Navigating the Shift: Modernizing Legacy ERP Systems in Public Transit

In this episode, AV and Megan discuss the critical need for modernization in public transit, the intricacies of managing disjointed systems, and the importance of infrastructure evaluation before making upgrades. From identifying the stakeholders involved to implementing change management strategies, they provide valuable insights into navigating the shift towards a more efficient and integrated transit management system.

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Transcript

00;00;01;21 - 00;00;24;20
Unknown
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Avero Advisors live stream. We've taken quite a break, but we're happy to be back with you today and discuss the intricacies of ERP modernization in public transit. So with me, you guys know Mr. Abhijit Verekar, who is our founder and CEO. Good morning, AV. Morning, Megan. Yeah, it's good to be back.

00;00;24;21 - 00;00;50;15
Unknown
Good to be back on live. I'm excited for today's topic, but if you're joining us for the first time, please let us know where you're joining from in the comments. We'd love to hear from you. We love to hear your questions, your thoughts, and we love for you guys to be interactive. Also, if you don't know who we are, we are a modernization firm that specializes in ERP consulting, I.T.

00;00;50;15 - 00;01;14;27
Unknown
Strategic planning and business process re-engineering for the public sector. So we invite you also to follow us on all social media channels and come to all of our live streams going forward. We go live every Wednesday at 10 a.m.. So without further ado, today's topic is a very intricate one. I believe we've had a lot of success with a few transits.

00;01;14;27 - 00;01;44;06
Unknown
We have a few transit projects under our belt currently and we've been going after a lot of transit projects here lately. So I want to talk about let's let's kick it off by talking about the need for modernization in public transit. What are your thoughts around the need and how is that need identified? AV So let me let me start off by telling, you know, the audience about the importance of public transit, right?

00;01;44;07 - 00;02;16;22
Unknown
You might think that you're only riding the bus from point A to point B, Public transit was transformational for me personally when I first got to the U.S., because that's the only mode of transport I had and I could afford. And, you know, when I was in Cleveland, Ohio, going to grad school, they had a cool program with the GCRTA, which later became a client to allow college students with IDs to ride the bus for free.

00;02;16;24 - 00;02;45;22
Unknown
So anyway, that's an aside, but it's an important part of society. You know, we saw during COVID all of these sort of government services that we take for granted, and especially in larger metros where a bus is guaranteed and granted thing that you can avail of. We saw that when you couldn't go anywhere, when things were shut down, these services were brought up to everyone's attention.

00;02;45;25 - 00;03;11;11
Unknown
So public transit is a very important service. If you go to a big city like New York, London, most people don't have cars. They don't even if they have one, they're on private. They just take the bus or the metro or the tube or what have you to get places. And it and it's the fastest way to get around in those cities in urban areas that that that's sort of a given that you have a public transit system in rural areas.

00;03;11;11 - 00;03;39;11
Unknown
It's not necessarily a given. Right. Even in a place like Knoxville, we have the KAT, which which does some limited runs and has some special services. But again, if you were to look at the future of mobility in transportation, public transit will play a huge role as it has in the past 100 plus years. Any city you go to, you would expect a modern, functioning city to have a robust, multimodal public transportation system.

00;03;39;11 - 00;04;02;13
Unknown
So a very important service that is offered to society and to citizens. And a lot of it is taxpayer funded. Even if you're not riding the bus, you're paying for it. Of course, there's fare fare collection and there's grants and all of these other things that help our our metro areas provide a transportation system. Now, why are we talking about busses?

00;04;02;14 - 00;04;35;12
Unknown
Right? Yeah, we're talking about modernization in the transit sector. We do a lot of work in transit. We've had in fact, my career started in consulting in in tech consulting with a transit agency, the Antelope Valley Transit Agency in California. I spent a couple of years out there working with the transit agency and did everything from ERP implementation to intelligent transportation systems to implementing fare collection systems, to implementing passenger counters, AVL, CAD you name it.

00;04;35;12 - 00;05;06;05
Unknown
So I know a lot about this. And you're right, we're starting to pursue a lot more transit authority clients. And I think, you know, there's a lot of need for our services in that area. There has always been. And why this is important, why I'm telling you all of this is because when you think of riding a bus, think about all the moving parts, one unintended moving parts that come with that service that's being offered to you.

