ERP Implementation Strategy: How to Get ERP and CRM Projects Right

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season. We are getting unstuck. We're moving forward, getting momentum. All of those good things that are moving us off our butt and into the new year, getting more productive, getting products out there and all of that kind of stuff. This is the Building Better Developers podcast, Develop-a-Nor podcast. I am Rob Roydhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, also one of the people that is not stuck right now because we're about to dive into part two of our conversation with Dustin. We're going to talk ERPs. We're going to talk CRMs. We're going to talk AI. We're going to talk a lot of letters and we're going to put them all together and we're going to have a great time doing so. Before doing that, also, I happen to be the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you with a technology reality check. It's so much what we're talking about this episode is sometimes you really need to understand where you are before you get off, jump in your car and go off on vacation. If you don't have your bags packed and you start going, you're going to have some issues with that. Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is I am after a long winter. Spring is here. I have got like I'm seeing nice weather. I've seen the sun. Sometimes the seasonal stuff is just you really got to have that kind of season. Sometimes it's like we do it in work. We do it in life. It is sometimes very nice to be moving on to that next season. The bad point, a bad thing that I've been running into lately is, jeez, I'll just go there. The world is falling apart. You should come listen to this more often because I go to these other places and I hear news and it's just depressing. People out there like just we need more happy people. We need less angry people. We need more like love, less hate. I know it's all foo foo and all that kind of stuff. It's not going to be one of those kind of podcasts. You'll find out very soon because Michael's quite the hater that we're about to talk to here, but I can. Yeah, it's just like seasons. I'm ready for a new season there as well. I'm also ready for my season of introduction to be done and Michael to introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Melaschmo, the co-founders of Develop and our Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we build and test custom software that eliminates your bottlenecks. That way your business can run smoother and grow faster. Good thing, bad thing, we are getting into better seasons here in Tennessee. The weather's getting better, starting to get out again, starting to enjoy the outside more after being cooked up for months on end. Literally couldn't leave the house for two weeks due to ice. So yes, weather's finally nice. We're able to get back out in the world and enjoy things. Bad thing, agree with you Rob. I'm back on the news fast. I am trying to avoid anything negative out there right now. The world is just a crazy place and I'd rather just go outside, watch the birds and enjoy the sunshine and enjoy talking to our guests here. And you know, that is like, that is a cure for all that ails you is just come here on a regular basis, hang out with us. We're going to have some fun. We're going to, yes, yes, we are going to complain a little bit. We're going to show some bad stuff that is like Project Combat and stuff like that, but it's not near as bad as what it could be. And we're going to help you find ways through it, which is where we're going to go with this conversation is Dustin's got some great, really he drops a lot of really good points through last episode in this one about how to tackle what honestly is one of the like bigger challenges businesses face these days. I don't know how many times ERM's ERP's ERP solutions have been a huge problem for a company that has cost them way more than supposed to. You know, it's just, it's, it has not been successful and it really is a solvable problem. And that's part of what we're talking about here and how to make sure that if you're part of one that you can do your best to get your ducks in a row and ensure, or at least very much improve the odds for your success. So let's just pick up right where we left off and here we are back with Dustin. So you've already kind of touched on using AI for smaller businesses and even the larger companies with the legacy mindset. What are some of the things that you would recommend to help them get their ducks in order before looking at these bigger systems, the CRM's, the ERP's to figure out their data? You know, how would you get started to even understand this? Because, you know, if you're a startup, you're an entrepreneur, you might be a tech guy, you might be a sales guy, but you don't have all the pieces to put the business together. What are some of the things that that would you recommend to these people to get started? Number one is assessing what the problem you're trying to solve is. You know, the old saying, people don't go to the store to buy a drill bit, they go to the store to buy a hole. And the drill bit is just the way that you get the hole. Like understanding what problems we're actually trying to solve and making sure those are documented and that you have complete alignment across your organization on what problem you're trying to solve. We want to increase our customer retention by 20% this year. Like that's a real outcome. That didn't have anything to do with software, but software technology, adopting some of these tools can absolutely be the driver for why you can increase your customer retention rates. So understanding what the problem is and making sure that the entire organization has alignment on what that is. To me, that's really number one. Number two, building a great team internally that will be supportive of that kind of education and creative thinking. You don't want to build a team internally that is responsible for technology initiatives, but they're adverse to the new technology. Like what? Why would we want to build an entire team of technologists that are scared that AI is going to take their job as a developer? I mean, that seems