18
  Speaker C: Right?
• 37:19
  Speaker A: Keeps, he keeps succeeding.
• 37:20
  Speaker D: Right? Right.
• 37:22
  Speaker A: You got to put.
• 37:22
  Speaker C: And I'm not a political guy. At the end of the day, do you want the country to be successful? Do you want everyone to be successful or do you.
• 37:30
  Speaker A: I don't think they do. I think people think they're watching a drama. I think most people think they're watching some kind of drama episode and they're like, ah, let's just see what happens.
• 37:36
  Speaker C: I don't know.
• 37:36
  Speaker A: Who cares if I like, at the.
• 37:37
  Speaker C: End of the day when great things are happening, it's kind of hard, hard to deny it.
• 37:40
  Speaker D: Right?
• 37:40
  Speaker C: So. Or you know, they bring issues to the table at the midnight hour. That, that's the worst.
• 37:44
  Speaker D: Right.
• 37:45
  Speaker C: We're about to go live and they go, oh well, we had this vendor management scorecard thing that we, we have to have and it's like, well, why are you telling us, you know, the week before we go live?
• 37:58
  Speaker A: Let's go, let's go deep, let's go deep now. So you've been through a lot of this. You've been through a lot of these changes. ERP is something that is nightmarish to me. It's, it's, it's where nightmares are made. It's, it's as, as one's as one someone said a long time ago, well, there's just. It's just one of two things that happen at the end of an ERP implementation.
• 38:24
  Speaker C: Well, you know what ERP stands for, right? No. Extremely ridiculous program.
• 38:34
  Speaker A: One guy said, phil, there's one of two things that happens at the end of an ERP implementation. Like, he might have said it might have been an SAP. Like, it might have been an SAP thing too. You either have a job or you don't. And. But you've gotten to do consulting and been involved on many of them. And I'm curious, with the onslaught of the future that is always upon us and all of this fakery that AI is taking over jobs, when in reality we just wanted to lay off some people and do some stock buybacks and make our company look more profitable than the rest, and it's all going to blow up anyways. And I moved on to another company anyways as CEO after I. After I got a standing ovation. Sounds very, sounds very dreary, doesn't it? But it's. So with the onslaught of the future in ERP and maybe people realize that we have to go back to just better and better automation and continuing to automate and make things better and do better. What if you were a CTO or a CIO at a manufacturing organization that is highly pressured under AI, may not be fully even invested in AI at all, but investors think that we're in AI and all this stuff and being asked to do more with less and cut budgets and all that, and maybe there are some M&A's coming and just all of these perfect storm scenarios. What's the best strategy? Is it. Is it to use? Is it to hire the best ERP consultants? Is it to bring something in house? Is it a mix of whatever. What's the best manufacturing strategy as a CTO nowadays? Is there any good models to follow? I. I know it's a very broad question, but what should they be thinking right now in the. With the temperature of the environment and marketplace right now?
• 40:40
  Speaker C: Well, you know, ERP is kind of the core system for most operational companies, manufacturers, distributors, engineers.
• 40:49
  Speaker A: It is the heart. It is the heart for sure.
• 40:51
  Speaker C: You know, it's sales, it's purchasing, it's inventory, it's manufacturing, it's logistics, it's warehouse, it's finance, it's. It's, you know, customer service. You know, so that's the core. So first of all, you know, pick, you know, if you're a very large enterprise, you probably need a tier 1 ERP, you need Oracle or SAP or Microsoft. Those are the big.
• 41:19
  Speaker A: What size, what size organization is there? Is there like a, is there like an employee count? Are we talking enterprise, Fortune 5000 in.
• 41:28
  Speaker C: Revenue, most companies under 300 million in revenue can't afford, or a Tier 1 ERP. So that's kind of a thumbnail. It depends on industry. You know, some industries are more profitable, profitable than others. Some razor thin margins, high volume versus others are very, very high margins, but lower, lower volumes. But that's just kind of a thumbnail. 300 million and above in annual US dollars, annual annual revenue. There, there are other measures that's just, that's just a ballpark. You know, if you're a $50 million manufacturer, you probably cannot afford tier one. You're probably going to go tier two or so.
• 42:07
  Speaker A: Hold on. SAP, Oracle. Did you say what was Microsoft?
• 42:10
  Speaker C: Microsoft, yeah.
