Why Excel and Quickbooks are not an ERP

Let me start then the webinar. This is all about the situation that probably many of you guys are in. It’s all about trying to organize your operations in your shop, trying to work with different tools. The reason why we’re doing that presentation is obviously because many, many times we meet companies using Excel instead of using full system to manage their activities. This is the agenda that we’re going to be using. My name is Jean Magny. I’m the CEO at Genius Solutions. This is really a webinar if you are using an accounting system and Excel spreadsheets. This is not about deep features about the ERP. There’s no demo about the system. It’s more a review of the situations maybe you’re in and maybe some ideas or things that you should be looking at to improve your situation. So the The agenda is covered. We’re covering the agenda with eight topics. The first thing is going to be a quick intro about genius solutions. Just want to be able to share to you guys where we’re from and also to explain to you why we’re sharing that experience components. The second topic is more about just reviewing the fact that you’re not alone if you’re in that situation.

Many companies are doing this. We’re going to be talking also about two types of manufacturers and what are their challenges What are they going through? What challenges do they have? They’re not exactly the same, but some of the challenges that the different manufacturers are having sometimes are the same. But if you’re a part manufacturer or let’s say you’re more doing assemblies, you’re not exactly normally dealing with the same challenges. Then we’re going to be sharing what we call the top three Excel spreadsheets. Then we’re going to talk about, okay, now if we define that an ERP is an avenue, what’s the best timing to implement an ERP? What’s our approach? We’ll do a quick recap and we’ll open up for questions. But if you don’t want to wait for questions, if you have something that you want, you’re ready to share, you can use the chat, you can use the questions. At the end of the presentation, I’m going to review what’s in the chat box. I’m going to review the questions, and then I’m going to cover all these points. Just to give you a quick intro, Janus has been in business for more than 30 years, and we have about 100.

It’s probably closer to 110 employees today. We’ve done projects in 30 states and provinces. So I mean, this is our playground. This is where we operate. The other thing that you have to know is when genius started, we started much more as a consultative group. A lot of our staff are mechanical engineers, industrial engineers. It was not about software. It was about improving the operations. It was about gaining efficiency. This has been like this since the inception, only working with manufacturers. The only thing that happened is we started to build up some modules, some features that we were installing at our customer base up to a point where we had a full suite. Then our focus, that was a bit mixed because when you’re helping companies to grow, not only we helping them using the modules, it was also about lean manufacturing, it was about plant layout, it was about quality control. It’s still deep down in our roots, but today we’re really much more around the implementation of the system. But always with one thing in mind, it’s not about installing a software, it’s about what you’re trying to solve, what are the issues that have to be fixed for your company to grow.

It’s all about that. Since 2006, this is where we really started the focus. Today, it’s hundreds of companies, it’s thousands of users using genius to improve their processes. This is where we’re at. What you have to know is, obviously, in the last year, it was quite tough for to meet people face-to-face. I mean, most of the trade shows have been canceled. Now, they’re going to start back in September. But when we’re normally talking to companies, when people are or we’re meeting them, let’s say, into a trade show, some of the things we’re always measuring, it’s always about half of the companies we meet that are in a situation where they have a system or they don’t have a system. Typically, that’s where we’re at. But 50% of the companies we’re meeting are using an accounting system, and that could be Sage, Peach tree, what used to be called Sage, Basically, accounting, now they’re all called stage 50 or Quickbooks or Xero or whatever the accounting system. But truly at the end, what we can see is people are meeting or are using accounting system and Excel. This is what we see all the time. That’s why I’m saying you’re not alone.

Sometimes it’s funny because people will tell us, they’ll say, We know we’re late and we should have had a system, but you know what? We had all kinds of issue and we’re still using in Excel, and there’s no surprise. The reason why I’m talking to you about this is when you think about that, genius is really made for SMBs, small and medium businesses. So think about it. When you start your business, where do you want Where do you want to put your first $1,000, your first $10,000? Where do you want to put that? Typically, what companies are going to do, you need to have an accounting system. Before you implement an ERP, you want to make sure you have suppliers, you have staff to pay. People will start with an accounting system. You know what? I did a small test. I took my credit card, went to Quickbooks online, just swiped it and said, Okay, let’s try this. How come people are using so much Quickbooks and Excel spreadsheets. The truth is, I was quite surprised. I was amazed to see how the interface is slick and how you can do transactions, and it’s quite easy to process.

