[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories and their business ventures. So now it's time for our very distinguished guest, Naga Nadigam, who is the CEO of dymcom and she's also a Gearhart Law client. DYMCOM is an ERP consulting company and she's a thought leader in her industry. I've gotten a chance to know her over time and DYMCOM really does have a lot of very innovative solutions. They're relying on AI to really propel the business forward and they're using it in unique ways. So welcome to the show. Naga, can you tell us about your entrepreneurial journey?
[00:01:07] Speaker D: I would say like right now I'm working with Dimension Consulting, also named as Dimcon. Dimcon is mainly focused on ERP. When I say ERP, there are different ERPs that are available in the small scale industries, enterprises, mid scale industries and everything. ERP is nothing but a technology solution that is provided in holistic. So what does that mean? Is it has everything from reports, dashboards, users, processes and everything. Layman terms if I have to say. It's something like a simple application that you can use on your phone or else on a web to make the business happen really fast. But we focus on business360. What does that mean? Is giving business everything that is required, whether it is going to be sales, people, journey, workforce management solution or it can be a product management and financials. So how do we do?
We don't own our ERP system, but we partner with major leaders like Oracle, Workday, Salesforce and few of them. And we are like Cloud excellence implementers or ERP excellence implementers. Our journey is very different. We actually work with the clients directly to understand their pain points. The pain points can be as if they cannot even just write a check. I mean they can write checks every day, right? They need thousand checks to be written. If it is a small department, sure they might be doing hundred, but if you're talking Walmart, they might be doing millions of checks. And using a right ERP solution might help that automate and that's what we listen to, the pain points and we use erp.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: That's perfect. So how did you though get involved in the business world? What is your story?
[00:02:51] Speaker D: My story, it's interesting. I started myself as a technology person. I have done development. I can use a Coke and write code stunts of it.
Later when I started working as a functional consultant, I got chance to work with a lot of C level executives where I'm hearing about their pain points. They're working with Deloitte's or Infosys or TCS and everyone. But still they have some part that is not heard. So listening to their problems and getting solutions is what I have been doing. Then slowly my parent company said like, hey, you have been doing amazing and they wanted you to everyone to hire me. But I said like it's not the part. If I can do, why can't I build a team to do it? So that's where the journey of services started and dimcon started. And we do have a couple of other companies too, but I mainly myself, I'm focused on delivering to the services. We started in 2019 on Deemcon, but 2006 I started other companies.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: I think you hit on a really important point there. You looked for pain points. That is so important because anybody can start a business.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: What's a pain point?
[00:04:05] Speaker C: Something that drives you crazy, that makes it hard to get your work done, that makes it hard to get your invoices out.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: It causes pain, it causes pain.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: But I mean you can start a company about anything but if you don't really have a directed purpose like you did, like what are the pain points in using these ERP systems? I'm not sure you're going to be as successful as you'd like to be. I think that's super important. And listening, listening to people. So did you go talk to people that were ERP users and just say what's happening? That's driving you crazy?
[00:04:39] Speaker D: Yeah, we do have discovery sessions that we schedule with the clients to understand their pain points. Right. I mean we just, we'll not even talk about pain points. We say like, hey, this is introduction, we do erp. And when they see that branch, like Oracle, hey, what do you do? Are you Oracle? So no, we are not Oracle, but we do Oracle implementation. You can buy a Salesforce, Netsuite or any of those ERPs and start utilizing it. If you don't know how to use it, that's when the pain points comes in. So we are here to help to situate that ERP provides 80% of commonality where the product is already built, you just use it, right? So it is not like you develop or you wanted to have an expert do it. It's already there. It's as if an application on your phone. The beauty of it is nowadays it's SaaS. That means you don't have to have computers on your system. Someone come and technically implement it, right? You're just using the application, anyone can use it.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: It used to be that a company had to build their own software systems if they wanted to use computers to organize their information or their production or their sales. And then SAP came along, right? That was the first one, I remember that. And that was a pre built system and you had to conform your business practices to what SAP was doing. And people who were actually on the ground doing the work absolutely hated that. Right, because they had to change the way that they were doing things. But ultimately it made things more efficient and over time, now there's different ERP systems. If you're a small business, there's ERP systems for you, right? And if you're a big business, then you go see Naga and she can help you implement one of these big expensive computer systems for your company. But it really has changed the way business is done and it's improved efficiency a lot.
