Tracey Baxter 0:00:05.4:

Hi, very nice to see everybody here. My name is [unclear words 0:00:07.3] Tracey Baxter. I was one of the funding partners at Allitix, and we recently got acquired by Accenture last May, and I'm now an associate director for Accenture, and I'm responsible for the OMERS account. I've been working with OMERS for the last three-and-a-half years, so Kristen, just to get us started, if you could, all three of you, introduce yourself and what your role has been in the Anaplan journey at OMERS.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:00:28.6:

No problem. Good to see everybody. Hopefully, everyone got some snacks laced with caffeine. I notice that they do that here, so if you had a granola bar, it probably had caffeine in. I hope everyone is ready for the next session after lunch. I'm Kristen Cornell, I'm the director of Financial Systems. I've been with OMERS for about four years. For those of you that don't know, OMERS is the pension plan for the municipal employees of the province of Ontario, so we have 640,000 members. Those look like transportation workers, librarians, police, fire, folks that work in schools who aren't teachers, so all across the community, people that you interact with every day, so we're really proud to be serving those pensioners. I sit on the corporate finance team, and I manage our finance technology platform, so Anaplan and our ARP system, expense and travel system as well, and been here since the beginning with Anaplan along with my colleagues, and happy to be chatting with you today about our journey.

 

Vivien 0:01:25.8:

Okay, thanks, Kristen. My name is Vivien. I am also in the corporate finance team, but on the FP&A side. Primarily, I support the corporate head office functions in my day-to-day. I've been here five years, so I was part of the initial implementation with Anaplan, so it's been a great journey so far. I'm excited to see where we're going.

 

Henry 0:01:49.1:

Hi everyone, great to be here. Henry, senior manager, FP&A. I've also been with OMERS coming up on five years now, and since I've been at OMERS I spent a few years also in corporate finance supporting corporate FP&A, and over the last few years I've had a great opportunity to start up a new FP&A team, specifically supporting our capital markets business, so our public market investment teams doing full P&O FP&A there. I've been very involved with the Anaplan project as well.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:02:18.9:

Okay, thank you all. I think, Kristen, this one is for you. The Allitix - oh, sorry, Allitix/Accenture/ OMERS partnership started about three years ago. From my perspective, and I think my team's perspective, it's been an absolutely fantastic, great partnership. Can you walk us through how the relationship began with OMERS, and what the initial goals were of us engaging with your team?

 

Kristen Cornell 0:02:41.8:

Yes, for sure. Maybe I'll just take a step back and share what we use Anaplan for, because we can do many things with it. We started with general and administrative expenses and headcount planning, so it's a platform that we put in across the entire enterprise, and we went live in July 2022. After that, we knew we needed support for the platform. Anaplan is a pretty bespoke skillset, and we were all new to the tool, so we wanted to bring in a partner that could help us upskill, that could help us really stabilize the platform as well, because I'd say Anaplan has evolved even since we put it in. It was a toolkit, and it still is, but there was much less pre-built material, so there was a lot of finessing, I would say, through the models that we've been doing. I don't even know where we met, to be honest. I think Anaplan introduced us. Yes, I think Anaplan said, 'Hey, you should ask Allitix to respond to RFP,' and met the team, really liked the size of the firm, and also the focus on Anaplan and the expertise in that area, so that was how we started working together.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:03:55.0:

Yes.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:03:55.4:

Yes.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:03:56.4:

So, the next question, then, I think, unfortunately, this is for you probably as well, is where you started with Anaplan, how has Anaplan evolved over the last three years? You've been involved in all of it, but from your perspective.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:04:08.0:

Definitely, so like I said in the beginning, it was we were very focused on stabilizing and just getting that first operating plan done in the platform, so I think it was a bit of a hairy time, like the first year, because we went live very close, right…

 

Vivien 0:04:23.4:

Very close.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:04:24.0:

…to the operating plan process, so as we were moving through and running different processes, we were just trying to do the basics. We took an MVP approach, so we felt like we kept it simple, but I think we still bit off a fair bit, so over the last few years, and I actually look at Vivien and Henry to weigh in on this too, we've been just, I'd say, cleaning up our models, optimizing, always trying to manage the data a little bit that we have in there too, the size of the model. Now, we're at a place where the broader team that uses Anaplan is, I think, much more comfortable, and then even also has a greater sense of ownership for the platform, which has been amazing. Like I think honestly, in the early days, I came in, Anaplan was my first program, I was driving a lot of it, and now the finance team is really driving much, much more engagement with you and your team, the work that they're doing, the road mapping, what they want to see in the platform. This year, we're going to talk about the long-range plan. That was something that the team did last year. That was probably the first, I would say, new use case that we put in.

 

Vivien 0:05:25.1:

Yes.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:05:26.4:

Do you want me to talk about what's coming up, or are we going to save that?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:05:29.6:

Well, I mean, I don't know if Vivien for you and Henry, so the LRP project, the long-range planning project, was a big initiative for OMERS when we first got engaged, so what value is that delivering to OMERS?

 

Vivien 0:05:43.6:

Yes, so if we backtrack a little bit, like Kristen said.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:05:48.5:

Yes.

 

Vivien 0:05:47.7:

Before Anaplan, we were on Hyperion and Smart View, so a lot of our work was very Excel-based, so with Anaplan, you sort of had to pivot the way that we approach things. We look at our processes, so that we can better use Anaplan's strengths as opposed to just lift and shift what we were doing previously, and so a lot of what we were doing after we implemented in 2022 was relooking at where we had established is there anything that we can improve on to streamline the processes before we started thinking about building additional modules. Then, like Kristen said, the LRP module, or just long-range planning, that was our first additional module outside of our main core workforce planning GenAI planning modules that we added. Really, the drive came from, as with a lot of things, from our C-suite. We always have a five-year strategy plan, the latest one takes us to 2025 to 2030, and then, along with that, we also wanted to see, with all these great things that OMERS is planning to do in the five years and achieve, what would it take to bring us there.

 

Vivien 0:07:05.5: 
Previously, and probably unsurprisingly, a lot of this work was being done in our good friend Excel, and with Excel we always had this issue where it's in various people's desktops floating around in places, maybe not the most up to date, so there is really that push to centralize everything so that everyone is just looking at the latest version, and you are not looking at SharePoint or your email for version 36 of the five-year plan. I think that was a big push to sort of centralize and consolidate that five-year planning forecast process, so that it's not just sitting in silos across the organization, but more so that we have a combined approach to that. The second piece was, as the overall business environment gets more complex, things can change very quickly, and so previously with Excel, what we were doing, it wasn't very flexible, we would really only do it once a year, and then during the year, if anything really changed, you would have to scramble and go back to your assumptions page and try to add them in without breaking the rest of the model. With building this model in Anaplan, the goal was really to give us that flexibility to be able to do scenario analysis and say, 'Okay, version one, let's say the return assumptions have changed this way, what would our expenses look like? Version two, let's say not as optimistic if that's how it goes, what would we look like five years down the road?'

 

Vivien 0:08:52.9:

Building this model in Anaplan has really enabled us to have that flexibility, and be able to respond to our C-suite leaders' ad hoc requests in a more timely fashion, and also with a bit more accuracy than what we had seen in Excel previously.

 

Henry 0:08:52.9:

Maybe I'll just add something just to echo there. We just talked about, we built this LRP planning model on top after we light-sized what we were currently doing. I think that's really important to say. We didn't just keep adding stuff on top of our system. We really took a fresh look to make sure everything was working the way we wanted to, and then we were very intentional about, okay, what's the priority? Long-range planning was a big priority, so then that's what we decided to tackle next. Yes, the other point I just want to highlight too, Vivien touched on it, the enterprise being able to consolidate everything. The way OMERS is set up, and I'm sure a lot of your businesses maybe as well, there could be different business units, different finance teams, everyone looks at things a little bit differently, so we really wanted to be intentional when we created this module that we all came together and created something that was quite flexible, but also not too rigid, so that we can still consolidate up at the top of the house.

