GA 334 | The Benefits of System Integration with Danny Bradford

Yeah, we had our director of IT said, you know, if we would have really gained everything on that was on paper, we would be 500% more efficient. We don't need anybody. The thing just does it itself because everybody makes promises and you know, not that anything, you know, it's, it's, you know, everyone goes in with the right intentions and if you believe it, then commit to it.

Today I'm excited to welcome Danny Bradford to the show. Now today, Danny and I dive into a topic that we haven't really explored very much over the last 300 some episodes here on the podcast. But specifically, Danny and I dive into the idea of system integration and B2B integration. In other words, if you have a company and you're working with another company, how can you tie your two systems kind of together so you might be able to communicate? So today Danny works in the legal industry and so their firm needs to be able to communicate with their clients in certain ways. But Danny has a background in manufacturing and so throughout the show he shares examples of how back in his manufacturing days, how they, they worked with tying bill of materials together in a more system, system integration way to really reduce a lot of waste, a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of like double entry, different things like that. So lots of parallels and lots of things to be learned from a lean perspective. Now show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 3, 4. Again gembapodcast.com look for episode 334. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Danny, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks. We're, we're in studio here and our got our, using our audio rooms a little bit here. So big old piece of glass in between us and all that. But, but hopefully it's, it's. I really do love doing face to face interviews. We, when we, we've done a bunch of interviews at various conferences and things like that. And so we'll set up a little table right there in the conferen. It's me and the person right across and those are the best, you know, when you can just really feed off of each other's energy and all that kind of stuff. But anyhow, I appreciate you driving in from Plano right over here to Keller, Texas.

There it is.

All right, well, Danny, I know you've listened to the show and your friend and former podcast star Jacqueline introduced us. So thank you Jacqueline for that.

That's right. Shout out to Jaclyn. Yeah.

Episode 320. Jaclyn and I talked about lean in the legal profession. So that was a fun one and got a lot of good. A lot of good comments on that, on that episode. So appreciate Jaclyn for that and for introducing us. So, you know, we like to begin with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a quote that's guided a lot of. A lot of my projects, a lot of my relationships. A lot of what I do is basically it's no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Theodore Roosevelt said that a long time ago. Essentially, people aren't gonna listen to you. People aren't gonna follow what you say. People aren't gonna trust you until they know that you care for either their job or whatever the context is. So I really make that a centerpiece or a major part of everything, all my projects. Cause when we do projects, lean projects, we're shocking a lot of people's business process. We're taking them out of their norm. And if you don't have their trust, it's not gonna last long. A bit, but it'll go back to the old way. So you really have to build that trust.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Trust is so, so, so important. So, Danny, tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us what you know, kind of how you got first exposed to this whole continuous improvement idea, and tell us what you're up to these days.

Yeah. So it's tough. It's 25 years. Been going. Started out as in mechanical engineering.

Okay.

And products. Outdoor lawn equipment.

Nice.

And. Yeah. And it was. It was a continuous improvement engagement because any product you sell, you were only gonna make 2%. You know, you're making pennies on an. On a $200 product. So if you could save a nickel, you were saving the company. You were making the company, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

Yeah.

So there was all. We were always squeezing it for every penny. Yeah. So did that for a few years. Then they asked me to do some training on the PLM tool. If, you know, if you aware of that. Space engineering product lifecycle management. We did a huge upgrade, and they asked me to participate and fell in love with the computer side of things and so moved out of the engineering into the computing application support and just, I guess, just meandered my way through. You just kind of learned on the fly.

You didn't go to school for that, right?

No, not at all. I came back and got a degree in database design later, but certainly winging it in the beginning. Yeah. And just trying to find projects and identifying projects that change the world. And almost every project I've been, I've led is in production working to this day and I keep up with them.

And yeah, you database guys blow my mind. My brother in law, he's low SQL database guy and all this kind of stuff. I'm like, I'm trying to like do some pivot table and access data, whatever.

I can't even, I'm like, ah, I give up.

Danny, come do this for me.

