ISV Talks
ISV Talks
Insights with Vicinity Software's Randy Smith on ERP Solutions, Industry Transformation and Mastering Batch Manufacturing
Ever wondered how batch manufacturing can revolutionize industries as diverse as food, chemicals, and breweries? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Randy Smith, the CEO mastermind behind Vicinity Software, who takes us on a journey through the nuances of batch or formula manufacturing. Discover the remarkable flexibility it offers compared to traditional discrete manufacturing, with its inherent variability in yield and the ability to handle multiple inputs and outputs. Randy's insights reveal how Vicinity Software crafts solutions for sectors like food processing and breweries, addressing their unique challenges from quality testing to managing complex production scenarios.
Hear fascinating stories that bring process manufacturing to life, starting with a chocolate manufacturer where precise documentation is paramount. Learn about a meat processing company in Barbados that tackled inventory control issues and a national brewery employing advanced data to perfect beer quality. We also uncover how a large food manufacturer transformed its operations with a Warehouse Management System, highlighting the critical role of ERP solutions like Vicinity Software in overcoming manufacturing hurdles. Each case study underscores the importance of specialized software in maintaining consistency and efficiency in production processes.
When integrated with Microsoft Dynamics, Vicinity Software offers formula management, better inventory control, quality assurance, cost forecasting, is scalable and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Dynamics D365 BC, MS Dynamics GP, SL and NAV. For over 20 years, Vicinity Software helps formula-based manufacturers streamline their operations, improve production efficiency, and achieve better control over their processes.
www.vicinitysoftware.com
Well, welcome to this episode of ISV Talks. I'm Carol Livingston, the owner of Dynamics Connections and your host of ISV Talks, and on today's episode I have Randy Smith, the CEO of Vicinity Software. Welcome, Randy.
Speaker 2:Hi, carol, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Of course, it's great having you. Hey, do you want to introduce yourself, randy? Tell us a little bit about yourself, and maybe also too, about Vicinity and how the company got started.
Speaker 2:Sure, happy to do it. So Vicinity itself has been around for about 25 years roughly the time that Microsoft acquired Great Plains Solomon, roughly that time period and our primary purpose is to provide batch or formula manufacturing into the Microsoft Dynamics community. I'm sure we'll talk a bit about the differences between discrete and process, but they're pretty significant Enough. That kind of gives us a nice area to operate and still keep the Dynamics manufacturing doing what it does really well, which is just reader assembly. My background is actually one mostly through business, through accounting and school and finance and that thing, and I went and worked for Arthur Anderson, a big eight accounting firm at the time, and I did my audit and all that work and became actually a systems consultant under Anderson and did my time there, like many people that work in big accounting firms. I left and started, actually went into a partnership for a brief period of time. I realized I really need to run my shop and it was at that time specifically on manufacturing.
Speaker 2:So over time I progressed into more and more vertical to the point that we got into process manufacturing or batch manufacturing and founded the company to write our own solution. So that's kind of that's 25 years of quick overview. But the common theme between all of our clients is they use recipes or formulas in the manufacturing process. So that's kind of the elevator statement, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell us what is kind of the difference between process and discrete?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have a lot in common. So it can be very confusing sometimes because in both cases we're consuming one or more raw materials and putting something on hand. Keeping it most basic is that they're very similar. The differences come down to how do we think about a bill of material or how do we think about the ingredients that go into a process? About a bill of material, or how do we think about the ingredients that go into a process In a discrete model? It's pretty rigid. If I'm going to make one of these, it's probably going to take X number of these, x number of those, x number of those, and it's always the same. I think of like assembly in a circuit board that's probably the best thing I could think of. Or a water pump. We have different individual pieces that you assemble together and at the end you've got a working product. You shouldn't have any leftover parts. It should be kind of a one-to-one type of a match or a many-to-one type of a match. Batch manufacturing is really different in that we think in terms of the recipe or the formula first, not the end item you're making, but what is the process you're handling? What raw materials go into it? For sure, but what machines does it go into? What machine settings do you have? Probably one of the big differences is we have variable yield, so on Monday you may put the exact same quantity of raw materials in and get one result, and on Tuesday, the exact same thing, get a different result. And that really is a challenge for the assembly model where they're expecting 100% yield or a very fixed, defined yield. Another big difference is it's not uncommon for us to have multiple inputs as well as multiple outputs. So think in terms of like a paint company as an example, where they mix their raw materials, stir it, do whatever, and then they'll package it into different container sizes. Stir it, do whatever, and then they'll package it into different container sizes, and it would be unusual for them to put it in bulk and then go pull from that bulk on a bunch of different batches. They would do it all at one time. So creating multiple outputs off of a single process, of a formula, is kind of a big deal for us. We also get into significant quality testing with raw materials, batches and finished goods, not as much in the discrete world. We're actually taking samples, bringing it to the lab and then probably making QC adjustments to get the batch where it needs to be. Those are some of the differences that we get into Largely.
