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Charlie Weidman is president of Buddha Logic, an enterprise content management solutions provider that helps companies streamline digital document capture and management. Charlie shares how their process starts is they typically go in, analyze the process, and then take a look at the solution set or tools that will help clients get to their goal. That culturally can be a challenge because people like to do things a certain way. Charlie shares they may sometimes have to convince their vendors and customers to take advantage of this new process they’re implementing. Buddha Logic specializes in the accounts payable world, but has also gotten into digital signatures as well, and shares that there’s a whole industry waiting out there to enjoy more of this automated processing.Listen to the podcast:" data-artist="Business Leaders Podcast" data-paid="true" data-social="true" data-social_twitter="true" data-social_facebook="true" data-social_gplus="true" data-speedcontrol="true" data-uid="Dg85VFb0" data-download_id="095fe5f3791424195d887d5539af216a" >Charlie Weidman, President Buddha Logic, Enterprise Content Solutions Driving Cost Savings And Improving ProfitsWe’re incredibly fortunate to have as our guest Charlie Weidman. He’s the president of Buddha Logic, a Denver, Colorado-based company with 25 years of experience specializing in enterprise content management and smart process application solutions that produce a return on investment. Charlie, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Bob. Looking forward to sharing.Tell us how old did you get started?Out of school. I graduated from University of Colorado Boulder and was offered a job with Martin Marietta and they started my career in the data processing world. They presented me with a PC back in the mid ‘80s and they weren’t sure what to do with. It pretty much is the size of a desk , but it was a lot of fun to play with it. I developed some of my first applications using some tools that were available at that point in time for an IBM XT computer. That started my path down to the data world. As my tenure with Martin, they trained me in a couple different other products. Both of them were content management products. What do you do with your documents when they’re coming into your world? How do you store them and retrieve them? How do you version them?They trained me on a couple of products that gave me enough skill sets to start down the road of being an entrepreneur. I worked with a gentleman, in fact I had hired him or recruited him to help us do a project at Martin Marietta. A year later he offered me a job to come out and be employee number two with him in a small company. That’s how I got started in this whole world and have been through several very exciting and enjoyable smaller companies that failed. It was sobering and you learn a lot. I also didn’t ever want to go back to a larger company. I was getting used to being able to choose what I wanted to do and how I would develop and presented and delivered to a client.I think about that pivot from large corporate security blanket to, “I’m going to come out with a small company.” Take us to that decision process in your mind. What did that look like? It was an interesting choice. The salary increase helped a lot. I was offered pretty close to twice what I was making to start. I thought, “Wow.” At that point in time I was pretty young and I thought that’s great. I didn’t realize there were a lot of benefits that were being taken care of by my large corporate family that I now had to do by myself, so that was interesting. However, the work itself was really exciting. That was what made it easy, pushed me over the edge, so to speak, to say, “Let’s give this a try.”I think about in the early years when you’re doing that data storage. What was that like in a large corporation trying to get folks to trust their paper documents to storage? These are big contracts, so these companies had lots of paper. I guess the good news is that the company was sold on the process. “We are going to help you digitize. We’re going to move you from paper into this world.” We didn’t have nearly the battle I did when I moved as a smaller company that offered those services, because we didn’t have the branding and the loyalty and that recognition that, “Martin Marietta says we got to do this. This is probably where we should go.”A lot of folks, you’ve got the person out there that’s maybe in a similar situation. They are in a big company, they have an idea or a skill set. They’re going, “I think I’m going to go out and I’m going to do this myself.” How did you get your first client?Content Management: You’ve spent a lot of money doing the same thing perhaps a little faster and probably electronic, but not necessarily saving you any money.Again, the training that we had with Martin made it very easy for us to find other companies and other clients that we’re needing the same processes. Martin went after a certain tier of client and ignored many, many clients that could’ve used those services. We had a list of people that we could go talk to. Our first company was here locally and they did survey processing. You would fill out all these surveys and they would get scanned and we started looking for the marks and you’ve selected this information.Pre-internet?Yeah, it was all paper-based and then you scanned it. The whole dot-com era was just starting to take off and those paths hadn’t crossed yet. Web and content really haven’t crossed.There was a bandwidth function too.Yes.I remember fiber optic was being late everywhere, and then