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Welcome back everybody.
James, you and I just listened to our podcast intro song.
Is that a theme song?
Theme song.
Just to get us into the podcasting zone.
It's a pretty good theme song.
It's a great theme song.
Great theme song.
Are you an expert or a technologist based on that theme song?
Which category do you fall into?
Are you a subject matter expert?
Yeah, I think subject matter expert is great.
I like that.
About the theme song itself, just to consumer of.
Just to consumer of.
On loop.
Yeah.
So today we're talking about benefits of enhancing or changing an ERP system.
And thankfully we do have a technologist and subject matter expert here with us.
I've been a user of ERP systems throughout my career.
Know a little bit about them.
Wouldn't say I know a lot of it about them.
I probably know more about CRM systems than full suite ERP systems, given my sales and
marketing background.
Some interesting stats that I looked up on this topic.
20 to 30% efficiency gains through operational process improvements and optimized access
to data.
As well as 10 to 15% average revenue lifts for organizations that get the right ERP system
installed.
What do you think about those stats?
Ballpark accurate based on your experience?
Yeah, ballpark accurate.
But when I hear those, I think, wow, why are we not doing more of this work for folks when
it's such a great help?
I think when you think of 20 to 30% in efficiency gains and every day we hear I'm understaffed,
I'm struggling to find talent, or I want to go faster.
That's a nice number.
How much do you think people need to invest?
There's got to be a trade off here, right?
Because we know that upgrading an ERP system is challenging.
It's a big distraction for almost every functional department in an organization.
What do you think you have to give up in order to get those gains?
Do you have to take a hit for a few years?
What do you say?
Yeah, I think a lot of times when you go into these projects, we have this feeling of it's
a hard e-break and I really got to stop it all to kind of move forward.
The beauty of let's stick to enhancing, right?
Enhancing can be more incremental.
So it may take me a little bit longer, but I'll get there.
So I had this mentor who was a CFO and he always told me about the TMR triangle.
It's time money resources.
If you want to do it in less time, you need more money and more resources.
If you got less resources, it's going to be less money and it's going to take you more
time.
So that inversion of how do I arrive at that and thinking about that TMR triangle, sure,
you can get to that path.
It may take you a little longer, but I don't think it's a hard stop, pivot and work.
Got it.
So let's also chat for a minute about, you know, I was skeptical about this topic.
I didn't think it was going to be terribly interesting for some of our readers or listeners,
readers, maybe aging myself there.
I don't, well, some may read.
I don't know where they'd read a podcast.
Hey, we have transcripts on our podcast.
We do have transcripts on our podcast.
I may have dated myself, but I'm not wrong.
So I had my doubts about this topic.
You convinced me that it was worthwhile.
How did you do that?
Same way I helped folks convince other folks they need a new ERP or need to enhance their
ERP.
So a lot of times we get calls and we have a lot of trusted folks we work with.
The typical year we do 150 transactions of that, we probably deal with the same folks
20 times in some businesses where we have those relationships that are richer relationships.
And we get calls all the time to ask, we know we need a new ERP.
We know we need to make a change.
And as a side note to that, we feel one of the two most disruptive things you can do
to a business is transact it or implement or change the ERP.
So we know-
And when you say transact it, you mean-
Sell it.
M&A.
Okay.
We confirm that ERPs can be a risky thing.
And we respect that and understand it.
So I don't think they're wrong in asking, but we get asked something unique.
I know I need to make the change.
I want to make the change.
How have others been successful in making the change or pitching the need for the change,
better said.
And really that is help me sell this to my leadership team, whether it's a board, CEO,
or some C level.
It's really James, help me sell this.
So just like I helped others sell their ERP needs, I tried to say on this today, write
a bit of a playbook to our clients and our listeners on how to move this project along
and bring people on the journey with you.
Yep.
True story.
I was a skeptic, but it made a lot of sense.
And then we went and did some research and kind of confirmed that with your expertise
on kind of the tangible benefits.
We talked about efficiency gains, revenue growth.
So good.
Let's put some meat on the bone here for some of our listeners.
So let's talk about how an ERP system change can help drive strategic growth.
That's a large topic a lot of times.
