Giancarlo Yin 0:00:03.8: 

Hi, my name is Giancarlo Yin. I've been at Bacardi now for ten and a half years. I'm senior director responsible for our global commercial technology and data service and our commercial planning product line. It's part of my purview and a big part of our portfolio as well. I'll start talking a little bit about the company, what Bacardi is, then talk about some of the business challenges that we were facing before we embarked on our big transformation, planning transformation. Then, go through some of the phasing of that transformation, ending with our outcomes and the lessons that we learned by going through that process. So, I think most people know Bacardi. Most people here are legal drinking age. We're actually the world's largest privately held spirits company. Been family-owned for seven generations now. It was founded in 1862, so the founder, Don Facundo Bacardi, he was a wine merchant that moved to Cuba from Spain in 1830, so about 200 years ago. When he moved to Cuba, he saw that the locals were drinking a lot of rum, and rum at that time was quite harsh, right, so think about stuff that pirates drink.  

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:01:35.4: 

He spent about ten years fine-tuning a rum recipe and techniques to distill rum, and he was very successful at coming up with a really good, more palatable rum that people could consume. So, once his sales started taking off, him and his brother bought a distillery in Santiago, and at the distillery, there were some fruit bats hanging out in the rafters, and his wife was very clever. She decided to use that as part of the branding, and in Spain, were a symbol of good fortune, good health, family, and she decided to go with the bat for the brand. Most of the people in Cuba at that time were illiterate, so they didn't really know how to read. What they would do is call for 'el ron del murcielago,' which is the rum of the bat, so that's how people started calling for the brand. Fast forward 162 years, we're now approximately 9000 people, actually, in over 160 countries and over 200 brands. As I said, we are over 200 brands now. We've made some pretty significant acquisitions lately. Last year we got into Mezcal with ILEGAL, D'usse Cognac, and also Teeling Irish Whiskey, but our acquisition journey just started in 1993 with Martini. Some of the notables that most of you know is Grey Goose, Patron, Bombay Sapphire, and Dewar's. These are some of our bigger brands. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:03:22.4: 

So, let's talk about business challenges. Going back to about 2015, we had a bunch of disconnected, siloed systems, homegrown systems that our planning was being done through… CPG is quite complex, but when you add [unclear word 0:03:42.7:] to it, it gets even more complex because of regulations. Especially here in the US, we have a three-tier system, so we have to go through distributors to get to the consumer to get to the trade. None of the data that we necessarily generate internally is that interesting to us, so we have to get quite a bit of external data. We also had systems that didn't talk to each other. We had our commercial teams going into a homegrown system, [?blender 0:04:11.6:] volumes going to SAP, plan their pricing, have to wait for overnight batch process to bring that data together to see the impact of both sides of planning. If tweaks needed to be made, they needed to go back, do some offline work, redo, re-enter, fine-tune, and tweak, so it took a very long time to get planning done. Because of how complex and cumbersome it was, also, the way the commercial teams were incentivized was not ideal. They were incentivized to really push volumes instead of value. They would do anything in terms of things to actually move those cases into the trade. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:04:58.8: 

Pricing and discounts were quite high, and that hurt the brand in many ways, so we needed to do something. That's when we started with our transformation. We knew that we needed a tool like Anaplan to connect everything together and be more agile. Having all those disparate systems were making things too complex. This was also around the time where the citizen developer-type tools were becoming more prevalent, and this was something that was intriguing. We started our Anaplan journey as it was a big digital business transformation, but the view from the company was that it was more of an IT-led program, and I think that was also one of the challenges that we saw. When we started, we were focusing on two regions, North America, which is our indirect market, right, we've got to go through distributors, and Europe, which is our direct markets, so in Europe, we can actually sell directly to the trade. However, the company, at the time, was also quite siloed. There was not a lot of sharing happening between the regions, so we had one team doing the transformation in Europe, another team doing the transformation in North America, and not a lot of sharing happening between the two teams. We kind of progressed, and somehow, we had very similar journeys. The difference that we did have is that IT governance was put in place right from the start. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:06:41.7: 

