Amplify 2019 Part 2

Sep 10, 2019

All right. So we'll get started. So, first of all, I want to thank Scott and Diego for joining us, taking time out of the busy amplify schedule to, to kind of tell their story. And we spent some time earlier talking about where W Data fits, in our existing customer base and how our customers have been able to take advantage of that to automate a lot of the data feeds in their system, provide their transparency and how that data gets there. And so, going to spend a little bit of time with each of you guys and have them kind of walk you through, some of what their experience has been like as they both brought on, W data recently, and I have some pretty interesting stories to tell. So, Scott Ash is the Financial Reporting Supervisor Montana. And, Diego Ponce is a financial systems analyst at the Finance Center of Excellence for Portland General Electric. So guys, I guess, kind of a question for both. Both reorganizations have been using WDS to manage and file multiple ports for some time. In fact, if you hear me, Diego, I think WDS is being used by multiple teams, both SEC and SOX. So I think first question is kind of what problems were you looking to solve, with, with, with W data? And for how did that do you guys perceive the opportunity to kind of improve the process with WDA, I guess? Yes. So we started using our SEC module and then worked our way into having the SOX workspace. And what we found when we were building a lot of these from the ground up was that Wdesk had a lot of functionality as far as conversations we could have, ways that we could interact with the data really cleanly and fast. Which was different from how we were working before. And so we have a variance analysis that we perform on a monthly, quarterly basis. And it involves about 20 people providing commentary, about 5 to 10 people providing review over that commentary, then it gets distributed out to the C level, also out to financial planning and analysis. So there's just a lot of communication that's occurring and when we had a previous solution, it was version control issues and, difficult user interface that we really wanted to kind of like clean the slate, start over, build from the ground up something that was usable primarily for our commentary commentators so that they could provide commentary quickly, grab the information that they needed, get that commentary in there, allow someone to be able to review as quickly as possible so that that information can get cascaded through the organization. Gotcha. And in your case, actually in both cases, that information gets pulled directly from the systems of record, right, and loaded through W data. So maybe, maybe, Scott, I guess from your perspective, could you maybe talk a little bit about kind of that process. And kind of getting up in one of the conversations we had earlier was around how people can quickly get up to speed. In your case, you guys actually use the API to do that. So maybe hoping you could take a couple of minutes and just kind of talk through what that looks like and ramp up time and that's Yeah. When we first, implemented the W data, I was pulling information out of our ERP every morning, and it took us about 40 minutes to be able to do that. And then I was able to work with our IT to be able to replicate those reports. In an API, and that's now run automatically every morning at 2 o'clock. So that's one less report to have to run every morning. So it saves me 40 minutes every morning. And then we've also found additional information that we've added to the API for information that we've needed out. And Scott, sometimes for people who are maybe less technical, the word API kind of scares people. Oh my god, this is a big technical thing I have to implement. But in your case, can you talk a little bit about Andy's experience kind of getting us, getting everything kind of connected in and time to value in that type of thing? He was able to get the information from the website on how to, connect our ERP through the the API. And I think he he had it done within 10 hours, and the biggest hurdle was not on Workiva side, it was actually on our enterprise side because he had trouble finding the reports and, being able to have it run properly. To be able to pull in for pulling the information in. Great. Thanks. Diego, in your case, So we, you know, we said that W. D. Enables organizations to integrate, with enterprise resource planning, applications and other on prem and cloud applications, to improve data collaboration, just between transparency. I guess, Scott, can I talk about connecting to the ERP? In your case, Could you maybe talk a bit about systems that source the information that you use for reporting in WS as well? Yeah. We have a source systems that we would pull information out of previously and it would land, in a, Oracle solution that would kind of present the information as a dashboard, but then we also needed input functionality because people were providing commentary that really wasn't supported. It wasn't the use case for the product that we were using. And so, what we have now is an SFTP landing zone that, runs nightly similar to the API, grabs the information out of the source system and provides a CSV file for Wdesk to collect and and put into W data. So