Unknown Speaker 0:00:11.7:
If you could help me welcome Mark and Anthony to the stage.
Mark Gordon 0:00:15.8:
Welcome. Hi, everybody. That's me, and that's him. My name is Mark Gordon. I lead our supply chain business in the Americas. I am more than happy to welcome a friend of mine, Anthony Holmes, who to me is all things HarperCollins, and more specifically anytime I have a question about tell me what's happening inside a customer, like what are you guys going through, how are you managing things - and we'll talk about all this later - I call him, and he helps me. Do you want to introduce yourself real quick?
Anthony Holmes 0:00:48.3:
Yes. My name is Anthony Holmes. I hope I still look like that picture. I work for HarperCollins. I work in their enterprise solutions. In enterprise solutions, we recently or actually over the last three years became an Anaplan customer. We made a decision to centralize all of our planning efforts across the organization, so sales planning, finance planning, and also supply chain, and as of late, we've really been investing more time in supply chain. I've had a great time on this Anaplan journey. Started many years ago in San Francisco at Anaplan Connect when it was 1000 degrees. That was my first time there and have been coming back ever since.
Mark Gordon 0:01:32.1:
Great and thanks for coming back and sharing your story. We're going to do a couple of housekeeping things. I recognize some faces in the room. Know even if you're sitting in the back, you're not safe. We potentially will be calling on folks. We also understand that we are a little bit later in the day today. We know you're caffeinated. We know you have sugar. We also know that the benefits of these sessions is not to hear me or even Anthony speak to you, but it's more to engage with you, and ask and answer questions, and so forth, so anytime you guys have questions, please feel free to raise your hand. Stop us at any point. We can do this either of two ways where save them to the end or ask during the middle, and we have been talking about it. We were like, no, just raise your hand and ask. We're happy to do it. We've got some material to get through, but we envision this more as a conversation between us and you and each other.
Audience 0:02:34.8:
Whoop.
Mark Gordon 0:02:35.8:
Thank you. Appreciate that. That has made my day. Now I'm thrown. Here's a question, a couple of questions just so we get a lay of the land. Who is into supply chain, a supply chain practitioner? Hands raised, a couple of hands raised. Okay, I like it, very good. How many customers do we have in here by way of hands? Okay, and anyone thinking about being a customer? I would call you a prospect. A couple of hands. Okay, cool. Thank you everybody for coming. That's helpful to us. I can't help myself. They told me not to do this, but I have to. It is March. I am tall. I play basketball. March Madness is on my mind. How many people have played their brackets? A lot of hands. There should be more hands up than not. You guys that don't have your hands up are missing. Of those hands that were raised, how many people still have a perfect bracket? Nobody. Okay, not surprising. We talk about this. That is my metaphor for supply chain. You make a plan, you think it's awesome, you think you're 100 per cent right, and halfway through the first day of games, you're wrong. Right?
Anthony Holmes 0:03:59.2:
That's correct.
Mark Gordon 0:04:00.1:
It has gone out the window. Your perfect bracket is gone. He and I talk about this all the time. That is supply chain planning. You make a plan, the minute you lock it in, you're crossing your fingers and you're hoping, but you're also realistic to something's going to change, and I've got to roll with it. That's a little bit what we'll talk about today. We're going to do it in two parts. One, I want Anthony to talk about the business and HarperCollins, and two, I want him to talk about his Anaplan journey and specifically what has happened inside the company and how has all that gone. Does that make sense with everybody? That's what we're going to do. That's what you guys are in for. What's cool for me, I get to do this a lot. I was thinking about books and supply chain. I'm like, it's not that hard, and I've been at supply chain for a long time, but it's paper, it's ink, throw some leather on the front, you're good. You are not good.
Anthony Holmes 0:05:02.4:
No.
Mark Gordon 0:05:02.9:
It's hard.
Anthony Holmes 0:05:03.2:
It's far more complicated.
Mark Gordon 0:05:05.4:
Tell me a little bit about the company and then let's talk a little bit about your supply chain, too.
