Unknown Speaker 0:00:03.0:
Good afternoon. Welcome to Turning the Page, HarperCollins expands connected planning with Anthony Holmes and Joe Horsey.
Joe Horsey 0:00:15.2:
Everybody, wow, what a crowd! What a crowd! Thank you so much for coming. It's amazing! It's amazing! Wait, in the back, can you hear me? Yes, okay, fantastic.
Anthony Holmes 0:00:24.4:
You actually know what's unfortunate is that HarperCollins is giving away $1,000 to every person that showed up to this. So the rest of them, they're beat, right? Just don't tell them on their way out and check is in the mail. We'll send it out to you.
Joe Horsey 0:00:39.3:
Well, thanks for coming. This will be great. We'll get through the content here, and then we'll have a lot of time for Q&A. So let's make it interactive and cozy as it is in here. So let's do some introductions. Go ahead, Anthony.
Anthony Holmes 0:00:49.1:
Yes, so my name is Anthony Holmes. I'm a director of enterprise solutions at HarperCollins. I've been working there for the past, I think ten years, eleven years, and I report in and up through IT, but a lot of the work that I do is more strategic in nature and more initiative-based. It just so happens that a lot of the solutions and things that we need in our future are IT solutions, are technical solutions. So that's where I currently sit.
Joe Horsey 0:01:16.0:
That's awesome. So I'm Joe Horsey I lead our global pre-sales organization here at Anaplan. I've been here about six months. Yes, that is me. This is Movember. So I'm in disguise, right? So anyways, for the men in the room, go get your health checks, go get your physicals and all those other tests that we don't like to do. So this is what I do. My wife gives me one month a year, and that's it, and then I got to shave it, literally December 1st, it's gone.
Anthony Holmes 0:01:37.5:
That is also still me, just in case you're wondering. Same amount of hair as well.
Joe Horsey 0:01:44.1:
So thanks for joining us. All right, so tell us a little bit about HarperCollins.
Anthony Holmes 0:01:46.9:
Yes, so HarperCollins is a book publisher. So we're based in New York. We have offices all around the world. We do global publishing and global printing. We have a bunch of different types of books that we publish. We publish children's books, we publish Christian books, we publish fiction books and non-fiction books. So right now, if you guys remember when e-books first came out back in 2008, it was a big, fast-moving pace for publishers on do we do e-books, do we do print books? That has settled down a little bit, but since 2020, a lot of the challenges that we face as a publisher have had to do with supply chain issues. So with paper and with warehousing, and getting a lot of our products printed in China, but then trying to come out of China. So that's been the biggest things that we've been facing, as a publisher in the past couple of years.
Joe Horsey 0:02:40.9:
So have you seen that demand for e-books versus printed books level off? Is it 50/50? When we were talking about this, I was like, I download everything to my Kindle, there's a supply chain challenge.
Anthony Holmes 0:02:51.2:
Surprisingly, it's about 70/30. So 70 per cent is still printed books.
Joe Horsey 0:02:55.7:
Wow.
Anthony Holmes 0:02:55.9:
And 30 per cent is e-books. So I know when that first started happening, it was like e-books are 200 per cent greater. At the time, it was a scary time in the publishing industry because we weren't sure if everything was now going to go digital, and Amazon is going to eat our lunch and all of that stuff. Readers tend to - your core business of people that are readers tend to still like a physical book. Some people love the physical book to take to the beach. It's also cool on Instagram when you're on the beach and you're like, look at my book, I'm relaxing and reading.
Joe Horsey 0:03:28.1:
Look how smart I am. Look at this book I'm reading.
Anthony Holmes 0:03:29.9:
Yes, people like to do that. I think the e-book or the readers are for someone who is more mobile. So if you're trying to read on the go and all that. For me personally, if I'm on the go, I use a Kindle, but if I'm reading at home or I'm reading in a static space, I'll probably use a printed book.
Joe Horsey 0:03:45.0:
Really cool. All right, so that's great. We see the stats. You guys print books. Tell us, really, how do you know, these are some titles that really stand out.
