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This is The Possibility Perspective.
The show where we peel back the layers on enhancing enterprise solutions with Workday magic and PeopleSoft innovation. We’ll sit with real-time customers who've participated in our tailored services.
Whether you're eyeing a smooth Workday transition or modernizing your PeopleSoft with the power of Amazon’s public cloud (AWS), we've got you covered. We’ll dive into topics from cloud migrations to fluid user experiences.
Tune in and empower yourself with the knowledge to optimize your enterprise solutions.
[00:00:00] Shawn Fournier: We're customer journey focused. Whatever challenges you might face, chances are we've already dealt them and we can help you through the same.
[00:00:09] Jeff Miller: Hello friends. I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA, and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to strategic-minded PeopleSoft customers who partner with ERPA for a better PeopleSoft experience.
[00:00:23] Jeff Miller: Hello, friends. I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA, and I'm gonna be your host. So welcome to you all. ERPA supports customers throughout their entire lifecycle on PeopleSoft, including managed services. Of course, modernizing with the cloud path to SaaS projects that require perhaps more technical expertise than you have in-house data center evacuation, and much, much more nearly anything is possible, but today is all about responsiveness, reliability, and innovation in the context of managed services.
[00:00:55] Jeff Miller: All while controlling costs. Let's go to the next slide. This is our intro slide for our world class presenters, Shawn and Vishal, both our leaders here at ERPA with expertise in managed services for PeopleSoft customers with an emphasis on managed services. For those of you with cloud hosted PeopleSoft infrastructure.
[00:01:15] Jeff Miller: They have some terrific material prepared for you today that you will find extremely helpful. And now I'm gonna turn it over to Shawn, my ERPA colleague who's gonna start us off with a little discussion about who ERPA is. Welcome Shawn.
[00:01:30] Shawn Fournier: Alright. Thank you Jeff. Very happy to be here, everyone, and let's dive right into it.
[00:01:35] Shawn Fournier: To begin with, let's just talk about who we are. Who is ERPA, what can we do for you in your journey for a better experience with PeopleSoft? My role at ERPA is a VP of Alliances, so I really. Consider my role as an enabler. So my responsibilities include ensuring that we are investing in our own intellectual property to ensure that we can deliver strong results for our customers, to leverage industry leading partners to ensure that we're bringing best of breed to bear for our customers and by constantly advancing our best practices.
[00:02:07] Shawn Fournier: So today what we're really gonna talk about is we're gonna talk about some best practices from a managed service provider perspective. Best practices from a managed services customer perspective, and ultimately, we're gonna share some real world examples of what good looks like when those two things are aligned.
[00:02:26] Shawn Fournier: So back to who we are. ERPA was founded in 1999 as a PeopleSoft consulting firm. So we've been helping customers get more out of PeopleSoft for more than 25 years. So it's safe to say that PeopleSoft truly is in our DNA and what is it that we do? We help our customers demise, modernize, and support run state critical applications for PeopleSoft and other enterprise ERP workloads.
[00:02:54] Shawn Fournier: The net is that after two and a half decades in this space, we've really become an ERP managed services provider. But the fact remains that PeopleSoft is in our DNA. So when we talk about PeopleSoft services, it's something that we do well, we'll continue to do well, and uh, have a strong customer base that can back that up and flat that as well.
[00:03:15] Shawn Fournier: Additionally, with PeopleSoft, we offer cloud services, right? And a lot of this has been done by demand from our existing customer base, right? They, we, we've helped them to modernize their stack and they've asked us, can we do more? When it comes to the cloud, obviously we can run. PeopleSoft anywhere, right on-premise, literally anywhere.
[00:03:35] Shawn Fournier: But our preferred execution venue is Amazon Web Services or AWS Cloud. We'll get into some of the reasons why, but at a high level, ERPA runs multiple enterprise workloads on AWS, including PeopleSoft and including Workday. And so we have a unique perspective, right? We're both an AWS customer. But we're also an AWS partner, and when it comes to cloud services and cloud partners like AWS, those cloud service providers or CSPs, typically credential their partners, right?
[00:04:08] Shawn Fournier: Meaning that. In order to make it easier for their customers to choose qualified partners, they authenticate partners skill sets. So in the AWS ecosystem, what that looks like is a competency. So AWS hires a a third party to do a very rigorous audit. To ensure that their custom, their partners like ERPA have validated expertise.