Anthony Holmes 0:05:09.7:
Yes, so HarperCollins has been around for quite some time. We publish in 16 countries and many, many different languages. We have about 4000 employees globally. Have any of you ever heard of HarperCollins before? Oh, wow, a lot of you have. Do you also read? Oh, perfect, thank you, so that $2 billion number there, we appreciate your loyalty and your commitment to reading, and so publishing has gone through so many different dimensions. How many of you guys remember the eBook when it first came out, Kindle, and how many remember at the time it was like, 'Oh, man, the actual hardcover book or the paper book is going to go away because of eBooks,' and all of that stuff. Well, the good news is eBooks are here and the paper books are still here. Publishing has always gone through its ups and downs and its ebbs and flows, and as a company, we've been able and have been trying to adapt to all of those market changes and trends. Ultimately so that way, one, we can be able to get our author's content to you as a reader consistently as time goes on.
Mark Gordon 0:06:18.1:
Yes, so I was thinking HarperCollins, some examples. I think we all recognize those. I tend to get stuck in the top row. My kids are older now, but I can't get past Goodnight Moon always, right? I'm seeing nodding heads. Everybody has read Goodnight Moon, correct? Yes, good. Thank you, because otherwise the rest of this would not be good. Just some examples of books here. One of the things that we talked about, so it's like as we head into the challenges of supply chain in HarperCollins, everything else, what was super interesting to me is your focus on the authors and in getting their product, not even in quotes, their product out, their voice out and representing them in the market, I know we're going to talk a little bit about it coming up, but tell me about just your philosophy on helping these authors.
Anthony Holmes 0:07:12.4:
Yes, so for some of you that are maybe not as familiar with the publishing process, what happens is the author writes this amazing content and after it's written, it goes through the editorial process and the publishing process, and once all that's done, it's our job in the supply chain to make sure that we get that book produced and we get it out on time. A book goes on sale at a particular time, and around that on sale date, there is marketing, there's publicity, and you have to think about each SKU or each title has its own go to market strategy. We publish, for new books, we do anywhere around 10,000 new SKUs a year, and so the responsibility on the supply chain is to make sure that once the author delivers his or her content, it's our job to make sure that we get it to the finish line when we say the book is going to be due or when we say the book is going to go on sale. All of the retailers, all of the customers, everyone is expecting that book to be there on time and ready to go, and any blip or shift in the supply chain can dramatically move that date. Now imagine your book is supposed to go on sale at the end of the month, something happens in the supply chain, and now it's not going on sale for three weeks after that. You're rescheduling marketing publicity, Good Morning America.
Anthony Holmes 0:08:34.6:
Your agent's calling, 'How come? What happened? We had everything ready to go,' and when a book goes on sale, most of its sales happen in the initial months of when the book goes on sale. There are some perennial titles that will sell continually, like your Paulo Coelho's The Alchemists, the Bible, those things, but most of the time when a book initially goes on sale is when a lot of the sales are expected to come through. If you miss that date, you can severely impact the sales of a title, and now the author is sitting there saying, 'Man, I did all of this hard work to get this book out there, and now we've missed the date.' There is an obligation, and a dedication, and a commitment from the supply chain team to make sure that we get this author's work out there, because if you read a book, sometimes it makes you cry, sometimes it makes you sad, sometimes it's contemporary, it's what's happening, and you've planned this book to land at a perfect time for market trends and things like that. It's so much more invisible behind the scenes, but it's so impactful to make sure that from a supply chain standpoint, once the author hands us the baton, we have to make sure we do a really, really good job of getting their content out and on the right time.
Mark Gordon 0:09:48.2:
Yes, that was a surprising, now that I think it through, not surprising, but surprising to me because we think in some of the different markets that we deal in, consumer goods and others, you think promotions and promotional spend, something's going to go on sale at the grocery store and whatever, if it doesn't go on sale this weekend, it'll go on sale next weekend. Something like that. Literally every title, everything that we see there, every title that's coming out, there is a ton of promotional activity and just coordination and synchronization, and the thing that I couldn't get over was the timeliness. There is a spoilage date on some of these where the author has something to say, it's a contemporary topic, it's relevant, it's timely, and it has got to come out when we say it comes out, because there are other things happening in the world bigger than what we're dealing with. If that title's a month or two late, that's not good.