00;05;06;08 - 00;05;27;15
Unknown
You have to track where the busses, you have to track how many people are on there. I, I think people are paying by card by a cash requirement for their transit cards. And then all of that needs to be sent back to headquarters where the accountants and the maintenance people need to watch what's going on across the fleet.

00;05;27;15 - 00;06;02;02
Unknown
It's not just one bus or train that they're watching. They're watching a huge system. Some of them have thousands of vehicles on the road at a given time. So all of these moving pieces need to be managed, tracked, accounted for and reported on on an ongoing basis. And all of that can does happen in multiple systems that eventually tied together with what data to provide to the executives and the board members takes the view that they need to see if their systems are working well or not.

00;06;02;05 - 00;06;27;12
Unknown
That's where we come in, right? We can help. And we have helped transit agencies figure this puzzle out. Right. How do you do financials? How do you track grants? How do you do effective maintenance management? How do you do asset management? How do you do people management? Because a lot of times you're dealing with a lot of maintenance folks, drivers plus the administrative staff, public duration relations, What have you.

00;06;27;12 - 00;06;54;29
Unknown
All of these things need to be managed and tracked and that happens with a any system or multiple systems. Yeah, and I would just add to that there's more stakeholders involved in public transit, right? I mean, just as you just mentioned, the workers, the the public, you know, the people who are utilizing this public transportation. So it goes beyond just arm finance, which is what we talk about in local government.

00;06;54;29 - 00;07;30;23
Unknown
You know, cities and counties, transit have, you know, asset management, stakeholder engagement operations and scheduling reporting screens. Sometimes. Right. So this is a huge puzzle that, like you mentioned earlier, we help put those pieces together. So without further ado, my next question is what challenges do transit agencies face without an integrated ERP or cloud based ERP if they're operating in the 1980s?

00;07;30;28 - 00;08;02;27
Unknown
Yeah. What challenges are they currently facing? What are we seeing in the market? I mean, huge, huge challenges, right? When it comes to running disjointed systems, The challenges remain the same in any agency in transit, especially be difficult. This is also similar to utilities where you have very specialized systems doing things like run cutting or scheduling busses or or, you know, you're trying to see fuel management or maintenance management.

00;08;02;29 - 00;08;25;10
Unknown
The cool thing about the busses today and the vehicles today is that you plug your computer in, that's going to tell you what's wrong with your bus. So or you don't even have to plug it in with intelligent transportation systems and maintenance management systems. You can you can have information transmitted back to the operations center to see exactly what's going on.

00;08;25;13 - 00;08;49;12
Unknown
So if you have those kind of vehicles running on the on the street and you're running 1980s AC 400 based DOS screen systems, it doesn't quite mesh right? You need to keep up with the times and keep up with technology that's available to you. And therefore, modernization is very important. The second thing is you have to integrate all of these things.

00;08;49;15 - 00;09;15;16
Unknown
Just having a modern, clean looking system isn't the end. All of modernization. How are you using this? The data that is being presented to you from different systems or different functions within an operation and how do you make sense of that? So business intelligence, data analytics and reporting become extremely crucial, right? And you can't have that if you don't have the right systems in place.

00;09;15;19 - 00;09;48;21
Unknown
And again, thinking of a large public transit system, there are so many moving parts that you can't rely on, on paper and pencil and radios to tell you exactly what's going on. Right. The video surveillance is huge in public transit. Most transit systems have cameras inside and outside the busses, primarily for risk management purposes. Right. If they if they get hit by somebody, if they go off the track somewhere, they need to have video evidence of what's going on.

00;09;48;21 - 00;10;13;09
Unknown
And that needs to be tied into your caddy rail system, that needs to be tied to your h.r. System, your training system. And and this holistic view is very important for a transit manager or a general manager to to have so that they can effectively manage the system. Right. And even before we talk about making upgrades, i feel like do you agree that we need to look at infrastructure?

00;10;13;11 - 00;10;40;25
Unknown
Like what is the infrastructure you're currently operating on and is it viable to integrate some of these things like cameras, like reporting data? Would you agree that it's probably best if, if we start out, like you mentioned, a holistic view, let's come up with a plan on how to, you know, look at where you are and how to get to the 21st century.

