Dana Therrien 0:00:10.9: 

All right. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Dana Therrien, and I lead Anaplan's sales performance management practice. I've spent most of my career leading sales and revenue operations and compensation for various companies globally. I also spent some time leading an advisory in analyst practice for a company called Forrester, where I got to know a lot of the different sales performance management vendors, and that's when I joined Anaplan, was after I left Forrester five years ago. Today, I'm joined by Sid and by [?Sanjay Tingare ], and I'm going to ask them to do their introductions. Sid, why don't I start with you, and you can tell us about your role and where you come from. 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:00:51.5: 

Great. Thank you so much, Dana, for the introduction. Hi, everyone. My name is Siddharth Poddar. I go by Sid. Based out of Houston, and I'm with a data analytics and planning organization called Polestar. We are based out of Dallas. We have a very, very large practice of analytics and planning solutions. Personally, I have two decades of consulting experience. Been with Polestar for close to three years, and I'm the industry head for pharmaceutical, healthcare, CPG, and retail verticals. Thank you. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:01:15.3: 

Sanjay ? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:01:16.3: 

Yes, thanks, Dana, and thanks, Anaplan and Polestar, to give me this opportunity to talk to you guys here. A little bit about myself, by education, I'm an accountant by profession, a finance person. I call myself finance - a professional. I left that that 15 years back of my total 32 years' experience. I started my journey in treasury operations. I was a dealer; I was a forex dealer. I was to money market. Then eventually, I moved to projects, and project management, and stuff like that. I did my [?SISA 0:01:46.6] that transitioned me on to the systems analytics sides. Eventually, I ended up getting into implementation. I joined Cisco. I did this work for Cisco for almost 15 years before joining [?Philips 0:02:00.9]. I joined Philips two years back. That was the start of a journey for Anaplan implementation. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:02:08.3: 

That's great. Sanjay, I think you might be one of the only certified public accountants running sales compensation that I know, which I think is a really cool thing. I have a degree in accounting, but I've never been a CPA. My brain thinks in terms of TNT accounts, so the debits and the credits have to equal out. There's probably no more accurate compensation program out there than the one that you're running at Philips. I know you've got a really interesting story to tell us, and you've created some slides for us. Why don't I just hand it over to you, and then you can talk about the Philips story and what you guys have done with Anaplan, and we might just pop in and ask you a couple of questions as we go through. Then once you're done with your presentation, I'm going to ask you some additional questions, and then we'll open it up to the audience, okay? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:02:50.7: 

Sure, sounds good. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:02:51.2: 

All right, thank you. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:02:52.6: 

All right, so I'm going to walk through the Anaplan transformation journey. Anaplan was already there. We transformed it this year. I'll quickly give you a scale of business, so you get an understanding. As I said, I manage sales incentive operations and transformation, so I have two teams under me. Anaplan team, technical team, and commissions team, which actually processes compensation for our sellers. Just to give a little bit of background about Philips, we are almost €18 billion company worldwide, of that €7 billion coming from US. We actually pay based on order booking right now, in this year. We are trying to get it on to the revenue as well. If you look at the plan components, it's a little different than most of the people who are paying on revenue, but we are getting to a mix of order booking and revenue. Looking at the scale, you could see we almost pay €150 million in 2023, supporting 3500 sellers, and we are just supporting US and Canada, so the sellers are only for US and Canada. My team is responsible for only USC market. We have different teams worldwide doing that activity for their sellers. Around 300 plants, and roughly 1.1 million transactions that we loaded into the system. I said loaded because, till 2023, it was more a manual undertaking for us to load the data into our system. 2024, I'll talk about that in future slides, which will say how we transformed that journey for us. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:04:27.5: 

Sanjay Tingare , how frequently do you pay commissions? Is it monthly, quarterly, annually? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:04:31.1: 

It's monthly. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:04:31.7: 

Monthly, so 300 plans, $150 million, 3500 sellers. No stress, right?! 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:04:40.0: 

No! Yes, and there's a mix. We have a monthly, and we have quarterly also. Stress wise, yes, no stress! 

 

Dana Therrien 0:04:48.0: 

I'm surprised they let you even come here! Who's doing your job while you're here for this? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:04:52.6: 

I have my whole team doing that. I have almost 12 people doing commissions, and five solution architects, they're manning the Anaplan platform. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:05:05.0: 

I have anxiety just thinking about this, but okay! That's great. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:05:09.0: 

