Bill Guerrero 0:00:11.6: 

Thank you for having me here. My name is Bill Guerrero and I'm the CFO, vice president for finance at University of Bridgeport. It is a small private residential college up in the northeast, in Connecticut specifically, and that's where I am located. So, our institution is roughly about 4000 students and right on the water, but we're a very, very distressed college, especially in this landscape. So, we're in a very affluent State, very affluent region, but, unfortunately, the whole higher ed landscape has impacted our university to the point where, with our 4000 students, we have some unique challenges where the financial challenges have impacted the university. So, back in 2021, it was acquired by another university. So, because of, and I'm sure you guys are going through your own re-accreditation processes at your universities, we are going through ours. I just submitted our financial one to NECHE, which is the New England one, this afternoon. With that, all our financial challenges are being shared and disclosed. So, I joined this university in 2022 after the acquisition. Due to accreditation, you have separate presidents, separate CFOs, separate boards, and so we work through this process to try to keep our university afloat and our 4000 students, to make sure that they matriculate, graduate, and obviously get gainful employment. So, I'm happy to be here to share our journey of University of Bridgeport and Anaplan's partnership. So, thanks. 

 

Rachel Cruz 0:02:07.9: 

Good afternoon. I'm Rachel Cruz, I am the associate director for budgeting at the University of Georgia. I have been with the university almost 13 years now. A little bit different than Bill's area, we have over 40,000 students now, and our operating budget is just over $2.3 billion for FY25, with a pretty large broad fund source as well. So, because of the complexity and the breadth of what we have, that kind of led us down the path of looking for some better solutions for our budgeting and our planning for campus, which led us to Anaplan. I'm excited to hopefully share some of what we've learned and what we've been doing over the last year. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:02:58.2: 

I'm Julie Rosenberger, I'm the director of budget and finance at the veterinary school at Virginia Tech. Unlike my two counterparts here, we just implemented Anaplan in our college, not in the university as a whole. So, a much smaller scale, and it's been great to use across our departments. We have three veterinary hospitals, a diagnostic lab, we also have DVM students. We have about 500 DVM students who have got a master's in public health, bachelor's in public health, and then we also have our biomedical grad school program. So, a large expanse of different types of funding that we get, and this has been really helpful to see it in one place instead of a spreadsheet with 25, 30 tabs. So, I'm looking forward to hearing how others have used it and also get some ideas and talk to those of you out there that maybe we can exchange some ideas. 

 

Justin Martin 0:04:03.9: 

Perfect. So, we'll stick with the higher ed landscape here for a little bit. Just for everyone in the room, I think there's a pretty long and seemingly growing list of challenges in the higher ed space. I think we've all seen inflation cool down, but still an issue. We talk about the models around faculty planning and what that looks like. We talk about salary planning and all of the just growing costs on that side. Then also the pressures on the revenue side from a tuition perspective, and growing political challenges just around what the future of higher education looks like. So, again, there's a long list, but I think we're in a unique position with this panel to see schools of different sizes and shapes here, whether it's from a school perspective, from a large public, small private as well, in different parts of the country as well. So, the first question is maybe go into a little detail of, from those different challenges right now within the higher ed landscape, are there certain or any specific ones that really impact you, given your institution size and shape? 

 

Bill Guerrero 0:05:17.2: 

We talk about the overall financial sustainability of higher ed, and, as Justin knows, that's where my wheelhouse is, in private residential colleges and dealing with the challenges of the higher ed landscape. With this question in particular, certainly you touched upon a lot of different ones, and so I'm always in complete survival mode when I think about the higher ed landscape. I came here yesterday, I had a couple of meetings this morning, so I needed to, as I mentioned with the NECHE reports and stuff, but I was able to meet with one of my college friends, a long time ago college friend who lives in Atlanta, I'm like, 'Hey, let's catch up.' So, we went to a bar across the street, not down in Peachtree, down across the street. So, we went, and him and his wife, who I've known forever but haven't seen personally, they have three kids in college. They have three kids, and they do fairly well for themselves, and we started talking about just the access and affordability. For us, we're lucky they have three kids. The overall demographics of higher ed, you all know that story, people aren't having kids. There's just not enough out there to satisfy the enrolment challenges for 3500 colleges and universities.  

