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Out of the Trenches

TRANSWESTERN’S ENTERPRISE JOURNEY

TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

An Interview with Kurt Emshousen, Chief Administrative Officer

This segment features Kurt
Emshousen, Chief Administrative
Officer for Transwestern. He led
CHRIS SAAH an enterprise resource planning
President initiative which went live in 2017.
TecFac In today’s conversation, Kurt dis-
cusses the scope and some of the
Out of the Trenches is an occasional series of interviews challenges of the implementation.
conducted by Chris Saah, President of TecFac, a leading
technology and IT management company. The series
features in-depth and timely conversations with commer-
cial and corporate real estate technology leaders on their
successes, challenges and insights into running a CRE IT the industry. We want to be able to provide our Market
team, as well as trends they see in the industry. Leaders with intelligence about their business, but also
about activity in their city, their region, nationally and
Chris Saah: You successfully completed your ERP imple- globally.
mentation. How did it go?
Saah: And CRM is a part of that as well, isn’t it? I understand
Kurt Emshousen: The launch went well. I am pleased you’ve automated the payment of broker commissions.
to report that payroll and commissions were paid with
very few issues. We did have a hiccup with a file nam- Emshousen: Yes, we did a rollout of Microsoft Dynamics
ing convention at one of our banks - a warning sign for 365 (CRM) including a commission calculation engine
other groups who have multiple accounts through legacy integrated with Workday to streamline broker payments
arrangements, etc. and customer billings. The ability to integrate commission
calculation directly into Workday speeds up our commis-
Saah: Tell us some of the details. sion payment process and generates significant amounts
of deal data to better serve our clients.
Emshousen: We completed the implementation of
Workday for Finance, Payroll and HCM. Workday’s cloud Saah: This isn’t your first time with an ERP rollout. Tell us
applications for finances and HR combine these areas about the organizational and process challenges you have
(and many others) into one system, allowing us to faced and how you dealt with them.
streamline these processes. Our next phase will include
Budgeting and Planning, Performance Management and Emshousen: Interestingly, most companies start with
Compensation. The value for the organization is simple: determining their old technology is struggling to keep up
Transwestern can replace over 15 legacy systems with a and they need to implement an ERP. What I have always
world class ERP that creates a foundational platform found is that a comprehensive plan that starts with the
for integration and creates a true universal data model for business concerns must be implemented; companies
better execution and extensive business intelligence. True need to update their processes first and foremost, but
business intelligence is the analysis of data, coupled with they need technology to be able to execute. What every
context within the company and, just as important, within company that undertakes such a challenge understands

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