Ed Hyer, as VP of FP&A at Verizon, built one of the most ambitious centers of excellence (COEs) undertaken in finance.
Put simply, a center of excellence centralizes similar types of work into a single entity. While relatively common for payroll functions or “back-end transactional work”, FP&A presented an altogether bigger challenge for the COE concept.
The creation of Verizon’s Center of Excellence at the $134 billion revenue 118,000 employee company counts as one of the most audacious challenges undertaken in FP&A–ultimately comprising 175 professionals, took more than a year to complete and fanning through 24 different waves transformation to take effect. Though the impetus from the beginning was on proving the concept could work, Verizon’s FP&A COE has now transformed the business in impactful and unexpected ways.
“I remember one case, where someone showed there were 16 different processes here. He said he could get it down to two, and I’ve just saved myself six hours on workday one. It didn’t require any new tools or technology.
In this must-listen to episode Hyer reveals the secret of Verizon’s FP&A transformation:
In this episode:
- How my passion for FP&A was lit compared to other finance work
- Leading FP&A for some of the biggest US companies including Hertz and Verizon
- The “why” of creating an FP&A CoE – and it is not just about cost saving
- The lessons of building a Center of Excellence
- How COE-building places finance teams at the vanguard of automation
- The oh-crap moment when building the COE
- Heretical answer on his favorite Excel function‼
Ed Hyer/LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-hyer/
Paul Barnhurst LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy/Datarails LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/datarails
Full transcript of the conversation:
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis. Today we are delighted to be joined by Ed Hyer. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed Hyer:
Hey, Paul. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here with you today.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, we’re excited to have you. So, just a little bit by way of introduction, Ed comes to us from Florida. He earned his accounting degree from Penn State University. He also earned his CPA license, and he’s worked for several large global companies, including companies such as ATT, News Corp, Hertz, and Verizon. So, this is a question we like to start our interviews off. We have to kinda have a little bit of fun. Tell me about the most challenging budgeting experience you have ever had?
Ed Hyer:
<Laugh>. Sure, Paul. I can do that. I, I I still, I still suffer some PTSD from this experience. I’ll be honest with you. Therapy’s helped a lot. But you know, the probably the most challenging experience that I’ve encountered was when, when I was leading corporate FP&A at Hertz, in addition to our annual planning cycle and our monthly forecasts, we would prepare a pretty exhaustive weekly flash. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> just provided every Friday, and it was distributed to our CEO and his entire leadership team. And this document was the basis for our CEO’s Monday morning staff meetings. And it was in a very, you know, a lot of data produced manually. And we were reliant on the different divisions to provide that information to us and to pull it all together. It was quite an undertaking to, to pull that off on a weekly basis and make sure that the, the data was not only provided timely, but was accurate.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I could imagine that was a lot of work. And especially on a Friday, probably a lot of late Friday nights, which, you know, we all like to get out early on Friday. So
Ed Hyer:
I, and yes I won’t, I won’t lie to you. There were some absolutely no question about that. And, and even it led to more than a couple of Sunday evening calls in preparation for the Monday morning staff meetings. But I’ll say this, one of the things that I did get a lot of support from when I took over the role was trying to re-engineer some of those processes to avoid those, those late Friday nights.
Paul Barnhurst:
It makes a lot of sense. There’s always a lot we can do. And, you know, re-engineering is a big part of the job if you wanna be efficient. So that, that makes sense to me. So, you know, next question. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Just give us a little bit about your background, kind of your career, how you got started, where you, how you ended up, where you’re at today.
Ed Hyer:
Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Paul, as you, as you mentioned, I, I graduated from Penn State. I have my degree in accounting. I’m a licensed CPA in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Like so many others, I began my career in public accounting in the greater Philadelphia area. I did that for about five years and then decided I was ready for a change in both my career and my personal life. And so I I moved to Los Angeles packed everything that would fit in the car, drove to LA and went to work for ATT Wireless in their corporate accounting department. And it was there, Paul, that I got introduced to FP&A. You know, I was very much involved as part of the, the monthly close process. I would partner with the FP&A team on variance analysis and variance explanations, and even talking a little bit about kind of what, what we saw from an accounting perspective and in perspective periods.
And I kind of realized over time that that looked like a lot more fun than what I was doing. No, listen, no disrespect to debits and credits and accounting. It’s great training. In fact, I have a, I have a daughter who’s an accounting major at the University of Florida right now. So I, I think it’s wonderful. But I had the opportunity shortly after joining at t to move into the FP&A space and never looked back. And that’s where I built my career. I spent seven years with AT&T Wireless left and went to work briefly in Hollywood for a division of News Corp. And then went to work for Hertz, where I stayed for 10 years. Started as started in Los Angeles as the western region senior FP&A business partner and controller.