Speaker 2:We get some of the oddball industries. They may not be traditional formula. Let's take a meat processor, for example. We'll get a side of meat in and then cut it into all the different cuts of meat. That's an example of a one-to-many type of model which is easy for us to do. It's a bit more of a challenge for some other systems. We also get into many-to-many that was kind of the paint example I used and then you can get into just bizarre. We don't know what we're going to get out of it. We've got some recycling facilities where they'll take a pile of garbage that somebody has taken at the waste area and they'll sort it, recycle it, et cetera, and they're pulling out plastics and metals and compost materials and it's very automated. But they need a system that can keep track of what came in, what process happened and how many different things came out of it. So we get into those weird kind of manufacturing scenarios as well.
Speaker 2:That really isn't a batch, but it has to get done so we can handle those kind of scenarios as well.
Speaker 1:So what kind of industries do you work in? It sounds like a variety food, for example, but what else?
Speaker 2:Right. So we think from a marketing perspective, we really brand ourselves around food and chemical primarily. Most companies that we work with fit into one of those two categories. We also have got a kind of close to our heart is breweries and distilleries, adult beverages, things like that. Technically I think they fit into the food space but they speak a very different language than their traditional bakery sauces, those type of true formula companies. So those, if you go to our website and you see our brands, those are the three brands that you're seeing. We only have one product. So this is definitely a marketing kind of thing where people want to hear their process spoken in the way they do, with the terminology they do. Now, chemical is going to think in terms, typically weight, because it's more precise. Food is going to be oftentimes volume, and even brewery is volume typically, but on a different scale. So it may not be pounds or gallons, may not be gallons, it could be hectoliters, it could be barrels, it could be wine barrels.
Speaker 2:So units of energy for us and so we have a number of in those categories. We've got area like food as had mentioned, bakeries and candy manufacturers and sauces and salad dressings and those type of things. On the food side we get into coatings, adhesives, lubricants, things like that, Oftentimes working with some nasty products that have to be reported.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it sounds like what you input isn't necessarily what you get, right you might get like one product or co-products. It can be your use, one of my favorite stories of a client was they never?
Speaker 2:no, two batches were ever the same. What they were doing was taking rail cars full of chemicals that was a byproduct for some other chemical company and they put it on this rail car and they put it on the track and they send an analysis, a sample, to the client and the client analyzes what's in that tank and what they're trying to figure out is how to neutralize the nastiness of that while it's traveling and when it gets to different rail depots they add different chemicals into it. So it continues to go down the rail to its destination. By the time it gets there, it's whatever the result they need. So that's a classic example of we have no idea what we're going to do tomorrow, but we know it's going to be needed and we need to be able to account for it, so we get into some weird scenarios like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. So on the ERP side, what products are you compatible with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we work with all the Dynamics products with exception of the old AX product, and the reason for not going to the AX product is they purchased Microsoft purchased Fullscope a bunch of years ago, which does exactly what we do. The price points are really different in that space than our traditional client. One of the things that we find for a lot of our clients is they appear all the time they're always growing, it's always changing Like a paint company. All you really need is a 55-gallon drum and a bunch of chemicals and you're in the paint business. So there's not a high barrier to entry, and so we get a lot of different needs that fall within those industries popping up because there's not a huge asset requirement to get started.
