Craig Lundskog, finance director and controller for Kaysville, Utah-based construction firm Great Basin Industrial, was nervous. A major monkey wrench had been thrown into the works of the company's implementation of expense management and accounts payable services from Chrome River in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered both companies' offices in the midst of the implementation process.
With both companies' staff working remotely, the hands-on testing and configuration workshop—a key implementation step that originally had been scheduled to take place over three days at Chrome River's client education facility near Phoenix— now would be entirely virtual. What's more, Great Basin would be the first Chrome River client to undergo the remote version of the workshop.
Given those uncertainties, the loss of what had been an eagerly anticipated opportunity to escape Utah's lingering April chill for the Arizona warmth was among the very least concerns for Lundskog. Responsible for improving process and financial efficiency for Great Basin, Lundskog was leading the 250-employee industrial construction firm's shift to Chrome River from the competitor expense management provider it had used for the past eight years.
"We embraced it very gingerly at first," Lundskog said of the remote workshop concept. "I believe person-to-person is the best way to do business, so I was very apprehensive, honestly, that it wasn't going to work."
Oren Salzman, vice president of global procurement for New York City-based enterprise digital communications provider MetTel, had an additional cause for apprehension: his 450-person company never before had used an expense management provider, instead relying on manual Excel spreadsheets.
"The way we'd been doing expense was not sustainable, especially as MetTel had been growing at a rapid pace and had more people traveling," Salzman said, citing improved user experience and better data reporting as particular motivators of the company's decision to adopt an expense provider and ultimately choosing Chrome River.
Both Great Basin and MetTel were enrolled in Chrome River's 1-2-3 Go accelerated implementation program, which the expense provider launched in October 2019 in a bid to speed implementation times, which had lengthened in recent years as the company added new features to its platform. The program tailors the process for individual clients.
"We were applying the same implementation methodology to every client and every project," said Anne Becknell, senior vice president of customer success for Chrome River. "We had to figure out and analyze what was really needed and the proper approach for each client … As a result of that work, we created the 1-2-3 Go design."
The program offers a streamlined approach customized according to each particular client's needs—and is particularly well-suited to SMEs for whom a lighter configuration of Chrome River's platform provides sufficient functionality, Becknell noted.
The first step in the 1-2-3 Go process is what Chrome River calls a "Quick Start Questionnaire," a detailed series of questions designed to assess the unique characteristics and needs of a client.
For both Great Basin and MetTel, that questionnaire turned out to be a valuable tool to fall back on during the subsequent virtual workshop phase.
"With the thoroughness of those questions, it became very evident further along the way in the implementation … that the homework really paid off," Great Basin's Lundskog said. The industrial construction company had some unique needs—including building teams located at various project sites throughout the U.S.—critical information that was funneled to Chrome River through the questionnaire, he added.
For MetTel, which was coming from a completely manual expense policy, the questionnaire served an additional purpose: spurring the company to get its house in order with regard to its expense management program as a whole.
"We used this opportunity to complete the questionnaire and also to clean up our environment, to enable all the proper approval processes, tag the right departments, the right general ledgers, the appropriate managers and so on," said Salzman.
Under the 1-2-3 Go model, once Chrome River receives the Quick Start Questionnaire back from the client, the company builds out a customized system based on the responses, using remote design sessions with the client to fine-tune the structure of the platform.
The multi-phased prep work ahead of time meant that, by the time the virtual implementation workshop rolled around, the majority of the heavy lifting was done, enabling the process to run smoothly—and even with a bit more efficiency than might be expected of in-person implementation sessions.
"It wound up being a very good experience, because we'd done so much pre-planning and working through the issues beforehand… and it actually took a lot less time than I thought," said Lundskog. "It wound up being less than a day and a half, and then we were done."
For MetTel too, the virtual model proved effective and efficient thanks to the prep work and the format itself.
"The switch to virtual was seamless because we spent a lot of prep time going in…and having all this legwork up front enabled a smooth transition," noted Salzman. "We got it done way ahead of schedule because there was a motivation to maximize the time… so the technical limitation wound up actually being a benefit."
While both Lundskog and Salzman said there were aspects of a face-to-face workshop that they'd missed taking part in, both companies found that the virtual alternative held plenty of real benefits.
The 1-2-3 Go process continued even after the platform was up and running for Great Basin and MetTel, with Chrome River providing virtual post-implementation support including instructional video clips to address user questions and online webinars, as well as a user community designed to enable collaboration and information sharing between client companies' expense managers.
Those elements bolstered change management efforts around Chrome River implementation for Great Basin and MetTel, helping drive both companies' employees to use the expense platform—and ensure a positive experience when doing so.
"The system has a lot of [elements] to help the users, managers and administrators to operate the platform," said Salzman. That simplicity and ease of use has been key in changing expense behavior for MetTel employees who were used to the old manual system, which had led to lagging expense discipline companywide before the Chrome River implementation, he noted.
"The best thing was that the system and apps were easy to use and intuitive," Lundskog agreed, citing the platform's gamification and rewards elements around user instruction as another important driver of compliance among employees.
Since its launch in October 2019, the 1-2-3-Go implementation process has been used by more than 50 clients, with more in the pipeline currently, said Chrome River's Becknell. She went on to cite Great Basin and MetTel as two prime examples of the collaborative spirit needed to ensure a successful implementation process—especially amidst the current all-virtual environment.
"The client's commitment is key," Becknell said. "And both Craig and Oren and their teams were very committed throughout the entire process."