So, it wasn't like a line of business tools. I feel like a lot of Anaplan journeys start at the line of business and then start getting governance. We had governance from the beginning, so we were making sure that things were connected right with our overall IT architecture. Of course, following the Anaplan way, we decided to go agile, and this was also the time when agile was coming out of software development and getting into more of a corporate IT. This was key for us, but it was also a big challenge in terms of change management. It was a big transformation for the company. Nobody had done agile before, so there was a lot of enablement that had to be done for us to be able to get into those cadences. It was actually very crucial for our success because also at that time, we were going through a big route to market transformation. We were consolidating our distribution into mainly one major partner that had a presence all over the US, and because of that, our processes were changing very rapidly. We had already started building some of the capabilities and the tools, so we had to adapt very quickly to be able to enable this new route to market transformation. So, because we started in that agile journey that enabled that to be possible. Fast forward a few years, so we went live. We enabled some of the planning processes. Of course, there was a lot of growing pains in terms of some of the decisions that were made. We were also new to Anaplan, but we gained some maturity. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:08:29.9: 

We evolved the tools, but then we found that there's some efficiencies that could be gained by bringing the teams together. So, we decided to come up with a centralized team to manage all of our commercial planning solutions, so we created a product team bringing it together. We consolidated the vendors that we were working with into one vendor for delivery, standardized the delivery, and streamlined the support as well. This also allowed us to really share best practices from across the regions and across the teams and allowed us to improve the ways we were doing things, and our ways of working to really be able to meet our compliance needs. Commercial planning now is such a crucial part of our business process that it's under SOX guidance, and we need to make sure that everything that we do is tied to that compliance. This was the journey that we went through - it was a very rewarding journey - not without missteps, but a lot of learnings as well. Today, we find ourselves with a very well-integrated, cross-functional team of tech people, businesspeople, working together to find efficiencies in what we can do with planning, and things are moving quite smoothly. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:10:03.3: 

This is where we are today. There's still a lot that we can do, but it's been quite a journey, right? It's been almost ten years now that we've been on this. From an outcome point of view, this cultural shift really helped us with the agility, and actually shifting things in the companies because now we do a lot more things agile. This was also key during the pandemic for us to be able to shift and adapt to what was changing at the time. Of course, now we're able to much more easily meet our compliance needs. We have one simplified architecture globally. Before, we had two. Now, we have really good opportunities where we have different roles within the team that allow people to try different things and also look at their personal development as well. Of course, we have been able to lower our costs to deliver by consolidating into a single vendor with the scale that we have now. So, lessons - it's a little bit of a repetition - but yes, now we know that thinking about how we designed the system, we need to keep compliance in mind from the get-go. We make sure that anything that we do is reviewed before we actually apply it to the process. Really, we have strong forums now within the regions, so we have… Even though it's two separate regions, they're part of the routines, of our agile routines. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:11:47.1: 

So, they're part of the product team. They're part of everything we do, from planning the program down to the delivery. Because of the architecture, before, we used to have many different ways to integrate with Anaplan. We've consolidated that into a single hub and a single way of doing things now with agility as well. Support has been huge in terms of standardizing what we do with support now. We've been able to get much more stability and streamlining through that. We also have a partner now that has the capability to deliver on our needs at a much better rate than what we had before. They're able to do both delivery and support, and that's been super helpful for us, so that is the end of the journey. I'll open up to questions from the audience if anyone has. 

 

Audience 0:12:56.9: 

Hi, good afternoon. I'm Nicola Barrett from MassMutual. The last slide mentioned cultural fit, and it was highlighted in a different color, and so on, and so forth. What was it about the cultural fit? Why was that so important, and what was it about the cultural fit that made it such a good match? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:13:14.6: 

Just in terms of ways of working and fit with the way the team operates. The previous partner, it didn't quite align with the way we were doing things. It worked, but it wasn't great, but once we had someone that was really able to integrate with the way we do things and the way that fits within the culture and how the team operates, it made a big difference for us. 

 

Audience 0:13:39.7: 

[Inaudible 0:13:39.7:] 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:13:44.1: 

Not really, so I think the partner was able to adapt to the way that we worked versus us having to make the cultural shift. 

 

Audience 0:13:53.7: 

Okay, I was just wondering because you said you had shifted fully to agile, not just from a systems standpoint but from an overall business process, business thinking, and so on. So, I was just wondering if there was like… 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:14:03.3: 

Well, not fully. Depends on what part of the business [over speaking 0:14:06.4:]. 

 

Audience 0:14:06.4: 

Depends on what fully means! [amused tone] 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:14:08.4: 

Yes. 

 

Audience 0:14:08.6: 

Okay! [laughs] 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:14:10.0: 

But within this space, definitely, it's fully agile. 

 

Audience 0:14:14.2: 

Thank you. 

