Steven Blemker 0:00:07.6:

Awesome, so today we are really looking to talk about how the Anaplan platform can drive value in a condensed timeline by leveraging best practices, both from a design perspective and functionality within repeatable use cases. Jay and Abraham, do you want to just do a brief intro on yourself before you get started?

 

Jay Spector 0:00:24.7:

Sure. Hi, Jay Spector, joined Blackstone coming up two years ago. I sit within our HR and strategic incentives function in a role spanning across it that includes both oversight of workforce planning, but also how we integrate in terms of compensation with our FP&A corporate budget partners.

 

Abraham Albert 0:00:45.5:

Hi everybody, Abraham Albert, Vice President of planning with Revantage. If you're not familiar with Revantage, we are a portfolio company of Blackstone. We support Blackstone's real estate portfolio companies, a lot of services like HR functions, tax, treasury, and all the functions that we help provide value-added services to drive value to the whole ecosystem. Happy to be here. I was wondering who the four o'clock crowd is, and what they look like, so it's good.

 

Steven Blemker 0:01:14.9:

Hi, I'm Steve Blemker. I'm a partner at Alpha within our UMP practice. I head up our insurance and FP&A verticals, and I think everybody knows [?Ankit 0:01:21.9], but.

 

Ankit Jain 0:01:23.9:

Hi everyone, Ankit Jain. I'm the mystery guest on this 30 minutes. I work in finance and workforce applications. We build best-in-class applications to solve for a specific [unclear word 0:01:38.3] problems, and so I'm here.

 

Steven Blemker 0:01:40.6:

Awesome, thank you, so both of you and both of your organizations have been leveraging the Anaplan platform for multiple years. Can you talk just a little bit about how you actually are leveraging it today within your organizations?

 

Abraham Albert 0:01:50.9:

Yes, do you want to take it first, and I'll go?

 

Jay Spector 0:01:53.5:

Sure, sounds good. Yes, so Blackstone has been using Anaplan far before I joined, since I think about 2017. We have many use cases across both all of our investment businesses, as well as our corporate functions, so everything from portfolio analytics, allocations and cashflow calculations, regulatory requirements, using it as a submission tool for corporate deliverables, as well as the more traditional forecasting use cases. My group, in particular, has used Anaplan for many years for our annual compensation process, where we collect compensation decisions from around the organization. Blackstone started with more of a siloed approach of building Anaplan models to meet specific use cases that had an immediate high business impact. I would say now it's evolved much more so to be focused on the connectivity between those models, and how we can build from a firm-wide perspective, standardize across both business units and corporate processes. 

 

Jay Spector 0:03:05.2:

What I've come in and done with my team is build out our workforce planning model across the organization, and so the focus with that has been that historically workforce planning, we've had a really good data foundation in terms of the latest activity in workday, building that into dashboards and databases, etc. In terms of forward-looking headcount information that's really living in the minds of our business users, that's stayed decentralized; groups have been managing that on their own, which is where we want the accountability to live, but it makes it really difficult to manage from a firm prioritization and execution perspective. The workforce planning models we've been able to build have centralized that all in one place while keeping the ownership with the business users, and at the same time, integrated it with our full FP&A corporate budget process.

 

Abraham Albert 0:03:57.6:

Yes, and for Revantage, we've been on a journey for a little while, and I would say it started before I even arrived at Revantage. One of the things that we do helping other portfolio companies with a number of different services we provide, tracking who we are helping and the time we're spending with them, is really important to us, so one of the first things we did is we implemented time tracking with Anaplan, and this was very granular. I think the thing for Revantage is we need our data at the most granular level, probably much more so than I think a typical company. For example, we would budget and forecast at a vendor level instead of just a P&L line, so time tracking is really important. That's when it became part of what Revantage used in order to track everybody's time, and how they allocate that time to different portfolio companies, what service they're providing those portfolio companies, by employee by week. That's really important for us to know where that service is going and who it is benefiting, so that was how we got introduced to it. 