Speaker 2:There may be some barriers of entry around compliance and things like that, but largely you're able to get into business pretty easily. So we see a lot of that type of movement of companies rising, getting large and then get gobbled up. Take paint they get gobbled up by a big paint company because they want another plant, geographically located, and so that leaves the market open for another person to pop up and create another one. So our clients typically are somewhere certainly above a million in sales, but probably closer to 10 million to probably about 100 to 200 million somewhere in the neighborhood, I believe, kind of a sweet spot for Business Central and Great Plains. Those were in the vision.
Speaker 2:That whole group kind of went to that one.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm hearing which. So the products you work with are GP Business Central. What else? Nav?
Speaker 2:We've got clients on Nav. We've got clients on.
Speaker 1:Solomon.
Speaker 2:Very happy Solomon clients out there. We've got clients on Nav. We've got clients on Solomon. You know very happy Solomon clients out there. So you know there's a lot of talk right now about getting clients moving from wherever they are to ABC. Whatever. We like Great Plains, we like Solomon, we like Navision they're all perfectly fine products and platforms. So we're really product agnostic when it comes to that. If a client is on Great Plans want to stay there as long as they want to, we're fine with that. We've got a compatible version and keep it compatible moving forward. We're still compatible with Salomon.
Speaker 1:So I mean it's Supported in a while. So yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 2:We're there. If you're there, we're there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's great. And you know, for customers that are on GP, let's say, and they want to use vicinity software for their manufacturing, they can do that now and kind of improve processes while they think about their plan to move to something else like business central. Yeah, so.
Speaker 2:I would see most of the opportunities we're getting right now for legacy clients is, that is, let's take Great Plains as an example, but it's all the same as it relates to our project, so we can actually implement where they are. So let's say they're on GP today and they're trying to fix manufacturing issues, but they've got an eye that they want to go to Business Central, got an eye that they want to go to Business Central. They could certainly do it all at once if they want, but we give a unique scenario where you can keep your GP where it is as long as you want, bring up the vicinity. We're doing our work and then, whenever it makes sense to do that conversion from GP to, say, business Central, all you're doing is replacing the ERP side. Our software is identical and so we're just literally changing the endpoints of data.
Speaker 2:And it works really well because it effectively allows them to split a pretty big project into two manageable projects A manufacturing project first and then more of an ERP distribution finance switch sometime later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know why not optimize what you have today, and then, you know, start taking advantage of sort of those modern technologies Fix.
Speaker 2:Most companies that come to us have issues with everything's kept in Excel, even if they're say on GP because none of those discrete solutions do formulas really well. So one of the things they're doing is Excel is handling their formulas and maybe they're doing manual inventory adjustments into inventory to get it up to date. They're just kind of bleeding that inventory control problem and we can solve that, and then let's give them a little bit of opportunity to take a breath and then go toward the distribution.
Speaker 2:It seems to resonate really well for everybody, the reseller as well as the client.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing how many businesses do operate with everything in Excel, so all that knowledge is either in someone's head or it's in an Excel worksheet and then God forbid trying to report in that kind of an environment because you have all these disparate spreadsheets.
Speaker 2:And theoretically, if you line them up exactly the same, you could have a master spreadsheet that pulls it all together, but nobody really does that. As soon as you add a column, it breaks that master, so that kind of stuff that's. Probably our biggest competitor is Excel, which is a great product, but it's not a great database.
Speaker 1:It's not a database, that is for sure. Yeah, I think I told you I had a client when I was a consultant that they made chocolates and they had a long-term family business and it was all the recipes, I think were in a book, a binder, and some of them written in German, because they were a German family that came over, you know, with their formulas and their chocolates.
