Speaker 0 | 00:07.757

Well, everybody, welcome back to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, where we’re allowed to geek out with our fellow nerds and where there’s no loss of conscious thought as people’s eyes scroll into the backs of their skulls. Today, I’m excited to introduce Lee Goodrich, who knows more about SAP and project management than I do about trucking and transportation technology. Lee, tell us a little about yourself, starting with something surprising that you’re willing to share with the world.

Speaker 1 | 00:38.058

Well, I’m a mother of four young women. I currently lead the ERP team at Bryce Corporation, but I’ve had a little different journey getting there. I’m a chemical engineer, grew up in the Mississippi Delta, went to Ole Miss and Mississippi State, got my degree. and worked in chemical manufacturing for several years. And while I was in manufacturing, I was IT’s worst nightmare. I had my spreadsheet that I ran my business on, and honestly, I thought IT was good for keeping my computer running and ordering me a new one when I needed it. And… The IT department I was working with at that time had a habit of implementing projects with zero business involvement. So we had a there was a business decision made to implement SAP as part of our Y2K project and it crashed and burned. The CIO at the time walked out.

Speaker 0 | 02:05.391

So let me jump in real quick and ask how much of, with the experiences that you’d already been having of IT not communicating to the business and implementing these projects, how much was this SAP project one of those?

Speaker 1 | 02:21.860

Well, it had started out where IT had implemented. an ERP system prior called Prism. Okay. And that was one we in manufacturing were forced to use. But I had my monster spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet, you know, I inputted my inventory and my demand, and it told me how much I needed to make. And I am. put my usage factors and it told me what I needed to order when I needed to order it by and was basically MRP in a spreadsheet. If I was going to be forced to use a new system, I was going to generate the results in my spreadsheet and key them into this system just on an absolute minimum basis. I think SAP was a better choice. in terms of an entire package. But again, it was something that was being shoved down our throat. There was no discussion on how it should be designed until it fell flat on its face.

Speaker 0 | 03:35.692

And I think that the point that you’re bringing up here and the door that you found into information technology is a critical one because there’s so many interviews that I’ve done and I’ve talked to different IT leaders and And one of the key things that everybody talks about is the ability to speak the business language. But innate in that is the ability to speak to the business. Because lots of us, lots of IT guys, IT people like to hide in that back room and stay isolated and work in isolation versus going out and talking to the business. And finding out the fact that… That even if it’s a great system, that spreadsheet had everything you needed. And double checking whether the system that’s going to get implemented meets those needs or not. It’s a critical thing. So like you’re talking about, talking to the business, not just being able to talk to them, but actually talking to them. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 04:44.666

Right. And I was manufacturing manager of our largest. manufacturing site at the time, and they plucked me out of my job completely and put me on the implementation team. This was in 1998. And, you know, did the same with materials management and finance. So we had a core group of business people that worked with the consultants, gave business requirements, reached out when we needed to, to our counterparts to make sure that we were not just representing our own needs. but making sure that we represented everybody in our functional areas.

Speaker 0 | 05:34.325

Right. And it’s truly critical also to be able to have that cradle to grave view of what’s going through the system, whatever it is, in your case, manufacturing. But whatever you were doing out on the operations floor for the manufacturing, it had to go somewhere and somebody had to pay for those resources that you needed ordered at specific times. And hopefully somebody was purchasing whatever you’re making.

Speaker 1 | 06:00.176

Right. And the fact that we had the old war room set up, you know, each of us had our different tables, but you could hear a conversation that was going on, you know, in procurement or in finance. And you could turn around and go, whoa, whoa, wait, wait a minute. That’s not going to work for me. And it really allowed us to not only collaborate. in a better manner, it got us out of our silo mentality and really started helping us look at what was best for the company, not what was best for me and my department.

Speaker 0 | 06:41.697

You know, that’s an interesting thought because I had a co-worker, our COO, who believed in that fundamentally. And he was even to the point of not allowing people to have headsets, not allowing people to have… radios and listen to ear pods so that they’d get isolated in their own world because he wanted that that bullpen effect of everybody there listening to each other and hopefully catching those conversations to catch that that piece of information that that suddenly you know for some reason I’m tuned into those procurement conversations those timing conversations so yes

Speaker 1 | 07:22.499

Sometimes you got to have your head down and we use the ball cap mentality. If I put my ball cap on backwards, it meant I’m focused. I’m doing configuration. I’m analyzing data. I’m doing something. Don’t interrupt. But, you know, otherwise we were all free to to interject. Anytime we heard something that was of concern.

