Mark Gordon 0:00:09.0:

I just want to introduce myself. My name's Mark Gordon. I run our supply chain business in the Americas. For those that don't know - because I do get this a fair amount - from my point of view, Anaplan is a supply chain company. Everyone thinks we are all these other things, and that's all probably true, and great, but from my point of view, we are a supply chain company. That's what I do. I live it day in, day out. That's the business I run, that's what I care about, but I'm not blind to everything else. Just a couple of quick things. We are a $200 million business. We have over 500 customers in all industries worldwide. We've got multiple use cases in every industry. So if you can guys can think about it, we've likely done it. If we were a standalone supply chain company, we'd be probably somewhere between the fourth and fifth largest. So people don't know that, and they should, so it's my responsibility, and now I am drafting all of you, your responsibility to get this message out and tell people this is where we stand as far as Anaplan goes.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:01:28.1:

For the rest of today, you guys can call more refer to me as Coach Mark. I would appreciate that greatly. I was trying to figure out what to do when they said, 'Would you get up and say a few words?' and so forth, and I said, 'Sure,' and then I started thinking about it. Part of me wanted to do like April Fool's thing, because it then dawned on me this on April 1. I decided to go with March Madness instead, because some people that know me - we had dinner last night - others know that I do this in my spare time. Coaching my daughter's basketball team is really my main job. So here's what I want to talk about today. Risks, managing risks, where they show up, how they show up, what do we do, how are they connected. A little bit about enterprise planning. I'm certainly going to go deeper in supply chain, because, like I said a few minutes ago, that's what I care about, that's what we do, and presumably you guys do too, because you're here. Then, talk a little bit about journeys, and I want to show you some things about journeys. I was really excited over the course of the morning, and even last night, to hear about more customers doing more things, and that was cool, so we're going to talk a little bit about that.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:02:52.7:

The slide's a little dated, actually. Yet, still relevant. The two things that I added were the one at the top, the auto tariffs, because, in case anyone hasn't heard of tariffs, they're a thing - today, or tomorrow, and then we'll see, - then, the other one I added was the picture of the formula, because my wife, as a psychologist, has no idea what I do. She said to me one day - and that was like, what, COVID time, like '21-ish, '22 - she was like, 'Formula is not available on shelves, and people are freaking out. I'm reading that these are supply chain issues. Is that what you actually do?' I said, 'Kind of, yes. It's my job to make sure that doesn't happen with our customers and clients,' but I look at this for a couple of reasons. Pick a year. Pick a year, pick an event. I threw some in here that are cool. There's always something, right? Whether it's tariffs, I was working on a deal once with a large German luxury auto manufacturer, who literally called me and said, 'I can no longer do the deal that we were going to do that we've been working on for two years to do, because Russia just invaded Ukraine, and all of my suppliers are in Ukraine, or most of them. This project is off.' Literally overnight. I've never had anything like that happen to me ever. Literally, overnight that's what happened. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:04:30.1:

The other thing that I look in here, is things like at the top. So there's the tariff part, and I get that from an operational standpoint, I get that from a supply chain standpoint, but the other thing to think about is job losses loom. That's what jump out to me, because that could be a supply chain problem, but it could not be, or maybe it is and maybe it influences, but how are these connected and how do we deal with that is really the thing that I started to think about over the last little bit. The more I'm in an Anaplan - and again, I care about supply chain - but people are educating me on other stuff, like, yes, interest rates matter, cost of capital maters. Are we opening facilities? Where are we putting them? How much is that going to cost us? Do we have resources to staff those facilities? Maybe, yes, maybe, no, but what are those trade-offs, and what do we do? So I was kind of looking at this and saying, 'Jeeze, these risks cut across all four different areas within the enterprise.' Arguably, you guys would throw more on there, and you're totally right to do that. These were just four that I selected: sales, finance, supply chain, and HR. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:05:47.3:

So, this is the fun part about it. Does everyone know what this is?  

 

Audience 0:05:55.7:

March Madness. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:05:56.4:

The March Madness thing, you guys have got it, cool. Just checking. So a couple of things about this. These are not winners. It kind of broke down. I got a little tired. These are not winners, like from one round to the next, like the traditional bracket. Think of it more as a listing, but they're still there. Show of hands, how many people this year - or even last, it doesn't matter - but this year played a bracket from March Madness? That's it? 

