Neil Thomas 0:00:05.6:

So, my name is Neil Thomas. I'm the lead of Finance and Workforce Applications. With me, my two colleagues. Ankit looks after the finance side of the house; John looks after the workforce side of the house, so that's how it works. What do we do, and I thought it'd be worth just spending 60 seconds. What we do is, of course, we build the applications that you're learning lots about and seeing in the marketplace. We build them, we help implement them, we help propose them, sell them. We make sure they work, and we take all the results of those feedback and make the next upgrade better and better and better. That's what we do. Adam Thier is my boss, so I work under Adam in the product group. So, we are definitely the technology people taking all of the modeling stuff that you're so delighted with, and converting those into the applications on the same platform. So, that's what we do all day. What we are always looking for is, how can we inspire our customers to implement and work with us to make the best applications we possibly can. As we go through, and you learn a little bit more about our roadmap, or you think you have something that you'd really like us to focus on, we're obviously actively collecting that feedback, and that helps us prioritize which application next, or how can we make an improvement or an addition, so please bring that to us.

 

Neil Thomas 0:01:22.9:

The last thing we do is, we do work in this space from a domain perspective. We work with lots of different customers, and how they've implemented and what they've done, and so as you're looking for, well, how did they do it, or how should I do it, where should I start, that's part of our role as well, to complement our sales and go-to-market organizations. So, that's a bunch of stuff that we do. Ultimately what we are trying to do is, again, take that modeling engine, and as quickly as possible - and we do have a 24-hour dream within a very, very short period of time, as long as your data is ready, you implement the application immediately. Then you start to fine tune it and tweak it and really leverage the modeling engine that's sitting underneath. So, we want these to be extremely easy to adopt, we want them to be extremely easy to switch on. We want them to integrate with each other, of course, automatically, and last but not least, anybody should be able to do this. It should be something that any finance-orientated user, or an HR-oriented analyst, somebody in those sorts of roles can pick up and use immediately. So, that's the mission in life.

 

Neil Thomas 0:02:25.2:

As I mentioned, our center of excellence, we look after two areas in finance and the workforce planning application. If you've met my friends, Dan and [?Ejay], they do exactly the same thing under supply chain and go-to market, so those are peers of mine. From a philosophical perspective, we are making sure that everything is designed and implemented the same way, so that means using all the same technologies underneath, and means, of course, the UI being aligned on top, the use of AI being aligned on top. So, there's a much bigger vision here than one application at a time. It's one application, but updating many as we take these applications to market. So, one platform, many applications. We have three favorite applications out there in the marketplace right now. There are some other ones coming. I talked a little bit about a roadmap in an earlier session, so we're going to focus on what we have right now. Financial consolidation, of course, is that wonderful month-end close process. Collecting all of my actuals, converting it into financial reporting, and for all my financial statements, and typically deployed by organizations that have multiple subsidiaries, multiple ownership, all the things that you probably all do in the audience, otherwise you wouldn't be here.

 

Neil Thomas 0:03:33.5:

Then there's the forward-looking side of the house, which is the integrated financial planning. Of course, that's just planning. For us, it's financial statement planning. So, our next generation of applications is now beginning to work on specific areas of the P&L that we think are easiest to help somebody get far really quickly. So, typically revenue, how do we make that easier and easier for customers to model and start with, and obviously on the operating expense side as well, and then workforce planning is truly for HR. Where we're finding that gaining the most traction is HR teams that are analytical. That's not to belittle the HR teams, but there are many out there that are very friendly and do a great job, but aren't necessarily thinking about the planning side of the house; maybe leave that to finance. So, we find HR teams that are striving to do this and get their hands on this operational information. They are perfect candidates for operational workforce planning, and have found it very interesting when we've introduced it to them.

