377- James Dean Miller

00:00:09 Phil Howard: 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 and what do you prefer me to 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, what should we go with? Just all of the above?

00:00:53 James Dean: so right now I am the CIO of Migrate Ammunitions, an ammunitions manufacturer for waterfowl and waterfowl hunting. So ducks, geese, that kind of thing.

00:01:04 Phil Howard: That’s pretty niche. That’s pretty niche, actually.

00:01:08 James Dean: 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 is for military ammo and the other is for hunting. as part of the manufacturing process we do quality control. So we actually have our own small range, uh, 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. Right. So, it’s kind of like NASCAR drafting, we we put the bigger, projectiles out front, and then we have the smaller projectiles that are along for the ride. Just like NASCAR drafting. So you know, they go further and then that the smaller shot is what typically kills the bird.

00:02:12 Phil Howard: That’s um. Okay, so me being a I grew up in Maine, my best friend growing up, his name was Jason Gilpatric, who will probably never listen to this. He’s still he’s still he’s still up in, like, you know.

00:02:28 James Dean: Maine innocent until.

00:02:29 Phil Howard: Proven. You know, he’s still like, up in probably up in Rangeley 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, uh, um, like healthcare, mechanical beds and stuff. And, you know, probably has everyone else running that right now. So he can either be fishing or hunting or four wheeling or snowmobiling or looking at what new snowmobile he’s going to buy for next season, along with what jet ski he’s going to buy tomorrow. It’s just he was like the friend that I always was. He was a really great friend growing up with, but he always had way cooler stuff than I did. He was really, really good.

00:03:15 James Dean: To have, you know, you know, the best kind of boat to have is somebody else’s boat. The best jet ski to have is somebody else’s jet ski.

00:03:20 Phil Howard: I mean, he was always, yeah.

00:03:23 James Dean: Insurance. You just, you know, pay for a little bit of gas, you know, and have a good time.

00:03:26 Phil Howard: He just. And he knew how to fix every engine thing and like, you know, oh 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, um, 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, you know what I mean? So like, every bullet was reloaded, every you know, it’s like we I think he had fifty two guns. Like we used to joke around like, oh, imagine someone trying to, like, rob this house. Like, there would be like, you know, it would be really bad. It would be a really bad house to walk.

00:04:19 James Dean: That’s a good friend to have. You know, when the crap hits the fan, he’d be the one to go, uh, 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. You know.

00:04:28 Phil Howard: It was we learned. I mean, we know I mean, we were reloading, like, I think like thirty eight with, like, we would just reprime them and then we would fill these bullets with wax, like we had. We had, like, what we thought invented this wax bullet. So we had like, I think people would think we’re crazy, like, because if you went into like, you know, you wouldn’t let your twelve year old kids like, you know, play around with like a thirty eight revolver and reloading thirty eight shells. But there was a revolver sitting on the like, you know, shop bench Downstairs. Yeah. And we’re like repriming thirty eight shells and then filling them up with wax that we were like, melting down from his mom’s, like canning stuff. Oh, okay. You know, and they had, like, an old 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’re talking about the round things. So we’d heat up an old Maxwell House can full of canning wax. Yeah. Bend the bend, the can. And then we would pour wax into into the thirty eight. 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 that it’s.

00:05:34 James Dean: Like poor man’s paintball. Sounds like. Exactly paintball. That’s what it.

00:05:38 Phil Howard: Is. Oh, we’ve got paintball stories too. We have paintball stories, food coloring.

00:05:41 James Dean: And I’ve got evidence that you actually got hit. You know.

00:05:44 Phil Howard: You know, when my kids tell these stories, like, tell us another Jason story. Tell us another Jason story from growing up.

00:05:49 James Dean: Just wear goggles.

00:05:50 Phil Howard: Yeah, a lot of them.

00:05:51 Speaker 3: Yes, yes.

00:05:52 Phil Howard: so anywho, first divergent, uh, into it. Into the IT world. But what’s interesting is a lot of people that have been in, in or are in it right now or 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 do you get how do you get into this whole mix? Like how do 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?

00:06:22 James Dean: I started out on computers way back with the old, Commodore Vic twenty, Commodore sixty four, TRS eighty. 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 boot it up on the other was for programs and data.

00:06:42 Phil Howard: That was my wish. That was my dream at Sears. It was sitting at Sears, but I never got that one. I ended up with Apple two, but that’s fine.

00:06:49 James Dean: Apple two C’s. Apple two E’s. 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 sixty four, and got published in, Apple Byte magazine and.

00:07:12 Phil Howard: Nice.

00:07:12 James Dean: C64 magazine, a few others.

00:07:15 Phil Howard: Can we still look that up? Do you have it? Do you have a copy of that?

00:07:19 James Dean: I probably do.

00:07:20 Phil Howard: Need a picture of that. That’s like vintage.

00:07:22 James Dean: Yeah, I still have my original tape drive. You know, it was a cassette tape. It was before it. Before disk drives.

00:07:29 Phil Howard: Can we call that an LP? Is that an LP? Is that what we called that?

00:07:32 James Dean: We we just called it a day. I can’t remember. It was. It was a data tape drive. and then we got the fifteen forty one disk drives, which was is five and a quarter inch, and you could cut the little notch with the,

00:07:45 Phil Howard: Of course.

