Steve Blemker 0:00:07.2:

All right, good afternoon and thank you all for joining the session on leveraging Anaplan for finance transformation within your organization. We will touch on that topic a little bit more broadly through the course of the discussion, but we also do want to focus specifically on organizational alignment within your largest area of expense, which is usually your workforce headcount and compensation through closed-loop headcount planning. Before we do that, we'll do a couple of brief intros. Austin, you want to go first?

 

Austin Trantham 0:00:37.6:

Hi, I'm Austin Trantham. I work at Enstar Group, which is a large runoff liability insurance company where we basically buy disasters, big insurance losses, and help manage those out over time. I've been with Enstar for about a year-and-a-half. One of the big reasons that I came over was, I had done an Anaplan implementation at another insurance company, Markel, based in Richmond, and that went fairly well. So came over to Enstar and brought in Steve to help us get it done. So far, over the past year, it's been a great success.

 

Steve Blemker 0:01:15.5:

Thank you. Yes, and I'm Steve Blemker. I'm a partner at Lionpoint, which is an Alpha Group company. I actually head up our FP&A and insurance vertical within our EPM practice. I've been in the Anaplan implementation space for about six-plus years. Started out in the delivery implementation area as a model builder, believe it or not. Before that, I had eight-plus years in financial services across a wider area of business and data analysis.

 

Austin Trantham 0:01:43.3:

He's the best at it!

 

Steve Blemker 0:01:46.3:

Lionpoint, if you're not familiar, is a specialist management and consulting firm focusing exclusively in financial services. So, we work with some of the largest financial services in alternative markets firms in the country, really helping them through every stage of project design and delivery lifecycle. Within our EPM practice, enterprise performance management, we really bring expertise to a variety of use cases and tools to meet specific business needs; primarily among them, leveraging Anaplan. So, 100-plus certified model builders. Over half of those are certified solution architects, and over a quarter of those are Certified Mater Annaplanners. So, not a space that we just dabble in; an area where we really bring expertise within the platform, and not just within the technology, but within the industry of financial services that would serve your organizations. Give a brief background on Enstar.

 

Austin Trantham 0:02:47.9:

As I mentioned, it's a runoff liability insurance company. Been in the business for about 30 years. They're the biggest, the oldest. What that involves is just, essentially, if you're an insurance company and you've got a disaster on your hands where you know that you're going to owe someone, or many people a great deal of money over the course of potentially many years, what we do is come in and usually pay some cash. Take those liabilities off of your books, take the reserves that you've set aside to pay those liabilities off your books, and then pay those out over time, generating runoff liability earnings. Then also, we're investing those reserves, and those are generating returns. So, it's a niche business.

 

Steve Blemker 0:03:29.7:

An interesting one.

 

Austin Trantham 0:03:30.4:

Yes. Well, a lot of my friends disagree, but I think it's very interesting! [Laughter]

 

Austin Trantham 0:03:35.2:

Anyway, so it's a great company, they've got some great processes in place, but at its core, it is a business that has general and administrative expenses, headcount, same as - I'm sure - every business that all of you work for.

 

Steve Blemker 0:03:49.5:

So, as you mentioned, you came over from Markel, which has really leveraged Anaplan for finance transformation. Given your previous experience there, and in different roles surrounding Anaplan, can you speak to the environment that was at Enstar when you arrived? Kind of, what some of your initial reactions were, and why you and your FP&A team ultimately decided to reach out, seeking help in improving how you were leveraging the platform.

 

Austin Trantham 0:04:14.1:

Sure. So, it's a dynamic company. It's grown and changed over time. I think it had just outgrown the build that was there previously. We had some dimensionality issues - I'll let you speak more to the technical elements of that - that created some pretty enormous space usage. So, when we wanted to expand Anaplan to include additional dimensions, such as what we would call a portfolio, so this would be an individual liability that we have acquired, introducing that to do more analysis on whether or not these assets or these liabilities are performing as we would have expected them to. We weren't able to do that because we were running into some big space constraints. We were also still using the old UX, the screens that we used for our G&A planning, where we have cost center owners who would come in and do the planning, we're clunky, not very popular, especially around vendor planning, stuff like that. So, we weren't getting very good feedback from them on that.

