Best Practice Tips to Successfully Implement FP&A Software with James Myers

One of the things that I'm asked about probably more than anything is FPA systems. You have a system and it's time for either a new system or some kind of upgrade. What are those things that jump out and say, hey, you need to start looking at something.

Now I've broken it into four different areas and I think the first area is really.

Today's guest is James Myers. He is the founder and CEO of FP and a strategy consulting which partners with CFO offices of global enterprises to drive digital finance transformation. The firm focuses on streamlining processes, implementing leading edge technology and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Okay, so now you're at a point and you say, we need a new system. How do you start looking for what are the right systems you should be evaluating?

The first one is really the traditional FP&A solutions which are more about putting your planning in there, using that to then compare to your actuals and your previous plans and things like that. The next category is more modeling and the modeling tools themselves are really designed to help you reduce the amount of reliance on Excel. And then the third one is really the AI selection of planning tools.

So let's say you're looking for a generic planning tool. There's 15 vendors out there that I could kind of think of. How do you figure out who would be the best ones to go with?

You know, we've done a lot of research on looking at different vendors and seeing what's working and what isn't working. I think the first thing that any company should do is foreign.

Are you tired of being seen as just a spreadsheet person? Will others get a seat at the table? Well then, welcome to FP&A Unlocked, where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, the FPA guy, and this week I'm thrilled to be joined by my co host, Glenn Snyder. Glenn, welcome again.

Thanks. Love being here, love having you.

And he'll be leading a lot of the conversation today. We'll introduce our guest here in just a moment. Each week we bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FP&A in today's business world. Together, we'll uncover strategies, insights and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. Speaking of strategic impact, our title sponsor of FP and Unlock is Campfire, the ERP that's helping modern finance teams close fast and scale faster. Today's guest is someone who's earned that seat at the table. He's done many implementations. He's known in the FP and A space and we're lucky to have him. So, James Myers. James, welcome to the show.

Thanks Paul. Excited to be here.

Really excited to have you. So today's episode, I'm going to let Glenn introduce it. He's going to kind of lead and I'm going to play a little bit of co host too today. But before we do that, I'm going to ask James one question I ask every guest. So when you look at FP&A, how would you describe FP&A, what are the characteristics are needed for a great FP and A department?

Yeah, so I think the great what is really needed in the FP and A world is to really be a value partner to your business organization. That means really understanding the business where you can fit in, where you can help. I see that role as being that combination of data, business and strategy. So being able to combine all of those three things together and really be able to serve your business partners, I think that's how we add value to the organization. All the other stuff as well is very important. So you know, it's all about optimizing, making sure that you are not spending a lot of time in all of the data cleansing and data analysis, but really kind of looking at the big picture and helping your business organization.

I really like how you mentioned helping the business org. Well, appreciate the answer Glenn. I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce our topic and what we're going to be covering today.

Thank you Paul. So you know, one of the things that I'm asked about probably more than anything is Finance Systems, FP&A Systems, which ones are good, which ones are bad. How do you make sure that you set up the right system? How do you know when you need a system? You know how you manage that whole process. So that's what we're going to be talking about today because certainly that falls right into James wheelhouse. So James, let's start off with the beginning of all of this. How would a company know what are those key things that pop up that say, you know what, either you don't have a system and you need to start getting one and looking at one, or you have the system you and it's time for either a new system or some kind of upgrade. What are those things that really kind of jump out and say, hey, you need to start looking at something now.

Yeah. So thanks Glenn, for the question. I think I'VE broken it into four different areas. And I think the first area is really the current system is broken. And typically where you see this is that the system is not scalable. So you've added a new business organization into your company or you've, you know, there's been a merger and acquisition and you just cannot add that extra business unit into your planning solution. Another reason, you know, with under that heading is that you've become too reliant on Excel. And although there's a lot of systems out there at the moment, still we found that at least 75% of the time people are using Excel to do modeling or planning or some, you know, interacting with a lot of data. So again you, you want to be able to kind of reduce the amount of reliance on Excel. Now I'm not saying Excel will ever go away, but really it really about reducing that and you have slow manual processes. So I think, you know, really looking at how, you know, those are kind of all of the things that, where you see your FPNA solution is broken, the next one is just, you know, reducing the pain. A lot of, there's a lot of pain sometimes where you've got an organization that's filling out the same information month in, month out, or there's, you know, you've got version control and you've got five different versions and you constantly trying to get information from the organization. So that's really kind of, you know, reducing amount of pain, reducing amount of time when planning. Another one of the third topic is really around improving the outcome. So you know, being able to get better outcomes from your financial planning solutions. So maybe you're doing at the moment you're getting your financial planning solution is giving you an answer. But really what you want to be able to do is do more scenario analysis to kind of test that answer, get better understanding about what is the risks associated with your plan and things like that. And then the fourth reason is really kind of just being able to take advantage of some of the new technologies. So obviously we talk a lot about AI and you know, the impact of AI on an organization. And we are seeing that within this space there is a lot of interesting new opportunities to leverage AI. But if you've got a legacy system, you might be unable to do that. So that's kind of like the fourth reason I see where you know, a company would look at their planning solution and really start to think about do I need something and want to invest in a solution.

