Susan Nasher 0:00:09.9 

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Susan Nasher. I'm from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and most people know us for two reasons. One reason is that we are one of the top recipients of NASA awards, so we have a very large research arm, and secondly of course is the Prime effect. Everyone knows that Deion Sanders came to Boulder, so put us on the map! We'll give him kudos for that. We have had Anaplan for over a year now, so we are in phase two of our implementation, and our university has had a lot of bumps in the road on our implementation as far as user acceptance, but besides that we have had just a great opportunity with Tru and Anaplan to use this world-class system as we were using really nothing before. We had Excel and shadow systems, and few this journey we've actually learned some people weren't budgeting at all, so this has been a great opportunity for us to really go through this roadmap. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:01:15.9 

We have implemented quite a few things so far. We did our full July budgeting, which was $1.3 billion that we did in Anaplan, as well as the position budgeting. It's been a great time so far. We're moving into our next steps, which I know we'll talk about soon. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:01:35.3 

Good afternoon. I'm Kelly Epting. I'm the Associate Vice President for Finance and Budget at the University of South Carolina. That also includes the system, which is three comprehensives, four two-years, and two schools of medicine. We are USC. 1801. The University of Southern California was 80 years after that. So we're just a little bit sensitive about that, so I will put that before you. Just education. The more you know, right? We have been in phase one of Anaplan for several years now and with an awful lot of success, folks begging for additional functionality to be added to that, and so we're hoping that within the next year that we will be starting that phase two. We had a lot of bumps along the road to get Anaplan, a lot of proving that we actually had the need for it, but we finally ended up prevailing and immediately the folks were able to see the benefits of it. 

 

Alan Mora 0:02:39.0 

My name is Alan Mora. I'm the Director for Business Intelligence with Financial Planning and Analysis at the University of Miami. We've been with Anaplan for about a year now, is when we went live. Our initial phase of Anaplan took a pretty large chunk of the apple out. We did variance projections, capital planning, tuition, our primary budget, our operational budget, position planning. We did a lot all in that first phase. We are just now kicking off our second phase having been live for a year. As my colleagues here have said, once people saw what Anaplan can do they started chomping at the bit at wanting to do more with the system, and so that's a great thing but it's a burden and a curse at the same time, because the more they see the more they want to do. You have to be able to react to it. You have to be able to provide that functionality. Fortunately, we have a lot of abilities to do that, but sometimes we don't have the bandwidth to do it all at once. You have to be able to prioritize, and that's where we are with our phase two is really prioritizing. 

 

Alan Mora 0:03:48.5 

For us what is priority in this coming phase is, we're going really heavily into reporting, making sure that our reporting is at the forefront of everything that we're doing, and really a lot of enhancements into our position planning. I'm sure like most of you personnel budget is a huge part of what our overall budget is, and so that's a really core component for us. The more we can streamline that operation the more time that saves for all of our users. 

 

Justin Martin 0:04:21.5 

Great. We kind of flipped through these quickly, but I'll just draw attention… I'll go back into these roadmaps. There's a lot happening here with each of these three institutions across the board that has been a very methodical and phased approach, a lot of intentionality behind that as well, so just something to call out there. I think that's been an important aspect of each of your implementations, and I would argue is part of the success of those. On that note, when we think about road-mapping and what that looks like, you all touched on it a little bit but any initial thoughts on that process around that road-mapping in terms of how you might formalize that, how you might reach out and try and get some of that? Alan, to your point, maybe there's more feedback than you want at certain times, more ideas than you might be able to handle, but any initial thoughts on how you go about retrieving that feedback. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:05:19.5 

Great question. So for our phase one we really wanted to implement something that had an effect campus-wide because there's so many things that units are doing that are different, right? So the requests that we're getting now, it's like, 'Oh, I do it this way. I want to do monthly budgeting. I have particular needs for position budgeting,' so we wanted to do something that we could implement across campus, and so that was our annual budget. Everyone has to have their annual budget, starting in July. That was one thing we started with to make sure we can make an impact across campus. The next step was doing our compensation planning, so a little bit different than maybe other people have done in Anaplan, but we actually are doing our full HR process to do our merit and across the board in Anaplan so it has a budgetary component. Right at the end there's a budgetary implication, but it's really an HR process. 

