Dynamics Corner

Episode 426: InsightWorks: Revolutionizing Business Central with Innovative Solutions

• Mark Hamblin • Season 4 • Episode 426

Share episode

In a recent episode of Dynamics Corner, hosts Kris and Brad explore the world of InsightWorks, a leading ISV for Business Central. Joined by Mark Hamblin, President of DMS Companies, they discuss the company's transformation from a VAR to a powerhouse offering over 30 specialized products. The discussion covers the challenges and triumphs of developing solutions that fill critical gaps in Business Central, the importance of partner collaboration, and the innovative use of AI in their offerings. With a focus on transparency and customer satisfaction, InsightWorks continues to set the standard in the industry. Please tune in to discover how they're shaping the future of business solutions.

Send us a text

Support the show

#MSDyn365BC #BusinessCentral #BC #DynamicsCorner

Follow Kris and Brad for more content:
https://matalino.io/bio
https://bprendergast.bio.link/

Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner. What ISVs out there that offers free stuff and just be transparent? I'm your co-host, chris.

Speaker 2:

And this is Brad. This episode is recorded on June 4th 2025. Chris, chris, chris. We'll learn about that in this episode, and many more things, because I brought some friends with me. I brought the fulfillment froggy. I brought the friends with me, I brought the fulfillment froggy, I brought the barcode bear, I brought the logistics llama, as well as the production puffin. We'll learn about all of these as well, too, with us. Today, we had the opportunity to speak with Mark Hamlin from InsideWorks.

Speaker 1:

Good afternoon.

Speaker 2:

It's going well. How about?

Speaker 3:

yourself.

Speaker 2:

Good, good, good. You know, it's that time of year, it's, rainy season finally hit and I think I need to build a boat. This time last year when rainy season hit it's a little fun fact I had fish swimming in my yard.

Speaker 3:

And I'm nowhere near.

Speaker 1:

You're nowhere near like a lake or anything like that.

Speaker 2:

No, they have the canals for all the rain and for drainage because of rainy season. I never understood why you had such big canals or ditches on the sides of the roads or even in the neighborhoods until you have rainy season, because they fill up. But I learned that all the water backs up, so all the drainage, because we had so much rain last year. The fish swim up the canals into the drainage like tubes into the yard.

Speaker 2:

I even walked in the neighborhood and I saw many more, that's that's a, that's a meal, man, that's I'm not going to, I'm not going to go fishing for those. I'll have to send you a picture of it, so so that's. That's the start of my summer is uh, it's been raining for days.

Speaker 3:

Where is that?

Speaker 2:

where are you located? I'm in florida right now, okay, so it's uh this time of year in flor in South Florida, the rain just whips.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're pretty flat out, though. You're kind of like sea level right, so you know there's not much.

Speaker 2:

Kind of sea level when I track my runs.

Speaker 1:

You're below sea level.

Speaker 2:

I do my garment and then the run will track the elevation. You know the elevation gained and lost. I I sometimes have negative elevation. So, um, there's parts of my run in my neighborhood we're below sea level.

Speaker 3:

I'll tell you, man, I think florida's going to wash away one day that's craziness you are all up in the northwest right, so you don't have to deal with all that yeah, well, I'm up in canada, so we're, we're north, north, but uh, we're kind of middle north, I guess, is where we are, you're the true north yeah, well, I mean, the next town over is 300 and some miles north of us. Wow, that's the north that's. I used to live up there in Fort McMurray Through oil sands and stuff.

Speaker 3:

But now we're kind of like in the middle, which is about what is it? 600 miles north of North Dakota, anyway, somewhere.

Speaker 2:

That must be nice being way up there. It must be nice and quiet.

Speaker 3:

It is. Yeah, we don't get any of the goofy stuff. I mean, we had a tornado here like decades and decades ago. We got no stupid weather, we got no earthquakes. We got none of that junk. It's.

Speaker 1:

Snow.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we get lots of snow.

Speaker 2:

Lots of outdoor activities too right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, last, lots of outdoor activities too, right, yeah, yeah. Last year we went down. Uh, well, out in the country, like we have forces, it was down to minus 50 and the city was only minus 45 ish.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, it gets cold once in a while fun fact, I lived in alaska for a short period of well, for four years and one thing, I realized about the cold everyone it.

Speaker 2:

It would get negative 10, negative 20 Fahrenheit and when everyone's like well, it gets cold. And I told everybody well, you get used to it and the cold is the cold, don't get me wrong. And you're up north, so you understand. Once you get negative 10, the difference between negative 10 and negative 20 really isn't much. I don't think I. The difference between negative 10 and negative 20 really isn't much. I don't think I think cold is cold.

