The Cost of Manual Processes & the Path Forward — John Thomas & Scott Brickler (Episode 2)
The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — with John Thomas and Scott Brickler (CADTALK)
John Thomas, Head of Demand at CADTALK, continues the conversation with CEO Scott Brickler — this time on what manual processes actually cost you in talent retention, why "lack of control" is usually really "lack of clarity," and what the first real step toward an ERP investment should look like.
Speaker note: same as the last one — a two-person conversation, with lines attributed directly to John and Scott.
Labor Shortages, Tariffs, and Why Manual Processes Hurt More Now
John: Here's a piece of this we haven't touched on yet — cost, and bringing in humans instead of automating. Right now we're hearing constantly about labor shortages, tariffs, all of it — no political angle, it's just what's in the news, and it's what manufacturers are thinking about as they make decisions. Given that, what happens when you have an engineer doing data entry, or you're trying to attract someone to your company, but you're still stuck in manual processes? What does that do to your ability to retain good talent?
Why Engineers Sign Up for Creative Work — and What Happens When They Don't Get It
Scott: It makes retention very difficult. People coming out of college today have all these tools available to them, and they're used to spending their time on the part humans are genuinely good at — the creative process, the inception of an idea. Even AI today can only regurgitate what's already been done, just faster, and it remembers everything — but it doesn't create genuinely new things, at least not yet. Humans are exceptionally good at that: coming up with a new design, a creative twist on how to do something. That's the part engineers actually sign up for — it's what I signed up for. That's the cool stuff.
There's this idea — the dream, or maybe the closest thing to real power — of "I think it, therefore it becomes." We're closer to that than we've ever been in our lifetime.
John: Absolutely.
Scott: Anything that adds friction to that kind of power is going to feel slow and unattractive. The companies that adopt tools removing that friction are the ones who get the best people.
Agentic AI Can Only Remix What Exists — the Human Creative Edge
John: I think you're right — doing the work you actually want to do keeps the passion alive, and you're just more productive, no two ways about it. That connects to something we touched on earlier: the concern people have about investing in an ERP feels like an added risk. We hear that a lot — "I don't know if I want to change my process even more." But what CADTALK ends up creating is this ability that people misread as a loss of control, when really it turns into managing by exception in most cases. Am I wrong about that?
The "Managing by Exception" Misconception — It's Actually Lack of Clarity
Scott: No, you're right, and it does two things. People call it "lack of control," but it's really lack of definition — they haven't defined well enough what they actually want, so they frame it as lack of control when it's actually lack of clarity. Going through the exercise of defining your process gives you that clarity. Most of the time, people actually do know what outcome they want — "I want this to look like this, under these conditions, do these things" — but they haven't gone through the exercise of writing it down.
When that hasn't been clearly defined, you end up with "Jim in Building B" who just makes it work, doesn't cause any visible issues, and nobody really knows what's inside that black box — Jim just knows, because he's been there forever, making all those decisions. There's no clarity around why it needs to work that way. Then people use the excuse of "too much variability" as the reason they can't systematize it — but there usually isn't that much variability. It's just unclear.
Jim in Building B: When Tribal Knowledge Becomes Operational Risk
Scott: "Managing by exception" only really applies when there genuinely is an exception — but it's easier to say "it's too variable, so we need a person controlling it" than to actually do the work of getting clarity.
John: This connects to something from my own background — I used to work in sports broadcasting. When a game came up on the schedule, there was always this sense of "the game's approaching, we're preparing, what do we do this week," or "something came up during the game, how do we solve it in the moment." It frustrated me endlessly, because it felt like people assumed there were far more variables in play than there actually were. Why can't we get ahead of this? Why can't we reduce the number of variables we have to deal with in the moment? There's not as much variability as you think if you plan ahead, make the decisions in advance, and put systems in place.
I think as humans, we sometimes overestimate our own importance — we think only we can solve a given problem, or that when something goes wrong, we personally have to be the one to fix it. It puts more pressure on ourselves than necessary.
The Talent Retention Argument: Tools That Remove Friction Attract the Best People
Scott: That's exactly it — and we draw meaning from being the fixer. There's this question of "if I'm not the one solving the problems, what use am I?" But managing exceptions isn't a bad use of people at all — the trap is assuming everything is an exception. That's the part we have to watch for, because it's usually not an increase in variability, it's a lack of clarity.
Transition: From the Cost of the Problem to the Path Forward
John: You probably didn't expect to hear all that on a manufacturing podcast, but that's the kind of conversation we love having. We've walked through the problem and what it costs — let's shift to the path forward. I know the first thing a lot of people think when they hear this — whether they're evaluating CADTALK or another solution — is "great, another system I have to buy and implement." That's not really what this is. So if someone listening recognizes their own situation here, where do they start? And to be clear, the path forward doesn't start with booking a CADTALK demo — this isn't a sales pitch. What does that first actual step look like if you're trying to make your ERP investment work?
Where to Actually Start: Getting Clear on the Outcome You Want
Scott: It comes back to clarity again. Be very clear about the outcome you want from that purchase — or from the system you've already bought. That answer is going to differ depending on which department you ask and who made the original decision. From there, step back and ask what would have to be true for that outcome to actually happen, and what assumptions — hidden or not — you've made about how much work that takes. That's the part most people don't clearly understand, and it's the part we try to help with: making those pieces more likely to actually happen so you get the benefit you were after.
Be clear on what you bought the system for in the first place, then build a priority list of what matters most and what you'd actually be willing to give up — because you can't do everything at once. I've seen ERP implementations where someone wanted really polished accounting reports and wouldn't give those up, but all the underlying data feeding those reports was wrong. Or people want finite scheduling — a very common ask in manufacturing, but very rarely actually implemented well.
Finite scheduling is the ability to schedule against the real, finite capacity of machines and people, and actually predict dates accurately. The only way that works is with clean bills of materials, good routings, and good run times — that's hard. So a lot of people buy an ERP specifically for finite scheduling, do all the work, hit the difficulty, and settle for infinite scheduling instead — losing the entire reason they bought the system in the first place. That happens more than you'd think.
