Neil Thomas 0:00:07.7: 

Welcome everybody, and obviously I'm Neil, I have my good friend Ross here, he'll introduce himself in a second, my other good friend, not quite as good friend, Sven, over there, as well, and we're here to talk about consolidation. So I'm going to do a couple of setup slides, just so that everybody's aware. Quiet at the back, please. Financial consolidation and disclosure management, as everybody knows this is an application that we acquired from a company called Fluence about a year ago. These two guys are long-standing Fluence to Anaplan customers, so we wanted to bring you a couple of folks who have implemented and been on the journey with Anaplan, as well. Obviously use the application for many cycles, so have got deep domain experience on how it all works and just from a vision perspective we love Fluence, Fluence is our consolidation engine, we love Planning, that's our planning engine, we integrate them together, we'll make the UIs more and more the same as time passes and terminology, etc. They'll always be in their own little worlds and nicely integrated together, that's the best practice approach and that's what we're continuing to develop. Under the Fluence world we obviously have - oh, sorry, that's my list of applications. Well, let's keep going, let's just keep going. So are we ready? That was enough? Okay, so let's start their consolidation journeys, and we're going to start with Ross, which is you. So tell us a little bit about you, Ross, and where you come from and we'll get into your company in a second, but just your experience, your role and your team, etc., etc. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:01:45.4: 

Brilliant! 

 

Neil Thomas 0:01:47.7: 

Oh gosh, you've been in England for what, three days? You're now saying brilliant, okay.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:01:50.4: 

Yes, so my name's Ross Kelderman, I'm the control of Life Care Service, we're the second largest operator of seniors housing in the United States. Let's see, got my start about 20 years ago with Ernst & Young, out of their Chicago office, really did not care for that line of work and took a role with Hyatt Hotels, as they were looking to build their real estate portfolio around the world and doing their consolidation of all those investments in those various properties. Loved that work, but did not so much love Chicago, being an Iowa native, which is more rural. So when we were looking to have kids made the move back west and I found this job with Life Care Services, which we'll talk about more on the next… 

 

Neil Thomas 0:02:35.2: 

Yes, so before we get to Sven, we're going to talk a little more about Life Care Services, more about the process of consolidating, you know, the business, the structure, a little bit about consolidation and then we'll move on to Sven. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:02:47.0: 

Sure, so Life Care Services is not all that different than Hyatt Hotels, the bread and butter of the business is somebody owns a senior living campus, facility, community, and they might be a real estate investor, or a church, a not for profit, and they want to pay somebody with experience, technology, to come in and run that community well, market it well, operate it. So that's how we really got our start is these owners paying us a fee to come manage their community and over time we built up our portfolio of customers such that eventually we had 150 of these communities and we're serving 30,000 plus residents. So with that we recognized, hey, if we brought everything together, so chicken, adult diapers, I don't know where I'm coming up with these examples, we could really get our residents a better deal. So we put together a group purchasing organization and then some more years went on and we realized, hey, if we pooled everybody together, we could offer much better insurance options, general liability, worker's compensation, property, things like that. So we have insurance, Captive, out of the Cayman's, where we provide insurance to our clients. We have a development arm that can, kind of, if you wanted to build up a community or you wanted to reposition it, we could come in and assist you with that for a fee.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:04:10.9: 

So we ran those businesses for several decades, we've been in existence since 1971, but when I came on they were in a similar place as Hyatt and they recognized, hey, we're making all these bankers like Goldman Sachs and all these guys a lot of money running these communities the way that we do. We would like to have a piece of that. So for the next five years or my first five years there, we built up a portfolio of equity method interest in a number of joint ventures with various investors of all sorts of different structures and grew that portfolio. Then that was very successful for us. Over the last five years we've been acquiring entire communities, so I'm doing a lot more consolidation, maybe considering minority interests and then with all of these different business lines I describe, you have somebody like me who might sit in one of our 150 legal entities, but I'm serving a lot of different business lines and entities, so allocations become very important, intercompany eliminations. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:05:12.0 

