Name: Digital Value Creation Factory: Oracle EPM Across Your Portfolio
Uploaded: 2025-06-25T19:11:16.284Z
Duration: 34 min 40 s
Description: Digital Value Creation Factory: Oracle EPM Across Your Portfolio

Transcript for "Digital Value Creation Factory: Oracle EPM Across Your Portfolio": Thank you for attending today's webinar. Digital value Before we begin, I wanted to cover a few housekeeping items. If you have technical or content related questions during the presentation excuse me. I'm having a technical difficulty. Please use the q and a box, and we will address them. Closed captioning is available by hovering over the table area and clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. To access today's resource materials, simply select the docs tab on the right hand side of your screen. All registrants will receive a link to the recording post webinar. Now I would like to introduce today's presenters. Today, we are pleased to welcome Chris Churchill, the EPM solution sales director at Oracle. With twenty five years of experience, Chris has built a leading consulting organization for Oracle Cloud applications. He focuses on customer successes, technology adoption, and fostering a resilient culture. Chris excels at solving business challenges through collaboration and transparency. Next, we featured the host of our This Week in EPM series, John Shaposka. John is the director of solutions architecture at Argano. John specializes in Oracle Cloud EPM solutions, selling and financial consolidation, planning, forecasting, and data integration. He has successfully implemented many Oracle Cloud EPM applications and has a strong background in public accounting and private equity, making him a trusted adviser in solving complex financial challenges. John, welcome. You may now begin. Hey. Good day. Thank you, Carrie. Appreciate the introduction. And, Chris, we wanna thank you as well for taking time to, do this webcast with us. We're excited about this new series focusing on on really growth around, private equity firms, companies who are growing, quickly in size through acquisition or internal growth and how they can really utilize the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management tool across all of their aspects that fall underneath the office of the CFO. So today, we're we're here to talk about, Oracle EPM, within your portfolio or your investment, companies that have been acquired, that you're growing quickly. And this is an area that's near and dear to my heart. And having talked with Chris, I know it's near and dear to him as well. So we're gonna get into some stories today around this topic. But first, why don't we dive in, spending a minute or two about Argano and Oracle, EPM, and then we'll dive into some exciting topics in this topic today. So real quick, who is Oracle or who is Argano, and, what's our EPM practice about? So our EPM practice has been around twenty five plus years. I think we're coming up to twenty eight here real soon. We have, we have been implementing this product really since the s space days, then into the Hyperion products. And built built straight into the cloud in 02/2014. So we had, the opportunity to implement the first, cloud planning and budgeting cloud solution back in 02/2014, and then the first financial consolidations enclosed. So we have been doing somewhere around four or 500 plus, cloud implementations since that first, engagement back in 02/2014. And, really interestingly, in in a decade of us implementing, we've earned six Oracle EPM and analytics partner of the year awards, which which is a very, very, large feat that we're extremely proud of. So, essentially, we're we're winning that award through, our creativity with the technology about every two years. As we pride ourselves with thinking outside the box and really building solid performance improvement and process improvements that your company, your your teams in FPA can, gain efficiencies with these tools. And and we're very passionate about it. We also have, as as as you know, you're in one of our webcast now, but many, many webcast on hundreds of different topics that we've done, over the years, and you're continuing can continue to do now. So really passing our education out to our customer base is one of our our key areas that we like to, provide for the cam community. Our most recent, success was the 2024 partner of the year award where we, we won this this award for our work with a, aerospace and engineer company where we use some of the newer technologies with cloud EPM, Groovy, and, the automation capabilities where we were able to bring, a new lens of how to do EPM and how users gonna interact with EPM across their planning and budgeting and forecasting processes using the most up to date technologies that EPM offers. So now we're gonna pass it over to Chris, and he's gonna talk a little bit about Oracle and what it what it offers and what it's gonna be offering in the near future. Great. Thanks, John. So so by ways of quick quick introductions, Chris Churchill. I'm a solutions director for EPM here at Oracle. Been with Oracle for a few years. Prior to joining Oracle, kinda much like John, I I spent spent over twenty years implementing these solutions out in the field. So a lot of depth and experience with the platform. It's really the only thing I've ever done in my professional career. So, so, you know, just to to kind of lay a