Speaker 0 | 00:09.647
Hey, Josh, good to meet you.
Speaker 1 | 00:13.370
Good to meet you as well, sir.
Speaker 0 | 00:15.732
I know before we kind of jump into the main program, I figured we’d just kind of chat a bit and talk about your kind of ideas. The way I figured I’d do this. Uh, is a little segment that I I’m starting called a random access memories. So, um, I, I’m going to, I’m going to say something and I just want the first thing that pops in your head, uh, to be your answer. And we’ll see kind of where this leads us. Right. So, um, what is your favorite computer icon?
Speaker 1 | 00:48.381
Oh, uh, probably the recycle bin.
Speaker 0 | 00:51.962
Okay. Why do you say that? Why do you say that? Uh,
Speaker 1 | 00:55.543
I guess because, um, You get frustrated in things with computing, especially when you’ve done it so long, you can, you can just be like, I just want this icon to go away. I just want this program to go away or whatever. And the idea of just throwing whatever you’re working on in the trash is just kind of one of those, like that, that would just be great if we could just all do that when, when, when you get to that point, you know, I mean, see you later.
Speaker 0 | 01:24.252
And they should make more out of it. It should be like when you hit the trash thing, it should be like, you know, you throw in trash into it, like, you know, crumple it up, throw it a little basketball, throw it in there. That’s what they should do a little animation. So that happens.
Speaker 1 | 01:38.077
You know, I miss when it was more popular to customize the sounds and stuff on your computer and you could like customize it to be like a sound of a fire whooshing or an explosion when you throw it, when you throw things in your recycle bin.
Speaker 0 | 01:49.322
There you go. There you go. When it was cool back in the day, right? and it was cool all right well speaking back in the day what was uh your most reliable computer uh back in the day oh um you know uh so probably
Speaker 1 | 02:11.662
an old uh it was the one like the very first series of pentium iv processor um It was original DDR, you know, all the good stuff where, you know, 20 gig of hard disk space was wow worthy XP and all that stuff. I mean, not super old, mind you, but still, you know, 20 or so years ago. And I was working in a program called the Student Technology Leadership Program in my high school. And they used us as kind of the IT department internally. And, uh… I was able to harvest some RAM chips off of other systems and got 512, 512 meg of memory. And when I left the program, my sophomore year, when I transferred high schools, they let me keep my workstation. And I actually use that workstation up through being told that it was incompatible for upgrade to windows seven.
Speaker 0 | 03:11.382
My,
Speaker 1 | 03:12.042
my you know,
Speaker 0 | 03:13.463
and in the wake of that, my I, mom and dad are moving. And, uh, and so they’re going through all their junk. Right. And so my dad has this closet of computer equipment that I know we all have. Right. And in the closet of computer equipment, he found a working compact computer running windows millennium edition. Uh, and I booted it up over here and sure as anything, you can actually, uh, it boots up in the windows. I don’t know what I can run on it, uh, you know, but, uh, it, uh, It’s definitely a working computer and it still works after all these years.
Speaker 1 | 03:46.834
Flight Simulator 2000, man. Flight Simulator 2000. There you go.
Speaker 0 | 03:50.256
There you go. Your favorite computer cable that they no longer make. Yeah. Tough one, right? Just think about it right now. What? Everything’s mostly a USB or some variation of that, right?
Speaker 1 | 04:07.566
You know, they still make it, but I’m going to go ahead and roll with it. because it’s so rare to see, but probably the serial cable.
Speaker 0 | 04:16.129
You know, I miss the serial cable and that little, you know, when I would pop the serial cable in, tell me if you’ve done this or not, you pop the serial cable in the back and then I just tighten one of the sides, not both, just one. Cause I know I’m going to pop it back off.
Speaker 1 | 04:29.733
You are a, um, you are a very, uh, formal gentleman for even the one.
Speaker 0 | 04:38.555
All right. Um, I got my, my, my last thing here for, for the beginning here is, uh, can you impersonate an old school modem sound?
Speaker 1 | 04:50.502
Oh my God. Um, yeah, I can still hear the sound in my head. Like I love it.
Speaker 0 | 04:57.985
I love it. That’s a great, that’s great sound. All right, guys, I just want to welcome everybody to the podcast. I’m Michael Moore, and here with me, I have Joshua Clemens. He’s the IT director at TransShield, which we’re going to talk about because this is really intriguing. Chris, welcome to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds and agreeing to meet with us and share your knowledge. What? What is TransShield? And to use a popular term, what is it that you do there?
