Kouros Behzad 0:00:03.6: 

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kouros Behzad. I'm the Director of Solution Marketing for HR and Workforce Planning Solutions at Anaplan. Been at Anaplan for almost five years now, and I always say HR and workforce planning because HR does workforce planning. So does finance, so does sales, so does operations, so does contact center. It is all over the place and there's a lot of components to what HR does in terms of planning, and compensation is certainly one aspect. Equity is one aspect of compensation. So it is my pleasure today to introduce you to Miroslav Vida, Amy Dang and Wesley Green from Adobe. I've had exchanges with Miroslav I think for probably [signal breaks up 0:00:47.1] and one of the things that always impresses me and really resonates with the title of Director of Planning Transformation, Miroslav is always thinking what's next, what's coming. What else should we do? This is certainly one aspect of it. So going beyond that headcount expense to offer very strong workforce planning, and from an HR compensation equity is a big aspect. So I'll pass it on to you to just introduce yourselves with a little bit of a brief about your background, what your interests are, and from there we're going to go into the Q&A. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:01:24.3: 

Great, sounds good. All right, Miroslav Vida here. I am basically the founder and lead of the Anaplan CoE at Adobe, overseeing finance and marketing use cases. If you look out the right window here, you'll be able to see our building literally right down the block, so this is our neighborhood. I have been at Adobe for, like, 16 years now. A little unusual. I've been there for quite a while. My background before coming in to lead the CoE was finance, actually. FP&A roles. I did corporate FP&A at Adobe for a long time, and other companies and things like that. I have switched into this area and just love chasing the connected planning vision. 

 

Wesley Green 0:02:10.2: 

Cool, I guess that means me. Hi, everyone. My name's Wes Green. I am a solution architect at Adobe. I've been working with Adobe for three years now. Prior to that I was Anaplan architect elsewhere, and have been in financial systems management for pretty much my whole career. 

 

Amy Dang 0:02:28.4: 

Hi, I'm Amy. I am a senior program manager at Adobe. I've been with Adobe for a little bit, over nine years, almost a decade. I've always managed all things executive and equity compensation, so executive compensation, anything to do with vice presidents and above, as well as board compensation and C-level compensation, equity compensation in the form of RSUs, PSUs, so all of the annual refreshers, promotion, so anything when you think of total reward or package or new hire, we manage all things equity. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:02:58.6: 

Awesome. So with that, maybe just tell us a little bit about Adobe. Everybody's probably used some pieces of Adobe in their everyday work life, personal life, but I just would love to hear a little bit more. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:03:12.4: 

Yes, so most of you know us. You know some of the flagship products like Photoshop, Acrobat, but over the years Adobe has amassed a portfolio of software solutions that basically puts Adobe at the center of an individual's digital experience. So changing the world through digital experiences - personalized digital experiences - is our company mission, and we have products in three clouds. There's a creative cloud, document cloud [signal breaks up 0:03:48.4]. Hopefully we can take a journey from content creation, iteration, editing, updating, all the way through to analyzing, optimizing people's interaction and experience with that content to maximize monetization, adoption, all those types of things. So just as one little quick example. You go to a professional sports event. Before that you're already interacting maybe with certain brands, with things through apps, through websites. You come there. You're at the event. You're being engaged through an app. You scan as you come in. After that event there's further follow-ons from that experience. Adobe's behind really the creation and analytics of all that. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:04:37.1: 

Very cool. Then you've had a long journey in planning using Anaplan. This is really a snapshot of all the different use cases that you've got in place, and even some of the things that you're building out. Do you want to… 

 

Wesley Green 0:04:54.0: 

Yes. We've been at this since about 2016, so you'd hope we have some good things to put up here. We have a lot, including new things that we're still working on. Long-range P&L is a big one, the equity compensation that we're talking about today, but at Adobe Anaplan also powers basically worldwide workforce OpEx, CapEx planning. We have a number of models that are also focused on internal profitability, P&Ls, all of that type of stuff. We've gone on to cash flow planning with the treasury team, marketing planning, marketing projects and those types of things. We have got into some PlanIQ use cases. Those are still budding and growing, a lot more we can do there. We've got some Polaris reporting that we've recently rolled out this year, so we're [signal breaks up 0:05:48.1] the team and everything we've done, but as much as we've done there's so much more that we can do. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:05:54.0: 

So with that, let's start with the why. What challenges and gaps led you to [signal breaks up 0:05:59.9] planning at Adobe, and why was now the right time? Amy, maybe you can start with that. 

