How our industry has changed, and why we changed with it.
I started helping my grandparents in their low voltage electrical contracting and manufacturing shop when I was 9. I did a terrible job at keeping inventory current on clip boards, but was better at shipping and receiving paperwork, and could follow a pattern of parts needed to stuff and solder circuit boards. It was a milestone in the business when we got our first TRS-80 for accounting (DAK Easy, I think?) and our first IBM PC to run primitive CAD software. We felt like these investments were amazing. We realized that these were special systems, that allowed us to replace arduous manual processes with better solutions, saving us time, and helping us scale and be more ambitious.
Through successive management and tech revolutions, businesses have made repeated investments in technology that promises (and generally delivers) on faster, more streamlined processes, optimized inventory and labor, and more sales, services, and supply visibility.
The industry I am a proud part of, the Enterprise Resource Planning industry, has been a force for good in delivering growth and visibility to staff and leaders in countless businesses. This industry is incredibly competitive, and wildly innovative, in trying to eke out new tools and approaches that can help their customers build and maintain new competitive advantages every day.
There is also creative destruction in this industry—Every new idea is built upon past approaches, but also eliminates failed or obsolete ideas and software regularly. We expect disruption, and work to harness the positive change, while managing the challenges, and to the best of our ability, helping our customers through these transitions, in order to get the benefits. AI is perhaps the most game changing revolution to ERP since the creation of ERP tech, 60 years ago. I think every ERP publisher has announced or will announce their approach for harnessing AI’s potential.
Several years ago, before the industry caught on, we started researching and investing heavily in AI enablement of ERP implementations. In our early steps, we created our own blueprint of the necessary components of successful implementations of technology, visualization and report tools, business process optimization, change management, and project management. Our outcomes have been breathtaking, and we are pleased to share our services with others, helping businesses have superior projects, faster and more precisely than ever before. We are confident that our investments will lead to better outcomes and customer success, in a way that was unimaginable not long ago.
We could have continued to ride on our previous successes, but in doing so, we would have been compromising on our goal of market leadership, and delivering meaningful competitive advantages to our customers. We would have become like everybody else, to put it bluntly. In these moments of soul searching, and obsessing about how we can be better, we realized that our old name didn’t fit us anymore, and we needed to reestablish our identity to fit with our capabilities. For those of you that knew us when we were originally Pragmatek, Ursa Information Systems, and Open Source Integrators, thank you for the friendship, and allow us to reintroduce ourselves to you—As Gray Matter Logic. We look forward to talking about not just our journey, but yours as well.