Right, right. Yeah.

That's a different skill set, man.

It is, it is. And yeah, and everyone wants to get access to the data now. We have data scientists nowadays. Big data. Big data, yeah. AI, all these things. But at the end of the day all of these things you can all track back to, you know, business process improvements and lean and you have cling to those roots or you can get lost in the technology. Yeah, the remote control is not going to help you if you don't know why you're building the remote control.

Yeah.

So that's, that's what it's all about.

Well, another thing that you know, that I'm pretty passionate about is seeing folks, you know, unfortunately, sometimes finding really sophisticated ways to automate waste, you know, you know, I'm like, don't automate waste, let's remove the waste and then let's automate. Right?

That's right, that's right.

So anyhow. All right, well, hey, so Danny, I guess today what we kind of want to talk about is this whole idea of system and B2B integration. So what's the start at the beginning? What the heck does that even mean?

Yeah, so when you're talking integration, you're really talking about essentially you could look at it as three different levels of integration. You're in one department and you have a co worker that's working on a different system and you need to integrate those systems inside of a department. So when you're integrating those types of systems, it's a little, it's different, but it's all about helping your co workers improve. Then you have cross departmental integration. So you have your HR group and then you have your engineering group or your manufacturing or your legal teams. In my world today, and other departments, they have their own siloed vertical system, if you will, and they work at their own speed and they do things and then whenever they, what we call touch points, they hand over a Piece of paper and then the next group, next tour takes that piece of paper and goes off into their system and retypes all the information in or does something with that piece of paper. So cross department integration is all about eliminating that piece of paper or that manual effort and streamlining that.

Got it.

So you walk up the downstream, if you will, departments just wake up in the morning and they've got new data in their system and they're triggered to action instantly. And no one had to do anything for that.

So what's the, I mean I, I've had guests on in the past who are really passionate about the whole sustainability kind of movement, like getting rid of paper for, you know, that kind of, you know, environmental reasons, but also just efficiency and cost and all the rest of it. Like what are, what are some of the reasons that, that you think this is so important?

Well, yeah, it's, it's, it's. So the first is the obvious. Just double entry.

Yeah.

Every time you have a process that reaches across departments and you have a double entry, you have potential for error, you have potential for delays. There's one piece of paper, I was in one. You mentioned paper. One of my favorite projects we call the EBOM project years ago was essentially eliminating engineering pieces of paper. And then all of the people that had to touch that paper went to a computer and marked it up and did things on it versus holding that piece of paper. I always remember our VP of engineering before we, when we still had the paper, tracking these paper, these, these drawings that were going from department, department and finally in frustration about once every couple months would just stand up in the middle of the room and just yell, who has drawing number? Da da da. Piece of paper. Because it had all this valuable markup and information and if you didn't find it, you were gonna have to start the whole process over again. So it's all about, you know, in that if you, if you have completely manual paper, then that, that paper becomes valuable and when it gets lost, you've lost all that work.

So now is this like this whole concept of system and B2B integration, is it like it's job or like who's doing this type of thing?

So that's probably the centerpiece of all of this. Right, well, let me back up a second. So the third layer, so we talked about cross departmental. So that's still not B2B. B2B is business to business. So if you can imagine two businesses that do work together, whether it's a CL relationship or a partnership, relationship. B2B is all about linking those two businesses together. And so you have completely different IT departments, completely different business groups with processes. And you're now bringing that, linking those two business processes together. So that's the one, that's really where we sit, where my group sits today, where I sit.

So really it's more appropriate to say system integration and then B2B integration, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, there you go. There you go. So, yeah, so in my world today we, we have clients and, and because we're managing cases for the clients, they, you know, we need to trade information about those cases. And they're interested in information that we've done, we're interested in the information they've done. And it's, it's only natural that we cross pollinate the systems so that there's not that again that, that manual typing. And also more importantly, we get alerts.

Right.

It's, it's one thing to drop a piece of information in a system that has millions of gigabytes of information, but that one piece of information is valuable to that one person in the corner.