Did that for four years. And then relocated with my family to new New York just outside of the city in northern New Jersey area where I would work in corporate FP&A. And then I spent a couple years Paul, and this was my introduction to transformation work and centralization of work and building COEs. I was asked to transform the revenue management organization within Hertz, both pricing and yield. So I did that for several years before returning to corporate FP&A. And then I had the opportunity to join Verizon. And I was, I was hired specifically to come in and stand up or build the Verizon FP&A COE (Center of Excellence) in central Florida. So that’s sort of been my journey. I, you know, counting as my training, the bulk of my career as an FP&A I consider myself an FP&A professional, and I’ve really enjoyed enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. I appreciate that background. And I agree with you. I think FP&A is a great career. And like you said, no offense to accountants. I prefer FP&A as well. I didn’t earn an accounting degree, but I’ve done some accounting. It comes with the job. I built accruals Sure. And done debits and credits and spent lots of times with accountants. And I always like to say, you know, the FP&A’s best friend is a really good accountant. I just don’t wanna be FP&A ‘s best friend. I prefer to be FP&A. So <laugh>,
Ed Hyer:
I don’t disagree at all. <Laugh>.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, one, one thing you talked about there, and I’d really like to drill into it on this episode, we haven’t had an opportunity to talk about this with a guest much before, is centers of excellence, right? Yeah. As you mentioned, you built one in revenue management at Hertz, you built the FP&A center at Verizon. So maybe we could start by just telling our audience what is a center of excellence and why do companies build one? Like kind of what are the benefits? Let’s just start there. Maybe talk a little bit about what they are?
Ed Hyer:
Yeah, absolutely. So a, a, a center of excellence sometimes also called a center of expertise is really just centralizing similar types of work into a single entity. And that work is performed by subject matter experts in that particular discipline, right? So it, it’s, you know, no, no reason to overthink it. It’s really centralizing similar work and then having subject matter experts focus exclusively on that type of work. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know, the concept of centers of excellence, they’ve been around for a while. More traditionally, centers of excellence tended to be around highly, highly transactional work, and more specifically within shared services or back office type functions. Yep. Your, your accounts payable, accounts receivable, or, or, you know, procure to pay, whatever you wanna call it today, billing, payroll type functions which lend themselves very, very neatly to coming together in a, in a centralized fashion.
Even accounting, Paul, even accounting can be centralized. And, and at Verizon, the accounting center of Excellence exists in, in central Florida as well. Look, the benefits obviously to, to creating centers of excellence. I kind of think of it sort of in, in, in three terms, right?
One is gonna be the efficiencies that that lead to cost savings. And there’s a lot of ways those efficiencies are, are driven. You’re gonna get economies of scale, you’re gonna get some labor arbitrage, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you, you’re gonna have expanded level savings, right? Talent, better talent alignment on the work that’s being done within that, that entity. So you’re gonna create some efficiencies and some very clear cost savings. And, and I know that tends to be the focus for many entities and organizations, but I also submit that you can deliver a higher quality product, right?
You’re gonna have a, a very consistent product a product that is gonna be more timely and it’s gonna be a better value and use to your internal constituents, whoever they, they may be, right? So I think savings are important, but I also think there’s a quality aspect of this that, that is important as well. Thing I’ll say, and we can maybe talk more about this, but you’re creating a platform for automation. By bringing together this type of work, you’re now establishing a basis upon which you can build out your automation. It’s much, much more difficult to do that when the work is disparate, either in different, different teams, different geographies, et cetera. So that is a huge element not to be overlooked as, as organizations think about bringing the work together and creating COEs.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. I appreciate the explanation is, as I gathered there, really, you mentioned three things that are key to it. I mean, the one that everybody tends to focus on efficiency and cost savings. Then there’s the quality of the work by having everybody use best practices and kind of having it together where you can keep it consistent. And hopefully, you know, by, by doing that, you’re producing a higher quality, obviously. And then the third one that you mentioned was around, and it just slipped my mind. Can you remind me about the third one?
Ed Hyer:
Platform for automation.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. Automation. Yeah. So, which is huge, and I totally agree, because if you’ve standardized all the processes, it’s much easier to automate than if you have every location doing something different. A
Ed Hyer:
Hundred percent, right? Exactly right.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yep. No, I, exactly. One of the companies, I, you know, I’ve seen some, obviously some COEs and stuff, some of the companies I worked with, but I joined one where they just barely stood up a shared service center for, you know, accounting for AP, for AR, for collections, all in the location I was working at. And I was one of, they were two, but one of the first two FP&A hires at that location. Okay. So it was interesting to kind of watch ’em stand it up and go watch that whole process happen. Because before that, they had been a holding company and everybody was doing their own thing, and they decided they were gonna, when they went private, they were gonna integrate it all, become an operational company. One of the first big projects was to standardize all that back office and, you know, go to a, we also went to a new ERP globally at the same time, you know, so that was going on as well. So that was a great learning experience to watch that project. Yeah.
Ed Hyer:
And you know, the other thing as well, especially with companies of scale, when you’re talking about your large corporations, Verizon being one of them establishing these centers of excellence also gives you the opportunity to select geographies that may be more economically efficient, right? So you can, you can examine those opportunities. You don’t have to have your COE where your corporate headquarters is.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. No, and that’s exactly what we did, you know, at the company I was at, the COE was in a different state than the headquarters.
Ed Hyer:
Yep. Not uncommon at all.
Paul Barnhurst:
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So, as we talk about center of excellence, something you mentioned is, you know, the one you tend to see is a lot of transactional work, very standardized processes, but we’ve started to see more center of excellences for FP&A. And I know you stood one up for Verizon. So can maybe you talk about the differences there. How should people be thinking of, you know, center of excellence for FP&A versus a transactional center of excellence?