But when you think I’ll talk a bit about it, the good thing with accounting is, typically people are trained at school to use these type of tools. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, when I started to dig, I started to ask, Okay, it’s very easy to make an invoice. It’s very easy to create a customer. It’s really easy to look at my balance and things like that. Very easy. Then I started to take a look and say, What if I’m fabricating something complex? What if I’m managing 20, 30 persons on the shop floor and my resources, the way I’m using them, my work centers, my staff, my material, how this system helps me. At the end, it’s a It’s the right thing for you to see what happened in the past because you’re voicing something that happened in the past. You’re looking at your financial statements for things that happened in the past. But if you wanted a tool that’s going to help you to determine what’s coming, how do you have to organize yourself, I was not able to find anything. So I said, simple, nice, but incomplete for manufacturers. We all know how tough it is to find the right persons, to have the right the person’s on the right seat to hire them.

We also know how tough it is, how tough it is now to get even the raw material or the parts you’re purchasing. There’s a huge demand. So if you’re last minute, chances are you’re going to be late to deliver to your customers if you cannot get the parts, let’s say, on time. At the end, when I took a look at that, I said, Okay, I understand people start with these tools. The person in charge of accounting likes that because it does the so on. But at the end, all the wires are disconnected. No one else has some benefits. This is where people start to use Excel spreadsheet to complete that. It’s the same thing for Sage, it’s the same thing for Xero, it’s the same thing for all the other accounting system. First status, first statement is people are using this software plus Excel spreadsheet. And what do we hear? When we’re asking people, we’re saying, Hey, can you tell me more about why do you want to look for an ERP now? Sometimes we talk to people and they say, We hear things like, We’re spending our time reentering the same data in different places.

We hear that. We also hear things like, The data is weird. Who updated the information recently? Meaning the information we can take a look at in the Excel spreadsheets, it’s weird data. I mean, it’s tough. And think about it, although you can use Office 365 and you can share some files. If someone changes something into an Excel spreadsheet, what’s the traceability? Who changed the data? Who updated that information? Who is in the same file as I’m doing it? I cannot update it, or I’m it, but someone else is doing it at the same time. There’s no security. There’s a lack of confidence at a certain point when many persons are starting to use the Excel spreadsheets together. Some other things. Are you sure you’re working with the right file. It doesn’t look like you’re using the last version. That’s tough. You’re in a meeting, you’re trying to share your results, and then someone says, That’s not the right version. You’re not working. You could be taking I’m taking decisions with the wrong data. So these are the type of things that we see. Not sure if the results are representative. The data is from last week.

Oh, shit. I’m taking decisions based on the wrong data. So That’s a true problem. Obviously, the first slide that was talking about time is quite important as well, because the first slide I talked about, we’re reentering data. The most The largest thing you have really is time. When you’re paying your staff to redo transactions in places where they should create, design, they should give instructions, they should train your staff, they should support your customers. When they do that, they do what we call non-value actions down the road that when you’re reentering, not only you can make mistakes, mistakes, but really, it doesn’t bring anything to the customer. I’m going to talk about now what we call the different types. These are typically the type of customers that genius is dealing with. Obviously, I’m not going to talk to you about verticals. We’re working with companies that are, let’s say, doing machining, that are, let’s say, equipment manufacturers, and it could be trailer manufacturers, it could be in the electronic. I’m not going to talk to you about the verticals. I think the concept is more… Sometimes you’re doing, I would call that you’re doing parts.

You’re more doing parts. You’re going to start from a block of steel and then you’re going to machine it. You’ll have multiple operations. I’m going to use this and I use the minions here because I hear people saying, It’s very important that you listen to me because we’re very different here. We don’t do the same thing. We don’t do the things the same way. We hear that all the time. But at the end, what someone who’s making parts has to make sure of. That person needs to make sure that all the resources, the entire shop, the equipment, the employees, they have to be efficient. Why is this? Why is this? Because if you’re fabricating parts, think about it, you should be paying the price for your raw material, the price for your parts, about the same price than your competition. Think about it. The way where you can differentiate, the way where where you can increase your profits is going to be how efficient you are delivering or making the transformation. That’s why efficiency is quite important for companies making parts in a certain way, because a lot of these companies, sometimes, they’re really selling hourly rates for their machines.

That’s one thing. Obviously, I have also to reduce the waste of time, of material. Everything that does not create added value, I need to evacuate that. Cannot do that. These are the things that I have to do. I have to take care of that. I must provide my employees with clear work instructions. If you deal with a company that had the same staff for the last 15 years, easy. We see that there’s a big push for manufacturing. We hear it and we see growth for manufacturing companies today. It means that you need to hire people. Then what was the tribal knowledge, what a few persons owned in terms of knowledge suddenly needs to be transferred to newcomers. People that are joining your team, they have to master how What’s your science, how you’re doing things? They have to do that. You cannot just rely on your staff because the first thing that happens to you is you have more business, you have more volume. Your staff who were already booked and very efficient, suddenly they have to train some other persons. It means that some of their precious time is now gone, trying to train someone without any tools.