Yeah.

And if you don't let them know in some way, then you don't have any. That integration has no value. And it's even worse because the person sending the information thinks they have it, has expectations of having it and you don't, and the other person doesn't know it exists.

So now is it now? So we're real big users here at Gemba Academy. We have folks here in Texas and California, Washington, so we have folks all over the place and we're real big on using it's poor man's system integration. But Google sheets and Google Drive and Google Docs and stuff like that. And so we are collaborating on the same document even at the same time. Is that sort of an example, like a generic example of what you're talking about? I mean a real basic example or it's.

Well, honestly, you've almost taken a step even further in that you have adopted the exact same system. So you've fully integrated your processes into one. So it's almost taking it even to that next step. Further, this is really around, if you can imagine an HR system where HR people are doing a lot of things with their HR system that has nothing to do with immigration or the things that we do. But there's a sliver of pie of work in the HR system. Okay, so it's that sliver of pie where they want to know the status of the individuals.

So you want to tap into Their system.

I want to tap into their system, and they want to tap into my system. But it's funny, the first conversation is always around, okay, bal, you have. You have some number of our employees in your system. Can you tell us who they are? Because they don't. It's not their job to keep up with. That's our job. And so the first thing they ask us is, who is our population? Who is our roster? And so we. The first level of integration is just syncing up what subset, what piece of information that we actually are interested in, what list of employees we're interested in. Got it? Yeah, got it.

So you've mentioned double, you know, entry of typing. That's obviously very unlean. You know, if you will, a lot of opportunities for defects, mistakes, redundancy, you know, waiting, you know, you name it. But what other kind of benefits are there? Because it sounds like it's probably a pretty big process to make this happen. Maybe many months. I don't know.

Yeah, definitely.

To integrate like this, definitely.

It's all about smoothing out and streamlining the process flow. It's about allowing the other department, the other business to know that something's happened and know about it instantly without digging into someone's email. I mean, we try to do these integrations with email, with trading, Excel spreadsheets, all that, but nothing beats having the data in context. If you imagine an HRIS system, they have a picture, you know, or a profile in front of them for that employee, if you will, right? They're in the middle. They see the person in their system, they're Nothing beats seeing at the bottom their status, their immigration status in the context of when they're in.

That came from you?

That came from us. Yeah, right. There's cost in what's called switching costs. If I have to close an application and I have to go open another application, have to go click on search and type in the persons, and go do this and do that. That's what's called switching costs. And there's value in that. Taking an individual and giving them 5, 6, 7 different applications to inter to get their job done is actually incredibly inefficient. And, I mean, they can become good at it, but it's never gonna be as efficient as one system where the data, the information they need is in context, and when they need it, one

source of truth, really.

One source of truth. That's the goal.

So we're here gambling like Adam. Over the years, we've moved through different customer relationship management softwares. You know, we started Like a real

basic CRM, you know, CRM. Willowell. Yeah.

And then we move. Now we're in Salesforce, which is a big, you know, monster kind of thing. And we probably use, I don't know, 10% of what it can do, but. But I couldn't imagine we couldn't. I mean, well, if we had to run our company without it, we'd have. We'd figure it out, I guess. But, boy, it'd be hard, right? It'd be hard. So is there, Is there integrations with things like that? Like, like, I don't know, like a Salesforce type application?

Yes, absolutely. It's Salesforce Workday is another big one. We run into SAP as an ERP system. Oracle probably haven't run into Oracle yet. But, you know, every client, even as you said, even if they have the same software as the last client we integrated with, they use it in a different way and they have to sign up to bending their software a little bit so that it is compatible with our world. There's a lot of that as well.

Okay, so talk about some of the key factors. What would you consider a successful integration? Talk about some of those things.