that, helped us kind of clean up that streamline, because W data is accessible as a a admin. I'm able to kind of track down if there's a discrepancy, if there's any issue. We're wondering, you know, maybe something didn't post I can look in directly and I can see that mapping from the source system into W data, whereas before it was a lot of firefighting that we were pushing on to our IT group, because they were the ones that were able to support the the Oracle application. So this way we're able to really quickly, I can mock up exactly what came over from our source system. I can triangulate, has there been a change in our source system that needs to get updated into W data, or is this something that's occurring, and a different point. And that is really clean, and it's entirely on the business side, which helps relieve us from always calling in favors with our IT group. It's great. One thing I just for clarity, the SFTP is just, you know, secure file transfer protocol. And those are simple. I mean, that's actually one of the easiest ways to integrate. We just look at a folder and, you know, files show up in the folder and we read them in. So, you know, in terms of complexity of integration, that's probably really highly valuable, method of integration, but one that's really, really pretty trivial to implement. So W8 obviously connects and automates data retrieval. I guess from your perspective, has this you know, has, has the kind of implementation of that direct feed benefited the process. And, maybe the follow on would be kind of how is it saved time? And maybe could you quantify that either or both really? Go ahead. All right. From my perspective, it was a beautiful project to get to be a part of. I started out on the sock side working in the sock workspace. And so the group of users that I was able to impact through, kind of streamlining some of our controls was, you know, once it reached a certain threshold, then I was talking to people because I was dealing with socks. But here, I got to transition over into, my new role in the COE and sort of implement things that were affecting, you know, the 20 people at the commentary level, the ten people at the review level, and then all the people that see the information, up the chain. And in terms of, user interaction, user adoption, it was a really, really clean. We rolled out single sign on same time. So people were able to just quickly, you know, click the link, click the tab, and then their instantly inside of their, workspace and the spreadsheet, and they can see the information that they have to provide commentary on and the data history allows them to see what it used to be. It's very clean where, like, I can talk anyone through whether they're the auditors, the, box team, the commentary reviewers all the way up the chain. I can talk people through how this system goes from our source system out to what they're viewing when was the last time that information got refreshed, has anything changed in a way that a reviewer would need to go in or a common person providing commentary, we need to go back in and update their commentary. And that's been hugely useful because oftentimes what'll happen is we'll settle on commentary and then maybe something will sneak its way in. Yep. And then we get a question from somebody that's working on eye out, hey, your support doesn't match what's going into MD And A. And then we have this fire drill, like, how big is this problem, instead of, like, oh, something changed by this amount. I need you to go review and make sure that, your information is still correct and update numbers is needed. I can make that through a message comment then if it's an e they get an email, they go directly to where they need to address the issue. They can wrap it up in minutes rather than hours later. While you're on that topic, can you talk a minute about just the, obviously, you were responsible for kind of helping implement this, but a lot of the users maybe don't have as much knowledge about what happens upstream and they end up consuming kind of the result of WDA through WDS. Could you just talk a bit about kind of the reception from the team, you know, with the new process and kind of how people adopted it? And what their feelings were, I guess, about, about the improvement. Yeah. One thing that I tell people is that I got high fives from people who don't give high fives That process was they said it was the cleanest it's ever been. The, like, pretty much everything that was on a wish list, either was at day 1 or has been added since then. So we had people that you know, oh, I need to add rich text. I need to add, this level of commentary. I need to be able to go down to the account level to give commentary. Oh, I only provide commentary at the financial statement line item level. We were able to service all of those needs all at once with the Wdesk product, and they were able to use the messaging components. They were able to view their links. They were it was just a really clean, transition. And going forward to other user groups, there's just ink like, when I show our external auditors, this is how I know that these commentaries have been updated and who updated them and when, they get a really good feeling that this process is is happening in the way that that the