Leaders in ERP: Jennifer Sherman, CPO, Unit4

Introduction: This is the ERP Advisor.

Shawn Windle: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Leaders in ERP Podcast from ERP Advisors Group. I'm Shawn Windle. Good to see you all again. I founded and run ERP Advisors. We're an independent objective firm. And over the last 15, 16 years, we've helped a bunch of organizations, nonprofits, businesses, lots of different folks with enterprise software. We're independent objective, as I said. But what's really cool about what we do is we get to meet with phenomenal people that are making a huge impact across the whole ERP market. So, I'm very, very excited to have Jennifer Sherman, who is the chief product officer for Unit 4, join us today. And Jen, thanks for joining.

Jennifer Sherman: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Shawn Windle: Yeah, thank you again. We appreciate you carving out a little bit of time here. Maybe could you introduce yourself, Jen, and then we can jump into some questions. And I think our users, our people that are listening, will have a good time listening to.

Jennifer Sherman: Absolutely. So, I have been at Unit 4 since May. As Chief Product Officer, I'm responsible for not only the product and design team, so that is our strategy and roadmap and where we're taking these solutions, but also pricing and product marketing and our demo services. So that is how are we commercializing these capabilities and what story are we telling about who we are, who we're not, and what we're here to do. Great role. I have been a career product manager from the day I graduated university, working always in B2B, generally SaaS software. I am also a certified judge with the Kansas City Barbecue Society, a certified massage therapist, and right, I am two weeks away from my bread baking diploma.

Shawn Windle: Oh my gosh, that's incredible.

Jennifer Sherman: Gotta stay busy.

Shawn Windle: Well, and maybe tell our listeners a little bit about Unit 4 too, very much a global ERP company for sure.

Jennifer Sherman: Yeah. European-based, we focus on mid-market services businesses. So that is public sector, generally municipal or specialist agencies, not-for-profit, higher education and broader education in some regions, and professional services. So, we like to say at Unit 4 that we serve those who serve. And that really is our calling and something we believe in because, and this is why I'm at Unit 4, when we make work better and give time back to a municipal employee cities get better. When we do that for nonprofits, whole communities improve. When we do it for higher education, our future is secured. And when we do that for professional services firms, businesses get better at their craft. And so it's a wonderful place to have a tremendous impact on business and how work is done.

Shawn Windle: Yeah, that's the thing about enterprise software that as we talk to more people like you and you, I think in particular, Jen, You have a really interesting story of working in enterprise software, but also moving away from it. But then coming back, there is sort of this appeal. Maybe just tell us a little bit about the journey that you've gone through, kind of what that looks like, and why you did ultimately come to Unit 4.

Jennifer Sherman: Come back into the world of ERP. So I started my career at Oracle in ERP. I was a product manager for almost 15 years. Learned a ton, learned about the craft, learned about how business gets done. And it was at Oracle that I kind of got my calling and what my career was going to be about. And that is. Spoken plainly, I want work to suck less for people. I have more professional ways of saying it. I could say it.

Shawn Windle: I love it.

Jennifer Sherman: I have the experience of work, but I just want it to suck less. And I want to do that in two ways. I want to give my team a better chapter of their career, and I want to work on software that makes someone's job better, smarter, faster, more intelligent. And after 15 years at Oracle, I remember it was, we're working on the next generation fusion application. We were thinking about how receiving was going to work. And I talked to a variety of customers across industries, right? I talked to semiconductors and they talked about the importance in receiving of being able to tie each serial number to the lot it came from. Talked to a food distributor and they talked about the importance of not just counting the cases, but weighing each one, because in transit, things lose water, they lose weight that needs to be written off. Talked to a diamond distributor who was like, you don't get to write off a gram. I just don't know where my diamonds are. Talked to an automotive manufacturer who said, you know, no, what really matters in receiving is the order in which those products are placed on the skid because that is going right to production and will pop right off the line. Talked to someone in public service who said, don't make me count anything. Don't even make me say I've received this particular item. I just want to check it all off. I couldn't design a system that was going to work for every industry. And the best I was going to do is fine, not American fine, which is actually fine, but like British fine, which is not fine at all, just done having this conversation. And so I couldn't, like I felt like it, certainly with that, the technology as it was more than 10 years ago, couldn't design a great experience across a variety of industries. And so I decided that if I really am going to make life better and work better for people, then I needed to be working on industry-specific functionality. And the future of B2B software was going to be verticalized and not horizontal. And so, I left ERP thinking I would never go back because I don't do horizontal plays. And when Unit 4 called, I first, I laughed and was ready to hang up the phone, and they said, oh no, have you taken a look at Unit 4 lately? Because we are verticalized and verticalized in industries that you can really get behind. And so, I feel like we actually do have a chance to kind of realize the vision of ERP, which was to make life more efficient for people. And we can do that when we really understand their day and their dynamics and what headwinds and tailwinds they're dealing with because of their industry and their country and the regulatory environment in which they live. So, when you know them more intimately, you can deliver a better solution.