[00:06:31] Speaker D: Actually ERPs are nowadays being used by startups because the CEOs or anyone, they have to know what is happening in the system.
[00:06:39] Speaker E: Peter, I think a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they think that Google Docs is a platform because everybody can be on a Google Doc and share it from different parts of the organization. That's our platform. And because they can do a comma delimited import that's a platform or they're using Tableau, or they're using QuickBooks and QuickBooks is speaking to Google Docs. That's not a platform. NetSuite is a platform, SAP is a platform. And if the data is really going to be housed with integrity and it's going to structurally be sound, which will eventually make you attractive at acquisition or help you with liquidity event, it's these types of systems. DimCom is central to implementing these types of systems properly.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Thank you Peter. Naga, let me ask you, can you talk a little bit about ERP systems for entrepreneurs?
[00:07:25] Speaker D: Entrepreneurs. So let us say like if you're talking about different, right, you are starting up new company or else you are there for already 30 years. So based on where you are, you have to choose the right erp and after that there is Second part, the C level suite, they have to see how the system is operating, the financial, profit and loss statements, income statements and everything. And you don't want your accountants to do that day to day job saying that entering an invoice like in QuickBooks. Right. So what you can do is you try doing your stuff, the end users day to day stuff, and the reports are instantaneous. The CEO or CFO can say, hey, the financials, this is my P and L and everything. So that is instantaneous. That's a good thing about the erp.
[00:08:10] Speaker C: It is, yeah. It ties all your systems together so you can get the big picture. Right. The question I have to ask you is how much is AI affecting this now?
[00:08:20] Speaker D: Each and every Oracle, I mean I can talk hours together on the AI part. This is, I think in 2016 when I was in a cloud world. That's when Larry from the CEO at that time, CEO of Oracle, has been talking about machine learning and how they bought in vertical cloud, vertical erp. And it was interesting. And everyone since then have been putting one piece or the other. 2019, they said, like how an email can be generated using AI, how machine learning is critical. But when we talk about erp, there are three pieces to it. One thing is how the user is benefited while composing an email, sending in or hiring an employee, or even services that they're providing. Because AI can actually consolidate and give the machine learning, the real analytics to you. So when I talk about AI, there are again predictive interactive and I mean interactive is too far away, but there is generative. So I would say Nowadays all these AIs the RPS are integrating with predictive analytics as well as generative. As a product owner, each and every company are integrating AI into it.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: We talked about that last night at this meetup I had for podcasting. AI is in everything and if you're not using it, then you're kind of getting left behind. Right. So it is interesting that it's coming into the whole ERP systems.
[00:09:41] Speaker D: I would say like ERP and AI, there are two different verticals. You have to use AI inside ERP to make life better. But it is not the end. The workers and everything, the business use cases are entirely different for AI versus erp. But ERP product owners, they're coming with strategies to bring that up. So I would definitely think so.
[00:10:04] Speaker C: Watch out.
[00:10:07] Speaker D: You'Re not left out. Like saying that if you're using erp, you are already using AI.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: So what were you finding was the biggest pain point when you talked to entrepreneurs Using this or businesses using this.
