Neil Thomas 0:00:04.5:

I'm going to start a little bit. My name is Neil, obviously, and I'm going to work through a little bit of our integrated financial planning application that we talked about earlier in the keynote. Then I'm going to bring Ross back up for a longer session on his journey with Anaplan Consolidations. Hopefully, you'll all be hollering and cheering and all that good stuff at the end of this. So excited about what we've been up to. So that's our agenda. That's what we're going to run through. I'm also going to tell you where to see more, so that should be exciting. So let's talk about finance applications. We mentioned this earlier. What we are doing there is literally working with customers that we've known and loved for many years, and bringing all of their best practices, all of their approaches, combining and comparing to build our planning applications. I will ask for volunteers because we are still early on this journey. So we've built our integrated financial statements, pretty solid foundational application. Mentioned earlier revenue through the margin, operating expenses, CAPEX, little bit of projects in there, but very much a very solid starting point; not 90 per cent ready. Say, 70 per cent, maybe 60 per cent ready. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:01:16.9:

Then you take the engine that you know so well, the modeling power, the scalability, and then you extend out. That application that we provide you will continue to update as we improved it and take feedback. Where we're looking for volunteers is, if you feel like you have a process that should be applicationized, we'd love to work with you as design customers. I mentioned our roadmap a little bit earlier. Subscriptions, we're talking about that. On the workforce side, contact center. We have design customers already very engaged with us saying, 'This is how we do it. How do we make this better? How do we make this more scalable?' It's also a nice way of moving along the technology that you might have if you're on a classic engine and you're considering moving to Polaris, because everything we're building is on the Polaris engine. So it's all the latest, greatest software. We mentioned CoPlanner starting to be integrated out of the box as well. So our complete vision, as I mentioned, as I want to be able to stand in front of a CFO and say, 'The second you close your books, you move into Anaplan world. From there, all planning across the organization should be in our one platform. You do that for SAP, for your actuals, pretty much. Why can't you do that for all planning activities with something like Anaplan?' So that's what we're aiming for. How are we delivering that? Whoops, excuse me, I pressed the button twice. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:02:32.2:

How we are delivering that is, again, maintaining and improving and keep working on and polishing the existing modeling engine. We will never, ever, ever lose the ability to build a model from scratch. If you never, ever want to use an Anaplan application, that's perfectly fine. Just use the engine that you know and love. That is the foundation of everything. The scalability what we also know and love that's market leading, nobody can get bigger, longer, faster, broader than Anaplan from a scalability perspective. Everything we're doing is leveraging that engine. Again, we make it bigger, faster, stronger as we progress. You can just be a consolidation customer. Ross will talk a little bit about what he uses for planning. For some reason, he doesn't use Anaplan. It's very strange, but we will talk about why that might be. So you can start in one place. You can start with consolidations; you can start with a planning area, and expand as and when you're ready. We are seeing a big trend in vendor consolidation. Obviously, it's more cost effective. Train people on one platform, work with one vendor, maybe one partner. Much, much easier. We like the actuals to plan vision. [?Adam] talked a little bit about the $500 million investment. That's probably more than maybe five to ten of our competitors' revenue combined. So only Anaplan really has the scale and ability to now invest, and you're seeing that - particularly in the AI area - start to come to fruition. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:03:53.7:

From an enterprise power and trusted partner perspective, yes, we want to be across your enterprise, but of course, we need to be trusted. So part of the benefit of having lots of cash in the bank and investing is making sure that we're very secure, making sure we're keeping your data isolated, making sure that you can trust us with the vital information that you need. So those core tenets are applied to our finance area, but also supply chain, performance management, and workforce. So super exciting vision. I love the idea of satisfying everybody in finance. I spent ten years as a CFO e-finance person, and always was looking for a single solution and a single platform. Never really found one. As I mentioned, I've been in the space forever, so it was always planning, planning, planning. 'Oh, that consolidation thing's really strange.' Vice versa if I was on the other side of the house. So bringing all this together is one of those unfulfilled missions of this industry, and Anaplan's very well placed to do that. What we also like is, again, back to the modeling engine at its core. If I did use integrated financial planning, and we've seen this across existing customers who have been implementing, I'm thinking of rolling out into a new division. I'm thinking of replacing my old, stale model because things have moved on. We built it ten years ago; it's time to upgrade. We've seen customers come to us and say, 'Can I use IFP as my starting point?' Of course, the answer is yes. [?Dan] mentioned this. [?Stan]. It's quite fascinating. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:05:20.7:

About half of our application sales are to net new customers, and about half are to existing customers, who are at that point in their journey, again, when an expansion opportunity or just replace something that's got old and stale. Maybe the staff have turned over and it's time to refresh. We don't mind if you're in the functional unit, if you're a business unit, if you're sitting at corporate from an FP&A perspective. We've always got places to start. Our three core applications, we are bringing those together really, really nicely now. We're on that journey. Actually, we're not doing that today, are we? We're doing something else today. If you'd like to see a demo of how we move that data around, please let me know. We are performing that now with customers saying, 'Hey, this is how you move the data.' So if you are a consolidations customer and a planning customer, and you change something over here, maybe you add a  new entity, maybe you post some journals post-consolidation and you want to flow that into your planning side of the house and see that reconciled for you and the metadata updated, we'll show you how to do that. If you aren't sitting in consolidations and you need to pull across the formal budget or the formal forecast last approve, we'll show you how to do that as well. Layering on top of that - and if you haven't touched our Anaplan Excel or Anaplan for Office, narrative reporting through Word, PowerPoint, and obviously Excel itself, it is a fantastic solution. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:06:41.5:

So just give it a try because it's absolutely fantastic. Super flexible, super easy, particularly for users who may be occasional users, just to consume information, or put information into the system. Obviously, it's bidirectional. All my report books, my budget books, my PowerPoints for the boss, etc., etc., you can now automate all of that using our disclosure management narrative reporting solution, which we are putting on top of both of our core finance applications, of course. So that's what we're up to. I'll briefly mention workforce. So we have a separate track for workforce. I obviously look after workforce. It's close to my heart. We are now beginning to integrate workforce planning into our headcount budgeting process as well. During the course of this year, if I'm doing my position planning, I'm working with my HR team, they're starting to plan capacity, etc., that should automatically flow into a version, a forecast within my financial planning system in the office of finance. So that integration work is being done right now so that if you are a joint customer, and we have a bunch of those, you will no longer have to do that plumbing manually. We will - putting that within the system itself and out of the box. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:07:50.6:

Again, we're extending into those other areas, so working with supply chain, the finance view of supply chain planning, working with sales and GTM planning. So when my total in quota is done, I can now pull across the financial plan of these are the heads that I might need, this is where we're investing, etc., etc. So these things are now really beginning to come together now that they've been in the marketplace for a while behind the scenes. The advantage of bringing them all together, of course, Adam alluded to, is one UI, one AI sitting on top, and one platform, one data underneath, sharing dimensions, sharing data where it's appropriate, but also keeping everything in its right place for the right audience and the right activity. So lots and lots of great work coming along. In our accounting world, we see some visions of increasing the value of the application by adding additional applications on top. We're looking at things like lease accounting, IFRS 16, how do we get that nicely automated for everybody? Just extending out the consolidation duties that people have to do. Then, obviously, into things like strategic finance. Strategic finance to us will involve things like benchmarking, so we're having discussions now with third party vendors of, 'Hey, this is my results. How do I benchmark against other business automatically from a nice independent data source?' 

