Does your real estate organization find itself in need of updating its reporting system to a more efficient and up-to-date software? With the use of the OneStream platform, real estate organization can achieve their strategic goals and business development pursuits. In order to demonstrate how organizations can realize their goals, we dive into the advantages of having a robust reporting software in place.
In this on-demand webinar, you will learn:
- How our firm helped one of the largest real estate companies in the world overcome operational and financial challenges through implementing OneStream into their business foundation.
- How to break down the multi-tiered software selection process.
- Strategies to overcome outdated, inefficient reporting processes.
- Insight into the development of a curated strategy, goals, and guidelines for your company that are introduced through OneStream.
- How to use the OneSteam platform with a comprehensive demonstration by our experts.
Our Speakers
- Kevin Hebbel, Director, SC&H
- Dave Collins, Analytics and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Thought Leader, OneStream Software
If you have any questions about how your real estate organization can achieve its strategic goals and business development pursuits, please reach out to our Advisory & Transformation team.
Video Transcription
Kevin Hebbel: Welcome, everyone, to today’s webinar with SC&H and OneStream. Today, we’re going to cover how real estate organizations can build a foundation of financial and operational success with a focus on some recent deployments of OneStream for real estate organizations. So I am going to start by going through an agenda and then we’ll dive into real estate reporting challenges, talking about a few success stories, as I mentioned, with OneStream, and then ultimately going through a OneStream overview and a OneStream demo. My name is Kevin Hebbel. I’m a Director at SC&H in our OneStream practice, I lead the OneStream practice at SC&H and I’m joined today by Dave Collins. Dave, do you want to give a quick intro?
Dave Collins: Sure, thanks, Kevin. Hi, everyone, this is Dave Collins, I’m Director of Solutions Consulting here at OneStream attached to the Alliance’s team, which means I’m attached to great partners like SC&H here to help them in education sessions such as this.
Breaking Down the Real Estate Industry
Kevin Hebbel: So let’s get into the content here. I want to start with a discussion about the real estate industry, because I think the industry, as most of you who are joining us here on the webinar today are aware, comes with its own unique set of challenges. Part of that is because real estate can be broken into a number of different categories. You have real estate brokerage and sales, your Long and Fosters, your CBREs of the world, where you can have both commercial and residential sales and your metrics in your reporting are really going to be driven by that revenue model. You know how quickly you’re able to turn listing’s into revenue and into sales, how quickly you can close for your clients, as an example.
You also have real estate investment trusts or REITs. Some examples are Forest City Realty Trust and WellTower. These are complex organizations that have specific reporting requirements related to REIT. So you may have certain revenue threshold requirements and usually, these organizations come along with very complex consolidation accounting, which is something that we will highlight as part of our discussion during the webinar today. So RIETs are another category, again, a unique set of reporting requirements for RIETs.
You also have asset management. So Blackstone or Brookfield Properties, right. They are organizing cash into funds, purchasing properties, and then sometimes holding those properties and having recurring revenue streams through that property management process and other times selling properties. Similarly, with REITs when you get the asset management, you get into very complex consolidation concepts, a lot of partnerships for your entity structure. It can become extremely complex to manage all that data in a framework of a solution.
Then lastly, there are companies that are really focused on property management, so looking at operational detail at the property level, really getting into the operational revenue of operational expenses and managing business properties down at that level of detail. So there’s a number of organizations that fit that bill, JLL and Greystar, a few that come to mind. For the larger organizations in the real estate space and I think for some of you to join the call today, it’s really a fit into multiple categories. It’s not necessarily one or the other.
Real Estate Reporting Challenges
Kevin Hebbel: Oftentimes, some piece of the organization is involved in each of these elements, which creates a unique challenge when it comes to reporting. You’re in a situation where you have a need for operational metrics and detailed property level reporting, as well as complex consolidation, and the associate elements that come along with that. In terms of reporting challenges for real estate, if we talk about what’s unique across consolidation, planning, and reporting. For consolidation, large, complex hierarchies. You have concepts like full consolidation, you have a non-controlling interest (NCI) method of consolidation, you have proportional methods of consolidation and oftentimes it’s prorata or effective ownership concept. What is our effective ownership of our properties when we don’t have one hundred percent of the ownership in the property or the asset? Then you have, as I mentioned, REIT and TRS reporting, different types of statistical measures that you need as part of the consolidation process for your public accounting and your reporting needs.