Okay. Then basically, I just wanted to talk about what is our goal. This is not going to be any different for anyone. We are planning to get to more frictionless experience for our sellers. When I say frictionless, I mean that we give them data that is needed for them to really be self-sufficient. They shouldn't be coming to us often asking for data, so they get the answers. They're happy. They see the data coming in. On a daily basis, 'This is what they sold, this is what they're going to get,' and everything is fine. That will actually create trust in the system. That's the basic premise of getting this data to what they need. Again, the other friction part is, when they open a case, they come to my team; we are striving towards giving them such an experience that they get the answers that they need within the time frame that we have given, the SLAs that we have given to their satisfaction, and they're satisfied before we close the case. That reduces the friction for our sales team. That's our north star. Maybe it's the north star for all those who are in commissions world to get to that, that everybody is - salesforce is happy. The key KPI for the whole process - and when I say key, we have multiple KPIs, but the key KPI for our overall process is timeliness and accuracy in our payments. Timeliness, like you pay them as you promised on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, for what you told them you will pay on, and as per their plans and accurate data. That's the whole goal.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:06:36.6: 

Sanjay Tingare , when you say when they open a case, does that mean it would be almost like a dispute or a question about their compensation, and then that's how they would interact with your team? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:06:45.3: 

Yes. Normally, it's a mix. It's not always dispute; it could be just question-asking or policy. Like, they don't understand policy, or they don't understand some report, or some other orders that they have booked in SFDC. I heard [?Valerie] talk about it, and I was very happy I was here, that we are not the only people here who are facing that data challenges from SFDC. They see SFDC and they say, 'I booked this. This is the amount that I need to have, but I don't have it here.' We have to explain [unclear word 0:07:12.5] difference output. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:13.7: 

I think it's brilliant that you're thinking them as customers. How many cases are you guys managing a month? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:07:18.4: 

Around 1000 cases a month. That's the scale of our business, just to give you an idea. Now, coming to this project, so how did we get on this journey? We were already having Anaplan for last four years. We've been on that platform, but major shift happened in 2024. There was a change in the sales structure that happened. We were a single sales hierarchy based system, and we moved to seven-plus view-based hierarchy. There was a major shift. The accountability of driving business when to BU. BU has started getting the ability to make that decision saying, 'This is how I want to structure my [unclear word 0:07:57.7]. This is how I want to pay my people. This is my go to market. This is the rate table.' We did an analysis and we saw existing system that we have. We cannot support the seven-plus BU [unclear word 0:08:10.0] hierarchy. That was the start of the new project. Then it was a humongous investment. The other thing that we found, or what we were struggling already in the previous years was, there was a lot of manual data, manual touches that we had to do. For example, the orders that are booked on SAP, it used to come to us from one order book, which is an enterprise data warehouse on SAP. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:08:34.0: 

We used to pull it through multiple systems, and then we used to… My commissions team, they used to massage the data. It used to take them seven days to massage the data and get it into the system. That was another point that we were looking at. Plus, also, people who are aware of compliance and SOX, everything, it's a big red flag. Any time you touch any system, any data coming into our system, manual touches, there has to be a lot of controls. That takes a lot of operational [?audits 0:09:01.6] for us. That was another key consideration. Other than that, there are multiple considerations into play, which got us to invest in this project. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:10.3: 

The company decided to reorganize itself. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:09:13.4: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:13.5: 

They weren't achieving their financial goals. I remember some things that happened post-COVID that they had to deal with. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:09:18.1: 

It was not that they were not able to achieve the financial goal, but it was more from the quality point of view, that we wanted to make the BUs accountable for the quality of the product and the outcome of their BU 

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:31.5: 

Now, you're running 300 plans across seven different BUs with different stakeholders, different executives; everyone's got an opinion about how these things should be done. That probably complicated things a little bit, I would say. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:09:41.9: 

Yes. 300 plans were already there. I was telling [over speaking 0:09:45.1] 2023. 2024 is when we made the change. Not that we were able to tweak down a lot, but we created the functionality which would help us reduce the number of plans. I'll come to that in the… 

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:55.7: 

This is when we started to meet Sid too, right? He started to come and help with some other stuff. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:09:59.2: 

Yes. He has been our partner for the last two, three years, and he has been helping us on multiple things. I'll cover that as well. This overall transformation wise, if you want to see what we underwent, so there were three big models that we were working on: territory management model, quota planning model, and ICM. Because of this change, we had to totally redesign territory management, ICM management, but quota managed planning was mostly enhancements, and that's what we did. We introduced a 360 model this time, which was again - and I'll talk about the benefits in the next slides. Another big win that we had was Docusign integration. I'll talk about the benefits in the upcoming slide. Again, as I said, we just cater to US and Canada. [Unclear words 0:10:50.7] seven plus. The biggest thing that I want to point out here in this transformation, we did over 500-plus user stories. People who have done these projects, they'll understand the scale of change that we did. Not only that, we did [unclear word 0:11:05.9] user stories, but we were able to do that in nine months' time. Never, ever have I ever done that. I've done implementations before. For example, when I was in Cisco, we just implemented ICM kind of, and it took us 18 months to implement that system. Here, we were able to do that in nine months, thanks to the capabilities that are - or flexibilities that is available in Anaplan that we were able to structure that so quickly. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:11:31.5: 