Speaker 1 | 05:34.924
Well, I mean, there’s the marketing-friendly stuff that I’m sure that they’d like for me to say, that we provide the cutting-edge protective technologies. But basically what we do is we make very fancy and very custom tarps. So I’m sure everybody’s been excited about that. the electric car craze. And so they’ve all seen their Teslas going down the road and they see how they’re covered with those nice, thin, tight plastic covers. Or they’ve seen boats going down the road with the thin plastic covers or even windmill blades, something huge like that. We make those. And what’s special about those is not only the size and that they shrink and whatnot, it is also that they have a property by it. that inhibits corrosion and allows you to store those things outside and then just chuck them on the truck. Additionally, we have a military division where on top of those feature sets, we also are on the cutting edge of electromagnetic shielding, whereby we can protect against efforts to communicate or transmit communications from the outside in, inside out, or even see it with radar and sonar.
Speaker 0 | 06:39.393
It’s a Faraday cage and a tarp.
Speaker 1 | 06:42.434
In a very real way, yes.
Speaker 0 | 06:44.094
Very nice. Very nice. But I already have bad cell coverage. So hopefully I don’t get a tarp covering me and unable to actually take a phone call.
Speaker 1 | 06:53.958
No, actually, we have a product, not to cut you off. We actually have a product that is just a little old belt clip, like an old belt pouch for your cell phone, that you might have thought you were cool having 10, 15 years ago. That is made of our material. Its sole purpose is to keep your phone from connecting. to the satellites while you’re in like a sensitive meeting or, or on the front lines in the Ukraine or something like that.
Speaker 0 | 07:21.589
Nice. I can, I can, I can see that, that, that’s actually a pretty decent technology. And, and it looks like, as I was reading on the website, there are a lot of patents for this stuff that you have, right?
Speaker 1 | 07:35.733
Yes, sir.
Speaker 0 | 07:36.473
So let’s talk about that. So you mentioned that you’re doing business with the government and A lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times that means that you’re diving into CMMC, if I’m saying that correctly, guidance. Basically, it’s additional NIST controls to be able to secure your environment and protect confidential data for the government. You want to chat about that for a moment? Because I guarantee you’re working on it, and it’s something that’s pretty big in here. organization?
Speaker 1 | 08:13.331
Yes, actually. So, well, actually, CMMC 1.0 was a, like a landmark effort by the government to actually secure its defense contractors. And they implemented, as a part of that, they introduced, there’s five levels of security, but they actually never really only got any traction on one, which was CMMC level three, which is also what would fall under a company like mine. And it was the NIST SP 800-171 guidelines in addition to another dozen controls and processes. Unfortunately, when after the first two pilot programs went out and after I submitted my year’s budget for compliance with it, as a matter of fact, like the week after, We got the notice that 1.0 had been killed and that 2.0 was going to be upcoming, but no further guidance would be available for the next couple of years. But then on the interim that we should focus for 100 percent compliance for NIST 800-171. Additionally, for the more the higher security of us and then and then us as well to be pointing towards a new procedure called NIST 800-172. which is, while not as quite as robust as 171.53, which maybe more people are familiar with, is more robust than 171. And we’ve been informed that aspects of 172 will be added to the CMMC requirements, if not in initial implementation, but as time goes on.
Speaker 0 | 10:01.195
Let’s talk about this because this is interesting. You know, anytime that you are implementing security controls into an organization, right, you’re going to run into some roadblocks here and there, whether it be user adoption, it’d be people trying to, you know, adjust some new security measures like removal of local administrator or, you know, just costs, right?
Speaker 1 | 10:29.639
uh have uh have you run into that and if you have how are you working through it well so i mean yes we’ve run into all of those things right um but uh and that’s going to be the case for any company uh of any size uh implementing uh the cmc model or just being truly compliant with the nist uh model as already put forward um but uh you First, I have – well, shout out a little bit to my boss, who’s the CFO of TransShield. His name is Conrad Bereza. He came from a much bigger, more robust company, which I won’t mention on the air because I try to keep everything clear. But that they – so when he came in, he’s been a big help as an executive sponsor, really shoving things through. And as the CFO, being the head money guy, he has a lot of swing there. Additionally We try to work with each department and introduce what’s going to be the hardest for them and see how we can best accommodate making changes that will both bring us into compliance and also not obstruct the workflow. One of the biggest things about what we do here at Custom is that we actually have a very robust design department where we take 3D scans of what we’re going to cover. And as you might imagine, being a military company that… is one of our most sensitive aspects of the company. But it’s also one of the most, because all of our products are discrete. We’re a discrete manufacturer. Almost everything we make is custom. Very few of our product lines actually are something that just gets replicated dozens and dozens of times. So bringing things into design and then going through the process and then going out of design very rapidly is super important. And every control that you add We’ll slow down systems. We’ll make an extra step or make it not easy to do this. Like we’ll get scans in from customers and they won’t all be the format type that we’ve requested. So the team will want to install some random program from 10 buck to, to read that program because that’s their job. That’s important to them. That’s how they are able to do their thing, which gets the sales out. It gets the sales guys satisfied, gets product out the door, gets us paid. He lets us pay our employees, which is important, but. security for both us and for the country as a whole uh because uh um things like that you know like um it’s super important and actually there’s an anecdotal uh uh to that i want to cover if we still have time but um and that’s super important so like when we wanted to integrate things like when we wanted to do things like um Uh, we wanted to start pre live scanning, uh, I mean, cause we all, you know, we already had anti malware software, right. You know, and everybody does. We already had really great, uh, malware software, anti malware software. Uh, but what we wanted to do was we wanted to start, uh, we want to add an extra step of pre-scan before applications were allowed to be opened. It was, uh, like a sandboxing aspect. Um, and, uh, but that, uh, caused a great deal of extra, uh, processing time. So we worked with our vendor and our security vendor and whatnot, and we were able to tweak settings and we were able to increase and buy better hardware for more RAM, better compute, better graphics and stuff to gain back more time other places where their actual output was something more akin to what they had going in so that instead of being an enemy to us, they were an ally.