You know, it's funny, as you were going through There I've gone through six different implementations of systems in my career and I think you basically covered all of them there. I was thinking about examples of each one as you were lining out. I think that's pretty thorough. Paul, what do you think? Any other things to add to that?

No, I mean, I think that really covers the main areas. Right. You see it whether it's taking advantage of technology, getting off Excel, current system doesn't work because you implemented it one way and it's going to cost you a fortune to make the changes. And so maybe it's time to just go with something a little more flexible. I mean, I think those, those tend to be the common reasons. Obviously within Excel, you could list, whether it's collaboration or different things. You could drill down and have a list of what are all the kind of signs within Excel. But at a high level, I think it covers it.

Yeah, I was going to say, I've got a great example of that. I've done a lot of Excel and put it into planning solutions. One of our clients had 2,700 Excel spreadsheets that had ran all of their project planning. So each project had four spreadsheets and each spreadsheet had about 10 to 15 tabs in it, and they had 800 projects. So you can imagine kind of the scale of, you know, being able to kind of manage that level of Excel.

I was thinking of, I was at a company where they had a planning tool. They would do all the work in Excel or Google Sheets, load it into the planning tool, it calculate, take the data out, put it back into Excel or, you know, Google Sheets to do the reporting. And basically they're using the playing tool as a fancy calculator. And so that wasn't really getting what you need out of the system. And so usually if you're doing something like that, you need to take a look at how you're set up and make sure that you're going to get the value that you're getting. It was a very expensive calculator that.

That'S a pretty expensive calculator in that situation.

Yes, it was okay. So now you're at a point and you say, okay, we need a new system. I don't know where to go. Where are we going to go look for this? How do you start looking for what are the right systems you should be evaluating? Because there's a lot of different tiers. If you're a startup, you probably don't need a multimillion dollar EPM or ERP solution because that's going to be overkill. If you're a mid sized company or maybe a larger public company, you're not going to want to necessarily have a small system that's more, you know, Excel based type thing. You're going to want something with a little more bells and whistles that are going to solve your problem. So depending on your company. James, how do you know? Where do you start? What are the companies that are out there that might be a good fit?

Yeah, so I categorize planning systems into four different types. Again seem form seems a popular number. So I guess the first one is really the traditional FP&A solutions which are more about putting your planning in there, using that to then compare to your actuals and your previous plans and things like that. A lot of those systems do some of the modeling, but not extensively. But you know, those are kind of, those are kind of your typical planning solutions that you see. The next category is centered around close and consolidation. So we've divided those ones out as a separate set of tools because really your problem is not so much being able to get the planning side of it done, but really the consolidation. So we see a lot of tools that are starting from the planning and consolidation and then they go and extend into the, into the planning. The third one is more around modeling and the modeling tools themselves really designed to help you reduce the amount of use and reliance on Excel. And typically these are where there's a little bit more complexity in your planning. So for example, if you think about revenue planning, you know there's companies that have relatively predictable revenue planning and then there's companies that have very detailed revenue planning models to be able to kind of build out what is the forecasted revenue. And they might have eight different sales motions. So you're really kind of modeling out different areas of the business and it's very detailed. So planning the modeling solutions kind of fit really well into being able to support those type of things. So we see those a lot in you're looking at manufacturing, where you're looking at supply chain, where you're looking at retail, you know, and you've got or you've got complex revenue planning. And then the third one is kind of the more interesting one which we still seeing. And you know, it's really the AI collection of planning tools. We've done quite a lot of research in the market at the moment and we're not seeing a lot of the research we do is more on upper mid market to enterprise size companies. So probably 100 million and above and what we're, we're not seeing any of the AI solutions kind of making a big mark in that area. There's still the traditional solutions that we see, but saying that a lot of the modeling solutions and the other planning solutions are getting a lot more AI in them. So I don't know if AI is going to be a separate category all on its own. So we'll just have to wait and see if that kind of grows and we kind of see that expanding into that upper mid market and enterprise clients.

What I've seen kind of speaking to that a little bit, J Blog turn back to you there Glenn, is most of the what I'd call AI native. You know, the cropped up last few years have mostly been focused on the small market. I haven't seen anyone, there's one tool I can think of but they're not covering planning. They call themselves an enterprise grade decision tool and they're really focused more on, you know, the operational decision making of the business versus planning. So I'm kind of with you. I haven't quite seen really its own category yet, but it'll be interesting to watch how that kind of plays out here over the next couple years.

Yeah, so I see them being more as a supplement to your planning. And we've done work with modeling solutions where they have a more, you know, a more robust FP and a solution in the company and then they've decided that, you know, because that solution doesn't provide them with the level of modeling they would have a, a modeling solution. So I have seen in some cases where companies actually have more than one have invested in more than one FPA or EPM solution.