 

Neil Thomas 0:09:09.3:

Then, obviously, you go from benchmarking into any kind of external data being used for analytics like demographics, geography, weather, whatever it might be. So we're working on that. As we integrate everything together from a planning perspective, a lot of those things start to tie nicely. Of course, if I'm planning something, I want to benchmark that as a comparison, not just my actuals. Here, we're beginning to verticalize, as I mentioned. So yes, I have capital planning sitting in my IFP application, but it's pretty straightforward. It's basic; solves 60 per cent, 70 per cent of the use cases. What happens if I want to buy a building, and it's really, really complicated, and it takes a long time, and it's got lots of nuances in it? So capital expenditures by industry, where it's most appropriate, we will start verticalizing there. That's another place where we'd love some help from our customer base on how best to do that. Allocations and profitability, everybody does that. We have a really, really nice application that focuses on allocation for financial services, if you haven't seen it. So things like asset profitability, etc. We're now taking that functionality, very purpose-built use case, and actually genericizing it around the other way for any kind of allocation activity, cost to cost, cost to profit, etc. So you should be seeing that application released fairly soon. We are working on that one. It's one of our secret ones that we're going to bring to market hopefully this year. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:10:34.0:

Allocation, so think of it multi-tier allocations, everything's got to go back to zero. Full profitability statements for 25,000 products, or a million contracts, or whatever you decide is the right level of detail. So we're excited about that one coming. As we go out into the future, we talked about subscriptions, we talked about things like project planning, and you can start to imagine, if I'm planning for projects out of workforce, so I sell a contract. If I'm a software company, I need a lead project guy, project manager. I need six implementers. I need a QA person. Whatever it might be. Okay, do I have the skills in-house to staff that? Do I need to subcontract that out? Do I need to bring somebody in, hire the requisition? That's our project planning both from a headcount perspective and workforce, but also feeding into what's the profitability of that particular project? Is it worth making the effort?  Again, these things start to glue together. Our beautiful lady on the right-hand side, what she's doing, obviously, is continuing to add applications that are her own, that you own, you build, and we will never get to because they're so unique and special that you still need to do that, or they're just natural extensions of the core applications themselves. All the way out into the rest of our application suite, so into GTM. You can imagine, if you've done territory quota, you better damn well make sure you've got the right sales reps, you've got the right skills and the right locations to execute against that.  

 

Neil Thomas 0:11:55.9:

Of course, if you're in supply chain, yes, let's make sure the products that we're selling are profitable, etc. Again, bringing this connected planning vision together. So we're excited about that. A complete vision, hopefully satisfying every area that's financial consolidation or planning customer. So what do you get in IFP? What does it look like? I mentioned we have a couple of sessions later. We have a demo. I will advertise this later as well, probably, and we also have a hands-on session. [?Tony] came up to me and said, 'Stop mentioning that because I'm really nervous,' but please, please attend that one if you have time to get hands on and actually start configuring within the application, and get a flavor of it. We might as well drive Tony crazy. What do you get? I talked about the full financial set of statements. Yes, you get your income statement, cashflow balance sheet all ready to go with appropriate drivers and metrics to plan out things like AR, AP, inventory, turnover, etc. You get a standard set of forecasting methodologies. I mentioned we are volume times price based, hence the need to do subscriptions and contracts and other revenue forms. Right now, that's the way that we plan revenue, which may or may not be appropriate to you.  

 

Neil Thomas 0:13:10.1:

Basic headcount budgeting, so simply by head budgeting that pretty much everybody does. Of course, capital expenditure down to the asset type level. It's ready to go with scenarios. Of course, if I have my basic budget, the latest version, expanding that out across scenarios and applying my different drivers however I wish to do so. Different levels of detail, methodology, etc. That's all built in, ready to go. So just extending it out. Very straightforward forecast planning. We've also found as we've been implementing with our customers, of course, what they're doing once they import their own structures is they start changing it, they start tweaking, 'I'd like this bit different. I'd like this a little bit different.' Even though there's a core set of activities available within the application, some customers have 15 dimensions; some have 27; some have 28. It's entirely configurable, and the configuration device that we used to use that is customizable by each of our customers. It saves you a hell of a lot of time. You guys all know how long it can take to implement something. So in the box that you get, there's about 200 lists, there's about 400 modules, there's about 150 very, very pretty UX pages all ready to go, and about 150 processes to glue everything behind the scenes.  