Speaker 0 | 07:44.994

So a couple of things. When the cross-functional team was created. for leading this project that, that it already kind of stumped, at least the first one had completely failed. Second one was stumbling badly and basically done a face plant and you guys are trying to revive it and get it back on its feet. Who came up with that? Was that the outside consultant? Was it top management? Was it all of those who were going to be affected by it standing up and going, Whoa, wait a minute, we want a voice.

Speaker 1 | 08:19.681

To be honest. I didn’t have enough awareness of what was going on to have been part of the one that raised the flag to say, hey, this wasn’t going to work. You know, it was top management that ultimately made the decision of who they were pulling into the team. But I have a feeling that the outside consultant or implementation partner may have had some strong recommendations about how to approach that.

Speaker 0 | 08:50.215

Yeah, because I mean, I would expect that management would know who were the local experts in the different areas. But with them rubber stamping Prism and the way that that was tried to be implemented already tells me that they weren’t thinking in that way of the cross-functional team for the full implementation. So this is all, you know, taking you from manufacturing into this cross-functional team. How’d you get from there into IT?

Speaker 1 | 09:22.327

So I was responsible for production planning and QM from a design perspective. Had another guy that was helping on the QM side, but was also responsible for taking all of the plant functions back to the plant from a training perspective. So a cost accounting. shipping and receiving, the procurement, plant procurement jobs, you know, all of that was something that I had to manage at the plant level to make sure everybody got trained to use the new system. Once we got that. stabilized, I got the opportunity to implement plant maintenance. And this time, I actually did the configuration myself, worked with a consultant who gave me advice, but I got to really do all the configuration myself. So that was a realization of how fun that could be. That was pretty cool. And honestly, I felt like… I could really make a difference from a technology perspective, from, you know, from a systems perspective, if I was on the IT side to help all my friends who are over there on the business side.

Speaker 0 | 10:56.779

Okay. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that approach to it. Although. I assume that you kind of found yourself in a, how much different was it being in IT, being a female in IT in the late 90s, early 2000? Because I think even then it was the male-female ratio was even worse than it is today.

Speaker 1 | 11:25.307

It was, but, you know, I’m coming from being a female. In a chemical engineering role, I think there was one other female that I graduated with. I started working at a manufacturing facility that was almost all men and the median age was 55. So, you know,

Speaker 0 | 11:49.493

being pretty used to this.

Speaker 1 | 11:51.695

Right. Right. And probably had more challenges as that 25 year old. 100-pound blonde coming into a manufacturing facility when a lot of the men I was working with, especially from the operator perspective, had kids that were older than I was, and some of them even had grandkids my age. So I understand that that’s hard from their perspective. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 12:23.315

Yeah. And I was realizing as I was trying to formulate the way I was going to ask the question that I’m like… wait a minute, you’d left the manufacturing area and it was probably the exact same there going into IT. So it really wasn’t that much of a difference. But going from the operations side, or what I think of as the operations side over into the IT side, what kind of challenges or unexpected experiences did you run into doing that? Because, you know, I know I… I enjoy the solving of the puzzles and finding the configurations that makes it do it the way we want it done and helps those people and being of service that way. But what other kinds of things did you run into that were some of the harder lessons that you had to fight through?

Speaker 1 | 13:14.193

So, you know, the problem solving was very similar on both sides. You know, on the engineering side, it was more tactile. You know, I could feel a line and see if it was running too hot. I could feel the vibration in the pump. You know, you just had to, in IT, go on different types of, I call them fishing expeditions. You know, do a test, tweak something, test again. And you’re trying to figure out what that lever is that is causing the behavior that, you know, is what you don’t want. Right.

Speaker 0 | 13:51.846

Oh, yeah. So many experiments like that. Okay. Hold everything the same. Flip that one switch. Don’t do anything else.

Speaker 1 | 14:01.714

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 14:03.035

You got people who want to flip all those switches and go, is it working yet?

