Ali Abedi: Welcome everyone to our webinar on the role of data and automation in finance. We’re thrilled to have you with us today. We’ve got a great session planned, and we’ll be saving time for live Q&A at the end, so please feel free to submit your questions in the Q&A box throughout.
All right, let’s start with introductions. I am Ali Abedi. I’m a Solution Engineer at Lydonia Technologies. I work with organizations across multiple industries to identify opportunities for process automation and data transformation, with finance being one of the key areas of impact there.
I’m also joined today by two fantastic speakers. First, we have Tod Dillon, CFO of Lydonia Technologies, who’s led several strategic initiatives around finance modernization within our own organization. And I also have Jawwad Rasheed, Financial and Financial Services Transformation Lead at Alteryx. He works closely with finance teams across industries to modernize how they work, leverage their data, and drive real business outcomes.
Thank you both for being here.
Jawwad Rasheed: Great to be here.
Ali Abedi: All right, so let’s get started. This question is for both Tod and Jawwad. Feel free to answer, whoever first: What factors are driving CFOs to transform finance and rethink how their teams work, and what trends are you both seeing across the industry?
Jawwad Rasheed: Tod, do you want to kick this one off?
Tod Dillon: Sure, and you could probably expand on it from my limited view and kind of your broader perspective. But I think, broadly speaking, I think, for finance—and this is not just for the CFO, but kind of for the office of the CFO, or the finance function more broadly—it’s doing more, better, faster, cheaper, with less. Which is, I think, I don’t know if that’s anything new. But over time, I think, you know, continual cost pressure, the demands on efficiency—those have always been there.
But I think, as of late, kind of the evolving role of the CFO and the office of the CFO, and just this call for like beyond just financial stewardship—like the books and the records—but into the strategic leadership. You throw in emerging technologies and obviously AI and AGI, and what that means for doing things not just faster, cheaper, with less, but just entirely different. Changing workforce demographics—just recently I was reading on just the decline in, for example, accounting majors in US colleges and universities, and what does that mean?
And then, just finally, I’ll throw in, you know, for one that’s just as of late I’ve been thinking a lot about is regulatory, and then the political environment as well, and just the macro factors that are, you know, requiring changes. So that’s kind of in a nutshell. That’s probably a handful that I’ve seen. And Jawwad, I’m sure you’ve seen more and could probably expand on those.
Jawwad Rasheed: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’ll maybe reciprocate a bit to talk about some of those factors that are impeding the evolution and transformation of finance as well—kind of what’s holding them back right today.
So yeah, completely agree. There’s a lot of focus on how finance has repurposed its vision to become more preemptive, autonomous, value-centric, and more of a business partner, tech-enabled is absolutely resonating across the finance leadership spectrum. We have to appreciate that the market that we’re in today is a volatile market, and the unprecedented—which should not really be considered unprecedented—is very much the norm. Tariff uncertainty is a priority use case that really brings that to life.
So we are in this environment where we have geopolitical risk, global supply chain disruptions. There is the emphasis here on how to drive growth, because we’re in a low-growth environment. And that’s putting a lot of pressures on finance leaders.
And all those things holding us back are really coming to the limelight again—the diverse stakeholders whose needs we need to meet, the tech limitations that we have to deliver, the talent shortages, as you mentioned Tod.
I think the 2 levers that really come to mind more often than not in this environment are the impact that, as you said, AI is having as a catalyst that is reinforcing the need for foundational capabilities. And one of those key levers, I think, is the re-emphasis on how to build trust in data—reopening that Pandora’s box around what does data quality mean, and why is it now so important in this environment—and the opportunities that are presented to us. So seeing a lot of trends around refocusing on those foundational data capabilities and obviously trying to realize the benefits of where AI and the rest will take us.
Ali Abedi: Great point. Well said, Jawwad. Honing on the challenges—Tod, a question for you: What are the biggest challenges you see finance leaders facing today when it comes to managing data, reporting, and analytics?
Tod Dillon: Sure. No, it’s a great one, Ali. And I think we’re a relatively small IT consulting firm, but obviously we have a fairly wide breadth of customers that we deal with. And so, speaking both for me personally and us organizationally, but into the broader—you know, I think it’s a matter of scale when you talk to certain companies. But I think we all face very similar things.
First and foremost, and just building on something Jawwad said—data silos. We have disparate systems, disparate sources of data. Small companies—obviously not as many, but it’s still there relative to the size of that company. Large companies, it’s also—you know, it’s just at a scale that’s far bigger.
Quality control—is my data good?
Is my data secure? Governance—do I manage my data? How is it managed? What are the rules governing it?
Again, depending on the age of the company—legacy systems, manual processes. And that goes across any organization, arguably.
