Patrick Picha 0:00:32.6:

So, first of all, welcome, everybody. We're going to talk a little bit about a solution, asset, that we've been building over the last couple of years for integrated planning in retail. Michelle Tezer, one of the people who couldn't be here today, is actually out delivering at one of our retail clients, this exact solution, today. So, for Brian and I, we're very interactive people. We would welcome your questions throughout. So, if you have questions as we're talking through, don't be shy, right? Let us know what your questions are. We'll be happy to k address as we go along. We're going to start by talking a little bit through some industry perspectives, some research. Then, we're going to get into the asset. With that, I'll kind of hit on the agenda real quick. We're going to talk through different pieces of it. Whether we go through how the industry is evolving. So, what we're seeing in the industry, especially since COVID, retail was one of the biggest industries, impacted from our perspective. It's changed quite a bit throughout the time. We're going to talk about some of the challenges.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:01:30.0:

We're going to have some interactive requests in here. So, we've got some mentees. Would love to get your guys' responses to some of our questions, as we continue to look to refine what some of our messages are in the market. I love to take opportunities like this to get feedback from people in person, versus anonymous surveys that go out from the big, broad, Accenture, or the big broad practice. So, we'll have some mentee questions. There'll be things that you can scan, you can use your phones. Would love to get some of your feedback there. Then, we're going to deep dive into merchandise financial planning, a key component. Then, we're going to dive into assortment planning. Then, we're going to dive into…  

 

Brian Smith 0:02:07.0:

Open-To-Buy. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:02:07.8:

Open-To-Buy, thank you very much. Open-To-Buy planning. Then, we'll have a little bit of the benefits around Accenture, what I would call your typical partner sales material. So, at the end, that's [?what will be about 0:02:20.3:]. If you have questions, we can jump through a lot of that as well. So, with that, I'll jump into a lot of what we're seeing in the industry. Most of retailers believe that the effects of COVID are done. So, two out of three are really thinking, 'Hey, you know what? We're past it.' What we're finding is that consumers don't necessarily believe that. We think the change that occurred as a result of COVID, the acceleration of the digital channel, the acceleration of the hyper-personalization, all of that has continued. Customers are demanding more and more of retailers today. Retailers are continuing to struggle in meeting all of those demands in a timely manner. I mean, anybody at this conference really knows that integrated planning is extremely powerful for speed, agility, accuracy. It becomes more important when the pressure increases to become quicker.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:03:13.2:

To be more personalized and dedicated. So, if you're trying to get that sales dollar, if you're trying to maximize margin and price, that becomes critical. The number of executives that expect change to continue to occur is very high. The rate of change, the amount of disruption, whether that disruption is coming from technology, whether that disruption is coming through supply chain issues, inflationary pressures, the cost of goods, the cost of manufacturing, the cost of shipping and distribution. All of those are going to be up and continue to press. Cross-industry, what we're hearing, so, not just in retail, is that a majority of the people believe that the amount of disruption is going to accelerate over time. Which means that you've got more pressure to make decisions faster, more accurate decisions. You have less time to make more decisions. Which makes the value and the power of integrated planning even more so. I don't know that I have to convince a lot of you guys of that because you're all at this conference. In a lot of the conversations that we have with the C-suite, whether it's the CFO, the CRO, or even the CIO, a lot of it is coming down to, well, what is the value of integrated planning?  

 

Patrick Picha 0:04:16.6:

The pain to get there is oftentimes too big. The reason people had gone into doing planning or activities in silos was for speed, right? Everybody did their planning in sales by themselves. They did finance by themself, they did merch by themself. They did it that way, because it was faster to do it within that group. Well, what you're finding now is, maybe it's faster, but then get the answers and ask the questions, that's still taking too much time. There's too much manual work, there's too much time going through. So, a lot of what we're finding in our research is the pressure and the need is increasing to become better integrated. So, I'll turn it over to Brian. He can talk a little bit about some of the specific challenges that I mentioned around the acceleration, the hyper-personalization, and then we'll do some deep dives from there. So, Brian, I'll turn it over to you.  