00:07:46 James Dean: Hole punchers, and you could flip it over and use the other side if it was really cool before they were, before they were dual sided and then, dot matrix printer original. what was it? nine thousand six hundred baud modem was the started out even slower than that, but I had twelve hundred went to two thousand six hundred, you know, off to the races after that. But uh, so when I went to I went to school, I went to college at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Of course, when you do that, you join the Navy. so that was nineteen eighty five. 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’s where I studied. was a Navy nuclear submarine officer, for a little while.

00:08:32 Phil Howard: I worked at Jim’s Wings and I worked at Jim’s Wings also. And I was a you know, I also maybe nuclear navy sub dude. And yeah.

00:08:41 James Dean: 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. Um, computer science was much more, much more interesting and lucrative. Um, 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. Um, and related electrical gear. Um, got promoted a few times there as an IT, programmer, 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 with home of the Steelers and the Penguins and the Pirates.

00:09:23 Phil Howard: Pittsburgh’s 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, I think, like, kind of, you know, the city’s almost in black and white.

00:09:39 James Dean: It’s a great city. It was a great city. I, as a single guy, I lived there, I loved it. great sports town, very clean. It’s when I moved there in the in the nineties, ultra clean, beautiful skyscrapers. And Pittsburgh is three rivers coming together. And of course, Three Rivers Stadium was there um, 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 goes up and down diagonally. kind of like a kind of like a cable car, but on tracks, but wonderful, wonderful city.

00:10:17 Phil Howard: Yeah. Oh, 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.

00:10:23 Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

00:10:25 James Dean: No disrespect to the Philadelphia Eagles.

00:10:27 Phil Howard: If Phil shows up beat up tomorrow then.

00:10:30 James Dean: Hey they won the Super Bowl.

00:10:31 Speaker 3: So you know doing something right.

00:12:54 James Dean: But yeah so I worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation and it, um, they got acquired by Cutler-hammer. Worked for them. Cutler-hammer headquarters was in Cleveland. Spent a lot of time between the two and their. Their parent was, uh, Eaton Corporation. Eaton’s out of Milwaukee.

00:13:09 Phil Howard: Never really hit the. You hit up all the. You hit up all the places, man.

00:13:14 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.

00:13:15 James Dean: And, they offered me a nice, nice job in Milwaukee at corporate. It there for Eaton. You know, Eaton’s in big time in electronics and electrical and automotive. very, very large tier one automotive supplier. But, man, I went up to Milwaukee and, during my corporate visit, minus twenty four degrees Fahrenheit, snow up to the door handles on the car. And I was like, I’m not so sure I want to do that. So, um, I went to work for another fortune five hundred 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 weaved our own cloth on, uh, knitting machines. and then we cut and sew and bleached, bleached and dyed our own clothing and sold to all the major retail chains, and private label apparel, uh, firms.

00:14:15 Phil Howard: I think it’s safe to say you’ve had a good manufacturing journey.

00:14:19 Speaker 3: Yes, sir.

00:14:20 Phil Howard: A little bit of pizza with a little bit of pizza thrown in there.

00:14:22 Speaker 3: Which is good. I like pizza.

00:14:24 Phil Howard: Yeah, yeah. so we did that out of all of this, though, out of all of this thinking back and even. You’ve been around since the dawn of the computer.

00:14:36 Speaker 3: Pretty much not the fifties.

00:14:39 James Dean: Not the.

00:14:39 Speaker 3: No, no.

00:14:40 Phil Howard: But my point is, is like, if we really think it still blows my mind, we’re three hundred and eighty episodes and people like. Phil, would you stop saying this? To think that I went to college and we still used like you 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.

00:15:12 Speaker 3: It was.

00:15:13 Phil Howard: Frowned.

00:15:13 Speaker 3: Upon at first. Yeah.

00:15:16 Phil Howard: 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. hallucinations and the likes. Um, 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 our life is formed based on decisions and what follows after that. But as, as it as it as technology is evolving so fast and you’ve made numerous decisions and been in leadership roles across the thing, what what would maybe be the biggest learning that you’ve you’ve had along the way, whether it be from I learn a lot by making mistakes, unfortunately have like, you know, learned by failing forward. I’m the fail forward definition.

00:16:19 Speaker 3: Hey, listen, if you’re.

00:16:20 James Dean: Not failing, you’re you’re not trying hard enough and you’re not learning. Yeah.

00:16:24 Phil Howard: so I mean, what’s give us something.

00:16:28 James Dean: Yeah, well, you know, I had I told you about my fortune. Five, my Navy career and then fortune five hundred career. after a couple of, uh, CIO positions and director of IT type positions in fortune five hundred. Um, uh, a buddy of mine that I worked for, um, decided to form a consultancy, and so he asked me to, to co-found it with him. And, uh, so we formed CSS international, and that was an IT consulting firm, uh, basically implementing ERP systems. So we implemented JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, uh, Oracle E-Business suite, uh Oracle Cloud ERP. And then you know, HCM and CRM and CSS. 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 know, uh, every customer has a new set of challenges. Every customer has a new niche in the marketplace of why they’re successful. Their secret sauce right there. Their market, their products, their services. Um, so in IT consulting, you know, you talk about manufacturing experience. I’ve been in over five hundred manufacturing plants and over three hundred large distribution centers, uh, with a significant amount of automation in them as well. and I would say, you ask, what were the biggest lessons learned? Number one, partner with the business.