 

Amy Dang 0:06:06.0: 

Absolutely. So we started our equity planning journey with Miroslav in 2022. We were trying to solve for two problem statements. The first problem statement was, how do you budget for equity at the macro-level world scale? A lot of our practices were reporting out of Workday, employee census information. You're kind of looking at the people of Adobe as well as all of the headcount planning that you're going to predict to hire for the next fiscal year, shall we say. There's a lot of attributes that go into it, whether you're a geo, your level, your role, if you have a technical or if you have a sales role, so there's a lot of complexity of the attributes of the actual planning budgeting model. We were doing them all in spreadsheets, and as you can imagine in spreadsheets it's always time stacks. Whenever I'm doing an extract out of data and I put it into a model in Excel, but the time I'm getting it into Excel it's probably outdated because of people movement. We have 30000 employees. Things move. We don't control every aspect of that movement because we're such a large company, and so we needed a more scalable option and we actually explored a few different options aside from spreadsheets. 

 

Amy Dang 0:07:08.8: 

The most viable option was Anaplan because of the partnership with Miroslav, as well as all the attributes that were going in. The model's so sensitive that if you change one attribute based off of competitiveness, if you're trying to target something else, if your year-over-year financial planning looks different from that, we were able to tweak that model dynamically so we could look at the total cost at any point in time, at any point in day. As you can imagine, if you're looking at this from a C-level lens they're going to ask questions dynamically, 'What about this? What about that?' and we were having to be able to be nimble and on the fly at answering those questions. Doing it in spreadsheets is not realistic from a planning standpoint, and answering those types of questions obviously was not realistic as well. So that was the first problem statement we were solving for. 

 

Amy Dang 0:07:49.5 

The second problem statement that we were solving for was, we were tracking equity at the total corporate level, which is the traditional way of looking at equity compensation as far as headcount spends. The problem we were also running into there was, if you have different lines of businesses and you have different roles, and you have different technical roles, if one unit was spending more than another it wasn't necessarily like a free-for-all, but leaders were imagining this was a free-for-all because there was no accountability. With being able to put this into a dashboard or some type of visible UI, they were able to look at it at any point in time, and I like to call this as like a credit card statement. If you're spending the money on a new hire you're able to track what your budget is, what your starting point is, and what you're spending thus far. At any point in time they're able to look in and say, 'Oh wow, I've spent this much on new hires, but what about the people I want to take care of from a retentive angle? Do I still have money for that?' In spreadsheets it's always a point in time. We needed something more dynamic. 

 

Amy Dang 0:08:39.8: 

So the why is essentially having more agility, partnership, transparency, and a huge governance in terms of tracking. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:08:50.6: 

I would just add, when you do traditional operating finance cycle you've got the OpEx budgets and things like that, but this doesn't appear anywhere unless you put in this effort. I would just probably say the north star that we're still chasing and want to work toward is, once you've put the governance and the transparency on to that you can also really start thinking about optimization. Once it's scarce then you can really optimize, and then we can hopefully scenario-model and get into things about how are you deploying your equity dollars, which is a major thing in our industry, for maximum impact on the people that you're going to attract and retain so that you can be competitive. 

 

Wesley Green 0:09:32.9: 

Yes. I mean, for Anaplan what makes it so good from my point of view as the architect, I can partner with these two who have very different functions, one in finance, one in HR. I can get that minimum viable product out there. It's the first thing that's going to make everyone happy, and then from there we can build on it. We can enhance it. We can solve for bugs. So super-quick deployment time, being able to use things that exist already, marry things together and keep working. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:10:03.5: 

So when we talk about workforce planning, one of the big components of that that's always critical to drive that continuous workforce planning is the position planning, position management. That's the foundation for it. How did position management play a role in enabling equity planning transformation? Why is that important? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:10:26.5: 

I think we even have a slide for that, the next one, just to illustrate it. So the concept is simple, and a number of companies that are doing this or moving towards doing this, but the idea is to unify the full lifecycle of the worker all the way from, 'I'm planning to hire somebody.' Now I'm in a recruitment phase. Now I'm onboarding somebody. Now there's changes, and at some point maybe also people leave. You're unifying that between your planning system, Anaplan, and your operational system, which for us is Workday, where we have our applicant tracking system and all the employees. So now the benefit of that is essentially that we start to be able to talk about the same data landscape. We can talk about a room like this with chairs, and when people get up and leave the chair we've got the history of who sat in that chair. We can talk together and decide, what do we do with that chair? Do we keep it there? Do we fill it? Do we take it away? Traditionally what we've had before we did this, we only had the bottom arrow from Workday back to Anaplan, and then it's a kind of different world because on Workday we're talking recs and employees, and only on Anaplan side does finance know how to read the tea leaves of how this connects to to-be-hireds. It's a lot more difficult to talk about the same picture. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:11:48.3: 