 

Audience 0:06:27.8:

[Laughter] 

 

Mark Gordon 0:06:30.5:

Keep the hands up, for those of that you did play a bracket. That's cool. How many of you that played a bracket, keep your hands up still if you only played one region of the bracket? No hands should be up, unless you had a really bad night. Of course, the bracket, you fill out all four regions, of course you do. Why? Because they're all connected, and you need to play the game across all four regions. Not just one, but all four. So when I put this together, I was like, hey, I could talk about this all day long, and you guys are going to hear me do that, but I can't ignore the other three regions that are existing, because we just talked about the headlines before, like this stuff matters, and it matters across the board. What we're doing in supply chain, we had a conversation - Will's here I know - because Will and I had a conversation earlier about finance and planning, and raw material costs, and commodity prices, and making investments. Like, that's there. So, all of these things interact with one another. We're going to focus down here, and I'm going to show you why. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:07:52.3:

Okay, the study's a little dated, but I've used this before, and I love this one. So when I think about risk, I think about managing a risk holistically, like we were just talking about on the bracket. If you don't manage your risk, that turns into a disruption. Is that fair? Do you guys roughly agree? Nodding heads. Good. So we're tracking. Disruptions are a problem, a big problem. Here's why. This is in the supply chain space alone, and there's plenty of data, there's plenty of case studies. You can google anything you want in supply disruption, and you'll see a lot of interesting things. On the day an announcement is made - this is a study from a guy at Georgia Tech, and - where's the other guy from? - maybe Northeastern - on the announcement day of a supply chain disruption, the markets were super-unfavorable. They hit the companies -7% on that day. That's bad. That's not a good day. Here's the interesting thing. That's worse, and that's not so great either. So what we're looking at is unmitigated risks lead to disruptions, lead to a huge problem, from a market-facing standpoint and from a return standpoint, and your ability then to, what, finance operations, money is more expensive, labor is moving someplace else, with an organization that's better run, whatever the case may be. So all of these things are connected, and this is bad. So you underperform the market, and it stays that way for a long time, so it's in all of out best interests to manage the risks as best we can, so that they don't turn into disruptions. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:10:01.0:

So I want to talk a little bit about that. Now, think back to that March Madness bracket kind of thing, and it dawned me in either a moment of clarity or a moment of being delirious, that this slide is exactly that bracket. I didn't make this one. I made the other one. You could tell, because the other one wasn't that good, but this one, this is what we have, this is what we do. I looked a this, and I'm like, oh, my God, these are four regions. We're playing all four regions at the same time, and they have to coexist somewhere in the middle. In each of these things, we could do this one, one day; we could come across and do this one another day. Nobody cares. I'm going to have a co-coach - not an assistant coach, but a co-coach - come in at the end and tell us about some of that honeycomb stuff, but I looked at this, and I was like, that is the bracket, and if we agreed, which we did two minutes ago, five minutes ago, because everyone put their hands down when I said, 'Who played only one region of a bracket?' everyone put their hands down. Then you have to agree we've got to do all this too, because it's the same thing. Okay? But, again, I only care about the purple stuff. There's other, smarter people at Anaplan to talk to you about the other stuff. I care about the purples stuff. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:11:29.5:

How are we doing that? That piece in the middle was the platform, so we're managing risk by the platform, and we're managing risk by our applications. I'm going to talk about each of those separately on a given slide. You guys have probably heard bits and pieces in different sessions, our technology, our platform, our scalability, the things we're doing, AI, and so on and so forth. All of that's great, all of that's true, and we like all of that, but the thing that strikes me about the platform is the way, again, all four regions need to operate simultaneously. That's not an integration thing, that's not a hand-off thing; that is one thing, where everything can operate simultaneously. So that's why I like the platform. Good enough? I like our applications, because, if we're talking about risk, and we're talking about managing risk so that it doesn't turn into a disruption, one of the ways that we at Anaplan are helping, and our partners are helping our clients manage risk, is through applications, which you have all heard about, I'm hoping. Nods. Great.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:12:54.3:

But I actually kind of like this slide, and I like this slide because of the top one on the right. So we have learned enough - 500-plus customers and supply chain, use cases all across the word - we have learned enough to say, 'Let's embed that in the applications that we have, that we provide to customers.' We're giving you a starting point, we're giving you accelerated time to value, we're giving you best practices, we're giving you upgradability. We're giving you all these guardrails, because we want to move from, 'It can,' to, 'It does.' Like I tell my kids all the time, 'Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.' To me, this is fairly similar. The platform can do lots of different things. That's awesome. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, and so we have, over time, made a significant amount of investment - you've heard about it in different sessions - where we're saying, 'Look, push it back on us. Push the work back on us. Let us build you applications. Let us give you guardrails. Let us give you workflows and methodologies to keep you within a realm. If you want to do other stuff to it, you can and you should.' I'm not saying like, take what we have, and that's the be all and end all. It's not, not at all, but you should take it, use what's out of the box, and then extend it as you need to, but then you're thinking more about making deliberate choices. You're not rushed, you're thinking how you want to run your business, and you are managing your project risk. We are reducing your project risk, so that your rollout does not turn into a disruption, because I don't want to see any of those headlines for anybody here. That's bad for me, and for us. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:14:53.8:

Why does that matter? A couple of slides ago I showed you disruptions are costly. They're costly in the marketplace to companies -7%, -10%, -1.7%. We saw that. This is why that connection and that platform and the applications matter. This is something I've been asking for a while, and you guys may have seen this in bits and pieces. I didn't make this up. We have it, you probably have seen it in certain places, but connected decision-making is what we care about. That platform in the middle, four regions operating together, that's what we care about, and people are rewarded for that. You are rewarded by performance, based on your ability to work together. Again, the working together, is simply managing risk holistically, not in a silo, and not in a piece, but managing holistically across the board. So our companies, our clients get rewarded by the ability to work together and tie it all together and see what's happening from one area to another.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:16:03.2:

Okay, supply chain and IBP. I'm missing a slide in here that I really loved, which is too bad. I'm going to pause here for one second, because I do need to talk about it. Does anyone know what the anniversary is today from five years ago? Anybody? Sorry, four years ago. We're in 2025, right? Okay, four years ago, sorry. 

 

Audience 0:16:26.5:

[Unclear] 

 

Mark Gordon 0:16:27.6:

COVID, yes. Back to the disruption thing, think disruption. Anybody remember? 

 

Audience 0:16:33.4:

[Unclear words] 

 

Mark Gordon 0:16:36.1:

Maybe. Do you guys remember the Ever Given? Does anyone remember that?  

 

Audience 0:16:43.7:

[Unclear words] 

 

Mark Gordon 0:16:44.7:

The Ever Given. 

 

Audience 0:16:45.9:

Yes, the ship. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:16:46.9:

The ship. The ship in the Suez Canal. That was March of 2021. That thing was disastrous. I have a slide in a different version. I meant to bring it up in here. It didn't make it, that's fine. The stats on how costly that was, like, literally knocked me off my chair. You're talking trillions, and hundreds of billions per day. I even brought it down per hour, and it was staggeringly bad. I had that slide in here, because, to me, can we do anything about a boat getting cockeyes in the Suez Canal? We cannot. We can do a lot of things; we can't do that. But can we manage the risks that are under our control? We can, and we should. Again, because I can't deal with the Ever Given, but I can make sure my risks don't turn into the disruptions that are costly, maybe to a lesser degree. So back to supply chain. Now I'm focusing that bottom-right region where we were, the purple region, just the supply chain stuff. That's what I care about. That's what, hopefully, you guys care about. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:18:03.1:

Just like the four regions, historically, don't necessarily don't talk to one another, supply chain isn't that great either in terms of not talking to one another. I'm sure I'm going to get nodding heads. I hope I am, anyway, when I tell people, 'Guess what? The demand planners don't necessarily talk to the supply planners.' Yes. Has anyone bought inventory when they should have? Yes. Has anyone put stuff on an airplane instead of on a ship, not because of the Suez Canal thing, but just because it needs to be there, but only for it to then not need to be there? Has that happened? Tell me yes. Okay. Because we are disconnected. We are disconnected in siloes. Again, I came from a world - I ran Oracle's supply chain business. I don't say that to throw anybody under the bus. We had great tools and great products at the time. It was a lot of heavy-lifting for them to talk to one another. It was a lot - latency, inaccuracy - it was just a lot. So what we're talking about here is, again, being all part of the platform with the applications on top of it.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:19:20.6:

The other thing that I'm interested in - I've heard a lot from you guys, not so much in this session, but in one-on-ones that we've had, because I've met a lot of you - like this stuff in D, and maybe also in E, I've heard a lot of where, I don't know, within the last few years I've heard more and more making decisions, making supply chain and operational decisions based on financial metrics, where I haven't heard that as much maybe a generation before that. Before that, it was like fill rates, and customer service levels. Yes, inventory costs, but really less about, what's my operating margin? How am I making decisions on margin and/or revenue? Like, those things weren't happening before. Why? Because supply chain tools were supply chain tools. I've got a team of folks - like I said, I came from Oracle - I've got a team of folks from o9, from Blue Yonder, from Kinaxis, from all the powers that be, and we all say the same thing, which is, 'Finally, we can actually dollarize and make accurate the financial picture of our supply chain to make "real" business decisions, not operational decisions, which in some way are great operationally, but suboptimal financially.'  

 

Mark Gordon 0:20:41.8:

So we're getting past that here, and then add into it now the growth of scalability, computing technology, AI, everything else, we're starting to look for anomalies, visibility, all those kinds of things, all in the name of managing risk to minimize disruption. I don't want to put anyone on the spot. Whose organization looks like that? Anybody? Anybody willing to raise hands? Okay, you're all doing well. Some hands? Half hands? Okay, a couple of half. That's cool. That's not a problem. Everyone's got to start someplace. I will tell you this, for anyone that's wondering, we're dealing with all kinds of customers, like I said, in all kinds of industries. We have companies - and again, not to put anybody on the spot - nothing shocks me in terms of the amount of spreadsheet usage. We're talking tens of billions of dollars of revenue in companies, where you ask them, 'How are your running your supply chain?' and the answer is, 'On spreadsheets.' So, don't think you're alone in this. The half hands, be proud. Raise that hand. We see it a lot. We see a lot of manual process; we see a lot of disconnected process. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:22:15.6:

The big problem, again, back to the theme of what we're talking about today, there's a process inefficiency. I don't love that. When I look at Anaplan slides, and I see stuff like so-and-so improved their process from 15 days to 5 days, like, that's cool, but what's that worth? That's what I care about, because you already saw me put up two metrics, and then, arguably, the third that I didn't have the slide with the Suez Canal and it costing a bazillion dollars, but you already saw the return slide. This is real money, and it's a lot of money. So I'm happy that people can make their process go from 15 days to 5. What I care more about is that your revenue goes up and your costs go down. That's what I care about, and that's not really going to happen here, and that's where, in my mind, process improvement can only take you so far. Enabling tools complete the picture, and they always go hand-in-hand, but one is going to take you only so far.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:23:22.5:

So we are moving folks, for sure, into the middle, and ideally, to the right. The one in the middle is the one I could talk to you about all day long, supply chain planning platform, and everything's connected, and all the functions talk to one another, and demand and supply and inventory and production planning can all synchronize. Yes, we can make all of that financial, and yes, you can make the right decisions based on the right metrics for you, and now you're able to focus on the metrics that you should be focusing on, not the ones that were handed to you because you couldn't do any better. Then, back to the bracket thing, we're moving over to the right, because in your journeys, as you guys think about your journeys - and I know, because I recognize a lot of faces again - I'm seeing folks at the beginning of their journey, some in the middle, some are moving towards the end. Spoiler alert: there is no end. But we're seeing folks move that way, and again, if you think that your journey doesn't include finance and sales and HR, as a supply chain professional, you are allowing risk to creep back in, and you are asking for disruptions to happen. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:24:58.0: 

We see it all the time. You guys see it. Are we tracking? We agree? Okay, good. I'm just making sure, because I did this late at night, and I wanted to make sure that it was not my Jerry Maguire moment. So we want people, for sure, to move left to center. Start somewhere, get good, pick a spot. We don't care. Start with demand planning, do really well there. I'm a demand planning guy. I've done it forever. That's like my bias, that's my thing. I love it. I think that's the center of the supply chain universe. People can disagree with me. That's cool too. Some people start with production planning or inventory planning. That's their problem, that's the one they want to address. Biggest return on value, do that. I don't have any problem with that, but I do want you to move and think about how do I go from here to here, because I don't want inventory on airplanes, I don't want expedited freight, I don't want an inventory planner buying stuff that the sales organization and then the demand planner is like, 'Why did you buy that?' 'Because you told me to.' 'No, I didn't.' 'Yes, you did.' All that kind of stuff.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:26:05.2:

Then, I want you to start thinking about how am I moving to incorporate the other risk. What is my sales organization saying? Am I in tune with what they're doing? Am I in tune with their risk and opportunities? Do I know what distribution is being increased? Am I moving into a new channel? Finance, manufacturing R&D, like we talked about, are we setting up facilities in the right place? Are we staffing them appropriately? Do I know what my costs are in that facility? What happens when I have a problem in supply chain and I'm running a scenario on the world's best platform that tells me I have to run a third shift? Is that a reasonable to do? How do we know? All of that's happening in there. So this is the way we're going, and again, it is a journey, an endless journey, and it's get better, get better, get better. One project, then the next, then the next.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:27:08.5:

A little teaser. We talked a little bit about risk, and how we at Anaplan want to take the risk from you and bring it back on us. People talk a lot about IBP. It's been around for a long time. People have written books about it. I used to work very closely with the guys at Oli Wight, who, arguably, wrote the book on integrated business planning. Yes, we are investing in an application for integrated business planning, to put structure, guardrails, best practices, visibility, workflows, all in your process, and no, you do not need to have everything in the middle done before you put something on top of it. You can, if you want. Those are discussions I would love to have with you. Should I? Maybe. Or, should I see visibility across the top? Should I see everything, and feed pieces in where I can at least rely on those pieces, where I feel good about those pieces happening, I'm really strong in demand, I have no clue what's happening on the product portfolio side, I don't know what's happening on the supply side? Yes, you can still do that, and arguably, you should, because I would say let the process and the governance of the process guide your roadmap - we're going to talk about roadmaps in a little bit - but guide your roadmap on aligning your priorities with enabling tools in the timeframe in which you want to do these things. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:28:49.9:

So we've got it, it's coming out, it's coming out soon. You can read stuff at the bottom - I'm sure you guys already did - so it's not detailed planning at all these functional steps, it is meant to sit on top of detailed planning at the functional steps. The nice thing I like about what we do, and I've said this a million times, and those of you that I've worked with have heard me say it, do I want you guys to use all Anaplan in that middle dark-red box? Of course I do. I sure do. Am I naïve enough to think you're going to do that, or haven't made investments in other tools that are working for you? No. If you've got stuff that's working, awesome. Take advantage of it. Be happy that you've got stuff that's working, and this will sit on top, it will ingest a different demand planning solution. It will ingest a different supply planning solution, but it will marry it up and you'll be able to all see it in one place, which is what I care most about, is derisking, not disrupting, and making sure you've got full visibility end-to-end. This is just in the supply chain space, remember, one region, not all four, but this is what's going to own that region, and this is going to be like one of your final four picks.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:30:16.4:

Okay, everyone's heard of IBP. I've got a couple of slides on what it is, what it isn't, what we should do, what we should not do. I talked a little bit about it already. For me, there's a couple of things, and it says it on here - everyone's got their own view of where it's the best and where it isn't the best - I like IBP. I like what we're doing in IBP for two reasons, and I'll go back to them all the time, and you'll hear me say it all the time. One is the financialization of the supply chain, and two is the visibility in reporting. I've been through a million - not a million, but a lot - of projects where people want IBP. They launch IBP, the management review meetings literally take a week, and it's a data argument, it's go-off-and-run scenarios, and it's inconclusive answers. That's not an IBP process, or if it is, it's not that good, if I'm being blunt. What we want is, the end of the monthly cycle to have evaluated the trade-offs, modelled the trade-offs, and come to a quick, easy-ish, transparent management review meeting as your final step, that the business can execute on. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:31:45.8:

So I've got a couple of screenshots. Everyone's seen Anaplan. You guys are at an Anaplan conference, so I'm assuming the answer is yes. A couple of reviews. This stuff may change. These are mock-ups and some recent stuff that I got, which I can share with you, but don't be surprised if maybe it's tweaked here or there. Portfolio review around products, a portfolio review matrix, growth and margin, etc., so a real decent view, I think, or even a good view, into the health of the portfolio, what's doing well, what isn't, what's coming, what's leaving. All those kinds of things are being managed in here. One platform, one place. Demand, which we've already established I love, and I do on a day in, day out basis, so again, lots of things in and around demand. Not demand planning. Again, this is not the functional piece underneath the layer. We've got different stuff doing that, or you may have different stuff doing that. This is sitting on top, looking at your overall demand picture. Risks and opportunities especially, up at the top, $1.5 billion, whatever that means, but that was our mocked-up data. What are my risks and opportunities? Those are the conversations we want you to have in the demand review. What is that looking like? 