Yeah. So the first thing, when you know that your integration is going to be working or is going to be successful, when you see it, start by talking about business processes. If I have, if I'm, if I'm integrating two systems, my number one goal in the beginning is to get those two business groups in the same. In the same meeting now in the same zoom meeting. Right. And helping them to understand A, the other group's process and B, what this integration, how this integration is going to impact their process. So they need to see that at the same time so that they understand what they're about to do to each other. Yeah, it's. Everybody has to. Is going to have to bend. And if you have A, integration and it's led off by, let's say, an IT purist who's going to go out and make some O's and ones connect and some move some wires around. That's the one I'm going to say probably isn't going to work out because they're going to, they're going to, they're going to shock the business processes. Got it. So, yeah, so if it starts off with what are the business, what are the impacted use cases, what are the impacted business processes and what is the new world going to look at from a business flow perspective? We're talking relatively ambiguous here, but it's all about that. It's all about what is the new business flow? And then come back with, okay, now that we know how the business flow is going to happen, then you come back with the technology side. Okay, now what does the remote control look like? What size are the buttons? What's the button going to do? But that should be secondary. And focus, primary.

You might even argue. That's probably the easy part, isn't it?

I mean, honestly, when we're doing integrations, I tell people, if you were to take out the remove the business processes side, the integrations are actually incredibly easy. I send you a file, you send me a file, I upload, you upload. That's. I mean, we take. If it takes, if a particular integration takes six, eight weeks to be done, we're only doing 20% of that time is actually touching O's and ones and doing integration pieces.

So you, I mean, obviously your business, your company, bal. You know, it's a law firm and you have very specific things that you're trying to do with your clients.

Right, right, right.

What about someone listening right now and they're in a, I don't know, manufacturing company or something like that? Like, how does this concept apply to them?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I. So 18 years of my experiences in a manufacturing environment, between products and. Between consumer products and aerospace. We've done a lot of integration projects there. I can give you some examples of business flow and how they can collide. If you want to grab some popcorn and watch some entertainment, get a mechanical engineer and a purchasing person and ask them each to define the word reuse. Something as simple as that. I've seen arguments break out and just, I mean, you know, spit flying and just the concepts are completely different, yet they have to collaborate to do the job. And so a purchasing person wants reuse to be a cadence of recycling of the same part numbers over and over. They want to see every product have the same or similar part numbers as possible. Engineering says, well, I've built this design, now I've built one other design and I've used that part number. So I've reused and then let the sparks flow from there. And then you have other things like raw material management, all of these things. Each department just has their own vocabulary, their own way of managing it. And when you try to take data from one of those and pass it to the other, if you're not really careful, you can end up causing a lot of problems and pains because you didn't understand the process flow of those who are receiving it. And you really have to dig in. You really do. One of our favorite projects that went awry. Feel free to Google The Mars Rover 1999, a classic integration problem. We're collaborating. They were passing off information and system A had a field called weight Weight, like how heavy is something and so does system B. So it makes those and ones connect. And so I'm passing weight from one to the other. Well, unfortunately, one was kilograms, one was pounds. And so all the calculations about fuel and all this completely off and off it goes. Now I'm probably butchering the story, but the spirit is there. And again, feel free to Google it. So that's another an example of bad integration. Bad integration. They didn't really take the. I mean, I'm not going to speak on their behalf, but clearly somebody dropped the ball on understanding how each other work and those type of things. Units of measure. Units measure, that's another. You want to talk about manufacturing. That's one of the challenges. Engineering says I need two of something. Well, that gets nested into a flat and they need. And the manufacturing says I need. Well, I need one. And then purchasing says, well, I have to buy in bulk of 6. So should I buy bulk of 6 of the flat or should I go ahead and buy 12 or how many ever they're gonna, you know, they want to buy in bulk. Well, reach back to engineering. Engineering doesn't care. But PLM is all about in state. What does it look like when it's done? Manufacturing is the process to go from the beginning to the end. How do I process this raw material and land on the final product that I'm supposed to land on. And purchasing is all about getting the. Not only the raw material in place, but getting it just in time. They're all about just in time. I want to know two days before I need it so I can land on. So I can land on my dock and have it in place and ready for the manufacturing groups to do. Well, all of that only happens if you have a solid, what they call mrp, Material Resource planning. And material resource planning is one of the largest, most complicated integrations, at least in my opinion, because it's all about getting everyone to collaborate to get your dates right, your schedules.

