Moderator 0:00:04.6: 

On the stage, today, we have two of my favorite people. We're going to be talking about Cardinal Health and their transformation on Anaplan. They've been a customer for a few years. We have James O'Leary and Alysa Cox to talk through a little bit about the company, a little bit about the transformation, some of the learnings that they've had. Alysa is the Vice President of Finance Transformation at Cardinal Health. Then, James O'Leary who, like Dave and myself, has been at Anaplan for a long time. He's worked with a lot of the life science customers and some of our largest customers for the organization. He is our Vice President of Customer Success. He has really helped transform the way that we support our customers and help them achieve value, so a wealth of experience and great knowledge from James, as well, so looking forward to this conversation. With that, I will pass it over to you guys.  

 

James O'Leary 0:00:56.6:  

Okay. It's been a transformation journey. It's been more than one attempt at a transformation journey, so we'll hear a little bit about that; understand what the goals and vision of the program are today, the approach and the principles that Alysa has used to drive the program and some learnings along the way. We want to leave time for a Q&A, so we'll be intentional about trying to leave at least 10 or 15 minutes at the end. Just to contextualize the small company of Cardinal Health. Over $200 billion of revenue, operating globally, nearly 50,000 employees, is a massive organization. It's also a very narrow-margin business. To start the conversation - just stepping back from technology and transformation - I thought it'd be helpful to give some context for what it's like to work inside an organization that is so large but also has to operate with such rigor in order to drive the bottom line. Every decision matters. Maybe you can share a little bit about that, with the… 

 

Alysa Cox 0:02:02.8:  

Yes, the way I would describe it is, as a transformation leader, I need to bring business cases that save us money. I can't bring business cases with warm fuzzies, right? My business cases need to have Type-1 savings that I need to, then, go validate and make sure that somebody else - when I say, 'You're going to save money,' because places we're going to save money, is not on the finance transform team, it's out in finance at large, or it's within our business operations. People then need to sign up for those savings in their budget. That is a lot of collaboration that happens. In a narrow-margin business, every dollar matters. We're not just a narrow-margin business. We are a narrow-margin business that drives pharmaceuticals and medical products to hospitals.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:02:53.0: 

We are a distribution business. We're not a finance business and, so, every dollar spent in finance, is a dollar that could have been spent delivering customer product, delivering health outcomes; delivering better margins for our suppliers, better margins for our vendors, better margins for our investors. In finance, in particular, because there are use cases for Anaplan well beyond finance. In finance, in particular, in a narrow-margin business, every dollar counts and you've got to be able to demonstrate how the solutions that we're proposing and that we want to spend money on, those are driving business results and financial results to the bottom line.  

 

James O'Leary 0:03:33.8:  

On the screen now. It's not a simple business. It's many different operating units and divisions and products and so the decisions that are made are made in different siloes of the organization. As the finance organization - and given the transformation that you've been on - I think it would be helpful to maybe outline some of the challenges you've had as Cardinal has been on this journey. I know you've only been on the latter half of it.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:04:03.9:  

Successful part.  

 

James O'Leary 0:04:03.9:  

The successful part of it. This is maybe the third attempt at your transformation with Anaplan. I think it would be interesting for the audience to understand what the challenges were that you've observed that led up to those prior unsuccessful attempts and what's perhaps started to change now and why you're seeing success in the way that you haven't in the past.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:04:27.0:  

Sure. We've been on a multiyear-Anaplan journey. It has not been a linear journey by any stretch of the imagination. There have been starts and stops and, then, as we reinvigorate our journey - as we're on the portion of the journey that we're on today - I do get people asking me, 'Why are we doing this now? Aren't we done yet? Are we still doing…? We're on this journey still.' When we started our Anaplan journey, so when I came in, I came into an Anaplan COE that was within my organization but had no lead, had dwindled in staff down to two people who really wanted to learn Anaplan. Again, no Anaplan lead. I am not an Anaplanner. I do finance transformation but if I had to put my hands on the keyboard, we'd be in trouble. That was our internal staffing. Then, a group of models that had been built by a number of different people - there were models that had been built by our internal COE. There had been models that had been built by service providers.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:05:43.2: 

