House of HR - Anaplan Connect - Brussels     OCTOBER 2024  JM - PRESENTATION - 21 MINS 

[Other comments:] 

Rein Bryssinck 0:00:00:03: 

Who are actually the project team that did the implementation, so welcome on stage, House of HR. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:00:09: 

Thank you, Rein, so indeed here today to talk a bit about our roads towards future-proof finance. It's felt more like an autobahn in the last in the last years. I'm Maxime, responsible for our financial and digitalization together with Lisa who is responsible for our controlling and Mattia who is responsible also for our digitalization and who is our in-house model builder which was involved from the start of the project. I will not talk a lot about that, it has already been talked about, very important, but we'll talk a bit more about, yes, our role in the project and hope you can learn from it if you have something coming up. First of all, so House of HR, not sure if everyone here will know it because House of HR is actually, yes, a holding company. As to say, we put other brands in the market which in Belgium our most known is Accent Jobs. Otherwise, very active in other countries which I will show in a minute. Focusing on two segments, so specialized talent solutions, so niche in essence. Otherwise engineering and consulting. Very important here, decentralized model at the top in the middle, which is a very important one from us. We are not like one big company, we are a collection of a lot of companies, each with our own finance department, each with our own CFOs, each with our own needs. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:01:57: 

It was a very important factor in combining all those needs in our project and fast-decision making, I guess that's the case because we started the project in March and signed in June last year and went live two months ago, so pretty fast. Where we are, all over Europe, we have a small activity in the Caribbean, we think it's for the travel expenses of the CEO of that company. Yes, so financial people here, so key numbers, so 18,000, clients per month. Very important ten powerhouses, business units, so those ten finance teams. Then 50 boutiques, which are the brands that we put in the market, 73,000 people at work and €3.4 billion revenue. We are pretty diverse in a lot of segments, which again shows we are not like one monolithic company, there are a lot of diversification in our company. That brings us to our finance challenges, because in that sense I came up with an analogy for this presentation, we are a bit like the European Union in that sense. We have a lot of different companies, countries in the European Union, each with their own needs, wants, opinions. We need to make sure that we combine those in one coherent story. That's actually the job of Lisa regarding management reporting, budgeting and also Valerie who is not here who is responsible for the consolidation. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:03:45: 

Our finance challenges are, so 10 powerhouses, 50 boutiques, 250+ legal entities, so pretty complex, we like to make it complex. We don't have a group-wide ERP, again, you cannot say we want entrepreneurship. We want each company to have their own finance team and then say, on the other hand, [signal breaks up 0:04:12.4] take six months to time to implement SAP or whatever. We used Tagetik up until very recently, but it was set up for a company of €350 million, so not adequate anymore, also with a limited flexibility, so very important for budgeting and forecast which we didn't have. Also, BI automation PR was not of this age. Most importantly we were not ready, we were ready as a finance team, but not in our processes and our tools to go for an IPO. With the help of our new CFO who joined two years ago, she really pushed to jump the curve. We were at the top of our previous curve regarding Tagetik and we needed to make a substantial jump to build, to form a base to build on for the next five, ten years, we'll see where it gets us. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:05:20: 

[Unclear word 0:05:18.4] already last year in June we made a decision for Anaplan and Fluence. Why? For Fluence I don't need to tell you the why anymore. Jerome [unclear word 0:05:29.3] already told it and I can only concur with what he said. Anaplan also very flexible and set up and can also be a pitfall. I think most of the people know that. Modern clouds, very good learning platform, easy to integrate in the finance landscape. Yes, it was the logical solution for us and exciting choice for us compared to other monolithic options in the market. Now a bit more technical. Our architecture at the start of the project, so I hope, I think a lot of people will recognize this, definitely if you have multiple solutions, so you have your source systems. For us, that's a lot like 20 ERP systems. We have a data warehouse between it, maybe you could compare it then with the new offering of the Anaplan data orchestrater. We did it separately, it didn't exist of course. We connected Fluence and Anaplan to it. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:06:30: 

First, we taught Fluence, we do it for consolidation and disclosure management and Anaplan focusing on planning and management reporting. Then during the process, we were also looking at other teams' text [unclear word 0:06:45.9] etc., we really quickly came to the conclusion the interconnected planning story that is a lot of value to actually, right from the start, not go all in, but make use of what we have. This is how it looks today. We use Fluence for consolidation, also disclosure management like really the best solution in the market and also workflow and also [unclear word 0:07:18.8] very useful, then on the other hand budget and management reporting of course. Lisa will talk a bit about her processes with that. We also are implementing a tax management solution, also IFRS 16, these liabilities, we have 20,000, around 20,000 lease contracts, so we really needed a powerful and flexible engine for our IFRS 16 calculations. Then cash forecasting, both liquidity cash forecasting and strategic. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:07:43: 

