Innovate with Ludia: The Dynamics 365 Physical Operations Podcast
Join us on the 'Innovate with Ludia' podcast for discussions on Physical Operations, including D365 Field Service, IoT, Mixed Reality, D365 Project Operations, AI, and more. We'll cover industry challenges, new features, and insights from Microsoft, MVPs, and ISVs.
Innovate with Ludia: The Dynamics 365 Physical Operations Podcast
Unlocking ERP Innovations with Bryan Barton: Data Management, e-Invoicing, Coffee Talk and Community Summit Insights
Unlock the future of ERP systems with us as we welcome Bryan Barton, senior manager and technical architect at Ludia Consulting. Discover how Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain serve as the backbone of transactional finance and inventory management. Get a sneak peek into Bryan’s upcoming sessions at the Community Summit, where he’ll share strategies on improving system efficiency with data archiving and optimizing e-invoicing and tax localization. These insights are not only practical but also aimed at enhancing your business operations, making this episode a must-listen for anyone in the field.
Curious about the latest in data management and cloud solutions? We explore the challenges of large-scale databases and the cost-saving efficiencies of new Power Platform functionalities. From cloud-based data lakes to the transformative possibilities of AI and co-pilot features, our discussion is filled with cutting-edge advancements that could redefine your approach to data handling. Plus, get ready for an exciting preview of the Summit in San Antonio, where networking and camaraderie take center stage. And don't miss our fun chat about coffee and seasonal drinks, adding a personal touch to our tech talk.
Welcome to Innovate with Ludia, the podcast where host Scott LaFontaine that's me explores the cutting edge of physical operations and groundbreaking technologies to industry shaping strategies. Subscribe now in your favorite podcast app and stay ahead of the curve. Welcome everyone to another episode of Innovate with Ludia. I am your host, Scott LaFonte, and today we have another Ludia guest. We're continuing that community summit theme, and so today's special guest is none other than Mr Brian Barton. Brian, how are you today?
Speaker 2:Hey Scott, how's it going? Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, my pleasure. We don't get to talk very often. It's interesting for those that are listening or watching. We don't get to talk a lot, even though you know Ludi is such a close knit organization. You know he's on the dark side, I'm on the good side, right, right, right right, you know I mean so you know, or you could say it the other way around.
Speaker 1:Dark side sure you know, but you know so. So, brian, for our listeners, you know. To explain why I say you're on the dark side. You know what is it you focus on.
Speaker 2:Oh well, yeah, Okay. So, speaking of the dark side, yeah, so yeah, I'm a senior manager here and a technical architect at Ludic Consulting. So dark side. Scott's definition of dark side is the, you know, Dynamics 365, finance operations. Nowadays we're calling it finance and supply chain. The name changes every once in a while. But dark side, Dark side, that's where. I'm at, compared to the CE is that what we're saying? Or power platform? That's the light side Talking. Jedi Sith type thing Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. I got to go get my Yoda going on right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so exactly. Got to go get my, my, my yoda going on, right, yeah, oh, but that, yeah, so exactly. And so you know we don't get to talk a lot on the podcast about the the erp side, but it really is, in terms of physical operations, which is what we specialize in very important, right. You can have a front end all you want. If you can't bill, you can't do inventory and all the other fun stuff that the ERP system does, what are you left with?
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, erp. It's kind of like the backbone, right. It's where a lot of the transactional, finance and inventory related things live. So on the dark side here, we got to know all those little areas and we got to, we got to. It could be a dark side thing because it's very technical, right. So you have to really know your way around this, this really old system. So that's where you know my background. 20 years back, I mean, I started when it was, it was still considered, it was still called the Xapta, which was a Danish product that Microsoft acquired and it was very. The code that exists today is still kind of carried through All these 20 years. They've just updated it into newer languages and stuff. Actually, no, it's still X++, but it's now usable within the Microsoft stack. So it's the dark side for sure.
Speaker 1:Until you come over to the Power Platform. Yeah right, Exactly.
Speaker 2:Which one day It'll happen, right, one day.
