Jessica Cedarleaf 0:00:02.3:

So Tonies came to be Tonies by two dads sitting in their kitchen together, probably drinking beer, in Germany while their kids ran around crazy and they wanted to solve the screen issue. We all know that kids are glued to iPads, glued to whatever phones. I have a grandson, he runs after me, crawling, trying to get my phone. How do we get away from that? How do we educate our children in a way where they're learning what they could get on a screen, but in a healthier way? So they made this box. I legitimately have videos of them throwing it down their hallway to test the resilience of it, because the last thing we want is a child being able to pull a part off, choke, any of those things. That was basically the testing of it at that point in time. It took about five years to bring it to market, and that's how it came to fruition. The founders were actually still running the company until a year ago. Their kids are all grown and they decided to take a step back. They're still 51 per cent owners, which is fantastic, but they developed this amazing brand and amazing thing for children.

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:01:15.8:

I have grown children, I finally have a grandson, he's not quite old enough, but I'd have kids come over, I'm like, do you want to go to my office, so they could play with the toys, and nothing is as fascinating to me than seeing a child put the Tonie on the box and watching them light up. It's a magical thing. So that's where we are, that's where we came from. We're German-based. We've been live in Germany about eight years, and pretty much everybody knows who Tonie is there anywhere you go. In the US, we're on our third, little over a third, year, but we are now the biggest market, as you can assume, US, we like to consume things. So we're still a baby company in the US but growing exponentially.

 

James Snyder 0:01:57.9:

Thank you for that. We had the pleasure of meeting about a year ago, and at that time you were looking at planning solutions and you landed on the supply chain applications. So I wanted to ask you, why Anaplan? What made that decision to push you in that direction?

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:02:15.0:

So I looked at about six to eight different companies. I've worked with two before. I worked for a company that was going to launch Anaplan, so I've been part of the building meetings, so I understood what it was and what it did. The reason why I landed on Anaplan, the biggest reason, is because we have five to six markets, we're all in different places in our business. It's totally disjointed how we process, how our processes are for supply planning, demand planning, and I needed a quick fix. I took a year to rip it apart and make everybody do it manually to understand where the gaps were. I needed a quick implementation that could align all the markets in the state and where they were in their business, but still work together. That's pretty complicated to find a system that can do that all in one and have us all on the same page. So that's where I found you guys. Of course, you guys are so lovely, and Anaplan was just the right solution. I got a lot of questions and a lot of pushback, there's a lot of opinions when you have five different markets in different countries, and everybody came to the same consensus, it was the right decision, and it was.

 

James Snyder 0:03:25.3:

So we started the implementation, I want to say, last July timeframe, and you guys were coming from Google Sheets and that shift to Anaplan, from the way that you're interacting with data to how you're working across your various markets. What were some of the lessons learned? I'm sure that everybody here has similar challenges that they could hopefully glean from your experience.

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:03:49.2:

Data integrity is a huge thing, we have a huge problem with that, we have no one source of the truth. We have a central team that does one thing, we have a US team that does whatever we want because that's how we go, because you have to be quick and we can't always follow the rules that everybody's already put in place. Really just making decisions is not easy because none of us are working with the same data. I would be in a meeting and I have finance running through something, asking me questions that, look, where did you get that? Well, I got it here. I'm like, I don't know when you pulled that, but that is absolutely not accurate. So we spent so much time arguing over what is the right source of the truth. I think that's probably our number one problem, it'll probably remain our number one problem for a while, but at least, with Anaplan, we aligned on what the inputs are, where they're coming from and they're the same across all markets.

 

James Snyder 0:04:43.3:

I think also one of the things we learned is, and hopefully you learned by using the platform, is just its inherent flexibility. Even though you're using the applications, what we found is some of our assumptions going into the business process, when we started to spread it out across the markets and look at the data, weren't necessarily correct. I hope that the experience that you had was we were able to pivot, solve those problems and continue to move forward and iterate on the right solution.

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:05:08.9:

We absolutely have. To me, the app was the right choice for us because it fundamentally set us up for success. Best practice is already built in there. When you have a bunch of different markets thinking they all know what the best thing is, it makes it a little bit difficult to come to consensus and alignment. With Anaplan, it forced us all to get on the same page. It forced us all to look at things the same way. I hate to say it, but without the force, I don't think we ever would have gotten there. Then we were allowed to dig in and make changes that really were quick and easy. I think we had maybe four change orders and different things that we found as we dug in, and if we would have done it a different way or with a different tool, we would have been so far down the rabbit hole, it would have been a nightmare. Then we would have had to engineer, and I think the first thing I said to you was I don't want to overengineer anything, dumb it down, make it as easy as possible, I want everybody on every level of expertise, because we have a large variety of expertise in our supply planning world, to be able to do this, to adapt to it. If I make it too complex because I can understand that or my team can understand that, not everybody will adopt it and they'll go back to the spreadsheet, and that was the one thing we didn't want to happen.

 

James Snyder 0:06:21.4: 

I think that's part and parcel for a lot of the implementations that we go through is land the product, making sure that you can iterate into and expand and use more functionality. I think those are the things that we're looking at later is adding in scenarios, adding in a more robust promotion management system by using the tools that are in the app, but not overburdening the team as part of the implementation to start out with. So making sure that they're getting up there, showing value ahead of time.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:06:47.6:

A quick question, Jessica, so you chose the best partner out there, Allitix, now part of Accenture, for the implementation.