Ed Hyer:
And, and that’s a, it’s, it’s a, it’s a very important question, Paul. I think when you, again, with FP&A, unlike the, the aforementioned, you know, organizations, even including accounting, you are not going to centralize 100% of fp and a. That doesn’t work. And there’s no model that I’ve ever seen where that makes any sense. You’re gonna effectively have to come up with a service delivery model. You’re going to have to decide as an entity what work you want to move into the COE versus what work will stay with your traditional legacy or what we used to call our business unit FP&A organizations.
And so, in my experience, we call that the service delivery model. And so the cornerstone of any good FP&A COE process or transformation is going to be an exceptionally well-defined service delivery model. And a very clear, aligned understanding across the enterprise as to what work will move and what work will stay. And it is super important that organizations understand that and then make decisions about that work based upon their own needs and their culture. In speaking and working with a lot of different consultants in this space. They can make recommendations, they can talk about the benefits to more centralization versus less, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to each individual entity and what they believe is right for them along their transformation journey.
Paul Barnhurst:
And I like how you said that each entity, each culture, because there are differences, but I’m sure there are some standard things that you would say kind of best practices those make sense for a COE. So what are some, as you were going through Verizon or just in general, what are some of those things that you think, you know, in fp and a lend themselves potentially to a COE?
Ed Hyer:
Yeah. Certainly the, the most obvious is your monthly internal management report, right? Any type of standard repeatable type report set that is being prepared, that is exactly the kind of thing you wanna start with. It’s clearly the most obvious. Okay? Yeah. And Lord knows that, you know, regardless of the size of the entity, your month end close is gonna generate a tremendous amount of internal management reporting. So that’s the most obvious place to start, right?
I think from there, you then can take a look at, from a planning perspective model ownership and maintenance. In my experience, all planning models were owned by the COE. They were responsible for updating the models for actuals. They were responsible for updating the models for the new year, et cetera. The data input of the models could, could go either way. But the big element within planning was, was all of the model maintenance enterprise wide guidance. In my experience, again, R FP A C, we worked very closely with
Paul Barnhurst:
Corporate. Yes, please. I’ve seen when enterprise wide guidance is inconsistent and just creates, we’ve all been there, creates a nightmare.
Ed Hyer:
We, we’ve all been there. We’ve all been there. And so one of the advantages to having an FP&A COE that touches the entire enterprise is you can become the tip of the spear in terms of communicating that consistent guidance, right? So in my experience was part of corporate FP&A, we, we rolled up to the, the head of, head of corporate. But in this case, and I used to joke about this with my leadership all the time, not only was my boss, my boss, he was also my customer. Yes. Right? And so, mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, we had that alignment, we’re able to, to do that. So I think those are the kind of things you start with, right? And, and one of the things, again, it’s, it’s when you think about transformations, right? And, and we talked about this at Verizon, frequently, transformation is a journey. It’s not a destination. Okay? And, and you’re never done. Right? And where you, the, the, the service delivery model that you agree to at the offset, right? You want, you wanna get to that point and then go back and reevaluate, okay, what’s next? Can we do more? Can we take on more? Right? And you begin to think about what’s possible beyond what you decided to do initially.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. That, that makes sense. And that’s helpful. I think that’s a good way to think about it. And I agree with you, right? You start with those very standard process type things. They’re still somewhat transactional in nature, very similar to when you stand up a shared service center that’s transactional. You’re gonna start with those things. And over time, like, okay, AP very standard AR . You know, maybe you have a very standard collections process, and then you might be able to bring in some of the accruals as you’re doing the accounting. And eventually you get to that point where, okay, can it, it all can be done in a shared service center, but rarely, at least if you wanna be successful, do you start by just saying, Hey, we’re gonna do everything all at once.
Ed Hyer:
And, and, and that’s exactly right. And again, because with, with an FP&A COE, there is a continuum of work that you may choose to centralize or not. Right? Over time at, at Verizon, we, we be, we, we took on first pass variance analysis. So here’s the report, here’s the first cut of your variance explanations. Yeah. Right. You know, and, and so we, we, we evolved into certain things that we would begin to take on more, more responsibility.
Paul Barnhurst:
And, and that to me makes sense as the, as the team get learns, things better, automates more, you continue to try to give them more and more responsibility and test it and see how it goes.
Ed Hyer:
And yeah. And, and, and you know, that, that kind of brings up a really interesting point, right? We, as you stand up your I’ll be, look, let’s be transparent. We’ve all worked in different cultures and different environments. Not everybody is a big fan of losing control of their work. <Laugh> you’re taking work from a team that’s been doing it, and now you’re saying, no, these guys have it. There is, there’s gonna be resistance, there’s gonna be concerns. Okay? So as you stand up your COE, it is super important that you are over-communicating with your constituency. Well, first of all, let me even take a step back, right? As part of your service delivery model, right? Governance and service management. Service management is an aspect of governance that is super critical. You’re going to have to have very clearly defined service catalogs, deliverables, inventory, SLAs, right?