Scalability—again, as I mentioned, Lydonia, we’re relatively small. We have small customers to enterprise-level customers. Scalability is always a factor. How, you know, in the finance function—how is what we’re doing able to keep up with the growth and the demands of the organization?
Which leads into, for me—and I think that everyone can share this in finance—it’s too many demands, too little time, right? It’s trying to take finite resources to support infinite—or seemingly infinite—demand.
And then just final one, not to be redundant, but I’ll just say again—workforce demographics. Finding the right people to do the work that you need, and, you know, and then dealing with potential skills gaps. And that’s just not even in regards to technology, but it’s just in general—finding the right people for the jobs you have today, but then also thinking about, okay, what’s that job going to look like tomorrow? So, you know, it’s just kind of in a nutshell there.
Ali Abedi: Jawwad building on that. How is Alteryx helping finance teams address those challenges? Do you have a real-world example you could share?
Jawwad Rasheed: Sure. Yeah, it might be a good segue just to lay some foundations for those in the session to explain what Alteryx is. And this picture that you can see now is probably the simplest way to depict that. So, this is a picture you’ve probably seen many a time: the information flowing from the left and being pushed into something and coming out on the right. So, what is Alteryx? Alteryx is a data analytics platform.
It’s not a store of data. It’s not a data warehouse. But it allows users that know the information best to connect to the information, integrate the information, transform it as needed—so stitch it, blend it, improve it, run data quality checks and controls—so that it can be pushed somewhere else or go somewhere else in the data lifecycle.
I mean, essentially, what a data workflow is, is just a sequence of processes that’s used to collect, analyze, and deliver data for a very specific purpose, like generating a report or training a model or supporting some business decisions. And that’s what Alteryx enables.
The secret sauce really is that the platform is first and foremost directed to people that don’t have—and don’t need to have—years of coding and development experience. We’ve simplified the whole notion of data transformations, workflow creation, analytics, workflow creation through simple drag-and-drop tools that you put on what we call a canvas and essentially paint like a picture, which is what a data workflow is. And it means that those requests that for many years have predominantly gone to IT—and relatively simple requests—can be managed within the users in finance so that IT can do much more complex stuff. But also, it helps the users in finance to become more data-savvy.
And all of those things come together nicely, I guess. In our two flagship products, we have something called Designer, which is where we’ll call data transformations take place, but also the ability to automate and become hands-free. So, you can schedule how those workflows are run as part of your process workflow. Very important as well from a control and governance perspective, as well as from a collaboration perspective.
So, that’s kind of what Alteryx is, I think, in terms of the impact it has and kind of how it fits into the ecosystem. As Tod mentioned, the thing—one of the drivers here—is to reduce operating costs. So, clearly, if there’s a lot of manual activities that need to be automated, Alteryx helps to do that by providing almost a cemental glue that brings processes where there’s data handoffs into a consistent platform—a consistent way of managing those across your data management lifecycle.
There are many other benefits, right? Beyond just the operating costs. It’s improving quality by reducing the operational errors by automation. It’s standardizing the way we do data processing. It’s eliminating key person risk that often lives in end-user computing solutions by making that transparent to all. It’s creating that visibility of data transformations. It’s increasing collaboration. And ultimately, I think there’s also the indirect benefits that are not often talked about, which is helping to drive data literacy and self-serve capability. This is a great mechanism to get people’s hands on, allow them to do more, and, yeah, become leaders and champions for themselves.
Ali Abedi: Jawwad, another question for you. What are the most common finance use cases where Alteryx delivers quick wins? And could you share a success story from the field?
Jawwad Rasheed: Yeah, sure. I think if I were to speak to an organization, and they were to say, “I’m really keen to try and improve the levels of automation and understand where Alteryx best aligned fits. Where would you start? Where would you go?” The answer I often give is based on the characteristics of the process themselves.
So let’s look at those areas which are highly commoditized, have a high level of frequency of operations, have an extensive level of standardization that could be achieved, and have a lot of people doing some stuff. And those ones are typically where there are many opportunities to eliminate manual activities—data handoffs that are often managed through offline solutions or other means.
Unsurprisingly, where does that lead us in finance? We can look at the finance, accounting, operations, and control spectrum as a wonderful area to start. So that would cover your processes such as receivables, payables, inventory management, R2R, payroll accounting, and others. All of those operation-esque activities that are often bundled together—or, in many cases, not even bundled together, disparate in an organization—that could help to come together in a more centralized, standardized form.
So, I’ve got one customer story to share here, which I think will be quite useful to bring that to life. This is a customer that I work with. It’s a provider of biopharmaceutical products. It helps with consulting and outsourcing service with clinical trials. So, a lot in the R&D space. And their aim—their finance leaders’ aim—was to say, “Look, I just want to simplify and standardize what I’m trying to do across my finance, finance operations, and shared services team.”
