I think in general, you know, the EDI safety net of being able to recreate transaction, never losing a transaction, it's just good solid technology that AI may eventually enhance in some way or another, but AI is not gonna replace EDI. Exactly. Hey, Mike. Welcome to the show, and appreciate you joining us today. Let's start off a little bit about, you know, your background and the background of IDEA and why this is big news to both Corsica and IDEA from a partnership perspective. Why don't we start there? No. It's great. Thanks for having me, Daniel. I appreciate the invitation. Yeah. We're very excited about the partnership. And I think part of what drives some of my personal excitement is I've had a long history in this industry. You know, I'm now in about my forty fifth year in software and the electrical industry. And I've seen quite an evolution, you know, from the time when I started when, you know, automation was kind of a backroom function. And, you know, there were even when I started EDI was really just in its infancy. So I've seen it progress through the stages, and I think now more than anything, our relationship is really important to the electrical channel. For my background, you know, I like I said, I've been in the industry for over forty years. Started off in the ERP software world, Spent about twenty five years in software and ERP systems. Came over to IDEA about sixteen years ago. Been VP of sales and marketing for pretty much that whole time. And I've had a really long standing kind of affection for the electrical industry because even though I work for a number of different technology companies, I've always been focused primarily in the electrical space. It makes sense. In Corsica, we've been in business for thirty years as a managed IT and cybersecurity provider while also doing EDI from a management perspective. So it's exciting for us to be able to take the intersection of electrical distributors and people that are in manufacturing and heavy equipment and going through those type of industry segments, as well as working with IDEA because of the expertise that you all have. So talk to me a little bit about the old and new technology of EDI. As we both know, EDI has been around for a very long time, and it's the backbone of a lot of purchasing that happens. There's two sides of that. So there's the procure to pay side. There's the order to cash side. How has that changed over the years? What are you seeing in your customer base? And ultimately, what are customers looking for when they want to select a partner like IDEA or Corsica for EDI programs? Yeah. What's interesting that, you know, the electrical industry was one of the first industries to really adopt EDI. I think automotive and the consumer goods or commercial grocery stores were early adopters as well. But the electrical industry created a common numbering system. And, of course, in order to make EDI work, have to have a strong internal structure with product identification and numbering. And so those standards that IDEA helped create really helped facilitate EDI and created it to be the real foundation for the industry. So whereas some industries were later to adopt EDI, electrical was one of the first and continues to grow. Know, a lot of people are talking about the transition away from EDI, and I can tell you that our transactional history continues to grow each and every year. Interesting thing in electrical is that the standard applications or transactions that have been automated haven't really progressed, and there's still a lot of transactions that could be added. So we have confidence that it's gonna continue to grow and that, you know, our partnership with Corsica is gonna allow certain industry partners, trading partners to be able to create more transactional automation than they've ever had in the past. And even though it's an old technology, the complexity of EDI is still there. I totally agree with you. It's not something that's gonna go away anytime soon. You know, what we're seeing and just to kinda give folks who who may not be as familiar in data integration, there's really a a triangle of opportunity when you're creating a connection. You have your trading partner. You have your end system, typically your ERP. And then usually, you have some type of middleware or iPaaS solution that's sitting in between those things connecting them, sort of like a Rosetta Stone because ultimately, each one of these systems has different operating models, differing systems of record, and ultimately different languages, for lack of a better word, that they speak. So how are folks that maybe are starting EDI today and looking at potential web portals or thinking about their ERP systems? What are some of the pitfalls that those folks face? And then for the more established players in the space, what are they seeing? I know AI is kind of a coin phrase today where we're seeing it all over the place. Everyone is bolting on AI, but on the EDI space, is AI having an impact for those more established players and and is it helping folks get started as well? Well, there's a lot there. You know, I I think that anybody that's not doing a lot of EDI or maybe not doing it at all today, one of the things that they have to consider is we wanna have better trading partner relationships with all of our partners, you know, and that means improving operational efficiency in many ways and not just for yourself, but also for your trading partner. So by getting to know your trading partners better, your customers, you know, it it's important to understand that it can be a joint project to make each other better. And EDI is one of the quickest ways to do that because you can eliminate a lot of cost and the cost of mistakes are huge. So I say understand your customers, talk to them about what you can do with them together to make you both more profitable, more efficient. And EDI is one way to automate those manual transactions that if there's a mistake or an error that comes down the line, that can cost you hundreds of dollars and thousands of dollars to correct those mistakes. And, you know, regarding AI, I mean, there were a lot of people that AI was gonna replace certain functions. We see it really as enhancing and being personal assistance. We're developing some AI applications based upon our product data that we have in the industry