There had been models that we'd gotten Anaplan support to build. There were models that we had used our third party - we used Genpact as a third-party service delivery organization for our finance team. Genpact had participated. Lots of people had participated in building models. The models didn't necessarily talk to each other. No one necessarily knew how to maintain those models because the people that built them had gone. We had a dysfunctional ecosystem. The aggregation tool that we were using was called 'the Bridge Model.' It was a bridge to nowhere. Our finance team would come up with the forecast every month and submit it to the enterprise team in Excel. After all $226 billion of annual revenue had been aggregated in Excel it would load Anaplan. They were like, 'Why are we doing this?' It was like, 'I don't know. I don't know.' In many respects, we had to start over. The first thing that we had to do, as part of the start-over, was I had to get an Anaplan COE lead, somebody who actually knew what they were talking about when it came to - and could put their hand on the keyboard and could hire. I am not in a position to hire good developers.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:07:03.9: 

I couldn't tell you what a good developer looks like interview, but Mike my CEO lead, he knows. Get the right expertise in-house to help me make good decisions. Then, we had to start to set some rules. Now, Cardinal Health is a consensus-driven culture. No one person decides; we all hold hands to decide things. When we restarted our Anaplan journey, one of the things that I said was… I said, 'Okay, there are two things that are going to be true. These have to be true. I'm not going to do any of this work anymore. We'll just go back to Excel or stay in Excel if we're going to do this.' One of them is the people who drive complexity, need to pay for their complexity.  

 

James O'Leary 0:07:55.4:  

Say that again.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:07:57.2: 

The people who drive complexity have to pay for their complexity. In an Excel-submission world, my business units would put together their forecast in the way that worked for their business partners. They would submit it to our segment aggregators, so our pharma segment. Then, the pharma segment had to normalize everything. They didn't have standard templates that anyone would adhere to. The pharma segment would normalize everything in a way that was convenient for our pharma CEO and CFO. Then, the pharma segment would submit to enterprise. Meanwhile, our medical product segment did the same thing. Our enterprise team then had to normalize the data so we could aggregate it at an enterprise level. All of that complexity was rolling uphill further and further away from where it was being driven. We said, 'Look, if you are driving complexity, you have to pay for that complexity.' Part of the way we did that was to say… I also said, 'If we don't have a real consolidation model, if Anaplan isn't aggregating then we don't have an architecture.'  

 

Alysa Cox 0:09:01.7: 

'You have a bunch of standalone models. We're going to build an aggregation model. It's going to have rules. It's going to be more stringent then Excel and we're all going to participate. Any models, any subordinate models, any BU-based models, or SGNA models, anything that needs to feed data to the consolidation model is going to have to feed it the way consolidation wants to receive it. You can build whatever you want to in your nuclear business model, but when it talks to consolidations, it needs to speak a language of consolidations. Consolidations is not the translation engine for all the different languages you've all decided to speak.'  

 

James O'Leary 0:09:45.3:  

For that to be effective, and it has been, you have to set that standard very clearly within your vernacular; the consolidation model which is the top-of-the-house aggregation model at the enterprise level. Corporate versus business unit, the subordinate model. You have to set that standard so that the freedom to build, and model and design is there but the understanding of the hand-off and the handshake is very well understood. How did you do that in a consensus-driven culture? How did you force that down as being one of the core principles? 

 

Alysa Cox 0:10:24.9: 

I paid people. I had to get… This one I had to get CFO alignment on. I had to go and have a lot of conversations with individual business unit stakeholders and it was not easy. The other thing that I did is then I said, 'Anyone who wants a model, I will have my team build you a model and either be you that want to participate in this journey, I would love to work with you. My team will help you build these models.' We put together a coalition of the willing. So, if you participate in the process, there are benefits to participating in the process. Again, within resource-reason, relative free reign to how you want to build your model, understanding that it needs to - that there are a few rules, and only a few, but that those rules are sacrosanct in our architecture. Yes, that your model has to talk to consolidations in the language of consolidations. The other one we did was, 'This is where we get data. We have a central datastore. If your data is not in there, you're not ready for an Anaplan model.'  