00:17:58 Phil Howard: Yes.

00:17:58 James Dean: If you aren’t doing it for the business, if you aren’t doing it with the business and with the C 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 your cubicles, right? 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, um, that that is number one. Number two, I would say is change management.

00:18:38 Phil Howard: Well, before we move on to 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 or vendor neutral or non-biased or like whatever it is that we want to say. But from 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?

00:19:10 James Dean: Well number one sea level or vice president level sponsorship. So not just the hey, we approved the budget and, hey, we occasionally get an update, but literally involved every week working with it in 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 a 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. Um, 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 they 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 needs 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.

00:20:36 Phil Howard: When you go back to the executive, sponsorship. What’s your. Tricks of 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 ninety three percent of the CTO, CIOs that have a seat at the executive round table. Are not necessarily seeing their executive team as the other sea levels. They still see their team as the 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 you become the Department of No. Or you know what 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.

00:21:57 James Dean: 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 a budget that needs to be cut and hacked and slashed and reduced every year. That that that is the death knell. You know, 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 have fifteen minutes, now you’ve got three and lunch is being served. We’re going to wrap here.

00:22:29 Phil Howard: Yeah. Because we have because we have to appease HR and we have to treat it. Yeah.

00:22:34 James Dean: What you want to be is embedded in every single department’s presentation. When finance comes up, that’s that’s we are working with it on updating our financial management system and updating our forecast system. Um, 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 systems so that we can, you know, comply with financial, uh, you know, compliance and regulations and speed up our reporting. We can close our aim is to close the month in three days. Not not four, not five, not ten. Right. Our aim is to be able to do all the what ifs. If oil goes up to eighty dollars a barrel. Uh, what does that do to our freight costs? What does that do to our our distribution network? What does that do to 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 and sourcing and purchasing comes up, we are working with it to, uh, put more of our more of our suppliers on EDI and more of our suppliers on, uh, our supplier portal of self-service so that we can, you.

00:23:43 Phil Howard: Know, we need to run with that.

00:23:44 James Dean: Etc..

00:23:45 Phil Howard: We need to run with that right now because this is one of the best suggestions. It sounds so simple. If you’ve ever seen what what about.

00:23:52 James Dean: Your partner with the business? Every single business department that reports to the executives is talking about what it is doing for them.

00:24:00 Phil Howard: Just 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. I’m giving you what you want me 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, um, I don’t know, James. The the the I don’t know the the, What do we, what do we want to call the, um, James the James, the revenue driver. Miller. All right, if it wasn’t for James, uh, we would be down one percent, but we’re up three percent.

00:24:39 James Dean: Yeah, well, I mean, and they don’t need to mention me personally mention my project managers, mention my senior team.

00:24:46 Phil Howard: It. Wasn’t for James and the the network autopsy. Johnny Smith and everyone on your team needs a fight name from now on, everyone. That’s the suggestion.

00:24:56 James Dean: 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, think of it as a as a wedding cake, right? You’ve got foundational things like this. You’ve got the network, you’ve got the internet, you’ve got your, your on premise servers. Right. This is kind of, you know, basic foundation of things. Then you’ve got your applications. Some of them are on premise, some of them are cloud, some of them are, um, you know, custom homegrown. Right. 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. and.

00:25:37 Phil Howard: We don’t want to get we don’t want to necessarily get a divorce. We just want to get a some plastic surgery?

00:25:43 James Dean: Sometimes. Sometimes there are 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 speed you know increase the speed of of information between systems. So all these things need to be to maintain 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. Um, 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. Right? 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. Right. But you know, so all of these and everybody is a customer of some or all of these systems. Right. The financial management systems owned by accounting. Right. 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 can be done as projects. Obviously we’re not talking help desk bug fixes and password resets. We’re talking about improved functionality and support of the business. And then some of these are major investments, right. So you’re you’re constantly planning and shuffling the deck as to what is prioritized, um, by need or, uh, by age. Right. So that is that, so that wedding cake that those layers are constantly being replaced.

00:27:26 Phil Howard: 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. Um, I love it.

00:27:40 James Dean: I love the icing on the cake is, uh, the the the biggest bang benefit for the for the company, right?

00:27:48 Phil Howard: Love it. Okay, so moving on.

00:27:52 James Dean: 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, uh, people underestimate the effort that is required and change.

00:28:10 Phil Howard: Yeah, it’s.

00:28:11 James Dean: Not just end user training. It is policies and procedures for the organization. Oh gosh. It is job descriptions for HR.

00:28:20 Phil Howard: Oh help me.

00:28:21 James Dean: Okay. So you’ve you’ve got to hit the trifecta right. Sure. There’s end user training. Absolutely. People need to know how they used to do it this way. Now they do it that way. No problem. But with improved systems, with improved capabilities, Qualities that can help change policies and procedures for the organization and your customers and your suppliers. So, um, that needs to be addressed and it changes, like I said, job titles and roles. Um.

00:28:52 Phil Howard: It’s a massive trickle down kind of effect or butterfly ripple in the force type of thing that can happen. Um, especially if you have a lot of, yes, um, vendors, resellers, customers, whatever, that are even plugged into your systems.