and utilizing analytics as well. But, you know, I think in general, you know, the EDI safety net of being able to recreate transaction, never losing a transaction. It's just good solid technology that AI may eventually enhance in some way or another, but AI is not gonna replace EDI. Exactly. And and I think that there's a couple ways that someone new in the space can analyze their current environment to see what are the transactions that are flowing through today manually. Who are your trading partners? If they decide to partner with Corsica and IDEA, we can go and analyze those trading partners versus the trading partners that we commonly see. And the question should ultimately be, how can you automate the purchasing flow as much as possible? These transactions, especially for larger companies, they're mission critical, and they really take away a lot of the exception handling, rule handling that folks have to do. You know, I think about when a company is ordering, and we could use an example of, like, a big box retailer like Home Depot. And I know it's a freight example, but when they're getting two by fours, they need them in that store. And everybody who's a distributor understands the challenges of inventory and inventory management. So making sure that that you're doing that in an automated fashion will always help. So going back to the space today and what you are seeing, our customers that are currently in the EDI space that have been doing it for a long time, are they doing a self-service model, a managed services model, or a mix of both? What are you seeing there? Yeah. It is a mixture. And, know, we have an interesting view of the industry because we're owned by the industry. We're owned 50% by the manufacturers in the electrical space, which tend to be for the most part larger companies like larger manufacturers. And then also 50% by the wholesale distributors, which, you know, vary in quite a bit in size. And so some of it is relevant to the size of the organization of whether or not they're doing managed services or not. But they're all keenly aware that, as you said earlier, that having orders and processing, you know, supply chain functions is vitally important to the industry. And manufacturers approach us all the time about saying, you know, is there any way that you could assure us that when we receive an order, it's a perfect order? And that's the reason being is because any error that comes down the line cost both trading partners a lot of time and money. So I think there is a definite trend towards managed services. You know, for the longest time, that was kind of a, you know, considered an expensive alternative to a lot of folks that had workers like my age and older that, you know, were grew up in the business and, you know, were relatively key employees but couldn't handle EDI testing and mapping and so forth. And and, obviously, we know a lot of those folks are starting to move on. The baby boomer generation is is retiring quickly. And so managed services is a very cost effective way to get the best of both worlds, to get that high level of expertise and to have a predictable cost that, you know, is gonna show up every single day, doesn't take vacations, doesn't get sick. Exactly. And the way that we define that here internally at Corsica is it's a co managed model. There are certain things that you want to have in house as a as a company. And not every electrical distributor, not every supplier, not every logistics carrier can have four or five people on their EDI staff. You do need expertise in your systems, so ERPs. You're not going to have the in house expertise of your customer systems. You do probably need to have somebody that's looking at and monitoring those transactions twenty four seven in this world. At the end of the day, if an order fails or something has a bounce back or there's an exception handling process that has to take place and it happens at 9PM at night, if it's with your biggest customer or your biggest trading partner, that's a challenge. It's very difficult for mid market to small enterprise organizations to handle internally. At the same time, what we're seeing more and more is that there is a trend of having granular expertise in different segments of how to handle data integration. Good example could be API. Before, you know, people were using VAN and x 12, and people are still using those things today. But, ultimately, a lot of the changes that we see are continued transformation in the industry, and it's not gonna go away anytime soon. So having someone like Corsica and IDEA together to give you the best of breed of both managed services and a provider who has your back like IDEA is the best possible alternative. So I wanted to flip gears just for a second and talk about your tagline, which is doing more with data and having accurate product data and how that is kind of a reinforcing cycle. So can you talk to us a little bit about, you know, transaction automation and how that fits into the broader digital transformation narrative? Yeah. And it really starts with, you know, part of our key customer base, which is the manufacturers because as they create new products or modify products, you know, it's really important that they provide that information to us so that we can transmit that to their trading partners. That's really the baseline for creating efficient, error free transactions between the trading partners. And, you know, we see more and more companies that are kind of niche providers of technology in in the electrical space or or view that as an an attractive market are approaching us and saying, we need to have access to the data because that's what allows our additional technology and efficiency to to really work in the industry is having a good set of data that's clean and and perfect. And so, you know, that along with some systems that we're creating in house, we're creating for the industry. We just received a a bid or or an acceptance of a proposal to provide the industry with a sort of where's my stuff technology, which is gonna link all the manufacturers, all the distributors, some contractors, manufacturer reps, creating a central hub for the whole industry to show and provide access to information rather than having it all be segmented off into individual portals. So, you know, we're doing more with data in order to bring