Shawn Windle: That's fantastic. I think it's something that I see. I mean, I myself, very similar to you, that especially if you've been in this for a long time, you don't stay in ERP unless you really want to help. Like you don't, because I mean, oh, it's for the money or whatever. I mean, that's good, don't get me wrong, but like, there's a lot better ways to make a living than to go through the trials and tribulations of ERP projects and redesigning software, going through all the changes that you're working with Unit 4 through. Those are hard changes to make, right? But you really do want to help. And I think that's something that, for our listeners for this podcast series, it's just a trend that all these phenomenal people that are really making these differences for ERP and for enterprise software. I mean, they really, like you, Jen, you've got your client's best interest in mind with everything that you're doing. And that's the value of packaged software, right? If you're doing custom solutions, well, you know, you're really depending on that developer who's going to do a pretty good job. But when you have yourself and your teams and teams of teams of people behind with that perspective, like it's only going to make you know, for a great solution. So that's awesome.

Jennifer Sherman: 100%. And I have to acknowledge that as an industry, I'm not sure that we've always delivered on that promise, right? I mean, I think, you know, ERP, one, I mean, in terms of the promise of getting all of your data in one place, clean, consolidated, single source of truth, yes, I think we've done that. But do ERPs really make every individual person's job better or more efficient? I think, you know, open a UI of any ERP, and I don't care if it's Oracle or SAP or even Unit4. What you see is a representation of the data model. I can tell you exactly what the table structure looks like, but does it really reflect how the person... writing a purchase order, entering a general ledger transaction, processing an invoice, does it really reflect how they do that work? I'm not sure. And so, I think particularly in the dawn of AI, I think we actually have a chance of building software that looks like the way the user works and actually does give them some time back in their day. Because I'm just not sure we've been doing that universally, even though it has been our intent, you're right. I think we finally have a technology that's going to let us do that and deliver that. That's a dream come true.

Shawn Windle: Well, it's a really interesting viewpoint because if you think about where ERP has been, which has led us to where we are now and where it's going, just expand upon that a little bit more. Can we really deliver the solutions that have been promised now, do you think, with some of these new emerging technologies, like for real?

Jennifer Sherman: I hope so. I think it depends on how we do it. I think what I'm seeing a lot of is let's throw an agent here, let's throw an agent there, or let's give you agent builder technology and good luck, here's our APIs and have fun. And I think those don't get me wrong. There are really smart people behind those solutions and they are looking at the business flows that matter most and the business flows where we really do have an opportunity to take time out. And so, I think that is a, it is an approach. But I think we could be thinking a level deeper. I think rather than layering agentic technologies on top, what if we really thought about what data and information is resident in the ERP? What if we built an ERP that really did understand its data and the connections between the data that had sort of a semantic layer that allowed us to explain what information is on that purchase order and how does that relate to a supplier and how does that relate to the invoice and how does that relate to your accounts payable aging. Yes, accounts payable aging. I think in stringing those together, we can better empower the user to ask questions, to not have to go hunt and find data, and to start stringing together their own workflows and to really start seeing ERP as a team member instead of ERP as this place where I have to go to get information. Because the truth is, nobody wakes up in the morning excited to log into their ERP, nobody. And it's a tragedy as a product manager to be responsible for a product that people do not wake up excited to use. And I don't know that's ever going to change. I think, but what we can do is say, okay, then don't log into the ERP. You shouldn't have to go through that experience. I think about the most casual user, the kind of person like me, I have to log absences and vacations, I have to approve things. I have to do a performance review every once in a while. Those things happen so seldomly that I forget every time where I'm going, what I'm doing, how I do the thing. I am a perfect user to never have to go into the ERP again, which means the ERP needs to come to me. It needs to come to me in some smart way. It needs to help me get work done outside of the ERP, and then really it needs to disappear. And so, I think if we can build this right for most employees, the ERP can disappear. And for those whose deep work, whose craft really is in the ERP, FP&A, payroll, the compensation planning, the folks who really do deep work in an ERP, that experience can get a lot smarter, a lot more assisted, a lot more proactive. I think ERP can be a team member, but it's not going to do that if you just add an agent here and a workflow there.