And measurement tools. These are very important elements, especially when you’re trying to ensure that you’re going to meet and exceed the expectations of your internal customers, which are the other FP&A organizations that you’re supporting. So having that foundation is gonna be super, super important. Again, it’s what comes along with splitting the baby, some work goes, some stay. So having that framework is super important. In my experience, we began standing, moving the work, migrating the work, taking on the responsibilities, and we were in a prove it phase, right? We were immediately in, okay, prove it. You said you can do it, and you said you can do it timely. You know, a lot of the deliverables were working through, or time sensitive as part of the closed process. And so the first few months were proven, I’m pleased to say that in most cases, we very quickly pivoted from, okay, you, you, you can do this. You have proven it here. Now, can you take all this as well,? That lends itself to a whole nother set of issues that fall as part of this governance conversation around demand management and how you think about ensuring that you have a robust process to engage additional work in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the COE, right? So that, that’s a whole nother element of ensuring that when you think about how you want to stand up your COE, that that service delivery model is so important.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. So you’ve shared a lot there. And just kind of question here will give you an opportunity to kind of recap that, maybe elaborate, but if we have a listener out there, their companies thinking about a COE, what would be kind of the advice you would offer? Like, how should they get started? What’s kind of that framework to follow?
Ed Hyer:
I think the yeah, the risk of repeating myself a little bit, but it probably bears it. You know, the starting point is you really have to be very, very thoughtful and deliberate about exactly what is the work you’re going to move. And again, there’s cultural implications to that. It’s not just as easy as saying, well, here’s the stuff. You gotta understand what your organization’s ready to do. You’re gonna have to get the buy-in of your, your fp a organization on that. But establishing from the get go exactly. The type of work that’s gonna move and not move is, is absolutely super important. Coming up with thinking about, okay, what is my process going to look like to actually move that work? Right? And again, in many cases, especially organizations of scale, that work is getting handed off to different people.
It’s not as simple as saying, okay, you four guys, now you’re all on the same team, and you sit over here Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, it’s, there’s, there’s a handoff there. And, and that’s gonna require some training and some spooling up. It may require extensive hiring, right? So there’s, there’s gonna be some overlap there. You need to think thoughtfully about that process. At Verizon we had a wave process. There were 24 different waves of the entire transformation majority of which impacted fp and a and it was a 16 to 18 month journey. Now that’s of, of significant scale. Sure. Right? Not all organizations have, it doesn’t have to be that way. But thinking about your service delivery model, how you’re gonna go ahead and actually move that work, and then creating a governance framework around your service management, your demand management and your performance measurement are hypercritical. You can’t overlook that.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. As I listen to that, as I kind of boil it down as I’m hearing you talk about it, one, you gotta be crystal clear on exactly what you’re doing, what belongs there on, what the governance is around that, what the model is, making sure you understand the entire touch points. And you over-communicate throughout the entire process.
Ed Hyer:
Yes, a hundred percent. In fact, Paul, you know, our our organization at Verizon, the FP&A COE was, was located in central Florida the corporate headquarters for Verizon or in New Jersey. My, I split my time, 50 50. I spent half my time with my constituents in, at, at, at headquarters partnering with them and ensuring they understood what, what was happening, what they could expect, addressing issues, questions, concerns. I had my directors to this day, they aren’t happy with me about it, but once a month, we all went to, to New Jersey together and spent time with our customers, our constituents, and made sure that we were developing relationships. Develop that intra FP&A relationship is really critical if you’re going to have a successful co OE experience.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. Thank you. And I appreciate that. And so, you know, one of the things that I know from a little bit of my experience, and also that I’ve heard, is just that initial investment in a COE can be very high, right? You’re, you have some overlap typically when you’re transitioning all the work. So you have all the employees that we’re doing it, all these new employees, you’re standing up a new center, which comes with cost. Sometimes there’s systems involved in that, if not initially later on as you’re going through the transformation, as you try to automate and scale it up. So maybe talk to how do you ensure that the cost to start a COE makes sense? Because you’re gonna make a big investment with the idea that you get the return later on. Obviously, you’re not gonna get that return from day one or probably even six months in. It could be, you know, year one, year two, year three, type of thing,
Ed Hyer:
Thing. So here’s what I I, I would submit, Paul, that you, you’re absolutely right. You’re going to incur cost out of the gate to establish an FP&A. There’s no two ways around it. Now, this, the, the significance of that cost can be managed, right? And this goes back to how you want to think about that service delivery model and how you wanna think about it from day one versus evolving it over time. So there are ways to mitigate that to an extent, but, but there’s no getting around it. And you hit the nail on the head. And I very vividly remember looking at the total aggregate FP&A headcount while we were standing up the FP&A COE And there was definitely a, a little bit of a bump there as we, you know. Yep. Okay. So I, I think, look, I, I don’t know that it is necessarily the kind of undertaking where you can develop a well-built, quantifiable business case that says, I’m gonna invest X and recoup Y in Z period of time, right?
<Laugh>, I, I don’t think this is that kind of analysis. What I would say though is that you know, based on my experience working with, you know, a plethora of different consulting firms, I’m yet to encounter any single entity that hasn’t dramatically improved their cost efficiencies after having set up an FPA coe. You know, in my experience, the things we uncovered the opportunities that were there were better than expected. Lemme say it that way, <laugh>. So I, you know, I would really say that, and, and again, those are, those are things, some of it’s very low hanging fruit. It doesn’t necessarily require out of the gate a dramatic investment in these systems. Now, over the time, over time, that certainly plays a role. But, you know, for example and again, in our case, largely because of the geography change, we had fresh eyes looking at the work, and, and it was wonderful to see people coming in and, and saying, wait a minute, I can take these three things.
