Name: Building a Value Creation Roadmap: Aligning FP&A Processes with PE Investment Timelines
Uploaded: 2025-08-13T19:02:07.570Z
Duration: 29 min 12 s
Description: Building a Value Creation Roadmap: Aligning FP&A Processes with PE Investment Timelines

Transcript for "Building a Value Creation Roadmap: Aligning FP&A Processes with PE Investment Timelines": Alright. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us this week for another session on EPM, and we will be discussing building some value around the private equity investments and how EPM can really kick start your initiative. And we're looking forward to this conversation, taking you where you are now and taking you ultimately top of that mountain. And before we get started, just a couple quick housekeeping items. I apologize for any background noise that I might have. I am stuck at the airport today. So apologies for that, but that life throws us some curve balls, and we just have to have to move swing with it. Right? And so we'll go go with that. But we do have a q and a box on your right hand of your screen. If you want to drop us any questions, we have a colleague of ours, Ronan Collins, a solution architect in our EPM practice who will be monitoring that, answering any questions you might have. There's also a closed caption option as well. If you're not able to have your volume on, and you wanna get closed captions, you can enable that, option as well. It's at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a a CC button that you can enable. And then, lastly, we're gonna be passing out our documents. So the PowerPoint that you're gonna see today, the recording, it's all gonna be accessible after today's presentation. And, we'll make sure that you have access to those, assets once we wrap up today's call. So quick, introduction. My name is John Shaposka. I'm a director in our, EPM practice. I've been, implementing EPM now a little bit, a little bit less than twelve years. Been at Argano for eight years. I'm a lover of EPM. I'm a lover of EPM. It came from, public accounting, so finance is the language that I speak. And I tell you, you know, private equity is where I I kind of, came out of. It's where I I learned learned the Hyperion tools before co presenter, Steve, today because he and I were meeting last week. I got introduced to Steve a couple months ago through a colleague of mine, and and we just connected. He's got some ideas that just I loved. He's a thought leader in the in the private equity investment banking world, specifically with these tools in enterprise performance management. So, Steve, go ahead. Give yourself a, you know, a a quick introduction. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. And, I'll qualify. Most of these ideas are just me regurgitating the ideas of others that I've, tried to pay attention to. But, for everybody out there, Steve Whetstone, CPA, and I'm a principal solution engineer here at, Oracle. And I, work with all the different business processes within enterprise performance management. Before coming to join Oracle a little over three years ago, spent a number of years in public accounting and in industry accounting, most notably where I was the, functional front end administrator, of the EPM application at a large OEM, here in, the Middle Tennessee area. So I, I've seen, quite a bit of the accounting industry working in public in an industry. So I'd like to tell folks that, it might not be in the same exact pair of shoes that you're in right now, but I've probably worn a pretty similar pair before. So that's it, John. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Yeah. Awesome. Looking forward to just talking with you about this. But before we get into the topic, just real quick, couple slides about Argano. Argano has been implementing the the Oracle products for about twenty five years now. So, you know, we consider ourselves a, a boutique but global SI implementer of ERP, HCM, CX, and, you know, obviously, with EPM, we're talking about that today. We are definitely focused on business process first and using the best technology to do that. We're super excited about our, net promoter score. So this is a score that, third party goes out and they actually meet with our customers. And this score tells us and tells our our existing customers and, future customers how likely they are to come back to Argano again. So if you think about your Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts customers, they're there every day or multiple days a week. Right? And so a good score is anything the score rating is actually from negative 50 to a 100. And so anything really between the sixties to a 100 is phenomenal. So we we landed at 86, and so we are very proud. This is a KPI or a a statistic that, really shows that we care about our our customers. We care about their processes and and making sure that they it really has an impact on their day to day activities at work. And it shows in our our our actual project success. So this is the most recent implementation project health chart that we received from Oracle. And so, we're proud to say that, you know, we're one of only a few partners globally that are green around the globe. This is not very this is not a statistic that's easy to achieve. And, our engagement methodology and our commitment to our customers, just proves that it can be done, and we're very happy about this. So without that, enough about Argano. We're here to talk about private equity and EPM. So, Steve, you know, last last week, we are over the last couple weeks, really, we were talking about, some some opportunities, some customers that you've had, private equity based, who were exploring the the EPM products. And, when I think about private equity, I think, you know, there's portfolio companies that are held by by the equity firms. There's the private equity firm that kinda sits above those portfolio companies as well. And when I was in the chair, you know, I was I was in the portfolio company, and we ended up purchasing the consolidation tool. Right? And but there's there's a flip side to it. And I'm just curious, what are you seeing and what are you recommending is the correct direction for purchasing and using Oracle EPM? Are are we you