The Workfront Fusion Fix: Ericsson’s Smarter Way to Unlocking True Event Costs

Transcript

Well, we are two minutes in. Yeah, so let’s get started. Welcome everyone. This is the Workfront Fusion Fix, Ericsson’s Smarter Way to Unlocking True Event Costs. This is really, I can’t wait for this, this is going to be really fun. Before we get started and do our introductions, just FYI, it’s the question that everyone always asks, this session is being recorded. We’re actually recording it two different ways. So you’ll get the recording, you’ll get the slides and resources after this event. It’ll probably be this afternoon just because of meetings, but I promise you’ll get it today.

This is being sponsored, hosted by your Workfront Scale team. We’re all here.

You know us, so we’re not going to go into introductions because that’s not what you’re here to see. But if you do need us, you can reach us at csatscaleatadobe.com. So that’s the only thing I wanted to point out. I am Cynthia Boone. We’re going to talk about the Workfront Fusion Fix with Lucas. A bito today from Ericsson, and we’re going to have plenty of time for Q&A. So bring your questions.

With that, welcome, Lucas. We are so excited to have you here. I’m about to stop sharing so you can share. But this is so amazing, this session, and I can’t wait for everyone to get the best ideas from your session. So I’m going to stop sharing.

There I can see you. Awesome. Yeah. Let me know if my screen comes up and it shows mine for you guys. Awesome. Well, Cynthia, thank you for the introduction and for having me today. It’s funny to be here just over a year ago when we purchased Fusion or have the ability to use it. I remember reaching out to our sales rep and asking to be connected within the community, just to get ideas like how do people use this? I know it’s powerful, I know it can do a lot, but what are the use cases? Then fast forward, it’s quite interesting to find myself here now sharing with the community on a use case of our own. So it’s- Love it. That’s the way it works, but I love that. It’s been really cool. Yes. So welcome everybody from whichever part of the country or the world that you’re joining from. I am actually based in Kansas City as well. I saw someone on chat that’s pretty close by. So that was interesting to see.

Wanted to quickly introduce myself before we get into the topic.

We have, within our team, we have two Fusion admins, me, myself, one of them and then Sam, my partner in crime. He unfortunately could not be here today to co-host a session with me, but I still wanted to really show that we don’t do this alone. We are a small but mighty team trying to automate some workflows and do some cool stuff and think outside the box here on what we do. So my role with Ericsson, I’m a marketing technology and analytics manager. What that long title just really means is that I’m responsible for our MarTech tools and any data analytics reporting insights. You’ll see that that blends well with what today’s topic is, which is reporting on expenses using one of our tools, of course, work in combination with Fusion. My background is in computer science, so I love doing this. Automation is something that I’m really passionate about, just simplifying processes and helping people out to work smarter and not harder. This is something that I really enjoy doing. But before we get into the use case, I wanted to just quickly share where we are within our journey with Fusion. What have we done and share some insights from our experience. Just like I said, we have had Fusion for just about a year now. We’re two administrators. We have currently 14 active scenarios in our production environment. There’s three times more. Actually, four times more than that, just sitting inactive either being developed that have been deprecated or that we just use for training purposes and experimentations. I will cover some of those scenarios on how we use them shortly below here. Our team that’s involved within Workfront is of about 60 people, about 60 employees that we support directly. But the processes that Fusion implements or enhances, that is way over 100 plus employees internally today. It’s something really exciting for us that we can see this in action and actually see the results, the benefits that it brings within our organization. As far as simple scenarios that we run today internally, I broke them up into two simple categories. More of internal only Workfront tasks, where we focus on just reducing the number of steps or clicks that a user would have to do within Workfront. For example, automatically assigning a task based on inputs provided on the issue or the request form, or automatically creating a project after a certain approval is given. Automatically assigning a template based on the type of work that’s being requested, or dynamically just renaming a project to include a Workfront ID into it, that will then use it for today’s demo. All of these are what you might call small things, but they’re aimed to just make people’s life easier or remove some of those elements that they actually have to do with Workfront when it comes out of the box. Then on the right-hand side, we have more of the external facing integrations that we’ve worked on. We export a lot of data from Workfront outside of it, going into tools like Power BI or SharePoint for additional reporting. We do SLA trackings outside of Workfront, and we do that through these types of integrations. We actually piloted a very interesting project, which was to track our inventory and asset management. Within our marketing team, we run a lot of events.

