Crack open a fascinating chapter of a journey that takes us from the farm to the boardroom. Our guest, Jim Winistorfer, President of Doig Corporation, shares how his humble beginnings and unique background have shaped a successful career in sales and marketing. He reveals how his industrial arts education and farm life have been instrumental in leading engineers and running business operations.
Transformations are never easy, and when it's about changing the way you conduct your business, the process can be daunting. In our chat, Jim provides an insider's perspective on how Doig Corporation transitioned to NetSuite, optimizing their sales process and customer relationship management. You'll learn how the single point of truth for all data and real-time access to live data became a game-changer. As we peel back the layers on this transition, we also touch upon their move to NetSuite's e-commerce solution, SweetCommerce, and the opportunities they foresee in the future.
The factory industry, like any other, is evolving with automation and AI paving the way for the future. Jim gives us a glimpse into this brave new world – the impact of automation on the labor market, the role of 3D vision in picking items, and the significance of external assistance for businesses running NetSuite. Whether you're a novice or a veteran, this conversation is loaded with valuable insights and practical advice that you won't want to miss. So, tune in and let's embark on this enlightening journey together.
Crack open a fascinating chapter of a journey that takes us from the farm to the boardroom. Our guest, Jim Winistorfer, President of Doig Corporation, shares how his humble beginnings and unique background have shaped a successful career in sales and marketing. He reveals how his industrial arts education and farm life have been instrumental in leading engineers and running business operations.
Transformations are never easy, and when it's about changing the way you conduct your business, the process can be daunting. In our chat, Jim provides an insider's perspective on how Doig Corporation transitioned to NetSuite, optimizing their sales process and customer relationship management. You'll learn how the single point of truth for all data and real-time access to live data became a game-changer. As we peel back the layers on this transition, we also touch upon their move to NetSuite's e-commerce solution, SweetCommerce, and the opportunities they foresee in the future.
The factory industry, like any other, is evolving with automation and AI paving the way for the future. Jim gives us a glimpse into this brave new world – the impact of automation on the labor market, the role of 3D vision in picking items, and the significance of external assistance for businesses running NetSuite. Whether you're a novice or a veteran, this conversation is loaded with valuable insights and practical advice that you won't want to miss. So, tune in and let's embark on this enlightening journey together.
Hello and welcome to the Booster ERP podcast. We're delighted to have Jim Winisorfer here from DOIG Corporation. Jim has been a customer of ours. We've actually known each other for quite a while. We've run into each other, different user groups and things of that nature. Welcome, jim, welcome to the podcast.
Jim:Thanks very much, Don.
Todd:Yes, I have the benefit of knowing a little bit of your background. But if you can, just for everybody listening to the podcast, how about where you're from? Where did you go to school? What's your story?
Jim:Okay, I'm a farm kid. I grew up with eight brothers and sisters in Stratford, wisconsin, in the middle of town, in the middle of the state, 40 acres, 40 cows or 80 acres, excuse me, 40 cows. And then went to high school, went to UW Stout and came out as an industrial arts teacher. I went back and taught, actually in my hometown for a few years, woodworking, drafting, building construction. I learned a lot of processes and how manufacturing works there and after three years I got out of teaching and went back to Stout and got my master's degree there in management.
Jim:So after Stout came to Milwaukee, worked for a number of companies in the manufacturing circles here, always on the business development, sales and marketing side of things. So the old RTE corporation, johnson Controls, dover Corporation, waukesha, bering's modern equipment in Port Washington and most recently here the last almost nine years with Doig Corporation in Cedarbury. So for me it's always been about sales and marketing. Even though I've risen into different positions in my career, from general manager to president or CEO, I've always kind of had a handle on the sales and marketing side of the business.
Todd:And that's an important side, because it really does drive it. And what is your current title right now?
Jim:President.
Todd:President, ok, so great. So going back a little bit. So you're a teacher for what? Three years.
Jim:Yes.
Todd:And so how was that a benefit to you as your career went along? How did that impact your career? I'm just curious.