[00:10:18] Speaker D: Usually entrepreneurs, they have multiple ERPs and they work on silos they don't like integrate with each other. So for example for a CRM solution they go with Salesforce or they go with HCM Workday and they don't talk with each other. So that is one of the pain point we hear a lot. And the other thing is not proper implementation. So they know how to use the ERP system as an end user but it is not configured properly. That's where dimension consulting can help. Where they can actually help and solve that to utilize the application. Right. ERPs are supposed to reduce the pain, not increase the pain. Right. The thriving businesses. I have seen tons of it my entrepreneurial journey. I think I served more than 40 plus companies including hers or TJX and there are multiple I can talk about. Each one of them has good references where they talk about hey Nagas understands the story well because we can come up with a story and then they build it. So I am a product architect actually initially now driving the business. But it's interesting we have to go there and to your point, we have to listen. We can't just do something without listening what the client is saying.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: I think the frustrating part for us was the person we had somebody that we had hired, he supposedly learned the business and it drives me crazy when people say oh, a law firm is just like any other business. It's like no it's not. But he didn't understand the business when it came time to do the implementation. He left out a lot of custom programming he threw out from the last one that we actually needed because it was a law firm. So I think if we had someone like you who actually knows how to listen to people and would learn the business, it would have gotten a lot better.
[00:11:58] Speaker D: That is good point. And one more thing is there are industry vertical specific ERPs, right? Something like sales, there are HubSpot, there are Salesforce. Everyone wants a solution. We don't give a rocket ship for every solution. Right. So we have to give what is right fit. So that's more important. And by industry, by vertical, by territory, you have to analyze and give the solution even though it is pre built.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: That's great. You know we have to end the segment right now but it's a fascinating discussion. We'll be back with more from Naga Nadigam and you're listening to Passage to Profit. We'll be back right after this commercial break.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: Let me tell you a story about Bill. Bill was a normal guy in his 50s. He had back surgery about two years ago. Bill was in a lot of pain. He dealt with his pain by taking the Percocets his doctor prescribed for him. Bill took more and more and more of them to help with the pain until one day the prescriptions weren't enough to get rid of Bill's pain. Then one day Bill found someone to help him get rid of the pain with illegal drugs he didn't need a prescription for. Fast forward to today. Bill lost his job and his family. The only thing he does have is his drug dealer. If you know Bill's story and you don't want to end up like Bill, call the detox and treatment help line right now to get away and get treatment. 8009-8017-6180-0980-1761, 900-1761, that's 800-980-1761. Are you running a small business with two or more employees struggling to find affordable health insurance? Well, help is just a call away. Whether you're a restaurant owner, retail store manager, or a gig worker with staff, we've got you covered. Get quality health insurance plans starting as low as $120 a month. Our custom comparison tool finds plans tailored specifically to your business. We know it can be tough to find the right coverage. That's why we're here to make the process seamless and stress free. Our plans include health, vision and dental coverage, all at unbeatable rates. Call the Small Business Health Insurance Hotline now. We'll compare top providers to get you the best deal in one quick phone call. Don't wait. Secure the benefits you and your employees deserve today. Call now. Rates may vary based on location and coverage options. 8024-912084-80249-1208-480249-12084. That's 802-491-20. 84. Now back to passage to profit once.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: Special guest, Naganandaga, talking about ERP systems and how they can make your business run so much better than it did without them. So Naga is an expert at implementing these and she's implemented across many different kinds. So she's going to tell us now, like when do you need one? When do you know that you need one? How big do you have to get and what considerations do you need when choosing one?
[00:15:01] Speaker D: When we start thinking about erp, it is like there are three reasons why when we go to a client ask do you need an erp? The first time that we'll be asking is hey, how many softwares that you're using and then are they working properly? Are there too much coordination? A lot of manual work that you're doing. So how many employees do you have just maintaining the existing software that Naga.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Nandigam, an expert in digital transformation specializing in erp, cloud engineering, software engineering and AI. How do people find you?
[00:15:37] Speaker D: We do have our website they can definitely reach out in www.dimcon.com but however so we are on LinkedIn and Instagram and my post I can publish my email to and my teams so that'll be great.
[00:15:52] Speaker C: Um, really if you are thinking of organizing your business, I think that somebody like Naga is the first stop.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Really? Yeah, absolutely. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, assistant Risa Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