We are now finishing up in Anaplan. Yes, so bits about expansion of scope. Why did we actually want to choose Anaplan for those other, not like, not the main features of Anaplan? IFRS 16 was really great for a modern flexible model, tax management also again, flexibility, also the synergy because we already had the financial data in Anaplan, and we did not really want to implement that in a whole new tool. It was actually the best offering in the market. Long-term strategic cash forecasting so that we can really start from the work of Lisa, budgets, P&L budgets, cashflow and then build further on that what-if analysis, etc. Then short-term liquidity planning, I think there is a lot of opportunities there with connecting to bank data, to commercial finance data, having a calculating engine to optimize the spread of our cash in our group. Then exporting payment proposal for a treasury system. Now Mattia our model-builder will talk a bit more about the implementation process that we went through. 

Mattia Lietaert 0:00:09:11: 

First of all, it was important to get a blueprint view of what we exactly wanted to do. We were working with Tagetik, and we thought we had everything to make a good blueprint fuel of what we needed. Unless we started talking with our implementers, or our implementation partners Delaware and Numlix and it came clear that quite quickly we needed a lot more. Our structure was a little bit more complex than we thought, for us it was the normal way of working. Due to the conversations with our implementation partners, we got through a good few of what we exactly wanted and how the future of this project would be. I want to express my gratitude for Delaware and Numlix, they really were a key partner in the success. Without them we wouldn't have completed this project in this timeframe and especially a special thanks to Marina Ketelslegers as well, she's here today and helped a lot with this project. From my perspective, I'm the internal model builder at House of HR, and I started my model builder training in August '23, to be ready for September '23, to start with the real model building experience. 

Mattia Lietaert 0:00:10:28: 

That was quite good because I was also involved in the user story-writing which made it possible to get more deep, to get a better deep dive in how the processes work and so on because I had the internal knowledge. Further on it was really helpful for me to get the physical model-building workshops at our headquarters in Kortrijk because it was far more easier to ask questions and to show things to other model builders as well. My model knowledge really has enhanced during this whole process. Now I can say and I think my colleagues can say this as well, I'm now a really key model builder within the Anaplan in House of HR. Which makes it possible for me to build things of my own and just have a little bit of support. For me, it was a very good experience being on the back line and now being in the front line. Then, maybe to show a little bit of our timeline. We were scoping which tools we wanted to use in March '23, and it came clear rather quickly that we would use the best-of-breed tools Anaplan and Fluence and the contract got signed in June. 

Mattia Lietaert 0:00:11:39: 

From then on the implementation started with user story writing and building, the real building of the models started in September '23. In January '24 we had our first FP&A model ready to use. That was quite a success. Until June '24, we did a parallel closing with our Tagetik system to have a little backup as well which also was quite smooth. Further on, in September '24, so last month we were live with our end system. We dropped Tagetik which was a good experience for us [Audience laughing]. Now we are looking towards the future how Anaplan will look, and we have some other topics as well we are building into Anaplan like the text model, IFS 16. We're working on cash flow casting as well, so our future looks bright in Anaplan. [Applause] 

Lisa Verhelst 0:00:12:37: 

Thank you, Mattia. I would like to start first with a small trip down memory lane. Back to March 2016, because that's when I started to work at House of HR. Then we were only a finance team of two people reporting to the group CFO. We had five powerhouses, and we were still implementing our old reporting system at that time. Also, we had a different shareholder back then, and they were more laissez-faire, so the reporting requirements were quite mild. Only four times a year there was an official board meeting, so they didn't ask a lot of us. Then, of course, yes, things have changed since then, so our group has been growing fast. Today we have a finance team of already more than 20 people. The number of powerhouses has doubled to ten. Our shareholders that we have now is much more hands-on, so we have a monthly board now and they are much more on top of it, on top of the results. Like Maxime already explained, our assistant Tagetik is just not suited anymore for the size of our group and for the reporting requirements we have now. 