all those were broken, but we have the fiber optic still. For the folks who are going, “You have processes and documentation protocols.” What is a typical customer look like that you service? Our customers are wide range. We don’t necessarily aim at any particular market. Content within a business, all businesses have to pay bills, so there’s a whole financial, accounts payable, invoice world that you can automate. We can help people and most organizations have that need. We also can help move paper and processes and transactions around a business. For example, if I am in mortgage banking or in the mortgage loan business, every day there’s money that needs to be moved from one account to another.Oftentimes, we find there’s this sneaker net version of a process. “I know the people who can sign for this amount are in today, so I’m going to take this piece of paper and run it around.” It has to be done, and to the person who logs into Wells Fargo for example and logs this transaction by [2:00]. We’re able to look at those opportunities and say, “Let’s put this into an electronic form and pass the information around. If that person is not in the office and they’re at home or they’re on their phone, they can take a look and approve that same request over the phone. If they’re in the office, they bring up their interface and select ‘I approve it or reject it’ and here’s why.”We were talking before the show a bit about the mortgage company. If you could take us through the mortgage company before you got involved and the effect of your process and help after. Ten years ago we started with one mortgage company. They looked at their processes, they have all this paper that comes in the door that is shipped daily to them. It goes to the mail room, it’s opened up sorted, and they wanted to now capture that and digitize it. Instead of stapling and moving these packages of paper to processors who need to evaluate the loan and the analyst looks at it, they decided to scan it. The goal was to take that information coming in, central location, your mail room, scan all the information into a digitized format, recognize what the document is. We took some baby steps.Originally, you put barcodes on it or you put a separator sheet in between each document so you can say, “These next ten documents are loan applications and what follows is a title policy, and then there’s insurance documents.” You can imagine there was a lot of prep time to get something to be scanned, and that was still a cost savings because now, I’ve prepped everything, but once it’s electronic I can distribute it to anybody in my environment. Now the processor, instead of going to look through paper, can bring it up on their screen, couple monitors, and start flipping through and making decisions based on what they’re seeing in these documents.Step one was to figure out a way to get the information into an electronic format that can be distributed and be stored in a repository where we can then turn on some retention, another positive effect of doing any kind of content management. Because now I can start the clock ticking on data that I might be able to get rid of and not be exposed to legal problems if I’m hanging onto documents that should have been destroyed X number of years ago. That was a real positive thing. We’ve got step one, captured paper, transformed it into here’s what it is, and then put it into a repository so it can be accessed.For the person listening who says, “I could expect if you came into my realization, the first order of business you’re going to digitize my work.” That’s really not what you do when you first walk in the door. No. What we usually do is take a look at their process. That’s your step one. First of all, what is their goal? Why did you bring us in to begin with? Typically, it’s that mentality of, “We’ve got to get everything out of paper, we got to get it electronic.” What we typically do is we say, “That’s wonderful. Now let’s sit down and look at how you’re doing it today and let’s make sure your process is sound.” I don’t want to bring a solution in that mimics a process that doesn’t work well. You’ve spent a lot of money doing the same thing perhaps a little faster and probably electronic, but not necessarily saving you any money. It might cost you more money.I’m on the organization and I’ve got a process and five or six people involved and I’m involved. How do you take and go in and analyze the process? Do you bring the stakeholders in? What do you do? Typically, we start with the business user, and then we find out from them where their struggle is, their heartburn. “Here’s why I’m bringing you in, because we struggle with this process.”Which could be the symptom.Then we whiteboard. Our method is to sit down as if we’re part of their team and we start white boarding why we’re doing this. “Here’s the process, here’s where our heart burn is. Ultimately, if we can get rid of that, we’ve now improved our process in the bottom line. We’re saving money or we’re delivering product faster to our customer.” We typically go in, analyze the process, and then take a look at the solution set or tools that will help them get to their goal.As the business owner, and I’ve got a pain point enough to the point where we reach out where you come. Between diagnosis and prescription, what’s that typically? Is there a typical timeframe? A lot depends on the size of the heartburn, so giving a span of time is difficult at times, but typically we like to start with a department that first of all embraces technology. That’s a big important thing is that is has a good relationship with their IT