Andrew Richards 0:00:05.5:

So Jenny, absolute pleasure.

 

Jenny Chen 0:00:09.9:

Thank you.

 

Andrew Richards 0:00:10.0:

An honor and a pleasure to be here with you on-stage. Just figured if you wanted to give everybody a quick introduction of like who you are, what you do at Estee Lauder, and then maybe just a general overview of the organization, to get us started.

 

Jenny Chen 0:00:23.0:

Yes, sure. So I've been with Estee Lauder for about ten years now, last five years have been in the strategic pricing team where we use Anaplan. We started using Anaplan about seven years ago and then I joined a couple of years afterwards. In terms of Estee Lauder companies, I think when most people think of Estee Lauder, they think of maybe a very traditional face cream, the gold top, maybe they think of makeup. We actually own 20-plus brands, many of them you might have heard, but you don't know are part of Estee Lauder, like Le Labo, La Mer, Bobby Brown, Tom Ford. It's a mix of haircare, skincare, makeup, fragrance. We sell in 150 countries' territories, 62,000 employees, and that's just full-time, so, there's also beauty advisors, makeup artists, the full Estee Lauder family is bigger than that.

 

Andrew Richards 0:01:25.8:

With that sort of scale, size, complexity in terms of the regions, the number of brands, the number of products, the number of people involved, you are probably facing some challenges that relates to what it is that you want to talk about today. So I guess as an organization, if we just wanted to quickly transition to what were some of the challenges that you were looking to solve for, originally?

 

Jenny Chen 0:01:49.3:

Thank you for asking, I will absolutely tell you about that. So Estee Lauder Companies, we cover 45 - we call them affiliates, geographical locations, here it says markets. Then we have, as I said, 20-plus brands. When you think of pricing, each skew needs a price, so when you add that all together, it's 45 markets times 20 brands, times the number of skews in each brand, and that really varies by brand, but let's say it's 200. So 45 x 20 x 200, I don't know what that number is, but that's a really large number and that's not the number of datapoints that we have, that's the number of intersections that require active management. Just to give you a sense, in each one of those intersections, as a base, if you want to do pricing you have to look at the name of the skew, the skew code, what is the price of that skew today? What was the price last year? Your planned price, what's the price next year? Then what's your increase percentage? Did it go up by one per cent, two per cent, five per cent, ten per cent? 

 

Jenny Chen 0:03:00.0:

That is just baseline, if you want sophisticated planning you have to add in a competitor view. So what is the name of your competitor? What is the name of their skew? What did they price at? What was their percentage increase? Then, if you want even more sophisticated planning, you need to know more about the skew. So what is the volume? How many units did you sell? What is the mix of business? What category is it in? What subcategory is it in? It goes on and on, I can spend the next 45 minutes talking about the number of datapoints that we need for each intersection. So that brings me to my next point in that before we had Anaplan and we had to manage all this data, we had to use 350-plus Excel spreadsheets, like individual Excel spreadsheets. I'm sorry if I gave anyone anxiety just talking about this, I don't know if I did, but if I have more than, let's say, ten Excel sheets open on my computer I already feel frustrated, I have anxiety, I'm not having a good day. So to have to manage 350, right, in a normal corporate team, I mean that's a lot.

 

Jenny Chen 0:04:16.1:

I feel like I'm not getting a big reaction from the crowd, but let's just do a poll. Who here, raise your hand, if you would be so excited to work on a team that manages 350 Excel spreadsheets. Yes, right, like no one, no one here. So that's why you need Anaplan. Right, that's the end, that's the end of my talk!

 

Andrew Richards 0:04:39.2:

I've heard people describe that process, it's the spreadsheets, the more spreadsheets, the pre-meetings, the meetings before the meetings, the meetings to plan the other meetings, the arguments over the spreadsheets, the slides, the backup slides, more meetings. It's just a never-ending process. Is that the sort of thing that you were facing in the previous [over speaking 0:04:59.2]?