Jim:Absolutely Presentation skills, being able to plan a lesson, being able to be up in front of people, whether it was seventh graders, seniors or their parents. And then I also coached a couple of different sports, primarily basketball and football, and got a lot out of being able to work with young kids and guiding, direct them and discipline them when necessary. And I still say you know, my title is president, but I still call myself head coach, because it took me about 20 years to figure out that what I still love doing is teaching and coaching. The only difference is that some of the some of the people that I teach and coach these days are a little older than the seventh graders and seniors that I used to work with.
Todd:And you can't teach them how to tackle. Yeah Well, that's cool. So industrial arts. So did you always know that you wanted to be kind of in that industry when it comes to like mechanical engineering and just mechanical types of? Did you always know that?
Jim:Well, growing up on a farm, you kind of have to learn how to do a lot of everything. You know your, your own mechanic, your own welder, your own plumber. In many cases my dad was all of those things, yeah. So, getting a chance to work alongside my dad, I tended toward the woodworking, building, construction side of things. I worked with him building rock walls and, you know, upgrading barns in the summers. That was my summer job in many cases.
Jim:But the teaching side of it I got into manufacturing processes.
Jim:If you start one place with a piece of wood or on a drawing, here's where you start, here's where you go next, here's where you go next. So you just learned the processes. I did my master's program in management technology and a piece of that was a master's project, I guess you'd call it with Wausau Homes and their millwork division and that's where I really got a chance to look at processes in a manufacturing setting rather than in a high school shop and really got a chance to say OK, I'm not just building a cabinet, I'm building thousands of cabinets and I'm building individual pieces of wood. So standards, processes, quality, all came into play. And having your machinery lined up and your inventory lined up and making sure you didn't run out of things and your maintenance programs squared away really gave me a good chance to see OK, all these things that I taught kids about at one level now goes on to a whole different level when you're in a production basis. So that time at Wausau Homes and Wausau Millwork was really valuable to me.
Todd:Oh, that's very cool. And now I don't know if you know or not, I'm actually a dairy farm kid grew up in Fenimore, so I grew up on a farm myself. And I talked about working with your dad. There was many times working on equipment that I had to say my dad didn't think fondly of engineers. So going into engineering crumbing from that environment probably gave you a different perspective on the practical usage of some of that engineering and how to build that out.
Jim:Yeah, I'm not an engineer by any means, but my background has been sales and marketing. Most of my master's degree was focused on the marketing and market research side of things strategy, development, organizational leadership but I've led engineers my entire career. My first position was actually an application engineer, but it was a business development role supporting sales and technical people out in the field. So I got to do a lot of technical presentations, technical demonstrations, technical instruction to customers and to distributors and reps in the field. And then every position that I've had since then has been with some kind of a technical product, whether it was transformers, batteries, bearings, furnaces, all the way up to some of the electronics and electrical products that we deal with today. It's always been leading a technically based company.
Todd:Especially, I'm sure, in Milwaukee, because there's such a great base in Milwaukee. There's a lot of great manufacturers all around. We have some clients over there. That's such a hotbed for really good manufacturers and technical so I'm not surprised by that. So you go down the sales and marketing path and you go into there and then you end up where you're at now. If I remember correctly, your first day was it that they decided to go with Nestwe. So tell me a little bit about that.
Jim:So Doig Corporation had been on a product called Tribute for years and years. I think that it had been put in place during Y2K, maybe even before that, but we had been on that product for a long time. My very first day at the company, at Doig Corporation, was our first day of installing NetSuite. So they had already made the decision to make a move to a new ERP, had gone through the selection process and settled on NetSuite, looked at a number of different distributor packages. In hindsight very, very grateful that we switched over to NetSuite and not made the choice to some others. But yeah, my first day was a day with Steve Verrett out of NetSuite in Denver who helped us decide what logo to put up in the upper left-hand corner. It was like, I mean, we were step one all the way through the first day. So I got a chance with the team here of about four or five of us that installed NetSuite over the course of. We went from June. We made a small acquisition in October. During that process. We were looking to get done by the end of December but decided to back it up. We went live March 1st. So from June 1st to March 1st was our install bumped around a little bit by a small acquisition we did and then two months later we took that acquisition live as well. So over the course of nine months, 10 months, we took two companies and brought it up, got everything together Through that process.