Speaker 1:Maybe before we retire, right? So let's talk about what we've been doing here the last couple episodes and really talking about Community Summit, and you, my friend, have two sessions during Summit, so I want to mention those real quick and then we'll talk about each of those. Your first one is Improving System Efficiency Data Archiving Feature in Dynamics 365 FSC. That one's on Wednesday, the 16th, from 9.15 to 10.15 Central. Then you have Streamlining E-invoicing and tax localization. Introducing globalization studio workplace in D365 FSC, and that's on Thursday, the 17th, from 8.30 to 9.30. So you and I the last day I think we got the early session.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep, that was me last summit as well. I a session, uh, early in the morning on on the last day. So, um, surprisingly, people are still around. You know it may be the last day and people are packing up and trying to leave town and stuff. I still had some folks in my session on the last day. I mean, people still want to know, they still want to learn um, some of these newer things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, well, and that's a great point. So if you're planning on attending the summit and these are helpful topics don't bail early. You will learn something, I promise you, and if you don't learn anything new, you're going to meet new connections, new faces, and that leads to so many positive outcomes.
Speaker 2:It does, yeah, and you bounce ideas off each other. I mean, I've, I've seen that at the end of some of these sessions where folks will be like hey, did you did? Did this happen to you, or have you tried this in your project? So yeah, there's a lot of uh, I guess it's. It is networking in a way, right. So we're.
Speaker 1:we're kind of learning from each other as a community, which a time, thursday come, brian and I are ready to leave as well, because we're mentally and physically exhausted, but we will. We will plow forward, that's right, so so so, brian, you know why these topics Like what? What about these topics? Spoke to you and said you know what this is? This? These are things that people really need to know about. I'm well-versed in them, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So these two particular topics they jumped out at me when I was deciding what I wanted to present at the summit to share with the rest of the community, and the reason why I picked these ones. I think my main two reasons would be first of all, I saw these pain points with our existing clients. That's the first thing. But secondly, I experienced the pain myself in trying to get over some of these hurdles in one of the implementations that I was working on. So when it comes to the data archive one we've had, you know we've had to write.
Speaker 2:So we've had two examples of clients where they really needed to like move some data off of their system because it was really slowing things down and there wasn't anything really in place at the time, right, I mean, microsoft had this feature.
Speaker 2:It was kind of in preview, not really ready to go, so they couldn't really implement it, and so we had to do some crazy wacky workarounds and figuring out how to export out stuff, writing queries and like pulling just certain things out of the way so that we can make room for system improvement as far as performance goes right. So I feel like that this is a new tool. It's now available, you know, generally available, which is really exciting because this is like something that our clients like I've seen in many places could use this. In fact, we have a couple of upcoming projects where we're like, hey, this is a perfect candidate for something to help meet the objectives that the client is asking us to help them with. I'm like this is perfect. The archiving feature it's really amazing. It's a new tool. It's unnecessary going forward really, because as we move forward in technology and the new way of doing business and the cloud and everything, data becomes an issue, especially when a lot of data builds up A lot of data.
Speaker 2:We have a way to alleviate that with this new archiving feature, which is real exciting to me. Actually, I'm excited to see it in action as we're going into these projects and implementing it for our clients. And then the globalization one. Well, that was another one I was involved in directly. You know there was this difficulty with the lifecycle management and keeping everything current. When changes needed to be updated updated In the past it was in the repository. That was a whole separate system that you had to integrate in with FNSC, and now this globalization studio has now become directly integrated into FNSC, so it's all there in one place.
Speaker 2:It's using the dataverse, of course, because that's what we're talking about at the beginning here. It it's the Dataverse and the Power Platforms all coming together. Everything is converging into one dynamics, right? So this is one step closer when it comes to localizing your reporting and your tax reporting and your invoicing and all that. So those are the reasons why I chose those two particular topics, because I've seen the pain points. I've experienced them myself. I feel like I want to pay it forward and show other folks how they can use some tools that are available now that will help get past these pain points for themselves.