[00:04:32] Shawn Fournier: So for example, in the AWS ecosystem, ERPA is an education competency partner, which certifies that we've demonstrated expertise in. The education pillar, or ERPA is also a migration and modernization competency partner, which means we have demonstrated expertise in migrating and modernizing workloads to the cloud.
[00:04:54] Shawn Fournier: And ERPA is also an Oracle workload partner, which means that we have expertise in migrating and modernizing Oracle workloads, like PeopleSoft to the cloud and leveraging AWS to do so. In addition to those credentials, ERPA has authority to operate on AWS, which means that we can deploy. Gov cloud to meet federal FedRAMP or other compliance requirements.
[00:05:16] Shawn Fournier: And ERPA is an AWS Professional Services MSA partner. So when AWS has a customer that wants to move an Oracle workload, specifically like PeopleSoft to the AWS Cloud for migration and modernization. They'll often lean on ERPA to provide that service for them beneath their AWS Professional services. NSA, so very credentialed in the cloud space, specifically with AWS additionally credentialed in the Workday services space.
[00:05:43] Shawn Fournier: And it's interesting because, you know, PeopleSoft 20 years ago was all about getting everything you can outta PeopleSoft on-prem. Over time it became how do we modernize and get more out of PeopleSoft leveraging the cloud? And what we're seeing today is PeopleSoft customers leveraging SaaS in most, most circumstances, leveraging Workday services so that while they may retain PeopleSoft modules, for example, for SIS or for finance, they're adopting other Workday service modules.
[00:06:14] Shawn Fournier: It just so happens that we're also a Workday partner. You may have heard the announcement less than two years ago. Workday instructed their customer base that they would need to move from Workday's private cloud to the public cloud, and today they can move to either AWS or GCP. When Workday made that announcement to their existing customer base, they also announced six partners globally that they recommended to help their customers with that transition.
[00:06:38] Shawn Fournier: ERPA is one of those partners. So we are a Workday implementation partner. We are a Workday application managed services or a MS partner. We are a Workday Extend partner and we're a work built on Workday partner, so we're very credentialed there as well. And then obviously you see the, uh, the last icon there is beyond ERP.
[00:06:59] Shawn Fournier: So while PeopleSoft has been in our DNA for 25 years. We're highly credentialed. Cloud partner with AWS. We're highly credentialed. Workday services partner. All of this. Is really a path to enable us to help our customers get beyond ERP and get beyond the operations mode of these ERP systems and get to the value mode of these ERP systems.
[00:07:24] Shawn Fournier: So once, once we've stabilized, we've got a steady run state. Now it's a matter of how can we focus on value add things to really impact the end user experience of the system. So. Regardless of where you are on your journey or what combination of those services you're using, whether it's PeopleSoft on-prem, some combination of cloud, perhaps some combination of SaaS.
[00:07:46] Shawn Fournier: Once that's stabilized, we can then focus forward and start doing some really cool things. So for example, you know that with PeopleSoft you have a ton of data. One of the things that we've done for uh, customers is help them to build custom dashboards. Leveraging that data to provide valuable insights and real time natural language query into that data.
[00:08:09] Shawn Fournier: From a finance perspective, we may be able to ask questions in that framework as to, Hey, what are the top three indicators to improved margin last quarter? And be able to see that data real time, then produce contextual will. Reports around that data. One of the other things that we might see beyond ERP is that if we're leveraging cloud to optimize and redefine how we do business and what are the things that we can attach to it.
[00:08:33] Shawn Fournier: So we'll get into some details about what all that looks like, but specific to PeopleSoft, let me just finish with this before we move on. We typically see that our clients are in one of three categories. Number one, they're just looking to maximize their PeopleSoft investment, and what that looks like typically is they're either retaining.
[00:08:51] Shawn Fournier: PeopleSoft stack OnPrem, or they've already re-host that PeopleSoft stack to the cloud. And when I say re-host, I think that's really, I think of that more as a lift and shift, right? It hasn't been re-architect, it is simply sitting on the data center or sitting in the cloud with very little change. And maximizing in that scenario really means a lot of tactical improvements, right?
