S2: E2: The Power of Partnership: How Collaboration Transforms the Manufacturing Industry

The Three Partnership Channels Behind CAD-to-ERP Integration
The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — with Jeff Brickler and Scott Brickler (CADTALK)

Jeff: Welcome back to The Integrate Intelligently Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Brickler, and today, no surprise, I'm joined again by my brother, Scott Brickler, founder and CEO of CADTALK. Last time we were both just back in the office. I've been back a week and I'm about recovered. How's it going for you?

Scott: Good — getting ready for another big trip. We're going to Hawaii for about a week and a half, a little work and a little fun. My wife is always super prepared, so she's going through all the checklists making sure we have everything packed.

Jeff: Mine's the same — a packing list with everything checked off and crossed out. We should be thankful we have people in our lives who take care of those things so we can be here on this podcast and focus on the work.

By way of introduction: we're CADTALK Software. We help manufacturing companies accelerate their engineering-to-manufacturing handoff — in layman's terms, we're a CAD integration platform, and we work with manufacturers all over the world.

Today we're exploring partnerships. When you ask what problem we solve, the answer sounds straightforward: we help manufacturing companies, we're an integration platform. But the ecosystem we work in is fairly sophisticated, and there are three distinct partnership relationships underneath that. When I came to CADTALK ten years ago, one of the things we talked about was that we often work with partners, and honestly I didn't know what that meant. So this is a good chance to explore what it actually looks like.

Partnership One: The End User
Jeff: The first channel may not seem like a partnership at first, because it's with the end user — the customer themselves. But we do partner with them on their journey, whether that's a digital transformation or a process improvement effort. It's more than making a sale or selling software.

This is the most straightforward of the three. We partner with manufacturing companies to help them accelerate or transform their engineering-to-manufacturing workflows, which usually involves implementing a solution, and sometimes just consulting with them on what they're doing today and where it could improve.

Scott, you've been working with engineering and manufacturing companies for almost thirty years. When we partner with them, what are they trying to overcome?

Jobs to Be Done: People Don't Buy Drills, They Buy Holes
Scott: I like to look at this through the jobs-to-be-done framework, which is a common way to think about products. The idea is that people don't buy drills, they buy holes. They have a job to do, which is to make a hole, not to own a drill. Everybody wants to talk about the motor and the ergonomic handle and the feature list — but at the end of the day, how easily can I get the holes I need?

That framework works well for partnerships too. Saying "partner" is a good way of putting it: we're going to help you get this job done. Not just provide software, not just hand over something with a lot of cool features. We combine our expertise with the tools we've built to produce an outcome.

When you work with us, you're paying us to do that job for you, and it involves both consulting on best practices and delivering the software. That's why we don't simply peddle software — "come buy our thing, good luck, on your way." We put people on our implementation teams who are experts in this specific problem. A lot of them come from industry, from our customers even. They've spent years in manufacturing, they've lived with this problem, and they know exactly how the job gets done.

Jeff: And it's not just one job. As a tangent — how many times do you go out and buy something for a job and then feel like the job is done? Mulch is the joke in my house. You buy the mulch, and you feel like you got the job done. But the job was buying the mulch. Somebody still has to put it on the flower beds.

Scott: Right, and the actual job of mulch is improving the look of your landscaping and keeping weeds down. Buying it is one step of many. That's why it matters to define what the job actually is.

Jeff: Important for anything, really.

Transforming Engineering Intent Into Manufacturing Execution
Scott: For us, the job is the engineering-to-manufacturing handoff. Engineers design things and then somebody has to make them, and there are typically multiple systems involved — a design system the engineer works in, and a manufacturing system the rest of the company works in, usually an ERP. We're the piece that handles transferring and transforming that data from one system to the other.

Traditionally, that job was done manually by a manufacturing engineer. We automate more of it. We don't replace that person — we augment them. That's the tagline I always come back to: we transform engineering intent into manufacturing execution. After design is done, somebody has to make it, and we grease the wheels of getting it made.