On the planning side, you get into a heavy oftentimes balance sheet and cash flow focus at the operational level there’s a PNL focus, but oftentimes at the higher levels and the corporate structure, there’s a balance sheet in the cash flow focus. As a result of that, you’re often looking instead of just at the current year operations, which are often times very important to real estate organizations. You’re also looking at long-range planning. So thinking about not just the current year, but potentially up to 10 years. We see some organizations in the industry that even look at 30 year models as they’re projecting cash flow for the various properties that they own. So there’s a challenge and that’s a lot different than looking at a current quarter forecast or the next year’s budget, getting out into those longer-term models. With that track record cash flow, discounted cash flows, IRR models, those are all blended into the forecasting and the budgeting process. It’s a different way of thinking about how you plan and working back to the lowest level of detail and operations on the planning side. You can also get into that driver base stop planning, rent roll calculations, really trying to determine what your capital spend is going to be on improvements to properties. There’s a lot of complexity that’s baked into the planning process for real estate organizations.
Then lastly, from a reporting perspective, what we often see is that just the financial data for real estate companies is not enough. It really needs to go beyond the financial information. It needs to blend that operational detail and data, a lot of statistical information. So occupancy percentages, turnover rates, those types of things are really critical. Again, depending on sector as well, you’re going to have different pieces of information that are very important. We hear that request often, can we have a solution where we can look at the financial information but also then blend that with statistical data or even textual data about a property? Its location, different square footage, information, things of that nature. Can we bring that into our reporting framework? When you go down into an additional level of detail, there are also unique reporting challenges that more fit the realm of custom models and calculations.
OK, so you have a heavy debt management concept, right? Within real estate, a lot of organizations are leveraging debt and understanding the details about that debt, being able to project debt expenses, those types of things are extremely important to real estate. Asset held for sale calculations. So I want to be able to flag an asset as held for sale and as a result, remove it from my reporting framework. I need to see with and without those assets that are held for sale. We always hear of the request for same-store comparatives within real estate organizations. So when I do a comparison, when I’m looking at property operations, I want to remove this set of properties from that comparison because they’re under construction, they’re in development, their status is unique. So there’s unique reporting requirements as it relates to same store, and that can create a big challenge. With SameStore oftentimes, companies aren’t just concerned about the look ahead, but they’re also concerned about the look backwards, too. So you need to develop a reporting framework that allows you to show SameStore, both historically and in the projections of data. And that can create a challenge from a solution standpoint. Other concepts that require calculation, right, you can automate that mark-to-market or debt fair value, you can automate the fair market value of investment properties. Similarly, you can automate IRR and xIRR concepts within OneStream. These are big challenges, especially when you want to get to a place where you’re at self-service reporting when users can go in, run a report, see results and blend these pre-baked, preset calculations into a solution. Usually, this is a big challenge that we see with real estate organizations. A few other things, just from a register standpoint, again, this is that kind of link to non-financial data, bringing in and storing in tables data that’s critical to the reporting process, but not purely your financial your balance sheet, your PNL your cash flow.
It’s other information. We often hear about contributions and distributions and the tracking of that in and out of cashflow through contributions and distributions as part of the reporting requirement, get a little bit different than the core trial balances that you’re loading from a ledger for financials.
Why OneStream?
Kevin Hebbel: So why OneStream? What does OneStream do differently that can support the real estate organization? A couple of things that I’m going to talk about, and then I want to walk through some examples, so a few live examples of clients that have gone through OneStream of limitations and where their benefits were realized through OneStream. First off, OneStream is a single platform, so I’m sure you’ve heard that terminology before. What does that mean? Well, if you are in a real estate organization that has unique requirements across consolidation and planning or other categories, you can accomplish those reporting requirements within a single platform, a single solution. And beyond core consolidation and planning, OneStream has a marketplace, it has an area where you can plug and play additional solutions as part of the platform account. Reconciliation’s is a good example for real estate organizations. CapEx planning is a good example. When am I going to make investments in my properties? How do I track those investments uniquely from the core financial statements? Are people planning, like if you’re looking at your GNA expense, you want to understand across your resources when you’re building budgets and forecast bottoms up, you have that capability within the platform. And really, it eliminates the need for multiple solutions and modules in every real estate organization I’ve worked with. There’s always a system for everything. So there are systems for project management and specific property project management modules or systems for debt management. Chatham often comes up as an example. There are systems for cashflow and 10-year cash flow projections.