Anthony Holmes 0:10:42.2:
Right, and I think for us, that's where getting a tool like Anaplan and getting visibility, because all of the hands have to talk to each other. Your production hands have to talk to each other, manufacturing, and when you're producing a book, you've got to coordinate the paper. You've got to coordinate the book, cover. The artist has to put together the book cover. You have to make sure it's the right paper. You have the paper, you have to bind the book. All of those pieces have to happen after the author has submitted their content. There are all of these steps that have to happen, and previously what was happening is they were all happening in silos and spreadsheets and different systems, and production was doing one thing, and everybody was trying to catch up to each other in meetings. We finally said, 'Well, everyone's working in a connected planning way already. What's missing is just the tool. It's just the system,' and so that's what drove us to wanting to get a tool like Anaplan, so that way it would help our internal teams work better together in that collaborative way to make sure we weren't missing dates.
Mark Gordon 0:11:42.6:
Yes, so let's talk a little bit about supply chain, because we have to. Supply chain 101. Let's go back. Little education session. The newsboy problem. Everyone knows it, and if you don't know it, it's what we learn right out of the gate in supply chain. Way back when there were newspapers that existed and you bought them on the street corners, how many did we want left over at the end of the day? Zero? No. Why? If we have zero, how many people would have come to buy it and not had it available? We don't know. Could I have sold ten more? Maybe. Could I have sold 100 more? Also maybe, so at the end of the day, we want one left. We want one, and to me, all of that is encapsulated in what we're talking about here, as well. Take me through a little bit, like we talked about Polar Express, for example. That title exists and will continue to exist. I'm pretty sure, I haven't bought it in a while, but I'm also pretty sure I'm not going to go buy it in August.
Anthony Holmes 0:13:03.9:
Yes, so some of the production complexity, if you go back to the other slide and we look at some of the titles that are there, I'll walk you through. Let's take the Bible, for example. When it comes to producing the Bible, has anyone ever opened a Bible before, seen the Bible?
Mark Gordon 0:13:21.0:
We're going to make you swear on it too, by the way.
Anthony Holmes 0:13:24.1:
When you open the Bible, you'll notice the Bible has very, very thin pages. It doesn't have the same page context as a paperback book or a hardcover book. What that means is you have to have special paper to be able to produce that Bible, and only special printers can produce that Bible, so you have to calculate all of that into your supply chain calculations of how long it takes you to produce a Bible. If a Bible takes you six months to produce, you have to know what that quantity is well before that book is produced and be able to supply to your customer. One of the complexities in publishing is just the lead time in which it takes to actually produce a book. An author could be finished with a book well before it actually makes its way to market because of the lead time. If we look at Goodnight Moon, Pete the Cat, these are all color books, what we call [?4 color 0:14:16.2] illustrated books. You have to print those on thicker paper. It has to be glossy to make sure the image looks good and all of that. Those are more expensive to make, so you're trying to source certain printers to be able to do that, and as you try to find more cost-effective printers to do that, you're probably expanding your supply chain timeline, and you have to determine is it worth expanding my timeline to be able to produce this book at a lower cost, or do I pay the cost to be able to get the book out to market faster, to be able to get those sales?
Anthony Holmes 0:14:47.6:
For each of these books, each of these SKUs, they all have something unique about them that you have to manage each of them from a supply chain standpoint individually. We don't just manage just a group of sneakers and say, 'Well, most of these sneakers, regardless of whether they're red sneakers, high-top sneakers or low-top sneakers, those will take X amount of time.' For each of these books that are sitting here, they could have a varied supply chain timeline depending on the complexity of the book, and so being able to put that into a system like Anaplan for every single one of those SKUs, it allows our inventory team when they do this, they treat each SKU individually one by one by one. We've built certain algorithms and things into Anaplan to help speed up that process, but they're still required to understand the specs of the book, or the specifications of the book, where the book is being printed, what region it's being printed in to help determine how much of this should I print? Then the other part of the complexity is, well, if it takes me six months to print a book, and the book goes on sale, and you sell out all of your inventory in two months, you can't then at the plus-two-month mark, decide I need to print another 500, because it's going to take you another six months. By that time, once you've replenished your inventory, you've missed the sales demand.