 

Austin Trantham 0:05:19.1:

We also wanted to build a five-year model, so a five-year forecast model, so being even more forward-looking than just the immediate plan year. Really, another big element of it was, what we're going to talk about today, the workforce planning piece where there was really no connection. We would create a workforce plan, but then analyzing and sticking to it, and explaining variance and actuals, there was just really no good way to do that, so the workforce planning model that you built has gone a long way to solving that problem.

 

Steve Blemker 0:05:50.5:

Yes, those four bugaboos that they were running into all of them, the sparsity, performance, maintenance, and kind of a rigid end user experience. So, I want to talk a little bit, just as far as finance transformation, how we can leverage the platform, but how we go about evaluating that process on our end, before we jump into the workforce planning piece. It's funny, in instances where a current model exists, or you're starting from scratch and it's a brand-new build, our philosophy of approach is relatively the same. We have a point of view, best practice methodologies, architecture, specifically within core FP&A that we can bring to the table. While we still need to understand the functional requirements of each individual business that we step into, and translate those into the underlying solution, both from a technical and operational perspective, again, we really do facilitate the same approach through that process, whether it is a current build that we're evaluating to replace or rebuild, or brand-new build that we would put in.

 

Steve Blemker 0:06:54.0

If those functional requirements don't exist, if it's a brand-new process, Lionpoint can bridge the gap with our industry peers and knowledge that we have from working with so many different companies. It was clear after we went in and did that evaluation process with Austin that the model, as it was today, did not clearly support the needs of the business, that it had grown in complexity, grown in size. It was just time for a new look and feel of the best way to manage that platform. At Lionpoint, we do have an FP&A app that helps facilitate that discussion, at least specifically in expense management. Really, just showing the art of the possible, of rolling forecasts, dynamic plans across time inversions, and it hopefully really turns that discussion into more of a configuration versus creation approach. Ideally, the goal is that it's easier for you as a business to digest where that architecture might fall short of your ultimate goal for your current planning needs today.

 

Austin Trantham 0:07:58.8:

Yes, I would say being able to see at least a template outline of how you envision the data moving through the model definitely made the design and build phase a lot easier, to have a little bit of a roadmap already laid out.

 

Steve Blemker 0:08:16.7:

Can you speak a little bit more about what it was like working off that established solution, what the end user benefits were, or if there were any other benefits that came out of that process; how you were really able to mold the application to your planning process, and make it the best of both worlds?

 

Austin Trantham 0:08:31.7:

Yes. So, I'll speak specifically to the G&A planning, so our general administrative expenses in a given year, around $400 million, so it's not a lemonade stand. One of the big things right out of the box was just the new UX creating landing pages for our cost center planner. So we have about 50 different cost center owners, different areas of responsibility, who go in and produce a plan. So, creating an environment that they could come to and have one single place, and it's just that updated look and feel, was a simple thing but it went really, really far. Demonstrating that we are being responsive to their complaints over time. Again, that was all before I got there, so not my fault! No, just kidding. So, the way that it's working now is, we have a salary and benefits plan that is largely put together by ops, our ops team in consultation with the call center owners. They say, 'Here are the people that we need to be accomplishing our objectives over the course of the year.'

 

Austin Trantham 0:09:45.7:

Then we take that data and work with HR to determine how much are these people going to cost to hire? We operate in many different countries, so the different benefits, and taxes, and social/national insurances, and those sorts of things. So, really, we asked the call center owners to just tell us who they need, and then we tell them what that will cost. That, kind of, is the first piece; it's in layers, so that piece comes in first. Then we built a major expense vendor planning dashboard, so this is a place where most of the rest of the G&A expenses are to vendors that are providing costly services to us over the course of a year. So, we've created a dashboard where planners can go in and pretty simply select a vendor from a dropdown; they can plan in whatever currency they want, specify what periods they expect those expenses to hit; and then that is the next layer that gets added. From there, we have a pretty intense focus on travel and entertainment expenses.

