Brijesh Varier 0:00:04.3: 

Funny story, I got these little cue cards, and I figured yes, I'll write my stuff on the cue cards, and realized I'm very slow at writing now, so it was just taking way too long. I'm like okay, I'll just put it on the phone and use it from there. We are, again, very excited; many companies, many customers we speak to today are really focused on improving their operating expenses, enhancing the profit margins, and one significant area for all of our clients is human capital costs. We are excited, really excited to have a customer with us, who is successfully leveraging Anaplan to align their workforce with their strategic objectives. They are here now to share insights on how you can build a talent strategy that not only addresses your organization's current needs, but also positions you for long-term success. Please join me in welcoming our guest speaker, Emily Scott, Director of Corporate Finance at OMERS. Emily, thanks for joining us today. Why don't we start by having you give us a quick background on your role and tenure at OMERS, and your experience with Anaplan? 

 

Emily Scott 0:01:22.6: 

I'm Emily. I actually started at Oxford Properties, which is our real estate investment arm at OMERS in, in 2015, and I came to OMERS in 2019 to do corporate FP&A. I've been there now almost five years, and we started our Anaplan journey in 2021. At the time we were using an Oracle platform that wasn't entirely meeting our needs. It wasn't as flexible as what we thought we wanted, and it certainly wasn't going to be scaling over time. We're just in the midst of our third planning cycle with Anaplan, and it's been quite a journey. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:02:01.7: 

That's great. You've seen a lot at both Oxford and OMERS with the time you have spent there, which is great to hear, but again, OMERS, I know a lot of our customers here are from Ontario, but maybe give us a little bit of a background on who OMERS is and what you do. 

 

Emily Scott 0:02:20.3: 

OMERS stands for the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System. We are a pension fund, obviously, and we're a bit unique amongst our peers in that we manage both the investment side, so the assets to pay the pension, as well as the pensioners. We collect contributions, we pay benefits for a little over 600,000 Ontarians. These people, they're librarians, they're firefighters, police officers, people you really encounter every single day, and we're really proud to be playing a really important part in their retirement with our - a little over $130 billion in assets as of the end of June. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:03:08.7: 

Wow. Yes, I'm a resident of Ontario, so on behalf of Ontarians, your team in the whole of OMERS, you do some great, noble work there protecting the pensions of those who serve our community day in, day out, so thank you for that. Let us maybe shift gears a little bit. Talk to us a little bit about your experience with Anaplan, the journey so far, and a little bit about what you leverage Anaplan for. 

 

Emily Scott 0:03:36.9: 

We all love the word 'journey', don't we? Like I said, we started our Anaplan project in 2021, and we used it for the first budget cycle in 2022. If you're counting months, that's not a lot. We did our implementation fairly quickly and while we thought we were using the term 'MVP' properly, we probably at the time bit off a little bit more than we could chew. Going into fall 2022 when we actually got into the system for the first time, our team was kind of surprised. There were some unexpected bugs, they had to be solved really quickly, because as you all know, the finance planning cycle kind of comes at you fast and furious and there's not a lot of time to make up with any downtime. Our team survived, they pulled it together, they delivered top-quality work like they always do. Then we spent 2023 working out the kinks, if you will. A little bit of stabilization work, a lot of optimization, and we had a much better experience when we got to the fall of 2023 and were planning for 2024. 

 

Emily Scott 0:04:54.9: 

This year though, I think we turned the page on our Anaplan book, journey, chapter, transition, yes. Our leadership team actually attended this conference, Anaplan Connect, in New York earlier this year. I think we were legitimately very inspired by what we heard. We talked to tons of customers, we heard about the potential, the use case, and I think we were a little bit reinvigorated. We knew and we were able to conclude really strongly that Anaplan was the right tool for OMERS, and then it was a matter of making sure that we were really taking advantage of the power that was there. 2024 is a different story, and I know we're going to talk a little bit about the work that we've done in 2024, but if we take a look at our platform overall, we manage - I want to say it's about $700 million in expenses in Anaplan per year, and of that, about 75 per cent of it is directly related to our people. We have a very well-connected inbound integration with Workday, and we plan on a by-person basis, so we bring in salary, compensation, incentive, benefits and make sure each of those people are in their right cost center. That's our workforce planning model. 