 

Bill Guerrero 0:06:50.6: 

So, they have three, and they're relatively affluent, and they're talking about access and affordability for their three students that are in college. They're like, 'How the heck do we pay 75 grand?' They're with scholarships and all this at State universities, and they're like, 'We're paying 75 grand a year for our students. We can do it, sort of, how is everybody else doing this?' Then when I think about my university, small private, we're enrolment dependent, tuition dependent. So, what keeps me up at night a lot of times is just I'm looking at enrolments constantly. I'm looking at not just fall enrolment, I'm looking at spring enrolment. You mentioned, certainly in the economic landscape or political landscape, there's no doubt there's a concern because we have some international student dependency at my school. So, regardless of affiliations and results and so forth, there is concern of what's going to happen with international students coming back for the spring semester to make sure, and will visas open up for my school and a lot of schools, certainly up in the northeast and across the country. So, the economic landscape or the landscape that I'm worried about most is certainly survival, financial sustainability for certainly tuition dependent institutions. So, that's my focus right now.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:08:24.4: 

So, obviously being a public institution, we receive funds from the State of Georgia. It's only been in the last couple years that the funds received from the State of Georgia have actually surpassed the tuition funds that we receive from our students. So, tuition makes up a very large portion of our budget. It is now the second largest funding source, like I said, but that's only been in the last couple of years. As you know, it's always a fine line of you've got to obviously sustain your institution and cover costs, but you're obviously putting a portion of that on the students who are attending your institution. You want to provide them the best services available, but keep costs relatively low or reasonable. It's interesting for me because it's been about 20 years since I was in my undergrad, but the university went through a pretty large tuition increase during my undergrad. It was the whole 2007/2008 timeframe. So, it's interesting having the perspective that I did as a student when we went through a large tuition increase, and then coming to work for the university and then ending up in a central office, doing budgeting and seeing how important the tuition funds are to the institution, and realizing why there was a need for an increase and seeing the other side of it.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:09:48.3: 

It's a challenge because, like you said, you don't want, or at least I feel, we don't want to put too much of that burden on students. Like you said, I don't know how some people pay for college. I have some friends who have students who are actually at several institutions in the State and some out of State. Like you said, tuition rates are going up, but where do you draw that line? For us, it's a little bit different. We don't have quite as much control over setting tuition rates because we are a public institution. So, a lot of that comes down from the university system of Georgia. Some ways it's helpful because we're not the ones making the choice, it kind of comes from someone else, but sometimes it is difficult because you don't have as much control over setting those rates. We've been lucky that we have seen a large increase in our enrolment over the last several years. So, we receive formula funding from the State based on the enrolment. So, we have benefited from that, but there's 26 institutions in the State of Georgia, and there are many more that, due to declining enrolment, are seeing the reverse of that coin. 

 

Rachel Cruz 0:11:02.2: 

So it's interesting, we focus on our institution and what we need and how those impact us, but I also see how it's impacting our colleagues across the State. So, I would say, for us, even being a State institution and receiving funds from the State, which are our largest source of income, I think the tuition is still the biggest challenge that we are facing right now. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:11:28.9: 

So, Virginia Tech is a State institution, so we receive funding similar to the University of Georgia, but our State funding has decreased, unlike yours that's increased. So, a good portion of the funding that the university gets is from tuition, and that trickles to the college. Within our college, we're partnered with the University of Maryland. It's actually called the Virginia Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. Maryland pays us for the Maryland seats, I think there's 25 or 30 seats every year, but with more veterinary schools coming online, and there is one in Maryland, Eastern Shore of Maryland, they're trying to get online, we're concerned that that's going to detract students from us and go there. There's other veterinary schools in the country too as well. As some of you know, there's a lot of people that want to go to veterinary school, but there's not a lot of vet schools right now. So, that's a concern for us. As far as enrolment in the university in general, we've been lucky, I think, as Georgia has, we have seen an increase of applications and enrolment in our school as opposed to other schools within the State. So, I don't think that's as much of an issue, at least for us for now. 

 

Justin Martin 0:12:48.4: 

Thank you. It's great to hear the different perspectives, again based on size, shape, public, private, different parts of the country. So, great to hear what some of those challenges are for the broader institutions. As you all think about your role specifically and what your day-to-day looks like, and just pivoting over a little bit toward your journey to Anaplan, your journey to sitting up here today, can you talk a little bit about what some of those initial pain points were, some of those big challenges that you were facing, whether it's just manual, tedious processes? I'll let you all answer and provide some of the different justifications, but curious what got you here? 

