Industrial Talk is speaking with to Jon Thompson, Cofounder and CSO with Blue Margin about “Increasing Accountability, Efficiency, Productivity and Profitability through data visibility”. Get the answers to your “Data” questions along with Jon's  unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

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Company Website: https://www.bluemargin.com/

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

data, dashboard, business, company, industrial, reporting, people, sales, systems, create, conversation, area, industry, metrics, private equity, outcome, insights, pull, margin, build

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go

00:22

around once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that is backed up by data that celebrates industry professionals all around the world, like you, I'm pointing at you, if you are out on the video, I'm pointing at you. Because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly. You're changing lives, and therefore you're changing the world. That's why we here at industrial talk our absolute cheerleaders for you, and we want you to succeed, and then we're going to do everything that we can to help industry succeed. Take that to the bag. All right in the hot seat, gentleman by the name of Jon Thompson. Blue Margin is the company he is a well, he's got a long title right here and it says senior partner, co founder and CSO of that organization Blue Margin, we're going to be talking about that data, that data that you have to begin to mine and be able to see it and be able to put it into a way that you can actually take action, gold in that data. So let's get cracking. Yeah, there is, I mean, come on, you know, I have conversations at all of these incredible conferences. And there's, there's, there's three things outside of all the other stuff, but there's three sort of themes that take place with a lot of this conversation is one, it's always a people thing, right? People? Where do I find people? How do I retain people, people, right people is it. The other area is of course, cyber, because I, I, I want to, you know, participate in this digital transformation journey. And the reality is, is that if you're doing that, you need to make sure that that you're properly protected. So cyber is a big conversation, and the other one outside of making it simple. Take that to the bank to make it simple. And that's why this particular conversation with Blue Margin is so important, because I think that it achieves that simplicity. But it's its data. Where do I get my data? How do I pull that data? What data is important? What's not important? How do I? How do I transform my business into a data centric organization that truly acts upon the information being delivered in my organization. That's where we're going. That's what you have to do. And and we need solutions to be able to do that. And and solutions that are easy. Yeah, I can turn it around. Alright, a couple of things that you need to put on your calendar, we've got some conferences coming up, we're going to be broadcasting live from the first one that we're going to be broadcasting from is the IoT solutions World Congress, it's in the end of January, it's going to be a great event. Of course, at that event, they talk about IoT, they talk about AI, they talk about data analytics, they talk about digital twin, virtual twin, you name it, it's it's being discussed there, and plenty of opportunities for you to educate. Because if you're in industry, this market is just just ticking along at a blistering pace. And you need to make sure that you stay current with your knowledge. And then of course, as I always say, find those companies, those individuals so that you can collaborate. That's important to trust it, trust it, so that you can innovate, because you need to, because we depend on you. And so it's a great time to be an industry and put that one down on the bank. Because it is all right. And we're going to have a lot going on at industrial talk. And you're saying you're so Scott, how do I how do I get involved with industrial talk? Well, you just go to industrial talk.com, you reach out to me. And if you have a story to tell, and you need to tell that story, and it benefits people, which it does, because you're an industry professional. Let me know, let's get you on the podcast. If you're going I'm going to have all the list of conferences and then some out there on industrial talk. So if you're going to be at one of those conferences, and you're saying Scott, I'm gonna do a live Yeah, let me know. I can't read your mind. But I certainly love your story. So you got to let me know you got to be forthright and upfront with that. All right. Here we go. Jon Thompson. Blue Margin is the company and the form that is filled out again, if you're going to be on this program, you're going to have to fill out this form because you need to make it simple for me to be able to look at and say, Oh, I get it. All right. Pretty cool. That's a great topic. I think the real component to this conversation that is really needed is the ability to be able to see that data from across, cross, let's say your legacy systems across your businesses, and be able to have those, that that information, boom, right there in a dashboard. Pretty cool stuff. All right. Enjoy the conversation with Jon. All right, Jon, welcome to industrial talk. How are you doing today? Doing great, Scott,

05:33

thanks for having me.

05:35

It's great. I'm pretty excited about this conversation, we're gonna be talking a little bit about insights into your business, looking at data, being able to sort of track that in a dashboard type setting, because you need a listener, that's you, I'm pointing at you, right? They're pointing at you. You need to make better decisions. And you need data, you need insights, you need that ability to be able to do that. And Jon, and Blue Margin, bring that to the table. Before we get into that conversation, Jon, for the listeners, give us a little background on you. Why you're such a great professional and a little bit about Blue Margin. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the solutions we're talking here.

06:14

Yeah, sure. So I went to school out east Colby College in Waterville, Maine, froze my butt off. But enjoyed that then went to the Peace Corps in Africa to counteract that weather was a game warden, which obviously led directly into business. When I came back, my brother and I had cell phone dealerships, and we ended up deciding to do a.com. Back when that was all the rage, we went out and raised some venture capital and built a business that analyzed telecom expenses for large enterprises back when that was a significant line item. And after about four years, we attracted the attention of a private equity backed backer, one equity partners, we became the platform company of a five business roll up, and suddenly had 500 employees, my brother was a CEO, I was doing biz dev. And we found that despite the fact that he is a Excel geek to the extreme, our instrumentation was lacking. And we found ourselves spending like, like, half our time managing the board, as we put it, and the rest of the time trying to figure out which way it was up. And that experience, and now this business, Blue Margin, where we've had 200 Plus clients, we have found that our basic hypothesis is that at the root of most, if not all business problems, is poor visibility somewhere, whether that's job ownership or alignment between business units, or accountability to the outcomes of the business, that kind of thing. And so that's what got us going.

