Navigating Digital Transformation One Step at a Time

[00:00:02.19] All right, we’ll go ahead and get started. My name is Sebastian Habermel. I’m the marketing and Development manager here at NetPlus Alliance. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, creating your digital roadmap plan, prioritize and execute. You know, we hear all the time from our members. Digital transformation can feel overwhelming. But with the right approach, technology can bridge operational gaps, support your people and drive long term growth. In today’s session, we’ll help you assess kind of where you are in your digital journey and, and outline practical next steps no matter where you are in that journey. We’re joined today by experts from LID, a NetPlus service provider who specializes in helping businesses like yours build digital strategies that align with your goals and processes. Today you’ll hear from Matthew Galipo, Simon Dubuc and Mark Menard. Feel free to drop some questions in the Q and A box at any time. Matthew, Simon and Mark, thank you for being here. The floor is yours.

[00:00:52.20] Thank you, Sebastian. So hi everybody. Again, LID Consultants. So we are a supply chain consulting firm. We focus on both physical and digital transformation. So today we will dive into understanding what your digital transformation looks like, how that journey kind of unfolds, and understanding those key steps to kind of take it piece by piece. Understanding this is not a sprint. We want to make sure that we do what we can to get everybody to the final, to the final goal. We will review how to assess your current state and opportunities of what or sorry, assess your current state, understand where the opportunities are, will then align on what your business strategies are. Then define what we see in terms of, you know, phase technology implementation. Understanding that taking these, you know, one step at a time makes the most sense. So first we’ll kind of just dive right into it today, kind of following directly into assessing what that current state and opportunity will be. We want to go to the next slide here. So again our experts will be Matt. Matt Sir Galopo, kind of referred to quickly as Matt. We’ll have Simon as well who kind of runs that practice on the lit side and myself kind of helping moderate.

[00:02:03.15] So any questions? Again, we are somewhat of a smaller group. Feel free to interact. It’ll make it a lot more meaningful for everybody on, on the current webinar but also kind of give some insight to people that are going to listen to it in the future.

[00:02:16.07] Awesome. Thank you, Mark. I think maybe we can just start by doing quick intros, just at least give an overview of what we’re doing at lid. So I’ll Start for myself. My name’s Simon. I’m a director at lid. I oversee our digital transformation advisory practice. So anything that has to do with digital transformation is typically, you know, projects that I will take on. And, Matt, you want to quickly go over your role?

[00:02:37.24] Yeah, of course. So I’m a partner at lid. I’ve been implementing solutions such as warehouse management system, erps, CRMs, and anything that revolves around pretty much operations. For the last 15 years, you know, been working on multiple digital transformation because it’s the key to a successful implementation. And I’m just glad to be here. I know. Mark, you want to go next?

[00:03:00.10] Yeah.

[00:03:00.19] I’m a director at lid, working a lot more on the design side. So understanding how technology and physical infrastructure come together. I do support a lot of what Matt and Simon do, as well as kind of bring in that notion of physical optimization.

[00:03:17.20] Cool. Thank you.

[00:03:19.15] Thank you, Mark. All right, so diving into the first portion of this webinar. So whenever we do have customers that are looking to implement technology, there’s always. There’s always a first step in order to get started. And the first step for us really is assessing your current state and identifying the key opportunities within your business. Yeah.

[00:03:38.21] And I would maybe just add quickly to that. Is typically the reason why you want to implement technology is because you have certain challenge, you have certain pain points of systems that come out of it. There’s a lot of horror stories that people hear about implementing technology. So it’s rarely people say, I want to get into an implementation project, but we know that there’s benefits to doing it, and there’s benefits in making sure that you have the right systems to support your operation. And those typically manifest because of the systems that come up and that you’re hearing from your staff. I can’t do this. I’m little visible on that, so on and so forth.

[00:04:11.20] Yeah, absolutely. And these are things typically that, you know, we’ll call symptoms, or we can call them also gaps in your technology, however you want to call it. Right. These are typically things that will come up from the people that work at your company that will come to you and say, hey, for example, you know, I’m unable to scale with our current systems. I can’t do this new business process that I really want to do just because the systems don’t support it. Right. So this is the. An example of symptoms. And we have a couple on the slide there that that might come up that really will tell you, hey, there is a gap in my technology. I need to make sure that I am addressing that technology. And so this is kind of the starting point. It’s that it’s understanding where you’re from, what the symptoms are and then, and then getting started on your digital transformation journey.

[00:04:54.28] Yeah.

[00:04:55.06] And there’s different ways.

[00:04:56.13] Oh, sorry, sorry.

[00:04:57.19] I’m just going to kind of inquire because we’re talking about assessing the current state. But how exactly would I, would I go by doing that? Right. What is my first step of thinking? How do I get this current state? How do I know where I am today? I have no idea how technology is going forward. I don’t know what technology can do for me. So I’m living in my little bubble. How do I define and assess what my current state would be?