 

Neil Thomas 0:04:27.4:

As we connect, to give you just a very quick flavor of where we're heading, we call our disclosure management an application. It's a little bit of a stretch because, yes, you can deploy it on its own. It can sit on anything from a data source perspective, so it is, but what it really does is convert all the information that you have into, essentially, office or finance presentation, so PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. If you were in the Excel reporting sessions yesterday, hopefully you had a wonderful experience with Ben, and getting your hands on with that application, so really cool. Where we're heading next on the consolidation side of the house is, we're beginning to get into, okay, what's next? What do people do there? So, they start doing their ESG reporting, particularly in Europe, and they worry about that stuff. Obviously, there's lease accounting, some really on-the-edge applications that are very, very important adjacent to the role of the financial consolidations team. Those are beginning to take place now, being designed and being worked on.

 

Neil Thomas 0:05:25.2:

Strategic finance to us is essentially planning and actuals combined for long-range planning, so think of it as merger and acquisition, five-to-ten-year plans out, different scenarios, etc., sitting on the top of planning as well as our actuals. On the planning side of the house, there's a whole bunch of things going on. Everybody does these things in some shape or form, we believe. So, allocations, of course, I've never met a company that doesn't do allocations. Building multi-tier, multi-threaded allocations that go back to zero as they fully allocate is actually really, really challenging. So, we are working on that application so that you can take that out of the box and use it for cost-to-cost, any input to outputs, obviously profitability, product profitability, project profitability, those sorts of things, so watch for that one. On the contract subscription revenue, that is obviously RevRec for any kind of subscription or contract planning, and we're hoping it will cover more than just generic subscriptions, like a Netflix subscription, like us, like a SaaS subscription, but revenue over time, like big, big projects, so work in progress and those sorts of things, we're still scoping how far we can go with that one.

 

Neil Thomas 0:06:33.2:

Supply chain is starting to integrate really nicely with our supply chain colleagues, where they're moving every day, every hour, and finance just needs the snapshots and plans and revisions to convert it into financial forecasting. Operational expense, obviously for projects is leading to workforce planning from a, well, how many consultants do I need, or how many implementors, or how many [?RIVETers 0:06:51.8], or how many mechanics, those sorts of things. So, John and team are beginning to work on that, and again, we're mixing them in with our other applications as we go. Plenty of work on the workforce side. We really see this as being pivotal to a feeling, not just finance, but also integrating with the demand side of the house, so sales teams, what sales force do I need? Do they have the right skills? Where are they deployed? As capacity planning comes into play, leveraging HR to go off and find the right people with the right skills, and the same with any other customer-facing activity where it's very people orientated, and you can also see that happening in production and some other areas as well.

 

Neil Thomas 0:07:32.7:

All right, so that's our immediate, what we have today, what we're working on, and of course, as we work with customers, they sometimes come to us and they say, 'Well, I'd like to start with this particular application, but I want to keep some of my models and integrate them into your IFP,' and we're obviously seeing that. So, the dirty grey area - I'm not sure that's the right color - that signifies that, that you can build on top, you can extend them out, or you can keep what you've got and just start afresh with a root area if you wish. Okay, where we are seeing this as deployed is, it's either a customer coming to us and saying, 'I have a new area. It took me far too long to implement last time. I'm not happy with what we did necessarily. I just need to get something in and start planning.' So, obviously, with the immediate value of put it in, switch it on and very quickly start using it, that's a beautiful use case for one of our applications, and then what we're finding is, our customers are saying, 'Well, where is the value? Where is the extra bit of modeling power that I can throw at this? Is it in my head count planning?' Well, no, you have a salary, you have a start date. We handle that perfectly fine out of the box. That's not an area of value. Where the area of value is, let's say in my revenue side of the house, where I really, really want to model that specifically to me, my drivers, my data sources, etc. So, we're seeing that happening in every customer. They basically start with the core, and then they roll out and extend.

