In today’s episode of The Fire Protection Podcast, Drew talks all things enterprise resource planning (ERP) with Brad Dempsey, CEO and founder of Solutions360.
ERP systems play a critical role in supporting business operations—but not all ERPs are made equal. Dempsey talks through the evolution of ERP systems, what it means for an ERP to be “purpose-built,” and the unique ERP needs of fire protection businesses.”When you mix in the skill requirements, the technology, the engineering, even your service tech skill level is much, much higher in this industry. And that creates some special requirements,” Dempsey explains.
Watch or listen to this episode for insight into the history of ERP systems and how they effectively work within fire protection businesses.
Timecodes:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 02:40 – Brad’s Background
- 06:04 – The Evolution of ERP
- 09:13 – Purpose-Built ERP
- 14:16 – When & How to Adopt an ERP System
- 24:25 – KPIs in Fire Protection
- 30:15 – Six Sigma & Lean Principles
- 33:59 – Getting Started in Software
- 36:49 – Trends in AI
- 42:20 – Episode Wrap-Up
Full Transcript
Drew Slocum:
This is episode 68 of The Fire Protection Podcast, powered by Inspect Point. Today, my guest is Brad Dempsey from Solutions360. Brad has a wealth of knowledge in the ERP space—enterprise resource planning. Essentially, kind of the central hub to a business, right? It’s got financial, it’s got business operations, it’s got sales functionality, and there’s a lot of different variety…There’s some big behemoth companies out there with ERP functionality, but we get into the niche space of fire and security and audio/visual and the purpose-built systems. It’s a new term I learned about where we’re focusing on fire and safety and creating technology solutions around that.
So, traditionally, these bigger ERPs are focused on a variety of industries where, all right, let’s hone in. There’s a big enough market here in fire protection. Let’s solve those issues within these niches. Great to have Brad on, gives a full timeline of where these accounting and ERPs have been over time, and we get into important metrics of what businesses should be tracking. So really cool to have him on and learn about it a little bit more. I actually learned a lot on the podcast myself.
So again, thanks for listening and feel free to share this episode. Thanks.
All right. We are live. Nobody caught this before, but I was—Brad and I were fixing our hair so we could get it ready for the podcast here.
Brad Dempsey:
I took a little longer than you did, for sure.
Drew Slocum:
Welcome Brad to The Fire Protection Podcast. Excited to have you on and learn a little bit more about what you guys do just in general in the ERP world.
Brad Dempsey:
Thanks, Drew. I’m very excited to be here. I’ve listened to a few of your podcasts and I’ve learned a lot. I think you do a great job.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, thanks. I think we just posted something recently about some—this is approaching 70 episodes, I think, so it’s exciting. Wish I could do more, obviously. But I know obviously your background, you guys have a podcast yourself. That’s really cool. I listened to a few of them.
Brad Dempsey:
Well, thanks.
Drew Slocum:
So I guess, for the audience, who is Brad, what is Solutions360? I guess, what is your mission here?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, Solutions360 has a purpose-built ERP system. And I know we’re going to talk a little bit about, you know, what is an ERP system?
And I started the company in 1988, and it has evolved since the ‘90s into an ERP system now that targets what we call “technology integration companies.” So, life safety is obviously a very important part of that, but it’s also audio/visual, security, even healthcare—are different markets that sometimes are considered low voltage subcontractors, specialty subcontractors. We fall into that same space.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, it seems like fire protection, life safety, and security are, I mean, they’ve started to blend before, but they seem to be coming together a little bit more, at least in the North American market. I mean, it’s still segmented everywhere, but it seems to be gelling together, and you can see that with some of the mergers and acquisitions going on, too.
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but I kind of see—the really unique part to me about life safety is probably more sprinkler systems. When I look at a fire alarm system, it is very similar to a security system from a technology standpoint, obviously the compliance is much more important, but when we got involved with companies with sprinkler systems, that’s when I really saw a lot of differences in life safety.
Drew Slocum:
I started my career 20 plus years ago in the sprinkler world, and it is a bit different, but there’s a lot of similarities, and honestly, the fire alarms are the brains of the fire life safety system. So it all really does connect at the end of the day.
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah, I got to tell you a little story. One of the most interesting things I learned in my first exposure with a sprinkler company was—you know how in movies, you see this person take a lighter and they hold it up to one of the sprinkler heads. Then all the sprinkler heads fire. Once they showed me an actual sprinkler head, and it worked okay. So there’s just a little glass bulb in there that breaks, there’s no way that sets off the rest of the sprinkler heads. That was very eye-opening.
