Workfront As A Project Financial Management Tool

Marriott International, Inc.

Presenter

Sara Rothkopf

Director, Digital PMO

Marriott International

Marriott International, Inc.

Marriott International, Inc.

ABOUT MARRIOTT

• A leading global lodging company

• More than 6,500 properties across 127 countries and regions

• Revenues of more than $22 billion in fiscal year 2017

• Headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland

MARRIOTT’S BRANDS

Marriott International, Inc.

JW MARRIOTT

HOTELS

AUTOGRAPH

COLLECTION

RENAISSANCE

HOTELS & RESORTS

RITZ - CARLTON

Marriott International, Inc.

PRESENTATIONOBJECTIVESDemonstrate how the Digital PMO tackled project financial management within Workfront. Specifically:

1. Getting Workfront to support the financial scenarios needed in our organization

2. Adding integration to eliminate manual keying of financial data

3. Automating a manual billing process

SUPPORT FINANCIAL SCENARIOS NEEDED IN DIGITAL

THE NEED

Show multiple projects leveraging the same funding

Capture 4 unique budget types plus expenses on projects

Capture initial budget and changes throughout the life of the project

Report financials at all levels of hierarchy

Marriott International, Inc.

• Budgets are set up for the fiscal year

• Budgets fund projects supporting

multiple programs

• Progress of funding tracked for both

budgets and projects

• Used a custom “project type” field on

the on the project custom form to

differentiate between the two

• Added the Workfront reference

number to enable a parent/child

relationship

BUDGETS VS PROJECTS

HOW BUDGETS AND PROJECTS LOOK IN WORKFRONT

• Workfront out-of-the-box only accounts for 1 budget, Marriott Digital tracks 4

• Used the issue object to allocate across the 4 budget categories

• Enabled tracking of changes to the budget over the life of the project

CAPTURING BUDGETS ACROSS MULTIPLE EXPENSE TYPES

• Using the custom fields and issue

object for financials limited native

aggregation to programs and

portfolios

• Partnered with LeapPoint to build

aggregation

• Aggregation extracts project

values, sums them then pushes

the results into custom fields at

the program and portfolio level

GETTING INFORMATION TO ROLL UP

ADDING INTEGRATION TO ELIMINATE MANUAL KEYING OF FINANCIAL DATA

THE NEED

Pull financials reported outside of Workfront into the tool to show impacts to Digital budgets

Marriott International, Inc.

IMPORTING ACTUALS FROM THE SYSTEM OF RECORD

• Mapped PeopleSoft export to

custom fields on the expense

object

• Used LeapPoint’s DataConnect

solution to push values to

mapped fields monthly

• Saved ~40 hours/month of

rekeying the financial

• Eliminated data entry errors

• Ensured accurate representation

of financials from the system of

record

BUDGET VS DELIVERY PROJECT ACTUALS

• Import enabled development of leading indicator reports to compare

budget actuals (from PeopleSoft) to the sum of project actuals

AUTOMATING A MANUAL BILLING PROCESS

THE NEED

Add efficiency and transparency to manual billing process

Bulk process billing records

Ability to recalculate financials on projects in bulk

Validate the bulk processing completed successfully and easily identify failures/exceptions.

Roll up billing records from projects to department budgets for a single invoice

Generate an invoice and attach it to the project

Marriott International, Inc.

FORMER MANUAL PROCESS

• Former process was built

using Clients & Profits

which was being

decommissioned with the

introduction of Workfront

• Billing took a finance

person between 3 to 5

days per month to execute

PROCESS IN WORKFRONT

• Step 1: Project owners generate monthly billing records

PROCESS IN WORKFRONT

• Step 2: Recalculate financials

• Step 3: Select the Portfolio

• Step 4: Select the billing records to process

PROCESS IN WORKFRONT

• Step 5: Preview records selected that will be processed

PROCESS IN WORKFRONT

• Step 6: Validate records processed

RESULTS IN WORKFRONT

• Auto-generated Chargeback

Summary (invoice)

• Rolled up billing records from

projects to a single

department budget invoice

RESULTS IN WORKFRONT

• Automatically stored in project documents

RESULTS IN WORKFRONT

• Automatically flipped the status of billing records to “billed” enabling

billed vs. unbilled reports

Billed Labor & Expenses Unbilled Labor & Expenses

IN SUMMARY

• By getting Workfront to support the financial scenarios needed in the Marriott Digital organization and leveraging the power of the API to automate both financial imports and billing, we achieved the following:

1. Improved data accuracy by eliminating potential manual entry errors

2. Saved ~40hrs/month through automation

3. Achieved financial rollups at the program and portfolio level

4. Provided leading indicators of anticipated cost to help prevent unexpected overages

5. Reduced the processing time for billing from 5 days to less than 1

Marriott International, Inc.

Marriott International, Inc.

QUESTIONS & DISCUSSION

Marriott International, Inc.