Speaker 1:I think the data archiving one feature is one that's very interesting to me because of to your point, everything's in the cloud now, and so data becomes a commodity, and data has a significant price tag associated to it if you start going over what your capacity is, and so I sit there and think, when is CE going to have a data archiving tool outside of what we have to do on our side, like a Nick Tausman his team, where they have to create some scripts to pull the data into a data warehouse, then purge it right, to have that tool readily available to say, okay, I only want three years worth of X data, or I want this or I want that or whatever the tool.
Speaker 1:That I'm really curious. I'm going to be sitting in on your session, you know a little heckling in the back, but it begs the question where is it? Why don't we have something like that right now? Why FNSC has it? Yeah, good question. I wonder if it's coming at some point because, realistically, this whole move to get to the Dataverse and the Power Platform, then that right there becomes a huge strategic factor in any implementation.
Speaker 2:It does. Yeah, I agree On the CE side. So the interesting thing here is with this data archiving thing is that it uses Dataverse entities, right. So we're pushing FNO or FNSC entities into Dataverse entities and then from there it's kind of like a leapfrog into a data lake, right? So I assume I'm just going to make an assumption on how Microsoft will do that for the CE side it's probably just adding another lever there on top of those virtual entities that are existing on the Dataverse side and just including those as part of the package, potentially or some other way that they have a specific what would you call it like a extraction channel. That's what they call it, the Athena channel. Right, it goes out to the data lake. I feel like that shouldn't be too big of a lift to happen soon for the CE side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, agreed. I'm really really curious because we see it all the time on our side. We see it internally. Hey, you're approaching your capacity limit. Some of it is because we have a boatload of environments, but usually in an organization our customers might have three or four environments and mostly the lower-level environments don't have a whole lot of data in there. It's really for testing. I've only seen once or twice where I look and say, well, why is test an exact replica of production? But the data grows very quickly and I don't think anyone realizes that. And it's not just the data, it's the metadata.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. Yeah, all of that extra overhead that we need to have when we're indexing and keeping track of how many records we have, when you get into the millions and millions of records, then it becomes a retrieval process. When you say, hey, show me last week's sales orders. Hey, the database has got to turn through these indexes to find exactly what you're looking for and then pull it back. All the indexing overhead and metadata there takes up a lot of space for sure, and so this is. This is the reason why you know someone or a company like the like the project I was referring to that had this pain point. They they were having I think they had gosh it was like millions of sales orders in a week, almost because they have a chain of a bunch of stores where they're keeping track of all the purchases that are happening. It becomes an issue very quickly when you have that many records coming in. This is so exciting that we're able to start using this new functionality.
Speaker 2:Then secondly to that, when you're talking about the testing and such, I know part of this unified administration, unified developer experience, now that we're going to be moving some of our FNSC activities into the Power Platform and moving away from LCS. There's features around data as well that I was just looking at yesterday, which is pretty exciting as well, where we can say hey, I don't want to copy my entire production database into my test environment, I only want master data and configurations. Leave the transactions behind. Then you can easily do that. It's so awesome. There's a dashboard in Power Platform. We could say leave out the transactions, just give me the standard stuff and then we'll move that into the test environment or the development environment and that way again, you're saving on storage costs when you're trying to do your development cycles right.
Speaker 1:It's pretty cool all right, all right, I'm I'm converting over to the dark side come on over to the dark side, yeah exactly like, like where have you been my whole life there?
Speaker 1:yep, yep, uh, that's great, I mean. So, I mean, has an ongoing so in your head? So if you look at the two topics, I mean, is it more of you're seeing these trends happening more recently, or has it really been like you know what? They've been there? But now that the strategy of Microsoft is shifting, it's becoming more prevalent, because I would imagine, even in the old-school way, I mean, an ERP database can grow exponentially large and unwieldy regardless.
Speaker 2:It does, I would say, and that's a great question. I would say in my experience in the past that still existed, I think, before we had the Cloud-based version of finance operations, or AX or Xaptor, whatever you want to call it, it was just an accepted thing. Sometimes, oh, expect the screen to load slowly, it's just how it is. And or the IT department would spend an arm and a leg to upgrade their in-house server, their on-premise servers, all the horsepower behind that, adding more computing power, whatever, in order to improve performance. Those were ways you could pull levers back then.