07:50

But my legacy systems are super important. So you know, I'm not gonna let them go. I like that spreadsheet. Yeah, right. No spreadsheets, a lot of time and effort in that spreadsheet that creating those macros, and the tabs and all that stuff. They're done. For, for clarity sake, here, we've talked about private equity, PE, we've talked about venture capital briefly, for the listeners, give us a little differentiation between a venture capital in a private equity.

08:20

Yeah. So venture capital is just earlier in the growth phase of a company, sometimes pre revenue, sometimes pre profit. Private Equity tends to come in later, typically, in the mid market, maybe 50 million to a billion in revenue. And so they're looking to take an established business, often a non rationalized industry, if you will, or a niche, whether that's, you know, pet food supplies, or you name it in industrial this or that, where there's all kinds of entrepreneur owners out there, and no one has really turned it into the Toys R Us of their niche. And so they look to do that roll up, get those efficiencies of scale, increase the value of the company significantly, and then sell it again.

09:06

Thank you. Yeah, that makes complete and utter sense. I like that. All right. Let's talk a little bit about data. Let's talk a little bit about having that insight. You're absolutely correct. I think that many companies struggle with visibility. And then it might be visibility, but it's 45 days late. And then by that time that the problem is festered into full blown, full blown infection. And so take us through how you layer I've got all these legacy systems, right? I've got my ERP and then maybe I've got my asset management platform over here, and I've got this and the other and I got this spreadsheet and I got and I'm not I'm not shooting any of those platforms down. How do you layer and consolidate to create that vision? The API's take us through that.

09:57

Yeah, it's particularly relevant in in private equity where you often have a buy and build model where you're not just organically growing the business through new markets and better sales and higher productivity. But you're also adding new companies to fill out your offering and to consolidate for economies of scale. And so you've got these new business units coming on, they have their own ERP or their own homegrown whatever. And you're trying to integrate them just you know, gluing together companies doesn't get you the impact, you want to integrate them. And that can take some time, it's very disruptive, if you've ever deployed an ERP system I hated you may have FYI. Yeah, it can. It can take you to your knees for sure. So instead of saying, We're going to wait the 18 months till we get this integrated, you can integrate at the data layer and create a virtual single view of the business and get everyone focused on those consolidated numbers. And so we'll tap into those various systems with API's, as you said, various data connectors, pull that into a central database, and then connect that to whatever reporting you want. In our case, we're a Microsoft shop, gold partners and Microsoft's we have their high competency rating, we don't actually make any revenue from Microsoft, but we'd like to train. So we've been on it for quite some time. And then we produce reports that the connection to that central database sustains and is automatically updated as new data is entered into those transactional systems further downstream, or upstream. And on a daily basis, whoever the target is, the user gets an update of that dashboard via their email, or they can log into the Power BI system or wherever you want to place those dashboards so that they can see up to the day, here's what's happening, not dissimilar to a scoreboard at a sporting event where you have all the fans and coaches and, and players really glued to that that information. And it's not extraneous information, it is the critical info, they need to know what to do next to win the game. So that's what we

12:07

Yeah. And I hear what you're saying. And that's all good. But there's still, I think there's a lot of heavy lifting in defining and deciding which data is important. I might be, I might just be married to this data. But really, is that data important? How do you walk a client through? Now this is important, this is important. I know that you love this one. But that's not important. How do you walk us through that?

12:32

So the typical process, one of the main stumbling blocks that companies run into as they try to use their data and get better visibility, which is every company is they'll send out a analyst or report writer to talk to the various subject subject matter experts around the company and say what metrics matter to you. And they create a catalogue of that. And then they go back to the lab, and they build reports that display those metrics and say, Here you go. And that invariably, because we've tried it, ends in this, or results in this endless tail chasing where the the person that requested the report says, Oh, thanks. Not quite what I was thinking. And in fact, seeing these numbers up in lights has given me new insight, I need to now have these questions answered in context, and I forgot about that goes back, and you never get there. And adoption is is marginal, and the impact is anemic. So having learned that lesson more times than we'd like to admit, when a client says, Here's what we want to see for our sales funnel, or the gap in our projection in sales, or whatever the case is, we start out with the end goal. So we say what is it you're looking to impact for the outcome in your business? Is it? Is it total sales? Is it sales by customers, that customer lifetime value? Is a diversity of products and services that each customer buys? Is it making sure that your best customers are well taken care of? What is it and they will outline those? Here's the things that matter most for us to get where we're going in the next one to three years. And then we work backwards from that outcome. We'd like to say, what's the measurement of it now? Where does it need to be? And when do you think you can get it to that point by when? And then working backwards from there? What are the drivers that most influenced that outcome? And who do they map to? who's accountable for those drivers? Whether it's production efficiency, or salespeople, and their outreach activities, or you name it? And then we look at where's the data come from for that? And is that the most salient information? Is that the highest impact metric that will influence that outcome? Or is it a nice to have? Since we have the data, we'll put it in there. We get that a lot where customers say, well, that's just informational. And that sets off a red flag or says it shouldn't just be information and you don't see a baseball scoreboard with just informational stuff. It's the things you have to know to progress. And so we pressure test that quite a bit. And one more comment, we'll do a quick what we call a wireframe. It's a sketch or a storyboard. Here's the dashboard based on what we've gathered that you're trying to achieve by this time, here's the drivers that influence that. Let's go through it and ask the questions. If this was in the red, rather than the green, or if it's in the yellow, what does that spur as far as questions or decisions or actions? And what is that next piece of information you need? So you see that your sales are lagging? Your first question is I want to see sales by product category, and see where my problem areas are. And then I want to filter to those. And my very next question is, show me the sales teams and who's doing well with those and who isn't? Okay, let me focus on the isn't filter to those now, let me see a list of the salespeople and let me see their history of sales and how they're doing currently. And now I know who to talk to. So it's that pressure test testing and keeping that end goal as the primary driver of what we're designing.