Susan Nasher 0:06:12.3 

So those are the two things we've started with to really get people on board with Anaplan to see how great it is, what you can do with it, and now we're getting all of those ideas on what we should do moving forward. We're trying to prioritize those because some of them… We have our own ideas in the administration office. I'm in the office of the Provost, co-leading this implementation with the budget office, and so we have ideas on commitment tracking that we would like to do. I push out myself $20 million every year over hundreds of lines of commitments out to the campus that the Provost has committed to each year, multi-year commitments. Tuition remission is a multi-year build out. We had someone leave our office and he was doing all the tuition remission for the entire campus. It's about $17 million of tuition remission that is manually added as an encumbrance each month to the payroll and then processed as an actual three times a year after every semester. When he left we got this huge legacy Access database that is 219 steps long! We're like, 'Hey, Bernadine, can we pivot and go into building tuition remission in Anaplan?' so we're working on that right now. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:07:22.7 

So I really think it's 1) getting people on board, and then 2) really rolling with the punches as they come and deciding what is really your priority and what's going to help you right now. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:07:37.8 

We have to get our mic game down. A lot of that I definitely agree. It was a needs-based assessment, right? What is our first use case? In the budget office we were doing everything on Excel spreadsheet. We had just implemented in 2021 an RCM budget model on the Columbia campus but we had incremental budgets throughout the entire system, so we wanted something that would contain all of our budget office functions, but again it's going to be different. Anaplan actually, it was one of their reps that did a really good job of connecting me with other institutions that had multi-campuses that were doing it in a very streamlined way. Again, we were looking really from our own office. What do we do to make our function easier, and those who are sending in reports to us, to make their jobs easier. We didn't want to make them submitting Excel spreadsheets to us. We didn't want them going into an online Access database to spread their budgets. We wanted to be able to do all of that in-tool, not only in Columbia but also in those much smaller but equally important other institutions within our system 

 

Kelly Epting 0:08:50.3 

Again, we had other things. We had just implemented a very messy, expensive HCM in PeopleSoft Finance and PeopleSoft HCM. We had Aleutian Banner for student. Somebody in the CIO's office had brought in HelioCampus, and I had to prove that we needed… That none of that was giving us the functionality that we needed, and so I did have to do the whole full-blown RFP, fought tooth and nail to try to have a group of multi folks, people from the Provost office, people from the Controller's office, people from the CIO's office. Anyway, finally it prevailed, the 'Hey, we need something we can actually plan ourselves.' We could see all those wonderful examples that Waylon at Tru brought to us. It was just magical. It's like, 'This is what we need.' We have to contain the RCM tool. We have to contain all of these things, and it is absolutely nothing that is provided with any of those other tools. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:09:57.7 

We had to do it small-scale, bottom line. PeopleSoft Finance only, didn't want to bother with HCM because we were going to be concerned about, 'Well, we've got to deal with the Controller's office with that. We've got to deal with access issues. We can't do that right now,' and so that is our phase two. These two, they've already implemented that. I feel like we're so behind the eight-ball because all of our units, that's most of what they have their… We need to be able to click and drag, look how to plan that position budgeting, fund budgeting for those people, and then that was again that natural flow of things. Then of course we also want to do bonds, capital planning, all of that other stuff as well. For us, the roadmap has to do with what is the next right thing to do, and it's really naturally come from that. 

 

Alan Mora 0:10:51.0 

I'm lucky because I got to hear their fantastic answers and then just build on that. I think the key thing that I was hearing from them that really resonates for me and strikes a chord across everything is, you need to make sure that you have a plan for where you want to go and how you're going to end up there, and then when it gets shaken up, either because leadership changes or because tool changes, or someone leaves your office and dumps a huge Access database on your lap, you need to be able to shift and pivot. Sometimes that plan that was laid out for you, or you laid out and was perfect and thought-out and methodical, when it comes time to implement it you have to be able to go in a different direction. So for us, when we were going live with Anaplan we were going to do the budget and that was going to be our number one - our position planning and then the departmental budget, the operational budget - and then we realized that our prior tool was being sun-setted, our contract was about to expire, and we needed to go live with our Q1 variance of projections process, and so we needed to shift to that. 

