Unknown Speaker 0:00:13.3: 

Okay, fantastic. So without further ado, I'm going to bring back up Mark Gordon to introduce our next session. Just as a reminder, we will have Q&A. We'll have that actually at the end of the session. So hold your questions towards the end, and I'll pass it off to Mark. 

 

Mark Gordon 0:00:26.1: 

Yes, thanks. Thanks for coming back. We had a great last session. We're going to have another great session here. I'm super-excited about this one as well. Rob and Dan are going to take us through all kinds of things. Great story. I heard it last week. We went through it and it was fantastic. You guys are in for a treat here. Ask a bunch of questions, but do ask them at the end because they're going to answer a lot as we go. As they do that, again, keep in mind, and I'm going to have a whole list for myself, but you guys will have a good time. You're in good hands. Dan, you want to take it away? 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:01:10.2: 

Yes. Oh, definitely. Let's go! Awesome. Thank you Mark, and thank you everyone for coming in here. Two in a row. We're going to really put the silicon in Silicon Valley here today. So we've got a really great story, as Mark had mentioned. I'm Dan Wittstein. I work with Slalom. I lead our supply chain capabilities within our Anaplan practice. So when I was talking with Rob and coming up with, 'Hey, we've got a really great story to tell,' and then we talked to Josh and others, and we're really happy to be here today to share a lot about what we're doing, not only with Skyworks, but how we're taking advantage of the platform and really pushing it, I think, to the extremes in an extraordinarily challenging and exciting industry. So with that, I'll hand it over to Rob for an introduction. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:01:49.0: 

Hi, I'm Rob Bhatia. I'm from Skyworks. I'm Senior Director of Business Analytics. I own the Anaplan project there. Happy to be here. Happy to talk to you guys. I work at Skyworks, and just so you know a little bit about the company, we're a leader in RF and mixed-signal semiconductors. We have chips in pretty much anything that talks to things wirelessly. We're there helping it out. So you probably have something in your pocket that has some chips in it from Skyworks, which is pretty cool. We have chips on the Mars rover. That's really cool. Artemis had some Skyworks chips in it. That's cool. I'm sure a lot of people have products in those things as well, but it's just fun to have that a content out there. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:02:28.4: 

So Anaplan has been to Mars and… 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:02:31.2: 

Anaplan has planned things that are… 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:02:33.3: 

And to the moon. It's amazing. Awesome. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:02:34.2: 

It's part of it. It's part of the journey. Pretty cool. So let's get forward here. So last time I came here, I came here with my VP, Chris, and he left me a quote this time. 'Anaplan delivers a configurable cloud-based solution that adapts to our process with less dependence on outside resources.' 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:02:53.0: 

Hi, the outside resource. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:02:55.3: 

That's actually what we were looking for. So when I was here last, I was in a lot of your shoes. Who's here that doesn't own Anaplan, that's a prospect. Come on. Any prospects here? You all own Anaplan. Okay, cool. Well, we're all the same people then. We all have stickers on our badges that say we own it. Yes. So when I came two years ago, we were prospects and we were shopping. (A) Do we want to buy Anaplan? Is this really the deal for us? Then (B), who's our partner going to be? So landed on Anaplan, landed with Slalom. Next page. Okay, so here was our journey, just to have some hexagons up. Like I said, we selected things… That was down in late '24, and then in 2025, we started our project and we implemented field sales forecasting. This is mostly sales and demand-focused, right? So we did our field sales forecast, which is where our actual sales guys who call on the customers get their forecasts. They put it in the system. We did revenue planning so that we can get to our dollars every quarter and make sure that we're aligned with finance, and that the higher-ups can see what we're doing. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:04:05.9: 

We have BoM-based forecasts, which was something unique that we built. When we sell chips into, say, a company that builds cell phones, we don't want to forecast each chip individually. We want to make a shortcut. So we basically made a system where we create a bill of material for that end unit device that we have, so we can say, 'Oh, this company is going to sell this many phones.' Okay, because they're selling this many phones, we multiply it by the BoM and now we get all of our demand. So our handset business is forecasted like that, and that flows into our sales forecast. We have the demand planning that flows into supply chain, so they get the units forecast that we want them to go build. We have things coming up here. We want to do more work on how we handle our pricing in Anaplan. Right now it's very manual. There's a lot of use cases where we can automate it, and a lot of our customers get price erosion over time. That's very set. So right now we manually set those prices. In the future, we want to build modules where we can say, 'Okay, you're getting 2 per cent a quarter down,' just erode it automatically so we don't have to type it in. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:05:10.8: 

Also, we want to continue to work on our marketing forecast. We actually already implemented it, but there was a little bit of a hiccup. So we want to make it better for the users. It happens. So we're working on that, and then we have some competitive analysis pieces we want to build so that we can compare our financial performance as a company to other peers in the industry so that we can get more of a handle on what we're doing compared to them, and have that analysis. Then finally, we're going to move the envelope on some of our S&OP, do more reporting within Anaplan, bring more supply data in, do some more supply demand matching and reporting inside that. So that's where we're at and where we're going. I'm going to go into a little bit more about our future projects towards the end of the presentation, because we do have more detail on that. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:05:57.0: 

Rob, when you were at this node, did you imagine that the hexagons would be multiple colors in cross-capabilities with supply chain finance and sales, or was it still just the original design? I'm trying to think of how it went into more of this cross-capability view. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:06:14.1: 

It was like that from the beginning, actually. That was the vision of where we wanted to go. We wanted to make sure that we had sales plugged in with marketing, plugged in with all the demand flowing into finance, giving our supply chain people what they need. That was the vision. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:06:28.2: 

Beautiful. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:06:28.9: 

We're continuing to build it out. All right. So semiconductor. You want to tee this up here? 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:06:37.4: 

Yes. So in working with Rob and team, one thing that stood out really early was that this is a complex industry. We just heard from the last session as well, and we put our heads together and thought, 'Really, why? Why is semiconductor different? Why is it the litmus test,' as we wrote here, 'For really putting Anaplan to the test and proving itself in this environment?' Rob and I came up with six really pointed areas here. I'll let Rob walk through them, but then we'll have a question for you all after. So without any further ado. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:07:06.1: 

Yes. So these are the six areas that we felt were challenging. So one is we have decade-long planning cycles. So we sell into space defense, automotive, and some of those cycles run very long. So it requires us to have a very long planning horizon. That was one of the things that attracted us to Anaplan. Our previous solution was a JDA solution, and we couldn't extend the planning horizon any longer because it just wouldn't handle that many intersections. So with Anaplan, we're confident we're at five years now. We're actually going to extend it to ten years coming up pretty soon here, and I don't bat an eye at that. You know, we'll just extend the horizon. It'll be fine. So how many people have ten-year planning horizons that they work with? Not quite? No one yet? Okay, well, that'll be fun. We have high demand volatility. I mean, everyone has that. I don't want to talk about that. Complex dimensionalities and hierarchies. So yes, when it comes to demand and forecasting, we forecast… We sell parts into distribution. The distribution sells the parts into contract manufacturers. Those contract manufacturers make parts for end customers. The end customers are the ones giving us the forecasts that they have. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:08:14.7: 

We have forecasts all along the channel. We have to harmonize all this together. So I mean, if you look at dimensionality, you're going pretty deep there. The only thing past that we don't model is, once the customer gets their products, they're selling it into retail, and that's past what we do. We do have a lot of steps we need to model, and Anaplan lets us do that. Our previous solution let us only do three dimensions. So Anaplan is great. High configurable BoMs we have. This is a fun one. We have some parts where the… Timing parts, where they're basically infinitely configurable. So our customers can go on our website, type in the parameters that they want the part to be operating at, hit a button. That creates a part in SAP, and then they get the part number. They can go order the part and sample it. If they like it, they take that part number, they talk to their sales guys and they negotiate and they talk about what their run rate is going to be and get a forecast in. I have parts that have hundreds and hundreds of variants that different customers take, and that's a lot. It's a lot. So putting that all in the system, a part is a part, and it adds space. So one thing that helps there is Polaris. It does. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:09:24.3: 

Custom algorithms. This is one that… This goes along with this last one. Monthly S&OP doesn't cut it. You know, the standard S&OP where the sales guy enters a number, and then his boss looks at it and reviews it and hands it off to finance and then marketing or whoever, and finally someone locks it in for the month and then that's what you go build, we don't really subscribe to that. So what we do is, we take different demand signals. So we'll have a sales signal, the marketing signal. We actually have customers giving us direct customer forecasts every week, in some cases. So we take all these different signals and we run it through an algorithm that we built outside in SQL Server, and it has a bunch of control centers, and it basically aligns us to our revenue targets and produces a quantity build forecast for us that's optimized every week. We take that and we pump that into Anaplan, and then in Anaplan, the users and the demand management team, they can go and edit that and make any changes they want. Typically, if they're making too many touches… We don't like them to be modifying the numbers. So we actually build control centers to then help them try to automate what they're trying to overcome. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:10:33.4: 

So if a part's getting end-of-lifed, and then it keeps giving them a signal that they want to go build it, and they're like, 'We don't like this, we need to do something,' we'll build a control center that says, 'Okay, for end-of-life parts, handle them in this way,' and then they can preset that so that every week when it runs, it gives them the right answer. So we've been building that out over the years, and we need to keep that. So Anaplan was a great tool because we can pump things into Anaplan, pump back out the answer and then get that out downstream to the supply chain folks. So those are the challenges. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:11:03.1: 

Yes. So we learned that everyone in here is an Anaplan customer, happily. When you see these…Let's put our hands up. How many of you have experienced one of these elements that Rob just walked through? Hands up. Nice. All right. Keep them up if you got two. Oh, there we go. We got more. About three. Okay, a few more. Four. I see, I see one. We're going to go for five. Okay. So four. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:11:29.3: 

What were the two we were missing? 

 

Unknown speaker: 0:11:31.2: 

Decade-long planning cycle and custom forecasting. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:11:35.3: 

Got it. Okay. 

 

Unknown speaker: 0:11:36.0: 

That's our insurance customers. They have 50-year time horizons. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:11:41.5: 

Oh, wow. 

 

Unknown speaker: 0:11:41.2: 

For investments. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:11:44.2: 

Fifty years. I guess mortgages are 30. Yes. True. Very good. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:11:48.4: 

Cool. Awesome. Thank you all. Yes, very curious about that. So yes, as Robin mentioned, super unique elements here that really drove the solution, and in terms of where… Throughout the deployment process, and as Rob and team have taken this CoE on and continue to develop, there have been some elements that have really been unlocked in the entire lifecycle of Anaplan. I won't cover them all, but we hit upon the first one pretty well in the roadmap slide there. So this is truly connected backbone for multiple different forecasts, merging in together to get that one number in order to produce a weekly plan. That's critical, especially in the high-paced environment of downstream semiconductor. The supply teams are dependent upon that number. It has to be clear. So I think what Anaplan has done, especially in the work that we've done together here, has simplified that process. It's also kept the proprietary algorithm, that third one, and it hands off a number that, yes, it might be more weekly changes potentially as it's coming in in a steady stream, but it's accurate. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:12:50.4: 

It's on a weekly cadence, and it enables supply planning to take their job and really run with it every single week versus a monthly plan or disruptive or multiple numbers that they then have to merge into a supply plan. So I think that's been a huge benefit here. The other one I'll cover too, which we'll get into in a moment with the roadmap, is really the data integration and with ADO that Skyworks is exploring now as well. So being able to pull that in, not just, 'Yes, the data job ran overnight. It's here.' It's the frequency, the accuracy, any dropout logging. It's really opening up the visibility to pipe that's coming in, and it's a lot of data flow. So having that I think has been a big unlock, especially going into further roadmap expansion too. Anything else that you want to hit on here? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:13:37.4: 

No, I think you got it all. I think we're good. Let's go to the next slide. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:13:45.4: 

Now it gets real, though. What do they say in the real world when people stop being polite and the real stuff happens, the real challenges? When we went through the process, which was the seven-sprint deployment cycle, where would you say we found the real realities of the platform, and how did you get around those as a leader? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:14:03.3: 

Well, we hit the real realities of the platform early on in the project, about sprint two. So sprint one was master data. Sprint two was going to be doing our marketing forecast, and right then we realized, 'Oh crap, we have way too much data for the Classic model,' because we had bought Classic. We had to pivot at one point there and say, 'No, we have to go back to Anaplan now. We're going to license the professional version.' So we got in Polaris, and that was great because we wouldn't have been able to build it without Polaris. Polaris, our model's only… What were we talking, 19 gigabytes? 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:14:37.4: 

Highly efficient model. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:14:38.5: 

It's great. Polaris is good. If you don't have Polaris, get on Polaris. Eventually you're going to have to, and you might as well do it. So we got it from day one, so we're happy about that. So that really helps. Let's just maybe go through some of these real-world challenges. So the Polaris helped on number one. Number two, the Excel problem, right? So for many users it's like, 'Oh, Anaplan is just like Excel,' and they get into it and they're like, 'Well, it doesn't do everything Excel does.' It's like, 'Yes, it's not Excel. Stop trying to think it's Excel.' So it's a double-edged sword, you know? It's funny, the way it works. You get used to using a pivot table, and just whatever data you stick in there, you can go pivot it and do whatever you want. That's not how Anaplan works. Anaplan has pretty strict hierarchies. If you don't have it built out, you can't just ad hoc do it, you know? So it's a little bit of a learning curve for people to get over. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:15:38.0: 

I think I addressed number three, maybe a little bit. Fixed hierarchies. You need them. You can't just get around them. This one was an issue that came up recently, and when you do big data loads into Anaplan on the back end, the transaction logs don't give you a cell-by-cell change log, and that infuriates the IT guys to no end. They're like… User will come to them. 'Hey, I entered this number and it got blown away.' 'Well, I don't see a record of it getting blown away,' and it's like, 'Oh, it did get blown away.' So Anaplan just works that way, and we deal with it. It's a gripe, right? The final thing here is, 'Business adoption may surprise you across teams.' So there was one team that was really vocal as we were building the product, and it was the sales guys, and that was our biggest user base. There were 100-something people. We built it, and we released Anaplan and trained them and everything, and it was quiet from them. I got really scared. I went and I checked on things and asked some of the folks around like, 'How's it going? How's it going?' and everything was fine. It was good. 'We love Anaplan. Anaplan is great.' I'm like, 'Yes, this is so cool.' 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:16:51.8: 

Then we have other users that only use it like once a quarter and sometimes once a year, and they start doing their AOP process and they're wanting to get all these forecast parts entered in SAP and flowing them into Anaplan, or we're doing all this manual stuff, and they have no idea how to enter forecasts in there. We had to retrain them. So those were the folks actually that… It's funny, because I thought the sales guys were going to be the ones that were the most vocal ones, but they were okay with it. It was these marketing guys that were trouble. So on our roadmap, we have some improvements for them to make things better. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:17:21.5: 

A quiet salesperson is a rare thing. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:17:26.1: 

Yes. They get angry. They want to just go out and sell, and they don't want to have to go into any system. That's how they make their money. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:17:33.4: 

Nice. Along that topic, we're going to go into just how you've taken ownership of the platform as well. To Chris's quote in the beginning, we aren't meant to be here forever, and you guys have really done an awesome job in taking ownership, building the roadmap, and continuing to push beyond where we left off, frankly. So how has the CoE been a tool for that? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:17:53.3: 

Yes, the CoE has been great. As part of the project, when we brought you guys in that was part of the deliverable, was to help us set up a CoE. So what we did was, we had a couple of IT folks really, really close in the project, basically shadowing every single meeting we had. We had a couple people from the business as well in our analytics team. The guys straddle IT and business, and they had them in there as well. Right now, we have one full-time guy in the business who does some of his work on Anaplan. We have two guys in IT that do some of their work in Anaplan. We don't do a lot in there, let's just say that. We have one full-time contract resource we've hired to do the bulk of the work. So internally we triage, figure out if we can do small things, fix things, troubleshoot things. Then, once it becomes something that's like a larger project, then we task our contract guy to go do that. So we like to keep it lean. We're probably going to add one more contractor just because we have so many projects that we need to get done in a shorter timeframe, but we have that flex. That's what we settled on, and we like what we've done so far. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:19:03.9: 

I think it was good that everyone got trained. At least they got Model Builder 1. I know it's not much, but at least they got that. They got a good hand-down from Slalom when we were done with the project, so how to look at the breadcrumbs, how to look things through and find things. So they got dangerous enough to be able to know the right questions to ask and to help lead an outside resource to do the work for us. So yes, it's working well. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:19:32.5: 

Yes, and from our perspective, this is the best possible outcome where Rob and team have full ownership. We've exited and we're cheering from the sidelines, and it's amazing to see full autonomous handoff. So one of the goals with all of our clients is really to get to the point where we are brought back when questioned, but not required. I think that the CoE has proven itself over the last year. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:19:54.5: 

We still need you for some stuff. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:19:56.4: 

I'll take the call, absolutely. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:19:59.4: 

Anaplan. I mean, they did deliver on that promise of… it's not one of those systems like SAP or something where you have to… It's much lighter than that. So we're happy to have picked Anaplan for that respect. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:20:11.2: 

Awesome. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:20:11.4: 

All right. What else do we have here? 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:20:13.1: 

Yes. Let's wrap up. Where are you going next? What's up? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:20:15.4: 

All right. What's next? So this is what we're doing next. So we have our sales forecast, and what we're going to do is add the ODM dimension to it, which is that contract manufacturer layer. Right now we don't have that, so we'll be able to add that. We're going to do, for our marketing folks, because they don't like to forecast all their part numbers… They're lazy, so they only want to forecast their NPI parts, and then after they forecast their NPI parts by part number, then they want to forecast other parts by groups of parts like, 'These are my Wi-Fi 5. These are my Wi-Fi 6 parts.' They just want to forecast them by groups and then disaggregate by whatever sales forecast was, and then they want to do a stats forecast for all the other stuff that's running. So we're going to build that for them. We're going to also roll out more Anaplan XL. A lot of the users are starting to get into that, so that's an exciting journey we're starting. We're going to upgrade to Anaplan Data Orchestrator. That's going to be cool. Get off Anaplan Connect. It's Connect, right? That's the name of the API. Yes, get off of that guy. Then we're going to continue to do S&OP reporting and get our competitive analysis, but the first side here is more immediate stuff that we're working on. Journey continues. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:21:29.3: 

Love it. Yes, and still adding across different capabilities. It shows you all have used this and ingrained it across the business, which is really cool. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:21:39.1: 

Okay, and I think that's good. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:21:42.5: 

Yes. Well, thank you all. Any questions at all, welcome to stay up and answer them, or anything in the audience if you'd like to really throw some zingers at Rob or I too. 

 

Audience 0:21:54.4: 

So who does the model building for you guys at the CoE, like for new accounts with the things that they put out? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:22:01.5: 

Well, right now the model building is all outsourced to a contractor. We don't have anyone in-house doing that. In-house guys are looking for things, looking at formulas. 'Oh, I found a small issue. Okay, let's do a revision tag and fix it.' Little stuff. When it comes to full-blown models, we totally push that out. 

 

Audience 0:22:18.5: 

On the data side as well. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:22:20.2: 

Yes. Oh, actually, no. Data side, we do handle it internally. Data side, we have that. Yes, that one we do. 

 

Audience 0:22:30.1: 

You guys were talking about the long-term demand planning. How much of your time is spent on more short-term, like zero to 18-month, versus that long-term demand planning. If you allocate how much of your time is spent, percentage-wise, on near-term versus long-term… 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:22:45.2: 

Whose time? 

 

Audience 0:22:46.4: 

The planners' time. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:22:48.1: 

Okay, the planners' time. Okay. We have multiple planners all over the place. Basically, you could call the sales guy who's entering the sales forecast that's a one-year forecast a sales planner. I mean, are you talking about demand planners who are putting it all together? 

 

Audience 0:23:01.1: 

Yes, I guess maybe demand planners, because you guys were talking about that you guys are already forecasting out pretty far out, rather than a lot of the audience here. So what percentage of that time is spent… 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:23:11.1: 

It's mostly short-term tactical stuff. The longer term, it flows through and it's fine. It's when it gets into that six-month time frame. That's where you really have to pay attention, because that's where you have supply chain saying they can't meet certain requirements that you have, or you have customers trying to change orders around. That's where all the action is. So I'd say about probably about 60, 70 per cent of the time is short-term and the rest is longer-term. You're working more with supply chain, making sure they have capacity just to build your long-term. It's a little easier there. 

 

Audience 0:23:52.4: 

After going live and enablement and stuff like that, is there anything that you recall that your end users were really surprised by with Anaplan experience? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:24:01.2: 

Yes. I think the rigidity of just the UI they were surprised by. Our prior tool before Anaplan was a JDA tool called a JDA's S&OP Tool, and it had an Excel plugin, and you used Excel as a front end. It was as close to Excel as you could imagine. So they were coming from there to Anaplan. So that was their biggest gripe. For example, I have a hierarchy. I have a part number, a rollup part, a product family, product line, business, whatever. I have a product hierarchy, and then I have all these attributes, right? In our old tool, you could just take an attribute and pivot it and see this stuff. In here, if I have… If all of a sudden someone decides that, 'Hey, you need to take all your…' Let's say I'm a toy manufacturer and I have toys that are all different colors, and someone tells me I've got to take all my blue toys and up them up ten per cent. If I don't have that part of the hierarchy, I can't break back and do that type of operation. So that's what gets frustrating to the users. 

 

Audience 0:25:06.5: 

Do you remember what was the thing that brought them over to the other side after adoption? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:25:11.3: 

Well, just time, and you can't get it. So it's like… 

 

Audience 0:25:16.0: 

No, I mean, a lot of people have gripes about just the limitations, switching over from Excel and being really familiar with being able to do all this stuff, and then going to the Anaplan user experience they're like, 'Oh, there's like six things that I can do, right?' The user experience, after having your gripes, what was the thing that was like, 'You know what, I am cool with this. I'm happy that we're here now'? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:25:38.4: 

It was just time. It's just time. Yes. Once they use it, get a little training, make sure… We'll get online with them and say, 'Okay, now here's how you do your pivoting. Here's your little eyeball, here's how it works,' and you train them a little more and then they get a little more happy. You can actually do a lot of the things they were griping about. It's just they have to be shown how to do it. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:25:59.0: 

I'll also add too that there's the avenue of customer success and feature requests too. So when there is a feature that isn't there, it's probably not just you that has that request or question. So getting it out there into the Anaplan ecosystem to get that onto a roadmap eventually, if it is material in that regard, that's a really great tool that we've found too, not only at Skyworks, but across all clients as well. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:26:23.2: 

Yes. So what we do is, I try to escalate everything I can to Anaplan, making lists of things that we wish we had and PowerPoints of how things should work. I do that as much as I can. 

 

Audience 0:26:34.3: 

You mentioned Anaplan XL as something on the roadmap. Is that designed to address some of those challenges around a different, more flexible interface? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:26:46.4: 

Yes. Some business users have a lot of data they're working with. Some customers have ten parts and it's easy for people to go in and make changes. Some customers have hundreds of parts, and it's a little harder for them to go in, and they're getting their forecasts from the customer through Excel. So, gee, wouldn't it be cool if they did a Vlookup and did a paste and then clicked a button and it just uploaded? We have some uploads we've built that are operating like that. So we've used them and they actually do work, but Anaplan XL would take it to the next level, give them a little more control. 

 

Audience 0:27:22.4: 

My question is probably for Dan. Dan, right? 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:27:25.4: 

Yes. 

 

Audience 0:27:26.2: 

So as the implementation partner, you made a comment that this is the best outcome or end scenario, that they've built the center of excellence and can now self-service a lot of the regular maintenance and stuff. So it's a two-part question. This is a super-loaded question, but why is that in the best interest for you as the implementation partner, to help get them to that point? It's obvious why I may ask that. How did you help them? What role did you play in helping them build that center of excellence? We're getting to a point where we've done three or four implementations that have gone really, really well, have a good relationship with our implementation partners, but we do want to be able to do a lot more self-service and not have to budget out this big implementation project every time we want to expand our capabilities. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:28:12.1: 