How can we leverage OneStream to eliminate the need for so many unique and separate systems? That’s the goal that we strive towards when we do these implementations with OneStream. The next piece is the flexibility within the platform, so because of the unique challenges from a reporting perspective with OneStream or with real estate, you can leverage the out-of-the-box functionality. You can leverage the standard spreading functionality for planning and budgeting. The workflow that’s built into OneStream can, and Dave’s going to talk about what a lot of this means as we get into the demonstration for those who haven’t seen it. But we can leverage out-of-the-box functionality for the majority of these challenges. We can do consolidations. We can do eliminations. We can set up the complex ownership relationships within OneStream and give you visibility into that process. So that’s meeting those major requirements. But we have the flexibility to add in customized components, adding custom solutions that really meet the specific and unique requirements of real estate. That flexibility within the platform is really critical for real estate organizations. Then lastly, there’s a large number of real estate organizations who have chosen OneStream recently to meet their reporting needs. I’m going to highlight two recent stories today, but there are others certainly that I can share and that OneStream can share beyond this conversation.
OneStream Success Stories
Kevin Hebbel: First up, I’ll talk a little bit about Brookfield Properties, Brookfield Property Services Co. It’s a real estate asset management company, a component of Brookfield out of Toronto, Canada. They chose OneStream over Oracle, EPM Cloud. To take a step back and think about what they had, they were in a position where they were organizing data from many properties by fund or by portfolio. And that data was coming from property management organizations and from internal ledgers all over the country. So that exercise was being done in an Excel-based model prior to OneStream. They went through the selection process, ultimately choosing OneStream over Oracle. That decision was driven by two things, one of which was customer references. So industry references that had like challenges that were met by OneStream and also this desire to take OneStream and not just think about a financial reporting framework, but also think about expanding the use of the solution to other elements to register-based concepts, that type of thing going forward. The implementation ultimately included the collection and consolidation of property financials. So there was data collection from many different property management companies, ultimately hundreds of properties, but also from internal ledgers where they manage their own properties. You had that combination being integrated via automation into OneStream so that automation came in the form of connections to ERP or in some cases more of like a file drop methodology where Brookfield wasn’t in control of that source system. The end-user or the property manager could export a file and put it on the server and OneStream can go and grab that and automatically consume that data.
Then another huge benefit on the consolidation side was the simplification of the close process. You have data loads, you have visibility into the data load process and that end-to-end task management throughout the consolidation process, robust reporting packages, including dashboards, so visualizations that are part of this and really when you think about real estate, Brookfield being no exception, you have these reporting requirements that involve many different factors, one of which may be time. You have actuals and you have your actual periods, you have forecasts, maybe a monthly or a quarterly forecast and your budgets and annual property budget, you have long-range planning and you have all of those different slices of data stored in a single solution from a reporting perspective. That was the value of the implementation. You also have variables like property detail. Portfolios or funds, different sectors. Your properties may roll into some type of subcategory or category, markets, regions. You may want to report on the property manager that’s actually handling the property operations so you can do different types of comparisons. Those variables are available within the reporting packages and then ultimately you have a lot of different stakeholders as well. You may have stakeholders that include legal stakeholders for your public reporting, tax stakeholders for provisioning for REIT versus TRS comparisons, private fund investors, parent companies, and ultimately, the public side of things, the reporting packages that we layered into this app are able to meet those needs of those different time or scenario requirements, different variables for reporting, as well as different stakeholders, to have that kind of robust reporting package as an outcome.
The combination of financial and operational data, is something that’s really cool, but it enables the organization to look at a property, see the financial information, and then also blend in what it amounted to over a thousand data elements. Each property had up to a thousand data elements that you could store for that property that weren’t necessarily financial in nature. They were more statistical or textual in nature and then you could bring those elements into various reporting frameworks. Then lastly, the initial implementation set the foundation and now it’s looking at calculations for driver-based planning for the cash flow projections rather than more of a line item entry projection. Also the easy incorporation and addition of additional assets to real estate organizations, another thing that’s very unique, which I’m sure most of you know and understand, is that those organizations are constantly changing. You always have new assets coming on board, old assets getting sold and the ability to adjust to that on the fly is extremely important and something that is getting blended into the application for phase 2.
Next up, a little bit of a different organization. This is a real estate investment trust and functions 100% as a REIT. They’re called Forest City Reality Trust, they manage hundreds of real estate assets across a variety of sectors. Ultimately, they had an older consolidation system in place. It was a SAP-based footprint and they had a decision to make as to whether or not to leverage SAP going forward or to make an investment in OneStream or Oracle. Ultimately, Forest City chose OneStream, and primary factors in that decision making were capability to meet complex consolidation requirements. I want to talk a little bit in more detail about that, as well as that customer and partner reference side of the equation. Just in terms of complexity, extremely complex legal entity structure here, over 2,600 entities, every type of relationship imaginable and different reporting requirements, so there was a need to see the data in a 100% aggregated view as well as an effective or prorata ownership aggregated view. That’s one complexity from a reporting perspective. We also need to see data aggregating with NCI and equity method factored into the consolidation process, backing out of the non-controlling components, removing the balance sheet in detail for equity method, and having the data consolidate and validate through that structure. It’s extremely complex.