Speaker 2:So anyway, yeah, and you know, one of the examples that I often talk about is a client actually is in Barbados actually, which is a wonderful place to go and implement. But they do meat processing and I remember them talking about some yields were kind of wacky as it relates to the spice pack. So they mix some spices and then they put it in with the meat. So the spice room was having kind of crazy yields. They could never keep their inventory under control. It was just really weird and we had been in there probably better part of a year.
Speaker 2:So we've been in there a while, been in there a while and I was there visiting and they brought it up and I said let me go down and see what's going on. So I'm in the spice room, we've got dust everywhere, we're in hair nets and the whole bit. I said, okay, so here's the batch ticket. So we make the changes here on the batch ticket and you follow this recipe. Well, yeah, kind of. What do you mean by kind of? We have all these pieces of paper on the side. Those are actually the batch tickets we use. We don't actually look at the paperwork you give us, we just use, and so what's been happening for 10 years is they've been changing the formula, but not changing the formula, so they're going back to the way they're doing things.
Speaker 1:A little bit of this, a little bit of that right.
Speaker 2:Right, but not following the recipe. And people well-meaning people in R&D are trying to optimize the formula based on, you know, least cost type of models, but that wasn't getting it to the workers.
Speaker 1:Human cooks in the kitchen. Human things that are challenging, yeah Well, yeah, there's a lot of variability in the process. Just anyway, process manufacturing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the name of the game. No, two batches are really ever the same for us. They're always going to be slightly different, whether it be QC, ads or substitutions, or maybe a customer wants that formula, wants something tweaked right at the end of it. Those are all things that we can accommodate which is good for the customer. That makes it very flexible.
Speaker 1:Nice, and it's not in someone's head or in a recipe book somewhere.
Speaker 2:That's right, it's documented now Well kind of changing gears.
Speaker 1:tell us a little bit about do you have a story of a customer, how they've been successful or a use case scenario with your solutions and why? I think we kind of talked about some scenarios, but yeah, we've got we've really got a ton of them.
Speaker 2:I'll stay with one that everybody knows I won't use the name just because I don't think it's important but a national brewery that everybody's had their beer. What makes them unique from other breweries is they intentionally push the envelope in things like yeast genealogy and where the yeast comes from, where their hops come from. They're the craft. Of the challenges they had was taking a lot of quality data. That would help them. They do sensory, so you'll get a panel of four different beers and you taste it for very specific things, and they keep track of all of that, and so it helps them understand where their formula is going and where their product is going over time. One of the challenges they had is they had a lot of data over here in quality. It was all in Excel and they had batches sitting out here. The usage of raw material here's the lots. We used all that kind of stuff, and so we were able to rather easily correlate that data so that they could now see if there was a difference in the hops and the raw materials. They could then predict what changes they were going to need to make to the beer, because the goal is for the beer to be the same as you had it last time, even if they're very experimental in nature. So the same time, next time you go to taste that beer, you want it to taste the same. That's a hard problem that breweries have Well, tying that quality together and being able to correlate that and see you know, when the butterfly flaps its wings that type of scenario we can see what's going to happen down the line, and so being able to bring that data together has been really powerful for them.
Speaker 2:And then one other to talk about is a large food manufacturer that implemented a WMS solution that was outside the channel, which is fine. They had their own inventory and their own PIC process et cetera, and so we were able to automate that process of putting inventory into that WMS and be able to know what they've got, do wave PICs, pic based on expiration dates, et cetera. And it was not a lot of work on our part because we already had the web services et cetera. But being able to work with the WMS to be able to make a really cohesive connection between the warehouse and the production, also production schedule, so everybody could see all of that, so that big 100,000 foot warehouse et cetera. I mean it's a big operation and they handle all that. They do about 50 million in sales with the four or five guys in the warehouse. So it's just really streamlined. They got it going really well. So there's just a couple of examples of things that we've done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess you know when I'm thinking about ERPs. You know, like Business Central, for example, has a really great manufacturing module. So how do you know when, like, that ERP module is not enough and you need vicinity?
