The Right Time To Introduce An ERP

hey everybody i'm jason bittner from triple helix corporation and welcome to our helix insider podcast uh today i'm joined by special guests pedro lopez one of our developers and andy webster are one of our senior developers here at triple helix and today we wanted to talk to you about when is a good time to look in getting a erp system that is a enterprise resource planning software solution for your business so in our world we deal a lot with manufacturers and these types of softwares the erp systems are very very common but a lot of our manufacturing customers who have not yet implemented or obtained an erp system they get to a point in their business where all the information is in different systems and different places and it becomes very apparent that they need to have a system that unifies all of the work they're doing so for example you could have what's called a customer relationship management or a crm software where you store all your customer details that can be in a separate

system but modern erp systems now sort of bring those into one place similarly in the finance side in your accounting side maybe you're using a quickbooks or a phd accounting and those software systems um being separate it makes it difficult to sort of get the big picture of the business and moreover if you're doing manufacturing and you have production you have schedules you maybe have inventory all your materials typically these customers and these companies use individual pieces like spreadsheets and separate systems to manage the company and at some point the volume of this information and all the different things that they're managing gets to be unmanageable and so they look for a unified system to manage it which is now what we call these erp systems there's many many systems out there but what we find is that at some point a company recognizes they need to go after a unified system um andy why don't you give us a little bit of thoughts on from your end on what constitutes a good

time to look at bringing together a unified system right so i mean if you've got an erp already and it's doing most of what you need to do but not quite taking you there yet and maybe you find yourself doing some workarounds in the erp to try to make it do something that it's not really made to do think about um augmenting on your erp and that's something that we do we typically build something that sits alongside it i could think of one instance where a customer had a lot of manufacturing data and they needed to figure out when each of these different jobs in their system need to be run and so they need to slot them kind of in the order that you know brings it kind of brings the information to your attention so that you could say okay this job is really far behind and we need to do that one first but without that kind of analysis of it you don't really know you're at that point the erp is great in that it has everything you need there and it stores it in one place but it doesn't necessarily

always take you all the way to where you know what to do with all that so it's a big power tool the erp system is then becomes the unified point of truth correct like all of the information that you're working on has to go into one place as opposed to disparate places like spreadsheets and paper and whiteboards correct right instead of having to write everything down like if you had everything on a whiteboard for some instance you could instead put that in electronically and once you have something electronically you can manipulate it in all kinds of different ways it might look like um like something we typically build is alongside an erp um it will be a a web portal that'll have a number of reports on it so you could kind of pull from your emp and report based on the data that's already there so you've got all the data you've been using the crp for a couple years maybe and then now that you've been collecting all that data you can you can use it more effectively well i think to complement

what andy is saying too uh is if a company finds themselves uh growing consistently and their spreadsheets are getting you know uh you know for example in the accounting department i get it really big and it's getting really cumbersome to um share that with other departments or for instance they find themselves you know having a lot of you know whiteboards and writing things down and losing track of things might be an indication that some of these things needs to be consolidated digitally into a system and therefore creating a need for erp and then the next question from that is uh where are where are the gaps right and so one thing that we do uh as far as trying to find the gaps is the digital assessment which is something that uh we triple helix develop uh especially for the manufacturing you know industry so uh basically we sit down with the customer we run through this assessment which is a series of questions in different manufacturing fields if you will and we just run through the

list trying to find gaps and opportunities for um you know to implement a solution and at the end we give our customers a report that uh tells them where they fall within the manufacturing industry and where the opportunities are and in addition to that we make a couple of comments as well uh and suggestions or recommendations asks you how to best implement those yeah so that digital assessment is actually a very powerful tool it actually assesses competency in their digital space about all the different things they're doing and it does address erps but it actually goes a little further it actually addresses different practice areas like their cyber security maturity how well they're using their data related to say their customers maybe their quality and and we do that as a free assessment so if somebody was interested in saying hey how are we doing um we run this for them and we let them see where they're at currently and pedro talk to our viewers about how the assessment can actually

