2349 - ERP Solutions That Transform Heavy Equipment Dealerships with VitalEdge Technologies' Vikram Savkar

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0:58With us right now, it's Vikram Savkar. Vikram, you are the CEO of Vital Edge Technologies. You're found on the web at vitaledge.com. Vikram, it's great to have you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you, Josh. You're up in the Boston area. And before we get going, kind of talking about what you do with Vital Edge, you know, I always love learning what high-level leaders do for fun when they're not at work, you know, the things that they kind of geek out on. What have you been into lately? way well last weekend was halloween and uh i have a young daughter so as you can imagine the last two weeks of my life have been all about quick changes of costumes mermaid astronaut jasmine we've run through the full gamut over the last two weeks lots of kids and you dressed it as well no i focused on dressing my daughter getting her through all the parties all the activities uh It was a blast.

1:52And so she had three costumes, three different costumes? She did. She was astronaut, mermaid, and Jasmine the princess. It's context specific. So depending on the context, she was a different costume. So lots of quick changes, lots of parades, lots of trick-or-treating, lots of candy, lots of hiding of candy after getting the candy. And that's the drill. You know the drill. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't think that there's any, I think a Jasmine mermaid astronaut would also be, we could next year maybe could combine all three and see if people can guess what her identity is. So Vikram, tell us about your work with Vital Edge.

2:33What is Vital Edge Technologies? Vital Edge is the leading ERP for heavy equipment dealers. I'll unpack that a little bit for you. So for heavy equipment, think tractors, construction equipment, agricultural equipment, equipment for material handling. These are multiple hundred thousand dollar up to multimillion dollar pieces of equipment that are used in the core industries around the world. And the dealers are the companies that sell or rent or service that equipment for those end users all around the world. So we are the leading ERP provider for those dealers. We really run the entire tech stack for dealers from the front office to the back office.

3:17And I'm happy to talk about this more later. But every aspect of what dealers do that help them succeed and grow in order to help their end users in agriculture construction and so on succeed and grow, we are the leading provider of. Well, listen, I would love from, you know, for those of us who don't work in the agriculture industry. So ERP, could you just explain what ERP is for those who are like, okay, what does that stand for again? That, and then actually go ahead and explain that first. And then I can't wait to get to my follow up question. Okay. So ERP is the core business system of record that runs most companies of scale.

4:01So, of course, the famous names, SAP, Oracle, people are all familiar with these brands. These are built around ERP systems. ERP helps manage the finance and accounting, the monthly close, all of the financial reporting. It manages all the products that are inventoried and sold to customers for companies that sell physical products. So really any company at scale has some kind of ERP system that helps them integrate all the data, manage all the workflows and manage the accounting and finance function. We are an ERP company. I will say at this point in our trajectory, we are much more than that.

4:43We have solutions for almost everything that our customers do. We have mobile apps that manage the activity that service techs do in the service bays where they're fixing the equipment. We have business intelligence solutions. We have CRM products that help manage sales and marketing funnel. So really much more than ERP at this point, but we still think of ourselves as an ERP company at our core. Yeah. Did you mention what percentage of your business is agriculture? It's about a third of our business is agriculture. OK. And so then the other industries are going to be construction, forestry. Mining, material handling.

5:22Yes. And any any kind of industry that uses very heavy, very expensive, very complex equipment. Those are the markets that we serve. Those are specialized companies that need deep predictability and deep efficiency in managing equipment that's that expensive. And our software is architected from day one specifically for those kinds of enterprises. That's one of the things that makes us special is that we are not a generic ERP that is used by a very wide range of industries. We are very specific to this industry and everything in the product is purpose-built for this particular set of customers.

6:03What is going on? Give us, for those of us on the outside, what, like if you were to give us some headlines over the past year, I know there's been some movement, some inconsistency, you know, some challenges this past year in some of these industries. But what are some maybe kind of like top line headlines for those of us who have not been paying attention to your world, maybe over the past, you know, six, 12 months or 2025 that might be of interest or if that I'm sure is part of your regular. Oh, yeah, this is this is something that's been either a challenge or an opportunity this past year.

6:44Look, there's the short term story and there's the long term story. I'll cover the short term story really quickly, and then I'll move on to the long term story, which I think is more interesting. The short term story is that macroeconomics geopolitics right now are in a time of flux. And this industry is very heavily affected. You think about agriculture. American farms make a lot of their income by exporting crops to other countries. And so when we have trade wars, that's in flux. Most of the heavy equipment that our dealers sell, let's say, in the United States, or much of it is manufactured outside the United States.

7:20These gigantic OEM manufacturers are global companies, and so they ship this expensive equipment cross-border. That is subject to tariffs. So given everything that's going on in the short term, almost all these markets are in a time of flux. And that's certainly a big area of focus for our customers today. And we are also focused on it, rolling out short-term solutions to help them manage the tariffs and all of that. If I move on to the long term, which I think is the more interesting story, this market is in a period of rapid and ambitious digitization. So 10 to 15 years ago, I would say this was a somewhat traditional market with a focus on traditional approaches to sales and marketing and so on.

8:05And nearly every dealer and manufacturer in this space now recognizes that digital is the key to success in the future. The equipment itself is digital. So these multimillion dollar tractors, for instance, are smart tractors. They are wired. The telemetry data is used by a variety of people for a variety of purposes, for predictive maintenance and so on. The sales and marketing now, increasingly people are looking to make digital as they seek to broaden their markets. particularly in tough times, you need to broaden your reach, broaden your market. And everybody in this space recognizes that AI has enormous capabilities for driving efficiency, better planning, and growth.