 

Jenny Chen 0:05:00.0:

Yes, and, for full transparency, I was not on the team when it was 350 spreadsheets, because, like all of you, I don't want to work on a team where that's the main goal, I joined after Anaplan was implemented. When I was there, a lot of the people had gone through this pain and I really heard an earful. I think to your point, right, it's not just the spreadsheets, but we now in Anaplan have 600 users, so it's not just the number of spreadsheets, it's 350 spreadsheets being passed back and forth between 600 people trying to make decisions and all of these little intersections. It's something that at some point Excel just cannot handle for you, and you need a system to make it better, and so that's when we started working with Anaplan and we've never looked back.

 

Andrew Richards 0:05:45.9:

So I'm going to foreshadow a question I'm going to ask later, how excited would have you have been to work on this team in that world? Like would you have jumped at the chance, jumped at the job?

 

Jenny Chen 0:05:56.4: 

With the 350 Excel sheets?

 

Andrew Richards 0:05:57.6:

This situation here.

 

Jenny Chen 0:05:59.0:

No, I wouldn't have gone, absolutely not. I wouldn’t have gone. I mean, I don't know, yes, like everyone has a price, but it would be a high price, like I don't think they could afford what I needed!

 

Andrew Richards 0:06:14.2:

So on to more exciting times, could you talk a little bit about the journey since 2017?

 

Jenny Chen 0:06:21.0

Yes, so, 2017 we moved to Anaplan, moved all of our Excel spreadsheets into Anaplan, used single sign-on, provisioned users, and it was incredible. I mean when I joined, this was about a year-and-a-half afterwards, the team was great, I had a great time. I never had to consolidate any kind of number, I never had to spend my time matching things, I solely spent my time doing strategic analytic work that I wanted to do. Things that I was using my brain, as you might hear. Then a couple of [?years/days 0:06:58.9] later we had so much success with this skew-level management that the company decided to expand the use of Anaplan into something that we call product roles. So that's looking at all of your skews and tagging which skew is a hero, which skew is a hero in the making, which skew is a regional hero, etc. Then also something called line edit, which is basically looking at your assortment of skews and deciding which skews should be discontinued so that you can make room for innovation, and you improve your margin. 

 

Jenny Chen 0:07:31.6:

Then, so, today we've got Anaplan for pricing, for product role-tagging, for line edit, we cover all 45 affiliates, all 20 brands, and I think that's not where we're going to stop. I think there's a lot of stuff that we can do in the future. Mostly right now what we want is we want to start enhancing some of the platforms that we've already built. So one thing is is there a way to have some kind of AI-generated price point? Because you still have 600 users, people who need to make these minute decisions. Is there a way that AI can help so you don't have to manage every single intersection so closely like that? You can have AI maybe do the easy 20 per cent and then you can spend even more time doing that strategic work on your top 10 per cent.

 

Andrew Richards 0:08:20.5:

So would you say you got started in a subsection of the organization, you saw some benefit, other people wanted to get involved, if we're doing this, why can't we do that? If we do this, what sort of benefit? Was that, kind of, the process that you went through?

 

Jenny Chen 0:08:38.1:

Yes, definitely, because before we moved line edit and product role on to Anaplan it was also managed in a bunch of Excel sheets, and you had all of the pain that you would have with Excel sheets. So no single source of truth, everyone keeps their answers and their data in an Excel sheet on their own drive and you just have to be like a lucky person that they decide to send it to you and then you get the data. Otherwise you don't know when there's an update and just to give an example, like the other day we had a question that was, 'What was the line edit result in fiscal year '22?' It was very difficult to find, I mean it just wasn't that easy, we had to reach out to that person, one person, thank goodness they're still at the company. Reach out to this one person, they had to look on their personal drive, in the history, to figure out three years ago what they had done and what was the result. For pricing, which has not been on Anaplan for the last five, six, seven years, we never had that issue.