 

Alan Mora 0:11:57.7 

Our focus and attention needed to shift to that because we had a business need there. It was either we do it in spreadsheets manually, collect the data somehow, collate it and create reports, or work with Tru, in our case partner with them, do something in Anaplan that could work for us for long term, and build it within the system. So you've got to be able to be flexible and shift when you're able to, and other times be able to stick to the plan. 

 

Justin Martin 0:12:26.0 

So if I can just double-click into what you just said there, Alan, I think that's important for your vision for where you want to go with Anaplan, but that's really across the board. Do you at this point, any of you - and the answer might just be no - but do any of you have any sort of formal documentation process of, 'These are the things that we think are going to be the next right thing to do,' or is that something that you're striving to get to, or any thoughts around what that could look like for you? Again, the answer might be no, but thought I'd ask. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:13:03.7 

So we definitely did a formal process throughout our RFP. As Tru knows, we were very specific on our contract of what we wanted in there, what was important, and we had a ten-person search committee for the RFP process. They brought in all of their different opinions about what does that look like, and we asked them to help us write that contract about what is important for campus, and that's when we identified that the budget, the annual budget, was number one and that's what we would start with. We did have both phase one and phase two already mapped out as you saw on our slide, but priorities change as we go through. We still have those on the forefront. Those are things that we still want to do, and we did do a formal process to have the committee come up with all these ideas. We asked them to ask all their units, 'What are we looking for? What are the pain points?' That was really our biggest thing of, 'What are the pain points in your area?' and we brought those all together and said, 'Are we having multiple pain points in areas that we're seeing come up again and again?' and those were the ones that we added to our list. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:14:10.7 

I tried to do some coalition-building in terms of our… So phase one was already spelled out what we wanted to do, and again that was the main functions of the budget office to be maintained in the Anaplan tool. For phase two I actually brought a project to our organizational excellence office talking about how we have HelioCampus, we have Anaplan, we have this other thing over here that the institutional research is doing. How can we better push out reporting? I started with the academic units because they take up the largest amount in Columbia - started with Columbia, just one campus - and through that process everyone agreed that yes, we do need to have a phase two that's bringing HCM into the planning tool, that yes, you can do queries and export Excel spreadsheets from PeopleSoft. A lot of folks in our areas don't have that kind of expertise, let's be honest. If you invite them to do that, they're going to come up with a lot of inaccurate information. Through that, phase two is pretty much secured, but additional… Other areas, like the Controller's office. We already have a long-range planning aspect which we did as part of phase one, but we need to bring in those non-current funds, the bonds, the capital planning. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:15:33.1 

So I'm going to have to do some additional coalition-building there. We do have a CIO who is new, and his eyes didn't light up whenever I said Anaplan, so I have been preaching Anaplan, and I actually got him on a phone call with Gartner to talk about the magic quadrant and, 'Hey, you said that you wanted to have a more efficient system of platforms, not ten different CRMs, not five different graduate admission systems, and this would also be another outshoot of that organizational effectiveness project.' So I'm getting that in front of him, talking to my own boss, CFO, trying to drum up that every time you've got a new use case, let's look and see what kind of functionality Anaplan can offer, because it doesn't make sense to go off and buy something else. 

 

Alan Mora 0:16:25.8 

For us, we've identified those large buckets, those large areas that we want to implement and the direction we want to go in, and then we're really drilling down into the details of specifically what are the changes. What are the things that we want to do so that we can prioritize with them? At the end of the day, you can say, 'I want to tackle operational budget.' That's huge. That's so many things. That's so many elements. You have to make decisions as you're going through your implementation of what's going to be done by when, and how long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? We're at that point of drilling into the details and prioritizing a wish-list, and we've had it going for a while. As users, as our constituents tell us, 'We want to be able to do this in the system,' we add it to the list, and then we go through it and continuously review it and reprioritize, and that's how we're able to shift focus and say, 'Okay, this is a more pressing need now, or this is a more pressing need.' 