I can pull ’em together into a single thing, and I can kick off the, the, you know, the run at two in the morning. I can, I can build something that’s gonna automate that, and we’ll come, come in the morning, it’s done. I mean, there was a lot of things, it didn’t require massive technological investment that very quickly started to yield results. But, but real quick, just to kind of dovetail back, this is why having that performance measurement is really important so that you can go back and say, look, this is the amount of, and our big focus, by the way, before you even got to process improvement was work elimination, right? We would take on work and look at it and say, wait a minute. If you, you have, and I, I, this is not uncommon, you’re gonna find if you’ve got you know, six different regions and you’re centralizing certain elements of their work, there’s one region that’s doing something, the other five are not.
Why is this region doing that? How necessary is it? Is there another way to get those customers what they need? Right? I can’t tell you how many times we would send out and, and not just in my Verizon experience, but when somebody insisted they had to have a report, we’d send it out and we would, you know password file you know, password protect the file, and then see if anybody asks for the password. And I’m sure many of your listeners have done the same thing, <laugh>. But eliminating work is, is a big, big part of it as well. And then ensuring that you can drive those efficiencies and continue to pull more work in that, that was the headline for us. And we could go back and say, look, here’s all the additional responsibilities we’ve taken on over X period of time.
Paul Barnhurst:
So just maybe a little bit to get more kind of granular, talk a little bit about how it was at Verizon. You know, how many kind of employees did you have in the center of excellence? How long did it take? Maybe just share a little bit about that transformation experience, because it sounds like, from your perspective, what I’m hearing, it was very successful. And I know I talked someone else who kinda recommended bringing on the show that spoke very highly of the job you’ve done there. So maybe just kind of share a little bit about that actual journey, you know, how many employees, how you thought about it, you know, what kind of, what were some of the benefits, that type of thing.
Ed Hyer:
Yeah. I, I think so first of all, yes, I was very, very fortunate to have a wonderful team that I worked with. We were able to attract some terrific talent and build a phenomenal organization. We had some phenomenal support from our leadership throughout finance, including my, my bosses and our, our CFO. So the, the you know, the, the, the support was all there, and we got the people, right? That’s important at Verizon, obviously, the scale of this is pretty significant. It’s a, it’s a massive corporation with, you know, a very sizable team. You know my organization, our FP&A COE was about 175 people, of which all but 25 were in central Florida. We had a an enablement team or a kind of a system and process support team at headquarters that was part of our organization.
So it was, it was a sizable organization. And so you know, to migrate the work from the legacy or BU FP&A teams into the CEO, that was a process. Paul, that took over a year. I mean, that was 14 to 16 months by the time we finally had all of the, the work moved in. So a again, it was a, it was a pretty significant undertaking. By any measure, I will tell you that we were highly successful, not just in driving the efficiencies that we’ve talked about, but over time, continuing to be able to provide our, our deliverables sooner than our SLAs. You know, and, and again, I’ll come back to something I mentioned earlier in the, in the meeting there, there continues to be at Verizon, a significant push for automation. And so we were at the forefront of leveraging digital tools, or digital disruptors, whatever you wanna call them and creating visualization solutions reliant on largely data blending technologies and tools that allowed us to, to really be the tip of the spear in many cases. For FP&A automation, it was hugely important.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well, thank you for sharing that. I love the part about automation, how you mentioned, you know, on any measure you’re successful was a long process. So, kind of leads me to a couple questions. You know, one thing I’ve always liked to say, and I’ve heard from others is I heard a consultant say, it’s one of my favorite kind of quotes, and I’ll paraphrase. He basically said, old processes plus new technology equals expensive old processes.
Ed Hyer:
Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
And I’m just curious how, you know. Yes. Is that what you’ve seen?
Ed Hyer:
A hundred percent. And and here’s the thing too. You, the, when we very, very deliberately, and, you know, in, when, in my experience at Verizon, when we established FP&A COE, the, the edict was the work was gonna move. There was no attempt to clean it up, transform it, and improve the process. Move the work, get it together, then you can begin your process improvement. Then you can begin redefining how that work gets done. Once you have it together, it’s much more efficient, and you’re gonna come up with a much better solution set once you see the totality of what you’re working with, right? So you, you don’t transform the work and then move it. That that’s not how I would recommend anyone do that. Right? So it, it comes back to your earlier question, how do you know you’re gonna get the, well, you, you really don’t. The truth of the matter is, you know, until you get your arms around it, it’s a little more difficult to know exactly what the opportunities look like. Right.
Paul Barnhurst:
Interesting. Got it. So your recommendation is take the work, then transform it. So that would lead me to a question as you’re transforming it, how do you ensure that you have best practice processes?
