Mission Cloud Transforms Their FP&A with a True Partner
A Partner Who Gets It
Mission Cloud's VP of Planning and Analysis, Sushmita Cosner, sat down with the Kainos Adaptive Planning team to share their struggles and successes migrating to Workday Adaptive Planning. Cosner shares how looking back, Adaptive drastically evolved their planning process and gave them more time to tell the story, eliminating hours of wasteful data tracking time.
Question 1: At what point did you realized you needed something better than Microsoft Excel for your budgeting?
Cosner: At that time, we were still in hyper growth mode. Our business was growing very rapidly, both in terms of size and complexity, and at that time we were running a set of detailed and complex financial models entirely in spreadsheets. Those financial models were critically important to our business. We needed to demonstrate to our investors that we were able to take our historical performance data and our understanding of the market, to be able to predict the growth in the business in a manner that was achievable when realistic and directionally correct.
Sometimes it would take me up to an entire day just to roll the model forward and update every tab that needed to be updated. This happened every time we closed a new month of actuals. Not nearly enough time was spent doing what I should have been doing, which was understanding the story that was in the data and looking at what I need to change in my forward-looking assumptions based on what has just happened in the business. All of that is time-consuming, but really valuable to the business. It helps us produce more meaningful and accurate forecasting.
Even after that, even after investing all that time and effort, manual errors inevitably happened just because there are too many formulas, too many links, too many of these tabs to refresh. Also, the reports simply weren't portable enough. Every time our investor asked us for a set of numbers, or when internal business partners wanted to look at their budget or their actuals, it wasn't easy for us to do that.
Very quickly after starting in my role, while I was still getting onboarded, I started to look at vendors. I started talking to my friends and colleagues in the industry and the tools that they are using in their businesses. The priorities for me at that time was to get a tool that was scalable that would grow with us while still maintaining a balance between the time it would take and the complexity of implementation. What we didn't want was to go with the tool that we could implement very quickly, but then must rip out again in 2 years, when we got too big for it.
Question 2: How do your other tools integrate into Adaptive?
Cosner: Primarily it's our accounting systems. Right now, we are still running everything in QuickBooks. We have a a plan in the next 6 to 12 months to migrate all of that over to NetSuite.
We have loaders set up with QuickBooks to be able to extract data automatically into Adaptive at the end of every closed cycle. So that's been, you know, massively useful, because, of course, in Excel, that would be a completely manual process of downloading copy paste all of that.
We also extract data from Salesforce. We don't at this time have an automated loader set up, but that's next on our agenda.
Lastly, we have a tool called Chart Hop that we use here at Mission Cloud. That has all our employee data, start dates, compensation details, custom benefits information, etc. We're able to capture a large amount of details because we have Adaptive Planning. It consumes all that data to build very comprehensive payroll forecasting for us.
Question 3: What benefits and improvements have you seen with the information that Workday Adaptive Planning provides? How does that impact the business?
Cosner: First and foremost, I have to say Adaptive has changed how we collaborate. When I first started, admission was a team of one. It was just me, and I inherited a lot of the processes from our CFO who before me was running all of it all by himself. So when I went from one person to, four or five, in some ways it was like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, because everything was manual, and we had several versions.
Now with Adaptive, all we have to do is build our report once, and then it requires very little to no manual maintenance. The power is in the hands of the user. They can log into the tool at any given time. It doesn't matter what time zone they're in, or if we are available to support them or not. They can log in on demand, choose the versions they want, customize certain aspects of the report, and it's completely user led. That has been incredibly useful to us.
One other thing I would call out is the ability to drill into details. Because we have an automated loader extracting data from QuickBooks, we're able to bring in the most granular level of detail from our accounting systems into Adaptive Planning, and that means is when our business users run those reports they can drill in to the most granular level of detail that's available, not just on the account lines and their P&L, but even further down into specific transactions within those account lines. That can be extremely powerful for a business leader or someone who’s trying to understand their costs and what’s impacting their margin. They have the ability to to go into prior periods, click into any account line that looks like an anomaly and drill into specific transactions without anyone from accounting and finance ever having to run a manual spreadsheet report for them.
What's next for Mission Cloud now that Adaptive Planning has been implemented?
Cosner: We've only been fully live in Adaptive for a little over 6 months. So I feel that we've only just begun to scratch the surface of what we can accomplish with the tool. There's so many things that we could do, and that we have planned. Probably the most exciting thing for me is what can we now do with the data that's coming out of Adaptive.
We are creating an internal data lake admission that consolidates data from multiple sources. Adaptive is going to be one of the inputs into that data lake. Then we will have an enterprise grade, business intelligence tool running on that data lake. My vision is for that tool to have a bi-directional data flow with Adaptive so that we can automate the calculation all of our standard KPIs we use to measure our business. And not just that, we hope to even use machine learning and predictive analytics, to forecast what's going to happen in the future.
All of our forward-looking modeling right now is based on assumptions, and we tweak those assumptions based on historical data and our knowledge of the market. But what if we could leverage the power of machine learning to try to predict what's going to happen six, twelve and even 24 months from now.
So that is a whole avenue of just new capabilities, strengths that we are excited to develop and explore and report more efficiently.