silly to me. They should be embracing and understanding how that affects their organization and really starting to put processes and things in place to do things like vibe coding. That's an entirely different subject, but you got individuals now that are literally vibe coding apps that solve business problems and technologists are resisting that. Why? Like we've got to be embracing of those kinds of things and creating processes and procedures that enhance the user's ability to do it. So making sure you've got teams with the right mentality in my mind is key. And the third thing is never let a project go more than 90 days. I think you should live in a 90 day world. And this is something, Rob, you mentioned it earlier, but like ERP projects are notorious for taking years to complete. And here's the bad part about that. Can you imagine a business having the exact same goals for multiple years? They all have different, like every quarter you've got a reset of what their plans are as an organization, what their strategic initiatives are, and the software never can get done because the business is constantly changing and evolving. Not only that, but ERP systems are known as the CFO killer for a reason. Like most CFOs don't survive an ERP implementation. I don't think it's because they're doing anything wrong. I just think it's because ERP systems take so long to implement. You're hitting people's career, their longevity at a company anyway. And so if that's one or two years and ERP systems take one or two years, well, statistics say that they just won't be around. So I kind of combat that a little bit like, oh, it's the reason why CFOs are getting fired. I don't think that's true. I just think that they take so long. So living in this 90 day world, there's something mental that happens to our goals after 90 days. They get stale, priorities shift, business changes, economies change every 90 days. There's different cycles that we get in every 90 days. And so I just think making sure you've got smaller chunks of new technology initiatives that can be delivered in a 90 day window is so important. If you can't deliver it in 90 days, it's too big. So break it up, do something smaller, get adoption and get the ball rolling internally is so important. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that being why I feel like that's a lot of why agile was embraced to the level it was is because it really forced stuff into smaller bite sized chunks. And yeah, it's that it was a perfect example. I don't know how many times I've been in these these ERP projects that like they start out okay and you get like second quarter third quarter into it. And now you're referring back to stuff like why did we decide that that way it's like oh yeah because the business was different then I don't know how many times I've been in I was in one that went long enough it went through three different consulting companies that were part of it along the way. And every time they almost had to reset because they would go back and have to re interview people because the processes had changed people had changed. It's a moving target. So you have to get something to just say okay let's we can't get it all in one bite. Let's get a draw line in the sand. Let's aim for that. Get that you know declare success even if it's moderate success and then move on to the next step. So at least you've got something to build on instead of like you know constantly resetting. It now it's momentum to write I mean it just yeah absolutely does. That's like yeah that's our theme this this sees it that's like a perfect one is it it It really it really is one of the things that you get that win and especially I think and I'm going to ask you I wonder your thoughts on this as well because especially CRMs but then more so like we get into ERPs and that where it touches everybody it touches their daily job almost across the board. It doesn't it feel more like just getting any win helps the internal resistance a little bit because now people are like there it builds a little bit of trust for the ERP group. Absolutely it does. That kind of confidence building I mean people hate change. People hate change. It's just it's human nature like we like you know we like our stuff where it was yesterday where we left it. My children are notorious for this. I've got a couple of teenage sons that never can and I like it because they like tools and they like to go do crafts and you know my son the other day was out you know building a ramp and doing some other things that he likes to do but the tools never go back in the same place where they were before and I can never find a screwdriver when I need it. That is frustrating for me. Is that a big deal? No it's not a big deal but it's one of the most frustrating things in my life because I don't like change. I don't like stuff not being where I put it and so I think there's just that that part especially CRM because you're dealing with a different kind of personality. Most of your users of CRM systems are sales and marketing and customer service to a certain extent and most of your ERP users are accounting and warehouse and back office staff and so there's different personality traits that come along with that and man I just think the sales and marketing personalities specifically are resistant to system change. It's in their DNA to be able to be more creative and be more structured in the way that they do things and they just like to get in and do their job and without someone moving their cheese so to speak. So I think change is a part of it. We got to make these things exciting too like throw a party like do some go live events doing some excitement around these projects are key and pulling everybody in making them feel involved as a part of this. You know as an example like throughout the project issue a project newsletter that puts photos of people working in a conference room together and the video calls that we're all on designing something on a virtual whiteboard like whatever you can pull together screenshots of the new system that they're going to get and how it's going to improve their life. I think we missed the marketing angle of software internally as well making it exciting