Kourus Behzad 0:00:11.4:
Well, good afternoon, everyone. I think it's the last session of the day. We can move forward. I think we've got some room up front if you want. My name is Kourus Behzad. I drive solution marketing for HR Workforce Planning at Anaplan, if you didn't have a chance to be in our earlier sessions. Super-excited about the session that's coming up with our friend Simon Wood from Equinix. This afternoon, I think it's all been more of a deep-dive into the workforce planning and how we're thinking about it as an organization in terms of the technology that supports it, where AI is coming in, what are the applications that are coming about, a deep-dive into the application. So this session right now with Equinix is more about how one of our good customers is actually using Anaplan to drive workforce planning, and really to enable their business. So with that, I would like to introduce Simon Wood, the Strategic Workforce Planning Lead at Equinix. I wanted to give Simon a chance - he's had a very incredible journey in terms of being a workforce planning practitioner across different industries - to tell us a little bit about himself as well as Equinix, and then we're going to dive into the conversation.
Simon Wood 0:01:29.3:
Good afternoon, or G'day, as Australians would say. Yes, look, I've been lucky enough to spend probably the last 20-odd years in workforce planning and analytics across the mining industry where I first got my start, then into semiconductors, now into data centers, and I just want to give a shout out. It's International Data Center Day today. We got some notes this morning. I've lived and worked in most geographical locations around the world, Africa, Middle East, the US now, Europe, and really been on a journey with workforce planning, with partners in finance, partners in strategy, partners in the business partner community. I started my career in talent acquisition, so the full circle to now doing the planning component for Equinix and some of my previous roles. So, Equinix. It's not equinox. We do data centers, not fitness. So we're about 280 data centers and growing significantly. We're doubling our capacity over the next five years, to give you an understanding of the data center requirements. So you talk about the hyperscalers and large buildings and data centers being built all around the world.
Simon Wood 0:02:55.0:
So we're having a real challenge in our growth and trying to keep up with the market and trying to differentiate ourselves when it comes to talent. So we've, I think, got a lot of challenges when it comes to our talent. A lot of the hyperscalers are coming, knocking on our door and saying, 'Hey, we love what you've done with your talent. Now we're going to take them from you.' So how do we, as an organization, prepare for that growth? Do we not just knock on our talent acquisition door and say, 'Hey, go and buy these skills for us?' How do we build them internally with different skills and capabilities that are coming down the pathways? How do we bot some of our roles? How do we bind people to our organization? How do we balance people in our organization? So it's not just a key focus for us, just looking at the, 'Hey, we're going to go and buy talent,' because we know that talent is becoming short in some of our locations around the world today.
Kourus Behzad 0:03:59.4:
Awesome. I think my conversations with Equinix around workforce planning started probably around 2021, 2022. Obviously, Equinix uses Anaplan for more than just workforce planning, and the conversation went for several months to try and figure out, kicking the tires and understanding what exactly can Anaplan do? How can it help? How can it enable? How can it help to bridge the different functions? So there was a lot of, I think, mindset change, in terms of how technology could actually enable this. Obviously, workforce planning has been around for decades and decades. You can go back to mining. They've been planning, doing workforce plans for 30-year horizons, because they're moving cities. So it's very ingrained, but it's always very data-heavy from that perspective, and the data sources are all over the place. It's not just in HR. It's in finance, it's in operations. It's in market data. It's outside of the organization. So how do you bring all of that together? So when you started to look at Anaplan, being a twinkle in somebody's eye and really thinking, 'How is this technology going to help you?' can you start with where you were at? What were the pains that really motivated you to have these conversations and start to think about what else you can do?
Simon Wood 0:05:28.3:
Yes, I think the, the bumps and bruises go back to 2007, when I got my first workforce plan on a CD. So that might be aging me a little bit, but the bumps and bruises, and really the stakeholder engagement, and it's not just from your traditional workforce planning, finance, doing cost planning to, 'Hey, we actually need to do talent,' right? They're not competing. They're very much in partnership, and you should run them in partnership. So breaking down some of the silos and the bumps and bruises to saying, 'Hey, Simon, I just need to create a budget.' 'Yes, but what about our talent?' The quick story about that is, if we don't have our talent ready to go at the location, what's the cost going to be to the business? So from a very risk perspective, I go back to the mining industry. A haul truck down for an hour, it's going to cost us about $1 million. So if we don't have the right drivers in the right place, the right location, trained up, all of those buzzwords that we like to use in HR, it really is a challenge for us. So starting those conversations, the bumps and bruises of not just, 'We need to do cost planning,' but 'What about talent planning?' What skills and what capabilities - which are the buzzwords at the moment - but what are those skills and capabilities that we really need to focus in on so that we're ready to go when the capacity is brought online? Whether it's a new mine site, whether it's a data center, whether it's a factory, what can we do?
