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The OneStream Podcast
The OneStream Podcast: Solution Series - CPM Express
On this episode of The OneStream Podcast, Marley Watson and Jerri McConnell join Peter Fugere to discuss CPM Express and how it is redefining the approach to implementing Corporate Performance Management (CPM) by blending rapid deployment, intuitive usability, and comprehensive financial management into a single, seamless solution. Designed for organizations seeking to leapfrog to successful financial clarity without the complexity, CPM Express is a streamlined path to advanced financial operations.
The OneStream Global Education Services team proudly presents the OneStream podcast with your host, Peter Fugere.
Speaker 00:Greetings, fellow OneStreamers, and welcome to the OneStream podcast, where we explore and examine all things OneStream, talk to experts in the industry, and gain knowledge from some of the brightest minds that help deliver and implement solutions for our clients. This episode is part of the OneStream Solution Series, where we explore solution exchange solutions and ideas in and around CPM. I'm your host, Peter Fugier, Chief Solutions Officer at OneStream Software. And as always, I'm excited to bring this discussion and grateful to welcome Jerry McConnell and Marlee Watson. Welcome to the podcast, guys.
Speaker 02:Hi. Thanks, Peter.
Speaker 00:Today, we've got a really special topic to talk about on the podcast. It's something the three of us have been working with, and we've been starting to work with clients, and it's really exciting. It's CPM Express. So why don't we start with, for the listeners out there, if you haven't heard, although it's been presented a couple times at conferences, and there's certainly a buzz about it at OneStream, when somebody asks you, what is CPM Express? What do you say? How do we start the conversation?
Speaker 02:Yeah, Peter, I think what we like to frame CPM Express as is a productized implementation. So what do we mean by that? We are marrying an accelerator application with an implementation approach that's really geared at accelerating time to value, getting customers up and running as fast as possible. And all of this is made possible based on things that implementers in the community are already using, the CPM Blueprint. So we've taken the concepts from the CPM Blueprint, added in the new magic of genesis and really brought all of solutions from solution exchange together in an easy to use way
Speaker 00:so that that's interesting too i mean these aren't what cpm express is isn't isn't really new then is it i mean it's a collection of things that are out there but these are all existing and best practices and and a lot of our our best approaches to implementing cpm right
Speaker 02:Totally, yeah. We're taking all the things that the community is familiar with, doing a little bit of pre-configuration and kind of setting it up, teeing it up for the implementers to go ahead and get the customer up and running.
Speaker 00:And all these solutions that we're bringing over, and for that matter, CPM Express, do we charge customers to use CPM Express or not?
Speaker 02:There's no additional charge. Where the customers see the benefit is the reduced implementation charges, but the regular licensing is the exact same.
Speaker 00:And this is really important. I always, when I get to talk to people about it, when we talk about CPM Express, they always think like, well, this is going to put me in a box and I'm not going to be able to modify it. Or what about other solutions on the exchange? Am I going to be able to add to it? How do we respond to that?
Speaker 02:Yeah, I love to reverse the box analogy because CPM Express isn't a box that you're stuck in. It's a box that you can jump off of. It's your starting block.
Speaker 00:Yeah, great analogy. I'm going to start using that. I like that. So how are CPM Express projects different from a normal bespoke implementation that somebody would do? A
Speaker 03:lot of times when we go in, we spend a good bit of time up front and design of projects. metadata, workflow and processes. With CPM Express, a lot of that is already in place. So we save a lot of time and design and build on those things that we already have ready to go out of the box. So there's a lot of time saved up front on those items.