00:29:08 James Dean: Yep, yep. And, you know, give you a simple example. Example. You know, um, 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 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 all the things got. And 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 multithreaded right. Everybody put in their stuff. And when when it’s all done you’ve got a complete record. Um, 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. Um, but the speed of it being done is much, much greater. And it is much more complete because of workflows and, and error checking and things like that.

00:31:28 Phil Howard: 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. Yep, 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 one. The second one was. Training, teaching, explaining technology to end users. Yeah. Those two go hand in hand. They almost go hand in hand.

00:32:18 James Dean: And and those actually go fit right into organizational change management. Organizational change management includes the departments in the organization.

00:32:28 Phil Howard: Yeah. 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 out 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. Uh, voice communication or vendors that don’t vibe with your team I 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. Um, uh, 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.

00:33:17 James Dean: Um, I think that, you know, I think there’s a very good diagram. Uh, can I share an image on this thing?

00:33:24 Phil Howard: You should be able to hold on. Yeah, let me see. You should. I mean, you’re a co-host of some sort.

00:33:29 James Dean: Yeah, yeah.

00:33:30 Phil Howard: 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. We’re going to integrate back with zoom. Yeah. You should be able to click Share Screen. You should be able to click share screen.

00:33:42 James Dean: Okay. Let’s see uh.

00:33:44 Phil Howard: Bottom middle arrow square thing. Yeah.

00:33:47 James Dean: Let’s see. Uh, well this isn’t the most high res diagram. So your your video editors can okay.

00:33:54 Phil Howard: It’ll go it’ll go in, it’ll go hand in hand with your your video.

00:33:57 James Dean: Can you can you see this? Yes. This is the change. This is the change cycle right there.

00:34:04 Phil Howard: Oh, denial. Yes. Of course.

00:34:06 James Dean: In the very beginning there’s there’s denial. Uh, then there’s anger, then there’s bargaining, then there’s depression and then there’s acceptance.

00:34:15 Phil Howard: Okay, okay. Oh my gosh.

00:34:17 James Dean: This same stuff happens in it projects every single time. Every single.

00:34:21 Phil Howard: Time. All right. So what’s it the denial stage that we don’t need to change. Oh it’s the we don’t need a new ERP system. We’re fine on our as400.

00:34:31 James Dean: We’ve managed this forever. We know it like the back of our hand. It does everything we need it to do. Well, then why are you.

00:34:38 Phil Howard: In denial.

00:34:38 James Dean: System?

00:34:39 Phil Howard: Well, so Sears was in denial. Sears was in denial. Then they got angry, and then they didn’t even bargain anything. They just.

00:34:46 James Dean: 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. Yeah.

00:34:56 Phil Howard: I like it. Okay, so what’s the depression phase? Okay, we gotta do it.

00:35:00 James Dean: Okay, I guess we’re going live. It’s going to be hell. But, uh, you know, we’ll try to manage through it. Oh, it’s going to be.

00:35:06 Phil Howard: So why is the acceptance phase not look happy? It looks sunburnt and surprised.

00:35:12 James Dean: Yeah. Like I said, this isn’t the best diagram I’ve got. I’ve got better ones. But I just did a quick flowster. I’ve got some better ones and they’re much more colorful. But I definitely.

00:35:23 Phil Howard: Have to share it. Exactly.

00:35:25 James Dean: I’ll have to share a better one for you. But anyways.

00:35:27 Phil Howard: You actually use this. I mean, do you actually use that for like that’s the type of thing that’s like, yeah.

00:35:31 James Dean: We use them. Yeah, absolutely.

00:35:33 Phil Howard: 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.

00:35:37 James Dean: I’ll email you a better one. I’ll put that on my.

00:35:40 Phil Howard: Where’s the where’s the I quit where’s the where’s the the quit quit portion I mean yeah I’m somewhere in between.

00:35:48 James Dean: Well, you know.

00:35:48 Phil Howard: I’m at the depression stage right now.

00:35:50 James Dean: We talk about people being on board with change. So you there’s kind of four quadrants. There’s the there’s the people that say they’re on board and they really are those, those those are your angels. Right? Then you have people that are say they’re not on board and they will let you know, you know, those are your naysayers. And, you know, it’s very, very clear. Right. Um, and then you’ve got your people that say they’re not on board, but they’re convincible and they’re they’re okay. They’re actually.

00:36:21 Phil Howard: Yeah, if I have to I’m not in charge here anyways. I’m not there. I’m not the big guy. But if you’re the worst one.

00:36:26 James Dean: The worst ones are the ones that say they’re on board, but they’re saboteurs. They’re sabotaging theirs. They’re poking holes in the Swiss cheese. Um, 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. If it’s legitimate, let’s vet it out. Let’s understand it, and let’s make sure we address it right. But don’t and bring suggestions bring bring ways that we can tackle and solve it right. That’s a good team player. 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. Right. That’s horrible.

00:37:15 Phil Howard: Um, it’s like we want, we want, we want Trump to fail. Right. He keeps succeeding.

00:37:21 James Dean: Right, right.

00:37:22 Phil Howard: I’m not. And I’m not a political guy.

00:37:24 James Dean: But I.