Now we have a position born in Anaplan, goes to Workday. You can only open a rec if you have a position. You can only onboard a worker if there's a position to onboard on to, and then we're bringing that information back to keep iterating on our planning. Last thing I'll quickly say. Doing this doesn't usher in connected planning on its own. There's a lot of other things that have to be done beyond that, and we're still on the journey of doing those, but I think this is foundational to it. I think this really enables you to pursue some of these bigger goals. I don't think we would be where we are with the equity compensation planning initiatives if we didn't have this as a foundation that we can leverage and pull into that model and properly analyze and dollarize. 

 

Wesley Green 0:12:39.5: 

I would just add to that by saying it is our foundational model. If you think about Adobe as a company, what do we do? We sell licenses. What do we spend it on? We spend it on software engineers. We spend it on servers. When you're managing OpEx, which is what Miroslav's boss really is responsible for in FP&A, the bulk of our expenses all come from this position management model. So having really clear guidelines around roles, really clear guidelines around when people are joining or leaving, how does that impact the P&L, that's all in this model and it's able to generate multiple cycles of op plans and financial forecasts. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:13:20.8: 

Super. Next we're thinking about equity compensation. It can be very complex, especially when you do it at scale as in your organization. How did you go about turning this slew of spreadsheet-based processes into something that's strategic, something that is transparent, something that brings in this discipline across the organization? 

 

Wesley Green 0:13:43.8: 

Yes, that was a little bit of my job, a little bit, with the help of these guys on here, of course. It's good that we talk about position management, because the way that I look at this process is, it was a little bit disconnected before we got this taskforce here to solve for it. We had on one hand over here finance doing what they do best, financial forecasting. We had very clear operation cycles. We had very clear managed systems and data that's structured and it works well, and gets you a good financial forecast, but we didn't really know what was going on with equity over here. So while we knew the cash impact of hiring and terming and expanding and re-orging, we didn't necessarily know how much we were going to spend on equity. That's when we partnered with Amy and we got to learn about Amy's world, and yes, Amy's world had a lot of spreadsheets. It was relatively disconnected from the world that Miroslav and I came from that has a much more rigid and systems-based approach. 

 

Wesley Green 0:14:42.2: 

So one of the things that's really important is to 1) be a partner with a different organization. There was a lot of focus on educating and cross-education, not just us but them as well, around what do we mean when we say what a forecast is? What do we mean when we say a to-be-hired is? What do you mean when you say that this hire is a certain HR type of criteria? Well, how do I translate that back into a dollar, and how can I as a systems manager tie that back to a record that then I could go to Miroslav's boss and say, 'Well, this actually means we're going to spend X, Y, Z on this hire'? You can think about that at Adobe. Adobe has… I probably can't say how much we're going to hire this year, but it's a lot, and there's a lot of backfills and things that come into complexities. So it's really the marriage of the structures that Amy was using off of spreadsheets to help scenario and guideline around all of the hiring plans that existed today from Miroslav's world. So we use a spoke model for this. As I mentioned, we have position management, which is our core OpEx and headcount planning model that sits at about 200 gigabytes right now, so it's a big monster. 

 

Wesley Green 0:15:55.9: 

I take all of that financial planning data and I built a model for Amy, and I'm able to connect it with Amy to say, 'Okay, here's all the positions we know we're going to hire,' for new hire spend. We have other components too like focal spend, your annual grants. 'Here's all the headcount we have. Here's all the headcount we think we're going to have next year. Now, Amy, can you tell me what our different attributes are to plug up the spend?' and that of course involves getting data rigid out of Workday, structured, not in a spreadsheet, on a weekly or monthly refresh cycle, using production data. Then of course coming back to him and saying, 'Here's a plan that's snapshotted.' We'll refresh the hierarchies again. Things will change. We'll have variance analysis, different dashboards that both teams can use to have the conversations that are probably more difficult than I can have! 

 

Amy Dang 0:16:55.2: 

One thing I would add is that prior to having Anaplan be our central location we would do things in silos. Miroslav and team would do their own predictive analysis of how much we would need. We would do that as well, but then when we were comparing the notes we were using very different attributes although we were using the same data population sets. We would have to learn each other's language to understand, 'Hey, what do you mean by this?' So what we're saying, 'What do you mean by this? Well, when you say this I define it as this way.' It was just astounding to understand that you're saying the same thing but slightly different, so that the numbers weren't panning out. We would go through rounds and rounds, and it was just a huge partnership of understanding your world, you understanding our world, and then coming up with a cohesive message to leadership so that we had a partnership that was aligned. 