 

Neil Thomas 0:08:58.9:

The other one, of course, is a refresh exercise. We're also actually somewhat surprised by the amount of activity we're getting here, but it's, 'Hey, I've had this Anaplan model for X period of time. It's getting a little stale. The business has changed. I don't want to go off and build it all over again. I would like to make use of things like ADO and Polaris, and other new technologies. Maybe I'm in the classic engine.' Obviously, our application is based on the latest greatest stuff, so it's a multi-learning opportunity. It's not just an application, it's also the latest integration and the latest calculation engine, and learn how that works as part of the exercise. So, refreshing an existing use case area, and just putting it side by side, parallel running, what are the gaps? We see that happening a lot as well, and we've also seen you don't have to implement the whole thing. So, when you buy an application, what you can do is, just say, 'Hey, I'm really worried about operational expense. I've just got to get my expenses in line, get my expenses done and in line and under control really, really quickly.' We've had some really nice experiences with that, where it starts small and then grow big, again over time, but within the scope of the application itself, and it's great for testing and playing around with.

 

Neil Thomas 0:10:08.3:

All right, so consolidations is the first one, and then I'll hand over. I always like to embarrass Adam as the father of consolidation software, because that's what he claims, but basically, Adam alluded to this a little bit. We have, basically, the most foremost people in terms of - nearly all of the products that you see that have gone to market and been successful, they either helped design, helped code, or actually built themselves from scratch. The second gentleman on the left, his name is Hervé Cappo. Adam mentioned him this morning. Hervé was, essentially, the author of Frango. I don't know how old you are, but I remember Frango. I actually sold Cartesis myself, as we used to compete against them. Frango was acquired by, essentially, IBM and turned into the controller product there if we go far enough back. What happened then, Adam was working on Hyperion, so he's a Hyperion guy. We mentioned Evo, and Hervé obviously also worked at SAP. Hervé was the author of the Outlooksoft product. Again, it's like a history lesson in consolidation, so it's an epic journey. The point being, ultimately is now we get to today, Hervé has basically created six different consolidation tools, and now we're on the latest greatest addition, which, of course, was the Fluence company that we acquired back in mid last year.

 

Neil Thomas 0:11:23.5:

So, Anaplan made a significant investment in that over the last period of time. We are beginning to integrate all of that together now. Obviously, what we're trying to do is maintain the best planning platform in the world. We all know and love that, but how do I add the control and the precise and the process management of consolidations? How do I keep those two things in sync and together and don't make any compromise whatsoever? So, my accounting guys who look after the actuals go, 'This is the best product on the planet for this particular purpose, and we don't care about those planning people.' Conversely, the planning people are like, 'We have all the flexibility and power that we need. We don't really mind what you do with consolidations,' but, of course, we want to integrate them together so there's shared data, shared dimensions, shared activity, shared workflow, shared AI. That is what we are working on in the background. So, to keep the best of both things for our audiences that we want to please, but all under one unified framework. Lots and lots of work is going on there, and we will update people as we make progress, and obviously, the Fluence brand has somewhat sadly disappeared, and we have to try to remember to call it Anaplan Financial Consolidations from now on.

 

Neil Thomas 0:12:29.6:

It truly is out of the box, so you can literally switch this thing on and get cracking, like any of our other applications. Obviously, there's some setup configuration, but that's the intent, you do not model anything from scratch. We talk a little bit about disclosure and Excel reporting, so these lay on top, and we can spend a bit more time on those, but those are essentially vehicles for delivery of reporting analysis to the users in the street, and very, very powerful tools and very easy to use. The key thing to remember is, they can, again, be applied to any data source, so they're not just some sort of Anaplan specific thing. You can universally apply them to other things as well, and bring data together, etc., even implement them independently of the Anaplan engine. It is designed to be so easy, even I can do it. I used to do consolidations back in my youth many, many years ago. The process hasn't changed very much. The tools' logos haven't changed that much. It's a fundamental repeat, repeat process but, obviously, you need the audibility; you need it to be easy for the finance team to get to; you need the structures; you need the scale; you need the speed; you need the reporting. All of those things are created and built in with a true native cloud. What we mean by that, of course, is it sits up in the cloud and it was designed for the cloud.

