Summary
In this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions podcast, host Kerry Boudreaux speaks with Cameron Wells, CFO of Valley Regional Transit Authority, about their ongoing business transformation journey with Oracle. They discuss the initial steps taken, the importance of project management, key success factors, challenges faced, and the significance of change management in the process. Cameron shares valuable insights and lessons learned from their experience, emphasizing the need for executive sponsorship and the role of trust in consultant relationships.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction
01:50 Introduction to the VRT’s Oracle Transformation Journey
04:08 The Initial Steps of Business Transformation
07:10 Key Success Factors in Project Management
13:39 Challenges and Lessons Learned
20:08 Navigating Change Management
23:36 Conclusion and Future Outlook
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi and welcome to the FourthSquare Solutions podcast. I’m Kerry Boudreaux, your host, Senior Vice President of Sales here at FourthSquare. And I am very excited to have a special guest with us, Cameron Wells from the Valley Regional Transit Authority. Cameron, welcome.
Cameron Wells
Thanks, Kerry. Thanks so much for having me.
Kerry Boudreaux
Absolutely. Now Cameron, you’re the CFO of VRT. Tell us a little more about your role and what you do there at the agency.
Cameron Wells
Yeah, CFO pretty easy for most people to get. I handle finances. I’ve got a whole finance team beneath me. We’re just here to help support the organization, get the right reporting that they need, handle the right finances the way we need to. We’re a bit of a special organization. We deal with a bunch of different funding partners around our area in order to fund transit in the valley that hosts the biggest city in Idaho, Boise. So, we work with a lot of different people to make sure that we can find the buses that drive our people around.
Kerry Boudreaux
And one of the biggest cities in Idaho, and I got to tell you, it’s one of the most beautiful cities in Idaho. I’ve been very fortunate to be there. Cameron, as you know, and the audience doesn’t know yet, you folks embarked on your business transformation journey with Oracle a couple of years ago, right?
Cameron Wells
Yes, that’s true.
Introduction to the VRT’s Oracle Transformation Journey
Kerry Boudreaux
We’re going to talk about that today. What that journey looked like and what that journey looks like today, because you’re not done with that journey. And to be quite honest, are you ever done with the journey? Right? So, let’s talk about your journey, how you’ve been transforming your business through technology and innovation. Tell us how you started your journey from day one, from your folks saying, hey, we need to change.
Cameron Wells
Yeah. So, day one for us, we had a database called FleetNet. It was specifically built for transit agencies and it was built in an access based database that was just super dated. We were told that they were going to stop supporting us and we needed to move to their new client.
We asked them for a demo of their new client and they said, well, no, it’s just going to work. We had issues with them to begin with and said, well, that’s not going work for us. So, we decided to move on from FleetNet. And our first step was we needed to find a project manager because we knew we couldn’t do this by ourselves. We’ve been around and had seen other entities try to switch to a new ERP system without a project manager and we’ve seen them fail. Before we ever even found you guys, we found us a project manager to help us to map out and organize the whole project. And then luckily, they led us to you.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so that project manager, correct me if I’m wrong, was that Avèro Advisors?
Cameron Wells
Yes, Avèro Advisors.
The Initial Steps of Business Transformation
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, and that’s kind of where we at FourthSquare first met you folks. But even before we Cameron on the scene, there was a sense from your team that it sounds kind of easy. We found a project manager, but there was a lot of preparation that went into getting ready just to release the RFP and to bring in vendors like ourselves and Oracle, right?
Cameron Wells
Yeah, as a governmental entity, have to follow every single hoop that you could think of. In order to get our project manager, it was a four-and-a-half-month process of vetting entities. And then once we found them, they made us do a six-month process of vetting, including, I don’t want to even say how many requirements they had us over a thousand requirements they had us make you guys go look at and say, can we do this? Yes or no? I believe we even told you if it was mission critical or just a bell and whistle we wanted. But we, that’s one of the reasons why we picked you is because you got that list of items we wanted and you went through every single item on that list to make sure that we got what we needed.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so it sounds like it was a 10 to 12-month process before you even have a consultant in-house to actually start building a new product. Is that what I’m hearing?
Cameron Wells
That’s exactly right. I don’t know, maybe if we were a smaller non-governmental entity, we would be able to move faster, but being in government, we’ve got to account for the public’s funds and we are held accountable for it. So, we want to make sure we do it right and we don’t like to miss. That’s why we picked you.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, people a lot of times are just like, really, Kerry? I say from the very first conversation that you have about starting your business transformation journey to actually going live and starting to use the new product that you have, it’s a 24-month process. And it sounds like that’s about right within a couple of months here. So that’s very interesting.
I talk about this and one of the reasons why I have you on the podcast is because you’ve had a successful journey so far. You are from that initial hiring of that project manager. Today, you’re using Oracle Finance. And I believe you just recently went live with Oracle Asset Management. Is that correct?