Speaker 0 | 14:05.411
Well, you know, and what a good point about that, too, is not only will those extra steps, you know, help with security, but they’ll also help with the end product. Right. I mean, there’s one thing to slow down. Right. Nobody likes to slow down. Listen, I want to go fast. I want to get this stuff done. Right. But the next piece is if I slow down just a little bit, measure twice, cut once. I’m going to have a better product coming out the door, one that’s Q8 a little better and made sure there’s no issues.
Speaker 1 | 14:37.638
Well, you would hope, but actually our biggest problem is that our 3D scans are so massive and take so many data points, and they’re so accurate, actually, that the act of converting that into a 3D model is massively hard on the equipment. And we couldn’t… We couldn’t tone down on security anywhere there because actually this was the anecdote I wanted to share. There was a general officer who spoke at a conference that I got to attend. And so I’m totally stealing it from him. And if I remembered his name, I would say it. And if anyone does know his name and they pass it to me, I’ll be happy to give him the credit for it. But some Chinese fellows assumed to act on behalf of the state government because it made its way to a state government, compromised a company that made bunk beds or something similarly small for submarines. And they took the measurements of the bunk beds and backed that into the shape of the submarine. And then they took that. to like wind tunnels or water or water flow uh measurements or something and where it’s able to determine the sound or approximate sound it was going to make underwater and then turn that into to their sense to their sonars and was able to pick out aspects of our submarine fleet uh based basically based on measurements of a uh bunk bed so that’s what actually that’s what that was actually apparently the incident or what I was told to be the incident that started the whole idea of moving towards CMMC.
Speaker 0 | 16:10.235
Yeah. You don’t want to catch people napping on a submarine. I agree with you. Um, so that’s a, you know, interesting point though, uh, on that is we were talking about in some things you, you had to abandon, uh, uh, security in some regards, uh, For the sake of processing. Is that what you’re saying? I just want to make sure I got it.
Speaker 1 | 16:31.676
No, no, no. What I was saying is, is that we actually had to go the other way. We had to we had to sacrifice capability for processing. And then we we had to slow the process, just slow down. That’s just how it was. And but that but that’s how by by by peeking at other areas, we were able to save in other areas. And gotcha.
Speaker 0 | 16:52.748
So the process itself from the 3D printing is it’s just slower.
Speaker 1 | 16:57.639
But right.
Speaker 0 | 16:58.679
But that you went to other areas to actually speed it up, to make up some ground for that, uh, for that piece. Right.
Speaker 1 | 17:05.561
Yeah, we, we, yeah, we received measurable loss, but because of our, uh, extra efforts and their efforts and working with us, we were able to keep something that our design team was happy with. And we were able to meet compliance. I mean, like, uh, you, uh, um, and that was asked and that was like one of the few places where we actually had no choice, but to, uh, take the hit, uh, which is. particularly difficult for us because military is only a third of our business. I mean, yes, I mean, I say only a third is a large portion, but I mean, two thirds of our business also have to suffer the same problem because of being us. Now here’s where we’re actually hit as a small business, a third, while a large chunk for a company, this, uh, for a $500 million company, I could segregate that into its own business. I could segregate all the employees that worked on military and I could create like a little sub shelter in my network that was ramped up and be happy. Our company is just at the right size where basically everybody touches something. And that means that no matter what I do, I end up having to put so many people under the under the net. that I’m not left with enough to be worth its own network. So what I end up doing is actually apply our security standards to every user. And that also means that I catch every single scan, not just the military scans, but I also catch the scans of a windmill blade. I catch the scans of somebody. There was this fellow who had this really, really nice boat that we had to go out and scan because he added some stuff to it and made it so that our normal cover for that model boat wouldn’t work. But he wanted a cover, and we got him one.
Speaker 0 | 18:43.291
But see, but, you know, and that happens where security may not, you know, affect a group. But since, you know, it’s all in the same network, it’s all in stuff, you may not be able to separate it out. And that makes complete sense. Now, Josh, let me switch gears here real quick, because I want to jump into you specifically. I saw in here, you know, that you’ve done many different jobs, a network. I think it was a network administrator. There was some desktop. support. And then in the current role, even being an IT director, which I think I share a lot of this, I’ve seen, I’ve seen this with a lot of people too, uh, even being an IT director, you’re also doing, uh, admin work as well.