Yes, you do the different ownership mixes and all the businesses are different, right? So you have this… 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:05:19.1 

Yes. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:05:19.1: 

…commerce business that busy the chicken. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:05:22.2: 

So as a storyteller it's like I want you to give me a summary of how this last month went, but all of these stories are different. We've got all these real estate interests that are operating these communities in different ways and I've got this development business and I've got this living management business. Depending on who you are, you might be the US government or the State of Alabama or you might be the CEO of my company or the CFO. You have all these different things that you're interested in learning about or understanding or my FP&A department. So I need something that can help me digest all this data and then bring it out in different ways that are reliable for the different stakeholders. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:05:59.3: 

Yes, perfect. All right, that gives a flavor of the complexity and we'll talk about your environment in a second. Sven, time for you to say hello and tell us about you and a little bit about Hoogwegt, which I can never pronounce correctly. 

 

Sven Kester 0:06:11.3 

Yes, it's a difficult name. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:06:11.9: 

You'll have to teach me with your Flemish accent. 

 

Sven Kester 0:06:15.0: 

Hoogwegt it is, but it's a Dutch company. Well, good afternoon, Sven Kester, well, working for Hoogwegt Group, which is a dairy trading company originally, founded in 1965. I'm the finance director group & financial control, started off as treasurer within the group, with a turnover of a little over 3 billion a year we needed quite a bit of finance to get the ball rolling. Moved up the ranks, so now I'm finance director, group & financial control, heading a team of around 17 employees, well, responsible for the reporting. So full consolidation of the company and, of course, also making sure that we have all the reporting in time and also provide management with the proper insights, report out in time to the banks, but also to the other stakeholders, supervisory boards, etc. So I'm responsible for that piece within the company. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:07:03.8: 

So give us a flavor of some of the complexities, as Ross did, in terms of number of inter-company ownership. What's the… 

 

Sven Kester 0:07:09.5: 

Yes, we are relatively small, so we only have like 430 FTE, well, compared to probably the companies that you work for, we're really small, we're a family-owned business, but we're located all over the world. So we're got operating companies in China, in Singapore, in Australia, the US, France, Belgium. So we've got different currencies, of course, also culture-wise, different cultures that we're got on board, making sure that they're all aligned and understand what they need to do. Also implementing, well, back then Fluence, also gave that challenge for us as a team to make sure that we went through all the motions. Of course, as you can imagine, as a family-owned business, well, we tend to hold onto the things that we already know and would like to continue for the foreseeable future. So that's also a bit of the tension that we had during the whole journey. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:08:01.6: 

Cool, so let's go on and we'll stay with you, Sven, and tell us about just as you were making the Fluence decision, it was time to think about something else, so give us a flavor of the environment, what motivated the change and what you were looking for. 

 

Sven Kester 0:08:13.9: 

Yes, it's actually a few of them. As I said, family-owned business, back in the days we ran as a [unclear words 0:08:19.5], as a consolidation tool, outdated. I had my colleagues back in that team that were over 60, so would soon retire, they have retired recently, not very well documented. We, well, used the system for 15 years, so it was built on top of another slicing and dicing that management wanted to have. It was slow, it was also not single sign on, so also not very, well, nice to work with for the operating companies and also from the IT perspective, as well, it wasn't on premise. So there were like multiple reasons for us to say, okay, you know, we need to change. We had to buy in from IT, but also from the operating companies and then, of course, it's the whole show start that you also have to convince the CFO, well, we need to make this investment, it's more futureproof, we get the opportunity to document it in a better way. Then also build on from there and also make sure that we have reporting in a faster, more meaningful way, and also, well, state-of-the-art, so that we're up to date. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:09:24.7:  

Yes, so we've got goals at the bottom there, so can you walk through a few of the goals? Obviously the most obvious thing is why didn't you go to the latest greatest BPC as part of that? 

