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461- Just Because It's Old Doesn't Make It Wrong w/Jeremy Mayfield · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: I really feel like the number one thing that I've seen and I've heard the horror story from others in the industry, the organization is not ready for change. And how do you know that? Because they can't tell you what their requirements are. If you don't know the problem you're trying to fix or solve, how can you possibly argue that you don't have the right thing already in front of you? Because just because you don't like it or just because it's slow or just because it's old doesn't make it wrong. We got board approval for 14 months. We finished in just under 12.
• 0:43
  Speaker B: Sitting in the guest chair is Jeremy Mayfield, the director of IT at National Sugar Marketing Cooperative.
• 0:50
  Speaker A: My name is Jeremy Mayfield. I've been in it now for 30 years. So it is a journey that has kept me busy and kept me on my toes. I love it. You know, when I started coming out of, out of school, I was a fresh engineer, you know, thinking, oh this is going to be great. I'm going to be doing time studies the rest of my life, you know, in manufacturing or something. And lo and behold, I fell into a career in it. Back then it was mis, right?
• 1:17
  Speaker B: Yep. And that's what my bachelor's in.
• 1:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I, I found a, found a love and a passion for the work in, in IT started where, you know, I mean, I knew nothing. I, I had specialized in, in some robotics and different things and that's why the company I started with had me ask me if I would be interested in an MIS position and they had no one. And so I was the only person in the company to do this back in, you know, way back when. And, and so I, I had to teach myself everything. So I took the initiative to, to really dive in and learn from creating Cat 5 cables to, you know, and punching down 66 blocks and you know, 110 blocks and different things myself, you know, and, and learning the lesson why you don't wear a gold wedding ring when you're punching down those old phone phone system blocks. Right. Because somebody picks up the phone, you get a nice charge through your ring all the way through learning databases. Becoming at one point a SQL expert. I no longer manage and do day to day transact SQL queries or anything like that. But I did spend quite a few years there. But I got noticed pretty early in my career getting to this leadership chair. I was pretty lucky in my career. A lot of people often take two roads. They either want to stay in their lane of IT and continue to grow and really hone their engineering skills, whether they're a network engineer or admins and different, different things and they hope to get to a certain level or you can kind of pick the management route. Early on I, I was kind of tapped by a leader to say, hey, I think I see potential in you. You have a good way with people. And really, you know, it is a service organization. It's always been kind of a service arm out of any company and, and I feel like I was blessed to have ahead of me that really felt like I could contribute. So most of my career I've been in a leadership position.
• 3:17
  Speaker B: You know, that's, that's awesome that they saw that right away and brought that forth. I remember a discussion with a peer. It must have been like the first 10 years into my, my journey as a leader also. And, and one of the things that he said stuck with me and that was that, you know, at that time and it, that point in my career I was a leader, but I was a doer at the same time. And, and we couldn't separate the two. Sounds like you got a little bit more of that chance to be just a true leader versus that doer because of, you know, the, that segregation of getting away from the sequel and getting away from the punch down blocks. And I know exactly what you're talking about and I wonder how many of our listeners have no clue when you're talking about the, the 66 block and the 110 because anymore we're not doing that anymore.
• 4:16
  Speaker A: No, no, I, you know, I, I look at it and I wish you were correct, but I'm very hands on even still to this day. So the difference is the type of hands on, right. So over my career I've seen a lot of transition and, and I had to take on different roles, wear those different hats as you're saying, right? So you get into a role and you're the leader, you're the boss, you're the guy everybody goes to. The buck stops with you. Great. However, they need someone to, to run and own the ERP or they need someone to own database or they need someone to own, you know, service. What does that look like? Or, or even on the, even on the manufacturing side when you get into, depending on your company, you know there's a wireless projects, right? I think I, I wireless was, I was doing 17 mile wireless hops in 1997. So I was using, you know, getting a whopping 3 meg of Internet across a 17 mile wireless line of sight hop in 1997.
• 5:26
  Speaker B: What year?
• 5:27
  Speaker A: 1997. Yeah.
• 5:30
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 5:31
  Speaker A: So we were doing. I was doing things. I got lucky to be able to do things early in my career. We were using a, a platform called breezecom, which was originally used for tank to tank operations in the Middle East. And we used, I mean, these radios would get incredibly hot. We had to build special enclosures just so they wouldn't catch drywall on fire. I mean, it was crazy the stuff we were doing. But I worked for a company that had a huge silo in the middle of the Midwest, which was pretty flat. And I had the company providing the actual Internet 17 miles away, who had a massive tower. And they were like, hey, do you want to try this? I'm like, what's the worst that could happen?
• 6:09
  Speaker B: Are you paying for the equipment?
• 6:11
  Speaker A: And, and they, I paid for the equipment. However, they gave me free Internet as long as they could use the silo to transmit off of and use it as a hop. So I ended up negotiating a deal for free Internet for the business. 3 meg in 97 was blistering.