Speaker 00:You know, one of the things I think about with CPM Express is it's really the only product that gives you choice. You know, do you want to have a packaged or solution or do you want to have something special or maybe you're packaged today and then later on in the journey you can specialize it and customize things when it's required so one of the things i think about that's great with one stream is it's the only product that gives you choice you have a total choice do you want to be packaged or do you need something special and maybe you want to be packaged today and then you know you have these sophisticated special requirements then later in the journey you can do that so you know if you're coming to us at the beginning and you've got these sophisticated, complex issues you're trying to work through, some sort of clients, believe me, OneStream is uniquely qualified to handle those. I mean, no company is more proven in delivering that in a platform than OneStream. Eliminating the technical debt and delivery ability to the teams to make faster and better decisions because you don't have the need to continually align data and systems. You can focus on the analysis, the results and take finance further, right? But at the same time If you're new to the CPM journey and you're not positive where to start, you've seen the art of the possible and there's a lot that you want to dig into and you're wondering just where do we get started? Or maybe you just have a smaller team or tighter time balance. resource constraints. OneStream also offers an implementation accelerator. That's CPM Express. And that helps guarantee the fastest time to value. So you're going to get up quicker than you would any other way. You're guaranteed a success. You know, we've implemented this already multiple times. We know it works. It's a less expensive implementation cost because we're managing the scope really well. And all the while you have a solution that's going to allow you to grow and evolve as your needs change. There's nothing in CPM Express that stops you from adding anything from the marketplace, growing or evolving. And that's not always the case with a package solution. Everyone else either gives you custom or in a box. OneStream gives you both. Both, basically, and allows you to move from that packaged quick start and allows you to evolve into something as your needs change. And so finally, we've talked about on the podcast hundreds of times about the platform, OneStream being infinitely extensible. It means you never run out of software. You're future-proofed. And let's say when you're at $100 million today, your needs could change when you're a billion-dollar company. OneStream allows you to deliver the success today, get up, going at the right price, time, and value, and then allows you to evolve and grow forward from there. And I think that's really what makes CPM Express powerful. It's going to give people a jumping-off point.
Speaker 02:It's a five-star tasting menu. Another analogy for you, Peter, here. I love that. In the same way that you can go to a five-star restaurant and you want to try all the different things. With CPM Express, we kind of refined... all the necessary items you would need for actuals, for planning, which includes forecast and budget, and then also basic account recs. Because of the pre-built chart of accounts, we're able to then pre-build reports, calculations, including cash flow. And we also have developed a user interface to handle allocations. So allocations can be managed by a customer rather than And what
Speaker 00:I think is great about that allocation is that it's not coding, that there's this great user interface for allocations in CPM Express that lets us build sort of graphically with pull down menus and set up allocations. You don't need to know, you know, any coding to set that up, which I think is really powerful. Exactly. And let's talk about the chart of accounts. And I know, Jerry, you spend a lot of time on the chart of accounts. If I'm a customer and I'm thinking about, hey, well, what does that mean? You pre-built the chart of accounts. I have a corporate chart of accounts. Am I going to be able to leverage that? Or do I got to use all of your accounts? How does that work?
Speaker 03:No, sure. We built an extended chart of accounts. And I'll just use the balance sheet as an example. And it's your typical balance sheet. We have current assets with your standard categories underneath, cash, accounts receivable, inventory, and so on. And you can extend that down to whatever level of detail using your corporate chart of accounts underneath that. And we can build the reports off your corporate chart of accounts. But we built the... the summary and middle level hierarchies based on the US GAAP XML taxonomies as they are published. So they work across the board for pretty much everybody.
Speaker 00:And I got asked the question recently, and I think it's a great point. So somebody was saying, well, if we have that chart of accounts pre-built and I want to make changes to it, or after phase one even, I want to Now, listen, I mean, everybody's got like total assets, total liabilities, total revenue, you know, like those are pretty common accounts at the top parent level. And you could change the descriptions on any of them to really whatever you want. Like there's no restriction on that. But if I wanted to update that chart of accounts, do I have to re-implement OneStream because I've used CPM Express? No, not at all. Yeah, not at all. Right. Like you basically would go in and update the accounts like you would like any customer would if they changed a parent level account. You don't need to reload data. You don't need to remap. You don't need to re reconcile. You may have to update a report. Right. But I mean, I mean, this is this is giving, I think, the customers sort of the most flexibility and the fastest implementation.
Speaker 03:Right. Because we are going in with pre-built logic, for example, cash flow, equity pickup, minority interest, all those things we've been able to pre-build because we have that pre-built metadata, but still giving you the flexibility of having your level of detail underneath. It gives us the ability to have the pre-built logic, the pre-built reports, and so on, and that's what gives us the ability to get you up and going quicker. Then later you can do whatever you want to do to take it to the next level.