 

Bill Guerrero 0:13:34.2: 

Yes, I would say, in the very initial state of the journey, is the need for, I would say, the ability to have or make data-informed decisions. So, we all have that in a lot of the requirement. Although we're probably very proficient, and everyone out here is probably very proficient in their Excel spreadsheets with 32 tabs to then spit out a chart or a graph that can be used for your board of trustees meetings or your leadership meetings or maybe your full community meetings. I'm a big believer in transparency because of the challenge of the higher ed landscape. I don't believe that needs to fall just on a president or a CFO or whatever. I do believe in that term 'shared governance,' although it's really difficult and challenging in one sense. I don't believe in surprises. So, without data-informed decision-making, sometimes things become very reactive. So, I was on a search, not only just because I've been in this role for a very long time in higher ed, but looking for a partner, looking for a partner that can help me to take that raw data from my ERP to spit out information that I can use to articulate and communicate to my various stakeholders.  

 

Bill Guerrero 0:15:06.4: 

A lot of times people are really afraid of information, and it's like, 'I'm not a finance person, I don't want to really look at that, just tell me what I need to know,' and then kind of just say, 'The CFO is going to figure it out, figure out the solutions.' So, I needed a partner, a tool that can take that raw data, so let's say it's your trial balance, to spit it out in a specific way where I can share it with all these stakeholders so we can make informed decisions. Literally, in my meetings this morning, let alone tomorrow, and I've got some heavy duty meetings tomorrow morning, where I'm going to be sharing information on my forecasts. Bernadette knows, some of that stuff that I work with TruEd and Anaplan is some of these numbers that if I waited till May or if I waited till, you know, when I say May for what my fiscal year is going to look like or because I've already began my 25/26 budget process and we already decided on our tuition rates for next year, all that's relatively new and people don't realize why you're making these decisions now. So, I would just say my journey has been I needed a partner that can be empathetic to what my challenges are for my audiences and to provide the data that I need to be able to articulate the headwinds that we're facing, that we're talking about in different ways.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:16:48.3: 

So, at the university, we're very decentralized in how we handle the budgeting for the institution. So, what that means is we have multiple major units on campus, schools, college administrative units, and they handle their own budgeting processes. So, we let them do their budgeting, and then centrally we basically aggregate all the data for reporting, and then we handle a portion of central budgeting as well. So, we had a system that we felt like it was serving the needs of our office, but as some of the data and our source systems was changing, we realized it wasn't serving the needs of our campus, both on the financial side and the human resources side. So, we started looking at what are our options here that - we need something that's still going to serve the central office, especially because what we're using Anaplan for is the main first phase was our budget development. So, we will use it to create our 26 budget, but we'll also use it to generate all of the data and reports that we have to submit to the Board of Regents. So, it was very important that it still serves the needs of what obviously our central office has in terms of reporting, but we needed something that was going to capture more of what campus wanted as that data has changed.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:18:15.2: 

So, we felt like we were, we always joked, I felt like we were the problem children, always complex, we just have so many different weird, quirky things in our data and requests from campus because we are decentralized and we try to bring in a lot of our campus and say, 'Pie in the sky, I'm not promising you everything, but if you could have anything, what is it that you would like to have?' A lot of it was stuff we already knew from the past several years in discussions about what they did not like about the previous system we had, but they also shared some additional information. A lot of it was tied to reporting. We realized there were a lot of areas of campus that were still operating a lot of offline Excels with multiple tabs or just shadow systems in how they were tracking and planning, especially long range planning, it was very big for our auxiliary units. We have a pretty large auxiliary presence on our campus, and so the auxiliary plus their capital piece is close to about $300 million. So, it was a lot for them to be doing a lot of their multiyear planning and capital planning all within spreadsheets. So, we really pulled them in heavily to discuss what did they need in terms of current year in your planning and forecasting and what did they need from a long range perspective?  