So again, let's go back to why we did this episode.
That's one of the main topics, right?
Because growth is easy.
No one's not going to sign up for growth.
So I think it's a good one to start with, Mike, because it allows us to talk about something
that connects with all levels of the organization.
So really, when you look at growth within an organization, we all know the phrase inorganic
and organic growth.
And for the purposes of this, we're talking growth with what you have today, but changing
the ERP.
So the constants of your business, no M&A to your earlier point, changing the ERP.
So improved efficiencies, we know when we go to new systems, we're much more efficient
if it's done correctly.
Let me put an asterisk there.
But if you're able to find the right ERP and you're able to do it correctly and you're
able to drive it forward, you'll find efficiency improvements.
And efficiencies can be as simple as getting paper out of the process.
I was on a project one time where I was asked to name the project.
And there was this group.
So it was a sales team in Brazil, and they were taking orders on a clipboard in the field.
And if anybody knows Brazil, traffic is a thing in Brazil.
So they drive all day, take these orders, and then drive back to the office and then
key them in a system.
So we called it project depaperization.
How do we depaperize your processes and drive that efficiency?
Super successful, really cool project.
I'm going to save that one for another podcast because some interesting learnings about that.
Number two, I would say revenue growth.
And someone says, how do you get revenue growth out of that?
Well, if I have better time to market, better customer service, all those softer things
around revenue that allow you to grow revenue, it's not the true sell.
It's not enhancing your product.
It's not coming up with a better product.
It's everything around it that makes it easier for the individual to transact with you.
And I hate to use this, but it's that Amazon effect, right?
Easier to transact, buy more.
I know, Mike, you say your house, true at my house.
Amazon packages arrive daily.
And a lot of times I have no idea what they are in them.
And that's a great revenue growth because they made it easy.
And unfortunately, my family, the bandy family is helping drive revenue growth for them.
You're paying for Bezos yacht.
Correct.
Yes.
Very nice sailboat.
287 meters.
Impressive.
Yeah.
Impressive.
I don't know what you're doing that.
That's impressive.
And the other one is scalable growth, right?
Again, we all want to grow.
We know we need to grow.
Sometimes we're hindered by those ERPs.
I think, Mike, you were talking about today when you try to find a partner to do an activity
and that partner can't hang, I think your example is skiing.
Find that right partner that's at your aptitude and your skill level to be able to ski together.
Did you find the right ERP that can go do those double blacks with you and be successful?
More of a blue guy myself.
But can you find that double black partner that you need like you talked about?
And I think a lot ERPs sometimes aren't able to hang.
And that causes some challenges on growth.
I haven't seen you ski, James.
But from what I've heard, I've heard you're more of a green guy.
Yeah.
I love the za.
I love the pizza on the way down.
The pizza.
So does my six-year-old.
He loves the pizza.
We call it the wedge.
The wedge.
So financial benefits.
Let's talk about that for a few minutes.
What are the tangible financial benefits associated with an ERP system change?
I think we've all heard this in business, but to call it out, complications equal cost.
So the more complicated something is, the more cost it incurs.
So if you think about modern ERPs and how well they drive out some of those complications,
there's obviously a cost reduction on that.
Now, the journey from getting to where you are today to that cost reduction, there's
a spend to get there.
But on the other side of that spend, there's the ability to reduce that down.
One of the biggest challenges, so I own my own business and no one told me this when
I started my business, I thought product was going to be my number one challenge.
Cash flow.
The ability to ensure you have cash flow to support growth and drive the things that you
need by having systems that are more aligned, that have better visibility, that are able
to work in a more efficient manner, even on the way that I communicate and do payroll
through my system to understand that.
Having the ability to have that visibility of cash flow and ensure cash flow optimization,
super important to a business.
And the last one, it's a little boring, but I'm going to call it out.
It's that compliance and risk management.
When you look at how much folks spend on outside groups to come in and audit, review your financials
and the cost that's associated with going back and recasting those financials if a mistake
is made, that's a very costly service that most of us outsource.
And so that can add up pretty quickly.
I think maybe one of the things that's good to talk about here, Mike, is, and I think
this is one of the things that you really focus on and one of the things I respect that
you have an eye towards, which is data-driven decision making.
