Steve Werner 0:00:11.2: 

All right, thank you. Did everybody have a good lunch? Well, thank you for joining us. Like we just said, this is with Invitation Homes. We'll be talking a lot about FP&A, so financial planning, and how they've mastered the art of that by using Anaplan. I think before I kick off though, I don't know if you guys have seen these little llama guys. Have you seen these? We're going to give one to Kayla, right, and one to Chris, a little comfort animal for the show here. You guys should grab one. My kids love those. They're awesome, so grab a llama. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:00:58.7: 

I thought I was special, but it's okay if Chris gets one too, I guess. 

 

Steve Werner 0:01:00.5: 

Chris looked like he needed one. All right, so we're just going to get started here. I wanted to give Chris and Kayla the chance to introduce themselves, so I'll turn it over. Kayla, why don't you start first, and then we'll go to Chris? 

 

Kayla Flores 0:01:16.0: 

Yes, hi. I am Kayla Flores. I am an associate on the FP&A team at Invitation Homes, so I work on Chris' team. I oversee all things Anaplan, so think data integration, model build-outs and maintaining our current Anaplan ecosystem. I'm very excited to be here today to talk about how Anaplan has led us to have a more connected planning process, and scalable as our company has continued to grow. Also, a little bit about me. So, we're based in Dallas, Texas, but I'm originally from Illinois, so go Cubs, to any Cubs fans in the room. I heard it earlier, but I want to say it again. Go Cubs. 

 

Steve Werner 0:01:54.1: 

White Sox fans. There we go! All right. Go ahead, Christ. 

 

Chris Story 0:02:03.2: 

I'm Chris Story, VP of FP&A and Corporate Development at Invitation Homes. I've been at Invitation for about eight years, joined right after the IPO, and I'm really looking forward to speaking to everyone today. 

 

Steve Werner 0:02:14.0: 

Awesome. Thanks, Chris and Kayla. We'll start with Chris. Anybody familiar with Invitation Homes in the room? Okay. Chris, tell us a little bit about Invitation Homes, and just introduce us to what the company does. 

 

Chris Story 0:02:29.1: 

So, pretty simple business model. We're one of the nation's largest single-family rental home providers, and if you think about what we do, we rent homes. So we own a portfolio of about 110,000 homes that we own and manage across 16 different markets in the United States. Think about all the Sunbelt markets like Georgia, Florida, Texas, all the way over to Arizona, and then we have some homes in California and Washington as well. We've been in this business since 2012. We were originally backed by Blackstone. We went public in 2017. 2017 was a big year for us because we also had a transformative merger with Starwood Waypoint that saw our home count grow from 50,000 to 80,000, and ever since then we've just been focused on making that leasing lifestyle, living with us, easier and easier. Our average resident is going to be about 39 years old. They usually have one to two kids, wife, so four people in the household. When you think about our typical home, it's going to be a typical suburban home located near great schools in a good neighborhood, a $300,000 to $400,000 home. 

 

Chris Story 0:03:34.7: 

What I love about Invitation Homes is we offer our residents some really outstanding services. Not only do you get a really great, functional home in a great area, in a good market, but you get some value-add services. All of our homes come with the latest smart home technology like smart locks, smart doorbells and smart thermostats, so you can all manage your phone easily on your app. We offer services for residents like internet and cable. You get a good discount on your internet and cable bill and get good speeds, so I really love that. If you look at the chart on the screen you can see our home count grew pretty drastically from 2023 to 2024. What happened is, we opened up our platform to third-party institutions. Think big insurance companies or analysts out there who have portfolios of single-family rental homes that needed a professional property manager to take care of their homes and do the asset management. That was a big thing for our business. 

 

Chris Story 0:04:33.4: 

I would say the other thing that's part of our big growth strategy right now is build-to-rent. So, big homebuilders like Lennar and D. R. Horton, we partner with them and we buy a whole community from them, so we own 100, 200 homes in a great community, good amenities, and can offer residents a brand-new home to live in, and rent it instead of owning it. 