 

Mark Gordon 0:33:13.3:

I skipped supply, and I kind of went to the end, this management business review. So this is where the arguments around data happen. This is where, okay, maybe we have the right data, except it's going to take me like two days to create reports, like non-value-added time. So this is where all this is live, it sits on top of all the data. You're looking at it, you're running scenarios. You are leaving that meeting with decisions made. Not decisions to be made, but decisions that are made around my trade-offs, managing risk, preventing disruption. All points that I talked a little bit about before, it's your job to manage risks in your supply chain. It's your job to prevent disruption in your supply chain. It's my job to make sure I'm giving you the tools and the process and any help I can on behalf of the company, to derisk your ability to do that, in as quick and easy and as clean a way as we can, getting you guys to the right answers, the best answers that you can possibly get to, in the most efficient way that you can. We do that based on the platform that I talked about, that thing in the middle, and the applications that we have that sit on top of the platform.  

 

Mark Gordon 0:34:51.2:

So just to make sure that we're all on the same page when you guys all leave, yes, we have this platform that's really cool, and it does a lot of great stuff, and it scales, and you can build lots of cool stuff on it. After, you evaluate and look at the purpose-built applications that we have already made for you that sit on top of it, so that we're helping you move further, faster, and there's the ability for us to try to compress that time-to-value which my assistant, or my co-coach, is going to talk about right now. We're going to do that through this explanation of journey. So, if you guys haven't met James O'Leary, you should, my co-coach in this whole thing. So as I understand supply chain, James understands all of it. So what I asked him to do, and you can introduce yourself too, what I asked him to do was come on and talk a little bit about the journey, the speed, the ability to move from one quadrant to another, one region to another if we're staying with the metaphor, while we're able to connect all of it with that view. So take it away. 

 

James O'Leary 0:36:17.3:

I feel like I should give a fiery, halftime speech as the co-coach. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:36:20.7:

One second. What I did want to do, Elena wouldn't let me do it, because it just is not okay, because there are some things that have not aged well, and it really depends on who you are and what your background is, and all that. My strong… 

 

James O'Leary 0:36:37.2:

It seems like you're going to do it. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:36:38.8:

No, no, I'm not. I am not. My strong recommendation to everybody, when you leave, put on your list of things to do, if you want to fire up your teams, or if you're thinking something about your team that's not that flattering, or they're not performing, or there's balls being dropped, or risks that are happening, or the disruption has come, google, 'Bobby Knight halftime speech.' It's like a minute-and-thirty-seconds of greatness. It does not age well. It is not for everybody, but I would often say to the girls that I coach, 'I can't tell you on behalf of your parents whether you should or shouldn't listen. I can only tell you this is out there, and you may want to do it, and just know when my face is beet-red and when I'm thinking about things, that's what's going on in my head.' I strongly recommend it. Go ahead. 

 

James O'Leary 0:37:35.0:

Your challenging your Bobby Knight. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:37:37.2:

I love that guy. 

 

Audience 0:37:38.2:

[?Do you want] some chairs? 

 

James O'Leary 0:37:39.8:

Yes. Well, no throwing chairs. Mark is a basketball player, if you guys hadn't figured. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:37:44.7:

That was going to be my closer, but anyway, go ahead. 

 

James O'Leary 0:37:47.6:

So we have a few minutes, but I think… 

 

Mark Gordon 0:37:51.9:

I think we have five minutes. 

 

James O'Leary 0:37:52.5:

Five, all right. So I think that the takeaways, for me, are first and foremost Mark's focusing on IBP as the connected supply chain, but start with Anaplan as the platform for the connected enterprise, driving decision excellence across the enterprise, Anaplan can work through IBP as the connected platform for supply chain. So it's your decision excellence motion within supply chain. It is not all the underlying capabilities; it's the layer that drives the collaboration, the visibility, the transparency, the decision-making around your supply chain. I'll give an example. Well, why don't we go through a couple of examples here? So, one point to make is, you can see this is an example of one customer that we serve, and they're doing multiple things. They're playing in all four corners of the brackets, or at least three corners of the brackets: supply chain, finance, and sales. I think this speaks to the example of the relationship between it's not just about doing something in the supply chain. If you think about what drives demand in the supply chain, it's your sales organization, and so having the connection point between what's happening in your go-to-market motion, where you're selling to, what your pipeline looks like, that's going to be one of the inputs that informs demand. 

