 Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Mike Rogers. He is the CIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Infor. So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over-the-road truckers. We do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network, but we don't own them. So we run the majority of the locations. And we own about 40% of the over-the-road diesel market. In the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S. and Canada, right. And talk about your relationship with Infor. So our relationship with Infor really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company about two years. We've run Lawson, David Clothier. I'll tell you, probably 25 years. And the company has grown very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well, now it's a rather large company. And we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things. So we wrote a lot of applications that are very disparate, siloed. And of course there's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I started with the company, we started an evaluation process and picked Infor as the partner to replace all of our financial systems and all of our human capital management systems. And so are you migrating from sort of traditional legacy Lawson to sort of cloud suite or? Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration, but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. Right, okay. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system. Right, which of course have to integrate into Lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there. And that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as a best-of-breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. So how painful is that? Is that why you- It's extremely painful. They brought you in for this task and you saw obviously new this coming in or? I knew this coming in. No surprises. No surprises. And by the way, Pilot is no different than a lot of the retailers and other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical debt. And I will tell you, the more I see about Infor, the more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I like the integration associated with all the different functions within the H, specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll-up like some of the other guys have rolled up, they bought, whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever. And they may talk about it being integrated, but it's not as integrated as the Infor suite. So if I may, sorry. Do you want to stay in the migrations for a second? Because it's non-trivial and people, the conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift, but the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. Right. I used to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say, we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch. And it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive. And I used to say, the guy at my seat usually gets fired. That really isn't, and I say that laughingly, but it's hard. It's a hard thing, not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. So an incredible amount of planning, obviously. You're freezing code? Pretty much, because I mean, why would we continue to develop something on, I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen, things come up, right? Especially in HR where there's a regulation change. Compliance, right? Right, compliance thing, you got to do it. So, but we got pretty good at saying, we're going to wait for in for it. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing, we've got a nice plan, an iterative plan. We're not trying to boil the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. In fact, the IT representation at this conference is the smallest compared to the business. So I would think a key there, though, is because when you freeze code, it slows your business down. But then, so when you actually go to the new platform, you want to be able to move faster and leapfrog your competition. I would argue that it really, because we really didn't have much, it really hasn't slowed much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. But the leapfrogging that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. Sorry, Becca, so I was just going to, I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have. And talk about the pain, I guess, is what I want you to describe. I mean, we run travel centers. They're open 365 days, seven, or 365 days a year, 24 seven, they never close. Okay, they all run food operations. It's up to three quick service food operations. It could be up to three. We don't have three in every store. Someone said that we may have one in every store plus a daily operation that we run ourselves in. We actually create the food, whether it's pizza, meatloaf, whatever, that the truck drivers really want with respect to a food offering. They want something different, what variety. So yeah, so it's a very complex business. It's hard. And we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in big cities like New York. You're not going to see a pilot in New York City, right? You're going to see a pilot or applying J on major interstates throughout the country. So we're spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner, Jimmy Haslam, would tell you that he'd give himself a five and we are on connecting with the team member. So we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We've actually partnered with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Infor Project Connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform for those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. We don't get to see very often, or if ever. We're hearing a lot at the keynote. Retail has been highlighted a lot. And Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The truckers themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Connect J. So I mean, our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member. And the investment in Infor is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop. And we want our customer to come back. We sell a commodity. Let's face it, we sell diesel. Buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our show. We want to take care of our guests like nobody else takes care of them. Truck driver, there was an article written in the New York Times about throwaway people. These guys, you got it. You're wearing it. You're tie, you're shirt, whatever, came on a truck. And these guys need to be, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come and it feels like home. And we want to make a better day for the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're away from their families. When they come into a pilot, it should feel like somewhat of an oasis. Right, so it's super clean, I understand. We, yeah, we try to make them clean. I mean, remember, if you're a truck driver and you're away for weeks on end, you're going to shower at our locations. Okay, so those showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. You know, nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest, it's challenging. We have 3,000 people come through our doors every day at every location. So it's challenging to keep the restrooms in particular clean, but the showers are clean before anybody gets in them. And you own the real estate or you lease it? We own, we own, I'm sure we lease some. I don't know, that'd be a question for David. We own most of it. But you're in the real estate business too. Yeah, we're definitely in the real estate business. What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? It's evolving very rapidly. And we are a data-rich company, especially with respect to the professional driver, which is the majority of our profitable business. Are they scan their loyalty card, whenever they come, we have like a 92% swipe rate. And that's because they use those points to buy food, to buy showers, they're rewarded. And it's lucrative to them, they're managing every payment. They're managing a business, so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when the guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Off him a free shower, if he fuels a location X because it's beneficial for him and us. We're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza, if he fuels it. We have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. Building loyalty. Right, and it builds loyalty. So that's on the customer side. That's the nudges they need to walk into. Then be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior. And loyalty, it's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them, and solve problems they have. Because they'll come back. I mean, Jimmy says, you know, we want them to come back. That's how he says it, and we do things that are going to solve problems they have. They're going to come to us because it's at least friction. Are you using data for logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? Yeah, now that's not in for, however, for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel there's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we're investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. Oh, so that's a data lever. You've got advantage, competitive advantage through data. That's where the data, that's where data rich and we can use that data very effectively. So data literally is oil. We just, we had a guest on it. Well, data's abundant insights aren't necessarily, so that's where you're making money. You mentioned before, Mike, that you said you're more confident after going through this migration that in for was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, we talked about the technical debt, right? So lifting everything to the cloud gives me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt because we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one, elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platform. Lack of, you really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool itself with that customization or configuration or extensibility carries along with the, as they upgrade the software. So that's the biggest advantage. And I think being in the cloud, I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure costs have grown, infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VM, where all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's because we hadn't retired anything, right? We're going to retire within four. We're going to retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it'll be in the cloud. I don't have to manage it anymore. You're getting rid of stuff. Wow, GRS we call it. That never happens in IT. I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. It is the, I want to ask you another kind of IT question. Is that that latest release, so because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenant, you have to go to the next release. Does that create downstream problems for you? I mean, how do you plan for that? We're new into it, okay? We're working with Infor on that and it's perfect, no, but they got to be careful when they make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it hasn't, it's been nerve-racking because it's a new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever, but I think we'll get that resolved. Like you said, it's new. We got to become efficient at how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. Forced agile. Yeah, forced agile, here it comes. There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say pilot flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce? I mean, giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. Yeah, I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing, AI when machine learning. I think it is going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate roadmap to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Watson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions and put power in the hands of our pricing team or logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's first, let's get that perfected. And then when you talk about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday, that I think is eminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our roadmap because as a truck driver, I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and convey information back to that driver without him having to touch his phone, there's a value to that. Now that has to be architected through the right type of data, how we structure our data to be able to be accessed via natural speech. But it is something that that is on our roadmap. How large is your IT organization? Roughly. A number of people? Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have significant use of partners. And they're distributed? No, they're in Tennessee for the most part but now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple of primary integration partners that we're using. So the reason I'm asking is so as you move to this cloud SaaS platform, how are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing? It's a good question and I've said in for a while that I think that we do a great job with security. We've invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. I would agree, no offense. So I mean, and I think one of the gentlemen who was speaking yesterday said the same thing and one of my guys looked at him and says, yeah, that's what we've been saying. So yeah, I think there's always a risk. I mean, security is a big deal, especially with what's happened with WannaCry and the subsequent Nepal that there's going to be more. I think that Amazon can be on top of it. And I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me every day with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me, it's not anymore. Great. Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Inforum in a little bit.