Plus, we had vendors like Polestar, and Deloitte was our vendor. Thanks, Sid. If [unclear name 0:11:38.4] is watching from Deloitte, India, or wherever he watches this video, thank you! This was a great team. If you look at the peak of the projects, they had some seven, eight people consisting of business SMEs, project managers… 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:11:53.8: 

Model builders. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:11:54.4: 

Model builders, solution architects. Same on Deloitte side. I have my own five solution architects into the place, so we are looking at the strength of 25 to 30 people at the peak of the project. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:07.8: 

You guys were doing territory in quota inside of Anaplan prior to this project; incentive compensation management prior to this project? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:12:14.5: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:15.2: 

Then you redesigned incentive compensation management. Your team was responsible for that. I believe there's a sister project that was going on with territory and quota enhancements as well, outside the scope of what you're talking about. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:12:26.8: 

No, my scope was everything. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:28.2: 

Everything, okay. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:12:29.0: 

Everything. That's why these two teams were part of - and my team were all coming together as one team, and it never ever seemed two vendor teams working together like that. It was really impressive. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:40.7: 

Polestar, Deloitte, and Anaplan Resources, in addition to all of your resources as well, and you guys just accomplished a miracle. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:12:45.5: 

Yes, and you guys also came in for optimization! We had [over speaking 0:12:49.8] in that time. 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:12:50.3: 

Yes, and such programs are - it's not something as simple as you put more resources and suddenly the magic will happen. You need to orchestrate across different organizations, across different teams to allocate them responsibility. One output is going to feed as an input to the second team. You have to make sure that you create them in tandem so that one user story's output can go into another one. Allocation of roles and responsibilities is also very important. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:13:13.0: 

Then that handshake is really important, because it's all honeycomb, like your Anaplan. 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:13:19.5: 

It is connected. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:13:20.7: 

Territory management goes into quota; quota goes into ICM. If your territory is bad, your quota is bad; quota is bad, the payout is bad. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:13:27.4: 

Without a doubt, where there's will and skill, there's a way. You did this in nine months. This was pretty incredible. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:13:32.2: 

Yes. Thanks to our vendor resources and my team all put together, they were able to pull it off. We are now stabilizing, in the stabilizing mode. That team has come down to around 12 to 15 people. We were able to get to the stage where we want by the end of the year. Moving on, actually, so yes, next two slides, this next slide is really going to be important that I'm going to focus some time on. I wanted to highlight what key changes that we've made. Till 2023. It was a static plan design that we had in our system. Static plan design is, if I have 280 plans, I have to create component for each plan 280 times. I have to create [?ray 0:14:20.9] table for 280 plans each time and create one plan. We moved from that static structure to a modular structure, where we started creating that in the library form. Instead of creating, say… In the standard plan setup, if I had a ray table, say, 0 to 100, 100 to 300, 100 to infinity, and all the components were to be attached the same ray table, I have to create that same ray table 280 times and attach it to the component. In the modular one, I just create that one ray table with that structure, and attach to 280 plans simultaneously. That actually improved our efficiency. Used to take almost an hour of plan to set up. We saved 20 minutes at least of the first-time setup. The bigger impact of that is, when you're looking at it year on year. Year one, probably, it's the ground up that you're setting up. Efficiency is not that great. Still, I'll say 40 per cent efficiency is great. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:15:28.2: 

When you're doing a year over year, any small change - for example, I have to just change my tier, 0 to 100, 100 to 300. Instead of, say, 100 to 300, I want to make 100 to 500, 500 to infinity. In the static model, I have to make the changes for that 280 ray tables, but in the modular, I just change that one tier on one ray table and auto attach. It creates such an efficiency for us. After this implementation, we are able to reduce our setup time from one our to maybe 25 minutes now. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:02.2: 

In the previous model, it was one to one. For every plan, you had to make a change. Now it's one to many. I make one change; it affects many plans. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:16:09.7: 

Correct, yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:10.5: 

Which is huge. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:16:11.8: 

Then you have to be very careful as well. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:13.5: 

Yes, because you've got to really understand where these different changes are going to affect, so you've got to keep track, right? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:16:19.4: 

Yes, and that's where solution architects come into play. They have to be very meticulous about what changes they are doing. Again, that is just one potion. I gave an example of ray tables. Similarly, there are multiple components in the plan. You have plan components; you have a product that you have to assign to a plan component. Ray table. Multiple factors. Just multiply the equation that I gave. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:41.5: 

How do you get support for a project like this inside of Philips? Was it difficult to get the investment? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:16:47.2: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:47.5: 

How do you articulate the benefit that they're going to receive when you go down something like this? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:16:51.2: 

We had to do multiple presentations to our investment committee to really call out the effects. The biggest driver to that was, 'Well, we are moving as a go-to-market from a single hierarchy to a multiple hierarchy. If you are to make it work, we have to invest, but then what is the scale of investment? Is it just do this, or use the opportunity to do a totally integrated system?' That was the convincing part. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:17:13.5: 

What I found is the people that write the checks for these things don't really understand the complexity of what they're trying to fix! It's impossible to explain it to them. You must have done a really good job of selling this internally. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:17:23.7: 

[Laughs] Absolutely. It was like a teamwork. Everybody put together at the senior leadership level. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:17:29.1: 

The whole one to one, one to many thing would have gone right over their heads! I don't think they really care. 'Just work harder.' Right?! 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:17:35.6: 

[Laughs] 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:17:36.1: 

'Will it help pay my people on time?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Okay.' 