 

Justin Martin 0:17:19.2 

Maybe picking up a little bit from the previous session, while all of our institutions are a little bit unique, I think there's also a lot we can learn from each other. Alan and I in between the sessions were just talking in the hallway about how fun it is to do these sort of things where he can share his story because he learned so much from others by sitting in rooms like this and hearing from them. I'm curious from each of you, just in terms of where you're getting any sort of inspiration for what you might want to do differently, how you might change your processes, how you might be able to leverage Anaplan a little bit more in the future, whether it's coming to things like this or at CUBO events and hearing what others are talking about, or even peer networks. Anything that kind of jumps off the page for you in terms of where you're getting some of that inspiration. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:18:11.7 

So yes, absolutely. Peers are a big one. ELP as well. I'm in that this year, and I've already spoken with three others in our group who are either implementing Anaplan or are currently using it. That has been really helpful. I actually just got off the phone with someone from Michigan State yesterday. We were just comparing notes of, 'Where are we at? Where are we going? What pain points have we seen? What can we learn from each other?' I think that's really, really important. Then the second one is really Tru. I think that they're great partners and they're good people to sit down with and say, 'Hey, what do other institutions do? What can Anaplan do, and how can we make this process better?' because I think that's one thing that we get in the weeds because we're, 'Oh, we're different. We have very specific needs,' and when you really step back and look at it you're like, 'Oh, we should probably change our process. This really doesn't make a lot of sense. Why are we all doing this differently?' 

 

Susan Nasher 0:19:05.4 

So that's one thing we really tried to push is, how can we make our processes better and easier, and save some time, and identify those things that maybe we don't need to be so different on. 

 

Justin Martin 0:19:18.8 

Real quick. I know you're not calling Clemson for any ideas, but anyone else that you… [Laughter] 

 

Kelly Epting 0:19:27.0 

Yes, we do have a mentor that we have dealt with a lot, but the cool thing is that whenever we first… During those RFP process, those examples that were shown by Tru just really was, 'This is what I'm used to seeing. This is very familiar to us, and this is something that we want to build on.' So we see the examples that Tru's able to bring to us. We also see examples from our mentors, from other institutions that are ahead of us, and we made those connections at the CUBO events and talking with everybody. There's an SEC group at Auburn that Brian has headed up which has been wonderful, because sometimes you don't even really know what you need until you see it. I can't see how we could have come as far as we have so quickly without that collaboration and the sharing. 

 

Alan Mora 0:20:22.9 

For us, in addition to listening to your external partners, which I think is huge, it's also channeling your inner four-year-old or your inner five-year-old. Ask your constituents, the people using the system, 'Why?' When they are doing something in the system, ask them why. If they're exporting out data to use in an Excel spreadsheet, 'Why?' If they're doing something outside of the system, 'Why?' If they're going into multiple screens, 'Why?' Is there something that you can do? Is there a view that you can give them that provides them everything in one screen? Can you pull something from here, something from there, and give it to them in one place? Is there another report that you can give them? A lot of times they don't even know that it's possible because they don't really understand. We don't understand what it is that the system is capable of because, like you said, if we haven't seen it before we don't know what it can do. It's hard to imagine that this thing that is set up for us can do more than what we realize it can. 

 

Alan Mora 0:21:19.3 

So we're just coloring within the lines, we're playing within the box, but sometimes we've got to go outside of it, and the way we do that is by asking, 'Well, what are you doing with this data? What are you using it for? How are you transforming it?' 