 

Audience 0:14:15.3: 

Hi, I was curious about the mix, so you're talking about your implementation partner. Who do you have on staff, and what are their roles as part of the COE? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:14:24.8: 

In-house, we have a product line owner that also overlooks the COE. We have one product owner - one for North America, one for Europe - and then, within the COE, we have three architects. One global architect and one regional architect for each of the regions, and then the delivery is all done through partners, so that's the internal team that I described. Then, the delivery itself is done through partners. We do have some operations management as well within the team, and the business team is also embedded into the team, so we have product leads from the business, and business analysts and testers that are part of the overall team. The business analysts are internal. The testers are external. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:15:19.0: 

Thank you everybody. We're going to just switch lens for a moment. We're going to invite the partner on the stage, and we're going to shift the format a little bit to a panel. I want to introduce Sid Poddar from Polestar. [applause] Sid's got a couple of decades plus of experience around organizational transformations specifically as it relates to analytics, business planning, and being a key partner for Bacardi, and also a key partner for me and my team, so thank you. Welcome on stage. Great to hear the story, Giancarlo. Got a few questions that we prepared. We're certainly happy to take more questions from the audience too at different points in time. Maybe, just as a starter for ten, if you like, I know it's a global program. We work with a lot of the different teams. Just curiously, in that federated global model, how do you manage that situation with all of the different time zones, the different teams, and the different people? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:16:21.8: 

Yes, so I have to rely quite a bit on my leadership team to be able to pass the message to the distributed teams. We do have a weekly connection point with my leadership team to talk about strategy, talk about things that are coming from leadership that we need to be aware of, the direction that we need to go, and also, understand how our workstreams and programs are doing. I also connect with them on a one-to-one basis on a weekly basis as well, then a lot of my team… We have people all from Manila to India, all over Europe, and here in the US. A lot of the folks in my leadership team that have teams in… The folks in Asia have folks in Europe as part of their leadership team, right, because then it's easier for us to have those overlaps of time and touchpoints with the global teams. Then, on a semi-annual basis, we also have a forum where we connect. Nowadays, it's mostly virtual. It's hard to justify the travel. So, we do things really on a virtual basis to be able to… Everyone to stay on the same track. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:17:40.7: 

Does language ever get in the way of that? Like, if I'm French, and I want some things very French, how do you deal with that? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:17:48.4: 

I mean, we do have to have good cultural sensitivity and understanding how different cultures work. There's different nuances and personalities that emerge from different cultures. The language is not necessarily a barrier because we conduct our business mostly in English. Of course, when we talk with our stakeholders and, the sales teams, and the local sales teams, they're not necessarily well-versed in English. In that case, we have to be able to figure out - to have the right presence - that can be there for translations, but for the most part, language is not a problem. It's just really understanding those cultural nuances. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:18:30.3: 

Now, Sid, question for you - a longstanding relationship - how do you manage to retain talent over such a long period of time? 

 

Sid Poddar 0:18:38.4: 

Thank you so much, Andrew, great question. For a customer like Bacardi, if it's a long-term relationship, keeping talent consistent throughout that two-year, three-year, four-year journey is very important because it ensures that we offer a consistent level of support, and learning and development timeline also reduces. I would say we take a four-pronged strategy to do that. The first and foremost are, obviously, the hygiene factors. So, whenever, basically salaries, mental health, physical health, we recently got Great Place to Work certified as well, so that was one thing. That means the environment at the organization level is conducive for people to stay. The second important part is showing the resource is a journey within the organization, that they are not just a model builder. Most people have some aspirations, so showing then a path that you are a model builder, tomorrow you'll be a solution architect. After, you become Master Anaplanner. Becoming a team leader, program lead, that type of journey, so that keeps people motivated to be engaged in the program. The third - very important - and I think that worked brilliantly with Bacardi, is the collaboration with the customer to support that growth path. If I have a star performer, I can reach out to the COE lead, I can reach out to the program director, and ask them that, 'Hey, this is a growth path for this employee. Are you aligned?' If they are aligned, they actually encourage us that, 'Okay, why don't we promote this to a team lead? Why don't we promote them to a program lead or a project lead?' 