Jim:One of the things we did that I thought was really smart was we got our salespeople out of the way, and by saying out of the way I mean we trained them first in contact management, crm management, how to load customers and contacts and events, how to load opportunities, how to do their expense reports and all those things. So they were actually working live, if you will, in NetSuite, for about three months before we went live as a business. And what was cool about that was the salespeople knew on day one when we went live they already knew what they were doing and from an inventory and purchasing and invoicing and sales order standpoint, we got the salespeople out of the way by putting them in front and getting them ahead of everybody. So usually sometimes the hardest part or the hardest people to bring around are the salespeople. We got them out of the way by giving them advanced work and advanced training and when we went live, like most companies, there is that first couple of days that are rough.
Jim:And then you learn how things are going and then at the end of the month your first close is a cluster and it's a tough week to get yourself closed. But we didn't have to worry about the salespeople in that whole process at all. So we went through our first live, a little valley of despair for the first few days, climbed out of that, had our first close, got through that and then we went on. The next close got a little bit better, the one after that got better, and now we kind of pride ourselves on saying that we're usually closed the first day of the month by at least 10 o'clock in the morning.
Todd:Last thing that is fantastic. You're definitely out of the curve on that.
Jim:It's kind of a point of pride. We just make sure that everything has to be done. All the transactional things have to be done by midnight, no matter what position you're in, everything has to be done by midnight so that when our accounting people take a look the next morning, there are a few things that we have to clean up and balance and then we're closed for the month. We can do all of our reporting immediately report to suppliers, report to our customers, report to our salespeople and let everybody know how the month closed very, very quickly.
Todd:That's fantastic. So it sounds like you spent a fair amount of time kind of working on those internal systems and processes. Is that correct? Yes, ian, what in you know? Everybody listening to this is involved in Nest Week one way or another. What do you think are some of the best processes that you've baked out? As far as for you guys to help, you know, facilitate some of that? What advice would you give with people with that?
Jim:Well, we're a distributor, so we're buying and reselling. We don't have all the manufacturing processes and all of the inventory transactions of work in process inventory that some other people may have to reconcile Expenses is typically, you know, we invoice, so we have all of our sales records done right away. All we have to do is make sure all of our expenses are lined up and in the proper period and then we can close. We do some bank reconciliation things, some account reconciliation things, but then we're pretty well done. We don't wait around for people to do their expense reports and have to record that we're not waiting for freight or you know other things to come in. So we can basically take it. As long as we've got a mindset that says, hey, we want to close quickly and get on to the next month, we can do that very quickly.
Todd:Awesome and so I mean you're correct in your statement that he's talked about with the sales staff that that's usually the most challenging to get up to speed and I've always shared that. There's good reason for that and, generally speaking, you don't want sales people living on a laptop or on a desktop all day, so they're not always connected to it and they don't always live on it. And two, like finance has gap accounting rules. You know there are no gap accounting rules for sales so, but it sounds like you may have some process behind that. Let's talk about that a little bit. For CRM, are you still using this week CRM?
Jim:Absolutely. It's the only thing we use.
Todd:And how have you been? Because that is and that was my specialty for years and years and it has always shown how have you been able to get that to work?
Jim:Well, for most of what we do it's contact management, event management, where when we visit a customer our sales guys are out in front of anywhere from three to six customers companies a day and a number of different contacts. We log all of those customer visits and contacts as an event. We don't go to that, we don't log telephone calls always, but we log all face-to-face visits at a customer site and if a customer comes in here to our business we'll log that. We log our supplier interactions so that if a supplier is along on an event at a customer visit we include them on it so we can always see who was on the event, who was on the call, who was included, what were the notes and the actions that are tied to that. And the sales reps are responsible for putting all of that information in. So on a daily basis they have to record. Some of them do it first thing in the morning, some of them do it at the end of the day, some of them wait a couple of days. We try not to have that recording be any more than about 48 hours old. I'm not saying we're perfect there, but that's most of the guys. Most of the guys are same day or next day. They get all of their customer visit reports in and we can all see those throughout the company. And if I wanna go back eight years into our history and see what we were doing with Go Virtual Office as a customer, I could go see that and see who called on them and which suppliers we had in there.