 

Neil Thomas 0:13:43.3:

It's not some 2020 thing that got ported. It has repercussions around size and scale, truly designed from the ground up to be the next generation platform, and it is literally the only one in the market that was made that way from a recency perspective. So, exciting for us. We're super-excited to have it. We would encourage anybody in this room who loves Excel to try Excel reporting. It's so easy to consume, so easy to use. You can do magical things with it and extend it into the disclosure management narrative reporting side as well, so tagging your information and having your reports update from a textual perspective as the numbers change. Again, it's a tool that anybody can use and pick up and sit on top of anything else. We've got some extra wins with the acquisition that we're now applying universally across all of the platforms, so these will be our delivery tools in due course for everything that you do from an office perspective. That's a little bit about consolidations. I will be delighted to show you a bit more in our demo later. I'd like to bring up my good friend, Ankit Jain, who leads up our clients team. Ankit. Tell us about IFP.

 

Ankit Jain 0:14:51.0:

Thank you, everyone. My name's Ankit Jain. I'm with the finance applications team. Really excited to talk about the integrative financial planning application. So, a little over a year ago, we were tasked with developing our first finance app, and we started by talking to our customers to understand what are their requirements. We talked to a number of [unclear word 0:15:10.9] in the room to understand what it means from implementation and deployment, and also industry analysts to understand what does it mean from a finance buyer's perspective, and what's important to CFOs. So, three things emerged. The first one was a universal desire to start with a set of best practices, right? Every finance organization's at a different level of maturity, and they're organizations that want to leapfrog into best practices. The second being the ability to actually compress the time to value. We live in a resource-constrained environment. We're being asked to do more with less, and so it's really important that whatever we do, we reduce the time to value. The last one, which is really important as well, as everybody's said, Anaplan has a superpower, it's called flexibility. Don't lose it. Essentially, what they're asking for, is the best of both worlds, an out of the box functionality solution that still has the power of the flexibility of the Anaplan platform.

 

Ankit Jain 0:16:15.2:

So, late last year we launched the Integrated Financial Planning application, and it's really long, so I'm going to refer to it as IFP now going forward. Essentially, what it is, is an out of the box approach to be able to plan for a P&L balance sheet and cashflow. It covers a set of foundational use cases, right? These are use cases that every finance team needs to be able to support their business. It covers everything from revenue planning, headcount expense, OpEx and CapEx planning. All of this in terms of an output from your three-statement financial planning needs. This application was built on the Anaplan platform; the same platform that you're used to, and it was built with high levels of extendibility in mind. We know that not every finance organization can fit in a box. We know that there are a certain set of unique requirements maybe on the revenue side, so we've built this with a high level of extendibility in mind.

 

Ankit Jain 0:17:20.0:

You see it right behind me, you've seen these typical use cases going down the vertical access, and a number of planning horizons going across. Now, what we've done is, we have built all of this into one single application, one integrated application. So, what this means is that Anaplan finance customers have a more comprehensive starting point on day one. They're not just picking on one use case. They're starting with a concert of integrated financial planning from day one, and that is what is best practice. So, how do we make this work? We use something called a guided setup configurator. It's this really cool piece of technology now in our platform that's available to our applications where you, as a customer and partner, will answer a set of questions. You'll answer a set of questions around how you view the business, what dimensions are important to you, what are the attributes that you need, what are the different planning methods you need.