foundation for Oracle, in the what we call the enterprise performance management space, Oracle's obviously a really big company. Right? We do a lot of things from, you know, hardware infrastructure, you know, hardware cloud infrastructure, the database cloud, ERP systems, HR systems. But today, we're really gonna focus on, a suite of, business processes that are really geared toward the office of finance. And and it's a platform that we call enterprise performance management, really intended to help, your FP and A organizations run, manage, and optimize the business. Right? And so, how do we think about that, you know, today? You know, it's it's not just, you know, a a tool for for reporting, although it does that very well. You know, the tool for managing data, driving your strategy. Right? So, you know, not just, you know, closing the books, but how do I get in and look at sort of profitability of different, you know, businesses and and products and capabilities within my, you know, portfolio or within my, within my business? You know, it's not reacting to market change. I mean, one thing that that we're all experiencing right now is just, you know, you know, constant change in our external environment. So, you know, do you have the the tools and the mechanisms to be able to, model what those changes look like? And not just model it one way, but model it four, five, six, seven different ways to really be able to to test what happens when market conditions change and change quickly to your business. You know, do you have the ability to connect your your finance FP and A organization with the operations out in the field. Right? Do they have, you know, when I'm looking at, you know, revenue, you know, when I'm looking at revenue and cost, do you have the ability to go into that revenue and see what's driving it? Right? Getting to those operational plans in detail, to to make sure that, you know, the business, is really aligned with the financial results. Right? And then, you know, ultimately, not just looking backwards at, you know, our historical performance, but how do we predict and and help gauge kind of future insights. Right? So all of these capabilities and and challenges that we kind of outlined and talked about here are are really kind of fundamental to what, Oracle's enterprise performance management platform is is intended to help within the, the office of of FP and A. So, you know, one of the things that sets us apart, which which I think is really, you know, really unique in the market is, you know, we're building a platform to encompass and capture all of these needs and capabilities. Right? These are all things that companies that, you know, depending on their maturity, and and turn you know, company maturity, everyone's gonna need to be able to close the books and report. Everybody's gonna have to do a budget or a forecast or some sort of forward looking, you know, plan. Everybody should be doing long range plans, right, and capital plans and labor plans, things like that. So how do you integrate all of these things together? Right? How do I automate things like reconciliations, tax compliance? How do I look at profitability? So all of these are needs within FP and A, and they all sort of present themselves, as as different challenges. And then this suite of, of applications, business processes is really meant to give you a one stop shop for an organization in FP and A, to tackle all of those challenges. And, you know, that's really as we kinda dive into, you know, the focus of today's conversation, that that's one of the things when John, you know, approached me, about this this sessions and, you know, kinda talking through this a little bit more, that we thought was really, you know, an interesting topic. Right? And and PE companies in particular are in a unique position in that a lot of the companies that they're investing in, or have ownership, partial ownership, things like that. They're all at varying stages of of their life cycle and and all trying to achieve sort of, you know, the same types of goals. And and so having this platform having a platform to really optimize finance, it is critical in in in setting the the foundation for, you know, setting the foundation for good governance and good behaviors going forward, things that companies should be doing, is fundamental. Right? It's hard to go in and change something that's been in existence for a decade, but if you start off doing the right thing initially, you tend to get better at that and engrain it as part of your your DNA. So, so it was, you know, when John approached me about this, I I thought it was a a a great topic and, again, really looking forward to this today. So, you know, so with that, I guess, you know, my, you know, my first question, John, you spent a lot of time, in in private equity, so you you saw sort of firsthand, how the EPM platform could really, you know, help. Why don't you talk a little bit or or, you know, let's start talking a little bit about how, you know, how you can really scale, help the company scale across the investment portfolios with the platform. Yeah. Absolutely. So we're gonna be jumping into, you know, a little bit more of the storytelling, side of this this webcast here. And, before we get get into some of, you know, some of the experiences that I've learned that, I and some of the things that I wish I would have taken advantage of when I