 

Sid Poddar 0:19:52.8: 

That helps us show a path and actually deliver that entire growth journey to that employee. No matter how hard we try, Anaplan is a hot commodity - the model builders - so we do get attrition at some time. In that case, I don't want any impact on Bacardi's business, so we have a concept of account managers where, at the end of the day, our team is our responsibility. We give 30 to 45 days of transition period in case a person is going to go. We have to make sure that Bacardi business does not get impacted, and we invest in that entire 30-to-45-day transition and ensure that the entire knowledge transition has been done by us. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:20:24.9: 

We're talking about skills, right? We're talking about people with specific skills that we need. We've mentioned that a few times on stage today over the course of the day. How do you manage that process in terms of constantly upskilling people, managing skills, bringing new skills to the ecosystem and then continually staffing that COE during times of turmoil? 

 

Sid Poddar 0:20:45.9: 

Okay, excellent, so there are two components to this. One is the internal upskilling, and there is an external upskilling as well, I would say. Internal upskilling, we have our own competency center who does a lot of active investment into educating people. We invest into our model builders to take classes and become level one, level two, level three certified, and so on. We invest a lot into their subject matter expertise so they do not just remain a model building. They understand the client business. They understand what is supply chain, what is financial literacy, and so on? That investment is done internally, and that helps part of their growth journey. The second important step we also do is invest into customers' literacy as well. So, their COE, we usually form a three-pronged approach for customer literacy. The first one is a low touch, which means email messages, webinars, etc., that gets conducted, which is more of a push content to make sure that people are aware. So, when Anaplan launches a new product like Workflow, then we would create a blog about what is Workflow, how will it be useful, and send it out to all of our customers? If there is a case study that we recently completed, we would roll it out to all of our customers that here is some advanced use cases. That is the low-touch part. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:21:49.5: 

The medium-touch part becomes where we actually get on a conversation call with the customer and explain to them about what has been done, answer any questions that they may have about educating them on that use case. The third one is high touch, where we actually take a two-day, three-day trip along with the customer. We did that earlier this year with another customer of ours in Eastern Europe. We are planning to do one with Bacardi at the end of this year, where for three days, we'll do tips and tricks, best practices of Anaplan. What are advanced use cases customers are seeing, GenAI embedded with Anaplan, and so on. That type of low-touch, medium-touch, high-touch helps keep competency centers up to date. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:22:24.9: 

You mentioned a few times during the discussion here Giancarlo, you know, you started this journey back in what, 2015, 2016? It's been a journey. It's been an evolution. Obviously, working with a partner is a key aspect of that. You mentioned that's been like an evolution for you as well throughout the process. Could you speak to that a little bit? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:22:44.6: 

Yes, I mean our Anaplan delivery has always been through partners. As a company, we're not heavy on internal development teams. We're mostly business relationship management and understanding what needs to be done, but when it comes to actual development, we work with partners. Yes, it's been a transition, and also, we know that… When we first started the journey back in the day, we felt the need to have people come in and be in sight with us. Here in the US, for us, it's a very expensive rate. We got to a point where, after the pandemic, we realized that we could do things without actually having people fly in and travel. We could do a lot of things virtually. So we're starting to now streamline that cost, and bring that cost down quite a bit by finding partners that are flexible. The other challenge was, with previous partners, we had a ton of attrition, and we know Anaplan is not an easy technology to find a lot of readily available talent out there that's actually good. A lot of times the partners would lose somebody, they would bring somebody into the account that has zero Anaplan experience, and they were basically getting trained on the job. With Polestar, what we found great about them is that they actually have an Anaplan practice, whereas previously, our partners did not.  

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:24:24.0: 

They did have people and staff that knew planning - so they had a planning practice - but not necessarily Anaplan. Now, whenever we do have any kind of attrition, it's a much smoother experience to get them up to speed, and this has been key for us, but yes, we've been with partners throughout our whole experience. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:24:51.7: 

Pivoting a little bit, coming back to that organizational change that you talked about a little bit… The reason I ask this question, I was with another customer recently, and they were talking about how, because of the innovative things that they're able to do within that specific business unit, and it was around commercial planning as well - like what you're doing - IBP commercial planning. There seemed to be a desire within the workforce to want to be on that team. Like, hey, I want to go work on that team over there. I want to go work on the Anaplan team. We're doing some innovative things. Have you seen anything like that within Bacardi? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:25:29.0: 

Part of our strategy was disruptive innovation - like five years ago - I think one of the things that we realized is that that's not core to our business, disruptive innovation, so we're more okay with… At least from a technology standpoint, we're okay with being fast followers. We do have open innovation, but from a planning standpoint, it's more about being able to make the impact on how we do things, and people are wanting to be part of those project teams. They want to be part of that transformation because they know that it has a huge impact on the business. It's not necessarily super innovative, but people still want to participate in the initiatives. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:26:18.7: 

