Peter Upapong 0:00:12.2: 

All right, well, thank you to those who have joined. I am the last thing between happy hour, but we'll try to make it fun. My name is Peter Upapong. I lead a business value and strategy team here at Anaplan. I'm based out of Chicago. My kids like to say I have a lot of lore because I've done a lot of different things in my life. I've been a battle rapper. I've been a Buddhist Monk. I was leading strategic scenario planning at a major bank during the financial crisis, so a lot of fun things and maybe some fun topics we can talk about during happy hour. In terms of business value and what we do here at Anaplan, when I joined about six years ago after leading a practice at Accenture and then the Hackett Group, I wanted to build out a capability here, really around benchmarking, around value realization. I think all day today, all the speakers have talked about value, and really, we're the team that is pushing and talking with CFOs, CROs, CXOs about, hey, what is the quantifiable value, that story. I think one of the most rewarding things about this role that I absolutely love to do is seeing people obviously be able to take a transformation, tell that story to their leadership team and obviously get elevated and get promoted and get everything they want out of their life. 

Peter Upapong 0:01:41.1: 

So this is our team here based in the US. You'll hear from Rob Urbani. He's one of the great members of our team, and he'll talk a little bit more about maturity and what we do beyond business cases and capturing stories. We also have Francisco Muir here, who's one of our great new folks focused on financial markets, public sector and all those wonderful areas. So you'll hear a little bit about what BVS does. Again, this is a resource to all customers available free of charge as an investment to our customers and really what we're focused on within BVS is how do we take something, whether it's assessing value, thinking about where you are as an organization, talk about maturity, talk about process, talk about what are the key things around key design decisions when you're thinking about level of planning? I think specifically for go-to-market and go-to-market strategy, my background in sales finance really helps shape some ideas around what value drivers folks are focused on. We heard from AWS earlier today about what they’re looking at when they think about sales planning. They've talked many times at these connects about being able to deliver their plans at an AKO, SKO type thing, to tremendous cheers from their reps, to be able to get those early. What does that quantify in terms of value? 

Peter Upapong 0:03:12.7: 

We've heard others speak about shifting and moving their planning when they're looking at 20 different dimensions of things, and then finally being able to have double-digit forecast accuracy improvement, as we hear from Stripe and other organizations that have spoken on this connect stage. At the end of the day, our team really helps you guide through, not only process maturity, but also what others are looking at as value drivers. The framework that I take to everything I call AIM. The first thing is that we really have to align in terms of what our leadership is seeing as strategic priorities. I think it's very hard. I've led implementations myself, and it's very difficult to get out of the weeds sometimes with project needs, but aligning the strategic priorities back to value drivers and really saying, okay you can have an a la carte menu of all these value drivers and we have all these value frameworks you can use in KPIs, but ultimately what are those ones that people are actually tracking? What are they actually measuring? How do you actually pick a couple that then you can say these are the ones we're going to carry forward as we go cycle to cycle and demonstrate to our leadership team quantifiable value? At the end of the day, we're all being told to do more with less. We're all being told that we need to find a way to justify value within the calendar year. Then, as part of post go-live, we're here as stewards to the journey through that entire value assurance process as you're working with your CSVPs and different members of our team. 

Peter Upapong 0:04:43.8: 

So as you think about the broader footprint, obviously, I think we can talk about value and how it exists across the entire organization. I think specifically the value drivers that have really come up in terms of my conversations with a number of organizations, when I talk to CROs, it's like, hey, you heard in the last session, our ability to get our plans out essentially six weeks, have the plans done, out day one. From that perspective, every single CRO I've talked to knows the value of what every single day of focus selling looks like. So that becomes a very easy target for them to say, are we going to take a bet to do this with Anaplan to say we're going to get plans out day one? I think another one that really comes up a lot in terms of ramped reps versus fully ramped reps and being able to say what is the value of that. What is the value of regrettable attrition? What is the value of having the cost of having the wrong rep within the wrong territory? It's probably the highest cost that we have.  

