Tracey Wells 0:00:07.3:

I'm not going to do introductions about each other because we're all on LinkedIn, you can go and find us. We're just going to get straight into it. I am, however, just going to do a quick introduction to Asda. Now most of you will know what Asda is. We are, of course, the third biggest supermarket in the UK. Grocers, everybody is aware of it, even if you don't use Asda, you know what a supermarket is and what they do. One of the things that's making us stand out at the moment is we're currently on a mission to make Asda the number-one choice for people who are short on money. Everybody knows how tough times are right now. What Asda is trying to do is make sure that everybody knows that they can come to Asda and get the right price and they're not going to get ripped off. So that's Asda. How does Asda use Anaplan? Well, we've got five primary tools. There are other bits on the periphery. Essentially, we are using it as a retail pricing tool, and that's what we're going to be talking to you about today. That's probably our biggest tool right now. There is so much that goes through that, it's unbelievable. We also use it for financial planning, so much the same as a lot of you, if you're already Anaplan customer, you'll already know about that side of it. There's lots of work goes into making what looks like a fairly simple plan, but actually the amount of work in the back of it is unbelievable. 

Tracey Wells 0:01:35.4:

Promotional planning is probably something we've been doing for quite some time. We've done our promotional planning in Anaplan, but then when it came to doing the price, that would happen outside. What we've now done is brought the two things together. In the keynote this morning we were talking about that connectivity of Anaplan, and this is where it really does show that we've managed to bring those things together. We've also done some space optimization work. It's been a really exciting journey, and not one that I was actually involved in, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway. We've basically been using it for doing optimizations for the categories within Asda around just making sure that the right amount of space is given to the right product. So you can always just make sure that the space you're giving to something is at its optimal. It's tough and it does need a lot of data science in the background to do that, but it's a really exciting tool using the Anaplan Optimizer. Then we also use it for routing and logistics. Routing some of our products through the Asda space, so goes from dock to depot to store.  

Tracey Wells 0:02:43.5:

Retail pricing because that's what we're here to talk to you about, it's a really tough environment right now, as I said earlier. Everybody is trying to say, look, we're the cheapest, come to us. Come and shop with us. In the midst of all that, Asda have to try and stand out. The only way to do that is to be very, very reactive. So if Tesco raise the price, Asda has to get straight in there and either match it or decide what we're going to do with it. You don't get the time to mess around with it because you want to hold that market share. Now it's really hard to beat Tesco because they just have so many stores, but there is still room for everybody else to get in there. What we've done is built a tool that helps us to get that price to store. Before I tell you how we did that, first of all, I want to do a bit about what is a price? I know what you're thinking, it's pretty obvious, Tracey, what the price is, it's what I've just paid for at the till. You're right, it is. However, to the retailers, and I don't know how many retailers are in the room, but for those of you who are actually selling anything, a price is not just a price. You will have your base price, and that is the thing that you get every day. If it's not on promotion, it's a base price, and that's what you've got. For us, we also have Asda Price, which is a base price that's so good we're willing to put our name on it. We know we couldn't do any better with that price, no matter what we do.  

Tracey Wells 0:04:15.7:

Then you've also got your promotional prices. For us, we're on a big mission to do Rollback, so we've got thousands of Rollbacks going on, but that's principally your was now. Everybody will have gone to a shelf and seen, was £5, now £3. Well, that's a was now. For us, we call them Rollbacks, but you all deal with them in the same way. Then you've also got Mix & Match. Now, we do less of these and more of the Rollbacks, but ultimately, what you have is, what we've had to do is build something that's basically got a Mix & Match, but not all Mix & Matches are the same because it could be buy three, get one free. It could be buy four for £2. It could be buy two pizzas and two sides, and you'll get them for a fixed price. So all of these have to be treated in slightly different ways. It's not just as simple as saying, okay, well, I'm going to do a Mix & Match. That brings with it a lot of complexity. If I wanted to create this offer that I've got on the screen right now, so I want something that's going to show a Rollback, that was £4.83 and is now £3.28, fine. I know it's already £4.83. I know it's going to £3.28. Stick it in the system, away it goes. Well, yes, except I've already got a promotion live in a couple of days' time that will actually be taking it to £2.37. When I come off of that promo, I already know I'm going to be taking a cost increase, so I'm going to have to put that retail price up. So the next time it goes on promo, it's going to be £3.28. 

