Unknown Speaker 0:00:06.2: 

Hello, good afternoon. Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. We are really pleased to have Janus Henderson here to share their journey towards building a profitability model. Before I kick off, let me just say: not only are they going to go through the journey and the implementation selection, but also what they hope to achieve in terms of business outcomes. So, we're going to leave some time at the end for questions, so please save those and then we'll pass the mic around within the session here. Let me start by introducing Esther Makaya. So, she's a chartered management accountant, an IT professional. At Janus Henderson, she's actually the product owner of Anaplan and other products as well. Esther has a real specialization around finance transformation. So, not only how is the organization going to be transformed, but what is the process optimization? Really looking at those technology-driven solutions. 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:01:10.4: 

Prior to joining Janus Henderson, she held a number of leadership positions within consulting firms, where she helped other organizations achieve their goals around IT maximization and finance system architecture. We're also joined this afternoon by Kulvinder Kaur. She is a program manager at Janus Henderson. She helped, along with Esther, to really spearhead this profitability solution. She leads the finance transformation and, again, focused on the technology-driven changes. So, she has a couple decades of experience within asset management. She's worked in projects around regulation, ESG strategy and other system implementations. So, without further ado, let me hand over to Esther. Thank you very much. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:02:02.5: 

Thank you. Is this working? Yes? Can you hear me? Okay. I will sit, but I'm short; actually even if I stand, it doesn't make any difference. My name is Esther Makaya, as I said. I work in Janus Henderson. I'm a product owner for the FP&A and business finance products. So, we look after all the head of FP&A and business finance org, and that has more or less 30, 35 users. Within my product we have Anaplan, we have Power BI, we have Snowflake, we have Databricks, we have Informatica. So, we use all those products to support the FP&A and business finance users. So, before I go into more detail, I think I'm just going to ask them to move to the next slide, okay? We thought we will start with presenting you a little bit Janus Henderson as a company. So, Janus Henderson is a global asset management firm. We manage a few billions of client assets, as you can see there. We are located in London and in Denver. We have a few offices around the world. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:03:14.8: 

In terms of employees, we are 2000-plus employees, and that includes Kulvinder and I. Today, we are just going to take you through our journey in Anaplan, why we started and where we are now. I will talk about the process prior to the strategic profitability analysis program, and then Kulvinder will take us through what we did during the program itself. So, if you can move on the other side. This slide shows the four key milestones that we went through, through our Anaplan journey prior to the strategic profitability implementation. We started with our first model in 2020, and it was a product analysis model so it was an allocation model. To give you some context: I'm part of the finance technology team, and the finance technology team has more than 15 applications that we use. At that point, our FP&A business users were using SAP BPC as a planning tool. But we needed another tool with more flexibility to, basically, deal with our allocation model.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:04:25.2: 

So, we looked at - we looked for a few applications, and Anaplan was our choice. We decided to go with a small model just for the FP&A team to trial, basically, the application and also try it on the user side but also on the technical side. From that implementation, what we liked is that the user adoption was very easy in terms of the users using the model, because it was all cloud based and very intuitive to the users to do their processes. On the tech side, we liked the fact that it was easy for us to follow through the training that Anaplan offered on their platform. So, it was easy for us to learn and then support the system. Following that successful implementation we added a new second use case, which was the revenue allocation model use case. That model went live in 2021. At that point, Anaplan had launched the new UX, so we also rolled the new UX to our users.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:05:26.0: 

So, up until that point, our users were using SAP BPC and Anaplan. We had to make a decision, what was the way forward for FP&A and business finance team, because it wasn't practical for them to move between different applications. That was chosen for the FP&A and business finance processes. They were also using SAP ERP for actuals, so to retrieve data and other applications that we have to retrieve AUM data. After reviewing the processes of FP&A, if you work in FP&A and business finance, you know that you change things all the time. You ask questions all the time and we thought that Anaplan was the best tool for that as opposed to BPC. BPC is more - it's more a consolidation tool, right? You change a dimension in BPC, it takes a lot of work, whereas in Anaplan you can easily add new functionality. So, we made the decision to move the planning processes to Anaplan at that point. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:06:24.9: 