 

Emily Scott 0:06:13.8: 

That feeds into our G&A model, where we're able to layer on all sorts of other expenses that you need to run a business of our size. If you think about travel, consulting, IT spend, you've got the picture anyway. We have four primary teams at OMERS who work in Anaplan. We have our private markets team, capital markets, Oxford, and then our corporate FP&A team, which is the one that's in corporate finance. Each of those four teams then consolidates to an enterprise FP&A team, and now for the first time this year we've been able to produce a really clean, enterprise-wide consolidation of our headcount, our expenses. That's really eliminated a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of copying and pasting, a lot of emails, and that's really the foundation of what we're trying to solve for at OMERS. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:07:12.8: 

Thanks for sharing that. I think I got a few things from there how you initially decide what you want to take on, that MVP, that's very critical. It can make or break the initial part of the implementation, make it smooth, if you really think through it. Again, for those in the audience who are not only maybe thinking about a new implementation but also maybe expanding on it, the scope effect, I heard Anaplan Connects are great events to go to, so don't make this the only one, right? We have many across, and different clients speaking, different experiences, so definitely take the opportunity to go to other Anaplan Connects as well. The complexity between OMERS and Oxford, two distinct organizations, being able to leverage the single solution across both entities and then consolidate all of that information so that you can report and gain insights at the organization level is pretty amazing. It's a pretty complex operation there. Talk to us maybe a little bit about how you support this environment, between your internal and any external resources that you may leverage. How does it work? 

 

Emily Scott 0:08:38.2: 

Our primary users of Anaplan at OMERS are FP&A teams. It was originally part of our vision that the business would be in Anaplan as well, but we've sort of pulled that back now, and I think that it's working better for us. Our FP&A team, they're amazing, I wish more of them were here but they're in the midst of the budget cycle unfortunately. We also do have some internal Anaplan support. Veronica is here, she can wave for us and say, 'Hi.' We couldn't do this without Veronica either. I will say she partners very closely with our third-party consulting partner. Generally speaking, Veronica is responsible for all of the day-to-day tasks. She does the rollover, she does the feeds, she makes sure things are coming in consistently and as we expect them to. Then as the issues increase in complexity or we consider taking on new builds, which we did this year, we rely on our third-party consulting partner who has just - am I allowed to name them? 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:09:50.8: 

Yes, sure. 

 

Emily Scott 0:09:51.4: 

[?Allitix 0:09:51.6]. Big shout out to Allitix, I don't think they're here today, but they're out of the US and they've been really integral in providing us some perspective on the Anaplan platform, guiding some of our decisions, challenging some of our decisions, and really have played an important role in supporting us. We consider between Allitix, our internal team, including Veronica and our finance professionals, and Anaplan, to really be the three pillars of our FP&A program at OMERS. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:10:21.8: 

Yes. Again, the importance of the Anaplan partner community here, so thanks for highlighting that. There's a lot you can do with Anaplan internally as a business unit, using your own skillset, training up your own people, but there's a great place for partners to come in and help you, because again, you have your day job. You need to make sure that the planning cycles run right on time, and often, you don't have the resources or the time to implement the next use case. 

 

Emily Scott 0:10:50.6: 

We need bridge too. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:10:52.1: 

Thank you. 

 

Emily Scott 0:10:55.6: 

You should be the - does the stool have four legs? 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:11:00.0: 

Yes, this one has four legs. 

 

Emily Scott 0:11:03.8: 

This one has four legs. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:11:04.8: 

Yes, perfect. You've not stopped of course your Anaplan journey or Allitix journey, it keeps going, and you have more excitement from the teams, more opportunities that come up, so how do you as a team decide what is the next use case that you implement on Anaplan? How do you go through that process? 

 

Emily Scott 0:11:33.6: 

We have a lot of ideas about working in Anaplan. Our team is super optimistic, super keen to lay out their vision, and I think it's because they see how Anaplan is making their life a bit easier. When we can do things automatically in the system and off spreadsheets, you really just need a few wins to drive the momentum. We have no shortage of roadmap items at OMERS. When it comes down to making decisions though, we're really evaluating - we have a vision for Anaplan. We have core principles around how we make these decisions, and ultimately though, it really comes down to how are we adding value for the business, so by building this new use case, whatever it may be, are we answering the question that our leadership is actually asking? Are we reducing the amount of - it's not paper, but Excel files, spreadsheets, emails, noise, inconsistencies in our process? If we can check the box on both of those things, we know that that's something that we really need to consider. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:12:44.6: 

Yes. That's, again, great advice for customers looking to expand their initial implementation of Anaplan on how you prioritize those use cases, what data already exists in Anaplan and what next use case could you leverage based on the data that's already in there, the integrations are built out, so great advice for those looking to expand. Just a heads up for the audience, there is an audience Q&A piece at the end, so hopefully you're thinking about questions you want to ask. If not, please do start thinking about them right now. Your turn will come soon. You mentioned the process, can you talk about maybe a recent use case, a recent build that you did for Anaplan and how that process went? 