00;10;40;28 - 00;11;17;04
Unknown
Yeah, that's true for any agency, right? You need to need to have a plan. You can't like the meeting we had yesterday with someone very important that that runs a large county. And the discussion was your what you're describing to us, meaning you need to overhaul your technology. You're not certain if backups are happening, you're not certain if you're in a cybersecurity good cybersecurity posture as an organization, there's a lot of uncertainty and you can go at it from let's just, you know, fix one thing.

00;11;17;04 - 00;11;43;03
Unknown
It's like you're asking a contractor that's recommending that you rebuild the foundation. You're asking them to come in and fix a window because it's going to help you see look outside better. Yeah, it's an improvement. But is it really solving the main problem you have so always starting with an overall picture of where you are today, what the baseline is and what's best practice?

00;11;43;04 - 00;12;09;20
Unknown
Again, an overused word, it's hung around a lot, but what is the best practice in the industry? What's the latest and greatest tools available and what fit and what does best fit the organization? That's that's where you start. And then you can have a real good capital improvement plan and operational plan that will help you define how much money you're going to spend in what year and where that money is going to come from.

00;12;09;22 - 00;12;38;27
Unknown
There's a very systematic way of going about this, and it's been done before. So so, you know, if you're in this situation where you have antiquated systems, you're not alone. We talked with the transit agency last week that is running an old Hitachi system for their ERP and in some other one, one offs for transit management. And, you know, we're going to help them consolidate all of that and modernize.

00;12;38;27 - 00;13;04;16
Unknown
But that's that's one huge project. You're going to have to take that one step at a time. But the first step always is defining the end result that you want. Right. And that was going to be my next question in regards to speaking with this particular transit last week, one of the questions that was posed to us was, okay, we're operating on eight or nine different systems.

00;13;04;21 - 00;13;24;20
Unknown
How are you going to come in and help me consolidate? Like I need to know what steps you're going to take, take how you implement change management. I need to know the intricacies of how you're going to make this happen. And so can you talk about that a little bit and how we answered that question? That was a great insightful question, right?

00;13;24;20 - 00;13;54;26
Unknown
Because you as consultants, we assume that when we're talking to an audience that we're trying to sell too, that they understand what we're saying. And in especially in our field works, words can mean different things to different people depending on where they've been. And this particular agency had been working on on premise older systems for so long that it's hard to imagine how you can even untangle this ball of yarn.

00;13;54;28 - 00;14;16;07
Unknown
Right? So the question was, are you just going to help us rip the Band-Aid and throw the old things out? And then what happens to all this data? There's some very specialized things that we have built in the house that do two or three things that no system on the market will do. And how do you how do you take care of that?

00;14;16;07 - 00;14;41;24
Unknown
So our approach to those kind of questions is pretty you know, it's simplistic sounding, but the first step is to define what each component is doing and to find out if there's any duplications, any redundancies, any sort of places where this data exists. In two places, it could be a spreadsheet, right? That has a very important function within the business process.

00;14;41;26 - 00;15;07;07
Unknown
But during the process of process analysis, we define and identify all of those things. And then when you do your requirements definition, you'll find out quickly what these specialized things are, what these special systems are that have been built solely for this agency and no one else has it. The person that built it no longer works there. There's no documentation.

00;15;07;09 - 00;15;39;04
Unknown
And that key piece of information is really critical in making the processes work. So you have to deal with that as exceptions and not as a rule. Because again, as we mentioned last week, everyone has these problems. Everyone has their special little processed, special little program that no one thinks can be replicated. And more often than not, I'm not saying this is the norm, but more often than not, we find out that it's something that is extraneous.

00;15;39;07 - 00;16;01;08
Unknown
Some executive 20 years ago asked for a report and forgot about it, and someone built this thing. And no one really knows why we use it, but it's there. And now we're going down this rabbit hole of how do we replicate this one specific piece of software. And more often than not, we find ways to not replicate it.

00;16;01;09 - 00;16;25;29
Unknown
We've found ways to get the same output of the same result of the same sort of end goal without going down this rabbit hole of how do we replicate this specific thing. So again, lots of ways of skinning that cat. But if you're if you're looking at your current systems and processes and thinking, man, how do I even begin to unravel this?