 

Alysa Cox 0:11:36.8: 

We're not going to integrate data from every inconsistent datawarehouse that we've got out there. We're going to move towards - we've got an enterprise direction towards a single-data hub. We're going to use that data hub for all of our Anaplan integrations to try to also drive consistency. All of the reporting that we do outside of Anaplan leverages the same data that we use to see our Anaplan models. Whether you look at an Anaplan, or you look at it through Tableau or Looker, or directly through our datawarehouse, the data - if you're looking for your revenue for June, it's the same number.  

 

James O'Leary 0:12:15.9:  

With a top-of-the house model that is the gold standard, it also doesn't change a lot. That is the common core, the standard. If you think about things like executive reporting or board reporting or corporate reporting, those tend to be the most stable views of the business. That's defined and codified for Cardinal in this consolidation model as they talk about it. Then, there's almost unlimited agility underneath within the businesses units, or the other functions to be able to design capabilities that can feed up into the consolidation model; with an agreement that there is a clear hand-off. It's almost like a cell receptor. There are only certain proteins attached to the cell in certain ways and so you've created that structure.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:13:03.5:  

Yes, and a minimum viable product. Your subordinate model is not a minimum viable product if it doesn't talk to [?console 0:13:10.7].  

 

James O'Leary 0:13:14.2:  

You've now moved from $220 billion of revenue and costs to operate a very complicated business in a spreadsheet-based way, to now running through the Anaplan models up to the corporate. So what? What are the benefits?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:13:33.2:  

The benefits, again, accrue to those who most want to participate. We have some business units that say, 'We just want to upload to the console model.' I'm like, 'Okay, that's what you're going to do.' We have some business units that are very interested in PlanIQ. They're very interested in next-gen Anaplan products to try to make their planning more effective and less labor-intensive. In a business that is so narrow-margined, finances, our time is best spent working with the business, identifying/supporting decisions with data, turning financial data, or converting financial data into operational metrics and vice versa. That requires collaboration. Collaboration is time-intensive. It's not time that you have if you're spending all this time copying from one Excel sheet to the next Excel sheet, hoping it didn't break, normalizing everyone else's custom formats into something that CFO or the board might want to see. What it has done is it has opened up, even just for those units that want to just upload their data, it has opened up time for them as well as for our enterprise teams or our aggregation teams to ask inciteful questions.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:14:48.1: 

They're not doing all this normalization of data. For those teams that are interested in engaging in what Anaplan is capable of, they are finding that they're able to ask more interesting questions of the data. They have more time to partner with the business, to understand what kinds of insights would help drive our business forward.  

 

James O'Leary 0:15:11.5: 

As you've evolved through the journey - and I suppose a question I asked you when we were preparing - but how is the…  

 

Alysa Cox 0:15:16.6: 

…surprise.  

 

James O'Leary 0:15:17.1: 

Surprise. We agreed we would go off the path. How has the team evolved? How has maybe the shape of the team or the approach of the team evolved as they've supported adoption of the platform, as different stakeholders of commodity use Anaplan? 

 

Alysa Cox 0:15:34.6: 

Our Anaplan CEO team, as I mentioned, when I joined, there were some staff [?hogged 0:15:42.9] from contractors. It was predominantly an onshore team. It was predominantly a - if we think about Anaplan resources as being techno-functional - these were people who were more functional than technical but were interested in learning Anaplan, which is not the way… We needed some kind of technical knowledge in Anaplan to be able to run this platform. We had a lot of turnover at the COE-lead position which led to a ton of churn. We had a lot of turnover at the FP&A transformation lead position; none of which was conducive to getting on a long-term journey and driving consistency throughout. Today, I have one onshore COE lead and I think one residual onshore developer, but the bulk of my development resources actually sit with our India subsidiary. They are in-house but they sit in Hyderabad. What we've been able to do - because we've got resources sitting in a low-cost location - is that we've been able to staff up to a much higher level than we had previously.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:16:51.5: 