So I must provide my employees with clear work instructions. I have to be reliable. I have to deliver on time. I have to increase my capacity. These are all things that we hear for people that are fabricating parts. Reliable, why? Because if you’re fabricating parts, then it means someone’s going to use that part potentially into an assembly. That person decided that they would outsource that part to someone else because they said, We don’t have the capacity and we need to deliver on time. Or you not to deliver on time puts you in jeopardy in a certain way because that might be the last order you’re going to get from that person. You have to be reliable, need to deliver on time. When you look at people fabricating parts, these are all things that are important. Now, if you look on the other side of the fence, if you look at someone who’s making assemblies, equipments, machines, using parts, I’ve already connected the dots here saying that obviously that person, that company, is expecting a parts manufacturer to have the efficiency, the reliability. I mean, these are all the challenges that they’re trying to share to someone else.

How do you deliver faster now? What do you do to be a better equipment manufacturer? What do you have to do? One of the first thing is if you’re doing a complex piece of equipment, and on top of that, imagine that you’re never doing the same or you’re doing some changes. The problem we had in the past was this. We had very good teams or very good people in engineering using very specialized systems like SolidWorks, Inventors, SolidEdge, name them. But the problem was that people were working in a silo. They were just creating Making, making designs. Then when they were done, they were throwing over by email an Excel spreadsheet to some other persons who had to deal with fabrication and purchasing. You’re trying to remove these walls, you’re trying to remove these silo. You have to be, your design as much as possible, connected with your manufacturing, your assembly lines. That’s what you’re looking for because you’re trying to cut down the time it takes to go from design to delivery to your customer. You also have to manage the changes without getting lost in the revs. Nothing is worse than when your customer says the product is perfect, you just delivered the wrong revision.

You didn’t apply the changes we’ve agreed upon when we were doing or we were completing the design together. These are the type of things that are required. I need to receive my parts at the right time and manage my cash flow. So let’s go back. I’m ordering some parts of someone else. I’m giving a planning. I’m giving I’m planning. I know when these parts are required, don’t send them to me too early because I’ll have to pay you 30, 45 days after. This is going to impact my cash flow. I need that cash in. Don’t send them late because if you send them late, then my staff, the people that were supposed to do the assembly at a certain moment during the week then won’t be able to do it. Then they’ll have maybe potentially to do another setup, and they’ll have to take another job, and when finally the parts are happening, then scheduling is going to be all messed up. I need to measure, obviously, the performance of my suppliers as I have to measure the performance also of the people inside. But I have to do that. These are all things. Without saying that accounting is not important, how does it help me to really platform.

So again, if accounting gives me the right information for financial statements, obviously, it helps me being paid. It helps me also determine when I need to pay my vendor. But all this, you’re bounded You’re attached to your vendors, you’re attached to your customers for this, but this is not going to help you to do the next good thing. Can I measure and improve without reliable data? Which goes back to if I’m using some Excel spreadsheets and I’m trying to manage my vendors, I’m trying to manage my revs, I’m trying to create, build a material into Excel, send that by email or share a file, and then someone makes a change, no one knows. It all goes back to all these companies trying to If you use dozens, if it’s not more of Excel spreadsheets, it’s very, very tough to make sure that your data is going to be reliable. This takes us to what we see normally. What we see normally when we’re talking to companies that are using Excel spreadsheets, we see typically what we call our top three. Normally, the biggest Excel spreadsheets, the place where we have the most creativity is going to be related to production planning.

Then it’s going to be about the challenges related to inventory management. Obviously, if you’re looking to know what’s going to be the profitability, it’s going to be about job costing. These are the three things. Let me talk to you a bit about what we see when we meet companies with these three things. I’m going to start with job costing. At the end, what are the questions that if you’re in charge of the job costing, what are the questions that you should be able to answer? These are just some examples in this case. It says, did more equipment, did we take more time, did we take more material than expected when we did a job? Because when we created an estimate, we said we’re going to make a thousand bucks on that product or we’re going to make seven or 10 or 15% of markup. Did we make that? What happened? Where’s the variance? How we estimated the job for the parts purchase. So again, did we do request for quotes to make sure that we got at the right price? When you’re doing job costing, first you need to get all that data. You need to capture all the information that everything you purchase is going to be in the accounting system.

That’s cool. You sold into the Excel spreadsheet That’s cool. But then how do you combine that? Because all your POs were made in the accounting system. The only way for you to get that is someone needs to take all these transactions, go back into an Excel spreadsheet, and How do we update the cost or add lines into an Excel spreadsheet to document all this. On top of that, what about the people who work on the job? How many hours are they all paid the same rates? If someone is paid 20 bucks per hour and someone else is paid 15 bucks per hour, you should use that detail. If someone did some overtime, you should use that to evaluate your job costing. Do you have fringes? What’s your over-ends? What are your over-ends? These are all the things It’s that when you think about it, if you want to be able to do job costing, every time there’s a job or production, you need to gather that information, extract that from your accounting system, or get data in, put that into an Excel spreadsheet. That makes it very, very cumbersome. At the end, what are the other things?

