Cloud Horizons: Overcoming Challenges in Water Utilities with Modern Solutions

By: RPI Tech Connect   September 10, 2024

In this episode of RPI Tech Connect, part two of our Cloud Horizons series, we explore the unique challenges facing water utilities today. Joined by Infor public sector experts Bob St. Ledger and Bob Benstead, we discuss how cloud technology is addressing issues such as aging infrastructure, cybersecurity risks, and workforce shortages.

This segment highlights the need for infrastructure investment and navigating high costs, while also emphasizing compliance with regulations like California’s AB 1668. Bob St. Ledger and Bob Benstead discuss how modern solutions like Infor CloudSuite provide vital tools for data management, AI-driven analysis, financial stability, and workforce management. They also offer advice for setting realistic goals, engaging stakeholders, and future-proofing platforms.

Tune in to learn how Infor CloudSuite is helping water utilities meet increasing regulatory requirements, avoid penalties, and ensure long-term financial stability.

Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories.

Meet Today’s Guest, Bob Benstead

Bob Benstead is the Industry Director for Infor’s Public Sector and Utility sectors.  His duties include strategic industry planning, partner relations, global industry council management, and client relations.  He has been in the government and utility software business for over 25 years and has held several executive roles including managing all sales and delivery related operations for various government software products.

Bob has experience in government operations such as regulatory compliance, infrastructure management, citizen relations, and utility management.  Bob has been a member of the CLEAR Regulatory committee, AWWA, APWA, IAM, and has been a guest lecturer for the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Engineering Professional Development Program and Colorado State University.

Meet Today’s Guest, Bob St. Ledger

Bob St. Ledger is Senior Strategy Director for Infor Public Sector focusing on designing and enabling secure, multi tenant cloud-first solutions across states, cities, counties, tribal nations, K-12 districts, water utilities, transportation and federal agencies. Bob has worked for a number of large and small business application and technology firms including Oracle, EDS, International Telesystems Corporation, EIS International, and Versatility.

Over the course of his twenty-five years in the technology industry, Robert has held a variety of roles in product management and development; solution marketing; and program management.

Meet Your Host, Chris Arey

Chris Arey is an experienced B2B marketing professional with nearly a decade of working in content creation, copywriting, SEO, website architecture, corporate branding, and social media. Beginning his career as an analyst before making a lateral move into marketing, he combines analytical thinking with creative flair—two fundamental principles required in marketing.

With a Bachelor’s degree in English and certifications from the Digital Marketing Institute and HubSpot, Chris has spearheaded impactful content marketing initiatives, participated in corporate re-branding efforts, and collaborated with celebrity influencers. He has also worked with award-winning PR professionals to create unique, compelling campaigns that drove brand recognition and revenue growth for his previous employers.

Chris’ versatility is highlighted by his experience working across different industries, including HR, Tech, SaaS, and Consulting.

About RPI Tech Connect

RPI Tech Connect is the go-to podcast for catching up on the dynamic world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Join us as we discuss the future of ERPs, covering everything from best practices and organizational change to seamless cloud migration and optimizing applications. Plus, we’ll share predictions and insights of what to expect in the future world of ERPs.

RPI Tech Connect delivers relevant, valuable information in a digestible format. Through candid, genuine conversations and stories from the world of consulting, we aim to provide actionable steps to help you elevate your organization’s ERP. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the ERP scene, our podcast ensures you’re well-equipped for success.

Tune in as we explore tips and tricks in the field of ERP consulting each week and subscribe to RPI Tech Connect below.

Transcript

Chris Arey (00:03)
Historically laggards of the public sector, water utilities are now adopting new tech at a rapid rate. Tune in as we explore the reasons why, including new regulatory requirements, aging infrastructure, and climate change.

Chris Arey (00:15)

This is RPI Tech Connect, and I’m your host, Chris Arey. Thanks for tuning in. On today’s episode, we’re focusing on yet another aspect of the public sector, water utilities. From tackling water utilities’ key challenges to showcasing how cloud technology aids in compliance, risk management, and service delivery, we’re discussing it all. To help us navigate these waters, I’m pleased to welcome back our two public sector guests from Infor, Bob St. Ledger and Bob Benstead.

Bobs, welcome back to the show.

Bob Benstead (00:36)
Thank you, and how are you today?

Bob St. Ledger (00:37)
Thank you.