Speaker 2:Right. So hopefully we're getting to the company and the reseller before they spend a lot of time and effort trying to implement a kind of square peg round hole type of scenario. Bc Manufacturing is a good manufacturing solution. I got nothing against it. What we typically see is a lot of customization happening to be able to handle what is normal. For us, it's like a Tuesday for us.
Speaker 2:People are spending a lot of money customizing a good, discrete solution to try to make it handle formulas and batches. All those differences there's probably another 10 more that I could list off. Those are all customizations that people are happy to do. That is a model you can do. If a customer really wants that type of relationship with their software provider, great, they can go right for them. It's not us. We're very off the shelf. Customization or localization to us is really relegated to reports and queries and things like that.
Speaker 2:We've got a lot of functionality built in that can be within the source code, within our own source code, be able to get into those nooks and crannies that different industries have. So we're working kind of in an unfair advantage. When you try to compare us and BC Manufacturing, we would be awful if you asked us to assemble circuit boards. I mean it does not make sense for us. I would say the same thing about BC Manufacturing trying to do formula manufacturing. They're very different but I respect that. We have partners in the channel that really like to make their own IP and do their own customization, do their whole bit, and they may have two or three companies in that industry. We've got hundreds in the industry. So we're able to standardize a lot more of our feature functionality into our core application that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's kind of out of the box versus custom right, so that's a big difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of the things that we really tout ourselves because we do the same thing so often is we're able to offer a fixed-t implementation. You know we don't track time. People ask well, how do you know if you're making money on that project? Well, there's money in the bank account. It's pretty simple, it's fine, we're good, we do enough projects that if one kind of goes off the rails a little bit, that's no problem, we're going to make it up in another. We also have subscription revenue coming as well. So it's not a fair comparison to compare us to a bar that's having to make their money on time and materials type of work. So that's a big differentiator for us. And that fixed fee is rather low. It's actually $40,000. I could say it to anybody, it's the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow.
Speaker 2:And we're able to do that for a fraction of what a typical BC implementation might be in just distribution. So you got your distribution implementation, you got our implementation. Take those together and that gets you a full solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's nice that you offer fixed fee implementation so that you kind of have that predictable amount. You know how much it's going to cost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're serious when we say we don't do change orders. We're in the mindset that it takes us longer to understand the change, to document the change, to get approval on the change, to track the change, to collect the money on the change, than it is just to do the change. So we just do it and normally we can slide it into something we're already doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you probably have encountered it in another business or scenario. So, in terms of just on the partner side, I know you work with now partners and GP partners and kind of what differences or challenges are you seeing between the different partners in the Microsoft ecosystem?
Speaker 2:The channels are very different and they have to be handled differently. The GP group is traditionally GP and Solomon traditionally have been very office-self minded, like what ISV is out there that can do this work. Some customization I got some good. I know some great folks that do customizations in GP, but that's not the typical model compared to, say, a NAV partner. A NAV partner largely has been okay. Nav is the basis we're going to start from. But we're going to get in there with our bus of programmers and we're going to get into those nooks and crannies and neither two of those are wrong, they're just different models. Crannies, and neither two of those are wrong, they're just different models. And so we work with both and it kind of depends on where they are and what their corporate goals are and do they match up with the customer goals as well.
Speaker 2:And so we do our project the same way, no matter who we're working with, in that our responsibility is to handle all the manufacturing and make sure the integration like costing and things like that's working the way everybody wants it to work and no matter how you get there, we end in the same position that the customer is happy with their manufacturing solution and they're working with their finance and distribution group that does EDI, they do warehouse management, they do fixed assets, they do all these other things that, quite frankly, we don't want to do. I don't want to teach somebody how to cut a check. That's not the business we're in. So we stay on the manufacturing piece, integrate in with the implementation team from the partner and we have a few touch points that we need to make and few pieces of data we need to make sure in connection with each other. You know part number, structure, unit of measure. That's about it.
