Power to the people: Eric Champagne, CIO of La Vie en Rose

Season 6 of The Catalyst by Softchoice kicks off with an episode that questions conventional wisdom about IT leadership. Aaron Brooks sits down with Eric Champagne, CIO of La Vie en Rose, to hear how Eric is flipping the script. Eric’s story is all about bridging a longstanding gap between IT and end-users, with the goal of making technology a tool for empowerment and efficiency.

Gone are the days of tech gatekeeping. Eric champions a philosophy where technology aligns seamlessly with business goals and, more crucially, the people it serves. His approach? Ditching the tech jargon for a language of collaboration and understanding, making him a leader in creating a more inclusive, user-focused IT culture.

Featuring: Eric Champagne, CIO, La Vie En Rose

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Aaron Brooks: You're listening to The Catalyst by Softchoice, a podcast about unleashing the potential in people and technology. I'm your host, Aaron Brooks. 

[00:00:13] Aaron Brooks: There's an age-old friction between IT leaders and the end users they serve. A divide sometimes widened by the very innovations they're meant to deliver. Today, we're kicking off season six with a story that challenges the traditional approach to IT leadership. Our guest, Eric Champagne, is the chief information officer at Le Vie en Rose, a beacon of success in the Canadian retail landscape and full disclosure, a Softchoice customer. 

[00:00:39] Aaron Brooks: Eric's philosophy has helped him bridge the gap between his IT department and end users. Eric Steer is clear of tech talk and puts a premium on aligning his work to business goals and more importantly, with people. Eric oversees a half a billion-dollar operation with an IT team of only 33 employees. 

[00:00:58] Aaron Brooks: Under his guidance, La Vie en Rose has made significant strides transitioning from a fully on premise infrastructure to embracing full SaaS and cloud based solutions. And I'm here to find out more about his winning strategy. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, you're very welcome. Very happy to be here. 

[00:01:16] Aaron Brooks: This is actually going to be a very unique podcast for us on The Catalyst because it's around one of my favorite topics, and that's around leadership. And we've actually been going through a lot of this at work recently as an organization, sharing the senior leadership team's purpose. Like, what is our purpose as leaders? 

[00:01:33] Aaron Brooks: What are we driving for that is really about outcomes and changes? And I think that you and I have a very similar mindset based on what I've seen from your story, and I'd love to dive into that with you. Yeah. Great. Awesome. So you're Eric and you run a half a billion dollar retail business in La Vie en Rose with a very small IT team. 

[00:01:52] Aaron Brooks: I'd love to understand from your perspective, um, how are you doing all this and what's your approach to leadership?  

[00:01:59] Eric Champagne: Very small team because we, we empower the people using IT. So the IT group is that the end user. So the end user is the, are the business units actually running the show and making the half a billion dollar revenues we get by empowering them, teaching them and giving them the choice to use the systems that we put in place. 

[00:02:23] Eric Champagne: So the people around us kind of tell us what to do versus IT telling them what to do. And they tell us their need, they tell us what they require to, to achieve. And our job in IT at this point is very simple, is to deliver a solution that will make the outcome a lot better, according to what the business needs. 

[00:02:44] Aaron Brooks: That's amazing.  

[00:02:45] Eric Champagne: And now, as you mentioned in your intro, um, when you involve the business in IT, they actually use IT. Instead of pushing IT down their throats, like, like we see, I've seen in the past where everybody complains about IT. Everybody doesn't want to use IT. Everybody's got a little comment. I would have done it differently. 

[00:03:06] Eric Champagne: All these, these, these things do happen if you don't involve them right from the start. So for me, the end user is so important. And to running the show and giving them all the tools they need to achieve what they need to do.  

[00:03:20] Aaron Brooks: I love that. I also wouldn't it be really challenging? Like if you think about asking and being almost a servant leader, which is the best kind of leadership. 

[00:03:29] Aaron Brooks: Um, and you have so many different personas and personalities in the organization that may want or need different things. How do you handle that and still maintain a level of consistency and standards in the technology you use and make the. employee and the users in the business feel listened to?  

[00:03:49] Eric Champagne: Thank you for that question. 

[00:03:50] Eric Champagne: And, and, and the goal here is to make sure that we do, we do have some standards in IT. You know, we have some very deep standards in how we connect between systems, either to APIs or web services. We try to avoid flat files. So that stops a couple of things of happening. We do not support Excel. So somebody coming with an Excel spreadsheet. 

[00:04:11] Eric Champagne: Yeah, I want to load my Excel spreadsheet into the ERP. We say no. So we kind of forced them. To use the systems we have in place and remind them that at the end of the day, they were part of the system selection when we implemented those systems. So it's a give and take play and not everybody gets a yes, like in any business or any family. 