And we hear it all the time.
We hear executives talk about it all the time.
And maybe if it's okay, we flip the script a little bit and ask you, you've been around
a lot of systems, you've been around a lot of technology, you know the systems that are
out there.
What are some of the capabilities from a system you look for, or an executive, whichever way,
to help them make decisions or help you make decisions that come from an ERP?
So kind of that decision making capabilities you look for.
I think you're spot on.
And I think, given that I have spent so much of my career in the private equity ecosystem,
where we see a lot of businesses that maybe, especially in their first round of private
equity ownership, maybe have legacy systems where they need to be upgraded to new systems
for a variety of different reasons.
Lots of what you've, lots of those being what you've already described today.
But one of the reasons why it's so popular to do an ERP system upgrade in the private
equity ecosystem is not just to improve off the legacy system's capabilities, but it's
to get access to things like real-time data, right?
If we want to understand something about a business, whether it's cashflow generation
or profitability or sales per employee or inventory on hand or whatever the metric might
be, getting some of those metrics five weeks after the fact, two weeks after the fact,
three or four months after the fact, if you can believe it, we've seen businesses when
we first invested in them that were still trying to close last year's books in December
of the following year, 12 month lag.
Getting data that far in arrears isn't terribly helpful from an executive business decision-making
perspective.
So, first and foremost, you can't really have a top performing executive team if the executive
team and or the board, which could include the investors, don't have the data they need
to make decisions on the fly, right?
You want to be responsive to your customers.
You also want to be responsive to your shareholders.
In order to do that, you need the information at your fingertips, the right information
at your fingertips at the right time to make certain critical business decisions.
So real-time data access is a big thing that certainly I prioritize.
These days, and this is an area that's kind of changed rapidly over the last 10 years
and will, I'm sure, for the next 10 to 15 plus, advanced analytics.
We now have tools like Power BI where if you don't have a upgraded system, good luck using
some of those modern and advanced tools.
Some of the best businesses in the world are the best businesses in the world because not
only do they have access to the real-time data, but they have visualization tools that
allow them to see that data, read that information quickly, distill it to the most important
points and topics and get that in the hands of the right people who can have an immediate
impact on the enterprise.
So real-time data access, like we talked about, advanced analytics.
And then lastly, everyone in our firm at least has, tends to have quite strong operations
backgrounds.
We love process, but not just process for process sake.
Design processes that are technology enabled.
If I can figure out how to do something without anybody having to touch it, that's a big win.
We're reducing costs.
We're reducing complexity.
To your point from earlier, the age-old saying, at least my age-old saying is the simplest
businesses make the most profits every single time.
Having integrated business processes that are enabled by the backbone of a modern ERP
infrastructure is critical.
Right?
So the executive and the board level, real-time data access, advanced analytics, integrated
business processes, all of which are byproducts of a well-functioning, modern and capable
and well-suited ERP system to whatever that current business's environment may be.
And that might look very different, at least in my experience.
I don't know.
I would call somebody like you if I went to go and upgrade a system, but I see very functional
systems that are very different systems.
You may have one business runs SAP quite well and another business runs a system I've never
heard of before.
As long as it's functional for that business and it gives the teams what they need and
it addresses the use cases of all the different stakeholders, it doesn't have to be the brand
name necessarily.
And certainly these days with the proliferation of different vendors in the market, regularly
I'm looking at businesses that have different systems I've never heard of before.
That's fine as long as they work.
And I appreciate that perspective because when we go into these a lot of times and we're
putting together that pitch pack to take to the CEO and the board, folks tend to focus
on the section that we talked about at the beginning, that process side, kind of that
day-to-day, that day-to-day pain.
And I think if you want to take people along on the journey and the vision, some of the
points you hit on and the things you look for, if we have an eye towards the final product
and at the end and what some of those value creation levers are, that's an important piece.
I think it's also important to remember, and you said it, the board doesn't see the day-to-day
operations.
The board doesn't see its 19 clicks to input in order.
The board doesn't see that when you go to receive, you have to print 18 sheets of paper.
The board sees those final numbers.