Shawn Windle: Yeah, I think it's a really good point. The confusion that a lot of our clients already have with their ERPs, I mean, frankly, that's why I think a lot of people listen to these presentations because they're trying to learn and understand what's really going on from the top down and they get that viewpoint. But yeah, when I think about some of my nonprofit clients or some of our services companies, professional services companies that are like crazy busy, and they're trying to figure out how to use AI for their customer-facing solutions. And now we're building agents upon agents and giving agentic framework. And yeah, there's a human in the loop and hallucinations, and gosh, only knows what other new lingo is going to come out just to track all this. It's tough. It's definitely a tough situation, but there's no doubt that AI is we're past the days of how is AI going to impact enterprise software, right? And will it be global or not? Yes, and yes, we know that. But what's interesting, I think, about you guys is that it's really a differentiator is that you really do focus on a global customer base. You're not just focused on North America or Europe, or I mean, you're really around the world. Tell me a little bit about how local innovations you think will be impacted by AI. And like you said, you don't do the horizontal focus, like cross industry, but more vertically focused. But what do you do and how do you handle sort of the local innovations?

Jennifer Sherman: I think it's actually-- one of the things that drew me to Unit 4 was its approach to globalization in these companies. When you grow up in American ERP, this concept of multi-org, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction entities really doesn't happen until your company is pretty big. In America, you can get really large without having to be multinational. In the Netherlands, in Portugal, you don't get very big before it's time to cross a border for that next degree of growth, right? And so, Unit 4 had to grow up in a global context, but also had to make that easy to use and accessible to the mid-market, which is our target. And so how do you bring that industrial kind of multi to the end capability to the mid-market in an easy to use, easy to consume fashion has been our mandate from the get-go. And growing up in Europe meant, you know, from the get-go, you also had to support the countries of Europe and all of their localization, which, from an American ERP perspective, was this an onerous tax that you'd had to do for the Europeans. In Europe, it's, you know, this is what we do first. At Unit4, we say our first foot out of bed in the morning is industry. And so, we have to deliver solutions that can be rapidly deployed for each industry we serve, which one means we're going to be very strict about the industries we serve. And then two means we're going to deliver out-of-the-box models that allow those industries in those countries to go live faster. So what we offer are these sort of, it's actually more than a template, but pre-configurations of the software for each model for each industry and each geography in which we play that allows you to go live faster because we understand the chart of accounts that professional services use in Germany versus the budgeting accounting standards that nonprofits use in the UK, right? And those are different and they drive different setups of the software. And so for each one of those permutations, we have a different setup that can get you live much faster because we understand your language and we understand your dynamics. Which means that we can now have, we're now seeing clients go live in 90 days. CFO was like, oh, I thought it was less because we had that deployment out-of-the-box. It also means that when we get to AI and when you start talking about AI enablement, back to that semantic layer, does the ERP really understand its data? The next layer is, does the ERP understand how you speak to that data? Because in nonprofits, we don't say project, we say award. And in public sector, we say grant. And these words mean different, mean slightly nuanced things. But also in nonprofits, our accounting standards are different because the donor might specify the maximum amount of that grant that can go to overhead. And we have to understand that and we have to understand what they mean when they're talking about budget and margin because it might be slightly different and nuanced. So a whole world of semantic distinctions that we actually have to build into the ERP in order to be able to service automation and to serve up automation in all of these geographies and countries.

Shawn Windle: Yeah, that's fantastic. Funny enough, one of my last jobs before I went back into consulting was with a technology company as a product manager. What was it, pragmatic marketing? Did you ever do the pragmatic marketing stuff?

Jennifer Sherman: Sure.