[00:05:21.17] Yeah, of course. So the first thing of that you need to do is you need to understand what are all the different business processes that support the value add operations for, you know, for your enterprise. And then from there what you do is you, you identify what are the manual process, what are redundant process, what are the processes that you’ve been adding headcount to solve for when you could potentially automate. So the first step is really, it seems simple, but it’s very effective. It is to have what we call workshopping sessions where we’re just working with the different individuals at a company. So you find the process owners for your procurement team, for your delivery team, for your sales team, for your operations team, and you ask them, walk me through your day to day, walk me through what you do and how you deliver value and you map out those processes as the current state because you need to confirm with the client or you need to confirm with your operations how things currently are right now and confirm what are some of the pain points that they’re feeling. So the first thing to do to assess your current state is simple, but it is have workshops, have discussions and map that out.

[00:06:30.05] And when you’re mapping it out, you should always map it out to your business process and then see what is the different systems that are supporting your business processes and seeing if you have these manual steps or do you have some disjointed system, siloed systems that cause the system that caused the symptom. A lot of S’s in there caused the symptoms of having siloed information or a low trust on the information that you’re receiving.

[00:06:54.26] Yeah. And if you think about, you know, us when we’re doing this, these projects with, with our customers, you know, we, we sometimes will not know, you know, anything about the business operation from the customer until we have these discovery sessions and just getting people to talk about their day to day and explain what they’re doing and how they’re doing it will, will enable them to kind of raise the flags like, hey, yeah, I have this problem here that when, you know, when I’m, I’m doing my supply planning, for example, that, you know, I don’t have access to the right information. So just by getting people to talk about their day to day and the processes will often bring up these symptoms. So yeah.

[00:07:29.06] And it’s important not take for granted that, you know, a business evolves. Right. And even if you did this kind of exercise maybe three, four, five years ago, odds are things have evolved since then and it’s a good exercise to do again. And a lot of times we notice whenever we’re running these different workshops that people, you know, end up saying, oh, I didn’t know we did that. Oh, I didn’t know we use that. And it’s important to know what you’re doing and that have everyone on the same page of understanding what you’re currently doing as your current state and what are the tools that you’re using. Because sometimes we learn that people build this one off app to do this very specific thing. You know, if you think that a lot of people are just going to use Excel and they’re going to create a ton of different spreadsheets that are going to have a very specific use to it, it’s important to understand how these Excel spreadsheets are supporting your current operation because then that’s how we’re able to understand what is the business requirement that you’re solving for and then what type of systems are available to solve that business requirement.

[00:08:26.24] Yeah. And like Master said, you know, these discovery sessions really are not only for the consultants to understand the operation, but it’s really for the whole business to come together and really understand. All right, well, why are we doing these processes and who is doing, who is doing what within the business? And more often than not, you know, some other departments might have solutions for, for other departments that, that they didn’t know about. So it’s also a really good exercise internally to understand really, hey, what are we experiencing in terms of symptoms within the company? Yeah.

[00:08:54.14] What I’m hearing is, what I’m hearing is that this is not kind of an exercise to take lightly. Right. This is something that we want to make sure we get into the weeds. Mapping single process means not only mapping out kind of the happy path, but understanding what happens if something does not, you know, meet expectations or does not follow that happy path going through it. And I think this is kind of a good, a good little opportunity to dive into some of these symptoms. Understanding, you know, what are some of these components, you may feel that that should trigger, you know, xry different tool. And I think something that came back up a few times during the conversation was making sure that everybody’s on the same page. So understanding that working in silo does not help the operation at all, whether it’s only physical or digital. You got a digital. Sorry. You want to make sure that everybody kind of works together and understands the points to make the best decision. So I think kind of walking through some of these signs of understanding where, you know, some of these, some of these lacked technology components come in and how we identify those would be.

[00:09:57.25] It would be a good, a good next step here.

[00:10:00.04] Yeah, and I would, I would add also understanding what does do previous steps or previous processes have as an impact on future processes. So, for example, if you think of running discovery sessions, how we run these, we’ll typically look at everything from generating a sale all the way to delivering, you know, a finished good. And it’s possible that the operation team creates this Excel spreadsheet that has all the address information for the customer ship to because customer service didn’t enter that initially or because the sales team didn’t request that during the sales process. So what’s important to also understand when you’re doing these discoveries is not only what process are we doing, what systems are we leveraging, but when are we entering what type of information, when are we duplicating that information? Because that’s an opportunity to reduce that duplication and who should be accountable for that data? Because no matter the systems that you have, if you don’t have proper data and it’s not entered at the appropriate time in the process, you won’t be able to efficiently run your operation. And as we think of, you know, assessing your digital maturity, a lot of the times just getting that correct is the first step to implementing any type of technology.

[00:11:13.12] Clean up your data, understand who owns it, and understand who’s going to augment it is a very important part of.

[00:11:20.06] It and in what system too, right? So if we look at, you know, for example, point number four, as we’re looking at the symptoms and you know, we, we put a couple of symptoms on there, the goal was really for you guys to be able to kind of, you know, identify some of these systems that might be happening within your company. But if you look at siloed systems that don’t communicate with one another. That’s a great example of what you just said. Maybe the procurement team, you know, purchases software for them to use, but really it’s not the data that’s, that’s being generated in this system is not going in the systems that departments are using. So really understanding, you know, what is your current digital infrastructure and how these siloed systems might need to communicate with one another to be able to expose that information. So once again, a couple of examples there. I think reliance on external tools such as Excel and or paper is something that we’ve seen pretty much every single business. Right. Excel is a great tool, but it is not a sustainable tool to maintain, for example, master data.