Chris Arey (00:40)
Thank you. Yeah, so before we jump into our topic today, I think it would be awesome if you could briefly remind our listeners of your backgrounds, particularly as they relate to water utilities. Bob Benstead, we can start with you.

Bob Benstead (00:57)
Sure. I’m Bob Benstead. I’m in the industry strategy group here at Infor. I’ve been in the public sector business and water business for almost 27 years now. Certainly have seen some dynamic changes over the period of time and look forward to this discussion.

Chris Arey (01:17)
Awesome. Bob St. Ledger.

Bob St. Ledger (01:19)
Yeah, welcome everybody. Good to see you again or hear you again. I work with Bob Benstead in the public sector strategy team, again at Infor. I’ve been doing public sector solutions for Infor and other application vendors for probably about 30 years. Spent lot of time, almost the whole time has been in public sector with everything from cities and counties and states, water utilities, K -12, tribal nations, transportation, so forth. So again, excited to be here.

Chris Arey (01:48)
Thank you both for that refresher and for joining me on the program for a follow -up series. As I mentioned, today’s topic, water utilities, what’s happening in that space. It seems like they’re facing a range of issues from aging infrastructure and cybersecurity threats to financial stability and workforce challenges. So I just mentioned some big topics there.

These challenges didn’t happen overnight and there’s been some developments in all of those areas. So I’m hoping you can elaborate on how these issues are affecting water utilities and what’s kind of developing in that space. So Bob Benstead, we can start with you.

Bob Benstead (02:31)
Sure. You know, one of the main topics that unfortunately doesn’t go away, but is certainly very prevalent in the water industry and infrastructure in general is the aging and huge needs to invest in infrastructure. It’s especially relevant in some of the utility sectors and water sectors, because when something goes wrong, it is extremely impactful. People don’t have water.

They don’t have you know, a power or whatever the case in the, in specifically to water. There’ve been some really big alarm bells over the last couple of years. The American society of civil engineers, for instance, has started doing some infrastructure report cards and it affects a lot of people. mean, you can imagine thousands of water authorities, but you know, it’s big stuff.

There’s over, I think 2 .2 million miles of pipe in the United States that carry water or convey water. And there’s a lot of needs. And this evaluation on the last round gave the overall infrastructure a C minus. What’s really scary is the enormous tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars are needed to bring the standards up in the infrastructure.

To modern and future type levels, it’s a huge, huge investment. And of course, we recently, a couple of years ago had the infrastructure bill, that is starting, but to be quite honest with you, it’s a drop in the bucket. The other one. Yeah, yeah, definitely, no kidding. The cybersecurity risks. We’ve heard of some of the hijacking of some of these local authorities and even energy.

Chris Arey (04:15)
Nice pun there.

Bob Benstead (04:26)
Companies and what have you, you can’t understate that risk and it’s only getting bigger. One of the main reasons is you have a lot of instrumentation, telemetry, and so the points of attack on these systems are even expanding. And quite frankly, there’s players out there that they make a living, if you will, off of bringing down these systems and holding them hostage and what have you. So there’s huge impacts on that.

I think Bob can speak to some of the financial instabilities and the workforce challenges on the same thing, but it’s not a simple issue and it certainly is a complex thing to solve on all of these.

Chris Arey (05:11)
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Before we switch over to Bob St. Ledger to hear about the financial impact, you mentioned that they got this rating of C minus for their infrastructure grade. What kind of things are they measuring when they’re putting together that card? Do you know?

Bob Benstead (05:26)
Stability, failures, condition assessments, impact, risk, all those types of things go into that. And of course, this is coming from civil engineers who design these systems, oversee the construction, rehab of these systems. So it’s a multitude of things, but at the end of the day, they’re measuring the condition they are, what it takes to fix them, and the impact on society and clients if they fail and when they fail.

Chris Arey (05:58)
Got it. Thank you for sharing that. As you mentioned, water utilities have a major responsibility. So to hear that the condition and state of their systems is not great is concerning.

Bob Benstead (06:11)
Well, it’s, it’s, as I said, a lot of money, but the one thing that is starting to come into effect on this is the climate impact, know, the drought in the West and, you know, all the ramifications of, you know, what happens when you can’t get water and the sustainability of these systems. But there’s some couple hidden things in there, you know, about demographics.

