Crum Electric Supply, an independent electrical wholesaler throughout the Rocky Mountain region, was migrating to Infor CSD from their previous ERP and looking to improve their overall customer experience technology.
Crum’s partner, Tridex Systems, recommended they reach out to Kodaris to learn about their offerings and experience in the distribution industry. Shortly after, Crum and Kodaris had a virtual demo meeting, followed by an in-person meeting at an annual TUG Connects conference. And within one month of learning about Kodaris, Crum was ready to partner together.
We recently interviewed Shane Sullivan, Crum Electric Supply’s IT Manager, about the transition to Kodaris.
Watch the video to listen in on our conversation, or check out the slightly edited version of the transcript for clarity of our conversation.
Margaret:
So first, Shane, can you introduce yourself, your roles and responsibilities, and what Crum does?
Shane:
My name is Shane Sullivan. I’ve been working with Crum Electric Supply since 1999. I'm the IT manager here for Crum Electric Supply.
I'm responsible for the IT needs, website needs, all around technical needs for Crum Electric Supply. We have 10 locations located in four states. And we have roughly 120 employees within our company.
We've seen it all and done it all. So when I first started, we were on SHIMS with NxTrend, then moved to Infor CSD. And for our e-commerce side, we were partnered with Billtrust and with Unilog prior to our CSD conversion. A year ago, we went with CSD.
Margaret:
So you've been there since 1999. You've seen some technological changes and shifts happen over the years, I imagine.
Shane:
Yeah, we have seen a lot. We’ve been a part of where websites were not a necessity - just more of another tool for people to use - to where it is nowadays that we're having more and more customers in the new generations, the Gen Z’s, the Gen Y's, where that's how they do their shopping. That's how they get their information.
When I first started, it was the old adage, “A handshake and meet somebody in the face”. Whereas nowadays, it's not that. It's more that people don't put the onus on that. They would rather just see what you got and see what it's about. And if you have it, then great. If you don't, then they move on.
And with us being small from an employee standpoint - where we don't have special marketing people, a special website person, a special like all these verticals where a person can focus on that. We needed to find a solution that allowed multiple people in different departments to maintain various aspects of what needed to go on to the web page, and that's where Kodaris came in.
We were with Unilog, and like I said, that almost required a full-time person to get in there to do the maintenance to be on top of it. Whereas now it more fits our model where we don't necessarily need a dedicated person to maintain the site, but it does allow us to grow to where if we do get, if we are allowed to go down that avenue, we can do that.
Margaret:
Tell me about Kodaris. What's the first thing that comes to mind?
Shane:
I would say their customer support, because when we went live with CSD, we had to quickly find a solution that could get us rolling. We were on Billtrust and Unilog prior to the CSD migration. And with that migration, there were a lot of open issues that were happening on the prior platforms that would take some resources and time that we didn't have with the speed that we had to do the implementation.
We got turned on to Kodaris, and it started out as the Billtrust side, not necessarily the website side, but the customer invoicing side, because we needed to keep that rolling through the migration. And just the ease to get that up and functioning very quickly, we were able to have that in place within a couple months before our actual go live migration.
So it took a big sigh of relief off of our plate. In fact, actually, we didn't know about the e-commerce piece until after we had signed off on the Billtrust on the customer invoicing piece. Once we found out that there was an e-commerce piece, we started to reevaluate where our resources were going, where our finances were going, and various things like that.
So instead of having multiple companies handle each segment and trying to figure out how to have that communicate back to our ERP system, that's when we decided just to go all in on Kodaris with what we could do for both the e-commerce and the customer side, the invoicing side.
Margaret:
You bring up a good point of the pain of having multiple point solutions talking to your ERP and connecting with it. Can you talk a little bit about what life looked like before having Kodaris be both of those?
Shane:
The prior solution, it did connect to our ERP for allowing sales orders to go back and forth. We treat our ERP as the master repository of data. Whatever happens from a pricing standpoint, the way the products are loaded, the way we maintain the products is all done within our ERP system.
When we had our prior system, we had all the products loaded in the ERP. But then we had to manually load those items up to the website, manually enrich those items. We had to manually take care of descriptions and images and various things like that. And that information did not flow back and forth. So as we were maintaining our data in ERP, whether adding items, removing items, changing items, changing products, somebody had to then take the next step and make those changes inside Unilog, inside our old website.