 

Sven Kester 0:09:34.9: 

Yes, well, we're not part of the - we're not an SAP company, so that was one of the reasons, we looked at other vendors back then, because we saw that we needed to make this change, but we also wanted to do it ourselves. So we wanted to really own the product ourselves, make the changes ourselves, be heavily involved in the whole implementation process, to really have it financed out. BPC was we were far more reliant on the external consultant to create much time to make changes, workflows, input schedules, etc., you name it. So I really wanted to have it also finance owned, but, then again, having that means that you're more agile, more flexible and you can easier adapt to also the needs that are there in the company. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:10:22.7: 

All right, and we'll move back to you, Ross, kind of a similar story, but obviously you were HFM, not BPC, we love our acronyms in software. Yes, tell us about the challenges and what are the goals? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:10:33.7: 

Yes, so I mentioned that I had been at Hyatt Hotels and we were an Oracle, Hyperion, HFM shop, and about six months before I made the move to Des Moines, LCS had acquired HFM, but the implementation had stalled. The controller at the time, they had a consulting firm and everything, but just having a hard time getting the right vision and stuff for it, so they were looking for somebody who had experience with that platform. So I was attractive to them, even though I was probably ten years less experienced than they were looking for. So they brought me on and we were able to get them up and running within a few months in terms of just replacing what Excel was doing. Then over the next couple of years, I continued to add on additional functionality, the allocations, automating the cashflow statement, eliminations, the equity method pickups. It did take me a couple of years to really build all that out and I did that using Visual Basics scripts to set up these calculation rules. So after a couple of years I looked back from where we had started with an Excel rollup and I was really pleased. Then Oracle came out with a major release and we did it and what came with that was a reduction of functionality.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:11:55.6: 

What they had realized was maintaining this whole massive tool for an on-premises customer doesn't make sense when we're trying to migrate them to the cloud. So there was this component called EPMA, I don't know if any of you are familiar with that, but there's this component that me and my coworkers really relied on to simplify metadata updates and it went away. It just seemed like every time they made it worse and worse, they weren't responding to our support tickets, end-of-life had been announced for support on the product. So we began to look at what a modern consolidation solution might look like. Particularly we looked at Oracle's cloud solution, because obviously we're an Oracle shop, and then we also talked to OneStream, to look at what they could do. The Oracle option was not attractive to my users, they felt that the interface would be not friendly for them, that it would be too clunky, it wouldn't get adoption. The OneStream product, it was acceptable, but then we started looking to implementation partners and the implementation would take six to nine months, according to them, and we were thinking it might be longer. It was $800,000 to $1 million, so that was a lot more than I felt comfortable spending and we've been talking about replacing our ERP, so I just thought we'll wait and see where the ERP side of things goes. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:13:19.7: 

So a few more years go by and then the CIO calls me and he says, 'Ross, we need to close down the data center, we don't want to run a data center anymore, so you need to move your HFM application out.' Again, I was not happy with HFM, I felt like every time a report needed to be made that there was an ad hoc question, it was always rolling through me, because nobody had really learnt how to use the tool. So I didn't just want to hire some other company, third party, to host the HFM, I wanted to take this opportunity, but, again, wasn't happy with the two options we had already talked to. However, on the planning side of things we use Workday Adaptive and I don't know if this is a great thing to say at an Anaplan conference, but our users are happy with our Workday Adaptive. So we called Workday and we said, 'What would you recommend we look at from a consolidation perspective?' So they took down our business requirements and they brought in a lot of people and at the end of the day said, 'You know what? You should talk to Fluence, they could actually meet your needs a lot better than anything we could offer under our umbrella.' So Fluence came and demoed for us and the interface was so modern and clean and intuitive looking that my users were just - we absolutely want that, we would love it. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:14:32.9: 

Then I started talking about business requirements with the Anaplan services team and, kind of, what that would look like and they put together a proposal for me and it came in at like a tenth of what the OneStream implementation partners had and they said three to six months. So that seemed like a very workable plan to me, even if the tool was very new, there were not a lot of references available. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:14:58.9: 

How long ago was this, Ross? A couple of years, right? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:15:00.2: 