Speaker 1 | 14:07.138

Right. As an engineer in IT, I kind of felt bad for my boss because I don’t think anyone had any idea of what kind of havoc I could wreak. In the in the on the IT side. Yeah. So the plants now had a source in IT and I’m learning all these new reporting tools and SQL and creating queries. And they’re requesting all kinds of data analysis. And I’m crashing the system left and right. You know, we had, you know, I don’t know what it was, half a million record limit. And, you know, I had to go to my boss and go, you know, but I need two million records to cover, you know, the whole year and seasonality and get everything. They had to reset some limits, you know, as long as I promised not to stress the system during peak hours. You know, the whole performance thing. So there was some learning on both sides. And thankfully, I had a very gracious boss. Mike was very patient with me and ultimately got me where I needed to go.

Speaker 0 | 15:24.600

Well, and guaranteed that he was learning at the same time because I remember those. remember running into the same problems in in the early 2000s of of running all of the reporting off of the production system and and how you know somebody who’s like select star from star um but you know somebody trying to do exactly what you’re talking about go through all of the records for a year of every transaction to start getting seasonality trends um and And then trying to do it during off hours or what we ended up doing or what I ended up doing was, as I learned those constraints on the production system, set up that disaster recovery or the business continuity system and made people do the reporting off of that system. Because if it was a few seconds behind, no big deal. But you got to let everybody do the data entry and continue to process at full speed. Otherwise, I’m affecting everybody in the organization.

Speaker 1 | 16:27.556

Right.

Speaker 0 | 16:28.617

Right. Okay. So what other things did you learn about the ERP system, about the product or project life cycle and, you know, the creating new things for the business? How did that kind of stuff go and what did you learn there?

Speaker 1 | 16:46.542

Well, so, you know, as with a lot of especially SAP projects, as people gain experience. they start leaving the company for other jobs, right? Okay. So first, I think our MM expert left. So I inherited that and I inherited SD. And then what was probably most painful is when our FICO person left, having to inherit. FICO and learn about, you know, not only the GL postings, but the controlling and things that I’ve not had the first accounting class. You know, I still dig my feet in and say debits and credits are backwards. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But having to really understand how all that works and asset management. It’s not even anything that I ever considered other than telling finance when the start date of my project was. So, you know, huge learning curve there had, you know, three PL implementations, implemented EDI. Our company had divestitures and, you know, ultimately we sold the company. So after 22 years with the same company. I’m faced with moving my family to the new company or finding another job. And so, you know, I thought it was best for me to try to look for another, preferably SAP job in the Memphis area. And what was funny about… That was 22 years, decent severance package. So I was going to take some time. I, you know, at the time you looked in the classifieds in the newspaper. It’s a little different than it is now. And I kept seeing this, this posting for a local company that was implementing SAP. It was. a financial supply chain company that offered business to business payments and a software as a service model. You know, it’s not my industry. It’s heavy FICO and M.M. Not really my areas of expertise. I look next week and there it was again. And there it was again.

Speaker 0 | 19:40.909

Remind me of M.M.S. real quick.

Speaker 1 | 19:43.531

Materials management. OK, cool.

Speaker 0 | 19:45.631

So just being myself.

Speaker 1 | 19:48.032

Yeah. You know, it was I think it was my last day at my first company and I was headed to Lake Erie to go fishing with my husband. and his parents. And I got a call from a local recruiting company, contracting company that said, hey, you really need to look into this job opportunity. I’d like you to interview.

Speaker 0 | 20:19.307

And this is that same one that you’ve been seeing in the…

Speaker 1 | 20:22.350

I hadn’t interviewed in 22 years. It’d be good practice. It’s never going to work. So… I talked to the controller, he set up a call with the CFO, and bottom line, they asked if I could start on Monday. You know, it was an awesome group of people to work with. It was an awesome environment and an awesome project. Yeah, so. I need to learn not to be so stubborn and to listen to that voice in the back of my head and not be afraid to step out of my comfort zone.