On the consolidation side, one of the keys to the OneStream implementation, as it relates to this, is providing visibility to each of those steps. In the process, you can always look and you can see the base trial balance at 100%, you can see the base balance with the effective ownership applied, or you can see that base entity aggregate through the hierarchy with the calculations for NCI and equity method baked in throughout. So clear visibility to that end-to-end process. And then beyond the core consolidation requirements, this was really similar to what we talked about with Brookfield, but budgets and forecasts, including bottoms up capabilities, some driver-based capabilities, and that ability to instead of just looking at current year forecasts or next year’s operational budgets, also looking at five and 10-year cash flow projections. So looking out to data models that look well beyond the current year. By design, the plan here for Forest City was to perform the preliminary implementation and come back and layer in tax reporting. This is a situation where we’re building into OneStream, actually to go live for Q3, some unique tax reporting requirements. That’s going to include the REIT versus TRS designations and every different combination of legal and as a designation that’s required between.
OneStream Overview
Kevin Hebbel: So an overview of real estate, why OneStream helps real estate organizations and a couple of examples of where it helps. I’m going to shift over and hand the presentation to Dave. Dave’s going to give a little bit of an additional background here on OneStream, and then he’s going to jump in and do a demonstration of OneStream as well.
Dave Collins: Sounds like a plan. Hi everyone. I am Dave Collins, Director of Solutions, consulting with OneStream. A bit of news on us. If you’re not aware of who we are, we’re actually borne out of the Oracle acquisition of Hyperion, a number of folks that were at Hyperion wanted to further the plan that we had. I actually was at Hyperion and then the Oracle parent, if you will, through very late 2010, went off into consulting for 10 years and then I joined OneStream 15 months ago. We’ve had a number of investments in OneStream, we’re a privately held company and that’s actually spurred a couple of valuations of us as a software vendor, which has been very exciting for us and actually been very busy for us because we’re now getting a lot of customers or prospective customers reaching out to find out about us. It’s been great because it’s allowed us to take those investments and drive them back into the organization. We believe in investing in ourselves and our partners and in our customers. So let’s talk a bit about us from a value proposition perspective. I like to talk about performance improvement. It’s the space that is soon to be formerly occupied by business, corporate, or enterprise performance management. When I was at Hyperion in the early 2000s, we came up with the phrase BPM or advisory ∓ transformation. Corporate performance management was Gartner’s response to that and then eventually to Oracle was enterprise performance management. The reason why I say soon to be formerly is that Gartner is moving away from this terminology into something they refer to as XP&A and I’ll talk a bit about that in a few moments.
At a high level, what we do is help organizations manage what’s going on around them. You can look at it in three basic categories. You’ve got the external forces, you’ve got economic and macroeconomic impact, supply chain pricing, and competition. One of our customers, Costco, I’m a member of the Costco Club, and I noticed recently that they’re starting to ration certain items. Again, paper for one. Toilet paper, you can buy one bundle, not multiple. So those external forces due to the pandemic have been a challenge for a lot of organizations and we’ve helped our customers through that very quickly and easily by modeling their data. We also help with internal complexities, myriad enterprise systems or NASSO enterprise systems, and those systems that typically need to be integrated. At some point, we can actually sit on top of them and pull from multiple sources, as Kevin mentioned a bit ago, so that you can get a feel for what the enterprise looks like and eliminate a lot of overuse of personal productivity tools like Excel. Last but not least, people and operations. A lot of the organizations that I’ve been a part of or that I’ve worked with have become somewhat siloed. That’s because they have established focus areas on a certain part of or aspect of the business. That becomes a challenge because much like internal complexities with separate systems, we don’t necessarily have visibility into what is going on and therefore we can’t see across the enterprise, as I mentioned, in the middle.