Speaker 1 | 19:24.522
Right. Yes.
Speaker 0 | 19:25.663
So let’s, let’s chat about that. You’re some of your previous experiences on that and current ones as well.
Speaker 1 | 19:30.584
Um, sure. So I was a consultant, I was an independent consultant, uh, for years. Like I, uh, I worked under some, uh, MSPs or I took. contracts, contract to contract, company to company contracts, a wide variety of situations. But it was pretty much everything from when I first graduated high school up through 2012-ish, 2013. I took two persistent long-term contracts and kind of found that I liked it. Additionally, in addition to liking the stability, I also liked that around then was when the Affordable Care Act came in place and I had to start paying for my own healthcare for sure. And that’s a little expensive as an independent. So from there, I actually initially got a contract with the company that I was a desktop support technician with. And They decided to keep me due to some, the way that their positioning works there and the way that everything kind of worked out. I was titled a desktop support technician, but I was off. I was actually the service desk team lead and I was the very first operations administrator or like systems administrator, like middle tier between the project team and the, and the help desk people. I was the very first one of those.
Speaker 0 | 20:48.609
Just to jump in for a second. Sorry to sort of cut you off for a moment, but I just want to hop in on this because it’s a big piece, right? Most of the time, you’ll find that IT folks are doing multiple roles. It’s a common thing where it’s like, hey, listen, I just need you to pick up this chunk of work and then now add this one to it and this. And it just gets other than one. Let me ask you a question based on that, because you have a wide variety of experience here and looking at your stuff. In all of this different. desktop and system admin work, network administrator, IT director, right? How do you in your current role manage all that? And how do you keep it so that you’re doing the IT director role and working on it, but also keeping support work going and any projects?
Speaker 1 | 21:44.632
Well, first off, I have a great team. I mean, I can’t thank them enough. They’re, I mean, if I couldn’t hand issues to them and they just fix themselves, if you will, I mean, it would be a much more difficult task. But on top of that, I’ve always been a guy who didn’t really like to want, I really hate doing like grabbing a one project and working it through. I always liked breaking my projects into bite-sized pieces and hit a piece here or there till I get frustrated and jump to another project. So I always liked having lots of things going on. So I actually really do break my job as a manager, break my job as a director, break my job as an actual administrator up into little bitty pieces. It also super helps for when things do happen because I am first and foremost responsible for my department. So if something comes up I have to deal with, I might have to shove part of my… part of what I’m doing off onto one of my team members and having it broke down into pieces means that I’m like, so A, B, and C are done. D, E, and F need doing, please handle this for me, man. And, um, I’d say probably the most challenging aspect is, is that we are international. And so, uh, we have that aspect of other languages and other cultures involved. And so that can be sometimes, uh, complex cause my, I’m not all of my team is based here in the United States or works here in Elkhart. Um, and so, um, I, uh, you know, sometimes I have to, you know, I, I’m there, I’m there, Moss, I’m their director. I provide their budgets. I provide their forecast just as much as I do my own. And so working with them is probably the most challenging part, uh, making sure that I understand their concerns. And also like there are cultural differences, like in the United States and in America, you will, you know, abruptly tell somebody when there’s a problem. Well, in Mexico, as an example, because that’s where our other facility is, there’s a, um, There’s a culture where you don’t exactly challenge the boss, if you will. They don’t do that. So sometimes communicating them is as much what they won’t say or they don’t say as what they did say. And it’s a relatively minor thing because culturally, Mexico is very similar to the United States. We watch a lot of the same shows. We’re right on top of each other. Hollywood, there’s a lot of transmission, of course. But that slight difference can be the difference between like my system’s administrator here will say, hey, this is broken. We need to fix this now. Whereas my system administrator down there might say, or might not say anything, like will be in complete silence when the complaint is made. And I ask him about, is his working okay? Or is it working okay for him? And he will be very circumspect about the way he says it. And I would think it was just him, but it’s the case with all of our management down there. Like you have to be very direct with them. to get a straight answer back. And then they clearly don’t like saying it as I said. So you just have to learn to read the mood and you can,
Speaker 0 | 24:41.319
you know, that is a, it’s a great, let’s talk about specifically, um, this point, but we’ll, we’ll, we’ll bring it into just generally, right? Because people, uh, uh, or, you know, if there’s anything that people are, is they’re all unique, right? And they all have different ways that they handle issues and respond to issues. And especially when you’re managing team and I know you’ve you’ve run into this and as you just kind of said, you are running into multiple people that are, that whole have different ways that they interact and they handle issues. Right. So the question I got is when you have that, right, how do you get around it? Like let’s say you have a person that is not as direct as other people. Like you said, you had a system administrator that was like, something’s on fire. We need to put it out now. Right. And then you’re going to have another assistant administrator that’s like, everything’s fine. Well, things are burning all around them. Right. You know, reminds me of that IT crowd where he just picks up the fire and moves it to the other fire. Right. So everything’s fine. Let me just type an email. So based on that, though, let’s talk about that. Right. How do you handle the difference from a management aspect? Right. How do you pull out the information that you need from one person and then also, conversely, the other person, which everything’s something on fire, we’re going to figure it out. How do you rein that in?
