The Customization Paradox: Turnkey vs. Open-Source ERP Solutions

Welcome, everybody, to today’s webinar, Turnkey ERP over Custom Build. What does that mean? Well, we’re going to be diving into hotly debate topic, I guess, of the world of enterprise resource planning ERP systems and how there’s a paradox between which one we should be using between turnkey versus custom build ERP. Well, a huge paradox here, I think probably from the summary or from some of the comment you might have I read, and even my title says, The Turnkey Over Custom Build. I guess we’re going to be proning that there’s, contrary to popular belief, a lot of distinct advantage of using or that the turnkey solution outshines the custom built. Though we will discuss some of the pros and cons of each other, and I will still state that at some point, depending on your needs, you might go both ways. Now, that also goes in line with a central topic at some point that we’ll reach that we’ll be discussing So that even if you choose turnkey solution, there might be gaps, there might be none fit between your industry, your reality, and what the ERP offers. What happens then? That’s also part of our topic today.

Before we go any further, I want to stop share, introduce myself. My name is Frank. I’ve been in the manufacturing industry for 20 years, nine years working with Genius ERP and proud of it. Implementing, helping customers with of their customization, but also working on doing these webinars, demonstration, helping out our customer in our canteens. I’ll talk about that later. I also have with me a silent listener so far or partner, Maxim Cotebo, who’s in charge of our custom development team. Hi, Maxime.

Hi.

Anything to add? I guess I said it. How long have you been with Genius, actually?

I’m curious. It’s been eight years We’re in it now.

Eight years. Cool. So when we’re going to reach that topic about what we do when we need customization and that little tweak about, yeah, I’m turnkey, built-in, but we need something else, you’ll chime in to help me, I hope.

Yes.

All right. Thank you. All right. Let me share again. We’ll move on to our agenda for today. All right. So we’ll take a few minutes to look at an introduction to genius who who we are, what do we do, and then we’ll move into what is turnkey versus custom built. We’ll take a quick moment and quick glimpse of pros and cons. I’ll keep it short. And then we’ll move to why choosing a turnkey ERP is the best solution and why we think that. Then also to the point, and probably the highlight of this discussion is, but what happened if I take a built-in ERP, built-in solution, but it doesn’t perfectly fit my needs? Or it actually might be hard to find one that actually fits your reality. We’ll definitely touch on that as well today. If you want to have a timeline estimate, I’d say about 5 or 10 minutes by section. This morning we did in French, it in French. It took about 35 minutes top for the entire I think so. Just to give you an idea here. All right, let’s head into it. First of all, we’ll talk about and we’ll introduce you to who we are here at a genius.

All right, so you can right away see the map. This is our coverage today where we have our customers. So We are very focused on the North America business. 30 year plus in business, 100 plus employee. Actually, today, this is 120 something employee, if I’m not mistaken. Ten thousands of users. That one is my hard shape comment here, 96% retention. That means that customers that are hopping on board with Genius ERP are sticking around. They’re finding a good fit, and we bring best practice of the business. I We keep our customers. That’s basically it. Continuous increase of our compound annual growth as well. This actually talks about the fact that if you are looking for an ERP, all of these little Capter, Software Advice, Get App, those are different websites that helps you choose your ERP for your business. What’s the good fit? Actually, we’ve got the similar badges in 2023. Didn’t update my slide here, my bad. Pretty much like this one here on top right, it talks about how Genius ERP scores along the other ERPs in the market, and some of the big names are in there as well. You can see how we rank pretty high on customer satisfaction and on ease of use as well.

So pretty proud notice here. Who we are. I think this slide really tells a lot, and I’ll bring this back a little bit later. What makes us unique and who we are? Really, we focus on custom manufacturers, people that do, you might hear these word often, engineering to order, build to order, design and build, configure to order, make to order, and so on. People that usually everyday have something different coming out of their shop. And because of that, we have a lot of unique tools in the system. Today’s focus is not necessarily on these tools, but if you’re interested, we definitely have webinars on each of these topics that are available on our site, if you’re interested in our tool to integrate with CAD solution, so software design, sorry, computer-assisted design, that’s actually CAD. And we have some scheduling tools in our system that are pretty much state of the art and also business intelligence basically giving you access to your data. I’m thinking the more you are custom-built, the more you need to see and drive decision by your data. We definitely have that in Genius. If you’re wondering how does genius work, where can you install it?