 

Vivien 0:10:04.8:

Yes.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:10:06.8:

Perfect, thank you very much. So, every major implementation you do, or project that you do, you face hurdles, so I think the audience and I would love to know what some of the hurdles were that you encountered. How did you overcome them? How did you move forward?

 

Kristen Cornell 0:10:21.6:

You want to talk about the Anaplan platform, or the LRP in particular?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:10:27.9:

Anaplan.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:10:28.2:

Okay, are there LRP hurdles, too, that you guys want to talk about later? All right, okay, sounds good. So, I think I mentioned this, that Anaplan was a new platform for us as an organization, and there isn't a large skillset in the workforce for Anaplan, I think probably, but maybe even less in Canada than in the US, so we were like babes in the woods after we went live. We were pretty helpless. We couldn't do much. We were really reliant on our partners, and so we were really just focused on the day-to-day, keeping the lights on, keeping the system up and running, what file didn't go through today or whatever. We have Veronica here from our organization, too. She is our assistant administrator, and she's become incredible and learned so much over the years, partnering, again, with your team as well, so that's been great to see. I think some of the hurdles and the risks with Anaplan are that it is a toolkit, so you can do anything. 

 

Kristen Cornell 0:11:23.6:

I haven't heard it as much this year, but other years I've heard this theme of, 'Just because you can, doesn't mean you should,' right, so is Anaplan the right tool for X, Y, Z? We haven't really been in that position so far too much because we're just starting to build our new use cases now, but I think that's something we'll have to continue to ask ourselves, what is the right tool or platform to be doing a certain type of analysis? Just the main thing up on the platform and then coordinating, like Henry said, just across the different teams because we started out with, I guess, at an enterprise level with owners, and then Oxford is our real estate division, but it's very much an entity in its own right and in a very unique business compared to the investment side, so we ended up splitting off at a certain point for some things, and we were trying to keep it together. 

 

Kristen Cornell 0:12:13.5:

I think with Anaplan, too, trying to make decisions around what level of granularity do you want to have with your models? What's the right breakdown? Then, just also coordinating with, it was in a C-suite session this morning, there was a good conversation around regional requirements, or business unit requirements, or just how do we manage the platform as it grows within OMERS as it becomes more well known as people want to take use cases into the tool. How do we approach it in a way so that we're not duplicating the same use case with a slight variation, and how do we kind of accommodate the needs of the business at the same time?

 

Vivien 0:12:51.8:

Yes, I think specifically for LRP, like Kristen has alluded to before as well, just because we have all these different businesses that are working together, and have to juggle the different needs, and so I think one of the key lessons we learnt in our initial Anaplan implementation was it was very, very important to spend the adequate amount of time in planning and setting up the module before you actually dive into setting it up. Part of that also involves taking a step back and looking at current-day processes. This actually makes sense to translate into Anaplan because what we found was across the different investment businesses, everyone had roughly the same approach, but then they had their different small changes in their details that made it a bit difficult to get to a consensus. That was very important to bring up in the planning stage and hash that out so everybody is aligned in the same starting point before we actually went ahead to build something, rather than rushing into the build stage and then retroactively saying, 'Hey, this doesn't really work. We need to go back,' or have all these complicated workarounds. That was something we were trying to avoid.

 

Henry 0:14:24.1: 

I'll just add hurdles specifically to the LRP implementation, really, a lot of it was just getting all the teams aligned in terms of what are the key processes we want to build into it. I think, with the help of LRX, it was very easy, I think, to actually get the model built in the end.

 

Vivien 0:14:42.1:

Yes.