00:37:24 Phil Howard: Mean.

00:37:26 James Dean: At the end of the day, do you want the country to be successful? Do you want everyone to be successful or do you?

00:37:30 Phil Howard: 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, oh, let’s just see what happens. I don’t know, who cares if I like.

00:37:37 James Dean: At the end of the day when great things are happening, it’s kind of hard to hard to deny it. Right? So or, you know, they bring issues to the table at the midnight hour. That’s the worst. Right. We’re about to go live. And they go, oh, well, we had this vendor management scorecard thing that we have to have. And it’s like, well, why are you telling us, you know, the week before we go live, it’s this.

00:37:56 Phil Howard: Let’s 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. Um, ERP is something that is, um, nightmarish to me. It’s it’s it’s where nightmares are made. It’s, um, it’s as as once as one someone said a long time ago. Well, there’s just it’s just one of two things that happened at the end of an ERP implementation.

00:38:24 James Dean: Well, you know what ERP stands for, right?

00:38:27 Phil Howard: No.

00:38:27 James Dean: Extremely ridiculous program.

00:38:34 Phil Howard: And 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 SAP thing to like, you either have a job or you don’t. Uh, yeah. And uh, but you’ve gotten to do consulting and been involved on many of them. And I’m curious, um, 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. Um, it sounds very it sounds very dreary, doesn’t it? But it’s, uh. So, uh, with the onslaught of the future and 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 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 of that. Um, and maybe there are some M&A coming and just all of these perfect storm scenarios.

00:40:07 James Dean: Mhm.

00:40:10 Phil Howard: What’s the best strategy. Is it is it to use is it to hire the best um 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 know it’s a very broad question, but what should they be thinking right now in the. The temperature of the environment and marketplace right now.

00:40:40 James Dean: Mhm. Well you know ERP is kind of the core system for most operational companies manufacturers, distributors, engineers.

00:40:49 Phil Howard: It is the heart. It is the heart for sure.

00:40:51 James Dean: It’s sales. It’s purchasing. It’s inventory. It’s manufacturing. It’s logistics. It’s warehousing. It’s finance. It’s it’s uh, you know, customer service, you know. So that’s the core. Um, so first of all, um, you know, pick, uh, you know, if you’re a very large enterprise, you probably need a tier one ERP, you need Oracle or SAP or Microsoft. Those are the big.

00:41:19 Phil Howard: What size? What size organization, uh, is there is there like a is there like an employee count? Are we talking enterprise? Fortune five thousand.

00:41:27 James Dean: In revenue? Uh, most companies under three hundred million in revenue can’t afford a tier one 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, uh, very high margins. But lower, lower volumes. Um, but that’s just kind of a thumbnail. Three hundred million and above in annual, uh, US dollars, annual annual revenue. Um, there are other measures, but that’s just that’s just a ballpark. Um, you know, if you’re a fifty million dollar manufacturer, you probably cannot afford a tier one. You’re probably going to tier two or.

00:42:06 Phil Howard: Hold on, SAP Oracle. Did you say what was.

00:42:10 James Dean: Microsoft Microsoft.

00:42:11 Phil Howard: Dynamics. Yeah. Really? Yeah okay.

00:42:14 James Dean: Microsoft Dynamics is uh, is is definitely a tier one player.

00:42:19 Phil Howard: Um, okay.

00:42:20 James Dean: Sapp is king in Europe. North America. Oracle by far is king. Um, yeah. But okay.

00:42:27 Phil Howard: So fifty million.

00:42:29 James Dean: And within within those companies, you know Sapp has several ERP solutions. Oracle has several ERP solutions. You’ve got ones that are one hundred percent cloud and you’ve got others that are, uh, on prem and then you’ve got hybrid type type systems.

00:42:44 Phil Howard: Just curious, what’s the biggest black eye in each one of those three with Microsoft? I would be guessing. It’s like, um, uh, for what? From what I’ve heard over the years, and they may have gotten a lot better at this. Now it would be, um, like invoicing and POS and stuff like that. From a dynamic standpoint.

00:43:04 James Dean: I guess I would even say I would step back a little bit further. I’d say sap, um, is the the most expensive to implement, um, because people, 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 five hundred, fortune one hundred 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 all of them. But I’m giving you kind of the extremes.

00:43:36 Phil Howard: But I can’t wait to see what SAP people say to this in general.

00:43:39 James Dean: Uh, in general, it’s very expensive. And, you know, there’s two types of documentation for SAP. Um, 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.

00:43:54 Phil Howard: Joshua Milos is going to like this. My my sap guy over at Birkenstock. So he’s going to be surprised.

00:44:01 James Dean: Um, uh, so, you know, again, they’re king in, in, uh, Europe, Western Europe. And, you know, they’ve got great business marketing, you know, the best run businesses, run SAP, you know, etc.. Um, in North America, Oracle is Oracle’s king. Uh, because one Oracle’s been around the longest. One of the one of the longest. You know, they went all the way back to mainframe, you know, Oracle, uh, financial applications. Um, but, uh, there there are two main. And they, they acquired PeopleSoft, which also owned JD. So they got huge market share from those acquisitions. Um, Oracle is uh, has great support. Um, and great partner. Partner. Uh, environment. I was I was an Oracle partner at PeopleSoft. Partner JD which partner. Um and the the company that uh I, we sold our company to um Argonaut. Uh, they, they have SAP practice, Microsoft practice. Oracle practice. So we were Oracle practice and and by by far the largest um but uh, so.