Simon Wood 0:07:06.8:
So really going through and managing the stakeholders, so bringing in finance partners. Great. We're going to do cost planning, but can we also do some talent planning and some location planning as well? Some role planning, some skills and capability planning. Talking to our strategy teams. Strategy. What's our business strategy? If we need to pull back on some growth, where do we need to align from a strategic perspective, from our business? So bringing them in, and then also bringing in our own organization, the HR team. I probably speak for myself and my experience with business partners across the business. We do people really well. We may not do the data side very well. So how do we bring our HR business partners, our HR community along on the journey so that we can enable them with the data to have some more probing conversations when it comes to the planning? So lots of bumps and bruises, lots of change, but it's all complementary, and that's the key thing with the stakeholders. It's not, 'We can only do this and we can't do that.' What if we combine these things, ask one more question and then we get much more of a data-rich environment, and some good things to make some decisions on?
Simon Wood 0:08:31.8:
So stakeholder-managing the change throughout that and giving people the end vision of, 'If we were to do this, look what it will look like.'
Kourus Behzad 0:08:43.4:
When we think about… Again, I'm not talking about strategic workforce planning. I'm looking at a strategic approach to workforce planning. When you thought about that, why start with the finance and HR? Why not start in operations? What was the premise for that, and just really how and where you started the journey and where you were taking it?
Simon Wood 0:09:03.2:
Yes. We started with the annual planning cycle. Let's start where there's a regular business process. Let's not go and try and recreate the wheel. We're not rocket scientists here. We're just doing some planning. So we really started at the annual planning process, and then from there that led to other conversations, whether it be the strategy conversation, whether it be the operations conversations, because a lot of our operational leaders are really focused on the here and now, managing today. You ask them to look up on the horizon, that three-to-five-year time zone, and they're like, 'Simon, I've got my people issues today. I'm concerned with this. Come back to me.' So really, you bring them in and you have them react to some scenario planning. What we're doing at the moment is we're taking a set of numbers. We're doing some ratios. We're doing the 'what next', the forecasts and some modeling, but taking them some numbers to react to. 'What can we be doing differently? What is changing, so that they can then apply that top-down view. We're starting from a very good baseline of understanding, 'Hey, we're still in the same process. We're just asking one more question.'
Kourus Behzad 0:10:29.1:
You talk about a three-legged stool. Let's dig into that.
Simon Wood 0:10:34.2:
Yes, my three-legged stool. I'll add a fourth leg to that now, otherwise I'll fall over. The three-legged stool for me are business operations, finance and HR. If you don't have those three people in the room, it's going to fall over or you're going to get one or the other. I've now just recently added the fourth leg, which is strategy, and strategy has been a really big key partner for us, because now strategy are really looking at that three-to-five-year horizon. So they're a great partner to disconnect the annual planning cycle to that strategic conversation. You can still use some of that baseline, but really a great partner for us in lifting our heads up and looking at the horizon.
Kourus Behzad 0:11:21.1:
When I think about operations and finance and HR, and again the three-legged stool - we'll come back to the strategy aspect of it - I always think about it in terms of more of a supply chain, but it's an order fulfillment concept, right? It's the business side, the operations side, they've got whatever business that's running for them. Their demand is coming up. 'Okay. I need more data centers. I need more capacity, I need whatever.' What's the workforce that's required for them? There is a short term, in the next three months, six months, a year, whatnot, that they need to address and optimize for costs, and then there is a long-term thing that always becomes the next thing. Today, that translates into this. You go back to your teams and say, 'Well, how many people do you need as part of that?' Then, as soon as the first month of the annual plan is done, everything is out of whack already. How do you make this a continuous process so that question of, 'How many do you need?' is always standing, is always active, is always continuous, and finance and HR always have visibility into what's coming. So as the demand is shifting and fluctuating for the business, you can see that that's a signal for the changes in the workforce, and that translates to finance.
