Ryan Weiss:
Hey there! I'm Ryan Weiss, founder and CEO of EPS. We are all about spotlighting leaders who bring vision and clarity to their teams. At EPS, we help you eliminate the chaos of bad handoffs and the frustration of employees between departments. We focus on increasing revenue and efficiency while making life easier for your team and customers. If you found this content compelling, join us at OpticsInAction.com. Apply to be a guest and share your insights as a leader with vision and clarity. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Optics in Action, where we spotlight leaders with vision and clarity, and we talk about people and process and technology challenges in getting folks organized and moving in the same direction. I am honored today to have Ryan Pollyniak. He's got a great first name, love that, and he is the cloud transformation executive with Western Computers. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Excited to have you.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Hey, thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me on.
Ryan Weiss:
I'm sure our audience are going to be interested to know what your title means. What is a cloud transformation executive? We'll get to that in just a minute. First, I'd like to start off with why. Why are you passionate about this? Then, we'll get into what it is that you do.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah, absolutely, Ryan. I've been doing it a long time now, 15 years, so I'm certainly passionate about it. I've got to say, when I first got into the ERP business out of college, it was not as intentional as you might imagine. It was like, "Hey, what do I do next?" I got into working for ADP for their little known ERP division that's long since spun off. We got done with a project and I had a car dealership owner just praising the project team and praising the product and you could feel the genuineness in terms of how we helped the business. That is very satisfying at the end of the workday, at the end of a project, to have somebody who you've made an impact on their professional lives and their personal lives, this is their endeavor, this is their business. From that point forward, I've been hooked. Helping companies make that transformation, get to the cloud, improve processes, it's been no looking back ever since then.
Ryan Weiss:
That's fantastic. I think, as you were talking, one of my best long-term clients first started working with me when they did an ERP implementation. They went from one system to another, and the woman who owns the business, she called me about five or six years ago and she said, "Ryan, we don't know where our inventory is, and I've heard you might be able to help." I'm like, "Well, I'm not getting on an airplane to fly around the world to find your inventory, but how can I help?" When people implement a new ERP, they implement a new CRM or any of these types of systems, they often forget or not forget, but they don't integrate the people and they don't understand the process enough of how people integrate and work with their system. Have you experienced that over the last 15-plus years of your career?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah, no question, and there are nuances to both ERP and CRM in that regard. You've got to match the technology up with the people on one hand. Especially on the CRM side, you have to drive user adoption. You have to help people accomplish their goals and not make their lives more difficult on a day-to-day basis or you risk investing a lot of money in a platform that doesn't do anything for you because it's sitting there collecting dust. Then, on the ERP side, well, those are things that typically have to happen. You have to invoice, you have to receive your inventory, you have to purchase. But that said, there's absolutely a user adoption aspect to that as well. You've got to make people's lives easier while at the same time not trying to reinvent the wheel of what you did in your old system in the new one. You don't want to have your user saying, "Well, this is exactly how I did it before. How do we make the new system do it exactly that way?"
It's a major pitfall in an ERP deployment or CRM deployment. You want to take the time to rethink things. There's a degree of change management that happens internally there that's critical, where your leadership internally, as you go through one of these projects, has got to stand up to the users and say, "Look. We're not trying to ruin your life. We're doing this for a reason. Let's explain the organizational goals and also explain that you may have done something one way for the last 15 years and we're going to get you to the same end goal though the road to get there, your process may be a bit different." Because you don't want to go down the road of just customizing and making a system do something that's not meant to do better to adopt the best practices. That's where the process meets people. A little bit different on those two systems, but some of the fundamental principles remain the same.
Ryan Weiss:
Yeah. That all makes sense. Sometimes people ask me, why the word optics? Podcast is Optics In Action. The word optics has two meanings, it has two definitions. One of them is it's the study of light. It's very technical. You think about physics class in college or university. It's the study of light, it's very technical stuff, which the ERP system, CRM system have very technical elements to them, you've got to have all the right switches flipped in the right ways.
But then, the second definition of the word optics is the perception of people about a situation. That's why I fell in love with this word and this concept. When we think about digital transformation, when you think about change management like you talked about, you've got to think about how are people going to actually use the process and is the process the technology set up in the right way? But you've also got to think about this change management piece. What have you learned about working with people when it comes to change management to solve these issues that are plaguing the company and trying to get them to a better place? In order to get to a better place, you've got to change, so how do you work with people to do that? What have you learned about that?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. Number one, first and foremost with change management is you've got to be open and proactively communicate to your people, or they will have all kinds of dark imaginings about what's going on behind closed doors. That has to start before the project, before the evaluation cycle. If people internally catch wind, "Well, we're looking at systems. Okay, why are we looking at systems? Are you replacing my job? Is AI coming for my job?" AI is a buzzword these days and there's some perception out there that my boss is going to go get an AI solution and we're all out of luck. We're going to be penniless and jobless, but that's not really the case. AI is not coming for jobs as quickly as people think. Though somebody using AI effectively may be coming for your job, so I do suggest embracing it.