[00:09:12] Shawn Fournier: So we have customers that are looking to maximize their PeopleSoft investment that are asking us to engage in project level. Tactical improvements, leveraging best of breed partners in our industry, best practices that might be, for example, implementing application change management by. Pardon that we have Fire.
[00:09:31] Shawn Fournier: It might be implementing PeopleSoft Identity and Access Management by Path Lock. It might be helping our customers build out a PeopleSoft test framework, right? It could be a 9.2 upgrade. It could be a fluid implementation or adoption. It could be FAFSA simplification. It could be building out a PeopleSoft data archive manager.
[00:09:52] Shawn Fournier: It could be chat bot implementation. It could be leveraging Gen ai. It could generate insights from your PeopleSoft data. All things that we're happy to do, but all very tactical to gain value from PeopleSoft. The second category that we see our customers in is really kind of in that modernized space where.
[00:10:10] Shawn Fournier: They typically re hosted their PeopleSoft from the data center and got maybe a step further to re-platform. And when I say re-platform or refactor, they've either made minor changes to the architecture or they've made significant changes to the architecture in terms of re-platform. And really the focus here is in terms of modernization.
[00:10:30] Shawn Fournier: Is that a little bit higher level? It's really about reducing total cost of ownership and improving the ROI. It could have, uh, a driver might be, Hey, look, we've had it with Oracle licensing. How can we get away from licensing dependence? It could be, how do we build a path for flexibility and avoid, like vendor lock in and vendor spend lock in could be resource prioritization, right?
[00:10:54] Shawn Fournier: So in that modernized phase, if you've re-platformed or refactored the application. It puts you in a position to start looking at managed services and saying, Hey, what part of this work should we be doing? So it's not a question of what your people can do, it's a question of what your people should be doing.
[00:11:11] Shawn Fournier: And typically at that level, with a managed services provider, you begin to. Draw a delineation of responsibility around your PeopleSoft stack. Things that you wanna do internally to drive value and things you wanna delegate to a partner like ERPA to maintain the stack itself. And then the third category, of course, is transform.
[00:11:31] Shawn Fournier: And in a transform category, this is where customers are really getting beyond PeopleSoft on-prem. PeopleSoft in the cloud, they're beginning to integrate and adapt SaaS purchases to really drive an agile cloud-based IT operation. So regardless of where you are in that spectrum, and I know that's a lot, the takeaway here is that we're customer journey focused.
[00:11:53] Shawn Fournier: Our purchase is helping you maximize your PeopleSoft investment, if that's project level tactical improvements. Certainly will help with that. If it's modernize your PeopleSoft investment for a SaaS like experience, which means you're gonna re-platform or refactor, or certainly help with that. If you wanna build a strategy for a path to SaaS and eventually SaaS adoption will help you with that.
[00:12:16] Shawn Fournier: I think the net is whatever challenges you might face in those three paths, chances are we've already dealt them and we can help you through the same. So let's go to what are the common customer challenges? What is it that we hear from our customers? And I'm not gonna roll through every single one of these.
[00:12:33] Shawn Fournier: I will just simplify it to the most common. I think what we hear most often, the number one thing I hear most often is, Hey, I need to help with continuous improvement and cost optimization. We've taken some move to drive more value from our PeopleSoft stack it. It could be on-prem in all likelihood.
[00:12:49] Shawn Fournier: We've already moved it to some cloud platform. We saw some initial gains, and now it just seems to be stagnant. It's just the same old stuff day over day over day. How do we drive continuous improvement in this environment and how do we continue to drive cost optimization? Another one that stands out and jumps off the page for me is how do we unlock innovation, right?
[00:13:11] Shawn Fournier: We have all this data. How do we drive intelligence from this data that helps us make better decisions for the business? How do we unlock, how do we implement things like gen ai? How do we train the models? How do we drive value there? And then the third thing that really jumps off the page from you that I hear most often from our customers is, look, my cost model isn't predictable and I need a predictable cost model.
[00:13:35] Shawn Fournier: So how do I future proof my environment? Into a predictable cost model, both from an operations and a support model. So those are the challenges that we hear and the promise of partners is that, hey, we'll fix everything. Right? And maybe that's true. Initially the question is how does it go wrong, right?