We spread across the US, so physical assets like tablets, computers, demos, and things that we use for these events. Of course, there are third-party tools that are built just for this, but we wanted to stretch Workfront and really see what Fusion could do.

Could we use this tool as a way to request inventory and make sure that we can actually see, is it being used? Is it not? For how long? When can I actually request? We were able to do that by creating assets as job roles within the system and doing API calls back into Workfront in order to get some status updates on them. So maybe that’s a topic for a future session. I don’t know, just a hint there for Cynthia eventually, but just something that I wanted to share that was a little out of the box as well. Of course, today’s topic, which is expense reporting and tracking. Then we also integrate with several by just doing REST API calls with several platforms with our data warehouse, which is based with just Google BigQuery, but also other MarTech tools as well. So this is at a very high level how we use Fusion today.

Let’s go into today’s topic of choice.

Events for us is really big. It’s one of the big components of our marketing team. We’re running events pretty much throughout the year, but reporting ROI or creating a full puzzle of expenses or for events can be pretty complicated. Within the marketing scope, when we think about ROI, the things that we look for on an event are normally attendance. How many people we invited, registered, and ended up showing up, and we have tools that we track that.

Sales opportunities. Did that generate any improvements or movements on our sales pipeline? So we track that as well. We track perception, satisfaction through surveys. And then there’s the component of cost, which I need to be very clear. All of this is done today. It was done before Workfront. It’s not that we didn’t have a handle of our cost, but it was just very manual in nature in how this was tracked and reported. And that’s because when we’re dealing with an event here internally at Ericsson, there’s three different systems that go into requesting or making purchases or incurring expenses. So that creates a fragmented approach, and I’ll cover that next. So that’s the missing link here towards a full automation of providing an event ROI that we thought this could be a good use case to use Workfront for. So those three systems that I mentioned are outlined here. The first one are purchase orders. So if someone needs to make a transaction for an event that’s with a large established vendor, we actually brought this process into Workfront. We’ve centralized it there. So we don’t use Workfront just from a project flow perspective. We also use it for these types of requests. Because an event is already logged into Workfront, it’s very easy for us to tie a purchase order that’s also requested in Workfront to that event because we’re talking within the same system. But for virtual cards, which are used for general incidentals as an example, those are tracked on a completely separate custom built internal tool to us. And then we also have the travel expenses. So those are your expenses related to when you’re on site, your airfare, hotel, business meals, transportation, anything of that nature. Those are tracked via SAP. So as you can see, three different locations where employees need to go in order to record their transactions associated to an event. So we thought we need a better place to store this because this is what we normally get from finance. These really big, raw financial exports that are very hard to parse because they don’t really describe that a transaction belonged to a particular event that we’re looking for. Yes, we’ll see the details of who the employee was, how much it cost, what that transaction was for, whether it was airfare versus hotel, as an example. But because we run so many of these events, it gets very confusing and things get mixed up very quickly. So normally what would happen, potentially here based on dates, is we might have someone from our finance team or our ops team reach out to the participant and say, hey, which one of these were your transactions so that we can reconcile? So when we saw this, we’re like, there’s got to be a better way. And that’s when Workfront really came to mind. So we’re like, OK, we’re going to use Workfront. It’s going to centralize all the expenses. It’s going to streamline it all. We’ll ask employees to come in. They already use Workfront, so they’ll click on the Expense tab and log in those expenses again. Life is good.

Problem is, we already have three separate tools that they have to go in to track expenses. Now we’re introducing a fourth one because they still need to go to the source to request them anyways. So while this provided a good foundation, a good landing place, we didn’t want to introduce that additional step. So that’s when we thought about Fusion. So if Fusion can be our orchestrator, if Fusion can go out to all of those systems, pull those transactions, and then load it into Workfront itself, then we’ll deliver a real value. So this was our ideal path when we’re thinking about SAP, that last bucket there that I showed on system number three. We’ll build on Fusion on top. We’ll move the data into Workfront. Problem is, we never got access, direct access to SAP. So that was our first blow. Like, well, how do we solve this now that we don’t have direct access? So either one, we give up and just tell people, hey, you need to go to Workfront and put in your task, but I wasn’t willing to fight that battle.