15:58

But really, it's still you have to have these conversations of saying, Okay, this date is important. Everybody shakes her head. Yeah, that date is important. And that date is important, because of these reasons. Yep. Everybody shakes her heads are saying yeah, that's, that's correct. You still have to, let's say, look at that data. When is that data available? Is there a lag with that? Because you're trying to compress that time dramatically? If it's saying, yeah, the data is great. And it's 45 days old, that's not good. So you got to figure out how to get that data quicker. That's one. And then two, I would imagine you're trying to create some curves around the whole thing, too. You know, if I go this way, that's bad. And this way, it's good. But be able to have that, that those parameters all defined, and then get everybody to say, Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Am I looking at that correctly?

16:43

You are? Absolutely. And so half of that discovery, is the data digging into the database, just saying does the data support this. And oftentimes, it's about data entry compliance, people have been sloppy about it, because it hasn't been up in lights, and there hasn't been accountability to it. And so there's a sweet spot of going ahead and putting those things up in lights in the form of dashboards, that drives that compliance, because the sales manager looks and says, it looks like there's nothing in your funnel, Scott. And you say, No, I've got a lot going on one cn zero. And that's going to the CEO. And now Scott has suddenly inputting his opportunities and making sure they're up to date. So that can drive that compliance. Sometimes the data is not there, and you need to leave a hole in the dashboard until a new process is put in place. You don't want to, however, wait until your data is perfect to put up a dashboard, because you never will. Because data never is. So it's it's sort of a balance in there. And then the parameters, I think you're talking you're talking about KPI thresholds, when's it Red wins? Yeah,

17:48

you just gotta it has, you have to put some level of meaning on it. Yeah. And again, I being a simple guy, green is good. So why would green is good. And then, and then, of course, yellow and red, and you don't want to be red. So yeah,

18:03

we sometimes get tripped up there, because the client is unsure of what those thresholds are. And we have found that it's best to take a guess. You know, we're a bi company, and we never stop evolving our dashboards, it's, it's been a bit of a eye opening experience in our latest iteration that, hey, this never ends where our business is always evolving. We're finding what we think drives our outcomes best. This insight is okay, but we really don't do much with it, what is it we're actually trying to get to. So you use that wireframe to try and get close to the bull's eye. And then you put up a dashboard, you take some guesses at those thresholds. And then the user acceptance testing, and the ongoing use really drives the refinement of that. You don't want to start too far off the marker, you end up in that tail chasing iteration nightmare.

18:57

So let's let's talk a little bit about I call it or I term it a pencil whipping. So if I'm, if I'm just if all of a sudden, you're saying hey, this data, this information is gonna go up to the CEO, then all of a sudden, I'm walking on water, and I'm going to be able to put my data in there and I'm walking on water, and therefore, no bad news gets to the CEO, my, you know, my, what I do, and that dashboards looking doggone green. How do you how do you ensure that good data is getting in there? You know, and you're able to sort of say, Yeah, we're good, bad, whatever ugly?

19:33

Yeah, I mean, how do you make sure that people aren't fudging the numbers? Yeah. Sales that would probably mostly apply in sales. You know, it's tougher in machine productivity, that kind of thing. You need really good alignment with that leader, that sales leader and they need to know their team but one of the mistakes companies make is to create topical dashboards. This is our sales dashboard has all our sales data The problem with that is dashboards are not read by a department or a topic area, they're read by a human being. So the whole point of this exercise is to render data for a human to consume, to touch nerves to improve their decision making in their actions that they take for better outcomes. So we have found that you need to design the dashboards to fit the role. What is their narrative for walking through their day to understand how am I doing? Why am I doing that way? And what details do I need to take action? And when you get that in, in a nice narrative form that really maps to the roll, it makes it hard to hide? I would say,

20:40

Yeah, because that's key. Because, honestly, you want it to be as accurate as you possibly can make those tactical decisions based off of data that is clean and scrubbed. And whatever. A question I do have is, a lot of people are discussing the ability to simulate. So I see it here. But if I go out a couple of years, are these is this data trending in the right and being able to do that? And And are we looking at that too, as well?

21:12

You mean scenario planning, putting in different numbers for for variables and seeing what happens? Yeah, you can do that as well. There's nice tools that integrate with most mainstream BI platform, certainly Power BI, where you can set up forecasting and put in an assumption, see what it does the outcomes, play with that, get get consensus among leaders, and then go with with Plan A.