know, what what what direction do you approach it? Do you approach purchasing it from the private equity standpoint and then they roll it down to all of their companies? Or do you look at it from an individual portfolio, vantage point and then use that just in in that specific instance. Yeah. No. It it's a good point, John. And I really think it comes down to who is gonna be carrying the load. Is it going to be, the burden of the portfolio company, or is this a directive that's coming down, you know, from the PE firm? So all of the tools that are within enterprise performance management, you know, can be, completely, you know, integrated at any level of the organization, whether it is, you know, directly, implemented at the portfolio company, or it's something that the PE firm owns and they are onboarding, you know, new holdings into that instance of, their consolidation application or their planning application or even their enterprise data management application. I know what you and I talked about quite a bit, as being sort of the foundation that we like to, share with, not just PE customers, but any potential customers who are looking to start off, you know, with a firm foundation, for their, performance management. So it it really just depends on who is gonna be carrying that load. Yeah. I can see that. Do you see a specific business process? You know, when I when I was I you know, the the focus for, you know, for for us when I was in the chair was obviously actuals. Right? You know, we we're heavily focused on EBITDA, growing EBITDA. We're focused on growing revenue on acquisitions. Is consolidations the go to no brainer? Most of the times where everyone's wanting to do that first. What do you what do you see? Sure. Well, you know, everybody has actuals, and everybody has budgets. But all of both those actuals and those budgets are built on, you know, your enterprise data and your metadata that make up, you know, the figures that you're looking at. So, it's Oracle's, you know, one of our best practice recommendations, that anytime you're looking at, your performance management business processes, just start off on the right foot and, you know, consider doing a enterprise data management where where you are aligning all of our metadata across all segments of your chart of accounts, whether they are, within the Oracle ecosystem or outside the Oracle ecosystem. It is a purpose built tool, that is designed for, you know, regular routine, metadata changes or transformational changes such as a chart of accounts redesign, or onboarding a new portfolio acquisition. So I like that enterprise data management piece. And so I got I I switched over the next slide. We've got this the the enterprise data management or I think you've coined this the dimensional pyramid. Right? And I love that idea because, like, when you in order to get to the top, the peak of the pyramid, you've gotta have your structure. Right? And with within the private equity world, reporting can be so dynamic and ad hoc. Right? You've got, obviously, there's GAAP. There's, management reporting that you're gonna have internally. Those are two very common financial reporting standards. You've then have to can layer in, okay, you know, private equity has their own formats that they need to have information, and they usually want it quick. Right? Because they're gonna be pulling from many other organizations that that that they've invested in. Mhmm. On top of those three, you also have bank covenants. Right? And in many cases, you're looking at at dozens and maybe hundreds of covenants that are out there that could potentially have different definitions Mhmm. Right, of how to define, metrics like EBITDA. Right? And and other KPIs that that you are required to report on on reoccurring frequencies. And so, you know, let's talk about this dimensional pyramid. You know? Do you what what what are your thoughts about, like, when they're setting out EDM from from the parent level, from the PE firm, how how how should they go about implementing EDM first? Yeah. Well, if we're, you know, bringing rolling out a data management program at the PE firm level and gonna be bringing in, you know, any of those portfolio company acquisitions, that are, you know, a part of that PE firm regardless if we're carving any of those out to be stand alone, combining them together. All of those, you know, acquisitions can benefit from the unified data model that we're talking about here with enterprise data management. And so being able to have, you know, again, some of those transformational tools such as, acquisition onboarding and being able to align Mhmm. You know, a a disparate chart of accounts that have been acquired from, say, a company that runs on QuickBooks. And we wanna bring them into our, enterprise forwards management consolidation consolidated reporting to, you know, be able to report under multiple different, you know, accounting standards, multiple different KPIs and metrics for any kind of bank covenants or external statutory financial statements we're reporting. All of that is 100% exactly what enterprise data management is designed to do, to onboard Mhmm. Those acquisitions as quickly as possible so that PE firms can start actually understanding the data, that is being, you know, provided by their portfolio companies instead of having to do all of the manual work to, you know, shift things around, to, align those chart of accounts to where we can actually have a true clear picture of what we're looking at. Yeah. That that idea gets me excited because you've you've got a new general ledger, and and what you have is of this foundation, the pyramid that you've defined, the global chart of accounts. And instead of, you know, having to create new reporting, you just point the NewCo general ledger to your reporting that you've been using for years with enterprise data management. Right? And then you might say, okay. If if you did happen to fund this acquisition and there's a new covenant and I don't know if you've ever read through the you probably have with being a CPA, but, man, reading those loan covenants were the worst. And and I remember I was, like, a detective, but I have, like, string theory. You know? I'm, like, pulling strings, trying