Name: Next Gen FP&A: Eliminating Risk and Accelerating Insight with Intelligent Rolling Forecasts
Uploaded: 2026-02-11T02:35:13.163Z
Duration: 48 min 28 s
Description: Next Gen FP&A: Eliminating Risk and Accelerating Insight with Intelligent Rolling Forecasts

Transcript for "Next Gen FP&A: Eliminating Risk and Accelerating Insight with Intelligent Rolling Forecasts": Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Workday webinar, part of our NextGen FP and A series. Our topic today is eliminating risk and accelerating insight with intelligent rolling forecasts. Appreciate your attendance today. My name is Perry Hann. I'm a planning specialist here at Workday. I look forward to taking you through this session. So just kicking off our agenda, welcome you to this session. We'll set the scene around planning and what that looks like for businesses today, some of the risks and some of the opportunities that are there, and the need for continuous forecasting. We'll then move to a demonstration with my colleague, Kelvin, and then have a fireside chat with our customer, Paul. And lastly, we'll open it up for questioning and take care of that. If any of you have been in a Workday presentation before, you may have seen this product statement. And so what we're saying here is if you are evaluating Workday as part of a solution for your business, do so based on functions in the product that are in here and now as opposed to what might be happening in the future. And in this session today, we will be focusing on the the features that are here today. We will touch a little bit on future state, but not too much, just a little bit. And so forecasting is our key topic. And so there's more and more pressure on FP and A teams for forecasting more than ever before. And there's a couple of things here to to consider. We have more data than we've ever had before. We have so many systems, both internal and external. We have payroll systems. We have ERP and finance systems. We have CRM systems, marketing systems, web systems. Depending on what industry you may be in, you might have POS systems, merchandise systems, warehousing systems. It just goes on and on. And we need to get data from all these systems into our forecast to to factor in some of those key data elements that are there. In addition to that, you may even have external data that you need to bring in for analysis. Maybe it's things like financial market data or even external government data, like demographic data or weather data. Any anything and everything, we have to forecast and analyze these days. That's the explosion of data, and that's one of the reasons that's driving this pressure on FP and A teams. There's so much for us to analyze. We also have constant course corrections, and I guess to set a watermark here, and and taking it back a couple of years, albeit, during COVID, we found that what even scenario analysis increased 30 times, which was extremely significant, and you all all would understand why there were so many different permutations in our business that we had to cater for during that time. But since then, it stayed constant at at that 30 times. But more recently, in the era of tariffs and tariff uncertainty, that's gone up again another five times. We've had to do more and more what if in scenario analysis. So we're just constantly having to reevaluate our business, and no longer is it good enough just to do an annual forecast and kind of put it in the top drawer and perhaps do a reforecast, you know, in six months' time. We have to constantly iterate our forecast to make those, course corrections. There's also an increased demand for better and more accurate forecasts. You know, the the pressure in that we're under, and and it can vary depending on your industry. If you're a public listed company, that's one thing. Maybe you're a not for profit, that's another thing, or you get government funding. Let's say, for example, a public publicly listed company, you know, the the pressure to land closest to the pin from your forecast perspective, it's crucial. Right? So we need to factor in all that information that's going to get us the most accurate forecast and run the tightest business. So if we consider those factors from FP and A perspective, like, how can we do better? Like, we know AI is out there. How can AI help us? So we are under pressure to adopt AI, but the question is exactly what do we adopt? What use cases do we have? You know, what systems or platforms might we use to do all that? And so what you might be doing today, you might be doing doing some of this in a spreadsheet or at least part of it in a spreadsheet. Many of you will, you know, perhaps have a a planning platform or reporting and planning platform, but no doubt there's some spreadsheets on the side. And so what's the the the the purpose of all these spreadsheets, and and what is the forecasting supposed to do for us? So it's designed to help leaders make better decisions. We also need to balance growth, cash, and risk, and also align finance in the business around a single view of the future. And so what's changed? I alluded to it on the previous slide. Volatility is now the norm. It's not the exception. And as much as forecasts are about accuracy, they're also about direction and confidence. So leaders are not necessarily asking, are we on budget? But they are asking, what's changing? What happens if we do this? What happens if we divest? What happens if we make an acquisition? What happens if we increase our