Sustainable Supply Chain

Integration Platform As A Service - A Chat With Celigo's Mark Simon

June 06, 2022 Tom Raftery / Mark Simon Season 1 Episode 231
Sustainable Supply Chain
Integration Platform As A Service - A Chat With Celigo's Mark Simon
Digital Supply Chain +
Become a supporter of the show!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript

Integration projects are becoming increasingly important to allow disparate systems to share information.

Enter IPaaS - the Integration Platform As A Service. Celigo is an iPaaS company, so I invited their VP of Strategy Mark Simon to come on the podcast to tell me all about it.

I learned loads, I hope you do too...

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

If you want to learn more about how to juggle sustainability and efficiency mandates while recovering from pandemic-induced disruptions, meeting growth targets, and preparing for an uncertain future, check out our Oxford Economics research report here.

And if you want to read up on our Industry 4.0 blueprint repost, head on over to https://www.sap.com/cmp/dg/intro-industry40/index.html, and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane! 

Elevate your brand with the ‘Sustainable Supply Chain’ podcast, the voice of supply chain sustainability.

Last year, this podcast's episodes were downloaded over 113,000 times by senior supply chain executives around the world.

Become a sponsor. Lead the conversation.

Contact me for sponsorship opportunities and turn downloads into dialogues.

Act today. Influence the future.



Support the show


Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

  • Lorcan Sheehan
  • Krishna Kumar
  • Olivier Brusle
  • Alicia Farag
  • Joël VANDI
  • Luis Olavarria
  • Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

Mark Simon:

You don't want those applications to be 50 or 60 disparate systems. You want them to be a single solution, your single business system. Companies that really take that approach, they see a lot higher return on investment, and much quicker return on investment with the addition of those cloud applications

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast. The number one podcast, focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host global vice-president at SAP Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today, I have my special guest Mark. Mark, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Mark Simon:

Thank you, Tom. Yeah, I'm Mark Simon. I'm a VP of Strategy at Celigo, uh, and I've spent the last 15 years focusing on digital transformation and automation companies across all industries, with a high percentage of those companies, being in the supply, basically being supply chain dependent organizations, um, originally started out as a, as a software engineer. Co-founded and led a successful e-commerce company. So I've seen the, uh, other side of things, so to speak before, focusing on consulting and then getting into, the integration space now, uh, on the software side.

Tom Raftery:

Cool. And you mentioned digital transformation and you mentioned supply chain, and this is the digital supply chain podcast. So sounds like a good fit, but for people who are unaware, can you tell me what is Celigo?

Mark Simon:

Definitely, we are an I-PASS company and an I-PASS, you know, all we need is another acronym in our technical alphabet soup these days, but an I-PASS is an integration platform, as a service and we are based in Silicon valley. And our mission is really to automate your business. And we help companies accomplish that by unlocking integration. And we make it accessible to more than just integration engineers, buried in IT, but to, to line of business users. and while doing that, we still provide. And gave you the technical capabilities needed to, to integrate, to traditional systems that using EDI or, or to custom and emerging technologies, but really providing a balance of power and ease of use. And by being what we think of is I-PASS 2.0 and bringing a modern approach, really, giving more of your business, the power and capabilities to participate in the automation process.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And what kind of integrations are we talking about?

Mark Simon:

We're really talking about, any point where you've got, multiple systems or in your business processes, within your organization. So we do, we do a tremendous amount of work through, supply chain automation, for example. So. typically we, we see a lot of integration centered around, we think of as your, is your foundational SAAS applications. So that would be your ERP, your WMS systems, and basically working through, but those are just the foundation. So then you have all of the other applications and also trading partners where their vendors, their, their customers, and you, you end up with all this data flowing through your businesses as part of your core business processes. So those, those integrations might be as simple as getting a. You know, in, in theory, we talk about it being as simple, the, where the rubber meets the road, it often becomes much more challenging, but the getting a, an order out to a 3PL for example, or, for executing on a fulfillment and then bringing that fulfillment information back upstream, but doing that very quickly, efficiently, easily, and in, in a flexible manner, is really the key.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And can you give me, I mean, you, you gave one example there, but can you give me a couple of other use cases for the kind of integrations that you're talking about?