 

Dana Therrien 0:17:39.0: 

That's great. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:17:40.0: 

The second important thing that we did was, as I said in the previous slide, Docusign integration. Till previous year, 2023, we had to distribute our plan docs using SharePoint. Now, SharePoint is not a very easy tool to use. You have to have so many manual processes. You have to be very careful on what accesses you give to which people when you're distributing documents. You don't want the wrong document to fall in somebody else's hand. There's a confidentiality issue. It's a privacy issue. You don't want somebody else to know your plan structure. With the Docusign integration, we were able to make do with everything. We started creating an on-the-fly plan doc. We call that dynamic plan doc. The plans that we set up, and the goal sheets that we set up in Anaplan, we integrate that to Docusign. Docusign will create a dynamic goal sheet, or a plan document. We have enabled a workflow on that, that the workflow will go to the seller; seller will accept, and that status is updated in Anaplan. Now, this also enabled us to really have a systematic solution for one of our policy that we don't pay any seller unless the seller has accepted the goal sheet. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:18:58.7: 

Was that the first time you were able to make that statement, because of just the efficiencies that you had gained, and now you can hold people - their feet to the fire for signing that document, because you could track it? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:19:06.9: 

Yes. We had it on the SharePoint earlier, but it was a very tedious, manual process, and a lot of misses in between to really use this, to flag this, to really hold and keep on checking both the system. Now, since this automation's happened, we can say fairly confidently that, yes, this is working fine, this is going to hold your pay. If you're not paying, and that you didn't pay, we can give them every proof, every point in time to say that, 'Okay, this is the time we should document to you. This is the time you got it. This is the time you accepted, declined, not response.' All that audit trail comes in. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:19:38.7: 

Sanjay Tingare , when you were thinking about what it was that you wanted to do in this new world, was this all coming from your head, or were you relying on people like Polestar, and Deloitte, and Anaplan Resources to say, 'These are the things that we think you should do; these are the new methods that we think you should use; you should be using a library.'? How much guidance was coming from outside versus how much were you just developing internally? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:19:58.9: 

That's coming on the next slide. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:19:59.6: 

Okay. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:20:00.2: 

[Laughs] I'll tell you all that. It's a very good question. I'll address that. Goal sheet, data flow, and again, workflow that we have given through Docusign; earlier, we were not able to inform the sales manager to say whether your person has accepted or not accepted. Now, this gives the sales manager the ability to go talk to the person and say, 'Did you decline? Why did you decline? Do we need to do something to mitigate that?' Remedy the situation so they accept the goal sheet earlier than later. Those are the benefits that we got out of the Docusign integration. It was a massive effort. Docusign, of course, there are good and bad to that. The bad part, or the limitations of that was like, we have to work with only a few templates in Docusign. That would mean that we are not able to give flexibility to a lot of views, because 280 plans, there are so many different flavors. I can't cater to all the 280 plans with two or three templates in Docusign, but you had to make the dynamic template in a way that it could cater to the majority of the people. There is a little bit of give and take that happens. The other part, a lot of people were talking about it, and as I was saying to somebody, I'm really happy to be here in this because the pain that we have been facing is just not us; everybody is having the same pain. It's the data. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:21:29.0: 

Till last year, as I was saying, we had to manually pull the data, upload it to Anaplan, whether it was a workday data, [unclear word 0:21:36.4] workday data, we had to actually depend on our sales organization to really tell - our sales had been to really say, 'Okay, this person is joining this date, and this plan should be assigned to that person.' Then they used to send us - my commissions analyst used to load it, and then it used to go for compensation. Imagine, again, it's a manual intensive, prone to errors; somebody doesn't give us the data; somebody gives us the wrong data, the wrong start date, wrong plan, the [unclear word 0:22:02.9] gets impacted. The same goes with the order booking, so we used to get that, we used to spend seven days to just get the data into Anaplan. With this integration, what is happening is that we can hold the source system as a true source of truth. We don't make any changes to the source system. We say, 'Okay, you guys are responsible for that data. We are not going to do any touches to the data.' Again, from a compliance point of view, you don't want any manual touches. It needs to align with your source system. That was the really important thing, working with our data partners. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:22:41.6: 