[00:04:35] Eric Champagne: So it's exactly the same approach. And at the end of the day is. Does the system in place provides 80, 85, 90 percent of the outcome you need to achieve and are you able to do your job the way you need to do it? Most of the time, the answer is yes. And if something really comes up that no, it's really out of this world, it's brand new and it could bring a huge benefit to the corporation, of course we'll say yes, and we'll, we'll, we'll get it to run, uh, but I'm not the type of IT leader that is looking for the last little gadget out there. 

[00:05:10] Eric Champagne: That we think might help right now. Our job is to sell our product. We do it well. We do it online. We do it in stores. And we do get our fulfillment from the factories according to what the business needs. But IT is there to support the business and make sure the users have the tools they need. But it's not always yes, yes, we'll do it, yes, we'll do it, yes, we'll do it all the time. 

[00:05:35] Eric Champagne: It's not something, it's not something we do  

[00:05:38] Aaron Brooks: as a whole. So, uh, getting their voice early in the process of the decision making and then allowing them to feel part of that process, which by nature would, I would assume, help with adoption and change management.  

[00:05:51] Eric Champagne: Absolutely. We get them involved from the requirements. 

[00:05:56] Eric Champagne: So they're part of the RFP. They build. The requirement list, which I call the Christmas list. And they can put anything they want on that list. IT will take care of the technical part of it. We'll take care of the cybersecurity part of it. We'll take care of all the things surrounding the solution in itself, but the business is totally involved. 

[00:06:15] Eric Champagne: And to explaining their requirements, why they're part of the, the sales pitch portion, they're part of the scope of work, uh, documentation and their part all the way through until, until we roll out. So we did the WMS that way we did an ERP that way. And the ERP, we said, we're going to go live on, on a date, July 6th, 2020 during a pandemic, and we went live on July 6th, 2020, which was decided a year and a half prior. 

[00:06:45] Eric Champagne: So And we didn't miss a blink, you know, we didn't miss a sale, we didn't miss a shipment and everything went well. It's not perfect, I'm not saying it's a perfect world. Of course. But we went live with a new solution and everybody was surprised and happy. And now it's in evolution mode and things are happening pretty much the same way. 

[00:07:07] Eric Champagne: That's amazing. We approach all the requirements for a change the same way. We approach a modification to the solution the same way. So everybody's used to working in that sense. And today, everybody knows that whatever they say is going to be taken seriously and see what we can do. Technology evolution is so fast. 

[00:07:28] Eric Champagne: Right. We have to be very weary of the taste of the week. You know, sometimes they go shopping to another retailer and say, Oh, they're doing this. It's so much fun. Okay, fine. And the following week it's something else. So we have to be careful of that in IT because it's easy to get the excitement of something you saw somewhere that maybe their  

[00:07:49] Aaron Brooks: infrastructure is built differently. 

[00:07:51] Aaron Brooks: There's many ways to do it. The worst, Derek, I find it's like conferences. Oh man, let's say drink the Kool Aid at a conference and you come back all excited about the new shiny thing you saw and it's like, well, we should do that. And, you know, if you're not reflecting back on the outcomes and the direction that the organization is trying to go and having a real conversation around, is this really going to help? 

[00:08:14] Aaron Brooks: Significantly, like is this worth the change management and the disruption to get this new shiny thing that must happen, especially today's day and age with how quickly everything is moving. So how do you handle that kind of stuff? You made a mention of always coming back and getting that voice of the individuals. 

[00:08:31] Aaron Brooks: Do you have a system in place? Like, do you have a user group? Is there scheduled meetings? Like, how do you run that in your business today? 

[00:08:40] Eric Champagne: We have a pipeline of 77 projects right now. And right now we're handling about 12 at the same time. The way we handle it is we put priorities. We identify, is it a technical project? 

[00:08:51] Eric Champagne: Is it a business solution project? Is it a cybersecurity project? And we handled it that way. So we subdivide the different types of project because it's going to require different types of resources to put that project to life. We just talk and, and we get the requirements. And the minute you start talking about requirements, this is where some of the excitement that you may get in a conference or another retailer, it starts dwelling down. 

[00:09:17] Eric Champagne: And, and sometimes they realize, you know what, we're doing that. We're actually doing it now. They just never realized it. It's been automated for, I don't know, five years. So people forget that things are, are running okay. And this is how it filters itself many, many, many times. And it's not because we say no, it's because you know what, what we have is actually pretty cool. 