and trying to break down that resistance to the systems. We got to bring people along for the ride and make them feel involved as a part of these projects. I think that helps with the training side of it as well because then you're sort of like that's again you're sort of piecemealing it along the way so now people have a little bit better idea of what to expect when it hits their desktop and they start using it like oh yeah I saw that on the newsletter last week or the little training session we had or the brown bag session we had. So I 100% think that marketing and it's really I guess that is what it is but it's also like training and it's also just due diligence making sure that the people are going to use it know how to use what it is you're building. Now you mentioned earlier and I want to swing back around AI. One of the things that I haven't actually asked here yet any of our other guests is One of the things I'm seeing is with AI RFPs and project proposals and things like that are starting to I'm starting to see entrepreneurs and business owners use AI to build to basically say I want to build X or I want to solve problem Y and they go to AI and say well how do I do this and it gives them a nice little laundry list like here's all the things you should do. Now I think you probably we all know especially all those people in the audience that are technologists is you'll get stuff that's like you know go build this app out of HTML and this CSS and you know this language when it's like well now that's not really what it was supposed to be but the guts of it are there a little bit. Are you seeing that that's starting to spill over into some of these CRM and ERP conversations a little more where you're you're almost getting like an AI question effect. So you're to me I would think it's you're getting better interviews up front because now it's sort of it is essentially educating the people that are involved a little bit more about what they're getting into. It absolutely is getting better. I mean I can remember responding to RFPs as soon as two years ago where you would see silly requirements like we want a user friendly interface for creating good customer experience like what how am I supposed to implement a system or tell you what that's going to cost. Every one of us have a different perspective of what user friendly and great customer experience means and literally that would be requirements listed because someone's trying to think of what they want and they're trying to write it down. Now we're seeing real requirements that come out. I think there's a danger the other direction because of course people are using LLMs to write some of these requirements and they're much better because of it. I think you know letting the systems help us design systems is a is a very good thing. I think we can go the other direction too though where people aren't even reading or validating what the artificial intelligence is saying. They're just dropping it into an RFP. It was funny we seen one the other day where we're literally they were asking for a module they didn't know it was a module but it was an SAP module that they listed in the RFP. This was a Microsoft RFP and so we went back and we questioned the procurement desk because they don't know right. I mean a lot of these decisions are being run by procurement departments and based on requirements that they downloaded or chat GPT into some template. And so we asked him we're like did you mean that you wanted to implement an SAP module with a Microsoft ERP like that's possible but why would you do that. The response back was actually no that was a mistake we shouldn't have we shouldn't have put that in the RFP as a requirement. We all know exactly what happened there. There was a you know a hallucination in the chat GPT and it went and found some HR module and plugged it in and and thought that would be a great solution when of course it wasn't a part of the overall business strategy. So there is context that these tools have to have and I think that's where to drive it back to to something that I mentioned earlier knowing what your outcomes are as a business is the most important thing to have. LLMs now can absolutely build a great RFP or great set of requirements as long as it knows what your outcome is. But if you don't even know what your outcome is or every stakeholder in the company does is different in what their outcome they're expecting from the tool is then the requirements are going to be just as bad as they've always been only now they're going to be confidently bad and that may be worse than unconfidently bad the way it used to be. Yeah I'll ran into one the other day which is another this is like I guess a word to the warning to the wise. It was something that it obviously had built you know from the start they'd obviously built this whole RFP out and they had towards then they had some questions that were assessment questions for people that were responding they want to be able to assess like the level of the people were going that were being you know that were going to be respond the respondents. But the problem is and they were great questions they were overly detailed questions and things like that. So it's like this is a bit much for an RFP it's almost you're almost making me give you part of the RFP. But the funny thing was is that they forgot to they like pasted copy pasted a little bit too much and then right beneath that was the same questions and said this is what you should expect. This is what they need to make sure they touch on in the answers and I'm like you gave everybody the answer key that's not really going to help you too much. And then everyone used chat GPT or another LLM to respond to those questions which yeah not sure how much value this is all going to add. Those are actually I've had those conversations myself where I like get an email that is obviously AI and I'll respond in an AI and then it'll go back and forth a couple of times. I'm at one point I'm like when do we become like just useless and we'll just let the AI talk to each other. They'll just go figure their stuff out and say yeah this is what we need to do. But you know it is. More time in Portugal is what it sounds