If and when we hit, probably when, when we hit these drought levels and extended droughts, it’s going to shift the demographics. People are not going to be able to continue living where they are or operating farms where they are, whatever the case may be, they’re going to move to other areas that have water and then impact those areas as well. So there’s some hidden ramifications at a societal level on what happens when these things go out of

Chris Arey (07:05)
Yeah, no, thank you. That’s, I didn’t even think about that. How, you know, these, the trickle down effect, right? Like, you know, at the, the surface, these organizations are not, you know, they’re struggling to uphold their services in the areas they’re operating, but as climate changes, it’s going to force people out. And those challenges will be presented in new areas where people are flocking to.

Bob St. Ledger, from a finance perspective, what can you share with us?

Bob St. Ledger (07:36)
And I would say the thanks again, Bob, good point you made. In terms of financial stability, I’d say that’s also linked to these modernization efforts to move infrastructure, aging infrastructure, not just the water pipe and everything underground, but also the in -house data centers that really need to be in the cloud.

So I think that cloud migration tied to financial stability as well as a workforce are kind of three areas that most water utilities struggle with. In fact, many public sector organizations struggle with. So when you think of how to make sure your instance is always available so that you can serve your customers, give them the water that they need, give them the billing they need, et cetera, you need a robust platform that doesn’t deal, that kind of avoids a whole issue with cybersecurity threats and what happens with those.

So when those do happen, even with a long time on -premise clients, we’ll also… experience cyber security threats, even though it’s on -prem doesn’t really negate that. So as people decide to move their platforms to the cloud, they do that for many reasons, including financial reasons, because they want to have a solution that’s going to help them always provide better services to their citizenry.

Also, in terms of their workforce, the internal workforce, like who wants to work on an old legacy platform? They really want to be able to use modern tools that the internet provides, mobility, provides, et cetera. So a lot of reasons why folks want to move their instances to the cloud. But with that, it does breed some challenges with cybersecurity, which I’ll just

Chris Arey (09:13)
I’m actually really glad you mentioned infrastructure in that context. Cause when Bob Benstead did start it, my initial thought too, was like software, know, the systems are using internally to manage, you know, delivering these services, it infrastructure is twofold here, right? It is the actual like pipes and containment centers and the facilities that are administering water throughout the communities. But in addition to the software they’re using to administer and manage that like on the back end, so.

Bob St. Ledger (09:45)
You really can’t have one without the other. When you want to modernize your pipes and the infrastructure that your physical water providing infrastructure, it doesn’t make sense to do that without also looking at a better way to manage your applications.

Again, the cloud is what folks are navigating to finally. Public sector in general has been a bit of a laggard in terms of moving to the cloud, but I think everybody agrees that that is the way to get for many reasons, including dealing with cybersecurity, sustainability, like we talked about, et cetera. Workforce, modern workforce.

Chris Arey (10:17)
Great, yeah. So it’s clear then that this water utility sector is facing challenges. And you mentioned them being laggards historically, but it sounds like that might be changing, which brings me to this next point of how are these organizations overcoming these issues and what actions are they taking to prepare? Bob Benstead, would you?

Bob Benstead (10:42)
Sure. Well, there’s a lot of things, you know, there’s multiple facets, I guess, of this. You know, if you’re to take the investment, the capital investment portion of it, historically, they have taken a swipe at doing what they think is best. But there are tools now that allow you to go and do some very detailed assessments and analysis and going, OK, incorporating risks.

How much money I have, how long do I have that money? There’s ways now that will allow you to prioritize where you’re going to invest. And having a complete system such as we offer, it allows that seamless capability to say, okay, here in the field, here’s what this conditions are and all the risks and let’s move it up and seek funding from whatever source, grants and so on and so forth.

And then circle back down into the projects. But more importantly, you’re making sure with tools now that are available to pick the right ones. What is the impact that the old verbiage of biggest bang for the buck, if you will. That’s one that’s really good. The other one that’s coming into play and it’s a highly used word these days, AI.

There are now cases where AI has the potential to not only suggest and lead you to the best outcomes, but actually do predictive type things as well. So it’s not just simply, hey, I’m going to automate responses to service request stuff. This is actually having the capability of taking this AI capability and really applying it to your operations and your strategy.