• 6:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, most definitely. I mean, most of us at that point, 97, we were still using US
• 6:36
  Speaker A: robotics, 5,000 KV everythings. Yeah, there were those.
• 6:40
  Speaker B: And then not the T1s, but the point to point frame connections.
• 6:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, Frame relay. Yep.
• 6:48
  Speaker B: Yeah. Frame relay. Oh my God. Taking me back, dude.
• 6:54
  Speaker A: It was br.
• 6:55
  Speaker B: And so you were playing with wireless at that point and doing that and getting three megs because. Wow. Bonded T1s.
• 7:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, it was, it was a big deal. The equipment was expensive though. Very, very expensive. And then you fast forward not even five years, actually six years in 2003, for 25amonth, I was able to score wireless Internet in the wet on the west coast of America like it was in Nevada. They had $25 a month, no equipment fee, you know, so we went from paying 1500 dollars in antenna to paying 25 bucks a month service for 10 meg of Internet. You know, and you're just the, the difference. I mean, in just a few years, I mean, when the Internet bubble burst, so many people started. The, you know, the technology revolution was already on at that point. So.
• 7:48
  Speaker B: Right, okay. And, and we got off on this tangent from being a doer, a doing leader versus a true, you know, that's right. Time management leadership.
• 8:03
  Speaker A: So the transition for me happened probably. And I'm still hands on. Don't, please don't get me wrong. I still, I work. When you work for smaller organizations, you tend to be more hands on than you would for great big Organizations. I did have the, the luxury and the blessing to work for a massive organization, right. You know, really large company at 1.9,000plus worldwide, you know, global, global entity, right. Fortune won something, right. And, and they're still a powerhouse in their industry. I worked for them and I was, I ended up in one of their divisions. I started there, worked my way up. I ran certain part of it there where I, I was kind of local, embedded it and then they, they said, hey, we'd really like you to come up to corporate. I started in around 2014 working with their, the corporate out Ireland, working on some projects for them, traveled abroad, did all kinds of things, had a lot of fun. And then I ended up working out of the US based headquarters where I was a full time remote employee long before COVID ever happened. So when Covid hit, you know, I was like, what's this? But I ended up being a program owner for them. Where and what that means in, in comparison to like a project manager is I, the project managers worked for me all, you know, and the different teams worked with me to do things like voiceover IP and Internet optimization and what we call landline optimization where we looked at facilities and we looked at their copper usage and we tried to determine could this be modernized, could we reduce costs. Ended up saving the company like $11 million just in copper, you know, eradication, right. You know, trying to get rid of all those copper lines everywhere. And you know, we were, we were managing 1600 North American locations right across different, different aspects. And so there was, it was a lot of work. And so they had, you know, layers of management. But it was, that was the first time where I stepped out of being a doer, where I was more managing, I was managing projects, I was managing, you know, I had the project managers who reported me, I had, you know, teams that reported me. And I was more directing. I was like an air traffic controller, right? Just directing traffic. Oh, this person's on pto. Then we got a backfill. I, I need some, I need some field service techs over here. I need this to happen. I need that to happen. I was doing more just directing at that point, which was fun, but it wasn't what all I had. And after a while I was approached by a headhunter and said, hey, I have a unique opportunity for you. And I thought it sounded neat and it got me back into interaction post Covid with people. And so I ended up leaving that organization, which in hindsight was probably, I won't say I regret it. But I do, I do sometimes miss that company. I love where I'm at now though. So I landed. So that was the in between, right? So I left one company, went to this intermediate, was like, oh, this really isn't great. So then I went over to where I'm at now and I, you know, I couldn't be happier. So I worked for great leadership, interesting company. But like I said, the type of hands on over the last two organizations and even where I was previously is what's changed. It's not that I'm still not a doer. I still have responsibilities. I still get what I call my hands dirty. The difference is the modernization of the platforms, right? Being more SaaS based, being more hybrid and remote, versus having the traditional infrastructure, traditional servers and firewalls and all of the things that you would normally have to manage and set up. And for example, where I'm at today, we are completely serverless. And people look at me and they're like, okay, so you have Azure or AWS. And I'm like, no, no, no. We are fully SaaS. We are totally serverless. We do not have a server presence. You will not find a physical, virtual or cloud server that we run everything we use. Yeah, somebody else runs it, right? Yeah, but it, it, it's, that's the thing is, and so, you know, we offload and we use the Microsoft 365 and your ERP and other tools that may come along. Those are all SaaS based. So now my job and my team, what we focus on now is the important things, right? Is availability, uptime, etc. But we're able to get more involved with the employees we work with and be more business partners and be more engaged. It's not without trouble and complication. I mean, being all SaaS, right? Everybody now everything's an agent on the endpoint versus having a server or a machine that can handle some of that workload for you, like using a SIM tool to help you review logs and catch cyber activity before it affects you is a lot more complicated because now you don't have that sitting there monitoring the local and you don't have traditional VPNs anymore. Because what we did is we got rid of the VPNs in favor of a zero trust framework. Because with everything being SaaS, guess what? Everything can just go to the cloud. We don't need to talk to each other because there's nothing important in those locations other than a laptop. And if somebody has trouble with a laptop, we have a remote tool that can allow us to remote into it. So I don't need to have a physical connection, a VPN or dynamic VPN between locations anymore because I have zero trust out to, out to the resources we need.
