Summary
In this episode, Kerry Boudreaux and Abhijit Verekar discuss the intricacies of implementing enterprise applications, particularly in the public sector. They explore the importance of setting clear expectations, understanding customer readiness, and the role of project management in ensuring successful implementations. AV is the Founder and CEO of Avèro Advisors. He shares insights on how they assist organizations in navigating these complex processes, emphasizing the need for a holistic technology strategy to drive business transformation.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction
02:49 Understanding Client and Vendor Perspectives
05:02 The Importance of Clear Expectations
08:08 Customer Readiness and Change Management
12:33 Project Management in Enterprise Implementations
23:04 Holistic Technology Strategy for Success
26:49 Conclusion
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi, and welcome again to the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast. Again, I’m Kerry Boudreaux and I’m the Senior Vice President of Sales here at FourthSquare. And I have in the studio my good friend Abhijit Verekar, or as we as his friends and family call him “AV.” Welcome to the podcast, AV.
Abhijit Verekar
Thank you, Kerry, and you got the name right. That was great.
Kerry Boudreaux
That’s awesome. Today we are going to talk about what a successful implementation looks like when we’re implementing enterprise applications such as ERP, HCM, supply chain, and EPM. So, AV, you are the founder of Avèro Advisors. Your primary business is doing client-side consulting, getting organizations ready for these business transformation journeys. Can you share a little bit more about what you guys do?
Abhijit Verekar
Yeah. I’m the founder and CEO at Avèro Advisors. We are an independent, third-party consulting firm that helps local governments across the country modernize their operations. And one of the major ways organizations like that modernize operations is by upgrading or implementing new ERP systems. So, we are independent, we are third-party, we don’t resell any product. We’re always, like you said, on the client side in their corner making sure that the right decisions are being made. We’re providing our best advice and helping them connect with the right partners and vendors like FourthSquare.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, and you guys are 100 % focused on public sector. Is that correct?
Abhijit Verekar
That is 100 % correct. We only work with government agencies of all stripes. Have not cracked federal just yet, but that may not have been bad thing given what’s going on at the federal level. But yeah, local governments, utilities, transits, airports, ports, anything that has tax dollars associated with it, we work with.
Understanding Client and Vendor Perspectives
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. So let’s dig into what a successful implementation looks like. And I want to do this from both the client side and the vendor side. So in your opinion, AV, what are some of the things that promote and ensure a successful Go Live?
Abhijit Verekar
I think setting clear expectations upfront is extremely important, right? When you’re selling to a CIO or CTO or a CFO, they have day jobs. They haven’t done it in a long, long time. They haven’t implemented systems. They haven’t bought systems. So going live, buying new software, modernizing, those things may mean different things to different people.
So you have to come up with a common vocabulary, common dictionary for what these things mean and what does success look like. That’s primarily what we do as third-party project managers. We will help our clients understand where the target is, what success looks like, what timeframes look like, because it’s really easy for someone, and I’m not going to say FourthSquare or Oracle, vendors to come in and say, “Go live is when this light turns green and this one turns yellow.” Meanwhile, the client can’t run payroll.
So the definition of “go live” is extremely important. The definition of success is very important. And all of that to be defined upfront is critical. Because otherwise, you can go down this two-year-long implementation where people don’t know why they’re doing this and there is no end in sight. We’ve all heard about these implementations. But there’s a specific methodical way that we have been successful with that starts with clear expectations.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, so a lot of people think that a client-side advisor gets involved when that RFP is released, but my experience is that’s not true. You guys are involved way before the RFP is released. Is that correct?
The Importance of Clear Expectations
Abhijit Verekar
Yes. Our ideal or typical engagement is before the RFPs release. We want to be the people that the client confers with, asks questions, strategizes with. We help you nail down what the need is because a lot of times you can’t really pinpoint it. If you ask finance, well X, Y, and Z report doesn’t work. HR says, I can’t do onboarding. Public Works says we can’t do inventory control and we don’t know where to start unraveling this ball of yarn.
So that’s where we come in. And that’s the best use for us is you bring us in to sort of decipher this puzzle you have to see where things fit, what still works, what doesn’t. And if the decision is to move on or go to market and look for something else, in what order do you fix these things? Because you could go out and see most of our clients have one system that they’ve used for 30 plus years. And in their head, it is another system that will replace this thing that we have. But that’s not the case.