Or we tried to be creative. So our current path today is we learned that from SAP, the Finest team creates a Power BI dashboard. So we said, great, we’ll connect Fusion to Power BI. We didn’t have access. We’re like, what can we do next? So our thought was we can use Power Automate to connect to Power BI and then move that data into SharePoint. And now that it’s in SharePoint, we can have Fusion connect to it and finally move it into Workfront.

So what should have been a straight push from the financial source system into Workfront became a four-step hop with Power Automate involved, with Fusion involved. But this is just to show that if you keep on trying and you think outside the box, you can still move things around and get things done. So what does that look like practically for our employees? What do we ask them to do? So going back to that puzzle piece on cost, there’s three components, three systems. Whenever they request a purchase order within that source system, what we ask them to do is the Workfront reference ID, your project ID, becomes our key to joining this all together. So when you go into your source system, I know it’s very small and probably hard to read, but this is just to give you an idea, within your expense name, please make sure you enter WFID and whatever that number is, and we’ll provide that to you. When you go to SAP, the same thing. Make sure you just enter it as part of your expense name, and the same thing happens on the virtual card system. As you can see, the interfaces are completely different, but what we’re asking them to do is for all of them, please enter that ID that we’ll then use to map back to Workfront.

So if all that is done, this is what we can create. These are fictitious numbers. I messed them up here for privacy purposes, but now we have a central, automated, and an easy way to analyze all of those expenses in one place. This screenshot here that you see was a combination of six different reports submitted by employees, where we could very quickly track all of the purchase orders, over $300,000, $30,000 in travel and expense costs, and $82,000 without ever having to open that Excel file that I showed you a couple slides ago. Giving us a total cost for that event. This also gives us the ability to track individual line items when it comes to categories.

I will get into a demo here shortly, just to give you guys an idea on how everything gets connected. But what I wanted to mention here is that our goal with Workfront, with this project, was never to understand what each individual employee is charging to an event. I don’t care what Lucas’s airfare cost. I just want to know how much we paid in airfare altogether for this event. So when we’re pulling this information in, we’re not bringing in any employee-related identifiers, or anything that can be tracked back to an employee. What’s shared in Workfront here are just the transaction amounts and the category they belong to. So we’re now consolidating it all here into the view where we can have a better understanding of how much we spent on airfare, on hotel, on meals, just day-to-day expenses, and in other transactions involving expenses.

The last point I wanted to make here about this screen, which I know it’s probably also hard to read, I apologize, is that because we don’t want to track every line item, let’s say six of us submitted this report.

I don’t want to see six individual line items for tickets. I only want to see a total line item for airfare. And that was another challenge that we had to address via the Fusion scenario, just making sure that we grouped all of those transactions together of the same category type to be able to simplify reporting here on Workfront.

So I showed you what we were trying to do, how we did it, but it wasn’t easy. I talked about the access limitations. That was definitely a bump that we had in the road. But the main one was just inconsistent naming conventions, because yes, there’s still the human element. They still need to go into those source systems and enter that WFID into the source systems. But we thought we had it all mapped out. So we said, well, we’re going to use a regular expression. We’ll play with regex. And what we’ll do is we’re going to look at whatever that report name that they used, and we’re just going to pull the numerical values out of it. So bullet point one, if someone enters something called Ericsson event WFID 12345, we’re just going to get 12345 back, and we’re going to use that as part of our Fusion flow. So that proved to work, and we were really excited. We thought we were done until someone entered what looks like bullet point number two, where they actually put the date, the year, I’m sorry, as part of their event name. Because our regular expression was looking at numbers, it took that year as well, concatenated it with the actual ID, and created an ID that doesn’t exist. So we’re like, all right, how do we address for that? So we thought maybe we look for year patterns, four-digit numbers that start with 19 or 20, and then we exclude those. But what if by some reason there is a work for the ID that starts with 20, and we’re going to incorrectly remove it? So that was another issue. Then bullet point three came in, where we started seeing variations where people were entering additional IDs from other systems as well, which our previous thought on looking for the year patterns were no longer catching it anymore. So this was really a big thing for us on how to create a formula that really tried to encompass all of these scenarios, and that’s what we got to with that little string there. I’m recommending regx101.com. I think it’s a really valuable site for you to test inputs and see how it outputs within the tool. That’s something that we leverage, and we finally got to that solution where it looks for any numbers that come after WFID, and if it finds any space after that, it ignores other numbers. So it’s working for all of these scenarios that I showed you. Is it 100% airtight? Not really, but we’re 90 to 95% there, which for us at this point, until we have full automation, is good enough at the moment. So inconsistent naming conventions, access restrictions, like I said, would have been much easier if we could have gone system to system, and then missed inputs. So our source systems, once you submit an expense report, for example, it locks those headers. So if someone forgot to put in their Workfront ID initially, you can’t go back, edit, and include it. So we still needed some sort of a manual way to get those reports from people and still link them into Workfront. These were the Ericsson side of the house issues. And then from a Fusion side, just upscaling in general, and learning how to use the platforms, which modules to use, when to use them, and how they interact. Like it was our first time using the expense collections and understanding how to group those transactions together and lump some of them all into one in order to create one category instead of multiple line items. So challenging, but we got there. But we don’t want to stop here. This is our first step. We have bigger ambitions.