 

Emily Scott 0:13:33.5: 

Earlier this year, we built a long-range planning model, and we did have a long-range planning model from our original build, but it would be an underestimation to say that it took more than 300 unique inputs to produce what should have been a high-level, five-year outlook. Yes, the FP&A people there are laughing. We knew we needed to do better, this is something that we get asked all the time, we're looking for ways to link it into our strategy, but we really need to able to produce it in the first place. We spent a lot of time actually with our teams understanding and explaining to them that there's this continuum between efficiency, delivery, and extreme amounts of detail and accuracy. When you have more detail and - sometimes, that just takes too much time, so we need to be weighing where we need to sit on the continuum. A lot of decisions were made, we had Allitix with us a lot of that time, challenging the choices that we were making. They kept reminding us, 'You know you're looking for efficiency, right? This is supposed to be high level.' 

 

Emily Scott 0:14:47.6: 

We would start to pull things back, and then as we were going through that initial build phase, we did it in a very traditional way. We did the user stories, we did the sprint, we did the UAT, but as we were going through that initial user story, we started to realize that we had even more opportunity than we thought we had to do a rolling forecast as part of this model. If we were going to pull all of these data points, to your point, we could use it in a more effective way to do a forecast plus 12 months. For those FP&A people in the room, one of the key things is figuring out how to annualize your headcount, because if you hire a person today, it only costs you three months of your 2024 budget, but it's going to cost you twelve months in 2025. That was a question that we were being asked very frequently, and it was something we were always solving for on paper. When we realized we could build that into our long-range planning model, the excitement in the room, you could feel it. 

 

Emily Scott 0:15:46.9: 

We worked with Allitix, we worked with Veronica and some of her peers at OMERS, and our FP&A team, and we designed this model. Allitix helped us to build it out. We made sure we had time for our staff to do the UAT testing. That's I think also really important, if you want to think about how to drive engagement with your team, giving them a bit of capacity to actually execute on what you're asking them to do is important. In the end, we were really happy with the outcome, because we got a rolling forecast, which we kind of didn't think we were going to be able to do, and a five-year plan, and we could consolidate it. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:16:26.6: 

Great story, and some great nuggets in there, especially around having people around you who challenge what is required, whether it be your partner or your internal business users on yes, it'll be great to have it, but the default answer shouldn't be yes, let's just do it. Is it really necessary? Do we need to get to that level of detail? Could we stay high level? That makes a huge impact. Maybe I'll ask do any audience members have a burning question they want to ask, or your time is coming up, if you wanted to start thinking about it? I'll ask maybe one more question there, Emily, and then we'll have the audience, so please have your hands ready to go up. Just maybe wrap up my questions with what are some of those key performance indicators or performance measures that you look at within Anaplan, and how that's improving your life, or enabling your executives? 

 

Emily Scott 0:17:42.6: 

For us, it's really tricky to - we haven't, I don't think, done a terribly effective job at measuring KPIs, but what I do know is that there were previously things that we couldn't do that we now can do, and when we think about eliminating emails, spreadsheets, copy and paste, it's hard to measure those things, but we can feel it in our teams' engagement and we can see that it's just frankly not happening. A few of the things that really stand out from the pre-Anaplan to post-Anaplan, the integration with Workday, to load it from Workday into our old system, which was an Oracle platform, was extremely tedious. It could be sometimes an entire day's worth of work to try to figure out how to map all of the columns, press the right 25 buttons in the right order and have the specs correct, so that was a really painful process. That's basically turned into a non-event now in our month-end process. The report comes from Workday, is loaded into Anaplan, it's very seamless, our team can check it, press the button. It goes straight into our management reporting. I think that's one thing that's pretty big for us. 