• 42:12
  Speaker A: Really?
• 42:13
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 42:13
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 42:14
  Speaker C: Microsoft Dynamics is definitely a tier one player. SAP is king in Europe, North America. Oracle by far is king. Yeah, but okay, so 50 million. And within, within those companies, you know, SAP has several ERP solutions. Oracle has several ERP solutions. You've got ones that are 100% cloud and you've got others that are on prem. And then you've got hybrid type ERP type systems.
• 42:44
  Speaker A: Just, just curious, what's the biggest black eye in each one of those three with Microsoft, I would be guessing it's like, for what? From what I've heard over the years. And they may have gotten a lot better at this. Now it would be like invoicing and POS and stuff like that.
• 43:02
  Speaker C: From a dynamic standpoint, I guess I would even say, I would step back a little bit further. I would say SAP is the most expensive to implement because people tailor it. And then it's kind of like if you tailor it too much, it's kind of like pouring cement around your ankles. You can't move. A lot of SAP clients, a lot of Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies cannot upgrade their SAP system because it is cost prohibitive. It costs more to upgrade than their initial implementation. For some of them, not, not at all. But, you know, I'm giving you kind of the extremes.
• 43:36
  Speaker A: Well, I can't wait to see what SAP people say to this.
• 43:38
  Speaker C: In general, it's very expensive. And you know, there's two types of documentation for SAP. There's German documentation and then there's poor documentation. So anyway, that's a joke. That's a joke. But if you aren't reading the original.
• 43:54
  Speaker A: Josh Romulos is going to like this my, my SAP guy over at Birkenstock.
• 43:59
  Speaker C: He's gonna rise. You'd be surprised. So you know again they're king in, in, in Europe, Western Europe and you know they, they've got great business marketing, you know the best run businesses run at SAP, you know etc in North America. Oracle is king because one, Oracle's been around the long, one of the, one of the longest, you know they went all the way back to Mainframe, you know Oracle Financial Applications. But they're two main and they, they acquired PeopleSoft which also owned JD Edwards. So they got huge market share from those acquisitions. Oracle is, has great support and great partner partner environment. I was, I was an Oracle partner, a PeopleSoft partner. JD which partner and the, the company that I we sold our company to Argonaut. They, they have SAP practice, Microsoft practice, Oracle practice. So we were the Oracle practice and, and by, by far the largest. But so what's their weakness?
• 45:06
  Speaker A: You'll say SAP is money. What's it with Oracle?
• 45:10
  Speaker C: Oracle, their erp, their cloud ERP system is still up and coming. So if you're heavily relying on deep, deep functionality with lots and lots of details, there are certain suites that aren't quite there yet but it's getting better every quarter, every year. So for the best functionality it's still their on Prem Solutions of E Business Suite and JD Edwards. Those are the, those are the two best functionality wise. ERP cloud is still coming along. It's getting there. You know if you're a more basic manufacturer, distributor or services company, you could probably absolutely run a cloud. If you're really deep in engineering, really deep in manufacturing lot control serialization, you know and, and the whole, you know, lineage and, and lots of QA QC type processes and stuff like that, you probably need either EBS or JD Edwards if you're light in those departments and some others then you could probably run cloud. But it's, it's getting there. Microsoft's and, and they can be just as expensive as SAP a little tend to be a little bit more and a lot more upgradable. Like Microsoft's biggest problem that you know they, they came up through. They had several different Navision, they had Solomon, they, you know, several different ERPs. There was a Project Green ERP where they were going to take the best of everything and create this new thing and that got abandoned and basically then the Vision product has become Dynamics. So Microsoft Dynamics 365 they put that in there because of Microsoft 365 or you know, Office 365 Microsoft 365 so Dynamics is their, their leading solution. The biggest issue I've seen with Microsoft implementation, it's very partner centric. So if you run a steel mill then they're going to put you in touch with you know, a large mill manufacturing type partner. If you are a engineering and construction firm they're going to put you in touch with the ENC type partners. If you are a financial services company, they're going to put you in touch with financial services partners. They all have their custom extensions to the core ERP system, Core Dynamics. And so now you are very dependent on that partner for support. If you call 1-800-Microsoft Dynamics they're going to be like, you know a lot of these programs are not ours. They're owned by the partner. And a lot of those partners are not very large. You know they're 20.