• 13:57
  Speaker B: So, couple of questions, but one of the ones that hit me while you were talking about completely serverless infrastructure and being a complete SaaS, you mentioned how it, how at times you'd needed the ERP expert or the ERP owner. So are you still having those traditional IT type roles or has that moved out to the, the departments or the groups that are using that product and they're more of like that SME for that product?
• 14:35
  Speaker A: Great question and yes, a bit of both. Right. So it still has a very significant role. You know, we're, you know, I'm, I'm happy to report that our company has just received its for the second year in a row. One of my initiatives a couple years ago was to attain SOC 2 type, you know, attestation. We did that as a company. We achieved it again this year with, you know, and, and one of the, one of the things there is of course your security and, and your, you know, a lot of the things making sure you have, you know, your privileged access. Correct. And all the things when it comes to erp, it's a bit more challenging because you would have someone like a controller who has a certain amount of access and because they're responsible for reports and different things, a lot of times they, you know, they feel they need more access than they actually need. So one of the things we've done is we have created those subject matter experts embedded in departments that leverage certain elements of the ERP so that it still drives the business forward and helps it not be so responsible for every little thing. But being all SaaS, we're more off the shelf cookie cutter, right? We're not doing. You don't. Gone are the days of these custom built platform where you take SAP and you write custom modules and you put it into a dev test environment and then promote it to production. Although you still do that a little bit with the promotion from dev or from test to, or sandbox to production. Your platform's a little different because now adding a custom field isn't like it used to be. Now it's almost like you're on an overlay of a database and you're just saying, okay, I want to add a new field to this table. Boom, done, it's on the screen and you give it some labels, you tie it back to a few things and now it's visible to everyone. And you didn't really customize anything. You didn't build new tables, you didn't build new screens, you just simply added a field.
• 16:39
  Speaker B: It's more of a configuration change versus a customization.
• 16:42
  Speaker A: That's right. It's configuration over customization. And that's the big change in the modern ERP platforms. But they're more rigid, right? Even SAP will tell you with their S4HANA cloud, if you use their S4HANA as it is, it's a shared platform, but you're getting a canned stock. This is how SAP works. You have to use it, how it works. If you want to go above that, they have a still customizable version that you pay more for, but they will build it how you want it. Like it will literally do anything you want, but it's customized and that's where you run into difficulty. Right. And so our approach was we want a vanilla canned app. We'll, we'll figure out if it works for our business. But the platform we chose happens to have a lot of applications that work well and integrate well with it and with the modern APIs and, and all the things you can do in 2026 that you couldn't do in 2016 or 2006 or 1996. Now you're talking about the ability to just, I mean, you can build something in a day or sync something or set up something in hours that would take years or months previously and, or fraction, if not zero cost. So it really has enabled us to take on a different role. You know, you don't have to be, you don't have to have those traditional roles and things now you can have those subject matter experts, you can have people who are working isolated in their departments, not siloed, but, but as an SME with their teams training and doing the things they need to do and then leveraging it when they need support.
• 18:32
  Speaker B: I was wondering how much, you know, as you talked through all of that, you did hit on the integration piece of it, the APIs and all of that. And, and how are you guys handling most of that? Are you, are you using a SaaS API provider or are you, what's, what's your approach there? What's your typical approach?
• 18:52
  Speaker A: So again, our ERP platform has one of the largest app sets that you can find. And so there, there's already hundreds if not thousands of applications. So if you think of, take a program like Rippling, which is a payroll HR platform, and also does some IT and some other things, right? If you wanted to plug it in. There's already a pre built connector. All I do is if I have a rippling account and I have my ERP account over here, I go into their, to their. And literally say add and it adds the connector. I plug in the data and it's done. It's almost like setting up something with Microsoft, right Where you go in and you're adding an enterprise application. You just say add app, do this, do this. It's almost that easy.
• 19:39
  Speaker B: And sometimes you're not having to deal with applications that don't have connectors yet. Most everything that you're doing is so mainstream that somebody else has already blazed that road way before you.
• 19:53
  Speaker A: It's. It was by design. It was our plan. We've been planning this for over two years. You know, it's what helped us go live. We went live with our ERP in under 12 months. We went from having a legacy on premise old antiquated platform to a fully SaaS cloud model under 12 months, completely different platform. Did it on time and on budget.