 

Abraham Albert 0:04:57.2:

I've put it in place, and it's really done well for us. Then, from there, we've built out an allocation model within it, so all of our expenses, being able to know that allocation, where that's coming from and who it's supporting throughout the whole organization. Additionally, our workforce planning, so that has been a big module that we've built out to be able to support how we look at all of our headcount, how we plan for compensation, how we plan for attrition rate assumptions, and how we do it at the lowest level, meaning each individual level attrition at an individual level by department, and how those departments and those individuals support the different portfolio companies. It intertwines with the time tracking tool. Then, most importantly, we've also lifted and shifted our data stack of our consolidation of our P&Ls into Anaplan, so that we can have all of our tools in finance, specifically FP&A, within Anaplan. Really, the purpose being we needed to build a great foundation of how we were going to build our planning team, not just for what we need right now, but what we need five years from now.

 

Abraham Albert 0:06:09.8:

That was something that I've learnt along the way, that we would always address issues for what's going on in this moment, and we didn't get ahead of things that we needed to be three/four/five years from now as the business grows and gets more complicated, and the data becomes more complicated. Those are some of the things that we've been working on and putting in place.

 

Steven Blemker 0:06:31.9:

And you both touched on a little bit, but just the breadth of how you can use the platform. I want to double-click into the value that you've received from the most recent implementations that we've done with your team, specifically on the workforce front. You touched a little bit on timing, components of that workforce piece. Jay, there was a whole other complexity within headcount management at Blackstone. Can you just touch a little bit on the value of those specific models in how the design and functionality of both have given you what you wanted out of the platform for those workforce pieces?

 

Abraham Albert 0:07:07.3:

Well, I'll speak for how we're using it, and this goes for any of the models that we built in Anaplan. As someone who leads our planning team, as much as I love to geek out and nerd out about data, and I love analytical tools to help me see insights, if we can't spend time with business leaders going over those insights, and helping them make great business decisions, then it really doesn't matter how great the tool is. So, for us the biggest value - and there is a lot of value in it - but the biggest value for me is it has freed up my team to not have to go through just an intense amount of effort to update model after model after model that aren't talking to each other, and having data that is slightly off from this model versus that model and spending time reconciling why we've got a headcount that three FTs off over here, and why comp is slightly off over there versus HR files. That's a waste of time, and it doesn't allow me to sit down with my executives and go over: what's our plan? How are we navigating some of the situations that we find ourselves in? How do we actually add value?

 

Abraham Albert 0:08:11.0:

For me, the biggest added value of this is just the amount of time that it has saved our team to be able to actually sit with business leaders, and actually do financial planning and analysis, not financial modelling and analysis. That's been something, I think, has been critical.

 

Jay Spector 0:08:27.8:

Yes, I definitely echo everything Abraham just said. At Blackstone, the impact of the workforce planning models we built was creating a single source of truth for forward-looking headcount information. In doing so, in addition to reducing the redundancies or requests, freeing up capacity, etc. It's allowed us to standardize views across our groups, so that leadership is looking at things in the same way, and able to make quick decisions. I think, even though it was a small part of the build, the management reporting capabilities that Anaplan has built up where a lot of our leaders are used to seeing things in PowerPoint format, and we're able to fully customize PowerPoint slides in real-time were updating from planners' usage in Anaplan, we were able to empower all of our users to go through their headcount planning processes and conduct their own internal reviews with their own leadership using those templates, knowing that that's the same thing that then upper management would see when we went back to them with the full firm results. Our users loved that, having that connectivity of knowing this is the way we're telling the story, and this is what it looks like.

 

Steven Blemker 0:09:41.3:

Go ahead, please.

 

Abraham Albert 0:09:43.3:

If I add one thing about some of the value. I think allowing the business to be a part of the process of the planning, the forecasting, and the journey from building out these models instead of being just someone you sit next to you and say, 'Hey, there's the output of this model,' the more we can take our executive team and the functional leaders through the journey of forecasting and why the numbers are the numbers, and be able to use these, so being able to have a user face that is easy for them, that they can sit there and make sense of that. I think, at times, finance people will take for granted that some of the data makes sense to them. It's easy. It's digestible. When you sit in front of people, and I do sit in front of people in digital departments or other functional areas, it's not as intuitive as we like to think it is. So, the ease of being able to quickly change the way the models look, being able to change the illustration of some of the graphs, it's been very helpful.