Whereas now, the minute our purchasing department loads 100 SKUs into our ERP system, those SKUs are immediately available onto the website for us to maintain it - with Tony and his group [team] of support. Tony worked in conjunction with AD to get the product enrichment site to be automated.
Again, when you're dealing with 2 million SKUs, 5 million SKUs, you can't just have one person manually going through and out there trying to find the images and working with vendors. And you need that automatic sync. And that was one hurdle that they bit off right away—was getting that sync between Affiliate Distributors, AD, and themselves to get that enriched product data into our site to where we could keep our internal resources at a minimum, not needing to hire a single person to maintain products outside of our ERP. Purchasing could still handle it.
When the products are loaded, we do our diligence within the AD PIM. And then those items are automatically synced on a weekly basis for product enrichment, SKU enrichment, and various things like that. So we continue to support AD, which we always have. And they are a very strong partner with us. And Kodaris is a very strong partner with them now, where we can read that information we are paying for, basically.
Margaret:
And you've mentioned support now twice. Can you talk a little bit about what type of company Kodaris is - being in the type of people that work here?
Shane:
They're really good. And they're really easy to get a hold of. Tiffany, Julie, and Peter are three people I dealt with through that AD conversion. We've had other questions pop up that are not related to the AD conversion, but they were able to hop right in there and give us the answers.
And there isn't the lag of waiting weeks for information back. I'm one that I would rather at least have acknowledgement that people are working on it and have every couple of days saying, “We're still looking at that. We're still looking at the issue.”
And Kodaris does that. I've seen too many times the other way where I've logged issues, there is not a personal contact number that you can reach out to, where it's only through a ticketing system. And then you support a ticket, and you don't hear anything for an entire business week. And then you go in the next week and you ping them, “So any updates?” And then it's another two days before they come back and go, “Still working on the case”. And I'm okay if you're working on the case, I just want to know, “Hey, am I still in the queue, or did you completely throw me out?”
And I've never felt with what we've had going on with Kodaris - that has never been an issue. They understand our pain points, and they understand how they're doing it. And they put in the time and diligence to get us up and going on the major issues. Now, I will say, I don't like to cry wolf. I don't like to say everything's a fire. I don't like to say everything needs to be done tomorrow. And so I think that's a little bit of an onus on the user also - that I can't go to Kodaris saying everything's a fire. But when something is a fire, they're on top of it. They see that it's a need on our side that needs to be resolved immediately.
Margaret:
It sounds like you're talking about a partnership here, too, because you're being a good partner as well to not cry wolf. What do you think it is about the partner relationship between Crum and Kodaris that's successful?
Shane:
Well, I think it's that we're both open to each other. I think they're open to our ideas. They're open to understanding what our workflow is, what our customers are asking. If I'm asking for it, it's because we have customers asking us for it. It's not Crum Electric going, “Well, hey, here's a brand new idea.” We have customers who have needs. They bring it to us. And if we can't fulfill it, we take it on to Kodaris.
And they're [Kodaris] very open to that. There's been some times they say, “Well, we can't do it this way, but we can do it this way, and it already exists”. And that satisfies the customer's needs.
It's having that openness. It's having that openness to their training. They have a very good training site with videos and documents and all that. And I've gotten to the point where that's normally my first stop is looking at those videos. They're not that long, and they go through detail on it.
If I go through the video, and I go to my site and I try to replicate that and it doesn't work, I can go back to Tiffany and Julie and her team and say, “Hey, I saw this on this video, but it's not working for us.” And what it turns out to be is either they just released the video, and they haven't turned on the permission on our side or - being very honest - it was a whirlwind during our go-live. So there's certain things that were missed on both sides that we just get it done - within a business day, sometimes even an hour - it's fixed, and then we can keep moving forward. And it's keeping that open. And it's also nice to have an open conversation with Tony when, “Hey, I need to have a one-off.”
The AD product sync was a big thing, and it was nice to be able to reach out to Tony. Not to have to start a ticket and wait weeks to get to Tony. He was very open and very adamant, and he was even jumping on a lot of the calls. And it was nice to see it. It felt nice to see that his push for it was also the same level as our push. And we've seen that throughout their whole team.