Generally speaking, when it comes to the journey that finance or an organization takes around finance, there are three key components as well. Looking backward, establishing the book of record, the historical perspective, looking in that rearview mirror. So the closed process, the consolidation process, most of our customers are doing that from multiple ledger systems and other operational systems, especially as a product of acquisition. Getting out the, not only the performance reporting or internal management reporting, but the statutory or regulatory reporting. From there, then I want to be able to do a forecast of what’s going to happen for the rest of the year or for a ruling X number of months, 18 months, 24 months, whatever is important to that particular organization. I also want to have some comparisons to my plan, my budget, my strategic plan. The part of the middle that has been lacking in this space and has been addressed by other products or other vendors is what we refer to as financial signaling. It’s the ability to see what’s happening right now. Typically, looking backward and looking forward has been a periodic event. It’s been end of month, end of quarter, end of year. And during the month, that’s been a challenge to see what’s really going on, we refer to that as financial signaling. I actually look at it as operational analytics and so the opinion, the position that we have is that our solution should provide the ability to get to the operational level of detail as well. So we fit firmly into a category of software today called performance management, corporate business, or enterprise. That is sitting on top of your source, very detailed systems, and if you think of it from a car perspective, ERP or running the business is very much like the drive train, the engine in an automobile. We’re the dashboard, we’re actually allowing you to see how fast you’re going, to see how much fuel you have left, to see if there are any alerts with regard to the heat of the engine, and so forth. So we’re helping to manage the process of getting from point A to point B.
Historically speaking, performance management has been fragmented and certainly was that way when I was at Hyperion and into the Oracle years and still actually at Oracle and several of the other vendors we compare to. Financial consolidation or looking backward typically is a series of applications or modules. The same thing for looking forward, planning, budgeting, forecasting or the activities, we would tie these two worlds together using some form of a reporting construct for management reporting or profitability reporting, we would often dimensionalize our data so that we could look by customer, by product, by location, by time, by metric. Ultimately, we’re trying to get information into the hands of the consumers, the decision-makers, so they can do just that. The great challenge in this world and I found this out after I left Oracle and I went into consulting, is the integration. This is hard, this establishes points of maintenance, points of complexity, and points of failure, to be quite honest. When I was in that consulting world, I was very disappointed that this was necessary. There is an idea, a thought that the cloud will actually sell for that and sometimes it can’t because sometimes you still have the separation of function and you have to do integration between. So since these days, there’s been an evolution toward a more intelligent approach to finance, where we’re looking backward to close and consolidation, doing things like financial reporting and consolidation, statutory reporting. We’re looking forward to planning, budgeting, forecasting. We are establishing a relationship with a business, partnership with underlying business units or organizations that we have folded into the family through acquisition. We’ve always needed to do decision support or performance reporting that allows us to do some analysis in-depth as to what’s going on, where we’re going, helps us to create in many cases where we’re going. Again, financial signaling or that operational analytics actually goes beyond the performance reporting and gets in-depth to where we’re looking at transaction operational levels of detail. At whatever level of detail might be pertinent, so there’s no limit to the scope of data that we can go after, and the challenge is it’s often very high volume and high frequency. So end of month, end of quarter, end of year really isn’t going to cut it. In order to have a higher business value, you need to be on that maturity curve toward the right and up into the financial signaling or operational side of that. Layered into this, by the way, data science, the ability for us to look at this high volume of data and do something with it from a mathematical point of view when it comes to the solutions.
We believe that a platform is the best way of doing that. So we have established our solution using Microsoft Azure, which is both in the cloud and on-premises. If you think of Amazon, Amazon is not going to deploy in the Microsoft cloud, so they deploy in Amazon Web services. Others have deployed in Google Cloud, or in their own private cloud, or they’ve installed the software locally in their own servers. It’s up to you. You decide which way you want to go. It’s cloud first or SaaS first for us as of this year, because that’s been the recent history, most of our customers. I think the figure is 98% over the last 18 – 24 months have chosen cloud as their first choice. In a public sector world, we are FedRamp certified, we’re a unified, single-tenant based platform, which is great from the standpoint of you get to pick when you scale, when you upgrade, and when you have the ability to do what you need to do. It provides you with the best choice at total cost of ownership being as low as possible. I mentioned this before, we’ve embedded a lot of function around the things that are important for financial performance improvement, like consolidation and adjustments in ownership. Ownership being key and critical with regard to real estate or in the real world currency translation is a given, intercompany matching, allocations, all of this function and much more is built into the platform. The other thing that we’ve done, and I think this aligns nicely with this particular industry is we provided an ability to dimensionalize data in a very unique fashion. I’m going to show you on this screen, an entity structure, scenario structure, and an account structure. If you think of entities, I might have corporate manufacturing services from a scenario perspective, I have actuals, I have budget, etc. From an account perspective, I have something like net sales, which is made up of three simple accounts, operating sales, a company’s sales, and returns allowances. Now for manufacturing that’s a great starting point, but for manufacturing, they need to expand operating sales so they can track third party, OEM, subassembly, and part sales. If you think in terms of a real estate world, very similar in construct where I have a different need for different metrics given industry. If I’m looking at real estate and I have property holdings that are four different industry-specific facets, I can provide the metrics that are pertinent to them all within one model. So this single account structure for manufacturing is different. It’s also different for our services group. I have management services and event revenue and for services on the budget side, I can actually expand event revenue into the detail that I need, again, from an analytics and a reporting standpoint. Then when I need to make a change to my account structure, I make it. It’s made in all of the various views of that account structure that I have. It’s a way of, again, creating flexibility or extensibility as we refer to it from a dimensional perspective. We handle all of that master data for you.