What were the shipping costs? What were the rejects? What’s the waste? This information is very tough to get. Today, what we see is people are struggling, and what happens is they do it for a while. They do it for a while. They do it for a few jobs or they try to do it for all the jobs. But the problem then becomes the fact that you’re looking at a job, you’re working on data of a job that was done in December, and you’re somewhere in February or March. I don’t know when’s the last time you’ve tried that, but go in a shop, try to see Mike or Bob, and ask them, What happened with that job? That job, the job that we made for our customer XYZ, it’s really weird because I can see 150 hours and the budget was about 90. What happened? It’s too late. No one’s going to be able to answer that information. It means that really it’s all your all in, you need to do it, and then you can have feedback from the people. You can go back to the purchaser and validate what happened. But the truth is, if you’re trying to do job costing and you’re looking at data that’s a while ago, you’re going to be able to see what happened.

But if you’re questioning maybe the way the data was filled in or the information was shared, then it’s too late. Then you’re not going to be able to have that type of information. Job costing is a tough one. It’s a very, very tough one. Imagine if you do job costing on a project that’s been done two, three months ago, and product has been shipped, customer is happy, and then while you’re not doing the job costing, your people in sales are being asked to quote again or to redo the same job. If you made money, you should be happy, right? Because then you know that you’re going to make more money because they’re doing the same job again. But what happened if you just did half the profits you were looking for or you lost money and the feedback is not yet available for people in sales? What happens? How do you deal with that today? I mean, I’m going to tell you what happens at many places. They just do it again. The person in sales didn’t hear any people complaining. It seems that the job was done the right way. It was delivered on time.

So I’m just going to sell it again. Pay me a commission on top of that because I did a good job as a sales rep. But think about it, I just repeated the same mistake because the systems in place didn’t have the capacity to give feedback fast That’s enough. So not only you need reliable data, you should not be chasing for that data. You should be able to take a look at it, and why not allow other persons to take a look at it? So job costing is a real issue. And the feedback that is required for the rest of the shop is quite important. That’s for job costing. Now, let’s talk about inventory management. The funny thing is, some people are saying, We don’t carry stock because every time we do a job, we are buying for the job. We don’t carry stock. The second question, in fact, we ask is, Okay, you don’t carry anything, right? No, we don’t. What happens if you order 10 plates of 4 by 8 of a certain gage, you only use 8 because you were able to use the leftovers, are you throwing the two sheets in the trash can?

They’ll say, Are Are you crazy? We keep them. We’re going to use them for another job. Okay, so next time you need the same sheets and you need 10, do you want a system to tell you you need to buy 10 or 8? I want a system to tell me I need to buy 8. Okay, there you go. Although you say you don’t have to manage inventory, you do. The truth is you could be purchasing items directly on jobs, that’s fine. You can do that. But normally, you have to at least have some mechanisms to manage inventory So what happens? It means that for people that are telling us that they’re not managing inventory, they’re still normally an Excel spreadsheet. If it’s not for people in operation, it’s going to be for people in accounting. At the end of your month, there are two things that an accountant will need. They will need to see what’s the value in stock. That’s the first thing. The second thing is they will normally have to evaluate what’s the value for the work in progress. All the jobs you have on the shop floor, what’s the material they’ve consumed?

All the hours that were spent on that job, this value is quite important on your month-end process. At the end, you need to evaluate this. That’s the first thing. So you need to do you do this? If you’re selling spare parts, let’s go back now to someone who’s fabricating machines, you’re going to need inventory. Because if you want your customers to buy the spare parts to you and not to someone else, if you don’t keep some service level, maybe not for your most expensive products, but maybe for things where you need to turn around quickly to offer a good service to your customer, you’ll have to manage this. Again, normally what we see, we have someone carrying an Excel spreadsheet with part numbers and descriptives. Now, some of the challenge we have is when you’re consuming a part for a job, someone needs to update the Excel spreadsheet. Then this This is where we see people using macros, trying to have a bill of material. But you have to consume the material in the Excel spreadsheet because if I’m selling a spare part, I need to know. I need to know if I have the parts or not.

