We'll get started. First of all, I want to thank Scott and Diego for joining us, taking time out of their busy Amplify schedule to tell their story. We spent some time earlier talking about where Wdata 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, to provide better transparency and how that data gets there. I'm going to spend a little bit of time with these two guys and have them walk you through some of what their experience has been like as they both brought on Wdata recently, and have some pretty interesting stories to tell.
Scott Pasch is the financial reporting supervisor for the City of Missoula, Montana, and Diego Pons is a financial systems analyst at the Finance Center of Excellence for Portland General Electric. Guys, I guess as kind of a question for both of your organizations have been using Wdesk to manage and file multiple reports for some time. In fact, in your case, Diego, I think Wdesk is being used by multiple teams, both SEC and SOX. I think the first question is what problems were you looking to solve with Wdata, and how do you guys perceive the opportunity to improve the process with Wdata, I guess?
Yeah. We started using our SEC module and then worked our way into having the SOX workspace. 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. 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, and then it gets distributed out to the C-level, also out to financial planning and analysis.
There's just a lot of communication that's occurring, and when we had a previous solution, it was version control issues and a difficult user interface that we really wanted to clean the slate, start over, build from the ground up something that was usable primarily for our 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.
Got you. In your case, actually in both cases, that information gets pulled directly from systems of record, right? Loaded through Wdata. Maybe Scott, I guess from your perspective, can you maybe talk a little bit about that process? Again, kind of getting up. 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. Maybe hoping you could take a couple of minutes and just talk through what that looks like and ramp-up time and that type of thing.
When we first implemented the Wdata, I was pulling information out of our ERP every morning, and it took us about 40 minutes to be able to do that. 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 2:00 A.M. That's one less report I have to run every morning, so it saved me 40 minutes every morning. Then we've also found additional information that we've added to the API for information that we've needed out.
Scott, sometimes for people who maybe are less technical, the word API kind of scares people. They think, "Oh my God, this big technical thing I have to implement." In your case, can you talk a little bit about Andy's experience kind of getting everything connected in and time to value and that type of thing?
He was able to get the information from the website on how to connect our ERP through the API. I think he had it done within 10 hours, and the biggest hurdle was not on Workiva's side. It was actually on our enterprise side, because he had trouble finding the reports and being able to have them run properly to be able to pull the information in.
Great. Thanks. Diego, in your case, we said that Wdata enables organizations to integrate with enterprise resource planning applications and other kind of on-prem and cloud applications to improve data collaboration, consistency, and transparency. I guess Scott kind of talked 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 Wdesk as well?
Yeah. We have a source system that we would pull information out of previously. It would land in an Oracle solution that would kind of present the information as a dashboard. 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. What we have now is an SFTP landing zone that runs nightly, similar to the API. It grabs the information out of the source system and provides a CSV file for Wdesk to collect and put into WData. That helped us kind of clean up that streamline. Because WData is accessible as an admin, I'm able to kind of track down if there's a discrepancy, if there's any issue. We're wondering, maybe something didn't post.
I can look in directly, and I can see that mapping from the source system into Wdata. Whereas before it was a lot of firefighting that we were pushing onto our IT group, because they were the ones that were able to support the Oracle application.
Yeah.
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 Wdata, or is this something that's occurring at a different point? 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.
That's great. Yeah, one thing just for clarity, the SFTP is just a secure file transfer protocol. Those are simple, and that's actually one of the easiest ways to integrate. We just look at a folder, and files show up in the folder and we read them in. In terms of complexity of integration, that's probably really highly a valuable method of integration, but one that's really pretty trivial to implement. Wdata obviously connects and automates data retrieval. I guess from your perspective, has the implementation of that direct feed benefited the process? Maybe the follow on would be kind of how has 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 SOX side, working in the SOX workspace. The group of users that I was able to impact through kind of streamlining some of our controls was once it reached a certain threshold, then I was talking to people because I was dealing with SOX. Here, I got to transition over into my new role in the COE and sort of implement things that were affecting the 20 people at the commentary level, the 10 people at the review level, and then all the people that see the information up the chain. In terms of user interaction, user adoption, it was really, really clean.