 

Wesley Green 0:17:41.8: 

We love mapping tables. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:17:45.1: 

One of the nice things is, I see our worlds converging a lot more as a result of this. We're much more attuned to each other. Our processes are more in line. Our vocabulary is more aligned, and as we go through operating plan cycles we're able to increasingly avoid some of the stumbling blocks of the past that we would really have to spend more time unravelling and unpacking. Maybe the last thing I'll mention, there's some scenario modelling in there which is pretty cool which we've started with, and we'll expand on. There's some management reporting in there that we're building and using which is also pretty neat, so we can get the insights all in the same package. 

 

Wesley Green 0:18:25.3: 

His world is bottoms-up planning. We're planning for something like 30000 headcount, hiring, firing, all sorts of activity that a business does at the individual position level. Her world, it's a little bit higher level. It's executive compensation planning, so the ability to roll up everything at a high level, bring it over here, do some scenario modelling on it, change some guidelines or some compensation plans and be able to translate that back into a financial plan, that's kind of the marriage of the data that we're doing all happening within Anaplan. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:19:04.1: 

Very good. I want to double-click on this HR and finance better together. That's an aspiration for a lot of organizations. Again, different languages, different ways of looking at it, but finance has got the money. HR has got the people operations and the demand, right? How do we line it all up and make sure this three-legged stool really stands on its own? With that, what did the cross-functional collaboration between HR and finance look like? What made it successful? How do you perceive that? How do you executives look at that? 

 

Wesley Green 0:19:36.7: 

I'll take that. Again I would say that yes, we're coming from different worlds to an extent, but one of the ways I like to model or I like to use Anaplan is to think about things front-to-back. So when we're having conversations with different partners within Adobe, 'What do you need? What's the end report going to look like?' From there we can work our magic to build it behind the scenes, but keeping in mind what we're trying to drive for, to have a north star. In this case it's a report to our executives around what an equity budget would look like, how much they've spent year to date, and how much is left to go. Keeping that true north star there, literally a dashboard - or, should I say, Anaplan page - a management report that tells me what I need, then we can start diving into the details. 'Okay, this cell needs to do that. It needs to be here.' That's where the other people come in. Amy doesn't know everything. Miroslav doesn't know everything. Maybe there's different parts of the data structures that need more coherence, we need to get more information on, so part of how to do this is, really can't underscore how important a good project manager is, truly. 

 

Wesley Green 0:20:45.6: 

Having someone who knows the different people involved, who can hold me, Amy, accountable to the type of data and type of reports that we need to be producing on a good timeline because we know these executives need it by this date. Holding our feet to the fire is a very important - friendly feet to the fire, I should say - important aspect to getting these things done. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:21:11.8: 

Decisions don't wait for data, right? If you have it you have better decisions. It really makes a big difference from that perspective. What kind of visibility, governance, insights do you have now that you didn't have before, and how has that changed that conversation [?in the executive leadership 0:21:29.7]. 

 

Amy Dang 0:21:29.7: 

Yes, absolutely. One of the things that we're still on a journey on is going down a path of explaining what we have been doing. Behind the scenes there is an army of people working on this as well, so we would actually pull in the HR business partners as well as the finance partner and ourselves in the compensation space to kind of have that cohesive message so that we can provide and deliver the proper governance as far as what does everything look like? How is the market doing? Are we able to spend more? Should we pull back? In the past we weren't able to forecast and look ahead because we were always doing things at a point in time. With the forecasting model we're able to say, 'Based on the current run rate, based off of our current hiring trajectory, at this rate we would be blowing the budget out of the water or significantly underspending.' So we're able to get more precise as far as how much we would spend on any given fiscal year. We even introduced models of long-term, so what's the three-year outlook? What are we saying for the three years? How are we going to be tracking in, let's say, three years? 

 

Amy Dang 0:22:29.1: 

From a governance lens our executives actually really appreciate what we have been doing, because not only are we showing things at the executive level, we're also showing things at the C-levels as well as our board. Our board actually tracks equity compensation as well, so they really appreciate how diligent we have been in terms of planning, forecasting planning, and basically just making sure that we are fiscally responsible. So from a governance lens and insights are able to kind of pull all of that out of Anaplan, whereas before we weren't able to get a lot of those insights. 