Well, genius is an SQL-based software. It lives either on your SQL Server at your facility or it could be installed on a hosting We also offer our own hosting of the software where you just have to log in to have access. All of these are possible. If we do have customers listening in today, because this is open to all of you for this webinar, for our customer, just FYI, if you want to move from one solution to the other, it’s very, very simple to do so. All right. This slide was meant to show you a shop floor. We’re manufacturing ERP, so that’s a center point here. But around that, there’s all sorts of other people involved. It’s a huge network of things, idea, processes moving around. That was the entire point of this slide. But Also, it was to put little dots on there of what modules, I hate to call them modules, functionality or a role base that we cover. If you’re looking at this and finding that pretty much all these dots make sense for you, we’re probably a good match. If you’re some of our customers joining us today and you’re looking at this and not knowing that we are covering certain of these things, please reach out.

We’ll be more than happy to talk to you about it. All right, so that’s some of it for who we are. I still We have one slide to go here. Oh, yeah, pretty important here. If you’re joining us or implementing genius, or even you’ve been on board for a while, we do have a learning platform where you can look at typical questions, get on board into your role. Maybe you have a change in employees, and you want them to ramp up their knowledge about the software. There’s tons of knowledge in that platform for you to reach your goals. All right, now, right into today’s topic. What are our turnkey versus custom-built ERPs. Let’s take a quick look. Again, I’m not going to extend this too much. What’s turnkey? All right. Turnkey, reading what we meant here by the expression is, some people will say out of the box, software as ready, meaning that as soon as you install it, it already has standard processes, define a standard structure, define processes. It’s I’m going to say limited, perhaps, but still has a full offering of functionality, but it relies on really those standard procedures and configuration that are supplied by the software vendor.

Yeah, I’ll get to the question. I guess there’s already a question about the last slide I showed about the learning platform. Are the learning options only available for existing customers? Oh, actually, today, that’s the case. You have to be on a contract with us to get access to that learning platform. We do have a lot, though, that is shared through the web, through our webinars and other tools. If you have any specific that you’re looking for, please reach out or please write a very specific one in the Q&A. I’ll be more than happy to reach out afterwards. All right, so that’s for the turnkey non-customizable ERP. If we look at Custom Built 10 ERP, well, that one means that there is flexibility, meaning that you could alter behaviors of a screen. You could create your own screen. If we push it to even open source type software, you could build your own from scratch, share apps or share screens that you’ve deal with the community and actually bring code in and share, basically. I guess highly customizable, this is where we wanted to go. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to compare both being in a mindset of non-customizable versus customizable.

Instead of doing an extensive pros and cons, I’ll list maybe five highlights of each that we’ll be able to compare. The first one, top of the list for sure, turnkey ERPs, out-of-the-box ERPs are rigid. They have a structure, process in place, standardize, and it’s It’s not easy to customize stuff in their behaviors or not possible at all. Now, if we look at the customizable one, for sure, there’s flexibility, you can customize them, you can actually adapt the software to your business specifics and to your needs. Now on the left side, we’ll gain on stability, scalability. I would probably add in there durability. I mean, you are building on an established framework that went through a regress testing, and you’re sure not to break anything by going through the process. Also it can scale because at that point, if you’re getting to updates, maintaining and going through change of servers or whatever, you are again working on a rigorously tested structure that will ensure that you can actually go through these steps without breaking. Versus the customizable one that will have Let’s just call it potential complexity. While flexible, it could be prone to bug or having to continuously revise your code or go through reassessing the entire process every time you bring something new.

The fact that you’re going through, perhaps even if we talk about more contributing software where you can even share with a community of developers, you could even bring code from somewhere else and trying to fit it into your software. So you’re walking into a complexity of things that you have to web together at some point for getting the proper behavior. Seamless integration and support. I have to choose words in here. Really, what I’m trying to say is it’s designed to be integrated with your current activities. It’s trying to make best practice reflected in the system to make smooth operation across your business. Now, it also makes it easier to maintain by the vendor to support, to train you, to do updates. And again, I’m starting to repeat myself. I’m going to be careful here. On the reverse side, we have community-driven development So meaning that you can have, again, contributors bringing in improvement, a lot of innovation if available. So do you have a community? Did they think or did they have the same challenge you did? Is that code available? Can I actually Basically, fit it into what we have, there’s a lot of challenge ahead.