Kourus Behzad 0:12:42.6:
'You need to earmark this much for a budget,' or 'This is a change that's going to come through.' How do you address that? Then, HR. 'Are you ready to actually… Business wants this many people. Do you have the right recruiting capacity to be able to support that? Does it make sense for us to go get contractors? In the short term and cost-wise, it might be more beneficial.' So being able to balance that three-legged stool and make it into this continuous process is where that workforce agility comes in, which brings that business agility in tow. That connection is important. You can get finance and HR talking to each other so well, but if you're not tied into the business side of the house, that lag causes problems. So how you can eliminate that lag is key, that latency that goes on.
Simon Wood 0:13:35.0:
Yes. It's the risk of, 'If we don't start building some of the skills today, we don't start building some of the capability today, an apprentice takes four years to build.' So if we need 1000… We're not looking at that today. If we need 1000 technicians or entry level engineers, how do we build it today so that we can then obviously execute when all of our data centers come online, or mines, or factories, what have you? They're all interchangeable. So I think that's how we've really brought in that strategy to say, 'Hey, let's have a look at our talent strategy overall, which then should feed into our workforce plan,' and likewise, the workforce plan should influence and have that conversation on the talent strategy side as well.
Kourus Behzad 0:14:30.5:
Absolutely. One of the questions that we asked in an earlier session was the relationship between finance and HR, and everybody just laughed at the answer because it just was not a positive experience. I think, in most organizations. How has that been?
Simon Wood 0:14:47.1:
Yes. Look, I've got bumps and bruises all over my body from 20 years dealing with my partners in finance, and I love the conversation because we're not… It's, 'Hey, we need to produce a budget. We need to produce a forecast.' Yes. That's great, and that's the bottom line, but what talent do we need to actually execute on that? It really sits down with, 'We're not going to do just the costing component, but we also need to do the talent component, and we also need to do the location component, and we also need to do the right leveling of staff. Oh, and what about AI?' You know, everyone's talking about AI at the moment, and so how do we prepare and how do we automate or bot some of our future roles? So looking at tasks and activities. So we're doing some great work in the business at the moment, looking at tasks and activities in our data centers and being able to work out, 'Well, if we were to automate this task, do we need that many more engineers or technicians, front level?'
Simon Wood 0:15:55.6:
Same thing. We can go into the sales or the accounts payable, invoicing. You can do any one of these, but as long as you've got the tasks and activities to bring back… So bringing back to the conversation with finance, we don't actually just need to do the costing, but we actually need to do X, Y, and Z. Otherwise, we've got a real risk that we're not going to be prepared for our future capability when we've got a new data center opening up. 'Do we have the people?' 'Well, no we don't.' 'Well, now we've got a problem. We should have been building four years ago on the talent side, not just pouring the concrete.' So really getting into, it's not just you can do one or the other. It's, we need to be doing both.
Kourus Behzad 0:16:48.2:
It's a team sport, workforce planning. Everybody says, 'Well, does finance own it? Does HR own it? Who owns it?' It is a common, I think, practice, a common discipline that everybody owns a piece of it and you have to drive it, and it's really that orchestration that comes through as part of that. So I wanted to jump into how technology can enable that, help with that orchestration, and I think it's a bit of a lead into, 'How does how are you using Anaplan in that sense?' Where did you start?
Simon Wood 0:17:19.2:
I wish we had the apps today three years ago. Not a sales pitch, but look, this is the second implementation I've done with Anaplan. It is the consolidation. I sat at Anaplan Connect in New York the first year that you were here, and the stories that were, 'Hey, we're consolidating spreadsheets.' That's great. We're consolidating spreadsheets, but what about the strategic workforce planning perspective? So it's been a journey, and so building out that first component, really getting our finance ownership. At Equinix Finance, own the annual planning process. At organizations in the past, I've actually owned the annual planning process and finance have just wanted the outputs. So they're more of a, 'Hey Simon, go ahead and do that,' whereas we're more of an output from finance at the moment. So, how does technology help? Well, it's as simple as the consolidation of spreadsheets and then the utilizing of the same data. That's the big thing. You can do anything you want to do, whether it's Excel. Anaplan, but from a technology perspective, being able to use the single source of truth or the one number that can now flow from our finance partners creating that workforce plan or that annual planning process, to taking that over to our talent organization, immediately having our Workday solution be able to look at Anaplan when we need to push them across, so now our time to recruit comes down.