revenue? How much time do we have to react? And so when we're dealing with all these spreadsheets, you know, it's very time consuming. They're out of date almost immediately, and they're quite disconnected from a lot of our operational drivers. We just spend so much time, and there's, you know, version control issues, and we're we're wondering, can we actually trust the data? And because it's a a constant iteration, it's a constant process dealing with all this, it can lead to a lot of fatigue in the forecasting process. And everyone starts to question, are these numbers actually real? And, you know, it's not really the people that are involved in the process that's the issue. It can be the process itself, but, moreover, it's the it's the level of cadence and rigor around the process due to the inappropriate tools that we've got, which are really causing us these issues and making spreadsheets an issue and a burden for us all. So we think about a more modern process, And what should FP and A expect from a modern planning process? There's a couple of bullet points that we have on the screen here. So one of them is ease of use, and that to us means a self-service experience. So once you're up and running, you don't have to rely on your vendor or your partner or a third party consultant or even the IT team to or the tech team to help support you. You don't need to have coding or scripting skills in house. You can run it within the finance team and and change your models and maintain your models with ease. We need built in analytics, so active dashboards that instantly reflect the changes that we put into the system. We need to be flexible because our business is constantly changing. That volatility that I mentioned earlier is constantly upon us. You know, the dimensions in in in which we model and and report on today might be different tomorrow. So you need really unlimited dimensions to be able to cater for future changes to the business. Time to value is key. We want things now. You need to get value fast, so we really need out of the box financial intelligence and automation of those, you know, routine and time consuming tasks that are that are sapping the the time of all our teams today. And we also need to scale because our business is what it is today, but in the future, it's most certainly gonna be different and ideally gonna be bigger. And we need a solution that's gonna be able to handle complex interconnected modeling that's gonna need to be high performance with fast response times and have ML embedded throughout the the system and the application. And so the power of any planning tool is in the fact that it's a single source of truth with financial teams owning that modeling, and that can really help us drive a continuous planning cycle. And that's one where everyone updates the plan regularly, And everyone's got that buy in, and everyone has a high level of accountability on on that forecast. And so what do we mean exactly by continuous planning? So, yeah, it's where FP and A and key stakeholders across the business can make plans easily throughout the year, where finance owns a modeling and analysis. But what it does is allow decision makers to quickly reset if we need to and alter for the best course of action at any one time during the year. You know, if if we say that this quarter's off track for some reason and there's some big issue, we need to make make a decision and move on that very quickly. We can't just afford to sit around and hope that it's going to ride itself without any action. And so our vision is that we establish a planning system that's a trusted single source of truth and that we're now leveraging the superpower of AI to augment, you know, roles, responsibilities, and processes. So there's a little bit of a snapshot here in terms of Workday adaptive planning and some of the things that we have live in our system today. So a quick snapshot here available now for all customers. We have things like anomaly detection and outlier reporting that's automatically turned on and available. We have predictive forecaster, which we just need to click a button to enable, and we have AI enabled throughout the application in in every nook and cranny there, making it easy to activate and and scale your data. We also have Workday Assistant, which is a really, really great tool, which Kelvin will probably touch on in our demonstration shortly, which should really help with data analysis, help variance analysis, and make it easier for FP and A teams and business users to navigate the system and really moving towards that conversational planning. And so you might be asking yourselves, well, what's gonna be the result if we do move to a more modern planning tool and get that great experience? What can we expect? And so what we've seen over, you know, 700 customers within the Australia and New Zealand region and over 7,000 globally of customers who have moved to a modern planning experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. They've gained great efficiency in their forecasting. They've reduced time spent from days to hours and seen a transformation of their roles more from being doers to being strategic advisers. So they're just some of the results that we've seen, and no doubt that we would all aspire in in our roles to be more strategic and and be advisers to the business. So with the scene set there, I will now hand to my colleague, Kelvin Yap, who will run us through a brief demonstration. Kelvin, over to you. Thanks for