Speaker 00:Another question I get asked too is around the forecast and budget piece of it. Can you guys tell me how that's set up and how we accelerated the implementation for budget and forecast?
Speaker 02:Yeah. So there's two ways you can plan in CPM Express. You can either load your data, do it offline, or which some customers might come to the table with, or you can leverage our planning method solution. So our planning method solution is a solution developed specifically for CPM Express, where you can account by account assign what type of method or calculation you want the account to be planned by, whether it's a run rate, whether it's a driver-based calculation, or it's a zero-based input where you just want to type into a form. All of this is driven off of the planning method solution. The planning method solution should be really familiar if you've ever used data entry one, two, three, because that's the crux of it. But what this does is it lets us flexibly plan. So the customer can go in and assign what method they want. And similar to what Jerry was talking about in The fact that you can always add on. The planning method solution isn't limited to what comes with CPM Express. You can build additional methods throughout your implementation and on the go forward.
Speaker 00:But there's a group of methods that are already pre-built, like you could use right out of the box, right?
Speaker 02:Absolutely. It comes with 10 pre-built planning methods, including seeding from a prior forecast and seeding from actuals.
Speaker 00:That's actually, when I think of CPM Express and how I've seen some of these early customers adopt it, that's one of the easiest parts to get going is building out the planning because so much of it's set up. I mean, the forms are there. The drivers are built. The seating's set up. It's just really ready to go.
Speaker 02:Absolutely.
Speaker 03:Yeah, Peter, and on my latest one, we discovered one additional planning method we needed to add in, and we did it in 15 minutes. It was fantastic. not difficult at all.
Speaker 00:Well, we still bill our time, Jerry. Maybe we'll say an hour. Okay, it's an hour. No, I think it's great. I think this is what we're doing, accelerating and pre-building a lot of stuff. I think we're seeing it. The three of us, for the listeners that are out there that are hearing this, the three of us have been working on the early projects. And so the feedback we've gotten, how we're seeing people implement it, these are customers that would be challenged to take on a much longer project and drill in and build custom solutions around planning and forecast and can leverage what we're doing, replacing Excel sheets that they're collecting with workflow, standardized reporting, standardized calculations, and getting up really quickly. So I think the feedback we've gotten has been really positive, wouldn't you guys say?
Speaker 02:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 00:So let me ask you guys this. How do you see this helping OneStream customers going forward?
Speaker 02:I think you alluded to it earlier, Peter and Jerry, but sometimes the base implementation isn't what a customer needs to solve their business problems of today. They want to do something like headcount planning. They want to get to their sales planning, but they need a starting point. This will help them tackle that hurdle much quicker so that they can focus on solving the problems that they need to solve today.
Speaker 03:Well, and I mean, Peter, you and I have been doing this for years.
Speaker 00:Too long. It's an impressive tool. It does a lot of things, and it can address so many issues across a company, across their business and their reporting. It can get to a point where you're just like, how do we get started? How do we dig into this? Where... What's the core of CPM? And then, you know, we'll even say, you know, start with the core, then do more. You know, like the foundation of CPM expressed to us is actuals, consolidation, allocations, cash flow. Budget and forecast, you know, the planning, having those drivers, the seeding, the variance reporting, constant dollar analysis, and then allocations. And even if you can just get started with allocations, we can get you going with a core piece of it that you could add later. You can really get live and get value out of the system and be reporting much faster. So I know a little bit, but for the listeners out there, let's talk about the history of CPM Express. It's been almost 11 months, a year we've been working on this solution. As a company, why don't we just talk about the history? How did we come up with this? What were some of the problems we were trying to address? I mean, one way just I think about it is going back to the art of the possible. You know, you can see so much in a demo. And when you start with a blank slate, so to speak, with a project, you can have bigger conversations and you can come up with more customized solutions. But a lot of what we put together, because we have this productized component, we brought in so many solutions from Marketplace. It aligns with the demo, you know, so much more closely. When you look at the CPM Express application, when you see it in the demo and you see, you know, day one when you're looking at the application, what you saw is what you get. Like it's right there. I mean, you can see the menus. You can see the interface. It's really aligned. And so it helps. I think it helps a customer who's looking at getting up very quickly. see that sort of from demo to delivery solutions just so much more clearly. And then I think, Marley, you brought it up. The projects are so much faster that we're bringing time to value on some of these implementations. And some customers, there's a lot of reasons why a customer might want a quick implementation. They might need to get off a legacy system for some reason very quickly. There could be a major acquisition or they could be getting ready for a general ledger project that's necessitating some sort of reporting solution faster. And this gives them options, I think.