 

Ankit Jain 0:18:18.5:

Within two hours it will generate a fully functional application; two hours, and what does that mean? So, as an application you get two data hubs, one for financial headcount data that already has a number of out of the box dimensions, plus dimensions you actually wanted to add, reporting currencies, versions, all of that fun stuff. Fully pre-built planning models that factor in things like reports, logic, drivers, forecast methods, all built on Polaris, our sparse calculation engine, and all architected to be performant and scalable. We also ship 110 UX pages with the application; that list is growing, and we've spent a lot of time on the UX to really understand what's needed for these different processes that we cover. Neil mentioned financial consolidation. We've built this with the ability to be able to map the financial consolidation data into IFP and be able to move data between the two applications, and so expect a lot more to hear in the coming months about integration between these two applications. Essentially, what the customer starts with is a very comprehensive starting point, but we know that we're not going to solve 100 per cent of the requirements. So, in this case, you will have a base application and then it's ready for extensions, so what we call it is a configured extend approach, and you're going to use the same modeling logic that you use today when you're building your own models to extend it.

 

Ankit Jain 0:20:02.9:

So, what are the benefits for our customers in this? We are really compressing the implementation timeline. I mentioned two hours using a configurator, so for those of you in the finance track, be here at four o'clock, because Tony Wright is going to share that with this group. What it does is, basically, we view that our customers cannot deploy the application in as little as eight weeks with minimal effort, full life cycle, and because we're providing such a comprehensive starting point, our view is that most finance customers will start their Anaplan journey using the Integrated Financial Planning application. They'll continue to extend their solution on the platform. We've also built this to be able to drive efficiencies and increase your forecast accuracy, and you have to remember, these are use cases that we've deployed over 1500 times. We've taken all of those best practices and distilled it into the application, and that means drivers, forecast methods, even how we architect it. All of this is meant to reduce the level of manual effort and improve your forecast accuracy. We're also providing a more unified financial view, so even though you may extend the application out, all of that data will come back to IFP. It's where you house your three-statement plan.

 

Ankit Jain 0:21:34.5:

Neil mentioned all of those cool reporting capabilities that we had around Anaplan [unclear word 0:21:37.5] and disclosure management. All of those are compatible with IFP. Lastly, flexibility at the core. This is an application that is built on Anaplan, and the approach that all our customers are going to take is, utilize the pre-built components that they need and then extend out, just like they would in the past. So, we've had momentum in the market. We have well over 11 customers now that have signed up to be on the journey with us from an IFP perspective, and they vary from different industries, from CPG to five services, to hi-tech, and organizations that are from $1 billion to $30 billion in revenue. We have two customers that are now live. Sayerlack, a $1 billion paint distributor manufacturer in Mexico, with a very complex brand structure all over Central America. They run on SAP, and prior to Anaplan, hundreds of spreadsheets moving around. They were able to deploy IFP within 12 weeks, and they even extended the application to be able to support commercial revenue planning, where they're planning at the skill level within the application.

 

Ankit Jain 0:23:10.2:

Sizewell C, this is a public private partnership between the UK government and EDF, an Anaplan customer. They are spending $30 billion over ten years to be able to build the first nuclear power plant in the UK. They have reporting requirements. They need to be able to show their shareholders that they're providing transparency in terms of where the spend is going, and they deployed the IFP application again within ten weeks for OpEx use cases. They even extended the application to be able to plan and report at a work breakdown structure, because they use the configurator to add that flexibility that they needed. I'm going to cheat a little bit over here, because we may not have time for Q&A! I see there's some questions. So, the common question I get is, 'Is this really built on the Anaplan platform?' The answer is 100 per cent, yes. This is built on the Polaris calculation engine. It uses the same platform services that you're used to from a UX, from an innovation perspective, from a security, from a workflow capability. It's the same platform.

 

Ankit Jain 0:24:27.6:

The other question I get is, 'Ankit, is this really as flexible as you say it is?' Yes, 100 per cent, because we know that finance buyers require flexibility. Planning varies from industry from a business model perspective. We have examples where customers have really extended the application to be able to support different business units that have planned differently, be able to bring in work breakdown structures, be able to actually integrate new revenue planning models into the application. How about, can I bring in my own planning model? A hundred per cent, yes. So, on this, our application, the way it's been built is to be able to support integrations with existing Anaplan models. You may decide that you have a very complex revenue planning requirement, and you're going to build that out separately. We've built this in a way that you can actually easily integrate that data back into IFP so that's where your main P&L will actually always sit. Can existing finance customers deploy this application? Yes. Of the 11 or so more customers that we have, over half of them are existing customers. There are situations where customers have outgrown their current Anaplan solutions. They may have acquired a couple of businesses, they may have restructured, or they may have simply run into limits around sparsity, and they're evaluating whether to use Polaris.

