While the TEM provider can be at fault, we have found them often made the scapegoat by customers that refused to modify policies within their organizations to allow the implementation to succeed.
As a TEM provider, this revelation caused us to consider whether to pursue these opportunities to migrate customers to our TEM solution. If the executive sponsorship was not present with the previous provider, how would we ensure it would be there for the implementation of our solution? We concluded that we would walk away if we could not get the sponsorship. Here’s why:
First, let’s define “‘executive sponsorship.” It is the approval of the executive team to allow the TEM team the authority and control to change or implement policies and procedures in order to achieve the proposed ROI of the TEM solution.
Since many of the TEM providers are companies that are being backed by a demanding venture capital or private equity firm, they are looking for immediate revenue. They have aggressive sales personnel that strive to get the purchase order, their commission check, and then turn it over to an implementation team. (In some cases, the implementation is completely outsourced to a third party). Translation: Get an IT director or controller’s buy-in and get the contract signed. While this company representative has signing authority, he/she most often does not have the authority to change or implement new policies or procedures.
A common example is the executive team not allowing the TEM team to alter how invoices are received or where they are processed. Many companies, for example, have multiple locations for processing invoices, each with different procedures. TEM requires one corporate-wide process. Many companies also have restrictions on how charges can be allocated as well as A/P policies and technologies that create additional challenges.
