Jan Sucaet 0:00:06.1: 

Hello, good afternoon, everybody. I'm the last one for today. My name's Jan Sucaet. I'm the IBP Global Implementation Manager for ABB Electrification. Today I will talk to you about the integrating, putting integrated business planning across a decentralized organization. That's how ABB is organized. Something short about ABB Electrification. We're one of the three divisions within ABB. ABB Electrification is a $15 billion revenue company. We have 52,000 employees. We're scattered across the globe, with eight distribution centers. I personally work within the division smart building, smart power, which is around half of the electrification business. We provide electricity distribution solutions, from source to socket, for both the residential market and the industrial market. Looking at the problem statement at ABB Electrification, we were looking for an IBP process, supported by the right tool that could help us with the process. From a tool perspective, we were looking for a single tool, where we could satisfy the demand, but also balance our resources at our factories, global factories. We were looking for a tool that could help us make decisions. 

Jan Sucaet 0:01:36.5: 

Before Anaplan, we had processes here and there, but there was no standardization. Certain regions did it in one way, other factories did it in another way. We had different levels of maturity, from people who were doing IBP already for ten years, to people who did nothing when it came to forecasting. We had multiple sources of truth. We had a lot of reporting for the past. We had actually no forecasting tool, except in finance, which was very high-level. We needed a common language, because some people were talking about when an order gets created, other people were talking when something gets invoiced. Now in supply chain, those are very different dates. Sometimes in the Middle East, they're six months in between. So knowing when you need to manufacture something is important, but then you need to talk about the right date. So having a single, common language was important for us. We were looking to be more digitally transformation, to use our data to make decisions, which we needed something to work with that. Our big challenge at ABB, as a distributed company, we had sales organizations in countries, organized in regions. We had global factories, typically shipping into the region, but also shipping across the other side of the world for some volume. We were unable to connect the front end and the back end, so each of them were making their own plan, using some high-level finance data. When it came to supply chain, we saw that the accuracy was not at the level we needed. 

Jan Sucaet 0:03:16.7: 

So we were looking for an IBP implementation of the process, supported with the right tool. We started with actually textbook IBP implementation. We say we want to have a product review, a demand review, inventory review, supply review, and an IBP meeting. We want to improve on-time delivery, reduce our lead times, shorten our response times when there is a shift in the demand or when we have a disruption in our supply chain. So we were looking, how can we do this better and use the right platform to help us? Looking across the different capabilities, we decided to use Anaplan as a platform. The main reasons were the flexibility of the tool. Other platforms, you need to use their way of working. In Anaplan, we could program the ABB way of working. We liked that you can hit F8 and see how the formulas are built up. I teach all of my users, if you want to know where your numbers are coming from, just hit F8. If you even press it four or five times, it will bring you how we calculated the lead time for you.  

Jan Sucaet 0:04:33.9: 

We actually had a previous implementation, at GE, which was GE Industrial Solutions, which was acquired by ABB seven years ago. They were already using Anaplan for ten years, so we had some people actually come also from that GE acquisition. So we have a positive experience using Anaplan in the old UX. The ease of implementation, and also the agile and interactive approach. You can put in enrichment to your forecasting. You can see it rippling down your entire logistic chain at the click of a second, and immediately see the effect in your reporting. Then the other benefit that we see is it's a mature platform. We can actually track and trace who made the change, when it was registered, who was the user account behind it. So we're talking about the mature platform. For the size of an ABB company, you can't keep working with spreadsheets. You need something more decent for that. Looking at the journey, it's been a long journey, and we are far from the finish.  

Jan Sucaet 0:05:39.2: 

We actually started back in 2021, where we actually started as an ABB company, we want to implement an IBP process, so we started with what do we want? How should it look like? Who are the people we need to involve in those different discussions? Product review, demand review, inventory supply. Do we have the necessary data? What kind of forecast accuracy can we expect from the data that we have? We then actually built a quick and crude solution, based upon what we thought we wanted to do. We did a quick, crude solution using Excel, PowerPoint, Power BI, using some of the data we had. We tried to mimic the process we were envisioning to run on the platform. It helped us to very quickly iterate on how should the report look like? How can we use the data? I remember that my demand review slides, every month I had a different slide. Every month, based upon the feedback I had from my audience, my sales team or my product management team providing the input, they were telling me, 'We should have this on the slide.' 'That information is too granular.' So I was updating the slide.  

Jan Sucaet 0:06:47.9: 

Once we had everything quick and dirty tried out, we said, okay, now we decide for the Anaplan platform. Now we built that report that now has the demand review slides, has a fixed structure. We will build that into an Anaplan report, ready on the data. I will get back to the 80 per cent of the functionality. We did a pilot implementation, meaning we implemented a tool that was ready to go global, but we implemented it locally. We actually started in South Europe, in Italy, France, and Spain. Now we started in August 2022, finished in June 2024. Much more due to ABB processes and data than the Anaplan platform that it took us so much time. It was a pretty four modular roll-out that we did. From then onwards, we actually have two things running in parallel. On one side, we are onboarding more regions and more factories. In parallel, we are improving the platform from a capability perspective and a user-friendly perspective. That has been continuing now into the entire Europe. We went last year into the Middle East. Now actually, from 2026 onwards, I've just come back from China, where we are almost live. In a couple of months, we will start with the Americas.  

