Managing Change for Business Services in 2025

And when I talk about services company, I talk about a wide range of organizations. I talk about construction companies, architectural firms, professional services, organization, accounting firms, all different kinds of organizations, and the market conditions are very, very tough to keep up with right now. Allocating resources is very, very important in today's environment. Whether those resources are people, resources, capital, equipment, resources, cash resources, whatever those resources are that you're dealing with right now, you have to really allocate it to the particular projects or departments that are really high impact in your organization. And not only do you need to allocate it, but you need to keep track of it and maintain it so you don't overcommit yourself in the organization. Revenue forecasting and financial stability is more important today than ever. We need to be able to predict when the revenue is actually coming in, predict when expenses are going out, and to be able to track that and morph that and make any changes associated to that.

Also, we all know clients are getting a little fickle these days and we want to be able to service our clients, whatever the clients are and be able to manage client expectations and changes in client expectations. And of course, regulatory compliance is consistently changing on a regular basis, so we want to be able to predict when something changed and be able to deal with that. The bottom line is we have to be more nimble in today's business environment. Change is happening quickly. We need to be able to predict when change might happen and to be able to adjust very, very quickly to those changes in order to stay in business and stay competitive. So let's go in and talk about how budgeting and planning could possibly help us in those particular areas. And oh, we're having a little thing, so how can we help manage change? It keeps moving.

Bella Brickle:All right. It looks like we're experiencing some technical difficulties, so just give us a moment while we try to get Rhea back in here. Kyle, I'm not sure if you want to continue talking.

Kyle Nesslar:Oh yeah. Did she freeze up? I couldn't tell. But maybe what we can do while Rio kind of reestablishes her connection is what I can do is start taking everybody through kind of a little demo of what a potential services dashboard and thing might look like. So let me share my screen here.

So what I'm going to show you guys all here today is just a potential dashboard of some of the things that you could ultimately look at and see. And everything here can be fully integrated and automated from a variety of source systems, whether that's your GL, HCMs, operational source systems, CRMs, data warehouses, everything can kind of be able to combine and be brought in to create one single source of trust within the tool and the platform for the company. And so the first dashboard I'm showing here is just a high level sample of a very top line financial dashboard to get a quick snapshot of where you're at and again, point in time. So you can see we have some basic things like revenue or our cost to consult, your services sold, gross margins, hot back costs, and even we can track cashflow and see how that's trending over time as we create our forecast and we plan those things accordingly.

And then even some cool little waterfall charts here where I can actually compare actuals to plan and get a quick snapshot of where maybe I'm creating overruns or underruns on budget. So for instance here you can see my budget was 4.1 and I'm at 6.3 and it looks like I might've went over on my TE budget for the month or the quarter, and then I'm looking at here. Now I'm breaking it down by my various divisions or areas where I can see, okay, it looks like my US north area may have kind of went way over on the budget from that standpoint. And if I wanted to get real even more granular detail, for instance, in my revenue side, I want to get an understanding of where I'm at from a service line perspective or ultimately locations and things like that by simply clicking on this 8.5 million here, if I wanted to see by service line, I can then click that down and it'll actually break it down.

So I could see, hey, of that 8.5 million, four and a half was for A or C or B, and I can continue to drill in and I'm only limited to the granularity I'm bringing in on the actual side from other pieces of information that I'm looking at. So then if I wanted to come in and come down here to location, I could see, okay, well now I'm breaking down my service line a by location and maybe I even want to see, oh, well what individual services are actually broken down for that so I can get as completely as granularly as I need from service line service, a one, a four, and so on and so forth. And then at any point in time, I can quickly hit the back button and get right back to my starting point to see where I'm at from that planning perspective here.

And I'm just right back to the original dashboard. So then I'm going to keep coming down here to the list. And if I go to Target versus plan, this is just a very high level dashboard of not only can you compare actuals to plans, but you can actually compare plans to other plans. So whether that's a budget to reforecast various other items, but what you could actually do here is you could have a completely top down benchmarking plan that maybe is provided by the executives of the organization to say, here's kind of where we want to have the targets hit for the given period. But then as you build up that more granular driver based plan, you can actually really see where we're coming from with, okay, here's how my plan is building up in time and how it's comparing to where the benchmarking was set so that you can actively make adjustments and corrections on the fly without having everything compiled and putting it in and then reviewing it and then saying, oh, well we're missing the mark.

