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Join us on October 15, 2020 at 5:00 PM Pacific for a complimentary virtual mixology event powered by and Black Diamond Advisory, a Platinum OneStream Partner. Our guests will craft two cocktails with an award-winning mixologist. Learn about flavor balance and mixology skills with instructions, tips and stories along the way. We provide the ingredients!  

Ahead of the event, Avital will send you all the necessary ingredients to create cocktails. During this exclusive event, you will be guided through the mixology, network with fellow finance and accounting professionals, and have some fun! 

Please follow this Registration Link to enter your information directly with Avital to receive your ingredients or reach out to Sherri Schaffroth (sschaffroth@blackdiamondadvisory.com).  

We’ll hear from Jason Karber, CPM Expert and former Koch Industries OneStream customer along with OneStream Sales VP, Mark Reed. Jason will tell a quick customer success story and Mark will share a brief overview of how OneStream has achieved 100% success in delivering world-class corporate performance management (CPM) solutions.   

This event is by invitation only and space is limited. 

To receive your ingredients, please complete the shipping form and register by Wednesday, October 1st. Spouses and loved ones are welcome to participate with you.  

 Cheers!  

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Local government agency finance leaders within the Office of Budget & Management (OMB) and Comptroller offices are under pressure to improve decision support, increase transparency, and create efficiencies. With continued scrutiny of fiscal spending and the tightening of legislative budgets, the formulation process is evolving from line item approvals to performance-based budgets to provide greater visibility into longer-term return on investment. 

To address these increasing demands, finance leaders are re-evaluating their legacy corporate performance management (CPM) tools and are modernizing with CPM 2.0 solutions. CPM 2.0 applications move finance transformation forward by unifying & aligning detailed operational plans, capital spending and workplace plans with financial results and reporting—all in a single application. 

During this webinar you will learn how to: 

• Reduce risk with built-in Financial Data Quality 

• Manage the Budget Formulation Process 
• Automate the budget book 
• Enable users with self- service visualizations & reporting 

 Randy Werder – President, Black Diamond 

Tyler Rodichok – Manager, Deloitte 

John O’Rourke – VP of Product Marketing and Communications, OneStream Software 

REGISTER NOW

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“You’ve gotta start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and figure out where you are going to sell it.” – Steve Jobs, 1997

After years of being a happy OneStream customer and gaining insider insight into the SaaS software industry, I want to set the record straight on cloud offerings in the Corporate Performance Management market. In this article, I will attempt to give a detailed review of a client experience utilizing OneStream’s Azure cloud solution and compare/contrast this with the current “True SaaS” solutions.

Business Leaders evaluating cloud software have important questions to ask. The first should be to ask how the product produces the best outcome for your business and what are the key criteria that should be used to measure performance and reliability in cloud offerings. Below are a few categories that evaluators should consider:

Other Considerations

Incentives: One of the “secrets” of cloud software is that there are incentives at play when selling the solution. One is that the vendor often believes the costs of the cloud to support the product are trending downward for either option. Investor expectations often include an assumption that the “True SaaS” products have steady or increasing license costs with a declining cost of sales. With OneStream, the customer reaps the full benefit of cloud cost reductions or performance improvements during this process. Carefully consider which benefits your company more.

Change Control: It is true that changes to the “True Saas” solutions updates have historically been more frequent. While this sounds like a benefit, consider this carefully. This is an exciting feature for software with a limited scope. For software meeting complex and diverse use cases it can be dangerous. Customers in these areas often have situations that were difficult to foresee in the vendor’s testing. Vendor quality control is essential in both categories, and deployment timing
flexibility may be an essential business requirement. Many wish to retain control of updates during yearend, acquisitions, restructuring, and legal hold situations. A vendor may claim zero defects, but past production rollouts that impacted the entire customer base adversely may tell a different story. Understand your testing requirements and windows.

Performance: It is critical to discover if your prospective solution meets your speed and consistency expectations. This can be very difficult to ascertain because “True SaaS” solutions can have terms and conditions that prohibit conducting benchmarking or disclosing any results. Make sure to understand if your solution performance slows during other customers’ peak activity. I have seen examples where a frustrated customer called support to hear than they needed to wait until other jobs have finished, and even one requesting that a customer reschedule high overhead jobs to a more opportune time. Diligently review the limitations of acceptable use, interview peers that are live, and incorporate dispute resolution in your contract.

Lock-in: Lock-in can be a challenge for any software. It can be an easy subject to miss during evaluation and can be a big challenge in the future. Evaluate how
difficult it is to extract 100% of your data, attachments, etc. Products vary significantly on this, and some could be described as “designed for lock-in”. If your product is sold to another vendor or supported with a different cloud what impacts does it have to your business? There are sometimes preferences of businesses to avoid one provider over another.