• 47:41
  Speaker A: They might at any given day they might want to sell off into the sunset. They might want to sell and yeah, they may sell.
• 47:47
  Speaker C: They, the talent may age out, you know, they, they, they may wither on the vine. They may merge, you know, with others and, and lose some of the key people, you know. So it's, it's just a risk.
• 47:59
  Speaker D: Right?
• 47:59
  Speaker C: And you know, you know they're the, the probably slight, they're slightly less costs compared to Oracle and, and SAP. Although I have seen some very, very expensive Dynamics implementations.
• 48:13
  Speaker A: What if you have a strong dev team yourself? I mean like would that be an option with the Dynamics thing if you just.
• 48:18
  Speaker C: Yeah, you certainly could. If you know, if you got trained in the, the, the Dynamics programming tool set and are very familiar with the data model and the tool. Tool set. Yes, but you know the problem again, upgradability.
• 48:29
  Speaker D: Right.
• 48:29
  Speaker C: So now you're depriving on that partner whenever you do upgrades. So you know, one of the issues that ERP systems run into is you know, especially the older ones is you know, trying to keep up with, with you know, functionality and features and regulatory and compliance. So you need to be able to upgrade your ERP system just, just like you would your email system. And with that up, you know, with those upgrades, not just features and functionality but security, you know, you don't want to be on the front page of USA Today next week because of the security breach that leaked out all of your customers information. Right. So th, those, it's very important to.
• 49:07
  Speaker A: You know, take you work with all. Do you work with all three when you were doing consulting and stuff like that? Do you work with all three or are you, it sounds like you're in Oracle. If I had to think it sounds like you would go Oracle but yeah.
• 49:16
  Speaker C: Yeah, I, I, I spent most of my career JD Edwards PeopleSock Oracle but again when we joined with Argano, Argano had a Dynamics, a Microsoft practice and an SAP practice and, and you know, we're all in it together. And then there are a lot of things that integrate with both with, with any of those systems.
• 49:35
  Speaker D: Right.
• 49:35
  Speaker C: With, with any of those ERPs, you know like Salesforce for example. Salesforce world class CRM. Guess what works with Dynamics, works with Oracle. All the Oracle, J.D. airworth, SAP. Doesn't matter. You know they have points of integration already defined.
• 49:50
  Speaker A: What do you do if you're a mid market SMB or mid market to Fortune 5000 growing to Fortune 500 company looking to grow? What do you do if you're the 50 plus million?
• 50:03
  Speaker C: I would go with a cloud solution. Cloud ERP. So a SaaS solution, software as a service solution. Okay, these are very generalities, right?
• 50:11
  Speaker A: I mean Dynamics I would think would be an option there.
• 50:13
  Speaker C: I mean certainly Dynamics is a, is a tier one option. I like SaaS because you don't need, you don't buy the hard, you don't have to own the hardware, you don't have to buy the OS and buy the database and middleware and everything else. You are essentially paying for them to host everything. And you are a subscription service. You say hey I've got, I've got 2,000 users that run, you know, they, they all, you know, divvied up amongst the different suites that they run and as you grow you increase seats and if you shrink, it's a little harder to shrink. But as you shrink you can create businesses.
• 50:48
  Speaker A: Well, I mean why is that not becoming an option for even enterprise? I mean isn't deeper anyways, it is so hard.
• 50:57
  Speaker C: It is.
• 50:57
  Speaker A: Have, have you seen any, or do you have any information on the roi or is it, is it not something that people are likely to do? Is there any benefits in, in migrating to the cloud from an enterprise standpoint of that?
• 51:12
  Speaker C: The, the, the, the largest objections slash impediments to that approach are one, if cloud is lacking feature functionality then you need to extend yourself and so usually you can do a pass type service. So platform as a service. So you've got your cloud SaaS system here.
• 51:33
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 51:34
  Speaker C: Hosted by the same guys you, you, you rent a paas, you know, platform as a service. So let's say it's a Unix server with this kind of middleware and this kind of integration where you Put your custom solution there and it integrates to the SaaS solution there.
• 51:50
  Speaker A: So if I'm thinking like a CEO or a CFO at this moment, the things that I'm thinking of, why you would want to do that is electricity, data center space. If I was thinking is that maybe, maybe speed, maybe flexibility.