 

Austin Trantham 0:10:50.9

Like I said, we are a global company, so people are flying around quite a lot, and that is one of the most controllable of our controllable expenses. So, our T&E dashboard reaches into Concur. We have a Concur instance at Enstar, and planners are able to go in and say who is going to be traveling where, and for how many days. Then we have centrally based assumptions, so how much will a hotel room in Hamilton, Bermuda cost for that month of the year? It just populates all that automatically. So, what we're trying to do is take as much of the - I don't want to say guesswork, but all of the estimations out of the hands of the call center owners. They just need to tell us what they plan to do, and we'll say what that will cost, and then that gives us a whole lot more ability to explain variants later on because we can say, 'Well, hotel rooms in Hamilton, Bermuda ended up costing a great deal more than we thought,' or 'These people didn't take this offsite trip that we thought they were going to.' Just a whole lot more granularity and color. 

 

Steve Blemker 0:11:53.5

You were able to do that at the employee level, which brings us to the largest value of the solution, and which drove the most process transformation within the organization, and that was the workforce planning piece, which you and I have talked… Kind of, the lifeblood of the organization; your talent is usually your most valuable and expensive asset. So, can you describe a little bit about what the headcount workforce planning process looked like before we implemented the Anaplan solution at Enstar?

 

Austin Trantham 0:12:21.6:

Sure. I think we had a visual somewhere in here.

 

Steve Blemker 0:12:22.5:

Yes, thank you.

 

Austin Trantham 0:12:25.3:

So, yes, here's a little bit of text about it, and then there's that other chart. Yes, there you go.

 

Steve Blemker 0:12:31.5:

You want this one?

 

Austin Trantham 0:12:32.2:

Yes. So, the way it was working before was fairly siloed. I'm sure that this is going to ring true to, probably, a number of people in this room, where we would have a… Our HR talent acquisition team would have this list of roles that they were intending to fill. That was maintained separately in an Excel file somewhere that they were sharing. Then we would have our operations team towards the end of each summer; would start thinking about headcount, new adds that we needed to make for the next year. So, they would have their version of the truth. Then we in FP&A would need to put numbers to how much all of that was going to cost. So, what we kept running into was a situation where, if somebody leaves the company, how are we ensuring that that position is getting backfilled in the talent acquisition file, in the HR file? Then, once our operations team specifies, 'Here's what the headcount is going to look like next year,' and months go by, people leave the company, people join the company, that data becomes out of date by the time we really get into the heart of planning season later on in the fall. So, misery!

 

Steve Blemker 0:13:48.1:

[Laughs] I remember when there was that recognition point. You said headcount management is ten times harder than most people realize, right?

 

Austin Trantham 0:14:00.1:

Yes, I would agree, [over speaking 0:14:01.2] myself!

 

Steve Blemker 0:14:01.2:

[Laughs] We're trying to manage, track, analyze employee movements across departments, roles, compensation attributes, across different time periods and plan versions when all of those different points of data are going to affect how we're calculating the eventual output of our plan across those different expense areas. I mean, how do we manage all this chaos? We start with a roster from UKG, your HRS system, and basically, new positions that are created and managed within Anaplan, within the platform, and sent over to HR. With a mix of some top sound assumptions, as you mentioned before, bottoms-up assumptions, we're able to extrapolate out the transfers, promotions, automatic backfills, those closed and open roles, ultimately driving out into the future from that initial baseline seating of our forecast the salary bonus benefits, payroll taxes, 401K, SBC. Your stock base comp. Basically, that full picture of your S&B expenses all from that calculation engine by simply just starting with that initial base of what your current picture looks like today.

 

Steve Blemker 0:15:16.4:

So, we enabled a solution, that Austin will get into the detail, or the specifics of Enstar here in a second, where every open role, every employee was tied to a unique position ID. The old boxes-versus-people approach to an organizational structure around headcount. You'd be surprised to understand how valuable that is, to really know what that organizational structure looks like at any point in time, to be able to effectively handle those movements in and out. We're actually seeing some trends like that in the industry. Someone leaves the company, and you're not automatically created a backfill, should the first question be, why do we have this position in our organization in the first place? So, the solution enabled - you basically couldn't have headcount or salary within the org without an assigned position ID. So, just from your perspective, more going into the Enstar details, why do you find the position-based approach so effective? Where do you really see it adding value? How has your organization transformed in the way that it operates within that planning space?