I've seen that too. But you know James, going back, I like your categorization around the functionality, if you will, of the system itself because every company needs to look and say what do we really need? Do we need a more of a generic planning tool? Do we need a modeling tool? Do we need a closing consolidation tool? So 100% agree with you. I would take that and add maybe another dimension where I think size of the company kind of comes into play a little bit. Because I think there are also vendors that are better for startup companies, ones that are better for kind of mid market and then large public enterprise as well. And I think if you think of it as that grid where you have the functions going across the top and you got the size going down and you could could then really start popping in kind of who plays in what space. But I'm going to bring it back to the original question about okay, well how do you know who's there? So let's say you're looking for a generic planning tool and you're about a $200 million revenue company. Something in that rate. How do you know where to start? Because there's 15 vendors out there that I could kind of think of who would say we play in that space. But you know, how do you go and you know, get the names of those companies. How do you figure out might be, who would be the best ones to go with?

Yeah, and I think, I mean again it's, it's a, I think that, you know, there's definitely speaking to the community and seeing what works and what doesn't. You know, we've done a lot of research on looking at different vendors and seeing how, you know, we speak to a lot of CFOs, to FPA leaders to get a very good understanding of kind of what's working and what isn't working. That does take a little bit of time. But obviously, you know, what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to see kind of firstly decide what it is. You know, I think the first thing that any company should do is kind of decide on what is the vision of what they want to achieve. Because I think that often doesn't happen. You know, we go, oh, we need a planning tool because this one's broken. But we, where do we see ourselves in five years and that tool going to look like? You know, and obviously the word AI comes up a lot. So again, you know, we want to be able to future proof ourselves. We want to be able to make sure that we are looking at, you know, at the vendors and understanding their AI roadmap and where they are at the moment and how they're performing. Because you know, the worst thing you can do is you can, you know, invest in a tool that you're going to, you want to invest in for the next at least 10 years and it's probably going to be five because of just the speed of evolution in the space and just the amount of new companies that are coming popping up all of a sudden. But you really want to at least have a good five year Runway. So it's really about setting that expect, you know, what is that vision of where you want to see your planning going and how, you know, what tools then are able to support that. And to your point, you know, there are going to be tools in different levels of the market, know the, the lower end, they kind of they have that more Excel feel about them, but then they. They may not they more kind of a. The consolidation of, kind of taking out some of that interaction that you would have in an Excel solution to something that is more online, but still a database, to something that's more a kind of a live model. So obviously, as you kind of go up the spectrum, things start to get more expensive. So that obviously balances everybody out. But again, setting kind of that future vision and getting an understanding of what it is you want to be able to do in the future is key. And the way that we often see companies think about this is just trying to leverage more technology to make things more efficient, to be able to enter the data. So ideally, I have this concept of planning is always on the idea there is that you can go into your planning tool anytime during the month and make tweaks and changes. And really what it's doing is it's using historic data, it's using machine learning, it's using optimization, and it's using a whole lot of other things that are now available in all of these planning tools to really inform the user, to give them a baseline of where, where they think the plans should be. And then on top of that, you want to still maintain accountability within your organization. So you still want people to take ownership of the numbers. So you want them to go in, review them, tweak them, update them and be able to do that. But you don't want them to kind of start from scratch every month. What you want to do is you want to have the ability to go and make adjustments. So they're in a meeting and they hear some events going to happen in the future, and they know that it's going to have an impact on revenue. They know that they're going to have to hire people for it. They can go into the planning tool, you know, right there then and there and just go and make that adjustment. So that's kind of the vision of the future, of where I see planning tools going along with AI as well, where you are using AI not only to help you do your analysis, but also help you do your business partnering. So being able to use AI in the future, where you can go and ask good questions and it uses that model and creates a scenario and then makes changes to your model. So that's kind of like where the market's going, but it's. So it's going to be very interesting. But again, coming back to your answer, start, start with a vision and then see kind of what are the, what are the players that are kind of matching that future view.

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I completely agree with you. I think you got to have that future view because you don't want to get, get a system for what just what you need today. You need to get a system for what you need over the next three, five, ten years to make sure that you're going to have the right investment. I would also just say for our users, you could go out and you could Google, you know, hey, ask Google what are some top planning tools and you know, and use some of the things that James described to go out and get it. But you can also find some market research. I mean James, he said your firm goes over and does that. You know, you could get other market research firms that might have an evaluation of that. Paul, you know, any other thoughts that you know, you could help?

I think there's a few places, so. Right. Obviously you should start with understanding your needs, what they are today, what they are five years from now. So you just don't get out there and hear, well, so and so said this is cool and you get fixated on it and next thing you know you have a tool that doesn't meet your needs. We've all seen it. So that's, I think that's critical. But as far as understanding the market, you know, there's obviously Gartner, Forrester, you know, James has done a lot of work. There's companies you can reach out to. I've done quite a bit here and shared some maps segmenting the market, you know, G2 and also talking to your fellow CFOs and people out there, right. That have been through the wars. Now, you know, they may, many of the CFOs may only know of a few of the Tools that are out there. And that's why it's good to also try to broaden and look at some of the industry and potentially talk to someone to help guide you toward that tool. Because depending on how you segment this market, you could argue there's over a hundred tools or you could argue there's 30. It all depends on how you want to count them and, you know, what space you're looking at and different things. So I've done a survey four times, different events, all four times. The biggest thing people have said that holds them back is knowing where to find the tools. They feel overwhelmed by the FP&A market. That's been the number one answer. The number, number. The other three have varied every time. And so I clearly think, you know people, I don't think I know people, are a little bit overwhelmed of how many options are out there. And so going to somebody you trust, going some trusted research to narrow down the list in a realistic manner like, you know, James mentioned. I'm sure if you're dealing with a large global multinational company, you're not going to put them on a basic Excel based tool. Right. That they should, but they may not always know that, hey, I can eliminate those right off the top because I need to be in this large space where it has the modeling and the close consolidation and can meet my needs at scale.

Yeah, in fact, actually I worked at a company and the CFO came to me and we were talking about a new system and he tells me, just go get this one system. And I'm looking at him like, why are you saying that? He's like, well, because it's the best one. It's the one everyone talks about. And it was significantly more expensive. It was a large enterprise, you know, solution for a mid market firm. And it was like, that's overkill. That's gonna, we're gonna be spending, you know, probably five times as much as what we need. Yeah, it could do the work, but there are some other solutions out there, probably better for us. So I completely agree with you, Paul. It's like you got to just go out, ask the questions, ask people in your network, do some research, leverage different surveys that you could find online, ask consultants as well, and just want to have the conversation, hey, you might be some good players. What you just got to be careful of is a lot of times consultants say, well, I'm more of, you know, I work with this vendor versus that vendor. And so you get a little, you know, biased, you know, response sometimes. So spread it out Ask a couple different consultants and see kind of, you know, what, what their take is.

I think the bottom line is you have to do your homework. You can't just expect to do a quick Google search and narrow your list down to three and move on.

Right. And not only that, I think when you start this process, you also have to have the right framework in mind as far as time frame, because this isn't, hey, we're going to go over to Best Buy and pick up a system and tomorrow we're going to have one. It's not a tv, it doesn't work that way. Right. It's, this is going to be something where your RFP process might take two to three months and then the implementation might take three to four months after that. So when you start the process to, when you're actually live on a system, it might be a six to seven month time frame.

There's a reason it's usually in next year's budget when you start the process to pay for it.

Right. And the larger the company and the more you're putting into it, the longer that timeframe is going to be. So keep all those things in mind as well. But so now let's talk about that best practice for the rfp, Right. So now you're going out, you're engaging with the vendors, you might ask them to come do demos or they're going to have certain demos. James, what are some of the like two or three key things that you say? Whenever I do an rfp, I make sure these things happen and I'm looking at these different things.

Yeah. So again, you know, we talked a little bit about vision, so I'm not going to touch on that one anymore. But you know, what you want to do is you want to, you want to start pulling together a cross functional team. And the reason is that one of the hardest things in any implementation is the change management. And that's kind of the thing that's always left for the last, the last thing after you've built the solution. And it's like, oh, we need to change. That shouldn't be at the end of the process. That needs to be at the beginning of the process. So if you pull together a cross functional team, you not only get insights that are, you know, you may not have thought about, but also what you're trying to do is you're trying to sell a solution to the team. And if they feel that they're in part of the whole process, then they're going to be a lot. It's going to be a lot easier getting them to and their teams to adopt that process. So again, that's kind of why my first kind of big call out is kind of make sure you have that the next one is, you know, again, it's when you're engaging with these, these partners, again, you know, you'll see lots of use cases and lots of examples. And typically, I think it's very important to kind of listen to the, the vendor and see if they understand your business or your business problem. What we often see is, you know, these, the vendors are kind of like they're trying to sell, they're trying to sell, they're trying to sell. But sometimes you've got a very specific problem. Maybe you've got a very kind of standard solution that everybody, everybody has. But often what we see and you know, where we, we kind of get involved in more is kind of really trying to help the customer understand not only their problem, but actually what are the best practices in the market. So really kind of, you know, when you want, when you're talking to vendors and trying to get them to have those conversations, also try and understand how well they understand the problem that you are trying to solve as a company. And then of the top ones, I think, you know, again, we can get into like the whole demo thing in more detail. But I will say that, you know, getting, getting references from other clients that have used the system, I think is, is very good because you'll get a good sense of especially how well the implementation went. But also really kind of what is that? What is that adoption? How are they using the tool? So that is that what matches what your expectations are. And I think that's, that's kind of like the key thing is really you want to be able to kind of make sure, you know, it's, it's a typical consulting thing where you, you know, the client has this, this level of expectation and the, the consultant sold them this level of expectation and the delivery is over there somewhere. So, you know, it's, again, it's all about understanding the expectations, what the solution is going to provide you, how it's going to work. You know, all the people that are kind of involved in making sure that everybody's on board and understands kind of what it is you're going to deliver.

Yeah, absolutely. Paul, what about you? Top couple tips for a good rfp.

A couple things come to mind. If at all possible, do a proof of concept with your data. Even if it cost you a few thousand dollars, it's worth it in the long run, because, right, the demo always shows perfectly if they're just using the standard data. And it can handle any situation. And that's not always reality. So I think often that's worth it. The other thing is, I always tell people, make sure you're 100% comfortable with whoever the implementation partner is, because that's as important as the software you've selected. These are bespoke tools. Often it's a couple months to implement it, and if you don't feel like they have a good understanding of your business, ask for a different one or go with a different vendor. Because even if the vendor has a great understanding, if the consultant doesn't, you're going to run into problems. And I'm sure you've seen that, James. I'm sure you've had people come to you to fix jobs that haven't been done right. And so I always tell people, look, that implementation partner is as important as the tool you've selected. And think of it that way throughout the process.

Yeah, I agree. I will throw it. So my couple key things when you're doing an rfp, James, I liked what you said. I was on the exact same page around bringing in other people from the company and make it a more collaborative approach because when you're implementing a system, you might, yes, it's going to be the primary FP and a tool, but it's going to also probably be used by hr, by accounting, by treasury, by sales Ops, by, you know, it, whatever. So make sure you bring them in because maybe they also have certain needs that the system can solve. And you want to make sure you're creating a system that, that works for the entire company, not just for your one team. I think we could all think about situations where somebody went out and did a system in a silo and you're like, oh, I wish I could have been a part of that because, oh my God, that would have been so helpful to me. And they just never brought you in. So you want to go over and do that. I like the collaboration thing on the, the demo side of things and something around Paul, around your proof of concept. I also agree, agree with, I like to look at, is these guys are all these demos, all these vendors are going to want to sell you their product, but when they come back and they do a demo, it's on their data, the way they designed it, everything works perfectly. But in the real world, it doesn't work that way. Not to mention the fact that their demo oftentimes doesn't look like your company. So what I like to do is create what I call dummy data, take about two or three months of data that you would normally have in the system and change the numbers around so it doesn't make any sense. You send it over to them, but then tell them what you want them to present back. I want to show. I want you to show me how to build this kind of report, how to create a budget template, how I could go over and structure a model around this, how I would set up security for a new user, whatever it is, and you tell them what to demo back. Now you're going to need to give them a couple of weeks to put all that together. But now they're going to present the data back to you that will look and feel like your data, like your data structure and the type of work you're going to do. And you will also now get the exact same type of presentation across all vendors, and it'll be easier to compare because you're not going to have different presentations from what the vendors want to show you. So a couple tips there. So now you go through the RFP process. Okay, now you're like, all right, I've got my handful of systems we've evaluated, we've seen three or four demos. Kind of get to that decision point, you're going to start negotiating. So, James, let's go back to you. What are the things that, when you're negotiating with a vendor, how do you get the right best price or the best services? What tips do you have for that?

Yeah, so I think again, it also, you need to look at your total cost of ownership, because often when you're looking at a vendor, you might say, okay, they charge a certain amount of money, but then you haven't factored in kind of the professional services on the back end. And then you have to invest in your team because you need people to maintain it at a later stage or maybe get a services contract. So I think it's very important to, when you starting to go down this path is to think about the total cost of ownership. So, you know, in each of those areas, there's obviously opportunities to kind of save money and, you know, make, you know, negotiate and things like that. I will say that sometimes investing in the professional services and going with the cheapest is not always the best. We've seen from a lot of our projects that we've had to take over. But again, it's about finding that balance between knowledge and experience, as well as being able to get the results that you really want with the vendors directly. Often what you see is that they have very fixed pricing and it's really often very fixed to users. So it's quite difficult to negotiate with that. But a lot of these vendors have a lot of additional functionality that they typically give to their, you know, other higher tiered clients. So that's something that you may want to also consider negotiating on. So it's not always just about price. It's sometimes about that functionality as well. So, you know, getting, getting AI included in there, getting machine learning included and things like that can often, you know, really kind of justify the ROI of any, any spend on these systems.

Really great. Paul, what do you think?

I think a lot of what James covered is great. I 100% agree. Look at total cost of ownership. I would, you know, encourage you when you create your rfp, you're measuring whatever evaluation criteria against each vendor versus pitting them against themselves. Now, at the end, there are some things you can do to leverage price and sometimes they'll be, you know, they'll come down on that. Sometimes they may throw in additional, you know, consulting hours or module or whatever. But don't, you know, don't just grind them on price because at the end of the day, as Jim said, you might get the lowest price, the lowest priced, you know, professional services. Turns out six months later, you're spending an extra 100,000 because someone's now cleaning up a project that never, you know, got off the ground. And then nobody wins. Then you're spending more than if you had just gone probably with a high price at the beginning. So the biggest advice is don't base it just on price. Look at that total cost of ownership and really look at this as a partnership. I think the best relationships as kind of vendor and business is you look at it as a partnership. I think, how can they help me achieve what I need to achieve? That's not to say they're there all the time and that, you know, this is a close friendship or something or relationship, but it's more than just a simple transaction. It's not like you're buying just a spreadsheet tool or just an Outlook client or whatever. You're buying something that is, you know, core to your finance department right after your erp. It's kind of often one of the next ones you buy. So treat it like that in the process. And now a brief message from our sponsor. Is your AI thinking like a generalist or like a finance leader? Here's the thing. Most large language models weren't Built for finance. They're trained on everything from Reddit threads to recipe blogs. So when you plug them into your accounting workflows, the results can be, let's just say, not balance sheet accuracy, accurate. That's why Campfire, the company pioneering AI native ERP just made a huge move. They've raised a 65 million Series B co led by Excel and Ribbit, bringing their total to 100 million raised in just 12 weeks. And they're putting that momentum to work with Lam, the large accounting model. It's a proprietary AI train specifically for finance and accounting. Already hitting 95% plus accuracy on accounting tasks. That's redefining what ERP can do for modern finance teams. Unicorn companies like Posthog and Replit are already using Campfire to automate their finance operations and seeing real results. You can see it for yourself. Sign up for for a live demo of LAM at Campfire AI. That's Campfire AI.

Yeah, I agree. I mean that partnership because you're going to, as your company grows and you want to scale, your vendor should grow and scale with you. So it's very important to have that good relationship partnership. I agree with that. Of course, the total cost of ownership is there too. I'm going to throw in a couple other things to think about. A lot of times when companies go into the contract, they're thinking about, okay, at the end of the day, you know, we're going to have X number of users, we're going to roll this out. And as James pointed out, a lot of the price is based on number of users. But I have seen it where companies go out and they say, oh, we're going to have 200 users. And when the system's implemented in the first six months they got 30 users and there's a big gap there and you're paying for a lot of that stuff. So it prices, price is an issue sometimes think about going lower on the number of users, especially at the beginning. And you could always. Vendors are always happy to have you add users because that's going to be more. So they're, they're always happy to do an amendment to that contract to kick in some more users. So that's one thing that you could use potential as flexibility. The other thing is something that, and Paul, you brought it up was around potential consulting. One of no matter how good you think you're going to implement how boring forward thinking you are, you're not going to get everything right. Something's going to come up and like you're going to be Working in the system, it's like, oh, you know what, I wish we would have done this a little different or I wish, I hope we could kind of tweak this. And maybe what you do is instead of pushing on the price for the system, for the license Fees, you negotiate 15, 20, 30 hours of free consulting from the firm that can help you because you know there's going to be a couple things in there and you know, that's, that's another thing that you could get that extra value. The final thing out there, out there is training. Don't forget about the training and do that with your implementation partner or with the vendor to make sure there's a lot of training. And when you do the training, have it all recorded so that you guys as a company that you have access to it. So when you hire somebody new, you have the materials and you could have the new employees go through that training without having to engage with a consultant again.

One of the other things, and this is to your point, Glenn as well, is about, you know, the amount of users you bring on. Some of the most successful implementations we've been, we've seen are more, you know, starting with a, you know, a big pain point. So it might not just be like a kind of a full rip and replace. It might be, let's keep the old system running and let's focus on revenue as a modeling problem and you know, bringing in just a few users from kind of the revenue, the go to market teams into the solution. So again, it's also kind of how you, how you think about it. Because the nice thing about planning is that, you know, there's, it's, it's very, you know, that all of the driver models are all separate between revenue, between headcount, between, you know, Capex and you know, whatever driver models are out there. So you know, you can start off by instead of doing this extensive replacement, you could do a slow, a slower replacement and then justify your return on investment each time. So when people see, yes, this is now giving me a great return on investment, I'm getting all of these benefits and let's go on to the next one then. We've seen a lot of success in that way as well.

Yeah, I agree. In fact, I think that you can, I like the approach of almost being demand driven where you go over and you show people what's out there and you generate the demand and people say, hey, hey, I want to get access to that rather than going out there and saying we're going to give everybody access Whether you need it or not or want it or not. So I completely agree. Let's go to kind of the final stage of all this. So now you've negotiated your contract, you're ready for your implementation. And I know that we've all seen fantastic implementations and we've seen horrible implementations. And what I find really funny is whenever someone complains about their system, I've heard complaints about every system that is out there basically. And it's not the system it was because of the implementation, because they didn't think it through in the right way. They didn't do the prep work beforehand to make sure that implementation was going to be successful. So James, what are some of the things that, when you talk to your clients to say, look before day one, the vendor shows up or the, you know, the implementers showed up to do that implementation. Make sure you have these things set up and you know where you're going. What, what, what do you like to point out?

Yeah, so I think where we see and this, this often ends up being that causing more kind of overruns in consulting and professional services on the back end is really about data. So you know, when we, when you look at your data, often companies look at their data and go, yeah, it's exactly as I, you know, want it to be, but I often it's not. So, you know, we'd have to put in some solutions to help kind of cleanse that data and remap the data and things like that, which, you know, again just takes time. But the cleaner your data is, the smoother your implementation is going to go. I will say some of the other things as well is just often where we've seen projects fail is where companies have gone. You know, let's just get what's out of the box from a, from, from a solution. Now a lot of these solutions don't have an out of the box but they have like some templates that you can start with. So you know, again that can cause some problems. But it's also, you know, often we're just working on a project at the moment where they've basically gone and replicated the previous system. So they've gone from a traditional FPA system to a modeling solution and all they've done is copied how the previous system did, did it and you're having to come in and help them kind of flip that around and make it more of a driver based solution to be able to enable that those efficiencies. Right now they can't do a monthly forecast because the Modeling solution doesn't work in the same way as the more traditional FPA solution. So again, you know what you want to do is you want to have a look at your processes, document your process, create a as is process and then think about your future state. What does your future state look like? And then at this point in time, you want to get the professional services team or the consultants that you're going to use involved because then they can match those processes and talk about the benefits of the solution and how best to kind of take your current process and put it into that new process. So those are kind of some of the things that really kind of would help you at kind of that early stage before you've gone done the implementation. I've got some other ones on the post implementation. Well during implementation as well. But let's, I'll hand it over to you and you can carry on there.

All right, well, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I'll say a couple of things. One of my favorite quotes is it gets a lot of what James said is new technology plus old processes equals expensive broken old processes. You need to look at your mapping of as is and to be and think about how it changes things. The example I give, we were working in a financial reporting role and we were implementing MicroStrategy. And all we did is we ported exactly the reports From Excel to MicroStrategy. It basically looked and filled and operated the same. Everyone's like, this isn't what I wanted. But that's what you had before. But it was a new tool and a new way of thinking and we had to go through and redesign all those processes and those reports for people to use them. And then the second thing, make sure you're not implementing a tool to solve your chart of account problem. We talk about data is, you know, clean up your chart of accounts. That's not what a EPM is for. Now, are there some things that you maybe you fix? Sure. But really I have a friend who does a lot of implementation in the mid market. He goes, I've told several clients where yak get their business like you don't need an EPM tool. You need to fix your chart of accounts.

Absolutely. In fact, I think one of the, one of the key successful, you know, approaches is to before you instruct the implementation, list out what are the data dimensions that you have, what are the hierarchy and what are all the data the members in there so that it's nice and clean. I even would just take in Excel a different dimension on Each tab and you write out the full hierarchy and you have everything for each dimension. I think you just hand that over to the installer because now you know what your dimensions need to be and they will go through it. Now there will be other dimensions that you might not even be thinking about, like, oh, a scenario dimension or a time dimension. And you know how you want those to work. And the installer will work with you on that. But your core data and your metadata, make sure it's all mapped out and it's going to be listed in the way that you want. The other thing is that I like to think about is this is a project. Manage it like a project with a project plan and a project manager. And this way you have somebody not only from the installer side, don't just go and say, okay, we're ready to go outside, consultant, all yours. Come back to us when this thing is done. It doesn't work that way. You're going to have to coordinate, consolidate meetings and data and sharing of files and things on the internal side, not to mention the training aspect that. So have someone dedicated to be that project manager and to actually put together a project plan. You know, have a kickoff meeting, the whole thing before you get started to make sure everyone's on the same page, you know, expectations you have, you know, as what James has talked about, everyone knows, hey, you know what, this implementation is going to take three months. Don't come back to us in a month and expect that you're going to have the system up and running. Right. So those systems, simple things, I think, also help to, to lead to a successful implementation.

When you speak of project plan, just recently I worked with somebody, I helped him select a tool and he had mentioned I'd asked how it was going a few months later. And he's like a star was born. The person that put over the project because she really managed it, did the project plan. He's like, and things have gone great. So I think it's a great opportunity. I think anyone working in FP&A, if you get the opportunity to help lead an implementation project, it's a real opportunity to shine and to learn. You'll learn a lot through that project.

And you'll know the system as well, a lot better than most. So 100% agree.

Yeah, exactly. And then you're also viewed as an expert on the back end when everybody asks questions.

That's right. Okay, so James, you mentioned post implementation.