If it was built custom for you 20-30 years ago, you’ll be very lucky to find something that’s one to one without any modifications to it. So our job is to educate our clients. And that’s why we do a lot of our online stuff, free advice, because we want to make sure that the clientele, the prospect pool is educate on what they’re asking for, what they’re buying.
We want to come in at the very front of the discussion where the clients not necessarily convinced they need to do something different. And they lean on us to help them articulate what they might need and then help them do the selection process. We stick with them through the whole process. But yeah, there are times when we come in after the product’s been selected, after they’ve signed the contract, and then they want us to oversee, project manage and make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. But that tends to be a harder project.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, you know, I often say that, you know, these implementations, these enterprise application implementations, you know, we’re not delivering babies, but we are darn close. And what I’m trying to get from there to there, is that these are mission critical businesses that you have, especially on the Finance-side.
You know, making sure that your finances are all in line and you get people paid, you get your employees paid. these are, these are not easy projects. and you know, I always encourage, you know, you know, agencies to engage with somebody like a Avèro, because of the importance of making sure that this stuff is done correctly.
Customer Readiness and Change Management
Kerry Boudreaux
You mentioned clear expectations. I think getting a customer, you mentioned like customer readiness. What does customer readiness mean, you know, in your mind? What are you trying to do to get the customer ready?
Abhijit Verekar
Oh, that’s fancy words for it, right? Change management and customer readiness, I think at the very, very basic definition, it’s do your people know what’s going on? Because a lot of times it’s you’ll sell to a CTO, HCM, Oracle HCM upgrade from PeopleSoft. By the way, that’s real. Someone’s thinking of this as an upgrade. It’s not. And meanwhile, you haven’t talked to your biggest department about doing a new implementation. So how can they be ready? And it goes back to our definition of success.
These aren’t IT projects. Just because you replaced PeopleSoft with Oracle HCM, and now your server load’s down, migrate this stuff to the cloud, but your end-users have no idea that PeopleSoft’s going away, that their lives are going to change. That’s the very basics of readiness.
At an academic level, when you talk about readiness assessments and needs assessments, is the entire organization ready for change? For change, not necessarily to buy a new product. Because in our world, in local government, in state government, change is hard. Change is optional because there is no profit motive.
You guys work in the public private sector too, right? You have to change, otherwise you’re going to be out of business. You have to change, otherwise you will be in a loss next year because the thing doesn’t do good inventory control.
That incentive is missing in government. So the only incentives left are, I don’t want to be in the newspaper for a failed implementation, or I don’t want to go the drag through my last five years in office through an implementation that eventually fails. What’s my legacy going to be?
Readiness for change and the motivations that people have are very different. So when we get in at an early stage, those are the things we’re looking for. Those are the things we’re educating our clients on. And when we do strategy, it’s not necessarily just what products is going to go where. It is, are you guys politically, financially, organizationally ready to take this on? Forget the end result.
If you do this right, you will have the result. If you pick the right product, right partner, the right consulting firm to hold your hand through this, you will have the result. You will have a new product, but along the way, how many fights, how much bad blood, how much just unpleasant stuff is going to happen, which happens anyway, but are you ready to handle it? Can you communicate? Is your organization strong overall? That’s what I mean by readiness. That’s how we do it.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, and a lot of agencies, I would say the majority of public sector agencies, AV, they probably don’t have the resources on their side in-house right now, ready to implement an enterprise application. Now you look at somebody like Atlanta, who seems like they have, or somebody like a New York City, or in LA, they seem to have unlimited resources. So they can say, “Hey, yeah, we need a project manager. We need an apps manager. We need, you know, a change management lead, so we can just go out and hire them.” But you look at an org, you know, look at an agency, a midsize agency, like maybe Lexington here, you know, you look at, you know, maybe a Paducah, Kentucky. That’s 50,000 people, and they don’t have those resources.
Project Management in Enterprise Implementations
Kerry Boudreaux
From a client-side consultant there at Avèro, what are you guys offering in regards to say project management, change management? When do you get involved with them when they’re looking for a business transformation?
Abhijit Verekar
I mean, we can get involved at any stage, but the ideal stage is early on. And, you know, we go to the same conferences, right? You have people walking around trying to collect swag. We have the best swag, the way, hangover pills, because you need that when you’re going through an ERP implementation. It’s been a huge hit. So, you know, people walk into your booth and want to have a conversation about what we do.
