BPM: How long would it take you in Excel?

Smith: Three months.

BPM: What was the process, then, for comparing actuals with the budget?

Smith: Our managers and our executives and the board didn't want to see all our performance data. They were not going to wade through that. So we came up with a very slick reporting solution. We built a dashboard with arcplan to sit on top of all the Hyperion data sources and applications. You could just open up a screen on your desk and you could see whatever you wanted to see in a graph form. If you wanted to look at the actual data itself, the numbers, you could click on a button, and the dashboard would display it.

And then we had a series of reports that we built in arcplan that gave it — well, I'll call it “the sizzle.” These reports had a really graphical view of the data with traffic lights, all built around things so you could quickly look at something and answer “How are we doing in terms of budget versus actuals, and how are we doing against our forecast?” Anytime we were reporting on our budget, we would report our actuals against budget and also compare them to our most recent forecast. So managers were able to see all three.

BPM: What were the results for GT of having this level of access to performance data?

Smith: For us, the biggest driver was having better visibility over future financial forecasts, including sales and manufacturing costs. For example, we would forecast a standard cost for the budget for the year, but because materials pricing was going up, sometimes the forecasts would be pretty far off. The Hyperion applications enabled us to very quickly put our finger on why our cost per unit was fluctuating plus or minus 4, 5, or 10 percent. We were very quickly able to identify the root causes and see what we needed to do in purchasing to try to bring our material costs down or what we needed to do on the plant floor to be more efficient in how we utilized our labor.

BPM: Do you have any advice for a CFO out there who is still grappling with spreadsheets for budgeting and reporting?

Smith: I can't believe they're doing it, seriously. I mean, just because of the risk of human error and mistakes. You can still make mistakes with prepackaged software, but it certainly reduces the risk of making mistakes a great deal. My own personal view of it is that I think people are very scared. They tend to think about these projects as kind of an ERP implementation, and they say, “Oh no, it's going to take me three years. I'll never get there. It's going to cost a lot of money. It's not going to work. Nobody's going to be happy.” That's the wrong way to look at something like this. These are tools that can be put into place and deployed very quickly by finance people for finance people. And it's not a big drain on IT resources.

We chose HFM, Hyperion Planning, Essbase, and Hyperion Strategic Finance in June or July 2006. By September we were rolling them out, and then we flipped the switch on January 1, 2007. From that point forward, everything was done through these Hyperion applications that we built and implemented. Which is pretty remarkable. We were a small company; I had two people besides myself, and we were able to implement and put those kinds of very sophisticated tools in people's hands very quickly.

BPM: You're using Hyperion through a hosted service provider. I would think that would make a difference in terms of implementation.

Smith: It's true that using K2Analytics saved us from having to build an internal support infrastructure. They had a service center up and running, ready to go, software installed, and it was just a matter of designing the application in the cubes. But I think it depends on what resources the company has. In our case, we had a small, lean IT organization. Going with a hosted solution saved us from having to wait around to hire five people. But had we decided to staff the system's management in-house, my expectations of our IT staff wouldn't have been any different from my expectations with respect to K2Analytics. I mean, at the end of the day, they've got to do their job and perform, and if we have a problem they have to act fast.