Back to your question, which is how do you help organizations embrace this type of change? You've got to proactively communicate far ahead of the project. It cannot start when the project kicks off. There's already fear and rumors and everything else going around. It certainly can't start as you're testing and getting ready to go live, which I've seen people first time and the people are in the system is, "Hey, guys, we're going live on this in a few weeks, so make sure you know what's going on." The messaging, and I don't mean the details of how they're going to use the system, but the general organizational messaging. "Here's why we're doing this. Our old system is 20 years old. It's a security risk. It's costing us all kinds of money." Take your pick of why an organization's making change. Those are common ones. Communicate that openly and make sure that everybody understands the why and how they're going to fit in going forward.
Ryan Weiss:
Yeah, great perspective. When people understand why and they understand the purpose behind what they're doing and where the ultimate vision is taking them, they're far more likely to be receptive to change. I think a lot of that comes down to leadership and trust and all those things that go beyond even the technology itself, but those are foundational for that change management to occur. Great, great perspectives that you shared there. Tell me more about then the process side. You start the communication and you get people engaged and communicate the purpose and all these types of things, and then you've got the technical stuff that you've got to work through. You've got to understand the way people work and what will actually make their lives better and how you solve some of those problems. How do you work with teams to identify the process needs in order to enable the technology to solve some of those problems?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Great question. Coming into a project, you always want to have your ducks in a row in terms of how you currently do business and how you want processes to change. Where are my pain points? Where am I trying to get, so that you can concisely and clearly articulate that to the consulting company, because you're paying by the hour here and you bring a high-powered consultant in, and if you don't have your processes in a row. Here's how we currently take an order. It could be in an old system, it could be in Excel, it could be on a notepad. Whatever that is, let's all agree on it. We've seen people fighting over how they actually currently do business, and you got a bunch of consultants sitting around the room making a couple of hundred bucks an hour racking up the bill. You don't want to go that route for sure.
Then, you want to make sure that your people have time to do this. ERP, CRM projects are big investments with big returns if they're done properly and massive consequences typically if they're not done properly. It's an investment where people have day jobs. If everybody is maxed out already and there's no time in the day, and then you're going to pile an ERP project on top of them where they have to take part in business process interviews, which is really the tactical way that we go about collecting this information. "Hey, Ryan. What do you go through during your day? What are your processes? What are your steps? What are your pain points?" And then translate that into designing best practice in the new system. They don't have time to go through the interviews and if they don't have time for training, most importantly testing.
As you're prepping to go live on any system, testing is number one. There's no question about it because you are still transacting in your old system, you're still using your old CRM, whatever it may be, you want to be ready and have ironed out all the bugs and tackled any kind of issue ahead of go live. It's never going to be perfect, but you'd much rather fight that stuff on the front end than after go live. Allowing people to have the time to test and the time to train and the time to embrace the new system is critical from a management perspective, it's an investment. If you're going to put that on people's plates, you can't also put nine other KPIs on their plates during the project, and you have to respect the fact that it's a lot of work.
Ryan Weiss:
What's your biggest piece of advice for a business owner or a business leader who's evaluating ERP systems and evaluating a new system, evaluating going a new direction with it? What's the biggest piece of advice you would give them as they're starting down this journey?
Ryan Pollyniak:
I think there's a tendency to be stuck on features, which is a little bit of a pitfall, not that features are not important. If you're a door manufacturer and somebody's got a door manufacturing software that does every single thing that you want, it's going to look great in a demo, but have to go a step beyond and understand the organizational depth, the supportability. How many people do you have? Is it a thousand? Is it two? Is it one guy? I've seen it before. There's a tremendous amount of business risk in jumping on board with a business critical system supported by a very small organization because things happen.
One person, you never know, can close up shop and then you're out of luck. If the support is all overseas, you've got time zone issues. If you don't have the technology backing of a big company, you may worry about uptime reliability. You may worry about cybersecurity, especially in the world of cloud. I would say that absolutely getting to the cloud is absolutely critical. You don't have to convince people that too much anymore, but there's still some questions about, "Where's my data?", especially with AI, so make sure you're evaluating data privacy, cybersecurity, transparency of the company, of what they actually do with your data. Are they going to sell it to another company? Are they going to use your transactional data to feed an AI algorithm and help a bunch of other companies out and help your competitors out?
