Accelerating From Accountancy to Tech: Steven Chinsky's Inspiring Path with Dynamics 365 BC

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Massachusetts in the United States. He is the director of Dynamics Practice at Accelerant. He was first awarded his MVP in 2023. He's a strong background in financial supply chain and manufacturing, as well as retail. You can find links to his bio and social media, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, steven. Nice to be here. Good to have you on the show. Tell me about food, family and fun those things you do when you're not thinking about work.

Steven Chinsky: 1:37
Let's see Food. Well, my belly would tell me that the food is good, as one would say. But let's say I love to barbecue. I mean, I think I barbecue all year round. I love to travel and that obviously plays into the food in the different parts that I travel to Love anything hot. As some people who know me, I'm pretty much a crazy man. I love to scuba dive and sky dive and love to do things like. My next adventure is going to be racing Lamborghinis. You can go to the race tracks and race them around at a pretty fast pace. I just recently did one as a ride along in AMG Mercedes. We're at about 185 miles an hour. Yes, it sounds a little psychotic, but I guess the adrenaline flowing. I love family, obviously, and we have fun. I love my friends, good times with them all the time, obviously getting together with the different people from the community when we can get a chance.

Mark Smith: 2:46
Yeah, how did you get into tech?

Steven Chinsky: 2:50
Wow, I was an accountant for about 16 and a half 17 years and I'm aging myself when I say this word Y2K. Back in 1999, a lot of my mentors just basically said you should leave accounting and operations and stuff and really go and get involved with the ERP software and implement it as well as advise and consult and get involved, a lot of my friends said. A couple of them said, hey, there's this company coming to America. There have been here only a few years and they called them a vision. I'm like say what? I don't know them from a whole new world. I knew Great Plains, macaulay Computer Associates, all the other players in the States, as one would say. I went to interview with a partner who was probably one of the top partners selling the vision at the time out of Manhattan and went to work for them. Really, it just kickstarted the whole thing. Basically, I just went hog, wild, crazy, got trained by the best. The people who worked for the vision obviously went because it was a vision. Back then, people some of us know in the Microsoft who are still at Microsoft in Georgia got to learn from them how to implement the software, got to learn all the tricks of the trade, as one would say, for 24-plus years now going pretty much crazy doing it. I love it. I've met so many crazy people all around the world because I have traveled doing this. It's been a blast. I think that's what sparked me In the early years to kind of get involved with, you know, keep spreading my wings and just helping the community out. So I think that's where I kind of why I got involved with the tech side, the ERP side, the power side now and obviously the CE side.

Mark Smith: 4:47
Yeah, so Navision, back then that was a Danish company, right before Microsoft purchased it.

Steven Chinsky: 4:52
Yeah, back in Denmark, obviously, yeah, company was owned by a few people there and they had their Navision side and, as we all have known the vision they also had, you know, the Damgard side which I think kind of came out and they created. You had Navision and Xapta I guess would be the two names that came out at the time of the sale to Microsoft and back then when Microsoft bought them obviously I know a lot of the material or correspondence out there was they were looking for that tier one kind of product to get it to compete in the industry. They already had great planes, as we all knew. So Navision complimented great planes to some respect, but it also was, in my opinion, was a better product and Xapta really jumped them into that tier one neck of the woods, which is what they were looking for. And, yeah, over the years the name has changed, obviously for everybody, but it was pretty amazing.

Mark Smith: 5:52
So so did and I didn't realize. But have I got this right? Did Xapta come from that same company or was it a separate sale?

Steven Chinsky: 5:59
No, it was a same company. I did not realize that. Yeah, for me personally, and I would never change my mind because this is the way I feel about it. But for me, when Xapta was born, it was born from the backbone of Navision. I truly believe that the core and the concepts, even though it was a tier one product and it was built differently we all can see it looks differently but to me it was born out of the kind of like a think of it as taking somebody's a part of somebody's body and using it as some DNA and building Xapta from it. So that's to me the way I see it, because if you look at it, it kind of looks a little in the visionish but yet it doesn't, and I think it grew out of it.