 

Wesley Green 0:22:58.6: 

To add on that to a more technical lens, we have our quarterly forecasting cycles that are being done in finance. The position management tool pretty much automates a whole chunk of that. It's able to say, 'We are hiring X amount of employees. We still have X amount on board,' whatever it is. I can marry that back up to Amy's view which says, 'Okay, this is what we budgeted for the year. It looks like with a reforecast,' we're pulling in actuals and we're reforecasting it, 'We might be coming in hot,' to Amy's point, or maybe we're not. That's then you can make the business decisions that you're talking about. This is really one of the few times we're actualizing and pulling in data from different systems, one from Anaplan for the forecast side, one from Workday for what we've spent so far year-to-date, and able to put that up on a dashboard and say, 'Look at where we're at.' Now we can make business decisions, whether it's targeted hiring, whether it's increase in focal for morale, what be it. That ability to connect what's been happening to what we think is going to happen and how does that affect equity? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:24:07.6: 

Then probably the last one, very briefly, is just scenario modelling of all of these things. We're going to be getting into the next operating plan cycle and we're going to be looking at, 'Okay, what happens if Amy designs the compensation structures in a certain way, or in a different way, or in a different way? We have a couple options. What's the financial implication of those and, based on the trade-offs of that, what does that let us maybe differently invest in in other areas?' because we'll see it all the way through to the expense. Those are types of things that now we're really working towards. A couple of years ago, we didn't have on the radar. 

 

Wesley Green 0:24:45.8: 

Just one piece of our ecosystem, you can see already that all of this is spend and it's really mostly around hiring for the most part, but you can imagine how that's going to translate into an expense on a P&L. Well, we have a P&L model, so that's to come. Based upon what we plan to hire we'll be able to forecast our stock-based compensation expense. Then again, even in that P&L model there's scenario modelling there, so you can imagine how all this can flow together and piece together. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:25:17.1: 

A little bit off-script, but what's been the effort to pull these models together around the position management aspect of it, which is the foundation of it and then the compensation piece on top of it? How much effort do you guys put in and how much of your time is it saving on a day-to-day basis? 

 

Amy Dang 0:25:40.9: 

I can go first. From a budget modelling standpoint, in the past when I was doing things in spreadsheets I would only have, let's say, ten different scenario modelling options because you're pulling different levers from a competitive basis. If I look at my market-competitive peers and we're targeting against… We're trying to take talents from the big tech companies. What does that range look like? Should I increase the target range for this given year because that technical talent blew up in the AI space? Should I tweak that up? Should I tweak that down? Most likely it would be an up because of how hot the market is. When I tweak that factor it gives me the financial outlook to say, 'Hey, that's going to cost the company X amount of dollars.' Each business unit would have X amount of dollars because of population headcount, so on and so forth. In the past I've only been able to do ten or so. The model that we've designed, I think this last fiscal planning cycle I did 80 different models because we were running so many different scenarios, and it wasn't just target value. 

 

Amy Dang 0:26:31.6: 

It was, 'What about the percentage collaboration receiving? What about if we target higher-level technical talent? Lower technical talent? Geo. Was it in India? Is it in the US? Is it specifically in the Bay Area?' All those levers become an attribute into the model, so being able to model 80-plus different models, it was almost like you play out every scenario possible to pick what was best for our business philosophy and our financial outlook for any given year. 

 

Wesley Green 0:26:56.5: 

It's just so much more precise. Amy can tell me that we're going to, say, just hypothetically, I don't know, Romania is going to be a new talent pool for us. Well, if we want to get some more Romanian resources and we're going to pay more Romanian resources X amount more than our competitors would in that country, how much does that translate into a budget based on the headcount that we have in Romania? I don't have to go search for anything. I already have all the positions that are there that are tagged to Romania. All we have to do is just up a little bit of a percent and it will translate down to all those bottom-down low-level records, and we can bubble it back up into a management report. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:27:38.7: 

I would say I'll just go on the effort side of this. Yes, it's been some effort! These things do help, and they do streamline once they're up and running. Position management, the position planning itself, there's other people in the room here who played huge roles in that to help us do that internally. We did that during the pandemic. It's all a blur, but essentially that's easily because we were doing everything bespoke, custom-built, all the way ground-up, every possible workflow. That was a good year of effort. I would say then all of that complexity also spills over into the equity model, and we have to account for all kinds of things. Position transfers and movement of things. Changes in attrition, because it's not only the positions. It's future backfills of future attrition. There's several other layers, so you know, I'm not going to shy away from that. It was actually a significant effort to get to this place. I'm very interested in how the apps and how all the Anaplan intelligence will help shorten that in the future. 