These are things you want to know. What's happening with my data and what's the backing? Features are important, and you've got to make sure the software is going to work, but that's not it. There's a broader evaluation. I think that would be my number one piece of advice and then narrow it down. Don't do full evaluations of seven different systems. It's a huge burden on your team, first of all. It's extremely confusing, by the end of the fourth through fifth one, people are tending to be glazed over, so do some homework.
Ryan Weiss:
Yeah. Remembering number one, two, and three and the differences between them, by the time you get to number of seven it is chaos. You touched on something earlier, I want to come back to you. This is something that the Optic System was designed to help organizations with, is that front end piece of getting your processes documented in a usable format. We have a very simple five-step process. We take folks of going through and understanding the purpose, scope, and gaps of their key processes. Building out what's something called a SIPOC, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but it's suppliers, inputs, process outputs and customers, so looking at a process and saying, "What are the outputs I need from the process? What are the inputs I need to be processed to give us the outputs? Who needs those outputs and who supplies the inputs?"
By going through the simple process, simple framework that we've done, it enables people to really start making those connections. I find it incredibly powerful for people to start visualizing the impact of their process and their decision on other departments and things. An ERP deployment or an ERP upgrade or an ERP change, that becomes really critical, doesn't it?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Absolutely. What you just described, if every project we had that level of documentation to kick it off, go much smoother. The project would end up taking off much faster and they would save a bunch of time. I love what you're doing there and it's hugely important. You've got to have your ducks in a row when you kick off, and it sounds like what you've got going there does just that.
Ryan Weiss:
Yeah. I think there's probably going to be opportunities for us to get to know each other more and collaborate further in the future. As you think about some of the stuff that we've just been talking about, is there one final piece of advice you'd like to leave our audience with or one final thought about digital transformation?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Embracing change is important. Communication on the front end, we talked about change management earlier. Good friend of mine, vice president for a big event center here in Georgia, and he and I were talking about effective communication recently, and what we said was the number one thing I think that causes an impasse in communication or poor communication is assuming that people know everything that you know. I take that to heart as I walk companies through the process of evaluating these very complex decisions, but also from a change management perspective. If you assume that your team and your employees and your future users of this system know what you know, you're taking a big leap of faith there, and that's where the articulation of the why we're doing this and what's coming down the track and what's going to be expected of you is so critical. Make sure you're communicating proactively with your team. Don't assume that people know everything that you know because they don't.
Ryan Weiss:
Yeah. That curse of knowledge. Sometimes the knowledge that we have, we sort of put it on other people and have that expectation. Thank you very much, Ryan Pollyniak. How do people get in contact with you? How do they learn more if they're interested in this conversation and digging a little deeper?
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah, sure thing. I'm on, westerncomputer.com is our company's website. We do European CRM. You could certainly come through there through the contact form. LinkedIn, if you want to come contact me directly, feel free, Ryan Pollyniak. There are not more than one Ryan Pollyniaks out there in the world, so you will find me pretty quickly. Or you go to the URL is Linkedin.com/in/MicrosoftDynamicsSolutions. That's my LinkedIn profile, so feel free to reach out. My title cloud transformation executive, if you ask my kids who told their class that ... I've got young kids in elementary school, "What does your dad do?" "He's a cloud transformation executive." Now, they all think I'm a meteorologist, but that's not true. It's helping companies get to the cloud. It's getting to the modern way of doing business.
Servers on-prem are ripe for cyber attack. You got to get your data aggregated out there. If you're going to take advantage of things like AI in the future, it's not happening with your 20-year-old AS400 sitting with a bunch of jockey data. You've got to get it to a modern system and aggregate that data in a modern platform. Feel free to reach out, guys. We're here. We do a great job.
Ryan Weiss:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Ryan. It was a pleasure having you on Optics In Action. I'm sure that our audience has picked up some things, especially if they're thinking about doing something with their digital transformation. Thank you again for your time today.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Thanks, Ryan. It was a pleasure.
Ryan Weiss:
Hey there! My name is Ryan Weiss, and I'm the host of the Optics In Action Podcast, where we spotlight visionary leaders who bring clarity and innovation to their industries. If you are interested in being a guest or if you know someone who would be, you could find more information about the podcast and listen to previous episodes at OpticsInAction.com. We'd be thrilled to have you on the show and can't wait to hear your story.