 

Neil Thomas 0:14:27.8:

It's approximately about 18 months' worth of effort has gone into the current version that we see today. So if you were to build it yourself, it would take you 18 months. That would be the theory. We've done all that for you, so huge time saving, and you can see the scope of the forecasting versions that we support within the application. It's only going to get better. It's totally upgradable, so if you acquire it today, we release a new release; the next new release will absorb the new AI console that Adam talked about, plus a couple of other feature functions that we're adding, and that comes out hopefully in June, July. You would simply upgrade and use the latest, greatest one. So a true application in its form that always can be maintained, always can be updated. Who has been using this application? Some of our early adopters, if you like, so we'll pick on one. Sizewell. Sizewell is a bit depressing, actually, as an English person. I'm English-American, really, but as an English person, how the hell do we pay the French to build the first nuclear plant in England? It just goes against my complete nature to do that, but apparently, we're building a nuclear plant. 50 years. That just shows how advanced the English is. It's not just our teeth; it's our energy as well that we're not very good at! 

 

Neil Thomas 0:15:43.1:

So a $30 billion investment. Obviously, Sizewell EDF came to us and said, 'Right, we need to manage this very complicated long-term project.' You can imagine the reporting requirements because it's essentially a joint venture between private industry and the wonderful government that must have everything in every single form, every I dotted, every T crossed, etc. So lots and lots of different reporting requirements across different dimensions. So they were the third customer, I think, and they acquired towards the end of December, and they were live pretty much by the end of March. So very, very rapid implementation. Now, that is operating expenses only. They're all spending our money on - well, not mine; I don't pay taxes there anymore, but they're spending our money in the UK quite happily. They're not making any money yet, but they will do, hopefully, eventually, unless there's some sort of horrific nuclear accident, I guess! I don't know why I said that, but whatever. They're moving along, so they're moving along really nicely. Obviously, saved on staff, saved on time, and all of the reporting requirements from one data source to all their different stakeholders and all their different parties beautifully met. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:16:50.1:

So very, very nice application. The other benefit of it if you're considering it is it is, obviously, there, so you can demonstrate it, you can touch it, you can feel it before you make any decision and do your gap analysis of whether it's appropriate or not. So we're very excited about that. We like that one. We like IFP and more to come. On the consolidation side of the house, so we acquired a company called Fluence about a year ago. I'll mention a couple of things on this particular slide. So Fluence is essentially a third generation consolidation product. So if you're as old as me, 100 years ago, you would basically bring to market two consolidation products. Any old person might know them, Frango and Cartesis. They were the first. They were European, and they were the first true consolidation products. So they're way off to the left. They're 1.0. Out of them became Hyperion. Adam mentioned he was at Hyperion when HFM was first created. So we have a lot of credibility with Adam, Adam's leadership. He also worked with me reselling Cartesis for a while, which was fun! Then we have the next generation. First generation is, it's pretty good, kind of works, but let's make it more web based. Obviously, around the year 2000, let's make it a little easier to use. Those are where the products started maturing, or the next generation arrived, something like an OutlookSoft. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:18:10.3:

I don't know if anybody in the house ever used OutlookSoft. That is now the SAP BPC product. The reason we show you the pictures, obviously, we have Adam there from his Hyperion SAP days. We have the gentlemen third and fourth to the right are both SAP BPC development leaders. They now work with us. The chap second from the left, his name is Hervé Capo. He is the inventor of Frango, he is the inventor of OutlookSoft, and he is the inventor of Fluence. Hervé is with us, leading development of the Anaplan Consolidations product today. Sits in his place in France doing lots of great work for us. It is the only application in the consolidation area that's been introduced since approximately about 2010. It's the only innovation. So when we went out into the big, wide world and said, 'How the hell are we going to support this office for CFO vision?' We could build it ourselves. We have the expertise in-house. Of course, we were aware of the Fluence company and the great work that it was doing, and we made the investment. Obviously, accelerated time to market. Since about approximately May, June last year, we've been integrating it into the Anaplan family. So it's a great legacy story. It's an extremely well-run product. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:19:24.7:

Have about 200 customers live. Pretty much again, once every couple of days, we close another one, which is super exciting for us. So that's the legacy history. What does it do? It does all of the consolidation stuff you would expect it to do. What it also brought along was the Anaplan for Office, Anaplan Excel reporting, because that was the metaphor that Fluence used to deliver to end users. So we really got a two-for-one win there because now that is our standard reporting for the future. So we're very excited about that. Now, who would be crazy enough to buy a product like that so early, so innovative, out there in the marketplace? Well, apparently, my friend, Ross! So what we want to do is spend a little more time than we had earlier just to go through consolidations from a true user perspective, a little bit more detail, and bring it to life for you. Then, obviously, we can answer questions. Ross, if you would spend a little more time with me on stage. We're making Ross work pretty hard, making him do two presentations, getting our full money's worth! Thank you. We're going to take a seat because it would be weird just standing up all the time. Ross, the idea here, of course, is let's get into a bit more detail about LCS, and how long you've been there, and where did you come from, and that sort of thing.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:20:43.2:

Sure, happy to share. As I mentioned earlier this morning, LCS is in the senior living industry. We are the third largest. The bread and butter of it is we operate senior living communities. So whether you're the Roman Catholic Church or Goldman Sachs or the sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi Arabia, if you want to get into senior living in the United States, you want the experience and innovation of a leader. So you would look to have somebody who specializes and that operate your property. That's how we got our start. We built a really solid reputation as an operator. People would hire us. We would bring in our expertise and compliance, HR, finance, all the technologies, and of course operate in the community. Over the years, we developed more fee-for-service product lines, which are highlighted on this slide. They're all very diverse in their revenue streams and how they generate revenue and what their products are. Things got more complicated about ten, fifteen years ago. We recognized that a Goldman Sachs would come in and invest in a property, and we would be very successful at filling it up for them and making it a successful community. So once it was fully occupied, then they would want to sell and monetize their investment. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:22:04.7:

So generally, what would happen then is the buyer would bring in their own operator. So we had done all this work over the last three or four years and found all this success and found this love for this community. Now, some other operators coming in. So we began deploying our own capital into the real estate market in these senior living properties. Over time, we have 150 communities under management, but we have various equity stakes in about 50 to 60 of them. That gave a lot of complexity to our consolidation. Equity method, noncontrolling interests, consolidation. Then we also have all the fee-for-service business lines and the complexities that that can bring. I am very proud to say that I worked there for ten years. I've seen a lot of growth during that time. We've been very successful in terms of helping our residents achieve the greatest levels of engagement and dignity that they can have in their senior years. In the last six years, we have been awarded that J.D. Powers award for the best senior living option in the US, so very proud to be part of the operation out there. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:15.9:

Like I said, I'm still looking for the insider deal later! 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:23:18.8:

I don't get one either, Neil! 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:21.3:

Good man. All right. So you look after planning and consolidations, just consolidations? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:23:27.3:

Well, as the controller, my focus is primarily on the consolidation of our actual results, working with the audit team, supporting the tax team, making sure we're getting the bills and the people paid. As the controller I also do get involved with our planning process, particularly on the corporate side, and a little bit on the site levels as well in terms of looking ahead for our short-term and long-term projections. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:53.0:

How big is your team? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:23:55.1:

Sure. We have on my team in corporate accounting, about 20, 25 accountants. If you look at us just in our headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, we have a finance crew of about 85. The reason for that is we operate all of these centers of excellence. If you want to hire us to operate your community, well, you can also have us do your accounting. We'll do your payables; we'll do your payroll; we'll do your billing. We have this shared service model that we operate in Des Moines. Because of that, we do have a fairly large team there. Then we probably have about 50 director level folks out in the field who run the accounting operations on site for some of the larger communities. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:24:33.2:

All right. You mentioned, from a consolidation perspective, minority interest, essentially. Do you do joint ventures or anything else weird and wonderful? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:24:42.7:

Yes. For instance, we're entering into a deal with a new investor. We want to invest, as I said earlier, and they want us to invest so that we have skin in the game. So our partnership may range from us being involved at 2 per cent all the way to us buying the entire thing at 100 per cent. Because of that, depending on the joint venture, depending on the site, I need to treat each entity using different accounting methods depending on our variable interests and ownership. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:25:15.4:

They change during the life of the property as well, right? You get even more fun.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:25:19.2:

Yes. You may have one investor that wants to exit. Of course, we would definitely want to keep the management agreement, but we would love to keep it in our real estate portfolio too, so we'll look to find investors who might be interested in partnering with us. We may make bids of our own to buy it. So what happens is you're constantly turning over these entities, and sometimes it's asset sales. So you've got a lot of open balance sheet work. Other times, it's just changing the unit holders and reconfiguring how we consolidate it in our consolidation. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:25:51.2:

That's right. As we learnt earlier, you joined because you were a Hyperion financial manager expert, right? So tell us a little bit about what you inherited. Again, just go through a little bit of the reason to change. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:26:02.4:

Ten years ago, as I mentioned, we were looking to move more from the fee-for-service business line, which is really all about billing our clients, to getting into real estate investments and joint ventures and some of these complicated accounting things. My predecessor had a process that involved downloading the trial balances from all of our various ERPs into a flat tables, and then bringing them in Microsoft Access, running a number of queries in Access, and then spitting that out into various Excel workbooks where he would do top-side entries. They would roll up as these files were all linked. It was really complicated when I came on and he was showing me how it works. I had a background in financial consolidations and systems, and it was difficult for me to get my mind around how he was accomplishing all this in Excel and Access, but that's what they were doing. He recognized that that was not going to be sustainable with the growth plans that the company had, and so he made the choice ten years ago to invest in Hyperion. Unfortunately, the implementation stalled. The team wasn't able to get it off the ground, and so he began to look for somebody who could really focus on the project. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:27:11.0:

At the time, I was the Hyperion planning and HFM administrator for Hyatt Hotels in Chicago, and they had just gone through a very similar journey. They were managing hotels for other investors, and they wanted to start building up their real estate portfolio, and so they were getting involved in a number of different investments and things like that. So I had been working a lot on their Hyperion solution. I also wanted to move to Des Moines, Iowa, which there are reasons why somebody would want to do that. So it was a great arrangement for me to join up with them. We were able to get them up and running in Hyperion by the end of - that would have been 2015, in terms of just rolling up the financials, but I was still having my team book equity method income in the general ledger. They were using Excel to calculate it. They were doing allocations using Excel and, again, manual journal entries. The cash flow statement, I was preparing manually. So over the next two years, I used my knowledge of Visual Basic and stuff to continually increase this calculation script to the point where, by 2017, I was pretty happy with what we had built. The problem was nobody understood any of it! People weren't very comfortable with the Smart View reporting. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:28:23.9:

The scripts were very black box to everybody else on my team. They didn't understand why this result was coming out of the system or how to trace through how it was calculating. If metadata needed to be edited, there's only one or two people on my team that were comfortable making those changes. It was just a very intensive technology for me to maintain. I felt I had a high level of job security, but I also felt I had a low level of mobility because nobody else in the company could manage the solution. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:28:56.3:

Yes, okay, so then it comes up to today. So we've got product challenges, usability challenges. You mentioned the data center and moving away from on-premise, the cost benefit, so all good reasons. I wanted to ask you on this one, so modernization to you, we hear a lot about finance transformation, modernization. What did that really mean for you as a vision outcome? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:29:20.7:

Sure. So the first thing I should say is our exit from Hyperion, I wish it was a proactive, strategic decision. It was more reactive. As you mentioned, the CIO had told me that our data center was going to get shuttered, and if you want to keep running these on-prem solutions, you need to find somebody else to host them. As we looked at that and we looked at some of the problems that we were having with Hyperion, there just wasn't a lot of energy or enthusiasm to start a project, like migrating the tool to a different data center. So we knew we wanted to do the cloud. As we looked at the market space for consolidation, there were a couple of key candidates that we identified. We're an Oracle shop, so of course we talked to Oracle about how they would approach our consolidation. They were able to demo their cloud solution. OneStream was another major option. Our sales rep with OneStream pursued the account for two or three years of trying to get us excited about OneStream, but at the end of the day, when I was looking to my senior leaders about what this project would entail, I wasn't able to show or imagine that I would come out with much more than I already had in Hyperion. Unfortunately, these Oracle OneStream solutions had major implementation hurdles to clear. I mentioned this morning that for OneStream in particular, it was $1 million price tag to get us set up with one of their third party partners. So that was a major consideration. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:30:56.8:

Plus, it was going to be a significant amount of time, which I just didn't have with the data center being shuttered. So that was a major challenge that we were working through, and I needed to find a solution. We were at the time - you alluded to this earlier - very happy on the planning side. We called our planning provider, which happens to be Workday Adaptive, and told them what we were looking at and what we wanted to do. They had their own consolidation. Actually, I think they had two different platforms under their umbrella. As they looked at our requirements, they recognized that they wouldn't be able to meet our needs with either one of them. What they were able to do was introduce us to what was a very new solution, Fluence. They were able to demo their product and show us what they could do, and the rapid deployment that they felt they could do in our use case was very attractive to me, and so we commenced on that project during the spring of 2023. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:31:59.4:

2023, so modern technology, speedy deployment, and ease of use, finance owned. Those are basically… 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:32:06.8:

Yes. That third one has been the big ticket item for me, this ability of people to get into Anaplan Excel and answer their own variance questions, or build their own reports. Again, the Smart View side, that was a great Excel add-on. I was into it, but nobody else would adopt it, whereas with Anaplan Excel, you can either use this design wizard and it takes you step through step of building out a report, or you can do this freeform style of reporting that I was more used to in Smart View. I'm sorry, guys. It just worked well for every level of use. So that's made my life a lot easier, being able to have others build reports and answer ad hoc questions. Then on the platform side, I'm here today, but I was also here yesterday, and yesterday was our biggest day for April close. It's the first time I've ever been able to step away from my team during month end, particularly on that day, because managing the metadata, managing the consolidation and all the workflows that go in and roll up our data no longer requires me to be part of the process. Again, job security down, but mobility up. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:20.9:

Hopefully, that's a good… 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:33:21.7:

Yes. No, it is. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:23.3:

You did learn a new thing yesterday on Anaplan Excel, right? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:33:26.2:

I did. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:27.7:

That hands-on training. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:33:29.5:

Which I should point out. So I learned something new. It's not that the functionality that was available wasn't shown to me when we acquired the tool a couple years ago. It's there's continual investment into the tool, and I get these emails every month or every quarter with, 'This is what's coming with this update.' I'm embarrassed to tell you guys, I don't always read the email. So I went into this demo and they were demoing some functionality that I didn't realize had been brought into the tool over the last several months that we would really value at LCS. So I need to read those emails so I know what I've… 

 

Neil Thomas 0:34:07.3:

It was worth coming just for that aha moment. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:34:09.5:

Yes, it was. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:34:09.9:

Yes, wonderful. So today, we are fully implemented? Anything left consolidation wise to do? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:34:18.2:

No. That was the challenge of this project. HFM had taken two years to build out, which was fine because we were starting from Access and Excel, so we could do that, but I wasn't going to go from Hyperion, which was doing what I wanted it to do, backwards. In my mind, I was thinking I could do two years of work to get into this new environment, but we were running live. I mentioned we started in April of 2023. We were live for June close in July of 2023. By the end of 2023, we had stopped loading to Hyperion. The data center was dark. I got through that year and audit easier than any one I had been through before, even though I had adopted a new tool during the course of the year. So we are fully live. We were fully live at the end of 2023, as far as I'm concerned. There are some opportunities as we look forward, but I'm not sure if you're there yet. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:35:12.8:

As in me, or you? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:35:13.6:

Well, do you want me to talk about…? 

 

Neil Thomas 0:35:14.5:

Yes. What's on the roadmap for [over speaking 0:35:17.9]? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:35:19.0:

As you talk about the finance stack that's available to us here, this disclosure management concept, with all these joint ventures that we have, we are always the managing member, meaning we always have to do the tax returns, we always have to do the audit reports. I've got to do 50 to 60 audit reports during the first quarter of every year. I'm reviewing these things and they're all basically the same thing, but I've got this big team of people that has to work super hard January through March, writing up all these footnotes and stuff for each individual or joint venture, pulling these numbers from the right places, and they don't always do it right. I feel that could be standardized. This footnote's always going to point at these numbers in our standard chart of accounts in our consolidation system. I should be able to select from a dropdown what entity I want to do an audit report for and get a standard audit report. Then I can just add some specific footnotes for maybe the unique debt structure or things like that, that maybe don't apply across the board. I think that could really help us because staffing for Q1 and then trying to figure out what to do with these people the rest of the year has been a real challenge. So I think that's an opportunity. Further integrations with our planning tool could help us in terms of integrating with our planning. Could be a shortcut to… 

 

Neil Thomas 0:36:40.2:

Yes. Certainly Anaplan for Office, the word stuff will help you, for sure, for narrative reporting. This is the fun story. It was so good, and such a pleasurable experience. What happened when you told the boss and reported up and shared the news? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:37:00.6:

I mentioned that this whole journey started for us in 2022 when I found out the data center is going dark. What I didn't mention is, the year prior to that, our company that was about 50 years old at the time got acquired by, basically, private equity, Redwood Capital Management. Initially, they were pretty hands off and just, 'We'll let you guys do your thing.' So kept running our consolidation the way we were in Hyperion. Then we did the project that we just described with Anaplan Consolidation, but Redwood's growing too. They're getting in more and more subsidiaries of greater and greater complexity and size, with differing ERPs and all that, and they were dependent on an Excel consolidation of all the subsidiaries they had invested in. So their CFO who sits on our audit committee - I can't - sorry - was so impressed with how our project went implementing Anaplan Consolidation that they pursued it and they've now implemented Anaplan Consolidation as their consolidation tool. It's awesome for me because now, the way that this is all built through pipelines and stuff, I hit play; all of my data that's consolidated into my financials comes out. It gets mapped into their chart of accounts and pushed into their system. I can open Anaplan Excel and a report that shows what's in my system next to what's in their system, and make sure that we tie out at all the key metrics.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:38:32.3:

It's made reporting to them super simple, and they have a super high level of detail available to them too, should they want to, while also having a high level of detail all in their own chart of accounts. They were so happy with that that now they've started suggesting that other subsidiaries go do it. So this [?Johnson 0:38:48.1] as an example. I don't know as much about them, but I do know that they're using the tool! 

 

Neil Thomas 0:38:52.6:

That's right. So thank you very much for spreading the word. Thank you very much for your time, Ross. Super job. Thank you so much for spending time with us. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:39:00.2:

Thanks. 

 

[Applause]

 

Neil Thomas 0:39:01.2:

Thank you.