was in the private equity space. First, I wanna just let all of the viewers know that, you know, we are recording this, but we have one of our principal solution architects, sitting here. And if you have any questions, go ahead and put those questions in the q and a box there. And Ronan, Ronan Collins will be answering your questions as we're we're telling our stories. And so, yeah, Chris, You know you know, going back to my beginnings where I really grew up in the EPM space was, it was pre cloud. It was it was the Hyperion products. But I was in I worked in two two stints, where we had investment companies that were, you know, all US based. And and private equity came in, we purchased us, and we were gonna, you know, grow the company through through acquisitions and take take the companies from, domestic domestic, to full global companies very quickly. And in in the first instance we did, we went from less than 100,000,000 to a half a billion in less than three years all through acquisitions. And there are so many, so many use cases and stories that just reside in in that small snippet of of a business life cycle for companies who are looking to grow those portfolios very quickly. And so when we first started, everything was kinda manual. I think that's the most common, the most common use case in tool is is through Excel to to gather information. But what we really were were lacking and where we were missing efficiencies was was because we were doing everything manual. There was money that we were, you know, having to spend because we weren't getting our financial statements out to our banks, when they were due. And so every time you missed a due date, you had to you had to pay a fee. And if if you could just imagine right then and there, if you've got rid of all those fees because you had efficiencies that, an implementation of a consolidations enclosed process really would pay for itself probably within the first twelve months. And, you know, so what are some of the the the things that I learned? What were some of the components, the issues? You mentioned the manual side of things, and if I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I'd, on day one, start working on a global chart of accounts. And so we were probably two or three acquisitions in and had already scaled the business quite a bit in in a very short period of time. But we were continuing to take general ledger extracts, submitting them. I was the guy who was doing all the reporting. So they all came to my desk through email. And they showed up at different times of the day. Right? We were no longer working in an Eastern Standard or Pacific Standard time zones. We were working international. And so I would be doing close and consolidation for The Americas and then receiving Europe's and EMEA's, general ledgers that they consolidate consolidated on their own. They try to do their intercompany eliminations, and I wouldn't know when I would get them. Right? So there was this organization everywhere, and all of that meant lost time. It meant lost salaries that were paid that we could have been doing other more value added tasks, like looking at other companies to purchase, do the due diligence on those companies. But instead, we spent maybe half to three quarters over each month closing our books. And Yeah. Closing your actuals are the most important, sets of data that we have. And so in terms of scaling, the one of the biggest value ads that I I I think of looking back is create a global chart of accounts right out of the gates, define every account, how you want the data to be built into those accounts, and then use that in a consolidation and close tool. And when we finally did that with when we brought in our consolidations platform with Oracle, we were went from closing, you know, three fourths of the way through the month to closing less than half half the month. Right? So we saw at least 50 to 60% gain efficiency by having global churn of accounts in a technology where our controllers around the world were submitting their general ledgers and having the system do that for them, do the Internet company eliminations, the complex currency translations right out of the gate through the technology. So I no longer had to collect, organize, do the cash flow manually. It was all defined in a system, and it brought us immediate scaling once we went live. Yeah. Yeah. No. I I it's funny. We we you talk a little bit about, global chart of accounts and and acquisitions, and that's one of the biggest challenges. Heck, not just for private equity, but for anybody out there doing acquisitions. Right? And, you know, what's the I I I it never it always boggles my mind that, you know, when you go in and you talk to, you know, a company that's gotta start a new chart of accounts or, you know, merge two companies, charts of accounts together, like, the the way that they do that is in Excel. Right? Like, so Excel version one, two, three, five hundred, whatever, you're doing d lookups and stuff like that. And, like, it's just not a good way of doing things. Right? And so, you know, to me, one of the the richest, capabilities within the toolset is, the ability to kind of author and master, you know, changes to a chart of accounts, quickly integrate other companies into that chart of accounts, right, and provide the mapping and things like that. I I remember in my, you know, my consulting days, we, we started