[00:13:56] Shawn Fournier: How do how, these are challenges that are faced by customers that have managed service partners in many cases. So they didn't make that selection initially. To have these experiences, but over time these experiences bubbled to the top. How does that happen? And I have to say, we both probably should take some credit for it, right?
[00:14:16] Shawn Fournier: I think the enemy here is complacency. So both parties have to remain proactive and disciplined. So if, if you find yourself facing any of these challenges, my advice would be just get back to the fundamentals. With your partner, give back to things like quarterly business reviews. Give back to helping your partners understand your business and what you're trying to accomplish.
[00:14:37] Shawn Fournier: And as a partner, we need to have the same discipline. We need to insist that our customers are adhering to what we understand to be industry best practices. If our customers want help with continuous improvement and cost optimization. We can help 'em with that, but we can help 'em with that more effectively if we understand the business, right?
[00:14:55] Shawn Fournier: And that's a standard part of what we do. So with that in mind, as we, we talk through customer challenges, let's look at what do we do in response to those challenges. And I think really we're gonna talk about drivers and PR best practices, but this is really about taking customer business drivers or concerns from the previous page.
[00:15:14] Shawn Fournier: Converting responses to those concerns into MSP best practices, right? And then encouraging our customers to hold us accountable. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about what these best practices look like from a managed service provider's perspective. Then we will discuss what these best practices look like from A MSP customer's perspective, and then we're gonna share some real world examples of what good looks like when these two things are aligned in terms of, uh, delivery.
[00:15:41] Shawn Fournier: Excellent. So let's just get right to it. Responsiveness and reliability. I'm not gonna belabor these things. You guys can read it. You'll have a copy of the deck if you'd like it. Really what our customers are saying is that we just wanted them. We want a SAS Slack experience. PeopleSoft meets our business needs.
[00:15:55] Shawn Fournier: We just want guarantees that's gonna work. And what that looks like from an ERPA perspective is service level agreements of very solid support team structure with dedicated support team leads, and very efficient cloud infrastructure hosting when it comes to addressing fluctuating needs again. From an ERPA perspective, that just means understanding your business, right?
[00:16:17] Shawn Fournier: Open communication and being prepared and architecting in a way that we can handle scalable traffic. Whether that's something like open enrollment, whether that's. High transaction volume in the form of student registrations, in the form of payroll, whatever that might need, whatever that might be, we can architect to scale and to fail over if needed.
[00:16:35] Shawn Fournier: Right? High critical path for us in terms of our partners, in terms of our customers, cost optimization, predictability, right? This is really driving infrastructure optimization, which is something that we do every day. More importantly, it's predictable managed services. So we operate with a fixed scope, fixed fee partnership.
[00:16:55] Shawn Fournier: We offer an agreed upon rate card for t and m, and we continue to drive cost of efficiencies in the cloud, something that we discuss in each of our q. What about resource gaps and backup pe The world isn't producing more PeopleSoft expert level resources, but we do have those. So if, uh, our clients are ever in a position where they need to lean on PeopleSoft, SMEs, we have those available, uh, to support whatever endeavoring they be pursuing.
[00:17:23] Shawn Fournier: And then on through product and regulatory requirements and business agility. And I think really. You know, the key is how do we get these things to a place where we can drive forward into business agility and innovation, right? So not only new feature adoption, but new environment creations and really continuous improvements.
[00:17:40] Shawn Fournier: And that's where we start to bring in the fun stuff like analytics and gen ion. And we'll talk a little bit about those things here in a moment. So this is what. Drivers and best practices look like from a managed service provider's perspective based on feedback that we've gotten for, from our customers over two decades.
[00:17:56] Shawn Fournier: And this is what it looks like from our customer's perspective, right? So what are, what are our customers demanding from us? They're demanding contract terms, right? We want straightforward contracts. We want terms and conditions that are very clear, concise, and can be modified over time. We want SLAs.
[00:18:14] Shawn Fournier: Everything is about transparency and flexibility. We want SLAs so that what the environment's just gonna run, it's gonna meet our expectations. Flexible resource models, right? So in addition to flexible contract terms and SLAs to ensure. The business outcome. Then we want resource models that can grow scale with our business needs.