 

Steve Werner 0:04:56.8: 

Amazing story of growth over the last few years. That's really impressive, what you guys were able to do in 2024, that transition. Congratulations. That sounds like an awesome ride that you guys have been on. Let's transition a little bit over to financial planning and analysis. Tell us about your FP&A team, how many people are involved on it, and just give us an overview of FP&A at Invitation Homes. 

 

Chris Story 0:05:25.2: 

We have a team of ten people. Everyone's located in Dallas at our corporate office. We've split our team up into three groups. We have a group focused on doing the budget for individual properties that we own, and the rental cash flows and expenses. We have a group that's focused on shared services, which is just understanding our G&A, our headcount planning and everything that goes into that, and then we have Kayla's group that really manage the models for us. They keep our data hub in great working order, all our data connections. If we ever need a model fixed, we can go to Kayla's team and they can quickly get into the models and get it working the way we want it to. Looking at the graphic on the screen now, I'd say the core of our FP&A team in Dallas is the annual budget. We also do a mid-yearly forecast. That takes up six or seven months out of the year. Our budgeting process is maybe a little bit longer than we'd want it to be. It's from August until February. I don't know if anybody in the room can relate to a very long budgeting process. 

 

Chris Story 0:06:24.0: 

Our budgeting, one thing that's unique about it is we're a public company. I don't know if you have this, but we have a concept of same store, so it's a like-for-like set of homes from one year to the next that allows for easy comparability and investor reporting. We had to build, and this was a requirement for us, a property-level budget model, so a budget model where we have an individual budget for each property, and we can change that same [?for this 0:06:47.9] and provide updated budgets throughout the year. It helps for tracking for budget versus actuals. That's the key component of the annual budget. On the workforce planning and G&A planning, we have a payroll model that we manage through the team that focuses on working with department heads to track their budgets, input the budgets into Anaplan. That's the core of our annual budget process. Other things that the FP&A and corporate development team do at IH is long-term planning. We actually connected our one-year budget model and build a ten-year corporate model. 

 

Chris Story 0:07:25.4: 

It's a typical pre-financial statement model, so it has a balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, and really we use this for all sorts of things, but it can be involved in if we're doing an M&A deal, if we're doing a strategic plan that helps us to think through what big decisions today or tomorrow could mean for us ten years from now. Helps us think through our balance sheet. Lastly, we are a public company, and I know it's not everyone's favorite thing to do, but we have to do reporting. So we do a lot of [?benchmark 0:07:54.9] reporting. We actually have a great meeting every month where we do a mid-month projection for the executive team where we walk them through, 'Here's where we think numbers will shake out at the end of the month.' It's a great opportunity for us to highlight how we're doing in certain areas, and maybe what are the risks and what are the opportunities. 

 

Chris Story 0:08:12.6: 

Lastly, we support the quarterly earnings process. So we're a public company. We typically publish guidance on an annual basis, and sometimes we have to update that, so we assist the CFO with tracking those thing and prepping him for quarterly earnings calls. 

 

Steve Werner 0:08:29.1: 

So tell us a little bit, before Anaplan, Chris, what was it like? What was the FP&A environment like there at Invitation Homes, and what were some of the challenges that you all were facing? 

 

Chris Story 0:08:42.8: 

That's a great question. Before Anaplan, we still had that need for property-level budgeting. We had 85000 properties at the time that we had to do an annual budget for, but before Anaplan what we did is, we had a consulting firm who was based in Utah that owned an Excel-based VBA model. For us, we have an iterative budget process where we start at the corporate level, then we go to our market leadership. We go back and forwards a few times. We would get those key operating assumptions. In the rental business that's going to be like, what percentage of the residents renew their leases? What is rent growth? Occupancy, turnover, those things. It would give us those assumptions at the market level. We'd load them into the spreadsheet and then we would ship them off to the consulting firm, and then in two days they would get back to us with the numbers. You'd better hope that when those numbers come back they look the way you expect them to, otherwise you're going to have to wait another two days to turn around any quick fixes you need to make. 

