Finance guided operations - Innovation spotlight series

Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us for our Innovation Day series. Today's topic is Finance Guided Operations where we're going to recap and dive into the innovations we announced at OneStream Splash just a few weeks ago. Now whether you joined us in Orlando or on our world tour, caught the live stream or are hearing about these announcements for the first time today, the next 30 minutes will give you an absolutely clear picture of where finance is heading and how OneStream is going to help you get there.

Now with regards to our speakers today and for the session, my name is Prash Chatterjee. I'm the Global Director of Product Marketing focusing on planning and analysis and I'm pleased to be joined by Jeremy Gutman who is our Executive VP of Product and Engineering.

Now some quick housekeeping before we get started. We'll be talking about some products and capabilities that are still evolving and some of what we discussed today is based on current plans and assumptions and is subject to change at the discretion of OneStream.

Now you'll see this quote on our screen from our Forward Finance Research which we as OneStream published just earlier this year. We looked at hundreds of finance teams around the world to understand how the role is changing and we identified five defining personas of the modern CFO function.

One of them stood out for this session, the Chief Operator. The Chief Operator isn't the CFO who closes the books faster, it's a finance leader who embeds finance directly into how the business runs day to day, who turns financial insight into operational decisions and who helps steer the business forward, not just report on where it's been. That shift from a scorekeeper to Chief Operator is what this whole session is about and we're going to walk through today is how OneStream is helping building the platform to make that role real.

Now one of the things I want to point out is that OneStream is a five-time leader in the Gardner Magic Quadrant for financial planning software. The research evaluates vendors not just by their capabilities within the financial planning space but also how they integrate, operate and help create the capabilities to help finance teams work with their operational counterparts to help create a cohesive view of the enterprise and that's something you'll hear about quite clearly today as to why we take the finance and operational synergies quite seriously.

Now for those of you that are new to OneStream, I'm just going to take a little bit of time to help introduce us.

OneStream is a platform for the office of the CFO. We are built on three key pillars, the first of which is financial management, which is the core finance your business must do, such as closing consolidations and financial planning and analysis.

Then there's operational planning and analysis, which is various processes and functions within planning analysis, such as sales performance management, capital planning, ESG planning and reporting that help bring your operational data closer and harmonize with their financial data in a manner as well that's really easy to consume.

And finally, their sensible AI, which is absolutely what finance needs to be a leader within the organization and as well to add shareholder value to drive the business forward. Because we are a platform and we don't have separate modules in disjointed applications. All of this happens on our platform with built-in financial intelligence.

I led the last slide talking about the core and amplify the core is a phrase that Craig Colby, one of our founders coined years ago, and it still shows up in everything we do. Jeremy, for the audience joining us, what does it actually mean to amplify the core and why does it start there?

Praz, it's a great question. When we talk about the core, first, what are we talking about? Well, we're talking about those financial processes you must do, things like closing the books, being able to report on actuals, consolidate those numbers, financial planning, financial reporting. These are the things that you must do.

And with a single platform, with one stream, you can do all of those. And so that's what this pillar is really focused on and is all about. And so being able to leverage one platform to do all of those operations puts you in a unique spot. One, you've got one single platform tackling all of that financial or core finance process or core finance workflows.

But next, when you've done that, when you've kind of tackled it from that first transaction creating all the way through to financial reporting, you've de-risked all of those processes, you've automated them, and you've given yourself time back. Time to then kind of focus on more strategic opportunities and a more strategic remit that we find finance is trying to do. And so bringing all those together, freeing up yourself, giving yourself more time to focus on strategic needs, that's what amplifying the core means. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeremy. Now,

one of the key keys of our platform is that we have a data model where our data sits, which is really different and unique from other solutions in the EPM space. And what this allows for is the concept of truly unified financial and operational data on our platform. So Jeremy, with that being said, once a customer has unified data and the core in place, what's the more that they're now positioned to take on? Yeah. Yeah. That more is critical to understand. And I mentioned it a little bit when I talked about kind of time and opportunity to enter a more strategic remit.

And, you know, Praj, you hit it at the onset, talking about the chief operator. The more you want to do here, the things you want to get done, is you want to help the business. You want to help the business better understand how to tackle the operational needs and how those operational needs tied to finance.

And so that's why the finance team is so important here, because the finance function understands both the business that you're engaging and need to execute on, as well as the data. And so being able to kind of cross and bridge the divide between business goals, business objectives, and the financial workflows to get you there and understanding the data, that's the more.

