Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1535954
JUNE 2025 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 13 which we've talked about already, but there's also keeping up with what the market needs. For example, before 2018, if you told me that soware for quoting needs to incorporate tar- iffs, I would've countered with, "For what rea- son?" en, in 2018, the tariffs started. With that Airtable soware, will you be the one to incorporate everything related to tariffs? Shouldn't you have better things to do instead? Now, let's say you need to onboard a new employee. Do you have a knowledge base for your homegrown soware? Probably not. at means you need to train them on the nuances of your homegrown soware. ese are small things, but they add up. There's another perception among EMS pro- viders that the integration costs of new soft- ware is just too hard and too expensive. But you're saying that the hidden costs actually equal out? Absolutely. First, the integration itself is not expensive. With modern soware, it's fairly straightforward. You can probably do it in a couple of days. e problem is doing the cor- rect integration, and that's where business knowledge also matters. I oen hear from com- panies, "I want to make sure it integrates into my ERP," so I'll ask them, "Which business process do you want to flow information from your CRM to your ERP?" Too oen, they aren't clear about what to share; they just want the sys- tems to talk. is detailed planning is exactly the kind of business process thinking that needs to be done here. Once you spec the whole thing out, cod- ing is the easy part, not the hard part. e tricky part is get- ting the business require- ment in place. Businesses struggle with this because they haven't properly understood what they want to build, but I think that would be true anyway. Now, let's step back from integration. Let's say you told an employee to manually get the two systems to talk to each other. Could you properly instruct that employee without con- stantly adjusting what they're doing? If so, then you've got a requirement. But without the employee getting clear requirements, it doesn't matter if you automate it or not. So, this is the time to really look at your pro- cesses; you want to get down to the actual steps taken. Now you have a fighting chance to understand your business and even opti- mize some of your processes. Otherwise, you will create something that doesn't work because it doesn't match reality. Yes, and here's a different way of putting that. e integration is an automation, which is usu- ally not viewed as expensive if you think about it in the long term. It depends on how far out your planning horizon is. If you have an under- standing of business knowledge, then integra- tion is an investment in infrastructure, rather than an overhead. Many providers say they face a significant challenge, and that challenge is that integra- tion is hard. Actually, what's hard is under- standing your processes sufficiently to inte- grate properly because they need to do that inte- gration anyway. Exactly. I've visited well over a hundred EMS companies in my career— and this is not unique to EMS providers—and I've seen that processes eventually break. You've been doing a certain pro- cess, you stopped think- ing about why you were doing it, and you just keep doing it. e world