Speaker 0 | 21:05.788

Yeah. And well, I’m betting that joining the cross-functional team wasn’t so much stepping out of your comfort zone. That was trying to help guard your own six, so to speak. But stepping into the IT management was probably getting out of your comfort zone. Um, how old were the kids at this point? Cause that’s part of, I know it would have been a huge part of my decision to how old my kids were and whether I’m moving schools for them or all of those things.

Speaker 1 | 21:40.176

Yeah. Um, so my oldest probably were in middle school at this time.

Speaker 0 | 21:48.499

Yeah. And it’s hard to move them at that point. Yeah, it really is, especially if they’re settled and happy. Now, if they’re hating life and they’re hating the schools, maybe then it’s like, oh, OK, this is a positive. But otherwise, no. OK, so wait, give me that last part about you interviewed and how quickly were you starting?

Speaker 1 | 22:11.029

Monday. I was leaving my job on Friday and they wanted me to start on Monday.

Speaker 0 | 22:16.831

Did you get to go fishing or no?

Speaker 1 | 22:19.492

Well, actually, we were supposed to fish on Saturday. Some heavy wind came in, so we elected not to. And Sunday I was driving home to start my new job.

Speaker 0 | 22:28.916

Wow. Dang. Okay. Well, so much for that time off. But at least now all of that severance became like an extra bonus.

Speaker 1 | 22:38.619

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.381

All right. So tell me a little more about what you experienced and learned at the new one. Especially since now it’s a… So you’re comfortable with the technology, but you’re now the business side, the op side is now an area that you need to learn.

Speaker 1 | 22:59.869

Right.

Speaker 0 | 23:02.171

Versus that situation.

Speaker 1 | 23:04.933

It was an international company. So on top of me trying to shore up what I knew about finance and controlling with SAP. We had operations in the U.S., in Belgium, and in India. So now we’ve got the whole new GL aspect and leading in local ledgers and calculating depreciation differently in India than how they did in the U.S. and U.S. GAAP versus IFRS, the two different methodologies that we were trying to make sure we maintained. You know, huge, huge learning curve. But still, it was I understood SAP, I understood how it worked. So it’s sit and listen to the business. And you tell me what you need from this system.

Speaker 0 | 24:05.652

How much did scale matter to your knowledge and your experience? Because I’m assuming that. the first organization and to the second organization, that the second organization had fundamentally more FTEs and was larger in that sense. Did that make much of an effect? Or since you’re dealing with the configuration of the system and 100 users versus 1,000 users really probably isn’t much of a difference except for the resources needed by the application.

Speaker 1 | 24:42.988

So in terms of actual users in SAP, it was it was fewer users, so fewer people to train. But the fact that this company was a joint venture between Visa and U.S. Bank. it was a whole different scale for expectations. So,

Speaker 0 | 25:08.136

you know, give me a little on that.

Speaker 1 | 25:10.797

You know, just the whole banking industry and controls that have to be in place and, you know, making sure that you’ve got everything that you need from an audit perspective. Well documented so that. You know, you’re prepared for a surprise audit, but, you know, also for the annual audits that every company goes through. But public companies versus small private companies are a lot more rigid.

Speaker 0 | 25:46.841

And I’m sure banking is even more because there’s like I was thinking when you were talking about this, I’m thinking, well, in chemical manufacturing or chemical engineering. There’s some byproduct, there’s some waste, there’s some things like that. But you can’t really, you have to account for every penny when dealing with a dollar. And when you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions, and then the audits. Oh, man. So how much did you have to deal with audits at the first organization?

Speaker 1 | 26:23.643

Well… At the first organization, my audits consisted of EPA audits or OSHA audits. Those were the ones, the regulatory from a chemical manufacturing perspective, were primarily what I was involved in. When I moved to IT, the audits were mainly around SAP users and licenses and the. security that we had. And we had a wonderful basis lady who managed all that. So that doesn’t fall on my shoulders as much. Come audit time for our finance department and from an inventory perspective, I was basically writing reports to provide them information to answer the auditor’s questions, but I wasn’t dealing with them. directly.

Speaker 0 | 27:24.700

Okay. Yeah. And I’m just thinking of how audits changed for us. And for me, it went from writing some reports and providing solutions or not solutions, but those reports to the head of finance, and they would handle it to the auditors to the point of then IT auditors showing up with finance. And then they came over and spent a couple of days in IT going, okay, let’s, let’s. Prove to me that you have password complexity. Prove to me that you’ve got authority control. Prove to me that, you know, more of these things. And, okay, show me the documentation. Show me the training materials.

