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. I’d like to open it now for a few questions from the audience. Again, feel free to submit them in the Q&A tab, and we’ll tackle as many as we can. Let’s take a look here, see what questions we have. Alright. So this is a question I get a lot. The question goes, what is the best way for a finance team to start their automation journey if they’re still mostly using Excel?
Jawwad Rasheed: Shall pick that one up first?
Ali Abedi: Yeah, feel free.
Jawwad Rasheed: So, how do you start an automation journey? I think you need to look at the applications that you have for something like Excel, or Google Sheets, or Access database. Like, what are you using it for? And more often than not, the usage of such tools may go beyond what it was intended to do in the first place. So Excel has some limitations. It has limitations around the number of rows that it can process before it crashes, the number of tabs that you can set up, the complexity of the macros, the integrations that you can have outside of the single worksheet or worksheets that you created. It has limitations. Those tools have certain limitations. Excel has just been used as a mechanism to continue to extend that, hoping that it would be appropriate to manage very, very complex processes.
So what’s a good place to start? I would look at where you have a lot of risk associated with using things like Excel that create risk in critical processes that can be managed through better platforms, like Alteryx, where computations are clear, workload capacity is managed, automation can be achieved by not even many running macros. It’s done through scheduling. Deduplication of effort can occur by sharing your macros, batch macros, and logic and workflows with others. That’s an area we’ll look at now.
Part of that, I think, comes down to having some certainty around, well, what are those opportunities? So an inventory of those would help as a start. There are tools available to help you scan organizations and create that inventory, just to get some level of completeness. Prioritizing those into most material, somewhere in the middle, and somewhere in the low. And where the automation opportunities typically exist are in the high to medium risk category. Obviously, if you’re doing some simple things in Excel, that’s fine. You just got to assess: what risk am I posing to the organization by doing so, and could I improve my operation by automating that?
So that’s where we thought we would deconstruct those and see how you would rationalize those into a way that’s far more succinct through workflows. And the impact that will have would be beyond automation. Again, it helps drive that literacy approach as well.
Ali Abedi: Alright. Another question we have, which is something I run into quite often, is: how do you recommend aligning transformation goals with other departments like IT or operations?
Tod Dillon: Do you want to have a way in, and then you can expand.
Jawwad Rasheed: Yeah, sure.
Tod Dillon: If I look at my career as a finance professional, it’s a long, long time ago I had a mentor who once said to me, you know, when we’re doing certain things, we have to take care of… but there’s the “so what” factor. Why is it—what is being produced by finance—why should that be important or relevant to the other organizations? And obviously, it’s kind of a simplistic way of looking at things, but expanding it to the question, it’s partnering with those organizations to understand that there’s probably mutual goals. And sometimes they might not be as clear as others, but there’s mutual goals—mutual objectives—that can be obtained by partnering to answer questions.
And, you know, for our organization, it’s finance partnering with our delivery services to really pull together the information that’s critical for business decision-making. We, you know, we’ve got our accounting, our blocking and tackling we’ve got to take care of, but it’s the critical information that our business leaders need to make decisions for our business. And we see it with our customers all the time. It’s how does finance partner with IT and operations, because those really are the two primary areas. And, you know, finance being their customers too—what finance is producing—and just identifying, okay, what are the shared objectives and goals? What’s the “this” before having an end state, or maybe not having a vision of what’s going on? And okay, how do we—you know, where do we want to be, and how do we work towards it?
We see—you know, I see it here, both internally with Lydonia, but also externally, as we work with a lot of our customers and partners to try to get to some sort of, you know, achieved goal and making sure we’re working together to get there.
Ali Abedi: From my perspective, as you said Tod, communication is key, right? A lot of people alienate IT or operations. They think that they can hinder it. But early on, involving IT in the conversation around the data governance, the access, security—it helps a lot. And the same for operations. As long as you have shared outcomes, like reducing cycle time and improving forecast accuracy—as long as you align these KPIs, that’s what matters for both groups. And that’s how you create great cross-functional success, in my opinion.
One last question here, and it’s a bit more on the technical side, so I’ll be more than happy to tackle this one. Can you give an example on how Alteryx integrates with ERP systems like SAP and Oracle for finance purposes?
Jawwad Rasheed: Do you want to pick this one up?
Ali Abedi: Yep, more than happy to. So absolutely—one of the great things about Alteryx, it has connectors that could pull data from any, most CRM—if not any CRM systems, right? So it can take data from SAP tables, from Oracle databases directly.
One common use case that I often see is extracting general ledger data and then transforming it in Alteryx to create a P&L report. And then with that report, you push it into a visualization tool like Power BI or Tableau. And you would have that on a schedule to either be monthly, weekly, or quarterly based. That process itself—that saves the finance teams from manually extracting those reports, manually manipulating them in Excel, which takes a lot of time and it can be a very monotonous thing to do.
Jawwad Rasheed: Yeah, and I think on the how aspects as well. To bring that to life for a technical point. Right? So, regarding Oracle, we have a 3rd party provider partner of ours that we work with, and they provide a connector called Insight, and that connects to the Oracle EPM, Oracle Fusion, Cloud ERP systems. They can pull your data, metadata, hierarchies, and on the SAP side, we have 2 partners we work with. They provide their connectors again to all core SAP data sources and modules, or the SAP tables, ECC and the rest.
And really, I think the beauty of that is there isn’t—there isn’t any impact on the SAP installation. Right? It’s installed as an Alteryx plugin. It works with all the Alteryx tools. It connects to multiple space systems. It doesn’t impact—you know, uses SAP authorization. So it’s a super simple and almost seamless integration to ERP systems for people that wanted to look at information. And obviously, there’s no—you know, there’s no issue in terms of additional risk around writing to core GL data or ERP data that needs to be managed, obviously, through the controls, access, and governance that needs to be in place. So there is version control, obviously, on books and records.
Ali Abedi: Thank you Jawwad. Well, this brings us to the end of today’s webinar. 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.