 

Justin Martin 0:21:31.5 

I think Alan's point about the why question is a critical one when we think about road-mapping and where that can go and where that can lead. You also touched on the very real problem in higher ed of shadow systems and what that actually entails, whether it's someone doing something in a spreadsheet or exporting something just to pivot it in Excel when they could do that in Anaplan, whatever it may be. Maybe from each of your perspectives, any thoughts around leaning into some of those shadow systems that you know people are using? Again, we're not here to get rid of every shadow system - that's not the intent - but are there some of those that you're seeing and hearing that are in turn contributing to how you might be looking at your road-mapping process? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:22:22.0 

Yes, shadow systems are a big thing across campus unfortunately, but we have seen some start to go away. I know that people are really excited about the reporting aspect of being able to use Anaplan for reports, because that's one thing that people are doing very much on their own. We do have a reporting system at CU but it's shared with our entire system, so it's not necessarily built for Boulder and we're very different compared to other campuses. We have a medical campus. We have more of a graduate campus, and then we have another undergraduate campus. Boulder is the biggest of the academic campuses, and so our needs can be much different. That is definitely one thing that we've seen, and with our compensation planning this is all new. Everyone is very excited about Anaplan because they were doing everything in a static Excel spreadsheet and then using it in their own system to make their merits work. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:23:19.6 

Each individual unit can do a different type of merit process, so they can say, 'Oh, we're doing it across the board.' Other people are doing it based off performance, so Anaplan has allowed them to be able to not have to do that outside of the system. All of those really make a big difference when you're getting people and getting that buy-in to Anaplan, and getting them excited about what else they can do and what other systems they might be using. Maybe we can save the institution money as well. We have a lot of people who actually bought other planning systems and they're getting ready to discontinue those. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:23:57.3 

One new functionality or app that we have developed which is not what you would think of when you think of a shadow system is for new program planning. We might be the only institution, of course, that's like, 'Oh wow, this college decided that they wanted to offer manufacturing engineering, and yet the business office in engineering is like, "Really?"' So this may not apply to you, but we worked with the Provost's office and they can go into an app and actually see, so our HCM stuff is not in there but overall we're still able to get a good idea of, 'Okay, let's build a new program. What's the cohort size going to be? What's the average cost of the faculty that are involved in that?' Those associate deans are having to go through that, through Anaplan, rather than just coughing up a static page of, 'This is what we think it's going to bring in, in terms of revenue.' So they're all having to do not only a format that is common, but a format that's pulling real data from the Anaplan system. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:25:11.9 

It's forcing that checkpoint with the business managers in the colleges, within the business manager in the Provost office, before any of that goes to our Commission on Higher Education. That has been a real culture change, but it is a way of grabbing another system that we didn't even really have a good control over from a financial perspective. How can you argue? You know it's not going to be a cohort of 40 the first year out. Let's be reasonable. Let's get all of that stuff down in there. So more eyes on it. I think it's really going to help with efficiency, and again we're seeing a little bit of pushback from that, of course, because… You know why. I'm very excited about it. 

 

Alan Mora 0:25:54.6 

Speaking about pushback, there's two main ways you could probably get rid of shadow systems. You could just force people not to do it, prevent them from exporting data out or just not allow it, or just prevent it somehow, and that's probably the least effective way, or you could make the system so user-friendly and so intuitive and so useful that they actually would prefer to use your system rather than their shadow system. I think it's important to remember that you're not going to do that for every single shadow system. Shadow systems are not going to be eliminated just because the system that you're generating is wonderful. They're always going to exist for a variety of reasons, because of user preference, because of security, because it's the blanket that I hold on to and I just like it. Some people like having printed paper on their desk, tucked in a drawer. It's okay. You've got to identify which are the ones that give you the best benefit, which are the ones that are the biggest pain point, who are the biggest users, whatever the case may be, and identify, 'Okay, these are the ones that I'm going to go after,' and start tackling them little by little. You're not going to be able to get all of them, so you've got to again prioritize and go after the ones that you can. 