[00:18:34] Shawn Fournier: We offer outcome based pricing, right? Which is our customers are saying, look, we want a fixed scope, fixed fee pricing with a predictable cost model for our run state business. That includes both infrastructure and managed services. Our customers demand a communication cadence, which is fantastic. We love that.
[00:18:53] Shawn Fournier: We love the collaboration aspect of it. We can serve them better when we have this communication and the demanding continuous improvement. So when our experience with MSP best practices aligns with what our customers are looking for to maximize the efforts of their managed service providers, that puts us in a very strong position to deliver amazing outcomes.
[00:19:15] Shawn Fournier: And with that, I am going to. Turn things over to Vishal Kothari and we're gonna talk about what some of those outcomes look like.
[00:19:23] Vishal Kothari: Hey, thanks Shawn. And hello everyone. I lead the Manna services practice for ERPA and in that role I spoke to several customers from different industries and. We talk about common challenges that they face for managed services engagements.
[00:19:40] Vishal Kothari: Today I'm gonna talk about three customers from different industry verticals and their challenges with the managed services providers before they engage with ERPA. So most of the, these challenges are common, and Sean already spoke about them, but I'm gonna go with the most common complaint. It was lack of responsiveness from their managed services provider.
[00:20:04] Vishal Kothari: When we spoke to our prospects then, and they mentioned it just takes two days to just to get a response and many more days to get a resolution. The other complaint was there was no focus on continuous improvement and innovation. Their PeopleSoft environment was stale and the services model lacked innovation.
[00:20:26] Vishal Kothari: Customers also spoke about lack of flexibility in their previous managed services model. Lack of flexibility in service delivery, meaning if they had to scale the service up or down, they were tied to one fixed model. They were not able to scale up or down. Similarly, flexibility in contracting and flexibility in hosting model.
[00:20:48] Vishal Kothari: We do not tie our customers to a particular hosting model. We are totally comfortable with the hosting account, being with the customer, or being with the RP. The customers also complained about frequent changes, change orders, and unpredictable and rising costs. And then there were very specific challenges for each customer.
[00:21:10] Vishal Kothari: Like for example is U student enrollment is a big thing for higher education customers and as a key business image. And they were facing performance issues and the system went down every time there was a heavy transactional load. For Corwell, it was financial reporting and it was taking a long time for City of Boston.
[00:21:30] Vishal Kothari: They were on mainframe and they had 20 different contracts with the mainframe provider, and that was a challenge. So how did we address these challenges for our customers? So. Basically, we architect the infrastructure solution based on customer needs. We base it on best practices and years of experience in making people's out better.
[00:21:55] Vishal Kothari: From an AWS perspective, we basically rely on the well architected framework. We base our solution on that from an industry standard SLAs. We meet the SLAs, we define the SLAs, and we meet them, and that's one of the key pillars of reliability. Also, I want to talk about the orchestration and automation platform.
[00:22:16] Vishal Kothari: ERPA has an orchestration and automation platform, ActiveGenie, which enables operational excellence and high productivity. But it's important to know that our automation engine is not a black box. We are transparent in our approach with how we use our automation engine. And then it brings me to another important point.
[00:22:37] Vishal Kothari: The key to our model is flexibility. We understand one size does not fits all. We tailor our model based on our customer needs, their environments, their pain points. Additionally, we infuse our managed services with innovation and thought leadership for a better PeopleSoft, whether it's enhancing business process through chat bots or AI, or through automation, or through feature adoption, which are released every quarter by through pumps.
[00:23:06] Vishal Kothari: All through implementation of products, best of breed products such as file for change management or security maintenance and other such products. As a result, the cost is predictable and we are also able to define the scope. Clearly, we don't nickel and dime with change orders, and because of that, the business outcomes, our customers have better business outcomes.
[00:23:30] Vishal Kothari: So in terms of outcomes achieved better business outcomes, we had a significant reduction in TCO and adherence for SLA is a hundred percent for P one and P two. Tickets for P three and P four is 98 and above. Also, in terms of registration, once we took over the ISCU managed services engagement. There is a hundred percent successful registration event.