[00:12:15.19] Yeah, exactly. Like Excel is a great tool. And Excel will never go away. So people that say, I want to get away from paper, I want to get away from, from Excel, that won’t happen. Right. The idea is that Excel has its place and is a flexible tool to allow you to complete certain tasks. But these can’t be repetitive tasks or automated tasks or tasks that you want to include in your business process. That’s the idea. But Excel and paper are never going to completely go away. The idea is to understand what is their intended use and then identify what is the right software and process to replace that Excel spreadsheet in the long term.

[00:12:49.24] Yeah, 100%. And as we’re talking about Excel and or paper, I think it’s an important, there’s an important distinction here to make. We built this digital maturity model, right? Because one of the really important things as you’re going through this exercise is also to understand where you’re coming from. So we built these little five different stages of your digital maturity, let’s call it that. And the further you’re going into these stages, the more advanced you are with your use of technology. So, you know, it’s, it’s important to assess your current digital maturity because if you’re thinking, you know, oh, I need to implement AI, for example. Well, it’s like, well, in order to be able to implement AI, you need to have strong data, you need to have a strong foundation for your system. So it’s really understanding where you are within this maturity model and really taking some, some bites that you know that are going to be logical for your company.

[00:13:40.15] Yeah. And understanding where you are and where you need to be. Right. Because a lot of times you hear these very fancy things, shiny objects that software companies are going to throw at you. AI is definitely the latest crave of that shiny object. And don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a lot of use for a copilot type of tools to assist operations. But to simul’s point is that that might not be the answer to everything. And at the same time, if you don’t have a proper foundation, you’re not going to be able to get there. So understanding where you are is important because that’s what allows you to build a proper roadmap, an attainable roadmap for you to get there. So for an example, if right now you’re all pen and paper in your warehouse, and you say, I want to go from pen and paper to a fully automated system, it’s going to be very, very difficult to do and very risk to do as well. Because if you’re pen and paper, you’re very. You don’t have a lot of. Typically, there’s very minimal structure to a pen and paper type of operation, and a fully automated operation has the most rigid amount of structure they could have.

[00:14:46.23] So thinking that you’re going to go from pen and paper to automated in one step is a high risk, because if you don’t get it exactly right, you don’t have any wiggle room. And that’s where it’s important to say, no, I’m pen and paper. Let me go to some. Some kind of directed warehouse management system that gives me some flexibility, and then I kind of iteratively work through that. And that’s where it’s important to understand where you’re at right now and how much your company is able to take on how well defined your business processes are, how these could be automated or put in the system, because it has to be done in an incremental way for it to be a successful implementation.

[00:15:19.29] Yeah, absolutely. If I go back here, I think it’s a good. Yeah, go ahead, Mark.

[00:15:26.10] One of them that kind of stands. Stands out that, I think is something that a lot of people can face, especially as they’re kind of growing, is the highest. The high dependency on individual knowledge. Right. Of a person’s individual knowledge. You know, a lot of the times IT departments might be one or two different employees that kind of have all the tribal knowledge inside their heads. Obviously makes it very difficult to train new employees as you’re coming in. I see that as something that, you know, it’s a cue to move something to something a little bit more sustainable, to a platform, to different systems that. That will have kind of these different, you know, planning and components and and reference manual tools for, for bringing up the next generation and understanding where we’re going from there.

[00:16:12.04] Yeah, yeah.

[00:16:13.08] That kind of goes back to the, to the first, first point where we’re saying whenever we’re doing discovery session and workshops, what we need to understand is what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Because to your point, a lot of, a lot of times some people are going to have some tribal knowledge and they’re going to say, well, I know that once I’ve completed, for example, my pick, then I need to look at my carrier list, I need to look at the different prices depending on the reason I need to do. And like, it’s important that they tell us what they’re doing to understand what the tools they’re using. But more importantly, it’s important to stand why they’re doing it because the, why they’re doing what the business need is that allows us to find the right tool to solve for that business need. Because as you’re thinking about your digital transformation, you don’t want to reimplement your process in a new system. You want the system to support your business operation and you want to do it in the most efficient way possible. So it’s really important to say, what is my business process that I need to achieve and how is the system going to support me?

[00:17:06.12] And that is possible. That that requires some change and that ties into your maturity level as well, because there’s going to be change that needs to be done from a process from a people and a technology perspective. And that’s where you need to be able to take those bite size to get the tribal knowledge out of people’s head and start automating some of these processes or adding these processes in different types of system.

[00:17:27.16] And I think maybe to give an example, a practical example that I’ve seen at a customer, I’ve seen this customer that implemented an erp, right? So they went to, you know, they went from no system to a system. And while doing the implementation, they, they didn’t use the opportunity to get the tribal knowledge from their planner to put it in the system. So they were trying to use the system, but the data just wasn’t in there. So really taking that into account when you’re doing the implementation, saying, all right, well, as we’re implementing the system, we need to make sure that this tribal knowledge is being taken into consideration and it’s being brought into the system in order to be able to use it.

[00:18:05.02] Yeah. If ever anyone initiates an implementation project and says, let’s migrate your data and processes over. I would say that’s a red flag just because you shouldn’t be migrating something that you’ve probably, you know, solved for, designed 10, 15 years ago. When you put in that technology, you should be implementing solutions that solve your current needs that are based more on an agnostic approach of the new system.