Speaker 2:

But it's not like the rest of the US or the southern portions of it, where it will be 20 one day, it will be 60 the next day, then it goes back to 30. So you don't have the opportunity Up north. It gets cold, it just gets cold, and it stays cold and dark for months. So you don't have the teaser. They call it exactly. Well, we enough about the weather. I just the values of rain today. Just, uh, it's been pouring, and when I say pouring, like you think someone's pouring buckets all day. So I just thought it would be an interesting thing to share. Uh, been looking forward to speaking with you, have a lot of things I'd like to talk about and your wonderful, great suite suite of products that you have. But if you could, before we get into that conversation, might you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely Well, where do I start? I mean, geez Well, I've been with InsightWorks since the beginning. I call myself a solution advisor. That's really. What I'm there for is to sort of look at what customers have, what they need, what we have. Is there a fit, Are there gaps? How can we help that customer be successful either with or without our products? So that's kind of what I do here, and InsightWorks has been around for about 10 years now under that sort of name, though some of the products predate the initial start of InsightWorks has been around for about 10 years now under that sort of name, though some of the products predate the initial start of.

Speaker 2:

InsightWorks. So with InsightWorks, InsightWorks has a suite of products for Business Central, a variant suite of products. I think you have over 30, I think A lot of times. I think of the InsightWorks warehousing, but what are some of the other products that you have?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we focus really on manufacturing, distribution and now we're getting more and more into retail. And so just a quick overview and then I'll mention some of the specific ones. But really what we did was we came into Business Central and we used to actually be Avara and we used to implement NAB and things like. We used to implement Nav and things like that. And you know my past history has been more product development focused. So we started building products very quickly and you know we looked at the gaps in Nav and Business Central and what manufacturers needed and what distributors needed and kind of tried to fill in those gaps.

Speaker 3:

So even when we talk about the retail, we have something called counter sales which you know there's a lot of retailers using. Now it was not really meant so much for retailers, more for, yeah, I'm a distributor and I've got an outlet store, I'm a manufacturer and I've got a parts counter that people can come up to. That's kind of what we built it for. So a lot of the products sort of follow that. We've lived that world. You know that. You know, in the real life we've been in these situations. You know I used to be an operations manager, I used to be an auto mechanic many, many years ago things like that so you know, we've got a lot of people that have come up through industry and can spot those

Speaker 3:

gaps and build something that the people actually need and use. So you know, warehouse management is one of the big ones because barcoding has become so accessible in the last decade or two. But you know, we've got shop floor data collection, we've got, as I mentioned, the counter sales for point of sale type stuff, we've got quality inspections, we've got shipping, we've got fulfillment tools. We've got shipping, we've got fulfillment tools, we've got a ton of maintenance management now, tons of stuff just to sort of build that end-to-end solution for manufacturing distribution.

Speaker 2:

That's great. You have a great suite of products. As far as to talk about the origin of InsightWorks a little bit and it seems you had mentioned before you were a VAR and then realized the gaps and then created these apps or app source. Now that you have.

Speaker 3:

How long ago did InsightWorks start as an ISV? As an ISV, you know, I think our first sale was in, I think 2013, of something outside of our, of our business right. So we, you know, we'd have our customers that we'd implement to NAV for and we kind of build these products that might include that with our deployments, and then we started selling. I think 2013 was the first time we sold something outside of outside of our own customer base. And then 2015 is really when we started inside works. That was sort of the, you know, that was sort of the inaugural website in 2015. So InsightWorks and that's really where we started focusing on being an ISV, not a VAR, with some products that we can include.

Speaker 3:

And since then we've moved away from that entire VAR business. We don't run that at all anymore. We don't have it. We focus really on the ISV side. So yeah, about 10 years, I would say, for InsightWorks. But again, some of those products predate that time frame. Just because we did that one where it's still a VAR, that's great.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome.

Speaker 2:

No, it is. It is and just to talk about some of it. I do want to get into some more details, because Business Central itself is a fully functional ERP application and it's nice that VARs, isvs and some VARs, if customers, if there are some gaps, as you had mentioned that, there are options available. So I'd like to talk about some of those gaps that may be filled by some of your. You know the more popular products within the warehouse management and the distribution area, because that's maybe some of the more popular ones. Which versions of Business Central do you support? Do you support Business Central online on-premise? And if you do support on-premise, how far back? Which versions?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we still support NAV 2013 all the way up to the current Business Central SaaS versions. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3:

We have a couple of customers still running our stuff a central SaaS version, oh wow, and we go back right over to this. So we have a couple of customers still running our stuff on, like NAV 2009 Classic and things like that. But you know, all the new development is going into, sort of you know, the newest business central and we like to focus on the SaaS. You know, five years ago I would have said it's you know, depending on who you are, as to whether you should go to the cloud or not. Today it's an over-the-top.

Speaker 3:

To me the cloud makes the most sense. I don't like it when we get on-prem installs anymore because they're so much more painful than the cloud. Most of the development those older versions have supported versions that run. But you know, obviously, all the new features that you find in Business Central that we can leverage, all the new stuff is going into the latest. And then on the cloud side, you know we give away a lot of free products. We get a ton of free stuff we give away and we try and keep that sort of cloud only to you know, sweeten the deal, I guess for people moving to the cloud.

Speaker 3:

When you go to the cloud, you get a bunch of free stuff.

Speaker 2:

That's great. Well, maybe we can talk about some of the free stuff. Speaking of free stuff, I do have to say this one thing Whomever came up with this?

Speaker 1:

Ah, yes, I got so many of those.