Speaker 02:Yeah. The art of the possible is great, but I think our mantra with CPM Express has really been, let's synthesize all this wealth of knowledge into
Speaker 00:best practices. You know, and going back to this isn't new, I mean, that's a great point. We leveraged CPM Blueprint, which has been out for a while, and that has a lot of best practices in it. And things like overrides, CTA and FX calculations, constant dollar. So You know, we were leveraging that, and that's been validated by dozens of implementations with OneStream and our partners. So those are sort of best practices that we're bringing in, too. And that helps. Again, why do I need to sit down and write a roll-forward rule for the very first time for you, customer? When we have Blueprint, it's validated, we know it works, and I'm leveraging that. I'm ready to go. So those are the sort of things, to my mind, that accelerate the project.
Speaker 03:Yeah, I was about to bring that up, Peter. That was probably what we spent half our time in that very first week of bringing this thing together was all of the architects in the room. What are we having to do? Over and over and over, every single time we do an implementation and we just brought all those things together and put it in.
Speaker 00:Well, and to that point, I mean, think about what we did with end user training for CPM Express. You know, when we had the UI pretty well defined and we know what the workflows are going to be, even the end user training, which... Developing it isn't a big part of a project, but it's a couple weeks, two, three weeks, and we were able to take that out. I mean, what do you guys think about what we did with the training?
Speaker 03:I think it's great. It's consistent, which is good.
Speaker 00:Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. So maybe we could talk about what customers can expect. for a timeline for a given project? Let's say I'll throw it to you guys. I'm a Fugere Inc. I make golf equipment and Patriots apparel for men. And I'm going to buy CPM Express. I work out with my salesperson. How do I get started? And tell me the timeline of the project. What do I need to do?
Speaker 02:Yeah. So something unique about a CPM Express project is we have the concept of pre-work. So because we have developed metadata and artifacts in the accelerator application, what we can do is we can come to the table with workbooks that allow you as the customer to figure out how you want to slot your individual metadata in our framework.
Speaker 00:And I look at those too as you know, we're asking for things so that when we show up, we're hitting the ground running too. So in there with metadata, you know, if there's additional reports, if there's user defines, we want to add your corporate chart of accounts that we want to layer into the structure that we have, that we have those already electronically. So we're not asking and waiting and wasting any time. We're moving really as quickly as we can. And for that matter, data files and mapping files too. So we can get get loading and get working. And then we show up and how long should a customer plan on design then?
Speaker 03:I think it depends on how many of the menu items they're selecting. If we're doing all components, I would say anywhere from three to five days.
Speaker 00:And then at the end of that three days, then I, just like any other project, we're probably going right into the build, correct?
Speaker 03:Yes. And in terms of overall timeline, as with any project, it's going to come down to how much history and data, how long it's going to take you to reconcile that data.
Speaker 00:Yeah.
Speaker 03:I think our assumptions going in include two years of history on actuals. Isn't that our current assumption?
Speaker 00:Yep. I think we base that to our typical CPM Express customer is only going to have somewhere between a dozen, maybe three dozen customers. legal entities that we're loading data to. So this is on the smaller side of an application. Obviously, if you have hundreds of entities and we're reconciling, and for those who don't know, and this isn't a one stream thing, every product everybody's ever worked with, not even CPM. ledgers, anything. Data reconciliation is the longest pole in the tent. It's the hardest part of the project, I think, to work through. But I think it's a really valuable exercise to go through. As you go through data reconciliation as an end user, when you're tying out the data as an administrator, when you're going through and tying out the data, you're learning the tools to support your end users. So when somebody calls up and says, where'd this number come from? Like you have those tools. And I think, especially on a CPM Express project, where we have a smaller window to go through that, I think it's so critical that the administrators are like right at the hip of the consultants doing the data reconciliation together. So they build that tool set up. And then a normal timeline. I mean, after we get We get through the build. How many parallels would you typically recommend for actuals?