Tracey Wells 0:05:54.2:

What Anaplan has to do is work out what's the was price for the day I'm saying this is going to go live? What is the now price going to be? What am I going to see on that shelf-edge label? What's going on in any future promotions? What was the price yesterday and beyond? Are any of those prices breaking any of our legislation, pricing strategy, SLA rules? You're not supposed to send something to the pricing team with only one day to go. They do, but we won't. Is it part of a campaign? There's all of these different things that you have to think about before you can load that price and expect it to land in the way you wanted. What we used to do is something with a lot of spreadsheets. Effectively, we would load our promotions into Anaplan, and then separately all of the prices would go into a VBA-controlled Excel sheet. That Excel sheet would then get sent to our pricing team, who would have a look at it, would manually work out whether or not it was going to be breaking any rules. They would then send it for approval via email. The email would then come back to them, and then they would have to get that email, match it back to the spreadsheet, and then go and type everything in. So all of this was extremely manual. Then eventually, it would land in store.  

Tracey Wells 0:07:19.1:

Now, as you can imagine, the margin for error for this is immense. You do not get to have a margin of error with retail pricing because if you get it wrong, the cost to Asda is unbelievably high. I've highlighted it there. If you are caught out doing something and you do get fined, it can be ten per cent of your turnover. That is no laughing matter. Especially when you're trying to offer value to customers, you want every penny you earn to go back into it, not going to pay a fine. If you consider, even if we just think about the fact, so we've got 1 for over 1000 stores, if we just took those 10,000 Rollbacks that we're doing - and that's not the only price changes we're doing, but just those - that's over 11 million shelf-edge labels that we're putting out there. If we get any of those wrong, then the impact is pretty high. So, what did we build? We built the whole process in Anaplan. Now we lent quite heavily on Fidenda for this. I don't know if any of you have worked with Fidenda, and if you know [?Hina], then ask her about Asda's RPT tool. She'll love it. She really enjoyed it.  

Tracey Wells 0:08:32.4:

We basically built everything so that price and promotion is being loaded in exactly the same place. It's just everything goes in, it's all done in one fell swoop. That is then pushed through, still within Anaplan, and it goes and checks all of those business rules automatically. When it's checked them, if anything has broken it, then it can be sent for approval, still within Anaplan. They're approving it in Anaplan, it's coming back through, and then it goes through to the pricing team. Now, at that point, they are having to export it and load it into SAP. Once we've finished doing all of the other divestiture from Walmart, then we will be automating that link between Anaplan and SAP. For now, we have to do that bit manually - and off it goes to store. We've not only improved our accuracy, we've removed most of the points of failure. We've also managed to repurpose that team to other areas of the business. For example, the article side, where SAP has been probably a little more challenging than RPT has. On the subject of business rules, I'm going to hand over to my erstwhile colleague. 

Elliot Meek 0:09:40.6:

Thank you, Tracey. As alluded to earlier, business rules make up pretty much the foundation of the RPT products that we have delivered through Anaplan. It's not as simple when an end-user wants to request a new price change as it goes through Anaplan and it goes straight to the shelf-edge label. It has to go through 80 separate, different checks, or as we call them, business rules. These can sometimes be warnings, i.e. something that gets approved by a respective department, who is in control of whether or not they want that price to go live or not. Then some are hard stops, whereby it is a complete big, red cross, this isn't going any further, and it is a blockage to say if you try putting this price any further, it's not actually going to get through the system. All the prices for all products at the moment are going through the retail pricing tool, apart from George clothing, so it is a huge, fundamental part of the network and how we actually operate in the commercial space right now.  

Elliot Meek 0:10:40.9:

Some of the rules can be legislative, i.e. things that are basically a legal check against us, and if we get those wrong, there are significant repercussions with that. Some of them are internal, competitive checks, so are we in line with pricing in Tesco, pricing in Aldi, places like that? Some are commercial rules, which I'll come on to in a few examples shortly. One key element of the whole checks is if it fails for one, it fails for all. If it has a price that has, say, three different business rules that it failed, if it fails for one of them but passes for the other two, it's a complete failure. It's very much interlinked and it's a very collaborative approach, with all business units, when it comes to the approval process. I'd also like to highlight again, a big shout-out to the Fidenda guys. These people were very fundamental when it comes to the building process of this. Just to talk you through some examples. I do just want to point out before I get into this, all of the prices and all of the commercial data in this is completely made up. Don't think you can go into an Asda and find any of these deals, but anyway. Moving on to the first example that I've got for you here. 

Elliot Meek 0:11:49.8:

I think we're all aware of multi-buy deals. It's quite a popular way in which not only supermarkets, but many retailers like to promote their products. Here you have one of my favorite Asda products, it's the Diet Tropical Crush. Fantastic, if anyone ever wants to try it, please go get yourself some. Here we have a deal where I'm trying to run a Mix & Match, any three for £3. Say, for example, to buy one of those products is £1.50 for the singular price, and I'm now trying to set that at a new price of 80p. Now, that directly undermines the Mix & Match deal. The reason being is to do the Mix & Match deal, you're looking at an average price per product of £1 per bottle of pop. If you then try and put it down to 80p you're essentially breaching it because you're saying, look, if I buy one of them it's actually no better than the multi-buy deal. So all of the promotions in Anaplan come with a hierarchical order. This is the example where your Mix & Match would take precedence and you wouldn't be allowed to run a single price deal like this. A better deal would be something like this, where I'm actually still giving the customer a discount, I'm going was £1.50, down to £1.20, but I'm not undermining the Mix & Match.  

Elliot Meek 0:13:07.9:

This involved quite a complicated logic, and something that was very fundamental as part of making sure we abide to a commercial rule where we don't want to be doing any shelf-edge labels that, as I say, give the customer something that doesn't support what we're trying to put across, as Tracey alluded to, giving the customer the best possible deal we can. You can see here a little snippet of the business rule and how it appears, and which approvers specifically need to go in and give their authority to proceed this any further. This is how it appears for every single rule. Another one that people will be quite familiar with is price-marked packs. You can see here another favorite product of mine, the Mini Cheddars, you can see there's a clear £1 symbol on there. What this means is that if we ever have any products that are flagged as a price-marked pack or, for example, like the Budweiser at the bottom there, which says clearly 12 for £10.99, I can't then come in and change the price of that without the authority of pricing strategy and our central services team. It's something that is, again, misleading. We have to be very conscientious of are we delivering what the customer expects at the till?  

Elliot Meek 0:14:18.4:

This is very much something that falls in terms of our strategy with suppliers. If they're saying, as a blanket statement, they want the price of a product to be a certain price, we have to abide by that. We can't be, again, undermining what they want and what they've stipulated. So there's a big part of maintaining a good relationship with suppliers in terms of maintaining the price they ask for. Minimum unit pricing. This is quite a unique one to purely alcohol products. It only applies to Scotland and Wales. Us guys in England and Northern Ireland can be trusted, I suppose, you could say. It's basically where, in Scotland and Wales, the alcohol percentage of a product will determine just how low a price you can give the customer. What that means is that I can't go below a certain threshold on promotions. I definitely couldn't go ahead and put, say a bottle of vodka, on for a deal of £1, it just would not be allowed. To give you some more real-world examples, say, for example, I had a bottle of wine that was on at £4.50, and it had a Wales price of £4.20, they're my minimum unit pricings. I can't go below that. If I try and set a new national price, which is the price for all nations, of £5.75, that's fine because it reaches both above those thresholds. 

Elliot Meek 0:15:40.9:

If I have the bottle of vodka and I try and put a price on that's a national price, that applies to all nations, of £5, it again is below £7 and below £6.50, so that will break MUP. This, again, carries very significant repercussions from a legal perspective. Then again, if I try and put one on at £3.50, it's fine for Wales, but it is below Scotland's MUP value. So again, something that is very fundamental that we have to check. We can't let this go through. This is a great example of a hard stop. There are no approvers here in Anaplan. It is purely if you try and do this, the MUP will break, and you can't proceed with the price any further. The last example I want to talk through is HFSS. For those who don't know, that stands for high fat, salts, and sugar. This was a piece of legislation that came in in 2021, that was surrounding not letting retailers put products that were deemed as unhealthy on certain areas of promotional space. What that means is an area such as a shelf end, like there, as you can see in the picture. Another example that everyone's accustomed to is when you're on the conveyor, moving into the checkout, you may have your shelves that used to carry things like chocolate bars, sweets, etc. As of 2021, this has all changed, and there are certain products, which are categorized, which we are not allowed to put on that space. It can be approved, but it's quite difficult to get it through that approval process. It's something, for example, like if I had that cake, it would have to go through what's known as our trade planning team.  

Elliot Meek 0:17:13.1:

So again, it's a great demonstration of the sophistication that we could build in in Anaplan. This was quite a complex rule that we had to build in, that involved taking an entire matrix of the space, and then take an entire matrix of all the products that were classified as high fat, salt, and sugar, and allowing the users to be able to see that, actually, I'm not allowed to put it on this specific space. It was a great showcase of what exactly Anaplan could do from an interlinking of different, complex data sets perspective. The last slide I want to talk you through is our integration architecture, and exactly how this footprint moves from one area to the next. How Anaplan was the perfect partner in terms of making a retail pricing tool that was completely collaborative and gave us exactly what we wanted. It wasn't rigid at all. It was super-agile. We were able to build things on the fly and move towards changing business needs as we needed to. All of our central pricing that drives the tills, drives the e-com network, drives all of the digital channels, such as like if you're getting groceries off Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, it all gets driven out of SAP. SAP really is the central repository, it's the beating heart of all of the pricing, where it's kept and goes to the various networks. Anaplan is where all the pricing is created, from the absolute day one, and it's where it all gets sent from before it moves into SAP. 

Elliot Meek 0:18:45.7:

Now the reason why we chose Anaplan was purely because it is that flexibility. It gives us what we want. It's something that you can build exactly to specifications that are difficult, complex. There was potentially some consideration to put it in SAP to begin with, but it was just too rigid, and there was too many different considerations and too many things that we had to keep changing on the fly. Anaplan has proven itself to be the perfect partner for this solution. As you can see, this all moves into SAP seamlessly. We're able to work with our Asda integration services to build a footprint that allowed us to utilize Azure Blob storage and connect various different data flows, to allow us to create this closed-loop process. How this flows from an end-use perspective is you would create your price in Anaplan. Once these prices were submitted, they'd been through all the relevant approval processes that I'd spoken through earlier, this was then available to a central admin team, who would export it out of Anaplan and put it into SAP. This is an area that we're working on, we want to get that automated. It's the only non-automated part of the process so far, but it's definitely where we want to move to next. 

Elliot Meek 0:20:00.4:

Then once it's in SAP, the Asda integration services, who really are like a data-engineering team, they transform a variety of XML files that come out of SAP and they create CSVs that we drop into an Azure Blob storage location. As a lot of you may know, Anaplan is great because it offers that real-time connectivity with Azure Blob. We're able to pick up files as often as sometimes 15 minutes. So it really is a great highlight of just how Anaplan can move at such a quick pace, to a process that needs to be updated at such a regular interval. As these files are dropped in, this then goes through a variety of different data processes. I think, in an ideal world, we'd have built all of this in a great, big hyper-model, but due to various commercial constraints and things, we've had to build all of this within the 130 gigabyte classic limits. It's meant splitting this all out into four separate data hubs - three separate data hubs, sorry - and moving it into the main centralized model. So this then moves into the data hub two and three, where a variety of different transformations go on, and then it gets fed back to the main model where it tells the end-user that your prices have gone live. The end-user only sees the top-left model, and they're able to see the closed loop, that their prices have been applied and they're ready to go live the next day. 

Tracey Wells 0:21:17.6:

The RPT tool, as you will probably see, has an immense amount of complexity in it. It's something that we've put, I think it's, what? Over 100,000, maybe even over 150,000 prices through our RPT model since we went live with it last year. I'm not saying there haven't been a few issues, but everything that Anaplan has, we've asked of Anaplan, it's delivered. So everything has actually been fine, it's just that we've maybe just not spec'd things out in the right way or whatever. It's managed to handle it. We do get a few instances of, it's quite a slow model because there's so much going on, but it does everything we've asked of it, and more. It's been crucial to us that, as a retailer, we could make sure that our pricing stays flexible and reactive. We have to move fast. We may have to make price changes live the following day. We have to also have confidence that all of those rules are being met. Everything has to still go through, you can't just go off and do what you like, you still have to go through all of that rigor, and it has been critical to actually do that.  

Tracey Wells 0:22:28.1:

We need to be confident that every time a customer interacts with us, they are getting the right price, it's the one that we intend for them to get. They're not going to go to a shelf, and then get to the till and get a nasty surprise, because everything is being handled through the RPT tool. We need to have confidence in that pricing tool. So far, we absolutely do. It's all been pretty good.