More than that, what I need to know is if I’m selling a part that I carry on stock, if I have a quantity of five and someone calls and says, Jean, I need that part because my machine’s broken, and I happily sell that part and I give discount of 20% on top of that. I just made a customer happy, but on the other end, maybe these five items was reserved for a job that was promised to a customer for a job of $50,000. What happened for the purchaser? How does the purchaser now know that he has or she has to do something? Again, we see people managing inventory with Excel spreadsheets, and then they’re adding and sub tabs, and they’re decreasing manually the inventory, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people will take apart from the inventory, will not update the Excel spreadsheet. Normally, the good guys also to do that will be people from engineering or R&D. Sometimes they need a few things. They say, You know what? There’s enough in the box in the bin. I’m just going to take a few. I need that. Suddenly someone is there, needs the part for a job, and the system says you have five or six or seven, you go into the bin and there’s nothing.

Really, inventory management is painful when you don’t have a system. We can see people struggling a lot just following up quantities. Now, I’m stretching When we look at this, imagine now, again, someone says, This is how we want to manage inventory in terms of dollars. We say, What are you talking about? They say, But when we evaluate inventory, we want to work first in, first out. It means that every time a transaction is occurring into your life, it means that if there’s variation, if you pay something 100 bucks, 120, 115 bucks, it means that you should also not only I’m not going to say how many you have on hand, but you should update your Excel spreadsheet to say, I have 10 on hand. I have seven that I paid 120 bucks, and I have three that I paid 117 bucks. The evaluation is this. You need a lot of detail. Again, imagine that the person who has to update all this is the person trying to update or keep an eye open on the job cost. Because when you think about it, these two things are quite attached or related. But the best place, the place where we see the most effort or the place where we see so many things in terms of Excel is really related to production planning.

In Normally, it’s going to be a huge Excel spreadsheet. This is normally where we see a lot of colors. We see some green, some red, some yellow. We see some red fonts. We see some conditional formatting Think about it. If you’re dealing with production, that’s the main system in your business. How to give the delivery date, how to optimize the time of your employee, Where a job should go on what work center? How do you communicate the information from your scheduling, your planning tool to the rest of the team? If a priority change, how do you do this? How to optimize my operation to reduce waste time and things like that. Typically, people will just create jobs, add them into an Excel spreadsheet. But again, if inventory could change, imagine when a machine breaks down, and you have six, seven jobs using So what do you do? You have to go back into your Excel spreadsheet. You have to change that, and then you had another tab showing the number of hours by work centers. Okay, this is cool. You’ve done that. It’s in front of you. What did you do with the people in the shop.

You’ve printed the drawings, you gave the drawings to everybody. So I’m working at my work station. This is what I have to do. So what do you do? You have to run in the shop. You have to say, You know what? You were supposed to do job 1,000, one, two, three. Now you need to start with 1,000, two, three, and 1 because we don’t have the material or the machine’s broken. How do you do this? This is really the biggest thing. In fact, production planning and scheduling are the most… It’s the biggest topic every time we talk to someone who’s trying to implement an ERP or is looking to implement an ERP. An Excel spreadsheet for scheduling is tough. This is where we’ll have people You know what? Typically, when we do a part, we always have five operations. We’ll design the part, we’ll cut the part. Sometimes it’s going to go to a press break. Sometimes it’s going to go, let’s say, to an outsource operation is going to come back to quality. Normally what people they do is they walk the floor with a list and then they look at where the part is and they go into the Excel spreadsheet and then they check They say first, second, third operations are completed.

They update that and they’re trying to do their best because they know that if they don’t do that, people in sales will spend their day calling them, asking them, is the part going to be on time this time? Because the customer is chasing me. The customer wants to make sure that we’re not going to be late again. So by updating this information, then everybody can take a look at it. But it’s almost now you’re paying someone to be part of your network. You’re taking someone to go and get data on the shop floor, and instead of getting that data through a Wi-Fi or our cable and update a system, that person takes that data, opens up a laptop or a PC and update the file. When you think about it, this is crazy, right? But this is what we see. This is what we see. With a tool like that, the other thing that’s really tough, again, is I talked about earlier a year about, are you dealing with data that happened in the past, or you’re trying to use data and transform that information into decisions? When really you’re using an Excel spreadsheet for scheduling or planning, at the end, you’re offering a view, a window to people in your company to see where things are at.

You’re not helping them to determine what happens if you make a change, how fast would you deliver something, what’s the impact if you change something? You don’t offer offer that type of opportunities to the rest of the company. It’s quite important. These are the three things, the three Excel spreadsheets that we see the most. Here we’re just saying honorable mentions also for them. We see a lot of Excel spreadsheets for people that are doing estimates, costing parts during bids, work in progress, and month in. I mean, this is where we see a lot. But I would say the thing that complicates this also even more comes with the fact that there are copies of all these files. People, sometimes they’ll say, It’s going to be faster. I just need to make a few changes. I’m going to start from that template. I don’t like the way it’s presented, so I’m just going to add a column. I’ll put my notes. I’m just downloading the file or saving it, giving it to another name, and there you go. Then I have, again, different versions. I don’t know, and there’s no way to know when it was updated, who did the changes, Then you’re sitting into a meeting and people are talking about the same company, the same challenges with different data.