Speaker 2:Now, in the cloud, it's a little bit different. There's more of a cost related to that. Hey, give me more horsepower in the Cloud. It's just way more expensive, whereas now, hey, here's an easier route, let's extract it out into a data lake where that storage is pennies on dollar compared to a SQL storage. That's what I love about technology. It's that these new things, these new paradigm shifts, these new ideas and just things that smart IT people come up with to make life easier. I think it's really fun to see where things go as technology advances. Now it's just advancing more and more rapidly. Every six months something new to see coming out, with Microsoft releases in their release plan.
Speaker 1:It's going to be fun. Yeah, you're not only keeping up on those core features now, but all of the exciting AI features and co-pilot.
Speaker 2:That's your forte right?
Speaker 1:You're the AI guy with Ludia I am Trying to keep on top of it. It's daunting because it's not just right, it's not just co-pilot, it's hey, you got co-pilot for finance and supply chain, co-pilot for this, co-pilot for that, co-pilot in this and in that and an overall co-pilot and it's just whew, overall copilot and it's just Ooh, you know, scott, some people would say, if you're talking about the dark side, wouldn't AI be?
Speaker 2:who would be? Is that the real dark side? Right, ai, they're coming after us. It's going to take over the world. Watch out.
Speaker 1:Right, it could be. I'm going to create a like an Scott AI version of Scott. I don't know if the world is ready for it yet, though.
Speaker 2:Yep Deep fake Scott. Is that what you mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of me probably is more than sufficient in terms of what the world can handle, or really wants to handle.
Speaker 2:That's the scary part about AI, right? You can train it to read every email you've ever written, listen to every I don't know every meeting you've ever been in, and whatever, and then it can kind of emulate. It'd be like well, this is how Scott would answer a question. Right, here's how Scott would do a podcast interview, kind of it's crazy right.
Speaker 1:I wonder if AI Scott would do a better podcast Right? Yeah, I know podcast right. Yeah, you know, that's a good question. Yeah, you know, I think I might have to find that out. You know what? Stay tuned for that one. Yep and and so okay. So we spoke a lot about the data archiving feature um you know what about? What about the? You know the e-invoicing and tax localization. I mean, obviously, invoicing and taxation has been around since forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, forever Right. But I mean, what's different about this? I mean, the Globalization Studio workspace sounds cool.
Speaker 2:I don't know what it is, but it sounds cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like I was mentioning before, it's a new workspace. Actually, it won't look new to the users who are used to it. That's. The cool part about it is that it's all in the background. This is part of the technical side. The nerdy tech IT folks will know about this. This is why I'm presenting it to those folks at the summit is that the interface is not going to look too much different for the folks who are already using it the way that it was before.
Speaker 2:I know that Microsoft, as of this year, August 1st so just last month they discontinued their RCS service, which is the repository where the regulation services, where they basically keep track of all of the different regulations across the world so like Brazil has different tax requirements than Mexico, that kind of thing right, and that was all in a repository and you'd have to sign up for this service with Microsoft and like set up all the links and then make sure that it's transferring data the right way. It was like its own integration, but it was an internal Microsoft integration. It's wacky. When you think about it now it's like well, why wasn't it always the way it is now? That's where they got to the point now where they can now put that in the Dataverse instead of in this external repository place that they had it before. Uh, so now in the dataverse we have instant, immediate access. We can now store our tweaks and customizations that we put against some of these like invoices. Like, let's say, we're doing an invoice for mexico and we wanted to change a few things for our client that you know, has a me, a Mexico subsidiary or something, and that's exactly one of the situations that was in one of our projects. We had a Mexico subsidiary and we were trying to figure out hey, why is this tax piece not coming through when we're trying to submit it to the government? That's the other thing that this globalization studio is now going to help with.