Jim:So the CRM piece of it is mostly about contacts and customers and events. The third or the other piece that we do is opportunity management. For us, any deal that's worth five grand in sale and larger we log as an opportunity because we wanna see it. We kinda wanna track it. We also report to our suppliers because they wanna see bigger deals, they wanna see the progression, they wanna see when it gets opened and track when we close it how many we win, how many we lose, the reasons behind why we might win or lose orders and the progression and how they can help. So we have at the end of the month we have an automatic report that goes out to our suppliers and the opportunities that we've opened and have live for them and it's an automatically generated report that just goes out four o'clock in the morning on the first day of the month. So it's another one of those auto-gen reports that we do that quickly give our suppliers information.
Todd:So what about your dashboards?
Jim:Have you been pretty successful with building out the dashboards for the sale staff and, as that goes along, yes, each role in the company has a different set of dashboards on their home screens so the sales reps can see all of their own information for their customers, their quotes. We've built a number of portlets as well custom portlets that allow them to see which customers they're selling to, which suppliers they're selling from, how they stack up against the other sales reps that we have in their other territories. We've got probably a dozen different custom portlets that we can choose from, depending upon the role that that person is working in. That allows them to see what's going on in their territory or in their role. It's one of the most valuable pieces that we've seen.
Jim:So as a distributor, we're in the middle of suppliers and customers and I always wanted to be able to see and we always want to be able to see, as a supplier, which customers am I working with through Doid Corporation. And as a customer, or as a sales rep, I want to be able to see which customers are selling to which suppliers. So there's always three ways to look at things. And if I'm on a supplier, I want to be able to see my sales reps and my customers. If I'm on the customer, I want to be able to see my sales reps and my suppliers and a number of different performance metrics that we have for either the supplier or the customer.
Jim:So on our customer portlets we'll have sales, gross margin, number of units sold. We'll have our on-time delivery specs. We have a customer profitability formula that we run using all the transactional data and the margins and the number of times we get asked to quote or ship or invoice or pull things from a warehouse. So we have some profitability reports we run. But the big thing for us is when you're one place in the system, you've got access and information from how it got there to be able to really take a quick look and not have to be running 15 spreadsheets at the end of the month or every morning and all those things. I can pop on any supplier and tell you who our top 40 customers are. I can tell you what inventory level we have, what on-time percentage we have right live on the spot.
Todd:Well, and I'll tell you this, that one thing that I've learned from you just your conversations in the past and different panels we've been on those processes that you have in place lead to one thing, and that's clean data, Because without all of that, that's one thing that especially somebody is coming off, say, of QuickBooks or a different platform, that maybe now you have a little bit more freedom within Netsuite and a lot of horsepower. You don't map out those processes to ensure that you have clean data. And is there anything that you've done that's helped to keep data clean in your account?
Jim:Well, I think the general concept and I don't know if it's your term or mine or I picked it up someplace else, but spot single point of truth for all data in the company, it's being able to look at the data and know hey, I have good information here. I don't have to compare this spreadsheet versus that spreadsheet versus that report and have periods mixing in. I can rely on the single point of truth for all of my data and we try to only store data in one place so that you're not replicating data all over the place on different spreadsheets, on different reports that somebody has on their laptop someplace. So it's very critical for us to have that fully integrated ERP system. And when I'm fully integrated, we've got our CRM, we've got our contacts, our customers, our sales orders, our quotes, our invoices and our payables and receivables and our website and our e-commerce site all linked to the same inventory data, pricing data, margin data, so we can all look at it and make a quick decision based on what we're seeing from the data.
Jim:So that full integration of the system is really the, I think, the power of NetSuite for us as a distributor.
Todd:I would agree. Do you, of course? Do you use safe searches and reports? You mentioned Portless. Are you using the Sweet Analytics, the workbooks? Do you use that in NetSuite or no?
Jim:At this point in time we haven't. I know it's there, I've seen some demos on it. We haven't dug into it. I think some of the work we've done on Portless has given us what we need for now.
Todd:Yeah yeah, I'm a big fan of Portless. I love KPIs core cards. We can get a lot of custom stuff with the drill down and I love it. For my team, we, as the saying goes, we eat our own dog food. With that, it's been very powerful. So if you're listening out there and needing to get to turn the tide a little bit on, like what's my shared information, if you can't get it with the natural Portless, those, those custom Portless with KPIs core cards, is a really good place to start and not overly technical to be able to build those out.
