Scott Thorne of Navy Federal Credit Union presented at the SC&H & Oracle EPM Summit on August 20, 2026 at Oracle’s Reston office, with John Smiechowski of SC&H. The full session is below.
Where Navy Federal started in 2014
Navy Federal is the world’s largest credit union, serving active-duty military members, veterans, the Department of Defense, and their families. At that scale, planning and forecasting shape how decisions get made across the organization.
When Navy Federal implemented Hyperion Planning and Data Relationship Management (DRM) in 2014, nobody was talking about AI or predictive finance. The goal was to give finance one place to budget, forecast, and report, without relying on a pile of spreadsheets.
The shift to cloud EPM
By 2019, more processes and users depended on the platform, and every planning cycle raised the stakes.
But most of the team’s energy was still going to infrastructure like upgrades, environments, and keeping things running. None of that work was unnecessary, but it just wasn’t where finance got the most value.
Every hour on infrastructure was an hour not spent on better reporting, better analytics, or a better experience for users. They needed to rethink the platform.
That’s when Navy Federal brought in SC&H to build an EPM roadmap.
The seven-month cloud migration
What came out of the roadmap was Navy Federal’s first ever cloud migration. Working with SC&H, the team finished the project in about seven months. It went live in October 2021 then the on-prem servers were shut off in January 2022.
Scott compares it to being first across a rope bridge. Everyone cheers, then waits to see if it holds. The project also moved metadata management from DRM to EDM, which he calls one of the most valuable parts of the journey.
However, going live wasn’t the finish line. Within 24 hours, users were showing Scott the spreadsheets they had been keeping on the side for years, making the roadmap even longer.
What Scott would do differently in the first 90 days
If he were to do it again, Scott would put more structure around these three things right after go live:
- Watch users work. Every Excel export is feedback. If someone pulls the same data every month and does the same thing to it, the application isn’t doing something they need.
- Tackle reporting governance earlier. If you don’t decide which report is official and who owns it, users decide for you by building another one. Navy Federal hit over 600 report templates and later cut 70% of them.
- Sort requests into buckets. Stabilization, usability, and nice-to-have. If everything is priority one, nothing is.
Capability stops being the constraint
Between 2022 and 2025, the ideas came fast. Navy Federal added ARCS, narrative reporting, PCM, analytics modernization, and moved to Oracle HCM and ERP. Scott says he’d say yes to all of it again.
But enough good ideas stacked together still make a complicated process. Eventually, the training guide needed its own training guide, and the fastest way to get an answer was asking the one person who just knew. So the question changed from what else can we add to how do we make what we have easier to understand and use.
That shift is behind two current redesigns:
- Workforce planning: Users felt the application had become a black box, so the goal is simpler planning with visible drivers and assumptions.
- PCM: The first version moved an already complex costing process to the cloud as is. Navy Federal is now working with SC&H to make it simpler and easier to act on.
Simplify before you add AI
Scott describes this path as build it, simplify it, then make it smarter. Navy Federal is now between simplifying and getting smarter. The capabilities are there, and the work now is making drivers, assumptions, and results transparent.
In order for AI to be useful, data has to be reliable, definitions must be clear, calculations have to be explainable, and users must trust it.
Navy Federal started with planning, then moved on to the cloud, modernization, and analytics, with each step building on the one before it. Twelve years later, that’s how AI is a real conversation today.
Where do we go from here
Platform grew faster than your ability to explain it? Talk to our team about where you stand.
Speakers
Scott Thorne, Senior Manager, Technology Portfolio Management, Navy Federal Credit Union