Cameron Wells
That’s correct. It’s been since the beginning of December, so almost two months for asset management.
Key Success Factors in Project Management
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, you’re just, in my opinion, even though it’s been close to two and a half, almost three years, in my opinion, you’re still early in your journey. You’ve talked about hiring a project manager. This has been a successful project so far and a successful journey. Tell us maybe two or three things, Cameron, that you feel like you folks did really well to ensure this success.
Cameron Wells
Yeah. number one, and I’ve already said it, but we, we hired a project manager. We couldn’t do it ourselves. I hated receiving all the emails just from them scheduling the daily checkpoints we had with you. I, they must have put in almost a full day’s work every time they were trying to schedule even a week’s worth of meetings with everybody involved.
This project involved almost every single project owner in our organization. Almost every single person in our organization touched this project. And in order to get all of those stakeholders wrangled together, including, you know, the CFO, the chief operating officer, the chief development officer to get them all scheduled at the same time was a pain, I assume, because I didn’t have to do it and I’m so glad I didn’t. So that’s number one.
I think you need a project manager, someone able to do that. And I think a third-party project manager is just key to not tie up your own staff’s time. That’s so critical. Every single moment of your staff’s time is so critical in this type of process.
Cameron Wells
I believe my chief development officer during one of the meetings that I had him in, he said, you know, Cameron, I’ve got a full-time job. And I said, this is the third meeting you’ve been in. I’ve got a full-time job. So even without that taking up the time of the staff, they still felt the burden of the lift that you have to know going into this type of project. It is a lift and you just got to prepare for it. So back to your original question, number one, you need an outsourced project manager, in my opinion.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. And a lot of times those outsource project managers, they don’t get factored into the budget. And that’s really important that you factor their time and their expertise. You really are paying for their expertise and their experience. You can name a project manager to this, but if they don’t know what in the heck they’re doing, then the project is going to get sideways and, and you’re back to square one. And it sounds like you hired a very good project management team in Avèro.
One thing that struck me when I first met with you, gosh, this was, I think the summer of ‘23 is when we first stepped foot in Boise and met you folks is the entire executive team, even the CEO, she was on the job and she was meeting with us and very involved. I really saw some executive sponsorship. Do you think that that played a vital role in your success?
Cameron Wells
I don’t think without the leadership from the top telling everyone that this is this is happening. Even if you’re having a bad day during the project knowing that the top brass is saying this is where we’re going, it doesn’t allow you to dwell on the bumps in the road. You’ve got to know that we’re moving forward one way or another. We’ve got to do everything we can to make this project go as well as it can.
Kerry Boudreaux
Another area where I really saw, once we got into the project and we started working on this, is how ready all of your entire team, your entire organization was to take on this project. I call it customer readiness. Do you feel like that you guys were ready for this? Or maybe it’s you’re never ready for a big project like this. I don’t know.
Cameron Wells
I think both. We were not ready because you’re never ready for it, but the organization was so ready to move on from the old outdated system we were working in. It was hard to onboard a new employee because the hoops you had to jump through in order to do the most basic thing in our old ERP system were nonsensical, non-logic, non-linear non-logical, and it was difficult to get anyone to understand the system to begin with let alone then after telling them how difficult the system was to let them know that they’re still mostly just going be working in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets are the real system.
It’s been a game changer being able to now host our documents, our backup documents in Oracle with the invoice, because we never used to be able to have the backup invoice when we were paying an invoice. We just had to have that stored in paper.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Kerry Boudreaux
That’s really interesting. So, we’ve kind of talked about what you feel like you did right to ensure success. Now, in big projects like this and in most things in life, when we set out to do things, we stump our toe and we look back and say, man, I wish I probably would have done this different. Are there two or three things that, as you look back over the last couple of years with this project, you can say, “We probably should have done this instead of doing that”?
Cameron Wells
Yeah, I think that honestly, we probably should have hired a temp finance assistant in some capacity, just because like I said, it takes up a ton of time. And if I would have thought about it, we needed extra help to shore up all the time that not just myself, but all the other staff in finance we’re dealing with. That time sink and time loss really could have been mitigated by another body, in-house.
Second of all, I’d say don’t lose your CFO when you go through one of these because I was not the CFO when we started this project. I was actually the Controller and that I that’s not something you can control, but I would warn you to don’t do it if you can.
Kerry Boudreaux
Well, I know the former CFO, Jason, and he’s a wonderful individual. We actually still stay in touch with each other. I know that he didn’t want to leave and you guys didn’t want him to leave, you know, but life happens. I’ll tell you what, it’s slowed the project down a little bit, but I think because you were so involved in the project as a Controller, we really didn’t miss a beat there.
