Heather Stork 0:00:10.7: 

Good afternoon, thank you for joining us, my name is Heather Stork, I'm an account executive with Anaplan, I've had pleasure of working with Donald Macmillan over the last 18 months and we'd like to spend some time just to look at that journey in terms of where Aberdeen started and how they've progressed over that time period. We've titled the session Decision Excellent for Profitability, but, as you will see, they've looked at a number of aspects of not only profitability, but workforce planning, but we'll get into some more details in a moment. Before we start, let me just introduce Donald Macmillan, global head of FP&A for Aberdeen. He joined the asset management industry in 1995 and prior to his time at Aberdeen he was actually head of finance at Aviva Investors, where he spent seven years in various roles of senior leadership. He's brought all that expertise to Aberdeen and we'd love to hear more, so welcome, Donald. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:01:13.8: 

Thank you. 

 

Heather Stork 0:01:13.8: 

Thank you for joining us, perfect. Now, before we kick off, do you want to just talk about, you know, your role at Aberdeen and how you helped the organization to plan and forecast? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:01:26.1: 

Yes, so I'm Donald Macmillan, I'm director of group FP&A at Aberdeen. Aberdeen's a wealth and investments group, so we have three core businesses that run and there's an advise platform, there's a direct platform, there's also a specialist asset manager. Now each of those businesses has got its own challenges, but they've also all got their own growth opportunities. So our role, my role in particular, is about ensuring that we are set up to be able to face into all of those challenges, whilst also taking on the opportunities, as well. To help us become more efficient as an organization and drive sustainable profit growth going forwards. 

 

Heather Stork 0:02:10.1: 

Yes, absolutely, and what do you think were the challenges within that FP&A process when you joined Aberdeen? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:02:18.2: 

So I joined Aberdeen towards the end of 2022, my initial remit was to look at the end-to-end plan process, there were a lot of frustrations, to put it mildly, around the plan itself. My assessment of the process itself was it was largely broken, it was very rigid, it was a cumbersome process, it took an absolute age to get any information out to our stakeholders, and it caused a huge amount of frustration for everyone involved, from finance and out into the business. I think part of the reason for this was there'd been a very long implementation of the previous planning solution. It had started when the business was being run one way, which was essentially regional businesses being run on their own, but it had pivoted as a group to running the independent businesses, if you like. The planning solution had never been adapted to address that, so they were trying to force it in and as we started looking at how would you change it, it became quite apparent that it wasn't a very agile solution that was in already. So a lot of frustrations from there, but it effectively - it wasn't fit for purpose. We would get there, we would get the end result, but it was just too time-consuming and too difficult for everyone. 

 

Heather Stork 0:03:46.1: 

Yes, and I think when we first started our conversations you were taking information out of your main system into Excel, trying to manipulate that data but, as you said, the structure had changed, the business was moving and maybe you just weren't able to keep up with that agile approach in terms of… 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:04:00.5: 

Yes, we had to take it out of the system because the system wasn't plumbed in the right way to get what we needed. So we'd take it out, reconfigure it and put it back and it just adds more and more time. 

 

Heather Stork 0:04:13.9: 

Yes, and then what happens when the business has a specific question? Then back to the drawing board and all the challenges that ensue from that, yes, absolutely. Well, I mean when you look at this selection that you had ahead of you, I mean obviously you've just joined, there were some senior management changes within Aberdeen. Why did you choose Anaplan? What was your thought process there for you and the team? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:04:37.5: 

Well, there were a couple of reasons, really. There were a few of us who had used Anaplan before, so my previous organization, we'd used Anaplan, the CFO at the time had also been at that organization, so he was aware of Anaplan. We had a couple of other members of the team that had, importantly for us, used it in a different organization, so that we could get a sense of what good really looks like by comparing notes with each other. So we felt comfortable, having used it, that we knew that it would give us what we needed, particularly for an asset manager. We also really liked the functionality of having the profitability model running alongside and integrated with the full planning solution. 