We've got to go back and make adjustments. You could do all of that in real time very simply and easily with this tool. Now, one thing that's important to every organization and is one of the most obviously largest drivers of cost that any organization is workforce planning. And with this tool you can create very granular driver-based plans around your employee rosters and do a lot of variety of things. And so what you can see here is some high level dashboards where I can kind of see what my trending costs are over time while I can actually see here's just another simple waterfall where I can see my actuals, how they came in and how they align with my budget. I can get a quick head headcount start, but let's say, okay, well this is great. I've established my interim plan, but I want to make some changes to this, but I don't want to affect the original plan. Well, I can very simply easily create alternative scenarios very quickly that won't affect the original plan, but I can make those changes and kind of get a sense of where they're at very quickly in real time. So I'm just going to create a new scenario here and call it alternate. And by hitting create, it's going to ask me if I want to switch over, I'm going to say yes.

And so now what you'll see here is there's actually this plan called alternate that's really connected to the working budget. But any changes I make on this plan are not going to impact the original plan, but at any point in time if I decide, hey, these are the changes I really want with the push of a button, I could sync them back into the original plan and have that become my active working plan, working forecast, budget, whatever the case may be. So I'm going to make a couple of changes here just to show you what that looks like in real time. And I'm going to make a large change here just so it really jumps out. I'm going to say, okay, well now instead of 135,000, I'm going to pay this person 13 and a half million dollars. What I can see here is it's in blue right now because that means I made an edit, but I haven't actually saved it. Once I save this, I'm going to see my costs and my charts drive up in real time by hitting the save button here.

And so now what I'll see is my actual stayed the same, but now this budget rose way up. I could see where I went way over, I could see that all my bars here kind of jumped up significantly because now I'm paying this person significantly higher salary than what I was in the past. And the really cool thing about this is not only does all those changes happen in real time, it actually highlights in yellow any changes I make that are different from the original scenario that I created. So I can be very cognizant of the changes in the things that I'm doing that I'm actively doing to make sure that those changes are recorded appropriately. And so I can see that that change happened. But let's say, okay, well now I'm not going to hire this person until the end of September. So now when I change this, I'll see this headcount drop by one because now I no longer have that person as I had in March.

I can see that it updated this date highlighted in yellow, and you can see now my trend is a little bit different because where I'm at here, this person no longer existed. So it makes it consistent. And this number, actually, it's actually even a little lower now because originally I had this person planned for March, but now they're in a completely other, I've got them starting six months later. And all of these things are all completely driver-based. It can be synced from any source system that you may want to pull it from so that you can really create a budget in a truly automated fashion.

And actually real quick, I'll just jump back here to show you that if I go back to my original working budget, I can see nothing has been impacted from that standpoint. Everything is still the same. And as I said, if at some point in time I decide that, nope, these changes that I made on this plan, here are the changes that I want and this is going to reflect my new plan with a push of a button, I can sink everything in and everything will just realign in real time. So the next chart I'm going to talk here, and this is more specific, really related to certain maybe service lines that have project focus or other things. What I can see here is I've got a simple project tracking plan that I can do where I can kind of look at all my projects, I can break it down my customers estimated revenues and costs, and I can see, okay, here's a quick pie graph of all my revenues that I'm generating by customer.

And I can see what this graph here is showing me kind of, okay, in green is my revenue for these projects. Blue is my margin on those projects. And so again, if I looking at this information and I say, oh, wait, something doesn't look right here. Oh, well this project here, this isn't my revenue, this is actually the cost I estimate for the project and I really think I'm going to make a hundred thousand dollars on this project if I hit save, I'm going to see that now that customer, so customer one, now it's much bigger slice to my pie. And what I see here is actually that project related to that actually has a much higher revenue total and it altered my margin to account for all of those changes that I'm making. And again, everything continues to be highlighted in yellow. So you can bring those informational systems and whatever you need to have to see in order to make those changes and really do these in real time and make them efficient and very specific and granular to your needs of the organization to make sure that you're actively doing things.

And it allows organizations to become much more proactive as opposed to reactive and making sure that you're addressing everything that needs to happen for not only your clients but internally inside the organization. Now, another great feature about this and what's become very important to companies everywhere now is the concepts and the tools and capabilities around ai. And so here what I'm showing is an example of a predictive forecasting dashboard, which actually shows product units sold. And what we actually see here is a couple of different things. The line in Orange here is my unit sold from my current plan and what I'm actually predicting, but in green and blue here are actually auto generated projections of units sold based on very specific algorithms that Workday offers that can be driven and created and customized or configured to be able to do a lot of different things.