Jan Sucaet 0:08:12.9: 

So we continue to globally roll out, and that plan runs until 2027/mid-2028 to actually cover the vast majority of ABB Electrification. From a model perspective, we actually have four modules. The typical datahub: demand planning, inventory planning, supply planning, S&OP. We have a single model to cover every requirement from the whole world, within a single model. It gives us the flexibility that the model we use in Europe is the same as in the US, even though some of the ways how they work locally is different. What we've done is we've built options within the module that we can turn on and turn off by location, and that's how we tailor for regional differences. It gives us the flexibility that everybody is in one model. We try to build functionalities for a certain region, in a static way, in such a way that we can reuse it for another region. That gives us the capability that some functionality we are building for China, I will reuse it in Greece if they have the same requirement.  

Jan Sucaet 0:09:27.3: 

I heard before, 'We are different.' And that's actually what I hear everywhere where I go, 'We are different.' Actually, we are not. If I go, it's a standard S&OP, and everybody has the same problem. You have sales orders, which are historic, and based upon that you apply statistical forecast. You want to enrich that and that's where you want to go. You have a certain granularity that you think you want to work on, which everybody thinks is SKU, but the fact is that you have 30,000 SKUs, which is way too much to maintain, so you need to work at an aggregated level. That's for everybody the same. Everybody where I go, 'We are different.' I say, 'I come with a single solution. I have a couple of options that you can turn on and off, but then it's a single solution for everybody.' I actually already know from doing this seven times over that my generic solution will cover 80 per cent of the requirements. Where from a size perspective, 2 terabytes, I have 50 million sales order lines in my data hub, which are then consolidated into monthly buckets that I move into my demand planning. We have a typical dev, QA, and production. We are using Optimizer, so I'm also looking to the functionalities that are coming there that we previously talked. We were one of the first customers using Polaris. 

Jan Sucaet 0:10:55.0: 

When it comes in ABB using Polaris, we're mainly using it for slice and dice. We do our demand planning in the typical UX, and the typical model, the Classic model, and then we just bring the reporting into Polaris. It brought us, or it kept us within the two terabytes, because our reports were growing a little bit too fast. Especially because of the sparsity, they were using too many terabytes. Now, as we have the report in Polaris, what we see now is that we're combining multiple reports into a single one, with more slice and dices. Three, four, five slice and dices. Bring a single report in Polaris, more slice and dices, and instead of having two or three reports. That's the next evolution that we see within ABB. From a benefit perspective, I know everybody wants to report the benefits. I can tell you, this is the most tough slides that I have to build. This took me four months. I can tell you, it's not easy. If you see, for example, on the factory side, on time delivery, improved to 23 per cent, we attributed, from that 23 per cent, 5 per cent due to the Anaplan implementation. The other 15 per cent, 17 per cent came from supply chain disruptions that we solved. We came out of COVID at that time, which was giving us some improvement.  

Jan Sucaet 0:12:23.9: 

So as a global company, when you look at global metrics, EBITDA, on-time delivery, those kind of things, the Anaplan implementation is not the only thing you do. It's a tough time to attribute a benefit and a global metric to a particular project implementation that you're doing, especially if you're talking supply chain, where 100 other projects are going on, and day-to-day activities are sometimes even moving the needle more than what you do from a project perspective. Nevertheless, you of course try to make a business case to your leadership, and it's also why I was kept being funded to do the global roll-out after the pilot. So we did get somewhere. Success factors, if I can look from an ABB perspective, and it's like for every project, it's people. People, people, people. Actually, from one to six it should be people. It's the people within the business. You have to find the right people, the right change agents, that are well aware and capable. I know the business, how it works. How the processes are working. On the other side, they have to have the willingness to change. Don't take too young. Don't take too old. Find somebody in the middle. All right. Your IT is supporting function. We did our project. I'm the project leader. I'm a business guy, I'm not an IT guy. IT is supporting the project, needs to be driven by the business. It's how you make success.  

Jan Sucaet 0:13:59.9: 

We have had multiple partners in our journey. Finding the right partner is crucial. As my colleague from the CM was saying, or the MC, finding the right partner that can help you on the journey is crucial. So find the right partner. It's not always the cheapest one. On the long haul, you will benefit from paying a little bit more. Then, of course, okay, Anaplan, we did get quite some nice support from Anaplan. Also, when we were struggling, we were able to go back to Anaplan to give us some guidance. The other thing I want to say is, as I said, we only built 80 per cent of the model, and we then continuously improve. You don't want to get perfection immediately. Start with the basics - and I hear everybody saying, but the Anaplan platform is actually perfect. You start with the basics, and then you gradually move on. Even within the same model, because I will not get additional cones on my slide. Those are the four or five models we work in. We will not add additional models. We will work within the model to improve. Anaplan is perfect like that.  

Jan Sucaet 0:15:09.7: 

What we typically do when I'm doing the geographical roll-out, we go with Anaplan as is. I usually get 50 requests for changes to the platform. I usually do five of them. The other 45 I park. Three months later, I go back to that same region. They've used the platform for three months. Guess what? From the 45 requirements they were listing, 30 are gone. Fifteen are still there, but they are not so urgent anymore. There are seven new requests that they really need. That's where I then spend my money. If I would have the 45 at the start, I would have wasted a lot of my money. That's how I got an agile solution, that is cost-effective, using Anaplan. Then also we have a CEO. On the CEO side, we really try to have a good combination between business expertise and Anaplan expertise, and that's really what you need on the CEO side. Don't just have IT people. Okay, that's what I had for you today. Thank you.