department. There can be a lot of stress between business users and owners and the IT department. One of the trends I notice starting back in the early ‘80s is that the IT department drove most of the software or the technology projects.Now I use software, I can tell what kind of document it is, where it starts, where it ends, and then I can present it to a processor.Click To TweetOver the last ten years, it’s now the business owner driving it. IT, because of the way that the tool sets are set up, they’re aimed towards the business user. I know my business. IT doesn’t necessarily know my business or care about it and they shouldn’t. They should make sure the network is running and that I have plenty of space to store things and everything’s running efficiently and maybe monitoring bandwidth. That’s great. Now the business owner says, “Here’s the functions I need to happen. Make sure my infrastructure is working all right. I’m going to use products that support me.”You got to be set up for additional storage capabilities clearly. If you go from not storing all your stuff to storing all your stuff, and there’s that estimation as well. I guess the pinnacle is taking that group of users and understanding their heartburn and saying, “Let’s put together a pilot that says we’re going to address your problem and we’re going to put these three tools in place or X number tools in place,” and we’re going to say, “Give us a couple of months and we’ll run this in parallel with your current processes.”When you are contacted by a company, are you typically contacted by the CEO, the CFO, or the IT folks?These days, it’s usually the business owner and then they have support from their CTO or their CEO. Sometimes, the CFO. In the case of financial, we’re finding a lot of CFO-level managers come in and say, “We need to save some money here. We need to take our processes and start looking at where we can save money.”Do they perceive they have a leak or do they know they have a leak? They know the process is struggling. One of the things that I’ve seen customers of my clients want visibility into what they’re doing. “I sent you my information, what status is it in? How do I know what you’re doing? If I have to wait two weeks to find out it never got out of somebody’s Inbox, I’m not going to be a very happy customer.” Part of what we’ve noticed is that upper management, the C-level people as well as business owners go, “I need to be able to tell my customer exactly where they are in the process of us handling their transaction.”We were talking about a potential case study. There were some metrics that you mentioned about a mortgage company. Let’s dig into that a little bit. I mentioned that mortgage company where we started with baby steps. We’ve got a central location where we’re processing the paper, it’s electronic, we’re moving it around. Right now, we’re at about 98% paper, 2% electronic that shows up. The next step is to give incentive to vendors to say, “You no longer have to mail your stuff to us or ship it to us. We’re going to save you $10,000 a month because you’re not shipping us paper anymore. All you have to do is send it to this FTP site or you can attach it to an email. Send me the documents that way.” They gave their customers some incentive to save money, so now we’re shifting. We went from 95% plus of paper, to the first year, it was closer to 60% when they offered it. Then about six months after that, we were at 98% electronic, 2% paper. Today, they’re less than a percent paper. Almost everything is sent electronically.If I’m the business owner of the mortgage company and the typical complaint from the person is going like, “I send my app and it goes to a black hole and nobody knows when it’s going to be done in my time has been in the processes forever.” For you, do you have tools within the process to say, “Our time from the front door to approval or disapproval is X?”Yes. If we go back to that case study, we’ve taken the paper issue away from people having to deal with paper. We have electronic information and we’ve added another layer. Now I don’t have to do anything with the separator sheets. I’ve eliminated all that pre-processing because it’s electronic. Now I use software, I can tell what kind of document it is, where it starts, where it ends, and then I can present it to a processor to say, “The human is grading how the robot did.” The robot says it’s this, I need you to confirm it, so they do that.The next step is we start extracting information off the document. Nobody’s entering data, they’re looking at it saying, “It got It right, the computer got it right,” or “We need to fix it.” The data now, we’re not only figuring out what we’ve got with our electronic information, we’ve figured out what we want to extract off of it. Then we bundle that all up together and start a workflow which says, “Now push it to the different analysts for them to start doing their job.” Now the SLA becomes measurable, the service level agreement. SLA is I received your paper at [10:00] in the morning and within 40 minutes, I’m going to get it to an analyst. That’s our SLA currently for our mortgage clients, is within 40 minutes, those analysts are looking at documents that have come in the door.What do you think it was before? Back at the beginning, the paper day, it was probably about three days before the analyst finally got it. Three days to less than 40 minutes.I think about there’s this perceived benefit. You had all the paperwork hanging, you’ve now got this faster processor and the right person. What other things did they discover? Storage paper. We used to store all these for