 

Austin Trantham 0:16:29.7:

Sure. To Steve's point, from a moment ago, when we talk about headcount planning, if we're talking about going around and just counting the amount of heads that are working in a particular department at a particular time and saying, 'Is this in line with what we thought our plan was going to be?' that's easy enough. Assigning dollars to these things is really where value is created. I just wanted to get back to the point you made. Thinking about an org chart and thinking about the boxes on the org chart as positions, not people; that is the biggest key, and I'll get into why. So, beyond the fact that it maintains a clear and consistent org chart, it adds so much more clarity where… How many times have you seen: we're making this new hire; this new hire is meant to backfill someone who has left; and then I might say, 'Well, hasn't that position already been backfilled by so and so?' 'Well, no, that person has a slightly different grade and a slightly different compensation package.' 'Well, then if that person's not backfilling the person that you think this one's back…' 

Austin Trantham 0:17:36.3:

You get into this loop, and that's where misery lies. By having a specific position ID that has to be selected before any position can be filled, it forces HR, it forces ops to clearly identify who this person is coming in to fill, and it avoids the possibility of hiring two different people for the same position, for example. It forces you to maintain the plan, because if there is no position ID for this role in the plan, then you can't fill it. If you are going to fill a position that wasn't in plan, that gets clearly surfaced and rings alarm bells, and maybe an approval will go through for it, but…

 

Steve Blemker 0:18:22.3:

Right, you're always going to make targeted hires for exception…

 

Austin Trantham 0:18:24.6:

Sure, yes, and that happens, occasionally.

 

Steve Blemker 0:18:31.7

What streamlined that whole process, and you can speak to this a little bit, was just we were able to, with that unique anchor of the position ID and the Anaplan platform, be able to create an automated process where these things are managed, created within the platform. HR receives the open position to report. They're going to manage and track those things the same way that ops, finance, and - are maintaining that same list, and they are now working under a singular umbrella, versus three disconnected operations trying to fill these different spots. Then when that new roster comes through the next month…

 

Austin Trantham 0:19:05.8:

I realize how dorky it sounds, but it's just nirvana, the way that this has been working compared to the way it was previously. Again, we have our UKGs. Let me back up. We have our plan. We have very specific - by GL account, so for salary and bonus and stock-based comp, and all the various insurances for each position ID. Here's what it's going to be in the plan year. Then we have details. You know, hire date that we're forecasting, all that sort of stuff. At the end of each month, we import the roster from UKG, so that's our HR system, so it'll have all of those same details for people who are actually working at the time. So, when that comes into Anaplan, it connects based on that position ID and wipes out all of the data that we had in the working version for that unfilled role and fills it with the details that are actually in that role, for the person that we've hired. What this allows us to do is to compare the working version in Anaplan to the planned version in Anaplan at an individual position level, where we can say that we ended up spending more or less money on this specific position because it was hired 40 days after we had said it was going to be hired in the plan, or because it was hired at a higher salary or a higher bonus percentage that we had in the plan.

 

Austin Trantham 0:20:32.9

So, we can get really, really granular on explaining why each individual call center has salary and benefits, which again, biggest expense, why they have that variance, and we can start to identify trends around the company where we can say we are typically hiring 45 days later than we thought that we would. For people in the UK, where we're finding that our salaries are coming in 15 per cent higher than we thought they were. So, we need to rethink what that market costs. So, just a ton more control.

Steve Blemker 0:21:05.7:

There's been such a focus on expense management, that that type of variance analysis is critical to the way that you guys are operating at this point in time. Again [chuckles], it probably sounds nerdy, but we're at the point where we're loading that new roster from UKG. We're kicking off the forecasting engine, and you guys are sending out the open positions reports to all the different departments; HR, operations, that day or within the next 24 to 48 hours, and they have an active view, or rolling view of how those positions are getting filled, the open positions that they currently have still outstanding, and can start to manage their headcount as well.

