Transforming your Operational and Financial Data into Powerful Insights With Workday Adaptive

With that being said, along with me today is Kyle Nesslar. Kyle is one of our directors and helps lead the Workday Adaptive planning practice. Kyle, if you could please maybe share a bit about your background.

Kyle Nesslar: Sure. Thanks Marc, and hello everyone. As Marc said, I'm one of the directors here for EisnerAmper in charge of the Workday Adaptive planning practice, and I've been with the team now for eight years working exclusively in Adaptive Insights, so that's helping clients do everything from build that solid foundation for reporting and analytics all the way through to any complex driver-based modeling you might look to be doing, workforce planning, expenses, revenues, all the way through to balancing and cash flow forecasting.

Marc Moskowitz: So Kyle, you've been helping clients, as you said, for just about a decade, helping them with their planning and reporting and analytics. What are some of the common challenges or themes around challenges that you see?

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, the biggest challenge we see is organizations want their financial and operational insights to be trusted. Our clients desire to maximize the value of their data so they can optimize their resources and adapt to changing situations quickly. The need to be proactive is more important than ever as opposed to being reactive, focusing on strategy rather than just manually compiling a bunch of reports. And the biggest obstacle we see to that in realizing that vision is siloed data sets stored in multiple disconnected source systems.

Marc Moskowitz: Yeah. So with that notion of siloed data or having it in multiple disconnected locations or sources, how does your team help our clients with their planning and reporting as it relates to that?

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, so we utilize Workday Adaptive planning to create one centralized location that FP&A and end users alike can consolidate all of their actual financial and operational data to marry that with their planning solution while all being orchestrated by the finance team in again, one streamlined centralized source of truth.

In order to do that, well, Workday Adaptive planning uses three different reporting tools to present for different purposes, they have what they call Dashboarding, which is used for trend identification and real-time planning scenarios. Self-service web-based reporting, which is used for generally end-user variance analysis, actuals to plan, as well as ad hoc analysis by the finance team to quickly generate quick reports on information they need to get. And then we use what we have the Office Connect Platform, which is a direct sync from Adaptive into the Microsoft Office Suite that is designed for presentation quality, reporting to leadership finance committees, other interested third parties or outside parties. And with that, what I want to do is share my screen and take you live to it in the tool.

So I'm going to share my screen and we're going to jump into it here. So without further ado, everybody should be seeing Workday Adaptive Planning and what I have up here first is the Dashboarding component. And just as a reminder, Dashboard is the first reporting mechanism we're going to walk through today and its core purpose will be for C-suite FP&A users, budget owners to review trends in real time while comparing actuals to plan to help them identify quickly areas of focus that they might need to do. And Workday Adaptive Planning has a completely configurable security-based system that can restrict users by any dimensions, account sets, or any other thing that you might need to do that can be completely controlled by the FP&A team so that you can define how your end users will interact with the tool. And what you're seeing here is I'm logged as an administrator, so I have complete access and view to everything, but end users may only have restrictions to their certain departments or the things that are important to them.

And the first thing I want to call out here today is up here in the top right this, working budget, and these are what they call versions in Adaptive, which you can almost think of like different spreadsheets as you go through iterations of the process of budget forecasting where you may have budget one, set it up in a spreadsheet, you copy it over or make adjustments, version two and so on and so forth. And that's basically similar to what the versions are, but the great thing about this is they also have the ability to allow you to create your own little personalized scenarios. So especially for FP&A users, while all their core end users are maybe working in their budgets and setting them up in the system, you can create customized spin-offs of your working budget where you can make adjustments and tweaks to things without actually affecting the core that then you can either understand what the effects of those will be and either sink them back into your budget or ultimately leave them as is.

And I want to show you that a little bit later in the tool, but I just wanted to call that out ahead of time and I'll bring you back to it when applicable. But what we're going to focus on here is the first dashboard I have, which is the finance top line dashboard, which is all the information that you see here can be automated from any host of source systems that you may need to pull from, whether it be your GL, an operational database or data warehouse, your CRM, your HCM, any tools that you have that aggregate data can be brought in to create one centralized repository for reporting, and at any granularity you might also want to see.

So the first thing I'm going to do here is just call out the net product revenue, which is telling me right now I made $8.5 million for the month of March of 2024, which is $740,000 under budget or 8%, but that's not a lot of information. Maybe I need to get a little more granular in understanding that. So by left clicking on this, you can see there's a whole host of options where I can actually drill into and get a much better understanding of what my revenue might be.

So let's say I wanted to look at my $8.5 million by location, for instance. By clicking on this, it creates a drill into that shows me not just the eight and a half million that I'm looking at, but how it's made up of all the different locations. So I can see the DVR had about $1.8 million. Canada has a little over $1.1 or US has $1.1 as well, but maybe what I want to see is even further detail. So by left clicking again, I could drill into my USA revenue by product, let's say if you have that information in, and you can see that it highlights it in blue, so it tells me what I'm looking at down below, and that $1.1 million is now not only broken down by starting with the 8.5, down to the 1.1, now, it's granularly breaking it down by product for me. So I can see that of that 1.1 for March, my product A1 was $200,000 worth of revenue, A4 was 150 and so on and so forth.

And at any point in time if I need to get back to my original screen, I can simply click this back button and it'll take me directly to my original dashboard.

Now, the next dashboard I'm going to show is a little bit different in terms of what I want to talk about because everything right now I've kind of mentioned is just comparison of maybe actual to plan, but we not only have the ability to compare actual to plan, but we can compare plans to plans very easy and seamlessly. For instance, perhaps your leadership sets benchmarks before the planning process of certain groupings and things that they want to achieve numbers wise, and you want to make sure that as you're going through and aggregating your plan in real time that you're coming up and achieving those.

So you can see here this red line is a baseline of another version called benchmark that they have preset revenue targets that they want to make sure their plan is building up by. So it varies month to month, and then the green here is my actual working budget and how that bottom up plan for instance, Hey, I'm trying to plan my revenue by product and I'm inputting number of units times an average sales rate to generate the total revenue, whereas this might just be high level numbers that we want to make sure we're hitting. And it allows us to do the variance analysis not only around actuals and plan, but ultimately around plan to benchmarks or plans to forecast. Anything that you can do to speed up the general inputs on things and make sure you're focusing on analysis rather than inputs.

Now, speaking of inputs, that's the next piece I'm going to show you in the dashboarding tool, and this is the concept of what they call active dashboards in the platform. So not only does it have all the benefits of the same thing I showed you before, and it's all the same exact tool, it's just what we're putting on each of these because they're completely customizable, but it's ultimately not only a way to see that information but also have the driver-based planning models in the screen. And as you make adjustments, see how those adjustments impact things in real time.

And what I want to show you here is not just how that impacts it, but I'm going to come back to that personal scenario I mentioned earlier in the webinar and I'm going to create it and I'll show you how easy that is to do. By hitting new scenario, I'm just going to call it alternative. And what that's going to do is I'm going to hit create and it's going to ask me if I want to switch my version from working budget to this new alternative scenario.

So by hitting that, I'm going to hit yes, and you can see now this change from working budget to alternative, but when you look at it, it actually has a subversion underneath that connects it to the working budget. So what this allows me to do is make alterations to what's currently on the working budget without actually impacting it so I can judge the impact of those changes before I actually go in and make those changes.

So for instance, if I wanted to come back up to the top here and I have this person here who is scheduled to start on April 30th and make an annual pay rate of $65,000, which is calculated based on working days a month, calendar days a month, et cetera. However ultimately you wanted to set them up, what I'm going to do is make a rather drastic change here and instead of paying them 65,000, I'm going to pay them $16.5 million and you'll see how that impacts these across the board from my trend to my waterfall, it's telling me how my payroll is accounting for over time. All these numbers will jump way up in real time in the solution the second I do this.

And what you can see is when I made that change, it's now $16.5 million, but it's showing in blue and nothing changed here. Well, the blue just indicates that I've made a change but haven't saved it yet. So once I hit save here, you're going to see all of these update in real time. So you can see my trends absolutely exploded from May on when I hired this person. And you can see I jumped from 35 million in my plan to 46.3 million in my plan. The other amazing thing about this is it actually highlights that change in yellow to call it out it's different from my original scenario so I can easily track all of the varying changes that I ultimately made on this. And so all of these things, everything you're seeing in this workforce planning sheet ultimately drives some of the calculations.

So maybe instead of starting him in April, now I think we're really going to aim to start this person in July. So you can see that change in blue, but because I haven't saved it, it has had no impact yet. And what I'm going to see once I save it is my May and June numbers will drop way down, but July through August will remain pretty steady because obviously now this person is starting in July, so I don't have that same impact on my budget in May or June. And you can see this even dropped from that 46 number down to my 43.2 just like that.

Now, the other thing I could do is also remove people. So let's say I no longer want this person here in Germany, we're just not going to hire them. I can actually right click, delete that row and then save. And now what'll happen is you won't see a big impact here because of the large amount I made, but what's really cool here is it just highlights that entire row and light items it out to show you that it's no longer part of that plan. And everything I'm doing here still did not affect anything that I wanted to do on my working budget, this still remains exactly the same.

But let's say I've reviewed those changes, I'm comfortable with them and I want them to be a part of my plan. I can sync it directly to this with that direct connection from this scenario back into the plan with a push of a button. So all different ways and things that you can do to create and go from there.

The next piece I'm going to show you here is the web reporting tool, which is what users will use as a reminder for month end variance analysis around actuals to plan, or maybe the FP&A team uses it a lot for ad hoc reporting and analysis for quick questions that they might have because it's all drag and drop functionality. So it's very simple to start with putting together reports.

And so I'm going to click on a navigation bar here, and this report section here, there's two core reports that I want to show you. The first is current month variance analysis and what you'll see here is it's a pretty simple report, right? It's my operating expenses with my actuals compared to my working budget with some variance and I have both my month to date and year to date numbers here. You can also see what's really great is you can do all sorts of conditional formatting here so you can quickly highlight any variances or challenges or things that you may want end users to be able to dig into without having to comb through a lot of information.

So for instance here, I can see my meals had a 556% over budget for the period of March. I had planned to originally spend $3000, but here my actuals came in around almost $20,000. Well, maybe as a department owner, I don't think that's right, I can't imagine what we spent $20,000 on for meals, but what I can do is left click on this button, there's a couple different topics I want to touch on with this.

Number one, I just want to point out that we have a fully functioning audit trail, so any changes that get made in the system, whether it be somebody changes an amount or moves a dollar amount from a different level or any other changes that they might make in the tool, you can report on that and get a quick report to see who made the change, when they made it, and what change was made. So it makes it very easy to every time you come into the tool, if something looks different, you can pop in, click on that audit trail and identify where those changes were to go back to that end user to understand what the thought process was behind it.

But what I really want to show you, which is really great here, well this information of the $19,900 is great, but I have no idea what the context of that is. And most tools, most of the end users don't have access to things like the GL and things like that, where we can actually pull all the GL detailed transactions into the tool and users can get to it with the click of a button. So if I click and drill into transactions here, it's actually showing me all the transactions I have in this system for March of 2024. You see I scroll to the bottom, it's got 50 transactions, but if I switch the page size to 1000, I'll see all of the transactions that are here and it ties to my summary of 19,915.

Then you're also seeing some other things, key information like maybe the department that was posted to, the account, the transaction type, the voucher numbers, descriptions. All of this is completely customizable, so anything that you have in your transaction detail from your GL system, we can add and you can pull in to give the users as much information as possible so they're as armed up front to be able to see what they need to see and come up with any questions they have. Instead of just going directly back to accounting and finance with high level questions of things that they need, they can dig into the detail and it really helps streamline the month end evaluation process from that standpoint.

The other report here I want to show you is really just a core three statement model, and you might have separate reports for each however you want to do it, but really, this is just showing you how that true three statement impact would be. You can see I start out with my income statement where we get revenue, cost of goods sold down on my contribution margin all the way down to net income. We have a balance sheet, perfectly balances, and then even a cash flow statement where I could see my monthly changes and operating cash flows, investing cash flows, financing cash, any kind of financial impacts and things that you want to see, you can have.

And it's not just limited to GL financial impacts, you can pull in any statistical data and ultimately create calculations to generate all sorts of metrics that you may want from financial or financial metrics like we have here for cash, current debt, maybe you have certain loan covenants that have certain requirements that you need to be able to evaluate on a regular cadence and make sure that you're keeping in line with those covenants. You can build all of that out here. As well as I said, bringing in any statistical data you may have in the system such as like for instance, these two here, which are headcount based. So revenue per employee, cost per employee, you can bring in square footage. Really, anything that is important to your organization can be built in. You can build all sorts of KPIs metrics and accounts around it so that you can create one consistent reporting style that everybody can pull those numbers.

And Marc, you were mentioning the same beat. There's nobody maybe doing a calculation slightly different on one spreadsheet where another user's doing it slightly different and all of a sudden you're getting two sets of information for the same number, creating that impact of the lack of trust in the tool. And it really isn't that the information's wrong, it's just two different people might be doing something slightly different ways.

So the last piece of the puzzle here that I want to show you is what I talked about is the Office Connect package. What you're seeing here, and really as a reminder, this is a full sync from all the Adaptive information to directly into Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, any of the suite of products. And it's really used to create that presentation quality, format reporting that you're presenting the third parties, your board, whatever you need to because it gives you all the power of Excel because it's literally just an add-in to Excel, but it creates a sync to Adaptive that you can pull all of this information in seamlessly.

And so I'm going to just explain a little bit of a story here that maybe a lot of end users will ultimately have some experience with. You've got all your board prep, your presentation, your setup, you're ready to go the night before your board meeting, everything's clean, is ready to go, you've got all your commentary, everything's good, and then all of a sudden the next morning somebody in accounting or somewhere else makes a change and all of a sudden all of your data is out of date and you've got to panic. You've got two hours to cleanly redo everything else. You got to pull all the information, make the numbers change.

Well, you don't have to do that with Adaptive because the data is syncing as often as you want it into the tool. And all of this is connected live in the platform. So with the push of a button, I can update all of my reports in one quick time. So by coming to my workbook properties here, and I'm going to change from February to March just to show you how easy this is, I change my date, see everything right here is February now, or by hitting refresh all sheets, it takes generally anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds just depending on the number of sheets and the volume of data you have. But what'll happen is once this updates and refresh, everything will now be represented for March. It's the most efficient way to get through everything you're looking to do. It's amazing.

But see now this jump to March, my functional P&L jumped to March, my metrics jumped to March. My departments, everything is updated from March. So whether you're just updating it for the new month or having to get last minute changes synced into the tool, you can do it very easily, cleanly and seamlessly. Even my charts are all updated. And the reason why I bring up the charts here is because as I mentioned before, it's not just for Excel, it's also for PowerPoint or maybe you have management discussion and analysis you do that you put into a Word document every month. Everything is seamlessly synced and integrated. So at the push of a button, you can make all the changes you need. Gone are the days of those last minute changes, two hour before a meeting that you got to panic and get everything updated and make sure everything's accurate. You already know it's accurate because the latest data is always in the system and you can just change everything by the push of a button.

So for instance, if I wanted to go back to February here, I'll show you this, we are live in the tool. If I hit okay here and I refresh all sheets again, what you're going to see over here is not only will that update, but my PowerPoint will update as well after that 30 second run. Or right now I'm looking at all March data. Well, once this updates, it'll sync back to February without a problem, and all of my information's updated for February. So now I got February here and you can see here everything updated to February information, and it's just as easy as that with just the click of a button. That's all you have to do and you're good to go.

So I think with that I do have time for a few questions here before I turn it back to Marc for a wrap up.

Marc Moskowitz: Thank you, Kyle. Just looking at some of these great questions that are coming through, I am going to combine a couple of questions that I think is a common theme, Kyle. The question is how long does a typical implementation take, but even more important than that, what are the phases of an implementation and how does that timing relate to it?

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, so the way we break down our phases and our implementation because we want these implementations not only be set up and get you in the tool, we want them to be transformational to set you up for the future is we break it down into a couple like four phases. The first is the foundation design and configuration where I sit down or another team member will sit down with you to really understand your organization and what makes you tick and what things you need to track to get you where you need to be for your actual reporting and metrics. And that can take anywhere from about four to eight weeks, just depending on the size and scale of what you're looking to do.

But then on top of that, then we start building in all of the great planning things that you saw there. So you might have all sorts of different P&L planning models from workforce planning, expenses, revenue planning, that we'll also sit down with you, really understand how you want to plan, how you want to drive that data, what you can collect from your different source systems to make sure we set it up so that you can seamlessly integrate information that you can use to drive those plans over time or make edits as you need to, which can be another about a four-week cycle.

And then once you have all your great P&L planning and your foundation for reporting and analytics, you're ready to go, you've got all your month-end reporting packages set up, we can turn our attention to something like balance sheet planning and cash flow forecasting, understand how you'd like to actually plan the balance sheet, how you'd like to forecast your cash out. And then you not only have that from the actual side, you have that true three-statement model cycle throughout balance sheet, cash flow and income statement so you're good to go comparability from any part of question that somebody may ask you.

And then once we completed all that, that's when a lot of clients will move into operational planning and getting really detailed and granular with their analysis, pulling it in from a lot of those other source systems that I've talked about, whether it's a data warehouse or a CR app or anything like that.

Marc Moskowitz: Great. Great. Thanks, Kyle. Actually, we got a question coming through an extension to your answer regarding integration of systems. The question is how is the data getting pulled into the system via workflow or what software systems does your tool connect with?

Kyle Nesslar: It connects to any source system, so they really have four different ways of doing it from being able to sync with a spreadsheet from a shared file or an SFTP to standard data connectors to they have a full service cloud connection that can go to any system that comes through an API or any kind of database that you might have, Google Database Data Warehouse. There's really no limitation to the system that we can connect to and it's all completely seamless and configurable.

Marc Moskowitz: Great. Great. I actually saved this question for myself. Looking at the time that we have left on this call, now that we've seen Workday Adaptive planning, its benefits, how might we connect with the team to get more information? On your screen, there's a call to action button that will have information regarding how to contact us as well as I understand that there is a bio screen with landing pages for both myself and Kyle. So definitely feel free to reach out that way. Our team members are going to be reaching out to you as well. And I know as I pass this back to Astrid, she will be commenting on how this webinar is recorded so that you can actually go back and watch it at your leisure.

So with that said, I'll hand it back to you, Astrid.

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