Hyperion Financial Management (HFM)

The Client:
Welltower delivers the health care infrastructure necessary to facilitate better treatment at lower costs while keeping patients out of the hospital. The business is centered on a relationship-based investing platform. With corporate headquarters in Toledo, Ohio, Welltower provides real estate capital to leading seniors housing operators, post-acute care providers and health systems. They currently have over 2500 legal entities included in their applications with many different forms of ownership.

The Challenge:
Welltower original contacted Inspirage in 2014 to add a legal entity hierarchy to their existing HFM application. This piece was completed during a four-month project which included working with Welltower to determine the actual hierarchy as well as creating the consolidation methods and modifying the application to support various tax reporting requirements. In April 2016, Welltower reached out to Inspirage to assist with a re-implementation of HFM. They were re-implementing their ERP system to better support their legal entity and tax reporting needs which facilitated the need to re-implement HFM. Inspirage consultants were able to develop the new HFM application to support SEC and Tax reporting needs in both local currency and US Dollars. This project was completed in time for their September/Q3 close and reporting needs. Welltower engaged Inspiragee to build an on-premise planning system that replaced the existing planning process of using Excel models by the Corporate FP&A Group. In addition, Welltower also wanted to build out a Workforce Planning application using Planning and Budgeting Cloud (PBC) to provide a budget model for compensation planning.

Welltower reached out to Inspirage to help with the re-implementation based on our previous working relationship with them. According to Marc Zinck, Assistant Vice President, Information Management, “We were pleased with the work that [Inspirage] did for us on the initial project in 2014 as well as their availability and ability to resolve issues effectively and efficiently through infrastructure support.” Inspirage was working on a Hyperion Planning implementation for Welltower when they reached out to us for assistance with the new HFM project.

The Solution:
The HFM project entailed created multiple HFM consolidation methods and scenarios that supported different tax and legal (SEC) reporting needs. The application needed to function using different consolidation methods for Tax and Legal/SEC reporting as well as have additional non-GAAP consolidations. Additionally, the project included changing the chart of accounts to match the new ERP accounts as well as streamlining the FDM mappings that were required. In addition to building the new HFM application, Welltower decided to build multiple FR Studio reports to support reporting needs. This was a change from the previous version of HFM where Welltower users relied almost completely on SmartView reports. Tom Russell, Director, Corporate FP&A shared, “[Inspirage] consultants were able to demonstrate the benefits of using FR Reports to support reporting needs while reducing the maintenance of hundreds of excel spreadsheets.”

The on-premise Corporate Planning application served Welltower with the following purposes:
– Provided a Budget Model for Corporate Planning (Acquisition Pipeline, Equity, G&A, Capital Expenditure, Non-secured Debt Interest Expense, and Secured Debt Interest Expense)
– Provided currency conversions capabilities
– Provided additional analytic capabilities performed by Corporate FP&A
– Provided data integration of budget and forecast to HFM for a Consolidated Welltower income statement
– Provided data integration of Final Budget to JDE.

It was important that the PBC solution for Compensation:
– Provided a centralized and driver-driven budgeting system for compensation planning, analytic capabilities by HR and Corporate FP&A
– Provided currency conversion capabilities
– Integrated employee data from ADP and SuccessFactor
– Integrated compensation budget to new Corporate Planning application.

Company Annual Revenue:
$4.2 Billion

The Solution Products:
– HFM