Peter Upapong 0:05:45.8: 

Then, as we look across an organization, you can think of, hey, what are the values that most are looking towards? Obviously, there are the core ones around increasing revenue and finding cost efficiency, but I challenge you today as you go out and you go back and think about what you're working on to move past productivity gains. The reality is that when we talk to a lot of leadership teams, they often discount all productivity gains from the discussion around business cases. So you have to really say okay if I think about not only Anaplan, but a broader operating model, how do I really talk about what we do in terms of maybe our planning cycle has increased. Maybe that ultimately impacts the cadence at which we do management reviews. What decisions are being taken during those management reviews that can actually impact our decisions around discounting and around product focus? There's a great case study that I talked during our own kick-off, where one of our customers found a ton of value in that and was able to refocus energy towards their premium line products just because they knew they could re-sequence their management review process. So I'm going to hand it over now to Rob to talk about maturity assessments and really how this can structure and take these broad concepts I talked about and do it in practice. 

Rob Urbani 0:07:16.7: 

Before we get started, is anybody here familiar with or used maturity assessments and maturity models? Okay, a couple. All right, good. All right, so the great thing about Anaplan is - and I've been here two years - we continue to innovate not only our products but we're innovating our group and the way we go to market and the way we work with our customers and prospects. So as we talk through the maturity assessment - what is a maturity assessment? We see here an example up top and then down below, and an explanation of what that is. Too many times in our lives, we know we need to be better, but we don’t know what that means. What are the steps? The great things about a maturity assessment is it provides us a step-by-step level you see here as we go left to right from an initial to the most mature being optimized. It helps you understand your current state. It also helps you roadmap where you want to get to. What does that look like? What can the future processes look like for us? This is a great tool to use with management because a lot of times we're all killing ourselves in our day-to-day jobs, but they don’t fully appreciate or understand what we have to do to get them the data, the reports, the analysis for them to make their decisions. Then lastly, this not only evaluates the qualitative, but it also helps us understand the quantitative as well. I like to use the analogy that you can walk into a doctor's office, and your numbers can look good, but you just maybe still don't feel well or vice versa. Sometimes it takes looking at both elements here.  

Rob Urbani 0:09:07.9: 

So what we've done is we launched this about five months ago, and you're going to see examples here in a few moments of customer examples that we've scrubbed and how they've been using these. What we wanted to start with here first is to show you all the maturity assessments that are available. So to Peter's point, our role is in investment from Anaplan into you, our customers and prospects. So you can use us. There is no charge for this. We are not commissioned employees. Our purpose and our mission are to work with you in this journey to use our solution to get better and better with it. So here you see if we look at the big four of the solution areas, these are all maturity assessments that we have. As we roll out new applications and new use cases, we're adding to this. So if there's something here you say gee, I wish I had a certain maturity assessment, likely we'll be developing it, or if you reach out, we will develop it. Some others we have here that are off the beaten path, and we have a bunch for retail. We've got one at the org level if you want to assess your CoE as well as others that look at tariffs, cost-to-serve, anomalies, and call centers. There's just a demonstration of that next to our last hour. So we've got, again, probably about 70 or 80 assessments, and that number is growing every month. Any questions so far? 

Rob Urbani 0:10:47.2: 

Okay, all right, so we're going to start to get into how to use these. So what we see here on this slide is the progression, and then below we see how we're trying to put our arms around some potential value, and in this case, we're looking at demand planning, and then the bottom here how is that going to translate to savings of inventory? So how am I going to improve, and then what is that going to mean for the bottom line? So is this mathematically scientific? Does a Level 2 to a Level 5 movement mean precisely that I'm going to improve by 10 per cent? It's not going to be the same for everyone. It's going to help draw that conclusion logically, but based on your current state, where you are, your business model, how you go to market, how you manufacture, how you sell, how you interact with your customers, etc., etc., that's all going to have a bearing here. What we are able to do is work with you to understand what will the business look like with Anaplan? What decisions can you make? What does it mean getting to an AI-driven forecasting level of maturity, and how will that sustain your business? 