21:35

Yeah, and I don't see any other way to get around it, you kind of have all those tools in your, you know, quiver, and being able to pull them out and be able to have those insights is I think it's a non negotiable. One of the areas that has always been a challenge, especially with anything that's technology, anything that's innovative, and it is always that culture, that's it's a human equation. Do you guys work in in that areas, and hey, here we go, we're going to be coming in here. And we're going to, we're going to be able to expose and look at all this data, and we need your buy in. Yes, you get a look back on that,

22:12

you've hit one of the top stumbling blocks. So we found that there are very few companies that are really wired for data where every role in the company has their own instrumentation knows the bogey thereafter, it's aggregated to the team. And there's this this team accountability, there are just, you know, low single digit percentage point companies that have that done. And part of the reason is that buying in alignment, we have found that a good way to fix that is to start with a company scorecard, or an OKR dashboard, depending on what framework they'd like to work in. And that's something that you can stand up quickly to three weeks, where you highlight here are the top six to eight metrics that really define our business model and our success plan. If we are hitting these than we are doing, and we've covered 80 plus percent of everything we need to do stand that up early, that becomes the beacon on the hill, the North Star that says okay, here's where we're going with our data visibility. And that can be manually populated by someone half an hour a week, puts in that information. So you're not spending three, four months connecting to eight different systems, building a data warehouse, eventually getting to that vision, you get that alignment and buy in at the most influential layer of the company, the management layer. By standing that up quickly getting it centrally located, having an automated email pinging people once a week and say, here's the company scorecard. And that gels, it coalesces for them, Okay, those are the metrics, usually, there's refinements very easy to adjust that manual dashboard, so that they can zero and there's our plan. And here's the area that were suffering the most sales or throughput or order to cash or whatever the case is. And now you go into connecting the data sources and building a dashboard that feeds that quadrant of the company scorecard and maps to the person that owns that area of the business. And you begin to take off. You do make another interesting point, though, around the change management, the human side, it's it's another aspect of where companies stumble, is they say, Okay, we want to do more with our data that sounds like it, let's send it to them. And it certainly is integral to these projects. But if it takes it on as the lead, they're looking at as as a technical project, and what invariably happens is you end up with a data warehouse that takes several months to build the the idea being we're going to connect to all of our data sources, get them in one place, and then we can create any report you want. That runs into several problems. One is you get this arcane data warehouse that's built to whoever built it in their idiosyncrasies for modeling data somewhere in the basement and it There's two people that understand it. And that creates this ongoing technical debt when you want to write reports. And you've got this difficult convoluted data warehouse that wasn't driven by the business model or the reporting requirements, but was more an academic or a more of a technical exercise to collect all the data in one place. That makes a mess. And so what we found works much better is to say, what's the first area we can get the highest impact for the lightest lift. And let's build to that, let's connect to Salesforce. Let's build that funnel reporting and get that gap in our forecast. Let's put those out to the right folks. Let's get people starting to use it. This is after you've got that company scorecard these stand up quickly. And then once we've nailed that, let's add the next data source our HR system or accounting or whatever the case is, and integrate that. But let's pull in the tables from those systems that are most relevant to the reporting that we need in our business model and not create this behemoth that no one can navigate and has performance issues. And it's difficult to deal with. So that's another key to to getting to a good start and not getting bogged down.

26:09

A lot of questions. And when we start talking about quickly, there's a couple of things. I don't want to post it that can we do this incrementally? Because sometimes I'm a business owner, I have got all my other problems over here. And you're asking me to do this thing over here? Is there a way of being able to do it one incrementally?

26:29

Yeah, I think you have to, to be successful. If you do the waterfall approach. By the time you're done building this massive database that's going to feed all reports it is out of sync with the company and where it's going. Also, if you don't get wins early, and often you lose that momentum, the lights don't go on, oh my gosh, if we can do this, then here's where I would really want to get better visibility. You just it gets lost among all the other tech initiatives that sort of have marginal impact? Yeah. So you want to do it incrementally, you want to do it modularly. And that can be done in the modern data warehouse, not some big thing you build for 18 months, but in two weeks, you stand up that piece of the data warehouse, you get out.

27:14

My next question is that time, so I, I've got and I'm coming to you, I knock on your door, I've said hey, I'm either I'm in private equity, or I'm in a standalone manufacturer, I just need insights. And I want to be able to pull data. And I think this is important data. And you mentioned a couple of weeks to sort of stand that up.

27:36

Yeah, I would say two to six weeks, depending on the complexity. And the left, if it's an entire ERP system, and you're covering of a broader set of, of reporting areas, then it takes longer. But we will try to talk clients out of pasting together three scopes, because it's much better to take one standalone scope that delivers value. It's the last thing you ever do with business intelligence dashboards, it'll have long lasting benefits. So it's standalone. Why do that three times at once and learn your lessons times three, learn them once on that first project, then go into those other ones. And as you get rolling, and you really get a feel for the organization and the data, you can have multiple streams where you're covering inventory, and you're covering throughput, and you're covering other areas all at once.

28:27

Yeah, it just seems like that would be the way to go. And I like the incremental approach. I think that that's vital. I love the fact that, let's just say it on the outside, let's say six weeks to prop something up. And I think that the way I see the seed in my mind, because there are a lot of a lot of systems out there that deliver a sort of a dashboard type of approach. But what you see is that I've got this dashboard, and recognition that there are multiple systems and being able to pull all that data together, do the data analytics on it, this divided by this gives you this sort of whatever that might be. That's where the the power lies. That's you're not you don't have silo systems, you're able to sort of pull it all together in a meaningful way.

