Supernova Award Category

The Problem

With increased competition from traditional and new digital advertising solutions, radio broadcasting companies must continue to evolve and modernize operations. Cumulus has navigated this evolving industry landscape by expanding and incorporating new business channels, but struggled to provide visibility for business leaders into its business performance and financials. Managers spread across 90 media markets had no easy way to collaborate on financials, and thus little financial control or responsibility. It was also virtually impossible to forecast financial trends in a timely manner. Cumulus was using Microsoft Excel as its budgeting solution. The company required an automated financial planning and analysis tool that would provide consolidated access to accurate, real-time financial data; automate the budgeting and reporting processes; and give executive management better insights into performance so that it improve decision-making based on market conditions and trends. Cumulus sought to deploy a cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) solution.

The Solution

I was hired to leverage my system implementation experience in a new finance role. I used a proven 3-step approach to lead the initiative: 1) assessing our needs, 2) defining the desired value proposition and 3) determining which technology or process would bridge the gap between the two. The approach made decision makers comfortable with the technology selection while laying the groundwork for early adoption. Our goal was to bring IT and finance together, focusing on financial systems without increasing IT demand. We wanted to increase scale, accessibility, reliability, and give key business leaders across 90 media markets real-time access to accurate financial data. In order to change how we managed our financials and performance, we had to ensure that our business managers would embrace and use the technology, so ease-of-use was paramount. The process gave us confidence that the CPM solution we chose would meet our immediate objectives, and position Cumulus to remain competitive.

The results

Our new CPM solution has changed our culture and focus--no other tool, financial or otherwise, has ever received this level of universal adoption. We have an entirely new approach to budgeting, reporting, forecasting and, ultimately, decision-making. Our budgeting process previously involved pulling together data from multiple, disparate spreadsheets and iterating repeatedly to ensure completeness and accuracy. Now, we simply roll prior year forecasts forward to set up a baseline, and then review budget data with senior management in real-time. We also enabled self-service reporting. Previously, business managers waited for days to receive reports because they had to be run by finance, with support from IT—the information was already out-of-date by the time it was received. Now, users create and run reports on-demand, accessing and analyzing performance data in minutes. We’ve also adopted a rolling forecast approach. Our automated solution has allowed us to initiate “Flash Forecasting Fridays,” where managers in each of our 90 media markets update their revenue and expense forecast weekly. Because executives can better assess quarterly performance and plan variances, they can make better decisions with respect to programming investments. We have also initiated in-depth sales modeling, which wasn’t possible before, providing instant visibility into both week and year-over-year performance and trends by advertiser, account executive, and office.

Metrics

Our financial transformation process took reporting from corporate control to real-time, on-demand access. Access to daily reporting decreased from 24 hours to seconds. Consolidated budget reports that once took days, could now be completed in minutes. We eliminated individual market revenue reports that took 3 hours per market, per week to prepare.  At an average of $100 per hour, 90 markets, 52 weeks--that is $1.4 million of annual efficiency pickup. Greater visibility into our financials has led to more effective real-time decision-making with regards to income and expense planning. The technology introduced a new discipline of effectively forecasting both income and expenses on a weekly basis, which was not possible before. By providing greater clarity on expenses, finance cut costs by over $2 million. Cuts included late fees, excess shipping and messenger, excessive travel and expenses, unused real estate, excessive use of part-timers and overtime. We have also saved approximately $700,000 in staff efficiencies. The technology also allowed us to depreciate multiple servers and IT infrastructure that would have required an upgrade or replacement. The elimination of these sunk expenses, along with a reduction in our financial ERP seat count, has reduced expense by approx. 40% over an initial three-year agreement. The finance team is now focused on strategic tasks holistically while all business managers own their market’s performance.

The Technology

We implemented Adaptive Planning, part of the Adaptive Suite, from Adaptive Insights. We selected Adaptive Insights software because it consistently received the highest customer satisfaction and ease-of-use ratings, while offering the scalability, accessibility and reliability we needed to improve our budgeting, reporting and forecasting processes.

Disruptive Factor

With over 20 years of background in deploying business systems, I have direct experience with how technology deployment can fail.  In many cases, projects are setup to fail from the start and leaders find themselves in a perpetual state of swimming upstream.  For this initiative to be a success, I knew we needed to achieve a high level of sustainable adoption.  I knew that our managers and leaders needed to spend more time analyzing the data rather than learning the platform. Ease-of-use, in addition to explaining the value proposition to users early in the process, was key. Anytime you introduce change, whether internal or external, it’s all about value. This technology deployment has fundamentally changed the culture of our company and how we manage our business. We are now making far more informed decisions and improving processes that are enabling us to compete through greater visibility into our financial landscape. From my experience, I’ve never seen the media industry quick to change, react or adopt. At Cumulus, we continue to move forward, challenge our own thinking, improve our processes and apply technology to assist with running our business.

Shining Moment

I'm most proud of the efficiencies we've gained as a company, contributing to our success in a highly competitive market. We were honored to receive an award for Excellence in Performance Management from Adaptive Insights. The award recognized Cumulus as a company that has driven broad performance transformation, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making and improved collaboration between finance and the business. The awards recognize only 6 of their 3,000 customers.