Speaker 2:So before it was this repository where we had to figure out well, why is it not sending the correct text information back over? There was these settings that we had to tweak, some configurations that were wrong. The thing is now how do we make sure that that's going to carry through with application lifecycle management, the ALM process? How is it always going to make sure it's going to be deployed across all the places we need it to be deployed? That made it a little bit more difficult when you had the RCS piece, and now we've got this globalization studio, which is really awesome. It's internal now to the ecosystem and it's now in Dataverse. Now we can easily track the ALM a lot quicker, a lot easier, because in Dataverse we can put control against it source control, whatever else. Now everything is just. Life is just easier because you can connect, you can make the changes, save them. It's just. Everything about it is better than it was before. That's exciting for me too, because I went through the pain points of trying to handle that before, and now life will be easier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds very painful. It sounds like when I'm trying to do my own taxes at times and you bang your head up against the desk and say why why, why why?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that is really exciting. Why, yeah yeah, so yeah, that is really exciting. You know, especially I mean it sounds like it's right to your point the RPC, the RPC. You said RPC was just deprecated this past.
Speaker 2:RCS, the Regulatory Configuration Service. That's what it was called Regulatory.
Speaker 1:Configuration.
Speaker 2:Yeah, RCS Yep.
Speaker 1:RCS was just deprecated, know, a month ago, yep or so. And so this is, this is pretty new and and exciting things, and so I mean for those organizations or users that are going to be at summit, or you know other consultants that are like okay, hey, what's this bad? How do I do it, how do I utilize it? You, what makes it better, which I'm sure is a really simple answer. You just said it, you know. But but all these things, you know, that's why you go to the session on Thursday morning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, setups are a little bit different with this one, which is which is why I, you know, I I wanted to share some of that uh side, specifically because you have to have certain configurations in place and permissions and those kind of things. So, yeah, and a lot of this. You know, with this globalization stuff, you have to, when you're done, saying here's how much tax I need to submit to the government or I need to, what do you call it? Like the tax return type stuff? I need to submit to the government or I need to. What do you call it? Like the tax return type stuff? Once a month I got to send in my taxes to the Mexico government entity that needs to see it. There's different ways that different governments want that stuff Could be XML, could be some other format. This is all handled within the Globalization Studio as well. It was before, but now it's a lot easier because, like I said, we're using Dataverse.
Speaker 1:Brian's going to have a lot of coffee at his session at 8.30. Yes. I'm planning I think I'm just going to bring in a vat of coffee for the 8.30 session on Thursday and say stock up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be nice Because it a central time, because we're going to be in san antonio. Currently I'm in mountain time because I'm over here in boise, idaho, so it's going to be a little bit earlier for me in my brain, right?
Speaker 1:so yeah you're gonna get some coffee for sure, whereas for me it's it's not so bad. 9 30.
Speaker 2:You know? Yeah, for you it's a little bit later because you're over there on the east Coast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's not terrible. Plus, when I travel, I don't know about you and our listeners, but when I travel a lot for work, I don't sleep well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me neither. It's awful.
Speaker 1:So I'll be wide awake.
Speaker 2:Plus.
Speaker 1:I'll be like, okay, did I forget anything about my presentation? What do I owe the talking points and all that fun stuff? And then, of course, you know we spoke earlier brian and I spoke earlier about sessions in terms of planning, and so I want folks to understand, you know, certain things about summit, like if you see that someone is presenting um screenshots versus a demo, some cases that's very there's a very good reason. Sometimes the wi-fi is really slow, sometimes it doesn't respond, sometimes the system could be down. So you know, a lot of presenters, especially seasoned presenters like ourselves, will have screenshots in our presentation as a fail-safe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, because you know, sometimes at these larger events we've got, I don't even know what the attendance is going to be. The attendance is probably going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of people, right? So everybody on the Wi-Fi at the same time. You know that sometimes can cause some internet traffic issues. And then when we're trying to connect up into the cloud to our URL that hosts our environment, this is, you know, one of the things that we deal with as far as looking at an environment on the Cloud instead of locally on a machine or whatnot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an issue sometimes with that Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it reminds, throws me back to my Siebel days, where I used to have a local database. Granted, my computer had to be exponentially larger because that database was massive, but you know to your point. You didn't have to worry about it back then, and so that is one of the challenges, you know. I know everyone loves to see live demos and we love to give live demos at these conferences, but I just urge everyone that's listening, like, if you see it and you're disappointed a lot of times, like Brian or myself, we'll go to start with a demo. If it's not responding or it's too slow, we'll fall back to the slide where and talk through it, because there's only so much time we have. Yeah, exactly, that's right. What are you looking forward to, brian? You were at Summit last year. What are you looking forward to, brian? So you were at Summit last year. What are you looking forward to this year in terms of Summit and getting there? I think you're getting there. You get there on Wednesday, I think it's Wednesday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I think it starts on Monday, right? Or they have like the pre-event type stuff happening on Monday and and then tuesday the event actually starts right.