Mark Smith: 6:47
Interesting. I didn't know that that was the nexus of it. Now, it's interesting. You could call it a tier one where I feel that great, sorry, I feel that, oh my gosh, I've just forgotten the name of it Dynamics 365.

Steven Chinsky: 7:05
BC.

Mark Smith: 7:08
I feel BC now is really it's up there from a. You know I'm seeing it in big multinational companies. Oh yeah, heck, I think we've got something like 600 consultants just on BC alone in our European part of our business that work on BC for multinational companies. So it's not like you know this kind of differentiation that AX was for the enterprise and BC was for mid-market. I don't know if that washes anymore, that kind of storyline.

Steven Chinsky: 7:47
I don't think so either. I mean, for me personally, I don't really care if you make $25 million a year gross revenue or you make, you know, $2.5 billion a year gross revenue. I think BC will fit perfectly in a company, depending upon the structure of the company. Are you a multinational, you know? Are you basically in multiple countries? You know how complex are you? How far do you actually push the envelope? And don't get me wrong here. You know I've worked with companies that are multinational in different countries. It works very easily in manufacturers or supply chain. I've excuse me, I'm in the process of working with one that's in six countries and they do a lot of distribution and some very light manufacturing, but they actually ship it out to the different ones. I've got a customer who has, you know upwards of, you know 200 users, if 250 actually, to be exact, and you know, I think it is. It competes right up there with the tier one. You know, sometimes people come up and say, well, I'm going to go look at Oracle. I'm going to go look at, you know, sap, you know things like that. I'm like you know what, go ahead and spend the big money. I'm sure you'll come back sooner or later because you know BC can fit the bill. I mean, don't get me wrong here. Bc, out of the box, is sweet, it's got a lot of features and functionality. The apps play heavily into the, depending upon the industry you're in, whether you're in food and beverage, whether you're in, you know whether you need shop floor control, whether you need, depending on what you need, the apps play perfectly into the market and really give you what you need. So to answer your question mark, I mean it truly is. You know, I think it can compete right up there. I think the problem, you know, sometimes, of course it's, I guess, the way it's portrayed. I mean obviously you know, for here in the States, you know, every time somebody says you know, you know, I may, I'm in X countries and I've got foreign currency and I got, I got to do consolidation, and on and on, you hear all the rhetoric oh, you got to go F and O, you can't look at BC. But in reality you can. I think BC works perfectly. Like I said, there are some pretty famous companies, as you know, around the world who use business, who use nav, slash, business, central. Now, with the upgrade, I can't answer that question, but you know. I mean I remember Web of Grill uses I mean that's an international company they use Nav. I mean you've got companies like CitizenWatch. They use Nav and they're multinational. Again, it's out there.

Mark Smith: 10:25
Where do you see BC really shines? Where is it like? Is it in warehousing? Is it in GL? Where do you? Yes, it's strong in those, but where do you feel it rarely comes into its own?

Steven Chinsky: 10:40
I truly think it comes into its own when it comes. It's got a great financial background Don't get me wrong, and being an ex-accountant I'll be biased a little bit where it could do consolidation and everything else. I think it shines perfectly and seamlessly in the manufacturing space. I like it because I really truly believe whether you're a discrete manufacturer, whether you have complex routings and bombs, it still works perfectly. I think it works with all the apps and again, I'm not out of the box. It does a good job. But you have to play into the apps here because the apps complement it, and I've worked with tractor trailer companies. I've worked with food and beverage companies that have recipes and byproducts and co-products and byproducts. I've worked with people who just build actuators or pumps or things like that. But I think it works perfectly there. I don't think anything's off the table meaning oh my God, this crazy manufacturer and I can't use the system altogether. I don't think it takes it off the table. I think you really need to look at that software. I think Business Central can work in any space from a manufacturing standpoint At least that's my perception of it.