• 20:16
  Speaker B: Right. So.
• 20:17
  Speaker A: Or under time and on budget. So I mean that it's and, but it's by design. As long as you stick to that and you don't have scope creep, you're fine. It's when you get into the areas of scope creep that it can really derail you. And so what we have done is we, we did do a phased approach where we said, hey, we're not going to do everything. We're going to lower our risk and we're going to do the things that create high value and high impact to the business. We're going to address those first. Then, then slowly over the next year to two years, we'll add in any of the other pieces that need to be added in. If, if something's missing. There are some things we still need to do and polish up, but overall we're very happy with where we landed.
• 20:59
  Speaker B: So I'm curious and I'm going to jump way back in the conversation mentioned that you're at a cooperative. What does that mean in difference for you and for the IT infrastructure? Because I, I'm assuming that that has ramifications beyond just I work at an Inc or an LLC or a, an entity. The cooperative tells me that there's multiple entities involved somehow. So how does, how does that affect your worldview?
• 21:38
  Speaker A: Oh, if we only had more time. No, I thought it was a simple question. Come on, honestly. So to be fair, we are Cooperative Inc. So there is an ink at the end of our name. However, It's a very unique relationship how our cooperative is set up or we call it a co op for sure. Our co op is set up in a way where each of the members of the co op manage their own it and, and then so our ERP isn't the same as theirs. And you know, all, everybody does their own thing, right? They're, they're manufacturers and we're more like the middleman distributor for what we national sugar literally is what it sounds like. It's sugar. So we are distributing sugar throughout, you know, to companies in the US we are purely US based. We do not do international. Our, our approach has always been that, you know, we're going to do. We, we have to maintain relationships with all of our members and we do that in ways through, through different types of integration. So one of the things that we had to do with our ERP is we had, we do have integrations with our members that we manage through middleware. So we added a middleware platform or a platform or ipaas integration platform as a service back to that SaaS type model. Right. So we added, we added a platform for, for the middleman middleware that allows us to integrate with them. And that can be things like whether it's sftp, edi, API, we can rapidly deploy that through the middleware platform versus having to which is standardized versus having to build something from scratch in our ERP platform. Through that integration we're able to integrate with them whatever we need to, whether it's order information, shipment information, inventory information, whatever it is.
• 23:45
  Speaker B: Okay, so there were, or there are some custom integrations based on somebody else's needs and requirements. But within, within the realm that's purely yours, all of you guys had, your organization had purposely chosen a vanilla version so that you don't have all of those customizations that, that you need to support and maintain and, and carry across versions. When the, the application provider changes things up, you've got all of the integrations, the connections, but because you're cooperative, you're dealing with other IT groups who may not have the same methodologies. So then that's where the come on SSTP. So flat file integration, EDI integration, EDIs, flat file integration too. Yeah. And then the APIs, you know, you're correct.
• 24:42
  Speaker A: But one of the things we did is we spent a year leading up to the selection of the ERP and ultimately the integration partner defining our requirements, which included visits to our members and visiting with them included visits to three PLs, visiting with them included, you know, meeting with each department internally at NSM to understand what their needs were and we compiled this massive amount of data and then we said, okay, so we're, we all know we're organizationally ready for change. We, we have the, the minimum viable product, the MVP of what we want to achieve and then we know what the requirements are from the members and from the other points. And so that is what we went into to the ERP vendors and said, here's our RFP, our like 90 page RFP or whatever it was. Request for proposal, right? And we sent it to them and we said, okay, you know, who, who's going to stand up? And at the end of the day, of the 10 or so companies we've, we sent the, that out to three of them. The cream roasted the crop, right? And you had the three that you would normally expect. You had Microsoft, SAP and, and Oracle and Oracle, netsuite. Right. You had, you had those companies rise to the top where companies like Sage, Upcore and four and others, although could probably do a great job in certain areas, couldn't quite do the job everywhere else. You know, one company that was interesting kind of a disruptor was Acumatica. But they're very much a ERP built on a bunch of different modules kind of crammed together. And we wanted something a little more streamlined that was a little more, you know, core application wise. You know, like your SAP, Netsuites, Microsoft right there. The core of them is all that platform where epicore or not. Of course, excuse me, Acumatica might be. Well, our, our finance runs like this. But then we come over here and we will bring in this piece for procurement and then we'll bring in this piece for inventory. We'll bring in this. And that was a little too radical for what we were trying to do. Really cool price point, but a little radical for what we were trying to do.
• 27:06
  Speaker B: And I was curious about that. I was curious how the RFP or how your organization kept those from rising in the, the group because I, I myself had a little sprint in between the prior organization and this organization and, and I was working for one of the resellers or one of the VARs and they, you know, here's an RFP. Tell us or tell them how we're going to match it and whether we did or not. And you know, sales, sales does, that's like their job is to figure out how to make it look like they do all of the things that your RFP had. So I'm, I'm curious how the, how you worded it. In the RFP or how the organization approached the responses to be able to have the, to pick out the cream.