[00:18:34.17] So now we’ve assessed, we’ve assessed kind of this current state. We understand some of these, you know, symptoms, some of these opportunities that we can use to get better. Right. Move the whole, the whole operations better with technology. We understand kind of a little bit of what that, you know, digital maturity model looks like, understanding where we are on that model after our current state. Now the goal is to understand and align on where we want to go. Right. And Matt, you’ve talked about, you touched on this a little bit. Understanding your processes, understanding where you want to go in the future, not replicate your current. So what are my next steps? I now I know where I, I know where I am, right? I know kind of the models of where I kind of want to go. What are the right steps here to defining those ideal process flows to then make sure the technology kind of moves with you. So strategies and understanding what, how, how to go forward to implement this.

[00:19:26.20] Yeah, that’s a really good point, Mark. And as we move on to this next slide, you know, after you’ve done these discovery sessions, you’ve involved pretty much every department within your business. There’s going to be a lot of symptoms that come up, right? People are going to be very vocal about, you know, what is not working well for them, what they would like to see in the future. And then you have to take all of this and make decisions on, well, what do I address first? Right. And this is why it’s really important that after you’re doing this, you take a step back and you’re like, well, what is my, my business strategy? What am I trying to solve for? What am I, what are my objectives for my business here?

[00:20:01.20] Yeah, and I mean, we, we put a few examples of certain objectives, but, you know, we’re going to typically hear, oh, I want to improve customer experience. Yeah, great. Like, it’s a great objective to have. Everyone should aim to improve customer experience, but then you want to go a little deeper in that because you want to be able to set metrics that allow you to identify has this implementation actually solved for this, met this business objective. So if you, if we take improve customer service, I would challenge everyone on this call or everyone that’s Listening to this call afterwards and thinking about digital transformation to really get to the root of what that means. Well, does that mean I want to reduce the time it takes to address new service tickets that come in? If so, by how much time do we want to go from 48 hours to 24 hours? Right. Like we need to set objectives that are quantifiable and that we feel are able, are going to be able to be measured afterwards to say if this was a successful implementation or not. The other reason why you want to push a little further and not just say we want to improve customer experience is depending what you want to improve in your customer experience, it might require different levels of functionality and complexity in business solutions.

[00:21:15.05] So for example, if you’re saying I want to improve my customer experience, so when my customer service team receives a call, they have the customer information in the system and they are able to look up at the orders they’ve placed in the last seven days or last month, so on and so forth. Well, that probably can be achieved by having just a contact information in your ERP or customer information in erp, and it could be relatively straightforward thing to do. So low level of mature digital maturity. If you’re saying no, no, actually that’s not what I mean when I say I want to improve customer experience. What I mean when I want to improve customer experience is to say whenever a ticket comes in, it’s going to automatically create a case for my engineering team to review the, the design that was initially submitted and that then engineering Theorem is going to integrate with their CAD software to return an updated CAD that will then send an email and then you’re adding these levels of automation on top of it, which is great because that might be where your business is and where your maturity is, but then that’s a very different need and how you’re going to solve it is a very different thing.

[00:22:17.24] So it’s important to go one step further in understanding what do you mean by improving customer experience, what are the processes they want to put in place and what are the metrics for success that are going to identify if you’ve reached that objective or not?

[00:22:32.11] Yep. Because depending on what you identify as being these key metrics and these key objectives, it might gear you in different, different directions in terms of, yes, the system that you decide to select to do an implementation, but also, you know, the complexity of the, of the implementation as well. Right. And I think, you know, lid being a supply chain consulting firm, we always see that, that third one, how can we improve warehouse productivity Right. Everyone wants to improve their warehouse productivity, but it’s really a matter of def what key metrics you want to improve in your warehouse. For example, if you decide that you want to improve picking, for example, right. That improve picking by 20%. Well, if you define that key metric properly, then when you’re looking at systems, when you’re going to market in order to see, well, do I need a wms, do I need, you know, some, a smaller tool that I can just plug into my erp, you’re really, you really know what to look for and you’re really able to identify what’s going to help you attain that objective.

[00:23:28.02] Yeah, and, and it’s really a question of as you’re thinking of these objectives and someone says, hey, we want to increase our service level, for example. Well, does increasing our service level mean increasing our fill rate or does it mean decreasing our time to, you know, to delivery? If it means increasing our fill rate, well, that might be an actual planning tool that’s going to solve for that. If it’s time to delivery, it’s more a warehouse management system that’s going to increase your efficiency at picking. So we really need to get to that lower level to really identify what is the functionality and what is the right system to be able to do that. And then importantly, after you go live, go back on it and it’s impossible to hit everything. It’s impossible that after your go live you’re going to have done everything perfectly, nothing’s going to have changed. So be open to be, be truthful to yourself. When you’re evaluating these metrics and you’re looking at them and seeing what was solved, what was insolved, and then work iteratively on the ones that weren’t necessarily solved or you didn’t completely meet that metric, but it’s important to track them because that’s what your objective of implementing technology is.

[00:24:28.05] It’s never to get that shiny object right. It’s exciting that shiny object, it’s exciting AI. But if it doesn’t meet a business objective, there’s no reason to do it.