Steven Blemker 0:10:45.4

Yes, and thank you. I want to double-click on that as well. I mean, you've obviously had multiple years of experience developing solutions on the platform. Can you share some of the lessons that you've learned when migrating existing business processes into the platform? Specifically you kind of just touched on it, right, but an implementation within the platform is an opportunity to change those business processes, right, to use that platform in its best architectural design and functionality to shift the way that you think about how the business operates, would love to hear your perspective on that as well a little bit more.

 

Abraham Albert 0:11:17.5:

Yes, I'll start on this one. The last session actually did a great job touching on this topic. They say, 'Hey, the first thing is allowing the functional leadership that ultimately uses this information to feel like they understand it, that they can use it, that it's something that makes sense for them.' There is a lot of stakeholder management to be able to sit down with someone who is used to a different tool, a different analytic tool, a legacy product that's still hanging around the enterprise and sitting there say, 'Hey, we're going to lift and shift this model and the way you've been doing it into a different way of doing it, and sometimes we're going to lift and shift this from your department into our department because this folds in better,' and there can be confrontation with that. There can be a little bit of rub there because it may make department leaders feel like you're taking work from them, or it may make them feel like you're changing something that doesn't need to be changed; it works just fine.

 

Abraham Albert 0:12:11.2:

I'll always go back to partnership and relationships with people are critical. If you were to ask what is the biggest takeaway of learning how to implement new things, everybody loves seeing a new way of looking at data. I've never had to convince someone, 'Look at this data this way, it looks great, it's beautiful,' everybody wants to see that. What they don't always love to do is go through the journey of learning a new thing. There is just a little bit of handholding, but if you show them, and you have a great vision of what the end product looks like, that's the key. If you don't have a great vision to explain what the end product is going to look like, that's where you have a tough time with the journey.

 

Jay Spector 0:12:46.1:

One hundred per cent, and I think probably one of my lessons what I learned is, at the very beginning, take the time to really flesh out requirements and prototypes, more so than you think you would ever need to. I think Alpha has been a great partner, and we both recognized, after the first build, everything went successfully, but there were some kinks that if we had really taken the time to pause on starting the build, we could have probably caught a few things early in that process. Also, just on the people management side of things in terms of lessons learned, a challenge for us is keeping accountability with the business users. Having them, in some cases, only be occasional users, it's hard to get them to want to learn how to use Anaplan to its full potential. I don't have a magic wand for that, but I think the solution is generally give them all the time that you can to help them, and specifically, what I would say, our rule of thumb has been don't compromise on best practices, but otherwise flex and sacrifice for your users in whatever way you need.

 

Jay Spector 0:13:58.9:

For our first planning cycle, for example, some users, the way that a page was built, didn't quite work for the way you're looking at the organization, we built one-time use pages for them literally knowing that we're going to phase you out of this, but we want to make this an easy transition for you. One group that's going to have explosive growth, we do our headcount planning on a line-by-line, name-by-name level, and to put in all those name-by-name changes was going to be really onersome [sic] so our team volunteered to just help them go through it. They already had an Excel, and we went through and helped to do the name-by-name changes. Those kinds of things go a long way in encouraging those users to buy into it, even in the stages where you're still figuring things out.

 

Steven Blemker 0:14:39.9:

The platform's customizer is enough to fit any business process, right, but I think where we've really seen that condensed time to value in those repeatable business processes is when we leverage best practice, architecture, functionality and design. Jay, do you want to talk with your group a little bit more about that as well, the most recent implementation we did, starting from a point of view of how we do this operational workforce model versus a blank canvas approach can really help guide decisions and turn it into more of a customization - sorry, less of a customization exercise and more of a configuration to here is industry standard best practices? How does your company differ from that, and we're going to get you 70 per cent of the way there, the rest, 30 per cent, is going to be unique to Blackstone, unique to Revantage?