Anthony Holmes 0:03:53.4:
Yes, so these are probably some of our more well-known books. As you see, and as I mentioned before, it's pretty well-rounded. We have multiple divisions, and you'll see at the bottom row is some of our more popular Christian books. Yes, we do produce the Bible. Bible sales actually have been astronomical over the past couple of years, the last two years, actually. We could talk about what supply chain looks like for Bibles. It's actually a pretty fascinating story and problem that we had to solve. The middle row there is our trade books, and the top row are some of our children's books that we print.
Joe Horsey 0:04:24.0:
So when you think about the Bible, right, you're printing a book, what's the difference? So talk a little bit about that, because we were talking about that during the prep, and I found it super interesting. How long does it take to print the Bible?
Anthony Holmes 0:04:34.5:
Yes, so the Bible, the lead time on the Bible is about anywhere from six to nine months. Part of the issue is, well not the issue, but part of one of the challenges are, I don't know how many of you have Bibles, but they're all different. The inside of the Bible and the words are the same, but you can have a brown cover, a leather cover, a print cover. You can have an edition that has embossing on the front, that has foil on the front, can have engraving on the front. All of these are different SKUs, and depending on how much you want to decorate the Bible or what you're looking for, it has to go to a different printer because some of those things are actually handmade by some people. The other thing about the Bible is it has very thin paper, and not many printers have machines that can manage that thin of a paper, and so we're limited in how many printers we can go to print the Bible. So therefore, the ones that can are typically overseas and take a lot longer. If we try to do any of those printings domestically, they either don't have the machines, the investment to get the machines, or the price is just astronomical for them to be able to do it. That's just going to be a completely different printing than if you were printing Good to Great. Good to Great is what we call a one-colour book. It's just a hardcover. Your run-of-the-mill book, and that takes about ten weeks to print.
Joe Horsey 0:05:49.0:
Ten weeks, okay.
Anthony Holmes 0:05:49.4:
Goodnight Moon is a four-color book, and it has all the glossy pages, and the pages are thick, and you have a hard cover on it, and it has what is called a jacket on the book. So when you open it, the cover can come off. All of that stuff has to be compiled, put together, and you have to calculate who's making the jacket? Where's the paper coming from? What printer is printing that? So every single one of these books that you see here have a very different story for that.
Joe Horsey 0:06:15.0:
Yes, I like that.
Anthony Holmes 0:06:16.1:
They have a very different story on how they're made and how they come about from a supply chain and a finance standpoint, we treat them all differently.
Joe Horsey 0:06:22.7:
It's super interesting. Well, let's talk a little bit about HarperCollins' journey with Anaplan. So 2022, you started in finance, right? So tell us where it began, and then we can talk a little bit about the journey you've been on.
Anthony Holmes 0:06:33.3:
Yes, so it actually began in - first thing was in 2019, I went to an Anaplan Connect conference in San Francisco. It was one of the hottest times ever in San Francisco, and they had no air conditioning, and it was right before Covid. It was a great experience [unclear words]. I can see where this can help our company and our organization. Then in 2022, you had someone from finance said, 'Hey, I'm doing…' Someone from our children's division said, 'I'm doing all of my FP&A on a spreadsheet. I'm sure a lot of you have that experience. Do you have anything that you can find that can help me work or whatever?' I was like, 'Yes, I've heard of this system Anaplan. I went to this conference. I think you guys can do it.' They're like, 'Okay.' So we got a partner with [?Accordion], that's our current partner, and I said, 'Hey, we want to be able to replace this spreadsheet, but we don't really have any money. We're a publisher. We don't spend money on technology. We spend money on books. Can you help us out?'
Anthony Holmes 0:07:28.2:
They're like, 'Why don't we start with a pilot?' We said, 'Okay, we'll do a pilot.' So they come back and they're like, 'All right, we can do the pilot. It's going to be twenty grand.' I'm like, 'Great.' I go to our CFO and I'm like, 'Hey, they can do it. It's going to be twenty grand.' She's like, 'Awesome. I'll give you eight.' Eight is such a random number, right? No rhyme or reason. So I was like, 'Hey Accordion, can you guys do it for eight?' They were like, 'You know what? We can do it for eight.' So that's how our journey started, with one, them partnering with us to say, you know what, we see the vision that you see as well, we'll come in on this. Also, working with our team saying, you know what, beyond FP&A, I think there's so much more that we can do. We delivered FP&A as a prototype to just get confidence in our organization and our exec team, because a new software for us is - was something that we'd have running royalties on an ASE 400 system and where green screens and people are supporting this. So it was a big shift for us from a spend investment and a direction standpoint, to take on Anaplan for FP&A.