right people are looking at the information at the right time. Focus on you for a minute because I'm talking about kind of the amount of time saved. We've had some conversations about that, but maybe take a moment and just kind of describe, you did it in kind of a high level way, the process before and process now. But could you talk a minute about as a small organization, trying to manage a really complex process. It touches a lot of people, kind of how W. D. W. D. Has helped you manage a scaled process small piece. The biggest impact that we had for our annual budget we would generally start the process of our budget in January, which was be gathering all of data, into spreadsheets and distributing it to all the departments and then collecting that data and then compiling it, for consumption by administration. And then the city governance. And then going through and making changes as that process happens, all the way to the adopted budget, which then translates into, we have to have our final numbers, which goes back into our ERP And so that process would gen generally start in January and end in about November, this last year with the, implementation of W Data And Wdesk. We were able to start the process in March. And we're able to present to the council by May being able to compile all that data, by pulling it into w data and being able to filter it and, translate it into all the different reports that were required for them to review it. And when they adopted the budget on the 19th August, 2 weeks later, we were able to push out the adopted templates And then, the Friday before I came here, we had all the data information in our ERP. So that saved us about 3 months on the back end. Wow. Yeah. That's significant. I know you, a lot of people outside. I mean, you're obviously kind of the primary user of W data, but a lot of people touch the result of kind of the work you together in that sort of collection process. Could you maybe talk a little bit about, kind of similar to the question I asked Diego kind of what the reception's been for the folks out, in organizations that kind of were they're supplying you with information, right, kind of what the response has been and how quickly they were able to adopt it and Yeah. At first, they're very tentative because, prior year, we used to use the classic data collection, and they wanted to tie me up and burn me at the stake. They were not really impressed with the process. But after this year, they were extremely pleased. And, I didn't really have there was a few complaints, but, I mean, they're very minor in it mostly with issues on their end, I guess you could say. But a lot of them have actually bought into the product now, and we're creating more reports that we're pulling, information into for them. And they've actually stopped using our ERP because all the information that we have is contained within WDS. So then I go into that, to do the research because it's easier. It's easier to get into, Wdesk to filter and sort to find the information looking for. Great. Question for both of you, because I think now that you've sort of seen you sort of tap the potential right, in a segment of your business. How do you guys think about what other parts of the business could be affected by the same kind of pattern, right? I mean, who else do you obvious that there's kind of other aspects that you can pull in or maybe that's much and what you're kind of thinking on where it goes from here? For us, we have all of our external departments or enterprise and component units, which is like their utilities, the parking Commission, our parks and rec department, they all have their own reporting software. And we're looking at creating APIs within those supporting softwares to be able to pull in a w desk and bury that information with either what's in edens to be able to for them to track, their pro programmatic revenues and expenses and tie it back to what's actually been posted in Eden. We're also talking with utilities. They have They tracked their assets in a, essentially a SQL database. We're looking at being able to connect that. Into w desk so they could be able to track, you know, if they can find dev tanks or, certain certain mains that have failures at certain rates and be able to track that information. Hey, going on from your perspective. Yeah, we have a a plan to roll out. So we we did one that was primarily utilized by our accounting function. COE serves the entire finance organization. So we have this financial planning and analysis arm that we're really looking to, piggyback on top of that variance analysis information that we're already pulling in that centralized NW data, all it takes adding, an additional sheet setting up the template. The CSM is actually really what I wrote there in their names. I want to mention them. Tani Urazar, Chris Dean, Heather Hoch, Kim Gonzalez, were amazing, an amazing team, for helping us. Get, everything off the ground and the way that they helped us build it out, extensions are really, really fast. All we have to do is drop in a new sheet, assign it to the right, connected data sheet. And then all of a sudden, we have all the information that forecast needs to start iterating. They take in, they consume the data provided by the variance analysis and they determine