 

Justin Martin 0:27:03.2 

So thinking of the next step in that progression of the road-mapping process, you can go through, you can prioritize, you can collect feedback. The act of actually executing on that roadmap, there are a few different ways to go about doing that. It can be working with a partner, but it can also be leveraging some of your internal team as they continue to grow and learn Anaplan, and be able to build some things on their own. Just curious across each of your teams, what do your teams look like that are actually in Anaplan on a consistent basis? Are they becoming masters of Anaplan and learning all the things that come with that, or is that something that continues to be a challenge in your groups? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:27:49.8 

We started out with five model-builder licenses, but it is a very niche type of work. We had everyone have a small percentage of their time go towards Anaplan, so overall there is maybe one, 1.5 FTE overall that we're really dedicated to Anaplan across five individuals. So we realized that that doesn't work. You need to have people who are truly dedicated to Anaplan, and so we have just recently hired two 100 per cent dedicated Anaplan model builders. One is level three, and one is a solution architect. For us it was really a big need because of our large roadmap. We really want to do more with Anaplan. If you're going to stick with a couple of things I don't think that is really necessary, but if you're really trying to utilize Anaplan to its full potential you really do need folks that are dedicated to Anaplan so that way you're able to make quick changes, decide on builds. 'What can Anaplan do for us?' You can help guide people as you're having these kind of scoping conversations. People get really excited and you're like, 'Okay, we can do that, but maybe not that direction.' I think it's really important if you're trying to really utilize Anaplan to have people who are truly dedicated. 

 

Susan Nasher 0:29:02.5 

Of course, having Tru as an implementation partner is really crucial for us because all of us are new to Anaplan. We didn't know how to build. We've slowly started to learn from them, learn from our own experience, be able to go in and make tweaks to things. I have been able to change column headers and update formulas and break Anaplan when you get that little thing that says, 'You did that formula wrong,' learning along the way. I think it really depends on the institution, and I have learned from my peers as well that they have at least one person dedicated, from what I have learned from others, but I've met someone else who has, I think, 17 model builders on their team, so it really depends on how deep you want to go. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:29:48.5 

Oh my goodness, 17 people. We have a very small team in the budget office, and the functions I've explained to you are owned by the budget office. We have three that were trained and one who's become the dedicated model builder. He's sitting right there, Marshall, and he's amazing, but we only have so much bandwidth. Do you only have so much bandwidth? Yes, that's what I was thinking. We had this new CIO I told you about, and he wants to not have a contract with IBM to do a lot of his work. He wants to drop the HelioCampus thing and have the data lake be all administered, but I'm thinking, 'Okay, is it through some kind of collaboration with that office in terms of having a model builder?' Marshall just had a really great affinity for it, but your background's in accounting. Again, we're still figuring it out. I still want to have a lot of, frankly, a lot of control in our unit. I feel like it's when the rubber meets the road we've got to have a really good collaborative partner outside of our own little silo. Sharing is caring, and I do want to bring all of us together, but it is going to be a big jumping-off place when we do take that next step. 

 

Alan Mora 0:31:10.7 

I think for us we're kind of in that maturation process where we've got three individuals, including myself, that are model builders really predominantly most of our time, but it's not a full-time thing. I manage… Probably 50 per cent of my time is spent on doing Anaplan functions. The other 50 per cent is doing other things. The other two individuals are maybe 50/50, and then any given day it could be 25 per cent of the time or zero per cent of the time doing Anaplan, and then the other 75 or 100 per cent of the time doing finance or technical items. The more you spend on Anaplan the better you're going to get at it, like anything else. I think we're at that turning point where we really have to start thinking about, 'When do we dedicate someone or a team of people to be 100 per cent dedicated towards model building, solution architect, and really focusing on that so that we can build out and grow for the future?' because for us it's getting close to there. 

 

Justin Martin 0:32:11.8 

So building on that a little bit, and just, gosh, a little over a month ago, Kelly, I think you were at SACUBO, the fall workshop - we were presenting with [?Mellor 0:32:22.1] around some of this too - but just in terms of contingency planning, when we think about some of the challenges there with having dedicated resources or splitting it between five people, and what does that look like when inevitably someone wants a new challenge or maybe switches to a new role within the university. Any thoughts on how you've tried or heard of others navigating a little bit around the contingency planning? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:32:51.8 