So if you can take them on that journey to say, we're going to make a thousand changes
you're unaware of, but the final culminating event is that you're going to be able to do
XYZ, real-time visibility, or some of the pieces you mentioned, that's a really nice
journey to take folks on and not worry about all that sits behind.
We're really talking about final products.
So I appreciate that perspective.
That's a good one for folks to keep in mind.
So we've talked about some of the tangible benefits, cost savings, improvements to decision-making
capabilities for the executive team, how a new ERP system might support strategic growth
for the business.
Let's talk about customer and supplier impact.
It's been my experience that if you have a well-functioning, and here's the catch, a
lot of businesses have to operate by using their system.
You can't ship parts without engaging with the system.
You can't release orders to the floor without releasing them in the system.
Sales and marketing, let's stick with sales for a minute.
On the customer side, you can do a lot of things in sales and marketing without touching
the system.
You can make sales calls and not log those calls.
You can quote things on the fly.
You can do things verbally.
You can go have lunch with somebody.
So at the end of the day, you do have to have the tieback, which is more of a cultural change
if you don't have that embedded in the culture of the business to come back from those sales,
meaning log those notes, progress things throughout the sales cycle or pipeline that you have
established in the CRM system.
But let's talk about benefits to the customers.
Let's talk about benefits to the suppliers.
Let's spend a few minutes talking about that.
I'm going to start by putting my board hat again on, right?
So I'm at the board level.
I know you sit on some boards yourself.
How important is to you the NPS score?
And maybe, sorry, maybe you can explain what NPS score is as well, but how important is
the NPS score to you as a board member or a business owner?
And then maybe spend a little bit of time helping us understand why that's an important
metric that's tracked.
Well I think there are probably other people who are more well versed in NPS than I am,
but we should probably actually bring one of those people on to an episode about this
at some point.
But NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, which is a, I believe, Bain Consulting, one of the
big consulting firms, created this a few decades ago, wrote a fancy book about it, and it's
become a fairly widely used measurement tool to measure customer satisfaction, right?
And at the board level, certainly the boards I'm involved with, I push hard if businesses
when we invest in them don't have something set up, but what we like to see, that they
do set something like this up, what we like to see is that a business regularly tracks
that NPS score, right?
So there's a mathematical calculation, but to keep it simple for today's discussion,
you ask your customers on a scale of 1 to 10, how do we do, basically?
And there's a little bit of math behind it all, but it produces this score, and you can
benchmark your kind of average score against peers in your industry and peers in other
industries, but you're trying to hit some type of benchmark score.
And if you track that over time, you can gain some really interesting insights, not just
in terms of how you compare to your competition, but how, what your customers feel about the
experience of your business or your service or your product.
So that's NPS score.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
I think it's important for our listeners to kind of understand that for this next section.
That is a numerical value, and folks usually that are on boards can count 1 to 10 and know
if it's a good numerical value, right?
I usually can count to 10.
Yeah.
Everyone's gonna use your toes.
Yeah.
But I think if you can count to 1 to 10, and you know that, that is something that boards
can focus in on and hone in on.
And that's a bit of voice of customer or VOC.
And so we think about how these systems help improve that experience.
How many times have we been frustrated by, I'm trying to use a system or I don't know
where my order is, or it was made incorrectly, or the technician didn't show up on time.
Again, if I'm putting my board hat on, it's easy to go and say, we're gonna set a goal,
and we've done this with others, of a 20% lift in NPS by making the following changes.
That's something folks can hitch to on the customer side.
Supplier side gets focused on a lot.
I'm not gonna touch on as much.
We all know we want our suppliers to like us.
We want to make sure we're getting a fair price.
Mike, you and I deal a lot in M&A.
I've got two people buying from the same supplier, two different prices, two different SLAs, two
different terms.
If I have that visibility and I can harmonize that, I can drive value in the deal that can
be put into the M&A event.
I think we all know a bit about the supplier side, but because it's so common.
But I think customer sometimes gets left behind.
So I'm glad you said it.
And then the last side, I'm gonna pull back what you mentioned.
It's that data-driven decision-making, but using data to drive decisions for both customers
and clients.
The way that we used to make data decisions with clients was when we priced somebody out.