[00:09:40] Eric Champagne: And this is what I try to, to get back when we get project requests. Okay. What is it where we're doing that you want to change today? Right. That you're going to get a better outcome. So the filtering process is not about the CIO. It's about running the business. Now we have 4, 500 employees in stores and in the office and IT needs to remain simple. 

[00:10:06] Eric Champagne: It needs to add value. It needs to be easy to use for the end consumer on our side because we're doing, we're in retail, but it needs to be easy to use for our sales associates to use it. Otherwise they won't use it. They won't propose it to the consumers and then it adds absolutely no value. I love that. 

[00:10:25] Eric Champagne: So when we ask those questions. It filters themselves and yeah, sometimes there are great ideas that we do put forward and we do, we, we do make happen. And this is where IT comes in with all its expertise. So it's a very, very collaborative work before we say yes to a project. And the very technical stuff is it's mostly, okay, we need to do it because we're, we're legacy or whatever. 

[00:10:52] Eric Champagne: Right. This happens. One thing, one thing I do not do. Unless it's a really big project or something we haven't touched before, I don't do an ROI on a project. Really? When we decide, when we decide as a group that it's the right thing to do, we just go ahead and we do it. Well, that's fascinating. We price it, obviously, and there's some evaluation being done. 

[00:11:13] Eric Champagne: But it's not because the ROI is, is the ROI again, if the project is good, the ROI will happen itself.  

[00:11:19] Aaron Brooks: That's fascinating.  

[00:11:20] Eric Champagne: So, so I don't, I've done it in many previous lives and in public publicly traded companies, but over here at La Vie en Rose, let's do this and we do it.  

[00:11:30] Aaron Brooks: How do you get the business case past the senior leadership team or the board? 

[00:11:36] Aaron Brooks: If it's public in your past life, like how do you make that business case without an ROI? How do you get the money?  

[00:11:43] Eric Champagne: While we get the money from the project, this is the cost of a project, for example, in ERP. So ERP is most complicated project you can do in a company and usually the most expensive. Yeah. So we go there, we make an evaluation and we say, okay, this represents X, Y, Z. 

[00:12:00] Eric Champagne: We just move forward. And that's, that's how we, that's how we run it. That's how we do it. And if ever there's not a good ROI, it won't work. The, the, the, not doing it is going to come up before you get to the ROI. Right. The ROI is the last step to, to get the money from your CFO. That's not how we run here at La Vie en Rose, where we sit together and we say, okay, let's do this. 

[00:12:21] Eric Champagne: It's going to cost X millions of dollars or X hundred thousands of dollars. Yeah, it's the right thing to do. Let's do it. We should see an increase in A, B, C. And as you know, these increases, yeah, sometimes they materialize, sometimes they don't. Right. Now, most ROI get increases in revenues or decrease in expenses. 

[00:12:41] Eric Champagne: Yeah, exactly. Well, the decrease in expenses never happens. Never. They never materialize. Ever. It's so true. Yeah. So, oh, we're gonna cut 10 percent of our staff. No, no way. It's not gonna happen. So, I don't waste time with that, because it's useless. And we just get the project going. And we do see sometimes the revenues. 

[00:13:00] Eric Champagne: And again, the revenues, is it related to a better system? Is it related to people getting excited? Is it related to the sales cycle, that's different. It's very tough to say. One thing I do put emphasis on is the cost of not doing it. Hmm. Interesting. There's a huge cost to that.  

[00:13:18] Aaron Brooks: Yeah.  

[00:13:18] Eric Champagne: All right. If you're running a legacy ERP system and you want to try all these, these new solutions out there, payments or. 

[00:13:25] Eric Champagne: You know, there's many new things that are good for business today. Uh, we can't do it because we're in legacy systems, because our systems are too old. The database structure doesn't work. We're in, we're running an AS400 platform where we can't hook up anything to that. So, this is where we move forward in the last six to seven years to completely redo our infrastructure to be able to use those solutions when they come up. 

[00:13:47] Aaron Brooks: I love that. So it feels like you're tying it to outcomes that the business is trying to drive, whether for your employees or for your customers versus a financial ROI on either revenue or because there's so many other. influences to the outcomes of that ROI for increasing revenue or saving money that may or may not have had anything to do with the project in the first place. 

[00:14:09] Aaron Brooks: And so it's like a false thing to look at. But if you get the outcome of why we decided on the project for the people or the business, then that's a great way to say this is working.  

[00:14:18] Eric Champagne: Yeah. And you know, the comment I get often is that it is expensive. Okay. Now, as an anecdote and our PNL here, I don't even have a In the PNL. 

[00:14:29] Eric Champagne: Really? I go in other expenses. All of, all of it, all of it. So how, how, how does that work? 2 percent of the top line. Marketing gets more money. That is amazing. Visa and MasterCard gets half my budget. Wow. So, and who's complaining on Visa and MasterCard? So all of that makes it happen that you know what, operating IT is not something that's. 