We rolled out single sign-on at the same time, so people were able to just quickly click the link, click the tab, and then they're instantly inside of their workspace and the spreadsheet, and they can see the information that they have to provide commentary on. The data history allows them to see what it used to be. It's very clean. I can talk anyone through, whether they're the auditors, the SOX 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 back in, or a person providing commentary would need to go back in and update their commentary?
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.
We get a question from somebody that's working on tie-out, "Hey, your support doesn't match what's going into MD&A." 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 as needed." I can make that through a message comment, and then it gets to me. 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 the result of Wdata through Wdesk. Could you just talk a bit about the reception from the team with the new process and how people adopted it, and what their feelings were, I guess, 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. Pretty much everything that was on a wish list either was at day one or has been added since then. We had people that, "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. It was just a really clean transition.
Going forward to other user groups, 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 happening in the way that it should, that the right people are looking at the information at the right time.
Yeah. That's great. Thanks. Scott, I want to just kind of focus on you for a minute because talking about kind of the amount of time saved, I know 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 the process now. Could you talk a minute about, as a small organization trying to manage a really complex process that touches a lot of people, kind of how Wdata and Wdesk has helped you manage a scaled process with a small team?
The biggest impact that we had was for our annual budget. We would generally start the process of our budget in January, which would be gathering all the 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. 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. That process would generally start in January and end in about November. This last year with the implementation of Wdata and Wdesk, we were able to start the process in March.
We were able to present to the council by May, being able to compile all that data by pulling it into Wdata and being able to filter it and translate it into all the different reports that were required for them to review it. When they adopted the budget on the 19th of August, two weeks later, we were able to push out the adopted templates. On the Friday before I came here, we had all the data information in our ERP. That saved us about three months on the back end.
Wow. Yeah, that's significant. I know a lot of people outside. You're obviously the primary user of Wdata, but a lot of people touch the result of the work you put together and that sort of collection process. Could you maybe talk a little bit about, kind of similar to the question I asked Diego, what the reception's been for the folks out in organizations that are supplying you with information, right? Kind of what the response has been and how quickly they were able to adopt it and a little bit of that.
Yeah. At first, they're very tentative because the prior year we used 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. After this year, they were extremely pleased. There was a few complaints, but they were very minor, and it mostly was issues on their end, I guess you could say. 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 Wdesk. They're not going to that to do their research because it's easier to get into Wdesk to filter and sort to find the information they're looking for.
Great. Question for both of you, because I think now that you've sort of seen, you sort of tapped 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? Is it obvious that there's kind of other aspects that you could pull in, or maybe not as much? I mean, what's your kind of thinking on where it goes from here?
For us, we have all of our external departments, our enterprise and component units, which is like their utilities, the Parking Commission, our Parks and Rec Department. They all have their own reporting software. We're looking at creating APIs within those reporting softwares to be able to pull into Wdesk and marry that information with either what's in Eden to be able for them to track their programmatic revenues and expenses, and tie it back to what's actually been posted in Eden. We're also talking with utilities. They track their assets in essentially a SQL database. We're looking at being able to connect that into Wdesk so they can be able to track if they can find depth tanks or certain mains that have failures at certain rates and be able to track that information.
Diego, how about from your perspective?
Yeah, we have a plan to roll out. we did one that was primarily utilized by our accounting function. COE serves the entire finance organization. we have this financial planning and analysis arm that we're really looking to piggyback on top of that variance analysis. The information that we're already pulling in that's centralized in Wdata. All it takes adding an additional sheet, setting up the template. The CSMs I wrote down their names. I wanted to mention them. Tawny Urrizaga, Kristin Dean, Heather Hosch, Kim Gonzalez were amazing. An amazing team for helping us get everything off the ground. 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 that's provided by the variance analysis, and they determine whether or not that would change how they've assumed that the forecast is going to run. They make those changes, and they provide commentary on that. We're really excited about being able to roll out new functionality across the finance org. </edited_transcript
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, kind of sourcing a lot of the reporting process, I guess. Can you maybe talk, and this really, again, is a 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. With this new capability, do you have more transparency, do you feel like? is there kind of a higher level of decision capacity now that you have some of these capabilities in place?