 

Wesley Green 0:28:48.5: 

Effort's an interesting metric there. I can look at members in the audience and say, 'Without what they built two or three years ago we'd be nowhere.' I can say in a sense effort begets effort. Even as we have been somewhat live for a year with this model and this process we're finding new things every day about how we can tweak and improve it. It keeps me employed. I like that, but I'm also learning so much, and really, truly, being somewhat of an engineer and somewhat of a financial analyst, and now somewhat of a comp analyst, has been a really fun career progression, I guess. Effort-wise it's tough to say. Whether you put that into hours or whatever folks in our community have done on our platform, it's like, 'We couldn't do it if we didn't start where we were two years ago.' 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:29:41.8: 

Yes, but I also… It's been a year to get here, but we're still very much on the journey. That is very true. There are still a lot of improvements, a lot of answers, a lot of things we're still in the process of figuring out too. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:29:55.6: 

It is a journey, but you've got to start somewhere. You've got to start somewhere and each improvement, each aspect, is absolutely critical to keep driving it forward and continuously making that change. Obviously, there is that operational efficiency that comes as you build these things, but that organization agility that it provides you, the value for that is billions rather than tens of thousands in terms of OpEx that you gain, so that's kind of the outcome, the business outcome. Looking ahead, what's on your roadmap? What advice would you give to others looking to tackle similar [?goals 0:30:35.0]? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:30:37.4: 

I'll maybe talk about the what's next. So just in this space here, okay, let's see. So first we're going to take a little bit of a breather, pay down some technical debt, do some internal improvements for better transparency, further auditability, to further automate and make our back-end even more efficient. Next, we're going to have to turn the corner and we're going to really charge into equity expense. What we've been talking about here is up-front equity spend. Now, think about translating that into the amortized expense based on vesting schedules. Think also about how we have to claw back forfeitures for unvested equity as people leave. We want to ultimately have that whole stock-based comp expense flowing from spend to expense so we can really understand what that means in the P&L context. I think we're going to come back, have to revisit our scenario modelling, because we want to again scenario-model from the front to back. We want to model from expense back into spending. That's a journey we're still on being able to do. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:31:38.9: 

I will also say, beyond equity compensation, we're also working with Amy and team and others on the team on improvements on cash compensation as well. We have merit modelling and all these types of things already, but there's ways to improve this. For the success we've seen with an improved alignment of our processes there's things we want to do on promotional cycles and things like that so that finance and HR, compensation and others, are again talking the same language. I'll also throw in Polaris, PlanIQ. This was unfortunately not built on Polaris. It's before we had access to it. I wish it was. Hopefully someday it will be, but there are a lot of intersections in this to stay on top of and to analyze. So Polaris might have an application there. The mix is very sensitive. There's a lot about, 'Okay, you know how many people we're going to hire. What's the mix going to be?' It has a big implication on the results. Mix modelling with things like PlanIQ is on our mind. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:32:38.8 

Last but not least, we're building a long-range P&L model. We have a cash flow model out there, so there's some future thinking about how these things are going to interact in a more sophisticated way. After that we're all going to get big… We're going to earn bit equity bonuses and go on vacation, honestly. So that's a little bit of what's ahead, and I would just say really quickly lessons learned. The process is huge and paramount to every success of what you will have, so twice as much time spent there up front, twice as much time saved down the road. Understanding that the cleanliness and the maturity level of your data upstream is critical. To set right expectations of what's going to be possible out of the gate. We have position management. Doesn't mean our data's perfect. Doesn't mean we don't have still things that we have to work through in a version one, and then come back with a version two and a version three. 

 

Wesley Green 0:33:41.3: 

Yes, lessons learned is a good one. Clean as you cook. I think regardless of just Anaplan, work in general. A cluttered desk is a cluttered mind. Same with the model. I think what you said first is, yes, a lot of tech debt we need to clean up. It's part my fault. Things move fast. Things change quickly. Requirements change. We manage the bucket a lot. Just don't lose sight of that. If you're planning a team and you have architects and model builders, and you need to go to your boss and prove why they need to have 20 per cent or a certain month to do that data clean-up, you're saving yourself headaches and fire drills in the future, for sure. 

 

Amy Dang 0:34:26.1: 

As far as next steps for my side of the house, a lot of the business enablement. So explaining a lot of this Anaplan lingo to our executives and just putting it in layman's terms. We're actually going to be having this in front of our C-levels next week so that we can showcase what we've done thus far, and the introduction of this next generation. The other thing we're also going to be doing is some roadshows, enablement for all our consolidators who actually support those C-levels, as well as our HR function leaders to say, 'Hey, this is what this means.' Fortunately, I partner closely with these guys so that I can speak some of this lingo, but translating it to some of my HR counterparts might be a little bit of a challenge. That's going to be part of my next steps, putting it in layman's terms. 