Speaker 1 | 28:07.171

And, you know, separation of duty. So that you didn’t have somebody that was creating a REC, approving it, and paying the invoice. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:17.840

Or a programmer who could get into the middle of it and do all of it behind the scenes. with nobody seeing it.

Speaker 1 | 28:24.185

Right, right.

Speaker 0 | 28:26.927

Okay. You know, what’s something that you learned throughout all of this that nobody would guess or that was surprising to you?

Speaker 1 | 28:37.494

So, you know, everybody knows that three-legged stool, you’ve got people, processes, and technology, right? It’s so easy to get excited about the… shiny new toy, the technology. But if you throw technology at bad business processes, it just gives you bad answers faster, right? It’s the people side of it that to me is make or break for any project. You can have good technology. You can have good processes. But if you don’t have the people prepared from top to bottom, you’re going to struggle. And, you know, oftentimes change management is seen as just kind of a sideline requirement when it really needs to be part of the critical path.

Speaker 0 | 29:43.342

Or in my experience, it’s part of that. So many people think of it as the bureaucratic red tape versus understanding why it’s so critical and why it helps. helps make that change actual or makes it real compared to just saying, okay, we’ll do that. We’ll do that. You know, it actually, it reminds me of a question I wanted to bring up earlier on training, because you mentioned training multiple times throughout this. And one of the things that I always struggled with was the organization was happy to go through training one time. When you implemented something new or when you started something different, you can have training then. But to insist that you’re going to retrain them on that process six months later, they weren’t very receptive to it. Or management just refused it or refused to follow through and make sure their people went to it. And then they would look at IT and go, well, you didn’t train us on how to do that.

Speaker 1 | 30:56.800

Exactly. And, you know, to me, there are two pieces of that. You’ve got training and you’ve got education. You know, the training is what to do. You know, definitely critical on the shop floor. It teaches them how to do their job, what transactions to run, what to fill in each blank. But it doesn’t cover why. And that’s where I differentiate. between training and education. Education gives you an idea of what the big picture is, what the benefit of the company is, and more importantly, how you’re performing your transaction impacts the people upstream and downstream of you. As hard as you try to communicate both of those things prior to a go live, especially with large projects like an ERP implementation, people are drinking from a fire hose. They’re not going to remember all of that. And a lot of times that why piece, that big picture piece, is not going to really hit home until they’re comfortable with the transactions. OK, I’ve been doing this for a while and now let’s go back. Let’s do some refresher training. Let’s talk about that. Why? Let’s correct some bad habits that may have you may have picked up. And you’ve got to have that to me as part of your project plan. You know, it’s not go live. a month or two of hyper care and we’re done and we’re off to the next project. You’ve got to have that plan to circle back. And that’s where you see the benefit. You know, in the ERP projects, sometimes you have, as part of the justification, headcount reduction. Well,

Speaker 0 | 33:04.082

you know. People love that.

Speaker 1 | 33:05.603

You know, but I have seen that in many. ERP projects, but not achieved because people never really got that good at their job. So if you look at circling back and you see how the transactions are being entered and where the mistakes are being made, you know, there’s an opportunity to automate some of those transactions. Let’s put that. you know, strictly keyboard data entry into an automated process and free people up to use their minds. So people can start thinking strategically and not just every day I enter these transactions and move on to the next.

Speaker 0 | 34:00.040

Let me let me see if I can. I just had a burning desire to try to articulate data. And. a little more succinctly. So the education piece is training them or teaching them initially how the system works. And then the training is the circle back and optimizing the education that they’ve received based off of the experiences they’ve had since they’ve started using it.

Speaker 1 | 34:34.595

Yeah. Yeah. That’s the importance of circling back.

Speaker 0 | 34:38.599

Yeah. And then we can throw in that third circle back or the next iteration of it, of now really trying to gain wisdom from the education and the continued training to now. truly optimize or digitize or automate on the next iteration so that we now are letting the system do more of the work versus the human.