[00:14:55] Eric Champagne: Out of this world. So expensive. You have to look from percentage to your top line and when retail and retail is more expensive than manufacturing, manufacturing is cheaper is below 2%. Retail is about when you're between one and nine to 2. percent of your top line. You know, you're running a healthy IT, every healthy IT budget and CapEx for big projects, obviously something else is viewed differently. 

[00:15:19] Eric Champagne: And in today's world, you know, we're fully SaaS, we're fully on the cloud. So there's a lot less investment to do from an infrastructure standpoint. 

[00:15:25] Aaron Brooks: Of course. Are those costs associated because it's associated to the lines of business as a cost of doing business? Is that why it's so small? No, no. That is fascinating. 

[00:15:34] Eric Champagne: I get, I get 100 percent of the IT spent. And I don't, I'm not, I'm not, I don't charge back to, by department. So I can look to, Good and have a good PNL and stuff like that. No, it's, it's, it's the, there's a cost to it. I'm not saying there's no cost, right? Of course, but it's not that high for most, most companies, unless you would be soft or that kind of, obviously I'm not talking about those guys or CGI cause they, they run it, but for us, It's it's for retailers. 

[00:16:02] Eric Champagne: It's not that high. So I tell retailers, you know what? Stop telling it's expensive and all of that. There's a cost of doing business, but it's not that big of a cost.  

[00:16:12] Aaron Brooks: I love that. I love that. And I love the human centric nature that you have and the approach to leadership. Um, I'm curious if this is something you've always done, you've always been this way, or has there been a catalyst in your career in the past that said, there's got to be a better way to do this? 

[00:16:26] Aaron Brooks: Like, how did you get to this place?  

[00:16:29] Eric Champagne: Um, I started using IT in university, just to give the audience, I'm 58 years old. So I was at university in the mid 80s. So it's been, it's been, it's been a while. And I've got, I've got a BSc and an MSc in physics. At school, I was looking at my colleagues and having a computer to do their reports and do their analysis, but there was no data, automated data acquisition. 

[00:16:54] Eric Champagne: So I started working back then in Lotus 1, 2, 3, and I said, okay, there's got to be a better way than being in front of an experience for four hours and clicking every 15 seconds on your time watch and taking your measurements. I said, no, no, no. I use the computers to acquire the information and that was the catalyst and I was, I was, I was 18, 19 years old. 

[00:17:14] Eric Champagne: I said, IT is fun. IT can help. And that's, that's how I viewed my career from using IT. Let's use IT as a tool. Interesting. Not as a, not as a weapon, not as an obligation for everybody, but as a tool. Is the tool working for me and can I get a better outcome? And that was back then, that was, I got a better outcome because in physics, my acquisition of data was automated. 

[00:17:39] Eric Champagne: It was accurate every 15 seconds. So I could put any timer on it, five seconds, 10 seconds, and getting the information results was immediate. Yeah, that was almost 40 years ago. So things have changed a lot. So today I look at it the same way. Can I get a good or a better outcome using technology? If you think technology doesn't bring me a new outcome, so why, why use it? 

[00:18:07] Aaron Brooks: But a lot of people get like caught up in the speeds and feeds and the features and benefits and you know, you go and talk to technology companies and I'm sure you get inundated every day with the big manufacturers and vendors that come and say, oh, we have this amazing new way of doing things. How do you balance Or get people's mindset to shift because I, everything you're saying is around outcomes. 

[00:18:27] Aaron Brooks: And if I don't have a business reason or something that I'm trying to do in my business, why do I care about the speeds and feeds and the features and benefits? How do you balance that?  

[00:18:37] Eric Champagne: Again, benefit, no speeds. Okay. You can get your inventory value in real time. Okay. You know what? There's a benefit to that. 

[00:18:43] Eric Champagne: I get that. That's fine. You get your sales curve analysis that can react on it in six months from now because it takes about six months to produce the product. Yeah, you can get that in real time. Uh, well, okay, but I don't need that in real time. Right. So why, if it's going to take me six months, why should I need it every day and every hour or every minute of every hour of every day? 

[00:19:06] Eric Champagne: There's no need for that. So it's coming back again to the benefits and, and the outcome. I was told when I was at school, if you're going to measure something that is smaller than the mistake you can do, Don't measure it.  

[00:19:20] Aaron Brooks: That's really interesting.  

[00:19:21] Eric Champagne: Don't, don't, just don't do it. You're wasting your time. So, if your error is 2%, why are you going to start measuring stuff that's half a percent or even, even 1 percent or one quarter of a percent? 