Ed Hyer:
Well, I think couple things. First of all by having all of that work together, right? You, you, you know, there’s nothing you’re missing. You’re not missing anything. This is, this is where you’re reliant upon hiring the right people to come in and examine that work, take a look at how it can be done better, faster, cheaper. And then, and then combining that, then Paul, with the new technology, right? But, but I love what you said. I mean, just throwing new technology at all processes is not the approach <laugh>. In fact, most of what we did was re-engineer process, right? Based upon the tools we had then say, okay, now that I have this process, what might data blending do for me? Right? How might I leverage something like an Alteryx or aan R to be able to automate some of this that I’m now doing more manual, right? And then ultimately, finally, you know, can I, can I stack some visualization type solutions? Our Go-to tool predominantly was Click. Although some, some, some, you know, Tableau ThoughtSpot as well, but, and, and really create some visualization solutions that are 95% automated.
Paul Barnhurst:
I really like the way you explained that is just, you know, get your arms around it, streamline it as much as you can, understand the process, you have everything. Pull out those inefficiencies by hiring the right people, whether you need some consultants in there, or whether it’s just your team, whatever that may be. But streamline that. Then think about automation.
Ed Hyer:
Yes, a hundred percent. A hundred percent, right.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, and you’re, as you streamline it, you’re gonna do some automation, but I’m talking more the technical long-term. True automated platform solution. Versus I wrote a line of EBAI pulled some power query, I streamlined an SQL code or whatever, right? It’s not system automation, it’s person having good skills and being able to continue to reduce that process.
Ed Hyer:
And there was a lot of that in the early days. In the early go. Yeah. Well, exactly what you just said. I was able to write some, some VBA and I was able to, you know, condemn or, or I took 16 processes. I remember one illustration, really, really smart guy. He’s’s like, I, I got 16 different processes here. I can get it down to two and I can have it kicked off at two in the morning, and I’ve just saved myself six hours on workday one, you know, stuff like that. You know, it’s, and that didn’t require any new tools or technology, right? But today that, that which he did then was in Excel, and now it’s not. Right. That, that now we’re leveraging new tools to get, to get away from even that.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, a hundred percent. I can relate to that. You know, a couple different levels. I do a power query training, and remember someone emailing me after one of my trainings, some, I think it was an Excel one we did, and goes, I just changed the process. It took me six hours every Monday. Now it takes me two hours, you know, and that’s when you just feel good. You’re like, all right, perfect. I just gave this guy two, two days a month back in his time. Yep. Yep. So he could focus on something that’s important or, you know, just seeing those, you know, I built a process one time and I built it all in Excel and Power Query, and the business saw it and saw the value, and they said, okay, let’s turn this into some cubes where everybody can use it. And we rolled it out globally, but it started with, as I like to say, a very janky process I built with my skill level, right? But there was still value in it, right? It was much better than manually trying to do it, which is what everybody had been doing.
Ed Hyer:
Listen, there, there is nothing wrong with crawl, walk, run. You, you leverage the tools that you have at your disposal and, and you, you make the, you make the gains where you can. But I think, you know, the headline for me though is that you don’t, you, you don’t need new technology day one, right? I mean, we had, we, we had a systems and technology support team as part of the FP&A COE that was integral to our success. And in many cases, it wasn’t even about new tools or technology, but augmentation to some of our existing platform systems, right? That that would go a long, a long way. So yeah, it was super gratifying to see those, those, those gains throughout the process. And, and again, back to the benefits, it’s not just time saving, but that one act that was able to save four hours on workday, one also meant that our customer wasn’t waiting until four in the afternoon on Workday one to get the initial report. They were getting it by noon. Right? So this perfect illustration of how it’s not just the cost savings, but also the better product for your consumers.
Paul Barnhurst:
I, I appreciate that. So I got kind of two more questions on the COE and then we’ll switch gears here a little bit. So the first is, what do you see as some of the disadvantages of having a COE? I mean, obviously not, we hear, we’ve been hearing digital transformation and transformations forever, and many are not successful for various reasons. But what do you maybe see as some of the biggest drawbacks or things to watch for if you’re thinking about doing a C oe?
Ed Hyer:
Look, I, gotta be transparent, Paul. I, I’m not sure that there is a dis, I mean, the most obvious disadvantage is your short term investment that you’re gonna have to make in this thing. And it’s gonna be disruptive, it’s gonna be, and you, you can’t spell COE without transformation, right? Establishing a C OE is gonna be part of a transformation process. It’s gonna affect your people, your process, and your tools. I, I’m not sure that I could sit here and tell you, here’s a, here’s a bespoke disadvantage of it other than the cost, the, the headline challenges are you’re going to have to have really good relationships, communication and, and interactions within your FP&A teams, right?
Know, you can’t just have an FP&A COE and go put it on an island that’s not gonna work.
You can do it with AP. You can’t do it with, with FP&A. You know, one of the other challenges that I saw in our organization was you, you had to be much more deliberate and intentional about trying to get your FP &A COE teams to learn and understand the business. They’re not bumping right up against operations. They’re not interacting daily with the operations customers. So you have to go, you have to, you have to be very deliberate about helping them learn the business. And we, we, we would do that. We did certain things where we’d have lunch and learns with the FP&A teams that our teams would do field trips when they would travel, they would go spend time with the operators. They would actually go out into the field sometimes. But you have to be more deliberate about that. But y you know, in terms of, of disadvantages, I really don’t, you know, I haven’t, based on my experiences, Paul, I, I really am not sure that there is one.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. No, I appreciate you sharing that, and I’m glad that they’ve all gone that well. That’s really, you know, good to hear. So, last question around COEs. Any metrics or KPIs that you recommend people track regularly when they’re running a COE? Were there things that really helped you understand the performance?
