TMS Toolkit Series – Implementation: Pitfalls to Avoid

Craig Jeffery: 

Transformations, treasure transformations are naturally complex as they may involve organizational changes, technology implementations, and adjustments to processes, and these have to be done while keeping the business running. And that brings us to our topic today: implementation pitfalls to avoid. And I’m joined with Mathilde Sanson, the chief customer officer of GTreasury. Welcome back Mathilde. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Thank you for having me on this call. Thank you. 

Craig Jeffery: 

In the footnotes to the podcast session, you’ll see a link where you can download the related ebook or the entire ebook series called The TMS Toolkit Series. There are four. The first one is building the business case. This is where we discuss making a strategic and financial value case clear to key stakeholders. 

Craig Jeffery: 

The second is technology stack, the digital backbone, and this explores the treasury management systems part in a modern technology ecosystem and the necessity of being modern. 

Craig Jeffery: 

The third is treasury management systems selection, leading practices, and this lays out the plan for navigating the selection process of a solution and a partner. 

Craig Jeffery: 

And then finally, the fourth ebook is implementation, pitfalls to avoid, understanding the context and issues organizations face and how to address them. Mathilde, I thought it would be useful for the audience to hear a bit of your background, your career, what you’ve done. I know you’ve had a part in directly in many, many treasury management system implementations and perhaps overseeing multiple hundreds of these implementations. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Yes. I certainly have built quite a case experience on implementations, whether actually they were ERP earlier in my career, because that’s where I started. I actually was an implementer of financial systems way back before even Windows existed, but now I’m dating myself. But since throughout my career, I’ve definitely overseen teams that are responsible for the success of a client implementing a TMS solution. I’ve now worked at two different TMS providers and it is definitely a journey that’s important to think about and to plan and to be successful at. So I look forward to this conversation on what are the things that can drive to success. I was very impressed with your ebook so I highly recommend for people to actually read in that link because I thought it was very good. But look forward to talking more about the experiences I’ve seen over the years on these implementations. 

Craig Jeffery: 

If we talk about this idea of avoiding pitfalls, maybe you start with, why don’t you want to fall into a pit? I know it sounds obvious, but what are some of the negative results of falling into a pit, at least metaphorically? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Well, the first one that I think is extremely important is that obviously you will not obtain the planned ROI that you had, when you build a business case internally at your organization. To acquire a TMS or to switch TMS, you really have expected some efficiency, you’ve expected some relief from a day to day activities that your team, takes them a really long time, for example. And if you fall into these pitfalls, you will not achieve that ROI in the timeframe you had hoped for, or maybe even not at the level at all that you had hoped for. So really avoiding them is critical. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

The other possibility in terms of negative result is you will have implementation fatigue because often time a pitfall is that an implementation takes much longer than had been planned or anticipated. And your team will be tired of an implementation as they manage their regular work load. And often time will then take shortcuts or reduce the scope you had hoped for the TMS to provide functionality across multiple aspects of your day to day, but you end up reducing it because your timeline is taking longer than you had thought or planned for. And therefore you’re also having lower adoption and usage of the full system you have purchased. 

Craig Jeffery: 

It’s like doing home repairs or home remodeling. You get fatigued after a while, and it was supposed to last a month and it’s longer than that. I’m not saying anything from personal experience, but it’s nice when things get buttoned up at the end, and that that fatigue can really wear on you at home, as well as with technology. Those are some good examples of the negative aspect of getting stuck in a pit or running into a problem. What I was hoping to do, and as we did the prep session, for those that are listening, we talked about some of the pitfalls and thought it would make sense for those listening to hear a discussion about the pitfalls and how to overcome them, how to get past them safely. So Mathilde, I don’t know which ones you want to address, but I thought you could start by listing the pitfall and talking about how to get beyond them. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Sure. So the ones that I think would be good to concentrate on is one of them is having a thought that you will have an implementation where you execute everything at once, which we call sort of the big bang theory of implementation versus having a plan where you have incremental success and building on that success in terms of confidence, in terms of adoption of the system, and doing sort of go lives in a staggered approach is something that should be explored and considered from the get go. So from my perspective, an all at once, approach can be a pitfall. I am definitely an advocate of the incremental success, or we call a partial go live, for example. So it’s having really set milestones that you go through in implementation versus waiting for the whole system to be completed, and testing all the way, end to end, every single aspect, and then considering the project something to be a success. So there’s a pitfall of the all at once that I think can create what we talked about earlier in terms of extended timelines, in terms of fatigue and ultimately reducing scope. 