Speaker 2:

We'll talk about this, but I have the of all of these. I go to many conferences Chris and I both do and we see everybody at these conferences and this is always one of the most memorable things is the InsightWorks stuffed animals, and this InsightWorks logistics llama happens to be my favorite. So who came up with this? I know we want to talk about the product, but who came up with this?

Speaker 3:

I know we want to talk about the product, but who came up with these? And I love this. Yeah, as an aside, you know all of these guys, like you know the the obviously this guy is is also one of the popular Lama and the platypus. But if you go to the websites, like you can go to logistics, lamacom or packagingplatypuscom, and it's got a little bio on the guy and you know what they do in their spare time and all sorts of fun stuff. So they're great for kids, you know. Anyway, we came up with that, I think in like 20, I don't know, it was like 2016-ish timeframe. We're at.

Speaker 3:

Summit and I was there with another guy and I had seen these like 20 foot tall or 10 foot tall stuffed bears online somewhere and I thought, hey, we should get one of those for the booth. And he took it one step further and like, yeah, we should get a mascot costume called barcoding bear and the guy can walk around. And we settled on neither of those, but we thought a bear would be a good mascot, right. So we got these little stuffed animals, the little bears called barcoding bear, exactly barcoding bear.

Speaker 3:

I have the barcoding bear right here too and now the original one actually had a little shirt, uh, instead of embroidered, and it was kind of fun. But um, yeah, and it's grown quite a bit. We've got six now in our little stable of stuffed animals.

Speaker 1:

It's genius because a lot of people don't realize. When you're going to conferences, you know you want something that's memorable, and then it's like one of a kind, and then most times you want to bring something back to the family, right, so this is like perfect I don't pick.

Speaker 2:

I don't pick up up swag typically because it's just a lot, unless it really serves a purpose. The stuffed animals serve a great purpose, like you said, chris, because you can bring it back. And there's some other things I pick up, but a lot of the stuff is just waste. But now that you said you have six, I realize I'm missing one.

Speaker 3:

Well, so it's actually seven.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I'm missing two.

Speaker 3:

So we've got Fulfillment Froggy, we've got Logistics Llama, we've got Production Puffin, we've got Packaging Platypus, barcoding Bear, obviously the original. So those are the main five, then we've got a sixth one coming in the fall. So if you're at Directions EMEA you'll see it there, otherwise you'll see it at Summit most likely, and that's a Quokka. Quality Quokka, oh, a good quality inspection solution. So quality Quokka, and that one's kind of cool.

Speaker 3:

And then we have a limited edition, this guy here, he is TechWorks Tamarin, so he's a little monkey that we have for TechWorks Conference and it's a monkey, first of all a tamarin, which is a type of monkey for the alliteration right. You've got to have TechWorks Tamarin Plus. He's a monkey and it was a development conference, so he's a code monkey for the alliteration right. You're going to have tech works Tamra Plus. He's a monkey and it was a development conference, so it's he's a code monkey for it. So here's our little mascot for our conference. That's awesome.

Speaker 2:

That's, that's creative. And now I know just, I'll have to reserve the ones that are missing for summit.

Speaker 3:

I'll have to.

Speaker 2:

I'll be there early so I'll have to hit up whomever's at the booth to get some of those to take them back.

Speaker 3:

The quark will be fun. And you know we also started shipping these to customers. So you know, when people you know buy a license like if they buy our Dynamic Ship product as an example we'll ship them the packaging, platypus, right, so we'll ship out these little stuffies. So you go into some of these facilities and they've got these little stuffies sitting at the shipping counter or whatever. I heard from one person at a conference where you know they're going live and the shipping guy or one of the warehouse guys you know they're struggling with the change and what he'd do is give the stuffie a big hug every time. He was stressed he's walking around like this thing as an emotional support animal or something.

Speaker 1:

Oh that's genius, yeah, so it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 3:

We had people on social media. You know there was, you know someone took it all over the world like Antarctica and Peru and all sorts of weird places. There's these photos of these things anyway, so it's a lot.

Speaker 2:

It is a lot of fun and I I didn't want to jump into it, but as we were talking about this, I you know the family loves those stuffed animals and it's always something nice to bring back with it as well too.

Speaker 2:

So you have a full suite of products and you you talked about dynamic ship, we talked about the warehouse insights, uh, order fulfillment, um, and then your counter sales, and you also have, uh, the handheld, I believe, option as well, uh for uh, business central. Uh, I do like to talk about some of those features within there, but did the product support any? Does your offering support any other products besides business central, or is it just business central focused?

Speaker 3:

No, we're focused on Business Central. You know, and we had a lot of people actually asking that you know, especially when you go to the conferences where there's mixed products, right, like F&O is there and GP and things like that People ask you know, for us it's not really worth it. You know, business Central is growing so fast, there's so much opportunity and there's so many people that need our solutions within the Business Central world. I think it would just be a distraction to go elsewhere. So, yeah, we're strictly business central, we're focused.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. I like that personally because I think if you're focusing on one product, you can put all your energy in that one product and then you can have a better offering Yep, instead of trying to support multiple applications where you have one foot in many camps and you may not be able to provide the offering. So having one solution, from my personal opinion I think, is extremely beneficial for a product because you know that's their energy effort, excuse me, where it's being pushed. Let's talk about some of the products and going through the cycle of somebody who is using Business Central, and Business Central has, like we had mentioned, has a lot of features, but sometimes we're basing additional gaps Within your product offering. What are some indications that someone may need to use one of your products, such as Dynamic Ship, and then to go to, maybe to your handheld or some of your warehouse management apps?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good question and a good point. I mean, business Central is a very comprehensive solution, right Like it's got the warehousing in it, it's got a lot of the manufacturing capabilities in it, at least at a sort of core level. But Microsoft can't do everything right. They can't build out these best-of-breed solutions as quickly or necessarily as well sometimes as what the ISVs can, as well sometimes as what the ISVs can. So, but to answer your specific question, really what it comes down to I use this term a lot, or this phrase you know what you want to do when you're doing an implementation is look at what your best practice physical processes should be Like. How are you going to be the most efficient in your environment? Because you know we're not dealing with accounting and stuff like that. For the most part, we're dealing with people working in shops and warehouses and it's very physical, right. So you want to, you want to be as efficient as possible in your physical environment. Once you've got that laid out, what software do you need to support those physical processes? How do you make your virtual world match your physical world? All right, so really the the first step is if I had a magic wand, what would make me the most efficient, as you know, possible in in the shop or the warehouse okay, in order. Now, in order to to be that efficient, I'm going to need software that supports this, this, this, this and this.

Speaker 3:

And quite often you, often you know when you get into that. You get into, you know, automation and validation and things like that, which is, you know, scanning barcodes for your pickings or your warehouse management type of thing. You know, spending way less time generating shipping labels and doing the shipping verification at the same time. Those types of things, all of those sorts of things you know, overall reduce the effort and improves the efficiency. Like a warehouse facility, same thing in shop floor, right, like in a manufacturing environment.

Speaker 3:

You know you want to have like an efficient production schedule. You want to have the people on shop floor be able to report accurately what they're working on, right. Those sorts of things don't really exist properly in Business Central today. So when people run into those situations where they're like you know what, we can't be as efficient as possible if we don't have something that does X, well, we're that X, right. In a lot of cases, you know we're one ISV and we've got those 30 products and they come to one organization and they've got everything they need really to help facilitate those physical processes in the shop.

Speaker 2:

No, it is. It's a challenge to do it and as far as through the implementation process of it, like I had mentioned, I do want to kind of hone in on some of these individual, specific ones. So, now that they've determined that they need to work with InsightWorks, typically, how does an implementation go? Is it more partner-driven? Does InsightWorks come in and help with the implementation? How does an implementation typically go of these processes?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, good question, and you know most of them sort of follow the same process. There's a few where it's not quite known. I'll maybe describe what I mean there. But yeah, we are very partner-centric, right. We want people to work with their partners, we want them to have that strong relationship because the partner is going to be able to go in there and do that consulting, whereas we may not have that capacity. I mean we do 300 and some projects a year. We're not going to necessarily be able to go in and do those deep dives and that real consulting work that the partners are able to do.

Speaker 3:

But for our little piece like, let's say, warehousing. Somebody wants to get warehouse management going in Business Central. Well, they're going to engage the partner to sort of get that core Business Central capability set up, like set up the bins and make sure their inventory is set up properly and you know all of those sorts of things related to making sure the core business central is working properly and then we can jump in and we have a fixed price project with a very formal project plan that you can find on our website that we go through to actually implement that additional portion of capability that we bring to the table. Now sometimes a partner does that. We have lots of partners out there that have been working with us for a very long time and can do those implementations themselves, and other times they have us do it. So we work on behalf of the partner, we work directly with the customer and we'll do that implementation and typically they're fixed price and they're honestly not a lot of money for getting up and running with a warehouse management solution I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3:

I'm sidetracking a little bit here, but I mentioned earlier. You know barcoding has become a lot more accessible in the last couple of decades and what I meant by that is really from a cost perspective and just ubiquity of what's available to do this automated data collection with barcoding. You know, back in the day and even today you buy an external like a standalone WMS that you integrate with Business Central. I mean you're looking at $100,000, $200,000 and up to do the implementation and get the integration working and everything else. I mean we're a small fraction of that to implement it because we're built into business and the hardware cost has come down and everything else just to make it. You know to speak to that sort of accessibility of being able to do barcoding nowadays. But so anyway, that was my side track, but you know back to the question on projects.

Speaker 3:

so so, I would say it's 50-50.

Speaker 2:

Half the time.

Speaker 3:

We go in there and we'll do the implementation. We're working with the partner and making sure that they know what's going on and understand how they want things configured to sort of match those physical processes we talked about. We'll go in there and we'll do the implementation. We'll do the UAT support, we'll do the post-go-live support. We'll kind of handle all of that ourselves. And you know some customers will go to the partner for their Tier 1 support, others come directly to us. You know we're very flexible. We want to do whatever the customer is comfortable with and whatever is going to make them successful. That's what it was.

Speaker 2:

I do like that approach and it's refreshing to hear because I know the partners have a varying size and partners have varying levels of experience and with all the features that are added to Business Central sometimes it's not possible to know in for a specific task or function to set up some of these products or these apps and these processes with a customer that they'll be successful. So a partner's not struggling to try to figure out and learn and maybe misrepresent the product as well too, so having an offering of both is good. Do you offer training for these products?