Correct me if I’m wrong, one of the things that kind of happened unexpectedly, did you guys get hit with an audit like almost like two or three months into this project? You got hit with this audit and you were like, whoa, wait a minute. But not only do I have my full-time job, now I have the audit and I’ve got this project here that I have to manage.
Cameron Wells
Yeah, and that’s another thing we should have thought of because I’ve got an audit every year. We were so excited to move forward that we did not look at the timeframe well enough to know you don’t start your project two months before you have an audit. You probably want to start it after the audit. But the audit probably would have gotten in the way somewhere or another, I guess, with the way our entity works.
It did kind of, it was a stutter start really even because of that audit where I know for a fact I had a gray month with the project. They just grayed out all my resource and they tried to work with IT a little bit more. You tried to work with IT and your staff more with our IT folk to make sure that something was still happening during that gray area of mine, but that the project was still able to move forward.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, well, you guys managed that really well because you know, with losing a CFO, getting hit with your audit, this project didn’t lose a whole lot of steam. I mean, if I’m right, that the project was only delayed, what, maybe two months, three months. And when you’re talking about totally changing your entire financial infrastructure, that’s really good.
Kudos to you and your team for working through those. So, the audit you were kind of expecting that, but you weren’t expecting your CFO to leave. Were there any other things that popped up that you thought “Well, we didn’t think of that.” And how did you manage that?
Cameron Wells
Yeah, and maybe another issue wasn’t that we didn’t think it was going to be such a big lift was data conversion and migration. Again, our whole system was old and it did not store data in an easy way to extract it. One of our biggest time sinks was trying to get our data out of our old system and into the new system. And with our two different approaches with the financials and then the asset management, by the time we learned that it was so difficult in the first financials part for asset management, we were able to reach out to our old partner with FleetNet and have them and their architects who knew the system better.
We paid them to pull our data for us. The cost to have them do that was way cheaper than having our internal staff do that. We were glad that we split up the project, honestly, and were able to take two different approaches at data conversion after we learned our lesson the first time.
Kerry Boudreaux
Data conversion and interface with existing tools that you folks used are probably the two hardest things of any project.
Navigating Change Management
Kerry Boudreaux
We haven’t touched on change management. And, you know, there’s always those folks that are reluctant to change. You know, I’m one of them.
Change always, whether it’s in my personal life or work life, change is always a struggle. We kind of have to get out of our comfort zone. Did you experience any challenges with change management within your organization? Number one, and number two, how did you deal with it?
Cameron Wells
Yeah, I don’t have any exact examples on change management that were difficult except for the fact that every process changed with this and I think the biggest help for us for change management was honestly that your staff were able to tell us if we if we said we did something a certain way they were they were able to ask us why do you do it?
Your staff were very, very respectful about it. But I do remember Sham a couple of times saying, well, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would you do it that way? And his honesty, it was very, very, I don’t know, it lightened the burden off our chest to say, well, why do we do it? That is stupid, Sham. Thanks. We can definitely find a different way to do it.
I think he knew Jason and I well enough to be able to call us out and know that that’s how we interpersonally would communicate to ourselves and to each other. He was able to pick up on our styles and really cut to what we were looking at and why we were looking at it. And I think that was the biggest help for change management was to call us out on why are you doing something so backwards?
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, you know, I was working with another customer and we were talking about what they would do different. And they were a small, city agency. They said, we opened up basically the software and we said, okay, here’s what we want to do, instead of letting FourthSquare say, here’s how you should do it. And that’s what you’re paying us to do, right? It’s to use and allow our expertise to guide you guys. But on the flip side, we’ve got to build enough trust, in you that you allow us to give you that pushback and allow us to challenge you. Because if you didn’t trust our expertise, you probably wouldn’t have accepted him saying, well, that’s a stupid way to do it. So, it’s a two-way street.
Conclusion and Future Outlook
Kerry Boudreaux
I think it, at the end of the day, it’s building that relationship and building that trust between you and the consultant who’s working on the project. So, we do try and put together, our consultants that have a lot of experience so we can build that trust.
it’s very rare that I get to share with the audience a peer of theirs who’s actually been on this business transformation journey. Cameron, I can’t thank you enough, you know, for sharing your knowledge and your insight.
These journeys are, you know, I don’t think they’re ever over. I think these applications are so powerful that you’re using. You’re just now scratching the surface and you’re basically a year and a half, almost two years into using these applications. So again, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your insights and your knowledge for the folks that are listening. Thank you for tuning in.
I greatly appreciate your time. If you have any questions or you want more information on the topics that we’ve covered, visit us at FourthSquare.com. But until then, from us here at the Fourth Square Solutions podcast, I thank you and we stay tuned for our next episode in another two weeks. Thank you so much.
Cameron Wells
Thank you.
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