Margaret:
Awesome. And you mentioned that there were times where you were like, “I need this.” And Tony or the team was saying, “We can't do it exactly like that, but we can do something similar or we can figure out this way.” Do you have a specific story of something that you'd be willing to share about?
Shane:
I don't have a specific story. A lot of it was getting used to the idea that Kodaris had more on their platform than our other platform. It was more or less customers were accustomed to seeing it one way, and we were accustomed to doing it one way. Again, since the systems were disjointed.
And then that's when Tony would come back and go, “No, we're already synced that way. You don't have to do it. You can do it this way.” Customer part numbers were a big thing. We had to manually maintain those, not through the Kodaris that's synced into our ERP system. So we were able to get back to the mindset where the ERP holds the data. And that's really where we needed it to be at. But when you're dealing with having seven to 10 years of having it that way, you kind of get stuck in a rut of your processes, and it's that that's really what I'm talking about.
Tony had to keep reminding me, “You're not on that. You're not on Unilog anymore. You're not on this—you're on ours.” That's like, “Okay, I'll remember that the next time.” We were joking about it. It was always a joke, and it was lighthearted. So it was nice to see that.
So it's more of a change in our internal processes to make it happen, than realizing we have more functionality than what we had before.
Margaret:
And it sounds like that's actually a simplification of business processes.
Shane:
Yes, I would agree with that.
Where again, without having to hire a specific person to maintain a website, we're getting back to simplifying it down. I already have one person doing the work in the ERP, why do I need to hire somebody to do it again?
Margaret:
And you talked a little bit about what the implementation looked like of Kodaris, and it was happening along the same time as your ERP migration. But were there any challenges, any hiccups? Can you talk about what implementation looked like?
Shane:
When we were going live with the customer side, the invoicing piece where they send out nightly invoices to customers, the data was there. It was one of the points when we had to redesign the documents, we had to redesign the invoices out of the system. That was a little bit of a pain point, realizing after dealing with Billtrust for the past 15 years, you tend to forget, “I forgot that we did this on this field. We forgot this.”
Out of the box, it worked fine. It was all those little nuances that we had to add for customer A because he wanted it a specific way. Customer B wanted it this way. It's like, “I forgot about that.” Now, we have to go back and add it.
During the same time, Tony introduced us to a partnership with ACH.com to allow us to start taking ACH payments, not just credit card payments. The prior with Billtrust and with Unilog, we only dealt with allowing customers to either send a check in or pay by credit card. Whereas with Kodaris, right off the bat, we added them to the ability to submit ACH payments, which allowed us to reduce the credit card fees and handling fees, which was a big positive. And it's still paying dividends today.
But it was a little bit of a heartburn, because we bit off a lot during the conversion. It wasn't just a simple, well, we're only going to handle invoices. If it was only the invoice side, that was actually done very quickly. It was understanding and getting the payment side to work the way we wanted to and understanding how do we integrate that in and get the processes in place? We are still working on some stuff with our customers with open credit memos, open credits that we do have an active case. When I say it's an active case, it's not an immediate fire. So it's one of those things. We're working on it. We have a solution internally to work with it, but we're going to turn that over.
So we still have things that we understand that we can do it this way now. And it's just understanding what those processes are. So, but the heartburn from the implementation… I've been through many implementations. We've been through many ERPs, many website conversions. Overall, the implementation with Kodaris was not painful.
It took a while and it took diligence on our side, again, to understand those little nuances that you tend to forget after having them in place for so long. It's like, “I forgot this.” Now, they were very quick to respond on those. And we're continuing to build the relationship with them. And the more we're talking with them, the more they're understanding our business processes.
Margaret:
Let's talk a little bit about the product itself. Are you in the product on a daily or weekly basis?
Shane:
There's two of us that are in there on a daily basis. And the reason I'm in it on a daily basis is because I've been testing for the AD sync, the product enrichment sync. But there isn't the need for me to be in there on a daily basis.