Speaker 3:

We do, yeah, so I mean we do offer training for these products. We do, yeah, so I mean we do partner training for the partners that do want to implement them themselves. But as part of the implementation, we'll do the training and we have a lot of um, you know, content on our knowledge base and on youtube and things like that for partners and customers to sort of dig in and learn some of those things on their own. But you know, we're always an email or a phone call away if people have questions and want to learn more and get some additional training. So, yeah, you know, I think maybe we've caused some people to change their behaviors, their business behaviors, like our mostly other ISVs.

Speaker 3:

You know, we started when we started with InsightWorks. We, you know, opened up the road, as the saying kind of goes. We put everything online. Like you want to see how the product works, here it is. You want to see a full demo? You don't need to put in your email address, here it is, it's on YouTube. You go watch this hour-long demo that shows you everything about how our product works. People don't like doing that. They still don't right A lot of times. Even just to get a data sheet you have to fill in your information to download a PDF right. So nobody was doing that at the time and a few people have started now doing it.

Speaker 3:

But our thought was yeah well, if our competitors want to copy us and see how we do things, great, then we'll just have to be better and that's how we do it. So we are very open with all that information. We have sample code repositories. If people want to do their own development, we try and help them along on how to do that themselves. Yeah, so there's lots of training material out there and again, we'll do the sort of interactive training whenever somebody wants.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, actually that's very, very important nowadays, right? Because of the fact that a lot of people can research. I mean newer generations coming up in the industry, so they tend to do a lot more research before jumping in Back in the day, when everything was nav. You know you kind of rely on your partner at that time. Whatever they recommended, you took it. Now, with the AppSource marketplace as a partner, it's much more difficult to know every single available applications out there, and so for you to be able to offer that and, at the same time, offer the support and then putting everything out there for them to access, to learn on their own including for clients as well it's nice to have an ISV that can do that.

Speaker 3:

And your point there on customers finding the product now and then deciding it before talking to their partner. We talk to partners and they hate that. I understand both sides of it. If I'm a customer, hey, this is what I want, like, make it happen, mr partner. And then the partner is like, well, I have no idea who this is or what this is or how to support it or how to, even you know, pay for it, like what I'm. And now the partner is got these dozens of you know, isv relationships because the customers keep choosing weird things that the partners never heard it. So it can be be challenging from a partner perspective. And again, that I think is one of our strengths, right, because we have such a wide range of solutions that fill all those gaps, you don't need to have those dozens of relationships you have one relationship with us and we kind, of you know, help you along with most of what you need need, at least in the, in the areas we play in no, no, I, I like I.

Speaker 2:

I laugh a little bit, like chris, because I hear that with a lot of partners, because with app source having over 5 000 apps I think I'm close to 6 000 apps now I can't keep up with it it is the case where a lot of times, customers will find and download and install things and then call the partner and say, oh, by the by the way, my system's not working. I installed this app. It is a little challenge, but I do appreciate the transparency. As Chris had mentioned, I think the generations that are looking now business generations, I could call it they're doing a lot more research ahead of time and they get more comfort versus reaching out and saying, okay, here's all my information, I just want to know something, we can go through it. So I appreciate the full transparency with products myself because even if I'm doing research for something, I always try to look at it that way as well. I want to have enough.

Speaker 3:

It drives me nuts. If I have to, I just want a data sheet on something and I've got to fill in my contact info, like, come on, it drives me insane, and if I hate it, why would I enforce that or force that sort of requirement on anybody else? So anyway, most of uh, probably most of the way we work is because I'm uh, I'm just getting grumpy in my old age or something, grumpy and lazy, and so you know, if I don't like it, then probably nobody else likes it and that's so, we're not going to do it, and that's kind of how it goes.

Speaker 2:

That's actually a good approach. I think If I don't like it, nobody else will like it to go through it as well, which is good. So I just want to do a quick run through some of these products that you have, just to go through it, and I'd like to dive into some more of them. So you have the advanced inventory count. You have the barcode generator, you have the counter sales which we spoke about, which is for retail.

Speaker 2:

I've been hearing a lot about POS these days recently. I know Chris and I have had several conversations about some of the options are out there and it seems it's nice to know that. You have the counter sales option. You have the dock extender, the dynamic ship products, and then you have the enhanced forecasting, enhanced planning, enhanced planning worksheet, the graphic scheduler, which gives you, I believe, a Gantt chart for scheduling jobs as well. You have your planning review, license plating, which is also another great option. Maintenance manager, multi-level BOM viewer, the MX app maps, your order fulfillment worksheet, your order ship express. You have a lot Print node connector I have so many stories about printing with Business Central Online. We'll talk about print node too. Product configurator, product order analysis, quality inspector, routing analysis, safety logbook, shop floor insights, warehouse insights and the WMS express. How do you have time to do all of those?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we have good people. So you know we've got a very strong team. A lot of them I've known for literally decades. You know, when I came over with InsightWorks, you know a lot of them came with me from previous jobs. So anyway, we have excellent people and we work hard. I mean, we've got a qa team. You know, you know, I think what is it? Six people on qa and deployment now that do nothing but make sure that you know the quality is built into the products, large development team working their butts off every day. So, yeah, we've got very good people right. And again, we've got that sort of industry experience from product management perspective where we know what to build. We're not doing a lot of trial and error. We say this is what we need and we build it and it's a lot more streamlined. Yeah, it's not easy.