Jeff: So the partnership with our end users isn't just about software or an implementation project. It's about helping them achieve the end result, which usually means time savings, more time spent on actual engineering, better lead times, shipping faster, and fewer fire drills — fewer people running around because a part is missing or there's a mistake or an engineering change nobody caught.

Hard Savings, Soft Costs, and the Value of Consistent Data
Scott: There's the obvious piece: a task took an hour, now it takes half an hour. That's easy to measure. But there are also the soft costs. How fast can you go from idea to collecting the money? Compress that, and you improve cash flow — that's what makes businesses go. Speed in the market is a competitive advantage people are willing to pay for.

Jeff: What's interesting now is that with the advent of large language models and the ability to work across your data, the quality of that data matters more than ever. We've always preached the value of data quality, and a better process and a better tool produce a more repeatable, consistent process, which produces better data. That used to sound like a nice-to-have. Now, with models training on your data, consistency is more valuable than it's ever been.

Scott: The data becomes the asset.

The other thing I keep noticing is speed to action. I have an executive assistant now, and one of the things we changed was how things move into my inbox for review. I don't check email constantly, because I'm working on projects and running the company — but I don't want to lose opportunities as they come in. So we operationalized it with rules that keep things moving forward while I'm doing something else.

The other day someone emailed about what turned out to be a sales opportunity — an old contact with questions. The next move was obviously to get a meeting going and pull Jeff into the call, and she knew to do that. Every minute that sits, the opportunity decays. There's an opportunity cost.

It's the same with any automation. Instead of that engineering-to-manufacturing transition queuing up and waiting for someone to work on it, it happens alongside the work you're already doing, so you can get to market faster. People discount that benefit because it isn't as obvious.

The Risk of Doing Nothing
Jeff: Opportunity cost is hard to quantify. People think indecision has no effect — if I don't decide, if we keep everything the same, I haven't risked anything. But there's a real risk in doing nothing.

Scott: It's like a leak in your roof. I actually have one right now, in an old house. You can decide not to deal with it, but over time it damages the structure. Something small becomes something big.

Partnership Two: Technology Partners
Jeff: The second channel is what I'd call technical or technology partnerships. As integration software, we have two sides of the equation — a source and a target. We're in the middle. On one side is CAD or PDM engineering software, and on the other side is the manufacturing system. So we partner with CAD publishers on one side and ERP or PLM publishers on the other.

Scott, when you were first developing the product, you knew you needed partnerships with these other software publishers. Why focus on that immediately? Some of these technologies have open, well-documented APIs — you could just go build an integration.

Scott: A lot of it comes down to risk mitigation, and specifically risk mitigation for the customer, who's the person we have to look out for first.

Here's why. We call ourselves an off-the-shelf integration rather than custom software, and that implies we'll continue to support the integration into the future. That's the entire point of buying off the shelf. To do that, we need ongoing access to the software we're integrating with so we can maintain the integration over time. Having a partnership dramatically increases the likelihood that we'll have that access.

The alternative — what an independent consultant or a custom shop often does — is get access through the customer's own system. There's some incentive for the customer to provide it, but it's a riskier arrangement, and you end up dealing with whatever versions that particular customer happens to run.

You also get more than access. You're usually paying for the partnership, which is sometimes preferable, because now the company has an incentive to give you the inside track: how the system actually works, the best way to integrate with it, best practices, how their customers are using it. That mitigates risk and produces a better outcome.

Take it a step further and their customers are our future customers. So how do we create a mutually beneficial relationship where you introduce me to your customers, you make some revenue, we make some, and the customer gets a better result? That's better than a win-win — it's a win-win-win. Why wouldn't we create more of those?

What You Get From a Technology Partnership
Jeff: So the partnership model provides a few distinct things. First, the technical side: access to the software, training on the APIs, sometimes a certification process, and best practices — how the workflows should work, how often the system updates, how versioning is handled. That matters for engineering and implementation.