One important point here, I guess I want to bring up with that is, do you have the reliable expert on hand? It could be your internal own heard. Often what we see is we start having different third party involved in coding the software, often each having their own little speciality of what they bring to the software, to the development you have. Security and compliance Compliance. Well, again, regularly tested, strong framework. There’s typically regulation about data management in different industries or market, but also there are compliance that we need to live up to in the software industry. The out-of-the-box turnkey solution has that, whereas if you are compiling code from different sources, having different developers, do they all have that in mind? You potentially will have to test security. You’ll have to validate a few things on your way. And that means double verification, double the time, perhaps you need to involve into development. Cost efficiency. Well, what I read through my research, I was probably none objective in that regard, thinking that turnkey software are cheaper. And by that, I mean that it might be on short term, higher cost to implement, to bring in the software, to buy it.

But on mid to long term, often they become cheaper. And the expression always goes back to what we call total cost of ownership. So again, initial setup, maintenance, support costs are already defined, and there’s not always a bump. A lot of the turnkey ERPs are pretty good into defining that roadmap for you and those costs cost ahead of time. Cost consideration on the other side, meaning that initial cost might be low, and you could even lay out some of the costs of development of customization throughout the way, but typically, they are a big spike at some point. You need to have a technology bump where you’re basing your code on might need an update that can play with your entire development that you think was stable, might not be anymore. So again, for maintenance, for security, for testing, these are usually doing a lot of spike into your costs at, let’s just say mid-long term. All right. So I guess you were seeing where I’m going, and I wasn’t necessarily biased in there. We’re going to talk about why we think there’s a superiority in choosing a turnkey ERP. Now, before I go there, I do need to say that, and I think I’ve always said before, There is value in both types, non-customizable ERPs who’s business that are looking for stability, established best practice, comprehensive support, maintenance, and stuff like that, whereas People looking for, or business is looking for, a lot of flexibility that has internal resources to manage the customization, maintenance, potential complexity, or vulnerability.

I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time with that Vulnerabilities. Well, I hope you understood that one. Let’s just call them complexities that might come up throughout the week. But again, there are people choosing both, and there are reasons why. On our side, we’re going to vote for turnkey ERP The reason is, and I’m not going to voice them all again, but stability, durability, security, even cost. You might look again at all these reasons we just went through. If you want to listen to recording afterward, everybody will get an access to the recorded session. So For all these reasons, we do think that there’s a highlight or a superiority by choosing turnkey ERPs. But when you do so, so you’re about to choose an ERP for your manufacturing business, perhaps you’re a custom manufacturer like a lot of our customers are, what happens is it’s hard to find the perfect fit. And even if you think you found it, maybe along the way, there’s a break in the chain. There’s a process that just doesn’t fit your need. What happens then? Now, before I go further, I want to restate where we sit here at GeniusERP.

The reason is this is our core focus. Genius really is looking at custom manufacturing as the target market where genius is usable. Now, manufacturer is the top of the list, and then I’d say custom manufacturers. I have a nice story where I heard a nice story recently from our owners and from our more senior crew members where they were talking about when the business started, we were looking at all sorts of industries. And back in, say, before the year 2000, every ERP was developed just by custom coding everything. And after a while, we had 20, 50, 100 customers, and they basically all had a different ERP. It was impossible to support. It was impossible to maintain. To be able to grow, to be able to really help our customers, we took the decision to become a turnkey ERP, a non-customizable ERP, but still focus on custom manufacturers. And I’m proud to say that we’ve achieved that so far. We have, again, 96% customer retention. And if you’re curious to know how we do this, there are some highlight on our website from the different industry we usually target and how we’re bringing stuff to each of these industries.

Now, if you want to know more, again, there’s buttons here to request a demo, reach I’ll leave an email at the end if you want to talk to us a little bit more about how we’re actually a good fit to these different industries or to yours. Now, where I want to focus on is you’re looking at an ERP, there’s a missing link. What happens? You have a need, it’s not covered. Here at Genius, what happens is it could be our implementers, it could be our customers reaching out, it could be me listening to your questions on a webinar, bringing the comment back to our product team. Now, how does that work out? It all gets to a list that we call our backlog of demand, our backlog of, let’s just say, uncovered needs or pains. Then what we do is our product owners will look at, all right, does it help our… Tam means target addressable market. Does it help them achieve more things with genius here? How many of our customers would actually benefit if we would add this to the software. And what’s the effort required to put this in place? Remember, we always want to be in line with those values that we were talking about earlier, sustainability, durability, security, and all that, supporting.