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:06:54.8:

Of course. 

 

Tracey Baxter 0:06:55.3:

The best decision you've ever made.

 

James Snyder 0:06:56.4: 

We're not biased.

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:06:57.1:

One thousand per cent. I love when they travel with us, it's quite lovely. 

 

Tracey Baxter 0:07:01.5:

So from the Allitix perspective, we had a pretty lean project team, we had our solution architects, we had our model builders, we had a delivery manager, but we had the subject matter expertise. Having that expertise, how did that add value to the project and how did, from the partnership element, our team add value to your team when you were implementing the tool, brand new tool for your team, getting them up to speed, going through the training and enablement, etc?

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:07:29.1:

We definitely leveraged off of all of your experience that you guys have had, and leaned on you guys for what is the right solution? We would come to them with, well, this is what everybody thinks, this is what we've been doing, what would you suggest? What have you learned in the industry by doing this? What's best practice in your eyes? Where have the mistakes been made that kind of looks like where we're going based off of what we've been doing, and what do you suggest is the best way forward? Really leverage them as part of the team, not just implementation partners. We definitely integrated them in. We've taken them to Germany, we've flown everybody in from every market and had them listen to the issues, listen to everybody's perspective, and then let them guide us of, okay, well, what do we do now? It's been fantastic to get alignment with the team. James especially was like, we've seen this a thousand times, we can fix this, we can do this. Trusting his expertise and really him leaning on the teams that really had the ability to do this, or the people in the company that have, has been instrumental in our success. He has partnered with one of my managers, who's probably the best in the company, to really help drive the change through the company. We pull them into anything and everything when we have an issue. 

 

Tracey Baxter 0:08:52.4:

I text Tracey constantly, we have a problem, I don't know how to fix it, and they jump on. James was on a call, we were in Paris at the crack of dawn, three days in a row, working through the night with my team. You don't always get that with teams, you get that, okay, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. I don't know how the rest of you work, but I need immediate assistance, not in 24 hours. I'm very impatient. Everybody's set up here. You miss a day, a day is a lifetime in supply chain. You can make a catastrophic decision like that, and then we spend the next six months fixing it, and that's not what I want to do for the next five years.

 

James Snyder 0:09:32.1:

Well, I just want to thank you, it's been truly a pleasure working, and a privilege working with your team and just working on and being brought into the Tonies environment and helping you guys solve some of your problems, from how you're thinking about things within the US, but the broader region and the central organization. For those of you who may not have caught it, they're doing their planning in market, but managing their inventory essentially from their production planning perspective. So it's a little bit different than I would say that the normal organization works, but it's truly been a pleasure working with the Tonies team. I also wanted to ask, as you're looking at your connected planning journey, you've landed demand planning, you're about to start inventory planning, how else do you see Anaplan fitting in within Tonies, and what are the other opportunities that you're seeing just using the tool and from your own experiences?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:10:21.6:

I think EJ has got lots of ideas. 

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:10:23.1:

Well, EJ probably watched me drooling as I'm watching the slides. We really struggle with launch planning, we struggle with go-to-market planning, with the tariffs. I'm pretty sure I've done my go-to-market plan with supply, and that team probably eight different ways in the last month constantly pivoting, I can't do Disney in Vietnam, but we all know we need Disney; all of Target and Walmart, all they want is Disney, how do I do that? So now the tariffs are 30 per cent, is that profitable? Let's switch it back. Do I still have capacity? Talk about a nightmare, but I'm sure you're all in the same boat, but it's like whiplash these days. With Anaplan, we've been able to look at things and pivot, and we actually have multiple plans now that we're just like, look, here are the five plans, let's plan with all of them, let's buy all material for all of them so we can pivot. So all of these things that we have would have been so much easier on all of us. We all thought COVID was a one-time thing, now this tariff thing is a one-time thing, but the fact of the matter is, if it's not COVID, if it's not tariffs, it's going to be something else. Setting us up and my business up to be able to pivot and get those decisions like that will be a game-changer to make sure that we stay at the top versus our top competitors. 

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:11:42.4:

As I look at Anaplan, if it was my choice, I'd have all of the things, but those things and a few of the new things and the AI stuff, obviously we want to keep our workforce, but AI just makes us better. It doesn't really cut teams, it just gives that team the ability to actually level up and do what we want them to do, instead of cleaning up the mess all the time. To me, that's what Anaplan offers us, the ability to do that, or I hire four or five more people to keep cleaning up the messes. I'd rather have them do what they love, level up, leverage, and use the data that we can get from Anaplan.

 

James Snyder 0:12:17.7:

I think too, based upon what you're experiencing today with the tariffs, I just shudder to think if you were still in Google Sheets, how much time that would eat up on those other activities that you haven't been able to reinvest into the tariffs and that level of analysis?

 

Tracey Baxter 0:12:32.7:

As you said, we have your team flying in today to kick off the inventory project this week for the next…

 

Jessica Cedarleaf 0:12:38.3:

Which we're so excited about.

 

Tracey Baxter 0:12:39.5:

…ten to 12 weeks, I think, to kick off inventory, which will be really exciting.

 

James Snyder 0:12:43.6:

All right, thank you.