Ed Hyer:
Absolutely, a hundred percent. Now, now, now remember, performance measurement again, that, that’s requires an investment. You’re going to have to have, and we actually had a service delivery team. It was a team of, it varied in size, but anywhere typically from, you know, six to eight people that were responsible for helping with all aspects of governance, right? Your service management, demand measurement, performance measurement. But we would typically track we, we, we, we, we tracked, obviously we had a, a, a service catalog, right? And we had a deliverables database or inventories, these all the things we were responsible for delivering. And then we had a whole process, you know catalog, if you will, around that. So that allowed us to kind of start with, okay, what are we producing and how much time does it take? So we could measure here’s the number of deliverables, the number of hours associated with those deliverables, and then over time, we could watch those hours, drop new deliverables would come in, and so we could, we could expand the catalog.
That’s the place to start, right? What are you delivering and how long is it taking you to deliver? Again, that’s a lot easier to do when you think about the reporting side than with the planning side, right? On the planning arm of it, it was really about, okay when I look at the scope and scale of the models that I’m maintaining and managing but it’s, it’s, it’s more difficult there. You have to find ways based upon your entity to quantify as best you can, the, the, the work and what’s, what’s what you’re delivering.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. All right. No, that ma that makes sense to me. I appreciate the answer there. You know, next question. You know, we’ve spent lots of times on the COEI think we’ve covered that pretty well, but just FP&A in general, what’s your favorite part about working in FP&A? What, what do you love about it?
Ed Hyer:
I, I love the idea. I’ve always enjoyed the idea. And I think what attracted me to FP&A in the, in the early going, was the opportunity to influence the business. The opportunity to make an impact, the opportunity to, you know drive, you know, positive decisions, good outcomes. I, one of my favorite roles, Paul you know, was when I was the western region controller and senior finance business partner in Los Angeles. And working very closely with operators, helping them achieve their goals, helping them find ways, look, this is your overtime target. This is your headcount target. These are what you need to do for utilization. How can you helping ’em find solutions is, is really what drew me to you know, in the beginning. And I think that’s, even to this day you know, helping influence the business has really you know, really been, been rewarding and gratifying. And the other thing I would say is just the within the COE especially was really helping drive innovation and adoption of, of new digital tools and technology was, that was really fun to be on the forefront of that, which is where you’d expect your COE to be with, given the nature of the work they’re doing. But that was, that was, that was pretty exciting.
Paul Barnhurst:
Those both sound like, you know, really fun opportunities. I love the being part of the business and helping influence the business. And then also I enjoy new technology. So it’s always rewarding when you see processes and technology come together that streamline things and that add value. And so I, I appreciate both those answers and can relate. So, one more question before we move into our Get to Know You section, which is kind of a rapid fire section we’ll talk about here in a minute. Can you tell me about a time in your career when you appear, experience what we call an aha or a strategic moment? So, you know, a strategic insight that you generated with your team that empowered you to drive change within the organization?
Ed Hyer:
A strategic insight. I, I guess Paul, the, the one thing that sticks out and kind of trying to tie it back, our COE conversation I, I don’t know if it was an an aha or a, oh crap, <laugh>,
I dunno if I’m allowed to say anything more than that on here, but you know, I, I mentioned earlier that, you know, we, we started out standing up the FP&A COE with you know, a prove it mentality. And, and you know, people looking at us to say, are you really gonna do this? Right? You know, and, and you don’t get to miss, you just don’t. Right? You know, the first month you take the work over, it’s gotta be done, done, right, and done on time. We, we transitioned from that pretty quickly to okay, wow, this does work here, take more. And so I remember vividly having conversation with my leaders and then ultimately my boss around, we need to move fast to establish a very robust demand management infrastructure. We understood demand management was gonna be something the urgency was a bit of a, you know, wow, okay, here we go. So I, I think, and, and, and that really we built out through the help of the great leaders that I, you know, was fortunate to have on my team, built out an incredibly robust process. It was at the same time user friendly for our customers where people would come and say, look, I, you know, is this something that fits in the ceiling? Can you take it? And we would, we would run it through the process and try to get pretty quick turnarounds on, on helping them out.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. I appreciate that. Yeah. And I kind of like, is, was it an aha or was it an, oh crap moment, but it worked out well. That’s the main thing.
Ed Hyer:
It did. It did <laugh>.
Paul Barnhurst:
Alright, so this section here, we call it the get to Know You section. You get no more than 30 seconds to answer each question. So the idea is kind of keep it brief and just have a little bit of fun helping our audience get to know you better. So the first question here is, what is something interesting about you? Not many people know, you know, something we generally wouldn’t find online that about you?
Ed Hyer:
Well, I am, I am fascinating to be sure. No, but in all sincerity, probably motorcycles, I like motorcycles. I’ve been riding since I was in college. And I’ve owned motorcycles my entire life. I’ve owned a whole bunch of them. And I have a Harley Davidson fat boy that I love riding on the weekends when it’s not too hot. And one of my favorite things to do is go riding with my daughter.