Then you say, who do we believe? What decision should we take? Really, that’s a tough part. Tons of copy with minor adjustments of all these files. We see that all the time. So Excel, it seems to be easy, but at the end, it hurts. Just use that image of the movie called the Groundhog Day. I don’t know. I just don’t know if I’m talking to millennials here or to people that are closer to my age, I’m 50. But this, for me, it looks like it comes back all the time, right? That the movie is all about the guy that wakes up in the morning, it’s 07: 00 AM, and when he wakes up, it’s always the same thing that happens. He’s trying to find a way to get out of that loop where he’s stuck in. That’s why I’m saying, why are we waiting then? We know that what I just shared to you should ring a bell if you’re working with Excel. What are we waiting? We’ve asked that question. We said, How come you’re in that situation? Sometimes we talk to small companies and they say, You know what? We’re just going to fix that with a few Excel spreadsheets.

We’ll put a bandaid, and that’s going to work. The second thing, we realized that there’s some duct tape over the bandaid. Then there’s something that an old man one day told me, There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. So it stays there. Then your Excel spreadsheet, they’re part of your business. It’s tough because then every time you hire someone, you’re training them to work on a tool that will not deliver what you need down the road. But you know what? What do we do then? What’s happening and why people are not making changes? Because at the end, we know where it’s going to end. At the end, you’re going to be in a situation where it’s going to be confusing You’ll have a ton of Excel spreadsheets. You’ll try to connect them. You’ll try to make them compelling. You’ll add macros. You’ll try to put some security on them. But at the end, normally what happens, there’s an unfortunate event. Something happens. A customer drops you. A part is late, you have a penalty. You’re not able to get the right staff because they are working at places where they’re more organized. Something bad happens.

This is normally where for us, the phone rings. Now they say, We say we need an ERP, and we say why, and they say, You know why? But we know we don’t. But something is sure is normally… Some of the things that happen are behind that, but suddenly it becomes clear people are saying it’s enough. We’re asking, why you didn’t do it before? Why you didn’t think about it? Why you didn’t want to do that? It’s always the same thing. It’s always the same three things. It’s expensive, it’s complicated, we’re too busy. We hear that all the time. Sometimes we talk to companies and they say, Okay, we’ve chosen an ERP, we’re ready to go. Okay, are you starting the project? No. Why? We’re just too busy. When are you going to start that? We’re going to postpone that to September. We’re going to postpone that to January. Let’s review this a bit. Just want to make sure that you take a look at this because sometimes people will say, Now, you know what? I’m going to look for an ERP. I need an ROI. I said, How do you want me to calculate an ROI?

You know what? Because it’s expensive, I need an ROI. But today, when your staff is reticulating When you’re typing the information, when your staff is taking bad decisions, when your staff cannot predict they have to look at what’s happening, there’s no cost for that, there’s no value for that. When you’re very small, this is tougher because you’re more agile, three, four, five persons. You know what? You don’t have to document things. But when you grow, really, this at the end creates a lot of issues. When you think about it, put the infrastructure aside. If you’re implementing gradually and you put a solid foundation in place and you train yourself the right way, then the good thing is when you’re adding people, you’re not going to train them on something like Excel and have them to do a project with change management and project management because now you have to retrain everybody and tell them that, You know what? The way I trained you a while ago, it doesn’t fit anymore. It’s not good. We need to change that. You know how people react to change, They all say, I don’t have a problem to change, or I don’t have any problem with change.

And normally, what they don’t say is, When it’s not in my department. It’s not that expensive If you’re trying to implement an ERP in your 30, 40, 50 employees, the more you grow, the fact the more it’s going to be expensive, the more it’s going to be complicated, the more persons you have to train. If you start early, then the few persons that are starting to use this system then can understand it’s going to be organized. When you’re adding up people, it’s going to be helpful, it’s going to go faster. Also, I know that for some of the The people we’re talking to, we’ve seen people having the opportunity to use some programs because implementing an ERP is probably the foundation of implementing or starting what we call a 4. 0 process. Sometimes we’ve seen some expenses covered or we saw some companies getting some help, sometimes different funding in terms of 4. 0 initiative. Expensive, take a look at what you do. Take a look at what you do and also remember that today, if you’re using 12 Excel spreadsheets plus an accounting system, you are doing all the transactions. You’re updating the Excel spreadsheet.