Well, no, during the implementation or during the implementation, what you want to be able to do Again, it comes back to that change management. And you know, most, I would say most projects, change management gets left until the end. So again, you want to get those people engaged at an early stage. But what we try to do, and the nice thing about a lot of these tools is they're very agile. So we can build up certain sections, certain visuals, certain modules very quickly we can spin them up and start to test them. And the reason for that is I think, you know, the traditional waterfall approach to kind of project management is where you kind of list out all your requirements and then I go away and build stuff and then six months later I come and show you and you go, but that's not what I asked for. What it is is it's more a continuous engagement. So what we try and do is, you know, it's called uat. But I don't like to do UAT at the end. I like to do UAT during, you know, user acceptance testing, but I like to do a lot of testing during the process. And that doesn't mean that everybody has to get involved in it. It's normally like a very small group of people. So sort of midway through the project I'm getting sort of the key modules, core functionality and some of the dashboards up and running at an early stage to kind of get, get feedback and often what happens at that stage, and again this is with one or two or three kind of super users often at that stage is kind of, there's suddenly a light bulb that switches on because what people, people when they, when users. And I'll give you an example. I did an implementation and I was actually on the client side this time. So I wasn't the consultant, I was asking the consultant what, you know, we were hired to assist with the kind of, the development and we were doing a, a cash flow solution and it was, they were implementing an erp and I just assumed that the ERP would deliver monthly, monthly balance sheet. But the consultant, the solution doesn't do that. And it was like, so how am I going to do my indirect monthly cash flow if I don't have a balance sheet? But that's, that's sometimes half of the problem is that there's just things that you, because you've been doing it for so long, you just assume that the system is going to do that and it doesn't necessarily do that. So that's why I like to do sort of a kind of mid build kind of review just to make sure that we kind of heading in the right direction at Least we're in the, in the right ballpark of development. So again, you know, that's kind of cool for me. And then it also helps with kind of that adoption and getting people excited about the solution and engaged. And then you often pick up a lot of the corner cases like the, you know, what happens if this, this and this, like three things suddenly align. And then, you know, again, part of the project as well is also being able to manage expectations by also then, you know, okay, you know, is this critical to delivery or can we push it to a separate phase? So there's all of that still. So again it's kind of a trade off and working with, with that client, but at least that's happening at an earlier stage so that we can change course and able to kind of deliver something that you know, the client is excited about.

Yeah, I agree. In fact, I mean, I think you hit on a core piece of success in pretty much anything you do just communication. You got to have continuous communication with, you know, you can't just go over and say okay, go, go do the implementation, come back to me when it's done because it's just not going to work. So you got to have that continuous communication throughout the project. Totally agree with that. Paul, any other thoughts?

No, I mean I think we've, we've covered the major things. I totally agree with that last part of just the importance of communication. The check in throughout the uta. We've all been there where you get to the end and you're like, this isn't what I expected and you don't want that.

Okay, so let's wrap it up. Final thoughts. James, you want leave the listeners with one or two things. What is it?

I also like when, when you asked me to talk on this topic, I also had a couple of thoughts on kind of just, you know, the challenges around why people aren't necessarily investing in new systems as well. So I was kind of, I had some thoughts on that. So really kind of that perception of FPA as a, as a cost center, the legacy mindset, really being able to kind of build that strong business case to be able to kind of really sell the idea of kind of moving that forward. So those are some of the other things that you know, you really want to kind of, you want to think about because you're competing against within a company, against so many different other groups that have got a lot of more tangible ROI that they can demonstrate. So you know, a lot of the challenge is trying to get above and get those projects agreed to so that you can really get the benefits. And the challenge is that a lot of those benefits are long term because you're going to be more strategic, you'll be able to make faster decisions. But it's hard to kind of measure that in kind of dollar terms.

I completely agree. I mean, my final thought is when you go over and you make a decision to implement a new system, if you do it right, it's a game changer. It enhances everything around your team, but also around the company because you're going to get better information, faster information, you're going to make better decisions. And ultimately that's really what FP&A is all about, is helping to influence those next decisions. And so technology and it's changing so often, but there's so many great things and you could really take your team to a whole new level if you go through and you do this in the right way. So, Paul, I'll turn it back to you for final thoughts and kind of closing out.

Yeah, I think you made a great point at the end there. I like to say, you know, you get the people, you get the processes right and Technology Services is an enabler if you're looking to do it. You know, an EPM implementation planning tool, whatever you want to call it, don't look at it as the answer that it's going to solve your problems. It is an enabler that can make you more efficient and effective, but you also have to take care of the rest of it. So kind of wrap up here. James, thank you so much for joining us. Really enjoyed getting chat to you, encourage our audience to reach out. I know if you want to share your website, we can do that. But James Myers does a lot of implementations, a lot of great work in this space and so we're lucky to have him and always great to have Glenn as a co host. Before I wrap up, James, why don't you share a little bit of your resources, kind of, you know, what you offer?

Yeah, I mean we do a lot of work with companies in Anaplan and Pigment and helping them turn more on the modeling, modeling solutions, really kind of helping enterprises look and you know, we work both from a business process perspective as well as kind of the implementation process. I really kind of help companies with those implementations.

Perfect. Well, I appreciate that. And we'll Definitely put your LinkedIn profile show notes so people can find you and appreciate you joining us today.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Glenn as well.

Thank you, James.

All right, thanks everyone. That's it for Today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting Earmark cpe, downloading the app, and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP and A Guy, and I'll see you next time.