[00:23:56] Vishal Kothari: The system has not gone down any time, and we were able to support the high volume transaction events for City of Boston. We were able to consolidate that 20 vendor contracts into one contract. For Caldwell, we were able to do a faster business reporting and also we achieved productivity improvement through automation.
[00:24:18] Vishal Kothari: And we are also in all these accounts are trying to infuse AI and automation to better leverage and enhance the business process.
[00:24:28] Shawn Fournier: Excellent. Great examples of customers at similar paths, but different desired business outcomes and ERPA's ability to help them. Realize those outcomes. So at the end of the day, why did customers choose to partner with the RPA?
[00:24:41] Shawn Fournier: Right. I think the takeaway is that first and foremost. We'll meet you wherever you are on your journey to better, right? If it's migrate can modernize to address scalability and performance. Obviously that's something that we're happy to do. I think ISU is a great example of that. In fact, ISU was on another cloud platform, I think it's okay for me to say this, but they were on, uh, OCI and, uh, just weren't achieving the business outcomes that they wanted.
[00:25:06] Shawn Fournier: So they selected ERPA to help them relocate. There are PeopleSoft stack to AWS where we've since succeeded their expectations. Perhaps it's about, hey, we already have similar to, to ISU, we already have a managed service risk provider, but we need to reimagine what that looks like. Certainly, we can help you with that as well.
[00:25:26] Shawn Fournier: I think. U is not only a good example of that, but also the city of Boston and Boston Public Schools, right where it was a little bit different lift in that they really needed a complete re-architecture. So City of Boston, Boston Public schools moved from a mainframe environment, wanted to adopt to a cloud environment, but in doing so, also needed to.
[00:25:45] Shawn Fournier: Reimagine what managed services look like. So we spent a, a great deal of time with them really walking through delineation of responsibility and helping the city of Boston to determine what are the things that their team should be doing right now? What could they do? They could do it all, but what should they be doing?
[00:26:01] Shawn Fournier: What things should we as a partner, be picking up for them? So we can certainly help you reimagine what your managed services look like. And then I think the third reason that the customers select ERPA. Is that we are committed, right? We are 100% committed to being transparent, to sharing benchmarks for success, reviewing that progress quarter over quarter, and ensuring that we are aligning with your business outcomes to ensure that you're able to see the results you would like to do.
[00:26:29] Shawn Fournier: So whether you're in a place where you're just wanting more out of your PeopleSoft tactical. Project level things, we'd love to help you. If you're a place where you're looking at, Hey, how do we redefine what managed services look like? We'd love to walk you through an art of the possible session and discuss with you how other customers have approached that same topic and the business outcome they've achieved.
[00:26:50] Shawn Fournier: And if you're just looking for potentially, how do we get on the path to SaaS, right? We have PeopleSoft workforce today. But someday, yeah. Oracle will not support PeopleSoft, and we need to be prepared for that eventuality. How do we get on a path to modernization that may help us transition to SaaS? When that day comes, we can certainly share with you the best practices that we've deployed with customers to ensure that they're on that path.
[00:27:13] Shawn Fournier: With that in mind, I think Jeff, we'll open up to any q and a if there might be any.
[00:27:17] Jeff Miller: First question, I think, Sean, this might be for you. Could you further describe what your managed services model looks like?
[00:27:25] Shawn Fournier: Okay. Yeah, that's a great question and there's quite a bit unpacked there. So let me start simple and then we'll drill down a little bit.
[00:27:32] Shawn Fournier: I think the one word that I would use to describe our managed services model is flexible. So in 25 years, we've learned that one size does not fit all right? Each of our clients are in a unique place on their journey to better, and they each have unique requirements. So we do have a framework to help our customers determine that delineation of responsibility, right?
[00:27:58] Shawn Fournier: Think responsibility matrix, but we're. With that framework, we're incredibly flexible. So three things I would say jump out from a technical perspective. I think Vishal alluded to this earlier. Some of our clients, for example, if they're modernizing PeopleSoft on AWS, would like to retain root account access of that AWS account.
[00:28:17] Shawn Fournier: Fine. We're perfectly comfortable with that. Others? Rather that their partner, like ERPA, retain root account access and manage everything from an infrastructure level. They just want a SAS like experience and then want it to work. So from a technical perspective, I think we're incredibly flexible. Where it really comes into play, I think is at an operational perspective, right?