[00:19:32] Eric Champagne: This is not, and, and that obviously those percentage can vary from one business to another, but it's all about balancing, making sense. And keeping it relevant  

[00:19:42] Aaron Brooks: to the business. I can see why you're lean. Like I can see how you don't have a lot of costs and that you can do really amazing things with a smaller team because you're focused. 

[00:19:52] Aaron Brooks: You're focused on the outcomes of the business. You're not getting sidetracked and going down rat holes around cool things because you're able to always lift it back up to what are the goals of the company, what problems exist from us hitting those goals and only do the things that are going to move the business forward. 

[00:20:08] Aaron Brooks: And to me, focus,  

[00:20:09] Eric Champagne: I'm a very disciplined person. My team is very disciplined. Yeah, we do have all the same issues like any other company. Of course. It's all the same. It's IT and everybody's using it the same way pretty much. At the end of the day, it's keeping focus. We prioritize our issues. And priorities are very simple. 

[00:20:27] Eric Champagne: Does it affect revenues? And my biggest expense is the distribution center. If the DC is down, I have a major problem. If the stores are down, I have a major problem. If the website is down, I have a major problem. Everything else? Okay. Yeah, we'll fix it as fast as we can, obviously. For sure. But if we cannot push a purchase order today, okay, we'll push it tomorrow. 

[00:20:47] Eric Champagne: It's fine. It's going to be okay. If we can't bring sales into stores today, that's a problem. Because customers won't come back, they'll go somewhere else. So, it's, it's all about looking at, again, the outcome, what brings the money, and what doesn't. Cost a lot  

[00:21:00] Aaron Brooks: from being not able to operate. So in change management, we talk a lot about adoption with our customers because they're always adopting something new. 

[00:21:09] Aaron Brooks: Everything is changing, even your comment about CapEx and everything moving to SaaS, which is more OpEx related. And so there's, there's always change. And it's always for us. We see that adoptions the thing that's stopping them from from doing that. And part of the biggest part of change management or adoption is constant communication. 

[00:21:27] Aaron Brooks: So you talked about voice early on and that iteration. How do you communicate at large with the organization? And do you celebrate wins along the way as you're making these pivots? Like how important is that? to a dialogue on a continuous basis.  

[00:21:42] Eric Champagne: We communicate with the business in many, many, many ways. So we have every other week, we have a newsletter that goes out with what's going on, what's up, cyber security, new systems, new options. 

[00:21:54] Eric Champagne: We're currently replacing our intranet, so all the teams are involved and we're doing it business group by business group. We're implementing, you know, some MFAs, some one password or single sign on activity. So we do it group by group and we celebrate and we tell the groups that we're just, you know, Signed up and got their training and using it to tell the other groups, yeah, it works fine and it's great and it's fun. 

[00:22:14] Eric Champagne: So we do communicate the wins. We do communicate when it's difficult. We don't hide. We just say, okay, it's a tough project. We're having some issues with A, B, and C. And we're working on it and we'll resolve it. And we'll get to the end of it. And once everything's okay, we'll all be very happy. Yeah, we try to be out there. 

[00:22:33] Eric Champagne: We're not in everybody's face all the time. But we try to be out there. We help them a lot. We try to give them a great service.  

[00:22:41] Aaron Brooks: I love it. Uh, so I have a hypothetical question for you, if you're okay with it. Um, let's say in however many years you're, you're on your last day working and you're retiring and they decide to put a press release about your career and everything you've accomplished. 

[00:22:56] Aaron Brooks: What would you want to be that one thing in your career that you're the proudest of? What would be the highlight of that press release?  

[00:23:03] Eric Champagne: I don't have a single word for it or an expression, but what I would like to say is I got people to use technology for the better. I love that. That's my role every day. 

[00:23:15] Eric Champagne: You know what? It's not about the newest tool or the latest gadget or whatever. We can all buy those at Best Buy and they're good at it. And that's fine. Sometimes I do buy some, I do buy some for my kids and that's okay. But for businesses, make sure as many people as possible can maximize the use of the technology that we purchase or we put in place to bring a better outcome. 

[00:23:36] Eric Champagne: And you know, when I see a solution that works and people are using it, This is what makes me happy. That's awesome. This is what makes me, I don't want to say proud because I'm not, I'm not, I don't, I'm not the kind of person who wants to be under the spotlight, but, uh, I'm happy when I see that I get excited and I'm, you know what? 

[00:23:53] Eric Champagne: I tell to myself, well, we took a right decision. People are using it, people love it, and they would never go back. That's how I see  

[00:24:00] Aaron Brooks: it. I love that. I gotta assume that part of your leadership style is very development oriented. And do you spend a lot of time with your direct reports on coaching, mentorship, lifting them up, delegation, giving them chances to fail? 