00;16;25;29 - 00;16;48;25
Unknown
Because it's again like a ball of Christmas life start tugging on one end. You don't know what's going to happen on the other. Are you going to make it worse? Are you going to break something? So the analogy we used was of of a, you know, ordnance disposal of bomb disposal. You're not going to cut the red wire every time because, you know, it's red wired causes the bomb to trap.

00;16;48;27 - 00;17;11;05
Unknown
You have to look at it really carefully from a distance first and how things connect to each other before you start untangling things. Yes. And I'm actually writing a book, guys, on a BS analogy, so I write them all down. I think it can become something big one day because it really helps to paint the picture of what we're trying to talk about.

00;17;11;07 - 00;17;29;21
Unknown
But the second part of that question was the stakeholder buy in. So a lot of times you said there's one person who, you know, has their arms around this system or this process. So what is the key to this stakeholder engagement? How do you get them to open up? How do you get them to feel empowered about this process?

00;17;29;24 - 00;17;58;21
Unknown
So there's this formal approach is to this is all part of change management, right? Yep. We've got like the proceed car approach where there's a very formalized set of communication and things you need to check off and take care of throughout the engagement. But I think it comes down to telling people, you know, understanding what their motivations are and helping them get there.

00;17;58;23 - 00;18;29;15
Unknown
And we've talked about this before. Some people might want to leave a legacy as they're about to retire. Some people are new to the organization and want to set up their legacy. And it's a cool time to be in an organization during a change, right? Because you can you can redefine your position within the within the operation. We can become more valuable all of a sudden because, you know, you were stuck doing spreadsheets and paper processes and now you're the one that's savvy on new systems.

00;18;29;18 - 00;18;55;03
Unknown
Now you're the one that understands these things better. And all of a sudden you go from analysts to, you know, you managing a certain process. If you if you play this right and take advantage of this opportunity. But it's really important that executives within an organizations that that's going through change does not do not sort of dictate that this is how it's going to go.

00;18;55;03 - 00;19;12;25
Unknown
That should be the last resort. But you need to try and build consensus among the rank and file and the staff on why we need to do this and why we need to do this now. Otherwise it's going to be something that, you know, the bosses told us to do. So we're doing it and we don't really know why.

00;19;12;27 - 00;19;41;08
Unknown
And so we're not going to put our hearts into it. This is these projects are a once in a lifetime projects if you do them right. Right. And so you have to take real good care about bringing everyone along for the ride and not just saying it's something that council wants or board wants or the CEO wants. So you're going to do it because at the end of the day, the end users are going to use this these systems more than the CEOs.

00;19;41;10 - 00;20;05;26
Unknown
And it's not different in in in any agency, but in transit sometimes it takes a little more to do well. There's more people involved, more people and more different kinds. You're not just talking to the office workers. You're not just talking to executives. You're talking with maintenance workers, you're talking with bus drivers. A bus driver job is to drive a bus.

00;20;05;28 - 00;20;26;12
Unknown
Now you're putting a screen in front of them and having them do things to it. And they signed up to do a bus driver job 20 years ago. That's a difficult transition. You're putting cameras in a bus and telling them that they're responsible for it and they're on camera all day. You have unions involved that don't like these things right.

00;20;26;14 - 00;20;55;29
Unknown
And so a lot of complicated layers get put on top of our usual complicated problems when it comes to transit agencies. Yes. And along those same lines, I mean, you have the people, but you also have all of this data, right, from different places, depending on what you want to report on. But let's talk about data migration. One of the other questions we were asked was how do you manage all the data?

00;20;55;29 - 00;21;20;23
Unknown
How do you clean it up and how do you carry it over? What are your thoughts on data migration specifically within public transit? Yeah, again, the approach isn't that different from any other agency. You need to define what data you want and why. Most most people try to go at it from, Well, I want everything from the beginning of time and that's just not practical on so many different levels.

00;21;20;23 - 00;21;52;19
Unknown
You don't know if that data is compatible, if it's clean, if it's accurate, and then you have the run the risk of it consuming your whole project budget because you're trying to shoehorn this bad and all data into a new system. So the best practice approach that I've seen over the last five years at least has been to take over, take forward, at least in financials, one year of transactional data and three years of balances, and then find a way to archive all the data so you don't lose it.