 

Wesley Green 0:35:10.4: 

I would just say, what's ahead of us from that point of view would be, remember one app can have multiple models. You don't have to do one model to one app. We're definitely going to be spinning off different UX that are just slices of what we've done for, say, HR business partners, slices for financial consolidators. Those two wouldn't even know that they're in the same model, but they are. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:35:35.9: 

So with that I want to [unclear words 0:35:39.6] any questions for our panel here. 

 

Audience 0:35:44.5: 

[Unclear phrase 0:35:44.5]. Thanks. I think one of the earlier slides, you had one where you had Workday and you had Anaplan in the middle, and you mentioned that your planning is in Anaplan. I know that Workday has their own forecasting model. What made you choose Anaplan? I understand after… Hindsight's like, 'Oh yes, it's consolidating and everything is connected planning,' but before that how did you make the decision of not going towards Workday, since they are the HR workforce giants? 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:36:25.4: 

I remember, years back… We've been on the platform since 2016, and I remember the early days when we did head-to-head-to-head against all these things, and honestly just long story short we felt Anaplan won out on the flexibility and customization we could have at that time. We certainly have really leveraged that to the hilt. I would say, now that we came to this project and we came to position management, we were already well-established in Anaplan. Anaplan is the source of truth really for all the OpEx and the financial and the headcount planning. The whole P&L is in there. That was well-established already, so it was very clear that we had a critical mass around this is where planning is. Workday, this is where execution is. There continued to be questions and ideas asked about that, but I think for us the more we can just invest in that single platform helps us, even if we think about some of these future types of enhancements that we heard about in the keynote this morning that are coming our way. 

 

Wesley Green 0:37:36.4: 

Having Anaplan as the source of truth for finance and for OpEx is a huge, huge platform for us really. The ability to say, 'Okay, this is how much dollars it's translating into,' we don't necessarily have that in Workday. The ability to ratchet up and down different hiring plans, different strategies, perhaps M&A, things like that, that can start with a budget but then translate into… One of the things, future, down the road, what we produce out of our model will eventually be visible to hiring managers, so they'll be able to know what they have at a budget level. I don't think we could do that in Workday if we didn't already have an established budget and processing cycle in Anaplan. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:38:22.4: 

Other questions? 

 

Audience 0:38:27.8: 

I'm curious how crucial it was the fact that Adobe uses Workday to your success with having that for most of the system [signal breaks up 0:38:44.6]? Would you have been as successful if you had a different system? [Signal breaks up 0:38:51.6]. 

 

Wesley Green 0:38:55.2: 

If you want my honest opinion, I'm an Anaplan guy so take it with a pinch of salt. You know much more about the complexities of Workday, and the things that go on there are quite complicated. Do I think it had to be Workday itself? No. For me, I care about the data that needs to come in and how do I manipulate that, and build it around what these folks need to report on. It's more that the data's clean. I think Miroslav could talk to how position management as a process allowed for data cleanliness in a way that we didn't have before that we could then use to do more compensation planning. I don't think it's like a Workday thing. 

 

Audience 0:39:40.1: 

So the Anaplan project's forced you to get clean data. [Unclear phrase 0:39:45.3]. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:39:47.8: 

Well, I would say that position management process, that was a big turning point for us to get data more clean, and cycling between the systems. There's bidirectional integrations there that are running every day so that we stay in sync, and whether it was Workday or another tool, to me the governance of that process is what's important. I don't know how other HRIS tools can handle it, but to me just having that was the key that made this work, because I… Like I said, I've been at Adobe forever. I did corporate FP&A before this, and I remember sitting in cycles where it's like, 'Whoa, we have all these massive numbers of recs open in Workday. What's going on?' Everybody slam on the brakes. Massive fire drill to reconcile and close down a billion recs that are sitting here because they have nothing to do with the plans that are in Anaplan. That's what we were doing. That type of stuff doesn't happen anymore, and if that stuff was happening then what I would roll up and be able to really track through the lifecycle in this equity app would be just a lot more challenging. So whether it's Workday or another tool, I just think that that lifecycle is critical. 

 

Amy Dang 0:41:05.6: 

One thing that I would add, not necessarily Workday but any HRIS system or in terms of the job architecture, so even before we had position management our HR teams had to undergo a huge project called job architecture. So basically re-architect every single one of your jobs so that it is a discrete functional job for exactly that role. A long time ago you would have a finance job. If you're a finance analyst, everybody was in that finance job. Whether you're in accounting or if you're a controller or if you're… It was all consolidated. When a lot of companies have moved over to a re-architected system it was discrete, so you can say distinguished-ly, 'You are a consolidator. You are an accountant. You are, so on and so forth, HR, benefits, so on.' That was the basis of how we were able to feed things into position management, because you're able to understand exactly what role you would need. I think that's the basis of everything regardless of the HRIS system that you use. It's just a clean data from the architects. 