[00:24:12] Aaron Brooks: How does that show up for you in your leadership style?  

[00:24:15] Eric Champagne: I get to see my direct reports on a daily basis. We get the weekly meetings for strategy and for what's coming up, do they need support. And I see the rest of the team on a daily basis also. Hi, and how are you that don't, the, the, the, uh, just getting the contact there. 

[00:24:34] Eric Champagne: Uh, they're in the office 50 percent of the time, the other 50 percent they're out. There's, there's many meetings on a daily basis. So I try to say hi to everybody every day. That is. Part of, of the solution and yes, to your point, make them make decisions. Oh, we live in a world today where nobody wants to make a decision anymore because they want to be accountable, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

[00:24:55] Eric Champagne: You know what? No, no, I'm paid to make decisions. My direct reports are paid to make decisions, make decisions. The decision. And if we fail, you know what, if it's a bad decision, we'll fix it. At the end of the day, you know, I compare, I compare decision making to a baseball player. A baseball player who hits 300 is a multi millionaire for 15 next generations. 

[00:25:20] Eric Champagne: Now, if I would hit 300 in my job on decision making, I, I, I would have a major problem. Yes. So we have to hit, yes, obviously we have to hit in the eight or nine hundred if we want to compare it to a baseball stats. So make decisions and they will not all be good. Overall we'll do, we'll do good. So and I don't make them, uh, I don't point anybody. 

[00:25:46] Eric Champagne: I never throw anybody under the bus and they know that. So if we, if we, if we screw up as a department, we screwed up as a department. That's it.  

[00:25:56] Aaron Brooks: It's not the individual, it's we succeed and fail as a team. Love that. Never.  

[00:26:01] Eric Champagne: That's my style. That's how I do it. I don't overprotect my team. But at the same time, I don't show them under the bus. 

[00:26:07] Eric Champagne: So everybody understands that everybody's, everybody likes that. And yeah, I do coach, I do mentoring whenever they want. I do some coaching. I, I go to conference, or every conference I go, I, I write up a, a summary note or a one pager, and I, I dispute it to them. I share the company numbers with them so they know where we're going. 

[00:26:27] Eric Champagne: There's no lies. There's no, we're not, I don't hide anything from them.  

[00:26:31] Aaron Brooks: That is fantastic. So, transparency, authenticity, giving people a genuine voice. All these things drive such a great culture, which leads to better outcomes. Mm-Hmm. , do you get any pushback from your peers in the industry that are more the traditional command and control? 

[00:26:46] Aaron Brooks: Like what's your, what's the feedback been like from other technology leaders? Well, smart. You  

[00:26:50] Eric Champagne: know what, less and less, because I made my point over the last 40 years, but early on, yeah. I was viewed that as a black sheep of the industry. You know, I was never in love with. The actual server rooms or get the huge it teams. 

[00:27:05] Eric Champagne: Why? It's, it's, you know, the more people you have, the more people management you need to do, and it's, it's difficult, it's tough, so I don't need that. Same thing with server rooms and all of that. I'm so happy that the cloud is out there now and it's a different way of working at it, but I don't need to maintain. 

[00:27:22] Eric Champagne: Fire suppression, or I don't need to do some tests every month for A, B, or C, or electrical generators, their diesel in the generator outside that I don't need to worry about any of that. So it's much nicer for me. And I do have some peers that, uh, today they still have huge server rooms. They still. I think it's the right approach. 

[00:27:43] Eric Champagne: I, we're just not in the same place. My goal is to sleep at night. No, I run from an IT perspective. I went to other locations in this country. We're open 128 hours out of 168. Our website is running 24 seven. You know what I sleep at night. Uh, so to me, this is, this is a huge, huge, huge thing. I use a lot of my partners. 

[00:28:08] Eric Champagne: No, we're almost fully SaaS. So obviously I've got. Not a ton of partners. I got 10 or 12 major partners that we do rely on a lot. So we've, we've becoming managing the partners. So we're partner management is a huge, a huge portion of my job and we're reading contracts and making sure the SLAs are being followed properly and that whatever is supposed to deliver is delivered on time and the way was supposed to be delivered. 

[00:28:34] Eric Champagne: And that's how I, I've been doing it and I've been doing that for over 25 years managing through that way and managing the partners and managing IT in that sense. Uh, it makes it much easier for me. It works for me. La Vie en Rose is my eight ERP transformation, which is eight. Either I'm crazy or. I don't know where you're really good at it. Maybe you're just doing something right. And it's like, so I can't complain. And major systems, WMS, OMS, uh, PLMs, uh, financial systems. So I've, I've done quite a few.  