00;21;52;19 - 00;22;13;25
Unknown
Of course, you need to go back sometimes and and look for data that's 15, 20 years old for a specific report. Someone's asking for it. And there's a lot of solutions available to archive the old data so you don't have to bring everything into your production system and you know, bulk it up and slow it down on day one.

00;22;13;27 - 00;22;45;25
Unknown
So really thinking about the why behind data migration, what are you going to do with this data? Right? And what pieces of data are really important to you on an ongoing basis as you as you conduct operations day to day? Right. Are there any regulatory and compliance pressures specific to public transit that may affect this new vision in new ERP and overall digital transformation in the public transit sector?

00;22;45;27 - 00;23;18;14
Unknown
Yep. So so transits are funded in several different ways. One is of course the tickets we buy, right? That goes to the bottom line. Then they have grants. Federal Transportation Agency gives them grants, local grants matching grants, special grants, corporate grants, what have you. So lots of funding mechanisms. The second thing is transit agencies that operate within multiple jurisdictions, like, for example, are all client 88.

00;23;18;17 - 00;23;52;03
Unknown
They were in L.A. County and two or three different cities, City of L.A. And what that means is depending on how many miles you drove within a jurisdiction, you're going to charge that jurisdiction for operating funds. So how do you keep up with that? Right. You have to overlay your available data on top of your run, you know, your scheduling systems and on top of your financial systems to really get that information.

00;23;52;05 - 00;24;14;23
Unknown
So you need to report to each agency on how much they owe you at the end of the whatever quarter year or prepay based on what happened last year. The second is FDA, federal agencies that fund transit transit systems want to know what you're doing with the money in your system. So entity reporting, national transportation database reporting is really critical.

00;24;14;25 - 00;24;42;10
Unknown
And they have their own systems and they want data in a certain format. And back in the day, we would help clients extract all of this information from various systems and then help them upload it to the entity. But now it's a lot more automated in and consolidated. So the reporting is critical. But again, it comes down to the who and what information do you need for what purposes.

00;24;42;10 - 00;25;08;09
Unknown
And you can you can get it. All data exists and in multiple formats. It's just who wants it and what format, what frequency and how do you want to present it. All right. I'm going to go to the comment section. Clay in like C are joining us today. So Clay says modernize the ERP system and then you might need new ticketing systems and new network infrastructure and even new vehicles to use to its full potential.

00;25;08;15 - 00;25;41;26
Unknown
How do you avoid the scope creep? I love this question. Love this question. Yeah. It's it's not necessarily go creep, right? It's something that some natural progression. You can just do an ERP system. Right? Right. Because once you have a brand spanking shiny ERP system and you have old vehicle location, then CAD and run cutting software and APC, you know, you have older systems.

00;25;41;28 - 00;26;00;23
Unknown
The new ERP is not going to get the data unless you manually, you know, intervene in it. So the best way to do this is to is to look at the overall picture, do a strategic plan that says you're R Here's our current snapshot, here's where we need to go. What's the best strategy to go from point A to point B and how much is it going to cost us?

00;26;00;23 - 00;26;24;06
Unknown
What what timeframe are you going to do this in? And then rank each project within this massive program And then ERP might be the third thing you do. New vehicles may not fall into that category, but you know, that's a whole other area of operations planning that that, you know, we can help with, but we don't necessarily go into.

00;26;24;08 - 00;27;05;06
Unknown
But network infrastructure, if it's not in a in a good spot, if it's not in a good state, then you're not going to get the best use of your ERP system. So all of these things need to be looked at holistically before you start going at it piecemeal, which is where we run into issues and trouble with, you know, when we read piece that are asking for one specific thing and it has information about all these other things that are sort of older cobbled together, we had a meeting with a with a large metro sewer district a couple of weeks ago that was in a similar situation.

00;27;05;06 - 00;27;36;13
Unknown
They wanted to separate ERP from their CMS system, which was currently whole, you know, hosted in one older system right now. And the puzzle was how do you separate this? Because you're you're the industry is moving to what's being called best of breed, meaning there are very specific systems that do a very specific job for your organization and most systems that are or vendors that claim to do it all for you actually can't.