29:17

It's funny because the benefits of a BI system like Power BI or Tableau or Domo or you name it are pretty simple. It's about getting that playbook to a centralized spot that everyone access is equally, it's not in an Excel spreadsheet that floats around. It's not a point in time it's being updated hourly or daily, or whatever the case is. So it's not this, this snapshot. It's sort of this ongoing view. And it's interactive. So it allows you to look at the dashboard and say I'm going to click on this region. I want the whole dashboard to filter just to that region so I can see how they're doing and whatever metric we're after. Those simple things are absolute game changers. It's not It's not rocket science. And each of those systems has reporting. We have a CRM, we use HubSpot. We use HubSpot reporting a lot. We build reports in there for, you know, sort of isolated views within the sales team. But we also pull that into an aggregated view of the company and cross reference views into how our sales impacting productivity, and are they balanced and things like that. So there is a place in the Venn diagram between the reporting of a source system and your BI dashboards does overlap. There's some some art and some science into figuring out where you want to move from one to the other. But that central view is, is uniquely powerful that you can't get on any given system. Yeah. Yeah.

30:47

And also, you're an author. Tell us about your book.

30:51

Yeah, so the dashboard effect. If you read it, you'll note that at the beginning, we heavily reference Chuck Coonrod, who wrote a book called The game of work. And I recently interviewed him on our podcast, he's was called the grandfather of gamification by New York Times or someone. And he basically says that for people to be most effective in an organization, whether it's a line worker or an executive, they need to know first, are they winning in their role? And second, how do they win. And if they don't have that, as he says, when people don't know the rules in the score, they tend to not want to play or they play safe. So giving a man clarity makes all the difference in the world. And he came to that conclusion, when he was consulting with a company that was manufacturing manufactured houses, and saw this team out on the floor that was sluggishly nailing in nails, and then the break, alarm went off. And they whipped their shirts off and ran to the basketball hoop and had the most intense focused effort on this game that had a score and a timer and a winner and a loser. And then the buzzer went off again, and they drag themselves back to their work. So his premise is give people that same incentive, leverage human nature, because people want to do things better, faster, more successfully, naturally, where they probably shouldn't be in the organization, give them the scoreboard that allows them to do that. And so the dashboard effect is largely about that if you can take these numbers that you already have access to they're in a Excel spreadsheet or in a transactional system, but put them in a format and centrally located so that they take on life and they really touch nerves, and they have KPIs that draw conclusions, instead of just information that then you have to draw conclusions from. You get that same gamification, that same athletic spirit that desire to achieve into the work environment, we tend to leave it at the office door and assume that what applies on the playing field doesn't apply at work. And that's a mistake. That's the general premise.

33:04

Well, clearly, you have an eBook out there. I have a link to it.

33:09

And an audio you can hear me narrate the whole thing. It was my first shot at that.

33:14

How did that go? It was hard. Yeah. Okay. Go to say I'm not sure. Yeah, well, kudos, man. Yeah, thank you. You put yourself out there. I like we're gonna have a link out there at industrial talk. All right. How do people get a hold of you there?

33:32

So they can reach us at Blue? margin.com. They can reach me at Jon at Blue. margin.com JLN. I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, all sorts

33:41

of way. All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Jon. We're going to have all the information and Blue Margin. We're gonna also have this ebook. You can listen to Jon or you can actually read it. It's both both available out on industrial talk. We will have the back links ready to go. Nothing fancy. Jonny, we're great. Thank you, Scott. All right, listeners. Yeah, this was great. I am all alone. I like books and stuff. I don't know why. But I do. I feel like I can't learn enough. Hello. All right, listeners. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Please do not go away. We will be right back. You're

34:23

listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

34:28

All right, that conversation delivered to you buy industrial talk through Jon Thompson. Blue Margin is the company. We're gonna have all the contact information for Jon and Blue Margin out on industrial talk beer night, go out there, find his conversation. We're also going to have past podcasts. Apparently, he's been on some of the podcasts. We've got some blogs there. We've got some videos there. Look into them. They're all there on his profile that we create and industrial talk. We also have the link to his Book, the dashboard of fact, I've read it, you need to read it too. So go out, download it, do what you need to do, right there. All the links. Again, we're going to be broadcasting from conferences, if you're going to go out to industrial talk, look for conferences, if we're going to be there, you know, contact us and say, Hey, Scott, I want to do a lot. Yeah, I do a lot. We need to tell your story. We need to continue to tell industry story and you are the heroes in that story. So don't shy away. Industrial talk.com All right, be bold, be brave. dare greatly I say it all the time. Because you are and hanging out with people like Jon, and you're going to continue to change the world. We're going to have another great conversation you know, at industrial talk shortly, so never go away. And by the way, go subscribe. You got a lot of great conversations out there. So stay tuned, we will be right back.