Jim:So you know, the one thing I like in particular with the Portless and the scorecards and the system itself is that I know that every one of my inside salespeople, my purchasing people, my operations people, our owner, our accounting department and our salespeople all have NetSuite open almost all day long on their desktops. You know, it's the only thing we work with. That and Microsoft Outlook are basically what we use, and we'll pop things out into Excel as we need to, but most everything is right in front of us.
Todd:That's very cool. Now you mentioned e-commerce and you guys are a sweet commerce customer and you use sweet commerce, which is NetSuite's e-commerce solution. So tell me a little bit about that. What do you like about sweet commerce?
Jim:We started on Site Builder, the original NetSuite product, and we went live on Site Builder Black Friday 2017, because I wanted to have a shopping day to remember. So it's just one of those little.
Jim:We went live in 2017 with our e-store and it took us a while to get some orders, and now we've been bouncing along. And then, I think about a year and a half ago, we switched up to sweet commerce not sweet commerce advanced, but sweet commerce. It was enough for us for the work we do and, as a distributor, a lot of what we sell through the website are one and done kinds of sales. Somebody looked at the supplier name and they looked at a part number. I'm looking at your screen behind. They bought an Ansel Adams Brown painting, number 12348. And that's what they were looking for. And boom, we popped out as Dory Corporation. Here's the Ansel Adams 12348. Boom, I'm going to buy that. I use my credit card, I get a chip to me, and that might be the last time I ever go to doigcorpcom, because I've found exactly what I wanted and now I'm done.
Jim:So we add a lot of customers through the website that are one and done kinds of transactions and it's okay. It's profitable for us to do that. We encourage our normal customers to buy through the website when they can or if they want to, and we've set up a few of them to do repeat sales. But most of our website sales are one and done kinds of transactions. So the setup, you know, setting up a customer most of the work is done by the customer. We have to review things before we accept the order fully and then process the order, but it goes pretty well. For us it's a huge lead generator. So, even though we may not, we get an awful lot of sales directly through the website where somebody pushes a button, says buy, now it's a credit card. But we get many, many more sales through the people that find the product and then hit the button that says I need more info or can you quote me a price and delivery?
Todd:if we don't have it there, yeah.
Jim:Yeah, so we quote an awful lot that goes through the website and we gain those new customers that way, so it's a great lead generator for us.
Todd:That's awesome, and so you've done a really nice job of management as well. I know our team has helped you at times of stuff, but what do you think is to somebody who's looking at going to a sweet commerce implementation and leveraging that? What advice would you give them?
Jim:It's a pretty smooth transition and we've worked with you guys to get ourselves back to a point where we did some customization work and we did our initial install and we worked with Go Virtual Office to get back to a point where now if we want to make a theme change from whatever theme we're on today to another updated theme, and even if NetSuite is making upgrades to those existing themes, we will get the automatic updates and it's very easy to take on those updates and go to a different theme. So that was the one thing that we did in our initial switchover to SweetCommerce that we probably did wrong. We allowed ourselves to get a little custom and it was to fix things that we could see, but we didn't know that we were pushing ourselves off a little bit of a ledge in terms of getting new updates and new theme capability.
Todd:Yeah, it's one of those things when you extrapolate a small change to a theme a year or two later, it's not a little change, it's actually a pretty big change. That is one thing that some people do as a common mistake. So be careful with your themes. If you're on SweetCommerce, they're easy to manage, but you just got to have a little foresight when you're doing that and how you want to manage them.
Jim:No, item management for the website is pretty good. It's not everything we want it to be. There's some things that we could do in SiteBuilder that we can't do in SweetCommerce, but item management is pretty good and it's live as soon as you make the updated flows through. But our best way of inputting new items is if we can get a mass upload, if we can do, even if it's 20 or 100 or 2000 items at the same time. It's a lot easier to do them that way than individually. We go through a lot every day to upgrade individual items that we have to quote or that we've taken an order on to get it ready for the website, and every one of those might take us I don't know two to three minutes to upgrade an update and item to get it ready for the website if you haven't done it through a mass update of some kind or another.