Yeah.

And then reach it backwards lead times and putting all these.

I mean, get us lean guys started on MRPs. We're not always big fans, but, you know.

Yeah, well, they're still only as good as the data.

Exactly. I remember famous MrP site. We're doing some value stream mapping out and I Said well we have 10 pieces of inventory in between machine A and machine B. And I remember sitting with a buyer and the buyer said no, no, we have 20. I said well actually you know what, I was just there and I counted with my eyes and I'll welcome you to come walk and walk with me. And they did and they counted them. I said well it says 20. I'm like well but it's wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get into first in, first out, last in, first out, you end up with all those things and that's all. Yeah. And then you say are you sure you're really last in, first out?

Right, right, right, right. So aside from, you know, you've talked a little bit about some, some of the things that can go wrong as far as a bad integration but talk some more. Is there any more things that we should be thinking about as, as we, we might consider trying to integrate system A to system B?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you think about trust, you think about your project that you're about to implement, right? You're going to integrate two systems with the goal of making improvements automations things are going to go smoother. I don't have to grab that piece of paper, I walk in in the morning and that piece of paper is now in the system as if I did it. And so if you trust that you're going to do it then you're going to have efficiencies and if you have efficiencies then things should go faster which means you should have more throughput. The challenge is if you don't plan for that increased throughput then it'll get lost and you're actually going to create waste. It's not exactly integration but one of the examples that came to mind was there was a, we had computer actually the literal, the desktop computer. They were in the engineering world they were really, really old and this was back when every 18 months things were doubling, right. So they, so they, we replaced it, it was about three or four years old and you could literally some of the things you'd wait on the computer went from 30 minutes down to two minutes and it's not worth going into all that. But the point is we created an amazing efficiency just by swapping these computers out. Nobody really, I mean you, we were just a bunch of IT goof heads. So we just, you know, so they, they just said oh thanks new computer. I'm like wait, you know, things are going to go faster and, and then you know, six months later things kind of just kept the same pace and because the management, the leadership didn't trust that there was really going to be gains. So there was no squishing of the care of the schedule or higher volume expectation. So you know, maybe a few more coffee breaks, you know, a little more chit chat time, those kind of things happened. And the financial controller over there like

hey, what's it doing? What's it doing for us?

Yeah, I just spent four or five hundred thousand dollars on computers and I'm still seeing the same number of products or things coming out. So you have to plan for, you have to assume things are going to go faster and schedule and plan accordingly. You used to put out one widget a week. You told me you were going to be 50% efficient. Great. I'm going to plan on doubling that and use that. And the same thing with you talk about FTEs full time equival. Right. And you have projects that okay, this department has, you know, 50 people and I've got 20%. That means you're going to, you know, no one's ever going to like fire because of these projects. But at the same time if you really reallocate them, reallocate them, give them something else to do and say, you know what, this project just went in place.

Yeah. Add value some other place.

That's right, go, go do some, those 10 people, go do something else. You know, take them out of there. Force the efficiency.

Yeah.

So yeah, if you don't, if you don't have that kind of organizational change management ocm, if you don't have that in place ready on the tail end, then yeah, your efficiencies are just going to be on paper only.

Yeah, yeah. Paper Kaizen we call it sometimes.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. We had our director of IT said, you know, if we would have really gained everything on that was on paper, we would be 500% more efficient. We don't need anybody. The thing just does it itself because everybody makes promises and you know, not that anything, you know, it's, you know, everyone goes in with the right intentions and if you believe it then and commit to it.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah. So what, what, what advice do you have for other folks? Like maybe some practical tips and we, you talked about the importance of you know, really understanding those business processes and that sort of thing. But are there any other practical tips that you can offer folks as they

look to, to do this is. I would say practical tips would include just. Yeah, just trust the analysis you did in the beginning. There's, I know oftentimes and this is really on the larger projects. A project can be 18 months. You know, the larger ones. When you're doing an ERP system, what you could, you could look at that ERP system is you're not only swapping out every, almost every department software, but you're also making a completely integrating them so that everything flows optimally. Well, that means you need to really jostle some business process. But trust the analysis you did in the beginning and the people that said yes, you do this for me and I can do that and don't look back, just trust and move forward with it.