Craig Jeffery: 

Is part of the issue, is that it introduces … Is it more an issue of it presents more risks to the process, or is it that it delays value the organization sees? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

I think it delays value to the organization that it sees. That’s where I would think there is greater risk. And there are unplanned things that happen in an implementation. In the business, things could reprioritize within your business, you could have an acquisition, you could have a reduction in force, you could have turnover. And if you go through a big bang or all at once implementation, that will put your project at greater risk versus if we use the metaphor of building a house. If you’re building one room at a time, you are able to at least function in one room and then move on to the next room and the next room. And so I think that that is something that reduces your risk in terms of the adoption and the ROI. 

Craig Jeffery: 

Good insights there. Yeah. So that’s one, we’ve got one pitfall underway, the big bang or all at once mentality. And the solution is moving this incrementally to achieve that value. What’s another one? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Failure to plan, really not thinking through and spending the time early in the project to really plan out what you will need in order to be successful. There are multiple things you need to plan for. The first one is resources. I mean, it’s really implementation is not as much about technology. It’s about the people involved in the project, whether it’d be your own team, whether it be a consulting partner that you engage to help you through this transformation or the system consultants who will help you with the technology. So having the right thinking time to plan that implementation, what will be your requirements in terms of your own staff? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

There are times where a company will decide to use their own resources while they’re doing their day job. But if you don’t plan for the amount of time that’s required to learn a new system, to think about the new processes that you will need, you will not have a successful implementation because you will have not dedicated enough planning time and your resources do not have the time and their own mindset to actually really engage with the system and think through the benefits they will have as they implemented. That failure to plan often time comes because of very optimistic expectations. If you have a team who’s never done an implementation before, then it is hard to imagine or to think about what are the things that could happen, but with consultants, or in this case system providers, we know that there are a lot of unexpected things that happen during an implementation. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

And if you’re overly optimistic on your implementation, you will most likely not have success because you have to give yourself breathing room for issues and unexpected changes or change in sort of expectation of how you will use the system. You have to give yourself that room to be able to … In fact, you have to plan for delays. I can’t say it any other way, but it happens just as if you’re constructing your house. The architect will be very optimistic and the contractor will also, but the reality is there will be delays and you need to plan for those and that’s very important. 

Craig Jeffery: 

Thinking about that, if you schedule it too tightly and you have no expectations, you’re going to be stressed. It’s like sometimes you read your GPS in your car telling you here’s what time you’ll get there. And that’s if you go the max speed the entire time, there’s no slowdowns, there’s nothing. And the only time you can beat it as if you are speeding and putting yourself at greater risk. There’s some aspect of that. There’s no margin for a delay, pushes the whole project, which creates this cascading effect. I think you’ve said a lot of really good points there. And it’s that optimism, people are very optimistic sometimes. And in theory, reality is just like theory. In reality, theory is nothing like reality. There are issues that come up and since you’ve seen so many, there’s going to be something you may not know what that something is. So that proper planning and realistic item is there. 

Craig Jeffery: 

I think one of the topics you wanted to talk about as well, or another pitfall is this area about being too aggressive or this, I wouldn’t call it a biased action, but a bias to a rush to action. Or how would you describe that other pitfall? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

I think a lot of implementation and the purchasing of a TMS comes along with a promise to a CFO to say we’re going to acquire this and we’re going to have efficiency with our team. We’re going to be able to move very quickly so that we either have faster payments or faster visibility to our cash forecast. And so there’s a real enthusiasm in reality, to implementing a new TMS that drives into, well, I hope to have this in three months because you might’ve made some commitment, higher in the organization and now you have to deliver. So we do understand that pressure to be very quick, but you also have to counterbalance that with you can’t rush to action, because what you’re doing is a transformation. You’re not just putting in a system that will do the same functions you had before. You’re actually thinking about your business differently. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

So that rush to action oftentimes comes from just eagerness to get going, or some commitment to higher management. But it is important to think that that actually only gives you a short sighted view of how you’re going to transform your business. You need to really have that time to think about and put it in right because most companies do not change a TMS systems for 5, 7, 10 years. So you’re putting in now a system that will need to stand the test of time for you. And you want to … Even though I will evolve during those five to seven years, you still want to have a robust implementation that will weather the changes in your business in the next, at least four years. So you need to plan for that and not rush into it. 