Todd:That's awesome, and I know that you guys have a fair amount of items on your store, if I remember correctly.
Jim:We have about 15 or 16,000 now, I think.
Todd:Yeah, yeah, you have quite a bit and so so I know you. So you use SweetCommerce. Are there any like other NestWeek modules or any third party products that you guys use?
Jim:I think no, we have more like 60,000 items.
Todd:Okay, I thought it is quite a bit yeah.
Jim:I knew that number was wrong. It's like I remember passing the 50,000 mark and we're at like 60,000 items. We have about 120,000 items in NetSuite itself and about half of them are saleable online. Awesome, so excuse me, uninterrupted. What was your last question?
Todd:Yeah, so are there any other like modules, like out of not standard modules but any other standard modules or third party products that you use?
Jim:We've tried a few but really don't. We're using SweetTax now to be able to do SweetTax and went through about a year's worth of integration trial and trial and error getting it at a speed and implementation. Yeah, it was one of the tougher implementations we've ever done.
Todd:Was that one of where you kind of like an early doctor was the SweetTax, or was that kind of a boom when it was a newer product?
Jim:Well, it was about a year and a half ago, so it's certainly within the past two years that we made the decision. We did the same thing. We did it at the exact same time. We were doing SiteBuilder to SweetCommerce, so it's about two years ago. And the problem was, as we were making changes in SweetTax, sometimes that had an impact on SweetCommerce and we didn't know which one was causing the problem. We were pointing fingers in eight different directions. At some point.
Todd:That's not fun. So well, let's switch directions a little bit from the Neswee side of things. So we talked a little bit before we started recording that currently we're 2023, towards the end of 2023, 2024 is fast approaching. Different market conditions than we've been used to in recent history. Costs of money is definitely a topic. In fact, you guys deal with a lot of capital projects and stuff like that. So, as we go into 2024, what do you think the opportunities are and it could be technically, or what do you see from your perspective? What do you think is some opportunities that are out there for people?
Jim:Okay, I would say outside of Netsuite, but maybe it also ties to Netsuite in terms of process automation. For us, our whole business is in factory automation. We service all of the customers in the Wisconsin factory market, whether it's machine builders, oems or end user factories, so we're selling them robots, safety scanners, sensors, vision systems, safety fencing and all different kinds of products. We have about 60 different product lines we represent. The demographics of baby boomers moving out of the workforce is not changing and one of my favorite jokes is it still takes about almost 19 years to grow an 18-year-old. So there are no. There's no quick answer to this thing. There's no quick answer to this thing. So there are still an awful lot of people leaving the manufacturing workforce and we are not, as factories, automating fast enough. So being able to walk through a process and saying I have some people here that I could put into much higher value kinds of jobs and work where they can generate much more productivity, much more income for us as a business, if I could just figure out how to automate that particular process or that particular job. So in our case it's lots of robots. In other people's cases it might be information sharing or information processing.
Jim:I used to go around to factory leaders and say do you think you're doing this fast enough, do you think you're automating fast enough? And now I'm old enough, now I've earned my strokes, that I can point somebody in the chest and say you're not automating fast enough. Got to get going here. China is not going to wait for you guys. So that's kind of what I see the opportunity for the factories and most of the businesses You're not going to be able to hire your way.
Jim:You're not going to be able to have people come across the border fast enough and get them trained fast enough to be able to get the workforce where it needs to be two and three and five years from now. So you've got to automate processes. You've got to find the waste in processes and remove it so that you can put the people that are doing those jobs into higher value kinds of positions where, as an old high school teacher, I was trying to teach kids how to do things, swing a hammer, use a saw, make things and put them into good jobs. Today I still see people that are moving things from one place to another on a machine and I want to grab the factory manager and just say you're wasting that person's life, do something about it. So the opportunity for the next several years is in automation, whether it's hard automation, soft automation of processes, process improvement to eliminate the wasteful steps, or data automation.
Todd:When you say data, is that AI? Do you think that? Are you just getting into the world of AI as it comes into automation?