And start thinking in terms of, what happens in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? What can I do now to elongate the life of my infrastructure and things like that? So those are some tools that they’re looking at right now to kind of move the dial forward, what have you. Now that also can be applied to, let’s say, where do I get my money from? How legit is this? What are the options?

You know, that kind of thing. So there’s some very powerful tools coming into play, really to kind of maximize where you get the money, how much you can get, and where you apply it to.

Chris Arey (13:11)
It sounds like these tools probably support managing water consumption levels too for like compliance reasons. Is that, is that true?

Bob Benstead (13:19)
Absolutely, absolutely. And there’s all kinds of intelligence systems that are, they’ve been around for a few years, AMI and all the types of consumption meter, end meter type tools that will allow consumption, what have you. But the AI component now can again, look at trends and look at anomalies and look at… say spots that don’t seem to be normal and stuff like that. So you can apply huge volumes of data and utilize AI to actually go, okay, I seem to have in this water zone, some real issues around consumption or water loss or things like that. So you are correct. It can be applied kind of up and down the spectrum.

Chris Arey (14:07)
Awesome. Thanks for clarifying that there. And I want to, I want to sidebar here for a bit and explore this compliance angle for a moment. you know, we’re discussing, you know, the drivers behind why water utilities are adopting new technology. And it sounds like compliance could be a big, a reason for that. so could you, do you know anything that’s happening compliant and regulatory requirement wise? Like that might be affecting these organizations.

Bob Benstead (14:38)
Absolutely. And you have these from multiple levels. Keep in mind, local law authorities have to answer to their states. They have to answer to the federal EPA and others. So there’s multiple levels of regulatory issues and regulatory compliance they’ve got to do. But one good example is in the state of California, for instance, they have had some extended droughts.

They’ve been through the up years of huge water availability to the point where floods are a concern. And then they swing clear back over to multi -year, sometimes 10 years worth of drought. And so all these sweeping changes forced California a couple of years ago to pass a new regulation that basically said, you will have a budget for your water and that’s what you get. So this bill, believe I want to say is assembly bill 1668.

But the long-term challenge of that and the long -term ramifications of that are enormous. Starting very soon, these water authorities get so much water and that’s that. And if they don’t stick to that, there are steep penalties. I believe $10 ,000 per day fines and what have you. Now the outcome, supposedly on models now say they’re going to save enormous amount of money.

Chris Arey (15:56)
Wow.

Bob Benstead (16:04)
But to get to that, it’s also going to cost these authorities enormous amount of money. So there’s a lot of ramifications of that, but California was the first state in the union to start saying, okay, enough’s enough. We can’t just keep pumping groundwater. We just can’t be grabbing water from every river and every lake that there is. Here’s your budget as a water authority. Here’s what you have to live with. Start making plans to live with that.

Chris Arey (16:08)
Yeah.

Bob Benstead (16:32)
The knock-on effect on that may be something like you do see in some water authorities in the West already, where that’s passed down to individual households, where they too have budget billing. Meaning you have a family four on a 2 ,500 square foot house with X amount of consumption history. Here’s your water allocation. This is what you get either per month, per quarter, per year. That’s that. Anything above that, you’re going to pay dearly.

So again, one of those knock-on effects.

Chris Arey (17:05)
Yeah, I’d say it sounds like that’s the kind of thing that changes the landscape of these areas. You know, and you only have so much water to use. If you can’t run your farm anymore with that water, you’re going to have to move somewhere else. Right.

Bob Benstead (17:16)
Yeah. Well, yeah. And that’s happening in the Central Valley California. There’s a lot of fallow land down there because they simply can’t get the water. But no pun intended, but changing the landscape. That is a huge effort in local authorities. I myself, you know, have put in drought tolerant landscaping. So a little play on that pun, but yeah, it’s from top to bottom. The ramifications are huge.

Chris Arey (17:37)
Yeah.

You live in California, right? so you’re seeing these things firsthand then.

Bob Benstead (17:42)
I do indeed, yep. Yeah, experience them. Great stories to tell, ugly stories to tell, but I’ll just mention one real quick. The last big drought when we had water restrictions, it was a mandatory reduction of 35 % of your water consumption. Doesn’t seem like a big amount, it’s a big amount. However, along with that, that nobody really anticipated is lo and behold,

Chris Arey (18:05)
Yeah.