 

Jay Spector 0:15:30.3:

Yes, so for us, it blew me away because at previous firms, I had only built Anaplan models from scratch, from the ground up in really complex ways. Alpha came to us with a pre-established model that could work for workforce planning for us, and we were actually able to complete the build, I think, it is about seven weeks or so, which would have taken us many more months to do if we had done it from scratch. I would say, from an all-Blackstone perspective, the vast majority of use cases, we wouldn't see a pre-established model working because of the nuance of the business. For something like workforce planning, which is a really repeatable process, it's something that virtually all companies do, there are just different perspectives and certain functionality that you would probably turn on and off depending on the firm, I'm totally bought into it. It's created a great experience for us to be able to have a more iterative approach to building. Even after we did our initial build, we were really thoughtful about going to stakeholders and getting continuous feedback along the way. As we were getting that, it was very easy for Steve and the team to go and turn on new features for us that users were asking for, or turn things off that weren't helpful. Having that kind of pre-established foundation that we could iterate on was really impactful.

 

Abraham Albert 0:16:46.3:

Yes, I think the same process. I mean, we were able to implement in very, very short order. I think, what I learnt, and I've spent time with other types of products - I won't say their name at this conference - but I'd say is when I had to hire talent to come in and to help support those tools, I was having to hire very specific talent that could do it where it was difficult to find them. If I wanted someone on my team that could help manage and be the administrator of this tool to just do the daily blocking and tackling, I felt like I had to really go out and get a developer that had spent a lot of time in that particular system. When someone leaves, all of a sudden, you're trying to backfill that, and we would never have the right person, so we were always having to use external resources. I've learnt that the biggest difference for me with Anaplan and my team is that I don't have to have people that are just real intense developers. Those that love financial modelling tend to gravitate towards this pretty easily. 

 

Abraham Albert 0:17:54.2:

We have a great guy in our team, Drew Busby, who has Anaplan experience, learnt how to do it in his last organization. Not a developer background, or other team members, not have a development background, but they are financial planners. They have that desire to build out models, and it's just a lot more intuitive, so having a team with a couple of resources on my team that instinctively know how to help build this, then having partners, right, like Alpha, that come in and say, 'Here are best practices. Here's what we've seen. Here's how we could do this.' That partnership really allowed us to really grow what we do in an incredible amount of time, weeks, and not months, and not half a year, which allows us to be agile. When we had different needs of the business and we've got to make changes, and they've got to be fast, I have a lot of confidence that in a matter of weeks we can get stuff done because I've got people on my team that understand it, and spent time with it, and have business partners that support it.

 

Steven Blemker 0:18:50.1:

Yes, I mean there is obviously a reason why there are established best practices, right, and I wanted to talk to Ankit a little bit here as well as far as you've heard the story from Everest before in this session, and you look at operational workforce planning and best to navigate that from a journey perspective across different industries, but that is a repeatable use case. From what you've heard from the team here today, the latest and greatest iteration of this is bringing those applications, bringing that best practice, architecture, baked within the Anaplan platform. Can you speak a little bit about that?

]

Ankit Jain 0:19:27.0:

Can everybody hear me, okay? All right, good. It's amazing to see what Blackstone and Revantage have accomplished, right? We want every customer to experience that, and we want them to experience it a lot faster, right, and with Anaplan applications, I think that's our objective, where these are business problems that are there that we can distill into an application based on best practices that help improve time to value. You are basically getting live a lot faster. You're derisking implementations, but also providing the same flexibility were known from an Anaplan perspective. All our applications that we're launching, including the operational workforce planning one, are extendable because we know there is always going to be 20 per cent, maybe 30 per cent, of a gap that is very unique to you as a customer, and that's why our intent is applications to provide the extendibility. The other piece that, Abraham, you have hinted about was continuity, right? Somebody leaves, how do you support that solution?

 

Ankit Jain 0:20:34.7:

With applications, we are making a very concerted effort to have a high level of documentation. If anybody is familiar with Anapedia, there is a whole application section in Anapedia now, because we want to have the documentation available for our customers to be able to maintain the solution. The other piece is, you heard Adam speak today, and there is a half a billion dollar investment that we're making in the innovation roadmap. A lot of those innovations are first coming to our applications because we believe innovations around AI, whether it's CoPlanner or CoReporting, are more consumable to our customers when they are wrapped up in a business problem or solution, such as an application. For example, CoPlanner is going to be available now with the finance application later this month, and shortly after, operational workforce planning.