 

Rachell Cruz 0:19:39.8: 

So, that's one of the models that we are about to deploy. Obviously, the biggest piece, like I said, was our budget development. It was interesting to try to serve - some of what campus would like is, not conflicting priorities, but there are things that they want that we cannot do because central would not be able to generate what we need if we implemented it. So, that's been interesting in trying to make sure we can do as much of what they have asked for, because, obviously, that was the driving force behind getting a new system was there are things that they were not able to do, and it was creating inefficiencies for a lot of people on campus and several of our systems. So, we wanted their input to make sure that we could make changes that were going to benefit them. So, going down that path, part of what led us to Anaplan is we felt like it was so customizable. Because we were the problem children with all the weird issues, it seemed like every time we were throwing things at Tru and at Crystal, 'Can we do this?' It was like, 'Yes, we can do that.' I was like, 'Really?'  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:20:52.9: 

I was like I feel like at some point you're going to have to tell me no, but that was really great and I feel like we've really gotten to a place where we're about to deploy a pretty incredible system and solution that I think campus is going to be really excited about. They seem excited so far from what we've talked about. So, yes, that's where we're at and I think it's going to be good. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:21:16.5: 

So, as I said, the spreadsheets, the workbooks, that's pretty much how we did our budgeting. We have robust start-up packages because we've got a lot of researchers in our college. I was tasked with finding a better solution than just the spreadsheet. Spreadsheet only works so much because you can have data errors and user entry errors, and we wanted something that would update on a dime and anybody could go in and look at it, that our dean could look at it, department heads. So, that's when we did our budgeting. We do our budgeting requests through there instead of sending out a spreadsheet, getting it back, me putting all the data and making sure all the formulas tracked. It was very time-consuming on myself and my team. Then the start-up packages, just as we've brought more researchers in and the larger they've gotten, we needed a better way to track it that was more transparent. Bill talked about transparency of where the funding is coming from, where it's going. Then also we do our position budgeting in as well. It all rolls up into an income statement which updates automatically, whereas before I'd have to make sure all of the Excel formulas were correct and if one thing got changed, it could break the whole thing.  

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:22:37.5: 

We rolled it out very quickly, probably faster than what Bernadine and her team wanted to do, but it worked great. We didn't want to have something where I would have to teach our department heads something completely new of how to do, because our department heads not only are running their departments, they have clinical duties in the hospital, research duties. So, it had to be something that was pretty easy for them to see the change and the ease of use for it.  

 

Justin Martin 0:23:14.2: 

So, first things first, Rachel, by no means is your experience unique in terms of feeling like you have just unique needs that no one else has. I think, as I look around the room, a lot of similar stories. In fact, brunch this morning, we were talking with some folks about some of their challenges. At the bar last night we were talking about it, it was at the other hotel. It's great to hear what some of those different challenges were that got you looking and got you curious. Double clicking into that a little bit, as you think about the process of actually selecting Anaplan and Tru and getting going, whether it was through relationships, through an RFP, was there some moment throughout that journey that really stands out to you in terms of seeing what Anaplan can do for you, whether it was through demos or, again, through an RFP response, were there any aha moments along that journey? 

 

Bill Guerrero 0:24:17.1: 

Okay. Let's see, how do I answer this question? Well, I would say this, in all the operations that I would run or manage throughout my career, so it could be any type of contracted services that you have out there, for me, it's less initially. It's less the company or the service provider, it's more about the people and can I work with those people? Because I'm definitely not perfect and my partners aren't going to be perfect throughout the process, but can we always come up with a solution at some point in time? There's always going to be those moments of panic like, hey, I need this report. Like, I don't know what I'm doing, can you help me with it? So, in my journey, the people was relatively important. So, I knew this person during my journey where he had a full head of hair, but it was not as grey. As that journey started, I felt like this was someone that was very trustworthy. So, that kind of trust, you stumble upon a variety of solutions. In my journey, and, again, this is a private college, and as the CFO I have a little bit more flexibility, and I'm a pretty decisive person. If I need to do something, I got to do something. Again, I do believe in shared governance, but I also have a sense of urgency to meet my stakeholders and meet the various demands, because at times, and I might even be in it right now, I might not have 12 months to deliberate, to get data, to make really good decisions.  

 

Bill Guerrero 0:26:13.7: 

So, I would say in my journey with Anaplan in particular, I was blown away, not because there's some audience members here. I was in a holding pattern, let alone a holding pattern, just a real challenge. Again, regardless I've used other providers, but I wasn't going to put an RFP out. I didn't have time for that. I didn't need sales calls, demonstrations and so forth. I knew Justin just from - as a CFO, I'm an active member in NACUBO. So, I'm an active member on the board and all that kind of stuff. So, yes, do I have connections, relationships or whatever with various business partners and access? Literally, because a trusted partner to my right, all jokes aside, you feel comfortable, like, hey, I got these plights, I need a solution, can you help me? Again, to shorten up the story, I presented my challenge and TruEd, Anaplan, whatever, blew me away with their solution, frankly, in 24 hours. I was like, are you freaking kidding me? That's all I need. Literally, that's all I need right now. I don't want to worry about all these other awesome things that we could do, this is what I need right now to meet my needs and my stakeholders' needs, and then we can talk about the future. They did it. They stayed within scope, provided it, and that's where I talk about empathy and people and partnerships. So, that's what I look for, and that's how I got to my journey with Anaplan.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:28:10.6: 