Speaker 2:And then we're able to kind of do our thing. They kind of do their thing and we make sure everybody's happy. I think the other thing that partners should know about us is that every client we have is unlimited support, so they can come to us anytime they need. If the partner wants to do frontline support, they can, and they just push it back to us, we're happy to do that. It's not a big deal. Other resellers want to be a little less hands-on as it relates to support, so customers will come directly to us. That's agreed upon between us and the reseller.
Speaker 2:In our mind, the partner, the reseller, is the quarterback with the client. They are in charge. We are subservient to them. We are there to serve equally the partner as well as the customer, and I think we do a really good job of that. And again, it gets down to you. Don't even have to ask us how much something is going to cost, because we're just going to take care of it. Let's just do it. It's just a better for us. It works better when we do it that way than try to have a bunch of best and they can kind of be that client liaison the trusted advisor, with you guys supporting the overall project.
Speaker 2:There's other work going on as well that isn't just ERP. So we've got some of these resellers that we work with that also accounting firms and their audit firms, their firms. And so it really works out beautifully for us to try to just help them get do the best work that they can for the customer. That's really the goal that we have. Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Very good. So just kind of along the same lines of talking about partners, what observations have you seen? What changes you know as a long-time Dynamics partners or new partners entering the Microsoft ecosystem?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a couple areas. One just about kind of doing business in the software world today is really different than it was 20 years ago. The revenue models are radically different, going from a purchase model to a subscription model. It is not for the faint, at heart it's you've got to build a book of business to keep yourself afloat. That's what it's all about is getting enough people in your portfolio to manage the running of your business. That's really different than what we experienced 20 years ago. You'd sell a deal and that handle half your consulting group for a couple of months. So those days are gone.
Speaker 2:So what we've got now is resellers that have got to find a way to keep their revenues going to pay the salespeople, pay the implementation people, support people and maybe even development folks. And how can they do that without getting a lot of the subscription revenue? And so what they're doing is doing a fair amount in consulting, which I get. It makes a lot of sense. But if you stay on a project doing customizations forever, first off, you're never going to be able to leave, and the way they're going to make money is having a number of clients in the portfolio. So I'm not against customizations as much as I'm against just doing one project for a year. You need to turn those projects in high quality, first and foremost, and then be able to turn them at a fairly rapid pace.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're doing a bunch of customizations, you don't have time to turn them in a rapid pace. So I'm seeing those firms that just want to do customizations. They're not going to grow very much, they're going to stay on that customization. They're probably going to be happy. Everybody's going to retire doing that. That's great, but that's not a growth model. And so in a subscription model you've got to get a bunch of people into your camp. And if you're doing a bunch of customizations and you build your product around customizations rather than off-the-shelf products, it makes that harder to do Not impossible, but harder. So we offer for those folks that are interested in subscription pricing and be able to get a number of clients and not have to worry about them six months later go to our model because it's a proven commodity but it's not for everybody.
Speaker 2:Some resellers are out there a higher percentage in the NAV world than in the GP world. There's a number of resellers out there that will just simply say I'll write it myself. Okay, go ahead. Your second client will be two years from now. But that works, or we can do it. You'll be three months out and you're done and now you're off to another project. So it's up to your perspective. But that's probably one of the single biggest changes that I see in resellers having to come to grips with.
Speaker 2:There's a lot out in the industry that's changing that most of the resellers wouldn't even know anything about.
