Start Your Year with Confidence | Agile FP&A Through Workday Adaptive Planning

And also something that's really big in the press today is digital transformation and technology change. New technologies are coming fast and furious, like artificial intelligence, machine learning there are reshaping all the industries. So a lot of our clients will need to incorporate technology, agility and assure employees are well supported during these tech-driven changes. So how can we here at Eisner Hamper, how are we helping these organizations? Well, the first and foremost is we have a concept called active dashboarding. Long gone are the days where organizations go to a dashboard, look at the data and identify any trends. Then they have to go to a report to see all the information that makes up those dashboards, and then if they want to make any changes, go to another spot to make the changes and then have to repeat that whole process to find out how effective their changes are.

So we need to put all those pieces of information in one spot so we can effectively forecast properly. There's a lot to do with scenario planning right now, and what we mean by scenarios is different versions of the forecast for a variety of reasons, whether the reasons are different initiatives, sustainability initiative, payroll initiatives, human resources initiatives. Not only do we have to track all those different scenarios, we need to trend them and decide which is the best course of action to take. So we can have multiple what ifs, 18 month rolling forecast forecasts out 1, 3, 5, 10 years that is available to you, and we'll show how we can do that very, very easily with a lot less manual effort. We need to streamline the forecast and reporting process by reducing all the manual effort. What we mean by that is we have to have the right information in the right format at the right time to the right people, whether it's operational people, financial people or what have you.

So we're going to show how we can do that. We need to collaborate across the teams like we just talked about, but more importantly, we're not going to throw anything away that you've already accomplished. A lot of our clients really love their spreadsheets, whether it's a report book or a trend analysis. Our dashboards are PowerPoints. These are the PowerPoints that we present to executive management or who's ever funding us or things like that. So we will show some integration into the tools that are already existing so you don't have to throw anything away. And then the big interesting piece is really improving the forecast accuracy, being able to take advantage of artificial intelligence or AI and being able to forecast out. But what we're finding is many of our customers are a different lifecycle for their AI knowledge. It may be very simple as just doing variance analysis or anomaly tracking all the way through based the system, based on our history in the system, forecast out as far as I want to forecast and give me a suggestive forecast and then I can change those pieces I want to change. So with our applications and our business knowledge of our implementation team, we're helping clients move forward with these kinds of things. So with that, I want to turn it over to Kyle so he can show you some pieces of the software and then we'll come back with any questions. Kyle?

Kyle Nesslar: Thanks Rhea. I'm going to pull up my screen share here. Just let me know if you all can start seeing Adaptive and then I will jump into it.

Rhea Wade: You can see it, Kyle.

Kyle Nesslar: Awesome, thank you. So well, the first piece, the topic I want to cover today is as RIA said, and talk a little bit about the dashboarding functionality that exists in Workday. Adaptive planning active dashboards is a great way to help manage changes today in a constantly evolving world. It's a great tool for all users of the organization, whether it's C-suite or fp and a or even the individual budget owners to be able to review trends in real time while comparing actuals to plan to help quickly identify areas of focus. This allows teams to be quicker, make quicker data-driven decisions while maintaining a secure change management process. Overall, everything you're seeing in a system is completely configurable security setup that can restrict the users by any data or account sets that allows the fp and a team to control all aspects of how the end users would ultimately interact with the tool.

The first dashboard I want to cover here is the finance top line dashboard, and you can see there's a whole host of information here. I can create some KPI metrics for revenues, cost of good solds opex, all the way down to I can get these cool little waterfall charts where it might show me my variance analysis from budget to actuals for a given period or multiple periods of time, and then I can quickly identify the areas of focus that may be causing those variances. So on this side, it looks like traveling entertainment cause me to come in way over budget or on this end it looks like that's related to the US North sales division. Now it's important to note here that all the information seen in these dashboards can be automated from their systems of record, whether it's your general ledger system, an operational database or source system, your CRM and HCM, anything that you can pull data out of, we can push data into in Adaptive.

And the great thing is it's not really just your GL accounts or departments. You can get as granular with the data, both actuals and planning as you might ultimately need. For instance here, this is showing me that I have eight and a half million dollars of revenue for the month in March, but it doesn't really tell me much else, so maybe I want to get more granular and down to the surface of it by simply left clicking on that eight and a half million dollars. I can come down to any pieces of information that I might have that this data is aggregated by. So for instance, now I'm seeing this eight and a half million, but when I continue to drill down, now I can see how that eight and a half million is made up by location. So here I'm saying, okay, of that eight and a half million 1.8 is related to the United Kingdom or 1.19 is related to Canada, or for instance the us about 1,100,000 is related to US revenue and I can continue to drill down to that as granularly as I need to in order to get to the piece of information that I'm looking for.

So for instance, if I click on this and then I want to see, okay, well now I want to see how this revenue broken down by product. I can see that this highlights in blue, so I know that I've drilled down into it further and how I'm actually saying of this 1.8 million that was in uk, how much is made up of all my different products and I can start to get a sense of, hey, what products are selling well, what products aren't selling well or whatever it might be meaningful to your organization in terms of how you would look into your revenue and at any point in time, all I have to do is simply click this back button here and it'll take me back to my original dashboard, which again, just giving me a bunch of cool little high level information that I can quickly get a glance and an understanding of where I'm at as an organization because it's important that these dashboards tell a story, but to tell it quickly and allow you to make decisions and react because of it.

The next dashboard I'm going to touch on is this tab called targets versus plan because it's important to note what we've talked about here so far is all actuals versus plan comparisons. But not only can you do actuals versus plan comparisons, you can compare plans to other plans. For instance, you may have top down benchmarking that executives set that they want to hit from the target levels as you build up a bottom up plan. And that's exactly what this is showing you here in the green. It is where my granular bottom up plan is for revenue, but this red is the benchmarking that is set on another plan at the top level that corporate may have set so that as the plans are built up over time and your end users go in there to ultimately create their different plans for their various departments or what section of responsibility they have, you can track this in real time to make sure that as it's built up over time, ultimately when you present it to someone or something, you know that the amounts are going to hit where they need to be.

Because this is allowing us to not only cross comparisons to various planning versions, be it budget to forecast or plans versus benchmarking set by leadership. Whatever you really need here is what that information is going to tell you so that you can get specific and quickly identify what you're wanting to look at. It makes variance analysis completely streamlined and it completely cuts down on the prep time for those ad hoc questions relayed across finance teams. The third thing I'm going to show you here is the true concept of active dashboarding. And this is probably the coolest thing that people like in the tool and I like to show it around workforce planning because obviously every organization has it and that's what's going to be ultimately most important to that. But not only can I do this from this dashboard, I have what are called versions in adaptive.

So you can see there's a whole host of different versions, but maybe I want to keep this version the same, but I want to spin off my own personal scenario so that I can make some adjustments to things and get a sense of where my data is ultimately going to be at. So by simply clicking new scenario here, I'm going to create an alternate plan, then I can make adjustments to and automatically switch to it. So this is just saying, Hey, do you want to switch to this new scenario you're about to create? So I'm going to hit yes and now you can see that it's flipped me to this new version called Alternate Scenario, but it's still connected to my original working budget and it allows me to make alterations to the plan without affecting the original plan so that I can evaluate whether I want those changes to ultimately be pushed back into the original plan for reporting and how we want to execute moving forward on our budget, our reforecast, whatever we happen to be working on at the time.

So just at a high level, I'm going to make a couple of quick edits here just so you can see how that works in the tool. For instance, this person here, maybe instead of paying them 80,000 a year, I'm going to give them 8 million a year. So I'm just going to switch it to a high number so it kind of sticks out here, but once I hit save, now I can see that it's going to way ramp up my cost down over here because I'm accounting for this new person who instead of paying 8,000, I'm paying 8 million. And the other great thing about this is not only does it make that change and everything happens in real time, it also highlights all those changes for me so I can understand exactly what I've changed from the original version that I copied off of to know exactly what's happening there to make better decisions around if I want to ultimately sink this back in.

So for instance, okay, now not only am I going to pay this person 8 million, I want to turn them back to say that they start in March. So once I changed that, I should see my account jump up because this is a March head count number. And now all of a sudden because I've changed that person's start date from August 31st to March 31st, I've added an additional head from March so I can track my head count, it can show me how my head count's trending over time and I can see all of the various changes that I've making and real time and evaluate what the impacts of those changes are. All wall. If I go back to the working budget, never impacting the original plan, everything here is still the same. You can see this person's still 8 31, 20, 24, 80,000 161 head count, but here it's changed and all those changes are tracked for me with that little yellow screen there.

So what the really cool thing about this is I can review my p and l, whatever different metrics I'm trying to look at to understand how those changes have impacted me. And at any point in time if I want to make the decision to sync them back into the original plan so that they're available for everyone to see with a push of a button, I can do that or ultimately I could get rid of this plan or I could keep it and continue to make tweaks to it just as a separate little scenario that I have so that I can understand what the impacts of any changes I make are going to be to the overall tool itself. And this is just one example of how the bottom up planning might work that all industries can obviously relate to because it's workforce, but it can be done with any other groupings of expenses, revenues, ultimately even balance sheet and cashflow forecasting so you can get very specific and quick sets of information to really understand the impacts of what you're doing ultimately are.

Now the last tab I'm going to show here is the predictive forecast. And really what this does is use artificial intelligence that can be generated with the click of a button using a variety of algorithms to automatically project out any operational or financial dataset. So you can see in the graph here, this shaded in green, this is what's actually happening over time. And then ultimately this shade of orange takes over. This is that granular individual owner plan that was created and showing how we're planning and what we plan for unit sales over time really is. But the great thing is this blue and this green line here, these are artificially, artificially intelligently generated predictions of what's going to happen over the course of time by looking at previous trends. So not only does the system allow for the flexibility to provide a variety of options of how these calculations run, but it's so powerful it can actually allow you to customize easy input preset parameters to guide how those calculations would ultimately project out.

For instance, here you can see I have a consumer price index where I can make changes to the CPI levels, which actually the algorithm will absorb and potentially change what it's predicting out over time. So that's really what that is ultimately doing and you can choose a whole host of different stats to be able to make your predictions along with seasonality and other items that can really tell you a lot of different information about it. What I've also included down here is the product revenue sheet itself. This is where the nuts and bolts of all the data's happening where we're looking at this unit account here, that's projecting out either from the actual side here in terms of what they input or what we have from those predictive algorithms that's looking at assumption tables that maybe have price per unit and specific products or other discomfort percentages that ultimately will spit out revenue totals, discount totals, and it can even be used to calculate out cost of goods sold and everything else that would ultimately push to your p and l.

And that's where this becomes really powerful because you can create a lot of different scenarios, both physically, manually maintained by actual end users in the tool while also using their predictive forecaster to generate other calculations outside for comparability to see if it aligns with trends that may be compared to, again, maybe CPI is a factor or you have seasonality fluctuations. All of those can be impacted into those predictive algorithms to generate and spit out where you may be going in the future and also then ultimately compare that to your inline forecast of where you are today from your planning standpoint and historically.

So now with that, what I'm going to do here is jump over to the last piece of the platform that I want to show you, which is their Office connect tool. And what this is is a seamless connection directly from adaptive into Microsoft Excel. So you have all the power of Excel while also the flexibility to be able to absorb all the data that's coming in from whether it's your gl, other operational systems or everything else. You have it right here at the push of a, but so for instance, if I build out my whole cleanly nicely formatted report deck, no longer do I have to every month, then download a bunch of new tables, reset all the data and then push it everything back in with the click of a button. I can update this at any point in time. For instance, if I change this to March 31st to stay here and I hit refresh all seats, I'll see that this actually will update and now this will all change from February to March.

Just a second here. So now I see this table automatically updated to March and not only did this table update, but everything else as well that I have built out my graphs, my charts, my p and ls, everything is now March. And the great thing about this is it's not just for new month ends or things like that. Most people, and I hear this story all the time, they have scenarios where you've got all your board decks set up, everything's propped, it's ready to go, and you come in the next morning, you know you're in good shape and then you find out there's some last minute entries that have occurred and now you're scrambling last second to reprep, prepare all your reports, reset up everything to make sure that the data is tying out to what it actually is Now because some numbers have changed, well you don't have to worry about that anymore because the real time feeds from your GL or your operational systems always can always be pushed you adaptive at any point in time and then the data is updated with the latest and greatest.

So to simply shift this from March back to February or just simply refresh the same month because you're just getting updated results, it all happens with the push of a button Now, and the great thing about this too is not only does this apply to Microsoft Excel, it can also apply to PowerPoints for board decks and presentations or Word documents for MG and a analysis. Everything can be synced directly into the tool. So for instance here what I'm showing you is my board presentation, my PowerPoint deck, but everything is interconnected. So the second I update this back to February, I'm going to see that in real time, not only is my Excel document updated, but ultimately once this finishes, this will sync back too. So everything is just push button now you don't have to worry about formula linkage errors, other issues that people run into all the time with Excel or the prone to braking or somebody comes in and makes a change, you can see that updated and now everything here is back to February. It really is just that easy. There's no more stress of last minute changes, last minute problems, everything is push button coming from whatever your source systems are to create these clean, nicely formatted decks that are perfect for presentation mode. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing and kind of turn it back. Toria for the last thoughts, wraps up, wrap up some questions.

Rhea Wade: Kyle, very much appreciative. We've got a couple questions coming in. So what I'd like to do is I think the first question is really more for your style, Kyle. What systems do we integrate with?

Kyle Nesslar: We pretty much integrate to any system, small or large. We've done everything from QuickBooks online to Oracle or SAP. Your most common are things like NetSuite or Sage Intacct, but there really isn't a system that we've never been able to integrate to, including, as I said, hcms, operational systems, data warehouses. If you can get the data out of the platform, we can integrate it and get it back into Adaptive.

Rhea Wade: Perfect, thank you. The next question is if I've already gone through the planning process for my operating plan of 2025, what do I do with that information? Kyle, that's probably best answered by you.

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, happy to answer that one as well. So that's actually very easy to do because everything in Adaptive has the ability to load via Excel files directly into the platform. So we have clients like that all the time where they may have already finished their ultimate budget for the year and they're going through the adaptive implementation and set up, but they need something in adaptive to ultimately set up that plan so they can reference back for their board decks and other things. So you can just via a very simple Excel import, we conform the data and load it by account whatever your dimensions and data, the detail that you ultimately need is. And it's generally a 30 to 62nd input to just sync it all in. And then you're pulling from all the same data sets that you might otherwise be pulling from if you're doing the more granular, driver based bottom up planning that we talked about as part of the presentation.

Rhea Wade: Great. And the next one's a great question. I'm going to hit this one first and if you have anything to add, let me know. Absolutely. What are the algorithms we use for predictive forecasting? So this question obviously comes from someone that's really into the AI and it's a very good question and I don't personally know the names of all the different algorithms. We have up to 10 algorithms that we can use for predictive forecasting. They all look at the history and can take into account seasonality and numbers, but it's up to 10. And when we go through predictive forecasting, you could pick one or all 10 to do the forecasting. If you truly want the names of all the forecasts, send me an email and I can look it up and send that to you. I don't know, Kyle, do you have all memorized yet?

Kyle Nesslar: No, the most common ones are on beats and Profit, but as you said, they have 10 different ones. They also have the ability to adaptive can kind of run through the hosted and kind of do what their best fit one is. And to your whole point, based on your different levels or levers or triggers that we set up, and like I showed with the consumer price index where that may drive some of the impact of what the demand would ultimately be, that could change maybe potentially what different algorithm it might use and things like that. So there's a whole lot of options and things to choose from and adjustments that you can make and ultimately you could run 'em all if you wanted to and compare 'em to your plan and get the best results possible.

Rhea Wade: Thank you very much.

Well, and just to summarize what we saw today in a very short time, I hope we've proved that you can use your data analytics to help making informed decisions moving forward. You can have effective change management for supporting some of your decisions, being able to track initiatives, whether those sustainability, workforce, revenue, jetting, whatever those initiatives are, we can track them and do that and also take advantage of the new technology within the Adaptive Insights application. That being said, if anyone has any questions, feel free to give Kyle myself a call or contact us. If you're already working with EisnerAmper, please talk to your EisnerAmper associate that you're working with. Or if you're working with Workday already, contact your Workday rep and we can all make sure you get the information that you need in a timely manner. Astrid, I'm going to turn it back over to you.

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