 

Henry 0:14:42.3:

A lot of the work went into the process design, so I'll kind of give an example. We have a lot of different line item accounts; if you want to budget, travel, consulting, people classes, all these different drivers that you could put into it. We had to make a decision on how granular did we want to go into it. Do we want to apply inflation to everything? Did we want specific assumptions for different lines? Another example I'll give is for a long-range planning for people class, we did have some assumptions from different leadership around adding headcount at different levels, but across the business a senior level person may cost a different amount depending on where in the business they were, so we did find a middle ground that made it more simple versus having, I don't know, ten/twenty different levels that you pick from just to add a headcount. Then you kind of decide where you want to apply the inflation assumptions. 

 

Henry 0:14:50.0:

I think the other big one for us, too, was trying to figure out a way to integrate technology spend. Like many companies, you might have some large technology projects where you are capitalizing class, and you know you are going to have amortization down the line. That we felt was important enough that we wanted to make sure that was captured. I think, once we got to that point, I do feel the process was quite smooth in actually getting everything up and running.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:15:54.2:

Yes, I think one of the interesting points, as well, because you've got OMERS and then you've got Oxford, I think it would be interesting, because they're on their own Anaplan journey, the Oxford team are, you're on your Anaplan journey, and sort of where's the cross between both organizations? We work with both teams, but from your perspective, the crossover. 

 

Kristen Cornell 0:16:09.6:

I can start, and then you can jump in. Yes, I think it was important to both parts of the organization that we work with the same partner. I think we saw a lot of value in that, so we were happy that we could agree on the same partner, we went the same direction. I think we do rely on your team to share things back and forth, and say, 'Okay, well, this is what Oxford,' there's a bit of coordination there that your team manages that way.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:16:33.9: 

We do, yes.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:16:34.8:

I think, also, as we've matured, we haven't really managed, I think, to stand up like a Centre of Excellence the way that I would have wanted to three years ago. I was like, 'Do the Centre of Excellence,' and it's taken so much time, but I think we're getting there organically, which is actually really cool, so now Oxford and OMERS were coming together more to have these conversations. Some of the new use cases are actually joint use cases.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:16:57.2:

Yes.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:16:57.2:

And we have complexity because we have our own instances, but we're still trying to figure out how we can work together on it, so yes.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:17:07.6: 
Good.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:17:07.7:

Anything you guys want to add about Oxford?

 

Vivien 0:17:10.1:

That covers everything.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:17:10.1:

Okay.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:17:10.9:

It covers everything. Okay, so the next endeavors, what is on the roadmap for OMERS? I know that we're working in the background right now on what we think you could be doing with the platform. There are two initiatives that we're talking about right now. Do you want to talk a little bit more about those?

 

Vivien 0:17:27.7: 

Yes, sure.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:17:27.9:

So, that's the corporate allocations and the HR incentive model.

 

Vivien 0:17:32.0: 
Yes, I can do… Yes, so the next sort of module that we want to stand up is the corporate allocation. It's essentially our transport pricing between the corporate head office to the different, various investment groups. Previously, again, we took the same approach. We looked at what our current processes were, where we can streamline that, before moving it into Anaplan. That was all done last year. We revamped our allocation process to make it simpler and more efficient, and less complex. This year, it's really just moving all of the pieces there into Anaplan, so that we can collect all the inputs and then disseminate it to the various investment businesses through Anaplan, so we're not just sending people the latest in an email. Yes, so hopefully this will really help save time and smooth out the communication process. 

 

Henry 0:18:34.5:

Yes, I can touch on the other initiative. This is getting our incentives or bonus comp model into Anaplan. Currently, today, and for the last few years, it's definitely been an area that we wanted to look at. It's a very manual, it's a huge Excel model that HR maintains. I think we've come a long way. A lot of the information does come from our HR information system, but where finance really needs the ability to is being able to do different scenario analysis, variant analysis. I'm sure a lot of people have different comp plans, so for us, things like investment returns, divisional scorecards, a lot of different assumptions go into these forecasts, and we haven't really had a great way to model our different scenarios and just turn one thing on, turn another thing off. Hopefully, this gives us the opportunity to do that, and in a way that's probably a bit more robust, some better controls as well, so that we're not juggling two/three/four different files at a time when we're trying to do some ad hoc analysis.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:19:40.2:

Okay, so we've got these two additional use cases that we're looking at implementing over the next quarter, I think. What, from your perspective - and I know that we're working on this in the background - but where do you feel, from an OMERS perspective, that you could take Anaplan for the future? That's the first question. The second one is, what are some of the takeaways you've gathered over the last four years with your Anaplan implementation that, if you could do it all again, you wouldn't repeat?