Imagine you’re doing that into an ERP instead of into an Excel spreadsheet. You’re making a scheduling sheet or a planning sheet. You do that in Excel or a miss project or T sheet or whatever. You’re doing this somewhere today. You’re just going to do it somewhere It’s not going to take more time. You’ll have to learn it. It’s not going to take more time. You’ll have more reliable data. So expensive, you’re already spending a lot of time doing this. And you know what? Complicated, again, I’m saying not, no, really. It’s not more complicated in Excel. In fact, there are more chances that your staff will do the right transactions into a framework, because when you go into an ERP system, then you can tailor. You can say, That person, I want that person I don’t want that person only to view things. I want that person only to change a few things. I don’t want that person to delete or add. I’m okay if they update. You can tailor the roles or what they have to do in a way where they have less chances to make mistakes. Then if you go into an Excel spreadsheet and then you have 6, 7, 12 cells that they can modify, you’re telling them, just modify these three.

Don’t modify these 12. It’s too dangerous. You should not touch these ones. So you have more chances to have mistakes with an Excel spreadsheet than with an ERP. So complicated? You know what? Not really. Not really. I mean, you have some control. This is the place where I have to say, Yeah, it’s a challenge, too busy. This is where I’m saying also in a certain way, It’s tempting to say that you’re right. Being busy is always going to be a challenge. And the reason is, and you know what? Time is the most important thing you It’s the most important thing you have. Once it’s gone, cannot come back. But at the end, will you have too much time one day? When you say, I’m going to start that in September because we’re too busy now, or sometimes people will say, Well, we’re going to start that in August or in July because we’re too busy now. Then you realize that 30% of the staff is on vacation. In August, really, you’re going to start an ERP project when you need your team to be aligned. Then September comes and that’s hunting season. Then you’re getting closer to Christmas.

Everybody wants to close their ears. My point is, there’s no good moment. This is tough. If there’s a desire to grow that motivates you, there will never be a good moment. The only thing that you have to remember, the more you push it out, the bigger the project will be, the more complicated it will be, the more expensive it will be. It’s really tough because it’s a trade between price and time in a certain way. That’s where you’re at when you’re a growing company, it’s really a trade between these two. These are really the things. Three reasons why people normally are stalled. Now let me just talk to you about how you can do that because an ERP can be scary in a certain way. This is just a quick representation of genius ERP, but whatever the ERP you’re you’re looking at, you’ll have a list of modules. When people are going to read that, they’re going to start and after the fourth line, they’re going to say, Wow, it does all that. That’s why we don’t want to do it. It’s really going to take us too much time. The thing that you have to take a look at, it’s almost like if you’re saying you need to choose your next house, chances are you’re just going to use maybe the main floor and you’re not going to use the basement and you’re not going to use…

You need to choose maybe what’s going to be your next and you’ll have to grow with it. How do you do that? Some people will say, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take an ERP, I want to grow in it. I don’t want to change my ERP. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to put in place a few modules. Then I’m going to implement another module. This is what I call the implementation of individual modules. We see some people sometimes approaching this. The problem with that is that you’re not really changing The truth is, instead of having, let’s say, inventory into Excel, then you’ll have inventory into a module, but you’ll have to update it manually because if you’re still doing your POs into the accounting system, then it means that you’ll have to retype the information into the ERP. No, okay. Then it means that you’re going to implement the accounting systems into the ERP. At the end, you’re not implementing just a few modules because accounting is AP, AR, customers, vendors, financial statements, then suddenly you need to implement a lot of things that go deep in these modules.

What we’re saying is, don’t do that. What we say is, one of the benefit of an ERP is the information that is being shared freely between all the silos, all the departments. There’s normally what we call a first layer of transaction that you need to implement. You don’t have to go deep. Imagine these are modules, these are, let’s say, six modules. We’re saying implement the foundation, not just the accounting modules, because you’re going to be stuck there in six months. We see that. We see people sometimes buying an ERP, implement Implementing accounting, two years after, instead of adding Quickbooks and Excel spreadsheets, they have an ERP and Excel spreadsheets. You implement the foundation, and you could determine that, let’s say, for these two things, you want to go deeper, but you should aim for something like The gains are realized when your ERP allows your employees to play as a team to benefit from the work of everyone without transcription, the information without doubting the reality of the data. That’s the goal. How do we do that? What are the tools now? Because time is always an issue. We’re busy, you’re growing. I want to talk to you about one thing that’s quite important.

In terms of time, the way you’re buying your system is not going to change anything. So If you buy it, you rent it, you go on a cloud, it doesn’t change anything. The true impact is going to be you’re out of pocket. It’s going to reduce your cost, let’s say, if you go cloud, and it’s going to offer you peace of mind. Often, smaller companies, they don’t have someone in charge of IT. Cloud is peace of mind. Overall, over the year, it’s going to cost you a bit more. That’s the reality. This is what we see often. People are purely preaching Searching for cloud will tell you the opposite. But our experience is at the end, you may have the feeling if you don’t have the resources that cloud is going to cost you more. But peace of mind, and it also means scalability. You start with five, you go to 10, you go to 20 users, you don’t have to take care of the infrastructure. Someone’s managing that. But you know what? With genius, you choose. We are offering all these three choices. The place where I’m taking you is this. The thing that’s quite important, and we’re pretty proud of that is when you’re implementing an ERP, normally you follow up some steps to make this successfully.