[00:24:36.11] Yeah, exactly. And I think this is why this fifth one, how do I enable end users to make data driven decisions is so important. It’s because, yes, it’s nice to have all these different features, right. But if you don’t have a strong foundation for your technology ecosystem that allows you to maintain your data and report on your data, then you might not even be able to identify what these key metrics are. And if you’ve actually been able to hit them. So really making sure that when you’re looking at your objectives, when you’re looking at where you are currently, you’re really making decisions based off of I want to be able to have my data be centralized and have a strong foundation for my technology.

[00:25:13.03] Yeah. And what decisions are you trying to make? Right. Are you looking at dashboards? Do you think they’re great? Or every time you’re looking at dashboard, you’re identifying a next step or something to resolve by some of the metric that you’re looking at. So go level further. What data driven decisions are required? I need to be able to know when to reorder, I need to be able to know when to staff, I need to be able to know these different things. And that’s how you’re able to get the data, the visuals that help answer these questions.

[00:25:40.13] Yeah, and that’s a really good point, especially on reporting. You know, we’ve had system migrations where clients have been telling us, hey, we just need the exact same reports, we need them to be carried over. And really doing that exercise of saying, well, what exactly are you getting out of this report? What decision are you making based on the output of this report? That’s a really important step in an implementation because sometimes, you know, you’re able to combine reports, remove certain reports, use out of the box features in order to make these decisions. So really understanding what you’re trying to get out of these things is, is very important, especially around reporting.

[00:26:15.09] Yeah.

[00:26:17.07] So I think there’s a lot that we’re hearing and there’s a lot of reporting and internal communications that are going to happen. Sometimes we want to focus on the customer. Right. We think about that customer experience. It could be as simple as omnichannel ordering, being able to order from an app, give them that experience. It’s going to be slightly more advanced than the modern world of saying everyone’s on their phones continuously. People probably like to order from that app. What do I require in terms of digital maturity or digital, you know, application park to. To be able to do something as simple as saying, hey, I want to create a website that I can order from. Like, where does that fall on the scale?

[00:26:58.23] I mean, it could range from, I would say a level two all the way to a level four. Right. It could have a very large range depending on what you’re trying to achieve. For example, if we take a very basic, I’ll use Shopify, because Shopify tends to be a simpler implementation for an E commerce site. And you take that and you say, I’m just going to hook it up to my erp. I’m not going to show the inventory levels to my clients. I’m not necessarily going to provide them the ability to shop the rate shop for different carriers. I’m not going to process return. Right. I’m keeping it very, very simple where I’m just saying, hey, I’m publishing a catalog of items to customers and they could use this catalog of item to build an order. And that order goes to a customer service agent that will call and then confirm the, the additional required information before shipping. That could be very, very simple. If you want to provide the same kind of visibility of your customer service team or an external sales sales rep to a client on a website, that’s where you could add a lot of complexity because there’s going to be questions that you’re going to be asking yourselves that the sales rep typically has a conversation which is, hey, how much inventory do I currently have when I’m going to have more inventory?

[00:28:09.27] What distribution centers have that inventory? Where do I want to ship from? Do I want to ship from multiple warehouses or do I want to ship from one warehouse? How do I want to consolidate? Do I pay shipping? Do they pay shipping? Do we take returns? Like, it can get pretty complex. So depending on what you’re trying to achieve, it could go from something very simple to something very complex depending on how much you’re trying to offload to client. And that’s where it becomes interesting to understand what do the majority of your clients want and address that first and then slowly ease into more complexity.

[00:28:39.26] Yeah, and you might also, you know, start with a level 2 and start with a very basic website. You know, just people are placing orders, you’re grabbing these orders manually and printing them and dispatching them to your warehouse. And that’s. And that’s good if you’re at that level. And then once you start to scale, you have more and more orders, you start having multiple distribution centers, then you might want to automate that process a little bit more and hey, and say, hey, I want Shopify to send the order to my ERP to then send to my WMS to then get picked. And then, so, so, you know, to answer your question, it is a. There’s not a clear answer on this. It really depends on, you know, your business objective and what you want to be able to offer your customer.

[00:29:15.19] Yeah. And what your infrastructure is. So if we take it a step further, for example, you have stores and you’re selling online. Well, do you need an order management system in between of that to say, are you shipping from store? Are you replenishing your store? Are you? Right. There’s a lot of complexity that could get behind that. So, you know, all kind of pickup in store or that type of stuff will add a level of complexity. So it’s really a question of what you want to do. Could be really simple, you’re selling something out of your garage on Shopify or very complicated, you are distributing from a DC stores, drop shipping, so on and so forth and want to give complete autonomy to your client. So there’s a large range in it. And it’s important to also go back to your business objective. What are we trying to solve? What are we trying to gain as customer experience or reduce manual clerical entry on our, on our part?

[00:30:04.08] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:05.08] So I want to, I want to bring back a few, a few of the points that I think are quite important, especially when we’re dealing with this kind of, you know, business strategy. One is don’t replicate what you’re doing today, tomorrow. Right. The notion of putting in a system means it’s also time for change. It’s time to see can I do things better. I think that’s a big point that’s kind of been pushed down quite a bit, or we’ve been talking about it quite a bit is understanding and making sure that your future state truly is beneficial. But understanding all of those processes will also help you pick the right technology. Which comes to the second point, which may be a good way to kind of walk into implementation components and roadmap. What we’re thinking here is there are a lot of tiers to this, meaning there’s a lot of software that do different tiers. Without properly mapping out your future, it’s hard to assess what tier and what level of technology you want to kind of implement because there could be a pretty, you know, big pricing difference between a tier one and like a tier two, or call it a tier three solution.