Today, every model that we have has a single-product owner. Now, we may have members of our COE that own two products, but we have no one product owned by two people. That product owner is the face of Anaplan for their business partners. Our business knows who they are by name, includes them in meetings, has conversations about the evolution of process and how we're going through a journey to implement rolling forecasts. The business users, our FP&A users that are in Anaplan, are reaching out directly to their product owners to understand what that looks like in their model, which is a big part of our success. Those model builders are also responsible for any enhancements to the models that they own. If we're looking to build brand-new models, and we are going live with Anaplan support, with professional services support, with two models here for the October forecast; a third model in December or January. Where we need additional help and additional build capacity to build new models, we look to bring on professional services organizations to support us with that build.  

Alysa Cox 0:18:03.2: 

We also, then, identify upfront who, internally, is going to be the product owner so that they are building hand-in-hand. For any of our models, for the two models that are going live - we had one go live yesterday and we have one going live next week. For those two models, the handoff from Anaplan Professional Services to our internal teams has been seamless; because we've been there along the journey. Our developers have been there co-building. They understand how the model works on the inside. We're not going to have to come back to Anaplan next year and say, 'Hey, it's a new year and we don't really know how to refresh our model for the new year; could you give us a hand?' That's not sustainable, especially not in a two per cent margin business. Really making our Anaplan COE accountable, but also making them part of our FP&A teams as much as possible, with names and faces and turning on cameras, and getting involved in business requirements...  

 

James O'Leary 0:19:01.7: 

I think my observation has been working with a number of large customers. I think [unclear name 0:19:01.7] just presented. I've worked with [?JJ 0:19:08.8] in the past. I'll keep it in industry, Cardinal Health. These are long-term journeys. These are big efforts and they are organizational shifts and they don't happen instantaneously. Having the right mindset for the duration of the journey, knowing it's something that you want to do in perpetuity. You're driving change and modernization into your organization for a long time into the future. It requires the right preparedness, the right team, the right approach. You have to have principles. Keeping it simple so that there's clarity and understanding of what matters and then where there's room to be flexible really matters. That starts with leadership. I think you can point to the Cardinal journey of really having tried this twice without those elements in place and not having been successful to - in the last 12 months… 

 

Alysa Cox 0:20:07.6: 

Yes, it's been probably 18 to 24 months.  

 

James O'Leary 0:20:11.9: 

Significant uptake in performance and progress towards this future state.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:20:18.0: 

Yes, we did go through a period where I was getting resistance around the consolidation model and I just had to say, 'Look, if there is no consolidation model, then we don't have an architecture. If you don't believe in a consolidation model, then you must believe that we, as an enterprise, should be aggregating $226 billion in revenue in Excel.' You don't get a lot of takers on that.  

 

James O'Leary 0:20:44.6: 

Show of hands. Anybody in the room?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:20:46.8: 

Anyone leading practices? The other thing that I said was, 'Just to be clear, if we don't have a consolidation model, we don't have an architecture and so I'm not investing in Anaplan anymore.' I'm not investing in standalone… 

 

James O'Leary 0:21:00.5: 

We get a lot of that by the way, [over speaking 0:21:01.9].  

 

Alysa Cox 0:21:02.0: 

They were not big fans. We've passed that which is why I'm here today. There are great things that Anaplan can do in standalone models but the real power of Anaplan is in connecting data across your enterprise to drive better insights, to drive better connectivity through your planning. Just like finance doesn't load stuff on trucks and drive it to hospitals and then unload it - this is what Cardinal Health does. Finance also doesn't come up with a demand plan because finance doesn't sell anything. Our revenue models, our revenue forecast ought to come directly from the people who are closest to that activity. We have S&OP processes with our sales folks. I don't know, is [?Dana 0:21:45.6] here? I spent some time working with Dana. We've bookings forecasts. Finance doesn't help with the bookings forecast, sales does. Finance's revenue forecast should be deeply tied to what the salesforce thinks they're actually going to sell.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:22:00.9: 

Having connected planning, in a connected architecture, allows you to do that, allows you pull the best business insight, into your financial models, into your financial forecasts. If your models don't connect and don't even aggregate vertically then you don't stand a chance of being able to connect anything horizontally.  