Drew Slocum:
It’s not crazy technology. The funny part is Frederick Grinnell and Henry—I know a lot about sprinkler. But the sprinkler head was invented in the late 1800s. So it’s not a new technology, and it’s essentially just water behind a cap and at a certain temperature pops.
But yeah, in Hollywood—there’s actually a pretty cool YouTube channel. I’ll give them a plug, I think it’s called Films on Fire, and it’s all these, I think they have more fire protection, but it’s all these misconceptions with Hollywood, and it kind of goes to the public because somebody goes up with lighter and they all go off just for the Hollywood aspect of having something destroy a room or whatever. But it’s not how it’s obviously.
So I guess with your experience with ERP, I guess, what has been the evolution of it over time? Has it changed names, and where are we going? I guess if you want to give a brief timeline.
Brad Dempsey:
Sure. Yeah. Just a brief history, back in the ‘60s, the technology really started more like inventory control systems, some of the early mainframe applications. You know, costing and keeping track of inventory.
And then in the ‘70s, we saw MRP systems. There was MRP, I think it was called MRP2, which was material resource planning, and then finally manufacturing resource planning. I think it was more in the ‘90s when ERP as we know today started to emerge.
And then we saw another big shift after the millennium. Probably around 2005 to 2010, we started just to see a lot of it moving to the cloud. Now, cloud is an interesting story because, having grown up in technology, I’ve been in technology since 1979. We used to have diagrams that showed network connections, and we used to draw this little cloud in the middle and didn’t call it the cloud. And then some marketing person looked at that diagram and thought cloud, that would make a great tagline. What a great marketing concept. So, that was kind of the next evolution of ERP was moving to the cloud.
Drew Slocum:
Cloud. It’s funny. It’s funny you mentioned MRP. I was in the manufacturing sector in fire protection when I started my career, and we were on the fun green screen, green and black screen of AS/400, and funny enough, there are still some pretty sizable companies on that platform. I’m like, how? I just don’t understand that. But…anyways.
Brad Dempsey:
There’s a lot of old code out there. I saw a survey just a little while ago about the most popular programming languages. Interestingly, COBOL was still, I think, in the top 25, which surprised me. But there’s still a lot of COBOL code running out there.
Drew Slocum:
So I guess, sorry to just disrupt you. So we’re at the ‘90s and 2000s. So we went to the cloud. Where are we now and where are we going?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, the evolution of ERP systems is kind of moving into different areas where you’ve got more generic ERP systems where they’re very configurable. When I think of ERP, a lot of times I might think of distribution, distribution companies using ERP systems. But we’re in a space called purpose-built ERP systems.
What I mean by that is we look at an industry, and in our case it’s technology integrators, and we look at what’s unique about that industry, and we build our ERP system to match that industry. So if you tried to put us in the distribution model, we would do a terrible job, because that’s just not what we’re designed for. Technically we’re an ERP, but we don’t do distribution companies.
Being purpose-built, I mean, if you look at the things which are really unique about life safety and technology integrators, you’ve got a project-based component, and usually you have engineering, you have to design something. You have to install it, you have to job cost it, then you’ve got to hand it off to your service department. So now you roll it into the second group and hopefully the handoff goes well.
And the service group has to manage the ongoing relationship with the customer. Now you’re talking about service contracts, you’re talking about rolling trucks, you’ve got truck stock, you’ve got service contracts that have profitability that you have to measure. Now you’re going to tie in other services, managed services like monitoring maybe. So that’s really where ERP has gone. We’re seeing more purpose-built type systems nowadays.
Drew Slocum:
Honestly, it’ll be our 10-year anniversary here in a few months. And I like the tagline, purpose-built system, right? Even in our space in the inspection compliance, even some of the field service management capabilities that we have, it’s like, we’re purpose-built for fire. I feel like that’s a newer thing, right?
Before you had these bigger packages or whatever, there’s nothing specifically built for those niches or whatever you want to call them. And as long as you can make—kind of the new thing is making those purpose-built softwares talk to other pieces in the ecosystem as well in the tech stack. I think that’s kind of where we’re at.