 

Austin Trantham 0:21:45.9:

That moves right up into senior management, where they can… Like you mentioned, we have a report. Again, it's just beautiful. I get excited about it! Anyway, the way it works is, we have all of our positions that are currently open. Then when we do the UKG load, if any of those positions were filled over the past month, they disappear right off of that report. If we had any leavers over the past month, automatically, a backfill position is created and added to that report. You're able to see the entire picture of our forecast headcount, either in the form of someone who's actually working, or a position that's been created as a backfill. We then share that report with all of our ops and HR partners. They're able to go through that list and say, 'We're going to close this position out. We're not going to hire that.' We can remove it from the version, and then we can start - or they can say, 'We've already made an offer. It's been accepted. This person's going to start on August 15th.' So then we can go into Anaplan for that position and give it a start date of August 15th.

 

Austin Trantham 0:22:53.4

We can even update it, if we wanted to, to the salary that we knew that we were going to pay that person. So, when we do our rolling forecasts on a quarterly basis; so much tighter, because we aren't losing sight of people who are going to be needed as part of the organization. They're in this other report, and we can put a dollar value on what we think that's going to end up costing us two, three quarters out into the future.

 

Steve Blemker 0:23:17.4:

Yes, and I just put this up. I mean, this is all the movement within a year that you're trying to capture, track, - again - analyze. You can just see the hires, the movements in and out of different roles within the company. Hopefully, the visual here just represents how much activity there actually is going on when you look at just one single annual cycle. This is just the first year that you had the platform in this fashion. So, hopefully, moving forward, it just continues to evolve and grow and add more value to the business. So, the solution in combo with the driver-based OPEX, the detailed vendor in major expense planning, the T&E at the individual person level because you have these effectively dated records of employees, and you know which departments they sit in, and you can still manage that large expense as well, tied to that individual employee and where they sit as of any given point in time. As well, with the short-, and long-term investments management, as part of a detailed revenue plan that we outlined earlier, which was done in tandem with this entire implementation, which took about 26 weeks. A little bit longer? Yes.

 

Austin Trantham 0:24:29.3:

I don't know!

 

Steve Blemker 0:24:29.8:

[Laughs] For a full FP&A expense management, and then to add on the detail revenue planning on top of that. We were able to just collaboratively work together, using Anaplan to enhance, again, the agility, accuracy, and effectiveness of your financial operations. Hopefully, as today and into the future, leading to better strategic decision-making and improved business outcomes. So, I think that was all we had for today. Thank you, and open the floor to some Q&A.

 

Moderator 0:25:02.5:

Yes, let's take some questions. I mean, I have a question off the bat, while everybody else thinks about this. Austin, how has this changed your relationship with HR, having this connected process now?

 

Austin Trantham 0:25:16.4:

That's a great question. Everyone's been very professional. I feel like there was maybe a degree of a, 'Why are you getting involved in this thing?' which is a core responsibility for us. At the end of the day, what we've delivered to them is making their lives a lot easier. They've been a good partner for us in FP&A, working with our HR team. The proof is in the outcome. They were getting roped into this misery as well. The constant reconciliations between the different data sources, I'm spending a lot of time on that, so I think they're feeling much better now. It still does feel like we've got to prove ourselves to them a little bit, like on a periodic basis, but so far so good.

 

Steve Blemker 0:26:07.7:

You all heard at the beginning. Was it the first speaker during the morning session, talk about spending more time analyzing, versus trying to consolidate these plans together. A lot of that's going on now. We're sending the reports out, we're talking about why these variances are occurring, versus just trying to get the full plan picture in front of everyone.

 

Austin Trantham 0:26:25.5:

Yes, and by having these positions where we can describe, characterize some of these open positions by department, by length of time that they've been open, that's one thing that I think in these last couple of weeks has gotten a lot of attention where people are saying, 'These positions have been opened since the planning cycle last year. Do we need this position or not?' Having it out there. 'If not, let's suck up some of that budget.' 

 

Steve Blemker 0:26:49.9:

There's accountability on all three sides within HR operations and finance now.

 

Moderator 0:26:55.5:

Absolutely. Questions in the audience.

 

Audience 0:27:04.0:

Thank you. We're on a journey of doing capacity planning, and so I'm curious. I have a two-part question. Our focus is more on salespeople, but I don't know what your remit is. What capacity planning model do you guys implement, and how has using Anaplan influenced that? The second question is: you talk about forecasting costs; are you importing any sales incentive information into that as well, as far as headcount costs, or not?