This would have been 2021-2022, and so made the decision to head down that path, signed the agreement and started off in the April of 2022. By June of 2022 we were closing in both Fluence or Anaplan Consolidation and HFM. My boss is a nervous guy, so we ran parallel for another three to four months, closing on both systems, which was not easier, but it did build confidence in our relatively new system, and then by the end of the year we were able to go full live onto Fluence. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:15:42.5: 

Yes, cool, okay, so that brings us all up to date pretty much with where we are now. So what we thought we'd do is just, sort of, say drawing a line right now, maybe Ross, you could, say, talk a little bit about the implementation being four months, but where are you? How successful was it? Learnings for the audience here, what would you recommend differently? Those sorts of things, that would be awesome. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:16:06.2: 

Sure, so I think one thing I would point out, when I went from Excel consolidation in 2015 to using HFM, what I was seeking to do is basically just replace what we're doing in Excel in HFM. Like I said, as we wanted to add additional functionality, that was another two years of work. So my concern with any sort of replacement was, well, I don't have two years to get back to where I'm at today, I'm already here with automated allocations and eliminations and equity method pickups and my cashflow statement works great. I'm already here, I don't want to do another two years. So I think that was my primary concern, but when I say I went live in June of 2022, after starting the project in April, that was doing all the functionality we had in Hyperion in Anaplan Consolidation. So a lot easier to set up. More importantly, from a maintenance perspective, as I mentioned, all of our rules were scripted in Visual Basic for HFM, which was something I was fairly comfortable with and I'd be even more comfortable with it today with the way AI works. Nobody else on my team wanted to touch that stuff and so any sort of maintenance or changes would require my attention.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:17:18.6: 

Today in Fluence if you want to go in and change a business rule, it's all a graphical interface, you can clearly see this is what this calculation or this rule is going to do. You've got drop downs, it's a lot easier to manage, so there's a lot more people that can do that, that can manage my entities, my accounts. We have several hierarchies to meet the needs of all those stakeholders that I had shared, whether it's tax or management or different - well, like our lender only covers certain entities and doesn't obligate others, so I need to have a separate hierarchy for our lender. So to build out all that functionality was a lot quicker. Another big improvement has been on the reporting side, with HFM we were very reliant on the SmartView addon that they had, and I loved it, it was great, but there were only about two or three of us that were really comfortable with it. So any time anybody had a reporting or an ad hoc question, it would have to go through us. With Anaplan Excel combined with the on-demand training that they offer, I've got like 15 people that are very comfortable hopping in there, doing ad hoc things, or even building routine reports. So it's taken a lot of weight off my plate. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:18:29.7: 

I think, kind of, the bottom line here is, so as the controller, prior Fluence, so a couple of years ago if I would have been invited to come speak at a conference in London on business day six, the 4th was a holiday for us, I would have had to say no. It was just way too much weight on me to be able to make a decision like that. Whereas today my team can easily handle month end close or quarter end close while I'm here with you guys. So it's really created a lot of opportunities for me to grow, but it's also created opportunities for my team to step up and do more. So it's been awesome in terms of development. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:19:10.2: 

Yes, fantastic. So Sven, follow that, if you can.  

 

Sven Kester 0:19:15.3: 

I'll try my best.  

 

Neil Thomas 0:19:17.2: 

So tell us a little about where you are right now and remind me, when did you go live? 

 

Sven Kester 0:19:21.8: 

Back in 2023, around summertime, so we actually took the decision to go for Fluence back then, now called Anaplan, back in December 2022. Went through all these phases, design phase, etc., all the testing, of course taking on board all those different operating companies that we have. Also have… Well, of course they could give their feedback, but, you know, even though it's a democratic process, you have to stop it at one point in time just to make sure that you meet your goals and get to the finish line in time. So we aimed actually to, well, do this parallel run between SPBC and Anaplan back in July '23, just to make sure that we had the last pickups also out of the system, make sure that we could actually depend on the system. Well, contrary to your approach, we actually decided just to flick the switch, just go for it. Our annual report, our annual year actually ends at September, so it would also mean that we would do our annual close in Anaplan that year. Also meaning that the whole disclosure management that we're also using would also have to be moved to Anaplan, and most of it could actually be done by ourselves building all those reports. Of course, you know, when we were live in August '23 we had to build a lot, you know? So it was making sure that we had all the reports in place. 