Speaker 03:Normally, we would always recommend two before go live. One of those could be, you know, lagged and in conjunction with UAT. It just really depends on how comfortable the customer is with their data.
Speaker 00:Yeah. How are you guys seeing customers respond to the project so far and the work we're doing?
Speaker 03:So far, it's been great.
Speaker 02:Something exciting from our first implementation that we tackled is the first week we actually were able to start loading historical data, which I think surprised not only us, but also the customer as well.
Speaker 00:That's an interesting story, too, because that customer, the CFO, had come from an implementation that was more bespoke and they had more involved requirements. So he was expecting a much longer timeline. And when I think that at the end of that first week, when we had data loaded and we were starting to tie things out, that was a little bit of a mic drop moment. Like we're onto something here, I thought. So that felt great. And so what kind of resources does a customer need to support a CPM implementation?
Speaker 03:As with any implementation, I would say at least two admins because you always want to back up. They need to be hands-on from day one. Sometimes with a bespoke project, we wait until we're ready about midway through build before we bring them in. But given the shortened timeline and the need for them to own it up front, We need them ready to go day one. So that's another thing that we've really been pushing with the CPM Express projects is to get them trained up on the admin training really before we ever get started.
Speaker 00:A big part of the pre-work. Like it makes sense. It really makes sense to have them go to admin training before we start that abbreviated design. Well, let's talk a little bit more about training, which we have videos and it's documented really honestly it's probably better documented than a lot of implementations out there we put a lot of effort into the documentation and the videos which i think beyond like just having videos to train the end users you know just as there's turnover or uh changes in the the the team that's working on it or just even people forget we did the training a year ago and now it's time to do budget again and what what am i supposed to do um i think that was That's been really valuable, all embedded in the solution. We also have a training package that we offer with it for customers. And I think the training package, besides being a smoking hot deal, is so critical to it. Do you guys want to cover what's in the training package that we have?
Speaker 02:Yeah, Peter. So with CPIM Express, because getting the customer up to speed is a crucial part of successful handover, we are offering them an amazing training deal that includes an admin course, two navigator passports. 10 Excel add-in navigator courses. And then we are also providing them with a really good deal on the OneStream Press books. So all of the books you can get for a super low price. And we actually have placeholders in the application to embed those directly. So they're always accessible.
Speaker 00:What I think is neat about that is, I mean, the books effectively are a site license. So everybody who has access to CPM Express and OneStream can download and read through the books. And, you know, we've all been part of the working on the OneStream press stuff. And there's some really great stuff out there that, you know, is included and you get it at a great price. So that's fantastic.
Unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 00:So how would somebody get, if somebody wants to see CPM Express or they want to get a copy of it, how would they do that? How do they get to look at it or how would they see it? I
Speaker 03:think they just call you.
Speaker 00:Well, eventually, maybe somebody else. I think, I mean, for a customer, they'd have to start with sales. For the partners, Marlee, you're part of the solution exchange. How are people getting access from there?
Speaker 02:Yeah, so for partner enablement, we have a course that you'll be able to take as a partner, and that's where you'll be able to get your hands on it. However, when it comes to the actual application, accelerator application itself, those will be included in the customer's environment build deployment. So when you log in to implement a customer that's elected to do CPM Express, that application will be there. However, CPM Express also has a wealth of documentation. As we mentioned, we have a configuration guide for how to activate all the functionality. We have some sample end user training. We have some sample timeline. We have all the pre-work we mentioned. All of that will be included on solution exchange as the CPM Express toolkit. So that will be available to download if you are a partner or a OneStream influencer.
Speaker 00:Guys, another great discussion. Thank you so much for bringing your expertise to the podcast today. And thank you, fellow OneStream We'd love to hear from you. Questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out at podcast at onestreamsoftware.com. I look forward to bringing you another exciting podcast. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time on the OneStream Podcast.
Speaker 01:The OneStream Podcast is brought to you by the OneStream Global Education Services team.