He's sitting right here! He helped us a lot on getting this data into our system from our boundary system. That was a really big thing that we have to do. The other important thing that I want to call about is the crediting rules. Till previous year, we didn't have the rule hierarchy. The way we would have to do the crediting rule is if one set of camps wants the named account to be the key rule, they were stuck with that rule for a plan. Somebody wants a geography-based rule, they are stuck with that. With this new system, we were able to create the layers. We were able to create a precedence to really say, 'Okay, your named account rule…' When I say named account, it means the account is assigned to a key account manager. A zip is assigned to a key account manager. We have a hierarchy now to really say, 'Okay, first, go with the name account rule; then go with the zip rule.' We have opportunity rule where we pull the data from SFDC and we say, 'Okay, if all this fails, go look who owns the opportunity. Give the credit to them.' All the three doesn't happen, then we send it on credited bucket were my commissions analyst looks at it and they fix the data, or they work with the sales excellence partner, which is our operations team, and they address the mapping of the accounts, and the zip mapping. That actually allowed us that flexibility. The important part here is the credit automation rate. We were able to get to 99.2 per cent automation last month. That was incredible. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:24:19.6: 

I can tell you from my experience, I managed sales crediting in Cisco. Of course, it was huge worldwide, but it took me almost five years to get from 89 per cent to 95 per cent. Here, out of the gate, in October, I was able to get 90… Again, this is first-time credit. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:24:37.8: 

You've created a model and a framework here. I've worked with your company for a long, long time, and one of the resistances that they've had in trying to deploy this in other geographies throughout the world was that they didn't have a framework that they could lift and shift and apply to other places. Have you been approach about that, saying, 'Hey, this worked. Let's go to EMEA. Let's go to APAC. Let's go to Latam.'? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:25:00.5: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:01.0: 

Okay, well, that's good news. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:25:02.6: 

Only thing is that those markets are vanilla markets. They are not as complicated as…! 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:09.1: 

Yes, so it should be easy! 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:25:09.7: 

It's [?at a flat light 0:25:10.4]! If you have to introduce this flavor to that sales team, imagine they'll expand their…! They'll export their sales plans! To answer your question, yes, we have presented our cases to other countries who are using Anaplan, and we are working on that to create a [over speaking 0:25:30.1]. Last but not the least, the Seller 360 model. Seller 360 model is a new model. We used to have so many challenges in previous years. Everybody used to work on the same model. I have 3000-plus sellers, I have commissions analyst, I have sales excellence partners, the sales operations people all working on the same model. Anytime anybody pulls a data, or my commissions team is processing data, it used to hang the model. It used to say, 'The model is busy.' That used to create so much frustration. We have to actually time our work in a way that, when we release the statements, we leave the model clean so that people can access the statement. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:26:09.5: 

The Seller 360, is that the commission register for the sales person, that they can log in and see it? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:26:12.7: 

Yes, it's a commissions reporting kind of thing, a standalone model. It's only for the sellers to look, and sales managers to look at the data. 'What is the commission statement?' That's the beauty. The other beauty of the data loading that we have, because of the integration, we are able to pull the data on a daily basis. We are able to refresh the data. Seven days that my team used to spend at the end of the month to massage the data, they don't do that anymore. It directly comes to the system. We are able to show the data on a daily basis. They spend that time that they were earlier doing massaging in actually looking and troubleshooting the issues and fixing proactively… 

 

Dana Therrien 0:26:49.7: 

Oh, yes, and one of your primary goals was to improve the seller experience. It sounds like you did that, right? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:26:53.3: 

Yes, that was a key… This was one big thing coming out of Seller 360 that we did. Moving on to the next one, so this is where - leading to your question, overall vision. Between me and my manager, we have 30-plus years of sales incentive experience. We have implemented models; we have normalized models. I have managed operations; he has managed operations. We had a vision in mind. This is where we want to go; this is how we want to do it. It actually took a lot of noise out of the system. People were coming, 'Oh, let's do this. Oh, let's do that.' No, we know this is how it works. What you are thinking, we have lived that for the last ten years. We implemented that in 2007; worked out in 2009. I mean, normalized in 2009. We have lived that, and we have gone through all those potholes, and we have fixed that, so we know how it works. There was a vision in place that everybody was driving towards. That actually helped, to a large extent, to get this project deployed in that record nine months' time. We still can't believe we did that, but we did that! That was the overall vision that I wanted to [over speaking 0:28:02.8] back to. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:28:02.8: 

I know your VP of sales comp too, [?Jason]. He must have just been thrilled with the changes that he was seeing as this was happening. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:28:09.0: 