Our credit manager is in there on a daily basis, because when a customer needs to have a statement reprinted or an invoice reprinted, it's a lot easier to do it in Kodaris than it is in the ERP system. And we've kind of made it a statement that we want the invoice to look the same each time it goes back out to the customer. So she's doing it from Kodaris. She's not doing it from the ERP system. She's in there on a daily basis, plus she looks at incoming payments and various things like that. If it was before we handled the AD sync, there was really no need for me to be in there on a daily basis because once it's set, it's set.
Where I need to get into it is when we add a process or change a process. But the whole hope is that once you get the process set, you don't have to continually go in there and start changing settings, playing with settings. You want the system to handle it the way it needs to handle it.
And there was a good run - probably about three to four months - that I wasn't in the product, because I didn't need to. They were working on the AD sync and prior to that, there was no reason for me to be in it, because customers were getting set up just fine on the website. They were placing orders just fine. They were sending invoices out just fine. So there wasn't the need to continually be in there to fix issues, to tweak the product, to do anything with it.
So the only reason I'm in there daily is to understand, rebutton up some of the processes we have for the product enrichment.
Margaret:
Well, that's good to hear. And in terms of functionality and usability, is it what you expected?
Shane:
It's a little bit easier than what I expected. I mean, I can get as detailed as I need to in the product, but I don't need to. I don't need to be in it on a daily basis to make advanced system setting changes. We're using it out of the box, and there has to be a very good business reason if we need to tweak it other than that. And a lot of times, it's I know how to do this stuff in Kodaris, but I would rather turn a lot of it over to the [Kodaris] support team and let them handle it, because they are so quick to make those changes. They are so quick to get in there and do it.
But I still want to understand the process. They did a really good training and all with that. But again, the benefit of the system, I don't have to be in there on a daily basis, continually making changes, continually doing maintenance, continually doing information. So it's actually a really good fit. So if you have a good system, you don't need to be in it every day. You really don't.
Margaret:
That's the goal, right? Make the robots do the work.
Shane:
Yeah, make them, or make it, or allow Kodaris to do their job and just hand it over to them and then move on. Now, I say that and then I turn around, and it's like, I want to learn how to do this.
I want to learn how to do it from a standpoint so if something breaks, I generally understand why it broke. It's like, “Ok, was it a change in our process that I didn't communicate to Kodaris? Was it an update that Kodaris did that broke one of the processes?” I want to learn about the system from a standpoint so I can try to track down to help them fix the problem in here quickly, because if the issue came about because of a business change on my side, it's a lot easier for me to communicate with Kodaris saying, “We made this change and it broke this process in Kodaris.” It helps them more quickly fix the issue. So that's how we operate. It's like we want to be as self-sufficient as possible.
But we'll still turn stuff over. But if need be, we want to be able to also fix the issue where we can. And a lot of the issues that can be fixed, we have fixed internally. But again, it's been our processes that we've changed, not necessarily changes on their platform.
Margaret:
You've probably bought a decent amount of software over the years. Can you talk a little bit about when you're looking at new partners, new vendors? Specifically for technology, how do you think about making that decision of what to bring into Crum?
Shane:
I'm not management, so I can't answer everything on that. I know from the management piece, they want to know what the ROI is, the return on investment. My side is I have to look at it - again we're not a big company. I mean we'd like to be, but we're getting there. I just can't keep buying software to buy software.
I gotta be able to buy it and be able to maintain it. But I don't want to buy three pieces of software to do three jobs. If I can buy one piece of software that can do the three jobs, that's gonna be more beneficial on my side than it is for me to try to find three separate pieces.
And also, cost is a driving factor in everything but especially in oil and gas. That's the bulk of our customers. So we have boom and bust cycles where we have great years and we have bust years where it goes down. So that means we can't invest in something if in the future. We're going to have to turn around and give it back up because we can't afford it.
And so it's my job to also look at that aspect. Yes, I can find software out there that handles 50 things, but if they cost 10 times the amount of what we can afford, I can't look at that. So it's a bouncing up between the cost and the usability and the functionality to what is the true benefit for Crum Electric Supply. Does it make sense today to bite off on it? Or is it one of those pipe dreams that down the road isn't an essential or can we get by without?
Margaret:
And where does Kodaris fall on that?