a project at a big manufacturing company in Atlanta. And right in the middle of the project, they made a huge acquisition. And so I had to do, like, a one eighty pivot real quickly, and it went from whatever we were doing to how are we gonna get these folks into our chart accounts. We promised The Street that we'd be reporting consolidated data in ninety days. Right? And, luckily, they had EPM. They had our enterprise data management, capability that comes with EPM that lets you author charts of accounts and and map and do things like that very quickly. And we were able to do that next few on that very, you know, very rapidly. Right? And that's not something that's easy to do, if you're relying on Excel and other kind of frameworks to to do it. So, yeah. I'm glad I'm glad you brought that up. What other, I'm curious. What other challenges or or systemic do you see kind of across the board in in private equity that, EPM is really good at handling? Yeah. I, you know, I kinda wanna I I think this rolls into the global chart of accounts. Most people struggle when when we mention a global chart of accounts in bringing together many different ERP systems, different general ledgers into one. And then they go, well, how do I know that account 2,001 equals cash from company one, company two, company three, company four. Right? Everybody gets so fixated on the numerical chart of accounts. And I I will tell you, we took a little little different approach on our global chart of accounts. And so rather than making it numerical, where if we did purchase a a a company and they use a different standard of accounting, right, rather than US GAAP or IFRS, maybe they're just focused on a statutory chart of accounts because that's the only, geographical area that they they did business in. Right? How do we map everything there? Well, our approach was to ignore the numeric chart of accounts and go with an alpha chart of accounts. And and that gave us tremendous amount of flexibility on the day. So, you know, we might have four accounts that we call cash. Cash, line of credit, right, bad debt. We we use the the actual, alpha using terminology rather than a numeric account to define that chart of accounts. And so when we've made a purchase, you know, one of those first challenges when you make a purchase is how do we do our mappings? Well, instead of aligning the numerical numbers, we just had a definition of these were the the accounts at the global level that we need in order to do a consolidation of our actuals so that we can be timely in our reporting, and we can also be accurate. And so challenge number one really was was alleviated when we provided them the global, you could call it the global dictionary of accounts and what they mean. And so instead of us sitting there for two or three days, when we've I'll give you an example. When we first when we did our first acquisition, they sent us over over to Finland, and we spent an entire week. I think it was actually two weeks. We had to do two rounds of mapping, trying to figure this out. This was before we had our global chart of accounts. And we learned real fast that, listen, we need to prepare be prepared so that we know the definition of every one of these accounts. Yeah. So second time around, acquisition number two, we show up with our Webster's account dictionary. We sit down. We pull up each account. We're able to map them within a day or two. And the time that we saved was was cut again in half, and so we could get to a a faster close date much faster. And and so that global chart of accounts can be a much higher level. It can be, alpha. It doesn't have to be numeric. And then challenge number two, that accountants and myself being an accountant, that's really who I am, at the at the at the end of the day. Challenge number two is, you know, answering to our auditors. So I always had a you know, every quarter or every well, absolutely every year end, I needed to go to my my auditors and say, well, this is how we got from general ledger to as reported, you you know, consolidated company. And we were able to use our drill feature. We were able to use our our, data exchange mappings, print those off month by month with the general ledger, and provide those as our working papers back to, our auditors. And that was an enormous challenge that we had, I'd say the first fifteen months of us growing this investment portfolio because, and in fact, we got dinged two years in a row for, risk in our consolidations because it was all in Excel. There was no definitions that were stored in audit. And, once we were able to encapsulate those within a system and show that, we could print them off very quickly and provide that as as a work paper to the auditors, those, year end audit dings that we got on our report disappeared immediately. And, we went from a very at risk to no risk at all on our financial statements. Yeah. Yeah. That that governance, which is really, you know, part and parcel woven into kind of the entire suite and solution is is really important. Right? Like, you know, becoming that's part of really being a, you know, real real company. Right? To to to, you know, for some regards. Right? Like, the ability to, have that governance faith, be able to pass those audits, do it very quickly, help with due diligence, things like that, is critical. Right? And this platform, really helps and and provides a lot of that, I