[00:31:10.20] And the way that you’re going to understand what that decision will be is by being able to know where you want to go, you know, five, 10 years down the road. And understanding, yeah, you know, in the future, I really do need this tier one. I know it’s a bigger investment right now, but there will be benefit of learning the solution as I go. Right there is that whole notion of one, rethink your process, rethink what you’re doing. Obviously guidance from experts will help tremendously because they’ve done it multiple times before. And then understanding the panoply of technologies that you may have access to to make sure you find one that meets your needs. Right. The goal here is not to customize something, just to be fully, fully accurate on what you have. It’s grabbing something that out of the box will maybe do, you know, 75% of what you need and then you can have that 25% of custom that no matter what solution you go with, you’ll have no choice to do something like that.

[00:32:05.06] Yeah. And I think maybe just to explain the concept of tears a bit more to anyone on the call that might not understand that concept. If we think, if we take a very simple example for a, you know, warehouse functionality, so if we think of a, an erp, you typically have some type of warehousing functionality in erp, right? You’re going to be able to create a receipt, you’re going to be able to create a shipment, a pick, so on and so forth. So how that works is that in an ERP you would typically consider that a Tier 3 type of system where you’re going to generate a receipt, you’re going to print out that receipt and you’re going to give it to a receiving clerk. A tier 2 might be something where it’s still attached to your ERP or heavily influenced by your ERP, but you’re adding barcode scanning in it. So instead of printing out the receipt and giving it to your receiver, you’re going to say, hey, I’m going to create the receipt so you know what’s coming in. But during the receiving process you’re going to do data capture as you’re doing your receiving process.

[00:33:01.08] This way we don’t have to manually key it in after. And tier one would be, as you know, it’s going to be completely detached from your ERP, is going to be a best of breed system. And what that means that when I’m receiving, I might receive against an advanced shipment. Notice that I could just scan the box, they’ll know everything that’s in it. Or I’ll be able to do advanced QA or I’ll be able to have these advanced functionality put away, algorithms, automation, so on and so forth that might apply. Right. So when we think, when we’re Talking about a tier 1, 2, 3, it’s really a question of like the level of complexity that we’re looking at. And a great example of understanding those tiers is a WMS in an erp, a data capture that’s leveraging ERP functionality and a best of breed solution. And to Mark’s point, when we think of a, of defining a roadmap, sometimes it’s to say, hey, let’s implement a system first, let’s get the data right. Let’s even start by having using a Tier 3 functionality out of that system just to get people accustomed to it, knowing that this will then be phased out by tier one system in, you know, 18 to 24 months.

[00:34:07.14] Right. Because the idea is that the systems that you’re implementing are all supported by data, are all supported by processes. And sometimes when we think of building out that roadmap, it’s too big of a bite. Depending on where your digital transform, your digital maturity is to go from not using any kind of system to simulate point before to having a fully automated instructor suggested put away algorithm in your distribution center. Right. You might want to bite size it, but you know that in five years you will have increased volume by 500 because you have, you know, very strong growth objectives and then you’ll know you need to get there. So properly confirming your system architecture is the first step of that. Understanding where you want to go doesn’t mean that you need to implement it right away. It just means that you need to build the proper foundation and understand where you’re going to be going in three, four, five years.

[00:35:01.24] Yeah, and this is what we tried to represent on there. This is, you know, an example of what you would typically see in terms of a roadmap. This one is, you know, over multiple years. So what the first thing that you would do really is confirm your system architecture. Right. So what do we mean when we say confirm your system architecture? You need to be able to, based off of the pain points that you’re, that you’re seeing today, based off of these symptoms that were identified through discovery sessions, based also on your business objectives and what you want to prioritize. What is going to be my future state system architecture. So you’re going to define in this case, right, in this example that we have on there that you need an ERP and you also need a wms. And then it’s a matter of defining, well, what needs to happen first. So in this example we said that the ERP implementation would be the first step in order to have a strong foundation and core processes. So this is something that we typically will see. You know, you need to have a foundation where your master data will live.

[00:35:55.17] You need to get your people accustomed to using a system for warehouse processes is a good example. Right. You might want to start by, you know, having your inventory be loaded in the system, but still doing picks, you know, with paper or, or, or, or rather manually for that, that first six, to send six to 10 months of implementation. So that first step here that we have back office operations, ERP implementation, the goal of that really is to set a strong foundation, set your core processes in a system to start gathering data to then be able to grow within, you know, your system architecture.

[00:36:27.00] Yeah, and sometimes we’re going to hear people say, yeah, but what I really care about is my distribution operation. That’s what needs to be fixed. I don’t need an erp, I just want a WMS fair potentially. But the problem or the challenge becomes, and it’s a case by case, that’s something that we need to evaluate and that’s the kind of work that’s done through this type of exercise is to say, let’s say we did start instead with the WMS inflation versus erp. Does the WMS have the right data to be able to operate properly? Because the WMS gets its data from the erp, it’s possible sometimes to circumvent, but sometimes if you do try to circumvent that, what you get is this siloed process once again. And the WMS won’t operate properly because it doesn’t have the right data. Simple example, you have a freezer and a fresh zone. If you don’t have someone during the item creation process that probably identifies zone control against the item or allergens against the item, your warehouse management system will be able to properly do a suggestion of where to put it away, because it doesn’t have the right data to make that suggestion.

