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Welcome to the Kodaris Community Show with your hosts, Tony and Margaret, and the occasional friends stopping by.
This is the podcast where we explore how innovation and technology is reshaping distribution and the supply chain as a whole. Discover how technology is making companies more efficient and profitable, making customers happier, and is paving the way for the future.
Join us for insights from industry experts, interviews with innovators and actionable ideas to stay ahead in our rapidly evolving world.
Margaret Kelsey (00:46)
In this episode, Logan Smith joins us from ParkSite where he is a Solutions Architect to talk with us about the challenges and opportunities that distributors have with payments.
Logan giving us a little background about himself.
Logan Smith (01:00)
Absolutely. Yeah, so I've been working with the Infor product for 10 years now, going on
started as a customer implementing the on-premise solution of Infor, so distribution SXE. It was the graphical environment and the web environment, so it was actually the Silverlight version, which has been deprecated and replaced with the HTML5. ⁓
That customer was a heavy, heavy user of credit cards, ⁓ more of a retail operation than a distribution operation. So definitely got my hands dirty with credit cards early and often. Probably the number one thing I spent the three years with them working on was trying to optimize their credit cards.
once I kind of rolled out that whole software, there wasn't really a permanent position at that location or that company.
So I took a job with Infor and was a consultant for five years.
expertise in credit cards continued, meaning I was one of the people that was responsible for dealing with Infor's credit card integrations when customers had issues troubleshooting. I have credit card devices that I have in my office used to set up, never wanted them, still don't want them, but for some reason it keeps coming around because of the importance, right?
And then I find myself after five years at Infor looking for the next kind of challenge of wanting to get back into a business, ⁓ digging deeper into solutions. And that led me to where I am today at Parksite as a solutions architect.
my background is I have an education in project management. I'm PMP certified and I have a huge appreciation. My specialty when I got out of college was
quality improvement methodologies. So like Lean Six Sigma was my specialty. So a lot of things I do today it's grounded in Lean Six Sigma or some type of quality improvement.
Tony Zakula (02:58)
So I think that your past experience, we always seem never to get away from the vein of where we're working. In my previous life, in banking integrations and expenses and ⁓ payments and various things. It's full circle now that we're also a fintech company as well as a distribution commerce company. ⁓
Logan Smith (03:21)
Thank
Margaret Kelsey (03:23)
there's a certain gravity to your life's work that just always kind of brings you back, right?
Tony Zakula (03:25)
It
sucks you back no matter how you try to escape it, sucks you back. ⁓
Logan Smith (03:30)
Absolutely.
I told myself in college I would never work in IT and I have pretty much only worked in IT. So I spent four years denying it saying, no, I'm not IT. I'm just business consulting. And yeah, now I've accepted it. I'm IT.
Tony Zakula (03:38)
Yeah.
So one of the things we did, ⁓ and we talked about it to your point on payments, you know, I think obviously payments are critical in any business, Collecting your money. However, for customers that it's really become an experience though. How easy can we make it? How fast can we make it? It's almost, ⁓ you know, it was to the point where using Visa MasterCard was like the easy button versus cash.
Then the world went to, ⁓ maybe I could also do that on my phone now. To I could swipe, to I could insert the chip. And now I go to Starbucks every morning, scan my barcode. Why do I need a card? Yes, I could tap my phone, but not all terminals support them. And it's funny in distribution, it was a very slow...
And even today, very slow adoption process to the latest and greatest. Well, in the U.S. actually, international Australia, people are way ahead of us. The U.S. itself, but even in parts of the U.S., it's been a slow adoption and distribution mostly because industrial distribution hasn't needed it or they felt they didn't need it. But I think it's becoming a demand now. ⁓ The other thing with typical
financial services companies, whether you go into your bank and open an account. You might be a successful person running a business and it's still going to take you four months to open a bank account because you have to prove who you are, right? And I think accepting payments and the whole financial ecosystem has just also been very difficult to deal with, which is...
One reason Coderis got into payments, I had no intention of necessarily doing it, but it just became such a pain point of dealing with being the go-between to the payment companies, or software to the payment companies to back. And I'm like, I know how to do this. We're just going to do something. And Coderis took payments for years. And then we finally decided to do integrated payments in CSD.
And we're expanding that obviously to other ERPs.
But it's interesting the challenge of now being in another software, getting the integration done and also understanding the ins and outs. So let's talk about when we approached you.
and I almost forget when we started brainstorming and said we're gonna do this and I think you just offered to help, said you knew it. if you remember. I'm not sure.
Logan Smith (06:27)
Absolutely.
Of course, I absolutely remember because it was really perfect timing. So when I started at a park site, one of the first things I asked is, do we have a credit card integration? We obviously take credit cards. And the answer was no. That they reviewed it a few years prior when they were launching, when they had consultants on site and they didn't like it. They didn't like the work that was involved, the cost that was involved. It just wasn't for them.
⁓ So I kind of dropped the idea at that point. had plenty on my plate. ⁓ Fast forward to almost a year ago, maybe nine months when we needed a customer payment portal and Kodaris was the solution that we chose. You guys showed the request for payment feature, being able to do a COD order within the portal that then goes in and tenders it within CSD and that re-sparked that
⁓ desire to get off of our current process. So I saw opportunity there. It's like, okay, so you're already doing the tendering in CSD. You're so close to doing the rest of it. ⁓ We had kind of a general conversation at one of the conferences we've been together and it was a few months later, you're like, hey, so we have a credit card integration with CSD. How do you feel about ⁓ testing this out? And it was absolutely a no brainer.
The team, kind of had this ⁓ moment where they realized they needed to do something as well. So it all really came out at the same time. ⁓ Previously, we were taking credit card payments and I think three separate merchants. So our Atlantic branches were doing one and our ParkSite branches were doing another and we had like a backup.
So it wasn't a clean process. wasn't a good process. ⁓ It was very easy to sell them, especially after the payment portal went so well. They're like, yeah, let's give it a try, see what happens. And that's really how it started.
Tony Zakula (08:31)
Yeah, what I appreciate was, know, their, as we know, Kodaris works with customers on all projects. So we, we did develop through our process, kind of an MVP product of the processing. We knew the, the processes get really, I want to say down and dirty, but really the rubber meets the road when you get in the business and every use case. So it was super helpful that you kind of knew every use case, every flow.
your past experience and working with that within Infor was great ⁓ to really put it through all the paces But I do like also the thought of, and we talk about this with customers, right? Making your processes better with Kodaris We just don't want to replace. We want to make them better, unifying them. So unifying that entire process across park site. then,
You know, some of the cool stuff we're talking about now was, which is kind of crazy for the payment space. How do we innovate together? How do we do more? How do we make this more streamlined? ⁓ Because really the faster and easier and the more automated payments is not only good for the customer and good for operations, good for costs. Costs on processing those payments, applying those payments, accounting those payments.
I think that's one area people really underestimate. ⁓ well, we take the payment, we put the card machine out there. It takes nine steps to make sure that payment's accounted for. And everybody hates paying credit card fees. But what are the operational fees or taxes you're paying every single time you process a payment just to collect your money? I think that's a ROI piece that lot of people don't realize.
when they're even choosing a payment processing, because everything's about margin ⁓ on the payment processing or what the fees are. And we get so angry at the banks and Visa for charging those fees. But at the same time, I feel sometimes our customer distributors miss the point of, I'm also choosing a processor.
What are my fees operationally to make and apply this payment and take it through the process? I don't know if you have thoughts on that because you've worked on this and seen it, but when you're talking about three processors, three MIDS, and you're not only talking about recording, but reconciling and tracking and all those things.
Logan Smith (11:11)
absolutely. I mean, I think one of my first questions to you was how do I reconcile? Because in the past, that was one of the number one complaints that I had within our department. ⁓ It can be so difficult when you're trying to match the bank to your payment processor to ⁓ what you tendered in CSD. ⁓ And I remember your response saying the data is all there. We can like...
pipe that into the data lake, you can create a report. We can work with you to create a report. Reconciliation will be easy. You'll be able to reconcile. ⁓ Of course, I had my doubts because ⁓ payment processors in my past experience, they're rigid. So when you work with an existing framework, this is what it is. This is how you set it up. We don't really change anything. There might be a few configuration options, but
It is what it is. They're going to pipe it in there and they're going to do what they're going to do. They're going to give you an existing report that's out of box and they're going to wish you luck. ⁓ So the fact that Kodaris was flexible and it's like, can give you whatever you need to reconcile. You just have to determine. Set me all the way back to, I don't know what I need because I don't think I've ever had the option to determine.
⁓ what the best solution was. So that kind of opened my eyes to, ⁓ so if we can create some settlement reports together and we can streamline that process, then what else can we keep improving upon? ⁓ Which of course just gets those gears turning. So it was a big impact on selling it to the Parkside accounting team. With those three mids that are not mids, three different payment processors, the reconciliation takes way too long.
the different fee structures, the different ⁓ how they're doing surcharges. ⁓ Every single one of those has to be taken into account when they're balancing and reconciling. So when Kodaris came forward and was like, we'll be the processor, we can do it all, we'll make the fee structure more simplified. ⁓ It was all such a huge impact as far as getting our payments quickly, reconciling and not spending time on something that doesn't add value to the business.
Because let's be honest collecting money doesn't move the needle. It's not what gets people excited It's the blocking and tackling of a business. It's necessary. It's so important, but normally top brass doesn't care about it as much as Well, how does it drive sales? Well, it doesn't but it's still important very important.
Margaret Kelsey (14:00)
I think there's been an interesting common theme in a couple of these episodes about the idea of business processes that are formed around to your point Logan rigid software or rigid process that you have to cobble together these solutions, internal business processes versus taking this step to almost demand that the technology that you use actually works with an efficient business process of your creation.
Logan Smith (14:31)
Absolutely.
Tony Zakula (14:32)
It's interesting because it's not even distributors. I follow different startups still and things also Silicon Valley I just, I roll my eyes when I see a young startup. Maybe they got five people, they've got money and they're bragging about how they have all these tools that they're doing so many things and they're only using 14 different tools to run a five person business, right? It's like insane.
Yeah, but when you're a distributor and you're managing warehouses, trucks, payments, cash flow, front counters, inventory, ⁓ you know, all those things add up and, we just simplified the process. We simplified the fee structure. We simplified the reconciliation, which then also in the world of the digital world where we need to be allows for automation.
allows for real-time exception handling, allows for all those different things, right? And I think that's where, to your point, the payments businesses miss it because they operate at scale to return money to their massive investors. They don't have the time, the bandwidth. It's not profitable for them to say, oh, your reconciliation is hard. Let me help you fix that, right?
Logan Smith (15:58)
Yup
Tony Zakula (15:59)
And I think that's also where it could, Eris has partnered with innovative payment providers, ⁓ to go back and say, we need X from you. And what's cool is, you know, I, because now the payments business is so commodity, right? It's, it's a huge global commodity is when you do find those mid market players who are publicly traded process billions, but they're.
They're looking for ways to go against the ultra big payment companies.
There's someone like us who's working with distributors and we go to them and we say well Yeah, we process sizable amounts of money not Goliath But we can get you more if you help us build the X feature so we can do X for our customers You know, it's something that's also missing when you're looking at ⁓ should we stay with this bank who does you know in the top five banks in the world and Like they're not gonna pay attention to you. They don't care
Right? mean, but then it affects your downline business. People talk about sometimes they should really talk about staying with their credit lines. Their bank has their credit lines, so they want to bundle it because that's what the bank's telling them. But they're also discounting all the other costs they're going to bear for staying there. Right. So it's an interesting dynamic how we
Logan Smith (17:03)
Absolutely. Yep.
Tony Zakula (17:32)
We perceive as human beings a value because people are talking to value, but in our own company sometimes we're not aware of the cost and hidden cost and expenses of a lot of what we're doing every single day.
Logan Smith (17:47)
Absolutely. I mean, it's just kind of brushed under is the cost of doing business versus highlighted and tried to streamline or improve.
Margaret Kelsey (17:57)
Yeah, like is that truly have to be the line item of the cost of doing business?
Logan Smith (18:03)
Absolutely, it shouldn't be. I ⁓ think the challenge is the larger the business, especially technology, they kind of rest on their laurels. They've released something, people are using it, people don't like change. ⁓ So they don't innovate as much. That's what brought me to Kodaris in the first place. it's what brought Parkside to Kodaris was ⁓ the innovation, it's going to continue to improve. Like you're investing in the product ⁓
from a business perspective, that's huge. Like you want to keep growing what's there, improving upon what's there instead of just saying, we have a good product, here it is, we're going to just run with it. So many larger technology companies, they find a solution, they implement a solution, and that's it. They've done it. They've done their R &D, they've done their development, they've released it to the public, they've
They have a client base that doesn't likely want to change. So they do the bare minimum to keep their clients without really continuing the innovation because they've made it. So big difference as far as like a consumer perspective or from a company perspective, looking at a software that wants to keep pushing that envelope to help businesses ⁓ realize those unrealized gains.
Tony Zakula (19:25)
It's funny you say that because sometimes on the flip side, like we know the, and we preach it, right? We're here because our customers are here. They're keeping us on the cutting edge. We're helping them stay on the cutting edge. ⁓ At times, I'll say, as we're scaling, sometimes it's like, can we really solve all the world's problems?
Logan Smith (19:49)
Ha
Tony Zakula (19:54)
It's great. ⁓ I love it. But some days you're like,
Margaret Kelsey (20:00)
These are too many problems.
Logan Smith (20:00)
I get that. It's the boil of the ocean, right? Like
you can't fix everything, but it also doesn't mean that you don't want to take a look at it, right? I think that's a huge difference of going into a conversation knowing that you might evaluate it as a serious potential versus going into a conversation with a larger provider ⁓ that's just, you know right away that they have no interest in changing it.
Tony Zakula (20:11)
Yeah.
Logan Smith (20:29)
I'm not a multi-billion dollar company, so it doesn't move their needle. They don't care. ⁓ Every suggestion conversation that we've had, feel like Tony's brain's going, can I make this work? Does it make sense to make this work? And where do I fit it in with everything else we're doing? So feeling heard is important. Especially, again, in the payment space, where I'm so used to just being a
like the amount of emails I've sent and questions to payment providers saying, can we do this? Can I get this? And just being left on read or a simple response of no. Knowing that you're at least thinking about it, does it make sense? Is it a dumb request? ⁓ Means that we can continue trying to make things better.
Tony Zakula (21:16)
what I've noticed the last 11 years as we've done this is sometimes you think about something and say, could we do this? And it's like, hmm, that'd be cool. But right now I don't see a path. But there's been lots of times where all of a sudden three years later you're like, ⁓ we could do that now. I remember. Now we have enough other stuff built around that that we could totally do that. And it's a small jump.
Logan Smith (21:25)
You
Tony Zakula (21:41)
I'd say technology evolves so much. And I think that's what's interesting, because I always tell my team, sometimes I think about features that I know aren't going to be there for three years, but let's put them out there. Let's write the date on them, how they would work, how they would, it's an incremental process to get to certain places. And I think that's some of the things. know, thinking about that, where are we going with payments? Where are we innovating?
You know, I think the payment link thing is cool. We recently rolled out real time, you know, AI third party fraud detection, but baking that back into the ERP. Some of the things I think on the next frontier is, you know, simplified POS and payments for retail establishments. You could do see as...
CSD, but can you do like almost a grocery store type scan? Swipe self-checkout ⁓ Can you do driver delivery mobile app collect it your driver? Anyway, just like we all use uber today like it's there right can you do? ⁓ Even at your retail locations barcode scan payments like Starbucks. I mean technically the tech technology is close for that
Logan Smith (22:56)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Zakula (23:08)
There's some new technology out there I think would be really cool. Around fraud where, and some, the payment ecosystem has it, it's just not readily deployable yet, but can you do, I'm a consumer, I'm checking out on your website, and instead of typing my card number in, I'm gonna get a mobile app thing and I'm gonna tap my card on my own phone.
in your mobile app and pay so you know that that person's holding the card. I that would be really cool and cut down on fraud a lot, I think. So I don't know if you have other ideas, Logan, but I think with all that, that's the point of acceptance, right? And then to your point, and I tried to map it out once, and I think we have like eight different or nine different payment flows or something like that.
Logan Smith (24:02)
I could see that like easily.
would, I would, it seems like there would be more, um, uh, just different opportunities. And as far as like future innovation, like the mind is always going. There's so much that I think can be improved, especially in the distribution sphere. Like, uh, retail has forced to adapt, uh, because there's big players that force the adaption. Walmart was a huge, uh,
Tony Zakula (24:07)
Hahaha
Logan Smith (24:31)
driving factor and changes within the market. A lot of the smaller ⁓ local or regional competitors had to adapt a lot of the practices for payments and accepting payments because Walmart was driving a lot of that. ⁓ Come to find out it's funny now that they've driven a lot of these changes. Walmart is one of the only places I go now that doesn't accept tap pay.
And it's like, you drove a lot of these changes in this environment for retail and now you're behind. And that kind of shows that back to resting on your laurels. You've spent the money, you developed, you drove an entire industry forward and they're just like, ⁓ not going to invest any further and not going to keep improving. But I think earlier you brought abroad as a great example. ⁓ The US is so far behind in payments.
⁓ It was eight years ago, I think, where the US finally pretty much required the acceptance of chip, ⁓ which had already been pretty much deprecated everywhere else. ⁓ I remember the first time I went to Canada and I handed on my card and they just kept tapping it against a machine. And I'm like, I don't know what you guys are doing. I'm so confused. They're like, it's not working. And I'm like, I don't know what you guys are talking about. ⁓
Tony Zakula (25:41)
All right.
Logan Smith (25:58)
And they look at the card and there's no icon on it. And they're like, this doesn't have tap. I'm like, I still don't know what tap is. They're like, I'm going to have to get a different reader. And I'm like, I just want to run my card. Swipe it.
Margaret Kelsey (26:10)
It's like discovering
tools for the first time and just like banging them around, you know?
Logan Smith (26:16)
It was so enlightening and frustrating because once we did get it, it's like this is so much easier and convenient. ⁓ And then it makes me think as a technology person who just enjoys it, what else is out there that the US is not using because of our like archaic regulations and lack of forced improvement. So no.
Tony Zakula (26:40)
Yeah,
last year I was in Europe and I went to Starbucks and everywhere you went, people were tapping their phones. And you didn't see anybody get out a card out of their wallet. It's amazing how even if you have that capability in the US, US consumers don't even have that mindset because...
Logan Smith (26:55)
yeah.
Tony Zakula (27:06)
some of the market we've never been educated that this is the future way to pay. I do think it's partially because it's probably not accepted everywhere. So you're worried it won't happen.
Logan Smith (27:16)
Absolutely.
Margaret Kelsey (27:17)
Yeah, you don't want to be the
person that's just slamming your phone on the reader.
Tony Zakula (27:21)
I think it's exciting. I mean, there's opportunities, like you said, everywhere to improve that. ⁓ Improve that not only from the payment rails, but the POS system. Another feature I've had the idea for for a while, going back a few years, is...
And in the construction business, you know, sometimes I'm on a job site and I need to send a runner in to pick something up, pick up ⁓ material. And I don't want that person carrying my card or paying. And so I might tell them just use the card on file if you need to. ⁓
But then there's the fraud, right? The potential of fraud. How do you know that person sent that person in? You're releasing the material too. I've always thought it'd be interesting. I think we're closer than ever now. Could be cool as the person at Parkside or the distributor says, ⁓ so-and-so is here to pick up material. ⁓ Clicks a button and the supervisor gets the tap to pay on his phone.
Hey, we're going to release this, right? Can you just click this button like a two factor off to let us know to release the material so and so kind of that third leg all fully integrated between the person coming in, the distributor, the supervisor on the job site. Like we have all that pretty much there. 85 % there. It'd be interesting, you know,
Logan Smith (28:32)
Nice.
Tony Zakula (29:00)
when the market demands that or as we get closer. We thought about that like three or four years ago, but we didn't have all the rails in place. But now I think it's getting closer.
Logan Smith (29:12)
Yeah, that worked.
Margaret Kelsey (29:12)
Logan, that's our
unofficial mascot inside of Kodaris is we've got that. It's like 80, 85 % there.
Logan Smith (29:19)
Yeah, and that last 10 to 15 % is definitely always the easy part. And innovation, yeah, yeah, getting it over that last 15, that's the easy part.
Tony Zakula (29:24)
But, why are here?
Margaret Kelsey (29:25)
yeah,
right.
Tony Zakula (29:30)
You need a good customer to pilot it with you. That's always a challenge.
Logan Smith (29:35)
Absolutely.
⁓ It leans into that that's a I've worked with a lot of companies that have that same issue, like a signers list, right? ⁓ The contractor has one government issued card or one P card. ⁓ They're not going to give it to an employee to do a gopher run to go grab some extra materials. ⁓ I mean, they do do that, but they shouldn't.
That card should be on file already. So when they get there, they shouldn't just run the card. There should be that workflow management that does some type of two factor and have a fallback. So it sends it off to the manager. It pops up on their screen. So and so is at this location. Do you authorize this amount? They click yes or no. If they say yes, great. If it times out, it comes back and it gives them a secondary option. ⁓ Maybe you can send another link or follow up.
But I love workflows that ⁓ have defined processes, like a standard operating procedure you can follow, versus in this case, do this, maybe do this. Here's a note. Call this guy to authorize. Setting that all up automatically behind the scenes to have that workflow management is ⁓ definitely a really neat innovation.
Tony Zakula (30:59)
The other thing I've dreamed up, which we're a little ways from, but since we're talking about innovation, we talked about reconciliation and cost of transactions. One of the things we've been thinking about, I've been thinking about is clearing those transactions. But then if you're...
And again, I come from the banking world. So if you had integrated banking where your banking transactions are also coming in to Kudaris. So you have the point of payment acceptance, all the invoices, the application. And then you have, you know the amount's batched out every day. You know the amount going to the bank. You know the card types.
and you bring those banking deposits back in. Then you auto reconcile. Yep, everything matches. No need for a human to look until you see an exception or variance. And then you can report. How cool would that be from an accounting standpoint to do the full cycle?
AI, robotic, whatever, right? I mean, whatever you want to call it, how cool would that be to just say the money's being collected, it's moving, it's all of those different things.
Logan Smith (32:17)
Absolutely, sign me up today. ⁓ Reconciliation is by far one of the biggest pain points in credit card processing, especially once you get into an integrated system like Infor ⁓ CSD. Obviously, to get technical, there's one-time sales and one-time authorizations, and those one-time authorizations can
Tony Zakula (32:20)
You
Logan Smith (32:43)
absolutely cause hours and hours of frustration from credit card reconciliation process because in CSD they may show tender they're hitting a general ledger so it kind of shows that money somewhere but that order may not be approved or completed for months which leaves that authorization out there and there's nothing that really tells you
So you've got this payment where you've collected from a customer in a backorder that's months old that now you can't collect on. And there's nothing that just warns you that says, hey, you need to do something about this. It's going to be a challenge to collect later. ⁓ Having some type of auto reconciliation that shows you what's settled in the order number in a three-may match between the bank, the payment processor, and CSD will expedite that.
massively because you could still see those payments as a two-way. It would be in Coderis, it be the MX, but CSD wouldn't show the money. That immediately can flag you, create a workflow that says, this, take an action because of this. Instead of having the first hour of your job every day is to figure out what actions do I need to take running custom reports that are different between every company. ⁓
I dream of having a reconciliation center for credit cards. ⁓ I lived vicariously through my accounting team every day, my first job that would call and they would spend days, ⁓ multiple employees days at the end of every month reconciling their credit card transactions ⁓ and the frustration that just emitted from their little office. I'd never wanted to go in there because I knew they were going to be mad at me.
Tony Zakula (34:06)
you
Logan Smith (34:32)
⁓ And I never solved the problem because that didn't have a willing participant on the technology side to ⁓ Invest in that or to look at that is even a potential. They're just like We have a report. Here's your report ⁓ We can send it to you daily what you do from there is up to you and it's like well There's only so much you can do on your own without
⁓ technology or a company that is willing to continue pushing that.
Tony Zakula (35:04)
Yeah, I think it's interesting that the GL is a whole other thing. So yeah, that's a fourth leg on that chair, right? ⁓ But I also think, I think all of this, as we develop technology with customers, it also leads to ⁓ process.
Logan Smith (35:07)
Ha ha.
Tony Zakula (35:26)
SOP, standardized processes drive. mean, people talk about AI and we talk about that it takes good data, good processes to drive, even AI automation. And I think all that though, getting down and sometimes like, oh, well, we could build something, but you might have to change this process and change this process to make sure we can do X with the technology, right?
I think that's also how funny it is in many companies that technology is there ⁓ or we provide things out of the box that are there that other companies are using to drive that ROI. But it's like, well, that's not how we do it. We can't change our process. so change management for humans are such a human factor in everything we do. Because it's not, you know,
Logan Smith (36:08)
Absolutely.
Tony Zakula (36:18)
We try to design very flexible workflows and things, but at some point the technology, and we've had this, ⁓ well there's four ship twos, well how does the sales rep know which one to pick? I don't know, he just knows. Like, well, the machine can't just know.
Logan Smith (36:32)
Mm-hmm.
Margaret Kelsey (36:35)
can't train AI on that business
process.
Logan Smith (36:38)
Yup.
Tony Zakula (36:39)
What piece of data? Tell people, how does a human decide this? Because that's what we're building. Right? ⁓
Logan Smith (36:42)
random.
why is like that that is the most powerful question you can you can ask right it's like why do you do it that way and if they can't answer that they're just like i was taught this way i've done it this way it's how we do it here ⁓ then you ask why again like you keep going down that path of get them to admit like this isn't necessarily a good process it's just the process we do today
And once someone acknowledges that that's when you have that room to grow as a as a company like as a department or a process When I started at Parkside, I know one of my very first questions I had for The person hiring me was is this a culture that's willing to accept change because I like change it's Fundamental to my position and it's fundamental to how I enjoy
working. So I want to constantly be changing something. Now change for the sake of change isn't good, but you still want to be looking at that and have a culture that accepts it. And their answer was, we love change. I'm like, okay, sure. Everyone's everyone says that. It's easy to say from a high level when your change doesn't actually come through. ⁓ But it's been great working with ParkSite because they are
Tony Zakula (38:03)
Hahaha
Logan Smith (38:14)
They understand that change is necessary, that to make improvements, sometimes there is a step backwards to take two step forward. ⁓ And that processes are not permanent just because you do it today one way. ⁓ I loved your reference earlier about ⁓ you may have a solution to something, but the technology or the current technology doesn't support it. Like maybe you don't have the full thing, but you've still
mentally prepared for that down the line. ⁓ That's something that I advocate for in ours is future development. If someone says, hey, can we do this? My answer isn't no, not at all. It's not today. Like as far as I know what we have access to our tools, our abilities, we can't do that today. But in six months, I will reach back out to you. I'll check it has something changed has a new tool been developed.
What is Kodera's doing that I can now leverage? ⁓ And it's amazing how often how quick technology changes that you can then go back and say, yeah, we can now do that. Like something has opened up. There is a new tool. There is a new path forward. But so many people do it once. say, nope, can't do it. And then it goes into the rubbish bin. No one brings it up until that employee retires. And the next one comes in and says, why are we doing this?
And then there is a software or a technology or something out there that's been innovated and it's been there for months or years and you just, no one has looked, no one's continuing to look for that.
Margaret Kelsey (39:51)
That's interesting to think about maybe that's how business processes become so codified is that if the answer is no instead of not today, but let's make sure we're keeping our eye on it in the future. I was trying to think about that about business process as a religion of like, we're not changing it. This is how we do it. And Tony has been very vocal internally at Kodaris of being allergic to that statement of this is how we do it. Or I used to do it.
Logan Smith (40:10)
Mm-hmm.
Margaret Kelsey (40:18)
at my previous company this way, so this is how we should do it. there's ultimate suspicion automatically when those words exit anyone's mouths. And I was trying to think about what it could be. And I do think that that answer of like a hard no stops even the person asking that would be willing to think up, hey, could we do it differently? They're probably like, well, we can never do anything differently, you know?
Tony Zakula (40:42)
Yeah, it's funny. One of the biggest challenges when we hire senior people, it's just human nature. Okay, I'm going to do this and if the answer is because at my previous company this is how we did it. I'm like the answer is no. It's like you haven't heard it yet. I'm like I want to hear, okay, we're doing this and we're doing this so here's a good solution because we have this challenge and this will solve that problem.
Because if we're always just repeating based on experience, then you're not thinking, we're not embracing the future, we're not changing. And coming from the startup world in Silicon Valley and some experience there, everything is changing. You're a totally different company every three months while you're scaling. There is only one constant, that tomorrow is going to be different than it is today and different problems, and you have to be embracing it, a fire hose of change constantly.
But not a lot of people have lived through that, a very small percentage of the population. So people think, well, this is the way we've always done it, or this is how the market works. But you don't build disruption by doing it the way the market does it. You do it by changing how the market does it. And so I am allergic to that, because I feel the minute we say, well, this is how it's done, we're going to become stale, and we're going to lose.
I'm always pushing, and I remember when you were talking about, it's not just in distribution. One of the huge social media companies about, I don't know, 15 years ago, in my prior expense reporting days, and they said, we have to have these three fields on every report. And I mean, this was one of the massive global companies.
I remember there's eight accounts around the table. We're talking, walking through what their requirements are and I'm like, okay, but just explain to me, I get field one, fields two and three. What do you do with those? Like I just need to understand, because I don't understand how those connect to anything and so they went around the table. At the end, the controller looks at me says,
I guess we don't need them. We don't even know why we need them. But that's the way a accounts did it there, right? And so us as humans, we always as comfortable rely on our experience instead of saying, what's in front of me? What am I trying to solve? How am I going to navigate this? Where's my goal two years out? Is this contributing to that? But the more you do that, I think the more you become allergic.
Logan Smith (43:06)
Yo!
Tony Zakula (43:31)
to the past is how we did it because now your new comfort level is, if it's not changing, then something's wrong. It's interesting.
Logan Smith (43:39)
Yeah.
Yeah, I value change, obviously, a lot. And I still understand that not everyone is as comfortable with change. So it's about finding the happy medium between not stagnating as a business, but not constantly moving to where your employees are in a state of panic because their job is too flexible.
groups are fine with that flexibility and I find accountants are not. Accountants, mean, yeah, accounting They have very set rules. Like they are the group that is the most likely to have a standard operating procedure and they follow it because there's so many regulations around it, right? There's so many things you can and can't do as an accountant that
Margaret Kelsey (44:15)
You're gonna be like, they're great with it, right?
Logan Smith (44:32)
Having policies, procedures, and sets of instructions ⁓ is required. So when you try to propose changes, a lot of times accounting, they have reservations about it because they've been doing something so long and so consistent. ⁓ So when you do implement something for accounting, I find that you have to really sell them on the ROI, the ease of how it affects their business.
And then of course compliance. So those things are so important in the payment space or in the accounting space in general is just ensuring that you do those things. ⁓ So which we accomplished. mean, with the payment portal, our payment portal and the credit card integration, it was easy to sell. I didn't even have to sell it to my team because it kind of sold itself. It met those things. It helped us become more compliant. It eased their job and ⁓
It was, I'll say, a minor change that we could adapt into their processes and it's not constant. ⁓ I don't have to change them daily. I can switch over to a new department and focus on them next and then come back to them in six months and throw another thing at them. Exactly.
Tony Zakula (45:41)
Yeah.
Margaret Kelsey (45:46)
with reconciliation innovation.
Tony Zakula (45:51)
Yeah, think even internally,
I think that's an important point. The process is incredibly important. Defined process, that's how you scale, that's how you keep your sanity, we have this rule internally.
If you want to do something different, propose the change, propose why is better or what problem is going to solve, talk with the group or the team about it, and then we'll decide to implement if it makes sense. But if you have a simple change management process like that so if...
If that change to the accounts gets shot down for five reasons why it won't work, well, okay, that's fine. Cause we have to go back and we have to work. would we solve those, those change in the process to make sure we're compliant? Right. it's interesting. And that's why I, I talk about our scale and things and everything we're developing.
But as a subject matter expert, which is why we have a CFO who's got 24 years in distribution and accounting, right? ⁓ Sometimes I'm like, Jack, no. Why would we do that? I know accounting. We don't have to do it that way. But it's good debate, right? It's about change. And is there another way to be compliant? Because there is. There's multiple ways, right? ⁓
Logan Smith (46:56)
you
Yep.