 

Chris Story 0:09:40.6: 

So it wasn't a very flexible process. It was a slow process. We lived in spreadsheets, and I feel like we spent a lot more time thinking about getting the numbers in rather than what do the numbers need to be, and working hard with the CFO about having good conversations around, 'What are the goals of this year's budgeting process?' I think the other thing, if we ever needed to make a change… We've seen a lot of changes in our business the past five years. I mentioned joint ventures. We started third-party property management. We've had new value-add services. We would have to send up a document and say, 'Here's the modelling change we need to make,' walk them through the change, how the logic needs to work. They would build it, then they'd come back to us. Now, with Anaplan we can make those changes in a matter of days, and we can make sure it's working exactly the way we want it to. 

 

Steve Werner 0:10:29.9: 

Kayla, anything you want to add there in terms of what you saw for challenges before Anaplan? Anything you wanted to add? 

 

Kayla Flores 0:10:39.4: 

I thankfully wasn't on the team before Anaplan, so I do not. From the sounds of it, just that real-time feedback sounds…Getting real-time feedback is huge, and not waiting days. Also, our business is always changing, so we have had to make logic changes every time in Anaplan. It's [unclear words 0:11:03.3] outside of your control, and you're relying on other people to do the changes for you. So having that aspect of control I think is big. 

 

Steve Werner 0:11:11.9: 

I saw some nods out here. Do you guys live in spreadsheets? Lots of data? Drill-downs? Yes. Let's get onto a little bit on the journey with Anaplan. This can go to Chris or Kayla. Where did you guys start? Going back a few years here, how did you get started? What were some of those key elements in terms of what you focused on really to make it successful with Anaplan 

 

Chris Story 0:11:42.6: 

So it was 2017 when we had the merger with Starwood Waypoint. That's what introduced us to Anaplan. Starwood Waypoint was using Anaplan almost for its reporting function… 

 

[Technical issue 0:11:54.3] 

 

Chris Story 0:12:02.0: 

…started working with Lionpoint, who I believe now is Alpha, to implement two Anaplan use cases, the big one being this property budget model which I've been talking about. They built out what they call a probability tree in Anaplan, which really without Anaplan you couldn't do it. Every property in our model has this tree of probabilities. If you think about the way leases work, you have the lease expiration date and when that happens you can renew or you move out. So we have this probability and these probability-weighted cash flows throughout the model. Without Anaplan we probably couldn't have done it at all. For us, I think the key thing was, when we had that first use case, we just wanted to nail it and make sure it's really, really good, because it's the annual budget. It needs to be right. The model needs to work, and we build up a lot of trust with our executive team and our senior leaders, whether it was scenario planning or the annual budgeting process, that we had that first use case right. That opened the door for us to do more on Anaplan as we grew throughout the years. 

 

Chris Story 0:13:05.9: 

I'm not going to read every tile on the honeycomb chart, but in between that first use case and 2022 we did a lot of tack-on projects where we added on different things to our models or built new models entirely, just to help us understand our business and really to ease the budget process. A lot of these models were replacing spreadsheets and manual process where you'd email things and get files back. In 2022 we decided to build our corporate model into Anaplan. It was an antiquated Excel-based model. It had 30 different tabs. It had your pre-financial statements, and it was just very difficult to work in. The modelling was often out of sync with the budget. Maybe the budget had occupancy of one number but it wouldn't tie in necessarily with the corporate model. What we did was, we built it out in Anaplan. We had a team of three people who spent about six months building the model, and we got it to a spot where it was in really good shape. What we did was, we were like, 'Hey, we're done. This is good.' We were like, 'How are we going to show this to the CFO? You can't just open up an Anaplan model and walk them through it.' 

