Family-owned and operated for more than 30 years, Kenny Pipe and Supply was founded by Bill Kenny in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenny Pipe & Supply is a wholesale distributor of plumbing supplies, pipe, valves and fittings, and was the 5th fastest growing business in the Nashville area in 2008.
At our recent ARIS meetup, we interviewed Grant Wilkinson, VP of Digital Strategy and Technology, about his experience with Kodaris - and the Kodaris community.
Watch the video to listen in on our conversation, or check out the slightly edited version of the transcript for clarity of our conversation.
My name is Grant Wilkinson. I am the VP of digital strategy and technology for Kenny Pipe and Supply. We're a wholesale plumbing distributor. We've been in business for 33 years now - family business.
Kodaris has been a great technology partner for us. They've really helped us implement several things.
I mean, we've learned about you (Kodaris) from Tridex. We were actually looking for a payment portal supplier. And from there, we learned of a million other things that y'all do and could partner with us.
We thought we were solving one solution. And then in regards to that, we learned about, you know, probably 50 others things that y'all could assist us with. Which was pretty cool.
Specifically with the payment portal: We hadn't had one. And so we were really looking at Billtrust, which is a big, you know, player in the game. And it's really expensive. And it was really cost prohibitive for us. It would have been a pretty big leap to take for us.
And so when we were talking to Tridex about it, they introduced us to Kodaris, and we learned that their product even worked a little better. It was a little more, it synced up. The Billtrust product was, at the time, it was a file that you would have to upload, and it was kind of a day delay.
And Kodaris is like, well, we can do it. You know, it's almost instantaneously because we're using API calls. And so, when we learned about the price it was really good. And it was, you know, API calls versus a file. Like, it really fit the needs that we had at the time for a payment portal that would sync with Infor.
We have to slow down so we can implement stuff the right way. And so we're, we've implemented AP Automation. We're currently looking at the tendering card present solution at the branch. We do have the Commerce platform. That kind of made sense to start when we did the payment portal. And so right now the roadmap is pretty full. I think slowing down so we can implement the right way because there's so much we can implement.
The distribution is kind of a close knit community. And it's big. So you have really, really big players in the game. And then you have kind of the independents. And what's really cool about the independents is it's us kind of working together, idea sharing to really help all of us kind of grow.
And that's kind of been the motto of Kodaris is that as Kodaris grows, we all grow. And so it's been really cool to learn about how other companies are doing it, and us kind of being able to input what we do well and learn about what they do really well, too.
Tony does such a great job at really helping us think a little differently. Being a family business, we've done a lot of things forever. We started in 1992. And so a lot of our processes, we've always done that way. And so him helping us think about how to do something a little different and maybe change the process and how we do things has been really beneficial for us of going, “Yeah, that worked to how we are now. But where do we want to be in the future?”
And that's been a really great piece about today. It is challenging our mindset about how we can go five, ten, 20 years from now with how quick AI has come about. For us, where we're really focused on this is building that foundation. So that we can take advantage of all the technology changes that are coming.
The biggest benefit for us, and we have a couple of providers we feel this way, is it is a partnership. And when we have ideas, we have problems. If we have anything, Kodaris is our call just to really work through the problem together. And we've had other software providers that when we have a problem, it's kind of like a finger pointing back to us, like we need to fix it. Whereas, when we bring those problems up to Kodaris, it's like, “okay, how can we work together to figure this out?”
And so I think that's been kind of the biggest thing for us is that it does feel like a partnership. It's more than just a provider.
Tony's great. He is absolutely one of my favorite people. The joke always is with Tony, “Well, it's always, you know, it's just math, right?” It's always just math. And that is true a lot of times. But sometimes there's a lot more going on than that. So he oversimplifies stuff. But I think that's because he's so much smarter than I am.
The community piece has been really great for us. Even today we have, like I said, a family business. We've done things the same way in. Is that the right way? Is that the wrong way? But here we get to work with other people in our industry and learn about best practices. And we get to share what we're doing. Some things are going really well, and we get to learn about what other people are doing really well, too. And it really just helps us drive the needle.
Having people at Kodaris who came from Infor, they know both systems really well. And so when we have problems or we have ideas, it really does help that process go smoothly because they've seen both sides of it.
It's been a really great partnership. It's been a great company to work with, and we really feel like they're working with us.