think, for you. And it all leads to efficiencies. I mean, if you go back to the, the audit governance that you were just discussing, you know, we would spend tremendous amount of time in meetings with our auditors going back and forth between, you know, how we got to our numbers. And we well, not only did we save on our time, but we also saved on our cost of our year end audit, which was, you know, an immediate efficiency, and cash saved for our organization. Yeah. And it's having all the answers, right, at your fingertips, right, versus having to siphon through hundreds of Excel files and whatnot to go to go get it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Good deal. Okay. So, thinking a little bit about how EPM, can work and really be tailored for, for a PE company that, you know, if I think about it right, you know, I remember that I, you know, when I did some work in this space, the company that we work for owned a lot of different types of of investments. Right? A lot of different support portfolio companies that wasn't just, you know, they didn't all make widgets. Right? We had services companies, product is in everything in between. And so the question always becomes, hey, I've got businesses that are very disparate and differently, do different things. How can I leverage this this platform, and, really use it for, you know, for for different types of companies? And, you know, it's something I it it's it's not anything that is, in my opinion, you know, systemic just to to PE and and those type companies. I mean, there's a lot of large companies that do a lot of different things. And and the EPM platform's really been built upon the the premise of, you know, we offer a lot of prebuilt capabilities, and and accelerators, you know, the ability to do transaction matching rapidly for account reconciliation, labor or prebuilt capital, things like that. So we've got a lot of things that are standard out of the box, but you've got the ability to configure these things to each business's needs. So it's not, uncommon at all to to have sort of a a standardized set of capabilities where it makes sense. Right? And then, you know, in these organizations. But then, for example, on a planning side, maybe you've got a, my revenue and cost of goods sold model is very different between services and a products business or manufacturing business. So you can have these separate kind of configured models, to really help out. So, I mean, that's one of the things that I see being a real benefit, you know, real real power in this platform. Curious to see what you've seen on on your side. Yeah. You know, I I and I love this picture that we have here too. You know, how do we tailor tailor this for the private equity firms. Right? And if you think about where the head would go, you know, I know it's a mannequin right now. That that's the portfolio. That's the investment company. Right? And they have many, many portfolios. So inches three, four, five, six, seven, eight, all the way through 18 on the screen there represents to your point a different portfolio of companies, a different grouping of investments, and they all roll up. And so problem number one, if you kinda if you think about each one of these 18 investments is they all have to have their actual data. We've been talking a lot about actual data. Right? And it's important for two reasons. One is, you know, as a as a private equity firm, we want the ability to pull our equity out, and we can't do that without accurate financial statements. Or we wanna be able to sell the investment for a gain. So those are that's the end game of all of this. So the very first thing we have to do in order to tail this solution for our our firm, for our investment portfolios, is focus on actuals. But if you think back to ten years ago, as I mentioned, at the beginning of this call, when we were pre cloud, you had to go into Oracle and you had to ask for a close consolidations SKU. You had to buy that. If you wanted to do a planning one, you had to do that. If you wanted reconciliations, you had to do that. Well, those days are gone with cloud to your point. So now when you purchase these EPM licenses for your portfolio companies, they're gaining the efficiencies around actuals, which are huge. So you can access your your line of credits and, pull your equity out and sell your businesses. But your portfolio companies can spend less time now on the actual side and then work more in other areas like forecasting in planning. So now that we, you know, first check the check the checkbox around accuracy and timeliness of our close, we can move on to how are we going to scale our business up faster through scenario modeling, through, through, faster annual planning, more strategic planning. And then also gain efficiencies to your point around things like account reconciliations. I call them the big three. There's close, there's planning, forecasting, and there's reconciliations. So not only are they able to do the biggest and probably most important one, which is closing the books, you guys get access to these other technologies that are gonna allow you to scale your business even faster. And so what I've loved, what Oracle has done is they've given access to their customers to all of these big three processes so that they can take advantage of all of them with within a single licenses. I didn't have that when I was back, when I was first