[00:37:29.13] So it’s just a question of understanding. Okay, well, I understand where my pain points. I know I need to get to wms, but to be able to do that, the data entry that happens before that is going to be done in another system because it’s going to be done by another part of the business. And if you try to circumvent that, then that’s when we hear these horror stories. Sometimes people saying system’s not working. It’s rare that the system is not working. It’s most typically a question of I don’t have the right data, it’s not implemented properly, or we don’t have the right change process in place.

[00:37:58.26] So, Matt, are you saying that even if I identify what my key business strategy is, what are the pain points that I’m trying to hit right off the bat, I might not even be able to act on these as a first step?

[00:38:13.03] That’s Exactly. And that kind of comes back to the digital maturity that we were talking about before. If you’re at a level one and you’re trying to lead at level four, unfortunately you need to get the building blocks going to do that. And that’s where you need to have a real strategy to get that done and understand that these things take time to happen properly.

[00:38:31.07] Yeah, they take time. They take resources also. Resources. I’m talking about capital, but I’m also talking about your human capital. Right. So do I have the team that to be able to support, you know, implementing such a system is also a question that you should be asking yourself. And the big advantage also of having a roadmap like this with phased implementations is if you’re looking, if you’re thinking about capital, Right.

[00:38:51.17] You’re.

[00:38:51.26] You’re spreading the investment over multiple years, which sometimes is something that’s much easier to take take on as a business.

[00:38:57.18] Yeah. And you’re getting value quicker as well. Because if you would think of this implementation, to do an ERP and WNS implementation, if you were doing it all at once, it might take hypothetically 12 months. Right. If you’re doing just ERP, it might take you eight months. So yes, the ERP and the WMS, one after the other might take longer overall, but you’re going to have value delivered to your operation quicker and you’re going to be able to learn as you go and realign as your business grows as well. You know, we’re seeing more and more business are benefiting from this type of approach. And with the rate at which technology is evolving and the rate, as you know, the market is changing as well, taking these smaller bites allows you to be a little more agile, get things deployed quicker and benefit from these investments.

[00:39:44.07] Yeah, absolutely. And if we’re looking at the third step on this roadmap, which I think we are at, once you’ve implemented your erp, once you have your strong foundation that is set, your teams are used to the system. This is when you can start actually improving them and going to that third or fourth step, if you look back at the digital maturity model. So what we put on there is advanced ERP features. It’s something that you are able to then put forward once you have your strong foundation. What do we mean when you say advanced CRP features can range from anything to from process automation. Right. I want the system to automatically do certain repetitive tasks that were being done.

[00:40:20.03] OCR is a good example of it that we typically see.

[00:40:22.22] What is ocr?

[00:40:23.12] Matt Optical Recognition Image recognition. So ultimately what it is is for example your accounts payable team, when they get invoices to automatically scan them in and have that invoice be generated by the system and match it it to whatever you purchased. That’s a good example. Some kind of advanced features that you’re going to implement after. If you try to do it right away, it might be convoluted or people might get mixed up with the details. It’s an easy thing to implement afterwards.

[00:40:48.23] Yeah, that’s a good point. We put something like edi, right. If you’re trying to get access to bigger customers and you want to be able to transact via EDI with these customers, then that’s something that you are going to be able to implement with a strong foundation. And E commerce is also something that advanced E commerce features will become available once you have a strong foundation with your erp. For example, if you’re trying to publish your inventory on your website from your erp, that’s something that you might be able to do afterwards.

[00:41:16.27] Yeah, and it’s always tricky. E commerce is always a tricky one because a lot of people want to do E commerce and ERP at the same time. But what tends to happen when you do that is there’s a lot of back and forth like where certain things should happen between the different teams, between the different integrators. So what we’ve seen being very beneficial. Say no, implement an ERP first, get a good foundation and then easily tack on an E commerce website. Or just make it a very simple E commerce implementation at first, such as showing the item catalog or something very limited that you could easily publish and get value out of and then iteratively working through it.

[00:41:51.18] Yeah, fully agreed. And if we move then to that fourth step afterwards, realign system architecture. Right. We call that return on experience. If you look at the steps previously, you’re about two years down the line. Maybe your objectives have changed, maybe you know, your business has changed. So creating your system architecture at the beginning is really important to know where you’re going to be at in a couple of years. But it’s also important to always go back to it and make sure that you’re still addressing the key, the key topics and your key business objectives. So that’s why we put, we put this in there. It’s really having a return on experience, saying hey, you know, we determined that we needed, you know, a WMS system. Is this still something that is relevant today? And maybe, you know, maybe your objectives has changed. Yeah, so this Last step really in this case is a WMS implementation. Right. So if you’ve outgrown the ERP system for warehousing functionalities, you want to add something that’s maybe a little bit more automated, a little bit more complex, you’ve got multiple warehouses. Then you might want to look at doing a wms and this is something that you could do afterwards.

[00:42:53.28] Once you have the foundation, once your data lives in an erp, you’re then able to implement a system like, like this. Yeah.