show them the path where they should go like the tiered level of our questions right so um off the top of my head i can't remember necessarily like what each question is or uh the sections of it but the assessment takes them through you know different uh portions of um the manufacturing uh process the business and and so uh from that point uh it kind of uh gives them a score from one to four in each question and uh gives them an overall score for each section and so uh based on that we're able to identify where you know how well the company is doing and you know in the future uh how well the company is doing in in reference to um you know the industry but i think that answers the question right yeah exactly exactly so i mean a lot of our customers um when they go through the digital assessment it's sort of telling them where they're at but where they could be sort of like best in class but at some point you know they start to wonder like okay so what would i need for my company in terms

of manufacturing and my competency to to be better and and actually improve things and so triple helix over the years has created something we call a phase zero assessment and the phaser assessment is a gap analysis it goes much much deeper than this digital assessment and what we like to do is we assess the company's practice areas in all areas of the company so that could be the operations administrations sales executive quality you name it and it and it basically looks at all of the different things that a company is currently doing and what they're doing well but more importantly where the challenges are and so said gap assessment allows us to create a roadmap or a plan of improving things sometimes that's a replacement of an erp very often companies that are actually not having an erp kind of where we started here how do you know you're ready for one it would be the ability to help them find an erp which is a very daunting task for companies who've never played with them but in those

situations where those companies already own an erp but they don't really get the full value out of it and they may not be willing to get rid of it you know what do they do so the same gap assessment is actually provides the ability uh to get a road map of i'm here today but i want to go over there tomorrow and what are the steps to go there andy talk to us about like now that you've run this phase zero and now we're looking to make a recommendation on helping a company go from here to there let's talk about it in a way that those companies already have something tangibly invested in maybe an erp is in-house they're not happy with it but they're not going to get rid of it and yet they do need to do something differently because operations are being hindered by the current technologies what would you recommend to a company that is in that situation and how do we help them to to go from here to there and in basically a very logical fashion um well essentially the phase zero you're kind of

getting a feel for what you have and what you need to get to and the phase one is where we actually um lay out a plan for what we're going to do so um typically we'll um go on site get a good feel for your operation um i i can think of one right now where we did something for and operate a uh a business with um a production line and they had all these different sensors at different points along the production line and um you kind of really need to be there for something like that but um and we get a good feel for where everything is physically how your whole business heartbeat works and um and then we set out a plan for um the different steps to implement that really i mean typically uh you know we'll need some of your data like a sample even a sample if there's um technical stuff that um in any case um and we'll go from there typically um yeah how long is it how long does it typically take for us to build something like that i mean we don't we don't do these monumentally large tasks right

i mean we try to micro chunk everything right right yeah so um for like a small task it's typically um it can take three months it can be a larger task could be a year maybe to if you're really overhauling something but if it's just something that's sitting on top of your existing system and augmenting it then those are usually fairly uh fairly small and um and they don't touch your existing system at all so you don't have to worry about that they're um the way we build things we build it alongside so that it's reading from the databases but it's not necessarily changing anything in the database and the way we develop it we always have a testing staging kind of an area so it's a it's a sandbox so um as we go along at different points during the development we will bring people in from your company who know that those particular areas and can verify that things are going that things are correct as you would expect them to be in the different reports i think to complement what andy is saying

is important to note that you know uh almost three six months or what have you uh you know part part a portion of that time is really just getting access to whatever databases uh we need to connect to to work with and really kind of interacting with the client that way to make sure that we have what we need to uh start building the solution right um and then obviously uh you know going ahead and doing the work and um it's very important that all the work that we do it's just like andy said is it's a side step on what's currently being used uh for example we have a client right now who we are building you know different reports they're they're they're looking at their data and they're trying to uh look at a different way so they asked us to build a couple different reports and uh we did so uh without disrupting you know the workflow just you know adding uh value and and to their existing workflow uh and so we developed all that on our test environment uh had them uh verify the data and