Simon Wood 0:19:07.0:
Our leaders are more engaged because now the talent acquisition team are going to leaders to say, 'Hey, I see you've got a rec that needs to be filled in three months,' not, 'Hey, here's a rec. I needed it filled yesterday.' So that whole journey around how technology has helped, it's helped us with the integration steps. It's helped us with the consolidation. It's helped us with getting out in front of issues and really just streamlined that whole process for us on the annual planning cycle to where we're now going into the longer-term planning. So I'm eagerly awaiting the strategic workforce planning app that's coming out, because last year we built our long-term model that goes out five years. It covers across all of the different areas, and now we're sitting down with each of the leaders and really getting their drivers. Once again, we're partnering with finance and strategy to understand what drivers are actually going to increase the headcount. We're working with another component of our organization, which is really starting to look at the tasks and activities.
Simon Wood 0:20:16.8:
So I think the tasks and activities is going to be the next evolution for us from skills and capabilities. Everyone wants to talk about the skills and capabilities, but what skills and capabilities are going away unless you know what the tasks and activities are? So we're now starting to build that into to our model as well. So I would say consolidation, integration and information-sharing is how it's working for us, utilizing Anaplan rather than Excel spreadsheets. Then you can, obviously, control them. You can scenario plan on them. What if? We do monthly forecasting, so once again our budget gets created. Then our forecast overrides that, and it's just a constant chasing of the tail, but we all know which tail we're chasing. We're not chasing ten different tails.
Kourus Behzad 0:21:09.1:
It was interesting. At last year's Connect New York, I think Ed from Everest Global was talking about a similar process that they've implemented, and one of the things that he raised was that, 'Our HR just wants to be in Workday or SuccessFactors or whatnot,' and so I wanted to see if you can elaborate on the difference between system of planning, HR system of record and finance system of record? Again, everything has got its place. How does this layer…
Simon Wood 0:21:38.2:
Yes. So, different systems. Se use Workday at, at Equinix. I've used SAP in the past. Our record of system in finance is Oracle. Each of them have got their strengths, but really that connected planning of 'Where does our real estate and our construction team sit?' Well, that doesn't sit in Oracle. It sits actually in Anaplan. So we've focused on, 'Hey, these are core systems that do things well.' Planning wasn't one of them, and also we've got some unique requirements that we would like to… So the flexibility for us in terms of being able to build our own models and be able to pull through all of those different integrations was really key for us, and sets Workday aside from its planning capability to being able to say, 'Hey, what about Dallas? What about Toronto? What about Bogota?' from a position planning and a scenario planning perspective for us, which makes it easiest to do in there. I've had conversations with people like, 'Can Anaplan just push it across into Workday? Yes, and then that starts to impact people. If you're doing a reduction in force, you don't want to push your new plant and your reduced ten roles, and push that across into Workday. Which of those roles? You've got to go through that legal process of selecting the people. London's a different process to here in the US, which is a different process to Australia. So you don't want to have some of those full-on integration points.
Simon Wood 0:23:26.4:
They're very specific and very thought through from a decision perspective. They've got their own place, but it's the planning and the scenario planning and being able to model on top of that that's really key for us and, and where we're planning in Anaplan at the moment.
Kourus Behzad 0:23:43.2:
Awesome. You were talking about, again, obviously replacing spreadsheets. So driving efficiency processing in terms of getting rid of all the manual. Every time you have to recreate or refresh a spreadsheet, you have to go get the data out of the system. Maybe you have to talk to somebody, get that information, get it at the right level, quality check, make sure the data is good. Again, it's a very manual, tedious process, and it takes time. When you pull into Anaplan now, the data is always there. You've got that regular sync that's going on, so it's always refreshed. So now you're obviously saving hours, days perhaps, in terms of cleaning the data, getting the data to actually do something. The impact is not that I saved Simon 100 hours a year, but it's what you do with that data. How you inform the business and the HR and the finance, all of these decisions, quicker through that. Now you're impacting the business, right? So this is more of a middle measure.
Simon Wood 0:24:48.2:
Yes. We're now taking away the 80 per cent build component and the 20 per cent conversation to actually having a 20 per cent build, and we're 80 per cent having the conversation, which is a great spot to be because now you're having much more robust conversations on your current talent, and then where we're going with the three-to-five-year of having those reactions of, 'Well, Simon, I've got a new piece of technology that's going to be in place in five years' time. What does that actually do? How does that reduce my number of heads?' So that conversation, you're changing it from, 'I'm questioning the number,' to now, 'We're solid on the number. Now what are we going to do about it?'