to connect the dots. I add this. I subtract that. I you know? You could probably find an alternate hierarchy for EBITDA and say, okay. I'm gonna share this and but I'm gonna make in a new addition in this alternate alternate hierarchy that goes to Credit Suisse for that covenant. Right? And just like that, your reporting is done. Right? So that that pyramid is literally setting up everything for every portfolio, every investment that you're doing in the future. And then when you unload it, you don't need to worry about it. You unload the investment, you know, you save so much time in the beginning, in the middle, and then at the end, and it was all worth it. And you had credibility throughout, which is huge. Yep. Absolutely. And so setting yourself up for success is exactly what enterprise data management is designed around. And and like you said, John, build it once and then be able to just rinse and repeat it, you know, as the the acquisitions come and as, you know, the, hopefully, the profits continue to come as well. Yeah. I wanna go back to the the the previous slide. You know, we're talking about, you know, the time to value here. What are what are some of the the value aspects that you see coming out of these these conversations that you're having with your customers? You know, I think EPM I can think of you know, I think implementing consolidations can be relatively quick compared to some of the other software options that are out there. And for the amount of features that it'll it allows you to enable multi gap, obviously, intercompany elimination, currency translations, ownership management. You can have this up and running, you know, within four months and have, you know, three years of data in there. That's a quick time to value implementation. Right? And you can you can scale that out. But what are some of, like, the the big items that you see reoccurring in conversations with with within this industry? Definitely, like you said, the consolidations and and, essentially, everything on the actual side of the house being able to implement that within, you know, a rough order of magnitude about four months. And the same can be said for, you know, a planning application as well. It really just depends on how configured that, you know, a a customer wants to get away from the out of the box offerings that that Oracle has when it comes to the planning applications and financial consolidation and close. But realizing time to value with enterprise data management, you know, is even shorter than that. We like to use the rule of thumb that it can be rolled out, in about one month for any of that, you know, metadata management or any of that, you know, single spot dimension management there. And and the great part with that is once that data management program is rolled out, that now just has set the foundation for the implementation, that will follow with your planning applications and your consolidation and reporting applications. If you, you know, set the foundation, the game plan is really gonna write itself and almost make, Argano's job that much easier when it comes to how they're gonna design, the rest of the implementation. Then I think Right. I I like that you're bringing up the planning piece, and, you know, obviously, that's probably gonna be I think that's gonna be a, you know, like a phase two, and you may roll that out, you know, across different different entities, different, investments. Maybe not all of them. But, one of the things that I think is common is trying to request data. And if you start with a portfolio company and you start with their consolidations or their databases and they're able to pull in data from the other entities and the the investments, they no longer have to email and pick up the phone and call. You know, like, the the the the portfolio companies can be closing their books, but they can also be checking the databases. And they can be logging into their systems with read access and seeing, hey. Where's the tasks at? You know, where's the plan at? Where's the forecast at? Now the whole, you know, the the question of the unknown, when am I gonna get my data? When am I gonna get my data? When am I gonna get my data? We're trying to get, you know, funding for this other, investment, and we need the data from our five other portfolios. We need the it takes that whole communication aspect out of the picture. And that can save you a tremendous amount of headache and time. Yep. When I hear when I hear you talking about, you know, the, the data, m or the the data sharing process and having that real time visibility into data, you know, it really draws my mind back to my, time spent, at a OEM here within the Middle Tennessee area. And I was a a balance sheet accountant handling all of the, the inventory accounting. But, because we always had, you know, those silos of information, the, p and l accountants who were working with the the downstream, effects of my reconciliations were always always hitting me up during monthly and close. Are you done? Are you done? I gotta do my part. I gotta do my part. And, you know, if we had, you know, all the way through to our month end processes rolled out, processes like task management within enterprise reporting, we wouldn't have those silos of data visibility to know where we were in specific processes. And if we had all of a, you know, a completely unified, you know, data transformation like enterprise data management, we could automate a lot of these processes. And, that's kind of the beauty with enterprise performance management is because of the built in ETL tool, that is delivered with it, a lot of these, data exchanges that happen between an investment and the portfolio company that's performing that consolidation. All of this is typically delivered out of the box, and automated. This can all be done in a completely lights out fashion, where we don't even have to worry about, you know, manual uploads of data anymore. Of course, you can always have that sort of ad hoc data load capability. But with everything being completely integrated through the the data exchange within enterprise performance management, hopefully, gone are the days of having to ping, you know, the admin at the investment company to ask