 

James O'Leary 0:22:23.3: 

We have a point of view around finance transformation which is, within finance there's really a set of core things that we can do to drive transformation within that function in an organization. We also see finances sitting in the middle of these other functions that you're referring to; your supply chain, your sales organization, your headcount organization. As you drive performance and vertical scaling and vertical integration within finance, you can, then, create the hub. Much like your consolidation model and your support model, you can think of these other functions as being things that naturally feed into your finance process. Another way to think about it is a simple P&L. In order to generate a P&L you have to have inputs from your workforce organization and your cost of people. You have to know what your benefits spend is.  

 

James O'Leary 0:23:14.8: 

In order to generate your revenues, you have to understand what your sales are. In order to generate your OpEx expenses you have to work with the teams to understand where they're spending. The P&L is a framework that you can imagine all of your different functions feed into. Finance owns the P&L. Finance owns the backbone of your business and all of the other functions can feed into it. Where we want to drive value and this connectivity in the organization is a more direct, and seamless, link between the function and finance so that you're able to see the results in the performance of the business faster, react, make decisions. To take it back to [?Jamie's 0:23:50.2] opening, when you make good decisions you drive business performance. Good decisions are the result of good information and good insights that are delivered in a timely fashion that drive good business outcomes. We want to be the technology that helps you connect your organization to do that.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:24:08.5:  

That's the bet that Cardinal Health has made. As you all know, there are lots of solutions for planning out there, but we have made a bet with Anaplan and this is where we've invested and how we continue to not just aggregate in finance but - now that we have vertical integration with our finance architecture - look to extend that architecture out into the broader business.  

 

James O'Leary 0:24:34.1:  

Maybe in terms of the integration and, now, where I see innovation being a contributing factor to where you're going, talk a little bit about PlanIQ. I think where that adds value on top - when you have integration and you've got a logical data architecture, and you've got a way to move data through the ecosystem, you actually start building a digital platform that you can now apply more modern sophisticated capabilities on top of. PlanIQ is our AI-driven forecast engine. It does two things: it helps you generate forecasts faster based on any time series dataset and it allows you… Well, faster but also with an alternative perspective that's different from maybe your analogue way or traditional way of working. You get a different lens to consider the performance of your business and ask questions around. I think once you've created the foundation, you start to build innovation on top of it. I'm curious how you're thinking about PlanIQ in the context of Cardinal's deployment, and the value that you'll get from it.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:25:40.3: 

Yes, so for me, in strict finance FP&A parlance PlanIQ is rapid modeling, rapid scenario-building, rapid-optionality exploration. Being able to run different scenarios by first holding FP&A and the business accountable for extrapolating based on a few key drivers to really understand what your drivers are. Then, being able to do rapid-scenario modelling around fluctuations in those drivers, helps us understand where our business is going. Distribution feels like a very slow business but I can tell you when logistics prices went through the roof during COVID, it didn't feel slow at all; it felt like a freefall.  

 

James O'Leary 0:26:28.3: 

I'm guessing in a thin-margin business, any change in input cost is pretty… 

 

Alysa Cox 0:26:32.7: 

…is real sad, yes.  

 

James O'Leary 0:26:34.6: 

…pretty hurtful, yes, yes.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:26:36.3: 

Being able to do some of that rapid modelling… Our margins are so thin, where are the inflexion points? Where are the things that make a big difference in our potential results/our forecasted results? How, then, would we invest differently if some of these things came to light? We're able to have those conversations in real-time by going in and doing some of this modelling/running different scenarios, as opposed to saying, 'Well, I think there are three different scenarios I want to think about. Send your finance team away for a week to go and run those scenarios, double-check that the numbers seem to work. Did the Excel break? Did it not break? Is this the way we did it last time? What's the walk from the last time we did this? How does this compare to this other one and why are the numbers different?' You can spend a week going through and making sure your stuff is presentation-ready, because in Excel everything is a moving part.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:27:30.1: 