Security: Security can be very good with either option, though OneStream’s cloud offering approach is widely accepted to be the most secure. OneStream has been certified at leading levels (FedRAMP) that I have not seen other vendors match. Independently verify your expectations and your vendor’s offering when it is relevant to you.

Scalability: Scalability can be excellent with either option. In instances where it is at the discretion of the vendor, consider the vendor’s reputation, and ensure that
expectations are clear. In use cases where the load is evenly spread over time “true SaaS” solutions can be very cost-efficient and yield high performance. In
performance management and ERPs, there is often concurrent demand (nearly everyone closes monthly in the first days or weeks) that makes it difficult to reap
the full benefit. With OneStream, the cloud resources are determined by the customers’ use case and is dedicated.

Summary

As always, consider it essential to talk with multiple customers that have similar complexity and are live on any prospective solution. Ask your vendor for a 100% list of customers who have purchased the product (live or not) and talk with as many as you can.

OneStream’s cloud offering is the most customer-focused approach in the marketplace. While other vendors may disparage the approach, it is the one that
provides the power, reliability, and consistency needed for large enterprises. Full SaaS solutions have incentives present that can be a detriment to the customer. With OneStream customers retain control of their data, performance, and options in the future. Many will find this favorable compared to other researched alternative companies limiting expenses.

The post Selecting a Performance Management Software with Your Head in the Clouds appeared first on Black Diamond | OneStream Solutions.

The natural reaction to be cautious and delay seems logical, but our recent experience proves that now is the time to make huge progress in leveraging technology to support finance processes and analytical capability.

The greatest advances occur in challenging times when people are forced to find solutions to new and difficult problems. This is especially true in the current business climate. We have seen more innovation in finance technology with our clients in the last few weeks than we have seen in years.  Forecast models have become mission-critical applications and the need to combine and translate operational information into financial metrics is critical. Corporate Performance Management (CPM) applications will become one of the most important investments in the next few years to allow companies the flexibility and finance automation capability to respond to this new world. The natural reaction to be cautious and delay seems logical, but our recent experience proves that now is the time to make huge progress in leveraging technology to support finance processes and analytical capability.  

The market standard for CPM is OneStream Software

All of our clients use the OneStream XF Platform to unify financial consolidation, budget/forecast, and financial analysis capabilities. They use the power of the single platform to perform detailed scenario modeling, leveraging financial and operational data from a single interface to get fast and reliable insights into their changing business. Over the last five years, nearly 100% of the CPM consulting industry investment has been in OneStream. Oracle Hyperion practices have gotten much smaller within the Big 4 / Boutique Consulting firms while the OneStream practices are growing by an average of 20-40%. The implications of this are real – there has been a huge talent shift towards OneStream that will continue at an even higher rate over the next several years. When we founded Black Diamond, it would have been much easier to provide both Hyperion and OneStream services but the reason why we are exclusively OneStream is important. Every one of our consultants who has experience with OneStream will never go back to Hyperion – this has been the reality in the marketplace for several years. OneStream’s focus on 100% Customer Success allows for a great long-term partnership for innovation at each client.

OneStream Software doesn’t care where you work – Start Now

We have seen incredible productivity in projects that are in the middle of development and our clients have easily adapted to remote sessions and application development.  We have modified our client’s work processes to take advantage of the unique opportunity. We have also started new projects in the last few weeks and it has become clear how important our work is right now. Clients are really motivated to bring new capabilities to their companies as soon as possible. Black Diamond has been implementing CPM solutions with a remote implementation methodology for several years and we have a unique advantage to lead clients and the industry in remote working best practices. Many of our global clients have multiple locations with limited ability to get their team together in person and we progressed to using online collaboration tools and a proprietary project management approach to be hugely successful.

Kill Spreadsheets – Financial Reporting and Analysis are now too important

After almost 25 years in the industry, we continue to be amazed at how many companies continue to overuse spreadsheets and legacy applications for financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis. Many companies right now have thousands of finance professionals building complex workbooks to help guide them through the crisis. While the industry is comfortable with this tool, complete dependency on something that is so easily manipulated is madness. It’s time to look for every opportunity to turn a manual, disparate, unmanageable spreadsheet nightmare into a process that uses centralized technology to support critical data and analytic needs. Finance leaders and their teams deserve technology that can take advantage of their talents and drive the accuracy and automation every company expects.