So, at the University of Georgia, we did do an RFP. We knew for a long time, especially in last year's budget cycle, that it was going to be time for a change. So, the RFP was actually initiated by our associate vice president, but we went through the RFP process, and we did bring in a few subject matter experts from campus that were actually part of the committee for voting. When it came time for the demos especially, we brought in a much wider audience from our campus. They wouldn't have much voting say in what we chose, but we wanted their feedback in actually seeing these systems. We knew what we needed and we knew how to express our needs and evaluate what we were seeing from that perspective. We had a few people, like I said, on the committee, but there were such unique situations on our campus, and we knew the people that had had the biggest pain points in the old system, and we wanted to hear what they thought about the systems that we were looking at. Was it doing what they wanted? Was it meeting their needs? It was interesting because I think it's one of those things we were like, okay, we're about to have to see how many different systems people like, we can't accommodate what everyone wants. It's going to be tricky, we might make some people happy, but not others, but we'll just see how this works out.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:29:42.5: 

I think I can share this, it was interesting when it came time to really discuss the demos that we had seen and what the different systems had to offer, it was pretty clear from everybody that Anaplan was the system that they wanted to go with, which was interesting to actually have everyone on campus agree to something. It was very clear that that was the solution to a lot of the problems that we were having. With that, everyone seemed very blown away by what Tru especially had to offer in terms of just meeting the needs of what we asked for. We had a lot of questions, I felt like, during the demo and they were able to answer everything and really communicate with the different people on our campus. That was one of the high points that they really gave feedback on was Anaplan was clearly what they wanted and Tru was who they wanted to do it, which is what we felt centrally too. So, that was nice to see more of a unanimous decision from different parts of our campus. Plus, we joked, we were like, well, if y'all don't like it, you can blame all your colleagues because they picked it. No, so far everyone's really excited. So, that was our journey. Like I said, we really wanted to involve a lot of people, which was, I think, a good thing for us. It was really interesting to see that Anaplan was pretty unanimously selected by everyone that was involved in the process. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:31:15.6: 

So, being just a college, I was tasked with this goal for the college, and I originally started going down the road with getting demos from another competitor, and I thought I really need to get some other options out here just to see what else there is. Bill talked about NACUBO, I was in the emerging leaders program in NACUBO, so I reached out to my cohort and asked for recommendations, if anybody had suggestions, pros and cons of different systems, and I talked to several people, Susan's one of them in here. They all had had experience with the two competitors. Even just talking to those people, Anaplan and TruEd just came out above. Through the demonstrations that I had, that my boss had, our dean had, it just became clear, I think, as everybody else said, that the customizableness of this, instead of just being out of the box and not being able to really do what I wanted to do with the other products was just the game changer for me. The team was fantastic that we worked with and I didn't know what I really wanted in the beginning, but as I got people in the room within the college and then we had our team, the Tru team, who had been there and done this with however many schools, the suggestions came out and I'm really happy and it's doing exactly what we want it to do. 

 

Justin Martin 0:32:55.5: 

So, you've teed up my last question perfectly there, all three of you have, so thank you for that. Then we'll have some time for some audience questions. Again, we started a few minutes late, so we'll go a couple minutes over. My last question for you all, again, we've all touched on it at different points in some of the questions, but when you look at Anaplan and look at other software offerings out on the market, I think there's a pretty big range or a spectrum of at one end it's plug and play, true productization of this is what you get and it should work for you and if it doesn't, we'll figure it out, versus starting from scratch almost and fully customize every single thing, let's start from the whiteboard. I would hope that we all agree that Anaplan fits somewhere in the middle of that, in terms of really leaning in quite heavily on the flexibility and being able to leverage it to do exactly what you want it to do, and then also incorporating best practices from across the industry. So, I'll throw the question to you all, just in terms of flexibility, and, again, depending on where you are in your actual journeys here, are there things that excite you about that? It's a little bit of a segue into our next session, but thinking about that road-mapping and that flexibility, what is exciting for the future for each of you? 