 

Sven Kester 0:20:42.4: 

Of course, you also learn along that process what is smart to do, what is not so smart to do, make sure that you've got the performance that you actually need. What we actually saw, if I compare it to what we did back in the days, how long it would actually take us to put together a good report that is actually going to be sent over to the supervisory board, it takes us now just a day or two just to get everything in. Including all the comments and everything that need to report out on. So that really saves us a lot of time. Also, in the selection itself, why did we go for Anaplan and not for Togetic? That was the other one that we actually invited to demo their solution for us. It's far more intuitive, the teams are used to working with Excel, you still see that it is Excel-based in that way, it's easier, way easier to adopt. Also, the set of the disclosure management, we could just do it ourselves. If we look at what the competitor actually does, yes, we would require actually the assistance of an external consultant to, well, really talk us through it, have everything explained to us and then, again, it would be maintaining that system would be far more extensive than Anaplan. 

 

Sven Kester 0:21:58.2: 

Yes, so faster close, so that we achieved. Then again, we're also looking at other options to really make our lives a bit easier in terms of reporting. As I said, for reporting-wise, for our supervisory board we use our Fluence disclosure management, but also for the annual reporting process, the big advantage there is also last-minute changes. Just update the system, run your report and everything is in there and out you can send it to your CFO or whatever stakeholder you need to send it to, so that really helps. Internally we're also looking more and more towards PowerBI, push all the data towards PowerBI, to our data warehouse. The way the data's set up is also quite easy for the BI team to pick up, so you don't need a little or a big manual to interpret all the data that is in the model, so it's kind of easy to set it up. Also, for us, you guys are also in finance, easy to interpret, you know? Do we really understand the numbers or not that are out there?  

 

Sven Kester 0:22:59.7: 

Yes, so that's more or less also part of our journey and also, well, adding to what Ross just said, also other people within the organization. So I'm in financial control, we've also got a business control team. Well, you don't really have to teach them anything about the system, how to pull the data from the system, they also create their own reports. I don't have to look at it, you know? It's just the data, that's it, and off they go. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:23.8: 

Got you, and remind me, on consulting how much did you do yourselves? 

 

Sven Kester 0:23:28.7: 

A lot of it. So we used our implementation partner in the Netherlands called FPM, they're relatively small, they were also, by the way, new to this solution. They said, 'Oh, well, just do this one,' and it was also for them easy to adopt, but I guess we did roughly 60 - 70 per cent ourselves. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:46.2: 

Right, in-house, yes. 

 

Sven Kester 0:23:47.2: 

Yes. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:23:48.0: 

Cool, and one of my favorite stories, you both have the same thing, so application implemented by parent company, turned into a reseller, and then you had the same thing. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:23:59.2: 

Yes, so we were acquired by a large private equity fund in 2021, and they were doing an Excel consolidation of all of their different subsidiaries. So the CFO was kind of watching as we went through this process and interested because we're a subsidiary of theirs. The project went very well for us, and so they decided to demo the product themselves, and as an Excel shop they liked what they saw with Fluence. I believe they looked at some other options, as well, but ultimately they chose to implement Anaplan Consolidation. RSM US is a large accounting firm in the US and they had also never done an implementation before, but they agreed to assist my parent company with their consolidation. So they got up and running very quickly, I mean maybe even less than three months, so now today, after I close my books on my end and I'm really comfortable with all my financials, there's a workflow I can go into and I can hit go. It sucks all my data out, runs it through Azure, the pipeline, over into their tenet, and runs it through mapping, into their chart of accounts, from my chart of accounts. Then I have a workbook I can open that pulls in data through Anaplan Excel, from both my tenet and their tenet, and I can compare several key things and make sure that the truth hasn't somehow changed through that mapping. It gives me a lot of confidence and I know that - I believe they've been very happy with it and they've convinced - well, they would be my siblings, wouldn’t they? 