Bob Benstead (18:12)
The folks in the Sacramento Folsom, you know, Northern California area did comply. They met the 35 % reduction. But what happened is the revenue going into these water authorities dropped accordingly. So, yeah, hey, listen, go comply. We’re in a water shortage. A lot of people did. Well, the other part was, you know, you don’t have the revenue. And so you had to have adjustments and things like that. So anyway.

Chris Arey (18:21)
Nice. It’s a double-edged sword there, yeah.

Bob Benstead (18:43)
It really is. really is. Changing times.

Chris Arey (18:46)
You mentioned something earlier about, know, these water authorities need to comply with this new assembly bill with water consumption levels. But in order to do that, they have, there’s like an investment or a financial investment to kind of support, I guess, managing that requirement. that, could you elaborate on that? Is that like installing new software or is it the pipes again? Like what is, what is that financial investment?

Bob Benstead (19:11)
It’s actually a multitude of things. Yes, it’s infrastructure. It’s coming up with reasonable objectives to get to that water allocation. Because don’t forget you have water allocation for agriculture. You have it for manufacturing.

You have it for individual households and what have you. So a lot of it’s coming up with the plans and defining what you’re trying to do and how you’re going to go about that and who has priority and premises and all that type of stuff. But then you have to have the systems to actually manage that, enforce that, and even to the end date, build that properly and see what happens. So it’s an infrastructure investment, it’s a software investment, it’s more importantly an operational investment.

Chris Arey (19:59)
Okay, got it. And so this is a, you know, we spent some time here talking about water utilities specifically in the California region. It sounds like consumption is a big, big challenge or thing to watch out for in that area. Are there other types of challenges happening for water utilities across the country? Like you mentioned, yeah, is there something else?

Bob Benstead (20:22)
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of water quality, water availability. But if you go back and, you know, other parts of the United States and world, quite honestly, the quality of water, you may have all the water in the world, but it’s not high expense to get it prepared and have it available for water consumption.

So water availability in the first place, water quality cost of delivery, all that type of stuff. And it changes regionally, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of issues around once you get the water, what do you do with it? And you got to make sure it’s consumable, if you will.

Chris Arey (21:03)
Yeah, for sure. The quality thing, especially there, you figure how much investment is involved with filtration and purification of water and how it’s being delivered. So this brings me to my next point here. How does a modern solution like CloudSuite support these needs?

Bob St. Ledger (21:26)
If I could just, I want to pull a couple of Bob’s points before. One was around AI and one was around financial stability. think those two are really two things to focus in on. In terms of AI, it’s really about there’s so much data out there. It’s making sure you have the right platform to access the data. And it’s usually in the cloud. Sometimes it’s on -prem, but you want to find the data source and apply your AI against it to then make those decisions, see those trends and see what’s happening. So I think that’s critical to be able to do that.

But again, this access to the data because we have the data, it’s just making access and then applying AI against it to make sense of it. The other thing is around financial stability because you want to make sure as you are looking at really water consumption, it’s also about like how much money do you have to operate to your water utility? What’s the funding source? Is it a grant that’s coming from the government? Sorry, I’m just gonna bark.

What’s the grant source coming from the government? So you want to even use AI to monitor your contracts and your funding sources to make sure you’re not going to run out of the funding sources before you’re able to really fully complete your So a lot is going on with the financial and the management side of the water utility, in addition to making sure the water is clean and available for the citizens.

Chris Arey (22:43)
So it sounds like that info kind of provides visibility into fund sourcing, is that right?

Bob St. Ledger (22:48)
Absolutely, and it’s all tied into our accounting structure in GL and it’s very flexible depending on what the water utility wants to report on or which is often different than what a city or county may want

Chris Arey (23:01)
Excellent Bob Benstead, did anything to add there?

Bob Benstead (23:05)
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things about that is when you’re looking in prioritization and looking at all this type of stuff, you have to have all the information. AI just doesn’t run in a vacuum. So you have to also have very good data management practices. you’re starting to see a lot of folks, not only just in water utilities, but in government, local governments.

They are an executive-level data director and folks that have to manage that. So you have to have oversight and you have to understand your data and make sure it’s in the right form to be consumed by some of these new tools and what have you. And that’s not necessarily a magic wand. So you have to plan for that as part of using all of this great AI type technology. there’s, guess you would say, operational changes that you have to do as an authority.