Jim:Yes, because a lot of automation has already been involved in AI. I mean, we're using 3D vision, 2d vision, to be able to detect products as they go down a line. We're getting to the point where some of our equipment now in the vision systems can take just a pallet full or a box full of stuff that's not stacked nicely. It's just in there all over the place and AI can now or 3D vision can now go in and pick this one first, and then this next one, and then this one, and then go and take a picture again and reevaluate to see which are the next best candidates that I can pick from. So you don't have to go through the process of stacking everything nicely and having good fixtures. Now you can put it kind of on a pallet or in a box in front of the machine and the machine and the vision systems can go and make the decisions on what to work on next. That's a next level of you can call it AI if you want. It's 3D vision. Really, that's giving us the capability to do it.
Todd:It's interesting just getting back from Sweet World within the last couple of weeks. The big topic, of course, was AI. It's interesting. A lot of stuff we showed is coming. We'll be out the next 12 months, but there's been stuff for years that really are under the banner of AI. If you really think about it, it's taking data and in doing something or making a recommendation base off it. I think that we're probably five to seven years away from dramatic transformations on the Nesway side. I think we're close on some things. There's some great third-party products out there that I've seen us do some really cool stuff with AP automation and stuff like that. It's really interesting to see where that will go. We are really at a time where we're pivoting. But the question I have going back to some of your clients are you starting to see any of the manufacturing coming back to the United States or is that still staying over there? You seen it coming back?
Jim:And I've had some customers say, not the United States, the Midwest Because of some of all the things that got have been pushed into China and parts of Asia where we don't think it's such a great idea to do business with anymore. A lot of those are foundries, die casters, electronics places and you think about where the foundries and die casters and some of the big electronics manufacturers are? They're here in the Midwest. So it's been very good for the Midwest and we have seen upticks in some of our customers and the projects they wanna do and the level of automation they think they need to get to in order to be able to handle that extra volume.
Todd:Yeah, and to me. I grew up in the 80s, prior to the 80s, and I remember when robotics was the big issue that nobody wanted to revise because you're gonna lose jobs. And it's interesting to me seeing the trend now that we're going have to go to AI or certain robots because there's not enough workers to actually do the work. It's really so different than it's being openly received, because I can't find anybody to work, as opposed to the ease, where we didn't wanna lose workers. And are you seeing, that's what's the biggest driver in your business right now as the labor market.
Jim:Yeah, not for us as the distributor, but our customers certainly, and our suppliers. I mean, we see supply chain issues all the time because our suppliers can't produce fast enough because they don't have the people. Our customers same kinds of things. They can't produce enough fast because they don't have the people.
Todd:That's interesting, so okay, so step back a little bit. You come out of college, you're a teacher and you're starting over. So if somebody was looking to get into what you're doing now, what would your advice be to them as they're getting into your industry or what you do?
Jim:I always try to tell people to get some level of business development experience. I don't care if you wanna be an engineer. If you wanna be, you know and you related to it before. Get outside a little bit and get out to the area where people are actually generating the business that you wanna be a part of. So, whether it's sales, marketing, sales account executive role, a business development role, working in a distributor or working in a rep firm or something like that, get out in front of customers and learn the business there, and that will help you all the way through your career, no matter what role you're going to be in.
Todd:You're always selling something.
Jim:Nothing starts till. Somebody sells something to somebody.
Todd:I would agree.
Jim:My father-in-law is favorite saying.
Todd:Yeah, I agree. So then I guess my last question for you is you know you guys have done a fantastic job with your processes and your data and things like that. So let's say that somebody's running that sweet dinner in there for a couple of years and just aren't at that level. Where would you recommend that they start? What would be the first step for them?
Jim:Well, we've been in almost nine years. We've gotten a lot of outside help. Initially we worked with NetSuite, then we brought in a couple of outside consultants. We've had another outside consultants. We worked with you guys for the last couple of years and the outside look from people who understand NetSuite is very, very valuable. So you don't have to have a consultant on permanent retainer all the time. Sometimes you just need that, as you guys call it. You just need that boost to get over the edge of something, and that's where we've gotten some of the best bang for the buck is hey look, we've got this list of six things we're dealing with and if you can help us get over five of these six, it makes a massive jump forward for us in terms of productivity, netsuite utilization, our ability to get information out quickly and just make our people more effective and more productive in front of our customers internally.