whether or not that would change how they've assumed that the forecast is gonna run then they make those changes and they provide commentary on that. And so we're really excited about being able to roll out a new functionality across the finance org. That's great. You talked a little bit about, kind of the experience, I guess, for the users who are providing a lot of the feedback on sourcing a lot of the reported, the reporting process, I guess. Can you maybe talk, and this is really again, this question for both of you. Has there been an impact on the way you now make decisions as a business, positively or negatively, I guess, as the case may be, but with this new capability, I mean, do you have the do you have more transparency do you feel like or is there kind of a higher level decision capacity, how do you have some of these capabilities in place? Yes, absolutely. So what we did when we designed our variance analysis is we've centrally located what the threshold is that we want people to provide commentary on and then build that into conditional formatting in our sheets so that, reviewer can review. And they don't even have they can look at, you know, they can zoom out, you know, till they're 20%, and they can if one of these cells is yellow and there's no comment there, they can say, I think that there's something missing and we need to investigate this area. So that part has been amazing. Another thing that I wanted to mention was that, we have had a lot of black box reporting. We provide these reports. They get exported out then they get sent up to who knows where. And then we find out later that, oh, there's a second iteration and we needed to update that information, but we weren't able to after emails or the pdfs or the Excel files to find out who ended up utilizing that information. And through rolling out this new functionality has actually been really help because people are coming to the finance DOE and saying, oh, I used to I used to access this commentary at this other location through our Oracle solution. What happened, and it's I'm 30 seconds away from adding them as a member of, Wdesk and then giving them permissions to view the information they don't have go through IT permissioning. We don't have to go through all those additional steps. So I can start adding people, and that means that I can start tracking retrospectively. We tried to do some front end stuff, but, the best case scenario is that now that we know that is going to be areas where we didn't know information was being utilized. I can plug those people in really fast and I can come up with some understanding of how they're consuming that data. That's great. I have it from your perspective. Yeah. The city's end is that we actually have more, real time budget management for the department heads is they can go in and getting point in time and take a look at what they have. Spent compared to what they have available to spend. We also have included in, like, construction commitment. So if we sign a contract with somebody, they're able to track. This is where we are throughout the process of that of billing and oh my gosh. Throughout the process of the project, so they know how much they have remaining to be spent. If they're gonna be over budget, under budget. So they're actually make being able to make the decisions faster and, see it in real time. That's great. That's helpful. One of the other kind of interesting dynamics we talked about earlier was, how a lot of companies have invested a tremendous amount of money in systems of record, right? And that's where a lot of times where the investment goes because it kind of floss well, we can just automate it all in our ERP, or we can just make it all magically happen in source of record. So when you guys kind of think about an investment decision, you know, with, with Fortiva to do that, maybe outside of that, sort of, you're essentially solving the problem in a different layer. Maybe can you talk about kind of how that conversation went, internally and, you know, was there a pushback from IT? Did they want to kind of centralize that or Was that a fairly where they fairly open to the idea of investing in kind of a different place to solve that problem? There's no pushback from ours. And they're like, sure. Whatever. As far as we don't have to do it, Yeah. And in your case, just so everybody knows, too, can you talk just for a second about eat ins? You mentioned eat ins a couple of times. Is that your It's a Tyler Tech products. I think it rolled out for us in 2. I think it's on a dot. Not a dot net. What is it? It's bad. In the you can't customize any reports that come out of there that it is it is that structure. So I'm having the ability be able to pull out just all the raw data to be able to do what you want with it is phenomenal. And knowing that we're looking at different ERP. We know that whatever we transition to is still gonna be able to connect to our existing data. Do you feel like you've been able to eke some additional life out of kind of your legacy product as a result of kind of snapping in W. D. On top? Yes and no. There's there's a additional functionality issues that are with it, but had those functionalities not been an issue, then probably got several more years out of it. Yeah. Yeah, we've