Speaker 1 | 35:12.052

Right. And why do you pay millions of dollars for a system like SAP if you’re not going to utilize this spreadsheet that handles everything? You know, so, you know, MRP works really well. It will alert you when there are exceptions that you need to pay attention to. Now, your master data has to be right so that it’s got the right rules. But it prevents a user from having to touch every single order. Just tell me where I have problems and what I need to address today.

Speaker 0 | 35:52.738

Okay. You bring up… He just mentioned two words that just like sent my antennas way up and made me think about like, it’s a whole nother interview and focus of concentration, but master data and data quality and all of those things. Because you’ve been dealing with, in your career, you’ve been dealing with the implementation of ERPs multiple times and setting all of these things up. When setting all that stuff up, I’m sure that that first time and even probably the second time, master data didn’t really land until after you’d been doing this for a couple of decades. And then how much did that become part of the initial implementation or did it become cleanup after the fact? Because I always found myself doing cleanup after the fact.

Speaker 1 | 36:47.146

Right. And, you know, master data. you’ve got two pieces of it. One is who’s going to own it. A lot of times companies don’t have clear ownership of the master data. It’s a pain in the butt. We don’t want to have to deal with it. Oh, it’s too hard.

Speaker 0 | 37:09.700

It slows me down.

Speaker 1 | 37:11.782

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 37:12.582

I can enter the transaction with five fields, but you want me to enter in 30.

Speaker 1 | 37:18.546

Uh-huh. And I, I think one thing that I’ve learned across multiple multiple implementations is that, you know, you have you’re doing your design work. You’ve got unit testing going on, but then you have integration testing, which is supposed to be the front to the back testing that you’re doing with the business. And. You know, I like to have at least three cycles of integration testing. You do one, you identify some things that need to be fixed. You do a second one. And usually that first one is done with some limited master data. So, you know, you don’t pick up on a lot of your master data issues there. At least by that third iteration of integration testing, you need to be doing a full. master data load. You need to give people plenty of master data to work with and you need to start identifying, you know, where you’ve got problems in that master data. Not only from a strict cutover standpoint and being able to load that master data, understand how long it’s going to take so that in that 24, 48 hours prior to go live. You’ve got a good window to load that. But from a data accuracy perspective, it is invaluable that users trip over those problems that master data is causing and recognize the value of lead times for your raw materials. And, you know, I’ve not. found a better way to do that other than to really have it fully integrated into that final integration test.

Speaker 0 | 39:27.358

When did you start dealing with integrations like this at that level? The transportation industry has been aware of and has needed, but hasn’t had that much knowledge. consumption of or hasn’t leveraged APIs as much as the rest of the world. So they’re still… There’s still some legacy systems out there that don’t really have APIs into them, but people are integrating, but using hodgepodge methodologies. What about in the worlds that you were working with? When did you guys really start working with that level of integration that you’re talking about? Because you’re talking about it at a level that I understand, but I rarely saw people doing.

Speaker 1 | 40:19.479

So I think we’re using integration two different ways. To me, an integration test means that we are integrating all the departments within the company in the test. You’ve got your production plan. It’s creating orders. You’re ordering raw materials. You’re receiving those. You’re consuming them. You’re making the product. You’re shipping it. And finance is checking that it’s hitting all the right GL accounts.

Speaker 0 | 40:48.164

Okay. Yeah, the cradle to grave of the process within the… application for the organization.

Speaker 1 | 40:54.768

Right. I have done some 3PL work, third-party logistics, some EDI projects where we’ve got business-to-business integration going on, which is another set of challenges. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 41:11.742

yeah. Yeah, EDI. EDI is a perfect example of what I’m talking about in the fact that, like, today it’s still using… SFTP, AS2, it’s using the old, here’s a flat file, let me drop it off, versus the API call of, okay, I’m ready for this, this pieces, or these pieces of the information, give me these, give me those, give me that. And then I’ll put all of that together to create the order on the bar side of it. But it’s an interactive communication versus a… creation of and a dropping of a file and then the consumption of the file which for the most part edi is today but it’s starting to make that switch it’s starting to make that that change over to the api and the true integration and

Speaker 1 | 42:03.931

you know sap the way they managed their licensing for a long time you know it’s it’s cloud it’s subscription now so it’s It’s a different licensing model. But in ECC, the licensing you had to be really careful about, because if you integrated another system directly to SAP, let’s say our sales people worked in this system over here and you integrated it to SAP. And even though those sales reps did not. run any transactions in SAP, SAP wanted you to have a license with it. They didn’t want that to be an option for you to skirt licensing. So one way around that was to create that flat file and then have someone with an SAP license pick it up, review it, post it.