Anthony Holmes 0:16:07.9:
So it's this game of constantly trying to figure out when should I reprint, how much should I reprint, how do I manage my lead time, because you never want to over print. If you do, you've now put all of that cash out, and you've put your working capital out, and you're sitting in your warehouse and it's not moving, but then you don't want to under print, because then if you under print, there are all these sales that you've now missed, and the spike, the sales spike, that has now gone away. When we're managing all of these pieces, in the back of your head, you have to think of the author again, because if there's a sales spike for an author's book, what you don't want to have happen is say, 'Well, we weren't able to get this content out to the right people because we didn't do the best that we could in making sure that your book was available.' That's what's happening from a publishing standpoint. We're balancing all of these pieces in the supply chain, so it's never just one size fits all. It's how do you look across your entire catalog and make these decisions on a day-to-day basis?
Mark Gordon 0:17:06.4:
Yes. Sorry, yes. Go ahead.
Audience 0:17:08.3:
What is your distribution strategy that you actually own and are you making sure a book gets to my mom and pop shop and to my specific Barnes and Noble or are they going through regional distributors?
Anthony Holmes 0:17:24.0:
Really good question. There are rules in place to make sure that the book gets released at the same time to everyone, regardless of where the book is distributed, so that is on us. If we decide to produce a book somewhere far away or difficult and you're further from where a distribution is, it's our responsibility to make sure that everyone gets the book released to them at the exact same time. We've recently embarked on opening a warehouse in Indiana. A lot of our printings, and that used to be third party, but we've opened up a warehouse and are working through that to be able to help with our distribution, at least within the US. In terms of the manufacturing of the book, a lot of that is based on the complexity. There are some places that only have the special printers, for example, for the Bible, so those are largely printed overseas, and you have to have the amount of time to ship those and bring those back in and then distribute them.
Mark Gordon 0:18:26.8:
Anything else for now? That was the interesting part when we were talking about it, because every time I'm out visiting clients, we're talking about hierarchies, and aggregations, and let's plan by attributes, or at a family level, whatever. Everything is so unique for the books, it makes it for a fascinatingly hard and difficult planning challenge. We get a lot. I get a lot, new products, so are your challenges any different for new books coming out because of Oprah's Book Club, or maybe new promotion, or is that just any different from the run rate product?
Anthony Holmes 0:19:12.3:
No, so we have what we'll call new releases, and then we have what we'll call backlist titles, so titles that are perennial that have published and it's doing so well that you consistently reprint it over time. Your lead time challenges are the same, whether the book is a frontlist or a backlist, and the complexity of the book is the same, whether it's a frontlist or a backlist. You always have to manage that. The difference that you're managing between a frontlist and a backlist is demand, is for a backlist title, knowing when to reprint the book, to try to predict demand, to say, 'Okay.' Let's pretend you're an author and the first book you wrote was amazing, and it sold through the roof, and then you have a second book, and now we have to be able to gauge is this second book as good as your first book, and is it going to sell as well? If your first book is currently in circulation and your second book comes out at the same time your first book is in circulation, that may drive demand for that second book, and how long ago did that book publish? Is it still selling? All of those factors are taken into consideration to determine when should I reprint this title.
Anthony Holmes 0:20:19.1:
For a new release title, you don't have necessarily as much of those datapoints, per se, other than marketing drive, publicity, and this is a new product and there's a lot of momentum being put behind it. The steps from a supply chain standpoint are the same, but the decision making for a new release title versus a backlist or a reprint title is slightly different because it's two different sales curves or two different demand curves that you're trying to plan for. In Anaplan we do both. We accommodate both of those scenarios.
Mark Gordon 0:20:51.5:
Okay. Yes, interesting. Can we pivot, so if the audience is not convinced yet that he has got a really hard job, I don't know what else we can tell you, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we covered in the last 10 or 15 minutes. What he's doing is really hard.
Anthony Holmes 0:21:12.3:
I'll tell you what's harder, I don't actually do it, the people who actually do it, and then trying to learn what they do and put it into a system. That part is hard, because right now it's all about how do we standardize? How do we standardize? How do we standardize? How do we make it all the same? To some extent, it's difficult to do that when you have thousands and thousands of SKUs that literally behave and act differently, and from an economic standpoint, you do want to try the best that you can to try to make them all fit. That way you can try to bundle things together and Anaplan helps us do that, but when you sit in the world of someone who does these reprints and these printing decisions on a weekly basis, and try to understand all of the different nuances that could make you print 10,000 to 1000, you could be ready to print 10,000 copies for a book, and then all of a sudden the author does something amazing. Social media takes off, and boom, now you look like the person who didn't anticipate this, and you've under printed because Oprah decided they were going to do it, or an author had a scandal, or something like that. In that case, the book may go up or it may go down. You don't know, and you're sitting there saying, 'Do I print 10,000? Do I not print 10,000?' Trying to take all of those nuances and put it into a system, by and large, was really impossible for our inventory team.