The platform has also enabled us and our partners to create solutions that act as accelerators, we provide these solutions in a marketplace. They fall into three basic categories. There are more than 50, I’m going to show you a few of them on screen, productivity task management, actually managing the workflow in a graphical user interface, you’ll see that in the demo, financial close and reporting. We’ve mentioned account reconciliations and transaction matching. Rather than by a third-party product, you simply download, configure, and deploy this solution from the marketplace and it’s free to license users of OneStream. We don’t sell separate applications, we don’t sell separate modules, we sell users for whatever it is you wish to do with our platform. When it comes to planning and analysis, we have a number of solutions. Capital planning was mentioned by Kevin. Cash planning is important, people planning or resource planning, sales planning, predictive analytics one, two, three is the first step to using data science to leverage the transaction or operation level of detail. That platform, again, has within it an integrated view of the master data of the dimensional side of it, it has a data quality engine, which is the acquisition mechanism for pulling data into OneStream. It has the ability to provide global financial consolidation and reporting so you can close the books and look at the book of record, and it allows you to then do the planning, budgeting, forecasting at whatever level of detail may be pertinent. On top of all of that, you’ve got great, very flexible reporting, you can use Microsoft Office to leverage direct access to the platform. You can also use the reporting that is embedded inside of OneStream. That’ll be the first demo I show you in just a minute. And again, access to and storage of the operational details right in OneStream.
OneStream Demonstration
Dave Collins: So let’s do a bit of a demonstration. I’m going to start with providing visualization to the data. Let me go ahead and bring on one of my personas. I’m going to start at the very top. Let’s pretend I’m the CEO of a company called GulfStream. I’m actually looking at my landing page. I have access across the bottom to reporting, to my Strat plan, to my budget, to my forecast, to my compliance reporting. I may want to start with my overall reporting that takes me into, among other things, my key performance indicators, but I’m going to start with, in this view, my bookings and my billings. This is very, very detailed transaction-level information throughout the month, day by day, showing me how my sales team is doing, how my sales team is relating to the customers that we have, and how my billings process is occurring. Am I getting the bills out the door so I get paid so I ensure my cash flow, yes or no? Well, the answer is no. We’re not meeting the target right now in traditional performance management. I wouldn’t know about that until next month after I brought the trial balance in from the ledger system and I closed the books. That metric was revealed to me down below. Another metric I’m missing the mark on is getting the product out the door. So again, all operational at the invoice level of detail, which is atypical for a performance management solution. From a manufacturing setting and blending in the data from a materials perspective, we work with a series of vendors to bring material to bring supply into our manufacturing process. I see that off the top 50 percent roughly of my material is coming from one vendor. That’s certainly a risk, that one vendor. I can see now the details for the raw material mix, my manufacturing locations, and my invoice details. Let me clear that filter as I look across the rest of the visualizations on this dashboard, I can see that raw material, I can see manufacturing. I may want to shift some manufacturing. I mean, real life, right now, we have hurricanes that are bearing down on either Florida or Texas, it seems like, on a weekly basis. Well, I can see the revenue that’s going through each of those locations right now and make adjustments,
Kevin Hebbel: You know, a couple of things Dave that I will add in. From a real estate perspective, this map view, especially for organizations that have a lot of properties, is one that we see commonplace in Dashboards and it’s relatively simple to set this up with what amounts to be a user interface within the solution. This tabular set up of dashboards, you can click across these different views. You can have sector views and then get down into the property details and see either summary or detailed drills of really anything from a real estate perspective. The other thing we see a lot is views of occupancy, reviewing occupancy across different sectors, but more importantly, across different regions, and seeing whether or not there’s a drop in occupancy or anything unique happening region to region. I just wanted to link that back to real estate and where some of that can really be useful.