 

Kristen Cornell 0:20:07.6:

I feel like that's a very separate question from the first one. Maybe you can come back to that second question.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:20:12.3:

Yes, come back to the second one.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:20:12.9:

So, the first question was, where do we see us going?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:20:16.6:

Us going with Anaplan in the future, yes.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:20:16.6:

Okay, right, so I think this year was really cool because HR said, like they were sort of pushing for getting the model into Anaplan, right, so this is primarily been a financed-used tool before, and we've talked to some of the other investment businesses about doing stereo modelling, and they've been a little bit back and forth, but I think as Anaplan becomes more established and mature that those use cases will continue to come out. Anywhere we've got a big old Excel file that takes forever to run and breaks, there is an opportunity to pull some of that into the platform. I think we'll still continue to build it out from a planning, a peer planning standpoint. I know, for me, I would love us to think about how we get the users in the system, right, because today we really give our business partners a very white glove service around the FP&A process in getting inputs from them. I'd like to hear about other organizations, like Fidelity, this morning, I think a lot more business users in the application. Thinking about how we could do that to really leverage the power of the platform from an efficiency standpoint. Yes, how about you guys?

 

Vivien 0:21:26.1:

Yes, I think those are really great points, and part of it is as we build out more modules, there is more that we can showcase through our user base to say, 'Hey, look at all this great stuff we have in Anaplan. Look at how flexible it is in how it can give you all that information instantaneously,' and that is, I find, a very good case to get more people into the system rather than talk to them through DEX.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:21:55.8:

One of the other things we're looking at, too, just some of the new - I don't know if it's even that new, but some of the products from Anaplan that we don't have like Excel, so from a reporting standpoint, not the other Excel - I don't know why they picked that name - so we're looking at that. When we got in, the reporting was pretty immature, I would say in the Anaplan tool, and we didn't feel like it was really executive-ready, but now it's looking much different, right, so we're going to check that out. There is a lot of interest, probably almost just in terms of adopting AI and figuring out how we incorporate that, so looking at what makes sense for us based on how we use Anaplan. We'll kind of think about that too.

 

Vivien 0:21:55.8:

Yes.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:22:36.4:

Okay, and now my second question that you didn't want to go into.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:22:38.5:

Which was lessons learned, or what would we do differently?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:22:42.3:

Yes, and lessons learned.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:22:44.3:

Vivien, you talked about the importance of planning the model in the beginning, and so I think just understanding that SA role, the social and architectural, and the importance of that foundational piece because I'd say generally Anaplan is implemented in an agile way, but then I feel like there's more control sometimes because it's easy to just let - like things can get a little bit adrift. Maybe, oh well, we're not always the best at agile, like we haven't adopted that as maybe probably some of the other organizations, but getting that architecture down, breaking the models into smaller enough pieces so that you've got the flexibility there, I think that's a good learning for us. We've come in and updated a lot of our models, right? I think, also, finding the right partner is really important, because of that skillset shortage. For Anaplan, a lot of the partners have more of a North American staffing model, so for us, even though all of your team is based in the US, making sure that your team comes on-site with us because the first year I don't think we got everything done we wanted to because it was just dragging. We couldn't get it done.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:24:03.2:

So, then the second year we said…

 

Tracey Baxter 0:24:03.0:

Hang on a sec.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:24:03.7:

'You've got to come. We're going to do this. We're going to get in a room,' and that's worked incredibly well because, to your point, once everyone got together in a room and planned it out, then the model build actually went quite smoothly.