 

Jenny Chen 0:09:52.8:

If someone wants to know, they have a question, what happened in pricing in 2019? We can give that answer in maybe five minutes, and you get these questions a lot. Like you have leadership, you have business partners, every now and then there's just a thought or a question that enters into their mind and they want an answer immediately. So it's been really nice to be that team that can deliver quickly.

 

Andrew Richards 0:10:19.0:

That's a good segue to the next slide. So in terms of some of the overall benefits that you've seen on an end-to-end basis, really operations, the business, like some of those business improvements, some of the value-drivers, like some of the operational improvements that you've seen. I know you've got a few talking points on the next slide. Like how have you been able to see that enhanced efficiency?

 

Jenny Chen 0:10:39.7:

Yes, this is like my most favorite slide because it just shows how much Anaplan has helped this team. So first, single source of truth, right, before we had Anaplan you had 350 Excel spreadsheets. Every single person has their own view of what the price plan is. If you match, great, and if you don't, that's just a function of having a bunch of different Excel spreadsheets scattered everywhere. I think another thing that's very nice is sometimes, as you all may know, in business you have these meetings that are very intense. Business decision meetings, very intense, hard to schedule people all at the same time and you go in knowing that there's going to be some tension, because not all the parties agree. When your data is not aligned and immediately in the first five minutes it says, 'I have $45,' 'Okay, well, I have $43,' your whole meeting gets derailed and you can't even get to that decision-making because all of a sudden you don't know where your single source of truth is.

 

Jenny Chen 0:11:45.9:

We never have that issue anymore, we never have that problem, because everyone knows if there's a discrepancy we go into Anaplan and we see live in the videotape what was the price and there's no argument. So that the 45 minutes that you have for that meeting are solely focused on strategic decision-making and not thinking about aligning the data. Other things that are very nice, so on-demand information, access to real-time changes, like I said, when you have a bunch of spreadsheets and you're emailing them back and forth sometimes you feel like you just have to be lucky. Someone just remembers you when they send out that email with the spreadsheet and then you have the information. If you have turnover, if you're a new person, if you're new to the team someone might forget to send it to you and now you have this huge problem because you don't have the latest. So you're building your deck, you're building your analysis with stale information, and you don't know what you don't know.

 

Jenny Chen 0:12:49.0:

With Anaplan never have that issue. A couple of other things, so faster, more reliable reporting. Like I said, we get a ton of questions, a ton of questions every day, even not during our price planning season. We had a ton of questions on what was the price point for this specific skew on this specific date? I no longer have to go into Excel archives to figure that out, I can pull it very easily through Anaplan, it takes maybe a couple of minutes. You develop a very strong reputation as a team. You get known as the team that's fast, that's reliable, that delivers, and I think that's something that everyone strives for. The last thing that I love is single sign-on, I love this feature, because on the pricing team in part we also manage the system, and so you sometimes do get questions. People saying, 'I can't get into the system, my password's not working,' and it's very nice to be able to say, 'It's the same as your single sign-on,' so, if your single sign-on is working, this should be working too.

 

Andrew Richards 0:14:00.8:

Sometimes it's the simple things.

 

Jenny Chen 0:14:01.4:

Yes, that's right.

 

Andrew Richards 0:14:03.1:

For a lot of us that don't necessarily understand the ins and outs of pricing and strategic pricing and how important that is to a business, like, why in terms of Estee Lauder are some of these decisions that you're making so critical to the organization? Why is there need to real-time access? Why are some of these decisions big for you guys?