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah, I would frame it along the idea of domain expertise. Because, if you look at a lot of bigger flexible packages, you get a reseller, and in a lot of cases, you’re trying to teach the reseller how your business works. And that’s where I see incredible similarities between what you’ve done and what we’ve done is you implement your own software, you understand fire regulation and how fire systems work and how alarm systems and sprinklers work. We understand how technology integration businesses work from a financial and operations standpoint.
Drew Slocum:
There’s something different on, especially the alarm and security side, where, and we’re coming to learn this. It’s like, there’s a whole different billing and revenue model to the monitoring and all that, and it’s not the same as fire. It’s similar, but it’s not the same. And it’s a whole new methodology that we’re starting to learn over the last few years.
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah, I mean, if you look at, this is kind of the specialty subcontractor realm maybe, or low-voltage subcontractors. There’s some very specific nuances to the way they do business. And when you talk about construction software, they’re usually targeted as GC or different types of subcontractors. “I’m laying concrete,” or that type of thing.
When you mix in the skill requirements, the technology, the engineering, even your service tech skill level is much, much higher in this industry. And that creates some special requirements. That’s where I see a lot of the differences.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, with certifications and especially on the life safety side, for sure.
Brad Dempsey:
And I would think for you, compliance is probably one of the biggest issues, right?
Drew Slocum:
Oh, yeah. Without—I mean the fire industry globally and then locally, even. Globally, nationally, state and province wise, and then even citywide, right? There’s different…and life safety is, it’s in the public space, so it’s more codified than HVAC and plumbing and even security to that.
Security does have some standards in certain parts, but fire and life safety, it’s very codified. You have to follow the international, national, and then down to the city even. Because it’s more of a public safety piece, so it’s complicated.
And some of the bigger generic platforms, like you said, there’s integrators out there that don’t really understand when they’re developing those tools for those fire and security integrators, you almost have to educate them. And I’ve heard some good experiences from integrators, but most of the time it’s not the easiest.
Brad Dempsey:
I’m curious. So we also work in the audio/visual space, and we see that a lot of audio/visual companies started because somebody was a roadie, they were a musician, they were involved with audio/visual, maybe they’re in the A/V club in their high school. What do you see in life safety? How do most of these companies start?
Drew Slocum:
It’s interesting trying to get, everybody’s got a labor shortage, but especially in life safety, it’s like, nobody really knows about it. You walk into a building, a commercial building, you don’t know some of the life safety systems that are protecting you. So it’s not like an HVAC tech or a plumber where you kind of know those trades.
So I feel it’s probably family, a lot of it’s family. But there’s also some of the trade unions kind of, obviously, they’re pretty big trade unions, right on the electrical side, but also on the fire sprinkler side. So I think there’s avenues there. And a lot of it too, a lot of the professionals in fire protection come from fire departments. Their dad was a firefighter, fire chief or volunteer firefighter. And even on our Inspect Point team, we have Jeff Pirro, one of our great account executives. He’s a volunteer firefighter, so he knew some of the fire systems before getting involved in Inspect Point. So yeah, I feel like probably a third of the fire professionals know somebody in the fire service. So I think there’s definitely a tie there. Even though fire protection systems are obviously different than firefighting, and sometimes they don’t get along. But yeah, that’s a great question. Where does the industry come from?
So with a purpose-built system, is there any metrics that are…when you make it for a specific purpose, are there metrics that you’re tracking? Are there big components to an ERP system that should be focused on when you’re looking at purpose-built?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, obviously an understanding of your industry. I think one of the questions, if you’re looking at ERP system, is who’s going to be implementing it? Who’s going to be teaching us? Who’s going to be helping with the adoption of the system?
But I think, number one, understanding your KPIs, and part of that comes from, “Why am I looking at an ERP system?” So when I look at the ERP system, I think of two factors: Number one, do I need one? And number two, am I ready for one? So the need is kind of easy. It’s either, in my mind, it’s one of the two things. Either we have a strategic plan, we know we’re going to grow and we’re going to have to put in a good ERP system to help us with our growth.
The other more common method is, we just feel the pain. We know we need an ERP system because we don’t know if our jobs are profitable until a month after they’re completed. We don’t know if the equipment’s going to be on-site at the right time, and we keep missing deadlines. Summer comes every year, yet we find we’re overstaffed or understaffed to meet the demands of the labor, the requirements of our capacity versus our demand. So the pain is what drives, I think, the need for a lot of companies.