Speaker 0 | 43:07.785

OK.

Speaker 1 | 43:09.470

But the EDI, the business to business stuff that’s done now, you know, we are just finishing up one of our major customers implementing Ariba and SAP on their end. And that is while we’re still using a partner to take our information. and map it to the way they need to see it. For smaller companies, utilizing a partner to do that for you is probably more cost effective than having people on staff that have to work through that kind of mapping, unless you are straight standard SAP. And I’ve yet to find… anybody who is, although with what they’re pushing with S4 HANA in the cloud, you know, that’s really what they’re pushing for. It’s just it works better for some industries than others.

Speaker 0 | 44:20.873

I was thinking, you know, who, what organization is vanilla anything? You know, everybody wants to twist the system somehow.

Speaker 1 | 44:34.144

Sure.

Speaker 0 | 44:35.144

Yeah. Yeah, we are. For sure. So here’s another topic and another dark path, different path to go down. With your experience of coming from… the operations side or the business side of the house, going into IT and then helping, you know, another experience of being IT and then working with operations. What’s a topic within IT that is the redheaded stepchild that nobody wants to talk about, that we should shine a little bit of a light on and talk about? Is there anything that you can think of out there that, that, um… that falls into that category?

Speaker 1 | 45:20.405

Well, you know, probably one of our biggest challenges are around trying to get clear requirements from the business. You know, hey, can we implement this little bitty piece of functionality? Right. Well, yeah, sure. But can you tell me the rules around that? You know, when do we do this? What if? that, you know, IT asks a lot of what-if questions. So you get to what you think is a design, you implement it, they use it for a few weeks, and well, what if we tweak it this way? And what if we tweak it that way? And, you know, 12 steps down the road, if we had known we were going there, you know, that that was our final destination, we would have designed that baseline. that table structure, whatever differently. So getting business folks to look long term at where do you think this is going to go? It has has been a huge challenge. So, you know, it takes discussion between both parties to kind of let’s back up and brainstorm for a minute and see what. Where we could take this. What are you trying to achieve? Not just look at the simple request of can we add this field to this report? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 0 | 46:57.119

And that’s interesting because I see that discussion from like three different angles immediately. One of those angles was what my CFO used to always tell me. Just tell me what time it is. Quit trying to build the clock. And. But, you know, it’s the same kind of thing. And so there’s one avenue that I sought from. Another avenue that I wonder about, and it’s a new thought to me, is how do we foster that environment for somebody in operations to start that what-if analysis? Because they start off with this small idea. You just talked about it. Okay, I just want to add this one field. And then once you add that field and they start consuming it and leveraging it, then they get the next idea. And so then now, okay, we’ll tweak it this way, like you said. And then once they have both of them, then, oh, now I conceive of the third iteration or the third step, and I’m up here. And the IT is going, if you told us that from the beginning, we could have made all three of these available. Add it to our main, and then all we have to do is enable the screen share. So how do we get operations or the business to have that chance to do that testing or that growth or that experience without step-by-step? How do we foster that kind of an environment or a place to play or test?

Speaker 1 | 48:38.972

So, you know, I think that, you know, everybody’s plates overloaded these days. You know, people don’t have time to sit back and really spend a whole lot of time thinking. It’s fighting today’s fire and, you know, moving on. Something that I see us doing now is.

Speaker 0 | 49:08.212

pulling people off site you know get them away from the telephones get them away from the from the radios and yeah away from the cell phones and like yeah hold dead hands and

Speaker 1 | 49:24.637

and let’s talk about what the ultimate destination is you know Forget what we’ve got right now. Let’s talk about what that ideal process or that ideal system is. And then see if we can find manageable paths to accomplish different pieces of that. Just going through that process a few times, I think, opens up people’s thought processes to start thinking about that also on a smaller scale. You know, looking at where we want to go and then determine how we get there instead of laying out the pavers, hoping that the last one falls right to that line where we want to be.