Kourus Behzad 0:25:34.5:
Let's talk about impacts. Since you've been using Anaplan, have you managed to quantify the impact that it's had for you in terms of driving efficiencies, the business impact, or is that still in the works?
Simon Wood 0:25:50.2:
Well, we're not able to track it. There's two [unclear word 0:25:56.5]. We're not able to track it and we're not able to say, 'Hey, we've 50 per cent improved,' because it was all manual in the past. I'll give you an example, in that when the budget was created, getting that across to our talent organization was normally getting it across in January. All roles start on 1 January. Why? Cost. Right? So we're now being able to have that conversation in September and have influence in that conversation to say, 'Hey, you can't start 800 people in January. Let's phase them. When do we actually need them? Oh, and by the way, that's going to drive a cost impact.' If you were just to move 100 people by three months because your truck's coming, or that's when you actually need to start to train someone for a data center, that can have hundreds of millions of dollars across a labor budget just by staggering the roles when you actually need them. So being able to have those conversations rather than, 'I need you to hire 800 people,' and now you're reacting. I don't have the people.
Simon Wood 0:27:12.1:
Now it's spend. You spend two months on the HR side trying to get the talent acquisition team up-staffed, and then all of a sudden, we change all the start dates for them because we haven't been able to recruit them. It's like, 'Well, why didn't we have that conversation earlier?' So it's not a physical number of efficiency, but being able to enable our talent organization is probably one of the biggest achievements we've had at Equinix to say, 'Here is what the plan is,' and then having those conversations before we actually lock it down.
Kourus Behzad 0:27:46.2:
So obviously driving efficiencies, in that it's eliminating the bottlenecks down the line. It takes away that you have to double back and redo something. Transparency is fundamental to all of that. When everybody can work off the same plan it actually makes a huge difference.
Simon Wood 0:28:04.1:
One hundred per cent.
Kourus Behzad 0:28:05.6:
Again, from transparency perspective, we've got a slide here on a bit of a footprint.
Simon Wood 0:28:12.5:
Our journey?
Kourus Behzad 0:28:13.6:
Yes, if you want to talk through that.
Simon Wood 0:28:14.1:
Yes. So, our journey. I've borrowed the Anaplan view and put it into the Equinix journey. We started off with our finance headcount planning in blue, and then we've started being able to leverage that finance. So we don't go into the finance side of the model. We get a feed through, so we're now working on the same numbers on the WP model, and now finance are coming to us and saying, 'Hey, we've built our model, but now we want a scenario plan.' So, how do we do that? So we built a change analysis model. We built a cost model so that they can say, 'Hey, if I was to have this particular position in this particular location, I want to see three or four of the different locations.' So we've been able to leverage their core build, use their same drivers, but now people can play in a sandbox and scenario plan. We've got a talent acquisition capacity model, so that allows our talent acquisition team to push back and make sure that they're staffed appropriately. We've got our plan versus actual, the long-term supply and demand, which is… Anaplan, would you hurry up with the SWP three-to-five year?
Simon Wood 0:29:34.1:
We've built that so that we can now go along with our demand and drivers, sit with our sales leaders, sit with our finance leaders, sit with our legal leaders, our Chief People Officer, and actually then start to have that conversation on that three-to-five-year conversation so that we've got a strategic decision on where we're going. We've got spans and layers. So you saw the visual organizational chart. When we take that to our OD and OE people internally, they're excited by that because they can drag and drop, and check their spans and layers on that. Then we're just about to put in the capabilities and skills and align that to tasks and activities. So that can help drive our long-term supply and demand, and then also pulling in a full workforce view. Lots of people think, 'Hey, we're good. We're just focused on our FTE picture.' We actually need to bring in our contingent workforce. That's a big part of our workforce from a borrow perspective. So how do we pull that in? Are there roles that should be FTE rather than contingent workforce?
Simon Wood 0:30:42.9:
Once again, I come back to the cost side. The businesses that I've worked in, it's a cost trade-off, right? It's, 'Hey, you can't have this many headcount this year from a cost constraint.' So what do they do? Go and hide it in the contingent workforce side. So it's that horse-trading bit that we're trying to bring to life around not just, 'Should this be an FTE?' but 'Do we have the right skill, and are we retaining that intellectual property and investing in that talent so that they stick around and we can build their career at Equinix?'