At least at Polestar, and I can definitely say many of our Anaplan model builders want to get on the Bacardi account. The growth that they are seeing of people on the account like I was saying, the collaboration is just amazing. They frequently come back and say, 'Hey, is there any vacancy open?' We go, 'No, not for now right now.' That's something that collaboration helps quite a bit into promoting people to join and see that, yes, there is a very creative model building going on there. There are a lot of use cases that we are doing for Bacardi that people want to understand better. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:26:46.1: 

Not just because you pay them in Grey Goose martinis. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:26:48.0: 

Not yet, no, unfortunately. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:26:53.4: 

Just touching upon - we've got some minutes - I'm going to throw some questions back out to the audience here. In terms of analytics, data analytics and insights as a key part of what we enable for you guys, could you touch upon a little bit about some of the analytical challenges that you've had, and then how you've been able to address those? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:27:13.9: 

Yes, I touched on it at the beginning of the journey, just CPG, in general. Analytics is complex, right, because we're acquiring so much external data in order to have any visibility of what's going on. From a planning standpoint, of course, data is super important for us to be able to do anything. We do have a global data and analytics team that's outside of my team, but I have somebody in my team that's responsible for commercial data and analytics - dotted line into that global data and analytics team - she's the one really understanding functionally what we need to do. What we need to do in terms of data capture within our systems and our tools in order to have the visibility and measure the things that we want to measure. Then, the delivery piece, it all happens with our global data and analytics team. They're ones actually with the architecture, the strategy, the governance. We try to work together to come into the same outcome. Sometimes, of course, there's different priorities, and I'm competing. I'm commercial. We have somebody on the supply chain side that's competing with my priorities, so then we have to figure out sometimes how to prioritize across. It works for the most part. Sometimes, we do have some clashes, so those are really some of the challenges that we see. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:28:43.8: 

Then, Sid, I guess a question for you more generally, some of the areas where organizations are starting to use advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine-learning to solve for some of these problems. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:28:55.8: 

Yes, so when it comes to AI, actually, I think for the majority of organizations right now, the entire planning focus remains process automation, which is a very small aspect of planning. There is a lot more that can be done beside automation when it comes to planning. At Polestar we created a framework called i3 framework, which is integration, intelligence and insight. Integration is the first step, where it's not just your own organizational data. We need to start thinking about what data can I get that can help me do better planning? It could be third party data. It could be data coming from SAS platform. All of that data integration is just one aspect. You have to match it to your master data, ensure that the data is understood correctly and appropriately before it is fed into Anaplan. All of those stages or steps are part of integration. Actually, I'll share a case study in a minute. The second part comes the intelligence part of it, which is before that data is fed into Anaplan, or any machine-learning algorithm, you need to make sure that the data is interpreted appropriately because not every data will help you do better planning. You need to identify after all that clutter that came in, what attributes actually helped to do a better plan. Do the feature engineering part, then feed it into a planning module, as well as advanced planning modules like PlanIQ, embedded within Anaplan or separate machine learning algorithm that will help you create an output that is actually useful. Then, we'd go to the third part, which is insights part of it. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:30:16.6: 

Now, every data output that comes out of Anaplan may not be readily readable by people. You need it to be presented in such a format so that people can interpret and take actions out of it. That makes it insight. Now, it could be a dashboard on Anaplan. It could be on Power BI. It could be on Tableau. It could be any other format in which people will be able to help make a decision, but unless and until you take it to the final level, where a human is able to see that and make a better decision, it could be predictive analytics. It could be prescriptive analytics. That part of integration is very important throughout the end-to-end journey. The case study I was talking about - it was a car wash company - it will be published very soon on our website as well. In partnerships with Anaplan, we completed - they were doing car washes - a very difficult task to do forecasting, and they have membership-related car washes, non-member related car washes, and membership revenue that comes. So, what is the revenue forecasting we have to do? Instead of taking their past data for doing forecasting, we recommended to the customer that we should take weather data, okay, and weather data, when we reached out to AccuWeather and pulled all the data from their APIs, we got 80 different points coming out of it. Now, PlanIQ has a limitation. We can put only 12 items, and I don't want 80. Determination of which 12 variables will feed into PlanIQ was the most difficult part of the exercise. 