Speaker 1 | 26:07.622
Well, so the person who is more direct, thankfully, is actually one of our veterans. And, you know, seeing as we just recently celebrated Independence Day, I would like to shout out a thank you to him for his service. But, yeah. He’s pretty self-correcting that he’s pretty good about only complaining when there’s an actual problem, though he has had a few false flags. And in those cases, we, you know, basically I ask him to talk it out. So, you know, we talk out the problem. Right. You know, like I’m like, OK, well, you know, so to fix this abruptly, we’re going to turn off all this. Is that OK? No. OK, well, then is this a is this a lesser problem? I mean, because I mean, if it’s legitimately if we’re you know, if we’re like, say, we’re getting crypto locked. Right. which we didn’t thank god and haven’t yet knocked on knock on wood but like say if we were you know like a correct answer could very well be well pull the power on the file server why because we’ll fix it later if it breaks but you know if you do that for some minor issue like we need to somebody accidentally deleted a file we need to restore it that’s a totally unacceptable way to go upon it just pulling the plug and then restoring everything and then going back right but i found that like going along with him on this on this on this tangent of of of excitement like and just like taking this all the way to the sky lets them see like where we’ve where we’ve gotten some disconnect on how on on scale and and and when you when you get them on that then they’ll scale back their complaint themselves and then we get on that and then you know we can usually have a chuckle right now but then that’s also just people’s personality like he tolerates that well and he’s a good person you know and good lightweight lighthearted person but somebody might feel offended about that so you know you really do have to know the person on the other on the other hand uh my person who’s more my uh mexican system who’s more uh lighthearted or more reluctant i guess the two to to put forward problems like that uh we have a weekly talk or weekly chat where i just kind of ask about systems and ask about what he’s been doing and i will look at his tickets and and and try to tease out issues and I frame them in forms of like, what can I do to, you know, what can I do to help him provide more help to his users? And by framing it like that, I get more cooperation from him as well.
Speaker 0 | 28:33.848
I like it. I like it. Yes. Coming in, not necessarily saying what’s wrong, but saying, hey, what are the things on which I can help? And then trying to, you know, elicit that information from there. You did mention ticketing, right? something that’s near and dear to my heart is implementing ticketing and, and idle and the KPIs that follow and actually having information. I would like to hear your take on this on, on the ticketing and KPIs and how you implement and get the information you need to be able to do the work that you need to get done.
Speaker 1 | 29:14.047
So I mean, I’m, So realistically, a ticketing system is like any other information management system. It’s like an ERP or a CRM or whatever. It’s only as good as the information you put into it. The trick of the trade is to teach your team to be able to pull information out of it. Because if it’s just the adversary, if it’s just the boss checking up on what you’re doing, it’s the enemy and an already tedious task becomes the last thing on the list. So the first step… to having a successful implementation of the ticketing system is to provide a measurable benefit to the participants. And so my big thing was bringing a doc, we actually used Jira, and bringing in their help desk tool, their service management tool, and then Confluence for document management and tying all that together and then starting to push on everybody to make sure they write down their solutions. And then waiting and waiting and then letting it come back around and then letting my responses start to be check confluence, check confluence. And they get used to the idea that it’s there as their tool. Because I know that a lot of folks hesitate to document things appropriately because they always think that they’re documenting their way out of a job. And I mean, really, that’s really what it is. I mean, I myself have had that fear in the past. If you’re good at your job or if you’re good at your job, and then conversely, if your job is good for you, because we as an employer owe you as an employee just as much or more even as you owe us. And so it’s super important that we help that mindset. And sometimes with some people, All we can provide them is stability until they feel that. But yes, once they start getting stuff out of it, once they start, I can show them like, you can look at your KPIs. When you’re arguing for a raise or a bonus for me, you can show me, hey, I’ve closed more tickets than everyone on my team. I deserve the money or I have closed this much.
Speaker 0 | 31:20.347
Josh, I think this is great. And I’m going to repeat this for people just in case they didn’t catch this. Step one to creating a ticketing system is to have the buy-in. from the people using the ticketing system, right? That is such a great advice. If you don’t have the buy-in, they’re not going to use the product and they’re going to go around it and circumvent it. I think that’s great advice for doing that. Now, when you do get the buy-in and you set this up, right? How do you create the KPIs needed? What do you use to be able to do that? I’m very familiar with your… Love the product. And there’s so many different ways in which you can create KPIs within that product and charts and click throughs and stuff like that. Tell me about it. How do you define those KPIs?