And the ones that are like, “Yeah, maybe, you know, we have X, Y, and Z product and you know, it works, I guess, but we’ve had it for 20 years and really don’t know if it’s doing.” Then you start thinking and strategically talking and for the right kind of prospect, indulging in that kind of cerebral thinking on is your product right for your organization, where it’s going strategically.
Those are the best clients for us. I love talking to those people because now I’m a consultant. I love being a consultant. I love solving problems. I want to know what works, what doesn’t work from a complete third-party angle. I’m not pushing a product on them, right? Which gives me somewhat of a unique position and a perch where they can talk to me, they don’t have to hire us and I’m not trying to push a product.
But I think that’s the right way to go because, tell me if I’m wrong, as a software salesperson or a software developer, you don’t want to be at that stage. You want to go sell to a client that’s ready, that’s convinced, that knows exactly how they want to use your product. And a lot of times software salespeople end up in this quasi consulting role where they’re like solutioning to prospects without the prospect actually moving through your pipeline because they’re not there. They’re 6-8 months too early to be talking to you. So that’s ideal sort of entry point for us.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, as a software vendor, here at FourthSquare, we provide the implementation services. We always like to engage with a potential customer or customer that has those clear expectations. They understand what the process is going to be, what it’s going to look like, what resources they’re going to need.
When we engage with an organization that doesn’t understand any of that, they haven’t been through their requirements, you know, assessment, they’ll say, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing now. Here’s what we’ve identified as broken. Here are best practices.” Boy, when we get a customer or a potential customer that hasn’t been through that and they don’t understand that, it makes for a very difficult journey.
And to me, that’s what you do, at Avèro. You resolve all of those issues and you get those expectations clearly identified and you get that customer ready to set sail on that journey. So it’s almost like if you’re going on a cruise in the Caribbean and these people are showing up with overcoats and you at Avèro, you’re like, no, no, no, dude, we’re, going to the Caribbean. We’re not going to Alaska.
That’s what I see a huge benefit for having a client-side consultant being. FourthSquare and Avèro we successfully together, you worked on a project at Valley Regional Transit Authority. And back in Episode 4, we had on the CFO, Cameron Wells, and he was talking about what made their journey a success. Now we implemented ERP for asset management, and he pointed out that Avèro provided very strong project management.
Can you speak to what you guys did there, number one? And number two, what do we mean by project management? So let’s speak to those two items if you could.
Abhijit Verekar
Yeah, no, great question. Yeah, VRT, Valley Regional has been a long-time client. We got engaged when they released an RFP for our services. They wanted to find a consultant that can help them through strategizing and selection of a new product. And so we won that competitive bid.
I think the first thing we did for them was an ERP strategy. Here’s what you have, here’s what and where you’re going, and the kinds of products you have or should have. Being a transit agency, it’s important to understand that you have to put boxes around these things. Like ERP might mean something completely different to a school system or a higher education institution than to a local government or a transit. So in transits, you have your core financials, payroll, asset management stuff. And then you have this whole transit operations side of the house, which could be considered ERP if it all flows into each other, but this project was financed in HR.
And through that process, we helped them demo a few systems, talked to a lot of vendors, and they chose FourthSquare, which is how we got to work together.
Then part of our scope was project management, independent project management for the duration of the project. So what that means is we are the client’s representative on this project. What that means is we work with the client and not just like executives. We work with all of their team members involved with the project and with the vendors, you guys with Oracle, to make sure that the client is getting what they signed up for. A lot of quality control. We do invoice tracking. Make sure the budgets are on track. We coordinate people’s times.
We make sure that when the vendors coming over on site to do some demos or some kind of stuff that we have presence and that we all have expectations clear that it’s not a wasted trip for anybody. So all of that might seem like you can have a junior accountant do while they’re not doing your reconciliations and stuff, but really is a full-time job. It’s a lot of moving parts, lots of work, and you need somebody that’s not deep in the weeds in your organization doing project management on a project like this.
What project management is not is simply passing communications; being the middleman. That’s not project management. We follow PMI methodologies. So there’s a project charter, there’s a project plan, there’s communications plans, budget plan, resourcing. All of that is buttoned up and that’s what we present and provide to our clients in several places.
But yeah, VRT is a great example of having done it right with the right partners in FourthSquare because at no point did you guys push back on the methodology, which happens a lot to us. We don’t need that. We’ve got project management. And you guys do too. But you know it’s different. Your project managers are herding your cats and then telling the client what they need.