 

Wesley Green 0:42:01.3: 

The language around position management has been so fundamental, especially with what I've learned since I joined Adobe and having us on this sort of process. Regardless of the tool, being able to say that my position as solution architect means that I am sat somewhere with a certain level in my career, with a certain pay associated to it, and that's across all 30000 employees when they join, when they leave, when we spin up 30001, when we go down to 29999, that having that bottoms-up architecture, foundational, is so important. IT's game-changing. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:42:42.1: 

Just to add to that, I come from [signal breaks up 0:42:48.3] position management was introduced back in 1993 or '94. That's the same idea. Success factors is this. [Signal breaks up 0:42:58.2]. Everybody's got their version of it. Anaplan is friendly with all of them, no matter which system you have for your HRIS. That version that goes back and forth. There are a number of customers that you can share. 

 

Audience 0:43:20.9: 

Thank you for sharing your story. It's super exciting as a rep here at Anaplan. We talk a lot about value, and I'd love to know if you could put it in dollars and cents how much cost savings putting this whole process… What it has shown for Adobe. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:43:46.8: 

Well, whilst I don't have a dollars and cents that I could just tell you outward, and probably some other metrics on how we're using I probably can't really disclose here, I will say in terms of what Amy mentioned, what she was able to do, I don't know if you could guesstimate or translate what that would take to have done before versus how long it took you. That's probably the way I think of the value right now. I think the bigger thing is going to be around the governance that we're going to have, and the ability to know when we need to course-correct and how to hold people accountable. I don't know. That's my best… 

 

Amy Dang 0:44:34.3: 

So unfortunately we're not able to share the dollar savings. We can't really disclose some of that, but if you imagine cost of labor of the amount of teams that are tracking this, you can look at that as a headcount expense saved. 

 

Wesley Green 0:44:45.8: 

I wouldn't even say it. There is certainly that aspect there, absolutely. You know, manhours saved, for sure. It's also the unlock of what we can do that we couldn't do before that is changing the way we're doing things. Like Amy said earlier, what used to be three scenarios, she can now do 80 of them. You could maybe have put together a spreadsheet on how much that would cost. Each scenario is X hours times the labor or whatever. It's not just saving money because we spent it on the platform and a good engineer. We're doing things that we didn't do before. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:45:27.3: 

One last question. 

 

Audience 0:45:29.8: 

Do you already have the buyer [unclear word 0:45:29.8] with HR having [unclear phrase 0:45:34.1]. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:45:42.6: 

So we actually don't open the recs in Anaplan. We create the positions. We open the positions there, and finance does that. Those positions have to have the right attributes on them, and then, when we're ready, then we publish into Workday, and then we have very clear rules about which system is the source of truth when. Once that rec is even pending in Workday, Workday is the source of truth, and Workday's going to win out and is going to come and update our system so that we don't have conflicts. I haven't sensed a lot of conflict with this this way, to be honest with you. They're able to do everything they need to do. We're able to do everything we need to do. I think maybe what we still see is that there are still governance processes that need to happen to periodically clean and prune the positions, decide what's going to be closed. Let's not. We have that periodically. This set-up seems to have worked for us, frankly, better than I probably would have guessed when we started it, to be honest with you. 

 

Wesley Green 0:46:50.0: 

I would say if you're struggling with buy-in keep in mind what I said earlier around, you know, one app doesn't have to be one model. You could always spin off another app that just have whatever their folks in HR need to do there, right? 

 

Audience 0:47:04.9: 

HR [unclear phrase 0:47:04.9]. 

 

Wesley Green 0:47:06.7: 

Something that I think about. 

 

Miroslav Vida 0:47:07.6: 

So that's the thing. We have… Like I say, as I mentioned, position management doesn't to me immediately just flip on the switch to connected planning. With some groups, like with HR and compensation, we've made great in-roads. With other groups and parts we have a good operational unit cycle going. There's more things to do with talent planning, the hiring demand into recruiting capacity. There's a lot of these things that we haven't taken fully there yet with various groups within HR. There's things with location planning we haven't done yet. We could still pursue improvements like these types I just talked about. I'd say we're still on the journey of really fully unlocking with HR. I like our opportunities, because we have the foundation [?that we do at least 0:47:58.7]. 

 

Kouros Behzad 0:48:01.0: 

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Thanks to our panel.