Speaker 1 | 32:15.533
So, I mean, to start with our ticketing system here, this was actually the first one we had. So we didn’t actually have any prior measurable spec. So, you know, we didn’t know that we generally closed 20 some issues per technician per day, right? We didn’t know this or that, right? So we came in with a complete blank slate. We had no idea how long it took us to respond to an issue. We didn’t know how many times an issue had to be reopened or an issue be reported. So basically what we started to do was first we opened it and let it run on its own without uh, interference for a couple months. And then what we started saw was the averages, like what, what cold, get a cold read on what the room looks like, right. Without any expectations, without any, any, any force. Then I started looking at what was my complaints? Like, cause I, you know, my, my, uh, a peer managers and my seniors would say, Hey, I had to complain multiple times to get a problem or, hey, I’ve been waiting a long time or whatever. So I start matching those up with what I was seeing from real-time data. And then I started trying to, A, well, first I had to make sure that they were real complaints. So I go through and make sure that these are legit. But then when you confirm that those are legitimate complaints, that they’re legitimate action items, then I take and pick a focus. And then I said, well, first I set my baseline KPIs at whatever the average was and I pick a focus to fix, pick a focus to better, right? And then I try to make some of those complaints go away. Like say if they say it took too long, will I make this month’s focus? Let’s respond a little bit quicker. Let’s move that up a little bit.
Speaker 0 | 34:07.619
And what is too long, right?
Speaker 1 | 34:10.194
Yeah. Well, and what, yeah. And what is, and what is too long? And, you know, I know that I, and I know, and I know that, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, like we said, we set the goal from the beginning, but if you do that, you risk burning out your people, your, your, your buy-in again, getting, uh, keeping your buy-in. If you go and say, everything you’re doing is wrong and we need to have measurable, uh, uh, benefit at 50% better than what you’re doing now across the board, you’re going to get nothing. Uh, but like, if I can say like, Hey, um, it looks like that. uh, we need, you know, that, that, that we’ve had this going for three months and we’ve had a couple of complaints about this and we can see that, Hey, it takes on average four hours to first response. We would like to see it in the first two. I mean, can we, can we at least, can we at least respond to it and say, yeah, we’ve got, it’s been assigned to somebody, you know, something small, just, just so that the user gets the warm and fuzzies, even if it’s a low tier problem, even if it’s, it doesn’t matter because we have something major going on just so they get the warm and fuzzies. Right.
Speaker 0 | 35:07.849
Such a great. It’s such a great thing and important thing to do, and it can buy you a lot of time.
Speaker 1 | 35:13.433
Right, but we just focus on those little bite-sized pieces. And then as we’ve adjusted up, like, oh, there’s too much work. Well, are you reporting all your work on tickets or on project hours? Because I’m not seeing enough to generate another position. Or is there – those sorts of things. And always pick one and go with one. Don’t make a user feel like everything they’re doing or a technician feel like everything they’re doing is wrong because it’s never going to work.
Speaker 0 | 35:41.074
So good information here on the KPIs and how to actually get them implemented and how to kind of massage them once you get them implemented to make sure they’re actually doing what you need. You know, what I also saw is that you had some experience with ERP implementation.
Speaker 1 | 36:03.089
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 36:04.350
So let’s chat about that because I find that to be. Um, very, very interesting, uh, um, because it’s one of probably, I think one of the most challenging things that you have to do because it touches every, almost every piece of an organization. Right. Um, would love to chat about that for a minute. And, uh, so, um, do you mind, uh, uh, saying what you were implementing?
Speaker 1 | 36:30.170
Um, so, uh, we were implementing, well, so when I started here, we finished the implementation of a Dynamics AX 2012 R2. And we’re currently moving to another solution, actually, at this time.
Speaker 0 | 36:46.483
You get to do it all over again.
Speaker 1 | 36:48.044
I know, right? I also got to help land the infrastructure side of implementation of AX2012R2 at my previous employment. We had some borked bits on the virtualization side. As an interesting aside, It’s a popular knowledge or popular saying that you can’t put an AXAOS and an AX database on different hosts, and you also really shouldn’t vMotion them. And I will say for sure, 100%, that you can do both of those things and get great performance out of that for what AX will actually give you ever. You just have to have a properly configured virtual environment.
Speaker 0 | 37:34.856
Yes, it’s don’t tell me what I can’t do. I’ll do it anyway and I’ll do it better. No, I think that’s, you know, I love when people come up with innovative solutions to work on things. And just because someone says you can’t do something doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I agree with you there. Now, this ERP, I know you said you were on Dynamics and moving off to go something else. But let’s talk about specifically. Was this ERP covering all the major pieces of the company finance and operations and all the fun little groups? Does it do all that or is it just covering a certain segment?