And there's a whole myriad of use cases, as we've seen from our customers, our partners, and the ecosystem at large. In this operational space, this is the more that we hear people want to tackle. And this is the more that we've been focused on unlocking. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Now, let's spend some time talking about, you know, what people are really here to listen. Operational planning and analytics pillar, like what that actually is and what that means to us at OneStream.

Yeah, it's a great question. Right. So when we're looking to unlock the more, there are technology enablers that you need to effectively move into this area. And so this pillar is focused on building the features and the functions to do just that. Right. You see here, we call it agile financial analytics.

And what that means is there are services that we're creating that allow you to build more flexible and more dynamic models. We have analytic services like dynamic cubes, dynamic dimensions, and a whole series of capabilities that allow you to build models that are more flexible and can respond to the changes in your business, can respond to that data. Because as a finance team, you understand, as we said, the objectives and the data. And so these tools, these capabilities help bring that together and make it real. Fantastic.

Now, Jeremy, this IDTC stat lands really hard. Based on your discussions and what you've seen in the market, are you seeing CFOs take on a bigger remit in conversations with their customers? And, you know, what is it that's changing and about like what they expect from a planning platform and a finance platform for that matter?

Yeah, it's a great it's a great question. You know, I mentioned just a few moments ago that, you know, we see finance getting pulled into these operational functions and and rather these operational use cases. That's exactly what we see in conversations with CFOs. They're asking for tools and capabilities to help with the operational needs of the business. Right. So this trend that IDC is talking about this trend is real. You know, we see it when we talk to these CFOs and we ask them their needs and their capability, you know, their requirements to help their operational business.

We see that they're already experiencing this merge. We have current customers where the CFO is also functioning as the COO. So this is happening today. This is real. And it's what's driving us. Right. It's what's driving our orientation to the the solutions we build, to the capabilities that we build in the platform.

Fantastic. And you know what? I know we're going to see a lot of that in just a few minutes. So with that in mind, before we get there, I did want to say that, you know, one thing we're quite proud of at OneStream is that we've now been recognized as an operational planning leader by Gartner, IDC and ISG. So with that being said, what is it about the platform that analysts are responding to when it comes to OneStream?

It's a great question. You know, I talked about a few already like agile financial analytics and agile financial services, but there's several other core elements of our platform and of our pillars that make this possible. A key area here is extensible dimensionality, right? It's being able to plan and model your business at any level. And if that's a departmental level, corporate, if it's geographical, whatever the driver is, whatever the level of detail and granularity that you need to plan your business, that's what extensible dimensionality enables.

And Praz, you talked about it as well, but I want to hit it again. It's a unified data model, right? It's a unified data model that understands core finance. And as we talked about closed consolidations, it's that same unified data model that you can leverage with your dynamic dimensions and dynamic cubes. And it's the same unified data model that you can leverage in Finance.ai, because we are an AI native platform, right? It's that unification that's built in, available everywhere, or what we say, always on.

That's what makes this possible. And that's why it's no surprise we see our customers using us more and more in these operational spaces. And it's great to see the same feedback from the analysts across the market. I couldn't agree more.

So with that being said, and I'm really excited about this part because I know you've got a lot to say on it. Quick framing question before we get into all the announcements. What do we mean by finance without limits? And why is that the umbrella for everything we're about to walk through?

Yeah, you know, when we have conversations with CFOs and they ask us about how we can help them in their operational needs. We talk about the convergence of the CFO and the COO. All of that is constrained by tools that don't provide them the flexibility and the capability to execute. And so what we want to focus on, what we want to do is we want to effectively address those needs, remove any constraints that finance might have. We want to deliver the solutions that finance is looking for, the way they want them, where they work, and how they work. Right?

Give finance those capabilities, give finance those tools, and you enable finance to be this true strategic advisor to the business. Right? And you talked about it. Finance isn't a function that exists to deliver the numbers. Right? Finance is a function that exists to advise and guide the business. And so what is OneStream focused on? We're focused on giving our customers the platforms, the capabilities, and the solutions to operate without limits. That's what it means to us. Perfect.

So what does that mean as we think about the future? And what does that mean to us when we look at building planning tools? Well, as I said, finance wants to be unconstrained. Finance wants to have those kind of blockers removed. And what that means is you have to take a closer look at the requirements of what's happening in this operational space.

And what becomes clear is there are new planning tools that are needed. There's new planning models. There's a new way to model that's needed. And so that's kind of a large idea. And it could be a bit abstract. Let me use a quick example in another area that we saw transform quite significantly. And that's the navigation space.