 

Sid Poddar 0:31:31.9: 

That required several permutation combinations of different aspects. We did whether precipitation impacts or not. Air pollution impacts car wash or not. We created a model that selected the best 12 variables. We fed that into Anaplan IQ, and voila, we got magic. We got 90-plus per cent accuracy of the forecast. We ran that entire model for Jan to June based on December 2023 data and got 90-plus per cent accuracy. That is the exercise that helps us leverage PlanIQ-type systems because there is an element of data science that is involved before we can invoke a machine-learning algorithm. A collective working of data science team and PlanIQ, Anaplan, will give you a better result is all that I can add. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:32:15.6: 

Giancarlo, what's next for you guys? You spoke about the journey you've been on? What's on the horizon? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:32:24.6: 

One of the key things that we're working on now is, I think the company realized that if we were going to have this parrot processes across the regions and nuances, it was going to very hard for us to scale, right? So, we've been able to roll out things in North America. We've been able to roll out in Europe. These are mature, high-margin markets, but we haven't necessarily been able to scale that into Latin America, into EMEA, into our global travel retail markets. That's because of all the nuances that we have with how teams are planning and what they're doing. Maybe they're not really wanting to change the way they do things. Right now, the enterprise realized that if we're going to make the most out of our tech investments, we need to start standardizing our processes. We have this big, global enterprise business planning program going on right now that right now we're just focusing on documenting what we want the ideal to be processes in place, which will then guide this new transformation in terms of what we're going to be able to do. We want to provide the capability to all of our teams so that they're not planning in Excel and offline, and they have the same kind of capability that our mature markets have. In order for us to do that, we need to go through that transformation. We're really just documenting, mostly focused now on route to market, whether it's direct or indirect. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:33:58.1: 

Even within markets, there's a mix of direct and indirect, but we're trying to find the best-in-class types of processes so that all the markets can adopt them. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:34:13.5: 

What are some of the nuances between, say, an indirect market like the UK and a direct market like Europe? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:34:20.5: 

It's mainly the distributor piece, right, so you have to… When we're talking with the distributors, we're not really talking about our sales data to them because that doesn't mean anything. It just means our cases are moving from our facility to their facilities. We need to understand both their depletions, so the cases that move out into the trade, and also the consumer pulls sometimes as well, because sometimes the trade is very high in inventories as well. Whereas in the direct markets, what goes into the trade is our transactions, so we have a little bit more visibility. Also, the types of agreements that we can have, so we can have actual contracts with the trade, so we control a little bit more our promotional activities. Whereas in indirect markets, that's happening at the distributor side, so we have to work through the distributor. The levers that we can pull are a little bit different, so we can do things at the account, but the distributor is the one that's mainly managing that, so the types of levers that we can pull on our activity planning are a little bit different. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:35:32.5: 

And you've got the ability to manage that different in terms of the levels of complexity, but still aggregate up into a single viewpoint from a global standpoint. 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:35:40.9: 

Yes, we do. Today, our planning systems are still siloed so commercial planning is done in Anaplan, but our supply chain and supply side, and then the financial side are done in separate tools. So, there is a level of communication that happens. From a planning standpoint, the consolidation piece it's super high-level. It's not really at the level of detail that we're doing things, but we are able to bring it all together through those integrations.  

 

Andrew Richards 0:36:13.8: 

Only seconds to go. Any final words of wisdom for anybody starting a journey, in the middle of one, scratching their head? Any recommendations for people? 

 

Giancarlo Yin 0:36:22.4: 

I mean, yes, there was a ton of lessons learned, right, so it is a journey. You're going to make mistakes. There's never a smooth way out. I think it's really learn from others and try to anticipate things as much as possible. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:36:40.0: 

Sid, any final works from yourself? 

 

Sid Poddar 0:36:41.2: 

No, I think technology, as [?GC] was saying their technology is… A process plays a very important role as well. I would say, before you embark on any journey and make a verdict on a technology is not working, I think teams need to introspect and look at their own process simplification as well change management as well before blaming technology for any initiative failures. I think that is something I am seeing at Bacardi, and a huge difference compared to many of our other customers where their success… They are so flexible in terms of process and change management. His team does a phenomenal job in working through the process changes, working with stakeholders into pushing back into requirements that will not add tremendous value to the models. So, that part of process integration with technology, it is a mutual play between the two. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:37:27.8: 

Well, Giancarlo, thank you for your partnership. Sid, you too. Thank you for the session today. We've got two seconds. We're at the end of the session, and it's cocktail hour for everybody. So, thank you.  

 

[Applause]