Building a Long-Term Partnership Through Workday Adaptive Planning
How a Workday Adaptive Planning solution led to a long-term partnership that extended organizational boundaries and helped an FP&A team reclaim control over their reporting.
Client
Mirum Pharmaceuticals is a high-growth biopharmaceutical organization committed to developing and delivering safe and effective therapies for children and adults with rare diseases. Headquartered in Foster City, CA, Mirum operates globally and delivers its treatments internationally.
My biggest frustration when I joined Mirum was the [FP&A] system and understanding how it worked…integrations would error out, or people could wipe out data inadvertently. There were no clear-cut access rules built out…so it was always kind of scary when people input data.
Challenge
Mirum Pharmaceuticals has multiple entities and accounting teams operating in the US and internationally. The financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team needed to plan across entities and currencies and produce more refined reports across departments, projects, customers, and vendors.
Mirum's FP&A system was anything but user-friendly; the software was complex and lacked visibility, and the team often needed to contact their consultants for help locating the data they needed and troubleshooting data integrity issues. In addition, Mirum's FP&A software did not integrate seamlessly with its existing financial systems, which made reporting tedious and manual.
With such detailed reporting requirements, Mirum needed a foundation for planning and analytics that integrated with its financial systems and scaled with the organization as it grew. Our team previously worked with Mirum Pharmaceutical's Executive Director of FP&A, Terry Chiu, in his former position with Global Blood Therapeutics, optimizing their Workday Adaptive Planning solution as the organization grew. When Terry transitioned to Mirum Pharmaceuticals, he knew the organization needed to implement a new FP&A system to accomplish their goals. Terry saw the power of Workday Adaptive Planning (WDAP) and trusted the EisnerAmper team to deliver a successful solution.
I had experience working with the [EisnerAmper] team, so knowing that gave me a lot of confidence in the quality of work I would receive.
Approach
Our team collaborated with Mirum leadership to understand their ideal outcomes, requirements, and pain points. Having worked with Terry previously, we understood his broader objective to build a long-lasting foundation for planning and analytics.
We worked closely with Mirum's FP&A team to design and implement a custom Workday Adaptive Planning solution based on their requirements. In addition, we helped:
- Automate the integration between WDAP and Mirum's existing financial systems.
- Build a planning model for revenue, personnel, and workforce.
- Implement comprehensive modeling and forecasting.
Our integration team worked closely with Mirum's FP&A leaders to make sure they understood how their WDAP software worked so they could be confident using it without our help—a qualm they had with their previous FP&A solution. We also needed to make sure that the software could scale as the organization grows.
When we engaged with Eisner[Amper], the big thing that they kept mentioning…was that they want us (finance) to be empowered to use the system and not rely on IT or consultants to drive it. That was key and empowered me; I'm very comfortable with the system right now.
Results
With their new WDAP system fully integrated with their ERP, Mirum leaders have a software solution that combines reporting and budgeting and provides a centralized view of planning, analytics, and financial activities. The FP&A team has real-time insights and can easily alter data from previous years if needed without having to go back to another source, allowing them to report on a more comparable basis.
With their centralized data and refined reporting capabilities, Mirum's FP&A team has complete visibility into their operations, increasing their accountability and supporting more meaningful conversations—and leadership has taken notice. For example, Mirum’s FP&A team can perform scenario analyses with their new solution, an unanticipated benefit that allows them to provide more insights into their operations, such as the long-term cost of hiring employees versus contractors.
Mirum's FP&A team is set up for success and continues to revise its WDAP system to meet its needs. Our solution allows Mirum leaders to customize the information they want to see as fit without calling us in for help, saving them time and money. For their last budget cycle, the FP&A team added dimensions to their WDAP system to refine their data and report on the individual project level to see which segments are most profitable and allocate resources more strategically.
Both our CEO and CFO have been very appreciative of all the visibility that we can now provide on the budget…We can now quickly provide various cuts of data to help drive decision making as well as efficiently drill into specific line-item details...There's more accountability [and] visibility so we can now have more meaningful conversations to help the business from a finance perspective.
Workday Adaptive Planning