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CFO Perspective: Q&A with Tatum’s Rob Weisgarber on the Value of Enterprise Applications for Midsize Companies

As CFO partner at Tatum LLC, Rob Weisgarber takes on interim roles such as CFO or controller at client firms. The largest executive services firm in the U.S., Tatum has around 1,000 partners in about 37 cities across the country. Weisgarber’s stints can last anywhere from 60 days to a year or more, and they regularly include software selection projects.

Weisgarber recently sat down with us to provide a CFO’s take on the value of enterprise application implementations—plus tips to make that value a reality.

In your experience, when and how does the CFO of a midsize company get involved in the approval process for an IT project?
From my experience, CFOs themselves typically get involved in projects that are pervasive—impacting the entire company. Our role is to do a bit of reality check and make sure everyone knows what to expect in terms of financial benefits to the company.

Do most midsize companies do a formal ROI analysis before and after an enterprise software project?
I think it’s hard for midsize companies to commit the time, money, and internal resources to do formal ROI analysis. It’s easy to know the cost size, but it’s much harder to figure out the return. I think a lot of IT projects are approved because the pain reaches a certain level that you’re willing to spend the money and invest the time to stop hurting.

When a project is done, how do you judge whether it has been successful?
As a CFO, I might notice that we’ve reduced our order processing time from 18 to 12 hours, or that we can close the books in 5 days versus 8. But once that improvement has been established, I don’t typically continue to scrutinize those specific metrics on an ongoing basis. I know that it’s working—that the pain is gone.

Given the current economic conditions, what types of IT projects are the most compelling to you as a CFO?
Every company is just trying to make the business more efficient. The quicker you can take an order, ship a product, or resolve a customer service issue, the better the company is going to be. Maybe it’s not one thing in a single application that accomplishes those improvements but the solution as a whole making the entire organization more efficient.

But haven’t most companies already cut out all the fat over the last few years?
With all the innovation going on, there is always some way to make improvements. Maybe it means just adding one application that reduces back-office man-hours—like taking payroll in-house or automating transaction processing between your bank and your financial management applications.

What types of mistakes have you seen midsize companies make when planning an IT project?
Underestimating is the biggest problem I’ve seen—all the way from the planning phases through implementation and testing. And if your scope definition isn’t done right, you’ll get into a project and realize you’re not going to get what you want unless you change the scope, which of course always costs more. Scoping correctly and sticking to that scope makes it more likely you’ll meet both your cost and benefit goals for the project.

How do midsize companies avoid these mistakes?
You can’t plan too much. Everyone with a stake has to be involved. You can’t just hand it over to two or three guys and say, “Get it done and let me know when it’s over.”

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