So if Evaluating this puts a weight on each of these demand, puts a business value to them, and that helps us define what hits our roadmap. At GeniusERP, we do release one major release per year that includes all of these improvement Every year, we reinvest in the software and we keep that backlog list going, and we populate that roadmap with the best priorities that we can think of. Now, it does happen once in a while that we have customers that have something they need, and unfortunately, we reach that point where all the needs are not everybody’s needs. Sometimes it’s very unique, sometimes it’s very particular, and that person, that industry or that customer will still It’s really hurting. There’s a clear return on investment that is obvious to that customer, and it’s not hitting a list. Sometimes, you use this was perceived as not a good fit, and perhaps you look in any ERPs or you’re going into demos with us, you might find out that, Hey, there’s a little thing missing. What we do here at genius is, and again, I want to be careful here, when something is not close to hitting that roadmap, it has to go through that hip first, because if we know we’re We’re going to be bringing something out in next year, next two year, the point is, if it’s part of our standard offering of that turnkey, we’re going to put it in there.

But if it’s not part of that roadmap, we’re not close to hitting it, we will evaluate. And I say, We, Maxim and his team, our custom development team, will take a look at this. They’ll evaluate, they’ll do an analysis, see what we can actually achieve through custom dev. I’m going to be careful because I just said, genius is an uncustomizable ERP, but we’re going to be doing custom dev. Let me put some attributes behind that and explain what we mean so we don’t get lost in translation here. First of all, it is fully embedded in integrate it into the application, meaning that our team will come in and there are entry points to make the application or the custom app available through the screen. I’m sorry, that one. I forgot to put the one in English here. I’m sorry. It actually is our home menu on the You can see there’s a section here that says custom apps at the bottom. In this reality here, there was two entry points. We would also allow it to be in each of the specific page. You are, I don’t know, in a job or in the sales order you want to hit your custom app, within more context, within that screen, you could be able to launch your own custom application.

Now, how does that work? Again, we have a dedicated team that would be ready to help out with those custom demand. But the important point here, we are leveraging the same technology stack than our standard development of GENIUSERP. That means when we do these custom apps, they are done through our own custom team, and they are done with the same line of conduct, with the same values that we were discussing earlier. The advantage of this, because you can think about this, most, or if not all, turnkey non customizable ERP will still allow you to do small customization. By that, I mean you can typically run reports, do KPIs, analytics, and stuff like that, but those are mostly read option. In this case, we’re talking about interactive behavior where we can read and write in the system. On top of that, it becomes more mobile because of our web interface. You can actually run this through a modern browser such as Chrome, Edge, Safari. You can see that in here, we’ve put a few example where it could be on a full page, so tablet, desktop ready, or through a phone. Now, again, always keeping in mind those same value that it has to be stable, it has to be supported, ready for updates, ready for changes in the software.

So using the same technology stack helps us achieve that in the same way. Again, it’s part of that standard offering that we have. Now, perhaps at this point, I want to bring in Max, if you have a moment here with me, and maybe give an example of what happened here. This is an actual screen that we had done quickly. The blurriness is a bit voluntary here. It’s just to bring in a bit of the concept of what we did in the past. Yeah.

In that specific case, it was a customer that was wanting to add some information. He wanted to create some sales order, but he had some specific parameters parameter he had to enter before adding the line. The parameters were to allow to select the proper item, and it was also to fill some custom parameter that we are not managing into genius. Then those parameter would be transferred into genius custom field or node fields. We were selling the standard genius sales order report at the end. They were able after once this this custom module was done, they were able to launch the job from genius and see everything as in the genius module. And after, they were able to get to the invoice and all the other steps after were the standard ones.

What I’m hearing is that customer probably had to reach two, three screens, use some custom fields, and in this case, we’ve put it all into one, speeding up a lot of process, reducing a lot of clicks. There was a lot of value to in that. Order entry tool for me, that was probably like a low hanging fruit. There’s probably other example in there that would be reachable. We’re not going to do all of them today. Do you think of another one, maybe, Max, on top of your head?