 

Neil Thomas 0:25:36.0: 

They would be your siblings, yes. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:25:38.5: 

Certain of them have implemented it now, as well. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:25:41.2: 

Yes, which is fantastic, and on your side, you have the same sort of experience? 

 

Sven Kester 0:25:46.2: 

Yes, so actually we are structured a bit differently. So at group level, so I'm located, we of course use Fluence or Anaplan and also all the operating companies are using it. The difficulty that we have, back in the days we were very decentralized, so having all sorts of different ERP systems, so making sure that it was all aligned, that we speak the same language, etc. That's the process that we also went through. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:26:13.3: 

Cool, excellent, all right. So what are you working on next? What's coming up? 

 

Sven Kester 0:26:19.9: 

Yes, so what we actually can gain more and more in terms of process, it's more automating, automating everything, you know? Of course, we're using part of it, not all operating companies, some of them are relatively small and quite straightforward in terms of finance. So they can improve there, but, as I say, BI dashboards definitely got to work on that one, that will really save us a lot of time and also the managing directors that we have for the various operating companies are also more owners of their own data instead of us telling them this is what your data actually looks like. So they can slice and dice it whatever way or form or shape or form they want to. Then, again, also as we see there's some intercompany reporting that we also have that could also be moved towards Anaplan, to make that whole process easier, having not to send so many emails up and down the organization, as we currently do. So that would also save us a lot of time. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:27:20.2: 

Yes, and Ross? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:27:22.3: 

Yes, I have a couple of thoughts. So a week or two ago I asked Anaplan to demo their disclosure management tool for me and my team. We are currently in the midst of an RFP to maybe change our audit and tax firm and we are not with a Big Four firm right now. The firms that we use are smaller, more regional, and so they do a lot of our report drafting for us, but we are very seriously considering one of the big four firms. I won't say which one because they're probably in the room, but they showed very well. It's just they would expect us to do all of the drafting for these 40-odd reports I do every year and I just don't have the bandwidth all concentrated from January 20th until February 15th to churn 40 reports in Word and Excel. I need help with that, and I don't want to hire somebody for four weeks, and so as I demoed this tool what I saw was something where these reports for all of these different joint ventures and communities are actually very similar. So if I could work on it throughout the fall and get it where I like it then we can start ctrl-c, ctrl-v, you know, copy and paste, send it to the different entities, just customer the wording around the structure of the entity or the debt structure. Really, that could accelerate that drafting process.  

 

Ross Kelderman 0:28:48.0: 

So disclosure management is something that we're really looking at. The second thing, I mentioned that we do our planning in Workday Adaptive, so it's all driver-based and love that, but we want to do our reporting out of Anaplan Consolidation, because we love this Anaplan Excel tool and the reporting that it does. So those two are both upstream and downstream from one another, I need to push actuals into Adaptive, but I want all my planning what ifs and environments to come back to Fluence, so that I can do reporting on it. That's a fairly expensive process right now, it takes quite a bit of time and is also fairly complicated. So I would love to get something like a data blend or something in order to improve that connection or just move to Anaplan. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:29:33.3:  

There you go, one day we'll get you. We'll get you one day. All right, and then before we move onto - can anybody quantify the benefit? Have you ever done any math? It's saved me $500,000? I doubt it, but I always try and ask. 