Todd:And it's the same goes you don't know what you don't know and that's the one thing that we have a time in service and, as we say, we've seen the mistakes, we've seen the right calls, the bad calls, and I always say that we help as much as you want help, because you're right, we asked a little talk earlier talking about just how you've done things and how we've worked together. I've always said that if we had to be more than 60 part of the relationship, that it's a strain from what you're going to get out of it. It's not strained from our perspective, but it's strained because we really need people's insight into their business and their industry and things of that nature. We understand industry, understand business, but we don't know your character of your business and that's so massively important for us to know and you guys to contribute that. So I know that you're a great client in that aspect, jim.
Jim:So in lean terms in Toyota production, in lean terms we always talk about go and see and going and visiting other companies that are involved in it. I'd say the same thing with NetSuite companies Go and see somebody else that's working inside of NetSuite, see what kinds of problems they're having that you can help them with and vice versa where they might be able to help you. The networking side of it has been good. The Wisconsin NetSuite users group has been good for us. We've made some good contacts and had some good joint meetings. Either we've gone to another company where they've come in here and we always pick up something.
Jim:I have personally never been to one of the NetSuite conferences the big conferences. I got to go to a NetSuite distributors group conference down in Austin maybe four or five years ago. That was great in terms of getting some direct contact with other companies. But go and see, get out of your own business, go and see what other people are doing with it and how they've solved some of the problems that you probably are banging your head against the wall with.
Todd:We didn't plan this as actually a great lead-in, but two or three weeks ago we released what we're calling the Boost Forum and I know that you signed up for it. But that was really the intent behind the Boost Forum is that we think that there's a need in the NetSuite ecosystem that it's just for NetSuite end users. We don't let in NetSuite employees, netsuite partners, recruiters, hat hunters, because just because I have NetSuite in my LinkedIn, I get bombarded all the time. I can't imagine as an end user, you must get bombarded all the time. But we really wanted to create that so NetSuite end users can talk amongst themselves.
Todd:We have the monthly town hall or we have just a chat area because we actually we think that's really important and, yeah, we as consultants have a place in the market but we can't satisfy 100% of that gap because not many people can afford that. We get that, you know. And so there's customers that are small, that can't afford a boost or manage application services, or they've gotten big that they don't need like manage application services but they need to connect with other developers or other administrators. And that was that's really the magic or the secret sauce behind it, because we want people to be able to grow their NetSuite account, grow their NetSuite context that they have. I've gone to Sweetroll, I think five times and I've always thought the best session is actually lunch, because you sit in the table.
Todd:Yeah, yeah, cocktails, and you sit there and you just talk with other partners or end users or vendors, and it's really just like you and I are talking and in some ways we want to replicate that in the form, but to be able to have that so people can just say, hey, I'm having a problem with this, is anybody else having that problem? And, like I said, I think it's best for us as partners or NetSuite resellers and everything else, for that ecosystem as a whole to rise up, because what we find a lot of times is people that'll come off like it quick books you move to in the ERP and it's powerful. And in NetSuite ERP it's really powerful and not everybody goes to ERP school to learn how to do it, and so that's really kind of it's almost like a light ERP school to help people do that. So if you haven't signed up for it, just go Google it. We got a boost form, it can sign up and it is free. The community area is free.
Todd:So well, jim, I thank you for your time. I've always enjoyed your conversations. I've always learned something for our conversations, so Good from one farm kid to another.
Todd:You bet? Yeah, no doubt. And for those that are listening, if you wanna learn more about Jim when it's sore for checking out on LinkedIn, I follow you on LinkedIn. I actually really enjoy your posts. I know I'll see you there tomorrow. One of the machines that was stacking on the pallet Some of that stuff is really cool to see this, so make sure you check it out.
Jim:And lots of things about you not automating fast enough.
Todd:Yeah, yeah, and if you need to automate it, get to get with Jim. So well, that's the end for the recording. Thanks a lot, jim. And if anybody, how do they get check out it? What is it? Do a corporation or what? Do you have a website?
Jim:doigcorpcom. D-o-i-g-c-o-r-pcom. Doigcorpcom.
Todd:Check them out, request a quote if you need the prize, and they'll follow up with you.
Jim:So Thanks, Todd.
Todd:Yeah, thank you Okay.