Mark Simon:

Yeah, definitely, some other use cases would be, very often we're working through, there'll be inbound, sales channels. we'll work through an entire business process and automate the entire thing for our customers. So that might start at, you know, even when we talk about where an order originates up in, uh, a sales team, Even before that we have to get inventory, and inventory information, pricing information, uh, consolidated and out to those sales channels. And that starts from the, supply chain providers. So whether you've got an internal WMS systems or that in a combination of three PLS, so, getting, PO's, out, getting ASNs out to your, your supply chain vendors on the three P on the three, PL the receiving side, getting that receiving information back into your ERP or other inventory control system, and then also even further upstream working with, vendors, uh, transportation providers. Maybe you got a transfer one or more transportation management systems, in your organization. So automating the communication from your, you know, very often we see that ERP going out to a vendor to send that order out to say your manufacturer, or, you know, very often multiple steps, supply chains, for example, with, with some businesses that might have, you take a, the beauty industry, for example, something very, very small as, uh, you know, you think of a lipstick, for example, may go through their steps there, four or five vendors that are spread across from China to Italy to, um, and getting those communications automated and flowing properly from your supply chain tools, from your ERP to your supply chain planning tools, and then out to your vendors. And back are some, some common use cases that we see.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, fascinating. And what's, what's the current state of the digital landscape out there because we've seen the massive disruptions we've had in the last two. Maybe even more years. And we've heard that that has kick-started digital transformations in organizations and that we've seen more digital transformation that happen in the last, six months than we're supposed to happen for the last five years. So what are you seeing out there in terms of digital landscapes?

Mark Simon:

Oh, just like you said, tremendous change and with that, that change, that disruption that, that occurred in, in the supply chain and the digital general digital landscape, we saw a great deal of risk hitting companies, but also a tremendous amount of opportunity. So, if you look at just the COVID the pandemic and, and particularly the first, six months of that, there were companies that were very, very clear losers out of that they couldn't adapt, whether it was simply adapting to, disruptions to, their staffing and needing to now have more of a dispersed, and, at-home workforce and the impact that, that the lack of agility, because there. And, you know, especially with organizations that were more paper-based, this was, this was in some cases, an absolute killer for them that hadn't even started say digital transformation journey, versus others that may have taken a more progressive approach earlier on. And they were able to take that, that crisis and turn it into opportunity. So they were already shifted more towards, digital transformation processes internally and had more, basically core agility in their business. We're able then to adapt and say, for example, take advantage of new new opportunities for sales and that shift new particularly we saw that shift big shift to to e-commerce, but we also shot saw a big shift to, you know, whole new product lines had massively more, more demand than, previously we'd ever seen. And that, that big, that created a big opportunity for a lot of organizations. But if they couldn't get their supply chain up, up and running, adapt, change their processes. They really couldn't take advantage of it. And those that were saw huge opportunities. And we saw some of our, customers that moved very rapidly, and it might've had one or two e-commerce channels. For a given set of products, say a particular in, some of the health care space or we had customers that had a product, a fairly minor product line around, around masks, for example, that were existing. And they w they, they just saw a massive explosion and they were able to, and that's a very obvious one, but, uh, they were able to take advantage and all of a sudden, they're, they're going from two e-commerce marketplaces to, they're launching in 20 countries in a very short amount of time, but their competitors that weren't able to, to be as nimble and adapt just really, they lose out and they might, they might gain some ground eventually, but often those first movers, can get a significant advantage.

Tom Raftery:

Fascinating, fascinating, yup, yup. And where does, I mean, you mentioned I-PASS integration platform as a service, where does that fit into that kind landscape?

Mark Simon:

So where that fits in is when we look at some of the core of being a more agile agile and successful, organization in responding to these disruptions. One of the things that's clear that you need to be as efficient as possible while the same time having agility. And so, we take an example, of, of like looking at something like, like EDI, which is very common electronic data interchange format. That's been around, gosh, it's been around 40 40 plus years. Uh, um, and, and, and. Yeah, something like that, that w we laugh about it, because I remember working that with that for the first time, say, twenty-five years ago and thinking like, wow, this is, and everyone's saying, well, this is going to go away. And here we are in 2022, and it's more, more prominent than ever, but we take something like, like EDI, and it's very common that companies have done some automation around this in some way. But what it's often not an agile approach and it's often not that flexible. And if you take EDI to two common, methods that we see is, is typically is that you go with an outsource provider of some kind. So you're going essentially with a managed service approach to it, which, can be slow to get your trading partners up and running and get everything plugged in. It's it very methodical. And now it's once it's, but once it's up and running, you get there and it's kind of like a black box. But when there is a change needed or it does need to be modified, it can be very, very slow with those providers that you really don't know what, if you need to change anything, uh, you need to move quickly. Now you're, you're really constrained and you don't have the flexibility you need. it is convenient until, uh, until you hit that inflection point and you need to move more quickly. And then conversely, another approach we see is. Bringing it all in house, but using, you know, very often we see kind of we'll call it kind of old, very old tooling or often organizations, not, not really using a good tool set there. You know, in a lot of cases, hand coding, what we think of as hand coding things. They literally have software engineers writing code to wire things together, and they've automated and they've checked the box said, Hey, we've automated this. Well, gosh, you've automated it. That's great. We have to say that you've increased productivity in one way, but there are such better tools now to, to accomplish that, that if you've, you've done that in. Sort of old manner, you can end up with something that's very brittle, brittle. Very often we see organizations that are, that are afraid to change anything. They hold back change. You have business change and a common scenario that we see as a business change is identified in an integration breaking. They're like, oh, we have all these integration errors, look at it and say, what is integration? Well, it's a contract between two systems, moving, moving data in between them. And when the contract breaks that tells you something, something's changed in your business. And it's a integration really act as a, as an early warning system, to, to things that are. That are modified that or changed that, that might've slipped through your change control somewhere. And when you see those break, okay, well, you need to now modify your end point systems or your integration. And mostly a very often it's like, oh, we have a new use case. Let's modify our integration, to handle this new use case that we, we have. but when you, you take, an approach that doesn't leverage modern technologies and really be at a disadvantage because that now can take months to implement versus doing something where you go, and can leverage a modern I-PASS tool. For EDI or any integration. And now you have something that's much, much more flexible. Well, you may still have some engineers involved. You might have something more technical. You moving the work more to line of business users, so users understand the business and the whole process more so you're, you're flattening your. Your structure for the team that's doing that work, but you're also infusing it more with more business understanding. And now you can be much more agile. You can be way more flexible. You can move quicker and, and iteratively address both those issues as it comes up, But when we talked about EDI adding a new trading partner. And when you talk about, responding to the disruptions that we've seen in supply chain, that can be absolutely critical. So it might be, well, how fast can you set up a new integration? With maybe an, a new three PL provider, maybe a new shipper. If we look at all massive disruptions in shipping, right? How how quickly can you adjust and move in to, to work with a new shipper? So even right now getting access. To maybe a new source of materials in some cases is, that's a huge win on its own so that now you're, you can keep manufacturing a given product. You're able to go to plan B or plan C. If we look at some of the, sourcing disruptions that are happening or port problems. And now you might be stuck with doing this all very, very manually. Now your organization has, has a big burden. So while you've you've moved forward, you're still stay operating and able to, to maybe manufacture that product. But now you've just added this massive, uh, maybe a huge like manual entry burden and all the downstream effects of that data inaccuracies, et cetera. And whereas being able to, to use modern tools will let you automate that in essentially in line with bringing up those, new components of your supply chain.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And I got to think and correct me if I'm wrong on this. But I got to think that the shift to kind of cloud-based solutions is going to take away a huge amount of that customized hand-rolled coding because you're switching to more standardized processes and solutions, right?

Mark Simon:

Yes, definitely it shifts away from a lot of that, but it also, this, the shift to cloud is, is very interesting because it solves a lot of problems, especially initially, because you have, with the proliferation of cloud applications, you have so many things that are. There's there's more standardization, but there's also more specialization in applications. So as an organization, you can go out and find a SAAS application to solve just about any problem that it feels like that you're, that you're faced with. So, and while that's fantastic, we often see organizations there, their application footprint very commonly being 40, 50, 60 SAAS applications in a mid-size, but we're not even talking about what you can find in, in enterprise. And you end up with solving that initial problem though, but it creates a secondary problem very often, whereas you've now created more data silos. And so you have to be very careful with that as you as with that movement to cloud that you're being, you're being very thoughtful about that. And you're not just tilting things up in isolation to solve this problem. You're looking at, we really recommend companies take a, and what we see are the most successful companies take. So we call an automation first approach to say, okay, we're going to, we're going to add this new SAS application, but we're not just going to drop it in and implement it and run it. How does it fit into the greater whole, we're not gonna even bring it online without a solid plan and integration and automation to bring really, if you bring it into a single, I think of it almost like a single mesh, a single system. And so you don't, you don't want those applications to be 50 or 60 disparate systems. You want them to be a a single solution, your single business system, . Companies that really take that approach, they see a lot higher return on investment, and much quicker return on investment with the addition of those cloud applications.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And talk to me about, what you call automation first or automation leaders, because, uh, you mentioned that in the, in the prep call, and I'm curious for the listeners to learn more about your thoughts on that.