Joe Horsey 0:08:32.1:
If I think about the journey, a lot of customers and a lot of you probably have had, is you start in one place and you stay in that place, and we expand the finance use cases, and obviously Anaplan is all about connected planning, and so we want to bridge the gap into sales into supply chain. So tell us a little bit about how you even started selling into some of these other lines of business that probably didn't know what you were doing for finance.
Anthony Holmes 0:08:51.9:
Yes, so there's two pieces. One, like I said, our sales group was running on a legacy app, so IT was motivated to move off of that legacy app. Also too, finance just complained that sales wasn't really good at providing them the information and the data that they needed to help with their budgets. So all the finance people, to the sales people, say Amen. So finance was like, 'Can you get sales onto this system? Because all of the information that we need in order to help fill out our budgets and our outlook and our forecasts, a lot of it comes from them, and they're not doing a really good job of sending us spreadsheets. They send it to us via email.' So it was just like a conversation with the sales group that said, 'Hey, how about I was able to give you what you have now, but make it easier for you, and finance will get off your back. Does that sound like a good idea?' They're like, 'That would be a great idea.'
Anthony Holmes 0:09:40.2:
So that's how we sold it into the other group. It was less about the technology and the software, and it was more about the solution. So for all of these next steps that we took, we never sold Anaplan as a software. We sold a solution, and Anaplan just happened to validate that solution. That's how we gained traction with all of the teams and going from one group to the next group to the other group.
Joe Horsey 0:10:03.6:
I find it really interesting that the first impetus for the sales teams was not this amazing new planning platform. It was like, I want to get off this legacy technology. So the IT benefit there was we're getting a newer technology that we can actually sustain and maintain. So, super interesting. Well, let's talk a little bit about how this process evolved here. So you've got a little bit of a before and after. So talk us through this transition.
Anthony Holmes 0:10:23.4:
Yes, so after we got everybody to understand why this would benefit them, so what you see right now are finance, sales and inventory. All of those lines represent emails, communications, offline. It represents spreadsheets, macros, SQL server data that's going from left to right, and all of that piece. There was just a lot of frustration within the organization, particularly - when things are going really well with your company and your organization, what you currently have in status quo normally doesn't get disrupted, even though it's not the right way to do it, you're kind of like, yes, we're making money and I'm good right now. Then the minute things become a little bit more difficult and there's pressures or external pressures and things like that, all of a sudden these little hoops and all of that other stuff, they start taking time, they start putting pressure on you and things like that.
Anthony Holmes 0:11:10.4:
So in 2020, when we had all of the issues with Covid and supply chain and everything else like that, there was a mandate that was given to us that we had to enter what was called the transformation phase for our organization, and that really helped accelerate what the vision for Anaplan plan was, because all of these groups were using legacy systems, legacy processes, macros, this, that and the other. The most, I would say in the simplest thing, the best thing that Anaplan ever did for us was just put all of these people into one place. Forget the algorithms, forget it can do 10,000 SKUs at one time, Optimizer, throw all of that out for a second.
Joe Horsey 0:11:47.6:
It still says that it scales really well. We can do a lot of that stuff [unclear words] so we'll come back. We do that, [unclear words] helping yourself this year, but.
Anthony Holmes 0:11:53.2:
I always say, one of the mantras we had was start smart. I know there's always like, start simple, but start smart. Find the thing that is going to bring the most value, not the thing that's going to have the most impact. I know it's nuanced, but the most value to our organization was simply being able to say people are no longer using a spreadsheet. So in the beginning, Anaplan was just one big Google Sheet for us, and everybody was ecstatic because they no longer were fighting with IT on integrations that fell over, or macros that froze, or Excel spreadsheets that did all of that. So that was our first thing, was just being able to put everybody in one place. Then once we did that, each of the functional areas sales, inventory, finance, they took ownership of their area and started realizing, hey, when I do this, it helps them, and when they do this, it helps me.