00:45:04 Phil Howard: What’s their weakness SAP is money. What’s it with Oracle.

00:45:09 James Dean: Uh, Oracle um, their ERP Their cloud ERP system is still up and coming. So if you’re heavily reliant 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. Um, so, you know, for for the best functionality, it’s still their on prem solutions of e-business suite and JD Edwards. Those are 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 or distributor or services company, you could probably absolutely run on cloud. Um, if you’re really deep in engineering, uh, really deep in manufacturing, lot, lot control, serialization, um, you know, and the whole, you know, lineage, uh, 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. Um, Microsoft’s and they can be just as expensive as SAP, a little tend to be a little bit more and a lot more upgradable. Microsoft’s biggest problem, you know, they they came up through, uh, they had several different division. They had Solomon, they, you know, several different ERPs. Uh, 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 the division product has become dynamics. So Microsoft Dynamics three hundred sixty five, they put that in there because Microsoft three hundred sixty five or you know, office three hundred sixty five Microsoft three. Sixty five so dynamics is their their leading solution. Um, 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, large mill manufacturing type partner. If you are a engineering and construction firm, they’re going to put you in touch with the inc type partners if you are a financial services company, put you in touch with financial services partners. They all have their custom extensions to the core ERP systems, core dynamics. And so now you are very dependent on that partner for support. If you call one eight hundred 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 twenty.

00:47:42 Phil Howard: They might at any given day, they might want to sail off into the sunset. They might want to sell.

00:47:45 James Dean: And yeah, they may sell. They the talent may age out. Uh, you know, they, they, they may wither on the vine, they may merge, you know, with others and lose some of the key people, you know. So it’s just a risk, right. And but, you know, um, you know, they’re the probably the slight they’re slightly less cost compared to Oracle and, and SAP, although I have seen some very, very expensive dynamics implementations.

00:48:13 Phil Howard: What if you have wrong dev team yourself? I mean like, would that be an option with the dynamics thing if you just.

00:48:18 James Dean: Yeah, you certainly could. If, you know, if you got trained in the the dynamics programming tool set and are very familiar with the data model and the tool set. Yes. But you know the problem again. Upgradability. Right. So now you’re depending on that partner whenever you do upgrades. Um, so you know, one of the issues that ERP systems run into is, you know, especially the older ones is, you know, trying to, uh, keep up with, with, uh, 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, 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 a security breach that leaked out all of your customers information. Right. So those it’s very important to, uh, you know, take.

00:49:08 Phil Howard: 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 an oracle. It sounds like you would go Oracle, but.

00:49:15 James Dean: Yeah, yeah, I spent most of my career. JD Edwards PeopleSoft, Oracle. Um, but again when we joined with Argonaut, uh, Argonaut had a Dynamics Microsoft practice and an SAP practice. 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, right, 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, JD Edwards, SAP doesn’t matter. You know they have points of integration already defined.

00:49:50 Phil Howard: What do you do if you’re a mid-market, SMB or mid-market to fortune five thousand growing to fortune five hundred company looking to grow? What do you do if you’re the fifty fifty plus million?

00:50:02 James Dean: Um, I would go with a cloud solution cloud ERP. So a SaaS solution, software as a service solution. Right. Okay. These are very generalities, right?

00:50:10 Phil Howard: Yes. I mean, dynamics, I would think would be an option there. I mean.

00:50:14 James Dean: Certainly dynamics is a is a tier one option. Um, 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, uh, I’ve got two thousand users that run, you know, 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 shrink your instances.

00:50:48 Phil Howard: Uh, well, I mean, why is that not becoming an option for even enterprise? I mean, isn’t it? Is it is. Okay, so even for for.

00:50:57 James Dean: one hundred, it is.

00:50:58 Phil Howard: Have you seen any or do you have any information on the ROI or. Is it not something that people are likely to do. Is there any benefits in migrating to the cloud from an enterprise standpoint, or that.

00:51:11 James Dean: Uh, the the largest objection slash impediments to that approach are one um, if cloud is lacking feature functionality, then you need to extend yourself. And so usually uh, you can do a PaaS type service. So platform as a service. So you’ve got your cloud SaaS system here.

00:51:33 Phil Howard: Yep.

00:51:34 James Dean: Hosted by the same guys. You, you, you uh, rent a PaaS 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.

00:51:50 Phil Howard: So if I’m thinking like a CEO or CFO at this moment, the things that I’m thinking of, why you would want to do that is electricity, data center space. Um, if I was thinking of maybe, maybe speed, maybe a flexibility.

00:52:03 James Dean: Flexibility.

00:52:05 Phil Howard: 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?

00:52:14 James Dean: We’ve done it over a hundred times. Absolutely. Over a hundred times. Yeah. So it’s, um, you know, there’s trade offs. Uh, so I wanted to go. The second largest objection is data ownership. So, um, 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. Uh, or, you know, bank of servers, you know, cluster of servers, etc.. So, um, those are the two major impediments that are objections that people run into, and they can both be addressed and overcome, um, 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.