 

James O'Leary 0:39:14.1:

So if you're thinking about demand in a vacuum, and you're not thinking about the connection to sales, you're missing a key input to the process. Similarly, on the supply side, if you're not producing enough, you're going to need to go and produce new facilities, you're going to need to hire labor, you're going to have to invest capital. That's a finance conversation; that's a real estate conversation. So the connections points of the supply chain to the other parts of the organization are through a connected supply chain organization that's integrated with the rest of the organization to drive the enterprise decision-making and execution that you need. Another customer - different - this is JLR. You saw them up on the main stage when Charlie presented this morning. I think the point I'd make here is that you can see their supply chain use cases. They're a little bit bespoke for JLR, but they happened over time. So to Mark's point, it's how you go on this journey sometimes isn't linear, or isn't one step after another. You might tackle an important problem in supply chain early, you might tackle a number of other problems that are related or connected in other parts of the organization, and then you might tack on future use cases as those issues or challenges arise and become more pressing. 

 

James O'Leary 0:40:31.4:

So how you go on this journey with Anaplan, whether it's by driving the connected supply chain use case and focusing on all of that at once, and leveraging in an integrated business planning type approach, or you do pockets of work in different areas, or in different corners of the brackets, you can take multiple paths to achieve the outcomes that you're looking for. One real example - and this is a customer that does incentive compensation management with us - doesn't do anything in supply chain yet - but I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago, a very large industrial manufacturing company, they're a multibillion-dollar, $10 or $15 billion business revenue, expecting to grow to double the size in the next three to five years. We just started talking about the business, and then we started talking about the supply chain, and we started talking about the implications of tariffs and what it means for their business. So the net of it is, they're in a situation where they have demand that outstrips their ability to produce and supply the components that their customers want for years. The demand is years ahead of where their supply is.  

 

James O'Leary 0:41:45.4:

They need to build facilities in order to meet the demand. They're building multiple facilities to do it. It takes a year to get them up and running, staffed, all the equipment, hiring labor. So they're doing all of that, and at the same time they're also dealing with rising prices to do costs of import for raw materials that they need - steel, copper - all the inputs that they need to make the equipment that they produce. They're going to have to go through a whole pricing discussion around how do we absorb. Do we absorb that? Do we reprice our products? So I think, without even thinking about or being focused on enabling a supply chain use case, we were just talking about their business, and in that conversation you can immediately see the connections between demand, supply, finance, capital, real estate, how it all fits together, and the risk, in this case, there were many, multiple, but things you don't control are tariffs. This is real. Everybody in the room's going to deal with it. You have to figure out how to account for it in your business and how you plan. Nobody controls that. That's a risk. 

 

James O'Leary 0:42:59.2:

There are other risks that will emerge that you can't control, so having the connectedness within your enterprise, within your supply chain across your enterprise, helps you navigate through these challenges more effectively. Last comment. I was listening to Charlie the other day. We were having a conversation, and he was presenting to the leadership team, and he was saying, 'The thought I have is, in these times of uncertainty, there's the old guard or the old-think way of how you manage it. You baton down the hatches, you create a bunch of inventory, you keep it on your balance sheet. You're not optimizing your capital or your resources the best way, and you try to wait out the storm and be in a position where you wait out the storm. Or, if you're able to be dynamic, make good decisions, be more agile, have the information in a more timely manner, you can navigate through the challenges in a more modern way, make better use of your resources, maybe come out more financially secure than if you were to take the more conservative risk-averse-based approach.' 

 

James O'Leary 0:44:02.5:

I think the only way you can do that is if you have visibility, and what we're really trying to do is give you visibility to make better decisions, whether it's in the supply chain, or across the entire enterprise. [?Questions? 0:44:15.1] 

 

Mark Gordon 0:44:16.3:

It's good. Timely.  

 

Audience 0:44:19.2: