Unlocking Critical Insights from Your Data | Workday Adaptive for Life Sciences Organizations

Terry Chiu:Yeah, thanks Marc. So am executive director of FP&A over at Mirum Pharmaceuticals. So we are a rare disease pharmaceutical company focused on deliver. We currently have three marketed products. We're currently running about $300 million in revenues a year and it's continuing to grow. And we have global operations both in both the US, Canada, as well as Europe. So we have headquarters in all those locations. It's a fast-growing company, it's a relatively young company. We were founded in 2018, so it was only about six years old. So there's a lot of room to grow, a lot of dynamics going on with international expansion. So yeah, great to join you guys here.

Marc Moskowitz:I appreciate it. And I know we've had the opportunity to partner with you while you've gone through this implementation and transformation as it relates to Workday Adaptive Planning. Maybe if you could share with the group what were some of the factors that led you to choose EisnerAmper and Workday Adaptive Planning for your organization's FP&A needs.

Terry Chiu:So EisnerAmper and myself go way back. So we use EisnerAmper in our previous implementation at my prior company, Global Blood Therapeutics, and we had really good experiences actually with our implementation with Workday. We did initially did implement Workday or Adaptive through Workday. However, it wasn't really well thought out, it wasn't a really good implementation. So we had engaged EisnerAmper to come in to help us rethink how we want to build out the models, not to only serve our needs now, but also to kind of help build the future. Because obviously in the biopharmaceutical space, things are always changing, things are always moving, so whatever you build now is not necessarily going to fit your purpose in the future. So that's why we engaged EisnerAmper. And then it was really great because I think EisnerAmper helped us think about how to look at things from different perspectives.

They had done multiple implementations, which is what we wanted. We wanted that experience to give us that feedback because at the end of the day, we only know what we know. We don't know other ways to implement these features and functions. And given the fluidity of Adaptive, it's always a evolving model. They're always doing updates, upgrades, and we don't know all the new things that are coming up that we could potentially use for our implementation. So that was what brought us to EisnerAmper and specifically for Adaptive, we chose Adaptive because it's actually a great system so that we have limited resources. We don't have IT in-house, we don't have a dedicated resource to help manage our systems, but Adaptive is actually a super easy system to use in terms of allowing FP&A, anyone to kind of pick up the system, learn it, and then Eisner was always there to help guide us through that process and journey. So that's mainly why we chose it.

Marc Moskowitz:Appreciate that, Terry. I'm going to turn to you, John, if you could tell a little bit about your role as a leader in our firm's technology and life science industry group?

John Pennett:Yeah. Thanks, Marc. Appreciate it. So my role is a couple different things. So one is to help understand what the market is doing, capital markets, what areas of technology are of interest or not of interest to help support the entrepreneurial community through their growth process. So we help support entrepreneurs throughout the country where we have offices and connectivity. So that's been a really important part of what we do is just kind of get all the boats to rise with the tides. So that's a big piece of what we're doing. Understanding the items that are critical for our client's success. And probably most importantly I would say is to help support our teams around the country.

So our teams are doing audits, they're doing tax returns, they're helping with grants, outsource services, IPO prep, technical accounting, consulting services. So understanding how the business of life sciences companies work, how the trends are impacting the companies and spreading that word throughout our service organizations and throughout all of our offices is really the most important part of what I do. So the better advisors we are to our clients, the more we can help connect them with other people in the ecosystem, help them connect to a funding source. Those are things that are really important to help the entirety of the practice grow.

Marc Moskowitz:Appreciate that. And I've had the opportunity to read a lot of your thought leadership and participate in a lot of the events where you've done speaking and as you said, you partner with our pharmaceutical and medical device companies in all stages of their growth and you're really there to support them. Just be curious to know what are some of the trends that you see impacting the finance organizations and particularly FP&A today?

John Pennett:So when we talk to companies about what are the most critical needs, so there's a lot of things that come in that conversation, but it always comes back to the same topic, money. So in the life sciences world, it really is a lot about money. These things are so expensive to go through the development process and go through the clinical trials, and obviously the probabilities of success are not as high as it is in other fields, so you've got to invest your money quite wisely and quite significantly. You look at the capital markets, pre-2020, 2021, there was typically let's say about 40 companies a year that would go public. These tended to be very well seasoned companies, late stage assets, seasoned management team, great investors and things like that. And that was sort of the trend for many years, if you would. And then '20 and '21 came around, COVID, so sort of the life sciences industry, pharmaceutical industry went from being one of the most despised industries to the most loved industries almost overnight, so tremendous.

And with that came this just enormous quantity of companies that went public, 100 companies a year roughly went public, including some very early companies, incomplete management teams, barely funded, et cetera, et cetera. So it was like, okay, so is that going to be the new trend? And then you saw, well, '22 and '23, that IPO market dwindled down to the teens and even through 2024, it's barely up through the third quarter was still in the teens, if you would. So the capital markets obviously has a huge trend on our business, and while the market is optimistic, cautiously optimistic for the tail end of this year and going into '25, having adequate funding to be able to deploy your programs is most important. So we're seeing companies having to make decisions about which of their programs to prioritize and perhaps which programs to either shelve or shed or outlicense or just stop.

So having data about that funding and how long it's going to last, et cetera, it's just critical to a company's success. When you're seeing companies trading below their cash value in the public marketplace, it tells you a lot about the impact that funding has. So really being able to think about funding, think of every resource available to extend that runway, super critical area. So I would say that from a trend perspective, that's been probably the most important topic. We're talking to clients about that all the time and they're looking at ways to virtualize their operations. As Terry had mentioned, some of their operations are virtualized rather than building organizations. So those are all critical decisions in that process.

Marc Moskowitz:Super, super. And Terry, this was the second time that you implemented Workday Adaptive Planning with our organization as you mentioned, and going into this, you're making a large investment not only in the technology but also the time and care for all the people in the organization, and we all do these because we want to have benefits, transformational benefits. If you could, share with the group here maybe some of the key benefits your organization realized as a result of this transformation you just went through.

Terry Chiu:Yeah, so we've definitely got way, way more efficient with our processes. So from a forecasting as well as a reporting perspective, we're now able to provide more insightful insights, do more scenario analysis. I think it is an important point that John had mentioned earlier that cash and funding is keen to our business. So management is always looking at ways to prioritize, to better allocate our resources and having Adaptive in place allowed us to quickly run analysis based off of ever-evolving kind of dynamics in the industry to kind of understand where our cash balance is going to be, what are our expense trends going to be, as well as looking at various scenarios of revenues, because ultimately we have to make the P&L work, we have to continue our R&D investments. And I think having Adaptive in place, being able to turn out quick analysis, use scenario analysis, like I mentioned, has been tremendous to kind help our company think about where we want to put our bets essentially.

Marc Moskowitz:And going into this, there's those transformative business outcomes that you're expecting to achieve, but as you do these sometimes there are unexpected benefits that result from that process. Were there any unexpected benefits that emerged that you didn't initially anticipate? Maybe sharing a little bit-

Terry Chiu:Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot. I mean, I would say that one thing personally is that we are, from a finance perspective, FP&A team, we are way, way more empowered to understand the system, to be able to modify the system on our own. And I think a lot of that is the partnership that we have with Eisner where you guys really help us learn the system versus build the system and just be there to kind of modify things for us. It's really that partnership that enables us to kind of be owners of our system because ultimately these are our systems and it's our machine essentially to kind of play with, to modify, to kind help shape our future for the company and its needs.

Marc Moskowitz:Super, super. So with that, I want to introduce Kyle Nesslar again who is one of our directors and leads our Workday Adaptive Planning practice, and he spent the last decade really helping our clients enhance and transform the way that they plan, report, and analyze. So Kyle, if you could, maybe spend a few minutes taking us into the tool and showing us an example of a life science specific dashboard and maybe some of its scenario planning capabilities.

Kyle Nesslar:Absolutely. Thank you, Marc. Appreciate it. Let me just pull up my screen share here and we'll get going. Just a second to set up. So what we're seeing here and what we're looking at here is an example of an active life science dashboard for Workday Adaptive Planning, and you'll be able to see, I'm going to take you through a couple of different tabs here, but we have a lot of different key information here. Some of these are just high-level financial metrics around KPIs that allow us to look at simple things like contribution margin, R&D expenses as a percentage of total revenue, total expenses. What we're looking at here is a cash burn chart so we can kind of look at how our cash burn is running over time based on our different projections and analysis. Something that John had mentioned is very specific and important to the life sciences industry.

This is a high-level scorecard that has things like revenue expenses by actuals compared to plan, and you can look at those year over year, quarter over quarter. We also have expenses by department where we can see these working down or even a waterfall chart, which actually what this shows is our working budget information for fiscal year '26 compared to fiscal year '27, and we can see what departments are actually taking the most of our budget and how those are impacting our future decisions. Another great thing that we can do with this tool in looking at these dashboards, if I wanted to look at my contribution margin and say, get a sense of what it is split out by my departmental functions, by simply left-clicking on one of these buttons, and you can see there's a lot of different options. So depending on what key drivers and information level of aggregation of data is important to you, you can actually see different things depending on what you're collecting.

And so in this case, if I was to click on this 61.8% and I look at it by function, it's actually going to show me, okay, of that 61.8% kind of on the weighted side, development is making up 84.5% of that while research is making up to 55.4% that get me to that weighted average of 61.8% and very similar to this, with any other of these dashboards in the tool. For instance, if I wanted to see a cash burn for a period and I wanted to kind of look at that by say, departmental level, if I click on this and I show this, now I can actually drill in very quickly and get a sense of, okay, what functions or what departments, what groups in my organization is what's spending my cash and where that's being made up of. And you can see obviously the G&A and the corporate are where we're spending most of the cash and anything that's generated is through the R&D department.

Then at any point in time if I actually want to come back to these dashboards, I simply click on this back button and it takes me back to the original dashboard that I was on. Now as I was saying earlier, you can see there's several different tabs here and I'll take you through each of them individually. But the second one here, other financial KPIs, you can see this one I won't spend a ton of time on, but it's nice because you can get a quick look at your revenue trending, expense trending, and you have all sorts of different graphs and chart options.

These are completely customizable and configurable to your organization and the way that you actually want to absorb and use the data. So I can see here I can get a sense of how my revenue is planning and trending over time. What I've got here is an area chart that's showing the operating expenses and similar to what I was showing in the other side where I can see here's kind of where my corporate group is, my G&A group and ultimately my R&D group so I can get a real sense of where those expenses are coming and what levels of the organization they're running through.

And obviously depending on the level of detail and granularity you'd like to get, you can go as far and granular and in depth as you want. From a net income trend where I can see where my net income is trending over time and I can actually compare my working budget with a trend line to see if I'm rising up, falling down, all the kind of key pieces of information that I might need to see and understand quickly in order to make decisions and be more proactive instead of reactive to the changing markets. Now the next dashboard here that I'm going to show is my workforce planning dashboard. And this one's a little bit different than the other two that I was looking at because this actually has a driver-based model where I can see I'm actually developing my workforce planning plan around in my individual rosters and individual users who are in the tool, whether they're being existing people or future hires that I plan to see.

And I got some other basic charts around here where I can look at like my FTE distribution with by department or other levels. I can look at my salaries by projects because what I'm actually doing is not just planning or tracking data by project or I mean, by department, but even project and ultimately other. I can do things by clinical phase, trials, all sorts of different information what's going to be important to my organization as well as a bar chart that's showing my trending salaries over time compared to prior year. So I can see and get a gauge of how that's flowing and operating. Now what I actually want to show you is how you can use this tool to actually make changes live in the environment in real time to see what's what is going to affect it's going to have on your working budget.

So up here in the top right you can see where it says working budget. This is what they call versions in Adaptive, and you can think of them as essentially different spreadsheets where I might keep one plan and then I copy it over and I might make adjustments to another plan. But then if I like those changes, I would have to go back to the original spreadsheet, make updates. Well, we don't have to do that with this system. By simply clicking on new scenario here, I can create an alternative plan, let's call it alternative plan for now, and I'm going to say yes, I want to switch over to that. That's actually attached to my active working budget. So I can see here now I created this alternative plan that is attached to this where I can actually start making changes live in the environment to get a sense of how that's going to impact my ultimate plan for the future and my projections.

So for instance, if I wanted to look at this person here that's in regulatory, a account executive that I plan on hiring on 10/12/26, let's say, oh, I'm not going to pay him $35,000, I'm going to pay him $35 million. I'm just going to use a large swing to make sure that it really pops here. By simply changing that salary and hitting save, you're going to see all these different charts and graphs really update. Well, not the headcount one, but what's going to happen here is now you can see these become very small, whereas these grow very large because once I've hired them, obviously it has a massive impact on my budget by changing that salary. And you can see here now the development side, the development group, which is attached to that project that this person is in now becomes a giant 92% slice of the pie that's actually happening.

Now the other great thing here is right here, I can see where I made that change. It actually highlights it in yellow. So I know everything that I have changed from the original plan so I can tell very easy what I'm changing and what modifications I made to make sure I know what I'm doing and what I'm changing so that when I ultimately, if I choose to sink this back into the original plan so that I don't have to make the updates in multiple places, I can do that very quickly and easily. For instance, if I was to change this to instead of 10/26, I change this to, let's say now I'm going to hire him on 1/1/27 instead of hiring him in '26. What I'll actually see is my headcount should drop and all of these should basically reset. So once I save this, now my headcount dropped by a single person and I can see that these are kind of back to normal because now I'm no longer affecting my current year plan.

But everything that I've done here that's changed and highlighted in yellow, I have not altered the original working budget. At any point in time though, if I decide these are the changes I want to make and sink them back rather than having to keep track of them and a separate Word document with notes and bullet points, whatever I want, it can actually just sink them back with a click of a button and then those changes will ultimately become my live and active plan that I can build all of my reporting or books, everything else off of.

The last one here that I'm going to touch on similar to workforce planning is the active dashboard for clinical trials. And this is very similar where I can see I have my active model and these are all completely customizable to your organization. So whatever information is important to you that you'd want to track, you can build these out and customize them to make them very specific for your life science organization, which you can see here not only am I tracking my departments, but I'm tracking the clinical trial phases, what programs they're in, the trial work, ultimately the projects that they're associated to.

And I can see very quickly here I have a couple of quick high-level graphs here, a cash balance chart that's showing me how my cash balance is trending over time based on what I'm projecting in my expenses and also a cash burn where I can actually see and get a quick visual of what my cash burn by these various projects are. But I could also do it by clinical trial phase or whatever information is ultimately important to me.

So for instance, if I was to change this development project 25 to, again, I'll just do 3.8 million here and I save this, now I can see that this really massively increased it and it genuinely affects my cash balances, my cash burn, all of those different pieces that are going to be important to me that I can know and get a quick snapshot so that as I said, I can understand where I'm trending, where I'm going to be able to make decisions proactively as opposed to reactively to make sure that I'm doing everything I need to for my organization to plan for the future. So I'm going to stop my screen share there, and I appreciate everybody taking the time to listen to that piece today.

Marc Moskowitz:That was really great, Kyle, just showing the capabilities of having a dashboard that not only could tell a story in 30 seconds or less, but it's actionable, but the ability to spin off in the moment scenarios and make changes and know what those changes are and then deploy it on a click of a button. I know we have four minutes left here, John, if you could maybe based upon some of the things that were said and what you saw and your experience in this space, any closing thoughts or remarks?

John Pennett:So one of the conversations we often have with our clients that are using an outsourced service provider for their accounting, whether it's us or someone else, is when should I start to onboard and bring those services? And I always suggest to them that the first person that you should really think about is your FP&A person. Those are the people who are having an impact on your business. They're giving you this really actionable data, and it's so critical in a funding environment, which is still very tight and it's been elusive for many companies in sort of the mid-market stage to find sufficient funding. So to really have command and control of your budget, your processes, prioritizing your programs, super critical. So I think as a CFO, as a finance professional, this is where you can add a tremendous amount of value to your company. So I think these are great conversations.

Marc Moskowitz:Thank you, John, and thank you, Kyle, and thank you, Terry, and appreciate everybody on this webinar today. When I hand it back to Bella, she will share a little bit about how this is recorded. I also have seen some questions coming through the chat, and we will personally be reaching out to all of you to answer any of the questions that we have out there and such questions as can we do three-statement modeling? And absolutely we can model the balance sheet and cash flow. Just one of the questions that I happen to see. So yeah, with that, Bella, I'm going to turn it back to you.

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