We try to summarize that. This is our methodology. Where first thing we’re saying is we’re going to spend some time to understand what’s your business. We’re going to do a kickoff meeting, We’re all understanding your business, and then we’re going to build a plan together. Then there’s going to be training, education. It’s going to be really your team gathering, learning. Then it’s going to be, Okay, time play for real now, we’re going live. These are the three steps with some sub-steps. Now, how do we transfer and we make sure that your team is getting the information? It’s quite important with some of the challenges that I shared. I said we don’t have time It’s complicated. We’re offering what we call one-on-one sessions, virtual classroom, and eLearning. I want to take you there because eLearning is quite important. We realized, and this was even worse It hasn’t even accelerated this year when people had to work sometimes remotely, people from the office were working remote, to have a trainer on-site to train everybody at the same time sometimes could be a challenge. More and more people then working remote, sometimes had to compensate work during the weekends or at night.

E-learning is very cool, and that’s something that allows you to offer your team to learn at their pace in a certain way, some of fundamentals related to ERP. To our offer, on top of the virtual classes one-on-one, we’re providing state-of-the-art e-learning tools so your people can learn the system be tested with quizzes and challenges to make sure that they’re really learning, and they can have what we call a learning path. You can determine if I’m the purchaser, these are the three modules that I need to master. If I’m in charge of production, I need these four modules, and then you can build your own training plan. You’re not paying someone attending a training that doesn’t matter, or you’re making sure that they’re covering all the aspects that makes sense. E-learning is a good tool that you should be looking for in terms of an ERP, because if time is an issue, and it means, imagine time is an issue to have, let’s say, four persons at the same time to be available for some trainings, this is a good way for you to get at least a bit more flexibility in terms of making sure people are learning but not necessarily doing it at the same time.

It’s quite important. Don’t rely on a F1 type of feature or on a manual. Make sure that you have some tools that allows you to learn and allow your people also to work more at their pace. Some people can plunge into something for four hours. It’s not an issue for them. Some people, they After 60 minutes, they have to disconnect, they have to do something else. So it’s more at your pace and it allows people to learn in their most efficient way. So these are all little things that can help you go against the too complicated, too expensive, not enough time. And this is where I want to take you now. Just want to do a quick recap because it’s 10: 24, 10: 25. And at the end, just saying, let’s go back to be ready for the future. So I’m saying using Quickbooks and Excel, you’re going to have an ERP. It’s only a matter of time. You know what? Maybe you don’t know it, but you are as you’re adding Excel spreadsheets, you are developing an ERP. You’re creating all the functions that you will need. You’re asking your people to do transactions just into a different weak infrastructure.

That’s what you’re doing. At the end, your staff will have to do that into a place that needs to be much more efficient. When you’re implementing, maybe take a look at going small and grow. Implement multiple modules, not just the accounting modules. Don’t do that, or not just one module. Try to get some of the benefits. Your team has to play together. The other thing I’m saying here, I’m saying the earlier you do it, the less people you have to train, the less habits you’ll have to change, the cost is going to be smaller for the implementation because then you’ll have champions within your business that will be able to support the other persons that are coming in. There’s an impact on the cost down the road. Make sure you have the tools that will facilitate your employees to learn. I just gave you an example with eLearning, could be something else, but make sure that because time is always an issue, you have tools that will allow you to get your people, ramp them up in a way where it’s going to be easier for them. This is why if you’re sitting today with an accounting system in Excel, I hope that we covered some of the issues that maybe you’re facing and maybe some of the challenges you have.

I hope that this gives you ideas to think about it, maybe go back and talk to your peers and say, You know what? We’re really not alone, but we have to do something because status quo is not going to change anything. That’s it, guys, for the presentation. I just want to check if there are any questions being asked in the chat room. Just give me a second. Just want to open up questions in chat. I can wait for a few seconds. If you guys have some specific questions to me, my name is Jean-Manier from genius solutions. Just give me a second. I’ve taken a look now so far for questions and for the chat. Guys, so far, I don’t have any questions. What I’m going to do is I’m I’m going to do this. Just going to complete the webinar, the webinar, and just tell you this. If there’s anything, if you’re looking for any information, let me take a look. I think that that slide will give you an email. You could send an email to jesse@geniuserp. Com or at jean@jean@geniuserp. Com. If there are any questions, it’s going to be a pleasure for me to answer any of your questions.

I hope that this brought value, and I want to say thank you to everybody attending that webinar. Thank you.