Key Areas for Immediate Focus:

1.    KPI Optimization – Use this crisis to find the “Metrics that Matter.”  Look for additional opportunity to combine more operational and financial data into patterned analysis that can support trend analysis and decision making.

2.    Refine Forecast Models – Leverage technology to develop multiple scenarios and trend analysis to develop key action (and reaction) plans.

3.    Proactively drive technology investment – Encourage your team to engage in technology demonstrations and use this time to truly understand how digital finance technology can support your immediate and future needs.

Black Diamond stands ready to support the digital finance transformation required to help finance leaders respond to the current and future challenges. We truly thank all of our clients for their partnership during the last few weeks and encourage everyone to take advantage of this unique situation to double down on technology to support their future.

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Most people hear Robotic Process Automation and immediately start picturing an assembly line, not unlike the one above. Repeatable processes handled in a highly efficient manner using purpose-built machines with exacting specifications. Every detail is monitored, every action precisely performed, all with an extremely low failure rate and, with proper maintenance, infinite repeat-ability.

Well, it turns out you can achieve the same sort of productivity gains and accuracy in using software systems – without any cumbersome robots getting in the way.

A recent survey conducted by OneStream Software (found here) revealed that the idea of Predictive Analytics, which is a perfect use case for Robotic Process Automation, is not some far-fetched idea. While only roughly 15% of those polled are currently using these types of predictive tools, nearly 40% were in the planning phases of using them to improve their business. As summarized by John O’Rourke, VP of Product Marketing at OneStream Software, “The target use cases for Predictive Analytics and ML are mostly on the revenue side of the business with Sales Forecasting and Demand Planning in the top five.” They recognize that the value of their data is not in the data itself; but rather in the information that can be systematically extracted from that data. That information, when projected forward, can then be used to predict what might happen in the future.

The vast majority of those polled were most excited about the possibilities of using Predictive Analytics to improve their forecast process. In and of itself, this isn’t unusual at all. We are constantly meeting new clients that have the same problems – a complicated and drawn-out forecasting process that everybody dreads, few fully understand, and executives demand. The key is figuring out how to use the old data, and how to extract valuable information that can help this process in the future. And that is where we come in.

The five main benefits of Robotic Process Automation are:

• Scalability and Flexibility
• Accuracy and Quality
• Productivity and Efficiency
• Advanced Analytics and Security
• Cost Savings

Through a combination of purpose-built input forms and user-friendly dashboards, we’re able to implement a tool that will help automate the drudgery of the Forecasting and Planning processes, putting reliably accurate data into the hands of your analysts and decision-makers faster than ever before. No more passing around spreadsheets and sitting in meetings, handing out assignments people don’t want, to people who don’t want to be there. You hired analysts, not data entry technicians!

Best of all, these capabilities are BUILT INTO the platform that is blazing the trail forward in Corporate Performance Management – OneStream XF. Our team is merely harnessing that power and tailoring it to give you the best results possible.

Robotics without the robots. Who’d’ve thunk it?

To learn more, please contact us below.

Thanks for reading!

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The Stage Data Dashboard contains Source and Target Dimensions.  The user can filter on any dimension as well as export the full data set to .csv.  The dashboard can be put on the workflow so users can troubleshoot data issues without IT or admin help.

Out of the box in OneStream, you have to drill into each line item to get the source items. The stage data dashboard has all the data on one screen.

The post Fast And Easy Dashboard Brings Stage Data Into Focus appeared first on Black Diamond | OneStream Solutions.

In the late ’90s, I took a leap of faith – leaving my job as a finance manager at the wonderful world of Disney to join a company called Hyperion Solutions.

I was terrified to fly, had a full head of hair, and no clue what EPM was or what this cutting-edge technology called Essbase did.

What I did know was that the people that welcomed me were upbeat, positive thinkers, and incredibly passionate about what they were doing.

The work was hard, the hours were long, and I loved every second of it.   Being around people who were gifted with intelligence and personalities to match were with me the entire way through my early career and it taught me that what you do is not nearly important than WHO you do it with.

As time went on, people left for other opportunities, and eventually, Hyperion was sold. Thus, I had to move on to the next phase of my work life.

For the next 18 years, I tried to find that magical combination of people, passion, and product that matched what pulled me into this amazing career that I have had, only to find everything came up just short of those high expectations.  When I found OneStream a few years ago, I was optimistic that I may have found something; then I found the passionate people around it and I knew I found something.  The ‘why’ I do what I do was re-born. I am now surrounded by people at Black Diamond who have a passion for a product you can believe in, a group that believes that the culture of a company is something to be cherished and wake up every day excited about what rewarding experience awaits.

That is why I do what I do and why Black Diamond Advisory was established.

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