Mark Simon:

Yeah, definitely. And that's a, game changer. It's a, it's a philosophical shift for an organization. What, we've, typically seen very often in industry and especially, less progressive industries, it's very often any change that impacts the business or if there's a pain point that arises around data transfer and movement. Automation is often looked at as, as a response to a, pain point. So, there'll be an analysis. Okay. We've got a lot of errors. You'll you'll do your root cause analysis. Okay. Uh, it looks like we're having these shipping errors at this rate. That's that's too high because we've introduced something here and we didn't automate three steps in the process. Uh, we've got these, manual steps and now, okay. Let's go back and fix that by automating, but that's a very, very reactionary approach. And, very often me, somebody who are kind of continually behind the curve and that you're, you're not optimizing productivity, both in your, your staff and you're, you're not your. I have to heal relationships with your customers, with your vendors. They aren't as productive as they could be, or, uh, because there's, there's you get friction introduced because you're, you're reacting to these problems after the, and you're letting you know, you're identifying where, how, how to approach and how to drive an integration strategy based on fixing, the most urgent or the hottest problem at the, at the time. And by shifting to this automation first approach, you're just moving, you're planning and you're, and you're looking at any addition or change to your, your systems or your processes from a standpoint of how does this fit in and you're working for the assumption we're going to make this as automated as possible from the beginning. we're gonna automate that. And sometimes it, it takes a little more planning upfront. You have to be a bit more thoughtful, but once an organization really approaches problems and changes in their, their landscape like that, they gain much, much more efficiency and it becomes sort of innate into the organization now. And you often see it spreading and It'll start in one department. And one department will build this culture and they'll shift from reactionary to proactive automation first, and they just become much, much more efficient and they start now, they're interacting with other departments in an organization and they're now they're pushing on them to work in the same way. And the other department say like, wow, this team over here is much, much more efficient. Wow. That's amazing what they've been able to do. How could they do that with, with a team of three and they start, they were able to scale out while we increased sales by, you know, we see companies increase sales by two X, three X, five X, and yet their their operational staff that's processing orders, stays flat. Yeah, because they've taken a really good automation approach. Other departments see that and they say they really want more of that. We see it spread across an organization organically, or we see very often a lot of leaders right now, CIO's, CTO's, business systems leaders coming in and saying, Hey, we're we want to adopt this, but either way really anyone in an organization, any leader, no matter what level you are in an organization, you can start thinking this way and it, and it will begin there and spread and increase efficiency and, and effectiveness of the organisation.

Tom Raftery:

Cool. Cool. Cool. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Mark, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had, or any aspect of this, we've not touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Mark Simon:

Yeah. maybe one thing that comes up Tom is I I often get asked by customers about, about planning, about what, how you know, how to get started on these activities. Okay. Well, we, we want to move forward, but, uh, w we want to change how we're operating and we want to, we want to plan, and, and I, sometimes I see resistance because some organizations are growing so fast, they're reluctant to for example, build out an integration roadmap or a system architecture roadmap, And one of the things is that you don't have to necessarily a small amount of planning around your, your systems, your processes, your architecture, and planning in and approach the whole plan may change, but just that act of going through, um, some high-level planning and identification of, of opportunities where you can optimize, productivity. Just those alone go goes a very long way. You know, the, the act of the biggest value will come. The process of making the plan and the plan may change in, in two weeks or two months and that's okay. But going through it, you'll learn so much more about your business, uh, and where you have problems within it and where you can, streamline it you've gotten the value right there and just, picking really anywhere in an organization. someone can start on starting at a process, looking at where, it's not automated and breaking it, breaking it down and it, really just takes, one point to start and then, working from there. And, and pushing out and, and start to get momentum and build up. It doesn't have to be a grand top-down, effort to where it's at this, this big bang it's. If we think of it as an evolution and really every, every company should, endeavor to be on a, on an automation and digital transformation. Continuous evolution.

Tom Raftery:

Very good. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Mark. If people want to know more about yourself or about Celigo or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Mark Simon:

Anybody, wanting to know more about, Celigo can visit our website, which is, C E L I G O.COM. and, they can email me at, M A R K. S I M O N @celigo.com. And I'm happy to, to talk more about what, uh, about some of the topics here and, and how companies can further their automation journeys.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic mark. That's great. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Mark Simon:

You bet. Thank you for your time, Tom.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sap.com/digital supply chain, or, or simply drop me an email to Tom dot Raftery @sap.com. If you like the show, please, don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application at choice to get new episodes, as soon as they are published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.

Podcasts we love