it together to make it more efficient rather than having one to one relationships. We're trying to maximize anywhere we can have one to many relationships that provide that efficiency. And certainly EDI, you know, we've been doing it since, you know, 1999, 2000 for industry. And, you know, unlike some industries that aren't as well organized as the electrical industry, we were able to offer really below market rates because we're owned by the industry. And so we seek out efficient, cost effective relationships like Corsica. We believe that combining our low transactional rates and very cost effective support rates with Corsica provides our electrical industry users with the best of all worlds. I wouldn't want you to leave without talking about the other capabilities of IDEA outside of EDI and data integration. What all do you do you do? Well, one of the exciting things that we're really launching and for the last couple months and and we have our annual user conference coming up here in another week or two. And we're introducing an AI chatbot that we call Nudge. And Nudge is really a sales assistant and it is really just completely changing the approach of a sales call. This AI chatbot has the ability to speak to and understand a salesman's request or inside salesman or an outside salesman's request for information about a customer or even a prospect. You know, they can walk into an industrial park and see an oil and gas type manufacturer and they can say, you know, what are the products, Nudge, that an oil and gas manufacturer would be interested in? And immediately the chatbot comes back with, Well, they're really interested in safety and enclosures because they have a lot of high risk environment. And you can then ask the chatbot again, Nudge, say, Nudge, what type of product specifically? Well, these types of enclosures are really important. Manufacturers that provide this? It's it's just amazing the depth and breadth of information that's available and the speed that it is able to retrieve it and even give that salesperson, you know, a list of questions of what to, you know, intelligently ask about somebody's business that they've never stepped foot on the property in the past. We're really excited about it. It you know, it's based on sales analytics. But more than that, it's opening up this whole world of information that's out there across the Internet and tapping into the best information that manufacturers provide about their products and about the kind of environments where they work really well. That's really exciting. You mentioned the E Biz conference. What is the E Biz conference, and what are the dates of that conference, and how can people stay informed? Yeah. It was coming up very soon. In fact, I think we've actually consumed all of the rooms that we have. It's in Denver this year. If anyone else out there would like to attend, we'll try to figure out a room situation. But it's coming up the end of September here, the first day or two of October. It's our annual user conference. We've been doing it for probably twenty years now. It's interesting because it brings together manufacturers and distributors, you know, both ends of the supply chain. It's one of the few conferences that does bring both those trading partners together. So it's a strong networking opportunity. It's a learning experience that we provide. And, you know, it's something that most companies that are focused on our industry wanna participate in every year. So we usually get a large attendance and a real cross section of industry partners and players from marketing and e business type folks to IT to operations type people. So it's it's really a it's a great conference. I know that Corsica is gonna be there. Gonna be a proud sponsor. We're particularly pleased to have Corsica be part of our eBiz family this year. We're super excited to be attending, and myself and our president will be there. And we're looking forward to meeting with all of the current and future customers of both Corsica and IDEA while we're there. Going back to data integration, we've talked a little bit about current customers. We've talked about folks that may be just starting on the data integration journey. Mike, talk to me about what are the most common reasons why someone would want to go down the data integration path or potentially change or augment their systems? Typically, what we hear, two common things that happen is, number one, hey. Employees are aging out or we're going through a acquisition or divestment, and we have two separate ERP systems. We need to combine those into a single ERP system, and we need to create our our trading partner connections again. We have to do some retooling. The other thing that we hear is, well, we're expanding. We're thinking about now doing new things in the EDI space. What are the common things that you all hear, and why are people getting started? Well, you touched on, I think, every one of them actually. You know, people is the one I would go to the first because, you know, we are seeing a transition among the the workforce. And also there is the, you know, growing sophistication among users these days too that understand that there's gotta be a better way than faxing a piece of paper across the network to somebody that there has to be a better way than, you know, putting something in the mail. So that technology of integration functions is really important because it does lower everybody's cost and allows them to do more activities that are gonna increase their business. Now we're also seeing a wave of consolidation in the electrical industry. It's happened in other industries. We have some national international players that are really consuming a lot of acquiring a lot of independent distributors. So to your point about ERP consolidation and merging, we're seeing a lot of that. And, of course, these big national players that are acquiring these smaller independents have a big infrastructure already in place, they're all doing a lot of EDI and doing a lot of data integration. So these smaller companies are being absorbed and that's increasing the volume of work that we're doing for these big national providers. And then lastly, you know, I think that we see driving a lot of EDI is when somebody lands a new customer and that new customer says, how are we gonna communicate? And most often, if