Paul Barnhurst:
Oh, fun. So your daughter rides with you?
Ed Hyer:
She does, and I’ve also told her that if I see her on the back of a motorcycle with anybody not named me, I will kill them both.
Paul Barnhurst:
<Laugh>. Oh, fun. That’s great, Harley. That’s a lot of fun. So I, I like that. One second one here. If you could meet one person in the world, dead or alive, who would you meet and why?
Ed Hyer:
<Laugh>. Okay. It’s funny you asked that question. So at, at at Hertz every year, we, lemme do this quickly at Hertz, every year we had a leadership meeting, and this was one of the questions we all had to answer one year. And it didn’t necessarily say it was a real person or fictitious person. So I picked Al Czervik. Any of your listeners familiar with Caddy sh will know who that is, <laugh>. But any rate in terms of a real world person, probably at least from my lifetime, would be Ronald Reagan.
Paul Barnhurst:
Okay, cool. Why weren’t, why Ronald Reagan?
Ed Hyer:
I just think he was a fascinating individual. Not, not just as president of the United States, but just his whole life being an actor coming up, you know, living in California, becoming a California governor, and and then his time going through, you know, the Cold War. I just, I think is pretty fascinating human being. And he reminded me a little bit of my grandfather,
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, fun, funny story. Just speaking of all that, my my step-grandfather knew him, didn’t know him well, but knew him in Hollywood. He was a stunt actor. My step grandfather was in Gone With the Wind. Oh, wow. I think he, he died a couple times in some of the scenes. Yeah, he was a stunt actor. Like, there’s one where the horse goes over a fence. He’s the, he’s the actor for that. You had a couple scenes
Ed Hyer:
Oh, no kidding.
Paul Barnhurst:
Oh, wonderful. Yeahinteresting. So yeah, he, he did know Ronald Reagan. And so kind of, you know, when you mentioned Ronald Reagan, that reminded me of that. It’s a small world. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Excellent. So this next one is a favorite. We like to ask everybody, it’s kind of a fun one. We ask everyone on the show. Favorite thing about Excel, favorite function feature.
Ed Hyer:
So I’m gonna be a little bit of a heretic here, Paul, on this one. You’re gonna have to forgive me and apologies to all your listeners. The favorite, my favorite thing about Excel is when I don’t have to use it because I’ve found a way to automate the work. And listen, there was a period of time and the pendulum swung too far. I, I, I acknowledge there was a time at, at, at, at Verizon where Excel sort of became a four letter word when it came to reporting, not planning, but, but if you’re using Excel, the question is why? What is it about our processes and systems that don’t allow a solution that causes you to have to use Excel? Right? So, and then further, when we could start to use data blending tools, like you said, create a queue, create data, plop Alteryx on top of it, and then, and then, you know, put some type of visualization solution, click on it and, and get away from it. That would be my, my favorite way to use Excel is to not.
Paul Barnhurst:
All right, well we won’t, we won’t ban you for that one. We won’t hold it too much against you. I mean, it’s, it’s between you and the one guy who said his favorite function was merge and center.
Ed Hyer:
Well see. Okay. But here’s the truth though. I listen, I have, I, it’s been a long time since I was in Excel jockey I have to confess. I
Get it. I’ve been, I’ve been outta that for a while. I did do some VBA scripts back in the day, but you know, it’s, it’s been a, it’s been a while, I have to confess.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, and, and I get it. I mean, there are definitely times when the goal is to automate, whether that’s putting tools on top of Excel, whether that’s using completely different tools, that’s, we always need to be looking for ways to streamline. So I can appreciate that the goal is okay, if we’re manually doing that, how do I automate it?
Ed Hyer:
Exactly. What has to be true?
Paul Barnhurst:
What do you see as the most critical skill for FP&A professionals today?
Ed Hyer:
So the way I guess I would answer that. My tendency is not to jump on a technical skill. My tendency is to think about something on the, in the soft skills, right? I’ve always been a huge believer in if you’ve got apt aptitude and attitude, you can be trained to do anything. You can pick up any skill that’s out there. I would say some of the more successful people I’ve seen in, in my experience are those that have a transformative mindset. Those people that are constantly questioning or challenging, why is it this way? And never accept the answer. Well, because that’s the way we’ve always done it, right? And, and, and ask why. And don’t be afraid to keep asking why after why, and figuring out how something could be done differently.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that. I mean, inquisitive nature is huge. And I agree with you, you know, attitude and aptitude can make up for a whole host of skills that you don’t have. As long as you have that ability to think critically and you have that right attitude. That’s right. You can train the rest.
Ed Hyer:
That’s right. Exactly right.
Paul Barnhurst:
So last question. If someone wants to get ahold of you, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Ed Hyer:
I would say through just through LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. My, my contact information is there. I’d be happy to, happy to connect with any of the listeners who wish to, wish to reach out.
Paul Barnhurst:
Right, right. Great. So we’ll make sure we put that in the show notes so people can know to reach you on LinkedIn. And thank you for joining us today. Ed. Really enjoyed the conversation. It was fun to have you on the show and appreciate you talking to us about center of Excellences.
Ed Hyer:
Super enjoyable time. Paul, thank you very much for having me.