Anthony Holmes 0:12:44.5:
That's how we got to this ecosystem of this workflow where everyone's like, okay, I give this to you, you give this to me, you give this to me, and they've really - when I say like Anaplan, I think for them, they like the fact that Anaplan facilitates a world for them that they had envisioned many years ago. So I think the collaboration and the collaborative effort that I brought is really what Anaplan has helped accelerate for us.
Joe Horsey 0:13:12.8:
So you mentioned you're part of IT, which is interesting because usually Anaplan ends up in the business, because that's the value prop, we don't have to talk to IT, we could just do it in the business and we'll get things happening a lot quicker. How do you keep these folks on track? So as an operating model, you own the Anaplan platform holistically, but then sales might come in and say, 'Hey, we've got this new thing we want to do. We want to extend this model.' How do you then operationalize that across the impact of finance and to inventory? I'm curious on…?
Anthony Holmes 0:13:40.4:
So what it's actually created is those people all sit in the meeting. So there's a key person from sales, a key person from inventory, a key person from finance, and they have to rationalize what they want. So even though it's - I would say this, it's held by IT, but it's owned by the business. So we hold it just because of the integrations, and it's a tech stack, and sometimes people in the business are like, I don't want to own an IT platform. Shouldn't you be doing that? So the business still does own it. We just facilitate the conversation because we say, 'Hey, if we make this change, just know it's going to impact this, and it's going to impact that.' The great thing is, it's conversations that people end up having anyway. It's just about when you have them, right. Somebody makes a change to system A, eventually you have to have a conversation with finance about that change, because if you make it without telling finance, three weeks later, finance is going to find out that you made the change and then they're going to be pissed, and you're going to have the conversation anyway, right?
Anthony Holmes 0:14:36.6:
So what Anaplan allows us to do is to have everyone have the conversation up front that says we're making this change, or if somebody wants to do something differently, or there's a new initiative or objective that's come down from the execs, how does this impact all of you? Sometimes finances say, 'This has nothing to do with me. You guys do what you want.' Sales and finance. So we actually do that on a pretty frequent - I would say very frequent basis, we have that conversation with the business.
Joe Horsey 0:14:59.7:
That's awesome. All right, let's talk about some of the business impact that you've seen just with this new interaction, in a way that you guys are operationalizing across finance, inventory, sales.
Anthony Holmes 0:15:12.2:
Yes, I think collaboration has been one of the best things that have happened. So in our industry, between sales finance and inventory, sales comes up with what they think they're going to sell for a particular book. Then finance takes that number and says, 'How does this translate to what our budget needs and goals are?' Then inventory takes that number and says, 'Okay, this is how many books we think we need to print.' In previous iterations, those conversations used to happen in a very fragmented way. Then what would normally happen is if we print too much of one book and it's sitting in the warehouse, inventory points to sales and says, 'It was them. They gave me the number.' Then when you go to sales, sales is like, 'Well, I didn't come up with that number. Finance said I had to hit that number, otherwise we weren't going to hit our budget numbers.' Then finance says, 'Well, who told inventory to print that much? It's their job to manage inventory, right?'
Anthony Holmes 0:16:00.8:
So we had an ecosystem, but it was just a very negative one of everybody blaming everybody else on whose fault it is, and finally we just said, 'Hey guys, like we have to do this together, right?' Separate from personalities, their biggest issue was well, the reason we can't do it together is because we don't have the right process and we don't have the right tools. So what we were able to do, and obviously you should lead process first, because of the flexibility of Anaplan, we were able to lead tool first in this particular case, and then rally everybody else around the tool, and that's when the process changes came. So the collaboration has increased tenfold. I think the thing with Anaplan that's interesting is if you make a change, right now the other screen updates automatically. That seems like, yes, of course. But when you have people that are working in legacy systems that you've got to pump the tire and you've got to turn the key six times, and you've got to hit the gas to boot it up, and you've got to call desktop to support because your password got locked out and all this other stuff.
Anthony Holmes 0:17:00.7:
When you enter a sales projection on one screen, and finance can see it in the afternoon, and they can do their job, they are best friends now. They're besties. They hang out, they chill. They're like, this is a really good experience. I think the flexibility of the tool and the [?power of the tool] that has really helped us in the collaboration space.
Joe Horsey 0:17:18.7:
I think one thing, so it's great when you're in the traditional planning cycle, right? We go into the end of the quarter, we go into the new quarter, we're projecting revenue, we're projecting all the inventory. You had some really interesting stories about unpredicted spikes in demand or inventory and how the system has helped you address some of those. So talk about some of those reaction to macroeconomic things that were not expected.
Anthony Holmes 0:17:40.4:
So for book publishing, how it works is you have some books that you've not published yet. So these are a bunch of new content that's come in. No book is the same. So it's really difficult to determine how well a book is going to sell. As a publisher, you have to make all of the investment upfront. You pay the author in advance, you produce the book, you copy edit the book, you print the book, you ship the book, you stock the book, you send the book. If the book sells zero copies, you're beat. That's it. There's nothing else that you get, right? You've just lost on that one. So you have to try to figure out how do you plan that? There's a couple of scenarios and stories, and I won't use any names or books, but things happen, like you have this book, it's a big profile author, and right before the book is about to release, a scandal happens. One of two things happens with the scandal. Either the book takes off and it flies, or it dies. In either of those cases, you have to make a decision to say, do we print more because we think this thing is going to take off, or do we not print any? Unless you get it right, you're going to be in a bad position.
Anthony Holmes 0:18:41.2:
What helps us get it right more often than not now is that sales has an opinion, finance has an opinion, inventory has an opinion, and they all can have that conversation around the same dataset in the system, and they can have it in two days, versus having it over two weeks, and by that point, who knows what we're going to do. Other scenarios are unfortunately, sometimes when an author or someone dies, that's typically when a book also will take off. So sometimes we have to pre-emptively know if some of the authors are a little bit older. So for example, Billy Graham, right, we knew Billy Graham was getting older. You have to start looking at his profile and his books, and you have to say, okay, he may go in three months, six months, twelve months. What you can't have happen is Billy Graham die and you don't have any books available to print. You have to be ready in that moment. So being able to have everyone seeing what inventory we currently have on hand, seeing what our lead times are, seeing where the book is being printed. Visibility into, you know what, this is happening faster. We should make this a domestic printing. We need it faster. Even if finance says the unit cost is going to be too high, because those conversations are now what are able to happen.
Joe Horsey 0:19:56.8:
You can make that decision, understand and go to the finance team and say, 'Hey, look, if we start - we can print this domestically to meet this accelerated demand, it's going to cost us a little bit more. Are you okay with the margin that you're going to lose on that?' Then you have a different kind of conversation. Whereas today, or in the disconnected environment, you just don't know until the end of the quarter.
Anthony Holmes 0:20:14.2:
Yes, and the biggest issue that teams talked about it, it would take teams two weeks to pull together all of the information to even have that conversation. Back to your legacy systems, spreadsheets, data not coming in. So before they can even get in the room and have the conversation, they've wasted two weeks of time just trying to aggregate data and information to have that visibility.
Joe Horsey 0:20:34.0:
I love this next slide, heard around the office.
Anthony Holmes 0:20:38.1:
Yes, I don't know the relationship you guys have with your IT department or if you're in IT.
Joe Horsey 0:20:44.0:
Everybody loves IT, right?!
Anthony Holmes 0:20:46.7:
Sometimes there's a strained relationship between IT projects and the business and finance and those things. The business feels like these guys don't know what they're doing, and IT feels like they never know what they want, and there's just kind of tension in this relationship. Since we've put Anaplan in place, it's really helped us build IT integrity. It's really given confidence to our exec team that we can invest in other tools outside of the legacy ones that we have. It's given our exec team confidence to say, 'Wait, we've actually seen the business impact and the results of when we do make a pretty significant investment in a platform or in something like this, that there is a return on it.' Sometimes the return isn't always well, we were able to reduce headcount by this amount of number. For us at HarperCollins, our goal is not to reduce headcount. Our goal is to be able to just increase the amount of throughput with the existing staff that we have. So Anaplan has allowed us to do that.