Yeah, absolutely. What we did when we designed our variance analysis is we centrally located what the threshold is that we want people to provide commentary on, and then built that into conditional formatting within our sheets so that a reviewer can review. They can zoom out to their 20%, and 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." 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 was a second iteration, and we needed to update that information, but we weren't able to track the emails or the PDFs or the Excel files to find out who ended up utilizing that information. Through rolling out this new functionality, it's actually been really helpful because people are coming to the finance COE and saying, "Oh, I used to access this commentary at this other location through our Oracle solution. What happened?" 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 to go through IT permissioning. We don't have to go through all those additional steps.
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 there's 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. Scott, how about from your perspective?
Yeah. The city's end is that we actually have more real-time budget management for the department heads, as they can go in at any 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 construction commitments, so if we sign a contract with somebody, they're able to track, "This is where we are throughout the process 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 going to be over budget, under budget. they're actually 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? That's a lot of times where the investment goes because the kind of philosophy is, "Well, we can just automate it all in our ERP, or we can just make it all magically happen in source of record." When you guys think about an investment decision with Workiva to do that maybe outside of that source of record, you're essentially solving the problem in a different layer. Maybe can you talk about how that conversation went internally, and was there pushback from IT? Did they want to centralize that, or were they fairly open to the idea of investing in kind of a different place to solve that problem?
There was no pushback from ours. They're like, "Sure, whatever. As long as we don't have to do it.
Yeah. In your case, just so everybody knows too, can you talk just for a second about Eden? You mentioned Eden a couple of times. That's your-
It's a Tyler Technologies product. I think it rolled out for us in 2002. I think it's on a dot net, not a .NET. What is it? It's bad. You can't customize any reports that come out of there. It is that structure. Having the ability to be able to pull out just all the raw data to be able to do what you want with it is phenomenal. Knowing that we're looking at a different ERP, we know that whatever we transition to is still going to be able to connect to our existing data.
Do you feel like you've been able to eke some additional life out of your legacy product, just as a result of snapping in Wdata on top?
Yes and no.
Yeah.
There's additional functionality issues that are with it. Had those functionalities not been an issue, then probably got several more years out of it, yeah.
How about you, Diego?
Yeah, we've been working we just developed the finance COE as a bridge between our business process and IT.
Okay.
That was really helpful in kind of discussing who owns what. Where's the line for what does IT own as far as system functionality, and where can the COE pick up some of that slack? What we're really working towards is helping get that so that IT can really focus on their core competencies around system implementation and system functionality instead of fighting 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 where they want to be.
Right.
I think that we have had some really great discussions with IT about there is some gatekeeping that is changing from IT would kind of own this product, and they were really comfortable with the information that was going in and out and transitioning it over to the COE, where we've. What's helpful is that we come from an accounting background. We tend to be super users of our applications or even working more on the IT side. It's been helpful to kind of bridge that gap to make sure that a lot of those kind of really important accounting considerations are made. A lot of times the system architecture will be the system architecture, and it is really nice to have a massage layer.
Yeah
that we can mess around with, if we do have things that ERPs weren't expecting, like tax reform or stuff like that.
Yeah
That we can be working on things real time while we get those systems to kind of catch up.
Up to date. Yeah. I sort of describe it to people sometimes as like a buffer. Like IT kind of has a buffer of projects, right? That maybe led by a year or two years in some cases. the ability, It's interesting the way you describe it, right? Because it's kind of the ability to keep up with change while IT is going to go implement that in that structural system of .
Yeah.