We'd go through price increases, oh, they stopped buying.
Let's lower the price.
Okay, business came back.
There's so many other variables and data points that you can use to drive decision-making
when you have a system that captures those data points.
What does my margin look like by region?
What products are in the ABCD?
How we do seasonality look at movement?
What are all those variables that drive me to get the right product to the customer for
their need or go out and procure those things I need to be able to do that?
And so having that data at the hand will drive customer and supplier satisfaction and ultimately
ends up in a very simple numeric value that's a culminating event that you can easily track
and judge yourself on.
What if you don't upgrade an ERP system?
What if you don't have a modern ERP system?
What are some of the risks of continuing with your outdated system?
Yeah, and this is a little more technical.
So I'm glad we're covering this because sometimes when you go to have that conversation with
your CEO or someone else, you're just essentially saying it's outdated, it doesn't work.
So in the IT world, everyone always works on projects and you do releases and updates.
And we always say if it's for security, compliance or legal, we make those changes first because
you have to make them.
Sometimes the ERP forces our hand to have to upgrade the ERP.
There's no choice.
So obviously it's inefficient because it's older and has been updated.
And usually if it's out of date, I've had it for a while and thus it's out of date and
it's not up to date to where I am.
So that's a usual thing.
We have another episode that talks about this so I won't go too far into it.
But the cyber security side, just like when you have a phone that you can no longer update,
the exposure and risk, and I know we discussed this term before, threat vector, your ERP becomes
a threat vector to your organization.
And it's at the back end level, it's actually at the system side of it that can create that.
So when I'm running a server, it runs Windows most of the time.
That Windows environment sometimes can't be updated to the newest version of Windows because
it's a legacy version to be able to support the ERP that's running on it.
So it's kind of one system blocking the other and then it all just ends up being a big risk
to the organization.
And then as you can imagine, if I can't do any enhancements and my ERP is stuck where
it is, it's really hard to scale.
So when we go and do diligence, one of the things we do is IT diligence.
And one of the questions I love to ask the management team is, at what point does the
ERP break?
2x, 5x, 10x sales.
If you have an outdated ERP, you know what it breaks?
At 0x, it's broken today.
And so I think that when you look at these systems not staying up to date or letting
it get to out of compliance is a challenge.
As a side note, one of the positions we take is if you know an ERP is coming up on being
out of compliance, we suggest you start your ERP selection upgrade process 24 to 36 months
before that compliance runs out.
They give you a long lead to know what's coming.
That gives you time to select your next system, implement the system, and have a bit of buffer.
But we want people to pull that forward, not wait to the ultimate last minute for that.
Because if you wait for the last minute, it can be a really challenge and you're under
the gun to get that done and mistakes are made.
So if you don't make a change, you keep running your outdated system, security risks or security
vulnerabilities, probably a better way to put it, current state inefficiencies probably
aren't going anywhere.
You're going to live with those for a while, more difficult to scale.
Let's go back to a positive topic here.
Let's assume you do make a change.
What else do you get to do?
What else becomes unlocked from a digital transformation perspective?
Which I know is a topic you're always pitching me on digital transformation.
I hear you talk about it all the time.
Still TBD if I really understand what you mean when you say it, but I think I've got
some ideas.
Some of our listeners might have a good understanding of it, maybe some not.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, you're right.
We should talk about the other side of the coin.
The other side of the coin is really some interesting stuff.
Now this won't apply to all businesses, but let's just generally speak about it.
There's this idea of IOT or IIOT, which is Internet of Things or Industrial Internet
of Things.
It's this automation you see.
Before AI came along that we're going to talk about in a second, it was something that we
were discussing quite a bit.
It's the ability to have these systems that dehumanize processes and allow me to work
in a more automated fashion.
There's tools like AI.
We really haven't seen a lot of AI plays fully integrated to ERPs yet today.
There's not a lot of omni solutions, larger solutions out there, but we know they're coming.
The base to be able to participate in AI is good clean data.
Having a modern system with good clean data allows you the ability to be able to use those
tools.
That's a little more forward thinking, but something that's important.
With that, it allows you the ability to pivot, that flexibility.