Yes, and his [unclear word 0:28:10.6]. He is trying to see how we can optimize the plan setup and stuff like that. How to leverage the modular structure of the plan design that we have done. Polestar, actually, in fact, this was not first time we are doing the modular design. One year back, or two years back, Polestar helped us implement that design for us. We did the fundamental, but we didn't have time to leverage that. Again, since we redesigned, we had to reimplement that. Some of the other cool features we tried out in the previous years with Polestar as well. The next important point I wanted to call out was the data integrity, because of all the automation that we did, we linked it all to our upstream data system. We are able to maintain the integrity of the data. We are not touching the data in our system. Anybody anytime wants an audit to be done on what I have paid in my incentive ICM, they can tie it back to my order booking to really say, 'Okay, this was the order; this is what you paid on.' In between whatever happened, I can just line it out to them and say, 'Okay, this is what we did.' We don't touch the data. SOX control that. We have to make sure that no touches happen. If there is any change, then we have a process that exception is approved, or case is approved, and then we do a manual adjustment, so it shows up a manual adjustment. That's another important thing that we think… 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:29:41.8: 

Again, when you're talking about data, it's really important: key takeaways for people who are in the project, who are doing implementation, is data is critical. You are depending on data, so the quality of data is really important. You need to make sure that you're working with your key stakeholders who understand the data, the quality of data, share the data with them, make sure the data is good. Your output is as good as your data. Your product is successful if it is adopted. People trust your system. No matter how good you create your system, if the data is not good, the output is not going to do well. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:16.2: 

How did Anaplan help with that, with the data integrity and the quality? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:30:20.4: 

Anaplan as in Anaplan, your team? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:22.4: 

Yes. Well, not the team, but just the solution itself. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:30:25.4: 

Oh, solution. The platform, you mean? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:26.6: 

Yes, the platform. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:30:27.9: 

We have a lot of solutions, like APIs, that we did that helped us integrate that, and it helped us actually check that we are getting complete data in, and accurate data in. As I was saying, we also have manual control right now that we have to check that, yes, this integration happened accurately. Right now, the APIs are not SOX. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:52.4: 

There was a triage that went there to identify any issues before they got entered into the system and flowed through as bad data. It helps you identify the problem before it occurred. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:31:01.8: 

Before it occurred, yes, absolutely. We put a gate on that. You wanted to add something? 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:31:07.0: 

No.  

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:31:07.7: 

Oh, okay. Again, that's why it's really important that you work with your key stakeholder, understand the data, try to work with live data. Very important, because normal times, when you rush to get the project out of the gate, we try to work with dummy data, we try to tailor data to your requirements, and you're limited with your understanding of the outcome you're trying to achieve. It's really important to work with the live data. We did work with the live data, but again, it's a big thing that, when you get the data in the production system, you'll see things different. Fallouts will start happening. That's a very key takeaway. Somebody was telling me, even… 

 

Dana Therrien 0:31:49.3: 

With the dummy data, it'll get masked forever. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:31:51.2: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:31:51.8: 

Then when you go to the live data, 'Oh, okay, here's what the problem is.' Then you can solve it. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:31:54.9: 

Technically, what we always keep thinking is that, yes, it failed, right? Oh, because the data is bad. When you start to get the live data, you start testing on live data, you'll start realizing that, yes, it failed with live data. You need to go find out what's the problem. Go fix, so that whether it's a functionality, user stories, or data quality upstream, that… Take time. Invest your time in making sure that the data is tested out thoroughly. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:32:21.4: 

Five hundred user stories in the business requirements that you were able to gather with Polestar's help, and Deloitte, and Anaplan Resources as well. How did you make the time for that? You were interviewing people, right, out in the field? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:32:37.2: 

Yes. Long nights! Forget about the days! Long nights. It's for everyone. It was just not for my team, or me, or Polestar, or Deloitte; they were equally working long hours. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:32:53.9: 

Then the change management piece of it, you were running the old system in parallel. You were running the system as you're building your system. Is that right? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:33:02.7: 

We were running the system for the previous year. The new system in the new year, we cannot use the old system because the structures were totally different. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:33:11.9: 

It was a total cutover. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:33:13.7: 

Total cutover, yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:33:13.8: 

There was no safety net. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:33:15.4: 

Boom. It is like, from here, you go there. There is no parallel run. That's one of the takeaways. If you have the ability, make sure you have a parallel run. In our case, if I would have done that on the old system, I wouldn't have put that money to create a new system! That is a catch 22. You have to work with what you have. Then just like your data, you need to be very careful on your business requirement. Again, your output is as good as your user story. What you're getting from your - many times, in big companies, it happens, like the actual end user of the data and the requirement provider is a different team. Sometimes, there is this communication gap of understanding what is required by the end customer, and what is translated or what is provided to us. Sometimes, that happens, so it's very important that you get that directly. We faced that challenge in one or two BUs where we found a couple of user stories were a little different than what the end out goal was expected out of it. We were able to fix it pretty fast because it's versatile. Anaplan is versatile; we can quickly fix and we can run the jobs pretty fast. That was another key takeaway. Change management, it's not new. Any big projects, change management is a must. Invest, invest, invest. Make sure that you're spending time with your end users to really look at the screen, the UX. The experience is also important. What is the UI you are showing them, whether they're getting to see everything that they want, any changes they want? Invest time in getting that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:34:55.9: 