With PlanIQ, we have aligned, in the design, where the meaningful moving parts are then we're able to move them much more quickly so that we can have same-day conversations running new scenarios. It's not catastrophic if we're sitting in a meeting, we've prepared three scenarios, and an executive says, 'Well, show me Scenario 4.' Nobody groans. We're like, 'Okay. I'll get that to you in a couple of hours.' That's real-time decision support and that's what's possible when you use a tool like Plan IQ, that's just not possible when you're using tools like Excel where everything feels infinitely flexible so the possibilities should be endless but the challenges of the [?air 0:28:14.9] states can also be endless.  

 

 

 

James O'Leary 0:28:16.7: 

Yes, I mean, I think there's an element of accuracy, using more sophisticated forecast methods can allow you to be more accurate but I actually think the one that most customers are comfortable with - as they learn and adopt these capabilities - it's the accelerated time to have a point of view. Then, you can determine, over time, can I rely on it? Is it more accurate? It tends to achieve that state over time. It's the ability to say, 'Instead of waiting ten days to generate a forecast, I can actually do it instantaneously the minute my books close and I have the results published to my model.' I can run that and I can have the results same day, in an hour, in some cases, less. The speed is, I think, the biggest driver when it comes to these kinds of capabilities that are only - speed in two ways. Speed because you've built the infrastructure already and now you're enabling yourself to do more using a plug-and-play capability.  

 

James O'Leary 0:29:21.9: 

You wouldn't be able to do it if you didn't build the architecture, build the data model, enable your organization to work their way towards… You're starting to create the exponential effect of being more modernized in the digital age. 

 

Alysa Cox 0:29:33.8: 

This is where having, and honestly if you have to, paying through the nose for a competent Anaplan COE lead can make a huge difference. What my Anaplan COE lead can do is he's committed to the organization for longer than a professional services provider; because I don't have the money for that, year round. He's committed to the organization in the medium to long term. He's building for long-term success. He's building, because he doesn't want to fix problems later, so he's trying to make sure it gets built right the first time. He's also building to eliminate tech debt, to avoid tech debt, to set the stage for what he knows is coming. As I mentioned earlier, we're starting a rolling forecast journey, with the models that Mike has overseen are rolling-forecast ready. The business hadn't asked for them. It was not onerous to, as he was building, put rolling forecast considerations in; so, extending the horizon, making sure his calculations can extrapolate out. Allowing for different levels of granularity at different timeframes. These are all inherent parts of the models that he and his team have built that he can now enable very quickly.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:30:45.0: 

The move to rolling forecast is not going to be from a systems perspective. A huge change in what our teams are used to using, how our solution works - we're not going to be a year in developing brand-new models for everybody. It's having an Anaplan COE lead who has that kind of commitment to the long-term, so planning on sticking around and also knows what he's doing is… 

 

James O'Leary 0:31:10.4: 

Thinks ahead.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:31:10.4:  

That's right. Sufficiently conversant of the business to be able to have conversations with finance and deeply technically knowledgeable so that he can convert that business understanding into something that his development community can leverage. I cannot say enough about the role that Mike has played in enabling my success. 

James O'Leary 0:31:32.4: 

This is the part where we get to open it up for the audience and ask… 

 

Alysa Cox 0:31:35.9: 

Make it tough guys.  

 

Audience 0:31:37.2: 

Hey, good afternoon.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:31:38.3:  

Good afternoon.  

 

Audience 0:31:39.1: 

It seems to be a complex bottom-up process. I'm wondering how you orchestrate all of that. How do you make sure that everyone has their input in the right order, at the right moment, and when do you know that your planning has been finished from the…?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:31:57.4: 

We're looking at what is the workflow.  