We implemented the expense and central model at that point, and we moved the entire FP&A and business finance - so the total of 30 something users - in Anaplan. They were no longer using SAP BPC. After that, we then ran a phase two, where we implemented the HR planning model internally. So, it was done by one member of my team who is sitting somewhere there. That's to tell you how it was easy for us as an internal team to integrate Anaplan and to develop the models ourselves, because at Janus Henderson that's our culture. We want to keep the knowledge as internal as possible so that we are not reliant on consultants for every single implementation. So, if you look at it after the planning model, we were supposed to continue on our planning roadmap. Our planning roadmap has another year or so on it but, as everything in life, priorities change.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:07:26.1: 

At the beginning of 2023, a decision was made to make the full strategic profitability analysis solution a priority. Our CFO and our CEO decided that we needed to implement that. What we decided to do, because we already had an internal team - we have an internal team of Anaplan - was to first run a proof of concept. We didn't want to rush to implementing the solution straightaway. So, we ran the proof of concept internally. The reason why we wanted to run that first, it was to make sure that our business users were clear in terms of what their requirements were, because it was the first time we were trying to do that in Anaplan. Prior to that, we just had a small Excel model. We also wanted to test - stress-test Anaplan in terms of data size because the granularity we wanted to go to was very low. We wanted to make sure that Anaplan could deal with that. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:08:27.2: 

So, at that point, my internal team, with the FP&A and business finance team, started the process in January. We started the process in January with a few of the guys in the team. The proof of concept was finalized in June 2023. At that point, we had a good idea of what our high-level requirements were. We had a good idea in terms of where our company sat in terms of data, where we could get data easily and where data was still a challenge and we needed to work on that. Data is always a good - a difficult thing to deal with in projects. It actually gave us a good idea of what our scope - the scope of the project was going to be. Kulvinder, if you can move to the next slide, this was our dream, basically. This is what we're trying to achieve with the strategic profitability solution. So, if you start from the left, you have all our upstream systems. So, you have the ERP, the general ledger system - which is SAP that we use at the moment. We have the AUM data. We had the HR data coming from employee central and other data sources.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:09:44.4: 

So, we wanted all these outbound processes to move to Anaplan, so these are the orange rows, through Snowflake and Informatica. Am I making it up? Snowflake and Informatica, and then the Anaplan solution was going to run the allocation model, so for revenue and cost analysis. Then we're going to push everything out of Anaplan again through Snowflake and Informatica. We use Power BI as a reporting tool. So, that was what we were dreaming. That was our dream at the time, and this was very important for us because it formed the base of our next step, which was to look for a vendor, a partner we could work with, who could support our implementation. Although we knew Anaplan, we recognized that we needed help to automate the process to Anaplan. Previously, we've used a lot of flat files to upload data in the system. We wanted to automate those because this - at the end of this implementation, we were going to end up with eight models in Anaplan and the data hub model, as well as the data hub inbound and the data hub outbound.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:11:01.4: 

So, that was a lot of models, and we didn't want the process to be manual; we wanted to automate those. So, if we can move to that, so we then started our RFP process after the end of that proof of concept in July. We worked with - first of all, we just went on the Anaplan website and checked who the vendors were. We already knew a few vendors we had worked with. We wanted to expand that search because of what we were trying to achieve with the solution. So, we selected five vendors, with the help of the Anaplan - is it customer success team? So, they helped us a little bit because they understood what we were trying to achieve and we told them what we're looking for. We told them what vendor we had in mind, and they supported us and provided some recommendations as well. With those five vendors, we sent them high-level requirements that we got from the proof of concept.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:12:04.8: 

The vendors were all invited to come in and present what they thought the best design was going to be for our - for what we were trying to achieve for our solution. Following that, we then did a vote. The technical team and the business team voted, and the winner of that process was Spaulding Ridge - the Spaulding Ridge team, who are sitting here. The reason why we picked the Spaulding Ridge team was because of their knowledge of all the systems that we're part of, our suite of systems. So, not only Anaplan, but also knew Databricks… No, sorry, they also knew Snowflake, Informatica and also Power BI. We wanted a team that could support the entire process and not just work with different vendors, basically. At that point we - in December of 2023 we did a soft start of the project, where Matt from the Spaulding Ridge team joined us to have an introduction of what our landscape looked like, what our models looked like, how we had - our existing models already worked.  

 

Esther Makana 0:13:18.3: 

Because we wanted the new models to follow the same principle, to follow the same framework as what we already had, because we had - we understood that they didn't implement the previous models that we had. So, we wanted everything to be in line. Kulvinder is going to take us through the next stage. 