Anthony Holmes 0:22:39.3:
When we first went to them and said, 'Hey, we have a system that can be flexible and it's going to work,' they were like, 'I don't have time to talk to you. I need to go figure out whether I should do 10,000 copies more or less and get yelled at either way.' They do 10,000 more, they get yelled at. They do 10,000 less, they get yelled at. We were able to introduce Anaplan, basically saying, 'Okay, just trust us. If we show you that it can be extremely flexible and that you could manage each of your SKUs independently, and we can make it easier for you, and we're not going to try to put you in a box, would you be okay with that?' They were like, 'Okay, you guys can try.' We work with our implementation partner, Accordion, who came on this journey with us of nobody believing it would actually work, and everyone's like, 'Yes, we've seen this before.' We went step by step, little by little, and I think the flexibility of the system is what really attracts the inventory team to it, and because it's so flexible, in a weird way the teams have standardized their process as they've gone on. It's like create this box and create this square, and as long as you're within this box and square, we don't care if chaos ensues. You know what I mean?
Anthony Holmes 0:23:48.2:
There's no standardization within the box. The only thing that's standard is the box itself, and you give people space to operate, and they've really adopted that, and so because Anaplan is flexible in that way, you can plan for backlist titles versus frontlist titles, four color titles versus black and white titles, complicated titles that are shipping far away, titles that are shipping nearshore, and all of those things. They have the flexibility to do all of that, but now they're all doing it in the same platform and within the same square with all of their other colleagues, so that's what has been one of the biggest wins for them is not trying to take away the complexity, but actually embrace the complexity of publishing and put it into a tool that can work for them.
Mark Gordon 0:24:29.6:
Cool. We didn't talk about this, but I'm thinking about it now and I'm interested. When you talk about the team, can you give me a sense for the people actually, like you said, that you feel bad for, how many are there? What are they doing?
Anthony Holmes 0:24:45.2:
Globally, there's a fair bit of them, I would say. They go into the hundreds, because if you think about what we do, a lot of what we do is make print decisions, so you have your publishers and your marketing and editorial, and that's the primary focus of our business is being able to produce content. Once that content is produced, just because the author stopped writing the book, doesn't mean that there aren't more books to be able to take care of and manage. If we're doing 10,000 new titles a year, you still have your thousands of reprints that you do each year. The inventory folks are responsible not just for the new releases, but the reprints. We're talking about hundreds of people who are dedicated to being able to make all of these steps happen.
Mark Gordon 0:25:28.8:
Are they aligned by genre?
Anthony Holmes 0:25:33.1:
It depends. In some divisions, so for example, like children's and Bibles, because that content is four color and Bibles have the long lead time, you do want to have someone who understands call it the market of supply chain for Bibles and the market of supply chain for children's books. Some of those people will be aligned more by genre just because they have experience. If we're talking about a four color book and you call up a printer, you want to be able to know what you're talking about if it's embossed versus gloss versus shiny pages, and so on. That's not necessarily generic to any supply chain person. Those specifications are what drive the complexity, and so in some cases they're aligned that way. Where it's less complex, they're aligned across divisions.
Mark Gordon 0:26:20.1:
Okay, so you talked a little bit about the box, and the chaos within the box, and flexibility, and that kind of thing. With all of these people, with all of these decisions, the distribution of decisions, people with information here and there, can you take us through a little bit the before and after of collaboration as a whole, but what did it look like before, what does it look like now, and what will it look like in the future?
Anthony Holmes 0:26:52.0:
We had multiple systems that were homegrown because SAP just doesn't, out the box, do publishing. Surprise. There are not many other mainstream applications that just do publishing or understand the publishing business, so we had done a lot of applications that we built in-house, and then we used the two most famous workflow tools, Excel and Outlook, and that's what everybody used, and those were our best friends, and that's how everybody operated. All of the meetings, collaboration, data aggregation was spreadsheets being sent around, meetings, Outlook, and that was the world that everybody lived in, and then at the meeting, you would hope that everyone brought the right information, and you would hope that it was current, and everyone would make the best decision they could at that time and hold hands, and that would be that. Now, all of those groups, sales, production, inventory, publishers, decision makers, all of them are in the Anaplan system, and so from the time a book gets released, call it to the operations folks, it goes into Anaplan, and then all of those other pieces happen within the system.
Anthony Holmes 0:27:59.2:
Even our meetings are run within that system, so when we're making decisions collaboratively on what should we print, what should we not print, that's not happening in a silo or happens at one meeting and then trickles down to everybody else. It's everybody comes to the table together. We all make a decision, and so it has really improved the efficiency of the process and helped people realize, okay, let's all make decisions from the same level playing field. Whereas before, in Excel or Outlook, you didn't always know if that were the case.
Mark Gordon 0:28:28.9:
I've had a lot of conversations over these last two days. Tell me about attitudes within HarperCollins. I've heard bits and pieces, not of HarperCollins, but different clients, customers coming up and asking me, 'Hey, do we do the carrot or do we do the stick? How do we get people adopting this?' Even if they want to, sometimes they're hesitant, even if they don't want to, sometimes they're hesitant. What was the scene at HarperCollins?
Anthony Holmes 0:29:03.3:
First, I would say all my colleagues have amazing attitudes. They are wonderful people to work with. They're never mean. They're always nice, so I want to put that out there.
Mark Gordon 0:29:12.8:
Because it is being recorded.
Anthony Holmes 0:29:13.8:
Especially since it's being recorded.
Mark Gordon 0:29:15.1:
Yes, for sure.
Anthony Holmes 0:29:15.1:
Even you, my boss, shout out to you, Matt. No, I think what it took from an Anaplan standpoint was honestly proving to people that it could work. I always say to consultants who come into our company and they're like, 'Man, you guys have a lot of older systems and this,' and it's sell the solution, not the software. People are less interested in how cool and how great the software is if they don't feel like it solves their solution. Might sound weird to say that on the Anaplan stage, and we're trying to sell software, but what ends up happening is if the software is good, it complements the solution very well, and so if somebody comes in and just continually tells you how awesome the tool is, it's like you can have the best hammer ever, but if what you're looking for is a screwdriver, it's really never going to work for you. So because we were able to come in, and Accordion went with us on this journey, when people actually started seeing that it could work and they didn't feel like the system was putting them in a box, they actually started advocating for the tool at a pace faster than we could keep up. We started with one consultant, and we barely could afford that because they were like, 'I'm not sure we're really bought in on this,' and then we went to two consultants, and then we went to three, and then we went to four.
Anthony Holmes 0:30:36.3:
Then we went to we're going to do it in North America, and now we're doing it globally in London, and doing it in our UK office, and all of those pieces, and so the attitude has been really good because people are able to see the results. I think from an internal Harper standpoint, the approach that we took was we had firm conviction and commitment from our leadership to go this route from a financial standpoint. They believed in the process, but they also said, 'We're going to give you guys room to breathe and push back if you feel like it doesn't work.' They almost came to the conclusion on their own, they meaning the rest of the team, 'Hey, Anaplan could work for us,' and it wasn't about Anaplan, it was about we're trying to improve how we work. Anaplan just happens to be the way that we get there.
Mark Gordon 0:31:25.5:
The enabler.
Anthony Holmes 0:31:26.3:
Yes, just happens to be the enabler, and so having a tool that works really well and delivers against what it says it will does make that process easier, but it's not like the team said, 'We know what Anaplan is. We're clear on it. We understand the back end of it. We know all of the cool features of it,' and the supply chain folks were like, 'That's the one we want.' If we told them to stick with Excel, they would have been like, 'That's cool, as long as that makes my life easier,' but the tool just helped them get there in a way that we haven't experienced with the other tools we had, so it has been a very positive attitude.
Mark Gordon 0:31:59.0:
Yes, that's great, and I think you're fortunate. Lucky, fortunate. We hear a lot, we talk to customers a lot, and a couple of things that you hit on, whether you knew that ahead of time or you just got lucky or were good, any combination thereof, executive leadership is hugely important for lots of different reasons. The envisioning in these small pieces, people seeing it actually come together and wanting to do more to speed it up, it's almost like this flywheel. I think it's also hugely beneficial. It's not like, 'Hey, sounds great, theoretically,' and then you're going to go away for nine months and come back and hopefully it meets your needs.