 

Emily Scott 0:18:54.6: 

Obviously, the consolidation exercise was previously happening manually with submissions via email on Excel, and now we can take a look at our enterprise expenses on a regular basis over the course of the operating plan cycle. That's pretty critical for us, especially when we think about the timeliness of producing board reporting or [?DECS 0:19:16.9] for our management committees and CFO. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:19:21.1: 

Yes, so the productivity savings of course, but again, removing risk from the whole process. 

 

Emily Scott 0:19:28.9: 

Yes, I should mention that too, I guess. Anaplan is extremely flexible. It's extremely powerful, but if you start to simplify the way you're thinking about it and think about it like a whole series of Excel books, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to look through your Anaplan system, which is I don't think something that you would necessarily get with some of the other out-of-the-box FP&A tools. Being able to audit your own - our team's not doing it, but Veronica can do it for us. Being able to audit your own work, or if something looks a little bit like you didn't expect it to, we can kind of follow the numbers to see exactly where it came from. That's really important when we're trying to troubleshoot in a really timely manner. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:20:12.1: 

Thanks, Emily. Looking at you, audience members, I think I'm ready with the mic if you have a couple of questions. I think there's one question here and then I'll come to you next. 

 

Audience 0:20:30.5: 

You said that you have a huge roadmap and then there's always external pressure from your internal customers what next to deliver, so how do you prioritize? Then there are always some things that you want to do but the customers aren't aware of. How do you prioritize? 

 

Emily Scott 0:20:59.9: 

I think kudos first to our FP&A team. They are constantly delivering. Anything our business partners ask for, they figure out a way to make it happen. When we think about our Anaplan platform, our customer is really our FP&A team. I think we talked about some of the roadmap items that we've come up with so far, but as we look into 2025, one of the things that we consistently are struggling with as a people-oriented business is this workforce - not workforce planning, but maximizing your workforce, partnership with HR so that they can understand what's in the budget, and so right now we have an inbound feed from Workday into Anaplan. One of the things we're thinking about is how can we actually complete that feedback loop so that the budgeted roles that we have approved by a very formal process, a very rigorous process in Anaplan, can also reside in Workday, and that our HR business partners, or our talent acquisition team, can actually use that information to support our business leaders in making their hiring decisions, so that's one thing. 

 

Emily Scott 0:22:07.2: 

The other thing our FP&A team really focused on, in 2024, is a new costing allocation model. It was a complete overhaul of what we previously had. Right now, in the interests of time because it kind of came to fruition as we were starting the operating plan cycle, we will be looking to build that into our Anaplan model for 2025. We only have about seven, eight months of the year where we can make significant enhancements to Anaplan. The other months of the year are reserved for actual planning, so we're really conscious about how we're using that time, so we kind of have our plan set now for next year. Does that answer your question? Kind of, we can talk about it more. 

 

Audience 0:22:58.9: 

Hello. My name is [unclear name 0:23:00.1]. I'm actually from [?TRAFiX 0:23:02.1]. We are just basically - this is our first year with Anaplan team. Historically, we were doing every single thing in Excel base. We are on a very hyper and rapid growth, so we are basically expanding our business on a tripling and quarterly basis. However, we were always having a challenge of basically having 22 locations to consolidate. Anaplan did a fantastic job of basically building us up. Obviously, especially one of the contractors, Tech Planet, they're so flexible, they really helped us out big time. We are very happy with Anaplan on year one. Now, basically by learning, attending this, we were having challenges with our headcount, managing headcount, because our turnaround is a lot during the staffing and all that, we had about 900-plus employees within the organization, which is from across the globe. This could be North America, Mexico, obviously in Asia, and obviously in Philippines and all sorts of places. 

 

Audience 0:23:58.3: 

Now, basically, give us in a simple way - I personally think you're absolutely right, kudos to the FP&A team. However, we learned that by implementing Anaplan, we had to cut down in FP&A people, because Anaplan is really helping us out basically and streamlining the processes. Please suggest, what do you recommend to us when we are basically doing the planning for the headcount and staffing? What do you recommend are the key factors to look - because you just did this at OMERS? 