Craig Jeffery: 

Yeah. And this idea of we’ll copy what we’ve done, our current process, make it fit and then we can re-engineer it later is unrealistic. Even over a 10 year time period or 15 years. It seems so unrealistic. And when people want to do that, it’s yeah. You can point out the pitfall. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Well, I would just expand just a little bit on the one you mentioned around use what you had before and just put in a system. You can’t underestimate the adoption of the system on your staff’s success. So you really do need people on board who are also excited about putting in a new system and who do see the change as a positive. We do encounter at times implementation where it might have been chosen by the senior management, but there is not as much buy-in from the actual people who execute the system. So obviously as a consultant, it is our job to help them see the benefits of the application, but that also really has to come from within, in order to have success because they need to make the time, they need to be able to play in the system, to test things out and really build that comfort on how does my job change? And that should not be underestimated. If it is, you will have lower adoption of the system. 

Craig Jeffery: 

Some of your comments there also tie back to the plan and resourcing issue you mentioned. You have to have time to play in the system and your staff is very fully engaged, how do you make extra time? Does everybody just stay later or do you get additional resources to help with that? Very good Mathilde. I know you have more pitfalls up your sleeve, but as we head towards our time pressures here, I wanted to get some of your final thoughts, maybe just guidance you’d give people for managing those pitfalls through phases of the project, or some key thoughts to take away and make sure those who are looking at technology projects or treasury management system implementation projects, some guidance. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

As we think about each stage of the project, obviously you want to be able to first really have a very strong plan with your team and with your consulting partner and system implementer in terms of what you will measure as success and what you measure as transformation. People don’t spend enough time, I think, on where are they coming from? How long does it take them to get a cash forecast or cash visibility? How long does it take them to process payments? So that you have a before and after. So start thinking that as even you launch on a project. Start thinking about some of the metrics that you want to measure and have success and be able to report as you incrementally bring different functions live. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

So from an implementation, at the beginning of the implementation to avoid some of the pitfalls, we’ve just talked about, first, you need your whole team to have buy-in, we’ve talked about that. You need them to be aware of what this technology can do. So usually not every member of the team has been involved in the demos from the vendors, or has not been involved in the selection process. So having, truly a beginning sort of kickoff internally, and understanding who are the stakeholders, understanding who are the people who will be implementing, understanding who will be your key users. And we’re talking about users who become subject matter experts. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Ultimately you own this application. The system provider is not the owner of the system. You are as an organization. And so you need to identify who will own and be the resource internally. That could be for the use of the system, for the administrative, but really for the business processes. And even for reporting. Often time, we find you need to plan out who will be the person who’s in charge of helping others in developing reports, for example. So having that planning time in terms of the resource assignments and the allocation of time. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

So in terms of allocation of time, one rule of thumb we tend to use is for every hour that you’ll spend with us as a treasury management system consultant, you need to think about three hours equivalent for your own staff. This is hours to prep, material they need to bring to the table. All your bank accounts, all your signatories, as an example. And after the session, you have homework, you have things you need to go and build, things you need to practice. And oftentimes that’s completely underestimated in terms of how much engagement you need outside of the calls with the treasury system provider. So I would really encourage you if your team cannot free up at least a third of their time to do this work, to potentially look at having outside help, having an outside consultant, having an outside, sort of maybe interns on certain functions, but really relieving some of the work that needs to be done, being supplemented by an outside source, that’s on a temporary basis, obviously through the project. But that really will relieve and make sure that your project continues to be on time and followed through. 

Craig Jeffery: 

That takes us through some of the implementation, pre-implementation items. Anything on the implementation side? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Definitely on the implementation. So again, having your team have the right focus and effort in terms of the time and the engagement within the meetings and the time that you’re spending with the consultant of the treasury provider, system provider, or within your own. Because it is a business transformation, you will do things differently. You might decide that payment approval could be rethought through. Who approves what could be done differently now that you have a system that can handle different levels of authority, for example. So you need the time internally to spend and design that. That is not something that system providers should be doing with you. That is something you should do internally because you know your business best. So having that head space and that time to do that is important. And you might need to reallocate some work. You might need to hire someone to do some of the day to day treasury so that your more expert people can spend the time doing this transformation work and this implementation work. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