[00:29:12] Aaron Brooks: So do you have any tips for those that are maybe stuck in the old way of doing things? Obviously, when you think about moving to outcomes, which is what you're leading with, you have to have a seat at the table with the business to hear and understand what they're doing in the business to get to the outcomes. 

[00:29:28] Aaron Brooks: What about the ones that are struggling to find that place? Do you have any tips for them on how to get closer to outcomes? Just go and do it. Spend time with the  

[00:29:36] Eric Champagne: business unit. Just do it, sit with them. Now, we have the best business card in any corporation in IT. We can sit at any table, it just depends on us. 

[00:29:46] Eric Champagne: We just have to decide, you know what? I'd like to be part of you, I think I can help you somehow. Just get in a meeting. Just go and listen. You'll get some feedback. You'll start creating. You'll start being, you'll, you'll be in a position to be able to challenge the business and ask them questions. 

[00:29:59] Eric Champagne: Understand what the business is doing. And what I, what I've seen, there's many IT leaders that don't understand. They understand their IT umbrella, their IT portfolio. They get that and that's fine, but sometimes they just don't understand how their business works. Get out there, go walk the distribution center, go in a, go in a product presentation, you know, we have some, some fashion shows, go in the fashion show, see how it's done, see how they do it, just go out there. 

[00:30:26] Eric Champagne: I make it myself an obligation. To talk to the people, walk the people, I go in the stores every week, just listening to what they have. How's, how's the cash running? Everything's cool. Everything's fine. It's just a simple question. I'm there for 30 seconds and I'm out. How is it running? How could we improve? 

[00:30:43] Eric Champagne: What can I do to make your life better? I love that sentence. It's a great sentence. That is  

[00:30:47] Aaron Brooks: the best business card you'll ever have. That's so great. Do you watch Ted Lasso? Have you watched Ted Lasso? No, it's a TV show about a coach and in one of the scenes he was talking about this quote that he saw about being curious instead of judgmental. 

[00:31:05] Aaron Brooks: And I find sometimes when we talk about technology, we're judgmental about our views on technology. They're not using it and they're, they're not doing what I asked them to do. And part of that was not being curious to understand what it is that they were trying to do in the first place. And we tend to want to bring technology for the sake of bringing technology versus being curious. 

[00:31:24] Aaron Brooks: And I think everything you've just said about getting out and understanding is seeking to be curious. And when you're curious and you understand what's going on, especially as someone who loves to fix things and is a solution oriented person, it's so much easier to do. Then hoping to God, somebody likes the thing you're building. 

[00:31:42] Aaron Brooks: Like, yeah, and it's a, and it's fun and  

[00:31:45] Eric Champagne: it's super fun. It is so fun. IT is, you know, we all got interested, all of us in IT, young or old. We all got interested with IT because it was fun. Now I have a six year old at home and we have an iPad for it that we give her one hour a week. But she has fun on that thing. 

[00:32:02] Eric Champagne: Right. She plays with it. She understands how it works. But IT, at the end of the day, IT is a fun tool to use. Yes. Yes. Because it's so versatile, you can get so many things out of it. For me, it's all about having fun at work and having fun using a tool. Again, I repeat myself maybe for the 10th time, to get a better outcome. 

[00:32:25] Aaron Brooks: So I love the idea of fun. And from the standpoint of I haven't heard somebody say that in so long, Eric, like we have lost the fun. I think you're totally right. So one of my takeaways is going to make a shirt that says bring back the fun in I. T. So I absolutely love that. Just as we start to wrap this up, I'm curious if you can. 

[00:32:43] Aaron Brooks: We've talked a lot about outcomes, and sometimes that's a very nebulous word. Would you be able to share one outcome you're proudest of for the business and one outcome you're proudest of for your customers? around the approach you're taking.  

[00:32:57] Eric Champagne: Yeah, I'll start with the customers. We've put out a solution out there now that's a mobile POS working off the customer's phone. So on the customer's phone? So they scan a QR code. They get to an app. They don't need to do registry. We don't need a, they don't need to do a password. They scan the barcodes in the stores. They check out and transaction is done.  

[00:33:22] Aaron Brooks: Wait, wait, they don't need to go up to the booth or the register at all. 

[00:33:26] Aaron Brooks: They can self-serve. Self  

[00:33:27] Eric Champagne: serve completely using their phone, looking up at our inventory, getting all the promotions that are valid in the stores, and they can enter their credit card credentials and check out. And they're out the door.  

[00:33:41] Aaron Brooks: I think you just blew my mind. We should have started with this conversation because I could talk another hour. 