 

Henry 0:24:15.8:

Oh, I was just going to echo that point, 100 per cent, when we all got together and we were whiteboarding stuff, and just writing out the whole flow, 'Oh, I want to add something here,' 'Oh, we actually don't need this,' just that part just came together incredibly.

 

Vivien 0:24:32.3:

I think one other bit of takeaway I have from this is, like Kristen said, just because you can doesn't mean you should, and the thing with Anaplan is because it's so flexible, you can do anything you want in it, you have to make a conscious decision around how you're building the model. For us, I think, initially when we started on our journey, we were very excited about this flexibility, and so we put in all these functions for exception cases that we thought maybe we need in the next five years, and then what that resulted in was a model that was very complex in the sense that if something broke during the planning phase, or we implemented a new function, the chances of something else breaking in the model is very, very high, and then it would take a very long time to try to figure out what was happening there. Really here, it's being intentional in striking a balance between building a flexible enough model for your business cases, and the complexity of that model. I think what we found really worked well, and our long-range planning module, in this instance, we haven't felt the need to go back, was that we sort of landed at a middle level where we had enough granularity, but not too much detail, but we could still get to a good enough number to be able to reflect the different circumstances that affect each investment business without building really complicated functions that required ten different assumptions. 

 

Vivien 0:26:15.6:

We literally just picked what are your top three cost drivers impacting your businesses, and looked at where that overlapped across the different investment teams, and those were the ones that we put into our long-range planning model. I think, so far, it's worked out pretty well. The model is not so complex that if something happens, or we want to update a function, it causes everything else to fall apart. I think that was one of the biggest takeaways, for me at least, coming from our initial implementation. 

 

Tracey Baxter 0:26:52.0:

I don't actually have any other questions, would you believe? Well, unless there is something else that you would…

 

Kristen Cornell 0:26:57.0:

Well, something else that you were chatting with someone over at lunch was just maybe a bit of a lesson learned just, because everything is built from the ground up, just documentation around the models and plans can be complicated, and it's easy to overlook that, especially if you're in your implementation. You've got your partner, and maybe they are using an offshore team, and so you show up and something has been built, and you have no idea how it was done, or how it all fits together, how the data flows through the models. That's where, I think, we've had some challenges where you make a change, it breaks something, you didn't know that those two things were linked. Sorry if this sounds bad, I'm just telling you how it was, what we've experienced. So, just understanding that lineage really, really well and figuring out how do you document it, because there isn't really a standard process for that.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:27:42.4:

There isn't.

 

Kristen Cornell 0:27:42.5:

And we talked a bit at the time on implementation, and at the end of the day, when we went live, we didn't have it, so it's something that we've kind of built up over time. Henry, you look like you want to say something.

 

Henry 0:27:53.9:

Yes, something there, just on documentation. I think something that our team found very worthwhile was actually going back with fresh eyes every once in a while, and looking at all the pages and models that we built, and looking at it from a UI perspective. Do we like the way things are set up? Do we like the way the formatting is? Do we have enough documentation on the page that explains step-by-step all the different processes, and what you're supposed to do here? I think having done that, and applying the same logic in the same process when we built our new models has helped a lot, and now everything has the same look and feel. You kind of know where to go to input your inputs. You kind of know where to go for your drop-downs. Just things like that, I think, were very worthwhile. 

 

Kristen Cornell 0:28:38.5:

Yes, I think we had a lot of inconsistency actually in the way that the models looked at the end of the day, because on the project, you had different teams working on different models, and then they maybe made a decision about a header or a color, or an instruction. I think a lot of the cleanup we've done has been streamlining the look and feel, so consistent design principles from a UI perspective is important, and maybe doesn't get talked about a lot, yes.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:29:02.2:

Well, thank you all very much.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:29:04.1

Well, thank you to Accenture and OMERS. Please join me in a huge round of applause. We appreciate you sharing.