Speaker 2:

I can imagine, I can imagine, I think I'm done for a while.

Speaker 3:

I'm not sure we're going to have any new products for a while. There's just lots of new features I want, but I'm not sure about new products.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure it must be difficult to manage and keep up with them all and understand them all, even understand them all. Talk about versioning. We talked about Business Central Online, business Central On-Premises. You support some older versions as well. Are there any regions that you do not support or all regions support? It's primarily North America, world One or some of the other countries. The Business Central now is operating. I think what is it? 170 countries now, chris, or 150? I forget the number it's growing. Are your products available in all those countries?

Speaker 3:

It is. Yeah, so we support pretty much every country where Business Central works, like some like counter sales. We have a North American version and a worldwide version just for the tax localizations and things like that. But yeah, we pretty much support every region. Languages are a challenge, right? So doing appropriate translations is always a challenge, so that's one of the things that is constantly something that we're looking to improve. But, yeah, we do support all of those regions and we are growing in Europe.

Speaker 3:

I mean, we've got maybe 75 or 100 partners roughly in Europe now that are actively, you know, selling, promoting the solutions. So you know we're predominantly, so we're predominantly North American based. Most of our business is North American. Europe is definitely a growing region in Australia, Europe and. Australia are both growing pretty rapidly at this point.

Speaker 2:

That's good, that's good.

Speaker 1:

I want to point out that I love the way your website's designed, because I think very few, if not probably the only one, that I've come across where you can go to your website, look at the apps and then filter on the categories. I think right now you have business operations. You can filter by free and subscription, and then compatibility and licensing options, which are the typical questions that people want to look at anyway, and so for you to be able to go to your website, filter quickly and say, okay, this is exactly what I need and it's free, um, and I want to enable it, this is, uh, very, very intuitive, even from a, even from a consultant perspective, or even a partner that maybe have not partnered with you yet and they want to see okay, how can I work with InsightWorks? This is nice.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's kind of the goal. And then when you find something, hey, this might fit, you can jump in and watch a 45-minute or an hour-long demo to see is it actually going to work. Or get know, get, get that base information on it, or jump into the knowledge base and learn all about all the technical details of it and everything else. Right, I mean, we're almost putting a roadmap for our competitors out on our website and you know, honestly, great steal our ideas, make them better, and then we'll learn from you and you will never be the only one, I tell everybody, because if you have something great, somebody else would try to create it.

Speaker 2:

So your point of, well, we just have to be better is, uh, profound. I I appreciate that as well, because you'll never be the only one. The world is a big place. There's a lot of talented people. So it's you just have to be better. And also, when it comes to business, just keep your customers happy as well. I mean, if the customers are happy and they're getting what they need, then they'll appreciate it as well. So, with all the products that you have, the print node I talked about because I've used the print node, set that up print node because with business central cloud, the cloud printing was a little bit challenging and print node is a great application to facilitate the printing and being able to automatically print on there as well, which is a good solution. What would you say are the more popular products that the customers are using?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so.

Speaker 2:

Targeting question.

Speaker 3:

But you're going to put up with a story before I answer.

Speaker 2:

I'm always willing to hear a story.

Speaker 3:

So PrintNode Connector, which is free, and DocExtender, which is also free, for drag-and-drop document management. We put those up fairly early. So we were actually we had the 11th app on AppSource for Business Central. That's including all the Microsoft apps that were published at the time. It's actually a Canadian payroll app, which we don't have anymore, but Microsoft in Canada approached us to build something because they felt at the time, payroll was a big gap in their offering for what was at that time called what the heck was it? Dynamics 365 for finance, not finance and operations. This is the original version of Business Central Online, but it didn't really do much other than basic finance stuff. Anyway, we were the 11th app and at the time, shortly after, we put our Warehouse Insight product up on AppSource and that, by the way, is currently probably the most popular product. To answer your first question, and when we put that up, we realized a few things.

Speaker 3:

Number one cloud printing is not available for Business Central yet, because we were early. Like I mean, this is 2017, 2018 timeframe. So there's no cloud printing, there's no barcode fonts, there's no way to easily attach documents with drag and drop those sorts of things. So well, we better build it, because we need to support our solution. So we built Print Note Connector. I'm thinking, ah, it'll last six months and Microsoft will have this solved. They'll have universal print available and Microsoft will have this solved. Right, they'll have universal print available and nobody will need our thing. So we'll just build it and we'll use it and that'll be that. Well, that's eight years ago.

Speaker 3:

Print node connector, out of the free products, is probably the most popular Like we've got 10,000 installs of that because it is free. You pay print node a few bucks a month to use their service, but our connector is is free. You pay Printnode a few bucks a month to use their service, but our connector is completely free, which annoys me because, again, I thought it would last like six months and you can actually resell. So, for partners out there listening, you can actually resell the Printnode service. You can buy it for $2, sell it for $9, and make $7 a month per customer. Well, I got 10,000 of those guys out there that that could be 70 000 a month. I could be charmed, could be making off reselling that service and we're making nothing, we're giving it away. So, anyway, partners can make some money on that. I feel like, yeah. So the same thing with doc extender.

