BPM: Perhaps one of the benefits is that there's no discussion about what the accurate numbers are anymore?

Schuster: It's a huge improvement. In the old days, there was continual finger-pointing between finance and the business units about whose numbers were right, whose Excel spreadsheets were wrong.

BPM: What would you say you have learned in the process of purchasing and implementing this tool?

Schuster: A couple of things. You have to engage your end-users; they have to be part of the solution. You need to do it with them -- not to them! People don't resist change; they resist being changed. So when we were looking at the possible solutions, we engaged all of the users. We had our two finalists come in and present all-day demos to our users, and the users voted on which system they wanted.

BPM: Did that result in much better acceptance than you were expecting?

Schuster: Yes. There is always some resistance to change. For example, there were some users that had a paranoia that with this new system the CEO was going to be logging into the system and drilling down into their detailed formulas to figure out what they were doing and all that. I said not to worry about that; he's not going to do that. We also had to standardize the database structure and the corresponding accounting approaches, which some didn't like because they were used to doing whatever they wanted in their own Excel workbooks, but they now see the benefits of consistent, comparable, reliable data. It's incredible, the initial concerns people have, and a lot of times they're unfounded.

The other thing that we did differently is that we did a majority of the implementation ourselves. I personally wrote the line-of-business allocation, along with Jeff McLeRoy, who did the step-down allocation, and Mark Goldstone, who developed the detailed person-by-person salary planning and forecasting tool. I have a personal belief that if you can learn the technology -- and all three of us had both a financial and an IT background -- then you'll have a much better implementation. This allowed us to customize the system to how we wanted it to work, rather than teaching the technology provider how our business works and having them do it for us. In addition, we're not dependent on them to maintain it and change the system. We don't have this problem.

BPM: So you think that it's worthwhile for a business to try to have someone in-house to customize the solution?

Schuster: If they have the skill set to do it, it's definitely a better way. Prior to coming to Trustmark, I spent most of my career in the hospital world. I was a hospital CFO and CIO, so I've had a combination of financial and IT backgrounds that spans 30-plus years.

Having fully understood the system, we have gotten it to do things that are pretty sophisticated. Over the years, in working with various external vendors, I've often heard people say, "It can't be done." I don't buy that. Heck, when John F. Kennedy said in 1961 that we would put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade, we didn't know how we would do it, but we figured it out! I've learned that when they say it can't be done, it's often a matter of they don't know how, they don't want to do it, or they don't have the resources to do it. But when you work through those barriers, you can almost always find a way to get things done.

BPM: What would you say to someone in a company that's still using spreadsheets for planning and forecasting?

Schuster: It's time to move to a solution that will be much more effective in its value and its cost structure. The change can always appear daunting. In our case, the question was: How can we afford this? And the answer was: Well, because we can't afford not to! There are so many hidden costs to doing it in a manual-intensive way. And how much are you losing because you can't manage your business effectively? Spreadsheets, to me, are just not a viable solution, especially in the rapidly changing world today.

BPM: Is there anything else you want to add?

Schuster: I didn't mention some of the other things that we do, such as tax planning. The Longview solution has a tax module that we use for doing our tax provisioning that works very well for us. And there are other similar beneficial features of the Longview solution that we use on a regular basis. As a final thought: People sometimes question whether such a system is worth implementing, and I acknowledge that it can be difficult to measure its specific value or validate its worth. But I found a simple answer to this issue: Whenever we're getting into pressure to cut costs, I just threaten to pull the plug on this system, and I hear massive wails! And this tells me that it's adding value and was worth doing.