Speaker 1 | 38:21.793
So we covered every group, maybe not to the extent that that group might have liked in a couple of the areas, but we did actually touch every bit of it. Um, some decisions were made prior to me stepping in and bringing my own team in because I was a replacement. Uh, the entire, the, basically the team here had been vacated and I was asked to build a team. Um, and, uh, so some decisions had been made and we were far enough long in the process that we couldn’t make changes, uh, too big a changes on scope. Uh, but yes, we did, uh, implement and pretty much every aspect of the business.
Speaker 0 | 39:03.482
You know, I’m going to we’ll get back to the CRP in a second, but let’s take a quick sidebar, because I think every IT individual has run into this where you’ve inherited something. Right. And and you have to run with it. You know, if we could build things from the ground up and just and go to go to town, we’d make it we’d make beautiful things. Right.
Speaker 1 | 39:24.930
But, you know,
Speaker 0 | 39:26.431
you run into issues where you have to work on something and it may it might have made sense. when they were implementing it, but maybe things change, maybe things modify, and you have to take it from this point and make it something, right? And tell me about that. And if you have any other, you know, experiences in that, that you think that may kind of relate to that piece where having to take something that was something and make it a new thing, but you can’t modify pieces of it. Go right ahead.
Speaker 1 | 39:57.912
Well, so I think that pretty much all of us Anybody who’s ever been IT for anything other than a mom and pop shop has had to live with pre-existing conditions, if you will. It’s like, wow, I like to call it. I like that.
Speaker 0 | 40:12.936
I like that term, pre-existing conditions. I need to live with pre-existing conditions. I’m going to use that. I’m stealing that from you.
Speaker 1 | 40:19.397
You’re welcome, sir. So what we did was we kind of figured out what was all the… Because we ran into lots of issues and we kind of figured out what actually… is the limitations what were the things that add that couldn’t change and then we took in and and we took the plan that was originally there and we tried to kind of follow the guy follow the plane color inside the lines if you will but we discovered that there were massive issues and that we we had to revisit everything so we did and we uh took our and we did get our list of of what things couldn’t change uh but uh a lot of it was just coaching expectations and learning that, and this is something I would like to say as just a flat thing to all of you who are wanting to implement an ERP system, to anybody who’s listening, who has nothing to do with the technical side, but who might possibly find themselves in a meeting for an ERP implementation. Your use case is not special. Nothing that you see on that system, a very few things that you will do in your business will be so unique that nobody else will pot in the world. or no big group of people in the world does it, and not only do you do it in a different way, but your different way is better than all those other people’s. So in 99.9% of the cases, when you see something in an ERP system that does something in a way that you, your company does not do, the answer is not for you to modify the ERP. It is for you to modify your processes to meet the ERP, because the ERP is probably doing it right, and you are probably doing it wrong.
Speaker 0 | 41:58.128
Yeah, this is such a big thing. And companies can get very specific with their processes. They narrow them down. They start from a small company. They work their way up. Those growing pains move along, but sometimes the processes don’t get re-evaluated. So that’s a great point. Take the chance here. And this is what Josh is saying, and stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what Josh is saying. Take the chance here and re-evaluate your processes before you implement the ERP.
Speaker 1 | 42:27.548
Right. And anytime you run into a thing where you’re doing something one way and your ERP system is pushing you to do something else, really, really sit and think about it. I mean, like, really take it to the people. Really look into it. Do your research. See if there’s a similar organization that you can look into theirs. I’m serious. If you have to modify the ERP system outside of some very specific situations, you’ve probably written yourself a check that you’re going to really hate caching later. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 42:57.444
yeah. Well, I mean, and not only is it going to be a headache to modify, it’s also going to be very costly.
Speaker 1 | 43:03.689
Well, yeah. Well, I mean, and the thing is, is the costs don’t stop at the day it goes in. When you want to upgrade the software, then you need to, instead of it being your administrators, just pushing patches forward after they pass tests. and now you’ve broke something. Now your patch, now your modification might have to be half re-implemented or modifications to your patch might have to be made or just having a developer on hand to watch. That’s extra money, especially for the company’s too small to have developers on the staff. That means that I’m paying 600 plus dollars an hour for somebody to watch me upgrade a piece of software. And then you get in a situation where you’re locked into an OS version or locked into a SQL version, which, yes, that’s the case most of the time with ERP systems anyway. But you can usually apply it like 2012 allows you to patch up to Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019. But if you have all sorts of modifications, you basically have to rewrite half of them in order to let that happen. So, I mean, yes, I mean, it might be minor changes, but there are changes everywhere. And then… even though the ones you don’t have to modify, you’re sitting there waiting for it to break. And it’s just, and all that is added costs. So, you know, your planned modification that was relatively minor, that may have cost $1,700 over the lifespan of your ERP, which for most of you, you probably are plotting on a 10 year or longer ERP lifespan. That $1,700 is now, you know, more like 17,000 or even more. And so, I mean, when you’re thinking, I mean, think about the fact that this software is probably going to outlive the platform it sits on and you need to account for those sorts of things.