Lisa Verhelst 0:00:14:07: 

This brings me to the story that I want to tell today. What advantage does Anaplan have compared to Tagetik or our old reporting system to cope better with the size of our group and the reporting requirements? For me, it's actually that we have a lot of efficiency gains. To give a few examples that are on the slides, so far budgets, for example, the powerhouses all did their budget planning locally with Excel. Then we had our own group Excel group template in which they linked their own budgets. Then they also needed to do a manual data entry into our reporting system. Today, with Anaplan, it's a driver-based model that all powerhouses have directly in Anaplan. It's also an automatic stream of their data, their model to our group model. Another good example, the monthly closing, so with our previous reporting system we manually created a PowerPoint based on several Excel files. With Anaplan, it's just one push on the button and the PowerPoint presentation rolls out of the system. 

Lisa Verhelst 0:00:15:29: 

Yes, these are really the main advantages that I now see with my team by using Anaplan. As you can see, before a lot of manual work, work with Excel, but now it's all more automatic, directly in the system, one push on the button and it's really easy to work with. To just give you one more tangible, or to make the example more tangible of the reporting pack, with our old system, we needed sometimes three full days to prepare our work pack, and we could then report to management on day four. With Anaplan, we lose one full day, thanks to the fact that we don't have to create manually the PowerPoints anymore. Also, when there are late adjustments in the figures, we don't need to update manually the presentation anymore. This is one of the biggest accomplishments that I have achieved with my team in the past months thanks to Anaplan. Of course, we have implemented the system in a quite short timeframe like Maxime showed, so we're not there yet. Our first focus was to get the system up and running and usable for reporting on our corporate level, but there are some next steps that we still need to take. 

Lisa Verhelst 0:00:17:00: 

How to get to a system that satisfied the needs of our powerhouses and also very important, how to get to a system that helps us drive performance and pinpoint already to us where the difficulties are. I think maybe AI can do it for us and also an important next step is evolving a rolling forecast and eventually even we would like to do continuous budgeting. These are the bits from a controlling perspective, but for a broader finance we also have some future goals, but I give the word back to Maxime to elaborate more on that. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:17:37: 

Yes, so to finalize, we have done a lot in a pretty short period of time, but we are not there yet, and we are quite ambitious. IFRS 16 needs to be fully automated, yes, you showed it there on the second point, you already have something like in Anaplan, but it's also something that we are working on. Very interesting point actually, in Anaplan, each month the powerhouse need to tell their story so that the team of Lisa can prepare the board pack in essence, they have to tell the story. In Anaplan, we are now collecting that data restructured so we can actually link words to figures. We want to try and make a CFOGPT, something like that, so quite exciting. We want to play a bit with Anaplan Optimizer for optimal cash allocations. Fluence also a bit more focusing on automation, we have a very complex ownership structure. The last point, and we have the next session on it, CSRD reporting in Fluence, so really exciting to see it. Like Deloitte likes to say, evolving towards lights out finance in the mid-term. Want to reiterate keys to success. I hope that someone here is helped by this. What we really identified as keys to success is buy-in from all the stakeholders, so even in a very short period of time, we made the decision together with our finance teams at the powerhouses with CFOs with their key people. We made the decision together to go for Anaplan and Fluence. Like Mattia said, implementation partner that is close by that is flexible, that understands your needs. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:19:38: 

Knowing what you want, they also have an end-vision in mind but be flexible in how you implement it. Mattia, yes, so the keys to success, just Mattia internal model builder, very important. Don't wait too long to build on your foundation, that is what we are now doing. We saw cash forecasting, building further on what we have in budget FP&A. Then, yes, a team that is driven to achieve results. A team not only internal but also external with the implementor and also with Anaplan and Fluence for which I'm very grateful for all the support I receive from them. Thank you and…[Applause] 

Rein Bryssinck 0:00:20:23: 

You guys, we didn't even have to push you to extend your roadmap with IFRS 16 and text and so on, so you have been very creative in discovering new things. What's next, what do you see as other things maybe in finance or outside of finance where there would be value for House of HR to expand the footprint? 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:20:41: 

I think we are already doing a lot. For me now, it's more focusing on what we have to really ironing all the last kinks out and then seeing where we want to go because potentially collecting data obviously is our deal in Anaplan and then reporting it through Fluence is a possibility. For now, we are ironing out everything that we have now, I think it's already… 

Rein Bryssinck 0:00:21:08: 

Enough on the plate. 

Maxime Mylle 0:00:21:09: 

Yes, indeed. 

Rein Bryssinck 0:00:21:06: 

Yes, okay, great. Well, thank you once again, thank you for the testimony. Very much appreciated. 

[Applause]