I think that was one of your key findings, too, was that you had to improve the UI, because it had to improve the user experience. The UI is really the end user's first visibility into the new system, and you'll be judged on it. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:35:07.3: 

Exactly, absolutely. If they don't understand what you're showing them, for them, okay, I don't trust the tool. You'll get more cases because you'll explain, or they'll keep - 'Okay, what does it mean?' 

 

Dana Therrien 0:35:19.0: 

I think, oftentimes, we undervalue aesthetics when it comes to systems and design because you're used to using their iPhones all day, and they want that type of an interface, right? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:35:31.1: 

Yes, absolutely. For that, again, another important point is you need to have a change ambassador very close to the end user. Their responsibility duty should be that they are ears to the field, and they are the ones who are actually promoting the product, so there is a constant interaction through the development cycle, so it's a give and take. Though we are agile, but again, that give and take is really important when we're developing the product. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:35:58.7: 

Sid, how did you interact? It's a delicate situation. You've got people from Philips; you've got people from Anaplan; you've got people from Deloitte, and people from Polestar. How do you make your way in an environment like that? 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:36:12.3: 

In our case, how we operate is that, once we are in a Philips Healthcare conference call, then we don't don the hat of Polestar anymore. We act as if we are a Philips Healthcare. No co-employment issues there. Wanted to make sure that we are doing everything possible in our capacity to act like a Philips Healthcare representative there, in the conversation. I have received the same amount of camaraderie with other team members as well, irrespective of which companies they represent. Once we are in the room, we are trying to figure out how to make this thing more scalable, more successful, more flexible, more suitable for the end customers. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:42.5: 

No competition between you and Deloitte? 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:36:44.9: 

Not at all. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:46.2: 

Total cooperation and partnership? 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:36:48.3: 

Absolutely. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:49.2: 

That's excellent. 

 

Siddharth Poddar 0:36:49.5: 

I can 100 per cent look in the camera and say, '100 per cent.' 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:53.1: 

Plus, Sanjay Tingare , you have model builders on your own team, right? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:36:55.7: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:56.1: 

How do you divide and conquer? How do you pick who did what? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:36:58.8: 

I have solution architects. Mostly, I have one or two model builders. It was split the user stories. Solution architecture designing was - I have three solution architects dedicated to the [unclear word 0:37:15.2] quota management. I have two Deloitte, because Deloitte is a big team, and it was an outsourced project for them, so that's how we split it. It was talking to each other, making sure that the overall architecture is right, even between the two different teams. They were working on one side; the other was working on another side. We were glue and getting them together to make sure! 

 

Dana Therrien 0:37:41.6: 

Who was the orchestra conductor? Was that you, Sanjay Tingare ? Were you the guy with the wand, and waving it, and keeping time? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:37:48.0: 

Kind of. I was playing that role in between, but it was like I'll give a credit to my team, solution architects. They were playing the major role in making sure things are connecting. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:37:58.7: 

Did they have the final approval, 'Yes, this is good to go; let's go with this version of it,' so they're the ones that approved it? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:38:05.1: 

Approval came from us, from me and my manager. We were the ones who were like - because we had the vision, we wanted to make sure it goes this way, and we just wanted to make sure that it's all coming together in the way we have envisaged! 

 

Dana Therrien 0:38:19.1: 

We have just a few minutes left. You shared a lot of lessons as you've gone through this presentation. What's your biggest lesson? There's somebody sitting in the audience right now who's contemplating doing something this big. What's the one thing that you would tell them? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:38:38.5: 

Don't rush things. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:38:39.5: 

I thought you were going to say, 'Don't do it.' 

 

[Laughter] 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:38:44.8: 

No! Don't rush things. Be very careful what you commit to. Put in all - what I was talking about - these learnings, put that into play to really make sure that you put some buffer for yourself. Don't crunch it in a way that is going to come bite you later on. Make sure you put buffer. If you think that it's going to take ten days, put five more days there. Keep some buffer for yourself. Generally, the way you plan the project - I've done project management for a long time. What you put on your project plan doesn't happen that way. You should not be rushing yourself to the end goal if the goalpost is shifting. If, suppose, tomorrow go to market is changing on you, you have a user story we started developing. You can't meet that deadline. You have to change your goalpost. You just say that, 'Okay, if I have to do it on the 31st December, sorry, I can't do because you changed the go to market on me. I have to move it a little 15 days ahead.' 