Speaker 1:I think that's right. Uh, it's actually, it's free. Pre-event is sunday sunday there you go, okay monday it starts because monday I actually in the afternoon have one all right first, first of three sessions on monday.
Speaker 2:There you go. Yep, yeah, no, uh, to answer your question, yeah, last year, uh year, we were in Charlotte. It was amazing. This year, I think I'm looking forward to meeting other other folks who are looking into some of these new capabilities that we that we at Ludia are very well versed in. We meet counterparts, colleagues from other companies who we maybe know from the past or whatnot. It's fun to see those folks. Then also, some of our current and former clients come and stop by. I love seeing everybody. That's great too.
Speaker 2:Then, just collaborating, like I was saying before, I remember last year had a great conversation with one of our clients and I finally got to meet them in person, which was great. It was great just sharing some ideas based on the session that I had just given and some thoughts on how to do some of the steps. And, hey, what was your experience around this? Those are fun interactions. Then just being able to get together, uh with, with everybody else, uh, not just at ludia, but like everybody that you know, folks and friends that we know from different uh places in this space, right, so, um, it's always fun on the floor too to see people, yeah it's as large as this community is.
Speaker 2:It's very small it is, yeah, it's like a small world. It's. It's like, yeah, you see some of the same people um many times in in many different places. So, yeah, it's, they're like old friends, like I've known people. I've known people from 20 years ago that you know I actually saw at summit last year, which was great, you know. So that's I love. I love that kind of community aspect of it, which is which is great because it's community summit, right.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's. That's what it's about. Right, it's about us, you know, not only giving back to the community in terms of sharing our knowledge and and networking, but, you know, having people come to the booth as well, or just reminiscing about, hey, you have an old client or an old colleague you run into, and so it happens all the time. And it's just a small world as large as this conference is going to be. And I'm curious because I've never been to San Antonio in terms of conference. I think I've only been there at an airport for a layover. So this will be interesting, but usually these conferences are. I mean, there's a lot, a lot of people and we have a great booth. Our booth number is 1217. So you won't be able to miss it. It'll be massive green lutea, right? It'll kind of look like this Green, like your shirt, exactly.
Speaker 2:I think we're actually going to be wearing shirts that color while we're all there. I believe, I think. So that's my, uh, that's my understanding.
Speaker 1:We're all going to have some lydia green, so you'll be able to find us pretty easily down there and I'll see if I can wear one of my, my signature hats here, awesome, my, my scally cap, and I'll see. Uh, you know, walk around and look like Dr Doolittle, it'll be great, it'll be great, yep, awesome. So so, real quick, let me, let me recap your, your two sessions here. So on Wednesday, october 16th, from 915 to 1015, you're lucky too, you get them out early and then you get to go to the booth and go see other sessions and cheer on everybody else. But October 16th, 9.15 to 10.15, improving System Efficiency Data Archiving Feature in D365 FSC, that's in location 303A. And then on Thursday, the 17th, from 8.30 to 9.30. I know, 8.30, 9.30. I know 8.30, 9.30,.
Speaker 2:that's the coffee right there.
Speaker 1:That's the coffee session.
Speaker 2:That's the coffee session.