 

 0:14:15.8: 

Our Customer Success Director, Linda, had advised us. She was like, 'You need to work on dashboards.' So we decided to build new UX dashboards, and we made four simple dashboards, some where you can key in your operational assumptions, your expense assumptions, and then where we're buying and selling homes your acquisition and disposition assumptions. We did a demo for the CFO and said, 'Hey, let's build a plan for the next ten years,' and we were able to key in five or six assumptions on each page, do it on the next page, and then when we were done we were like, 'Okay, here's the forecast.' We showed him the results in real time, and with mandatory reporting we can now go in and export that plan to a PDF. We don't even have to open up the Excel workbook anymore. That was really, really huge for us, and really the corporate model wouldn't have been possible without that network effect from Anaplan. We have over eight different models that feed into the corporate model via actions and model-to-model connections which really unlocked a lot of value for us, and it helps to make sure that all of our planning is in sync. I think nothing can frustrate a CFO more than seeing one number one place and another number someplace else that aren't aligned. 

 

Steve Werner 0:15:28.8: 

Thanks, Chris. Kayla, let's take a little step back and go a little deeper on the data front. We all know that data's at the core to driving success with this. Tell us about your data approach. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:15:40.1: 

Yes. So in talking about data, I first want to talk about the importance of a data hub. So you can see on the screen in 2019 we had our initial Anaplan implementation, but since then, so 2024, we have maintained and built everything completely in house. I think one of the keys to this is a very strong data hub, add those you bring, as you start to add in new models, which you can see we have done a lot of. It keeps that standardized structure across everything, and also as you are creating new models you're never starting from scratch. You already have that really solid foundation, starting point with the data analysts at your data hub. Secondly, I want to talk about data integration. When I joined the team in 2022, we had no actuals in Anaplan at all. We looked at our actuals in Excel and then tried to basically transpose what we were seeing in actuals into our forecast assumptions. Since we know how closely aligned actuals and forecasts are, we made the decision to build a data integration between Snowflake and Anaplan, so that was the first big project I worked on. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:16:52.8: 

I partnered with our technology team, and we now have a very robust integration and are able to bring millions of actuals datapoints into Anaplan at the push of a button. I think this has been really key for two reasons. First, we have been able to transition a lot of our actuals that started reporting into Anaplan, and second we have created a methodological approach, and we're automatically setting starting points for forecast assumptions based on prior-year historical actuals. So again, never just starting from scratch with assumption generation, we have this very well built out approach to automatically go in and set a starting point for assumptions. I also wanted to bring in data at a pretty granular level into Anaplan. This definitely had some space implications, but we found it to be completely worth it, the reason being flexibility. We're now able to slice and dice data in so many different ways, as long as we're able to attach it to the property code, since that granular level of bringing in data is at the property level. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:18:07.4: 

This decision really stood the test of time, because we're already looking at data in different ways than we were in 2022. Bringing in that data at the granular level allowed us to be able to have that flexibility of, 'Okay, I want to look at it by community,' and that's fine as long as you can create that relationship back to the property list as a way you can dimension and summarize data. 

 

Steve Werner 0:18:32.5: 

That's a lot of great detail there on the data front. I love it. Chris, where are we going from here? How do you see the future with Anaplan in terms of what you guys want to roll out FP&A-wise or connected planning-wise? Where do you see this going? 

 

Chris Story 0:18:50.0: 

That's a good question. I think there's probably two things we're focused on in the next year or so in Anaplan. One is, we have a consolidation model. I think we talked about it earlier. We have a lot of joint ventures and third-party management clients, and then we have our own balance sheet. What we're doing with the consolidation model is, we're rolling all those into one and having a model where we can do reporting and say, 'Here are the KPIs, here's the P&L performance, here's how we're doing versus actuals, here's version-of-a-version comparison.' We envision that model being what hopefully gets us away from heavily relying on the Anaplan Excel add-in. The old add-in, not the new one. So we're very excited about that. We have the model mostly complete and we're hoping to roll that out for the end of budget season. 

 

Chris Story 0:19:35.5: 

The other thing is, there's a lot of sparsity in our models. We have a couple of models in particular that are dimensions by all the GL accounts, all the departments and then all the vendors that we have, and we think [?OAS 0:19:47.9] would be a huge benefit for that, so we're really excited to hopefully roll that out next year. We've done some demos, and we think it will be a big one for us. 