Shawn Windle: Yeah. But we were working on the semantic web in the late 90s with that concept. And the more important thing, why I mentioned the past here, is that Even more so today, right? And there's been, even as recent as the last couple of weeks, there's been this question of, oh, the SaaS companies are, they're dead or blah, blah, whatever crazy things are out there. And when you really know what is happening in technology, it's impossible because nobody knows non-for-profit, multi-company, multi-country, pardon me, or the ends, like you said, it could be other variations. I mean, you guys have so much experience with that. I mean, there's other competitors, we get it, but you live, breathe, you wake up in the morning and that's what you're thinking about. Whereas somebody who's newer, an AI company coming in, they just, they don't have the decades of experience with understanding the data, the semantics of the data, the business processes, how they're different. And so, then layering in the AI is not a rewrite of the whole application. And that's I think that's something that our listeners are usually pretty practical people, right? They're in the mid-size space and they're busy and they probably need, you know, five times more people and I can't find them. So, they're really relying on these automation solutions. And it's important that they understand, you understand as you're listening to this, that having vendors who've worked through these problems, not just on industry, but also the technology stacking can think with things like a semantic layer. It just puts you so much farther ahead. than to go to another vendor that's coming in. I mean, maybe there's some use cases. I mean, we've talked to some very early-stage AI ERP companies on this series also, and they do offer something different. But when you look across super complex requirements, like I think what you guys do in your people-centric businesses, Jen, I mean, how do you see even like AI, right? Not just from the tech side, but then you're also sort of impacting the people, right? And that it's going to sort of elevate them by working alongside them versus taking over. So, if we kind of shift over to that change management side of AI, like what do you see really for real happening there?

Jennifer Sherman: A lot of people asking questions about where this is going is what's happening. Yeah, I think you're right. From a kind of the new startups, do they have that history and grounding in the world of compliance, local legislations, and vertical specifications, right? That is the moat that the ERP vendors of the past have because they've earned those stripes the hard way. And I think the race is definitely on to own the user experience of the future. And I think a lot of that will be how do you present AI and does it help the user? I think... AI has the potential to be as impactful for services industry productivity as the industrial revolution did for manufacturing. But it isn't going to be effective if you just hand over the keys. You will lose your IP, you will lose your kind of who you are as an organization, you will lose the oversight and crazy things could happen. But how do you design an AI system that augments the person, that frees up the person's time, that actually acts as thought partner, as assistant to the person? I think that is going to be the art. And I think that is going to be the race to the next generation of what ERP looks like. I mean, I think certainly this devaluation has told us that the race is on to own the user experience, right? And what Anthropic has done is built a way that it can own the user experience and allow you to pull data from other applications. I myself have, you know, there are a set of applications that now that I can get an MCP or an API connection to, I will probably never log into again. And Claude code is going to be my front end. I think ERP owns enough of the user's time that if we can deliver that dashboard, we own enough of their concern, not just time, but also their concerns and their focus, that if we can deliver that dashboard and integrate out to the third-party systems that they need, then we have a chance of continuing to own that user experience. And so that is, that is the race we are all now on. It's essentially the race to deliver Jarvis, isn't it? And to make everyone Tony Stark. And I think, you know, we've been talking about making developers Tony Stark for a long time, and we've given them Jarvis, but have we done that for the GL clerk? Have we done that for the payroll manager? Have we done that for, you know, our users are they're the unsung heroes of an organization that probably no one is thinking about giving these very powerful dashboards to. And I think we can stand them up as the Tony Starks of the world as well.

Shawn Windle: Yeah, love it. And like you said, I think we've had a few promises over the years of doing that. So here we go. Yeah.

Jennifer Sherman: The race is really on.

Shawn Windle: Yeah. Well, and speaking of kind of race and evolution in the future, maybe my last question to you is, you know, we've kind of went from, I'll be a little technical here, right? Three tier client server architecture, right? In the eighties from mainframe, mid-range and all that stuff before, and now to cloud-based solutions. And then we talk about software as a service or SaaS. Not just on how software is hosted and delivered, but also how it's sold and what is sold with it. And so now, I was just reading a really great report this weekend and this concept of services as software, right? That's going to be a little; we got to figure out what the right phrase is. We're not there yet. But instead of selling seats, licenses, that kind of a focus, do we go more towards an AP solution, right? There's Bill and many other organizations are already doing like, you know, AP automation. But do you think that the ERP, like if you look at sort of trends in this shift of ERP, do you think we do move from sort of a module-based, license-based, user-based to more of an offering that is really kind of truly a service?