Question for you while you're on the topic. Could you talk a little bit more about the formation of the COE? You talked briefly about that, but one of the other interesting dynamics that I know a lot of people are curious about is the way the IT role is changing as companies are becoming a little more forward-leaning on how they treat IT, kind of less of a ruling with an iron fist and maybe a little more of a partner with the business. How did you guys decide to build the center of excellence 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 wasn't around for the formation. I do know that we have had super users of specific platforms that were relevant to the areas that they kind of started in on.
we had our AP person, because we actually have two 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 use that information, but we also use PeopleSoft for things like HR and AP and things like that. we would have super users that would get core competencies in these different systems. they would often be siloed so that there was a lack of communication around how that information was flowing when we brought it all together doing consolidations and financial reporting. the need was definitely felt as accountants become more technologically fluent around utilizing some of this newer technology to get a group of people together who-
Yeah
were really focused on not just day-to-day accounting activities, but where is the technology going, and how can this help alleviate some of the pains, sort of see into the future into some of the features that we want to be taking advantage of.
Okay. That's interesting. Thank you. Scott, question for you. Was there anything that surprised you from a benefit standpoint that maybe you didn't anticipate on the front end of the project, after it was implemented?
I think the biggest thing for me was how easy it was to implement it. After it got implemented, I guess it just kind of opened my eyes, like, "Oh, I can additionally create my own data sets to drop in there to extract the information that I want." That was the biggest aha moment, was I'm not limited to just what I pull in from the ERP or any other 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.
Final question, then we'll open for some Q&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, right?
I would 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 and spreading it out amongst different sources, everybody having access to the same information, but being able to slice it up in different sources, is essentially what this does. It'll save you just a ton of time, effort, and headaches.
Thank you.
Yeah. I would recommend if they're at the Wdesk conference, try to find other people that are utilizing Wdesk and pushing it further-
Yeah
working with the development teams and trying to find out where are those really low-hanging fruit that you can start. The great part about how the workspaces are set out is you can really kind of bootstrap yourself into different workspaces and ways of utilizing the information. What happened for us was that we started doing our variance analysis, and then all of a sudden it's just emails after emails of 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?" A lot of it is just planting the seed, getting ready for that cultural change, because at first, 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's going. We need to clean up our process side, get an idea, "Oh, if three people are putting commentary into this one cell, can we disaggregate that? Can we clarify what each person's duties are regarding 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 how they're going to utilize the new technology, because they may have been doing it one way and grown accustomed to it.
How can they move forward and use it in a new way? </edited_transcript
That's great. Thank you both for sharing your stories. 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 Q&A.
We impressed you that much.
Sorry to cut off here.
Oh, were there any other solutions you explored besides Workiva, and if so, why did Workiva 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 painful. 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. When I started looking at Wdesk and I'm like, "I think that one has greater functionality because it's not limited to just that product." Because if we're looking at replacing our product in, say, six or seven years, we're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on this product that we're no longer going to use in six or seven years.
With Wdesk, if we switch products, we can still be able to use Wdesk with that new product, but keep the old legacy data and be able to tie it together.
Yeah. I'm a tinkerer. I will play around with anything that I can find to see if there's an additional new way of doing it. 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 put SharePoint out of the water was that we would have this constant check-in, checkout issue with our spreadsheet. With Wdesk, what we have primarily on our monthly variance commentary is a super tight window. We close net income, and then we have literally three hours to put together variance commentary before it goes before a meeting of leaders.
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-fly review, has everybody done their work, that really stood out for us as a win to be able to get that really tight window nailed down.
Scott, I think you mentioned at the beginning that it took you 40 minutes to run your reports every morning doing it the prior methodology. I think I missed how fast you said it comes out now. I'd love to hear that in a little bit more detail. With respect to the reporting outputs that you're able to push these into, 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 seven minutes, and it runs at 2:00 A.M., so we don't even touch it. That's even at the end of the year when there's 200,000 lines of data that it's pulling in. Yeah, it takes about seven minutes. As far as other external reporting, we've actually migrated all of our external reporting into Wdesk. 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 CAFR this year out of Wdesk.
Any other questions? All right, last chance.
Our official emcee is going to come up and say a word or two.
I think we'll break up this morning till one o'clock. Thank you guys very much for your participation. Great panel. Why don't we take a break, and we were going to restart at one o'clock, which is in how many minutes? 25 minutes. All right. Thank you. we'll