 

Steven Blemker 0:21:25.9:

Thank you, and I mean that's why we're excited too, right, bringing that time to value for customers, and then we can expand into more specific use cases, provide more value across the firm by getting into the specific Blackstone use cases, specific Revantage use cases, and obviously it helps with user adoption, right, landing that first successful implementation. Jay, you mentioned business partners being happy, and then they're probably open to expanding those use cases a lot faster. I think that was all we had for today, unless you guys have any closing thoughts before Q&A.

 

Ankit Jain 0:21:59.9:

I did want to have a quick shoutout, so right in this room, right after this session…

 

Steven Blemker 0:22:04.6:

Oh yes.

 

Ankit Jain 0:22:04.2:

John Pitstick, who is my colleague, is a product manager for the operational workforce planning application, will be demoing OWP, operational workforce planning. It's a great way to see what has been built, and what that means from an application construct.

 

Steven Blemker 0:22:20.9:

And it fits in very nicely with the best practices, so trying to see that come to life from a position-based, bottom-up forecasting perspective, you'll get to see that visually in the session coming up next. 

 

Abraham Albert 0:22:34.5:

No, I think the final thought I would have is, I think as we think about the things that we've learned about today, forecasting budget, those are the conversations that planning people tend to really enjoy and understand a lot more. I think one of the things with Anaplan that's been a little bit different is, it's not just, I guess we do time tracking, so it's not just your financial statements and your traditional FP&A core work, but think about Revantage, there are transactions that come in, right, that we're helping to support. There is a process where we were in an Excel tracking sheet, a new transaction would come out, and we'd have to sit there and think, well, okay, who is going to help with this? Who is navigating through this transaction? What are the timings that it's going to be done? What are the services we're offering? It's all being tracked via Excel and a bunch of emails back and forth between stakeholders. We sat down as a planning team, and with Drew, and we thought we've got to centralize this, an actual system. 

 

Abraham Albert 0:22:34.5:

We have an actual input system to intake these transactions to be able to track them, the details and the attributes that change over time before they are finalized, and we put in Anaplan, and it's just a process so that we now can go into Anaplan, pull up that tracking and know this transaction, what dates it's coming in, who is servicing it. It's just a variety of things. If we change it, if I go and change an attribute, a date, or whatever element, the next person can go in and it will highlight in yellow what's changed, so I could automatically see this list of transactions with, oh, this change and that change, it's good to know, also now communication. That's not financial planning. That's just really staying organized. I think you can really look at Anaplan on a lot of different levels than just your financial statements.

 

Joe Spector 0:24:24.6:

Yes, I would add to that, to reiterate the benefits of a pre-built model or an app. I think, don't be afraid, I guess. If it doesn't seem like it's exactly what it looks like, you really can flex it to meet what you need. Just an example I'll quickly give at Blackstone. I've heard today from just about everybody else that they look at workforce planning on a position ID level, and I think it was even said that is the right way to do it. At Blackstone, we have a little bit of a different perspective, just in that we kind of view that all of our groups should constantly be reassessing their talent and their role. If someone leaves, that doesn't mean you should just automatically backfill that role. You should be constantly assessing where do I need talent in the highest impact area? We do tend to build most of our workforce planning off of our active and pending activity that's in the system, but that was still totally able to work, and we were able to build cool add-on tools like our working reconciliation page so that the first time a user goes in for their planning cycle, they get to look at here are the manual changes I made in Anaplan in my last planning cycle, since then this is the activity that's come through workday, and that activity is automatically reconciled for them based on the Anaplan plan IDs that are generated being loaded into workplace. We've created that connectivity, and even though we are building on somewhat of a moving platform by building off of active headcount, we've been able to make it a really good process for people to be able to do that continuous planning exercise.

 

Steven Blemker 0:25:59.8:

Thanks.

 

Jay Spector 0:26:00.9:

And having good partners like Alpha really helps, yes.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:26:05.3:

Thank you. That brings us to the bottom of the hour. We wanted to thank Abraham and Jay for sharing Revantage and Blackstone stories, Steve Blemker from Alpha Alternatives for consistently great work as a great partner of Anaplan, and Ankit for his expertise, so give it up for a round of applause.