So to kind of lay the groundwork here, what's critical here and how did this transformation happen? Well, first, navigation started with maps. What are maps? They're a single source of the truth. We know that that's important.

Next, we started with simple routing devices, getting you from point A to point B. But what happened next was we took those two fundamental needs, but we brought the next piece that was needed, which is real-time visibility into what's happening.

Real-time visibility into the signals on our journey that are important to us. These are things like construction, traffic, you know, accidents.

And now what we have is we have the ability to do dynamic navigation transformation, right? Myself running this app, driving from point A to point B, I can be alerted to what's happening and I can decide what I want to do with those alerts. I can decide if I want to accept a rerouting change or not. I can use my cognitive ability to digest the information I'm getting and decide how I want to go forward. That's the human in the loop. And you're doing all of that on one platform with one experience.

So that's what made that navigation transformation so important. We think planning needs that same exact or similar transformation. We want our planning models to operate the way we think.

We want to be able to cognitively respond to what's happening and plan our business, right? We call this the cognitive planning era where these planning tools, these planning capabilities, they learn, they understand the changes, right? They're looking for the signals.

Based on the signals, they can adapt. They can adapt to change. They can enable the human in the loop to give decision-making capability based on the signals that they've got. And then the model can adapt and change. We're not talking about someone taking the time to go figure out or predict the change or go make a model change because something has happened. No, we don't reconfigure the map when we're driving. We don't need to reconfigure the model. These models can be more flexible, more adaptive, and they can operate and they can change as they need. And that's what's really exciting here.

And so you might ask then, okay, how are we doing that? Well, there's a number of things that we're introducing. The first of which is line item modeling. It's the latest capability that's really powering this cognitive planning era. And we announced this at Splash. What's really different about this is it's one engine that allows you to configure and address a whole myriad of operational planning use cases. And you can do it without coding. It's all through configuration and standard capabilities.

And the LIDA modeling engine does exactly what we just talked about. It gives you the ability to configure it so we can learn, it can adapt, and it can enable those models to change over time.

Now that's the capability and you can leverage it directly. Or what we want to do is we want to make it even easier and we want to deliver its capability in the context of the business challenges, those operational and financial, that you want to tackle.

And so what are we doing? Well, I'm pleased to discuss what we announced at Splash, which is the first two packages and first two solutions built on line item modeling. And that's fixed term planning and duration based planning. So fixed terms covers aspects and use cases for projects, leases, and subscriptions. Right? So that's one capability that you can use in a number of different sectors, a number of different industries. You know, certainly if you're in the public sector, you know, you're not new to capital projects and large investments. This is a great solution to help you be there.

On duration based, we're looking at covering things like contracts and grants, which also has a number of different use cases that are applicable to many verticals, certainly one of which would be higher education. So you can see there's a lot of flexibility in these solutions and they're freely, you know, geared and configured and set up to enable you to tackle your use cases faster. Now, one of the key line items in any business is people, right? They're a strategic asset and they're also a significant expense.

And so we're excited that we are able to announce a new workforce planning solution, right? That really helps you dial in focus on what's happening within your workforce. And what makes this different, right, is the ability to truly unify finance, HR and operations all in one solution, right? And again, because it's powered by the line item modeling engine, you're talking about configuration and setting up your calculations to address your needs without coding, without any extensive development.

Now, this new solution is easier to configure and faster to deploy, but we didn't want to stop there. When we see certain standard deployments, standard calculations and standard needs, what we wanted to do is we wanted to help accelerate the time to value. And that's why we were pleased to announce the workforce planning express solution, right? Works on top of workforce planning.

And what it does is it packages our experience with a thousand plus implementations dealing with people and workforce related needs, right? Understanding common setups, standard calculations and so much more. And so what makes this different is it's designed to be delivered faster, designed so that you can get a faster time to value, right? And so you've seen that from us with other express products. We're freely focused on how do we continue to accelerate the time to value.

And with that in mind, we also introduced at Splash our OneTrim Financial Planning Express. It's the latest express package within our express family. And, you know, now that you've seen it a couple times, you know, it's based on our experience working with our ecosystem, right? So that's 1800 plus customers.

And so what's in Financial Planning Express, our standard reports and packages, our best practices, again, working on all these implementations, what have we learned and how can we package that and make it available for you? Again, delivered in weeks, really looking at accelerating it.

It's one thing to focus on a use case and a need and evolve that forward and then implement it. But we want this to be something you can leverage for an iterative evolution and deployment as you tackle more and more use cases, right? Because that's where you're going to find the biggest, you know, impact to your business, a financial impact, an operational impact.

These are the things that truly transform kind of your business and transform the reality of how you plan.