 

Austin Trantham 0:27:34.5:

No, go ahead.

 

Steve Blemker 0:27:35.8:

Not in this instance, but I think capacity planning and leveraging… I mean, you could get as granular as you need to, but leveraging some type of more tops-down approach for that type of operational workforce certainly comes into play when just looking at the total architecture of the workforce planning solution that we developed. From a sales compensation side, we do also have an ICM team at Lionpoint that would focus specifically in that area, looking at commissions and stuff like that. You don't have a ton of people in your org that get paid off that right now.

 

Austin Trantham 0:28:09.8:

No. The thing that we might do one day in the future is really leveraging the five-year plan, where if we're looking out into the future at M&A activity and investment asset volumes and stuff like that, that could probably tie in as a driver for… If we're going to have this many more liabilities sitting on our books, those are going to need people to process those claims; so we're going to need to hire, so let's start thinking about that now. That's maybe another step down the road for us.

 

Steve Blemker 0:28:43.3:

Not necessarily applicable to Enstar here but would certainly be a use case I'm happy to talk to you about afterwards.

 

Moderator 0:28:50.6:

Questions.

 

Audience 0:28:58.9:

Just from an integration point of view with the HR model, what was the lift like, from your perspective?

 

Steve Blemker 0:29:08.9:

The Concur stuff is only loaded on an annual basis at present, those for T&E and stuff like that.

 

Audience 0:29:14.2:

Yes.

 

Steve Blemker 0:29:15.8:

That was just a manual upload at the beginning of the planning process. The UKG file is currently being, for the first few months, was done on a manual basis, just to make sure that, as we were going through the process, the integration was working as we expected. They use Azure, so to drop the UKG file to Azure, then you can have an automatic connector in Anaplan. Really, the only field we needed to add was position ID, I think, to the UKG file. Once we got the data cleaned the way we wanted it, the integration is pretty simple.

 

Austin Trantham 0:29:49.0:

It occasionally needs a little massaging, whether I have interns in there. Just some stuff that I'm like, 'We don't need this as part of the file.' Yes, for the most part, it's - on a monthly basis - a 20-minute job.

 

Moderator 0:30:06.7:

The other. Who's going to close us off with a question? Over there.

 

Audience 0:30:19.9:

Thanks. I can totally get the reconciliation with HR. I feel you on the nightmare that that can be. How about on the operations side, how you're getting the forecasts? Maybe that is more for your LRP, as you think, but have there been any pain points on thinking about forecast, or any analysis, and how did this help? Also, are you seeing better alignment across forecast? We run into that across FP&A with HR and the operations side, all trying to forecast future headcount needs.

 

Austin Trantham 0:30:57.1:

There was that one slide where it had Anaplan in the center there. I might not be answering your question exactly, so correct me if I'm missing it. Yes, the file that we share has replaced this annual event where operations is going to the various call centers and saying, 'Who are you going to need?' Now, we have that all consolidated in a single place. I don't think I'm answering your question, though, I think I get lost. Help me, Steve.

 

Steve Blemker 0:31:36.1:

The two processes were segregated today. You still had TOM, the target operating model, but the idea is that the two groups are leveraging the same platform, moving forward. So, inevitably, you're just going to end up with more integration between… Almost, for better or worse, we're forcing people to interact and agree on a standardization of the planning process and how we're going to operate that moving forward, based on the fact that we're using a unified platform to do so, and there are not 40 other spreadsheets that everybody's managing and evaluating.

 

Austin Trantham 0:32:10.0:

I think the hardest part was getting to the starting point, getting agreement on where we start. They say if you mess up the base of a pyramid, you end up with a corkscrew. So just getting everyone on the same page at the beginning was the lift. Then from there, the updates are mutually agreed upon on a monthly basis, and we just roll forward in harmony now. It's been pretty great!

 

Moderator 0:32:37.5:

Well, this has been fantastic, hearing about how this has been rebuilt and connecting these processes together. Austin, Steve, thank you so much. If you have more questions for them, I'm sure they'll be hanging around and you can talk with them one one-on-one. Otherwise, we'll be kicking off our next session at 1:45. Thank you very much.

 

[Thanks]