been, we're So we just developed the finance COE as a bridge between our business process and IT. So that was really helpful. In kind of discussing, you know, who owns what, where where's the line, you know, for what is IT owned as far as system functionality, and where can the COB kind of pick up some of that slack and what we're really working towards is helping, get that, so that IT can really focus on their core comp efficiencies around system implementation and system functionality instead of finding fires because that was what we would come up with constantly was, like, we would change something on our end, and we would need it changed now. And that's not really how the ticketing system and the organizational flow works for IT or whoever they wanna be. And so, I think that, we have had some really great discussions with IT about you know, there is some, gatekeeping that is changing from IT would kind of own this product and and were really comfortable with the information that was going in and out and transitioning it over to the COE where, we've from an, like, what help what's helpful is that we come from an accounting background. We tend to be super users of our applications. They're either working more on the IT side. And it's been helpful. Bridge that gap to make sure that a lot of those kind of really important accounting considerations are made. And a lot of times you know, the system architecture will be the system architecture. And it is really nice to have a massage layer that we can mess around with we can, if we do have things that, ERPs weren't expecting, like, tax reform or stuff like that, you know, that we can be working on things real time while we get systems to kind of catch up. I got the data. Yeah, I I sort of described to people sometimes as like a buffer. Like IT kind of has a, you know, a buffer of projects right, that maybe lead by a year or 2 years in some cases. And so the ability, it's interesting the way you describe it, right? The ability to keep up with change while IT is going to go kind of implement that in that structural system of Question for you kind of while you're on the topic, can you talk a little bit more about kind of the formation of the COE? You kind of talk briefly about that, but one of the other interesting dynamics that, that I know a lot of people are curious about is the the way the IT role is changing as, as, you know, companies are becoming a little more forward leaning on how they treat IT. You tell lots of, ruling with an iron fist and maybe a little more of a partner with the business. So kind of how did you guys decide to build the center of points and what maybe kind of triggered that. That'd be great if you could maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I was lucky enough to join the COE. I was around for the formation. I do know that we have had super users, those specific plat forms that were relevant to the areas that they kind of started in on. And so we had our AP person because we actually have 2 separate systems of record because we're a utility. So we have large amounts of assets and we need a specialized software that can help us access and and, use that information. But we also use PeopleSoft for things like HR and AP and things like that. And so, we would have super users that would get core competencies in these different systems. But they would often be siloed so that there was a lack of indication around how that information was flowing when we brought it all together doing consolidations and financial reporting. So the need was definitely felt for as accountants become more technologically fluent around utilizing some of this newer technology. So kind of group, get a group of people together who were really focused on not just day to day accounting activities, but, like, where is the technology going and how can this help alleviate some of the pains, sort of at the end of the future and some of the the features that we wanna be taking advantage of? That's interesting. Thank you. Got a question for you. Was there anything that surprised you from a benefit standpoint that you didn't anticipate kind of on the front end of the project, kind of after it was implemented. I think the biggest thing for me was how easy it was to implement it. And then after it got implemented, I guess it just kinda opened my eyes like, oh, I can additionally create my own data sets to drop in there. Extract the information that I want. That was the biggest moment was I'm not limited to just the what I pull in from the ER or any other, enter enterprise software, but I can create my own data sets to be able to drop in there. Create my own queries or get out the information that I need from different sources. So final question that will open for and A. What would you say to an organization who's still doing it the old way? What would be your advice to them? Stop. How? Maybe it's great. I'd I'd first look at what it is that you're doing on a monthly annual basis, how is the information being gathered? And then how can it be simplified? Because if you're all gathering the same information from and spreading it out amongst different sources, having everybody having access the same information, but being able to slice it up in different sources is essentially what this does. And so it'll