The post Jon Thompson with Blue Margin appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're onsite at FABTECH in Atlanta, GA and talking to Sunny Han, Founder and CEO at Fulcrum about “Improving manufacturing efficiency through workflow optimization and automated data collection”. Get the answers to your “ERP” questions along with Sunny's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

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Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fulcrumpro/

Company Website: https://fulcrumpro.com/

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

fulcrum, customers, erp, industrial, business, manufacturers, product, manufacturing, build, company, vendor, sunny, platform, sunny, purchase order, people, find, scheduling, digital transformation journey, realized

00:00

Industrial Talk is brought to you by Armis. Yes, you were in the digital transformation game. Yes, you need to find trusted companies, trusted individuals to help you along with that journey. The Armis platform delivers complete asset intelligence, you know what that means? insights into your connected assets, you're in the digital transformation game, you have to have that insights into what is connected. Go to Armis.com. Find out more, you will not be disappointed. Industrial Talk is brought to you by Arduino the original all in one IoT platform. That's right, go out to Arduino.cc. And you will find documentation you will find devices powerful boards to help you with your digital transformation journey. It's all there. Go out to Arduino.cc Find out more see how you can connect with these professionals to help you along with your digital transformation journey arduino.cc.

01:07

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots. And let's go

01:25

Oh, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe Sunny, backed up by data. So don't even go there. I'm not going to argue with you. It is all data being driven right here and we are broadcasting on site. And this is FABTECH. This is gonna go I was at another conference last week or a couple weeks ago. Oh my god, are we gonna blow that one? All right, this is FABTECH, Atlanta, Georgia. And it's

01:51

it's three huge

01:53

halls or whatever you want to call it, of just technology solutions provider. And you know what, they all have a common passion, passion to solve your problem in the best way possible. Sunny is in the hot seat. Fulcrum is the company. Let's again, correct? Yeah. Sunny, hang on. Let's look closer to the mic there,

02:18

Sunny Han will do.

02:20

He's the CEO. I am big thinker. So if you're if you're at the show, which I don't know, doesn't matter. If you were at the show, you would say, hey, Scott's booth is right there on the corner. And right to his right, is fulcrum. And you have a team of people who are

02:38

there working the heck out of that booth. Oh, yeah. They're great. They are very lucky.

02:43

Yeah. I was trying to, I was trying to coax a couple come over here. No, I wouldn't dare do that. Anyway. So you flew in today? I did. And we had a chance to sort of look around.

02:56

I have talked to a couple of people already. Other CEOs of other startups and some tech leaders at more established companies. And just good to connect and meet in person. And just to chitchat a little bit. So I've gone around or made my rounds already.

03:12

Did you go did you go all the way to see

03:14

I did go all the way to see did you change your time?

03:19

Yeah, I generally try to stay within one time zone. But

03:22

stuff, I have to move. It's definitely tough in this, this venue, because you realize how, how important manufacturing, how important technology, how important innovation is needed for just the economy. Just just business, it's so important to see it here. And, and, and what's really fascinating is just seeing the diversity of of stuff. There's a bench there that apparently is good to see it there. And it's got to be good. And anyway, it's just it's been a, it's been a real joy to be able to do that. All right. For the listeners before we get into talking about fulcrum, which is a great name, by the way. Fulcrum, sunny, give us a little background on who you are.

04:07

I'm just a nerd that stumbled into manufacturing. As a kid, I emigrated to the United States when I was really four years old. My mom was studying computer science in University Minnesota and move there and just hung out at her computer lab learn to code at a really young age.

04:28

I'm sorry for laughing. That is a that's an interesting so I learned to code at

04:32

a very young age. I did and just lucked into everything. Really. The Universe Minnesota had a program where elementary school kids would start taking math at the University of Minnesota and I was part of that I led the math team at my high school, which is through that I met one of our board members, SHAN Wong. He was the CEO of Reddit and one of the first engineers at PayPal and Facebook. Well, wow. And he's been an incredible mentor of mine and a great friend. A great person to have as a resource. Basically, my life is just a collection of random luck. That's led to what I do.

05:08

Right here right now, right

05:09

here right now, Georgia in November,

05:14

finally started cooling down a little bit. All right, tell us just a little bit about fulcrum, there's still a start there. Because people talk about ERPs. But it's out there, you could talk about the need to be able to, to track the business in a very effective way and data and all that because it gives us a little background is the

05:38

fulcrum is an operational platform, it's, it's what you would probably consider an ERP, we handle every piece of information that our customers need to operate their business. We help them do some cool stuff with some Algorithms and Heuristics about when to build self-scheduling, when to buy stuff from which vendor how much when you know what to build, when how much is an inventory, how much demand is coming. So the core products is a very automated cloud based connected ERP that's really well designed so that your end users can have a really, really good time for machinists or operators, your estimators or sales engineers, we want them to love using the products. And there's a few things that informed that one, I think, this extremely random, but potent realization that manufacturing in the US and a Europe and in Japan and a lot of other countries, is decentralized and distributed. It's a bunch of small manufacturers all working together. Oftentimes not even knowing who each other are, that roll up into a caterpillar, or roll up into a Polaris ATV, or whatever it is, it's being made in a rocket or a shuttlecraft. That is incredible. In other countries, manufacturing is very centralized. We've seen some of the dangers of that with COVID and COVID, shutdowns in China. But I think it's so so so delicate, and valuable, that I'm motivated to create an entire company to try to support this network ventures, the future that I want to vote for is one where there are still hundreds of 1000s of small manufacturers working together to make stuff instead of one giant on the factory or something. And that coordination requires technology, we have the internet, we just haven't brought the Internet to manufacturers. And what we envision

07:30

is that really, is that a gap? I mean, when you say the internet not to manufacture I know there's a lot of mom and pop businesses out there. What do you mean by that?