Speaker 0 | 50:22.426

Very interesting thoughts. This has been a great conversation, Lee. I truly appreciated it. And it’s been challenging in lots of different ways. I mean, so, you know, this whole discussion that we’re having at the moment makes me, I typed it out for myself, you know, MVP, minimum viable product versus the real goal. We have so many organizations today or the agile method is aiming at the MVP. Okay, let’s get the MVP out as quickly as possible and then iterate and then add and then change and then keep doing this. But then those of us that have had those decades of experience and recognizing how much wasted effort or how much knowing what the final goal is compared to the MVP. that we can make some fundamental design decisions that will enable capabilities, iterations four, five, and six to come out at five times the speed if we know what that final product is versus the iteration, consume, learn, optimize.

Speaker 1 | 51:45.961

Right. And. especially for smaller companies with smaller development teams, you get stuck on that merry-go-round and find it hard to get off and work on something else and start the next merry-go-round, right?

Speaker 0 | 51:58.405

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 51:58.905

So there’s two pieces to that, you know, and I think agile is great for collaboration. You just got to understand the risks.

Speaker 0 | 52:08.147

Yeah. And some of that’s what I was just, what we were just talking about of, you know, the MVP versus the real goal. And, and. spending some time trying to define what the real goal is or the long-term goal versus, okay, what’s our next iteration? What’s our next iteration? I get, okay, the schools of thought of IT and which one’s right, because it really depends on the environment that you’re in, but we’re all in the same environment ultimately. Any other? Huge lessons that you learned or things that you overcame, barriers that you broke through?

Speaker 1 | 52:47.937

You know, whether it’s coming into a new environment or that young engineer going into the male dominated workforce. You know, I think that it doesn’t matter what your title is. It doesn’t matter what letters you have at the end of your name on the business card. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what your education is to a great degree. You can learn something from everybody. So invest that time listening to other people. Listen to learn, you know, not just respond. You don’t you may see some big problems. But don’t just come throwing solutions at people who haven’t learned who you are and where you’re coming from. Listen to see how you can help. Ask to sit in to department meetings, not to tell them what you need, but to listen for their pain points where you might help. And the more you help with those little things, the more trust you gain. for the bigger projects. So that investment in your time is critical for your success at a particular company, but also for your own growth. Life is about filling your tool bucket, right?

Speaker 0 | 54:23.519

Right. And yeah, and it’s not as the people that I’ve met that are Always grabbing the tool to, I can fix that. I can fix this and I can fix that. Versus what are you trying to do? What do you need? And hey, here’s one way I may be able to help. Here’s another way I may be able to help. Versus I can fix it.

Speaker 1 | 54:50.818

Right, right. Because that oftentimes comes across as arrogant. And you really need to listen to where they’re coming from to offer those. But also, as you gain experience, you know, we talked about agile, but earn certification in multiple project management methodology or take the classes. I’m a Six Sigma black belt. I love it because I love the statistics and the measurements. And I’m a man. math nerd. But PMP is also has some really good tools. It’s got great governance, but, you know, frankly, the level of documentation is overkill for small, smaller projects. These put different tools in your tool belt. And so you can choose the right ones at the right time.

Speaker 0 | 55:48.217

And I’ll throw this out there just because I’m experiencing it now. Grab those certifications, maintain them, or at least document that you’ve got them and keep going after more and keep going after more and keep going after more. And if you hold on to those things and the portfolio that you build throughout your career of all of these projects that you’ve gone through, if you grab and throw together a little summary about that project and just set it off to the side, you will have a great. toolbox to draw from and or to impress your next employer with.

Speaker 1 | 56:24.776

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 56:25.757

All right. Well, Lee, I want to respect your time. Thank you so much for today and for spending some time with us on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.

Speaker 1 | 56:35.765

Well, I have enjoyed that. Thank you.

Speaker 0 | 56:38.708

I’m glad you did. And I, too, have really enjoyed our discussion. And I just want to thank our listeners for taking some time out to listen to us. And remember, drop a like and give us a comment and let us know what you think of all of these interviews and what we’re bringing to you. We love the feedback and we really need it. Thank you.