• 52:03
  Speaker C: Flexibility, yeah.
• 52:04
  Speaker A: Flexibility with employees. Yeah. So is it. Yeah, mainly cost. But then that's not an easy lift, is it? Have you done many of those?
• 52:14
  Speaker C: We've done it over a hundred times. Absolutely. Over a hundred times. Yeah. So it's, you know, there's trade offs. So I wanted to go. The second largest objection is data ownership. So people are very protective of their data. So now all of your customer information, vendor information, employee information, payroll, all that is in the cloud, right? So it's on a rented server, right. Or you know, bank of servers, you know, cluster of servers, etc. So those are the two major impediments that, or objections that people run into and they can both be addressed and overcome because you know, you, you own your data. It's just, it's just, you know, you're, you're, you're leasing the hardware, the os, the, the, the system, right?
• 53:02
  Speaker A: And your data has to be somewhere in a, in a, I mean, data center somewhere has to touch that Internet at some point.
• 53:08
  Speaker C: And a lot of people, a lot of people rent space in a data center too, right, for their servers. So at least, I mean, even if you have on prem, you should have a hosted, you know, disaster recovery facility.
• 53:19
  Speaker A: You know, what's the super sexy reason to go cloud?
• 53:24
  Speaker C: Continuous upgrades, continuous improvement, continuous release of features and functions. Again, you cannot, In a true SaaS solution, you cannot bastardize the core, you cannot modify the core. So it's always upgradable. So every quarter, you know, you're, you're getting new features and functionality. Every month you're getting security patches.
• 53:48
  Speaker D: Right.
• 53:49
  Speaker A: And I would think support would be more flexible as well, or even hiring IT talent.
• 53:54
  Speaker C: And yeah, your software is 100% vanilla. So you know, if you're a provider, whether it's SAP or Oracle or, or you know, Microsoft, if you're running 100% vanilla software, it's 100 upgradable, it's 100 patchable. And there's, there's, there's no limit to not, you know, most of them will let you delay taking patches and updates, but they'll only let you delay so long, right? You know, like Netsuite, you know, they'll.
• 54:23
  Speaker A: 15 days, 30 days, 60 days, whatever.
• 54:26
  Speaker C: Six months a year, then you got to take it, right? But, you know, if you're running 100%, the only thing you need to worry about is integrations. And then that PASS solution that you created that for your customization and your integration. So you just need to. As long as the points of integration haven't changed, you're good. But if the data model or the points of integration have changed, let's say, hey, you know, whenever you add a new customer, here's the. Here's the API you call, for lack of a better term, you know, web services. These are the param. We've added five more parameters because there's more data now that we have in. So, you know, you just. You just add those to your integration as well.
• 55:04
  Speaker A: So if you're a CTO or a CIO looking for an MSP consultant, ERP consultant, It's. It can be. It can be a daunting thing. I. I think most people are gonna be like, all right, well, I'll start with Chad GBT now, or Google or something like that. But what's. Or I'll ask my friends, or I'll go to a. I'll go to an expo or something. But what. What would you say is the best way to feel confident about making sure you have a really good partner in your corner? And I. I realized this mistake myself as of recent, because I just. Something that, like, Alex Horosi made me think of because he said, either hire really young, fresh talent that are crazy hungry, or just hire the absolute best, or hire the best that you need know is just the absolute best, even though it's crazy expensive. Never hired this kind of, like, in the middle because. And I just. I realized that, and it was. It happened from me. It's. I think it's very hard to find really good web developers nowadays. So it's like, okay, go on upwork and just go really cheap and trying to find a bunch of people. And what you end up doing is just spending a ton of time doing your own developing and working with people, and it becomes a real waste of time. And then I've tried for years, like, this kind of in between, like, all right, I'll pay $10,000 to do this, or I'll pay $20,000 to do this, which is still painful. But I was like, it's got to be enough. No, it comes out terrible. So I eventually bit the bull, and I was like, okay, I just pay the $60,000 for this, plus I'll pay another 10,000 for this. It sounds absolutely Ridiculous that I would pay that much for Onite. But I can tell you that getting a brand expert and hasn't come out yet. This is a secret. No one's seen this yet. It's going to be coming out October sometimes, but getting the right person. I looked at my team. I'm like, greg, are you thinking what I'm thinking right now? And he's like, what are you thinking? I was like, he just did the whole thing in five minutes. Something that took us two years of mistakes to fix.