 

Brian Smith 0:05:06.2:

Sure. So, Patrick laid it out well, industry's got some challenges. It's growing. It's changing. It's evolving. Here, when we look at that landscape, some of the things that we've talked to you about are, there's different economic pressures across the globe, depending if you're a worldwide retailer or if you're local. Everybody has different pressures that they're having to face. They're also looking at disparate systems. There's a pressure, to Patrick's point, bring all this integration together. What does that investment look like? How do we go and understand bringing all that technology and integrating those practices and processes? Ultimately, what we're seeing, and he alluded to it, is, a lot of those silos have been put in place over decades of operation. In some cases, for relatively new organizations, it's really how it stood up. Now, over time, as the industry is transitioning, we're starting to see that shift of, we need that collaborative approach. So, we can all make sure we're on the same page because so many decisions that we're making have economic impacts.  

 

Brian Smith 0:06:10.7:

You don't want your products sitting on the shelf if they're slow-moving, how do you maximize your profitability? How do you make sure you're minimizing your freight costs and really planning to achieve your goals? When we look at connected planning, we can start at a very high level. You see, strategic plan, long-range plan, annual operating plan, FP&A forecast, those are all typically happening inside of FP&A. As they're occurring, there are pieces of those decisions that absolutely have key intersection points in your merchandise financial plan, how you're looking at your assortment plan, and also how you do Open-To-Buy. Now, there are other intersection points, besides these three. What we're looking at is creating an integrated asset that combines and integrates these areas. So, where you see all those lines of interconnectivity, those are all areas where stakeholders should be aligning on goals, how they want to get that top-down target. More importantly, what's the bottom-up tactical strategy to deliver those products and achieve those goals, and hopefully, put yourself in a position to outperform?  

 

Brian Smith 0:07:17.5:

When we talk about where that connects, you can talk about target setting, your financial framework, your promotion calendar. More importantly, that's just getting it aligned at the top line. Ultimately, you have to look at, how are we doing our assortment planning, decision-making, how are we linking that up to how we're ordering those materials, both preseason and in-season, and how do you make sure that's all aligned? So, we're always managing back to our target and our financial goals. So, when we sat down and started talking about, how do we help solve this for the industry? Can we bring a template or an approach together that allows organizations to start, not from scratch, but from a place where 100 per cent doesn't need to be developed? More so, you have a template that covers maybe 70 per cent of these processes. See an opportunity to really customize the remaining 30, maybe 40 per cent, to your organization. How you're structured, your SKU families, how you distribute your product to your various points of sales. So, what a high level is, you see, all of those financial components are linked.  

 

Brian Smith 0:08:28.7:

When we talk about these processes and how they come together in this particular scenario, these are big. These are big rock topics. How do you get your long-range planning, your [?strat 0:08:35.0:] planning linked up, how do you tie that into your forecast? That's great because you've established that FP&A, that top line, the slide that we just talked about. More importantly, it's how you bring that to market, those tactical executions and steps, how bottoms-up planning ultimately drives the tactical strategies to achieve that. Over on the far left. Sorry, for you guys, your far right. Those are all the challenges. You guys have a lot of distributed, siloed, Excel spreadsheets, standalone processes. The things that Patrick alluded to. How do we break through that, bring those disparate data sources together and integrate how they operate? Providing you transparency, end to end, not only for your planning processes but seeing that data real-time in months. So, you can make those decisions on your Open-To-Buy. So, let's talk a little bit. Was there a mentee question there? Did I blow through it? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:09:30.7:

I think we had mentee question around the challenges. I mean, real quick, we could take a pause. One of the things we would love to get feedback on is, what do you in the audience see from a retail perspective, as being some of the industry challenges. Are you aligned that these are the challenges that you're seeing and hearing in your business or do you think that there are other challenges? I mean, is it talent? The other challenge I hear a lot from retailers is access to talent, 'Do we have the right talent? Is the talent skilled in them? How do I develop? How do I retain?' With the cost of talent increasing from everywhere, from quick-serve restaurants, up to high-end fashion for the right skills? Talent is another key aspect. So, what we'd love to do is just get some of your quick feedback on what you think some of the challenges are, or if the challenges that we laid out resonate with you guys. 