Dave Collins: Thanks, Kevin. I pivoted to sales analysis, regional sales analysis. I want to give a feel for some of the dashboard or visualization capabilities that are available within the platform. We’re leveraging the Microsoft analytics capabilities. So basically, anything you can do with a PowerBI, with an Excel, you can do within OneStream. This data is sitting on lots and lots of detail. This particular visualization is showing me state by state on a filtered basis how well I’m doing from a revenue perspective, but it can also be based on occupancy. Whatever metric is pertinent on the left hand side. I’m not in love with this particular visualization, but we have dials so I can see on a state by state basis how well I’m doing and all of these can be filtered. If I wanted to focus in on my home state of Illinois, as soon as I make that click, it reduces, reduces, reduces. It filters down to just that particular locale. Last but not least, the KPI’s or the executive overview, where I want to look at my gross margin, my EBITA, I may want to get more information on my EBITA, not just for Houston, but for the components, the locations below Houston, Houston Heights, South Houston, get an explanation of what’s going on. We store all of this information together. Data is data to us. If I wanted to drill down, for example, on any of my key metrics, there’s my return on assets.
- When I do a drill-down and actually see the dimensional view of that data, what scenario was I looking at?
- What month was it, year to date or periodic?
- What location did it come from?
I can just choose to drill down and go from that ratio into the component parts and see how it was derived. I can take this as far as I want, going down through my earnings, so the revenue side of it or the expense side of it until I hit the bottom of this. So below operating sales, I’ll go down to my third-party sales and some of the items that I showed you in that PowerPoint slide just a few moments ago. Here’s the cool thing I actually have in the system all the transactions as well. So I can go from this platform view, which is summarized by third-party sales all the way down to the aggregated data that’s below that particular data point, showing me pages and pages and pages of the transactions that are stored within OneStream. I don’t have to go anywhere else for it. It’s right here. I can leverage this now to do my planning, budgeting, forecasting activities, or further analytics on top of it. The ability to visualize any data at any level of detail is important. You can’t do proper performance improvement without it. We also provide the ability for full audibility and transparency on a process by process basis. We’ll eliminate the data latency of drilling through to a subsystem or going over to the tool by bringing that information into OneStream. We can bring information into OneStream from anywhere. The financial data quality engine will load from on-premises, from the cloud, either direct connection or by way of paper-based reports that are in a more electronic or PDF view. We can acquire data from anywhere from there. We can do a consolidation, we can do a planning process. So let me show you some of this.
Let me pop back over to my CEO view. I’m going to go back to my landing page and let’s start with a strategic plan. My strategic plan ultimately is a cash flow model. This is a solution from the marketplace. It’s laying out for me a series of levers across the top, these are my drivers. Above that, I see I have different scenarios and different entities, I’m modeling right now Houston with Houston Heights in south Houston, but I could leverage any and all of the entities available to me. This particular executive is focused on Houston or that operation. I can leverage predictive analytics to go off and look at that very detailed data I showed you a moment ago to build up what these levers, what these drivers should look like. I’m going to focus in on my final Strat plan, and I’m not satisfied with it right now for 2023. The premise here, by the way, is that we’re operating in 2021. Our demo team decided that 2020 and 2021 were not very good years and we flash forward and try to erase those years from our memories. For 2023, we’re currently at one hundred and eighty four million and change, and then we go to 2024 and 2025, as many years out as you need to to get to that full cash flow model, down to my free cash flow, starting with total revenue and you model per your needs.
How can I change this? Well, I could change the drivers, but that’s a very individual type of an approach. I want to get a little more macro. Let’s just change that. One hundred eighty four million to one hundred eighty two million. When I enter that and it shows me what it’s going to look like on a monthly spread, it spreads proportionally based upon the data that’s there by default, I actually have several different spread methodologies that I can choose from. Proportional was the default for this particular view, but I could use several different approaches. Once I save this, I’ve essentially changed my cash flow plan for 2023, and that trickles forward into 2024, 2025, and 2026 because of the nature of the cash flow. What I now want to do is align this with my plan and my operational plan, so I’m going to go ahead and see those all the way down to the bottom. A simple tool to do that allocation from my strategic plan down to my plan process, which is much more detailed by customer, by product, by location. Simple as that. Now let’s change hats. I’m going to become the Houston controller and what I’m focusing in on at this stage is workflow, I have things to get done. Those things fall into the category of closing my actuals, doing the annual report, perhaps doing the budget after I close the actuals, do my forecast process and the like. I have a graphical user interface here. This is task manager coming from the Marketplace Solutions List. I can look at this and again, chart view. I can focus in on, for example, my actuals, and I see that some of the process has been done, I actually have closed out some ledgers, that’s outside of my purview but I’m managing that workflow here within OneStream, again, wanting to be the one solution for every facet of this. As I scroll down, I see I’ve closed the GL. Then I can load the data from my sales data warehouse from my trial balance, let’s have a look at that. Now, there’s a process here, I can go ahead and execute the process, I can see what’s going on of late, I could forward this to someone else to do on my behalf, I can add attachments that might provide me with education. I’ll go ahead and execute and it takes me to a three-step process for bringing in the sales detail. I had to import the data from the source system and I had to validate it, I had to map it, I had to transform it, I had to turn it into Houston Heights versus the source system, which shows me as H200.