• 57:03
  Speaker C: You hired an expert. So there's an old saying, if it's important to you, don't buy cheap, or you're gonna buy. Or you're gonna buy twice or three times or four times, or you're gonna go to Lowe's seven times.
• 57:22
  Speaker D: Right.
• 57:23
  Speaker C: So, you know, as a partner, we were often the rescue partner. J.D. edwards sold the deal as the software seller, and they had an implementation partner that they recommended and. Or the part. Or the. Was on a.
• 57:41
  Speaker A: A zip code or something like that. Yeah.
• 57:42
  Speaker C: Or the. Or the customer found it themselves and they're like, okay. And it went horrible.
• 57:47
  Speaker D: Right?
• 57:47
  Speaker C: Lawsuits and everything else. And everybody, you know, they wanted to sue the software maker, they wanted to sue the implementation partner. I wanted to sue the program manager. But listen, the software works for tens of thousands of companies that are so happy, they're still on it eight years later, 10 years later, they're paying 20%, 22% support fees every year on their $2 million software. Where, you know, because it works, it supports their entire business. ERP is not a place to buy cheap. You're running your purchasing, your sales, your manufacturing, your warehouse, your payroll, your. Your financial records on this system. You do not want to screw up your company.
• 58:31
  Speaker A: No.
• 58:32
  Speaker C: If you, if your company can't do it, can't operate for two months, you. You're probably going to go bankrupt.
• 58:38
  Speaker D: Right?
• 58:39
  Speaker C: This is not something to mess around with. And this is why companies sue.
• 58:42
  Speaker D: Right?
• 58:42
  Speaker C: So if the software works for tens of thousands of companies, it can work for you. You just need to implement with the right partner because the partner will understand how to implement that software. It's going to be different than some of the other customers because you need different switches set different ways. You need different processes supported. And if you need extensions, if you need customizations, you. They know where you need them, why you need them, and how you need. How to implement them. That's why you want a partner that's recommended by the software provider, and you vet them. How much is going to be vanilla how much do you anticipate, Anticipate being customizations. How much is it going to cost me? I need to know in dollars, in time and in resources. All three is the classic triangle, right? Say that time, how many months?
• 59:35
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 59:36
  Speaker C: Resources. How many people do I need to put on the team? How many people do you need to put on the team full time? 100%. And then how many do I need? You know, part time, you know, 20% or whatever.
• 59:46
  Speaker D: Right.
• 59:47
  Speaker C: And then dollars.
• 59:50
  Speaker D: Right.
• 59:51
  Speaker C: Money.
• 59:51
  Speaker D: Right.
• 59:52
  Speaker C: So time, resources, money. You can, you can lengthen any one of those legs, you can shorten any one of those legs, but the, the, the area in the middle is going to be about the same. The, you know, obviously quicker is better, but part of that organizational change management cycle I was talking about was being involvement is, you know, you don't just demo the software at the beginning and just before go live and you know, training and go live. Every single week, people on your team are in the software, seeing how it works, mapping the business process, seeing where there are gas, you know, helping with the, helping with the configuration, making sure it's done right. So that there is no surprise, there is no UAT at the end where they go, oh, we don't accept this because it doesn't work the way we thought. I don't think we can run the business on it.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker C: If they're involved every single week, they already know we can do all of our procurement cycles, all of our sales cycles, all, all of our manufacturing cycles. We know all the processes and all the records are kept the way we need them to be so we can run our business. There's no question UAT is just a formality. Well, way to do it.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker A: I'm so glad that you're in our top secret community for CTOs and CIOs because I'm sure there's going to be some people that have just a few questions to ask here about, about ERP stuff, you know what I mean? It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. I just had a curiosity. How confident are you going into any given ERP project? I'm assuming it starts with like, kind of like a brief like, hey, what the heck are you doing? What's the short story? And like kind of a general rundown. But I'm just curious how you go about an engagement.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker C: Very, very, very confident. You know, done it over 600 times.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker A: I mean you've been on a nuclear submarine underground and probably under some, under some serious pressure.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker C: Well, no, no pun intended.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker A: You know what I Mean in a.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker C: In a nuclear submarine, you're making your own electricity from a nuclear power plant. You're make. Got your own propulsion, you're making your own air, and you're making your own water. The only thing you're limited on is food for the crew.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. And you don't want to screw that up where you get some kind of like, weird chicken. You guys have like, chicken. Someone screwed up the budget so you ended up with chicken for a long time or something.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker C: I mean. Yeah, well, yeah, that's why we have, you know, a nice mess crew that not only cooks the food, but taste test it, take one to the team.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker A: So I, I guess the main point is if you want to, if you want nuclear power, if you want the ability to end World War II within like minutes, not days or months, with, with numerous casualties on your side, then you got to call James the erp Nuke Miller. I don't know, we need like a fight name for you. Nuclear. You want to go nuclear with your erp?