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:13:34.2: 

Thank you, Esther. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:13:36.4:  

You can stand, if you want to stand. 

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:13:36.5: 

No, I'm fine speaking from here. Thank you very much for setting the context. As Esther has taken us through the Anaplan journey so far, also the significant potential to expand Anaplan usage with strategic profitability analysis. That's where I come in, so I'm going to focus on some of the program management, how we turn our idea of strategic profitability analysis into reality. Before I move on and delve into some of the program components, just a quick few seconds on the role I played. As we say, every Sherlock Holmes needs a Watson. We had a team of experts; business finance, technology, finance. They needed a support to deliver this program. That's when I was brought in to play the role of the Watson. I was particularly tasked with shaping up the program structure, ways of working and also connecting the dots and overseeing the entire program.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:14:48.5: 

So, with this introduction, I will focus on some of the program objectives, benefits. Sorry about the slides. Program timeline along with some of the implementation approach and, most importantly, some valuable lessons learned along the way. So, let's begin with looking at the program objective. Now, in order to understand the program objective, it's very important to understand the problem statement we're trying to resolve. When I took this project, I was told by the business sponsors that this is a vision of ten years. They've been wanting to build something like strategic profitability from the last ten years. Now that the opportunity is right, they want to actually deliver this in the next 12 months. So, the first thing that came to my mind was, wow, it's a decade-long dream - but why the rush now?  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:15:48.1: 

Well, the answer lies in the rapidly-changing financial Industry, and Janus is no exception. We're actually going through quite a lot of changes. We have a new board, a new CEO. They wanted to look at the firm-wide profitability, which means they wanted to see every dollar earned and every penny spent across JHI - Janus Henderson. So, we had a tactical solution. As I mentioned, we had the Excel spreadsheets, but I'm sure you all will agree that it's highly manual, error prone and it's not a single source of truth. You can have various versions of the spreadsheet, and most importantly, it's not scalable. Just like an old pair of vintage jeans, you can't fit all into it, even if you tried. So, we had a large amount of data we were - which we were trying to analyze and present to the senior executives for our decision-making. What we realized is that Excel is not going to be our port of call.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:16:53.4: 

So, we then decided and formulated these objective statements. I've underlined four key takeaways for you. We wanted to deliver a strategic solution; that's the automated solution and more scalable. We wanted to understand firm-wide profitability; like I mentioned, every dollar earned and every penny spent. We wanted to support enhanced decision-making by providing more insights to the senior management and by driving a fully-allocated P&L. Now, what does fully-allocated P&L mean? It means making sure that all our costs - direct, indirect - and all the revenue are fully accounted for, and it's allocated to all parts of the business so that everyone understands what their cost entails and where they are making an impact on the profitability. So, with this program objective, I'll move on to pick up some benefits. First off, it's the strategic decision-making. It's enhancing the strategic decision-making - which essentially means, imagine you're being able to pinpoint a specific business line to say, 'I want to boost it or I want to scale it back.'  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:18:08.1: 

So, we are getting into data in enough details to give clear insights to our senior management so that they can make the informed decision-making. We're also empowering our business leaders by giving them more insights so they can make the smarter cost allocations and trade-offs. We're also increasing the visibility of cost utilization. That's not very visible at the moment, so the business areas will be able to see where their cost is coming from and how it's being allocated, like a peanut butter spread. Last but not the least, it's the target-setting. So, we're trying to set the targets and also monitor the performance of the - through the KPIs. Clearly, this isn't just about the numbers; it's also about increasing the accountability for the senior executive members so that they can drive the better results from this. Okay, I'll take a pause. Esther, anything to add? 

 

Esther Makaya 0:19:13.3: 

No, I think you've said it all. 

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:19:15.4: 

Brilliant, thank you. Okay, so this is the entire 15 months of work we have done on the profitability program. It's still ongoing, but I can quickly take you through the important timelines and the four distinct phases we structured in the program. So, just to remind: I said in the beginning the business sponsor said, 'We need this implemented in 12 months.' The second vertical implementation, if you can see, we actually delivered the solution in 12 months. However, before committing to the timelines, we did ask for three months of extra discovery because we wanted not to overpromise, but go into the discovery phase and understand what we're getting into; the scope, the objectives, implementation plan. But the most important is data because that's the foundation of the entire strategic profitability.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:20:19.8: 