Speaker 1:That's right, Coffee talk Streamlining. I think that's what you said. Coffee talk Streamlining. Yep, but streamlining e-invoicing and tax localization. Introducing the globalization studio workspace in D365 FSC, and that again is in room 303A.
Speaker 2:So, easy to find for you, so that'll be great, hey speaking of coffee, last year in Charlotte, at the Community Summit, there was a Starbucks inside the convention center, so there were some of us who were going and getting our iced espressos right. Give me a quad shot. I need to stay awake. You know that, yeah, so yeah, well, I just had.
Speaker 1:Uh, there was a new one, starbucks speaking of starbucks, and I know we're getting off topic, but this is what we do on this. You know what, if you're listening, you're just gonna have to deal um. So my wife went to starbucks the other day and got this apple crisp something or other. Oh, I saw that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw that new drink.
Speaker 1:And I'm like I don't know, Sounds weird. Right, it sounds weird. It tasted like I was drinking apple pie.
Speaker 2:So it's a coffee-flavored apple pie, basically. Is that what you're saying Pretty much Interesting.
Speaker 1:Now I need to go try it, and at first I was like, yeah, I don't know, it's all right and then it grew on me it was like a fungus, it just, it just grew.
Speaker 1:It's like each sip you're like it's not bad, it's not bad, that's great. The one, the one was like. It was like a chai one with the apple. That one was a little I'm not a big chai fan. It was pretty good. It was a little sweet. I'd tone it down a little bit on the sweetness. But then there was this espresso latte, I don't know whatever. Whatever it was. Um, that was less sweet. That one was good too. It's a toss-up, you know. Do you want dessert or do you want your main course, apple pie?
Speaker 2:I, I don't know you know, I don't know well, I'm a huge, uh, I'm a huge coffee snob. I guess I'll call myself a coffee snob. I mean, I've got've got probably the best home semi-automatic espresso machine that you can get, the one from Breville. It's a pretty snazzy machine, so I make myself a really nice latte every morning.
Speaker 1:I'll have to send you the photo. I think we might have the same one. Oh really, you have one too. Awesome, that's great the breville, the breville burris the touch yes, that's.
Speaker 2:Oh, I have. It's the oracle touch. Is that the one where it has a screen? Oh, you got the oracle that you got that's the highest, and oh okay, yeah you're definitely a coffee snob, then that I am definitely a coffee snob, so yeah, so sometimes those um sugary drinks are a little out of my range. But you know, when my gets it I'll have a little bit. But I'm normally just just give me a simple little maple sugar or something. I don't need a lot of sweetness, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll do a little cafe Americano maybe a cappuccino once in a while. Once in a while I'll do a little espresso. It's all good, it's definitely coffee talk. This is what you get on Innovate with Ludio. We talk about technology and the evolution of things, and then we get to coffee.
Speaker 2:This is me and Scott catching up just a little bit as well. I mean, we're both in the leadership team here at Ludio, but we don't get to talk too much, so yeah a little bit of coffee talk there.
Speaker 1:That's fun and hopefully maybe it inspired some folks to go try some new types of coffee. Or maybe they say that sounds really disgusting. And I thought the same too I did. Warning you, I'm not a big flavor kind of guy. Explosion with you know, like I'll do a caramel macchiato and that's about as adventurous as I go. Yep, it was not bad. Like I said, a little sweet, a little sweet to tone it down, but it was not bad.
Speaker 2:Yep, well either way, bring your coffee to the sessions in the morning. That's right.
Speaker 1:And we'll have some coffee talk. We'll talk technology, we'll talk e-invoicing and tax localization. Yep, it'll be great, yep, yep, awesome. Hey, brian, it was great catching up with you. I look forward to seeing you at Summit and then, of course, the month later when we do our all hands in Denver.
Speaker 2:Yes, that'll be great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Good talking with you, Scott. Appreciate the time. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you again, brian, and thank our listeners. We will talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, thank you for listening to the Innovate with Ludia podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast app or follow us on LinkedIn. Until next time, I'm your host, scott LaFondre.