Now, the second part is, are we ready an ERP system? And not every company is, and that’s one of the reasons we actually, I acquired a consulting company a couple of years ago, Navigate Management Consulting. And one of the reasons was that we felt it was very important to be able to do things like readiness assessments, go into a company and interview the management, look at their strategic plan, look at their processes, hopefully they have some process flow charts, swim lane charts, and understand are they at the level where they can actually adopt and implement an ERP system? Because if you’re not ready, don’t do it. And that’s one of the things we’re very strict about. It’s such a big undertaking. You don’t want it to fail, so it’s better to turn one down if the companies aren’t ready to implement it than it is to take on a customer who is going to have problems, right?
Drew Slocum:
Yeah. Yeah. And there’s multiple—I don’t call them horror stories—but they’re pretty rough stories of either not ready or not doing the correct evaluation of an ERP and even the integrators that are implementing it. And then you’re starting from scratch two years later. It’s tough.
In the fire—and I would say even the security market—is broken up into segments of sizes of companies. You have your small/medium-sized business, and we categorize that in a certain way at Inspect Point, but then you have your larger companies, regional companies, and then obviously your national or international companies. I mean, if you’re an owner operator, one, two people at the company, is an ERP needed or is it more of a financial package? Where does that ERP start to fit in?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, it definitely doesn’t fit into the 1, 2, 5, 10-person company, that’s for sure. And it’s not that it couldn’t do all of the work. But number one, it’s too much overhead. It’s like it’s having a dump truck to drive back and forth to the grocery store. It’s not meant to do what you’re doing in our world.
So for our system, we look at that, probably a minimum of 25 employees and up, it’s just kind of the entry point. And we go all the way up to thousands of employees. So anywhere in that space, you definitely are a candidate for an ERP system. Because what happens is, we tell a story, we do a presentation called the “Big Why.” When we’re doing an implementation, we like to remind the customer, why did you buy our product? I mean, they’ve already bought it, but it’s a good idea to remind them.
And we talk about the idea that a lot of companies started off as a couple people in a truck. When we’re a couple people in a truck, we can turn to each other and say, did you remember to install that? Whatever? And oh, did you talk to a supplier about this? So the communication is quick and easy. We install things, we build for them, we make money.
As you grow, you start to build these silos. Now you’ve got somebody who’s doing sales and you’ve got somebody else who’s doing installation, you’ve got somebody else who’s doing service. So now the coordination between all of those people, departments, silos, processes, become very important. That’s when you really know that you need an ERP system to manage those silos, to manage the handoffs, and the swim lanes of all the different processes.
Drew Slocum:
So I guess when you’re back on that note, like that 20-25, when do you start thinking about that and what does planning look like? Obviously, a small growing company, once you’re getting to that size, what should they be thinking about to set themselves up for success?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, if I was in that position, the first thing I would say is go out and get the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. The E-Myth is the entrepreneurial myth. And the idea is that, how many times have you heard somebody say to their friend who’s a great cook or he’s a great carpenter, or whatever, oh, you should go into business. You’d make a fortune. You’re so good at that, you should start a business.
So the myth is that we can take these people who are very good operators, technicians, and that they can just magically create a business and start being profitable and grow the business. Growing a business is very different from having the skill to be the technician, and that’s what this book is all about. So what I like about the book is they actually start with a pie shop and a lady who starts a pie shop, and she did go through the process of the typical things that a company sees is they go from one person to five people to 10 people, and they start to have specialized roles.
What it does though, is it teaches you to prepare your processes and your documentation for breadth. So regardless of the system you have, they use a concept of hats, and I really like that. So I know from a company I need 25 different hats. I’m only one person, so I’m wearing all the hats. So what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to document what that hat does. So when I hire somebody and hand them three hats, I can give them documented processes to say, this is what you should be doing. As opposed to just abdicating, which is what I was guilty of when I was growing the business at first. But it’s a different mentality. It’s thinking about the processes, documentation, structure ahead of time. So when you grow and you bring on the people, those are all in place.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, I love the analogy with the hats. You always say, how many wear three hats or whatever, but what are those three hats and what is that daily, weekly task that makes those important?
Brad Dempsey:
And expectations and agreement—so here are your three hats. Here’s what I expect you to do. Do you agree to what those expectations are?