 

Steve Werner 0:20:01.3: 

Awesome. All right, Kayla. Back to you. We're going to walk through a specific example of how you're using Anaplan for market planning. Please do share. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:20:11.2: 

So we can dive in on one of the hexagons. I was calling them octagons earlier, but they're hexagons. 

 

Steve Werner 0:20:17.8: 

They are hexagons, yes. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:20:21.8: 

So our market planning example. I talked a little bit about how the FP&A team sets the initial assumption starting points for the budget, but we would always recognize the importance of whether our market leaders chime in since they're really the eyes and ears on the ground of the ins and outs of their markets. This is something that we've always recognized, and previously we used to gather their feedback through Excel. So we would create 16 different Excel files, send them out to each market leader, who would enter their adjustments and send them back to us. Someone from the FP&A team would manually go in and enter the adjustments, put together a summary and then send it back to the market leaders. This is a very time-consuming manual [unclear words 0:21:09.1] process that would leave our market leaders waiting days or even weeks to see the actual impacts of their changes. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:21:17.0: 

So a couple of years ago we transitioned this process into Anaplan. So we can see on the screen, the first screenshot is from our renewal rate dashboard, so the proportion of residents that are renewing out of total lease expirations, and you can see we have our 2026 budget starting point which was set by the FP&A team, and then we have adjustment lines for market leaders to go and enter adjustments, and then they can see the real-time impact of their changes, and it goes through the model immediately. They can see how it impacts things like occupancy, so you can see on the second screenshot, which is a known KPI driver of our model, and also not shown we have a P&L view where I can see the impacts on the P&L. So if I change my renewal rate by this much then my rental income and operating expenses will change by this much. We also created some dashboards for their bosses, so our regional leaders, to go in and see summarized results of all the changes that the market leaders were requesting. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:22:24.2: 

So overall I think this was an amazing process. We were able to transition into Anaplan and received really great feedback. The market leaders love that they can see the real-time impact of their changes and make better-informed decisions, and I even had a market leader say that they were actually excited for the [?creating 0:22:43.4] process, so that was a really big win for us. 

 

Steve Werner 0:22:50.5: 

It sounds like this solution has been a game-changer a bit with executive leaders across Invitation Homes. Anything else, Chris, that you wanted to share in terms of impact with the other executives that you've noticed? 

 

Chris Story 0:23:05.4: 

From my standpoint, we've done a really good job of building the dashboards to facilitate the meat of the budget season. I think for me what I look forward to is, I feel like we can really build on that and build dashboards more for the C-suite that shows them exactly how the budget is rolling up at one point in time, rather than having to send out PDFs and long emails explaining what work performance is supposed to look like for next year. 

 

Steve Werner 0:23:31.9: 

Yes, okay. Let's talk a little bit around what has been the biggest impact and the outcomes that you've seen through the rollout with Anaplan. Chris or Kayla, I'll turn it over to either one of you if you guys want to share this one. 

 

Chris Story 0:23:51.7: 

I can go first. I think there's three things from my standpoint that have been a big impact from Anaplan, the first one being - Kayla talked about this - we used to spend a lot of time doing manual data aggregation. Even when we were using Anaplan, before we used the dashboards we were aggregating data. We were making important files. We were importing them to the model. We were having to send updated Excels out to the market leaders. Now all that's automated, and I think we spend a lot more time thinking through, 'Okay, what do the driving assumptions for next year need to be? How do we better understand the changes? How do we position ourselves to do the best we can next year?' The second thing is modelling flexibility. We basically have a team of ten model builders, so whenever we had the need to roll out new model changes or quick fixes or whatever it may be we can do those in a short amount of time. 