 

Ankit Jain 0:25:56.4:

A lot of situations, in this case, using the IFP application is a great way to be able to get on Polaris, because it solves for the core model-building needs. We have a couple of cool things that are coming down the pipe. So, later this month with balance and cashflow logic, so the ability to plan prepaids and accruals, be able to do an indirect cashflow plan. Co-planner, you saw that video that Adam shared. That is a capability that is coming within IFP, and it's our generative AI capabilities. We're also working on stronger integration with our operational workforce planning application. We recognize that there's organizations out there that need more robust operational workforce capabilities and IFP at the same time, and we're working hard to actually make these two talk together, and with that being said, I'm going to hand it over to John.

 

John Pitstick 0:27:01.6:

Thanks, Ankit. Hey, everyone. Figure out the button here. So, I'm John Pitstick. nice to meet everybody. I'm what's known as a boomerang Anaplaner. I was here in 2015 to 2017, then I went to Workday for five years and decided this was the best platform to work on, so I came back. Nice to see some familiar faces again, and I'm here to talk to you about operational workforce planning. Obviously, being at Workday, I learned a couple of things about HR data, HR systems, and talked to a lot of customers looking for better workforce planning. So, we have an application. I'll get into that in just a second, but just to set the context, I want to talk about how we think about workforce planning. We see it in a few different spectrums. There's your traditional headcount planning that finance typically does. This is all optimized towards finding out the costs, using headcount for drivers. There's strategic workforce planning, which is all about that three-to-five-year vision, how are we transforming our business? What are we looking to do several years out? Getting into a new market, new technologies, adopting AI, etc.

 

John Pitstick 0:28:17.4:

There's the demand side that happens in the operation. If we're a professional services organization running projects, what are the skills that we have in those teams? How do we need to deploy those? What does that mean for our workforce hiring needs and demand on that front? That can cover a lot of different industries, it will. It's also a reason why we didn't want to focus on that first. We wanted to go broad, have a large addressable market, and a best practice use case to start with initially. So, that led us to what we call operational workforce planning, and that's your short-to-medium-term workforce plan. It's anywhere up to 18 months. We have within the application top-down, bottom-up very robust workforce planning! So, plus-plus to what you normally see in headcount planning that finance does. For example, spanner control metrics, demographics available, everything is position based which we built. That's one thing I learned in the HR tech world, is that position-based planning is the right way to plan. It helps get rid of all those concepts of employees plus TBHs minus RECs equals not the right number.

 

John Pitstick 0:29:40.1:

One thing that is tricky here is, we did talk to - I won't repeat a lot of what Ankit said; we did a lot of the same research, talked to customers, talked to partners. HR is a different animal. Is there anyone who can say they're on an HR team in this room? Oh, yes, almost a handful, three or four. Rupert. It's trickier to get to HR. They're on their own maturity spectrum in terms of data adoption. People in analytics wasn't really a thing 15 years ago, right, and then it became a thing, and teams are becoming more data driven, more strategic in their influence, so it's not for every HR team yet, but those ones that are strategic, we are finding success in being able to engage. This use case is actually for multi - or this application, I should say, it's actually for multi-stakeholders. It's for HR so that they can tie together the needs of the business, the hiring plans, work within the confines of finance in terms of budget, and also be tightly associated with their business partners, business leaders of the organization to make sure they are finding the right skills into the right role at the right time. That's the whole mission of operational workforce planning, is to bring together these three organizations to have one source of truth for the workforce of tomorrow.