00:53:02 Phil Howard: And your data has to be somewhere in a in a data center, somewhere. It has to touch the internet at some point.

00:53:09 James Dean: A lot of people, a lot of people rent space in a data center to write for their servers. So at least I mean, even if you have on prem, you should have a hosted, you know, disaster recovery facility. You know.

00:53:20 Phil Howard: What’s the super sexy reason to go?

00:53:22 James Dean: Cloud 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. Right.

00:53:49 Phil Howard: And I would think support would be more flexible as well. Or even better.

00:53:53 James Dean: Because your.

00:53:54 Phil Howard: IT talent.

00:53:55 James Dean: Yeah, your your software is one hundred percent vanilla. So you know if you’re a provider, whether it’s SAP or Oracle or or, you know, Microsoft. If you’re running one hundred percent vanilla software, it’s one hundred percent upgradeable, it’s one hundred percent patchable. And there’s there’s there’s no limit to, uh, not, you know, most of them will let you delay taking patches and updates, but they’ll only let you delay so long. Right. Um, you know, like NetSuite, you know, they’ll.

00:54:23 Phil Howard: fifteen days, thirty days, sixty days, whatever.

00:54:26 James Dean: six months a year. Then you got to take it, right? Um, but, you know, if you’re running one hundred percent vanilla, um, the only thing you need to worry about is integrations. And then that PaaS solution that you created 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. So, you know, web services, uh, these are the parameters. We’ve added five more parameters because there’s more data now that we have to fill in. So, you know, you just you just add those to your integration as well.

00:55:04 Phil Howard: 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 think most people are gonna be like, all right, well, I’ll start with ChatGPT now or Google or something like that, but what’s or I’ll ask my friends or 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? Um, and I realize this mistake myself as of recent because I, I just something that, like Alex Hormozi 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 know is just the absolute best, even though it’s crazy expensive. Never hire 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 ten thousand dollars to do this, or I’ll pay twenty thousand dollars 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 bullet and was like, okay, I’ll just pay the sixty thousand dollars for this. Plus I’ll pay another ten thousand for this. It sounds absolutely ridiculous that I would pay that much for a website, 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 sometime, 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 fail.

00:57:03 James Dean: You hired an expert. So there’s an old saying. If it’s important to you, don’t buy cheap or you’re going to buy or you’re going to buy twice.

00:57:17 Phil Howard: Or three times or four times.

00:57:20 James Dean: Or you’re going to go to Lowe’s seven times, right? So, you know, as a partner, we were often the rescue partner.

00:57:29 Phil Howard: Mhm.

00:57:30 James Dean: JD Edwards sold the deal as the software seller. And they had an implementation partner that they recommended and or the or the customer.

00:57:40 Phil Howard: Was on a zip code or something like that.

00:57:42 James Dean: Yeah. Or the or the customer found it themselves and they’re like okay. Uh and it went horrible. Right. Lawsuits and everything else. And everybody, you know, they wanted to sue the software maker. They wanted to sue the implementation partner. They want 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, ten years later, they’re paying twenty percent, twenty two percent support fees every year on their two million dollars software. 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.

00:58:31 Phil Howard: Now.

00:58:32 James Dean: If you’re if your company can’t do it, can’t operate for two months, you’re probably going to go bankrupt, right? This is not something to mess around with. And this is why companies sue, right? 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 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, 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?

00:59:32 Phil Howard: Say that again.

00:59:33 James Dean: Time. How many months?

00:59:35 Phil Howard: Yep.

00:59:35 James Dean: 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? One hundred percent. And then how many do I need? You know, part time, you know, twenty percent or whatever, right? And then US dollars. Right? Money, right. Uh, so time. Resources. Money. Um, you can you can lengthen any one of those legs. You can shorten any one of those legs. But the the area in the middle is going to be about the same. Um, the, you know, obviously quicker is better. But part of that organizational change management cycle I was talking about is 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 processes, seeing where there are gaps, you know, helping with the helping with the configuration, making sure it’s done right so that there is no surprise, there is no, um, 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. Right. If they’re involved every single week, they already know we can do all of our procurement cycles. Uh, 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, that’s the way to do it.

01:01:03 Phil Howard: 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 you about about ERP stuff. You know what I mean? Um, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I just out of 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, uh, how you go about an engagement.

01:01:36 James Dean: Oh, very, very confident. Um, you know, done it over six hundred times. Uh.

01:01:41 Phil Howard: I mean, you’ve been on a nuclear submarine underground under some serious pressure. Uh, well, no, no pun intended. You know what I mean?

01:01:50 James Dean: In a nuclear submarine. You’re making your own electricity from a nuclear power plant. You 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.

01:02:05 Phil Howard: Yeah, and you don’t wanna screw that up. Or you get some kind of, like, weird chicken. Didn’t you guys have, like, chicken? Someone screwed up the budget. So you ended up with chicken for a long time?

01:02:12 James Dean: Yeah. I mean, yeah, well, that’s why we have, uh, a nice mess crew that not only cooks the food, but, uh, taste test it as well. So take one for the team.

01:02:24 Phil Howard: So I guess the main point is if you want to. If you want nuclear power, if you want the ability to, um, end World War two within like, minutes, not days or months with, with numerous casualties on your side. Then you got to call James, uh, the ERP nuke Miller. I don’t know, like a name for you. Nuclear. You want to go nuclear with your ERP?