00;27;36;13 - 00;27;58;26
Unknown
Because when you're a, you know, sewer district in a large metro area in a state, there's some very specific laws and processes you might have to follow that, you know, the one system basically won't be able to do all of that for you. So so back to Clay's question. It's not necessarily scope creep, It's how you manage this.

00;27;58;26 - 00;28;24;05
Unknown
If you don't go at it in a systematic manner, then yes, then you'll have it and you have scope creep. So I think this is a good segue way into some storytelling. We worked with the client that we did this sort of planning for specific to transit. Can you speak a little bit about that project and what came out of it and what's currently happening?

00;28;24;08 - 00;29;02;29
Unknown
Yeah, well, there's several, right? It the best best example is a transit. I worked with where we started with the right strategic plan for them. We gave them a at the time a ten year plan for I.T. Technology modernization and one of the first things we we went down the path of is automating their fleet, meaning that they didn't have any system that would track busses or allow them to, you know, schedule routes in the way the busses are running into each other.

00;29;03;01 - 00;29;24;22
Unknown
So they needed systems like intelligent transportation system, which essentially is a collection of systems that allow the operators in the at the operations center to to a see where the where the vehicle is at all times, to how many to see how many people are on it, how much money was collected, what route is it running on and is it is it running on time?

00;29;24;22 - 00;29;52;07
Unknown
Is it running behind? And which other busses are supposed to be on the same route? So there's a there's a process called run copying that happens. It used to happen manually and it was a fascinating process to watch. Right. If you can imagine, you know, a drafting table with with a large map. And this person, there was a guy called run Cutter or a gal, and they were very specialized in this one process and no one else could do this job until software came along.

00;29;52;09 - 00;30;17;11
Unknown
So we helped them implement all of these things. And it took years, right, Because this is like 2008 nine cellular technology wasn't all that create fiber optic connections weren't that great. So, you know, we were trying to do this very cutting edge work, not that it hadn't been done, but this is in the desert, right? This is in this blind was not in a in a very urban area.

00;30;17;14 - 00;30;55;27
Unknown
So we did we did a lot of modernization and then back to place. Question That led to the question of we have all of these great systems. We have an older, really terrible ERP system that's not going to be useful. So then we did an ERP system replacement, Atrius payroll system replacement, and we got so entrenched in the transit agency that we were also hired to do an RFP and help them select their next operations contractor because it was a hybrid agency, right?

00;30;55;29 - 00;31;27;13
Unknown
They had only eight or ten employees of the agency and about a hundred contracted drivers and maintenance workers that actually ran the system. So we helped them create an RFP to the selection and negotiate with the vendor that eventually won the contract. And we also helped them with contract negotiate a contract compliance. Meaning is the vendor that is doing the operation of this agency actually keeping up with the contract?

00;31;27;15 - 00;31;53;10
Unknown
And if they weren't, we would they would be liquidated damages and all kinds of fun stuff. So my point is it it's not just the technology, right? We are we are really good at understanding the operations of a transit agency, the ins and outs of the funding, how the system works and the moving parts and the technologies that make make them work.

00;31;53;12 - 00;32;23;12
Unknown
So that was that's a that's one example where we've done this end to end. Yes. Thank you. So speaking of operations and all that are involved in public transit, how do you maintain the operational continuity, especially during implementation? So, you know, we've chosen an ERP we're implementing. How do you keep all these moving parts still moving while implementing?

00;32;23;14 - 00;32;48;08
Unknown
I think the key is planning again, right? You can't it's it's all part of change management and it and it can be as small as swapping out a server or a or a storage device. You can surprise the user. You cannot surprise the end user by saying, you know, at ton by not giving no warning on when this change is going to happen.

00;32;48;08 - 00;33;16;18
Unknown
So apply that to a larger project and it's the same concept. You cannot surprise anybody. So the way you handle this is if you're doing an active implementation where you're putting in category of systems you have on onboard devices that need to be tested, you tested on a on a subset of the fleet. You don't take out the whole thing and say we're going to stop the bus routes and we're going to do testing on this.