For instance, I can use these algorithms, but then maybe I want them to make those decisions based on something around CPI. And obviously all the things that are going on in today's world expenses and things are becoming very important to understand where costs are driving to. So you can actually have levers and triggers that can alter the decisions and the projections that these algorithms are making to change what it will predict out in the future that you can use in conjunction with your baseline plans to get a sense of what's actually truly happening inside the organization and where things may be going at any point in time. So it's very granular. You can do different things like seasonal projections or other, there's lots of different ways that you can actually alter the calculations and what those algorithms will ultimately project out and see where you're actually going as an organization and continually redo those as you get more and more information and get more and more precise and then coming through here.

So one of the other things that users love to have, because especially in the FP&A side, you want to be able to give as much information to your budget owners as possible to allow them to self-service as much information as possible so that you're spending your time more on analysis and less time on compiling data sets. So here's just a quick example of a three statement model based on web reporting that you can actually attach to the dashboarding too as well as actually get through it to the web reporting tool as well. But what you can see here is I have a comparative of here's what my actuals is, here's maybe my original budget, here's my working budget in terms of a reforecast and what's coming in. I can see variances. I can quickly expand and get down to various items like service line revenue, and I can see, okay, what's coming in, what do I have for my existing contracts and what do I have in terms of ink is dry versus Hey, here's where my pipeline is at and where is my pipeline going to predict what new revenue and things that I'm ultimately going to generate.

And so you can track that all the way through all your core operating expenses, all of those good things and good information that you can have quickly right at the hands of your fingertips. And this will allow your budget owners and end users to come in and self-service at the end of every month to understand variance analysis and get a sense of where everything's going and what may or may not be happening inside the organization and make changes and react accordingly to what things might be happening or make a more proactive and alterations is where you see different pings coming down the pipe in your organization. And not only do we have the p and l, but obviously we have a full balance sheet. You can do all sorts of ratios, quick ratios, current ratios, other examples of various things. We have a cashflow statement where I can kind of quickly see my operating investing financing activities and get a sense of how my cash is trending not only from an actual perspective, but what I'm forecasting it at.

That's what you can really do with the tool. You can create conditional formatting and highlighting that has little, in this case it's red flags, but it can quickly call out any variance percentages or things that I want somebody to drill into and really pay attention to understand better what's happening in that organization. Like I sold on the very first slide where the sales north side had gone over their t and e budget. They can quickly drill into that information and get a sense of what happened. Maybe, hey, something was coded wrong or maybe they know there was a one-time event that they had to account for and you could quickly and easily explain all that. And as I had mentioned before, we can get all sorts of financial metrics, cash ratios, current debt ratios, and not only can you do that with financial ratios, but you can also combine statistical data as well as financial data to create all sorts of important metrics to your organization.

Just a couple of very high level simple examples, maybe this is revenue by employee or cost by employee, and you can control these and make these calculations completely standard, standardized so that organizations can make sure and the finance team can control the calculations that people are doing so you don't have three different people calculating something three different ways and getting different answers inside the organization. It's a tool that's created by finance for finance to allow you guys to have the complete control over how your teams or your budget owners, your stakeholders will ultimately utilize the tool. So that's enough about dashboarding. What I want to spend another couple minutes on is talking about the office connect side of things. And so what this is a 62nd add-on to Excel that can pull all of the data directly into Excel so that you can cleanly create board quality reporting, clean formatted reporting that you may send out to external stakeholders.

And everything is completely connected into the tool. So not only is it great because if you have those automations at month end, if you have everything built out and cleanly formatted, really at the end of the day, all I have to do is change my date. So now I'm going to do my March reporting. I click this button and I hit refresh all sheets and in about 30 to 35 seconds it'll refresh everything. And what you'll see is all of my information will update live and everything will ultimately update to March. You can see this updated to March or a metrics sheet updated to March, whatever different, my balance sheet, all this information real time right away at the click of a button is all synced and pulled in. And not only is this great for obviously no longer having to create and customize all these board reports or month end financial statements, quarter end, year end, whatever they are, it's excellent for last minute changes.

So if people are ever in the situation where you've got everything prepped and prepared for your board meeting the next day, but then all of a sudden that morning, an hour or two before your meeting, something comes in and changes needed to made on the accounting end and the statements are all wrong, well all you do is you can simply run the integration and pull the latest data into the tool and adaptive, then all you have to do is refresh your data and you don't have to worry about it anymore. No more changing hundreds of charts and graphs and things on that information. You just quickly and easily click a couple of buttons and you're ready to go again without having that last minute panic or having inaccurate information where you're presenting information that's either out of date or for whatever reason may be incorrect.