 

Heather Stork 0:05:25.9: 

Yes, it's great, and how did that implementation go in terms of the timing, some of the benefits, the challenges that you found? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:05:35.6: 

So the approach we've taken to implement is basically we will build a use case and then we'll deploy it, so we're not waiting until the end before we get the benefit of everything. Part of the reason for doing that was the necessity of having something that we could rely on for forecasting, but it was also because we could see the benefit of the - what it would provide us and we could use it immediately. We had, for example, like profitability, which is one of the use cases that we used. We planned to do that much later in the process, about a year after we put in - finished putting in all of the planning bits, but with all of the stakeholder pressure to get better insight into profitability in the investment management business, we were just - we were able to accelerate it. So because we were doing build and deploy, we could just reshuffle things around. 

 

Heather Stork 0:06:37.0: 

Well, in fact, let's have a look at the use cases that you have implemented with the team over 12 months. I have to say, we're really proud of the progress that you made and the speed at which you moved through these use cases. As you said, profitability was at the end and I remember when we had the meeting with your CFO in the investment management business and he said, 'Could we bring that forward to July from January?' So that was how we began to move the shells around, but with Anaplan it's eminently flexible, so we were able to do that. Maybe you can tell us more about that process? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:07:14.5: 

Yes, I mean personally I was super keen on getting the planning solution in first, because I needed to plan, so I was happy to wait for profitability, but we'd partnered with Mavens Cloud to help us build everything out and their assurances around actually we can do some of these parallel meant that actually it didn't create an issue for us. We were thinking about logically you do them one after the other, but we could be running two or three at a time if we needed to. So that ability for us to bring forward profitability. 

 

Heather Stork 0:07:50.3: 

Absolutely, and I might add that as Donald mentioned in the beginning, not only were they moving at speed, but also across three different divisions. So tell us a little bit more about how managing the stakeholders and how that would work. So really it's like three separate companies, in a way, obviously all under one umbrella. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:08:08.5: 

Yes, so we are a group and there are three businesses in the group, two of those businesses are quite close, so the investment manager and the advisor platform. Historic reasons, they've been part of the same organization, so they're quite intertwined. So it was very easy to get stakeholder buy in there because we were able to basically impose it. Our direct platform, Interactive Investor was an acquisition that Aberdeen made a few years ago, and they have their own governance, their own need to get into - is it the right tool for them? It might be the right tool for the group. So while we were able to manage our stakeholders really easily for these two businesses, we had to take more of a softer approach with the other one. It meant that Interactive Investor's use cases followed a little bit later, but it doesn't hold us up from pressing ahead with all the other ones. So we've been able to manage it and just treat each set of stakeholders slightly differently. 

 

Heather Stork 0:09:16.3: 

Perfect, well, great project management from the helm, I have to say. It was a delight to work with you, you had a small team, but, again, very agile in working with Mavens Cloud. You're able just to make the changes that you needed to in the moment and the result is really incredible. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:09:33.8: 

Yes, and it's, I mean, the main thing for us is actually we know all of the things we want to do, right? It does evolve and we add more things into it. When I started this 18 months ago the CFO said to me I had seven weeks to put in place a revenue forecasting model for the investments business. So I kept telling him he's not yet started the clock, but also that we've added about eight other things onto it. Being able to look forwards to what we want to get at the end of it, we're able to take a relatively decent view of scoping each bit out to know when it can be done, how it can be done, and then when it comes to its turn to get built and deployed, we can then do a full scoping exercise. Make sure it will then interact with the other modules as it should and if the business needs have changed in that period, we're able to adapt to that. We find that when we're building them with the guys at Mavens, if there's a need for us to iterate then we'll do it, we'll do it quickly. It works really well for both of us, we want these things deployed quickly, they like to work really quickly and get things in. So it works really welly. 

 

Heather Stork 0:10:50.9: 

No, that's perfect. So seven weeks for the revenue and AUM, went straight into profitability, how many weeks did that take to be live? Given that it was sort of out of the box, but, again, we want to customize it for our customers. So how did that process go? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:11:05.2: 

Yes, it took us 12 weeks from start to having it deployed. Now, to put that into a bit of context, we always had profitability models before, most investment managers will, most of them will be in spreadsheets. I think the original ones that were being used at Aberdeen were very clunky spreadsheets. If we were still using those just now, I would estimate that anything we published just now would probably be at the end of last year's data, if we were lucky. We had spent quite a bit of time building out a better one, again, in spreadsheets, but it meant that we kind of had like a proof of concept or a beta model, which we could then speak to the guys at Mavens. Who were able to say, 'Yes, this will deliver all of that,' and use some of the logic and the drivers that we'd already established there to feed into the profitability model. 

 

Heather Stork 0:12:05.4: 

Fantastic, and the model allows you to change some of the rules. Have you seen that you've changed those rules over the last year in terms of how you're doing the allocations? Let me know how that flexibility has worked within the product itself. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:12:20.1: 

I mean we're able to show the rules changing live, so I think the most powerful thing for us in finance is how much it's enabled us to engage more with the business and that the engagement is coming back the way, as well. Previously, you'd try to give profitability views to them, but they wouldn't be listening, because they didn't understand what was going on underneath the engine hood. Because we weren't able to explain it. Whereas this way we're able to say these are the drivers, and if you change it from this one to that one, that's the impact. So there's been a fairly iterative process with the business around adjusting these. So they bought into it, they're fully engaged in it, and we're starting to use the profitability outputs more and more. So they've been to the board, we use them for the value assessment for the FCA. These are all very regulated areas that we need to be absolutely certain that we can explain it and it's robust and that's what this gives us. 

 

Heather Stork 0:13:25.0: 

No, absolutely, and in terms of managing the stakeholders, as we've heard in other sessions this is very sensitive data, right? So this isn't being distributed to a large part of the organization. How have you managed that in terms of reporting that you've sent out and which individuals within the organization can see the data? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:13:43.1: 

So we will manage who can access it directly in Anaplan. There will be a number of people from the business, so the product team will need to see it and they get to. We'll give them a read-only access, so they can't do anything, but we'll manage it that way. More widely than that the output will either get shown on screen in front of a wider audience, or it will be produced into a pack and taken to the board. 

 

Heather Stork 0:14:11.0: 

Okay, perfect, and then when we look at the other use cases, so you have things like workforce planning and OpEx, did that enrich your profitability analysis? I can imagine, as you bring in another bit of data to fine-tune that analysis, tell me some more about that. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:14:27.9: 

Yes, I mean I think for me, anyway, the benefit of the workforce planning and OpEx is much more about the plan end-to-end piece than profitability. They both communicate and any refinements that we look to bring in on workforce or OpEx, as we're seeing the data more clearly we'll be able to replicate that into profitability. 

 

Heather Stork 0:14:52.1: 

Yes, perfect, and what's in store? Further use cases for next year. You're going to be busy, yes. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:15:00.0 

Okay, so like I said, we started out with this very simplistic view of what we wanted to build, profitability and revenue and AUM forecasting. It quickly spiraled out to full end-to-end plan, so we will have capital and treasury forecasting. We'll bring in non-operating expenses, as well, so we'll have the adjusted operating profit, all the way down to IFRS. We're doing a group aggregation model, so two of my favorites are the group aggregation, because it gives you the consolidated view of the business. We'll do a strategic model, as well, which will be my baby, where I can come in and make top-of-the-house adjustments where I think perhaps the businesses have been guilty of flabby forecasting. So we will look at other things, as well, we've got in our mind, you know, variable compensation. Whether we find a way to get it in the way that we need it, we'll go through that, but anything that we can think will complement what we're doing, we'll look at it. 

 

Heather Stork 0:16:09.3: 

Yes, no, that makes perfect sense, and in terms of a cultural shift, how has this huge body of work, how has it changed the culture at Aberdeen? We see that you've added some more vowels into your name, so that was something, I don't know if that had anything to do with Anaplan, but what else has happened at Aberdeen over the last 12 months? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:16:29.4: 

Well, we did - we looked at the vowels in Anaplan and we got jealous that ours had gone, so we've got them back. I think culturally it's most noticeable just now in the finance team. So it used to be - like I said, it used to be a fairly horrid process for everyone, very frustrating. This year we're doing the plan, we're using Anaplan for the plan, but we're kind of sprinting as we do it. So we know that it's going to be really busy and we'll come up against things that we need to deal with in the moment. The difference I see culturally from the team against what would have happened last year and the year before is that they're all coming together. They can see much further ahead, once they've done one full plan cycle, once they've done a number of monthly forecast cycles they'll be really comfortable with the tool and they can see how much it will benefit them in the future. So that bit is the biggest bit that I can see, like, on the floor, if you like. We can also see it culturally within the wider group, where the relationship between finance and the businesses is better. Particularly investments, because that's where the profitability model comes in. We're getting a lot more engagement, they like what they see, they don't always like the end result, but they understand it, right? They don't think that there are things in there that we're holding from them, because we can be completely transparent about it. So that relationship is much stronger and that'll help. 

 

Heather Stork 0:18:06.9: 

Absolutely, and Kevin, who is on your team, who actually was responsible for cost allocation, when we first met him there was a bit of a joke that three or four months into the project he was smiling on every call. Whereas before we were teasing him that he wasn't smiling as much, but he was really happy, yes. In terms of the response time, obviously when a senior member of the team has a question, I mean, it used to take weeks and now I think Kevin said - he didn't want to give the answer to the CFO too quickly, because it almost seemed like it wasn't real, right? So he's waiting five minutes, as opposed to sending something across straight away. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:18:45.4: 

Yes, and we've seen that across, you know, everything that we're using. So if I think about the revenue and AUM forecasting as it used to be, I mean it's kind of embarrassing when you say it out loud, but we have cut weeks and weeks out of the process. It used to be the case that if you're doing a plan, you want to do scenarios, we would have to start, we'll get all the inputs, we'd all get put in the machine, and then three weeks later you'd get an output. It didn't always make sense, you'd then spend a lot of time trying to figure it out, you'd eventually figure it out and then you would want to do a scenario. You could only do one at a time and that would take another two weeks, and then you could… So scenario one, the markets have gone up, we'll find out in two weeks. What happens if they go down? Well, two weeks later we'll find that one out. The difference now is that we can do it live, effectively, I mean it's minutes to do these. 

 

Heather Stork 0:19:43.3: 

Amazing. When you have a new CFO joining shortly, how has having Anaplan helped you and the team prepare for that transition and I'm really interested, how have the initial meeting gone? Hopefully you've let her know that there's an amazing program here. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:19:59.7: 

Yes, I have. I think the thing for me with the new CFO joining, so she joins in a week-and-a-half and we do half-year results in like three weeks' time. So she's going to come in, she'll be focused on half year, everyone will disappear for August for holidays and we'll come back. The plan, the big plan process will already be a couple of months underway. So what this gives me is the ability to say to her just now, as she comes in, we have control over this, we know what we're doing and this is when the outputs will come. So she'll get comfortable that she doesn't need to look at it yet, I hope, but we'll also be able to deal with any new CFO scenarios. We've had new CFOs each year, I think, that I've been at Aberdeen. 

 

Heather Stork 0:20:55.2: 

A lot of change. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:20:55.2: 

Each one has joined, unhelpful for me, some way during the planning process. 

 

Heather Stork 0:21:01.5: 

It always happens that way, yes. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:21:02.1: 

They always want to see something different to what you've done. Now, I feel much better tooled to be able to do that now than I did last year or the year before. 

 

Heather Stork 0:21:12.8: 

Yes, no, absolutely. Well, it's really great. Now, I know when an audience comes together like this they would love to know lessons learned. What advice would you give to someone who's contemplating a project like this? Any nuggets of gold that you can share? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:21:26.3: 

So I think we probably took quite a brave approach, partly because we needed it, we knew what we needed, but that was key. So knowing what you need, knowing what you want, if you've got that then you can be a bit braver. We also knew Anaplan, so we knew it could deliver it. So it enabled us to push ahead and start deploying things and not have that foolproof a concept. So if you're able to do that then I would encourage it. I like it that way because I'm not waiting a long period of time before I can see the benefit, we're able to use it as we go. Immediately that we had investments, revenue and AUM forecasting ready, we were using it. We had to build a tactical conduit into our existing planning system, but we did that, we knew that the structure of the data wouldn't change, so that when we came to integrate it in Aberdeen's infrastructure it would be a relatively light touch replumbing.  

 

Heather Stork 0:22:32.5: 

You raise a really good point, because a lot of potential customers have said, 'Well, our data's really not in great shape.' So we need to go back and fix that and let's speak in a year's time or something. How did you deal with those data challenges? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:22:49.0: 

So wherever I've worked we've always had that same data challenge. It's never going to be perfect though and if you're chasing it being perfect before you do anything, you'll never do anything, but it has to be of good enough quality. So we got ourselves comfortable that it's at least 80 per cent, say, good, but also the gaps in the data or where it needed more attention, there were steps in place elsewhere in the business to address that. That's what we've seen. What we've been very keen to ensure though is anyone who is making any changes to data, there's a direct connection back to what we built. So any changes there don't suddenly end up with things that don't communicate. 

 

Heather Stork 0:23:38.8: 

Yes, and how have you managed that process? Because that's really important, you're right, the left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing, so you change the inputs, it doesn't affect the output. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:23:51.0: 

Yes, so in terms of managing the process, a lot of it is about awareness of what's on your - what's in your infrastructure and how everything connects. I suppose the risk that we had is because we were doing a lot of it tactically to begin with, so we would build it, we'd have a tactical connection into our infrastructure, and then our changing technology teams would come along after and then do the proper integration. So there's always a risk if you've done that here, what you end up here with when you're trying to integrate is slightly different. Our mitigation of that risk was we were plumbing it in here already, so maybe there would be some change, but it would be just general pickup. Probably the most frustrating part of the whole journey has been how much further ahead the builds have been against the integration into the system, as in our infrastructure. That is something that we're seeing recently having kicked off and once it kicks off the pace picks up really quickly. So I don't have any concerns around that integrating, now that I'm seeing it happening. 

 

Heather Stork 0:25:01.8: 

Absolutely, and your team was relatively small, initially, but I know it's expanding, we were talking about earlier this session about training with other members of the team and how is that going as you begin to expand the number of stakeholders, quite frankly? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:25:17.6: 

It becomes more difficult, as you expand more stakeholders. Particularly when even in finance, when it's not FP&A people, so because we're doing everything out of legal entity budgets, we've got legal entity controllers coming in. So we recently hosted an Anaplan familiarization session, we called it. A lot of the legal entity controllers came to that. It's not quite as exciting as the plan that I like to look at, but it's necessary. Just, you know, you have to approach those stakeholders differently, so they want a legal entity budget that they can take to a board and explain. Being able to tell them that not only can you do that, you can go in and see how it's all plumbed together behind the scenes. It gives them the ability to self-serve and it kind of brings them along in the journey more easily. 

 

Heather Stork 0:26:20.2: 

Yes, and have their own workspace to flex the drivers, no longer do you have to pull it out in Excel and build your own models and then hope it goes back into the system. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:26:29.0: 

They just need to know that they are 100, so if one of them makes a change and someone else needs to take the delta. 

 

Heather Stork 0:26:38.0: 

Yes. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:26:38.7: 

Again, that fosters greater working relationship and better culture amongst that group, as well. 

 

Heather Stork 0:26:45.4 

Yes, it really does. You mentioned earlier the strategic model, which hasn't been built yet, which is going to be your baby. What's going to go into that? You don't have to give away any state secrets, but what are you most excited about? I mean what is Mavens Cloud going to have to put together for you or help you build? 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:27:01.9: 

Anything I want, really. I mean we do it top of the house changes at the group all the time and we'll have that in our group aggregation model, I think, where we're able to say, 'Actually, flex this, flex that and make these changes.' The strategic one, it will enable us to take it up a level and maybe look at much bigger impacts. It's not something that we share, the businesses won't see it, it will be something literally for the C-suite to see. 

 

Heather Stork 0:27:33.3: 

Yes, absolutely, and so many changes in the industry, of course, you have assets being sold by other asset managers, you know what I mean? There's a lot of movement, a lot of consolidation, so I can see how that would be really useful in terms of truly strategic long-term planning. 

 

Donald Macmillan 0:27:49.5: 

Yes, it gives us a lot more strategic what ifs, as well, so we can do it within our existing business and those models, but we really want to sometimes come at it and say, 'Well, what if this thing happened?' It's too big to then go and work out what does it do to these individual businesses, you want to come in at a much higher level. 

 

Heather Stork 0:28:12.3: 

Yes, absolutely, and flex those. Obviously enough changes at going on at the moment, I'm sure that it's going to be a very well-used model once it's built, so yes, absolutely. Thank you very much, indeed, it was really a lovely discussion. Thank you very much, yes. [Applause].