that, Perry. Hi, everyone. I'm Kelvin Yap, solution consultant specializing in adaptive planning. So what I'm gonna do now quickly is share my screen, and that should come through. And in terms of a quick navigation, what we have here is a expense sheet. On the top right hand corner, I've defaulted to a rolling forecast. In terms of navigation, if I do a quick drop down, we can see with adaptive planning, you can have unlimited versions. We can go through and file versions into different folders as well as different levels of actuals as well just to dissect what information is compiled in each section. As well as that, I've logged in as a call center manager where I have essentially logged in to Sales Melbourne. Now you may have multiple different cost centers. If so, it means that if you're in charge of different areas, say it's Australia, you can see those cost centers. So, again, with security utmost in mind, you can only see what access you've been given to as such. But, again, if you have multiple legal entities, you you will see those entities listed here. Now in terms of this particular sheet that we see here, up the top, we've got months running where we've also got our GL accounts on the left hand side. But, essentially, we'll also see two different figures, one in green. Now with what's in green is our actuals, and what's in black is the forecast that we're going through and entering figures. Now in this particular scenario with our rolling forecast, we've now closed April month end, and we just need to bring in data for for April into into adaptive planning. Now in terms of going through and navigating how that looks like, I'll have to go through and essentially click on our menu on the top left hand corner. In terms of navigation, we've got our areas split up into sheets. So in terms of sheets, we can interpret the sheets as the different models that you have in your Excel workbook, for example, or spreadsheets where we split them up into your financial statements, revenue plans, expense plans, and workforce plans as well. With that, as well as we go down the the menu list, we can have reports, dashboards, which we'll go through and touch on, as well as other elements such as modeling, which what we need to go through now is essentially update our rolling forecast to include April actuals coming through. Now in essence, this is our model management screen where all 7,000 of our customers come through and administer different parts of their adaptive planning models that they have. So in this particular case, we're looking at versions, but you may have to go in and update your levels or your organization structure, your different dimensions, your GL accounts, as well as other elements that Erica touched on as well that that Perry had touched on, which was our intelligent planning section where we look at our predictive forecast that anomaly detection. But what we're gonna do here is quickly click on our versions that we see. And clicking on versions, this is our expanded view of what that looks like in terms of, those versions that we may have, with a quick description of of what we currently have at hand. Now with our rolling forecast that you did see, we would take a quick snapshot. So essentially coming through here and, creating a plan versions, take taking a version here of of our March figure. And now what we're gonna do is update this to include April actuals. So what we're gonna do here is update the description to include four months of actuals and quickly come through here and update where the start of plan should be. So the moment, it should've been in April, but what we're gonna do here is start from May. So it's a essentially, a a four plus eight forecast that we're currently doing. So this is is coming through, updating when the starter plan is, and hitting save there. Now to easily navigate and show you how that's changed, we I need to first go through and and quickly show you what that looks like from an integration point of view. So, again, coming back to the menu up in the top left hand corner, being able to go through and click on integration. So with integration, you may have tasks set up to to pull in data from different sources, so which will populate whether it be for your GLs that we see or it could be for your different models that you could run where you may need CRM data to to look at your overall pipeline, which, again, impacts your, revenue figures. But what we're gonna do here quickly is just to show you that if it's importing actuals from your ERP, it could be from Workday, for example. By clicking through, it's as easy as going through and updating the figures or the date or periods that you're gonna update to and which version you're gonna go through and update as well. So it's as easy as going through and defining what that is and then going through and clicking run. So with that, that'll pull through the data and update from your source into adaptive planning from there. But as well as that, with these scheduled runs, you may have overnight runs that you can go through and conduct to review the process in terms of actuals on a daily basis as well. So once you've gone through and run, we're gonna go through and look at that expense sheet and see what that looks like. So in terms of going back to expenses, we can see that with our rolling forecast that we've come through, we're back into our Melbourne Sales Cost Center here, and our April figures are now being updated from the load from our ERP here. So, again, so that's now