Love it, and after I answer this, I promise this is not a planted question. So the first part though, why is it good? Short-term penny wise, dollar foolish type of thinking, I would want to have Rob think of us as an annuity client. 'Every month, we're going to have them back.' No. The benefit, though, is that Rob and the Skyworks team, they're autonomous, and then when they're thinking about the next challenge or the next really cool hexagon, they're calling Slalom back versus a fix, or one of the list items that you mentioned there too. It's also really great because we can come up here and say that. We can say that Skyworks is independently operating on a tool that is business-led, not IT-led, and Slalom enabled that, versus we're still they're every month chugging along a little there. I think just snapping the line was huge, and being able to have Rob and his team continue to run, run the CoE, build out the roadmap, it's a good outcome for everybody. At the end of the day, this product is growing rapidly. We have so many other areas that we want to explore too. So when we work with Skyworks again, we want to do it on a really exciting net new use case in that regard. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:29:21.5: 

Then, part two, how did Rob and team get there? I mean, this isn't brown-nosing, but they've got a lot of talent. They've really invested the time. So I know you mentioned everyone did MB1 training. Bigger accolade for sure. I mean, that's a big step, but they were with us the entire deployment cycle for all seven sprints. So multiple users were assigned small but impactful user stories with actual story points… 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:29:46.5: 

You actually gave them work to do. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:29:48.3: 

They had work. So we handed it out, dished it out, and I think getting them in there… We had multiple weeks of design sessions in a room probably about this size and everyone there, so everyone felt like not only did they provide the critical inputs so the platform came out looking like they had envisioned it, but they also had their fingerprints on it. It was not just in design. It was in the build. It was in the hyper-care and the UAT throughout. So I think it's not really just a one-day part of it. They were there every day of that entire sprint cycle and deployment process. Anything that you'd add? You were there. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:30:23.0: 

I mean, in our philosophy at Skyworks we don't want to keep consultants just hanging around. We want to do things that are cheaper. Honestly, we're a cheap company. We like consultants, but in a proper dose, you know? 

 

Audience 0:30:42.4: 

That's a great answer. Thank you. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:30:44.2: 

Awesome. Awesome. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:30:46.2: 

Yes. That was one of the big things that drew us to Anaplan when we came here and I was sitting in there as a prospect, hearing people say what I'm saying, and it's true. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:31:00.2: 

Great questions. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:31:01.2: 

Any more? 

 

Audience 0:31:04.0: 

Just curious. Did the sales team come back with issues? 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:31:08.4: 

No, they haven't. I hope that when I add the ODM layer to their forecast they don't have any more issues with it, because it'll complicate things a little bit for them. 

 

Audience 0:31:18.1: 

That's a very good sales team. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:31:20.4: 

Yes, it's a good sales team, and as we roll out little fixes… I mean, they do stuff that's stupid. One guy we had, he went up to the highest level of his product hierarchy for his customer, and he zeroed out the forecast… Or no, he entered a number or something and it disaggregated to all the part numbers and we were like, 'Crap, who did this?' and found the guy and said, 'Okay. So we decided to limit the product hierarchy on that page so you can't go up to the company level and screw everybody up.' So there's little stuff we've done along the way to handcuff them so they don't screw things up, but it works. 

 

Audience 0:31:55.3: 

So you used the history to get to that. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:31:57.2: 

Yes. You can use the history to find out. That actually was also another big feature we liked about Anaplan was you can actually see the history. Little breadcrumbs. 

 

Audience 0:32:08.4: 

It's actually strategic. So in my staff we will see the history, and I will not say, 'It's you doing it.' It's this ID doing it. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:32:18.4: 

I've seen cases where, 'Someone blew out my forecast.' 'All right, let's go in the history. Oh, you blew out your own forecast.' 'No, I didn't do it.' 'Okay. Well, you know, if you hit delete it will screw it up.' I wish there was some type of rollback or something. That would be cool. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:32:41.5: 

We'll connect after. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:32:42.1: 

Maybe you can help us build that. 

 

Dan Wittstein 0:32:44.2: 

Nice. 

 

Rob Bhatia 0:32:45.1: 

All right. Any more? 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:32:50.3: 

I wanted to thank both Rob and Dan for such an engaging session, and I think it was also just great to hear the Anaplan camaraderie in the room as well. So thanks also to the attendees. So we have another break. So at 4:00 we have our final session in here, which is the supply chain network planning effect, so also a really cool session, but I just wanted to give a round of applause for both Rob and Dan, and thanks for presenting.