 

Audience 0:32:00.5: 

Do you have that in Anaplan, that workflow, or is that separate?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:32:03.3:  

We've built workflow into the way that we run our process and so the integration with different - the hand-off of data from an individual… For the Nuclear BU, the Nuclear BU is done planning and they're ready to push their working version to the final version. That's, then, the version that the consolidation model will read. Trying to be very planful about who reads what, when? The other conversation that we have quite often is, 'What do we want to do from a reporting perspective?' There is reporting after your forecast is finalized, but there's also a lot of mid-cycle forecast and budget reporting where you're socializing. We like Tableau for a lot of that really sophisticated visualization, sophisticated reporting. We don't hook all that data. We have Tableau sitting, today, on top of our datawarehouse.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:33:04.1: 

We don't push data, forecast or budget data to the datawarehouse until it's absolutely final. We've had an active negotiation with folks on, what visualizations do you need during the process? Let's make sure we're satisfying those out of Anaplan. What visualizations are you looking for, for month-end close, for example, to talk about variance performance against forecaster budget that you would be able to get out of the datawarehouse and through Tableau? Understanding who needs to be able to see what data, when, is really important when it comes to trying to figure out how to sequence different activities within the various models.  

0:33:46.9: 

What was your decision to build in-house versus using partners and setting up your COE partly in US and partly in India?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:33:58.2: 

What made us decide to go offshore versus onshore? We're a two per cent margin business, so as we looked to get deeper into Anaplan, and as I looked to re-ramp up this journey that we're on, I had people come back to me at the SVP level and say, 'Why are we spending a dime on Anaplan? Haven't we already established that it failed?' Part of the way I bought the next step on the journey was to say, 'I hear you. We're going to staff up, but we're going to do it offshore so that we can control cost.' Now, we've been very fortunate in that we've found, through [?Susan from Pfeizer's 0:34:43.4] connections, there's a resource that we've got sitting in India that is somebody that Mike had worked with previously. They are folks that had been on our account as vendors and then have left their previous professional services supplier, that we were able to go and bring them back in-house. They wanted to work for a US-based company, and we wanted them to work for us. The recruitment journey, we have not found it to be onerous.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:35:13.0: 

We also have Cardinal Health India already in place. We've already got that overhead, that infrastructure associated with hiring in India, managing payroll in India, doing that work. What is the right pay/grade for any of these resources? We've already got a team there and we were able to take advantage of them. Now, in response to the question, 'How do you decide in-house versus outside?' When I started, we already had some models built and we refurbished those models using internal labor. In part, because we were restarting a journey and I didn't have any authorization to go and spend loads and loads more money on very valuable professional services support. The pattern that we've established now is, again, that any of our product owners, internally, they're responsible for enhancements. We only go outside basically for surge supply from a model-building perspective. We do look and we've used a number of different vendors, all of their names are now gone from me - aside from Anaplan Professional Services - but we have enjoyed leveraging Anaplan Professional Services.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:36:36.1: 

We've had a really good track record there but it has depended on having that product owner in-house ready to build side by side as part of that build team. I would say, 'We don't do any more exclusively external build. It's all partnered inside/outside.' Any of our enhancements, my question back to the team is, 'Why is it that I'm staffing a team this big if we can't handle some of these enhancements in-house? You guys know what these models are, write me your product roadmap.' So, really turning our internal folks into product owners as opposed to just developers. Does that answer your question?  

 

James O'Leary 0:37:16.3: 

That product-owner mindset I think is a fundamental concept to take away which is - and it aligns with the transformation journey itself. You're building for the long term. You're driving change. You need to have an ownership approach to doing that because it's so meaningful to the business. A product owner has a sense of ownership for what they're doing. They have pride in the work they're doing. They understand the impact that they're driving for the business. If you create that mentality when you think about standing up to your internal capability, you get really bright, smart, innovative people who have a passion for what they do. They don't feel like they're just doing a job and it's a fundamental difference in terms of the output and the commitment that you get, and the results that you see when you have that kind of ownership.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:38:04.5: 

I will say citizen development in Anaplan, I'm all for it. Cardinal Health is not ready. You have to have a developer community before you can have a citizen developer community from my perspective. We have been rebuilding the developer community and the developer knowledge. I think that, over the next several years, we will look to empower more citizen developers and more functionally embedded developers within our various finance segments. For us, right now, we don't hire into our COE people who are interested in learning Anaplan. We hire in people who know Anaplan because we are building the infrastructure of knowledge to enable us to, effectively, bring on people who want to learn. I think it's important, as you're building your Anaplan COEs, you're building your Anaplan capability within your organisation to make sure that you don't put the cart in front of the horse; in terms of bringing in enthusiastic people who can figure it out.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:39:11.3: 

Those people need somebody to check their work. You've got to be really honest with yourself about whether you have anybody like that and, if you don't, you've got to wait and build that knowledge base first.  