Then there's marketing. We're working across both sides — the CAD, PDM, and PLM companies like PTC, Dassault Systèmes, and Siemens, and the ERP companies like Oracle, SAP, Infor, IFS, and Microsoft. When a customer is evaluating a new system, there's an opportunity for joint marketing and demand generation, because their existing customers are our future customers and vice versa.

And then sales. Sometimes our partners can sell CADTALK themselves, because it's so complementary to what they're implementing. If a customer is putting in a new ERP or PLM, they want those workflows to be easy, and they want to see benefit from the transformation. CADTALK helps that conversation by making all those systems talk to each other.

Jeff: In your mind, what makes a technology partnership successful?

Scott: Again, anywhere you can create a win-win-win. If you publish a system we integrate with, you get to go to your customer with a broader set of capabilities than you'd have on your own.

Any of these publishers could build what we build. But they're not focused on it — they're focused on making their product the best it can be. Plenty of companies do build their own integrations, and it's hard, because focus is what makes you good at something. Integration is literally all we do, and not integration in the general sense: we do integration on one very specific problem, so we can be the best in the world at solving it.

That ties back to an earlier conversation about whether you assemble best-of-breed applications or buy one monolithic system that's okay at everything. With good integration you can have both — best-of-breed solutions that behave like a single system. And our partners don't have to worry about all the systems we integrate with; they get that breadth by default, and they get there faster.

Jeff: It also makes their product stickier — and by stickier I mean the customer gets more value out of it. More things are connected, the workflows are better, and the customer thinks, "this is really working for me, I don't need to change." People evaluate the whole picture. A system can be amazing, but if nothing integrates with it and you have to build manual processes around that fact, that's a negative. Partnerships make the ecosystem stronger, and a strong ecosystem attracts more customers.

Scott: And the customer gets a more seamless experience. Once the systems are talking, things move faster because you've removed the manual handoffs. Work happens in the background — making money while you sleep, in a sense, because systems are talking to each other without you physically doing it.

Partnership Three: Resellers, VARs, and System Integrators
Jeff: The third partnership is resellers, or system integrators. This is different from the technology partners. These are ERP resellers, PLM resellers, or CAD resellers — the people selling and servicing the products we integrate with. SAP resellers, Dassault resellers, Siemens resellers, Windchill or Arena PLM resellers, and so on. They need to expand their offering to meet a client's specific manufacturing requirements.

Most of the relationships I've built over the years are with these ERP or CAD resellers — people who already work with a customer, or who want to.

Here's the use case. A customer is looking for a new target system, let's say a new ERP. They already have CAD or a PLM, and they want it connected to whatever they choose. They're evaluating three systems — maybe Microsoft, Infor, NetSuite, Oracle. The reseller trying to sell one of those systems has to address that requirement, usually through an RFP or an RFQ. That's when things start for us. The reseller comes to us and says, we have a customer interested in our ERP, and your product integrates with it — how can we work together to present a solution?

Because ultimately the customer wants holes, not a drill. The hole here is the new business system that fixes their problems and improves their processes.

Scott: It's a bit like a drill company going to the drill bit company.

Jeff: Exactly. The ERP reseller is the drill company — buy my drill, my drill makes holes. And the customer asks what drill bits they have, so they come to us and ask whether we have a bit that drills these particular holes. And we say yes, we've got a bit for that.

That's the win-win-win again. The customer gets the solution they need, the reseller sells their ERP, and we help both of them win.

Understanding Reseller Motivation
Jeff: Before I came on, one of your first partnerships was with an ERP called SYSPRO, which had its own resellers. What was it like in those early days — finding them, onboarding, training, enabling?

Scott: The hardest lesson to learn is that the relationship an ERP reseller has with the ERP company is different from the relationship they have with us. Their incentive is to sell the ERP. That's the first focus, and we're a means to that end.

If they see enough volume, some will see the benefit of providing the services themselves and act as a true value-added reseller, adding value along the way. But a lot of the time we're complementary rather than something they're building on. They're adding us as value to supplement their overall offering, and it's still on us to provide the services.