Mark Smith: 12:02
Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Tell me about what you've noticed around the Power Platform integration story with BC.

Steven Chinsky: 12:11
Oh, for me, Power Platform has taken off and I love it. I think I was it's not that I wasn't a guy who jumped on board and waved the flag and said, woohoo, power Platform's going crazy. It took a little while for me to kind of actuate myself to it and understand what it really meant to the software I see Power Platform allowing anybody who has Business Central to actually perform things they can never perform in Business Central. So let me give you an example. I mean, look the workflows outside of Business Central. They're nice, they're good, they're very basic and standard. But to me, taking the Power Platform and using that to actually do all the workflows whether it be simple workflows for approvals, whether it be complex workflows with outside parties taking, notifying people for different actions and reactions using the Power Platform I think that's cool. All these things that you can, just you can't do out of the box. You would need a developer, programmer to write some code, write an extension and do all of it. Just go out, just go open up a power, go to Power Platform and just write some flows and do all that. I also like the fact that with that you can do some pretty crazy things, like if you really needed something more complex with whether in quality control or whether you're in with the manufacturing floor, whether somebody needs something, and you need to notify the office in terms of inventory, inventory going, notifying people in certain inventory things. I'm actually intrigued by it because of the fact that and I haven't really looked into this heavily, but when you think of the old Kanban methodology and warehousing or the card system, so you know that when you're going to bin or a box, let's say empties out, you take your card and you put it over here and somebody's going to go buy some stuff for that little bin. And interesting enough, I was thinking like a power platform can really play into this, because if each bin stands on its own two feet and with bin contents, of course you can set minns and maxes of how much have in that bin. It could be its own little private Kanban. So think about it like when you empty out, a notification goes to a planner. The planner just makes a purchase order for that one bin. It says like Hi, mr Planner, bin 2222 is out of inventory of item XYZ. Go buy Max 50 or something like that. And it's the coolest thing when you think about that. But for those who want to still be in the Kanban world, it would play very well and it's a very simple thing, as you know, to learn and implement. So that's what I love about it. I was speaking to a gentleman today who actually asked me how can he implement Kanban in manufacturing, and I did say the easiest way to do it is with a power, using power, because you can notify yourself when you run out. I know there's an app out there. I have heard of one. I think it's made out of Germany, I think it comes from. I haven't really looked at it so I couldn't really say one way or the other.

Mark Smith: 15:27
Interesting. Yeah, it just shows how powerful these combined technologies are for organizations. How did you become an MVP?

Steven Chinsky: 15:39
Wow, funny enough. Back pre-COVID, one of my colleagues and friends actually, I've known him for probably 15 plus years now. He worked for a partner and the partner I was working for bought them and we were friends already. We met at the conferences, we crossed each other's paths and became friends anyway, but at the time I was really heavy into the conferences, speaking at the conferences, helping at the conferences. And time went on and right before about 2019-ish, he was an MVP already. He became an MVP, I think in 2016 maybe. I think it was like 2016, 2017. Aj, I'm sorry, and AJ says I'm going to nominate you. You got to go become an MVP. And I said, ok, great. So here we are. It's the year before COVID. I got really busy and I submitted my app stuff and obviously with COVID, things were crazy back then. So my first round I didn't get in. I didn't know why. I didn't really know the reasoning why. So AJ said do it again and just go back and do it all over. So we did it in 2022, very late 2022, I did it and I pushed it through and obviously in early 2023, as you know, back in February, and I became an MVP. So didn't take long for that to push through. I think I don't know if it was the people who needed to know me, because I got to know a lot of the different Microsoft folks, obviously being at the conferences and getting involved with Still getting more involved with the speaking and the conferences and stuff. So that's how I got involved. It really hasn't Deturbed me from even getting crazier and crazier and speaking at any conference. So that's the funny part.

Mark Smith: 17:43
Hey, thanks for listening on your host business application, mvp Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ 365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out, buy me a coffee dot com. Ford slash NZ 365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time you.