Drew Slocum:
Yeah. Now, back to your KPI, kind of comment on key performance indicators. For anybody that doesn’t know what that is, essentially metrics within the business. Is there anything that you’ve learned in the fire space that are kind of KPIs in the fire space that you can point to? Because it is purpose—obviously different businesses of different KPIs—but is there anything in fire that struck you as just different metrics to focus on?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, in my mind, the most unique thing I’ve seen in the fire space is the whole concept of deficiencies, because that is such a huge opportunity for revenue and for growth. So understanding…one of the KPIs that we think is the most important is what we call customer profitability at a complete level: How much did I make from installing stuff? How much did I make from my monitoring contract? How much did I make from my inspections? And then how did that roll into deficiencies and my profitability there?
So understanding that, if I install a sprinkler system and a fire alarm system, am I getting the inspection contract? And if I do get that inspection contract, am I doing a good job of tracking deficiencies, quoting deficiencies, turning that around really quickly and then addressing them in as profitable a way as possible? And then also, am I offering the customer those other services, like monitoring, that could be profitable? We consider that a really important KPI. We look at that on a monthly basis, and we look at was the customer profitable in the previous month? Were they profitable in the previous quarter, the previous year—as a whole.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah. One thing I have learned over the last…looking at these KPIs and deficiencies is obviously a big part of our platform and identifying those to show those further dollars down the line. There’s a lot of companies out there that aren’t even…obviously there’s some great solutions out there to track all this—but they don’t even know what some of these KPIs, they have no idea what’s happening with their business.
It’s almost like, you have to go and measure what your current stats are, and they might not even have a measurement tool to do that. So knowing what your current deficiency rate is or multiple on what you’re getting on that customer is important because you want to show that improvement when you’re putting these processes and technology in place—before and after.
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah, I think one of the things we talk about is the idea that there are lag KPIs and lead KPIs. So, think of it like driving with your rear view mirror. I can see what I’ve passed, I can see what’s behind me. Those are kind of my lag KPIs, but that’s not how I drive, that’s not how I manage my business. I want to understand, what are the lead KPIs? What are the ones that tell me about what’s going to happen and what’s happening going forward. So an example of that might be the ratio of deficiencies to inspections. So if I can understand, if I can do this many more inspections, then I should plan for having the staff to do this many more deficiencies.
Drew Slocum:
There’s another one that we came on earlier in our runway with Inspect Point is—the inspection deficiencies obviously important—but then really the turnaround time for proposals. And I think this is in general for sales quotes. You’re in a variety of industries, so where have you seen—there are so many companies that are still doing proposals on antiquated…they’re doing it in Word or they’re doing it in Excel, and it’s kind of crazy that it’s still the case. So do you have any key metrics on improving the sales side of things with the CRM and beyond that?
Brad Dempsey:
Yeah. Well, we actually have a CRM component to our product, but I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s the turnaround time because, I think quoting deficiencies is different than quoting a lot of the other products we see. And you probably know this better than, you obviously know this better than I do, I think it falls out of the mind of the customer very quickly. If you can get that quote from the deficiency right on the heels of the inspection, I think, and what I’ve seen from our customers KPIs is you’ve got a better chance of closing the business for that deficiency.
Now, it’s one thing to have a tool to help you quote a deficiency, but a lot of that is also dependent on workflow. So it’s always good to have features, but never forget about workflow. And by workflow, I mean: How do we get the information from the inspector to the person who’s quoting the deficiency?
How do we make sure that that deficiency quote gets to the customer in a timely and efficient basis? And then do we follow up on the quote? Is there a formal process workflow in place to make sure that, “Yeah, we’ve set out 200 quotes for deficiency repairs, but we’ve got to follow up on those.” Because people will tend, as people do, to ignore those kind of things. It’s all about that workflow, the timing, every portion of that workflow.
You talk about Lean and Six Sigma—and you usually think of that in manufacturing. Well, we actually talk a lot about that in our processes because it’s about reducing waste and increasing value, and that’s just the support in our industry, right?
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, no, it is. It was funny, and you might have seen my recent post then, because I have a Six Sigma black belt from my manufacturing days. Obviously brought it to this, and obviously optimizing processes and all that. But one thing, and I recently wrote an article about it, and I kind of brought it up earlier, is you have to know your metrics like those, you call them lag KPIs.
So what was it before? Do you even know that? Right? And there’s a lot of companies that don’t even know some of those metrics, and obviously, you can put all the improvements in place, but if you don’t know where you’re improving from, it’s tough to do that. And that’s where some of the, I don’t even know what they call it, it’s probably not even Six Sigma or Lean anymore. There’s probably some new term for that.
Brad Dempsey:
I know our COO actually interned with Dr. Deming, so he’s obviously a real believer and has been teaching this for decades. So we’ve really interwoven that whole concept into a lot of our processes, our teaching, the way we manage our customers. It’s new to me. I’ve only been really exposed to it for last three or four years. So it’s a fascinating field.
Drew Slocum:
You can kind of put it to work anywhere. I mean, manufacturing was the easy way to do it back in the GE and the days back then. But I think accounting processes and just business workflows, there’s a lot of potential there for service-related industries, kind of where we’re in.
Brad Dempsey:
That’s a great point. Two other things I might like to mention about KPIs: I think one of the most important things is it shouldn’t take you extra work to get your KPIs. You should be working on platforms and developing processes where the KPIs are naturally and all that. Because if you have to work to create them, you’re probably not going to use them and they’re not going to be as accurate. So that’s a really important point.
The other is in understanding that Lean can correspond to administration as well. How much does it cost you to create an invoice? Now, that’s about waste. It’s about a repetitive process that can be improved and measured and that has a dollar value. There are a lot of KPIs that are not associated with dollars in finance. Employee utilization is one of those. How efficiently am I putting my employees on work that provides value, that makes sense, that is creating revenue for the company. That’s a percentage KPI that has nothing to do directly with dollars,
Drew Slocum:
It’s interesting. Coming into the software realm, 10 or so years ago, I had to learn all these new—I knew the metrics back from the manufacturing and kind of material sales days, but then getting into software, there’s all these new KPIs and customer acquisition costs. And you get into the software end where you’re demoing, it’s similar, but it just different. And those kind of drive your business and obviously helped us to get where we’re at today.
Brad Dempsey:
So, how did you get started? What possessed you to start a software company?
Drew Slocum:
See, you’re a podcaster, you’re flipping it around on the host. I like that.
Brad Dempsey:
Sorry, I’m curious. I don’t know if I’d start a software company today based upon what’s happened to me over the last, almost 40 years.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, it was good. So I worked for two Fortune 500 manufacturers in the fire space. I started my career manufacturing a dry pipe sprinkler valve—knew how to put it together in the assembly line and kind of the manufacturing processes. Had an industrial engineering degree, so Six Sigma and all that kind of fit into where my education kind of career brought me.
But then funny enough, I kind of moved around with Tyco, the big conglomerate, for a little bit. And they kind of said, all right, you either go operations or you got to go into sales. You’re a decent golfer, so we’re kind of pushing you in to sales. And obviously, I knew the product pretty well, so it’s kind of the road I went. So I did that, moved to New York City, did a lot of stuff in fire protection with FDNY in New York City, sprinkler, fire alarm suppression, all that.
Partnered up with some really bright developers that knew the startup business for software. And we kind of put our heads together and created…we saw an opening. It was around the shift, right after the shift to the cloud, I guess, 10 years ago. I think everything, a lot of other things shifted to the cloud, but fire protection always lags and it still lags.
Anyway, we saw an opportunity—there was not a lot of cloud-based processes out there, and nobody really figured out the inspection kind of workflow that well. So yeah, we jumped in and got a lot of great interest right out of the gate, and we were able to produce a lot of features and requests very quickly. We were able to iterate really quickly, but then have the basic basis of all the fire protection codes and be that purpose-built. And it kind of just flourished from there. It’s been a fun adventure. Now I get to do fun podcasts and talk to innovative entrepreneurs like yourself.
Brad Dempsey:
Excellent.
Drew Slocum:
One question. One of the last topics I wanted to get to is, I hear a lot about artificial intelligence and AI obviously in the news for the past year or two years. Funny enough, the stock markets are kind of tied to the buzzword of AI. And I struggle with it a little bit because I feel like AI has been, it’s just a term, but we’ve been doing similar things with cloud computing and business intelligence before. So where do you see AI in the ERP world and where is that going?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, I think AI is the biggest thing to happen in my lifetime. And I think it’s bigger than the internet, honestly. Every bubble bursts. I think what happens is people who hear about technology in the news don’t fully understand it, get really excited as the news progresses and the stock market goes crazy, and then all of a sudden they realize it’s not perfect.