 

Emily Scott 0:24:37.9: 

I'll give you my experience and one of the things we've learned, and hopefully it's applicable to you. When we built Anaplan, it was person-first. Emily Scott sits in corporate finance, and Emily Scott sits as a field. One of the things I think in retrospect that we wish we had done was not done it by person but done it by role, so that the director role in corporate finance sits - and then anyone can really occupy that role. Whether it's me, Christie, or Veronica, it doesn't necessarily - I'd like to think it matters, but it doesn't really from an FP&A perspective. I think considering reducing some of the detail in your people plan can sometimes be really helpful when you're dealing with such mass volumes of people, because whether you have one analyst, five analysts, or six analysts, it doesn't really matter what their names are necessarily. You just want to have six of them, or one hundred. 

 

Audience 0:25:47.5: 

I'll go next. Hi Emily, my name is [?Samir]. I am from Manulife, and similar to you, we have had Anaplan for three years now, two-years-and-a-half, and always getting better and better at it. Something that we have always wanted to do but never took seriously is the rolling forecast that you just mentioned. I wanted to ask, what was the main challenges that you encountered switching from non-rolling forecast maybe to a rolling forecast, and how Anaplan helped you with it? 

 

Emily Scott 0:26:23.4: 

I will say we've not spent a ton of time socializing the idea of the rolling forecast. We don't take it to our board members on a regular basis. We use it more from an internal perspective actually to almost forecast our budget for next year. When we're doing the Q2 forecast or the Q3 forecast, it sort of sets the parameters, the bare minimum of what we expect 2025 to look like, because it has a fully loaded headcount as at the end of December. Does that make sense? One of the challenges that we faced because of the sheer volume of data in our workforce planning model is - part of it was a size issue and just the volume of it is a little bit tricky to manage. We had to work through some simplifications of how we would extrapolate our salary and incentive information from December into the following year. We can talk about that in some nitty-gritty, but… 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:27:25.4: 

I think we have time for one more question and we already have a taker. 

 

Audience 0:27:30.8: 

Hey Emily. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:27:31.6: 

Find Emily after. This is the formal Q&A but she's here for the rest of the event networking session. 

 

Audience 0:27:38.3: 

My name is [?Santos] and I am from ATB Financial in Edmonton. I can really relate to your story about salary and benefit of the workforce planning that you built, because we have a done similar thing before at ATB. My question is twofold. One is, how do you manage bad data? You feed the data from Word directly into Anaplan, so what if an employee is not attached to the right cost center? There are always exceptions, right. 

 

Emily Scott 0:28:13.1: 

Oh, God, this is my every day. What's the second part of your question? 

 

Audience 0:28:21.1: 

The second part is about do you use CloudWorks to automate your feed from salary and benefits to the overall expense model, which is non-salary plus [unclear words 0:28:34.0], and also to the enterprise model. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:28:38.4: 

CloudWorks is an Anaplan integration tool. I don't believe OMERS… 

 

Emily Scott 0:28:41.7: 

I don't know. 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:28:45.1: 

Only the first part of the question. 

 

Emily Scott 0:28:46.5: 

Oh, phew. Actually, can I answer the second one only? No. Okay, cost center data in Workday. Holy moly, I've not spent the entire year talking about this. As a short-term fix, one of the things that we do is we actually stage our Workday data in Anaplan before we push it out into our model. We load all the employees into a worksheet and the team goes through and performs some analysis to make sure that the right people are getting loaded into the right place. Then they can do an override at that point if they think the Workday isn't correct, but that's really compensating control, if you want to put it that way. Partnering with HR, it is beyond critical, we spent almost this entire year discussing who owns cost center data in Workday. From our perspective at OMERS, we've actually concluded that it's finance, so now we're working finance into the Workday process around setting up new people, auditing that field, knowing when it's changed, helping to manage reorganizations. 

 

Emily Scott 0:30:02.1: 

That's one piece of it. Then the other piece is - this sounds like a lot of management advice now - but we're listening to HR, and one of the things that they want to be able to do is say yes or no to hiring decisions as they're coming up, based on what's approved in the budget. We're really leaning in to help them and support them in being able to do that, to have the right information. For us, it's like we'll give you a little bit and we'll take a little bit back, but I think the way that - as a support function, given 75 per cent of our costs are people, we really do need to have a strong partnership with our HR team, but we could have a trained collator. Am I allowed to say that? 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:30:49.0: 

Absolutely. 

 

Emily Scott 0:30:50.9: 

Hurrah! 

 

Brijesh Varier 0:30:53.6: 

That concludes our Q&A session. Thank you, Emily, again for… 

 

Emily Scott 0:30:59.9: 

Thank you.