 

Bill Guerrero 0:34:22.4: 

Yes, I would say I'm excited about the future. I'm trying to be very methodical about what I'm going to gradually keep adding, because a financially distressed college or university, and as the CFO and I take my fiscal responsibilities I guess maybe too serious, because my ultimate thing is I'm trying to keep affordability and access and keep people's jobs. So, I don't have this large staff of finance staff, accounting staff, and I'm actually okay with that, I'm relatively comfortable with that. I'm also uncomfortable a lot of times with software all over the place, like you were saying, all the different ones throughout the system and so forth, having software all over the place and you hear from internal customers, it's like, 'That company stinks or this one's great,' or whatever. You're like, I don't know, how much are you actually using of it? They might be using five per cent of it, ten per cent. So, I'm always very mindful and careful of that, that for me with Anaplan in particular and when I think about ERPs, so if you're with Oracle, if you're with Workday or if you're with an Ellucian client is want to make sure that middleware is as efficient as possible, so there's not all these additional costs and all that kind of stuff. Then when we get into all the different modules or new needs that I have, I want to make sure that they're used to its fullest capabilities.  

 

Bill Guerrero 0:36:14.5: 

So, that's what I'm really excited about, the methodical way, because, frankly, I can't add more headcount. So, I want my software, my partner basically in some version, as oddly as it sounds, is outsourcing my finance team. So, if I can do that methodically and almost like in a pareto analysis, I'm trying to attack things that are time-consuming for my staff, attack those as I go through what steps we're going to do in building next year's budget, long-term planning, labor planning, whatever it might be. So, that's where I'm really looking forward to the future, and then we'll talk about the next stuff in the next session what I'm excited about. 

 

Rachel Cruz 0:37:02.3: 

So, I mentioned that the budget development portion of what we're deploying was the driving force behind looking for change at the University of Georgia. That was more of a need, I would say. I'm really excited about, and I think a lot of us are, we're also deploying a long range planning and capital planning piece. So, we have a lot of multiyear initiatives that come down from the president or the provost. We have a lot of multiyear faculty start-up packages. The tracking of what money has gone out, what money is still owed to different units, maybe if they actually owe money back to central, everything was independent spreadsheets that different units were holding and email conversations. So, sometimes we would get a request that was how much money has gone out on these three initiatives in the last six years? So, we were checking our different spreadsheets and checking the email chains, making sure everything's been recorded. Then we'd have to go to maybe the provost and say, 'This is what I've got, does that reconcile with the numbers that you're seeing?' Because sometimes maybe packages are picked up and then at the end of the year something wasn't spent, they asked to return it, pick it up the following year. 

 

Rachel Cruz 0:38:18.8: 

So, it wasn't even just look at one spreadsheet to check our numbers, it was check our outgoing tab and our incoming tab and our balancing tab. So, there was no easy way for that data reporting. So, when we had requests that would come down generally from our senior administration, it was not an easy task to pull the data together. It was very time-consuming for people on my team. It was also time-consuming for our campus partners if we had to validate any of the information against them and sending them spreadsheets. It was definitely just not an efficient way to run the institution. So, with the capital planning piece as well as the long range planning specifically, we're going to be able to monitor these multiyear projects with our campus partners. So, instead of us keeping track of an initiative and the provost keeping track of an initiative, and maybe the school and college keeping track of it as well, we'll be able to communicate with each other and all track it together in one central location to see what has gone out, what do we still owe people, what's being spent against these initiatives, what happens to be possibly returned at yearend? So, we're hoping that, when it comes to reporting capabilities in the future too, it's just going to make things much more efficient for the central offices as well as our campus partners.  