[00:28:36] Shawn Fournier: And we look at operations really in five buckets. What's the cloud infrastructure support? What do you want to cover? What do you want us to cover? What's the PeopleSoft Admin and maintenance support again, what would you like to address? What would you prefer? That we to address? The same for database maintenance and support, PeopleSoft development support and also functional support.
[00:28:57] Shawn Fournier: So we, we'd look at those five buckets and work with our clients to kind of determine where are the roles and responsibilities within that context. And then last thing, in terms of our managed services model, if I had to pick like, Hey, what's. Flexibility to describe the, what's really the, the cornerstone of our managed services model?
[00:29:14] Shawn Fournier: I think it's really strong engagement governance. I think that's what differentiates our managed services model, probably from most others out there, is that we're a tough teammate, right? We're gonna hold you accountable and we're gonna hold ourselves accountable to ensure that we're driving the right business outcomes together.
[00:29:30] Shawn Fournier: Great question. Thank you for that. Good, good, good.
[00:29:31] Jeff Miller: Yeah, ho, hopefully that helps. You mentioned the word flexibility in your answer at the top of your answer just now. What do you mean when you say you offer flexibility in your delivery model?
[00:29:43] Shawn Fournier: Okay, so what we just talked about was flexibility in terms of our managed services model.
[00:29:47] Shawn Fournier: What are the different areas of flexibility there and delineation of responsibility, flexibility in our delivery model? I think if I'm understanding the question correctly, is a little bit different, right? It really. Speaks to our ability to meet the individual needs of our customers wherever they are.
[00:30:05] Shawn Fournier: So for example, if they have, if our customer has PeopleSoft on-prem, is that something that we can work with? And the answer is absolutely yes. Perfectly comfortable with that. If our customer is seeking to rehost right, to move, uh, that PeopleSoft application to the cloud. Is that something we can help with?
[00:30:23] Shawn Fournier: And again, the answer is yes, right? The flexibility to meet the customer where they're in that journey. And all the way down to refactoring, right? Re, or I should say, lemme say re-platforming. So for example, Illinois State University that we discussed re-platformed from OCI to AWS, it maybe it's re-architect.
[00:30:43] Shawn Fournier: We can certainly work there as well. So Boston, city of Boston, Boston Public Schools is an example of re-architect from mainframe to AWS. And then repurchase is really what we're seeing a lot of today where our customers are leaning into a hybrid model, right? We're saying, Hey, PeopleSoft works for this, but we wanna lean on SaaS for some of these other aspects.
[00:31:02] Shawn Fournier: And we certainly lean on Workday for ERP SaaS. So. Kind of a long-winded answer to the flexibility in your delivery model. I think the flexibility in our delivery model is that regardless of the technical state, we're happy to meet you there. When it comes to the support of that delivery model. We're flexible to delineate lines of responsibility.
[00:31:24] Shawn Fournier: And then lastly, I would, I would also add that we're extremely. Contract friendly, right? So we have flexibility with our contracts as well. And one example of that might be if one of our clients is on a path to SaaS, right? They're maintaining peoples off today, but they know that eventually they're going to adopt SaaS.
[00:31:40] Shawn Fournier: If they choose to adopt Workday SaaS. At some point in the future, we'll actually build a contract that allows them to transfer the spend of their managed services for PeopleSoft to manage services for Workday if they choose to go that path sometime in the future. So usually flexible in a delivery model as well.
[00:31:56] Shawn Fournier: I hope that helps.
[00:31:57] Jeff Miller: Good. Good, good. Okay, cool. I've got a couple more. What does your support team structure look like from an onshore offshore perspective?
[00:32:06] Shawn Fournier: Okay, that's another great question and this does come up a lot, so thank you for the question. So by default, ERPA customer support teams leaders are based in the US.
[00:32:19] Shawn Fournier: So our support team leadership is based in the us. That's to facilitate timely support for North America, and then they're augmented by offshore as needed. So offshore is a critical component, and it's critical because it allows us to offer that 24 7 support for our customers. Right? So we have support centers in North America, which operate at UTC minus five.