Great question. This one's a difficult one, right? Like I said, it's a very niche skill and it is difficult to retrain someone on your specific model and Anaplan in general, so that's why we decided on these two new model builders that we did not source from higher ed. We sourced from, 'We want you to be an expert in Anaplan,' so that's really our way of utilizing them to help cross-train our team. 'You are the Anaplan experts. We are the higher ed experts. Together we can cross-train each other so then in the future as people leave and take on other roles that we don't have a huge gap,' because we were seeing that as a really big problem moving forward with Anaplan. That's our solution for now. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:33:38.9 

I have a question. Did they already have Anaplan experience? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:33:44.2 

Great question. Yes. One is a level three model builder and had been in Anaplan for a couple of years, and the other is a solution architect and has, I think, three-to-five years of experience in Anaplan. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:33:56.8 

In industry? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:33:58.0 

Industry. They had no higher ed experience at all. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:34:03.2 

Interesting. Well, I think I probably already answered the question with my comments just previously. We're trying to figure out, 'Okay, what will we do next?' The most immediate thing we would do is call Tru and say, 'Hey, we need some support.' We already know that we can do that in terms of if we need some stuff done quickly, that you're able to provide that service for us as well. Long-term, that's interesting. I know that the, again, CIO wants to bring everything in-house. I wonder if we will be able to attract this level of talent in Columbia, South Carolina. I think it will be interesting to see. It depends. We're not as friendly as we should be to remote working. Perhaps I see him go through this experience trying to beef up his own staff that that will be telling for me. I think I'm just going to do a little bit of observing and chatting with him and talk about that. In the meantime, we'll love Marshall and treat him well! [Laughs] 

 

Alan Mora 0:35:11.6 

The remote working experience is probably a whole topic in and of itself, and I'll be following along with your journey of hiring Anaplan-specific folks that don't have higher ed experience, because to me it's a delicate balance around how much do you know the technology and how much do you know the business? Higher ed is a very, very unique business. If you've ever worked outside of higher education and then you come to work in higher education it's almost like speaking another language. It almost doesn't make sense until you're in it, and then you're like, 'Well, how does everybody not understand this? It makes perfect sense.' It's a completely different thing, and so it's a really unique skillset and you almost have to have both. The ideal candidate that has both? That's not easy to find. You really have to, I think, prepare for that like you do for any other position. You've got to make sure you've identified people within your organization that could maybe step in and fill a need in the short term if there is a gap, and then identify what types of individuals or what shifts you're going to make if somebody does leave. 

 

Alan Mora 0:36:15.5 

It's no different than if you are an executive director or an AVP and you say, 'What happens if I take another role, or if one of my leaders takes another role?' You have to be able to identify who's going to step up next within your organization, or what type of individual you're going to look for, because each individual that you hire is an opportunity to shape the future of the organization. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:36:37.6 

…question, Justin? 

 

Justin Martin 0:36:38.5 

Sorry? 

 

Kelly Epting 0:36:39.7 

Should you answer that question? Like, how is Tru going out to bat, hiring, because you're really our star with that. 

 

Justin Martin 0:36:50.9 

Good question. The Tru perspective, it's just I think very similar to what each of them have said. It's a difficult thing. You're kind of looking for that perfect candidate that can have some higher ed knowledge and experience, can be a little bit technical but also has some of those soft skills to fit the consulting mold of it too. I think something that we take a lot of pride in at Tru is our intentionality around ensuring that of those three buckets, that higher ed experience does come through. It's not like it is mutually exclusive. You have to, but we find to Alan's point it is another language, and it's really critical to have some credibility to be able to walk into a room with other higher ed people and have that experience to fall back on and be able to, using his phrase there, speak the language. That's really important to us, but it's a difficult thing to find for sure. 

 

Alan Mora 0:37:54.1 

I will add, as Bill said in the previous session, having higher ed experience in the people is what makes the difference, and that's why there is this track and why we're all seated here. Higher ed experience is different, and while we can gain a lot from the other sessions here at Anaplan Connect, we're going to gain more from understanding what each other is doing and connecting with one another than we would with industry. They're great, but they're not like us. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:38:23.7 

Don't forget that one of the main reasons why we went, I believe, with Anaplan is because we were able to get the entire tool immediately, and we were able to train our folks. So we're saying that we would love to just start it immediately with somebody that can hit the ground running with Anaplan, but we have doubled or tripled the amount of reports and come up with that whole new functionality for those new programs because we built from within. Don't lose sight of that. I think it's both. 