Jennifer Sherman: We literally were just having this argument internally an hour ago. No kidding. We're still going to have to keep talking about it. Here's what I think. I think if you... you know, what we recognize is and what we believe at Unit4 is that it's not about agents and AI replacing people, but augmenting people. And so, we do then understand that our organizations, our clients are going to grow, but not from a headcount perspective, it is not going to be as linear as their growth had been in the past. And so, I think that if you are, if you are Pricing by user, you're probably capturing value today, but not really speaking to the value that you will offer in the future. That said, particularly in the mid-market, and particularly in public sector, usage-based gives me very little control over budget, and it gives me very little predictability in terms of what I'm going to owe. And so, we've got to still think about what works for our clients and what they can tolerate. And I think the big challenge with ERP is what outcome do you tie it to? And how do you do that without blowing up your SKU structure? I mean, if you think about the number, I mean, it's easy for Zendesk. They've got tickets. They can talk about helping you reduce tickets. It's easy for bill.com. They've got invoices and they can talk about invoices. But ERP has so many different types of users and therefore so many outcomes that we have to think about how we do that without excessively complicating the story for our customers. And given the number of changes we have seen in our competition in pricing structure in the last 18 months alone, go into your AI engine of choice and ask how many times the ERP vendors have changed course on AI pricing in the last 18 months. You will laugh just to give yourself a giggle for the day. And what that says is that we as an industry have not figured it out. It will probably be some degree of hybrid. And I think now is the time for buyers to be able to push back and be very loud about what they will accept and what they won't accept and start thinking about for themselves. It's very rare that a buyer has some choice in the pricing metric. And I think in this era of experimentation, they don't realize how much choice they have. It'll be interesting to see what they demand.

Shawn Windle: Yeah. Well, and maybe as a final thought here, Jen, what do you do if you're a buyer right now, right? Like there really is this evolution. I mean, we just found out last week that software as a service is dead. I was surprised to read that. Okay, that's interesting because I got like a bunch of clients that are thinking something different because their business is about to be automated beyond belief. But so, who knows what's next week? Seriously, if you're in that buyer's seat and you're a project sponsor or the unlucky soul who gets the project, okay, go find the ERP for our company or for our nonprofit or our agency, what do you do with all of this? Do you just wait and let it work out? I mean, that sounds crazy, but what would you advise these people?

Jennifer Sherman: I mean, so AI is, so fundamentally, you as a buyer still have an obligation to get some things done in your business. Do you have an obligation to deliver on invoices paid, on suppliers managed, on donors managed if you're a non-profit? There is still a checklist of the things you have to do, the legislation, the regulations you have to comply with, and the support you have to deliver to your team, right? And so that is still, the lion's share, let's say 90%, the lion's share of the requirements are still functional requirements. And then the onus is on you to ask that vendor, that potential partner to you, what is your plan around AI? And to ask it with several lenses. One, is this actually going to deliver value in the places that I want it to deliver value? Two, is this going to be accessible to my user base? So I've seen a lot of acquisitions of agentic layers and agentic frameworks that are sort of, you know, here, here you go. The world is your oyster. Build what you want. We've got APIs and now we have an agent set. Is your team going to be able to build an agent? Is, you know, Paul in accounts payable going to be able to build that? Is Marian Payroll going to be able to build that? And what kind of support do they offer? So there's an accessibility question. The other part of that accessibility question, I think that back in July, there was a day in which someone announced 6 new agents. I thought, oh, think of some clerk sitting in a Dutch municipality. There are a million agents out there. How do they know? Where are they? Which one worked for me in the past? How do I do this? How do I figure it out? Like, are you creating this laundry list of options that are going to actually further confuse the user? So when you ask that vendor about their partner, about their plans in AI, the lens you should be listening through is how digestible is this to my customer base? Are you putting the onus of building things on me? Are you going to make me go find an SI or pay a lot of money to your consulting organization to build this? And how do I maintain it once you've built it? By the way, how do you maintain it? If I build some prompt that's terrible and I start getting slopped, like how is that going to work for me and my constraints? Is the important part of that story. So one, are they delivering value that I actually agree is going to be what I need? And 2, can I even consume it when they're done? But still, if you can't deliver the things I need to get my business run, we don't even get to have that conversation. But once we get to have that conversation, I think the question is just going to be particularly in the mid-market accessibility.

Shawn Windle: Jennifer Sherman, thank you so much for your time. Jennifer is the Chief Product Officer at Unit 4. You have a great insight into, I think, the practicality of what a lot of our prospects are going through. So hopefully our listeners here for Leaders in ERP Podcast, you got some good nuggets and can take some things back to your vendors, including Unit 4 with some great questions and others. But Jen, thank you for your time. I really appreciate you joining.

Jennifer Sherman: Shawn, thanks for having me. It is always a pleasure to chat with you. I always think about new things.

Shawn Windle: Love it. That's what we do. Thanks, everybody.