a four plus eight from this perspective. Now in terms of being able to have that continual planning process, users may wanna see what those impacts of different business decisions are. So with adaptive planning, we're able to go through and create personal scenarios. So with these scenarios, we can go through and have shared scenarios where if you're collaborating with different parts of the business, you can go through and do that. But in terms of before I click on that, just to quickly show you with adaptive planning that you may have different geo lines. If I go through and look at our telephone calls that we see here, we can see that in the formula bar up the top that we've got our different drivers. It could be FTEs as well as an assumption that we've held centrally to drive some of those particular figures. As such, you can go through and have different geo lines driven by, say, last six figures and uplifted by 5%. So, again, we've got different models driving different parts of the overall geo structure that we see in this particular expense sheet. So one key one is such as your workforce plan that comes through. Now in terms of entering data, only the white cells can be entered into anything that's in gray. We've actually gone through and locked those particular items, those GL items there. And anything that's got a blue triangle in the right hand corner, that is our connection to either a model or a formula that's attached to that particular GL. Now in terms of seeing the impacts of different business decisions, as I mentioned earlier, we can go through and create a particular scenario just to see that what those impacts are. So what I'm gonna do here is create that particular scenario that we see, and maybe you wanna see what the impacts of our coffee machine repair is. Had a lot of complaints from the office about it, and everyone needs a coffee every day. So what we can do here is just quickly show you what that looks like when you do create a personal scenario. So all users who are contributing to the actual budget will be able to to go through and create a a what if scenario. So in this particular case, I'm gonna go through it and add, say, 5,000 for that coffee machine repair, for example. So anything that you do enter will be in blue. And once we go through up the top, there's a save where we go through and commit that particular change. And we once it does hit save, that blue will change into into black. And because we're in a personal scenario, we can see that it's now a lime green color. Now if we're happy with this particular change that we have, we can go through and update the overall and merge that back into the rolling forecast that we do see. So just to quickly show you with our scenario, we can go through and and merge that back in. You can also see that I previously had another scenario where maybe I wanna see the impact of a pay rise to the overall organization. I can go through and see what those impacts are and and what the changes in the panel is. But to keep things brief, I'll go through and merge that back in. If I merge that scenario back in that I'm happy with, if I do go back into, that expense sheet that we saw, that rolling forecast, which has referred to our working budget. So working budget has been our default, but we can change your default planning version. And now I'm gonna switch that back to rolling forecast. We can see now that that 5,000 that we have added has gone from lime green to to a standard white cell saying that we have gone through and committed. So you may have different personal difference scenarios that they're going through. You can go through and view that in a report and see what those particular impacts are. Now to make things easier, we do have an upcoming release, which I wanna quickly go through and quickly show you is that that's coming through. So with adaptive planning, we do have two two releases a year, one that's in March and one that's in September. So every six months, we do have a a release or an update to adaptive planning. So in this upcoming release in in March, we've got hubs. So with hubs, essentially, that is a collection of dashboards, reports that we've collated. And with these hubs, you can go through and have that for a particular department maybe or a different role as such to be able to to go through and navigate what they need to do to contribute to to the overall plan. So just to quickly show you what that looks like with revenue planning side of things here, we've got some dashboards. So in this overview, we've got a quick summary of what needs to be completed. You may have some key dates to have the overall plan completed. Quick highlights of of some of those particular changes that's that's come through or in terms of actuals that's impacted the overall plan and what the trends have have come through in terms of certain stuff. So in terms of targeted revenue in this particular dashboard that we do see, you can go through and curate your dashboards for your audience to to help contribute as well as to analyze the data that we do see here. So if we go through and see, say, product revenue, we can see a number of different graph types as well as information that's dissected for the the revenue. But users come through here and essentially go through and do the analysis. So if we're going through here and looking at product group a, which is more than half of our revenue that's coming through, we're able to go through and drill down. So we can go through and drill