Yeah. Some customers are having field services or site installation, and they need to have the supervisor fill in the time card for every employee. So we’ve developed some mobile apps mobile web page more than apps in order for the supervisor to fill in all their crew members’ time sheet. After, they were able to have an approval that doesn’t exist in genius, and the information would be transferred after into the genius standard time sheet. So the job costing is good, and we can edit and see all the time card created by the application.

For those who are new to genius here, we do have time capture. We do have tools to validate time sheet. I guess where we were going here is there are a few of our customers that are, I’m not going to say installers, but equipment manufacturers, and they go out with teams to install it or to commission them. It happened a few times where we saw this, where there’s a group of people just they hop into a truck, they go and install, and it’s so much easier to do one-time entry for the team. So the team lead in there would actually process that through. That’s the situation you were describing, Max, where we speed things up there instead of having individual entries or some other type of batch entry that we can do in genius. Great. All right. What I want to go here is I really do want to invite anybody in the attendance to use the Q&A session, the Q&A from Zoom, because at this point, I’m going to be concluding going to Q&A. If you want to start typing in your question, please feel free to do that. What we’ve been covering so far today, we’ve been talking about the fact that none Customizable, turnkey ERP are, we do think, net least superior to custom-built ERP for sustainability, for cost, for…

I’m not going to go through all of these reason again. But keep in mind GECRP is one of these rigid and reliable structure, but it does offer integrated vendor-supported, I think that’s key, vendor-supported customization that are reliable, equitable, and cost-efficient. We’ll see. Yeah, I do think so they’re cost-efficient. So next, again, as I said, if you have any questions, please write them into Q&A. For our existing customer on the line, I want to remind you that if you are curious about this, if there’s a process you think could be going better, it could just be validating good practice with us. So I propose that you join one of our canteen again three times a week. You have that access through genius academy to hop on one of our live canteen and ask your question with other customers customers, and that could be a very good place to just validate process, validate if it would be worth looking into customer development. If you prefer just to email someone, I’ll have… Actually, I can go there right away. You could just reach out to us through either my personal email, or if you’re new to genius, meaning that you’re looking for more detail about hopping on board with geniusERP, this is the email to reach out.

For our existing customer, that’s the last one here, you can write to customer success. That will reach directly either Oscar, Antoine, Facine, Karol-Ann, one of our super nice customer success team members to help you out with your request. Now, I’m looking at question fields. There is no question so far. We’ve answered one or two along the way. I’m trying to think about the question we had this morning. I think most questions this morning were about how genius was a good fit for custom manufacturers. We had a few new customers joining in. If that’s the case, I guess I would refer back to that to that slide where we were sharing business-specific here. I don’t know if that probably answered the question. Maybe I went through it a little bit more better this time compared to this morning, so people understood a little bit how we can actually reach out. All right, so how can we be a better fit to custom manufacturers or make to order customers? Well, definitely we have tools such as… I mean, Maxine was describing some quick order entry tool, but we also have configurators, we have tools We have tools to do estimating, we have tools to build budget.

Maybe how I can compare to other industries is sometime you might do a rough quote, and when you move to production, that key process of moving between quote to production is something that we have a lot of best practice and experience on with a team. Okay, I think there’s a question here more in line in two. Do we cover better custom manufacturing or Make to order? That’s a pretty large question because a lot of our make to order customer consider themselves custom manufacturers. So maybe I’m misunderstanding exactly the question here. But again, Some of the tools can show here. Okay. So repeated products, we can definitely still help out. You probably have some batch orders that you have to line up with forecast demand. We can also definitely help that type of I guess this webinar is perhaps a little bit more in line with custom demand than with repeat demand and quantity loads. I’ll leave the question and answer open. We flew through the process here half an hour and we’re done. If there are any other questions, please write them down. I’m going to leave it open for a few moments. If there’s no question in a minute or so, we’ll probably just close up early today.

But again, feel free to write your question in. I’ll be more than happy to answer. Somebody left already. I’m going to thank you very much for joining today. I want to make sure I voice that up. Be on the look out. We’ll have another webinar in February and in March. Topics are still being defined, but definitely we’ll have something coming your way. All right. More questions? A great day, everybody. Thank you for joining. See you next. Thanks, Max.