 

Brian Smith 0:10:19.6:

Oh, that's good. Yes. Heightened financial pressure, margin. So, typically, when we set those targets, it's not just a sales target. We're also looking at a margin target. Also, understanding how our new products are performing in relative in relation to our old products. Anything we missed, that wasn't an option? As you guys looked through those options, are there any other risks that we didn't cover? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:10:47.5:

And this may vary, too, based on the type of retail that you're in, right? So, whether you're in big-box retail, like a Target or a Walmart, or whether you're in a high-end fashion retail let's say, an Aritzia, or a Lululemon, or somebody like a Macy's, or quick-serve restaurant. Falls in the retail category, right? Are you a McDonald's or what are the different challenges that you're facing? Now, what I see is a lot of variation, based on the type of retail. So, high-end fashion retail has different kind of challenges than big-box retail, than grocery-food retail. There's different kind of challenges. At the end of the day, these big challenges, I think, affect most everybody. 

 

Brian Smith 0:11:29.6:

Yes. Let's talk about those, specifically… 

 

Patrick Picha 0:11:37.3:

You want to flip back over to the PowerPoint.  

 

Brian Smith 0:11:38.8:

Sorry.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:11:40.6:

That's okay. 

 

Brian Smith 0:11:41.3:

I gave you guys a preview of the next question! [Humorous tone] So, no cheating. Now, so, let's talk merchandise financial planning. We talked earlier about getting the FP&A layer of tops down, lined up with the bottoms up. Tactically for merchandise financial planning perspective, how do we bring that to market? Typically, what we have seen is that the level of detail and the content, and the dimensionality in the merchandise financial planning space, is different than what FP&A is planning at. What we need to do is find a way to bring those two together. How do we cascade top-down target down, to SKU-level profitability? How do we clearly communicate what our gross margin targets are, what our sales targets are, how we go after particular clusters of stores, or points of sale? All of those things really manifest themselves in that merchandise financial planning. Ultimately, is the first spot where, when we look at it, the tactical execution arm comes in. Merchandise, financial planners, you're looking at your assortment plans. You're looking at your current in-season buying practices. What are your inventory levels?  

 

Brian Smith 0:12:42.1:

How much do you anticipate selling? What is your markdown strategy? How much inventory do you need to procure in season, to ensure that you're going to meet your financial goals, at the same time, ensuring you're not going to have overstocked quantity on your shelves? How do you make those decisions, when you have to not look at one cluster of stores, or a store, or a location, but look at the entire organization in totality. Against all of your points of sale. In merchandise financial planning, as we've constructed it right now, it allows us to link, through common dimensionality and anchoring on what we call enterprise KPIs. So, one of the big drivers of connected planning is having common units of measure. Many times, when folks operate in silos, what you'll find is success is varying, depending on how they measure success. What's that calculation for how they're achieving margin, or how they're doing sales throughput, and how they're accounting for receipts? When we take the high-level plans, usually at the FP&A level, those metrics are a much different level than what we're seeing tactically in the stores.  

 

Brian Smith 0:13:45.0:

So, we have to figure out, what we have to anchor on is creating the commonality between tactical execution and high-level planning. So, there's a tight linkage. So, when we mention a number or an approach, it's consistent for everyone involved. Secondarily to that, you also have different stakeholders. You have planners, you have merchandisers, you have finance folks, you have folks out in the stores logistically trying to drive to those tactical plans. Each of them has a different agenda in how they're going to achieve their targets. That doesn't mean they're not on the same page. It just means they're all executing at different levels of detail. Some are out in the field, others are more strategizing how they want to achieve it. While others are trying to make that engine run, by ensuring the right products are in the right location, at the right time. Obviously, the one thing we have to understand is, how do we do scenario planning around that? By combining consistent dimensionality through lists, and linking that with that low level of detail, we can then enable scenario planning, to run a variety of different processes.  