On one of those huge 18 month engagements. About how much time of those 18 months is the, I don't know, the planning, the investigation, a deep dive and then how much of it is actually making it happen?

Yeah, it's, it's usually it depends on how many departments are impacted. Might as well you could plan a month or two of analysis on how. On each department. Because it is. The challenge is, and it's true, not with just integrations, but any project, the people you're asking, they have full time jobs already. They're not just sitting around. I mean now I will say the two or three, some of the bigger projects, they do say, okay, I'm replacing you so that you can go be my expert. But that's an extreme case. Usually you're beg born stealing the people who everyone else wants already.

Yeah.

So some of it is just trying to get on their schedule. But, but yeah, it's, it's a few months to stay, you know, let the business continue to flow as normal and then move in and then, and then it's, it's several months of build it. And as soon as you think you have something worth it, bringing those people into a, you know, what they call a war room, into the room with all the computers sitting there and then say okay, you know, purchase. You go do that now, you know, person B over here. Did you see what you think you saw? You know, and, and just play that game of running through those use cases. But again, it's running through the use cases that you originally mapped out is not only what you're doing today, but what you want to do tomorrow.

So to wrap things up, why don't we talk about, think about your favorite integration that you've ever worked on. It doesn't have, I mean maybe it's at bal. I mean you don't have, have to. Obviously don't be sharing. I don't want a bunch of lawyers yelling at me hey, but, but, but, but, but I in particular I'm curious to know, like what was the problem you were trying to solve? And then, and then you know me talk a little bit about the integration itself, but then what was the result? Like how did it benefit?

Yeah.

Organization A and B. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I have, there's gosh, that's maybe

say your favorite because it's like your favorite kids.

There's a top five for sure. I would say my favorite's always going to be the most challenging. It was actually a four year project we implemented. We did the original implementation after about a year and a half and then every year or every couple months we would do improvements on it. So we were on the project employing me and my team wise for about four and a half years. And it was manufacturing bill of materials. So if you can imagine you have engineers in one space, you have manufacturing in another space, purchasing in another place, warehouse in another place, if you will. And where all of those collide and combine or overlap if you will, is the manufacturing bill of materials. It's taking the engineering bill of material and converting it into a manufacturable process.

Got it.

Because engineering just shows you what it should look like when it's done.

Yep.

End item is what it's called. We'll refer to it as. So the manual. The M bomb introduces processes. I have to take that part, I have to cut it out in a lathe, I have to bend it. Or someone who knows what I'm talking about. Absolutely slap me upside my head if they heard me say that.

Because you know, it guy over there.

Manufacturing process. Yeah, yeah, but you just, you have three or four different processes and any one part in fact could have three or four different manufacturing part numbers. Because you may get halfway through if you. And then you have to go shelve that part. Well, it's not the finish. They're only halfway done with it. So you give it a part number dash A and it's sitting on a shelf for a month and then someone semi finished goods semi finished and then they come back and get that part and bring it. So anyway, so we, the inbound project was all about again bringing all those groups into one place and saying, okay, how do we optimize so that we can eliminate some of the redundancy in the design? Different groups. Now, full disclosure, in this case, this was what's called an engineer to order. So basically, you ever seen Orange County Chopper?

Okay, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

We were custom making airplanes and so you didn't. Engineers only started working once the, the customers made an order. Yeah, you don't see anything before that.

Right.