Rob Urbani 0:12:04.3: 

All right, so now what I'm going to show you is what I referred to a few moments ago, and these are actual examples that we've used with customers. So there are seven steps here. If you think about where you would start and where you would end with Anaplan, the first thing you're going to want to do is assess your current state, then define where you want to go. Where can you go? One thing that we like to tell our customers is that just because Level 5 is the best on the slide, it doesn't mean it's what's right for your organization. Is a Level 4 sufficient? Is getting to a Level 5 from a Level 4 worth it? What will that actually do? Will your customers benefit from that? Then there's drawing the journey of where we are today to what can Anaplan provide, and then what do those outcomes look like. So think about assembling a business case there where we then can help identify potential benefits, further the business case, then we go back in, as Peter mentioned earlier on one of the previous slides, tracking progress post go-live and then measure that value. 

Rob Urbani 0:13:25.8: 

So let's start off here with looking at a maturity assessment. This again is a demand planning example, and I apologize. I could have used others, but I don’t know all your backgrounds, but for this sake, we're looking at demand planning. Here, you see this was an organization that came to us and we had them do the exercise. One of the questions they asked was who should fill this out? My reply to them was whoever you think is most knowledgeable of these processes, and it can be more than one person. Meaning you can have more than one individual fill this out, and then you can compare results. Why does someone think we're at a one-and-a-half, but you think we're at a three? What are you doing that we're not doing and vice versa? So this really helps foster some healthy conversation around current state. So once we have the current state, we've put a stake in the ground, and now as we move forward, we can refer back to this and see how far we've come.  

Rob Urbani 0:14:29.2: 

So the next step here would be, where do we want to get to? Thinking about the process of crawl, walk, run, this organization felt they could get here through their first initiative with Anaplan. So you don’t see all fives. You see a couple of fours and a couple of four-and-a-halves, and we really encourage folks to put the box, if you will, where you believe it is. We don’t believe that the boundaries are solid, that you're only in a one, and you can't be in a one and a two. So where are you? Where do you want to get to? Then, here what I've done is taken the maturity assessment results on the left side here, and we're now starting to make a logical progression to, okay, here's how mature we are. Now, let's list off the challenges we have within our organization. You want to overcome these challenges. So then the next step is to understand what enablers does Anaplan have that will mitigate those challenges that will help you move that maturity left to right here in these left columns, and what do those outcomes look like? So now we're able to say, here's where we are today. Here is the list of challenges that we want to mitigate. The enablers from Anaplan will help us do that, and here's what our future state outcome is going to look like.  

Rob Urbani 0:16:01.7: 

So now that we've started that logical progression of mapping this together, we can then, as we showed on the earlier slide, start to make that leap into what does this mean quantitatively? How do we justify this project? Finance wants an ROI. What's that going to look like? Peter mentioned revenue enhancement, cost savings and productivity, which are typically the big three value areas that we see quantitatively. So we've got a plethora of usual suspects of these benefit areas here working with you to understand which ones will resonate. Which ones will a maturity progress - a maturation in that assessment… What will that yield quantitatively for you? So here you see other areas like premium freight, expedited freight. We saw that example this morning on the video, the containers falling off the ship. One of the options there was air freight. That's an expensive option, but that's going to be looked at, right? So we have a lot of customers where they're able to reduce air freight where they're planning better. Obviously, a container falling off a ship is not something you can plan for, but you can certainly have those scenarios spun up. Then, we have a productivity example as well here. So what we've found with our customers is that they can free up a lot of the planners that they have to do more strategic things. CoModeler helps them to be more effective, but as we've heard in some of these sessions, what those folks are doing now with their time is more value-add. So all of that leads to revenue growth, but not necessarily the same headcount growth that tracked that revenue growth earlier. 

Rob Urbani 0:18:03.3: 

All right, so now we've built the business case, what are the next steps? Well, the next steps would be to track that progress. You've gone live, let's say, and so we've had a couple of customers who have taken a snapshot of where they were in 2020. I'm thinking of one customer in particular, not far from here. They gave us where they were in the black in 2020, then we said here's where we are in November 2025 in the green and then where they wanted to get to in the next few years in the red there. So they're able to say yes, we've come this far. By the way, they didn't do this assessment back in 2020. They did it when they were in this state of green, if you will, this current state. So they went back and had to understand where they came from, and yet what is still left for them as far as process maturation. Any questions so far with this? Okay, she's going to get you the mic. Thank you, Lindsey. There you go. 