And not only does this work with Office Connect, it actually works with PowerPoint as well and as well as Word. But what I'll show you over here is what you can see is all of my slides here are updated for March. So really everything jumps right in and all I have to do is maybe make my commentary and then I'm good to go. So for instance, just so you can see no smoke and mirrors on this, I'm going to flip it back to February. And so when I hit refresh off sheets, what you'll see in real time is this will update to March, excuse me, from March back to February, once the integration's done running or the import's done running, and you can see it's back to February with simple push of a button, everything's set to February. I've got my graphs and my charts that are here on February.

So at the end of every month, all I have to do is leave some commentary, I'm good to go, no more last minute changes, no more issues with any of those things. Everything is just push of a button and all you're doing, as I said, is now you have the ability to spend your time on analysis and becoming more proactive as opposed to reactive in your organization when looking at historical information. So with that, I'm going to stop my share and I'm going to turn it back to the Rhea for any kind of final commentary or close out.

Rhea Wade:I am back so sorry for the technical difficulties. As you can probably guess, Kyle and I have been doing this for a very, very long time and we can talk forever, but what I thought we'd do before we end is just go through the slides to let you know what they're entailed and you can always look at the widgets at the bottom to see what it is. But we like to talk about Workday. Adaptive planning because we're trying to keep employees for longer is another byproduct and hopefully you saw from the adaptive planning application, it's easy to use. It creates a culture of support. It encourages your end users to actually continuous learning, learn more, want to be around. You can align your objective with the company goals so people know what's going on to everything, and then build strong supportive relationships.

We have lots and lots of customers, some very, some that name recognition and some that you don't. I took some from architectural and engineering, the construction community, real estate, community, professional services and things like that. The last thing I want to leave with everybody is we talked about active dashboarding and scenario planning and things like that, but the one thing I want to leave you with is that the adaptive planning solution is easy to use, easy to use for all kinds of users, whether you're finance, accounting, project managers, residential managers, things like that, easy to administer. You don't have to go to an administrative class for three weeks in order to learn this stuff. It's extremely powerful and flexible. You can use the system very, very simply. As you saw on Kyle's demo, you can just do, here's the income statement, let me add cashflow and balance sheet later, or it can do everything all at once.

It's your decision on how to use the application itself and you can do a crawl, walk, run, and it's also very, very fast. As you saw, Kyle did a lot of things in a few minutes and the system reacted very, very quickly. Were old traditional systems is when you press the enter key, you see a little Rubik's cubes, twirling, time clocks twirling, everything is updated very, very quickly. So with that, we thank you very much. We'll send a recording out. Of course, if you would like some more information, please feel free. Does anybody have any questions with the last couple of minutes? Oh, Kyle, I have a question and I think you're best to answer. The question is, can we integrate other systems with Adaptive?

Kyle Nesslar: Yes, adaptive is designed to be a single source of trust that brings all of your other systems together in one place for companies to use as that one repository to review things. So we often find that we integrate not only from the GL systems or ERP, but we bring things in from payroll systems, HCN systems, operational systems, CRMs, data warehouses, data lakes, all of those things. Anything can be seamlessly integrated through one of a variety of different established connectors that they have to bring information over to be able to compare budgets to actuals at the granularity you need.

Rhea Wade:Very good. Thank you. And the one last we could answer real quickly is with ai, how is AI work with Adaptive? And I'll answer that, Kyle, because I'll make it a quick answer is Kyle showed a little bit about ai. We realized that our customers are in different spots in their journey. Ai, some may be very, very beginning. I just want BVA reporting and that's all I want. I don't want to go any further. Others are maybe in the next step. They want to have anomaly checking, put a box around a number, and if it exceeds that box, be notified. And others are truly involved in the AI journey. With Adaptive, it's not like Chat GBT or Microsoft Copilot. The system can go in and look at the past and what the numbers are and forecast out the future, which Kyle showed in the demonstration.

The nice thing is, is you don't have to be a data scientist within the Help Text for Adaptive. Not only does it show you how you can do the AI within Adaptive, but we have different algorithms that you can go through. You don't have to know the algorithm. You just say, I picked these algorithms. The help text will tell you what different algorithms are used for, and you can go in and say all algorithms and learn how to use AI within the tool instead of having to go to a college course to do that. With that our time, I'm a little over. Bella, can I turn it back to you for final comments?

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}