So, just on the next slide, we’ll see what some of the key objectives are for this particular project. Finance leaders were absolutely looking to drive more savings and improve the quality. What they had was a number of services that were outsourced, and they relied on external providers to manage their record-to-report process—how they did things like statutory and tax reporting, and more.
They said that, “We want to bring that in-house. We want to be in control. We don’t want to spend lots of money on external providers.” They wanted to use that as a vehicle to drive more automation across their wider stack—not just with Alteryx, but RPA solutions, other hyperautomation solutions, etc.
And they wanted to standardize that. That happens for a large number of people that sit in their shared service and operations team. And obviously, by doing so, you reduce operating costs and improve all the visibility and transparency of execution—and become more accountable.
So we’ll see on the next page, like all of those shared service process towers are called. And, well, there are a number of those items, as you can see, that were outsourced: accounts payable, T&E, R2R, procurement processing, tax reporting, and more.
So that was how they set up—said, “Okay, how can Alteryx help us?” Well, essentially, what we did was run a number of pilots across these key areas to enable the users to get more hands on keyboard and deconstruct the process to identify areas where Alteryx could improve. And unsurprisingly, what that also led to was rethinking about how the process should work in the first place.
So it was a good example, actually, of how the old adage of, “You need a perfect process and think about how automation and technology can then support that model,” broke in this instance—in a nice way—to say, actually, technology helped us to rethink the process. And by doing so, we were able to create a different operating model that was more effective.
The kind of results that this led to—on the next slide, you’ll see—are very evident. There were around 80 licenses deployed on what’s called Designer, a flagship product, alongside the collaborative governance control tool server.
What did that lead to? Well, there were around 90 processes that were then augmented with a level of automation with Alteryx. By bringing in all of the external services now in-house, they then managed to drive significant net annualized savings—around 40%.
If you look at quality KPIs—like number of exceptions raised, number of resubmissions, all of the things that lead to bad outcomes—they had a massive improvement just in the quality of the outputs they were producing.
And I think the really important one is unlocking almost a third of the workforce to say, “Hey, we’ve got free capacity to actually do the more exciting things.” So, take R2R—we can do variance analysis. We can understand the numbers more to understand the movements. And that was the biggest gain.
So, we can see that over a short space of time, huge gains—and something that is helping to drive further innovation and automation within the organization.
Ali Abedi: Excellent customer story. Thank you, Jawwad, for sharing. Tod, from your perspective at Lydonia, how has Alteryx helped improve finance operations internally?
Tod Dillon: Sure. You know, Jawwad’s giving this example, and obviously a much larger organization than us. But speaking on behalf of Lydonia, I mean for us, Alteryx isn’t just a partner in the provision of software and services—that we’re there. We’re also a customer, and what we’ve been able to do with Designer—and just echoing some of the things Jawwad said—we were able to, using Designer and using the citizen developer approach to training and execution, we were able to learn how to do a number of things on our own. At Lydonia, we like to say one of our missions is to help our customers, teach our customers to fish and not just do the fishing for them. And likewise, using Alteryx and Designer as a tool just broadly—we’re a consulting firm. Our lifeblood is project billing, in addition to software resale. But project billing. And so we had a couple of disparate systems where we were doing operational reporting. We had our project reporting, and then we had our billing, our financial reporting and our billing. And using Designer, we were able to pull together these sources and integrate data across the different sources.
We were able to scale. You know, a lot of the stuff we were doing before was very manual. But as you know, as the CFO, I’m looking ahead—as I mentioned before, we’re looking to grow. So can we handle these volumes at 2x, at 5x, at 10x? And we were able to put in processes that can do that, that we can build into that in a really cost-effective way.
And then there’s a quality control aspect to it—from using Excel spreadsheets, doing manual calculations. I think anyone in finance knows the fewer fingers that can touch data on its path from source to output, the better. And we’re able to automate a lot of that. And so for us, again, the stats for us—while they’re not at the same level of the biopharmaceutical firm that Jawwad was working with—for us, they were super material.
We went from taking about 11 business days to get our billing out on a monthly basis. We’re down to anywhere between business day 2 and 4. And you talk about DSO, you talk about just cash return on that—it’s just massive for us. And what we did wasn’t that unusual, but it was super important for us.
And then, likewise, we’ve been using Designer and looking at a lot of our operational and our project reporting— a number of things that we were doing in the past. Again, it’s just, for us, it’s time to market. It’s time to decision point, where we can speed up the time in which we’re doing less of the analysis because we’re bringing that data together. And, you know, we’re getting to a point where we can start making decisions on it. And so for us, it’s been—it’s been, you know, a game changer for us. Really, for lack of a better term, it’s really been a game changer.
Ali Abedi: So thank you all again for joining us, and huge thanks to you, Tod and Jawwad, for sharing your time and insights. And if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to reach out on that. Have a great rest of your day.