down client customer. So, essentially, that will go through and and split that up to see who is contributing the most to the overall 53%. We can also further do further drill downs and maybe look at it by location as well where we split that up into different regions. And lastly, if you wanted to look up by product, we can go through and see which product or service is contributing overall to the that particular product group a. But as as well as that, on the left hand side, we can have different reports that are coming through here. We may have different workflows in terms of the approval as people go through and contribute the overall plan. They can go through and submit, and it may go through to a different line manager to approve certain GLs, for example, that's come through. As well as that, we touch on the different tasks that we see. We can also have that as as part of the model in terms of the hub where if you do have access, you can go through and update information from the data source. And if you don't, then that would be grayed out as such. Now in terms of to to further assist with your whole plan, we touched on the ability to have that intelligent plan using, say, a predictive forecaster as such. So what I wanna quickly show you, with that particular forecast, we can navigate to our dashboard. So this is a quick illustration of what that intelligent plan can look like. Now with our dashboards, we see that here there's a number of dashboards. You can go through and have dashboards basically focused on different parts of the business that we have here. So what we're gonna go through here is look at our Workday Illuminate, which is our AI. But with our predictive forecast that we do see here is that we're able to run different machine learning algorithms and be able to predict out what that looks like based on your historicals that we see here on the left hand side in green. And based on those different algorithms, we can see what those particular predictions could look like. Now with those algorithms, we can also pull in different external data such as different levers for, say, weather. If your business is influenced by by weather, we can pull in weather data to to be able to influence what those predictions look like. Or if you're additionally, it's, say, for example, tourism, we we can also use pulling tourism data that's available to us to influence what that looks like. If there's an uplift in tourism coming through, and that may affect your revenue and and get that uplift or decrease in in terms of what those predictions look like. So, again, we can have those predictions set out to be able to look at what that looks like overall. Now so that's currently available. In terms of what's coming through in our next, update is our planning agent. Now with our planning agent, that, period highlighted is that we, have the ability to look at that variance analysis aspect here. So if I go through and and look at a particular report, for example, just a quick p and l variance report. One of the capabilities that we have by just clicking through an ask workday on the top right hand corner, if I do click that quickly click on that, we have different options available for the user. So we can go through and summarize a report. So one of the things that each of us would have to do on a month end basis is to be able to look at that variance analysis as to what's driving that. But we're also able to to do further variance analysis by looking at maybe the top variances, which I'll quickly go through and show you. With that, that I'll go through and highlight some key variances that needs to be investigated. But, again, if I do a right click analyze, the planning agent will go through and surface up information in terms of what some of those movements are by the different product groupings that we have here. Now, additionally, it'll provide some commentary around some of those particular movements within Workday. We go through practice responsible AI. So this will be your first pass in terms of what the AI AI has surfaced. But for the user to go back into further analysis and to enrich the data that we see here and validate the information that we do see. Now we are able to go through and look at some of those different drivers of those variants. So if you want to look at the level, again, with levels, that's there's different parts of the organization that's driving some of that different data that we do see. But, again, it it it surface up what's driving that particular variance. Additionally, with that, we can go through and change those different graphs that we do see. You may prefer a pie chart as such. We we can go through and change that. And lastly, what month end process would not be complete without a PowerPoint? But we're able to now go through and auto generate a PowerPoint, And, essentially, the information that we do see here on the right hand side, we can go through and and have that information there. And, again, doing that further formatting and additional commentary, we can go through and and have that from that PowerPoint that we do see. But, again, this is that first starting point that we do see for your month end reporting process, especially to the board. Now I think my time is up now, but, at the end of, the session, we will have some q and a, but, I will pass that back, to our Perry and to Paul for the fireside chat. Yeah. Thanks, Kelvin, for that demonstration. And and to your point, if anyone does have any questions as a result of