We tend to follow, for example, here, sort of a train the trainer will train you on how to use the application, your main key contact, but then you need the time to train and deploy across the whole organization within with your own resources. So maybe having some internal training document that would be helpful. You need that space for people to do that. And they might need to be freed up from day to day function, some day to day functions to do that. Also, what’s very important is having a real commitment to the schedule that you have planned in the beginning part of your implementation. So if everybody’s on board and understands and is comfortable, and what’s the timeline we’ve committed, with everybody’s input, this is not a top down. It must be done by X, it’s really we’ve come up with a plan that we feel confident in. Then we need to push everyone to be committed to that schedule. We need everyone to really drive to those deadlines that we would have as part of the project plan and effect. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

It needs to be realistic, but it needs to also still be pushed. There’s a lot of engagement one has with banks, for example, in these projects, treasury projects, and the banks needs to be also completely aligned. So it is a three legged stool. And having this commitment and understanding of the schedule clearly defined for all three parties is pretty important. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

I would also say you really need to engage members of your whole organization. This is not just about your treasury team. This is also about your IT team who will help you do the connection with your ERP, for example, or with other systems that you want to flow the data to. Your ERP team needs to be available and scheduled within this. Your accounting team needs to be involved as well, because oftentimes the postings that go into your general ledger outside of the treasury system, they need to be involved in the decision, they need to understand how this will work and guide the treasury team. So having them clearly engaged and understand when do they come in? What is their timeline? What is their deadlines? Will also help a project move to completion in the timeline you were hoping for. 

Craig Jeffery: 

So that’s implementation now. Sometimes you pick a go live date and everything’s supposed to be perfect. There’s always things that come out no matter how good your testing is, unless you have a very, very simple operation. There’s going to be some things that production is different. So what are your thoughts on the go live and making that smooth? 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Go live is something that is extremely important. Yes, absolutely. And it is something that you want to have again, enough time in the plan, in a project plan to accommodate the rounds of testing that you want to do internally. Different organizations have different testing requirements. So depending on the size of the organization, how involved the IT team is, again, this is a SAS platform, but there are definitely organizations who follow a model, with sit one, sit two. And there are others are like, okay, what’s a testing plan? I don’t know because I’ve never implemented a treasury system. So we try to guide each customer to their culture as well in terms of the testing. But we do recommend that you have certainly two week, maybe three week testing cycle ahead of a go live that you’re targeting, you will find things in that testing cycle. That’s the whole point. You want to find them before you go live and you want to have a cut over time that you manage clearly so that not everything’s going to be perfect on day one. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

But enough of it will be that you can then work through the rest. So striving for perfection means that you will have a hard time going to go live. You have to get started and you have to commit to the date. We recommend having a sort of a period of, we call it hyper care. So you’ve gone live, but the consultants are there, understand that you’re in a go live mode and help you through that one week, two weeks where you will have new questions you hadn’t thought about because now you’re using it every single day, the application. So planning for that and expecting that, I think relieves a lot of anxiety that people have about what a go live means, because I think oftentimes people think, oh, that means my consultants are going away. And now I might go to a support team who doesn’t know me. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

But we do plan for that and that’s part of our transition and it’s important we celebrate go lives. Go lives is a milestone. And just like you move into a house, there’s a little punch list there for that house because that light switch is not working. Then let’s make sure we have the punch list. That’s okay. This is normal. And those are the things that I think we can … It’s more about expectations to me, having the right expectation in a go live that avoids the pitfalls we’ve been talking about. 

Craig Jeffery: 

That’s excellent Mathilde. Thank you so much. And the house example, there is a good one. Let’s say theoretically, if someone shot a nail gun nail through a baseboard, let’s say in my closet and it went into the pipe in the kid’s bathroom and had a slow leak. And then when they moved stuff downstairs to cut out a wall, all of a sudden the nail came free and created a flood. That would be an example of you want to solve… 

Mathilde Sanson: 

God, you’ve taken it to a disaster scenario there Craig. I don’t believe go lives are ever disastrous like that. 

Craig Jeffery: 

No, but it made me think of some of the work we just had done. That was yesterday’s example. But Mathilde, thank you so much for sharing information. Everybody, this is Mathilde Sanson, chief customer officer at GTreasury. Thanks for your time. 

Mathilde Sanson: 

Thank you for having me. 

OUTRO: 

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