Speaker 2:You know we get in deep into some industry stuff like compliance, ghs and STS and lot traceability and nutritional analysis and product state, ingredient statements and all kinds of industry specific things that have been changing over the past 10 years More regulation, more reporting, more audit capability, those type of things, and so we keep ourselves busy on that. That's why we don't do any other type of manufacturing. Is that's keeping us busy enough? And we see, expect and we see the resellers doing the same thing in technology and stack and things like that. They're getting really good and really smart at delivering intelligent tools to analyze data. If you can get it to them in a structure that kind of makes sense, they can do all kinds of great things for the customer if they're not able to spend all their time trying to make a bill of material fit to be a formula, and so that's kind of how we see ourselves fitting into all of this today and in the long run. We've been doing it for 25 years exactly this way and it really works well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you made a good point to kind of going back to kind of like the there's a lot of nav customers out there, there's still SL customers out there. So you know there, those customers, you know at some point you need some help. You guys can help with that overall project kind of repeatability, like you mentioned right and helping them move them, because honestly, if we had every customer on the on-prem trying to go to the cloud, there's just not enough time to get it there, isn't't?
Speaker 2:If you just look at, just do simple math. Just take the GP community for just a second and say if you're wanting to move them from GP to Business Central. As an example, how many GP clients do we have? I've heard in the 35,000 range. You would know better than me on those counts, but it's a big number.
Speaker 1:And how many resellers do we?
Speaker 2:have that can actually convert you from GP to BC. It's not a lot. If I do back of envelope math, I get to about 30 year backlog of moving all these customers from GP to BC. So there's no rut, because we can't handle a rut, the panel can't, and so that lends itself even more. To get to standardization Customization is great in certain areas, but now when you're talking about core business so let us come in. Handle the batch manufacturing part of it. You focus yourself on the distribution and all the new requirements associated with that, things like EDI and e-commerce and rate stopping for freight and all those type of things that are really important. Focus on that. Get the manufacturing cookie cutter to be moved over. Now you're able to start turning when clients are ready to move from GP on their terms and they want to move to.
Speaker 1:BC.
Speaker 2:There will be plenty of resources out there to handle that type of conversion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that might be a good strategy. Point right there, think about who you can move at least to get that part that's complex handled, and then it'll be easier. That's right.
Speaker 2:It's all about the numbers. At the end of the day, it's all about how many can you get in your book, and that's the key here, along with your technology capabilities.
Speaker 1:It's a different model.
Speaker 2:It's a different world now.
Speaker 1:And I think you're right. I think some people will still be out there supporting their customers until they retire or the customer retires.
Speaker 2:And there's nothing wrong with that model either. We have those that it's not a big deal. We're happy to help that too, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, randy, I know you've been in the industry a long time, so I'm going to ask you just what trends are you seeing that are coming on the horizon, other than like okay, we're already going through this transition, a kind of cloud-based subscription model, but what else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, kind of cloud-based subscription model. But what else? Yeah, so obviously getting into the cloud is the one we're in the middle of right now, maybe even toward the tail end of that, where most new opportunities are coming in, looking for cloud, and that's great. I think what we're seeing more and more. Once you get it into the cloud now you've gotten rid of this barrier of getting to the data in a secure way. When everybody had their data and their environments on-premise, then we've got to really worry about data access to data, data privacy, things like that Because, quite honestly, most of the clients with on-prem are way easier to hack into their data than if they were in the cloud.
Speaker 2:We have data centers that all they've got are people watching and making sure nobody gets into their data than if they were in the cloud.
Speaker 2:We have data centers that all they've got are people watching and making sure nobody gets into your data. I guarantee you that Bob in the IT department isn't spending as much time trying to make sure that people aren't getting into your system. Now that part of it has moved. Most people are pretty confident and comfortable moving to the cloud. That's great when you do that now. Now you've got a platform to be able to do other things, like be able to tap your data with tools like AI, tools that are out there. Show me formulas with yields of such and such that have used these kind of raw materials at this price point. And yeah, you can do all that manually, but AI is going to make that so much faster and easier to do, so I would say that's one of them. That's there.