that demonstration that Kelvin did, please put that in the q and a. I'll put it in in the chat in the platform here, and we'll we'll happily address those. But, at this point, I'd like to welcome Paul Baker, FP and A manager at BaptistCare, to the session. So thanks thanks for joining, Paul. So we'll just have a little bit of a bit of q and a. And, yeah, Paul, to set to set the scene here and, I guess, to start us off, could you briefly introduce yourself, your role in BaptistCare, and maybe share one thing about the organization that people might not know? Yep. Sure. So I'm the FP and A manager at BaptistCare. I've been in this role for about two and a half years. Started in a contract role. Having previously spent my life in the software industry, so a bit of a change. We've got about BaptistCare has about 13,000 more employees. I think when I started only two and a half years ago, the revenue was around 350,000,000. We've had a number of mergers and acquisitions, so now we're heading towards that 1,300,000,000.0 in revenue. So quite a bit of growth having merged with particularly entities in South Australia, Victoria and WA. Probably one of the bigger unknowns is or one of the unknowns is I don't think we're recognized as much yet. We're about to have a rebranding, so it'll be become a bit more obvious, but we're one of the largest care organizations in the country. So we're covering home care, aged care, retirement villages, community housing, as well as supporting those in poverty and disadvantaged groups. So they're completely different business streams to each other, which adds its own level of complexity from a finance and planning perspective. Excellent. Thanks, Paul. So you joined Baptist Care after Workday Adaptive Planning was already established. And so coming in with fresh eyes, what did you notice about how planning and forecasting were operating, particularly in terms of forecast cadence, responsiveness to change, and how risk was surfaced or discussed? Yeah. Sure. So I think when I came in, WAP was already established. It was a bit of an urgent installation during COVID. So it was done pretty much remotely and within a short time frame. I think it was in within a couple of months. The the previous system that they used was very clunky. It had consultations, you know, taking forty five minutes for every time they wanted to to look at a change or test anything. You know, it was on prem, so the updates were slow. There was no auditability. So there was a lot of risk, obviously, around that installation. Now having gone onto a onto a, you know, cloud based platform where we're getting the updates regularly, generally, this on a weekend, we've got a we've got a different view, a different approach to our whole forecasting and planning cycle. I'd previously used Hyperion Planning as well, but I've found this I definitely found Adaptive Plan just to be much more much more user friendly, easy to use as we've rolled through. So it's definitely been an improvement in the on the previous systems to what was already in place. Okay. No. That's that's awesome. Great great to know. And as someone stepping into that existing planning environment with Workday Adaptive, what surprised you most about how it's actually being used day to day? It was by that time it had already been pretty much established as the source of truth in terms of the financial information. So we've used it for budgeting and forecasting, reporting across the P and L, balance sheet and cash flow as well. As I mentioned, it's quite complicated a complicated environment with the number of business lines that we have. It is actually very intuitive and easy to use. So I found that coming in with no knowledge of it, I picked it up relatively quickly. I think the rest of the team would agree with that. But we also use it for reporting at all levels across the business, not just, I guess, not just for the management reporting that's done at a board level and leadership team level, but also at lower levels as well. So the level of detail in those reports changes. In some cases, some things are grouped differently, but we've got that ability to do it very quickly and very easily. Obviously, we've able to order the activity that we we input, so it's good to know who's been putting the information in. We've got up to about a 150 budget contributors who are licensed, so that's quite a quite a few people that have the, I guess, ability to input into the system. Some we might monitor a bit more closely than others, but at least we're able to see at all times who's been who's been making any of the changes. I think we're, you know, we're trying to get away from spreadsheets on the side as was mentioned earlier. And, you know, our budgets go out to five years, so it's it's quite a it's quite a complex environment, but it is well adopted within the business, and it's used across the business by, yeah, by by different levels. Yep. No. That's that's awesome. You mentioned around about a 150 people contributing to sort of budgeting and forecasting process. That's quite a lot. And if you think about the business, you mentioned there's a number of different, you know, departments doing various things. Yeah. And, you know, there's probably different levels of competency across all those contributors. What are some of the things that you see that are notable around how people contribute and how how easy that might be for them or or any other observations that you might have around the community that contributes