Speaker 3:

You know, eight years later, and it's still a great tool for putting documents on sharepoint or right in Business Central. Microsoft hasn't quite closed that gap yet. Even barcode generator again, we needed to have something to be able to print barcodes. We have a barcoding solution. What do you mean? You can't print barcodes. So we built that for Business Central, made it free and again, we've got 7,000 or 8,000 at least customers out there using it. Microsoft finally did add the barcode fonts, but they didn't add all of the ones that people need. So yeah, barcode Generator is still very viable.

Speaker 3:

You know, seven or eight years after the fact even though we thought those three products would last maybe six months before, you know, microsoft would fill that gap. But yeah, they're still going strong. That's great.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome.

Speaker 2:

No, I always appreciate the stories. I always like to hear the evolution of some of these things or the background behind it as well, too, to see where they come from, because, as you had mentioned, a lot of these things just they evolve through implementations and listening to customers, which is good to customers, which is good.

Speaker 1:

I was going to ask you, with all the products that you have in apps, I'm going to ask you a question that's like well, who's your favorite kid? What's?

Speaker 3:

your favorite app? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, Warehouse Insight is pretty cool, Like okay, it's barcode scanning.

Speaker 3:

And we have the free version, the WMS Express, which we have probably scanning, and we have the free version, the wms express, which we have probably more installs of the free version than the paid version. We actually have some people that have canceled the paid version to go to the free version, versus the other way around. We almost never have people going from free to paid, but the other way it happens. Um, but yeah, where else insight? I mean, people don't realize really the technology and the capability within that thing. So, yeah, it's an app that runs on the device, that's a scan barcode. It's a big deal, but it's got a full application designer in there, right? So it's got this Blockly editor. So kids that are going into grade six are using the same tool to sort of learn coding. Well, we've got that. So consultants can actually go in there. Like you don't need to be a developer to build your own handheld application, sort of extend the existing applications. We've even got a wizard and an ai driven wizard where you can just describe the application you want and it'll build you a mobile app. Like that's part of our solution.

Speaker 3:

We've got our own little marketplace called the add-on catalog. Like you know, you want to extend the capabilities. There's you know 30 some or whatever apps that are on there. You click a button and bang, you've got it on the handheld or within business central. So even things like proof of delivery and fixed asset counting and all these different solutions you can plug in no cost. All the code is there. You can do whatever the heck you want with it. You don't even have to tell us you're using it and off you go, right. So it's more than just this app that scans barcodes. It's really a full development platform, very, very powerful too. Pardon me, we've actually started building some of our other products on that same platform. So our shop floor insight. You can now get a version of that that runs within the warehouse insight platform and our counter sales, which is retail.

Speaker 3:

Um, that can also run on that warehouse inside platform. So if you want a fancy touchscreen user interface, what runs within warehouse, so anyway it's. That's my favorite I shouldn't say favorite, but that that's. That's a pretty cool one. The other one that I really like is order fulfillment worksheet, because it's such a simple concept, so powerful, and everybody doing any amount of volume in a warehouse needs that sucker, and it's not a lot of money either. So, uh, yeah, those probably goes to, I guess the two favorite children.

Speaker 1:

No, it doesn't mean you don't like any of the other children. No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2:

It's not awesome.

Speaker 3:

It doesn't mean you don't like them All product managers and developers and inside works that are going to listen to this are all going to be mad at me now, Like what do you mean? I like mine better.

Speaker 2:

You don't love me anymore. Tell them they need to do better, and then they could be the favorite child again. That's all you need to do. It doesn't listen you. Just because you have a favorite doesn't mean you don't appreciate the others. I have a. I have favorite things that I like to eat. It doesn't mean that I dislike all the other food, it's just. It's just one that I like the most. Uh, you know, I hate to talk about this because this is all I ever hear about, but it's been. Chris knows where I'm going with this, but I almost feel like I have to because I'm obligated to some for some reason. I know where you're going. You know where I'm going, probably. What do you guess? Yes, you know. See, that was the leading.

Speaker 1:

So you kind of mentioned that on your app, though on your uh handheld device. I'm curious about about anything else with that, yeah, yeah, so we've actually got a again.

Speaker 3:

We put everything we do online almost, so there's a video there that talks a little bit about our AI journey, if you will, and you know I think anyway it's I don't know, it's interesting for me to watch. But, you know, we talked a little bit about how we use it internally and things like that. But more for the products, we've got a bunch of stuff that we're putting out into the products that are AI related, some that have been, you know, published in the products already. Like a quality inspector makes a great deal of use of ai, uh, for managing, you know, uh, inspection records and creating inspections, all sorts of fun stuff. And then, um, I mentioned the ai app builder, our configurator products, or, you know, configure price quote has a as a described to configure feature where you can, you know, just either talk or type in a description of the product you're looking for and it'll build it for you. Right, build a bomb and the routing and everything else. So those are those types of tools that we're building out and looking at.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, AI seems to be everywhere. In Copilot it's jumping into all areas of Business Central. It'll be interesting to see where it goes and how we all work a few years from now.