What comes next for us is, like I was saying, we want to push this automation further. We want to continue to remove manual work. And the way we achieve that is if we can actually push data from Workfront into SAP instead of just pulling data out of SAP. So right now we’re asking people to go to SAP and add a Workfront ID into their expense report. We want to create the expense report on their behalf, being triggered by Workfront. So in the people tab, if I can add a list of people that are going to attend our event, I would love to upon approval, to take all of those names, go into SAP programmatically, and create the shell for that expense report on their behalf. So one, we’re ensuring this process gets done. It’s being done correctly. And we’re also helping our end users because they don’t actually have to do this in SAP when they actually go there. So is this currently in flight? Not yet. There’s a big battle here in push, though it’s getting approval to do this because of course it’s a financial system. It’s very sensitive and opening to external integrations. But this is what we aim to achieve.

So with that, let me show you a little bit of it in action here because I felt like I did quite a bit of talking.

I will jump into our scenario in Fusion. But this is what it looks like. We have three of these scenarios, one for each of the systems that I showed initially, one for the purchase orders, one for the virtual cards, and one for the SAP connection. The overview of it in a very high level nutshell is that we start with SharePoint. We’re watching for those items there in SharePoint, looking for new entries within the source system. Then we’re filtering for just the transactions that are relevant to us because these source systems spit out more data than we care for. We only care for event-related expenses, so we’re getting all of our team’s expenses through it. So we of course are trying to filter for just the transactions that contain that WFID as part of it. Then we use an aggregator to create those bundles of expenses and that’s where we go into regex to fully just parse out the numerical value of what was entered by the user. And then we start going to the regular process of Workfront. So with that idea, we’ll jump into querying what project that is. Out of that project, what expenses does it have? Once we get the expenses, of what type are those expenses? Again, going back to what I described, we want to club expenses together within the same category. This is what we do here through additional aggregations and variable settings here. Until we finally get into our first decision, our first decision fork here, or second, I guess, where we decide, is this a brand new expense and a brand new expense type that we need to add to the project? Easy path. We go up. If it’s something existing, we need to query all of those transactions. Again, search for the project and then eventually add those costs in there.

So with that, let me transition my screen and I will show you here on the other side.

This is special, folks. What this looks like? He’s about to go into Fusion. I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you, Cynthia. I was going to say, this is special. He’s about to go into Fusion. So we don’t get this that often.

Let me make sure I’m sharing my right screen here. There we go.

Can you see my screen? Yes.

Yes. So I’m sorry, I’ll probably disappoint. I can’t run this scenario live here for the demo because this is in production. I did not set a test environment for it. So if I do run it, we’re going to potentially mess up our reporting. But I’ll at least show you some of the modules as I was explaining. So very simple SharePoint watch items here. If you’re using it, instead of just doing the list items, we’re watching for any new elements that come in.

Within our variable setting, one thing that we did was we had to map all of our expense types that were coming in from SAP. We created them in Workfront as well. So we could merge them together. So we had a place to store those transactions in an easy, digestible way. So this is what we do here with this long list of variables. Now, I know there’s probably 100 different ways to achieve this same goal with Fusion. This is just the route that we took, of course.

Then we aggregate the bundles. So here’s the regex expression where we take out those Workfront IDs from the strings entered by the user. And then we go into Workfront to search the projects. Using that ID, we get the attributes that we need. And then we query expenses, get the expense types, and then we start going through the flow in order to create the expense again, doing several tests within the bundles that we have. Here’s a sample output that I can share. This just kind of showing from a previous run where we have a bundle that has an ID. And here’s a better example. On bundle number three, you have the SharePoint ID with multiple entries. That just means multiple transactions. So we had multiple employees charging hotel expenses where we’re aggregating that number and storing it as one back in Workfront instead of having each one of these transactions as a different line item, really creating a long list within our Workfront site.