Anthony Holmes 0:21:44.3:
So instead of you spending half of your day aggregating spreadsheets, we'd like you to spend half of your day figuring out which author is going to die and make sure we have all of the books that stock for when they go. That's a joke. Yes, we want you to spend more time doing value-add things. Look at the market. Look at market trends. See what's going on there. Look at our backlist of titles. What's happening in the world that you can find a title that maybe we weren't expecting to print more of, but now we can print. So those types of things and, just around the office, a lot of things. Anything that comes up now that's a spreadsheet, the answer is can I put it in Anaplan? Can we put that in Anaplan? Sometimes you have to say no. We've never had that type of collaboration relationship, and I would say positive energy around a program or a platform before. So I think for us as an organization, it's been hugely helpful, especially because we work with a lot of creatives as well, and creatives don't take too kindly to processes and systems and have to do it this way exactly on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday.
Anthony Holmes 0:22:51.0:
The great thing about Anaplan is, if they need an adjustment from Monday to Tuesday, we can do that and they feel energized and inspired to do their job and do their work. So I would call that the soft benefits of what we've been able to achieve with Anaplan.
Joe Horsey 0:23:07.5:
Amazing foundation of confidence, ability to deliver, everybody's day in the life is so much better. What's next in your journey with an Anaplan, and as you look forward, what excites you about the innovation that either we're bringing or that you're looking to drive?
Anthony Holmes 0:23:21.1:
So we actually just started rolling out Anaplan to the UK and to Europe. So we're going to do UK first and then we'll do Europe, and then after that we have some ideas on India and Asia. So we really are - we've really doubled down on making this a global enterprise solution. I don't know if any of you have worked with other international partners or people with your companies and things like that, but our experience is whenever the US tells the UK that we're going to give them a system, it just doesn't go well. They're not excited about it. They don't think we know how to do systems. They always try to manage to do their own thing. But this has actually been one where they have actually called up our global exec team in New York and said, 'Man, our team is really excited about doing this Anaplan project. They really think it's going to help them improve their jobs and it's going to go well for them.' So for us, that's the thing on the horizon for global and for Europe, and I think for North America, now that we've closed the loop on that, we checked the box where all of North America for sales, finance and inventory is on.
Anthony Holmes 0:24:27.6:
Now we're leaning into the insights. How do we use all the data and everything in the system to make better decisions? How do we do capacity planning, warehouse planning? How do we use AI to help us with predictive analytics and coming up with better demand, and putting that information in front of analysts and users for them to make decisions, versus having them spend time doing process pieces. So we're trying to hit the part of what Anaplan can offer, which is the value add. So we hope to do that in the UK after that.
Joe Horsey 0:24:58.4:
That's awesome. I love the fact that you've set up a foundation you can build upon, right? A lot of people want to just jump into AI blindly, but if you don't have the foundation set, you don't have the data, then you can't really bring and elevate those insights to those planners to make the decision.
Anthony Holmes 0:25:10.9:
Yes, it's one of the things that I think I learned personally throughout the journey of Anaplan, is sometimes people just want something simple, and sometimes if you're like, 'Oh, man, Anaplan can do this and it can do that.' It was like the other day, my mom was trying to get a new car, and the salesman is like, 'Look at all these amazing safety features.' And she's panicked. She's like, 'Wait, what? It beeps. It stops on its own. If I go into another lane…' The anxiety on her face was just too much because she's like, 'I don't need this car. I don't need it.' I'm like, 'No, you need a car that has safety features, etc.' So what I said was, 'Mom, we can turn off those safety features for now, until you get comfortable with the car, but you should still get the car.' So I think sometimes, what we can do from a software standpoint is we can talk about all of the safety features and hey, this can do AI, but the person just asks you to take them out of a spreadsheet. They can't even spell AI, and we're like, 'Hey, this is what you should be doing.' It can be a little bit off-putting. It can be intimidating.
Anthony Holmes 0:26:11.2:
But if you sell the solution for what they're after. If I gave them Anaplan or Google Sheets, they'd probably be none the wiser. So at that point, just give them Anaplan and keep moving forward, because they gain confidence as they go. I'll report back in three weeks. Maybe my mom is using the out-of-lane thing, who knows?!