Speaker 2:One that might surprise you that I think is going to be more connecting automation to your ERP system. We could be way past this, but we're not. We still have a lot of clients out there that have got a nice fancy control systems that they've never hooked into their ERP system. So that bridge of coming from a computer that opens a valve that drops raw materials into a mixer and then off, taking that data and passing it through to a manufacturing solution like vicinity. I think that's where we're going to start seeing more and more, and it's so boring and esoteric. It's not something you want to talk about over a beer in the bar, but it's something you know.
Speaker 2:Whereas AI is super sexy and everybody loves it, this just blocking and tackling is stuff that we're there, the technology's there, our software has been there for 25 years to do it, and that integration, because I don't see one ring to rule them all. I don't see that. I'm an ISV that sits outside the BC environment and so I don't subscribe to that model that everything has to sit within BC. Heck, our company name is built around the concept of being in the vicinity of, but not embedded in, and we've done that for 25 years and done a great job with that. And we don't get thrown by the UI changes or the infrastructure changes that Microsoft throws at us rightfully so, but we're not spending our time reworking UIs. We're not doing any of that. It works really well for a manufacturing company that writes directly into BC. So those are. It's not the obvious things. I think it's the more blocking and tackling that we could. All this industry could do a better job of to reduce pricing, deal with supply chain issues, things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. So just to kind of end conclusion here, Randy, what's kind of the one reason that partners or customers will come talk to you?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the things that we probably stand up beyond everybody else is in our implementation support. All of our clients love the responsiveness. How we know the industry, we can almost predict their questions. The responsiveness how we know the industry, we can almost predict their questions. So it's that's a once you've worked with us, that's what you experience, so our job is to get that message out to people. So a new customer coming in, you can't really rely on that. So what we've done is taken our sales methodology and basically showing how we actually implement. So what I mean by that is we are heavy in tell me where your pains are and what is your vision to solve those pains. And our sales methodology is all about that is let's solve those pains. You know there are 20 things you don't know about that are pains, yet that when you clear these pains you've got 20 more coming. But you got to get through these first.
Speaker 2:And so we just focus on where is the customer today and where do they see themselves in a very attainable future, like a year or two years, something that they're going to be able to get an ROI pretty quickly. So our implementations are inexpensive. We get you in and then you're a customer for life and then from there, subscription is a beautiful thing in that respect because it's very predictable revenue stream. We can afford to just work with you at whatever pace you're wanting to work at. And I think that's probably one of the biggest differentiators we bring to the table is longevity with the customer in as they change their business, we add new functionality et cetera and so on.
Speaker 2:But it becomes rather easy to support when all you do is that type of work of work when you are trying to remember that industry because you implemented them a year ago and you've never done another one since it gets a lot more complicated.
Speaker 2:So that's how we I think that's how we partner so well with partners is we allow them to do what they do best. The GLAPAR distribution will handle all the manufacturing. If they want to start doing the manufacturing, the tent is big and we're happy to have them do implementations as well. But most want to find a project, do the finance the distribution and they're happy to let us handle the messy stuff, maybe in the manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, it was great having you on our ISV Talks video. So thanks, Randy, for being part of our ISV Talks episode today. It was Randy for being part of our ISV Talks episode today. It was really interesting talking with you and if you need to reach out to Randy, here's his contact information. So, Randy, you want to share what that is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, feel free to reach out to us. Probably the easiest thing to do is to send a message into info at vicinitysoftwarecom. I'm also rsmith, if you want to reach directly to me, vicinity softwarecom. I'm also r smith if you want to reach directly to me, r smith at vicinity softwarecom. But honestly, you're probably best shoot a message into info act, because there's about five of us that are watching that email address and we'll be able to get something to you rather quickly. Jamie kirsch handles all of our all of our new client activities and his account manager, etc. That would be the person that would probably reach out to you. Also, hit our website at wwwvicinitysoftwarecom. V-i-c-i-n-i-t-y software all spelled out dot com, and in that you'll see three main categories food, chemical and beer distillery that kind of world. So that's the best way to reach us. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, randy, and thanks, friends, for joining this episode of ISV Talks and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye-bye, friends.