Our job as third-party project managers is to manage the clients and herd their cats and then coordinate with you guys to make sure everything’s in sync. And yeah, some clients have in-house project managers. That’s their full-time job, which is fine too. We work with those also where needed. Then our involvement becomes more of independent validation, verification, high-level strategy.
So, there’s several flavors of project management, but again, yeah, go back and listen to, what was it, Episode 4? It’s a great example of working together with vendors and clients.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. You mentioned a couple of things there, you know, typically when we get in, our engagement starts when the RFP hits the street, and then we respond to the RFP. Then if we get shortlisted for demos, that’s when we really start getting engaged. You know, if you’re on the project, at Avèro, that’s when my communication and my engagement with your project team really gets going.
And I’ve got to tell you, it’s my job. It’s Avèro’s job. And then it’s procurement’s job at the agency to make sure that we deliver a good quality experience for the line of business owners, whether it’s finance, HR, the IT team, the procurement team, whoever it may, it may be.
I can tell you that successful projects are when we deliver that high-quality value experience. and that has a higher percentage of happening when you have good project management on the ground from both sides. So, great work there.
Holistic Technology Strategy for Success
Anything else AV, from a client-side consultant’s experience and view? What else insures an implementation in somebody’s business transformation journey? And when I say business transformation journey, a lot of people use digital transformation, but what are you transforming? You’re transforming your digits, your digital. I like you’re transforming your business, right? Through technology. What other things, are there anything else that you can share with the audience that can ensure that successful journey?
Abhijit Verekar
Yeah, there needs to be a holistic look at technology. Think starting with your organizational vision, right? A lot of times this becomes an IT thing. Again, I’m not knocking CIOs or IT departments. If you’re going out and asking the users what makes their life difficult? How can we automate certain things? How can we modernize your operations? These aren’t IT projects. This is outcomes.
The more and more AI proliferates and SaaS and hosted environments become the norm, the IT department’s job becomes security and connectivity. And they’re not necessarily in the weeds with the user base, meaning they shouldn’t know how to run a specific report on an HCM system. They’ll do it, but if they don’t understand the business, they shouldn’t have to. Back to your question, I think about a holistic view, a holistic strategy, and we do this a lot. I think that’s actually the best place to bring us in is if you need to know or understand what an overall organizational technology strategy looks like. If you don’t have one, we can help you create one.
And more often than not, the biggest piece of that strategy becomes replacing your PeopleSoft or what have you that’s been around for a while, and we need to look at something else. And if you don’t have that, you’re always going to do things piecemeal. You’re going to be doing an Oracle HCM implementation. You’re going to be trying to do AVL and GPS for your trash collection somewhere else. You have a third platform for your financials. And you’re not taking advantage of the beauty of integrated systems. And I’m not talking about just one system. Best of breed is a real thing, right? You can have Oracle HCM and you can have Acella. But if you’re not thinking about how these two things talk to each other, or are you asking them both to do things they’re not best suited for?
If you don’t have a global technology digital strategy, you’re going to fail. You might g o live with the one system, but you will be in the same spot. Next year, a new mayor is going to come in and say, what did we spend $2 million on here? Because I can see that Acella is doing X, Y, and Z here. Oracle HCM is doing the same thing. And then you’ve got some mom and pop system someone built over in Parks and Rec that we’re keeping up. So, in the absence of an overall comprehensive strategy, these projects will make your silos even worse.
Conclusion
Kerry Boudreaux
That’s, that’s excellent insight. AV listen, I want to thank you for your time today, but more importantly, I want to thank you for your knowledge. You’re always willing to share.
If you want to learn more about Avèro, you know, go to their website. I believe it’s AveroAdvisors.com and you can find them on LinkedIn. Just do a, do a simple Google search. You’ll find them on LinkedIn.
AV and his team are always willing to share their knowledge and they would be happy to take your phone call and to have an engagement with you just to explore where you might need some services and some guidance on your business transformation journey. That’s going to wrap up this episode from all of us here at FourthSquare, and we thank you.
If you have any questions or you want to learn more about what we do, you can visit us here or at https://fourthsquare.com/. We’ll be back in two weeks. And until that time, always be asking yourself, how can you be transforming your business through technology and innovation?
Again, thank you again and take care. See you next time.
Abhijit Verekar
Thanks, Kerry.
If you’d like to learn more about FourthSquare and the services we offer, click here to contact us. You can also call us at (972) 919-6135. We’ll be happy to speak with you.