[00:43:00.05] In this example, we’re saying your data lives in erp, but it’s, it’s different for everyone. Right. Your data might live in different systems. Some companies will require to use a product information management solution versus having everything in erp. Other people are going to opt for different data strategies. But this example we felt was, was a relatively straightforward one to understand. But the idea is, as you’re building this is to identify where your data resides, what systems are involved, and how do you need to deploy that technology in a logical way, that you are quickly gaining benefits from it and that you’re not building something they’re going to need to necessarily rip out or, you know, circumvent afterwards.

[00:43:44.29] Yeah, that’s a good point. Obviously this is an example. I’m sure if we were to do this exercise with, with any of you, it would be different from business to business for sure. It always is. Some of them are more complex than others. But essentially this is really what a phase implementation will look like, really identifying, you know, what I need to do in a first step to be able to address my, my business objectives.

[00:44:08.20] Guys, I mean, great, great conversation. We definitely through, flew through some time here. I just want to give the opportunity to see. There’s not, I don’t see anything currently in the Q and A, Sebastian, on your end. I don’t know if you have, you know, anything that came up on your side. Just kind of want to open the floor now to see if anybody in the audience has any questions. Just type them in. Kind of give it one or two minutes before we kind of wrap this, this whole thing up.

[00:44:31.29] Yeah, Mark, the biggest thing is for us is like a lot of people see this journey, this roadmap as like having an end, but really this is like an ongoing process. You know, perhaps your team could speak to just what it takes from a commitment, from an organizational standpoint, to be dedicated to really following through over the course of many years and that this really doesn’t have an end.

[00:44:49.22] Right.

[00:44:50.00] That if you’re going to continue to innovate. That’s part of your culture, you know, what does that look like from an organizational standpoint?

[00:44:59.01] Yeah, that’s a great question. So obviously you need involvement from your different teams. Right? Involvement from the teams is something that is crucial. As you’re doing these implementations, as you’re going through this process, you always need to make sure that everyone is involved, everyone has a voice, so that everyone is on board with the systems implementation. Right. So the more you can get your teams involved, I think the more you will set a nice foundation for everyone to participate and make sure that you are implementing these tools properly.

[00:45:27.22] Yeah, And I would say involved is important, but I would say owning the design, owning the solution is as important to being involved. Right. So the implementations that we see are successful is whenever the leadership believes in what is being pushed forward, what is being implemented. And they don’t see it just as something that you need to do. It’s something that buying needs to come from the top, top of the organization. And then from that buy in you are going to be able to get the teams involved and get the teams owning their solution. One thing that, you know, we sometimes notice whenever we do implementation projects is people say, oh well, your software, you know, does this and you know, it’s, it’s never the integrator software, it becomes the company software. Once they start the implementation, they, they need to take ownership of it and that’s how they’re going to continue iterating through it and grow with these, with the solution. So Sebastian, to your point, this, this is not a start to end journey. There’s a start to end to the project for that particular implementation. But once the implementation is, is, you know, deployed, it’s the start to iteratively growing into it.

[00:46:39.16] And that’s why, you know, we took an example of saying, you know, get a good foundation in and then iteratively grow, go through that implementation. And the people that drive that change, that drive those incremental improvements aren’t going to be the system integrators. They’re going to be the people that are using the solution or bringing back up the challenges that they’re getting and making sure that they’re resolved from a system standpoint versus creating additional spreadsheets or additional side processes to work through a challenge. Because even after the implementation challenges are going to continue coming up, the business is going to continue to evolve. And what’s important is that there is buy in from leadership on these initiatives, there’s importance from the business on these initiatives. And that Everyone understand that you need to dedicate not only time but curiosity to what you’re doing and how you could continue to use to improve.

[00:47:26.26] Yeah, and one thing that we found with these pre projects, you know, we were talking about discovery sessions. Making sure that you’re getting everyone’s voice before actually selecting and implementing the system is something that’s been really beneficial for our customers because then once you do decide to go forward with the implementation, everyone knows exactly why we’re doing that implementation and what’s going to come next and what we’re going to get out of it. And just making sure that everyone knows that before you start a project, I think is really important.

[00:47:57.20] Any other questions? And I know that other people are going to watch this afterwards and I’m sure the people that are watching are going to think about it afterwards. And if you have any questions, feel free, reach out. We’re always available. You know, this is something that we love to talk about and we love thinking through. So, you know, hopefully we covered enough material to, to get you all thinking about this and understand what, what you should plan for either this year or next year or whenever that is, to be able to meet those business objectives. But feel free to reach out to, to the NetPlus team or to anyone else if you have any questions. Questions.

[00:48:38.08] I really guys, really, really appreciate the time. Sebastian, we’ll kind of hand it back off to you.

[00:48:42.19] Yeah, I just want to thank you guys for the time today and our members for the engaging session. This webinar is being recorded and will be available on the NetPlus Academy, powered by Bluevolt. You also find more tools and support from LID there. If you do have any questions, of course you can reach out through the through our Net plus portal. Reach out if you have any other questions. We also do have two upcoming web webinars next month, including a safety webinar with Ergonine. Be sure to register for those and we’ll see you at the next one. So thank you again to the team at lid. They will be at the annual meeting again this year, so stop by the booth there as well. All right, everyone.

[00:49:17.04] Hope you take care everyone.

[00:49:18.16] Thank you. Cheers.