Kourus Behzad 0:31:19.2:
Very cool. Next thing I want to talk about was a bit of a roadmap. Where do you want to go next? I know from a supply chain perspective, I think, in terms of the data center build outs, I think you're also using Anaplan on the other side of the business in terms of the materials and the equipment and everything to build out. So there is a labor component to that. There's a project side of the house. How does that tie back into this side of the story?
Simon Wood 0:31:46.4:
Yes. So we don't have that up there, but our design and construction team also utilize Anaplan. So that's a purely connected planning cycle for us now. We're not having to go out to Excel spreadsheets. We link directly into their models and their information, bring it across, and then we can use the people analytics on our side of the fence to really push those together. So for a large component of our business now, we're actually not checking the wind and getting a workforce picture over five years. Actually, we're getting a very good picture of when it's coming online, being able to build training plans that will be able to bring you back from, 'Hey, if it goes live in August of '28, how long does it take to train a technician? How long does it take to train an engineer?' Being able to have those three, six-month training plans in place so that we don't hire them all in January, but we're hiring them six months or three months, depending on what that training or readiness plan looks like, to be ready when they go.
Kourus Behzad 0:32:53.4:
Awesome. So this idea of just in time that was very common way back when is coming back, and I think a lot of it is now. Now AI is a big part of that mix in just in time. What else can we get done?
Simon Wood 0:33:07.2:
Yes, exactly. It's walking away from the traditional, 'Hey, we'll just buy everyone.' I'm sure everyone here knows the challenges of going and getting some great talent to join your organizations. It's really starting to think about, 'What are the other levers that we can pull? What are the changes in roles that we may need to role redesign?' I go back to my mining days when we role designed our mining engineers. Global production of a mining engineer is about 5000 globally. We needed about 1500 of those, and we were one organization. Our neighbors that were the bigger mining, they needed 2000. So between two organizations, there was 3500 out of the 5000 that were coming off the production line. Sorry. They're wonderful people, mining engineers, but 5000 coming off a production line. You needed 3500. How do we now change that role description to say, 'We don't need 1500'? Can we take out some of the administration? Can we automate it? Now, this is going back to 2011, 2012. AI wasn't even thought of, or probably thought of in a few people's minds. How do we automate that and change it so that we could focus in on just having the mining engineers doing their mining engineer work?
Kourus Behzad 0:34:32.5:
Very cool. In terms of lessons learned, let's talk through that. It's a few years into the journey, and hopefully many more years ahead, but change is coming in every aspect, right?
Simon Wood 0:34:46.1:
Yes. Look, I think the change management component, bringing everyone along on the journey, it's not an 'If we do this, we can't do that.' It's 'What are the things that we need to do collectively that we may need to ask the additional one or two questions?' but bringing people along on that change journey, bringing people along on the journey to create the personas, the security, making sure that people know exactly what their roles are. So the change management, making sure that the right stakeholders are in the room, so coming back to the four-legged stool. Making sure that strategy's there, because strategy, have got a really good view of the three-to-five-year journey rather than just the here and now, the 12 month, where our operations are 12 months. They've got some good ideas about what they're doing to change their environment today. Then, obviously, the people side of that. We talk about interns, apprentices, how long do they take to build, so bringing the HR side along on the journey. So it's really that stakeholder… Make sure all the stakeholders are involved. Making sure that if you're changing process or you're doing anything to change, what is that? Making sure that you communicate that change to them.
Simon Wood 0:36:14.2:
So really, the change and the stakeholder engagement, I think, are the two biggest journeys that we're going on at the moment to make sure that when we produce our first long-term strategic workforce plan, five years out, link it to our talent strategy, we know exactly how we're going to close that gap. Is it going to be 30 per cent bot? Is it going to be 20 per cent bot? People are going to have reactions to that, and that's where we want people to be reacting to. It's the numbers and the scenario planning. 'Right. Now let's have the conversation. What levers can we pull to make sure that we're ready when all these new projects come online, that we don't have them sitting there idle but we're ready to go. We're efficient from a workforce perspective.'