• 28:04
  Speaker A: Honestly, it was really more of a, you know, we basically built a checklist and so when we, when we met with them and talked to them, we forced them to answer the hard questions. We know that everybody's going to come back with accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, basic sales, basic procurement, basic inventory. Right? We know they're going to come back with that. It's how do you handle it for a food grade business that has FDA requirements, USDA requirements, lot traceability, who has, who has to have, you know, certain requirements on certain fields, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they had to answer the question and if they came back with anything other than here's how we'll do it and here's an example of how we do it, they were just, they were disqualified. I mean it was a very quick process, right? We didn't want to waste time by looking. I mean it was bad enough that we had all the demos that we had. I mean we were, we were, had demo exhaustion by the time we got to the point of selecting the actual product. Because we didn't just look at the tier two, we looked at Tier one and Tier two. And what I mean by that is you take Microsoft F and O and Microsoft Business Central, right? FNO being Tier 1, Business Central being Tier 2. And then you take Oracle Fusion Tier 1, Oracle NetSuite Tier 2 and the same again with SAP. You have SAP S4, HANA Cloud and Business One with, with SAP. So you, you know, you had the Tier 1 and Tier 2. So we weren't just limiting ourselves to just, you know, a smaller ERP or a larger erp. We really wanted to figure out what was going to fit our business based on our needs, based on our specific requirements. We created a hit list and we forced the companies to answer the hit list and if they refused or if they couldn't, then it was pretty apparent and they knew what, they knew what it was, it was, it was clearly laid out in the, in the rfp. But we didn't put necessarily a checklist of the ER in the rfp. We, we gave them the verbiage and of course they're going to come back and be like, okay. And we're like, okay, now show us. And they're like, well, what do you mean? We're like show us. We want to see it. We don't, we're not here. You made it this far because you came back with A a response to the RFP and a price and all these things or whatever you wanted to send us. That's great. Now you have to show us. And the ones that showed us were the ones that moved on to the actual in house demos with our, you know, leadership team, our subject matter experts, sometimes board members.
• 30:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious how the organization got to the point of this. And by the way, let me just stop for a second and say thank you for walking us through this adventure that you've gone through recently. Because I've never really sat down and walked through. You know, what's it take to go through an ERP change? And it's an experience that many of us get and many of us have to kind of approach without much experience. It's not something that you get to do every day. It took you guys a year from the beginning of the implementation, let alone would you say like a year, maybe a year and a half doing the requirements gathering because that alone is huge. And getting all that ahead of time is so key to making sure that
• 31:29
  Speaker A: you hit the, the, the right target.
• 31:31
  Speaker B: You can get a bullseye, but on the completely wrong target if you're not doing that.
• 31:36
  Speaker A: 100 where I have seen in my career businesses fail, ERP systems are going to do what they're designed to do, right? Just like computers. Computers are always going to do what they're designed to do. It's when people try to make them do things they're not designed to do is where we get into trouble. And that's where errors come in and people don't understand that there. Whatever you design an application to do, like I said, they're all going to do payables, receivables. There's just some nuances that we as an organization needed that we had to uncover. In my career I've had four opportunities to do ERP well, five opportunities to do ERP changes. And that started from the early days. When I first came out, I literally started going into Y2K my, that was my first one moving from a homegrown application into, into Great Plains. Then moved from, and then I moved organizations and we did, we went from. Well, Syspro was already in the, in the organization but that it was on a old database structure sybase and we migrated to SQL which was basically a whole new platform but it was, it was more of an upgrade versus implementation. Then I moved to SAP, the SAP world and I was, I got to do not only upgrades but I got to do a full transformation. Where we went from on premise, SAP to cloud, S4 cloud. And that was really a great experience. Then I, my next opportunity really wasn't erp, it was more point of sale for hospitality driven activities. But it was similar. I mean they're similar based systems. They just, they do different things. Right. One's more of a cash register and doing renting rooms and stuff versus, you know, other things. But they still have the same payable, receivable, general ledger, base, payroll.
• 33:31
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 33:31
  Speaker A: And then you, and then now here with National Sugar, you know, going from the legacy to, to the full SaaS platform. So it's, it's been something I've been privy to in my career. I've done it a few times with different platforms and, and I really, I, I really feel like the number one thing that I've seen and I've heard the horror story from others in the industry, the organization is not ready for change. And how do you know that? Because they can't tell you what their requirements are. And if you don't know your requirements, if you don't know the problem you're trying to fix. And this isn't just with, with erp, this goes with AI, this goes with, with any system change, any system.
• 34:13
  Speaker B: Right.