So there's a lot. So that's very different than if you were in a different like volume manufacturer volume or car manufacturer option order or engineers just a bunch of options and don't even know how it's ever going to come together but you know all the different options. So anyway, this was, this was a bit of a unique endeavor. But anyway, the goal was to instead of treating each airplane post engineering as a brand new thing, identify how to reuse what's been done in the past. The problem is everything has been done in the past at some point in some previous airplane, but you didn't know which one to look at because yeah, 80, 90% of a new airplane is going to be already been done. But 10% of that was in an airplane two years ago. Another 10% was the last one just now. But no one has the time to figure all that out. So the N bomb was all about identifying that reuse and then bringing that reuse into a library, a master library of every permutation ever been seen and then spitting out at the other end what was done in the past in those particular instances so that they did have it done. And we landed on the increased number of product we were expected as a plant, as a facility, we were going to have to hire roughly 100, 125 additional manufacturing engineers to manage all that. And we were able to take on that entire workload and we only hired maybe 10 new people because we were able to just, just use what was done in the past. But I will say I think one of my new favorite is going to be what we're working on right now at bal. We're actually in the middle of really a ground up rethink of how we do integrations. We're bringing in a lot of tools that are making things over the next few months really exciting. And so BAL has been, is a really exciting place to be right now in terms of technology and establishing integrations because it is about the business process. But at the end of the day it's also about the, you know, you still have to have IT tools in place to do what you want to do. And so I would say we're in the middle of doing that so we'll finally, we'll have both and yeah, and we, I get to meet a ton of people, you know, with client facing integrations B2B and you establish those relationships and then when we're done. We shed a little tear because we were going to miss everybody. And then six months later, we get together because they need to do an upgrade, and it's like the band's back together again, and it's. You know, we have a small team. You come to bal. It's. It's always going to be us, right?

It's.

We don't have a big conglomeration. You're going to meet Melissa, you're going to meet Jesse, and you're going to meet me, and we're going to. And whether it's an upgrade, whether it's a maintenance issue or a maintenance that we want to do to make some minor changes or whether to do it the first time, it's the three of us. So. Yeah. So we have a great time.

Yale is not a small company, though.

Boy.

I went onto your website today. I was just poking around a little bit, and I went to team or whatever, and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. I'm like, that's right now. How many locations? I mean, lay and I. Obviously, that's where Jacqueline is, right?

Well, I believe she's. Yeah, there's five or six locations. There's the Richardson office, which is our IT hub. But the reality is, BAL is really such an awesome company because they give us the flexibility to work where we need to work and do what we need to do. So it is centered in Richardson, but we have people all over that aren't in Richardson. We have the San Francisco side, Houston, and honestly, I talk to people. Boston office, New York office. Um, so, yeah, we see people.

Once you're forgetting, you apologize in advance.

Right. I got a lot of LinkedIn apologies to do. I'm telling you, you're gonna be driving home. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, we're. We're a large. We're. We're definitely large, but we're. We, you know, we. We work with. When we. When you get down to it, and you. And you work with the clients, the client's gonna interact with a very small subset because we want to be that family, that extension of the client.

Yeah, I get that vibe, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We want to stay boutique, but we also can't want to expand. We expand to handle the workload that's needed.

Yeah.

For the client.

Yeah, yeah.

But you're definitely gonna, you know, it's definitely, you know, personalities and faces.

Yeah.

When you come to bal, that's what we're all about. Our awesome. Our managing partner. I knew and then I was going to be there for a long time. I went from the first month we were there and he just, he randomly was right, riding around in an ice cream cart yelling, ice cream. Ice cream. Coming and handing out free ice cream sandwiches to everybody in the office. I'm like, yeah, that's a pretty cool place to work.

Oh, nice, Nice. That's great. That's great. All right, well, hey, Danny, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Wow, that's a good question. Well, I'm on LinkedIn. Danny Bradford. Dabratfordlglobal.com is my email. That's probably the. The two easiest ways.

Yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes. So this is episode, let's see, 334. So just go to Gemba Podcast.com, look for episode 334 and link up with Danny and get your integration on.

There it is. Anytime, day or night.

All right, well, hey, I appreciate you coming in, man. It's been fun.

Yeah, this is a blast. We're gonna do it again.

All right, you take care.

Thanks.

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