 

Justin Martin 0:38:55.1 

We do have a few… Any more questions? 

 

Audience 0:38:57.8 

A question on position planning. Tell me more about that. Are your users submitting their position requests for the following year inside of Anaplan? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:39:09.7 

Great question. We were already doing position planning within our PeopleSoft ERP, so people were budgeting based off of the position and so we rolled that into Anaplan, so we're doing it for the annual budgeting so it's just the one time starting in July. We had not only our HR data but also the budget data coming in, so it's informing them about what their current budget was, what their current salary is. Do those not match? Do you need to make an adjustment? So we are budgeting, and then that rolls up to the account level and says, 'Okay, now you've budgeted this person. You have 50 people in there. What is that in total for your account?' that that then is rolling to our full budgeting. That was the process, and that is 80 per cent of our budget, or 70 to 80 per cent is salary and benefits. 

 

Audience 0:39:59.4 

So those budget managers can see the individual positions in their department? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:40:06.0 

Yes. 

 

Audience 0:40:06.4 

Is that information pulled from PeopleSoft, or is it sitting in Anaplan but pulled from PeopleSoft? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:40:15.3 

Yes, so it's pulling in from PeopleSoft. We use the CloudWorks integration and we have what we call a CIW, a central internal warehouse, that's pulling all of our data from all of our systems into one spot and then Anaplan is pulling out that data from there, so it's pulling out that finance data, it's pulling out the budget data, it's pulling out the HR data, and then populating it into the models that we build so then they're able to plan for those budgets on each position line that then rolls up to the account, that rolls up to the [unclear word 0:40:42.8], that rolls up to the org, which rolls up to their institution. It's a multi-level process. 

 

Audience 0:40:49.8 

How do you handle positions that are [unclear words 0:40:51.6] budgeted for but not get, like the position hasn't been created in your HR system? 

 

Susan Nasher 0:40:58.7 

Great question. We have not only the filled positions but also the vacancies, and what we call TBD or pooled positions that you can then budget for a position that you can put in a dummy position number. You can do it as a pool so it's just living on the account code. We do have three levels of position budgeting. 

 

Alan Mora 0:41:21.2 

For us at least, those do not roll into our HCM system. The budget would be there for that position, but it won't create the position for you in the system. You would still have to go in there and create that position. 

 

Justin Martin 0:41:37.2 

Any other questions here with maybe our last minute or so? Yes. 

 

Audience 0:41:41.5 

This is about planning for new courses. Do you use Anaplan at all to determine the profitability of your majors? It's something that we're trying to think about doing. 

 

Kelly Epting 0:41:55.6 

We have not done that yet. We're doing it basically… Here's a spot for you to create something new, or here's a spot for you to look at what you've already got in there. We don't have courses in there. We only have PeopleSoft Finance in there right now, so it's mainly just like a sandbox for you to take and determine, okay, so what's your average cost for this particular type of professor? We definitely see that as another phase coming in the future. The complicating thing with that again is that other system. We had Helio before we had Anaplan, and so we had an EAB product even before that that was supposed to be doing that sort of thing, and didn't do really well with the EAB product. With the Helio product, they're trying to work it right now. So many overlapping things. To me we just need to decide, but they've already got all the student data, all the registrars' data in there. Anyway, I would like to have it all in Anaplan right now, but not currently. 

 

Justin Martin 0:43:03.8 

That profitability program, sustainability or whatever you want to call that, I want you to touch on that a little bit in the next session as well, so keep us honest. Make sure we come back to that question. Just keeping an eye on the time, but Alan, I did notice your NACUBO socks. Bill is coming back here in a few minutes so watch out. He might try and take those off of you. Thank you all very much for being here for this session. Thank this great panel for all their help today.