save you just a ton of time effort and headaches. Yeah. I would, you know, recommend if they're at the Wdesk conference, try to find other people that are utilizing Wdesk pushing it further working with the development teams and trying to find out, you know, where are those really low hanging fruit that you can start of the great part about, how the workspaces are set out is you can really kind of bootstrap yourself into different, workspaces and and ways of ways of utilizing the information that can, you know, what happened for us was that we started doing our variance analysis and then all of a sudden, it should emails after emails and other groups that are like, Hey. I heard you were doing this thing in this way. How do we get in on that? How can I find out about doing this thing? So a lot of it is planning the seed, getting ready for that cultural change because at first, you know, is we have grown a culture around, oh, this ERP is a monolith and there's nothing we can do about it. Now that we've kind of cleaned up a lot of our system side We know where the information is going. We need to clean up our process, but I'd get an idea. Oh, you know, if three people are putting commentary into this one cell, can we just aggregate that, can we clarify what each person's duties are regarding, kind of the accounting side, the less, technological side? Kind of preparing for that, doing some footwork on making sure everybody knows what their role is and and how they're gonna utilize the new technology because they may have been doing it one way, and growing accustomed to how can they kind of move forward and use it in a new way? That's great. Thank you both for sharing your stories, and I think it's very valuable. Certainly for me to hear and I think for a lot of the folks. Here, we've got a little bit of time, maybe open up for some some Q and We impressed you that much. Alrighty. It's all here. Were there any other were there any other solutions you explored besides Warkiva and if so, you know, why did why did Warkiva prevail? When we first went out looking, we were looking at what can make our reporting easier because pulling the information out of ease is is painful. So we looked at several different solutions. One was in particular was that they actually, tied into our database to pull that information out. A lot of the other people on the team were leaning heavily towards that. And then when I started looking at Wdesk, And I'm like, you know, I think that one has greater functionality because it's not limited to just that product because if we're looking at placing our product in, say, 6 or 7 years. We're gonna spend 100 of 1000 of dollars on this product that we're no longer gonna use in 6 or 7 years. With, Wdesk. If we switch products, we can still be able to use Wdesk with any product, but keep the old legacy data and be able to tie it together. Yeah. I'm a tinker. I will play around with anything that I can find to see if there's a an additional new way of doing it. So I looked over. We have existing licenses for SharePoint. I tried looking at whether or not that was an option. And, really where, Wdesk kind of the share point out of the water was that we would have this constant check-in check out issue with our, spreadsheet and with W desk. What we have, primarily on our monthly, variance commentary is a super tight window. We closed net income And then we have literally 3 hours to put together various commentary before it goes before a meeting of, leaders. And so in order to have 20, 30 people all in the same spreadsheet at the same time with the level of permissioning that we wanted locked out cells and things like that and the ability to do on the flight review has everybody, done their work that that really stood out for us as as a win to be able to get that that really tight window nailed down. Scott, I think you mentioned at the beginning, that it took you 40 minutes to run your report every morning doing it the prior methodology. I think I missed how fast you said it comes out now. So I'd love to hear that in a little bit more detail. And then also, with respect to the reporting outputs that you're able to, push these into. Are you are you satisfied with what's available today? Do you still lean on external reporting functions, or can you find everything you need within Wdesk? Thanks. Pulling those reports would take 40 minutes. And then once we got it automated, I think it takes about 7. 7 minutes, and it runs at 2 o'clock in the morning. So, I mean, we don't even touch it. And that's even at the end of the year when there's, you know, 200,000 lines of data that it's pulling in. So, yeah, it runs takes about 7 minutes. And then as far as other external reporting, we've actually migrated all of our external reporting into WDS. We're not looking at any other, platform. We're actually looking at creating more of our external reporting in Wdesk. We actually published our budget last year out of Wdesk and we're publishing our CAF for year out of Wdesk. Any other questions? Alright. Last chance. Our official MC is gonna come up. Say where did you So thank you guys very much. Your Yeah. Visibility and trade panel. Why don't we take a break and we're gonna restart at 1 o'clock, which is in how many minutes? 25 minutes. Right? Thank you.