 

John Pitstick 0:31:09.9:

What is additionally in this application, if you've heard the term closed loop workforce planning, that's definitely something we wanted to focus on. That's the best practice. It is position centric. We do as frequent of update from core HR systems as a customer wants to, so it could be nightly, it could be hourly. The idea is to always have that constant view of what's going on. I like to say - I'll watch my language here - but the workforce doesn't give a crap about your financial cycles, right? It just does what it does. It's very dynamic, it's very volatile, impacted by external and internal factors all the time. We do have some modeling in there. It wouldn't be Anaplan if there wasn't some scenario modeling. So, we have some ways to project out hiring surges, hiring freezes, rifts, etc., but really this whole thing exists to give this alignment to these three critical parts of the organization. We will get into some additional applications or applets over time. We're working on some stuff in the platform to better support org modeling, for example, and we do have project resource planning and context in our planning planned in some of those departmental examples coming later this year.

 

John Pitstick 0:32:29.2:

So, yes, as I mentioned, it's really interesting. I'm living this right now. You didn't know this, Anaplan has been through a transformation over the past couple of years, and we're back to a stage where we're actually surging in hiring again, especially within the applications teams, as Neil knows, and the process has been a little painful. There's a lot of manual steps, spreadsheets, emails, approval processes, and we're really trying to eliminate that. So, I can happily announce that kicking off the project next week, our own Anaplan HR team is going to be adopting operational workforce planning with the rest of the company, and we are so happy about that, not chasing spreadsheets and emails anymore. Yes, there's a cool aspect where it's like a staging area, right? So many things happened between the original plan and actually going out and doing the hiring, finding the right person. Things even happened during the hiring process, and we really optimized this to be a continuous planning system, based on these key positions that you need to hire in your organization.

 

John Pitstick 0:33:35.5:

So, as mentioned, these are the big stakeholders that we're trying to help. We do have lots of views for finance in the application. Everything on the finance side is more cost-center-based, trying to give them the financial impact of what's going on. Then you have HR. We really tried to focus on the HR BP. Not many softwares have ever done that throughout all the time. Those three of you probably know what I'm talking about. These are very important roles working with business leaders, and so they understand what those business leaders need. They understand the right skill sets for the positions they're trying to fill, and again, this is really, for us, one of the key stakeholders that HR BP, our people partner. Talent is huge. Usually talent doesn't know what's going on beyond the next three months, and so we tried to make it so they could have more visibility into this continuously adjusting forecast, and what they need to be ready for in terms of maybe going out and getting some contractors to help with hiring, like we're doing right now at Anaplan. Then, of course, the business, giving people leaders visibility into what's going on in their organization, helping them to see patterns where they have successful employees, what are the skill sets that those employees had, and being able to apply that to future decision-making.

 

John Pitstick 0:34:58.5:

I like to always give a nod to the analysts' firms we work with out there. One of our favorites is Sapient. Sapient is very interesting, because I think more than any other firm, they really focus on workforce planning. You take some of the other ones, they're more focused on the HR systems record, the HCM tools, or the recruiting tools, but Sapient really looks into workforce planning, and these are small numbers, but we're dealing in really big numbers. If I told you, if you're a fairly large organization, you could be spending $20 billion a year on your workforce. What if you could get one per cent better? What's one per cent? $20 billion. There's lot of math people here. $200 million, that's right! That's no small potatoes, right? Not only is the workforce the most expensive, that's been said a couple of times today. Also, I think I've heard Neil say the most important asset, and totally true but, yes, the skill sets that they bring is going to drive the mission-critical operations of your organization, whether that's driving revenue, or customer engagement and customer satisfaction.