it's a, you know, if it's a new AI data center that's being built somewhere in the country, those production people, the manufacturers that are pulling it all together, construction people, they need answers quickly and efficiently because there's a lot of dollars involved in that. And so they wanna know how can we integrate our businesses effectively and efficiently. So, you know, EDI becomes high on the list of ways that they're gonna solve that problem. Mike, I think it's interesting that you all are creating a an AI tool that's really a sales function tool, and then you're also in the data integration space. And I think they go hand in hand because EDI and data integration, can that data inform a sales rep on the relationship of their trading partners? And do you think that you can see whether a relationship's potentially in trouble or getting stronger? How would you do that? Yeah. The analytics that we receive the point of sale data from a distributor or manufacturer, and that allows us to do analytics to, you know, look for trends whether they're increasing or decreasing. It allows us to identify items that they're buying, but they're not buying associated products for some reason or another. It also allows us to see the purchasing trends, the seasonal trends. And, you know, it's something salespeople go out on sales calls, you and I have been in sales for a long time, and I think that we've always done a good job of post sales reporting. But oftentimes, the presales prep work goes undone because people get overconfident. Hey. I've done this for ten years or twenty years. I know what to do when I get there. But, you know, what this tool allows them to do is to be better prepared to go into that sales call to make it more efficient, to not just talk about last night's football game, but rather talk about the customer's problems or trends that have been identified that maybe the customer doesn't even realize is happening. So you can go into a customer and say, you've been trending to give me these small orders every single day of the week. It would be so much more efficient if we would bundle those orders and we do one order per week or every other week rather than running trucks at high fuel costs all over the roads these days and having multiple deliveries when we could make it more efficient for both trading partners. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of predictive analysis. And then also, you know, we have the ability to remind the salesperson, hey. This customer has three quotes that are outstanding, and you need to ask about those quotes. You know, one's been out for thirty days, one's been out for ninety days. Where does that stand? So things that oftentimes even mature seasoned sales vets don't take the time to review before they walk into the customer's office or into their plant. This can provide it on the way over in the car just by talking to it. And that's the important piece. The data that's available is less about having a dashboard or a widget. It's more about how can this impact the relationship with my trading partners. And it's getting to the why of how the health of the relationship is going through the orders that are being placed. We see the same thing. A big part of what we do is is asking and consulting on where is your data currently living? Is it all inside of an ERP that's a closed system? Is it a black box? What are you currently doing with that data? Have you gone through and analyzed the trading partner relationships that you have? If you have, let's say, 40 or 15 trading partners, what's the difference of separation between your top five or 10 and the last 30? What are the changes that need to be made to continue to increase the volume? And this is really a revenue function, not just an IT function. I think EDI historically has been something where it's been on the shoulders of IT and salespeople, for better or worse, have seen it as a potential necessary evil. And one takeaway that I hope people have is that EDI is necessary. The visibility visibility is is necessary to continue to have a successful relationship and having a partner like IDEA that gives folks the ability to understand not only where EDI is today, but where it's going in the future and how the health of their accounts are doing. Yeah. It's all about having good healthy relationships and obviously all building the foundation for future growth. A lot of companies will tell you that basically, you know, if if you're not growing, you're dying. And it's really about just growing the relationship and increasing the transaction volume and the value of those transactions for each other. Mike, before we leave today, I did wanna ask, you've been in industry for over forty years. What is one piece of advice that you would give a person who's just starting in the space or starting with data integration? Yeah. I think, you know, there's a lot of focus on technology and it's changing really really fast. But the one thing that I believe after all these years is that, you know, technology is important and process is important, but people are still the backbone of how we conduct business. And, you know, getting good people involved and getting people that are willing to adopt new technology and be flexible about change is really, really important to your business. You know, think each company that we deal with fortunately does a great job of recruiting new talent into the industry. But, you know, we thought that with the baby boomer generation retiring that there was gonna be a staff shortage and and there's been a lot of technology that's been introduced to replace some of the functions that used to exist. But still, it's it's all about good people, good systems, and good technology. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great conversation. If today hit home with you, maybe you're you're looking at a new ERP migration or adding trading partners or you have folks internally who are thinking about retiring. You don't have to figure it out alone. That's why we're here. That's why IDEA is here as well. Please visit ideaforindustry.com. And for details on the partnership with Corsica, we'll be having a PR newsletter come out. You can also head to corsicatech.com as well. So we'll be dropping both links along with a full announcement in the show notes. Thank you so much. Thanks, Daniel.