Speaker 0 | 44:42.846
This is anybody listening to this podcast and you’re a business leader and not even IT and you’re just you stumble upon this and you’re listening to Josh Clemens here talk, right? Really pay attention here because this is a huge deal. He is explaining to you how to save money. in your organization when you’re implementing an ERP, right? Really evaluate the processes, make sure you’re not changing how the system works, right? And it should be going with the grain and working things on. By very few exception should something be changed in this system. And a lot of times you can implement stuff in and get it working just fine with a new process that works sometimes even better. So, um, I, I, I like that. That’s a great, that’s great. Uh, um, you know, great information, not only for it, but for, uh, business, uh, uh, leaders now, Josh, uh, I’d like to end here, uh, with, um, uh, you know, with some, uh, fun stuff here. Um, I want to know, uh, you know, the kind of the craziest thing that you’ve ever come across with, uh, in, in all your IT dealings, because I know you’ve done a bunch of stuff here. I know you’ve got a story. And I would love to hear that story.
Speaker 1 | 46:02.596
Ooh, uh, let’s see here. Um,
Speaker 0 | 46:08.881
really dig deep.
Speaker 1 | 46:10.322
I know. Well, yeah, but I also have to censor out some of them because, um,
Speaker 0 | 46:16.928
agreed, agreed. Uh, the, uh, the, the craziest PG related thing that you’ve, uh,
Speaker 1 | 46:23.973
okay. So it’s not technical. It’s not technical. Uh, it does involve the committing of a crime. So I won’t tell who did this, but they did get caught. They have been brought to justice, if you will. But we had a, I was working for a company, a nonspecific medical informatics firm. And we were rolling into implementation of Windows 7. We implemented Windows 7. Everything was happy. It was becoming popular to have a solid state drive as your operating system drive. And somebody got the bright idea somewhere that we were going to put 40 gig solid state drives into everybody’s laptops. And this was back when these solid state drives were several hundred dollars for a 40 gig one. And we bought thousands of them. So we shipped the amount that was going to our Chicago office to our Chicago office and assigned our on-site person. uh persons to uh replace them in the people’s computers well so uh everything’s going fine he’s he’s going through them at a regular rate he gets a system from somebody they’re just they get their system back totally re-imaged uh because we didn’t you know just migrate we didn’t we did a whole we did a whole image we re-imagine you know they were re-imaged faster everybody was to just reconfigure the system and get it the way you want while you’re doing it correct So everything goes forward. Everybody’s happy. And so everything goes on and everybody’s happy. There’s never any complaints. But here’s the deal. Our Chicago office was pretty insular and never showed up in our Elkhart office or any of our other offices, or very rarely did they travel to other offices. So none of us got a chance to look at any of the systems. So roll forward probably three or four months and one of our managers gets a call. or one of our receptionists gets called and he forwards it to one of our managers. And it’s from a pawn shop locally near our corporate offices in Chicago. And the deal was that he had gotten a bunch of solid state drives in lately, and one of them had one of our labels on it. And he was wanting to know if we were good with them being sold like that because they looked expensive.
Speaker 0 | 48:49.805
Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 | 48:51.050
And what had happened was that our person was re-imaging these computers, doing all the things, wiping the drive went out. So they were performing better, faster for the users because they just got a refresh. And they were selling the – they were hawking the
Speaker 0 | 49:10.500
– Yep, the drive.
Speaker 1 | 49:11.481
– the drives for money. And so they got walked out. And as a related thing, they were covering up something for one of our executives, and then our executive got walked out. because of that um so then i ended up up there uh helping image and basically uh put newly new ordered solid state drives in a mess yeah but that’s probably i mean like that wasn’t the most complex i mean that’s a relatively simple task but like that was just the wildest are you kidding me moment that i’ve ever wow wow that’s no and uh it doesn’t surprise me that that
Speaker 0 | 49:49.958
would happen, but it, you know, it’s unfortunate, but, uh, that’s crazy that a label at a pawn shop goes, wait, I should probably call on this.
Speaker 1 | 49:59.725
Well, I mean, and it wasn’t, and it wasn’t even, and it wasn’t even that like it was a pawn shop out in the middle of the suburbs or something, or that we were in the suburbs and it was a, the pawn shop was literally across the street.
Speaker 0 | 50:09.714
I didn’t think that one through,
Speaker 1 | 50:10.975
did they? No.
Speaker 0 | 50:14.277
Josh, it has been a pleasure having you on guys. This has been a Joshua Clemens. IT Director at TransShield. If you need, we will post his data up so you can contact him. If you need ERP advice, right? If you need any additional details on how to set up a ticketing system correctly. Thank you so much, Josh. It was a pleasure to have you on today.
Speaker 1 | 50:41.812
Thank you. It’s been nice to meet you, Mike. And it’s been nice being on your podcast. Maybe we’ll do it again someday. Absolutely.