to the process? Yeah. I think there's definitely different levels. So from a I guess from a user side and from a contributor side, We've got people within the FP and A team who are obviously all across it and work with the GMs and operations team. We've got a dedicated WAP technical resource as well. But within, I guess, the people that those business partners that we have will work with different levels of the organization. Some budget contributors don't necessarily do much from a from a day to day perspective, but others are heavily involved, such as things like, you know, we've got rostering models that are built in to adaptive planning that are very complex with all the, you know, awards and EBAs that we have in place. So they can get down to a high level of of knowledge that's required not only to understand the system, but also to understand what needs to go into it from a background perspective. But generally, the level of training that we have to provide is not that not that difficult. It can be done relatively quickly, and it's because the system's, you know, as I mentioned, quite easy to use. But having those GMs involved as well gives us the ability to, I guess, give them the ownership of the numbers as well. So they're not seeing it for the first time generally when they come up to a leadership team meeting. It's already been gone through with them. They can access it themselves, and they can they can work through the numbers with their business partners or their finance business partners as well. Yeah. It's awesome. I like that. That ownership and accountability of the numbers for those stakeholders, I think, is is key. Yeah. Incredibly. important. Yeah. Absolutely. One one thing that I wanted to touch on as well, and you alluded to earlier the growth journey that the organization's been on and how diverse it is now. You know, the the revenue growth is significant, and, obviously, your people and all the other types of growth off the back of that. You know, we spoke about that prior to this session as well. What role has Workday Adaptive Planning played in your m and a activity? And I say that because there's probably lots of people on this call who are also undergoing m and a or planning to do a lot of m and a in the next next little while. Yes. So it's generally not used from a I guess, from a perspective M and A activity perspective other than getting some of the benchmarks of what we already have in place. But once that activity, once that merger takes place or that acquisition takes place, it's definitely been a critical piece of being able to keep the business going forward. So we did have, after the last merger that we had in place, the first cab off the rank, if you like, in terms of some of the integration work was the budget cycle. So we took the view of using WAP as, I guess, that source of truth and using that as the basis for all of the budgeting for that for that next year or the year that we're in now. So there's definitely an element of not having enough time to build everything within WEP, but we're definitely also able to build it to the point where we could easily integrate some of those spreadsheets into the system to to at least get through that first cycle really quickly. And it was acknowledged that it that it worked well. Always room for improvement, and that's what we're going through with this current business cycle or budget cycle is to then take it to that next step of of building in as much more as we can in terms of in terms of what's needed from a, you know, evolution perspective. But it got us all those numbers that we needed for the board, for all the levels of the business within a couple of months. Yep. That was it. And that's a good segue to my my next question. You you've got a good sort of baseline established there with the system. Where do you think you might wanna take it moving forward? What other things do you wanna do? I think so, I mean, our CFO has a view that we can press a button and magically when the numbers appear. I think we always know it's not necessarily that straightforward, but that is basically, I guess, the holy grail of where we wanna get to is be able to have everything much more integrated than what we do at the moment. As I said, we're still evolving some of those pieces through this budget cycle. So we're taking some of the, I guess, some of the learnings that we've had out of the previous operational cycle and using those for some of the business lines that we've got now. We are working with external partners as well to help speed up that process and get their knowledge as well. But, you know, we'd need to also reassess as we've grown through the business. You know, there's always discussions around whether you've got the right ERP and other systems in place. So irrespective of what the ERP is, we also need to take a similar approach with what we have from a planning perspective. So we are revisiting some of the areas and looking at what we can do better within the system and, you know, taking what we've got now, but certainly being able to build on that. And, you know, we know we can build some of that offline and then integrate it pretty quickly into a production environment. And then, obviously, I think from then, we want we wanna move on to also the AI capabilities that we haven't really always had time to look at up. until now. No. And that's that's yet another segue. That was gonna be my next question. There's so much talk about AI machine learning and finance. From