Anthony Holmes 0:32:44.4:
Right, and that was largely the experience. I'm sure it's probably the experience of many people here where technology shows up and they're like, 'We have this really good idea. It's going to be better, it's going to be faster, it's going to be stronger,' and for the first 30 seconds you're like, 'Cool, that's great.' Then they unveil what it is and you realize that's completely not the thing I actually need, and then you're stuck between if you do the stick approach, you're like, 'All right, now I guess I've got to go along with this technology option because my boss said I have to,' but the reality is you're sitting there, you're not contributing to the project. You're not adding value. You're figuring out what's the fastest way you can leave, and when they install the new tool, you're just going to go back to using Excel or Microsoft anyway. You're just not going to tell anybody. It's just going to happen and that application is going to sit on the shelf.
Anthony Holmes 0:33:31.1:
If you take the approach where you engage the team and you bring them into the process with you, even though upfront it may take longer, they actually start coming to the meeting with ideas, and concepts, and ways that they want to do it, and then they adopt the tool. You don't even have to do onboarding, because they've actually been onboarded and working in the tool throughout the entire project, and so when it comes time for a go live, there really isn't one. It's just like, okay, you're just not using your spreadsheet anymore. You're just using Anaplan all the time, and everything just goes on in that cycle.
Mark Gordon 0:34:06.8:
Nice, so you alluded to this, any comments on this, but also give me one or two things, what do you guys wish you did better or what did you do wrong?
Anthony Holmes 0:34:23.9:
Yes, what did we do wrong. I would say that what we could have done better is probably provided more IT support. What I mean by that is when Anaplan started, because it started as this thing on its own, this island to the thing, and you're trying to prove it out to everybody, you can't have too many people involved because then everyone is going to give you what should you do, why do you have to do it, and you're just trying to get like the five per cent benefit out of it to keep it going. What ends up happening is sometimes you can start going further and you can make certain mistakes, like without having the right data person in, I'm just like, 'Whatever, just get the data there, just throw it into the system. It's fine. Let's just figure out if we can make it work.' Then all of a sudden it's like, 'Yes, we got the data there,' and then three weeks later you realize, 'Whoa, it took this person 17 steps to get the data there, and now if you want to make it scalable, this guy has got to quit his day job to figure out how to feed your system a bunch of data.' Versus if I'd had that person alongside of me, we may have come up with the right way to get the data into a system in a scalable way that I didn't have to now double back.
Anthony Holmes 0:35:30.2:
The pace at which we were going was so fast that sometimes we were just like, 'Just get it in there,' because from the user standpoint, they loved it because they could just see what's on the screen, but behind the scenes, we were creating a lot of technical debt as we were going on and on and on. I think finding a better balance of how you include technical resources that you're fearful that they're going to say no every time you want to do something that doesn't fit the right technical approach, but still bring them on the journey with you, I think we probably could have done that a lot better, because we still have to take care of that technical debt. It doesn't go away.
Mark Gordon 0:36:08.2:
Yes, for sure. Any other lessons learned that you would highlight for the group?
Anthony Holmes 0:36:12.7:
I think the trust and alignment is important. Again, when you're building solutions for people, I'm not the one that has to use this solution every day, but they have to trust that the solution that I'm giving them can actually work for them. If they don't trust me, they don't trust what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, why I'm doing it, it could be the best thing that they need, but it's like your doctor, a little bit. If you don't trust your doctor, do you always trust what they tell you the solution should be. If your doctor is super shady, but he's like, 'You should take your five vitamins,' are you really taking the five vitamins from the super shady doctor? I'm not. I don't know if the rest of you are, but you want to trust the person who's giving you the solution, as well, otherwise you're not going to be bought into it. Take the time to work with those business stakeholders and build trust with them, because again, they're not impressed by the system. They're not impressed by technology. That's not what they do. What they're impressed with is that you came to them with a solution that also has a system that actually works for them and their job. I would say of these three, that's the one that I would say is probably the most important to trying to get people to buy into what you're after.