 

Chris Story 0:24:47.0: 

I think one recent example was, I mentioned earlier in the single-family rental business build-to-rent has become the new growth driver for our business. We're buying most of our homes directly from homebuilders and leasing those up. So we had to change the way we do our budgeting and forecasting process. Now we have 200 homes located in the same little subdivision, whereas previously we had 200 scattered throughout several neighborhoods. What we did was, we re-did our Anaplan model. The driver for our assumptions used to be market-level. Now it's community-level, so we can go deeper and see, 'Okay, how are individual communities performing?' This helps our asset management team a lot, because they do asset reviews and review community-level performance. They can now see, 'Okay, we're budgeting 96 per cent occupancy. It's supposed to take us 100 days until we see that,' and they can see that all in more or less real time. It's created a lot of really good conversations, and it's been fine because we've got to partner with IMG, our investments team, on these projects, and they've given us input, 'Oh, we would love to see this.' Being able to deliver that value to them has been a game-changer. 

 

Chris Story 0:25:58.8: 

Then last but probably not least is time savings. It goes without saying Anaplan has saved us a lot of time. Back in the consultant process it used to take us two and a half days to see updated numbers. That could take five to ten days each planning cycle. Now, with the UX dashboards, we're probably saving at least a day every time we go through one of those iterative budget rounds. So, huge time savings for us. It's allowed us to have a little bit of a leaner team and grow more quickly. 

 

Steve Werner 0:26:31.2: 

That's impressive time savings. Go ahead, Kayla. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:26:33.5: 

I was going to say, so Chris talked about some of the benefits that we've seen on FP&A team, but I also wanted to talk about how I think Anaplan has benefitted the company as a whole. So if it's in, it does sit within our finance department, but we have partnered with other departments to find ways to extend the value of Anaplan across the company. I think a really good example of this is our partnership with the accounting team. We partnered with them on two projects. We transitioned month-end close vendor reconciliation projects and technology projects reconciliation process into Anaplan, and instead of me sitting here telling you about how I think I had to [unclear word 0:27:15.9]. I wanted to read a first-hand account from one of our managers in accounting. So he said, 'Hi, Kayla. The vendor dashboards in Anaplan save us a ton of time during month end. We used to manually put together an analysis, and now Anaplan allows us to spend time actually looking at the results instead of preparing materials. Anaplan is now a mode to what I'm looking at [?GL's 0:27:37.2] data and month-end review.' 

 

Kayla Flores 0:27:40.8: 

'Also, technology capital summary in Anaplan has streamlined our quarterly technology tie-up process significantly. We used to spend countless hours at quarter end attempting a manual tie-up with [unclear words 0:27:51.7], and now it takes a fraction of the time with the Anaplan model.' So I wanted to share this because I wanted to encourage everyone. Don't be afraid to talk about Anaplan to other departments. Our vendor and technology processes already somewhat existed in Anaplan. We had maybe 75 per cent of the work done by their own need for their process, so it was just a matter of getting together and leveraging our already-existing Anaplan infrastructure to put together something that made their lives so much easier. 

 

Steve Werner 0:28:27.9: 

That's great expansion into other teams, and it's awesome to hear that. All right, so we've covered off on what went well and some of the positive impacts. We all know that any transformation has bumps in the road. We all face our challenges. Looking back on it - maybe we'll start with Chris and we'll go to Kayla - if you guys could share with this audience any lessons learned that you had throughout this process rolling out Anaplan, and then any advice maybe that you would give if they were just starting on the journey, or if they've been an Anaplan customer for a while. What advice would you give? 

 

Chris Story 0:29:10.2: 

Definitely I would say the one thing that stood out to me is, we talked about where we had success with Anaplan. Adopt Anaplan a little earlier, whether it's new features or just Anaplan in general if you're just starting out. Don't be afraid to get started. The story I like to tell people is, we were at the Anaplan… I think they used to call it CPX in San Francisco. If you were there you'll remember because it was really hot. The AC was not working, so we were all out there sweating because they were going through heatwave. I remember going to a session with the FP&A leader from the Simon Property Group, and they were talking about how they did the annual budget for all their malls. They've got all these malls throughout the country. They'd get these dashboards out and they'd put in their assumptions and then it just comes back and there's their budget results. We were just amazed. We were like, 'Wow, we would love to do that.' It ended up taking us three years from that Anaplan conference to get to where we are today where we use the Anaplan dashboards. 