 

Jenny Chen 0:14:23.2:

Yes, it's a really, really good question, really good question. I've worked in pricing for so long that sometimes I like forget, but basically price is important because it affects your revenue. It's a top clear driver of your revenue and every single year brands, regions, they want to know year-over-over what part of my sales growth is due to pricing? If I'm short, can I fill in that gap with pricing? Where is my pricing power? What can I price to? So that's the importance, and then I would say the need for all this real-time data, all of this single source of truth, all of these things, is that pricing has to go through many different decision-makers. We saw on that other slide the 600 users, so you have the person, the local person who is in the country. So in France, in Spain, wherever you may be. Then you have someone who is in the region, so, in EMEA, in Asia-Pacific, in LATAM, in the Americas, next layer. Then you have someone who is in global brand. It's a matrix organization, so you have someone who is running Bobby Brown, who is running La Mer

 

Jenny Chen 0:15:36.4:

Then all these intersections you have a marketing person, you have finance person, all these people in some capacity need to give input into a pricing decision in every single one of those intersections. So it may feel like there's a lot of time to make these decisions, but in reality there isn't. Then we are also beholden to retailer date notification, so if we want to change price I can't just say, 'Okay, let's do it tomorrow.' I have to make a plan for it, because you have to give your retailers, you have to give your brand dot com, you have to give your commercial business partners enough time to change the sticker prices, to make a plan, to change the price on the website. It's a process that really requires a lot of intense coordination and intense planning.

 

Andrew Richards 0:16:32.8:

Yes, and we're moving onto my favorite slide, which is to speak a little bit about the people. Because it seems to me that pricing's critical to the performance of Estee Lauder as an organization, it's also critical to me as the father of teenage girls that needs to get makeup at the right price, at the counter, at the right time. So it's important to the people doing the job, because I can only imagine what you described through the various layers of the hierarchy, from the person operating within a specific customer base, all the way up to the brand managers. The number of arguments that must have existed and we don't have any tense meetings at all [?in Sales 0:17:11.9], so I can't relate to that whatsoever, it's always like very plain sailing, but it's always tense when the data's not good. I've heard it over and over again, it's a significant impact on people's lives - the pre-meetings, the meetings, the slides, the backup slides, the arguments, the disagreements, the missed dance recitals, the missed golf matches, the missed dinners. All of that disruption to your life that comes with the situation that you were describing earlier. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:17:39.9:

I know you as an organization and you specifically as a team and you as an individual have talked to me about some of those human interaction benefits that you've seen, and if you could just speak to that a little bit on the next slide?

 

Jenny Chen 0:17:50.9:

Yes, and this also has been my favorite part of using Anaplan. I think that at a surface level when you go with a platform like Anaplan, that all your data is going to be aligned, single source of truth. That's like you probably are like that makes sense, I could have expected that, and I expected it too. What I didn't expect to this degree was just how it transformed the composition of the team and the talent that we are now able to get on the team. I would say at a base level, everyone on the team has moved from data alignment people, spreadsheet people, people just who spend all day doing spreadsheet gymnastics, like in the dark, in a room. To very much like strategic people, people who spend time talking to their business partners, making relationships, being thoughtful about their pricing actions. Because they have time, because they're not wiped out by trying to be fastest fingers in the spreadsheet. So I think it's been very, very good for the team, I'll give a couple of examples.

 

Jenny Chen 0:19:09.0:

When I first joined the team I was the only internal hire in this team, no one internal really wanted to join the team. Because, like all of you, no one was excited to manage hundreds of Excel spreadsheets across 600 people, no one wanted to do that. Now, today, I would say most, if not all, of our hires are internal. We have [?Sergio] here, all-star team member. I think he was our first internal hire. The team now has a reputation for being a place where people want to be, an area of the team that's interesting, that's fun, and I will say it just has like snowball effect. So because the work is interesting and it's strategic and you're not doing this grunt work in the Excel spreadsheet, we all generally really enjoy coming to work and working with each other. We're never fighting over little data things, we're always thinking strategically, how do we make it better? How do we make our team better? Our happy hours are not awkward, they're genuinely very fun, like we have a good time. You know what I mean? Sometimes it's a little weird! It's just been like lovely, lovely, lovely working on this team.