• 34:13
  Speaker A: If you don't know the problem you're trying to fix or solve, how can you possibly argue that you don't have the right thing already in front of you? Because just because you don't like it or just because it's slow or just because it's old doesn't make it wrong. It means maybe we're not utilizing it correctly or maybe we need to make some minor changes, you know, to, to modernize. But in our case, we recognize there was a need for change. We identified the gaps, we identified our must haves, nice to haves and wants and that's how we approached it. And like I said, like you said, about a year and a half to get to where we are today. And it showed because we were, again, we were able to finish ahead of time. We got board approval for 14 months, we finished in just under 12, we got board approval for a certain dollar amount and we finished well under that. So again we, we were, you know, we knew what we wanted and that's, that made it so much easier for the provider and for the implementation partner. Now I'm not going to say there weren't still hiccups, I'm not going to say there weren't things. We didn't, we still found out even after spending a year and a half, even after doing all the legwork and meeting with countless meetings, I mean, so many meetings that you would, your head would swim with different individuals in the organization, with our members, with, with vendors. We still miss things, but we were more prepared than if we wouldn't have done that. And I would. And I again, I say that with AI, with erp, with anything, if you don't know what the problem is, a potential solution, that's what you're trying to solve. Right. The gap is the fix. So if you say, well, we have to achieve X, our system doesn't allow us to do that, so we need a different system. So obviously the new system has to be able to do that. And that's, I mean, I know that's real simple method or simple explanation. That's really what it comes down to.
• 36:15
  Speaker B: I'm curious on another aspect, especially with you having accomplished this. When did you guys finish?
• 36:22
  Speaker A: May 1st. We went live of this year.
• 36:25
  Speaker B: May 1st. Okay. So in the last four months, five months. Four months. The, during this time period, AI showed up and showed up hard. And, you know, I know you're bored and your executive leadership had to have been drinking the Kool Aid because everybody's been drinking the Kool Aid. How were you able to keep focused on the ERP implementation when something that radical showed up? And, and I, I know that there were people in your business that were saying, we need to do this.
• 37:07
  Speaker A: Yep. And there was me sitting there saying, no, we don't. There's an advantage of this. Yeah, well, no, there's an advantage of being trusted by your leadership. And that's one thing that I have to say. When I said I work for great leaders, I mean it. At National Sugar, I, I, I literally have some of the best leaders you could ask for, whether it's support from the cfo, the CEO. Amazing. I mean, I never worked for a guy like him. And I'm not just blowing smoke. I really mean it. He understands how to motivate. And it's not that he doesn't get in your face if you deserve it. You know, these folks get in your face and they let you know. But, you know, from, you know, whether you're talking quality or finance or logistics, everybody knows that we're, we're on a team to get to the same place. We don't always agree, and we shouldn't always agree. If we're passionate about what we do, we should fight hard for what we think we need. But we shouldn't be afraid to listen to those around you who might have a perspective you're not considering because there's an impact every time sales makes a decision that has an impact in finance and logistics and other areas. And we have to keep that in mind. And so my job has really been more of a strategic business partner, helping keep everybody in line to the point of, hey, that's great, you want to do that, but how do you plan on accomplishing that? Right? What's. And here's our bandwidth, right? So we have so much bandwidth. I have taken a very cautious approach to AI with NSM because I felt like, one, we, during this transformation, okay, doing a complete digital transformation, going from what we had to where we were going. We needed this. One, stay focused, right? Again, avoiding the scope. But. But two, once we got there, once we went live, there's a stabilization period. You're not just live, everything's perfect, right? You're not just, oh, look, everything's great. No, we're still stabilizing about six months. We figured by October we should be October, November, we should be in a really good place. And we are aggressively looking at like, we just went. We just started our fiscal year and budgets were already set and AI had a small piece of that. And I went to our CFO literally this past week, and I said, we have to relook at our AI perspective. And it's not because I want. I've taken a very conservative approach. I've told you all in the rest of the elt. I said, we need to not jump because, you know, it make, you know, everybody's dangling the carrot. We need not to chase it. I said, however, now, you know, after just attending falcon, the CrowdStrike security conference in Las Vegas, and can my continuing learning on other areas and people I talk to, I'm like the days for sitting back on my heels and kind of taking an outside looking in approach. Said, now I need to get my arms around it. The organization needs to be prepared. We need to be bringing AI in so we can secure it, test it, and make sure that we have what we feel is the next first step so we can start thinking about agents and bots that will help us improve where we are. So We've got the ERP now, we've got Microsoft 365. We've got all the security pieces in place. We have a very good security posture, very good security rating. We've got all the things we'd like to have. But now we need to. Now we're. Now we're in continuous improvement. Now we need to become more efficient. Now we need to take a hard look at the tasks we've been performing for years and say, why are we doing it this way? How can it be improved if it can? And can technology AI be part of that solution? And if so, how? And by asking those questions, everyone's going to give you a different opinion. But by asking good questions, you get to a point where you understand what's needed. And maybe, and maybe by having it already, you, you take a 1:3, 5 year approach and you say, oh, maybe this year I start with Copilot. Next year maybe I add Anthropic or, or chat and then year after that maybe I go out and I get something like Dev's AI and I start bringing in all these platforms and I start really building right as the business evolves. But not so, not, not so slow that you're left behind but not so fast you can't keep up. So it's all about understanding the needs of the business and trying to pace it. But as fast as it comes in and people saying, oh, we need to do this, you, you really have to make sure you're taking that 10,000 foot view and going, but we're not ready. You know, we were ready for erp, we're not ready.