implementing the the products, and I wish I did. Because we would have been able to use scenario modeling, just about every acquisition that we we did. And we would have been able to use the AI technologies that are available in that tool to come up with different versions and different, different checks to see, hey, you know, will I actually have this much cash, or will my equity act be increased to the point where I can, you know, go to the go to the market, pull some equity out in order for me to finance another investment so that we can double or triple the size of our business. If we had that, we would have been able to do thousands of what if scenarios rather than doing one at a time, you know, taking a data do on in Excel. So the the the tailoring of this is so much faster and easier than it was, year ten years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I am glad you brought up AI. As I once we wrap this up, man, in thirty minutes goes quick, as we kinda wrap this up, I I look at where is our EPM platform going and where is the future trend. It's really about the future trend of where kind of finance and FP and A is going. And and I think about it in terms of just agility and the speed to execute. Right? We've gotta provide answers faster, quicker, and then be better informed. And and I look at it in really three areas. Right? The first one is, you know, reporting and ease of reporting. I'm not talking about printing hundreds of reports and double clicking all that. I am talking about I manage our IP in the organization, and I need my EPM platform to know the three or four things that when I wake up in the morning, I wanna bring those alerts and dashboards and metrics to my my my, you know, my iPhone, my email, whatever. Right? Like, not having to peck and hunt, but, like, having our AI and intelligence working behind the scenes to bring that stuff forward. The second area that I think we're gonna see, you know, nonstop, and continue innovation in is around integrated business processes. Right? So I think about you know, again, we talk about Oracle doing a lot of stuff. Right? ERP systems, EPM systems. But there's a lot of stuff that's really gray area and and works on the edges of both of those. Like, a good example is, cash forecasting, and where does that belong. And and we're starting to see, knocking down some of the barriers between these legacy systems and looking at sort of an integrated business process that can transcend a lot of things. Right? So we've got a new capability with an EPM called predictive cash forecasting. And it's really a blend of both ERP and EPM, and it uses a lot of our, you know, AI capabilities to really help organizations do that that cash forecasting. And then, you know, the last one is, you you know, we can't end the session without really talking about AI and and automation, And the ability to automate, integrate, do things faster, bring information forward quicker that you can act on, that is built in the DNA of the platform that we're building. And and, you know, anything that we're kind of building into this is, you know, how do we use predictions? How do we use automation? How do we lean on some of these new capabilities that, you know, the Oracle tech team helps, you know, develop and and bring those forward into the platform and do it in a way that's just elegant and easy for an FP and a user to to take advantage of. It's exciting times, you know, within the the Oracle world and the the platform. So Great. Yeah. I love where I love where the AI technology is heading. And you might be thinking, okay. All this stuff sounds great, but how do I get to a reality of what you're talking about, John and Chris? One of the probably the way to do it is is by starting with the EPM strategic assessment. When you hear assessment, you might be thinking technical assessment, you know, the and it's not what this is. This is not about scripting. This is not about, technology. This is about efficiencies. Our strategic assessments are all about coming in and understanding what you want to do with your business and how you can gain efficiencies through UPM so that you can really scale vastly. You can, hurdle over those common challenges and get your EPM technology, operating efficiently so you guys can focus on growing that business. So great way great place to start here. And then, following up with that would be taking advantage of our cloud training. We're one of the only partners out there that offer, EPM training on three different scales. We have public training that we're we're doing on a reoccurring basis. We have standard training that we do for both admins and end users, and we also have custom training courses. So not only will you have a road map that'll get you to, take advantage of the technology quickly, but you'll also know how to how to use it and and make your day to day life at work much more enjoyable so you can really be the the all star that we know that you are in in your in your organization. So thank you for joining us today in this webcast. We're gonna pass it over to Carrie to close us out. Thank you, John. That will conclude our webinar session today. Special thanks to Chris for presenting with us. Also, I want to thank everyone for your time and hope you join us for future events in our webinar series. The next one takes place on July 16, driving due diligence in Oracle EPM Cloud. Have a good day.