 

John Pitstick 0:36:10.7:

There's another one of my favorite people here, somewhere out there, is [?Kouros]. This guy, he loves this one slide. He built - it's called Don't Kick the Can. You're going to see it at some point from us, but it's basically this foot launching a can with WFP on it. So many organizations kick the can on workforce planning. You don't have to do that anymore. We're trying to give you the easy button with our application for workforce planning, and again, proper workforce planning, sure it's small, a small percentage increase, but in massive impacts to your organization. We also have some customer momentum. This is a little story about Delivery Hero. Delivery Hero is a German food delivery organization. Has anyone heard of Delivery Hero? A few. Good. Not a ton, though. They're not big in North America; they're big everywhere else. They have 50,000 employees, and one crazy stat is 1.5 billion riders, people delivering food all over the world. They were our design partner. They showed interest in our application very early, and I think it's been about a year we've actually been engaging with them. We had access to their data and their systems very early, spun up an early version of the application as a beta, learned a ton from that.

 

John Pitstick 0:37:35.9:

We were, of course, using Polaris. I think everybody knows all the apps use Polaris now, so there is some things to work out, some learnings there. That was very helpful. They're a little finance heavy. We're working to get the HR team a little more engaged here, but they're doing annual and quarterly processes at position level. They are engaged with the HR BPs. The HR BPs are actually the primary planners in this use case. One thing that was a little bit challenging, they had so many different pay elements, or pay components we actually call them in the application. So, not just salary, not just bonus, not just overtime, but meal vouchers, auto reimbursement, money for your bike if you're a rider, etc. So, that was a bit of a challenge, something we had to learn from. It's not just five or six pay elements that make up workforce planning for some of these companies out there. What are they getting out of this? Well, they're getting an app for free, because they were a design partner, so hey, that's a good plug for being a design partner, you get a good deal on future apps!

 

John Pitstick 0:38:48.1:

They were struggling with standardization. They're growing so fast. They're acquiring a lot of different companies around the world, and they just couldn't get a handle on the workforce plan, so they just needed to standardize globally. We're helping them to do that, but also with best practice. They're not going to do the closed loop position planning thing quite yet; that's a phase two for them but, yes, they're actually in the last stage of the final implementation steps for production go live. It'll be before the end of this month that they're actually up with all users. Just a little quote from Mario, 'Yes, they've been great partners. Always loved Delivery Hero for what they helped us with.' Then we also have some cool stuff going on. I didn't make a big deal about this before, but if Adam was here, he'd be proud of me. We are using the cutting-edge technology whenever possible in the workforce app, so of course that's Polaris. There's a new platform framework that is going to PAF, if you've heard of that. We're the first application to jump on that. That's the platform provisioning and delivering upgradable to our customers. We're getting our own co-planner instant soon. We're actually in the process right now of training it up on those questions, but always going to be adopting the new stuff. I get excited about that. I've been in product a long time. I like to take risks, and thankfully, we have a boss like Neil who appreciates that, and also, Adam loves risk takers and innovators.

 

John Pitstick 0:40:26.1:

We started our PAF journey about four or five months ago. It's like, hey, here's our application just into the system, and then we deploy it, and I learned just late last week that we've actually added 1000-line items to our application since the very first time we tested the application framework. That's just to say we're continuously innovating learning from customers and trying to make this application better, so I guess that we do have co-planner. We just built a pretty cool - I think it's awesome, actually - hiring freeze, What if. I've never seen anything like it. Check it out. Actually, we won't be able to demo that to you today in the demo sessions, but reach out to me. I'll find a way to show you that pretty cool stuff. I have a feeling it might be beneficial the rest of the this year with what's going on. Yes, further expanding based on feedback into more stuff on skills. We started out with just toe dipping on skills, but then we've been adding more capabilities around skills.

 

John Pitstick 0:41:29.9:

Yes, learned some lessons with Delivery Hero on the pay components and how to make that more configurable and more robust initially. We have one workflow included in the app right now for the bottom-up annual plan, but we'll be adding more over the next couple of months, and then, yes, we're working with our UX and the Polaris team to bring more advanced, more robust time-aware org modeling capabilities into the application and all future apps. So, that's what's going on with OWP. Talk to your reps or your USBP if you want to learn more, or partners, find me, and then I think I'll wrap it up, Neil.