Chris Arey (24:05)
Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that too about like, so there are obviously things that water utilities need to focus on in the short term, know, managing, you know, consumption or staying below that threshold that like California law, for example, has established. But in addition to that, they have to think long -term strategy too. And so how do they go about, I guess, balancing those potentially competing, you know, requirements? This CloudSuite support that and maybe you could talk through how that how it does.

Bob Benstead (24:40)
Sure. mean, not only for the management of the data and all the tools and the AIs and what have you, but also having the analytic capability of looking at trends going forward. We mentioned the cybersecurity part of it, but along with all that comes policy. Number one, you have to have the policy and make sure those are in place. Now, some of those will come from your governing jurisdictions, whether it’s a state or EPA or whatever.

But the other one is at the end of the day, you also have to have the people, the resources, the talent, if you will, to ensure you have people coming in through that. One of the things that’s happening in this industry is a lot of people are hitting that age where they want to retire. So you have this young generation coming up that are very tech savvy.

But they’re not experienced in the government area or the utility area, what have you. So you need to make sure that you prepare for the long -term of having the actual bodies, if you will, and the resources to manage all these things. That includes policy, software, infrastructure, field forces, all that type of stuff.

Chris Arey (25:58)
Nice. And this is one of the topics that kind of overlapped with the city county government that we spoke about on our first segment with the current generation retiring and bringing in the new generation and what better way to do it than to use software and tools that’s going to appeal to them. Right.

Bob Benstead (26:17)
Absolutely. Bring them in on the discussions. Don’t be afraid to have their input if you can.

Bob St. Ledger (26:22)
And all the younger workers, don’t want to deal with any old legacy green screen. They want the mobility. They want something modern, new, and fresh, which is really what the COD solution

Chris Arey (26:32)
Okay. Thank you for, for explaining that to me here. So we are getting close to time. So thank you both again for hanging out with me this afternoon. Before we wrap up, you know, I like to end these segments with a question and that is if you could offer today’s audience, one piece of advice about water utilities and the challenges that are happening in that space and how, you know, new technology is supporting their needs. What would you, what would you say?

Bob Benstead, we can start with you.

Bob Benstead (27:05)
Sure, think, you know, we’ve discussed this before, but have realistic goals and don’t adopt bright, shiny things just for the fact they’re bright and shiny. You know, make sure that the tools, the people, all the things you’re investing in does have realistic capabilities are working toward realistic goals, but make sure you know what the resources are.

You always have to have good sponsorship and what have you. But I also suggest that some of the new generation come in, are very savvy. They really understand this stuff. So as much as possible, make sure you reach out and include input from all the vested parties, your own workforce, your own experts, your own people.

And then where it’s practical, bring in your… bring in the public or bring in your water clients in some kind of forum, if not to make decisions, at least to understand their angle on things. And quite often they have some very good suggestions and things such as simple as, gee, what do you think of self -service? Is it easy? Do we make it right for you? Can you actually use this type of stuff? So bring all those folks in and

Chris Arey (28:22)
Yeah.

Bob Benstead (28:25)
Bring in your public and your constituents if you can, at least get their input and bounce things off of them. And we’ve had clients that do that. They actually will do trial runs, input sessions, workshops, things like that. And by and large, it really adds to their success.

Chris Arey (28:42)
Awesome. Thanks for that. Bob St. Ledger.

Bob St. Ledger (28:45)
Yeah, we just add that as you’re looking forward and trying to decide what is your cloud strategy that you have to make sure your platform is ready for what happens today as well as the next decade or two decades out. Organizations, water utilities, city, they’re not going to change their platform probably again in our lifetime. So you really have to make sure that it’s going to support.

The needs of today, the emergencies, the wildfires, the water, the drought conditions, et cetera, Bob was talking about. So I think you have to make sure your solution’s gonna support all those variations. Some you can think about, some you can’t even think about. So it does require lot of imagination about what your platform can do for you in the future.

Chris Arey (29:25)
And those are important questions to be answering when you’re evaluating options. So thanks for that excellent advice, as always. It’s been a pleasure having you both on the show today. So thank you so much for your time. For those of you tuning in, if you have any questions about our discussion today or about Infor Cloud Suite, feel free to reach out at podcast@rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast@rpic.com.

This is RPI Tech Connect and I’m your host Chris Aery. We’ll see you next time.

Bob St. Ledger (30:01)
Goodbye.

Bob Benstead (30:03)
Thank you.