So really, this is all I had to share. This is kind of the journey that we’ve been on. We’ve migrated away from those Excel files. Everything shows up in one place as long as we have the human aspect working, which is adding those IDs into the tool.

We have plans on making that process better and smarter, but some of these things are beyond our control when it comes to access control and permissions to be granted. So that’s it. That’s amazing. Because, OK, so I wrote some things down that just to me, you’re doing true Workfront work, right? And we all know what that means. Like you’re stretching it. Because my favorite part, honestly, of the presentation is we’re like, oh, we want to connect to SAP. You didn’t stop. You went, OK, well, I’m just going to walk around and I’m going to figure out a different way. And I feel like that’s all of us. OK, well, we’ll find another way to do this.

So I just love that you didn’t just give up because we don’t ever give up, do we? So I’m going to start asking you questions from the chat. Are you ready? Yeah, let’s do it. And then we’ll open it up. So the first one, just in general, it is from early in the presentation, but what do you get from exporting timelines into SharePoint? Is that some sort of visibility or what is that help of the team? Yes, so for example, when I talk about timelines being exported, our whole purchase order process, when we centralized it through Workfront, what it helps us with doing is that it gives us a view, a custom level view, onto SLAs. So within our template, let’s say we get a request in for a purchase order to be created. The first step is, of course, it needs to be reviewed. Do we have the budget for it? After there’s an approval on that, we move on to the actual inner works of going into the source financial systems and logging those, creating the actual POs and all of the bureaucratic pieces of executing or creating a purchase order. So each one of those steps are a task on our project flow within Workfront. And because we know how quickly people, when it was assigned, when it became ready, to the point that it got ready to be worked on, we just track those timestamps and we bring them out into a Power BI dashboard that we keep tabs of. I know we can do a lot of reporting within Workfront itself, but this is part of a bigger, I don’t know if I can show it here, honestly, but it’s part of a bigger analytics dashboard that we have that covers all of marketing operations, not just the PO side of things, but also how our campaigns perform. So it all sits in this separate portal and we can provide insights to our ops team to say, we’re hitting our SLAs in the intake form, like we’re processing it quickly, but the review step is taking longer than it should, or the PO generation or the communication with the supplier is taking too long. So that’s why we export these data points outside. We always talk about going to where your users normally want to find information. So that’s great. And the ability to see where we’re at with our SLA, because that’s always been a problem for me too. So that’s really brilliant. I love that.

Okay.

The question, and Monique asked this question, so did you have plans? Okay, so we know that you didn’t have access to SAP, but do you have plans to work with the SAP team to get read-only access for cleaner export? And bonus question, if so, did you build that original scenario where if you do get direct access, you can rework it or are you going to have to start over? It’s a two-part question. Yes. So we haven’t given up on either one of the fronts from a consumption layer or actually ingesting or pushing data into SAP.