07:40

So how would you go about finding a new CNC shop to do you know, five axis work with a specific grade of aluminum at a specific procedure, you might go to Thomasnet, you might go to Bucha stuff, but there's 10s of 1000s of them that are out. And the discovery of those folks is difficult. And then now I'm working with you and your let's say your CNC shop, and maybe I'm a powder coater I'm gonna give you some wheat times and have some buffer, and you're gonna give your customers something tangible, for and now all of a sudden, something that actually only takes three or four weeks to complete. The end person that's buying, it thinks it's a 12 weekly fundraiser. And without some sort of automated coordination. It's just never going to be better than that. But imagine if we could actually tie all these things together, coordinate them together with the same number of people in the same amount of machines, we could then just produce so much more stuff on

08:38

See, this is interesting, because this is sort of this is not like a typical what I see as a typical

08:46

ERP.

08:48

Yeah, I think we're in ERP by

08:51

looking at your your display, and it said, ERP, so

08:54

that is that is what, but it's much more. Yeah, I think you need to build, I think we slowly realized as we tried to build AI schedulers first. And we realized we needed to plug into the ERP to get the data out. And then we realized the data in the ERP is trash. So we built a job tracker that allows the shop floor employee to have a really beautiful interface that has the drawings on there that it can enter all the all the checkpoints of measurements of the part on there that they can start and stop on there. And then we got better data. And then we realize, Oh, we got to understand when the materials coming from ERP Well, that's slow, because people are like, sending purchase orders are not entering that information back into the system. Well, that we built that and we never intended to build a full suite ERP. It was just each and every time we built something, we realized there was something else that we needed to make it better for our customers. And over time, we realized that there was a nonlinear exponential growth and value we deliver to the customers. Every time we built something else. When we knew what the purchase orders were. Our purchasing planning got that much better. We knew what the sales orders were our demand planning better. We knew The work centers were in what what, what the humans could do and and how many there were, the scheduling got better. And so, as we've continued to evolve, we've just, I wouldn't say reluctantly. But it certainly wasn't the grandiose plan to be an ERP system. We just wanted to help improve throughput for manufacturers, and it's grown into this thing.

10:19

That's interesting. If I was if, if I, if I was on the fulcrum platform, I'm a manufacturer, how does the how does the platform help facilitate my vendors, like I have ABCD, whatever the vendor name, and I want information about where they're at on there, I want to tighten things up. That means I've got to be able to have a line of communication. How does that how does that work and fulcrum

10:50

there, it's there's no publicly published features that do that we do have technology, that for some of our customers, we can tie their information together a purchase order, and is a sales order in another company's full. Now, the real blunt truth is that we're just not large enough, we have hundreds of customers, now we're tripling every single time we raise funding, which is either a year or year and a half, we've grown over 9x Over the last couple of years, three years. But we're not even anywhere near the size we need to be to create a real network. So for us, the strategy right now is, let's work with a broad set of manufacturers, let's work with rubber extruders, and let's work with aluminum, CNC shops, with sheet metal fabricators, with plastic injection, molders, let's make sure we can even service all of them really well. And then let's make the product increasingly awesome. So that everyone, it's just a no brainer that they're gonna switch to that I think are the those are the two ingredients that we need to make sure that we're compatible. And so we're experimenting selfishly behind the scenes writing software to connect these businesses together. And so if if you want it, you will opt in for it and you wanted to connect, we can make it so that when you placed a purchase order became a sales order in your vendor, we could we can pull from them if they wanted to share what their capacity is. And maybe the lead time for this quantity is is three weeks. But if you want 10 times the amount? Well, you're gonna have to wait 15 weeks, well, maybe I'm going to place five smaller orders for 1/10 the amount, get them exactly what I need them instead of buying a huge amount. And that way everybody's capacity starts to loosen, and we just get way more yield out of the situation.

12:32

I don't see how you can avoid that. I think that that's where it's going. Yeah, I know, if I was a just a manufacturer, I would I want to, I want to have as much visibility into my business into my vendors so that I'm as efficient as I possibly can be. I mean, just that would be the ideal situation. And then having that conversation, I want to buy my materials from you. Let's have this conversation about how we connect and how you send that information. I just don't see any other way of getting around.

13:07

Yeah, I think the industry is trending in that way. The it used to be that there were job shops that didn't only customer stuff. And there were long run manufacturers, well, the long run manufacturers, they're hearing from the auto companies, we're going to change this program every year now instead of every three years. And instead of having one lump sum in our warehouse, we want blanket orders where you deliver stuff to us every other week. Well now imagine how difficult it is to go from scheduling. I'm going to build this for three weeks. So I'm gonna build this four times over the course of three weeks, and schedule that all together, it went from a three by three Sudoku board to a 100 by 100 Sudoku board. And it's just getting almost impossible for these businesses to solve. And because these businesses are so richly diversified and distributed and decentralized, they're not hugely powerful. They're not 100 billion dollar companies that can afford to write software for themselves, they need somebody else to build this technology for them. So I think that's where the need comes from, for what our vision is

14:05

for the market. So with that said, as we venture into the future, I would imagine course poker wants to be bigger, stronger, faster, you want to apply the Steve Austin approach to your business. And where do you see fulcrum growing? Because you guys are growing rapidly, guys. Clearly, it's it's that way. Is it? What do you see yourself going? What do you want to go?