Speaker 3:

I'm curious how Microsoft's going to. You know they've been talking about and we were on a private preview for a while on how they want to bill for that stuff. But you know that's the one stumbling block that we find so far. You know we have, for example, an invoice reconciliation tool for dynamic ship, like in reconciling your carrier invoices, and you know we don't charge for that module. But you know the customer has to have some ai subscriptions and they're like well, what do you think? It's going to cost us to run.

Speaker 2:

They're like I have no idea that is the the, the big gorilla, because it's the prices sound reasonable, but you really don't know how to gauge how much you're going to consume to be you know, is it really reasonable or what am I going to be charged?

Speaker 1:

because I can't tell you what it is yeah, I think I struggle with that too, because I know like even for some side projects where you're using Azure AI, it really depends on whatever the content that you want the AI to read in terms of the documents, and sometimes they're like less of token use and then sometimes they're like massive. You just there's just no way to gauge it, and so it gets pretty dangerous, I guess, because then you can spend a boatload of money for something that you just wanted to test. So that is a struggle.

Speaker 3:

I think if Microsoft put that licensing within Business Central so you didn't have to go out and deal with getting a separate zero AI subscription and buying tokens or pay-as-you-go or all that stuff, if they just made it easy within sort of the Business Central admin center to set up a plan and maybe set a price limit not necessarily a token limit or anything. Say, you know, warn me when I hit $100 or $200 or whatever, if they could do that in Business Central, that would solve a lot of issues. So we'll see. I mean, I know they're working on it, they know all the pain points, probably better than us, but hopefully, so hopefully, they'll deal with that, yes, it's awesome.

Speaker 2:

It's still all in its infancy. So, as far as the products are concerned, I'm not looking for prices specifically, but how are they typically licensed outside of free?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, free is the best. It varies. So we actually publish the prices on the website too, which is a little unusual. So if you go to the bottom of each of those application pages, it'll give you sort of representative pricing, right? So we give annual discounts and three-year discounts over the monthly subscription.

Speaker 2:

But they're either licensed.

Speaker 3:

So the Warehouse Insight is licensed per physical device. So you're going to have 20 people using one device when you need one license for that device. So yeah, warehouse Insight is per device, shop Floor Insight is per employee. So the employees that are out there scanning, you know, have to have a license for Shop Floor. They don't need a Business Central license, they just need one of our licenses. Everything else, for the most part, is licensed by a company, which means well, I lie. Things like Dynamic Ship and Encounter Sales are by location, but generally unlimited users. So per location or per company, unlimited users is the most common way of licensing our solutions Confirm.

Speaker 1:

It does show pricing at the bottom of each of the products.

Speaker 3:

That's awesome. So, yeah, anyway, we're trying to be as transparent as possible and allow people to sort of make those comparisons. I mean, people don't like doing that because it's a competitive disadvantage, maybe because your competitors oh, they charge that. Well, we'll charge 20% less. We'll say we're the cheapest out there anyway, but it is what it is we're no, no, it is what it is.

Speaker 2:

And again, you just have to be better. I'm gonna, I'm just going. That's my new slogan. Usually it's just be. Uh, you know, I I follow osho and saying just be, but now I think, oh, it's, I'll expand it to be just be be better. It solves a lot of problems and I can tell you even those that want to say that the cheapest product around or the cheapest price around doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the best quality or it's cheaper in the long run. I've learned that quite well and I've seen it many times that you know two people at $5 isn't cheaper than one person at 15, as I say going on. So that's good to have. Good to know. Well, mr Mark, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us this afternoon to talk with us about InsightWorks and the product suite that you have. If anybody would like more information, what's the best way to get in contact with you to learn about the products?

Speaker 3:

Probably the website right. There's a chat box, a contact form, all that sort of thing, and then somebody will jump on and help right away.

Speaker 2:

So it's dmsiworkscom and we'll also have the link in the show notes as well, those that want to use it. You have many great products. Anybody who hasn't looked at them or isn't using them? I highly recommend it. I've worked with Dynamic Ship Graphic Scheduler Print Note. I can't even remember the warehouse, the handheld, so it is a great product suite that's out there and offering for to just where Business Central, as we had mentioned, may not have all of the gaps that you have. You know it's a fully comprehensive product, as you had mentioned, but if you have any unique requirements that aren't within the core application product, as you had mentioned, but if you have any unique uh requirements that aren't within the core application, I definitely recommend taking a look at these uh.

Speaker 3:

Thank you very much again and I look forward to talking to you soon and appreciate it and we'll see you, I'm sure, at uh these conferences coming up and uh we'll hold on to some stuff I'll actually be first in line.

Speaker 2:

I'll be first in line sounds. Sounds like a deal thank you, you very much Talk to you soon, ciao, ciao, bye. Thank you, chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair, and thank you to our guests for participating.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlifecom, that is D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E dot com, and you can interact with them via Twitter D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E. You can also find me at matalinoio, m-a-t-a-l-i-n-o dot I O, and my Twitter handle is matalino16. And you can see those links down below in the show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Kris

Host
Contributor

Brad

Co-host