your perspective, where do you see these technologies having the most impact? We really want to know what happens when we change some of those variables. So we're heavily dependent on government funding. So areas like home care and particularly aged care. We want to be able to look at what happens if we do change some of the numbers. Don't know if we can do that in some of the what if scenario analysis that we have access to now. But it's also being able to look at anomaly detection and some of the predictive forecasting and then look at the AR driven tasks we can integrate as well. So not necessarily fully across what all of those might be, but that's what we wanna start heading towards and getting, I guess, more using more of the capability that's there that we haven't just tapped into yet. Yep. Awesome. No. That's that's great. One one last question before we wrap up this section. For any finance and FP and A leaders that are listening today and maybe considering a shift towards a new tool or continuous forecasting or any sort of major change there, what practical advice would you be able to give them? I think one thing we've certainly learnt even just as we bring on these other businesses is just spending that time upfront working out what it is that you need, what's the end point that you want to get to, particularly even just around something some of the basics like cost center structure and what other structures you might have to report that you can report alongside, not necessarily have them integrated into the main approach. Also, I think just resourcing it appropriately using partners where you can and having that data readiness, you know, up and running before you even start just, you know, cleaning up cleaning up a lot of the data that you already have, working out how far back you wanna go in terms of what you're bringing in. You know, it can be scaled. I think, you know, we've scaled it quite well over that growth period from 350 to 1,300,000,000. So it scales quite well. Yeah. It's just a question of knowing where it is that you need to get to and having that having that understanding that you're gonna have to invest time and resources into it and making sure that that's properly done and having the stakeholder buy in as well. Yeah. No. Absolutely. That's that's great advice. Well, Paul, thank you for the q and a. So I really in enjoyed that, and, for those who are listening, they've got something out of that as well. So we're sort of getting towards the end of this session. So wrap up the q and a for now and then move towards the end. But for anyone that's on the on the on the webinar today, if you do have any questions, feel free to put it in the in the q and a section of the of the platform here. And we can address those. Haven't seen any so far, but even if you don't want to go online and put put it there there today, you can always reach out to to myself or Kelvin or anyone from the Workday team and ask us any questions that you might have afterwards. So just as we're moving forward here, I will just flush up the the planning agent, and Kelvin touched on this. You you you may be aware if you've been following Workday. We're all in on on agents and Workday HCM being the the the agent system of record. And there's, you know, agents pervasive throughout the business and the platform in in terms of the various areas for HR finance and planning. And so the planning agent is is one of those agents that are there. It's helping, you know, people and agents collaborate there. So there's, you know, roles and skills within the planning agent. So we have roles being the analyst, the planner, the modeler, and the admin, and then there's various skills underneath each of those roles. I won't talk to all of but as you can see, we've got data export exploration, automated variance analysis, KPI monitoring, insight communication, etcetera. And so some of these functionalities are here already today, and there's some that are coming in the future. We did allude to the the product statement at the very start of the discussion, but really quite excited about where the planning agent is gonna take us, not only today, but in the future. There's some exciting times ahead. Lastly, we do have some events coming up for Workday. Some of you may have heard or been to our Workday Elevate events in previous years, and so we'd love you to attend those events. So we have two major events in region this year. We have Workday Elevator Sydney on Tuesday, May 26 at the ICC. So there's the QR code that's on the screen now. So if you're able or interested, please, you know, take a copy of that QR code and register to attend the event. We've also got Workday elevating Auckland on the April 29 at the New Zealand ICC, and we have a QR code for that as well. So that'll be a workday wide event. We'll be talking talking, you know, to all our different, you know, solution and product areas, and there will be specific planning tracks within those. So if planning is something that you're interested in and and you're in either Sydney or New Zealand, you know, please come to the events, and we can have a planning specific discussion with you. But that brings us to the end of the session. Haven't seen any anything in the q and a, but look forward to, you know, covering off anything that may be coming up later. Please feel free to reach out to us. With that, thank you very much for your time and attention today. We'll wrap it up, and we hope to be in touch again soon. Thanks very much.