Audience 0:19:18.0: 

When you estimate those numbers, do you work with the client and get them to gain consensus with you, because sometimes the clients are like, oh you made up those numbers. So I like to try and have the salesperson work with the client, and they co-opt it together. 

Rob Urbani 0:19:36.3: 

Yes, thank you so much for asking that. It is a collaborative process exactly. The numbers that were on this previous slide, if I can go back to these, these are all numbers that the customer has agreed to and buys into. I'll be perfectly blunt with you, we've got a list of benefit areas to fill a page, and typically in our business cases, we get maybe five or six areas because that's all folks want to sign up for. What I like to encourage is don't confuse benefits with measurement. In other words, when you go live, don't just compare what was in the business case. Compare all these other measures too that you were afraid to put in your business case. Yes, back to your point, we do this collaboratively, and we're looking at other customer experiences, so we try to bring as much of that data into the equation. Thank you. 

Rob Urbani 0:20:40.8: 

All right, so then this last slide is taking the previous slide and now saying what did we capture? So estimating a ten per cent improvement in inventory, can we stretch that now to make it a 12 per cent? Can we get two more additional points now that we're with Anaplan? We've secured our usage. We're strong in it. We've got CoModeler now. We've got other capabilities, other use cases. Can we take that and do more with the solution and therefore drive greater value and get a couple more points here, or perhaps in other areas? So the maturity assessment really gives us the ability to know where we are today, help you frame where you can get to and then continue to measure yourself. So this is something that the three of us - Francisco had to leave, unfortunately - but this is something that the three of us do day in, day out with our customers at every point in their life cycle. 

Audience 0:21:45.8: 

So going through the maturity model I can understand and such. What type of strategies or support to help an organization literally change the culture, because what you're doing is in a poor maturity level, you have a bad culture, we can just say. Any strategies or anything to help follow that maturity model to increase it while changing the culture?  

Rob Urbani 0:22:16.7: 

Yes, thanks for asking that. Do you want to take it? 

Peter Upapong 0:22:19.0: 

Yes, I’ll start. I'd say, given the number of transformations myself that I've led, it's really around a couple of elements like the change agency you have. So finding somebody that can be a change champion at all levels of the organization. Just because you're at the bottom and you're running the project, if you don't have that type of agency and support and air coverage at the top, I think it's very difficult to change that. I think being able to articulate this and giving a framework of thinking is actually the biggest impact that I think you can have in terms of changing minds. You always talk about hearts and minds and that kind of stuff, but I think we make a lot of assumptions that everyone knows the value of something or can flippantly say they have an idea what the value of something could be. I think using something like this, as well as just thinking of what is the framework of thinking you can create, really creates a place where then people can understand and say, okay, I'm here. You guys are doing this to get here. It's very tangible for them versus up in the air of what value can be. I think the hardest part would be really around some of those decisions you have to take, and then who can take those decisions. I touched upon the level of planning. I touched upon who is owning the decisions around data and those things at different levels. Those are the ones that are not easy ones.  

Peter Upapong 0:23:50.4: 

I would say the last thing is when you start thinking about cross-functional, we do a lot of engagements where we're bringing different cross-functional teams together. I think putting them to the fire and having them answer the tough questions together, and being that calm voice of reason, bringing data points, customer stories and examples from their direct competitors in a non-competitive way to be able to show how others have achieved value, I think gives people the confidence to be able to change themselves. I don't know if you want to add to that. 

Rob Urbani 0:24:25.2: 

I would say your implementation partner there has got to help you out because the OCM, the organizational change management, is enormous. Who was it who was sharing earlier today that somebody kept wanting to go back to Excel, and you had to break that habit? That's natural. It's going to happen. The habit broke, but any of us who have tried to break a bad habit knows we gravitate to that. That's our default. So I think a lot of the partners have these OCM capabilities and methodologies, and they can help with that, and probably do an assessment around the readiness to help you with that. Thanks for that great question. Yes, sir. 

Audience 0:25:11.1: 

Yes, quick question on the topic of customer life cycle and the engagement model here. So you noted that this is free for customers. What about prospective customers? Similar to the prior question. How do we engage our executive leaders with the value proposition? Do you help with that? Do you help build the business case, or is it just once you're on board, we'll help you proof it out? 