• 1:02:50
  Speaker C: Well, you did ask a serious question. I mean, first of all, you know, even if you're very, very experienced and done this 600 times or anything, listen to the customer. What's. What, what are the pain points? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to achieve? You know, why are you looking to do this, this project, this program?
• 1:03:07
  Speaker D: Right?
• 1:03:08
  Speaker C: What, what's, what's the, what's the, what are the pain points? What are the things you need to improve? What are you looking to get out of this? Second, you know, what makes you, you. What makes your company successful? What's your niche in the marketplace? What's your niche with your products and services? Tour the plan, tour the warehouse, tour the office. Get to know the operation, the departments. Look at the challenges that, that they face and listen to them. Then also, you know, make, ask intelligent questions and make intelligent suggestions. Let, let the customer speak and feel like they're heard. When people feel like you understand them and you've seen the same problems or similar problems and solved them before, that's very, very important. That builds a lot of a good relationship, you know, a lot of credibility that you've got solutions, you've got the experience. And when, when I sold, you know, as the executive sponsor for my consulting company, I, I was over the program for them. I was like, I will be at every single monthly steering committee meeting. I will be at every project, weekly project SAS meeting. I am bringing this team. These are the people that will bring on your team. Here are their resumes. Not somebody. These people, right? And these people are involved in the discovery, involved. Some of them are involved in the, in the, the sales cycle as well. And understanding the customer, building that credibility, understanding the nature of the project. Certainly your project manager, a couple of your consulting leads for the different. You order to cash, you know, procure to pay, you know, record to report all the different business, business cycles, business process cycles that you have and you know, talk about what, what solutions you bring to the table and what similar, you know, challenges you face in other, the same industry or similar industries. You know, whether you're an asset intensive manufacturer or you're consumer products or you're, you know, custom, you know, configured to order type products, you know, highly engineered products, automotive steel mills, you know, Department of Defense, you, you name it. You see lots of similar issues and you see lots of good solutions and offer the customer, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this. You get to choose Mr. Customer and then this is what they cost that you know. So yeah, very confident in, in, in doing that. And then obviously you have references, right? When your customer visits other customers you've had and tours their facility and says they implemented this, they did this for us. It was on time, it was on budget. We were, we're happy, we're still happy. Your other customers sell for you as well, right?
• 1:05:48
  Speaker A: I mean on time and on budget is. Yeah, that's.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker C: Yes, we were 93% on time on budget in my 600 projects. It's very, very high.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker A: And most, how many do you think there's a lot of people out there trying to do like, do you think a lot of CTOs or CIOs are out there thinking, yeah, I can do this myself. Do you think that happens a lot? No way. A lot.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker C: Try to go it alone. The smart ones go, no, I'm, I'm hiring experts. But what they do that's really smart is pair up, right?