like. I'm not I am not against that. But I think that gets to it really gets to your point and so we bring out a lot is understanding your why understanding what it is you're actually trying to do. And I think you get I think this is where it sort of comes back to circle full circle to where we started is that you get people that are they understand their business they understand that they've got some problems but they don't really fully understand it. They need somebody you know they like they don't are sales sales enough or HR enough or IT enough or finance enough or some of these pieces and they just aren't able to put all the pieces in place. And AI doesn't fix that if you ask it questions and you don't tell it by the way this is Microsoft you know instead of an SAP it's going to give you you know it'll hallucinate but basically just give you whatever it pulls off the top of the deck. It's not going to go vet that. So I think those are just a lot of excellent points there. This was really it's really neat it's sort of a timely topic to have something that's so complex but it also I think more people can relate to it these days down on the AI level because we've all done some simple writing email or something like that and seeing it go off the rails. And I think it's becoming more I think we're all learning a little bit to become more sensitive to the details of how to define a problem and where to go from that. And serving the last service because we're running out of time now but it sort of is a closing it up based on how you've seen things progress is where do you see this going as we step forward in the years ahead. One of the things as an example I saw somebody like like SAS may disappear because all these vibe coders will be able to just custom code everything. So do you see maybe that we are switching the pendulum is swimming swinging back to more of a like much more people doing their own custom thing as opposed to the SAS a pocket lips basically we've had for the last 10 to 15 years. I think that's very possible because it is easier now than it has ever been to release a new piece of software that that solves a very specific business problem. I think the challenge with a lot of that is going to be integrations between systems are still it's not as easy to vibe code those kind of solutions as it will be in two to three years I'm sure maybe sooner. But the integrations between the products get more complex the more bespoke solutions you start launching. And so I think there's a there's a challenge there that that comes as a part of this that someone needs to solve and maybe there's some people smarter than me that are already working on that kind of integration technology where you can vibe code system integrations between software products that it may not have any idea what the two endpoints have have any any mirroring of them. It can determine what the right mappings and write the data transfers and some of those other things. So I'm positive that that's coming. I think what's more likely in the short term is we're going to see a lot of people that are moving into bespoke add ons for core platforms. So you're going to get lots of people vibe coding their own Microsoft Business Central F&O SAP Oracle NetSuite like all of those products are all have their you know their app store. We're going to see a lot of vibe coded apps that start coming out for these platforms. And so I think it's going to be hard for somebody to to get to the point where they're vibe coding an entire accounting system. Not impossible but it's going to be difficult to get to the point where you're going to go sell a CFO that they should use this you know this company that just started last month because they've got this cool vibe coded thing even if it's just as good. I don't want to minimize the quality. I think the quality could be there but I think confidence level it's going to be really hard to get adoption and somebody to sign off on putting that as the backbone of business operations yet. So I think having add ons that are created by AI and vibe coded add ons that fit into a core product and solve a very specific vertical need but still using you know your big four players as the backbone of the ERP and CRM systems. I think that's absolutely going to happen. It probably already is happening with a lot of these that we don't even know about. I want to thank you for your time and for just like diving in with all of this. We have failed to mention that you have you've got a book called Reboot, an executive playbook for rescuing ERP CRM and digital transformation projects from disaster, which I think everybody in the audience has run into one of those in one way, form or fashion. What is the best way for people to get a hold of you if they're now like, this sounds like a guy that I want to learn more about or you know check out the book. Yeah, you can get the book on Amazon and I would encourage everybody to take a look at dynamic consultants group.com, which is the company that I founded 12 years ago, specifically doing this type of thing for organizations. There's actually a health assessment that we do on our website. You can find a link at dynamic consultants group.com and it gives people the ability to walk through a free health assessment of their CRM and ERP platform to be able to find out where they're benchmarking against their peers. So it's a pretty cool tool. You can also reach out to us directly on that form as well to be able to get in contact with somebody to do a deeper analysis or if you're looking to explore a brand new project, certainly we'd be willing to have some conversations and help out in any way that we can. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. We're going to let everybody else pencils down. You can stop taking notes and we will be back with continuing. Yes, we're now doing our weekly challenges. You'll have that. But then right after that, we'll be back into yet another interview and just continuing challenge strut like striding our way through the season and trying to get some forward momentum going and trying to make sure that we start the year on the right foot. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Next episode.