where the data is if we could just automate that data transfer. Yeah. I I I would have loved that. I couldn't tell you how many times it was, like, 05:00 in the afternoon, and I could hear the phone ring in CFO's office. And I knew exactly what the question was, and they go, no. Right? And you go, no. Alright. I'll get working on that. But, yeah. So, you know, time time to value is definitely EPM is bringing that. You got the integrations, communications, and EDM. We talked about EDM. We talked a little bit about, you know, where do they where do they start with. I guess, to spin this a little differently, do you see any hurdles with getting started in in your conversations with your customers? Or what are some of the hurdles that they generally have to work around? For specific hurdles, you know, it's really just being willing to, sometimes look at things differently, look through, you know, your performance management processes through a different lens. Typically, you know, with portfolio companies, there is a reason, that they are, you know, being acquired by a private equity firm. And that is because there is a there is a reason potentially why they have arrived at needing that, you know, cash injection to be there. So being willing to, you know, reevaluate your processes, being willing to, you know, leverage over thirty plus years of performance management knowledge that Oracle has been able to to gather with working with our thousands of customers over the years who have shared feedback with us to to build these processes up, you know, could be the ticket for, being able to inject some new life into that organization, that was needing a lifeline to it. And so, we definitely have, you know, all of the out of the box, actuals reporting for your consolidations and building all the way up to, arrive at that accurate, fully burdened p and l with your actuals, and then being able to start taking that top down or bottoms up approach to, rolling out a complete and connected planning process across, you know, a portfolio company that has, you know, many different, or excuse me, an an investment of a portfolio company or even that consolidated portfolio company as well. And so, many different ways to skin that cat. But, ultimately, if you just choose a bottom up or top down approach for whatever your highest priority is, you could typically arrive at the right destination if you just keep at it long enough. Mhmm. The one, so there's you know, obviously, this is a SaaS product. The newest feature that I you may know this off the top of your head that came out was predictive cash forecasting. Mhmm. Not not as widely known, to the EPM space, but this is a AI heavy tool that combines treasury. It combines, ERP, you know, bringing in receivables, payables, your forecast from your your FP and A, from planning and budgeting Mhmm. Along with, you know, the ability to hard input information that's known, like, when you're going to have a balloon payment, if you have interest only payments on a monthly, quarterly basis. Forecasting being used at every one of the entities or the portfolios rolling up to see what's our leverage ratios, what's our debt to equity, what's our cash positions, and then how much can we go and get leverage on, right, to go get more business, right, to go out there and buy more companies and invest more money. Right? I think that product has a tremendous amount of potential and value within the private equity space, if it's used across the entire enterprise for PE. Mhmm. So just an interesting thought. What do you think about that? No. Predictive cash forecasting, you know, is one of those newest out of the box offerings, within enterprise performance management. And and you're exactly right, John. It is a very quick win for, you know, private equity, those portfolio port portfolio companies, to consider, you know, as maybe one of those very quick wins, as a part of your, performance management program. If you've got great day if you've got good data coming in from your a your, you know, receivable sub ledger, your payable sub ledger, and you've got, you know, good good data within your your cash or treasury sub ledger, You've got most of the information and most of the granular detail that you need in order to begin leveraging AI and machine learning, predictive planning, and even applying, you know, new features within newer features, within EPM like our IPM insights, where you can actually have Mhmm. Very granular, data anomalies, forecast variances, and biases, or even forward looking predictive insights being delivered directly to your, cash planners, or the the treasury group as well, from the bottom up that oftentimes might get lost, you know, along the way as the consolidation happens or, you know, as we have the COA roll up that goes on, things just get kinda buried in the mix. So all of those tools that, customers are using planning and budgeting today, that is it that is exactly what we are applying now to your detailed cash management program. Yeah. It's exciting. It's exciting. It it SAS is such a a it's like the wild, wild west. Who knows where it's gonna go next? We we didn't anticipate this, and all of a sudden, there's this technology that could be completely useful and could change the way we we we interact on a day to day basis with predictive cash forecasting, and it's exciting stuff. So we are running out of time here. I wanna thank you all for joining us for this week's, this weekend, EPM. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me directly. I'm happy to schedule a call with you to talk about any ideas we have with the EPM products. Hey. If you even wanna talk about baseball or whatever, let's let's, you know, talk EPM and baseball. I don't care. We had this is our fourth session, but we do have two more coming up. They're they're not yet, out in our our queue. We do have them confirmed and are working on getting them scheduled for dates. But you can use this URL, to watch one of our previous three recordings, and we will be sending out today's recording along with the documents that you saw today. And, again, we thank you for joining today's session. I hope you have a fantastic day and continue to be the all star that you are. Thank you.