Rob Urbani 0:25:34.2: 

Thanks for asking. No, we're here early on. If I go back to one of those original slides, we spend a good bit of time… It's going to take me a moment here to get back, but we spend a good bit of our time working on the upfront business case side of things here. Come on, you can do it. There we go. So the whole pre-Anaplan, I would think we spend probably 60 or 70 per cent of our time there because there's quite a bit of effort required to do just what you said, get your executives engaged. We've got to put together something that is logical, that makes sense and we want to provide something that's not disposable so it stays on and we can carry it over into that post-go-live assessment. So we're very engaged. So I'm not sure who you're working with at Anaplan as far as your account manager, but one of the three of us maps to whoever they are, and yes, we're there for you. 

Peter Upapong 0:26:39.0: 

We're happy to talk to you directly right after this, too. The key thing with all that pre-Anaplan stuff is you're trying to create the story. You're trying to create the confidence in your organization. You see the value probably already, but the hardest thing, I think, is the actual articulation of value in terms of the language of what they care about in your executive team. We've gotten that down to hopefully a science, but also, there's a lot of art in terms of what is that message you have to deliver. What are those examples that maybe are not talked about during connect right that are available for you to understand in terms of measures and benchmarks that can give your leadership team the confidence that this is the right thing to do? 

Rob Urbani 0:27:21.1: 

Yes, great point. Everything that we have, we share with you. So the calculators, you own those when we're done with them. So it is collaborative. To Peter's point, we've got all these frameworks and calculators, and we do all these business cases, but no two look the same because they need to speak the language of your organization. So a perfect example is it may not be about headcount reduction, and maybe that's a large benefit area. So we need to speak about how we take those resources, redeploy them so that you’re growing revenue or something to that effect. So we can have two organizations that seem the same on paper, and yet, business cases look like two different planets. Great question. Thank you for bringing that up. 

Peter Upapong 0:28:15.8: 

Great questions. Any others there? 

Audience 0:28:18.3: 

How long does this take? 

Rob Urbani 0:28:19.4: 

How long does this take is the question. It can be a couple of weeks. It can be up to six weeks. What I've found is that some of the bigger challenges really reside in getting the data back to us, doing the maturity assessment internally, digging out some of the quantitative data, and determining what we want to measure. The framework is pretty straightforward. We tried to bring it way down from a PhD level because I can't operate at that level for sure. So it doesn’t take long, but I've had some where it's been as quick as two or three weeks and then others that take a couple of months just because of the way folks do have their day jobs and such. 

Peter Upapong 0:29:02.2: 

Yes, it depends directly on what you're assessing, right? So a great example would be at a gaming company that makes video games. They were focused on workforce planning. You would think naturally we'd start in HR, and then some finance, but the real meat and the real understanding of value came within the studios, came within the operations area, came with the understanding that their pre-production planning didn’t have the attrition data that they needed and cross-studio data and that took a little bit longer. If it’s yourself and the core team, and you have the information, then I think you can be enabled within one to two weeks for sure. 

Rob Urbani 0:29:45.4: 

Any others? 

Peter Upapong 0:29:47.8: 

Love the questions. I really appreciate… Four o'clock crew coming through right now. 

Rob Urbani 0:29:53.1: 

Yes, the density of good questions to attendees is… 

Peter Upapong 0:29:59.0: 

We can put that on a chart. 

Rob Urbani 0:30:01.0: 

Yes, we can chart that. So I'm going to back to this slide just so that you guys know who we are if you want to reach out to us. These are the industries that we map to, so we try to stay within the same similarity of organizations. It makes what we do a little easier and helps us bring more value-add to you guys. 

Peter Upapong 0:30:22.4: 

As well as just connecting you with people who maybe have gone through that journey already, which is, I think, the biggest thing too. 

Rob Urbani 0:30:30.4: 

Was there a question in the back? No, all right. All right, well, we thank you for your time. Thanks for coming to connect. I think we have a happy hour going on now, so I hope that makes you happy, and we can fill up on some food and drink. So thanks again.