The positioning is different from a VAR relationship. A VAR for CADTALK would be someone taking our product and adding services on top — somebody who really knows manufacturing and knows how to use our tool to do the job well. You see a lot of that with CAD VARs and ERP VARs, who take a base platform and layer real value on it. Often we're talking to those same VARs, but they don't act as VARs with us. They're using us as a tool to demonstrate additional value and complete a package for the customer.

That's why we see more sales through partner channels combined with an ERP or target system purchase, as opposed to what we call an aftermarket sale to someone who already has their ERP in place. We're helping differentiate as part of a larger sale.

The early SYSPRO relationship worked exactly that way. They wanted to differentiate and offer more without building it themselves. Somebody would come to them asking to integrate with particular systems, and by working with us they got all those systems by default. It was a great thing for them to take to market — but their goal was always to sell the ERP.

Jeff: Which makes sense. Their motivation is to sell their product, and ours is a value-add that helps complete the solution, because end users have very specific requirements and a bunch of different problems to solve.

It's a different scenario from typical software sales. Most of the time you're selling directly to the customer — and we do that too, in the aftermarket case, where the customer already has their ERP and CAD. But in the reseller scenario, our customer is effectively the value-added reseller, who needs our solution to round out what they present: the full picture, from design all the way to shipping. Quote to cash.

Enabling Partners to Spot the Opportunity
Jeff: So we end up doing marketing and sales enablement with partners. You teach them not just how the solution works, but who's a fit, how to identify those clients, and how to position it — because you're not selling directly to the customer, you're working through a partner whose goal is to sell their own software. You're teaching them to keep an eye out.

It's a bit like a partner going deer hunting. They're looking for deer. We're looking for deer too — but maybe they could pick up a rabbit along the way. You have to tell them what the rabbits look like, how big they need to be, and the best way to get them.

Scott: Let me push on the analogy, because in yours, how does the rabbit help you get the deer? Say you're selling to hunters, and you sell guns, but you can also sell deer scent. My goal is to sell you the gun — I'm selling a package for obtaining deer, and the scent is part of it, but I make my money on the gun.

Jeff: That's better. The hunter wants to bring home a deer. He absolutely needs the gun — otherwise he's wrestling deer to the ground like Bear Grylls. But buying a gun doesn't mean he'll get a deer. The deer scent makes it much more likely he'll succeed. And his actual goal isn't to buy a gun or buy scent. It's to get the deer.

Scott: Which goes back to holes and drills.

Jeff: Exactly. So that's where we sit — we're the drill bit maker, or the deer scent maker. Same idea.

How Partnerships Remove Risk
Jeff: What incentivizes partners to work with us?

Scott: Differentiation. If a customer already owns a particular PLM or CAD system, and you're coming in as a new provider saying you already integrate with it, you borrow the legitimacy of the thing they already trust. That removes a barrier, and it removes risk.

How does a customer know these systems will work together? Because there's a product that does it. That removes the risk of the transfer being hard, or cumbersome, or carrying hidden costs they didn't expect.

Jeff: Two kinds of risk elimination, really. Risk for the partner that the project won't succeed, and risk for the customer that they won't get what they wanted — because there's something pre-built and ready to leverage for their transformation.

Three Ways to Work With CADTALK
Jeff: This was a good conversation. It took me a long time to get my head around how partnerships work, and new employees ask the same question — why are we talking to these partners instead of directly to customers? Partners help us reach more of the people we can help. I like the win-win-win framing, because that's what it is: we're helping both the reseller and the customer achieve their goals.

So, three ways to connect with us. If you're an end user and you want to learn more about CADTALK, visit cadtalk.com and request information or a demonstration. If you're a technology partner — you work for an ERP, a PLM, or a CAD publisher — and you think partnering with CADTALK would be valuable, there's a partner link right on the website. And if you're a reseller selling ERP or PLM and you want to talk about how we can help you help your customers, the partnership page has contact information and resources on how we work.

Anything else to add on partnerships?

Scott: No, I think we covered it pretty well today.

Jeff: Have a good time in Hawaii. I'm glad to be home and not traveling, so I'm not envious. Thanks, Scott — we'll talk to you next time.