Kourus Behzad 0:37:03.5:
I think one of the things that I think you've alluded to in a number of places, we talk about strategic workforce planning. The outcome of a strategic workforce plan is not necessarily a hiring plan. It might be investment in training. It might be partnership with a university that you're earmarking. So as you're looking at these different strategies and different scenarios, what's it going to cost you to get there?
Simon Wood 0:37:28.3:
Yes, 100 per cent. It's, 'What investment do we need to be able to do?' If you go and just look at the apprentices or interns, when you go to finance and say, 'Hey, I need $5 million to build a whole heap of apprentices,' finance go, 'Well, I can't. It's not in the budget.' That's great, but now we know that we've got X amount of new builds coming online in '27/'28. We've got to build them now. Yes, that may make our operations a little bit less efficient today, but think about the conversation now - and this is the talent pull-through - of, 'What about the level 5 technicians or engineers that we may have that are just about ready to make that jump to supervisor or manager?' Now we can have proactive conversations with those individuals and that talent to say, 'Hey, we've got opportunities here,' and now you're finding people to the organization, and now you've got that conversation that you flow through because you're building lower-cost talent through our apprentices and technicians all the way through. Then your experienced people, where are we moving them to? What opportunities do we have for them to lead a site?
Simon Wood 0:38:48.1:
So it then becomes a very good cost story for our finance team to say, 'Hey, we need $5 million, and here is the story based and anchored in our data sets,' for them to go, 'Yes, actually we do need to invest in this. Otherwise, when we get to our end point, we're not going to be able to buy this,' because we're already starting to see across the industries… We look at not just our data center builds, but competitors in other industries, taking people from our industry and vice versa. So it's about not just looking at our industry, but looking at other industries. What's a like-minded industry that we can start to pull in from? Really having that good talent conversation based on, 'Hey, we're going to need another X amount of roles in the next five years. How are we going to solve that?' Finance are then more amenable to actually digging into their pocket and pulling out. It might not be $5 million. It might be $4 million, but at least we can get most of the way there, and then we can start to talk about some of those other HR levers that we can pull.
Kourus Behzad 0:39:57.4:
It's about risk and building business cases, right? That's what it comes down to, which is the language of finance as opposed to… It's not typical HR. Absolutely. So you've got your roadmap. You've seen Anaplan's roadmap for applications. Are they coming together? How are they lining up?
Simon Wood 0:40:20.5:
Can Anaplan take us back three years and just deliver the apps for us, right here and now? The challenge, I think, in a finance session that I was in earlier today, they've built three classic models and now they're jumping over to the applications. So the challenge for us is going to be about, 'How do we move from our custom classic builds in Anaplan across to a predominant practice or a good process that's going to get us 80 per cent of the way there?' That's going to be the challenge for us is, 'When do we turn off some of our classic stuff? Can we overlay some of the apps on top of the classic builds that we've got?' We don't need to be rocket scientists. The process of planning is pretty robust. Sure, like every organization, we've got our uniqueness, but that's going to be a big challenge for us of, 'When do we now start to switch across to the apps?' Because then we don't need to be doing 90 per cent of the build. We just need to be doing a small amount of customization. All of the questions that our leaders are having at the moment come through. We start the model builder on the journey. Then there's the tweak. 'I don't like the green, I want the blue.'
Simon Wood 0:41:46.4:
All of those things take time, and so if we can automate some of that through the applications, and those things that applications offer us, then that's just the challenge of when do we start to switch over those investments?
Kourus Behzad 0:42:05.2:
Awesome. So it's a matter of right now being able to understand the delta, and then understand what it takes and when is the right time for you to make the jump. Obviously, it's an investment to do that.
Simon Wood 0:42:17.5:
That's a question that I've got now for you guys, sitting here over the last couple of days.
Kourus Behzad 0:42:22.4:
And on that note…
Simon Wood 0:42:24.2:
Yes. Now, let's wrap it up. That's the question I have for Anaplan. It's, 'When do we transition from classic into applications?' Because I think there's a lot of great work that has gone into creating our classic models, but the benefits are outweighing from a time perspective, and what we can get out of the box.
Kourus Behzad 0:42:49.4:
Absolutely, and I also want to thank Equinix. They've been a great partner in terms of looking at some of the technology, some of the platform capabilities. We talked about org modeling, hierarchy charts, whatnot. You guys were privy to it very early on, and you've been using it and giving feedback on some of that to some of our platform teams.