 

Brian Smith 0:14:48.7:

Understanding, how do you hit that target? What if we move product to a different location? What if we look at different pricing? How do we address those gross margin goals and then take into account promotion sales. So, now, at the FP&A level, they've got that sales and marketing plan. We can push that down into merchandise financial planning. It's exposing any of the markdown strategies, pricing promotions that could not only drive sales but also allow you to have downstream impacts in your Open-To-Buy, based on how you want to execute that strategy. So, in this particular scenario, we have folks that are in the store, they don't have clear transparency. They know that the organization wants to hit a particular target. They know they want to hit a particular gross margin goal or sales margin goal, profitability goal. In many times, folks at the local level don't know, don't necessarily understand what that means to them. How do they tactically go execute? By creating that transparency at MFP, they can now see down to that tactical execution at that localized level and get real-time data as store receipts come in.  

 

Brian Smith 0:15:58.8:

That will get back to a data refresh strategy. So, as those receipts are coming in, you're now totally up against what's happening at the local level. You're also seeing your inventory levels at that store by SKU and understanding how those SKU-level sales are rolling up to your overall targets from merchandise financial plan. Now, when you take that level of detail and you mix into it the assortment planning, now, you're getting into a different level of detail. First thing they typically want to understand? How did the product perform? Historically, did I sell what I thought I was going to sell? Did I get the margins that I thought I was going to achieve? Do I need to do something different? So, by understanding that prior product performance, both for new products that you're introducing, that are currently in season, or historical products that are staples of your particular brand or organization. By understanding that performance, you begin to start seeing how you want to address your assortments. So, then, the next question, how do we improve the assortment?  

 

Brian Smith 0:17:00.9:

Can we change the products that we're pairing together? Can we run scenarios against those products to see, is there better ways of meeting customer demand? Maybe customer demand isn't always the same at each store location. Maybe the Northeast performs differently with a particular set of products than, say, the Southwest and Phoenix. Weather is different. Personal buying traits are different. By understanding where you're seeing that draw on your products, having that transparency into understanding how those products are moving, that then allows you to start taking into consideration how you want to source those products. Meaning, when you're looking at your fabric, and you're talking to your raw material providers, what colors do we want? What styles do we want to push? What are the volumes that we want to order? What does that look like as you're preparing for the next season? By combining the merchandise financial planning push down into assortment planning, assortment planning is also pulling up all of that supply chain, detail, and store sales information.  

 

Brian Smith 0:18:05.3:

Allowing the individuals in the assortment-planning function to see that information transparently and start running scenario plans dynamically on all of their different products. By doing so, the idea is, through potential AI ML integration, or just back-end Anaplan configuration, you can now run those scenarios and see what are the best cases for each of your products, based on store location. Which, at that point, we can then push up the merchandise, financial plan and show how we want to meet certain specific expectations from an assortment perspective. Now, when we talk Open-To-Buy, that's a little bit different. So, with the Open-To-Buys, you guys now know, you already have inventory. You have your sales plan in place. You know how much you want to buy. It's not necessarily a cut-and-dry answer. You can't just say, 'This store is pushing the most product. Let's move product from one store to another. Let's order more for that location.' You have to look at it in totality. So, by having an application that can combine the transparency of assortment plan to MFP.  

 

Brian Smith 0:19:16.3:

Now, bring in your Open-To-Buy metrics. Now, you have all of your sales detail. You know what's happening at that local level. You're seeing which products are moving. You know where your sales targets are sitting. You know what inventory is sitting on your shelves. Now, you can take that information together and start assessing. What should we be buying? How much more should we be buying? Taking into consideration markdown strategies, which things are you fine dropping? Which ones are you fine going ahead and ordering more? Where do you want to expand that capability? Ultimately, pushing that detail down to the local levels, the local stores now have that same level of transparency. Ultimately, it becomes up to the business to decide, this is the information you want to push down to your local store levels, down to your regional levels. Do they sit centralized up in corporate? All decisions that you can then reflect back and say, 'With all this information available to us, we now have sort of a cockpit, if you will, on how we want to get our product to market, as well as what we want to procure, when we want to procure it, and how frequently we want to procure it.' Any questions so far? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:20:27.6:

I would say, as you're thinking about questions, the key for me here, in conversations we have, is, this really gives you the insight to start looking at margin and pricing. So, now you have this connected enterprise. You really can start looking at the margin that you're getting by location, by category, by product. You can start looking at the levers you can press. Whether it's to drive price, whether it's to drive trade promotions, to drive volume, depending on what you have. If you've got inventory costs. So, this is based primarily on high-end apparel. We can use the same model and have done similar models, for big big box as well, too. Depending on how you do assortment, how the big box does assortment. The key there is having that rapid insight to make the decisions around, 'How do I discount, where do I discount, what is the cost of sales?' So, when you're taking those questions on up, either to the merchant, or you're taking it all the way up to finance, you have some of that real integrated timing and access. The way that we'll look at integrated planning in a retail environment is very much business-process-focused. The models, the technology.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:21:51.9:

You guys probably all know, too. We can make it do whatever you want it to do. If you're not thinking about the end game, what you're trying to achieve, what is the business trying to achieve? Whether it's market expansion, whether it's margin expansion, whether it's top-line revenue growth, whatever it is. Those are the areas that are going to drive the key levers. How you integrate the planning across the board? 

 

Brian Smith 0:22:00.1:

And getting back to that. So, common dimensionality. Product, location, channel, account, promotion. So, when you get down to product, you can even bifurcate that further by fabric, color, product type, SKU family. So, when we talk about a standard out-of-the-box asset, the dimensionality is there. The customizable piece, how far down do your dimensions go? How much do we want to put into that product dimension? How do we want to view your point of sales? How do we want to manage our customers? How do we want to look at sales, geography, and locations? How do we want to integrate all those different pieces and how far down do we want to go? We can keep it at a high level with the FP&A. As we get into these retail planning models, that's where we have an opportunity to get down to that SKU level. You heard the presentation or the video this morning from [?Baer 0:22:56.5:], where I think she talked about, she was getting down to SKU-level detail and seeing that profitability margin. Very similar approach.  

 

Brian Smith 0:23:05.0:

By understanding what your SKUs are doing, how they're performing, and having that full end-to-end view, you can now take a step back, run multiple scenarios, not only in your Open-To-Buy, but in your assortment planning, and up at MFP, and then have them roll up. So, as you're rolling them up, you can then also take a look at the macro perspective and see, do you want to tweak that a little bit? That's where we get into process change. As this is implemented, it could change how you do your decision-making. Who's empowered to make those decisions? When do we make those decisions? What data do we leverage to make those decisions consistently? By having that asset, you can scale it across your organization to empower your folks. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:23:52.2:

I think we have one more mentee, if you want to flip over. 

 

Brian Smith 0:23:58.6:

Is this resonating? Is it the next one? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:24:07.6:

So, here, we're just trying to get an idea. The feedback that we're hearing in the market is, this is in demand for certain types of retail. Some kind of retail do a lot less assortment planning, others do a ton of merch planning. The in-season buying varies by type of retailer. I believe there is a big opportunity, right? Especially when you start considering how retailers are looking at channel. Whether they're looking at digital channel, omnichannel, brick and mortar. As the real estate market is really changing over the last couple of years. The cost of real estate, the cost of capital, the digital channel's becoming much more attractive. Younger consumers are much more comfortable buying through a digital channel, and, in fact, probably prefer that more than going to a physical brick-and-mortar. So, you can start looking at the ways that you're going to market and maximize profitability. That, to me, is at the end of the game. I mean, I'm a finance person by heart, so it always comes back down to the margin, the dollars and cents, top-line revenue. 

 

Brian Smith 0:25:12.9:

Okay. Want to talk about any of those? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:25:13.2:

Awesome. I mean, I think we're getting close to time. I think we had until 3:00. So, I think that's great feedback. I think we do have a few more quick topics around the advantages of integrating. You guys can get all this material to download it. I think, at the end of the connect conference, all this stuff is provided. So, you can look at these slides. Feel free to reach out. We'll be here the rest of today. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us at Accenture.com, all that other fun stuff. Any specific questions? Are you interested in learning about what we're doing, what we're doing with the asset, what we're doing in the market? I'm happy to take questions. 