01:02:51 James Dean: Well, you did ask a serious question. I mean, first of all, you know, even if you’re very, very experienced and done the six hundred 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? Um, you know, why are you looking to do this? This project, this program. Right. 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? Um, 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? Um, tour the plant, tour the warehouse. Tour the office. Get to know the operation. The departments. Look at the challenges that they face. Um, and listen to them. Then also, you know, make ask intelligent questions, um, 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 good relationship. Um, 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, uh, project status 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 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 order to cash, uh, you know, procure to pay, uh, you know, record a report, all the different business business cycles, business process cycles that you have. Um, Um, and, you know, talk about what, what solutions you bring to the table and what similar, uh, you know, challenges you face in other the same industry or similar industries. Um, you know, whether you’re an asset intensive manufacturer or you’re a consumer products or your, you know, custom configured order type products, um, you know, highly engineered products, automotive steel mills, you know, Department of Defense, you name it. Um, 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. Um, and then this is what they cost. Um, you know, so yeah, very confident in, uh, 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 we’re happy. We’re still happy. Um, your other customers sell for you as well, right? I mean.

01:05:49 Phil Howard: On time and on budget is. Yeah, that’s. Yes.

01:05:53 James Dean: We were ninety three percent on time on budget in my six hundred projects. It’s very, very high. And most.

01:06:00 Phil Howard: How many do you think there’s a lot of people out there trying to do? Like do you think a lot of, um, CTOs or CIOs are out there thinking, yeah, I can do this myself. Do you think that happens a lot? No way.

01:06:10 James Dean: Uh, they a lot try to go it alone. Um, the smart ones go. No, I’m. I’m hiring experts. Right. But what they do that’s really smart is pair up, right? Take your.

01:06:22 Phil Howard: I hear a lot of kind of weird.

01:06:25 James Dean: With our consultant that’s ordered a cash, right. You’re procure to pay or procure to 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.

01:06:44 Phil Howard: 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.

01:07:18 James Dean: That’s a bad situation. So. So you want to.

01:07:20 Phil Howard: I hear that a lot just from talking with people just randomly. Hey, what’s going on? Like, you know, living the dream. They’re like, ah, 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 it’s terrible this ERP part. Well, I just hear stuff like that.

01:07:37 James Dean: So 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 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, right. It’s not going to be day one. It’s you know, most of these projects were two million dollars for the software, two million dollars for the implementation, and it took two years. Okay. That’s most of our projects.

01:08:15 Phil Howard: Now, that sounds pretty reasonable, actually. When you in the face of these.

01:08:19 James Dean: Did we do one million for the software, one million for the project and done in six months? Yeah, we’ve we’ve done those two. But those you’re more reliant on the consultant and you’re less self-sufficient. Um, and maybe it’s a simpler implementation. Maybe it’s a smaller implementation. Um, 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. Um, if it’s not sponsored correctly, you’ll get this combative nature. Well, that’s what that’s their program. That’s their project. They did it. They set it up this way.

01:08:52 Phil Howard: They they no ownership in anything. It’s.

01:08:55 James Dean: Yeah. Yeah. It’s you know, it’s a blame game. Right. And that’s those projects are the ones that they run over budget. They run over 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. Right.

01:09:08 Phil Howard: That’s that’s messed up. Yeah.

01:09:10 James Dean: You know that’s that’s not a that’s not a team project right there.

01:09:14 Phil Howard: So that’s really messed up. Yeah. Uh, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Um, I’m assuming someone might some people might have some questions, uh, and want to reach out to you if that’s okay at any point. Um, absolutely. Really? Really, I thank you. Uh, any advice for, uh, for the for the leaders out there? Anything, anything. I’ll give you the final word.

01:09:32 James Dean: Uh, um, look, uh, the hard way to learn something is the school of hard knocks, right? Um, you know, wisdom seeks, uh, you know, the knowledge of others, right? It’s better to learn, um, and benefit from the wisdom and experience of others. So we all, we all seek out wisdom when we do Google research, right. 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. Um, certainly use the head on your shoulders and the experience that you’ve had, but leverage the experience of others and it will reap tremendous benefits in terms of cost, in terms of time and in terms of the rewards, right, in terms of the benefits that you need for your business. You want your business to to thrive and grow and, uh, and be able to survive the tough times too. So, um, absolutely. That would be my my final advice.

01:10:35 Phil Howard: A lot of wisdom in that I have a, 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 someone that’s able to teach that and say, well, this is an interesting point, but 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 um, yeah, very well said. You can’t it’s like graduating college with the whatever it degree and saying, I’m ready to go in and, you know, like, no, everyone knows you’re just getting started.

01:11:27 James Dean: At that point.

01:11:28 Phil Howard: 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 thirty years. I’d rather have the assistance. That’s not even an MD.

01:11:44 James Dean: Right, right. At least he’s seen a lot of situations. He’s seen the the process and probably had a hand in it and probably assisted. Right. And probably seen a few things that didn’t go as planned as well. So. Yeah, absolutely. The you know, even even, you know, partnered, you know, shoulder to shoulder experience very, very valuable.

01:12:04 Phil Howard: Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. Yeah. All right.