Mark Gordon 0:37:26.9:
Yes, I think that's wise and super important, thank you.
Anthony Holmes 0:37:32.7:
Thank you.
Mark Gordon 0:37:33.7:
Like I said, we could be up here for a long time talking about the ins and outs of everything that you do. It is super complicated. I think you articulate it well. It's not easy, but your partnership has been great. Your ability to tell your story has been fantastic. We do have a couple of minutes, I think, for questions if anyone has any. Anthony and I are up here now. We'll be around the side, but we're happy to take a few questions if anyone has any. I think Emily has got a microphone too.
Audience 0:38:10.6:
Thank you. A very interesting story. I guess today you've leveraged Anaplan for both frontlist and backlist processes. What I would like to know is what's next for you with your journey with Anaplan? You've implemented inventory planning, global connected planning. Have you started looking into AI or LMs, especially on the forecasting side, because this is an important part of your business?
Anthony Holmes 0:38:40.2:
Yes, so we have Forecaster now. We've had pre-forecaster called PlanIQ, so now we have PlanIQ 2.0 Forecaster. We've been doing that for quite some time, and we are leveraging AI to help us with some of our, when I say decision making, just more datapoints. We don't believe that AI is ever going to be able to tell us, given the complexities, 'This is what you should do,' but we do believe it has the ability to present more datapoints to inform the decision makers, give them more information on what direction they should or should not go in. Then also with our warehouse implementation, being able to do title sortation and segmentation, and things like that, where should a title sit in the warehouse given how quickly it's moving, and those types of things. We've been looking into doing that next in that realm, in addition to rolling out the other pieces of connected planning, sales, finance and workforce planning globally. Those are the next two big buckets for us is AI for North America, and then global implementation of the whole connected planning suite, if that's what I would call it.
Unknown Speaker 0:39:52.5:
Maybe one more.
Anthony Holmes 0:39:59.1:
Oh, it's two.
Mark Gordon 0:39:59.7:
Two more.
Anthony Holmes 0:39:59.8:
What are you going to do? Supply chain question.
Unknown Speaker 0:40:01.5:
Did I miss it?
Anthony Holmes 0:40:02.1:
Which one do you pick?
Unknown Speaker 0:40:03.8:
Who was the other one?
Mark Gordon 0:40:04.4:
It's like Sophie's Choice or something.
Anthony Holmes 0:40:06.1:
Yes.
Audience 0:40:09.6:
Thank you. Very interesting results. Can you talk through that newsboy problem, what your results were post Anaplan, if you've seen an improvement in your in-stock rates and your launches?
Anthony Holmes 0:40:23.9:
Are you saying do we see any improvement in our, what's the last word? I'm sorry.
Audience 0:40:29.8:
In your in-stock rates.
Anthony Holmes 0:40:31.8:
In-stock rates. Yes, because we have an algorithm that helps us determine. It's called a safety stock and reorder point, where based on the demand the system comes up with and says, 'This is when we think you should reprint this book based on the lead time associated with that,' and it gets presented to a planner to help make that decision. That used to all be done manually, or someone would just scan the list and look at it, but now the system presents planners with, 'These are titles we think you should consider given the forecast, given the lead time, given the demand,' and some other pieces that we build into it. When Accordion came in, their supply chain experts helped us build that and what we call an economic order quantity model that says, 'All things being equal, what would be the ideal quantity of this book that you should print that gets you the best unit cost?' So leveraging that model with the safety stock and reorder point are two other datasets that proactively tell supply chain folks, 'This is what we think you should do.'
Anthony Holmes 0:41:33.6:
Again, it doesn't make the decision for us, but it does help bring all that information up, so now planners are able to look at more information and go through more titles, because remember, it's one by one, than they ever were before versus exporting a spreadsheet, looking at the last three months of sales, going through it, finding out what the specs are. The system now automatically calculates all of that for them, where they're not just making adjusts, but they are now armed to make a better decision than they used to do before because they have more time.
Unknown Speaker 0:42:07.3:
All right. If everyone could help me thank Mark and Anthony for speaking today.
Mark Gordon 0:42:15.5:
Thanks, buddy.
Anthony Holmes 0:42:16.6:
Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 0:42:19.9:
We will have a short break and finish out the day with Vita Coco.