Once I have that data loaded into one stream, I can do a number of things with it, not the least of which is drill down to the component parts that made up that data and then drill back through to the source system to perhaps see something like an invoice coming from it. From an import perspective, from my trial balance, I actually have multiple steps to do. I’m importing not directly from an underlying source system like a warehouse, but we have a very old ledger system where this is it. This is my trial balance. Costco was a great example of this for us. We can filter out the headers and footers. We can leverage the data that’s actually in the existing report and then turn it into an electronic source that I can leverage to do further analytics. If I go to my workspace, the end of this particular process, this is where I can start to look at now in a form by form basis, my balance sheet, my income statement, where the data came from, how it was mapped. There’s my petty cash there and my cash deposits. That’s a many-to-one mapping. If I go to the income statement, this is where I’m now blending with the operational level of detail. Third-party sales is thousands and thousands of transactions. That’s what I drilled down to as the CEO just a bit ago.
We pop out of here, we can do the rest of the full value accounting side of this for the controller through the CFO to close out the books. I want to do a little bit of planning, budgeting, forecasting, so you can see what that looks like. This process that is created here is configurable. So you work with Kevin and his team to create what’s right for you. OneStream isn’t going to say you should do this and then that and then the other thing. Instead, we will facilitate it. We will facilitate the best practice process for you. So I need to enter in some plan drivers. I need to do my revenue plan, my people plan, my travel plan, my CapEx plan. Let’s have a look at it. If I click on instructions, it tells me what to do. If I execute much like what you saw a moment ago, it takes me directly to that process and the workflow. I’m going to close that out because I actually have some buttons here that will walk me through the work. First thing I want to do is review where I’m at from a budget standpoint. Let me draw your attention to the one hundred eighty two million. That was my new Strat plan. The CEO actually set a new target for us, drove it down, and now I have to match that. So very quickly, I’ll go into my revenue plan, I can look at this in a very detailed granular level, say on a customer by product basis, looking down into each of my locations and then set a target that might be appropriate. I can do that by way of a very simple tool. I might want to set this to say seven million instead of the six million that’s there. I’ll update that and when it’s finished, it not only updates the top line number to seven million, but if I drill down, it’s actually updated and adjusted all of the data beneath it.
Now, the rest of this, the expense side of it, I have a whole set of drivers, I’ll show you that in a moment, but if I look at see my people plan, it starts with a register, a list of people, so here are all of my resources by way of an integration coming from PeopleSoft or Workday or a combination of solutions. I’m then going to generate the data by using the drivers, by employee, and then I have a whole bunch of analytics that are out of the box ready and waiting for me, both dashboards and reports. From a CapEx perspective, the same construct, where I have a list in this case of all of my assets with all of the appropriate levels of detail, again, very configurable. You decide what you want to include in this and then it’ll generate the planned data based upon the drivers, I’m going to show you the drivers just a minute, and then I have all of the analytics associated with it. It gives you an acceleration toward the back-end solution and it can be customized. It can be configured per your needs. If I go to those drivers, I actually now see for CapEx, I have useful life assumptions, maintenance, cost assumptions, insurance assumptions. I also have the cost of money. What are my interest rates? If I look at my people drivers, I’m going to have things like FICA, 401k, and disability or other insurance, and then I’ll have my various midpoints with regard to salary and merit increases. If I look at my travel drivers, I can actually set the stage for trip planning down to a very detailed level. Configuring in domestic airfare, international airfare, my hotel costs, meals, car rentals, and the like. It is very configurable. I’m going to throw it back over to Kevin and see if we had any questions that we wanted to address before we end the session.
Kevin Hebbel: This is good Dave, thank you so much for going through the detailed demo. And please reach out to Dave and I with any questions and we’ll proceed from there. Appreciate the time, everyone.
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