What our finance teams wanted to, they challenged us within this process saying, well, instead of you going through this process, we’ll create you different network codes or cost centers for each one of these transactions. So that was their way to try to solve the problem for us. But we run so many of these events that if we go that route, it becomes just a governance and reporting nightmare because we have different numbers for our employees to use on each type of event. So reconciling these would become harder with having to share all that information every time. The fact that everybody is in Workfront already participating as part of the project flow, it’s easier for them to just carry that ID there into SAP than introducing a complete new system, a complete new ID that they would have to track. So we keep on trying. We’ve explained, we showed the benefits. It’s a governance approach as well. It’s not just simplification. We want to make sure that we are better forecasting our events. Like we get more requests to conduct events than at times we can fulfill. So having a true handle on all of these costs, when 2026 comes along, we can better prioritize to say, yes, we got these number of, these many people show up. We got these deals. We got this satisfaction, but it did cost us this much to execute. So is it still worth us going there compared to this other one that cost us less? Or can we do more or can we re-shift our strategy? Maybe we, you know, there’s different approaches based on cost or financial insights that can be analyzed by looking at this data. I was just thinking also, for me personally, the time saving that you’re helping with, like the multiple entries, even especially if you were able to push data into SAP and automatically create that expense report. In my mind, it’s always like, how much money are you saving without, by taking away the necessity for your employees to have to enter all this information and build that out. To me, that’s a big piece of fusion. So I don’t know, have you gone that route as well as like, hey, we’re also saving time and money in terms of automating this process? The effort to actually go out and create that initial expense report is not the big concern there. It’s because it’s pretty quick. So we don’t have hundreds of thousands of people doing that on a daily basis that we can really quantify and say, this is where our ROI really is. But it’s just the ability of being able to track what those events are in a faster way. Sorry, what those expenses are in a much faster way if they do get, if the process is followed, as we are asking people to do. Because going back to that Excel file that I showed, that is the reality. That’s how we get things and how we consume. So those transactions are categorized. Like I said, it’s going to say hotel, and it’s going to say Cynthia and a certain date, but it doesn’t belong. It doesn’t say this belongs to the Adobe Summit versus the experience gathering or whatever. So as we’re trying to reconcile these, it just becomes very hard because you can have employees at then two to three different events within the same week. So at that point, it’s like, was this airfare here? What should it fall under? For B, for C, for D. And that’s where we get the true value in having those answers much faster. But it’s also hard to quantify what that saving really is, because it can be a lot during a certain time of the year, less during other times. It just depends. Gotcha. I think we also had that report, the Workfront report that had the chart on it. There was a request if you would mind, like, what’s the break, how you created that report in Workfront.

Let me see if I can pull that out, because I’m actually not the one who created that. That was Sam.

So I’ll see if I can bring it up before the end of the session as you’re going through the next questions. And we’ll see if we can get there. There’s just one more, and then we’re going to open it up.

The tip, I think it was from Kristen. Kristen, you gave this tip. You might be able to use Fusion to push a communication to the relevant folks with the correct naming convention ID for them to use in the SAP report. And I didn’t know if that made sense or if, because I’m not a Fusion expert or a few, but I just thought it was cool that she was like, hey, here’s an idea.

I actually love that, and I appreciate the comment. This is something that we’ve been, and I’d love to get some feedback on from others as well and from the person that asked the question, because we are currently struggling in getting our outlook integrated with Fusion. So the ability of sending communications directly through Fusion, maybe there’s a better way. It’s the first time that we’re trying to do such thing, but not just for this purpose, but for other use cases as well, like communicating with suppliers, emails that are more customized than just what Workfront would generate.

We thought that we could just integrate with our Microsoft 365 Outlook module or connector in Fusion, but it’s a permission issue internally where our IT team is saying what’s being requested of Fusion from us is that we give, I think, full read access or read permissions, and we can’t entertain that. So it’s a roadblock for us on the email side. So if people found workarounds or that’s not how they’re doing, I would really like to learn more on that.

You can definitely get it from this community, so we’ll put the challenge out there. I know a lot of customers that have used Outlook. I don’t know how they overcame that. Again, you’re probably in a very locked down. I came from financial services, so every system, anytime I tried to integrate with another system, there was always pushback.

So I think that’s a legit question.

Oh, Kirsten. Thank you, Kirsten. Said we have Outlook connected with service account that sends custom emails. Feel free to reach out. So you found your friends. For the record, y’all, I promised Lucas that this would happen, and so I did not set this up. But thank you for being the generous community that you are.

So do y’all want to just come off mute and ask any other questions? I’m just going to keep reading, but rather hear y’all’s voice if you just want to ask your questions directly.

Hey, so we are in the process.

So first of all, thank you very much for organizing this, Cynthia and Lucas. Thanks for that wonderful presentation and clarity.

Our team is in the process of looking into integrations with Salesforce.

And while the requirements elicitation is in the preliminary phase, are there certain things you would want to call out that would guide us through bringing the data from Salesforce into Workfront? Because that’s what we’re looking at right now. Number one. Number two, what are some of those governance precautionary measures? We should take into account when bringing in data from another system, especially Salesforce in our case, which I know you’ve demonstrated SAP, but I think the ideology is the same, right? Or similar.

So and Cynthia, I don’t know if you want to address that as well, but my two cents on it, because as you alluded, we’re not connecting directly to Salesforce. Salesforce for us, it’s a very controlled and tight environment, which I would love to be able to integrate directly with. But that is not allowed at this point. But from a governance standpoint on what we do with this financial data is we have when we created that SharePoint list that’s pulling out of Power BI, we just put a lot of effort to ensure that we’re not creating duplication of records so that we’re just getting the unique records and we’re just pulling things on certain timestamps. So when things get modified within the system, we do also do complete trunk and loads at times just to make sure things get refreshed so that we were always in sync and we’re matching both sides. So those are a couple of things that we do just to ensure that what the elements that we have are not matching with the source system originally intended. And then we also expect to get things on a certain date. Our financial systems don’t update.

The exports from those financial systems don’t update on a daily basis. Yes, the financial systems do, but they’re not pushing it on a daily basis. So we also check if new data is coming in when we expect it to. So those are kind of the controls or what we do in order to make sure that we’re not incorrectly reporting or creating an incorrect financial view or representation of what we have.

And Mike, go ahead, Ritesh. No, that’s fine. I was just thinking.

So, yeah, I was just gonna say that Salesforce was the only one that I was successful with. And that’s because it was the coolest admin team ever, the Salesforce. Like they were, it was so funny. They might as well have been work front people because everything, when I would meet with them, I’m like, hey, what would you think about us doing this and cutting out, you know, maybe automating? And I just need to know the field name. Like they were so willing, unlike the JIRA team, but like to just jump in there and let’s just see. So like that would be the only tip that I have. And I think, oh yeah, Stacy did the same thing in the chat. Like it came down, honestly, even though there were very strict rules on integrations, it strangely came down to the team of admins and what they were willing like kind of to go around the rules to try something out. So that was my experience. But I don’t know about anybody else.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Mona, you’re right. Definitely. IT versus like sales. Sales to me was always like, whatever we got to do to make it easier for like, yeah. So it’s just as a funny mindset. But yeah.

Anybody else got any questions? We have some time and I have some resources to share because I know that one of the big questions we get is how do you learn Fusion? And so I see names in this right here. They are self-taught Fusion people, but there are definitely some options. There’s classes, there’s remote consulting. Oh, Krista, go ahead.

Oh, I did. I achieved at this time. I got the mic. Turned on.

This is unfortunately not a Fusion related question, but Lucas got my brain moving. We also have super complicated event, events request forms.

And so if we ask the user, is this a presence or web? Is it a single event? The next question is, is it a single event? Is it a road show? Is it a row of events, which is different than a road show? And then we ask, then we, depending on what they choose, they have different web formats or different present formats. And each combination carries its own planning day count.

If you have a road show or a row, then it gets multiplied by how many appointments there are.

And then we try to tell them how much all that’s going to cost.

And I’m wondering, we’ve been using a super, a few super complicated calculated fields to calculate all of that and let them know. I’m wondering if we would be better served with external lookup fields and does anyone have any experience with that or opinions? Thoughts? Would you use Fusion for that Krista to like go grab data? I’m trying to think if that would even be necessary if it’s solved in like an external lookup thing. But I feel like with external lookup, it’d be much easier to remove choices and add than it would be because now with half of the web formats, it costs 40 an hour because it comes from a team internally. And with all of the other formats, whether they’re web or present, it’s an 85 euro per hour price tag. So that adds then another complication to it.

Monique, did you have some thoughts or questions? I did. I did.

I was going to say, I like your background, Danielle.

But anyway, I was going to say that in Fusion, there are data stores. So depending on where that information lives and how often it’s updated, you could just have it live there and then have Fusion kind of tap into that, do whatever multiplication and spit out a number.

Maybe not the VLOOKUP route, but just using your information in a data store and then doing it that way.

What I’ve learned recently is that Fusion doesn’t work with requests that haven’t yet been submitted. And what we’re doing currently is we’re showing them a cost before they’ve submitted the question, the request, sorry.

Yeah, no, that’s an important little caveat there because, yeah, live in depending on what your process is, like I’m assuming once they see the cost, they can kind of make different choices and update their requests on the fly. So because of that, you might need to go to VLOOKUP or because even calculated fields are going to give you the same kind of thing where you kind of have to hit the done button before it can do its thing. But if there is a possibility for them to submit it, then see the number, and then with that edit it, you could go that route or have like a secondary form that gets attached by some Fusion that once they’ve done it, then they go back in and answer it. So there’s still a couple of routes, but all of those are going to be just as complicated as what you have going on. Okay.

I was just going to add one note on the external lookups that one thing we’ve found recently is that they do act differently to the type of head fields and that they don’t have a link to the data. So as you’re going in and making changes, that might work well for you if you’re just doing it right there and showing them that immediate cost. But if you’re ever having to go back and then update those fields or change anything on the back end, the external lookup field doesn’t then update. So there’s no link to the data back and forth there. So just something if you do go down that route, something to be aware of. Okay. Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody. Again, Lucas, check it out. Here’s your team. I know. And I was thinking when the external lookups came up because the solution we did with the inventory tracking, we kind of ran into a similar issue where we actually had to do an initial submission of that request in order for it to then spit out the availability instead of it live, just telling us, no, this is already being used.

But it’s not an area that I’ve worked on too much. So I didn’t feel I felt like there would be other members in the community more qualified to answer on it. Cindy, I just wanted to cover one thing really quick that I kind of pushed back from an earlier question. I’m going to share my screen again. Someone had asked about the expense, the report that we had. So I was just kind of reverse engineering what we had here. Basically, what we have are just two reports that were done. So very, very basic reports, just charting and then putting on a matrix on a table view where we built charts. And then we have a dashboard that put these two reports together and have it in work front. That is what that visual that I showed with the six transactions looked like. And so the one was a matrix report? Yes. So there’s one report for the chart visual and then there’s another report for just the matrix in the bottom. So then we have a dashboard that puts those two reports one on top of the other. So that’s what it is. Well done. Thank you for sharing that. Of course.

I’m going to share my screen really quickly. We only have a few minutes left. With you all, just like some resources really quickly.

And give me one second. And then we will, if you want me, share your screen. There we go.

Back in presentation mode, please.

Then we can see. Yay. There we go. All right. So we have upcoming events just really quickly. So next week we have the admin 101, bring your questions, work front collective. And then there’s another Fusion event this month. This is the follow up for the navigating the work front API for the multi-select fields. And then we have a planning, a work front planning event.

Just as a note for you all, the Adobe summer break is coming up.

Just, you know, not, it’s not a brag. It’s just a fact. I’m just kidding. June 30th through July the 4th. So we won’t have any events that week. But we will come straight back in with getting started with work front. And the thing that you all are going to want to come to is the third quarter release webinar. So you’ll get these links, but you’re going to want to sign up for that. And then the next day will be the admin chat for marketing creative. So those are upcoming events that you want to sign up for.

This is hot off the press, like literally like days hot off the press. There’s a brand new fusion template change project timeline when tasks completed early. And your PMs will love this. So typically, right, if something gets completed ahead of schedule, then you have to like literally change dates and update, like instead of trying to just automatically accelerate the timeline. This is done early. Everything should like let’s go ahead and get everything done early. So this template will automate that. Just wanted to share that with you all, that that is available as a template. The other one that was released, I believe last month. This is again, I just want to bring it back up just in case you weren’t aware. This is something that we have been wanting forever is where it changes the proof role to read only. So if you just have a bunch of proofs that if the project’s rejected dead, then it’ll take care of all of that for you. Here are the things that I wanted to show you. So we have a lot of fusion resources for those of you that were like wanting to learn more or to start your training. And I think Kristin posted one too. So there’s a bunch of resources here.

And there’s two new perspectives. Nicole published the eight step, Nicole and Jen eight step reporting guide. So this was something we mentioned last week. But if you haven’t checked it out, please go look at it. This is an amazing. And then literally again, just published, Kurt and Sky published a perspective on work front certification. So these are like just so many different resources coming out. And we wanted to make sure that you all were aware of them. Thank you for posting the survey in the chat. So please do the survey and let us know if you liked it.

I’m going to stop sharing here because Lucas, this was amazing.

Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. And just seeing the ideas here sparked, I know I’m going to take a lot back on the email side. So this helped me a lot as well. I’m glad. I’m so glad. That’s when you give your time to the community and take the time to build that presentation and share it with us. I really wanted you to be able to get that that information back as well. So thank you for your time. Thank you all for being the best, generous community in the whole world. You all are amazing. And I mean, I’ve decided you can take tomorrow off. Everyone can just take tomorrow off. And I want you to have a nice long weekend.

Sounds good. Thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome.

Thanks, everybody.

And we’ll get the I promise you’ll get the recording and the follow up and all the things this afternoon.

So we’ll see you on the next event, hopefully next week. And otherwise, have a great weekend. Thanks again, Lucas. Thank you. Amazing.

Bye, everyone.