 

Sven Kester 0:29:48.1: 

No, it's difficult really to put a figure on it, you know, how much you actually save. I think for the most part the biggest saving is actually making sure that your data's more reliable, you can faster report out on it, you know, you've got the connection with PowerBI or two other platforms that you're using. That's where the benefit actually is. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:30:07.9: 

Yes, I think the ROI conversation is interesting. We have software salespeople come to our office, they'll say, 'You'll get a billion per cent ROI on this project and you'll save way more money than you're spending today.' Which can't possibly be true. From my perspective, as wrapping up my time in HFM, all I wanted to do was take the functionality that I already had and not have it be in a dying, fading flower that nobody knew how to use, have it in something that was new. So it wasn't like I knew how to go in front of my executive team and ask for an investment into something, because I wanted to deliver something, from their perspective, that I already had. So with Fluence what I was able to do is say this implementation cost is equal to or less than what it would take for me to move HFM into a data center, a new data center, and the subscription cost is really comparable to the support for this on-prem solution. So I'm not asking for anything, we just need to make this move, so that was relatively easy. As I mentioned earlier, in the end there has been a great return, I don't have to be at the office during month end close anymore, I can do other stuff, I can spend more time looking at my financials. I don't know that my team's any smaller, but my team's doing more valuable work now and so am I. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:31:25.0: 

Yes, got you, and then any lessons for the audience before we do a Q&A, like don't do this or do that, or regrets you've had? 

 

Sven Kester 0:31:34.3:  

No, no, no regrets. No, of course not. No, I think scoping, I think scoping is one of the most important things that you should do upfront, you know? What is your aim? What is it you want to achieve and make sure that you're all aligned. Also, the teams throughout the world or wherever the other finance teams are located are also aware of the project, know what can be expected of them within the process. I think that's the, well, biggest thing that you've got make sure that you do, because in the end it's also about change management here. So make sure that they're all aligned and that you go through this whole process together. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:32:04.3: 

Yes, Ross, anything? 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:32:05.9: 

I would agree. I think it sounds like Sven did this even more than us, but when we do the implementation they provide a lot of the training and it's kind of like, well, you can do this as we go, or you could do it right now. Do as much of the training as you can upfront, so that you're fluent with the technology as you're thinking about the design and everything. Because you're fluent with your business needs, but maybe your implementation partner isn't as familiar with that, even if they know the technology well. So I think taking advantage of that training as early on in the process as you can is helpful and then, two, this kind of gets to what you guys did, being as hands-on during the implementation as possible. So that your team is capable of quickly carrying the weight once the support team goes home. The other, kind of, a-ha that I had, I snuck into that CFO roundtable during lunch, they didn't invite me, but… 

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:01.4: 

I got you in eventually. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:33:02.4: 

They were talking a lot about mindset and the importance of mindset, right? You need technology, but it's really how do we change the mindset of the people that we work with? I was thinking about it, and a couple of weeks ago I flew into Santo Domingo and the airport there is not like your airport. My mind was telling me I need to go to the bathroom, but as I went into the loo, my five senses said this isn't going to work, why don't we wait? Just hold on, wait, don't do this now.  

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:33.1: 

Where is this going?! Just checking, just checking. 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:33:37.1: 

So recently landed at Heathrow, my mindset was the same, I need to go to the loo, and I went in and I went. You know, it was the same mindset, but the difference was maybe cosmetic or something. It just my senses were a lot more comfortable with what I saw at Heathrow. My point is user interface matters and… 

 

Neil Thomas 0:33:57.0: 

God knows what Santo Domingo looked like! 

 

Ross Kelderman 0:34:00.9: 

I believe that Anaplan Consolidation offers a user interface that will make it easier for us as we work to set a proper mindset of improvement and enhancement in our teams. 

 

Neil Thomas 0:34:15.1: 

It's a moving story! Wow, okay, didn't expect that one. All right, so summarizing modern, I think if anybody was in my main stage this is the only product in the space that's been invented in the last 20 years and it was five to ten years ago, so it's a very modern, but proven solution, so that's great, true SaaS, so multi-tenet, all the best, latest, coolest stuff sitting underneath. Obviously rapid deployment was a real benefit, I'm with you, I like to learn the product as I go, so definitely able for the finance teams to carry on, learn and be part of the implementation. Don't leave it all to those lovely consulting people and then wonder what you've got. Then obviously use it, it's intuitive, it's easy user experience, there is a booth over there if you haven't seen so you can get hands-on with the consolidation guys. [Applause].