then approve it and then we push to production uh without any disruption to their activities so that's a really important point you bring up because when we do these things it's intended not to like affect the day-to-day operations so we sort of in your example like use things in a test or a development environment but everything is non-invasive non-disruptive correct right even even the database access that we typically get uh it's usually read only um and uh we pull this data into the application or uh the report or what or where have you and we organize the data uh to best uh you know create the solution uh but typically we are not you know writing back to the database or you know altering the data in any way we're simply reorganizing the data in a way that uh you know fits the task or you know solves a problem that's a good point andy if we did have to write back to the database how do we do that um the best way to do it is if there is an api that works with your erp what's an api

sorry yes uh application programming interface that's kind of like um it's a step between so if you're directly connecting to your database your erp is built in a certain way so that one part of it changes and the other part's supposed to change but that might not always be on the database level so if you go through the api then all the correct stuff will happen like say um if i change say if i have an invoice and i change um a line of it in the um in the database directly it might and then on the top level of the invoice they have you know the total of how much each line costs um you might it might if you don't go through the api you might that might not flow upwards so um little things like that that it's um but um in in some cases we if we need to write directly to it we can directly connect um as well but we we prefer to use the api because it protects the data environment correct right no good no that's that's very important you know so um kind of just to recap so you know we started

our conversation here about you know how does a company know when they're ready for something better you know we get rid of spreadsheets and paper and and whiteboards and stuff it becomes apparent to the business that they need something better for manufacturers who we deal a lot with an erp system that enterprise resource planning software uh becomes very important um we then decide well how do you know what you're going to need from a technology standpoint even outside of the erp and that's what you said earlier page was our manufacturing digital assessment allows us to gauge a company's maturity level so they know what they might where they're at and what they might need and then they graduate to a phase zero that the phase zero allows them to understand where those gaps are where the opportunities are that if they're buying a new erp a phase zero erp assessment could tell them how to buy a new erp or a more traditional assessment would just give them the knowledge to how to augment

what they have so that it's a non-invasive b cost effective and see can get done in a timely manner to your point andy with the modular development that we do these phase ones are small and and micronized to the effect of that you get meaningful improvements in a reasonable amount of time pedro any final thoughts on that process we just laid out no i think you outlined it perfectly um you know it's essentially what you said uh digital assessments uh introduction introduction uh if you will uh just to gauge some opportunities and situate where where you are and then phase zero is a more in-depth look uh in maybe taking some action and then uh from that point uh you know it's either developing uh something completely custom or uh you know uh adding to an existing uh solution that you already have implemented but always keeping in mind that uh without any disruption to your current uh workflow uh or whatnot so i think that outlines perfectly and obviously if anybody uh finds themselves in

a state where uh they don't know what they are or you know they're you know kind of situated in those uh examples that uh we mentioned you know they're always welcome to reach out and um you know take the digital assessment and start that process so we can help them out and that digital assessment's free right it's absolutely free it's something that we do to help uh you know people within the industry and also uh you know be able to develop a relationship and and and find opportunities for for them to implement so excellent andy final thoughts yeah just um do it sooner than later because the longer you sit in a disorganized state the more you know the more time you're wasting and um and the the more efficient your business is the better you can um you can function and the healthier it'll be so right i mean this you know this is a good point andy and just that that affects your bottom line you know the as your business is growing or running it you know the more efficient and organized

it can be will end up save you money in the long run and so uh taking action uh today is paramount to uh making sure that uh you're you know allow your business to go properly and uh making sure that the bottom line is safe right so final thoughts is you know if anyone out there is looking for a manufacturing digital assessment you know please feel free to contact us this podcast is actually loaded on our website so you can get our contact information that way we'd be happy to run a digital assessment for you kind of give you an idea where you're at and where you might go and if it looks like it might be a beneficial we would recommend a phase zero assessment it's a much deeper dive but it provides a lot more insight as to how the business is doing and where the opportunities are and we would be very happy to run that for you so i want to thank my guests here again pedro and andy thank you for your time today and i appreciate the insights you offered thank you