[00:32:43] Shawn Fournier: We have support centers in India, which operate at UTC plus five. So literally we've got that follow the Sun model of support for 24 by seven. But I think the key takeaway is that support team leaders are US based, uh, across the board. And that also escalation leadership resides in North America as. Good.
[00:33:05] Jeff Miller: I've got two more that have come in. Sean and Vishal. This one relates to change orders, says this person says they've experienced surprise change orders with their current service provider. Can you talk about your change order practices and what surprises your clients should expect?
[00:33:24] Vishal Kothari: Yeah, so with ERPA, change orders are, are more of an exception.
[00:33:29] Vishal Kothari: Whenever we are defining our statements of work, we define the fixed scope and the modularity, like Sean was alluding to the levels of support in the statement of work. So it's very well defined and our contract terms are non restrictive. So in the three customer examples that I spoke about, I. Can say that we've just had one change order combined, combined total of one change order over three years for all the three customers.
[00:34:00] Vishal Kothari: Again, to emphasize it's, it's an exception. If you define your statement of work, then we don't need to go through the cynical and diary and continuous cycle of change orders.
[00:34:10] Jeff Miller: Very good. Yeah, that's, that's a pretty good ratio, Vishal, thank you for that. But I've got one more final question unless we have another one.
[00:34:18] Jeff Miller: Shawn, this is to you. You referred to something called Beyond ERP. This person says they weren't aware that there was a, beyond ERP. Can you tease that out a little bit more? They say Help, help me understand what you mean by that.
[00:34:32] Shawn Fournier: Yeah, of course. And that, that's a really another great question. So I think, I think really what that's about is that.
[00:34:38] Shawn Fournier: Once we have, look, we'll just stick with PeopleSoft as the example, as the ERP example, right? Once we have PeopleSoft modernized, updated, current and running autonomously, now all of a sudden we have resources that are more free to go beyond ERP, meaning focus time, energy, and in some cases, funds. To value add things on top of just that PeopleSoft platform.
[00:35:07] Shawn Fournier: So a couple of really quick examples, and Vishal may wanna lean in here as well. You know, we do for one customer, they're like, Hey look, we need help with, uh, chat bots. Can you help us with a digital assistant to automate our support processes? That's something that's kind of beyond the baseline PeopleSoft layer, and that digital chat bot then makes their support for their end users much more efficient and allows their staff to focus on even more things to drive value for the business.
[00:35:33] Shawn Fournier: Another one, I think Vishal may have mentioned CorVel. So CorVel an interesting example. Ton of data, right? Like most of us, a ton of data, oftentimes disparate data sources, and they were trying to understand, hey, how do we leverage this data to make more informed decisions about the future of the business?
[00:35:53] Shawn Fournier: They asked us to help them build some custom dashboards powered by some gen AI technologies from a w. That produces a natural language query. So they can now query against that database for a number of different insights. And those queries then produce executive level summaries, written summaries that they can then share with board and other members.
[00:36:15] Shawn Fournier: So again, one step beyond just ERP, but getting the baseline stable, it really enables all of that innovation.
[00:36:22] Jeff Miller: Good. Good. Vishal, anything to add there?
[00:36:25] Vishal Kothari: Yes. So to add to what Sean said, we are making the business process more efficient and more simpler for and more intuitive for the end user. End of the day, what we are trying to do is improve the end user experience of using PeopleSoft and all these technologies are beyond just what business processes offer.
[00:36:48] Vishal Kothari: It's enabling and enhancing that business process and the user experience that all the. Customers have
[00:36:55] Jeff Miller: Very good, very nicely said. Thank you, Shawn and Vishal, and thanks to all of you who joined us today. We hope you found this discussion helpful. Whether you're looking to begin your journey with PeopleSoft or you wanna refresh your journey, our service delivery model at ERPA is not a one size fits all.
[00:37:12] Jeff Miller: We meet you where you are with the internal expertise to take you where you want to go, and this slide shares a number of ways that you can be in touch with us. It looks like that's it for now. Look for more webinars to come on, a variety of topics of interest to those using PeopleSoft. In the meantime, thank you from ERPA.
[00:37:31] Jeff Miller: Have a great rest of your day, everybody. Thanks for listening to The Possibility Perspective. If you'd like to talk to ERPA about what's next in your PeopleSoft journey, be sure to visit ERPA.com.