Shane:
It was a no-brainer to that. We took it right off. We bit off on it because it fit the model that we needed to do for our business. It checked the boxes for features and functionalities inside one piece of software and also the cost. The prior environment we were on, the pricing kept going up and up and up and up. And I understand going up on a year to year basis to cover the features, development, stuff like that. I get that, but it was getting a little bit out of hand. So we were in a position, we had to do something, but we had to do something else.
Margaret:
And I know you said you're not management. You're not thinking necessarily only about ROI. But if you were thinking about the ROI of Kodaris, what would you, how would you categorize it, or how would you talk about it?
Shane:
I would look at it from a technical side. Our customers are happy. They're happy with where it's at. So that's one piece. I get it. A lot of it, it's not all about the money aspect. If the customers are happy, they're going to come back, and they're going to keep using it. So if our customers are happy, we're happy—everybody's happy.
I've heard extremely good feedback from our customers that they like the site. They like the ease of use to make payments. They like the ease to find products and purchase and various things like that.
So that's where I see it. I don't see it necessarily on the bookkeeping side, but I see it on the customer front-end side how easy it is for our customers to use, to do what they need to do.
Margaret:
Do you remember how you found out about Kodaris - where you first heard about us and what that was like?
Shane:
We have a partner, Tridex Systems, who helps maintain our products. They knew we were looking at CSD. They also knew the struggles that people were having with Billtrust and some of the other solutions out there. And they told me to go out there and look at Kodaris.
So, my diligence went on the website. Then shortly after that, we went to TUG, there was the user group meeting. And Kodaris was there. And that's when I was talking with Tony on the call a couple of weeks before that. We had a kickoff meeting, and we talked about it, where we found through Tridex, because they're our partner.
By the time the meeting came, we actually had a sit down conversation with Kodaris at TUG. And that it basically solidified what the path was that we had to go. We made the decision, I would say within a month, like from start to finish, from finding them to actually partnering with them was within a 30-day time span, I would say.
Margaret:
And what was that conversation with Tony that solidified, “This is the right call?”
Shane:
He just answered the questions about what we were needing, what we were looking for. He had the solutions, and he also was able to provide other customer references. It wasn't just him saying it. He was perfectly fine saying, “Hey, you need to reach out to these five customers because they kind of follow your model.”
And we did. We reached out to them, and they all said the same thing. They were all happy with the product. They were happy with the direction.
And that's actually what sold us on it was the upfrontness of saying, “You can go talk to these people.” And we did. And they said the same thing. So we haven't been disappointed with the direction.
It's never been an afterthought of us wanting to go back or needing to go back. It was very much needed. And it was a very big solution for what we needed at the time.
Margaret:
Well, just hearing it from Tony, it almost sounds too good to be true, right? So it's good that you can talk to them [customers].
Shane:
I'm telling you that—that's how he is. But he's very nice. We had some projects that I said, “Hey, why don't we do this?” And I went, I'll listen. He said, “No, you don't want to do it that way because of this and this.” So everything worked out well. And again, it's a partnership. So it's good.
Margaret:
I think my last question is: You've seen technology change over the years, starting to snowball, moving quicker than ever. What is your hope for the partnership with Kodaris?
Shane:
I think they are in the direction where we can grow with them. I don't see us being boxed in for any reason. I don't.
I see us able to grow, and I also see the openness of Tony to listen to what we need in our daily business, and them being able to adjust their path forward. They're not stuck in a, “Well, this is the way we're going to do it.”
They're very open to change and understanding and trying to provide a solution that we can pass to our customers. Because in the end, if we don't get paid or shopped by our customers, we can't pass that. We can't do the purchasing.
Tony and his team understand that at the end, it's really our customers that are driving this, and it's seeing that and for them to realize, “Okay, this is a big thing”. And being able to see that and not being so big that they can't make the change.
I've seen many software [companies] where you get certain people involved. They think, “Well, this is the way it's gotta be. This is the way it is.” But they're not listening to their customer saying, “Yes, that would be nice, but that's not what we're getting asked for right now.”
Tony's never been that way. He has a vision. He sees where it wants to go, but he's very open to change that vision—on the feedback he's getting from us, from his customer. So it's a very breath of fresh air to see that.
Margaret:
Well, thank you so much. This was absolutely wonderful.
Shane:
Thank you very much. I do appreciate it.