 

Rachel Cruz 0:39:42.2: 

With that, implementing a capital planning piece as well is going to be huge because a lot of the capital planning, either with our architects and space management group as well as our auxiliary, they do a lot of their own capital planning, especially our auxiliary. Obviously, we're getting a lot more students, we need more dorms, but dorms take up space and we have a limited amount of space. So, then in comes maybe a parking deck. All of that's handled by our auxiliary units. So, their tracking of their capital projects, because they generally span multiple fiscal years, was all, like I said, multiple spreadsheets. We actually didn't have access to most of the data for reporting. If we got requests from either senior administration or from the state in terms of those capital projects, we had no visibility really into what they were using because everything was offline. So, our hope is that we'll be able to gather some of that data when those requests come in to alleviate the burden on having to go to them and say, 'Can you pull me all of this information? By the way, the State needs it by five o'clock today.' We're hoping that we'll be able to do some of that work for them, and it'll take some of that burden off of their plate. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:41:01.8: 

So, I think for our college, well, for me personally, I would love to see the university start using it, but I'm not in a position to make that decision. So, I can just encourage other areas. For our college, I'm really looking forward to being able to have all the historical data in one place and to be able to see the start-up packages and how the start-up packages are spent over the three-year period. Just to be able to always go back and refer back to what we've done in the past for last year and then come to this year, just everything being in one place and knowing that it's correct because it was built correctly, it's pulling in the data correctly instead of always questioning if maybe somebody went in and screwed up a formula in a spreadsheet. 

 

Justin Martin 0:41:57.4: 

Thank you. We have a couple minutes if there are any questions from the audience, if you want to be brave and shout it out.  

 

Audience 0:42:09.6: 

First, thank you, that's very helpful, especially, Bill, something you mentioned, which is the customization versus out of the box. I'm looking over listening to start-up packages, which is near and dear to my heart. So, with TruEd, is that one of those in the middle? Do you have a start? Is that something very customizable that you just did here, or is that something which everyone can take advantage of? 

 

Justin Martin 0:42:39.6: 

Great question. I can take a first crack at it, but if anyone wants to chime in, and just for the recording, I'll kind of restate that a little bit. So, the question was really around we'll call it commitments packages and what that looks like from a start-up perspective, around vet med is critical, schools of medicine where those are very common, but it can really be across the board. So, really from our perspective, much like other use cases, we want to come in with a perspective of best practice of what we have seen work well or not work so well at other institutions. So, less around trying to formalize or productize a solution like that, but having a starting point to launch from that is inclusive of those best practices, but also acknowledges the fact that you may have a different way of doing things. So, I don't know if anyone wants to add anything to that. 

 

Bill Guerrero 0:43:30.4: 

Thanks for the follow-up question. I would say one is, personally in my niche, let's say my niche is private residential colleges, do I think this tool, Anaplan with TruEd as the implementer, can that be replicated at all private residential colleges? Absolutely. I think the business model of that type of school is pretty similar across the country, although every school believes that they're so unique and special and different. So, that's where I always have those kind of challenges. What I'm really excited about in my methodical approach is, yes, let's get these core things done, but in my conversations with the team is like, hey, what do you think about literally even today, and, again, not a conversation, but what was done was like, hey, what about my accreditation reporting, why can't I just spit that out? What about my NCAA reporting, why can't I just spit that out? I just issued a large bond, why can't we just create those reports? So, all those kind of things, that kind of partnership, I think, I'm really excited that might be slightly different with other schools and universities to have that flexibility or adaptability is awesome. So, it's more so like a hybrid of let's take these things off the shelf that you've done at a school similar to mine, and let's replicate that. It saves money on everybody's standpoint hopefully. Then some of these other things, I'll be the guinea pig and let's be the first one to do the NCAA reporting, as an example. So, I'm excited about it. 

 

Julie Rosenberger 0:45:10.3: 

So, as far as start-up packages go, as Justin said, they call it commitments tracking, but the nice thing about Anaplan is I have the ability, the team taught me how to go in and change the different buckets by account codes. If you look at it, it's basically equipment, staff, things like that. They taught me how to customize it a little bit more for what I need it for, even going through the back end, I'm not a model builder, I'd like to get there at some point, you all know how we want to do these things and just don't have enough time to do it. It was helpful in them because they said, 'This is what we've done before. Let me know what your thoughts are.' Then we tweaked things throughout it and it got to where I've got it now, and it's so much easier to look at and to understand, and for even the departments to look at and to communicate to our faculty. 

 

Justin Martin 0:46:12.2: 

I will say Tamika is actually leading a charge of model builder training over the winter break. So, if anybody wants to jump on board with that, they can. So, there you go. Again, with our last couple of minutes here, any other questions that we wanted to throw at this great panel? All right. So, we're going to try and catch up a little bit, but we won't start up here in just three minutes, I want to give everyone a break and maybe a chance to escape the warm room. We'll start back up at 2:40, if everybody wants to come back in for our second session. So, thank you very much. A quick round of applause for this great panel please.