• 41:59
  Speaker B: You are headed into an interesting world and I'll, I'll throw a little nugget out there. I don't know how much of it that you've had a chance to deal with yet. It sounds like you've been so focused on the work around the ERP and the transformation within the organization as a whole, your not going to be lucky enough to focus in on. Let's start with Copilot because you've got all of these SaaS models, all of the SaaS providers are throwing in their flavor of AI and then you've got this world of all of these independent LLMs, like anthropic, like. And I hesitate to even say this one is Copilot, but you know, in, in a certain way it's operating like it's a standalone and you've got all of the other ones play with. And so you've got a plethora of these things coming at you being used in a plethora of ways.
• 43:00
  Speaker A: But so the how I approach it is this security first.
• 43:04
  Speaker B: Right?
• 43:05
  Speaker A: So I hear you and I understand and that's what I'm acutely aware of is we recognize that we don't have the luxury and that it's the, you know, one of the things we just learned at the show, we were just Attending was the fact that everything's already using AI. Our service desk uses AI, our customer service tools use AI. It's built into our erp. Now it's Microsoft, of course, is adding it in and you have people using it. So there's the shadow AI that's already being used by people all throughout the company that we're not controlling. So that's my message to the CFO is we have to realign the budget. I know we didn't budget for it, but I need to appropriate. Appropriate money from somewhere. Whether we reduce something somewhere else, whether we cut somebody else's travel and take some budget money or what, whatever we have to do, we have to get to a point where we're one buying, you know, getting business professional licenses that we can then administer and then also secure. And, and by security, I mean, you know, we do use CrowdStrike, right? I'm not afraid to say that we're. We're a crowdstrike shop. I know Everybody's got their op opinion. I'm not here to debate that. I like CrowdStrike for what it is. I don't necessarily like their politics. And the head of the. At the organization, that's not. Again, I'm not here to debate any of that. My, my thing is, is, is it keeping me safe? It is. Does. Is it progressing? It is. Therefore, I'm staying with it. If they take the world down again like they did a couple years ago, I'm going to abandon ship. That's all there is. I mean, but my thought on it is they do have a lot of tools that make sense for our business. And therefore, by providing me SaaS tools like CrowdStrike, Falcon Shield, and then AI tools like their new guardian that they have, and I'm not here promoting them. I'm just telling you what we're looking at. It allows us to have security in areas where AI is already living, okay? And therefore we have a. We have somebody or something or a tool watching what we can't see. So that's step one. Step two is being able back to what I talked about, having real control over the AI that's happening. So we can start reducing that shadow AI and start steering, hopefully steering our users in the direction we want them to go with AI. Like, we're not saying don't use it. Up to this point, we've said, hey, you can use it. Just be mindful of what you put in it. Now we're saying, hey, we're taking the guardrails off of you for what you can put in it, but we're now controlling what you use and we have administrative controls over what if you drop something in there and it's not supposed to be there, we're going to yank it out, those kind of things. So just, you know, we're, we're giving them the illusion of more freedom without actually giving them more freedom. And hopefully that buys us some time. I can't guarantee that it will, but I think that's what we've seen throughout our cooperative. Is there a lot of our members are approaching it the same way, right? They're approaching it in a way that's like, okay, look, we know they're using it, so what we're going to do is we're going to provide them a platform to use that we can control to give them what feels like more access, but really it's more controlled access versus everybody. You know, this guy over here is using Chat gbt, this guy's using Grok, this guy's using, you know, Claude, this person over here is using some other thing. And then this guy's just, you know, Googling, you know, using Gemini through the browser. We want to really try to start getting our arms around that.
• 47:00
  Speaker B: That's a good place and a good approach to it and, and wise. One of the other questions that I had for you and hadn't had a chance to get out, you were talking about some of the demo fatigue. How much of the demo did you guys do or how many of the demos did you guys sit through before you even started to do the requirements gathering? Because something had to have happened to cause the organization to say this ERP or our on prem is not working. We need to.