[00:33:45] Aaron Brooks: Yeah, we can do another hour with that. And we did  

[00:33:47] Eric Champagne: that with a startup here in Montreal.  

[00:33:49] Aaron Brooks: That's amazing.  

[00:33:50] Eric Champagne: So, uh, that's super cool from a customer, from a professional standpoint, back in the office. Now we did a full ERP. We went from a old legacy COBOL base, fake SQL front face, mid eighties. And we completely revert back. 

[00:34:07] Eric Champagne: And. For me, what I wear, I'm very proud is that when I joined Navier Rose, IT was accountable to run the show for everybody, run the markdowns, run the product loading everywhere. And the way we've done it is today, all the business are accountable to run their show using the systems. Wow. So if they're late pushing markdowns, it's, it's not an IT problem. 

[00:34:32] Eric Champagne: Was there an IT problem? No. Well, Okay. It belongs to you. People say, Oh, you're just, you know, you're just stepping away from the issues. Well, there's no issues. The systems do work when there are issues. The issues are erased and we fix the issues from the systems. We're not here to fix the issues inside the business units. 

[00:34:50] Eric Champagne: Understood. We're here to fix the it, the technology issue, the tool issues. And that to me today, the company is growing fast and the business are involved and using the systems. This is what makes me the most proud. Here at L'Aviare, also even in my previous lives, this is where I strive. This is where I have fun. 

[00:35:09] Eric Champagne: And this is where I say, you know what? It's working. Love it. And it's better to have the business unit take care of their own, uh, operations. Sure. Using the tools, then giving it to IT in an Excel format, uh, where you never know if the Excel format is going to stay alive. If you swap a line or something like that, everything is, everything, nothing works. 

[00:35:29] Eric Champagne: Totally. Um,  

[00:35:31] Aaron Brooks: it's, this is what makes me proud on a daily basis. That's great. It sounds really awesome. And if I, if I was to recant some of the things that I loved about this conversation, what I took away from it, the focus on business outcomes, and you just seem to naturally elevate every technology discussion to why. 

[00:35:48] Aaron Brooks: And which is such a critical port, centering it around the people outcomes, which is so phenomenal that it's human centric, um, a real focus on adoption all the way from the beginning where you seek to hear the voice, you collaborate with them, you check in on a regular basis, you pivot if needed, and you're a servant leader to understanding what it is that we're trying to do in the organization, communicate, collaborate, Thank you. 

[00:36:11] Aaron Brooks: Move fast and pivot. And my new favorite term moved from ROI to ROO return on outcome. So I really appreciate that as we wrap up, Eric, I wanted to thank you for obviously joining us today, and I do want to follow up with you on that amazing. experience you've built for your customers, is there anything that you want to leave the listeners with in terms of how to get ahold of you or to see your amazing journey and your story on social media? 

[00:36:38] Eric Champagne: I'm on LinkedIn, so I'm easy to find. There's some posts sometimes where I'm involved. So, uh, you can look for me on LinkedIn, if you want to join me, uh, send me an invitation and stating where you heard of me because I don't accept everybody. I'm not, uh, I'm not that type of person. So if you tell me you heard the podcast, uh, it's fine and I'll, uh, we can, we can, uh, exchange some, some information. 

[00:37:00] Eric Champagne: I'll gladly do so. And again, bring the fun. You said it, bring the fun back to IT. It's what we live for. Uh, yes, there's some days it's difficult, for sure. It is, it is still a fun job, and it's a very interesting job, and it's always evolving. Keep learning. Keep learning.  

[00:37:19] Aaron Brooks: That's amazing. A lot of great one liners for me today that I'm going to steal Eric, but don't worry, I'll give you, uh, lots of credits when I'm sharing them, but I appreciate the time. 

[00:37:27] Aaron Brooks: And, and this was a lot of fun in this conversation itself. So it was a good way for me to start and remind the next meeting I have, which is it centric that I will try to bring some fun to it. So I appreciate you.  

[00:37:37] Eric Champagne: Well, thank you very much and bye to everybody.  

[00:37:40] Aaron Brooks: All right. Take care. Eric, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. 

[00:37:46] Aaron Brooks: You remind us that successful IT management is not about tech. It's about business and people outcomes. And that's a pretty compelling call to action to bring more understanding and more fun into information technology. Well, that's it for this week of The Catalyst. If you like this episode, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. 

[00:38:06] Aaron Brooks: We'll be back in two weeks for another episode. The Catalyst is brought to you by Softchoice, a leading North American technology solution provider. Written and produced by Angela Cope, Felipe Dimas, and Brayden Banks, in partnership with Pilgrim Content Marketing.