Simon Wood 0:43:08.3:
Our OD team is was really looking for something, and when you showed this to us we were like, 'Fantastic, let's get them back in the room,' and they were excited because the drag-and-drop functionality is there. We did a test case for part of our organization, and they were just tickled pink because they can see the spans and control and layers moving and shifting as they were doing it, and before they were doing that in an Excel spreadsheet that was taking them a long time to do.
Kourus Behzad 0:43:41.3:
Awesome. Well, thank you. I wanted to take maybe a couple of minutes, take some questions, if anybody's got some. Rupert.
Audience 0:43:54.0:
Thank you. Hi, Simon. I would really love to learn more about how you've implemented this in partnership with the leadership team, and how big your COE is, how you're resourcing this. Can you tell us a bit more about the influencing and the resourcing journey?
Simon Wood 0:44:16.2:
Yes. So the resourcing journey, we've gone through a bit of change. We had Deloitte as an implementation partner when we first started our journey. We bought the COE in house, and so now each of the areas in Equinix that are in Anaplan all have model builders. We've got a center of excellence that's working there. So from a resourcing perspective, we can go to our solution architect and start to build that in-house. In terms of how we're bringing our leaders along on the journey, we're really starting at the VP level and starting to not take the managers through it, because the managers are the here-and-now. That's the operational headcount planning, 12 months, but really taking… When they're having their strategy conversations, HR is now in the room on those conversations. Really, when we're talking about some of the business drivers, we're at the table now rather than, 'Hey, you need to go and find us 5000 people.' So it's being able to have that ability to be in those conversations, and the way in which we got into those conversations was being able to show them through our annual headcount planning process, 'Hey, this is the value we can bring. Oh, and by the way, you're going to need another 5000 heads.'
Simon Wood 0:45:36.5:
They're like, 'What do you mean?' 'Well, have you not spoken to our strategy team? Have you not spoken to the design and construction team?' So it's linking those things together, and linking those conversations for people in the room. So it's not just about cost, but also about talent. Some of the numbers I'm throwing out are fictitious, by the way. I'm not giving you Equinix's game plan. It doesn't matter whether it's data centers… I can go back to my mining careers, go into the semiconductors. You're building widgets. It applies across the board, absolutely.
Kourus Behzad 0:46:22.5:
Any other questions?
Audience 0:46:28.2:
Thank you. Super-excited to hear the story. I've had the pleasure of working with Equinix with the construction side of the house, with Dave Rinard and crew. I actually had drinks with him last week. and I'm super-excited because I know when you guys kicked this off three or so years ago, the vision of it was to connect it to that construction piece. You answered the question super-well, and I'm excited that you're really able to tie those together because accelerating the design-to-build process from an overall timeline perspective and then making sure you have the resources, I know, is key to your business. Any lessons learned when you went through that process as you connected those things, like things that you learned that you might tell people here as they're thinking about to try and help that make that more seamless, as you look at that process?
Simon Wood 0:47:16.1:
Yes, I think it's breaking down the, 'This is my data set. I've worked very hard to build this model,' or 'It's my data.' It's an ownership thing. So being able to break down that. 'Hey, it's Equinix's data. It's the company's data.' What we're trying to utilize is not just you over here and me over here. We're having a conversation on bringing employee data into Anaplan, and it's like, we bring it from our Workday system and GDC. We're pulling some in sales. We're pulling some in… So it's about being able to leverage and disarming people to, 'Hey, it's my data. I don't want you to touch it.' Well, it's not your data. I don't want to mess with it, but how do we partner to utilize that information so that we can then build out the operational side of the workforce? Not just the construction piece, but operations are going to need this in five years' time or four years' time. So it's just disarming people to say, 'Hey, not your data.' You don't say it that way, but how do we how do we come across from, 'This data will help improve our talent pipeline, and wouldn't that be great for the business?' So just taking the sting out of, 'This is my this is my data,' to, 'Hey, it's everyone's data. How can we utilize it? Oh, and by the way, the data that you need we've also got, so we can send back your way as well.'
Simon Wood 0:49:00.3:
People go, 'Oh, you're going to actually value-add to me now? That's great.' So that benefits the pros and cons of 'I need your help, but then on the flipside it's going to better enable you to make some more decisions.'
Kourus Behzad 0:49:18.1:
Well, thank you everyone. Thank you, Simon. Really appreciate the insights and sharing your story. It's been great, and I'm looking forward to many more years. Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate that.