For those of us who have lived with many waves of technology, we don’t expect perfection. It’s all about the evolution of technology and seeing its potential. And I think that’s where the real innovators come into play…is we can see what AI does not do well, but I think the big things we see is the potential, and something huge happened very recently. The fact that for a very, very small amount of money or free, I can have AI do tasks that I never dreamed it could do five years ago. And it came much faster than I expected it to, than a lot of us expected it to.
What I would say is, please embrace AI. But the way I think of AI is in an advisory role—we don’t get AI to do stuff for us at this point. We are basically asking, almost asking its opinion on things. Look at this data, tell me what you think. If I teach you this data, can you help me categorize my service calls? So that’s one of the ways we’ve started using it. It looks at the description of the call. It’s got a list of all of our previous service calls and how we categorize them. We give it a few tags and some information on how we want them categorized, and it does the first pass. Now, it’s going to get some wrong, but the big difference now is a lot of the AI we’re using can learn. So machine learning is a little bit different than AI, when we talk about narrow AI.
So we’ve had AI for a long time that could do things like speech recognition, but the speech recognition engine was more or less static. The difference now is, it’s learning and evolving. We’re not at generative AI yet, but we’re certainly well on our way. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.
One of the things that blew me away was when I started feeding pictures into AI. In particular, we’ve got some customers who have thousands of pictures of fire panels, and they take a picture, make sure the panel’s up and open, they attach it to the service call, so they’ve got proof that it’s GPS-stamped with coordinates and time, so when they leave the site, they can prove that the panel was left up and open.
Well, AI can actually look at those pictures now and analyze them and tell me whether or not there’s a green light and tell me what it says on the LCD display on the panel—for pennies. And that kind of technology, just think about the potential of that kind of thing. If I can take a picture of a part and then ask it, number one, what is the part? Do I have it in stock, which warehouse, and maybe even just ask it to process an order for it.
These are all things in which the potential is there now,. But we’re very careful in using this in an advisory role. What do you think of this? Give us a first draft, give us some information. But I strongly encourage people, start using it today, just get aware of its strengths and weaknesses, but try to look at its potential. I think that’s really important.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, it’s funny, I wrote an article, I think it was about a year ago. I wrote it for the American Fire Sprinkler Magazine, I believe. I forgot what I wrote it on. It might’ve been KPIs or something, business in fire protection, but it was like, I don’t know, eight paragraphs, and I wrote it pretty well, took my time. But I actually asked ChatGPT to write me a similar article, and weirdly enough, I took a paragraph from the ChatGPT AI-generated article and actually plugged it and put it directly into what I wrote, and I asked the audience, asked the audience if they could recognize the AI-generated paragraph. Nobody—I had trouble remembering what one it was, and it was wild to be able to do that. Certain industries, definitely the marketing side, is being transformed pretty quickly with AI.
Well, great. This has been awesome, Brad. Love to have you on again at some point and discuss more. Really, I would like to discuss, “Hey, you have this great ERP system, where’s integration with other parts of the fire industry?” And I think that would be a cool topic probably down the road if you’re up for it.
Brad Dempsey:
Oh, I would love that. And I’d love to have you over on Clear Talk.
Drew Slocum:
Yeah, I’m in. I always like just jumping into a podcast and not having to do all the prep.
Brad Dempsey:
Yes, I know what you mean.
Drew Slocum:
So I guess tell the audience where we can find, obviously you, Solutions360, where we can find anything about you guys?
Brad Dempsey:
Well, we’re solutions360.com, and that’s the main place to find us. Also, Q360.com. Q360 is the name of our product.
We have newsletters, we’ve got blogs, we’ve got, as you heard, podcasts. Our podcasts are on Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts, and anywhere where you can find podcasts, just search Clear Talk Solutions360, and listen to our podcasts as well.
Drew Slocum:
Awesome. Awesome. This has been great. Yeah, I’m glad to finally…Well, we’ll see you again soon, and yeah, thanks again.
Brad Dempsey:
Absolutely. Thank you.
Drew Slocum:
This has been episode 68 of The Fire Protection Podcast, powered by Inspect Point. Wanted to thank Brad Dempsey again for coming on the podcast to talk about everything ERP. It’s not always the sexiest topic out there, but it was really cool to learn about these business processes. Six Sigma and Lean got brought up a bunch, so back to my old roots. Anyway, thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you again soon. Thanks.