Tony Zakula (47:13)
Anyway, it's cool, but subject matter experts in their areas are always fun to work with because they're going put the dose of sanity on, right? I'm responsible for this. But is there a better way to get to X without how we're getting the X today is always the fun part. And then to get them excited about seeing their job become easier is really the satisfying part to us IT folks, right?
Logan Smith (47:39)
Absolutely. mean, rarely does IT ever get thanked, right? IT for the longest period of time is this like dark closet room with people that only show up when something's broken and it's always IT's fault. They're the ones that are rolling out new patches to Microsoft somehow, even though it's not their responsibility and it broke.
Tony Zakula (47:43)
Yeah.
You
Logan Smith (48:02)
⁓ So when we do get those wins, when we do get to implement something that goes smoothly and makes a difference and they call to thank us instead of to tell us something's broken, those are the wins that we look forward to in the IT group because ⁓ they don't come as often as we would like, but they can come more often when we do look towards solutions that are innovating instead of stagnating.
Otherwise we do get stuck in that. Thanks for asking, but no, we can't do anything about that. having anything that helps us not say no is huge. Parkside has ⁓ lots of tenants. One of the tenants that we kind of follow from a cultural standpoint is find a way to say yes. And that was a really impactful one for me because for a long time, the answer was no. And that was the end of the conversation.
⁓ Now everything is focused on, okay, no, but this is how we could get to a yes. We need a new software, technological or a technology change or a process change, but it's never no. It's no, but here's how. ⁓ Or no, it's no right now, but maybe later. So that changes that mindset to continually look for a better way of doing it just because it can't be done.
day.
Tony Zakula (49:31)
Yeah, I always, ⁓ I always say to customers, I'll never tell you no. I tell my team, don't tell customers no. It's time and it's money. Now it's a business decision. Is it worth it? Right. ⁓ because to your point of saying no, it's, we don't want to do it. Well, we, know it typically if the, if there was enough
Logan Smith (49:39)
Hmph.
Tony Zakula (50:00)
profit involved or enough whatever, people do a lot of things, right? So it's, ⁓ but you know, you can't do everything and everything's not worth it. Everything you dream up is not worth it ROI wise either. But ⁓ to your point, it should be a business decision. The business should be able to make and value those decisions, not what people do want to do or not do, especially for large companies.
Logan Smith (50:05)
Absolutely.
Tony Zakula (50:27)
trying to innovate because they might do a five-year ROI and say, it sounds crazy, but this is be totally worth it. And I've seen that. So I'm always like, well, that'd be really hard. That'd be a huge project, but I mean, I don't know if it's worth it.
Logan Smith (50:44)
I remember the first time I started submitting requests to Kodaris during the customer payment portal. And users are constantly requesting, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we update this? And in the past, it's so easy to say no by just saying, I'm going to send it to the software provider. And I know they're going to say no. They're just going to say no, and then I'm not the bad guy.
Tony Zakula (51:08)
Hahaha
Margaret Kelsey (51:11)
You're
hot potating it.
Logan Smith (51:12)
They
get to be the bad guy and I start sending these requests and it's just like progression, working on, to do. And it's like, wait, they're doing all these things. I have to be a lot more careful now and pick and choose what I request. So we started actually having to vet what our people are asking for and really know why they want it instead of just like,
Tony Zakula (51:21)
Thank
Yeah.
Logan Smith (51:37)
I know it can't be done. I'll send it off to the software provider, let them shoot it down and give them the bad news. Now I have to be the one that questions, okay, is there a business value to this? Like, does it make sense to request? Does it affect more than just you? Before I give it to Tony, because it's likely Tony's going to either ask those questions or just say yes.
Tony Zakula (51:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
joining, Logan. I think hopefully this has been helpful for other distributors and the community. It's cool stuff. I'm looking forward to innovating with Parkside. And Parkside's great to work with, by the way. I love the Parkside team and working with all of you. We love working with innovators and people who are thinking ahead. So it's been cool and look forward to it.
lots of other stuff. I know we got several projects so it's always fun.
Logan Smith (52:27)
Absolutely. Coderis makes it easy to work. It makes it easy. The only thing difficult is picking and choosing which of the different modules and implementations we want to do.
Tony Zakula (52:34)
Yeah. Just tell
your boss you need an unlimited budget. ⁓
Logan Smith (52:39)
I need unlimited people is what it is. To
Margaret Kelsey (52:40)
There you go.
Logan Smith (52:44)
roll out all the cool things that we can do, I need more people and time in the day.
Tony Zakula (52:50)
Hehehe.
Margaret Kelsey (52:52)
If you figure out how to get that, let me know. More time in the day. All
Tony Zakula (52:55)
Yeah.
Logan Smith (52:55)
Will do.