8:45When you think about the cost of this equipment, as I've said, multi-million dollar equipment, making the right decisions at the right time is ultra important. The stakes are high, and AI has a big role to play. So the longer and I think more interesting story moving beyond the short-term macroeconomics is that there is a race to digitization. And that's uppermost in our mind is being the provider that helps our customers go on that digital transformation journey. I think it was, boy, I think it was John Deere or someone, I think it was at CES this year that I think they made some really big headlines by pronouncing, we're not a heavy machinery company.

9:27And I'm paraphrasing, I'm probably completely missing the exact wording. But I think that they really drew a big line in the sand and saying, we're an AI tech company. And I actually watched a long form video. And again, this was many months ago. So you'll have to kind of fill me in about just how true that is. when you think about just how critical efficiency is in an industry like agriculture and others. And in the long-form video that I watched, they showed just how important micro-efficiencies can be for profitability. Can you take what I'm stumbling on and explain why this is so important?

10:17Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with what they said and what you just said. These are established industries. These are not industries where someone can gain a huge advantage by doing something incredibly disruptive. These are physical industries rooted in land, rooted in sites. There's no purely digital player from Silicon Valley that's going to come in and disrupt the equipment industry. So competitive advantage in this space is a game of inches. It's about driving better intelligence around ordering and procurement, around better intelligence about maintaining the right inventory of equipment and parts and so on on the shelf.

10:54All of this has impact in terms of cash flow, in terms of capital management. All of it has impact in terms of being able to serve customers just in time. So it is a game of inches. And I absolutely agree. driving efficiency through digital intelligence is where competitive advantage is going to be gained and lost over the next 10 years. And I think all of our customers know this and are looking to us to help guide them or partner with them on this journey. They know that they are at core equipment enterprises and that we are at core a technology enterprise. And so we're very capable of driving innovation in AI and so on.

11:36And they're looking to us to help them go on this journey and succeed on this journey. In fact, Vikram, about five months ago, I think that you had made the announcement about VitalEdge AI Labs. Can you talk just a bit about what that is? Absolutely. AI is the future in this space. And after coming in, I realized that it was the future And I made a deep commitment and a deep investment in driving that transformation in ourselves and through that driving that transformation for our customers. So the AI Labs is a ring-fenced group of people who wake up every day, they eat, sleep, breathe, just AI, doing prototypes, doing innovation, co-innovation with our customers, taking new products through alpha beta all the way to GA to the point where they can be used at scale by our customers.

12:29This group of people is making rapid progress on bringing AI into our ERP systems, into our workflow. Look, the core engineering team that we have is more than capable of doing AI. But what I've seen over the course of my career is if you really want something to happen and you want to happen fast and at scale, you have to dedicate a team to that. And that's what we've done. And we're seeing some incredibly exciting results. We've got some announcements coming up in the next six months, and I think some even bigger announcements coming up down the road. So this AI lab team is really making a big impact for us and for our customers.

13:06your website is vitaledge.com tell me a little bit about the company and how you engage with your clients and so and kind of what i'm getting to is you know they may be listening to this conversation right now so they might be curious about well what is you know how would i work with you and how are you going to make i mean you already kind of talked about how you're going to make their life easier uh but i'm i'm curious about next steps for potential engagements and researching and kind of maybe tapping into some of the resources that you've got available? Yeah, I would say our journey with our customers is a journey of even deeper intimacy.

13:45So we have a proud history. Vital Edge is the result of a few acquisitions put together. And those acquisitions have been around for 20, 30 years, those original businesses, and they were born out of dealerships. And that's why our software is so authentic and so powerful. It really comes out of this world. So we have a long history. We have thousands of sites using our product every day. We have close relationships with all those customers. I would say for the next phase, we're looking to turn those into co-innovation relationships, which is the new frontier. Everybody's talking about AI. Everybody should be talking about AI in the world today.

14:24Everybody's talking about it. But there's AI and then there's AI. The first category is AI that does really nifty things, but doesn't actually make a tangible impact for its customers. Then there's real AI, which is rooted in customer workflow. Customer data is accurate, is intelligent, and really transforms customer activity. And that's our bailiwick. That's where we are planting our flag. And the only way to deliver real AI in the way that I defined it is with our customers, not as a technology company in a vacuum, but co-innovating with our customers. So I would say that's the next phase for us, which we've already begun, roping our customers inside the velvet rope, working with us to help think about how we can apply AI in real world settings.

15:12I love it. The website is vitaledge.com. When somebody goes to your website, what would you encourage them to do? I see a red button that says request a demo. That might be a great place. Absolutely. I think the product speaks for itself. It's the most powerful product in the industry. So we absolutely encourage people to take demos. But of course, nobody shows up, does a demo and says, yes, I will buy an ERP system. What our website is all about is information on how our customers can think about their business transformation. And we've really invested in that. There are white papers. There are case studies.

15:50We're all about partnering with our customers to help them solve their business challenges. Technology is just an enabler to solving their business challenges. And because we've been in this space so long, we really understand their business needs. So our website is filled with insights about if you're having trouble planning your parts inventory, how should you think about that? How should you approach the next phase? How can technology help with that? That's what we really want our customers to do is to engage with the thought material on our site. That builds a relationship between us and them.

16:20At the end of that process, of course, we are here with the technology solution. But that is the end of the process, not the beginning of the process. Vikram Savkar, CEO at VitalEdge Technologies. Your website is vitaledge.com. Vikram, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh. It was a pleasure.

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