• 47:33
  Speaker A: So we're in an interesting position because our organization, National Sugar, was actually formed from one of the members of our co op about 15, 16 years ago. We. We separated or divested from them and became our own. That's when we incorporated. We became our own company. However, before I was hired, that organizations was still doing all of the IT for National Sugar, including hosting the ERP package that was part of their erp. So we were basically licensed users within their space. Part of our divestment, or decoupling, if you will, was we needed to stand up our own platform. But before we could do that, we needed to know what we needed to. To replace. So it was a little different in our scenario. We basically had to get off of the platform. We had an antiquated, unsupported version of software that was. We were. That we were paying that we were paying them to maintain it for us and it was unsupported. So now they've got a vulnerable software package in their environment. They're like, we can't do this. You guys have got to get on something. And so we, over the years it was always talked about, but it was never the right time. And so one year turned into five years turned into many. And then all of a sudden they bring me on board and they said, your task is to modernize us. My very first day on the job was cutting over from their Microsoft 365 tenant to our very own. That happened my first day. First boots on the ground. Yeah, I walked in at 7 o' clock in the morning, at 8 o' clock, we started the cutover and I can't make it up. It honestly happened that way. So then, and then literally my, my tenure with National Sugar has been drinking from a fire hose ever since with these projects, trying to modernize, moving from a, a managed platform off of what they were doing all the way to a fully SaaS environment. You know, I would say that that was probably the best case scenario for us though, because it enabled us to be able to have liberty to do it without seeing a demo. Now my experience, I've seen Syspro, I've literally used it for 10 years. I used SAP for over 10 years, great planes for many years. So I had a lot of experience and I had exposure to Microsoft Dynamics, you know, so it wasn't like it was. I was coming into it blind as a, as a person, as an experienced technology professional. Some of the other folks had had experience with erp. So again we, we weren't coming into it blind. What we were doing is coming into it with a, a mindset of we don't want any prejudice. Even though we all hated SAP, we don't want any prejudice, you know, saying, here's what we're going to do. We're going to pick this one and run. We really wanted to pick the best solution for National Sugar. And that's what we feel like we did a goal. That was the goal. We set a hard goal. And, and we have a saying in our organization that I absolutely love. I never done this before National Sugar, but it's say what you're going to do and do what you say. And so we were very clear with the employees what we're setting out to do and then we delivered. So say what you're going to do, do what you say. And we told them, we said it's going to Be painful before it gets better. We've been very clear and very transparent, and I, I, it's, I think it's worked out really well.
• 51:12
  Speaker B: Awesome. Jeremy, I could continue this conversation for at least another hour, two hours, but our day continues to trudge on without us. I promised you a question at the beginning of the show or prior to the show. What do you think we, as IT leaders will be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today?
• 51:34
  Speaker A: I think the biggest came to mind. I think the biggest thing we'll be talking about 18 months from now is, is, you know, the next frontier, right, Is the, the, what I call the death of the data center. I really believe you're going to see more, you know, like we're on a SaaS model now, and I don't know what the next model will be called, but I think the days of traditional data centers and applications, at least for this, this 10 to 20 years is done. I don't think you're gonna, I think you're gonna see more and more companies moving away from that traditional data center approach, more so because of security. I think AI becomes such a dis. In the negative way of, you know, ransom and malware and things. And, you know, some of the things that we're seeing, these, you know, the impersonations and things. I feel like that organizations are going to have to move away from the traditional data centers and they're going to move more into. Maybe they call it cloud, maybe they call it SaaS, maybe they call it something else. But I do believe that's really where the next 18, in the next 18 months, that's really going to be the big thing, is how to, you know, how to protect against those AIs, by, by removing that data center, by removing that single point of where you can be vulnerable and dispersing it into more of a, I don't know, almost like a, an atom where you have neutrons and electrons and you have all these moving parts where all of your data is all over the place but no place at the same time. And I, I think that's what we're going to try to get to and, and allow companies, you know, a feeling of additional security when it, you know, it'll, and it'll be good for a while until, you know, technology catches.
• 53:29
  Speaker B: Interesting. So, so you're thinking even the, the giants like Microsoft and Oracle and, and Google and Amazon and everybody will be getting away from the consolidated, concentrated sets of racks and servers.
• 53:47
  Speaker A: I think they have, trying to do
• 53:49
  Speaker B: a distributed model of some sort.
• 53:51
  Speaker A: We've seen too many instances this year in the last 12 to 18 months alone of Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Google, all going down for some DNS issue or some other related issue.
• 54:04
  Speaker B: So we're distribute the pain. Don't concentrate it, don't focus it. Don't allow the magnifying glass with the sun behind it to hit that one spot.
• 54:15
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 54:16
  Speaker B: Cause the fire.
• 54:18
  Speaker A: That's right. And they're already preparing for it. If you look at how things are getting set up, they're already starting to kind of shift that way. And I think that you'll see more of that in the coming months.
• 54:29
  Speaker B: Interesting. Very, very interesting. Well, Jeremy, truly thank you for the sharing of your experience and your time.