Let's say that you're a business today that owns one type of business, and tomorrow you're
going to vertically integrate it with something else.
Today I manufacture something, and tomorrow I'm going to acquire something who makes the
monomers and polymers for me to be able to manufacture that.
When I have a system that's a more modern system, I have the ability to absorb that
system, expand my horizon horizontally, and be able to work within my system without having
to rip it out and replace it.
Then the last one, which I know is something that we talk a lot about at TriVista, is around
the CI and continuous improvement side.
The ability to constantly look for ways to improve, become better and more efficient.
I know that you and I have a lot of conversations in this space.
What are some of those more modern things as you sit at boards and have those board
conversations for our listeners that talk to people about the maybe a few buzz words,
if you don't mind as well, that you're hearing folks talking about or boards really wrestling
with how can they integrate and use?
Well I think one of the areas that we've seen some of the most intriguing advanced tools
is in supply chain management.
There are some really interesting predictive tool sets out there that will help you with
demand and supply planning in ways that would have been unthinkable even five, seven, ten
years ago.
We're also seeing some pretty big advancements in CPQ, right?
Cost price and quote.
We're starting to see tools and I'm not using these tools every day, but we're starting
to see some of our more forward thinking leadership teams implement modules or implement applications
onto some of these newer ERP systems with businesses with fairly clean data sets.
Obviously, that's a journey that companies have to go on to get there.
But once they're there, you're actually able to plug in some of these newer applications
and get really interesting intelligence that wouldn't have been available otherwise that's
enabling them to make more informed business decisions.
Whether that's raising prices to increase profitability or reducing prices to increase
market share or making sure that you've got the right product in the right shelf in the
right geography at the right time so you can take advantage of that selling opportunity.
But really, I'll be honest, you said it when you started this last section here on digital
transformation.
We're only just starting to see some of this stuff, especially in some of the more industrial
environments where we still walk into businesses that are using ERP systems that were built
in the early 90s.
It's not that that's like once a year, we're seeing that a number of times a year still,
right?
So, you know, there's a lot of companies out there, mid-market companies, companies that
people have heard of even who have some pretty antiquated systems.
And I think that a lot of them are going to be falling behind from a competitiveness perspective
as many of them already have.
But I think there's just a lot of change coming the next 10, 15 years.
You know, we've seen more dashboarding certainly with the off-the-shelf BI tools.
We're seeing better custom dashboarding products, which is something, you know, I know our team
has been working on some proprietary solutions to that effect over the last 12 to 18 months.
But yeah, I think we're early days.
Yeah, I agree.
I appreciate those insights again, because I think it's interesting to hear it.
And then obviously the solution starts to kick off in my head about how we've helped
other folks solve those very things.
And hopefully our listeners today are able to take some of these nuggets and really have
those conversations where it's not just presenting the problem, it's presenting a potential solution.
And obviously finding someone to help you work through that solution or present the
numeric or improvement opportunities that we, some of those that we've discussed today
is important as you start to have those conversations.
I know every time we go to a client to have that, you and I partner a lot of times on
thinking through what's that value driver and what does it mean to the client.
So how do we close this out?
How do we close today's episode out, James?
What do you think?
Well, I think we could go back and review, but I think our listeners probably took pretty
good notes throughout the episode.
I can only imagine as you take notes when I'm podcasting in the car.
I'm sure, I'm sure.
Taking the kids to school.
I think, I think a good way to close it out, Mike, is to say when you have an ERP that
is, has its challenges and you know its challenges, it never hurts to think through an approach
or a proposal on how to improve.
And there is always hope.
And that sounds a little bleak when I say that, but there's always hope to make those
improvements.
There is a system out there that can help you on your journey.
Taking the time, having the thoughtful conversation, working through that, and then having those
conversations with others such as ourselves to think through what those value propositions
are is valuable because on the other side can be a lot of great growth.
Well, I'm just glad that you didn't give me a hard time for mentioning another consulting
firm.
Oh yeah.
I thought that might be a nice little plug for you to talk about some of our competitors.
Hey, if I was going to give you a hard time, I would let you know it's configure price
quote and not cost price quote, but I didn't provide that hard time.
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