 

Brian Smith 0:25:54.2:

Yes. In the back. 

 

Audience 0:25:55.5:

You talked about real-time data analysis, well, integration. What's the tech stack that you guys are using for that? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:26:06.1:

I would say the tech stack varies by client. I mean, Accenture, the big Accenture, right, is a behemoth. So, we could do just about any tech stack that you want. Whether it's custom Python, whether it's Databricks, whether it's Snowflake, whether it's SAP. Whatever tech stack you work, we can put it in, and we have a group that will focus on it. Anaplan integration to the tech stack, it's not the heavy lift. The heavy lift, I think I heard this in the group that was in here before us, it's all about data. It's all about the quality of the data, where the data resides, the consistency of the data. The other problem with having siloed components of planning, and the reason it takes so long, is, nobody's thinking about data across the enterprise. They're only thinking about very specific pieces, account number. I can tell you, over the last 30 years, I've probably gone into a dozen or two dozen companies. I'm amazed to find how many different ways they calculate key metrics. Their key performance indicators. Way they calculate return on invested capital. It's different. It's amazing.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:27:11.7:

The more that you see mergers and acquisitions that occur in the market, companies coming together, what I find is they don't take the integration all the way down to that level, right? They take integration up to a point in time where they get the numbers. Nobody thinks about, 'Hey, how are we looking at KPIs? How are we calculating KPIs? How is the data?' That is the most critical aspect of getting real-time analytics. Having that core data foundation, that's critical. 

 

Brian Smith 0:27:38.2:

He took all my thunder. I was going to draw a line underneath this that said, 'Data.' It cuts across all three pillars. It literally enables all of those advantages. I'll be quick. We think the benefits, and we know the benefits can be achievable, depending on the scale, across this range, across just the three highlighted assets. I think we're almost at time. So, I'm going to be real quick. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:28:00.0:

Yes, I mean, go back to the value one. To me, this is the money slide. From a finance person's perspective. When I'm talking about a return on investment, when you're having conversations about your stakeholders, or when you're looking for budget or funding, a lot of people will come to me and want to know, where is the hard dollar savings for doing a planning integration? Is it coming from cost reduction? Am I going to get it from labor reduction? Am I going to reduce the number of heads so far that it's going to pay for that? My answer, oftentimes, is no. It doesn't often come from pure labor reduction. Is that a component? Yes. Most certainly. If you're doing a lot of manual work, a lot of integration, there's extra cost and labor. You can redeploy that labor, more so than eliminate that labor, to making better decisions. More effective. You should be going after margin. You should be going after top line. You should be going after market share. That's the real opportunity.  

 

Brian Smith 0:28:52.5:

Yes. Gross margin are usually benefits that don't decrease in time. When you continue to focus on the gross margin expansion. This is all you. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:29:01.4:

This is the why Accenture? This is the fun part. I mean, we tend to look at things from a very business lens, focused first. We have recently signed a strategic partnership with Anaplan, just this year, to co-invest heavily between our two companies. To build out better assets, to make integrated planning better. We're focusing on a couple of key industries. Retail is one of the first industries we're going to focus in. We see a big market opportunity to help clients tie this together, to help advance, and, quite honestly, to try to reduce the cost and time to do this. So, by building some industry-specific assets that link together some of the key components that Brian talked, we're trying to accelerate the speed with which you can start to realize this value. Both Anaplan and Accenture are really committed to driving this market. I've been working in planning and EPM for about 15, 16 years. I led our global EPM practice for about 12 of those years. I'm leading our global Anaplan capability right now because I believe that neither Accenture nor Anaplan are truly tapping into the potential of integrated planning.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:30:10.5:

There's a lot more opportunity. There's a lot of business need and demand to make this happen. The barriers become the data, the barriers become the cost, and the effort to put it in. By trying to build more of these repeatable, integrated assets. Which, you heard the same thing from Anaplan, by building the apps at the same concept. How do these work together and become synergistic? That's what we're trying to do.  