• 1:06:22
  Speaker A: Take your, I hear a lot of.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker C: Kind of weird with our consultant. That's order to cash, right? Your procure to pay. Our ProCure pay both IT and business. So, so for every consultant, there's two people from your organization, IT and business, that are paired up with them. Get the knowledge transfer, understand the system and then you can support it better internally and rely on people outside less.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker A: I've heard. I kind of get this feeling sometimes that a lot of times the IT department and the ERP consulting are like these two separate entities that don't get along. Or I hear comments like, well, yeah, the ERP Consultant did this or I came into an organization where the ERP consultant did this or I kind of get this idea that, that, that there was like a sale that happened. Yeah. And then there's like this implementation ERP consultant and then it's over here like in another corner of the room or something. I don't understand what's going on.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker C: That's a bad situation. So, so you want to be.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker A: I hear that a lot just from talking with people. Just random. Hey, what's going on? Like you know, living the dream. I got a nightmare. Call me in like eight months after the. I'd love to be on the show, Phil, but we're in the middle of an erp. Blah, blah, blah. What's going on? Oh, it's, I, I, it's terrible. This ERP part. Well, I hear stuff like that.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker C: So that's part of the problem. It wasn't first of all executive sponsorship, not just the cio, but also, you know, COO or CEO. Those or CFO are typical sponsors. This is our project. We are all going to learn the system, we are all going to implement it together. We're going to learn there's going to be knowledge transfer so we can be a lot more self sufficient. We will know the new system as well as the old system, you know, sooner.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker C: It's not going to be day one. It's, you know, most of these projects were $2 million for the software, $2 million for the implementation and it took two years. That's most of our projects.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker A: Now it sounds pretty reasonable actually when you in the face of these.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker C: Did we do 1 million for the software, 1 million for the project and done in six months? Yeah, we've done, we've done those too. But those you're more reliant on the consultant and you're less self sufficient. And maybe it's a simpler implementation, maybe it's a smaller implementation, but you want that knowledge transfer. And it's not, it's not they did it, it's we did it and we know why, right? That, that's what you want. If it's not sponsored correctly, you'll get this combative nature of. Well, that's what, that's their program. That's their project. They did it. They set it up this way.
• 1:08:52
  Speaker A: They, they no ownership in anything. It's.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, this blame game.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker C: And that's, those projects are the ones that they run over budget, they run over a cost. It's not a great implementation or it's a Failed implementation. And they're like, yeah, we knew it was going to fail from the beginning.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker D: Right?
• 1:09:08
  Speaker A: That's, that's messed up.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker C: You don't even, that's, that's not a, that's not a team project right there.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker A: So that's really messed up. Yeah. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. I'm assuming someone might, some people might have some questions and want to reach out to you if that's okay, at any point.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker C: Absolutely.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker A: Really? Really. Thank you. Any advice for, for the, for the leaders out there? Anything, Anything. I'll give you the final word.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker C: Look, the hard way to learn something is the school of hard knocks, right? You know, wisdom seeks, you know, the knowledge of others, right? It's, it's better to learn and, and benefit from the wisdom and experience of others. So we all, we all seek out wisdom when we, you know, do Google research, right, and, and compare different answers and opinions and, you know, you can see right off the bat, oh, no, that, that can't be right. Okay. Yeah, this, this is confirming. This is confirming. This is confirming, right? Certainly use the head on your shoulders and, and the, the experience that you've had, but leverage the experience of others and it will reap tremendous benefits in terms of costs, in terms of time and in terms of the rewards.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker C: In terms of the benefits that you need for your business. You want your business to thrive and grow and, and be able to survive tough times too. So. Absolutely, that would be my, my final advice.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker A: A lot of wisdom in that. I have a lot of close friends and they all refuse to take information from anyone that is well read, meaning every book must be taught. Behind every book, there is a professor. Behind every. And a lot of times, it's not just one book. It might be a whole series of books that all overlap together on one particular subject. And you need something that's able to teach that and say, well, this is an interesting point, but this, this other point over here and this other book completely goes against that entire theory there. But they all are teaching the same thing, so it's. Yeah, very well said. You can't. It's like graduating college with the whatever it degree saying, I'm ready to go in. And you know, like, no, everyone knows.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker C: Just, I'd rather point.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker A: It's like, it's like, would you rather have the guy, you know, do your kidney transplant that just graduated from medical school or the assistant that stood next to the doctor doing the transplants for the last 30 years? I'd rather have the assistance that's not even an MD.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker D: Right. Right.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker C: @ least he's seen a lot of situations. He's seen the pro, the process and probably had a hand in it and probably assisted.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker D: Right.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker C: And probably seen a few things that didn't go as planned as well. So. Yeah, absolutely. The, you know, even, even, you know, partner, you know, shoulder to shoulder experience. Very, very.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker A: Thank you so much for being on the show.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker C: Thank you. All right.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker A: So.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker C: Pleasure.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker D: Yeah.