00;33;16;20 - 00;33;44;24
Unknown
Back to my earlier project example. We actually did live testing on when the system was about to go live. We would ride the busses with our laptops and see, you know, if the map was actually showing where we were. Again, this is in the late 2000s and jeeps and cell technology wasn't all that great. So we had to rely on onboard Wi-Fi 2G signals to actually do the testing.

00;33;44;26 - 00;34;07;10
Unknown
So how do you keep the systems running? It's like anything else. People have day jobs. The busses need to run on time, the trains need to run on time while you're doing all of this stuff. So effective project management, change management and communication is the key. Making sure that nothing falls apart while you're trying to modernize the systems for public transit agencies.

00;34;07;12 - 00;34;33;21
Unknown
In your opinion, do you see more of them going towards this best of breed or buying something, you know, just completely off the shelf shelf that is all encompassing? Because my issue with that is, is can they keep up with all of the operations that a transit agency has to intake? Well, it depends, right? It's it depends on what you're talking about.

00;34;33;22 - 00;35;07;04
Unknown
Meaning there are very specialized systems like we're working with a transit agency right now that we're implementing financial system for. Right. And they're moving away from what they had, which is one system that did financials and transit management. And they we helped them go to RFP and they picked a product that is financials in each are only the next stage of this will be doing their enterprise asset management solution, which may or may not be the same system.

00;35;07;06 - 00;35;31;01
Unknown
It really comes down to what the requirements and the needs are. And it's a great time to do these things because there are systems that specialize in a few things and they don't pretend to be anything else. So really depends on on who you are, what kind of operation you're running, and what that specific quote unquote best of breed solution might be that that you're looking at, that that might improve operations for you.

00;35;31;04 - 00;36;03;16
Unknown
And how can these ERP systems help public transit agencies with their sustainability and environmental goals? yeah, it's huge, right? Because more and more transit, by the way, transitioning to, you know, either electric or some other form of renewable or abundantly available source of energy. So sustainability from that standpoint is is being taken care of. And when it comes to ERP, it's just the tracking, right?

00;36;03;16 - 00;36;33;16
Unknown
If you're still on diesel busses, fuel management system will tell you what what that's doing to your bottom line, how much it's costing you. And they also have systems for emissions checking and estimating how much damage, if any, it's doing to the to the environment. So just I think like with any agency modernizing operations to be more efficient, to do more with less is is indirectly affecting sustainability in many, many different ways.

00;36;33;23 - 00;36;57;28
Unknown
Yeah, I would agree. Well, I think I am going to wrap this up today unless you have any other points that you would like to make as it relates to public transit. I think we will continue along this topic. So if you guys want to dive in to one of these areas that we cover today, please let us know because I don't think that we do enough as it relates to public transit.

00;36;57;28 - 00;37;23;19
Unknown
So I think my biggest takeaway here is and I feel like it has been throughout our live journey, but the planning and understanding your operations from a holistic view is so important. When you undertake any modernization project, right? You can't just say, Hey, we need to upgrade our ERP, right? Well, what does that mean? Right. What are your takeaways?

00;37;23;19 - 00;37;54;08
Unknown
AV Or what? What's one thing that you want our listeners to hear today? No, you hear it on the head planning and understanding that, that if you think you're behind the times and you don't have the right solutions in place, you're not alone. A lot of you know, we have an aging infrastructure as as is evident in terms of public infrastructure, but the systems are aging to my if you're not on the cutting edge, it's okay.

00;37;54;10 - 00;38;21;02
Unknown
The positives too that you've you've probably you have leapfrogged a lot of bad stuff. Yeah. And it's a good time to be taking on any kind of modernization, any kind of upgrades, any kind of sort of improvements to your system overall, because the systems are great, prices are going down and you have great consultants to lean on that can help you through the journey.

00;38;21;04 - 00;38;40;28
Unknown
That's right. Small plug. We can help you with that always. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out. Follow us on all of our social media platforms. I just shared the link to our newsletter. It's really fun. We work hard on that to make it fun and energizing and easy to understand. But thank you for joining us today.

00;38;40;28 - 00;38;47;07
Unknown
Thank you for your time and we look forward to seeing you guys next week. Thank you. Thanks, Megan.