 

Brian Smith 0:30:30.9:

Yes, and soon, we'll have a demo by August, that will walk us through all the exact same capabilities. I think the last one? 

 

Patrick Picha 0:30:39.3:

Just the people. 

 

Brian Smith 0:30:40.4:

It's just pictures of us. So, we're better than the pictures. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:30:43.9:

Yes. Glorious. 

 

Brian Smith 0:30:45.5:

Any other questions? Yes, over here. 

 

Audience 0:30:47.7:

So, you spoke about ROI. Now, I want to understand how to estimate the ROI. So, we have a plan, right? Just Anaplan. Now, we are trying to see, should we purchase PlanIQ on top of Anaplan. Currently, we are using, let's say, Oracle forecasting modules. Should we bring the forecasting within Anaplan or not? What are the pros and cons of doing that? I understand it helps bring all the data in front of us. It's easy and better. In terms of forecasting accuracy, what could you say? A similar question for the optimizer module. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:31:42.5:

I mean, ROI, there'll be some basic stuff that you look at in ROI right away. Which is, how do I reduce the cost of my software licensing? Can I harmonize it by standardizing? What I tell clients often time is, fewer pieces of technology is better than more. Whether you get to one or not, probably not going to get to one, depending on how big your organization is, how complex it is. Less is better. You have similar skills that you can leverage. You can get better negotiation with the vendors. If you're negotiating a larger pie with one vendor, you get a better-negotiated rate on the vendor. So, that's kind of the baseline of what you're thinking about ROI. When it gets into, will it improve your forecast accuracy? I will tell you, that's not tool-dependent. The forecast accuracy becomes much more about process, about the data standardization, about the aligning your organization, and about how you get those decision-making and the drivers. The number one challenge, I would tell you around forecast accuracy, is understanding what's driving your forecast.  

 

Patrick Picha 0:32:44.4:

That is exponentially more difficult to do in a siloed environment. When you're siloed, and you've got planning split out across multiple different parts of your business, run by multiple different people, with only touch point integrations. Touchpoint, at month end or at quarter end. You don't understand the granularity and you don't really understand the drivers. That's going to be a bigger return for ROI than purchasing PlanIQ, or Optimizer. Those things are great. I think they're awesome. I think you can get a lot of value out of them. Don't expect those to be the main driver for your ROI. What you should be thinking about, is, what am I going to do, that those will enable, that I will get ROI? That becomes super powerful. That's when you can get into the margin. That's when you can get into the speed of decision-making. That's when you can get into eliminating waste. If you increase your accuracy of your forecast from, say, 80 per cent to 90 per cent, what is that worth to your organization? What do you lose on 10 per cent? You calculate that. 

 

Patrick Picha 0:33:43.6:

If I can make those decisions in minutes and hours, versus days and weeks, what is that worth to your organization? How fast does that turn into bottom-line savings? Where are your opportunities lost? The business case tends to be a lot more on that than it is just purely taking out labor cost or software licensing cost. 

 

Brian Smith 0:34:01.3:

Yes, speed and better-informed decision-making. Back to his point on drivers, when I talked about the enterprise KPIs that are linked from the top to the bottom, the drivers are going to be different at the FP&A level, than they are going to be at the store level. By having KPIs that anchor those drivers, now, as those drivers move, they can inform the higher level drivers on up. That's really the beauty of integrated planning. You can keep certain decision-making at a lower level, as long as you have a way of boiling it up, that can move that driver at the higher level. Which allows the conversation to occur with a similar dialogue. Everyone's on the same page as to why that number moved one particular way or another. Anything else? I think we're at time. I think we're overtime. 

 

R1 0:34:48.5:

Yes. Thank you so much to Patrick and Brian for sharing your insights in this great session today. Thank you to all of you in the audience. We'll pick back up here shortly at 3:15 for a session with PwC and NetJets. Thanks, everyone.