 

James O'Leary 0:39:24.4:  

We have one more question, I believe. 

 

Audience 0:39:26.2: 

I have a question. Thanks for sharing your experience. I have two questions. The first one is how the COE relationship with the IT, data and tech organisation. What does their transformation look like right now? The second one is where do these… 

 

James O'Leary 0:39:45.4: 

Go to question number two.  

 

Audience 0:39:48.3:  

You wanted a tough one, so…  

 

Alysa Cox 0:39:49.4: 

That's right. I'm ready. I'm ready.  

 

Audience 0:39:51.6: 

The second one is where do these product owners sit? Are they part of the COE or are they part of the business?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:39:58.8: 

I'm going to hit question two first. Our product owners sit in the COE. They are a cross-functional partner who are customers but they do, in fact, sit within the COE so that we can oversee and make sure they have the right qualifications. We make sure they have the right support. We make sure they can access the community of knowledge. We also have some more junior resources on the team that are shared among different models and so it allows those product owners to pull on that pool of more junior resources. The interaction with IT is so we have a different team, a finance technology team that manages our data hub. Our COE actually only manages the Spoke models. We do periodically get some territorialism around who can call who and who can ask who what questions? Why are you not including my team and what value are you, then, adding anyway? Those are not productive questions. We've been through many roles and responsibilities conversations and post-mortems around how the interaction model needs to incorporate our finance technology team.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:41:23.7: 

I think it does come down to making sure we understand and/or appreciate what their value proposition is. At the end of the day, our consolidation model needs to integrate with HFM so that we can send our budget to be logged in HFM. The only people that are going to do that for us - because we don't get to write into HFM, right? - is that finance technology team. So, understanding some of those integrations to other systems that make our tool more powerful and more efficiency-driving within FP&A; that's important. Then, also, that finance technology team understands the SAP data in ways that my Anaplan COE team is not trained to do. When we end up with interpersonal conflict, let's go there, when we end up with some territorial squabbling it helps to get down to first principles. What is the role of our finance technology team? What is their expertise? Where is the value that they drive? How do we make sure that we are including them along the journey to make sure that they understand what questions…?  

 

Alysa Cox 0:42:36.2: 

We give them the context as part of the journey to understand the questions that we're asking. That partnership has not always been straightforward but, when it works well, it works really well. We are finding that we have a model. We had planned to deploy here in December but got through initial requirements gathering and discovered that, in fact, the data that we need for that model is not sitting in the datawarehouse because it comes from another ERP. One of my principles is we're going to get data from the datawarehouse and we're not doing anything else. That's it. This is our principle. We leverage, then, the finance technology team. We took those funds, redeployed them to getting the data work done. Then, took advantage of the expertise of that finance technology team to say, 'What's it going to take to get that data into the datawarehouse?'  

 

Alysa Cox 0:43:29.8: 

'How do we understand your priorities/our priorities/the work that you've got lined up to make sure that we're all working on the same roadmap and that we are all contributing in ways where we drive value?' It's a lot. It's a lot.  

 

James O'Leary 0:43:46.9: 

Takes effort.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:43:48.6:  

It takes more than effort. It takes going on assumption. All of these roles are important and have a job to do and value to add.  

 

James O'Leary 0:43:58.2: 

Appreciation for that.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:43:59.3: 

If you actually believe that you have the foundation for a productive relationship.  

 

James O'Leary 0:44:05.4: 

I think we're at time. Thank you all very much. Alysa, thank you so much. Brilliant.  

 

Alysa Cox 0:44:10.8:  

Thank you so much for having me.