So there's a lot of exciting announcements. Really, the last question is, when are you going to start planning?

So that's great, Jeremy. And in fact, like just to recap, you've covered a lot and you've talked about our vision at OneStream with the cognitive planning era.

You brought about the fact that, you know, we have line item modeling and with line item modeling, we've got duration-based planning, fixed term planning, as well as workforce planning, but as well easing that deployment with the workforce planning express and then closing the loop with everything with financial planning express. So what I'm wondering is if you're an existing customer or you're a prospect and you ask yourself, well, where do I actually start? What's your answer to that?

It's a great question. You know, if you're an existing customer, you know, certainly you want to leverage what you've already built on the platform and continue extending.

As we talked about line item modeling and fixed term and duration-based, these are great solutions that can help you tackle these use cases and can add on well and leverage the investment you've already made, right? Dimensions you've already built, the investment you've made in that unified data model. If you're new to the platform and you're focused on planning, Financial Planning Express is a great way, as we talked about, to get up and running in weeks.

As well, Financial Planning Express isn't tied to any predefined data model or predefined setup. If you're an existing customer and you're looking at the next planning use case, you can leverage Financial Planning Express. We're really trying to make it as easy as possible to leverage these solutions so you can focus on the challenges and deploy it and get that return on your investment. Awesome. Thank you so much.

So I began a conversation today talking about forward finance. And so how does everything we've covered today connect back to the broader forward finance vision?

David Miller It's a great question. Forward finance, when we use that term, we're fundamentally talking about finance becoming the operating system for the business, right? And that finance is not just a reporting function, but a strategic function. And our research supports that. We hear it from the market. And that's that conversation we had in the beginning about the chief operator, where you're really focused on how you can help steer the business.

And everything we talked about in finance-led operations and the solutions and the capabilities that we've deployed on the platform, they're all geared to enable that, to enable finance to be that operator. Light item modeling gives chief operators the engine to model and plan their business at that level of granularity, right? That level of granularity at the light item level is where business happens and where it actually operates with these capabilities. You can model and plan. Workforce planning, we talked about it unifies finance, HR and operations. Right?

That's those three functions coming together. That's a key operational unlock. And as we said, and you know, it's one of the biggest line items on your P&L, right? That's the kind of cross-functional enablement that these solutions are delivering. And that's what forward finance needs, right? Our express packages carry that forward.

So you see that we're really focused on how do we give you the data, the context, the governance on our platform and within all of the solutions that we're delivering, right? That's what we've built into OneStream. That's why we talk so much about the unified data model for finance and operations, right? And that's what it means to be an AI native platform. It's all coming together. So if it's, you know, cognitive planning, line item modeling, workforce, our express packages, all of these elements in our portfolio are here to make that chief operator role something that's real.

Like that's the vision for forward finance. That's what, you know, we're so focused on and delivering today.

And I think we have some questions coming in. So with that in mind, the first questions that did come in was, how do I install line item modeling and the other solutions?

Great question. Line item modeling, all the solutions we talked about today are available on the OneStream Solution Exchange. You can log in there, you can browse all of our offerings. And certainly with line item modeling from there, you can add that to your environment just through a couple of simple clicks.

Another one. You mentioned these operational models. Do they need to be integrated with the financial model or is that done automatically? It's a great question. So one, the customer or the implementer has the control. And if you'd like these models to operate and be natively networked together, that's how they work. You don't have to take data from one and load and import it into another. You can have them dynamically work together and they're always updated. They're always in sync. Fantastic.

And I know you touched on this one just a little earlier, but just to recap, how does AI play into the financial and operational planning solutions and processes?

That's a great question. So one is an AI native platform. We have AI capabilities that stretch across everything that we do. And so that means that our AI capabilities are available across our platform and available in all of our solutions. You've already seen us in other solutions in integrate a number of AI capabilities. And that surfacing is a simple setup and configuration that you're going to see us continue to extend and add everywhere.

That's the benefit of having an AI native platform and the investment that we've made to build out the finance AI killer. Fantastic. Well, before we wrap, take a look at the resources on screen. You'll find absolutely everything you need to learn more about forward finance, the new operating model for intelligent organizations and how it helps finance teams put AI and trusted data to work to steer the business forward as well. Be sure to check out our Splash Experience Hub, where you can explore all the exciting new product innovations we just announced.

With that, I want to thank you, Jeremy, for sharing these great announcements and insights. To you, the audience, thank you so much for joining us today. And we hope OneStream can join you on the path to help take finance further. Thank you. Thanks.