 

Dana Therrien 0:39:39.9: 

You still had a deadline on this, right? There was a go-live date that you had. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:39:42.8: 

There was a go-live date that we had to adhere to, and we hit the deadline, but to get to that deadline, we had to actually deprioritize some of our capabilities. We got to the MVP to make sure we pay all bells and whistles. We were trying to create a new tool to make it self-sufficient for our sellers. To claim any of the orders that they are not getting, we said, 'Okay, that's extra bells and whistles.' You just put it for later. We went with a core implementation where we actually can get the territory management done, quota, issue the goal sheets, get the calculation, make it visible to them on a daily basis with all the data integration. That was the core thing. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:40:26.6: 

I've seen a lot of these types of implementations like this in my career. One thing that I'll say about this one is that you guys had the courage to go out there and secure the numbers and the types of resources that were required to get the job done in order to deliver it with quality on time. When I've seen companies try to skip on that, they end up living with a solution that's subpar for many, many years, and it ends up costing them a lot in the long run. Not just in terms of missed commissions and inaccuracies, but also attrition for dissatisfied users, which you guys put the users at the centre of the base. I'd say you guys exhibited great courage in doing this thing, and tenacity, and strength. That's really what made the difference. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:41:07.6: 

Thanks to my management team! They believed in us; they funded us. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:41:12.3: 

Well, and humility too, because you guys all had the humility to work with one another. Polestar with Deloitte, with your team, with the Anaplan people. Let's just bring the best minds to the table, and let's work together. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:41:23.1: 

Absolutely, yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:41:24.2: 

We just have a few minutes left. I know you want to get to this last slide. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:41:26.5: 

That was my last slide. This is a honeycomb slide, just to show the interconnections like we talked about it, but that was it. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:41:32.5: 

Are there some questions out there from the audience? I know that Sanjay Tingare  just went through a lot. Any burning questions on lessons learned, or anything like that? 

 

Audience 0:41:43.2: 

I'll ask a question around - it sounds like you're currently on a [unclear words 0:41:46.7] management services model. How did you work around knowledge transfer to make sure your team is actually going to adopt this and own this when your consultants are out of the way? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:41:59.2: 

We started that, actually, cross training our Philips solution architect. We had multiple sessions, actually. In fact, we had cross sessions with even Polestar, Polestar to Deloitte, so we are keeping everybody on the same page. We started out, we did the whole training sessions in depth for each model. Even the documentation around that. Tomorrow, if they are not there, we are there to support that. Having said that, it's a huge application. We created a kind of - I won't say monster! We created a very complex beast out there that we will need a lot of hands to support. With the constant ongoing changes in the go to market, we have to constantly keep changing. Suppose tomorrow, if I were to expand that to other countries, then all the more this will be a big infrastructure to maintain. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:42:58.5: 

That's great. Any other questions? 

 

Audience 0:43:01.0: 

You alluded to some of the performance issues. We face something similar. How did you get around that? We worked with different folks, modelers, and the model was pretty efficient. We don't get the performance issues often, but then today, while I was in - I can do this; for five minutes, you get the performance issue. Most likely, there are a bunch of people going in and using the model at the same time. You mentioned something like that. How did you get around that? 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:43:39.5: 

That's where I was talking about Seller 360 model. We implemented Seller 360 model, which was specifically dedicated to our Seller population, was 3000-plus people. We have an ICM core model, which is meant only for my commissions analysts, which were 12 people there. They are the ones who would get into ICM. Whatever I do in ICM, doesn't impact seller's ability to look at the reporting system, so it doesn't hold that up. That was the split we did to manage the performance. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:44:09.1: 

You segmented the viewers from the calculators. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:44:11.2: 

Yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:44:13.1: 

When you have that many people going in, yes. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:44:16.0: 

Especially, the data that we have, it takes time. We are now in December. When I started at the start of the year, like April, May, the processing time was not that high. Now, with the data that we have in the system, it takes long. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:44:31.8: 

Yes, because you've got things that need to be processed in arrears, and corrections, and things like that. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:44:33.4: 

Correct, yes, absolutely. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:44:36.2: 

That's great. What a wonderful story. This is great. Okay, so with that, Sanjay Tingare  and Sid, thank you so much for agreeing to share your story with us. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:44:45.2: 

No, thank you. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:44:48.1: 

It's really compelling. It's probably one of the more interesting ICM deployments that I've seen, in addition to T&Q, so congratulations to you. I know it had to have been stressful. It's been wonderful to watch. It's also been great to see you guys have such great success. Thank you. 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:45:02.0: 

Thanks. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:45:02.3: 

Thank you very much. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:45:02.7: 

If anybody would like to catch up with these two gentlemen, they'll be around after this, and I'm sure you can hit people up on LinkedIn as well, and for me too if you want to say hello. 

 

Sanjay Tingare  0:45:11.3: 

Yes, absolutely. 

 

[Thanks and close] 

 

[Applause]