14:32

So I think we talked internally a lot about not comparing ourselves to competitors, we really want to continue to just service our customers as best as possible. So from a growth standpoint, we try as best as possible to see the sales growth and customer count growth as a natural byproduct of the product getting better, and really just invest as much of our energy into making the product better as possible. And it's hard. It's hard because you have a very volatile stock market environment. We have have really great venture capitalists that are backing Yes. But the value of your company is largely based on how much revenue you have. So it's really easy to fall into that trap of, well, I need to be at, you know, X number of million dollars in revenue, we really try to force that as the revenue is an outcome that's driven by better products by a better marketing plan, not the other way around. Because I think you can get into this really toxic mindset, it's like, well, we have to hit this thing, I'm going to say yes, to a customer that doesn't actually fit, we're going to build some stuff just to close them. And then your product gets muddy and cluttered and whatever it may be. So I think keeping the long term sanctity of this vision of a network of manufacturing alive is we want, we want the luxury to make that as the power to be in our hands as much as possible, so that we can continue to stick to that. So insofar as growth, we want to grow enough to be self-sustainable.

15:52

So one last question, before we wrap it up. Do you have sort of groups out there that you take suggestions like I, we have these working groups, and we we all use your your, your, your solution. And we think that it would be great to have this and this and then provide those insights into your organization? Yeah,

16:15

we have a we use a piece of software called tribe. And it's like a community platform and all of our customers, if they want to, can sign up and put ideas in there. And sometimes it's negative, and sometimes it's positive. And then actually, just before this, we did a live stream from FABTECH for our customers, and they asked a bunch of questions about is this feature coming? How do you think about this, so we, we try to have an incredibly open dialogue with our customers about it, some customers are just happy as is, they don't want to mess with that they want a stable of a product as possible. But a large portion of them want to tell us what their thoughts are, and have been really, really fun to work with. Because they understand that we can see so many manufacturers, we can deliver really great ideas that maybe they can't see, but they still want to share that. So I think for now, we're managing that feedback really well, we're getting a lot of ideas from them in in the in time, we're probably gonna have to formalize that and make some sort of customer Counsel of non-customers as well to try to collect the information in a balanced way.

17:12

So with that said,

17:15

one last short last question. I'm sorry about that.

17:18

So this particular this, this particular event is you are focused primarily if I was a manufacturer, and I'd say gosh, I like hearing what Sony has to say, I want to knock on the door, I want to be able to sort of begin that dialogue. What is your typical approach to a manufacturer saying I hear it? I want? How do you approach that manufacturing?

17:46

So if you just want to learn more, anyone can email me, SUNNY@fulcrumpro.com Sunny, like the weather, my inbox blows up all the time, I might not answer as fast as I used to. But I always answer everybody's emails. If you actually think that you could be a good fit our processes may be a little antithetical, we do as much as we can to push you out, we asked a bunch of questions to make sure that you fit. And once we believe you fit, we'll give you a price. We'll show you the software right away. There's no need to set up a demo. The product is cloud based. It's it's super intuitive. We don't need to do anything, you can see a demo right away. And then you can ask us questions be like, Okay, we handle things this way. How would we handle as a fulcrum? And either we have no answers for you. And then we would say you don't fit or all of our answers make sense. And then we would see what we need to do to implement as soon as painless. Well, there's a little bit of pain, but

18:36

I've been upgraded software. It can be painful. Sounds like you guys got it under control. Yeah, we already given me your contact information.

18:47

This is fulcrum. She's just fulcrum.com Pro.

18:52

I'm looking at your card right now. Both from pro.com. You are great. Sony.

18:57

Thank you. Thank you for doing all this. This is,

19:00

this is a lot of fun. All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for sunny out on industrial talk.com as well as fulcrum. I highly recommend just like, like I keep on saying you need to reach out you need to find individuals, you need to find those Sherpas that'll help you become a better business. I did Sunny and tiempo from fit that bill, reach out to them go out to industrial talk.com Alright, once again, we are broadcasting from fact. It is in Atlanta, Georgia. And it is a great, great event. Put this on your calendar for next year. So if you find yourself you gotta get out here. It could happen, Captain. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

19:38

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

19:44

All right. Once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk and definitely thank you very much for your support. Sunny Han. He was in the hot seat. Fulcrum is the company you need to check them out. It'll all be out on industrial talk.com. So just go out there, click on the link boom. You'll get a stat card, which is pretty doggone impressive. Yeah, he's been around seven, close to eight years for fulcrum. Incredible stuff. Right? Check it out. And tinkled I gotta tell you, man, they were all on it, man. They were just absolutely working the floor. They definitely, without doubt, have your best interest at heart. Okay? Just keep that in mind. It's a fact Jack. All right, once again, the platform, industrial talk is dedicated to you industrial professionals as well as those companies. You need to amplify that voice. You need to tell your story, go out to industrial talk, reach out to me say, Hey, Scott, I want to be on the podcast. I'm going to be at this conference, whatever it might be. Let's get you. Let's get your voice heard. Because that's what we're all about. Education. Yes. Collaboration, absolutely. Innovation, a must. And we just got to continue to bring up that human side of you each and every day because you're you're changing the world. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Sunny and you're going to change the world. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Once again. We're going to have another great conversation coming from FABTECH so stay tuned.

The post Sunny Han with Fulcrum appeared first on Industrial Talk.