 

Jenny Chen 0:20:36.6:

Just to give another example, we have one person on the team, [?Lucas], who he was on our team for about a year and then he moved off the team and he continues to do work for our team. He reports to nobody on this team, he doesn't need to do any work for our team, he does it on top of his new job because he likes it so much. He actively refers to it as 'the fun stuff' and so just an example of just how far this team has come in terms of the people, what we do, the joy in the team. I constantly have people asking me, 'Is there room on the team? Are you guys expanding?' Sometimes I feel like I have people coming after my job a little bit, like, 'Oh, you've been there a while.' Just, again, further examples of you align your data, no one's doing horrible data work anymore and you just get this blossom of a team that's so excited to be there, forward-thinking, happy, and it's just been phenomenal, just been great. I could talk about it forever.

 

Andrew Richards 0:21:53.1: 

Yes, I could listen forever as well. Yes, we have time. So if I go back to the beginning you were talking about this team that nobody wanted to join. That you couldn't attract talent on. Fast-forward six-seven years to today, eight years, you've got a team that everybody wants to be on because the value of the work is rewarding, strategic, interesting, and we know from what you described it's critical to the performance of the organization. It's critical to the customer, as well. Like we all love to underpay for what we buy, but we never want to overpay for what we buy, so that's interesting. You spoke a little bit about what you're doing next in terms of some of the AI-assisted decision-making. We'll leave some time for the audience to ask some questions, I'm sure we're going to have some, but as a closing thought you've got people in the room, I would imagine, at different stages of an Anaplan journey. Some probably on the fence, not quite started one yet. Some maybe working with Anaplan in finance and looking at commercial areas of the business, maybe you're in supply chain looking at finance. 

 

Andrew Richards 0:23:05.0:

You've been on this journey with us for a while now, you've got some experience, any words of wisdom, regardless of where you're at on that journey, in terms of, 'Hey, these are some of the things to be mindful of, these are some of the things to be aware of.' 'It's not always easy, but sometimes the hard work is worthwhile.' What would be some of those final words of wisdom?

 

Jenny Chen 0:23:25.9:

Yes, I think of like a couple of things. So the first thing I just - no Excel gymnastics. The first thing is I also want to mention in terms of like elevating the team, when your data is clean, when it's organized in Anaplan, it's much easier to do data analytics. I often find that the hardest part of data analytics is getting clean data, the data exists, but it's in, again, a million different spreadsheets, it's not clean, makes no sense, no one knows what the fields are, it's so confusing. When your data is clean, right, you can cut the data however you want, you can put in those calculations, you can put in those formulas. You can make beautiful charts, graphs, you can sell the story, it's so much easier. So I think that's another reason why people are excited to join this team, because you can do the fun part of data analytics and you don't necessarily have to worry about the gritty part of finding the data, cleaning the data, transforming the data. You know, all the things you may not want to do.

 

Jenny Chen 0:24:31.6:

In terms of the journey I would say for me, I mean, team is always super important, but particularly I personally think Anaplan has been a wonderful partner, if anyone is considering. I never felt like you guys licensed this product to us and then just said, 'Great, see you later, enjoy, hope it works out for you.' Any time I have a question, any time I'm stuck, any time I need help, like so responsive, always helps me find a solution. I'll give an example, when we were building out line edit, product role, we needed a partner to help build these functionalities out. We had an internal team that we good at maintenance, but they didn't have a lot of experience in building something for the first time. So you guys introduced us to Columbus Consulting, Dave, amazing, they were so, so helpful, one of the best business partners we've ever worked with, super responsive. It was a team that wasn't just executional, it wasn't just implementation, but helped us think through what is an optimal design? What makes sense for line edit? What makes sense for product role? I think that really helped us out. It was something that we specifically requested, and I felt like you guys really were thoughtful and delivered.

 

Andrew Richards 0:25:52.3:

At that point I'll move to one side. So thank you, Jenny.

 

Jenny Chen 0:25:55.2:

Thank you.