 

Chris Story 0:30:08.4: 

I wish we had done it a little earlier. I think we were always scared of things like, 'We don't have the technical expertise to get actuals into our models. We don't have the time and resources to build all these dashboards. We've got to focus on core business.' I think if we had done it a little earlier it would have worked out really well. It was difficult, but it was nowhere as hard as we thought it would be. Then the second would be advocating for Anaplan in your organization. This is where, I think, if you do a good job with your models and your dashboards it does it for you, because when customers and clients or department heads and people throughout your organization see Anaplan, and they see the success you're having with it, they're going to call you and they're going to say, 'Hey, we feel like we could use Anaplan for this part of our business. Can you connect me with someone to help figure out how we can do that?' We've been fielding more and more calls like that over the past couple of years. 

 

Chris Story 0:31:04.4: 

What I like about that is, the more people who use Anaplan in our organization, the easier it's going to be for me to do our job in FP&A, because we'll just be able to connect to other models and be smarter about our planning, rather than having to take spreadsheets and importing them into the model to do key aspects of the budget. The last thing… This was a little bit of a lesson learned. When I joined the team, it may have been before they came out with the… I'm sure they did. They had the Anaplan trainings, but we weren't necessarily taking the Anaplan trainings, learning the Anaplan way. We just kind of sunk our teeth into it. I would say over the past five years we've come up with the training plan for all new analysts. They do the level one course. We introduced them to the planual. We show them how we structured our models. We give them deep dives onto the key models, so they know how it works, and then we eventually get them into Anaplan level two. If you're an overachiever like Kayla, they go on to level three. We've got a great team, and I think having a group of Anaplan experts within the company that are trained in Anaplan makes working on the models just so much easier, and it's a lot more fun. 

 

Steve Werner 0:32:12.6: 

Kayla, anything you want to add on either the… I know you put up there organized models, end user experience, data integration challenges. Anything on that front. 

 

Kayla Flores 0:32:23.4: 

This is not on that front at all, but something that I would recommend for anyone that's just starting Anaplan is just really go all in. When I first started at Invitation Homes, my first week I did level one training. Then the next week they were like, 'Oh, the rest of the team that's been here for a couple of years is doing level two, so you should do it too.' So then I did level two training, and then about three months in they were like, 'Okay, Kayla. You don't really have any goals, so your goal is to build a model in Anaplan.' So within three months I was basically building an entire model in Anaplan, which is kind of crazy looking back, but that's really how I learned. Now that's my entire job. I just went all in and wasn't afraid to mess up, try things out and just commit myself to learning. That's what you have to do to get really good at Anaplan, I guess. 

 

Steve Werner 0:33:17.4: 

Being such an expert on the platform. What are your thoughts on CoModeler? This is totally off the cuff, so you're not prepared. What do you think of what you saw earlier? 

 

Kayla Flores 0:33:26.7: 

I hope it doesn't take my job! 

 

Steve Werner 0:33:30.5: 

We're still going to need experts and COEs. It's all about prompt, right? 

 

Kayla Flores 0:33:36.1: 

I think it's really, really cool. I think that I leverage ChatGPT now to help me with my model, but it's nice. CoModeler knows the ins and outs of your models, and sometimes that's the hardest part with ChatGPT or something. You're like, 'This is my model. It's the property model. These are the module names, and these are the risks [unclear word 0:33:58.8],' and then you spend more time trying to coach it about your model than you actually reap the benefits. I think it's really helpful to have something integrated in the system. 

 

Steve Werner 0:34:12.0: 

New skills, not replacing your job. All right, well we're going to call the session a wrap. Please join me in a round of applause for Kayla and Chris. Thank you very much. We'll hang out up here. If anybody has additional questions we can hang out for a few minutes, but thank you again for joining the session. Enjoy the rest of the day. 

 

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