So, we did have a separate workstream for the data architecture who went through all the data workstreams that we were sourcing from various sources of the organization. Obviously, in reality some data were more advanced than the others. So, we had to bring that into a summary as to how many datapoints do we have, how many are good to go versus how many of them have issues attached to it? This gives us a bit of a forward-looking view of how much work is required for us to fix the data. So, this was a dedicated three-month effort, distinct from implementation. Once we received the go/no go for the implementation, you can see - just quick points - we adopted the agile development for rapid iterative delivery and early feedback from the users. We had three parallel streams ongoing: data integration, Anaplan models, calculation engine and modeling, etc., and the Power BI for the dashboards and reports.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:21:26.8: 

Most importantly, while these were running in parallel, we had a dependency-driven plan. What that means is, we had a clear view of what are the tasks that can be run independently versus what are the tasks that are interconnected in these three parallel streams? We then have quality assurance, so it goes without saying it's a big technology project. We had short-term versus long-term testing cycles, so quite heavy on the component and end-to-end testing. Last but not the least, technical go live. So, we deliberately separated technical go live - which means getting the functional tools set up - versus the business go live, because business needed some more time to review the real-time results, validate it, make it more meaningful for the wider distribution. Just quickly moving on, business readiness: again, we did everything in our power to make sure that the core finance team is ready to run the strategic profitability analysis, whereas the business teams - like the wider executives - for them, we needed some more time to prepare and get ourselves ready to answer their questions.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:22:44.3: 

So, with this, I'll just quickly move on since we only have ten minutes left. I'll just quickly cover this to show you the project or the program approach we took. While we have the agile product teams leading the show, we did actually go for the hybrid model, which means we had the product - sorry, program - wrapper on the top in terms of the governance. What this means is, we had set up a specific project steering committee that consists of the technology and business leads. There was an alignment with product management. In setting up the product - the program milestones, we are aligned with the product plans. Then at the bottom, here are the delivery teams. You can see the blue bar is essentially the - our vendor implementation partner, Spaulding Ridge. They were integrated with the product model teams for the successful and the seamless collaboration. I'll hand it over to Esther for the next slide. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:23:54.2: 

This is just a quick slide to show you everything we achieved during the project. I'm not going to go through all of them because we are in a hurry. But we ran 15 discovery workshops with the business, the finance technology team and the Spaulding Rudge team in part of the foundation stage. The total user stories we worked on were 478, so almost 500, mainly on the Anaplan side. But you can see in the middle that integration was also a big portion of our implementation. This was mainly built with the Spaulding Ridge team. We created two new applications in Anaplan and also dashboards in Power BI. We also worked on some enhancements in the existing models that we had. On the last part - which I'll show you - everything we did in terms of testing, so we had a few rounds of testing. We first tested component by component. So, if we created one model in Anaplan, we tested that model in isolation, tested Power BI in isolation and then ran an end-to-end testing at the end.  

 

Esther Makaya 0:24:59.6: 

This ensured that bugs were being identified as we're building. We didn't wait for the end-to-end testing to, basically, identify most of our bugs. I'll just move to the next slide quickly. This is a summary why we believe the project went well for us during this implementation. The first thing is that the proof of concept helped us a lot to identify what the high-level requirements were. They also helped, I think, the business in terms of focusing on what were the main things they wanted to achieve out of this project. That then ensured that the project runs smoothly. We didn't have as many changes as we will have expected. The second thing is that the BAU team - so the technical BAU team - was involved in the project from the start. The business team was involved from the start as well.  

 

Esther Makana 0:25:51.1: 

To give you an example, so if the Spaulding Ridge built the story, it was peer reviewed by my team, the technical teams, just to make sure that everything was in line, so that was test one. Then it was tested by business users; that was test two. That was prior to the component UAT and prior to the end-to-end testing. So, by the time we finished end-to-end testing the - whatever we built was tested multiple times and gave us a lot of opportunity to identify the issues. The third item is that we gathered most of our requirements pre the onboarding process of the Spaulding Ridge team. So, by the time they came in, we already had a big list of our requirements already with us. The fourth point is the fact that we had a separate foundation. We ran the foundation part of the project completely separately. That then ensured that our estimations, when we had to do them for the user stories, were a lot more accurate than if we had just run everything in one go. The last point we have already talked about; it is - was our UAT strategy. We did a lot of UAT, as you can - a lot of testing, as you can tell. 

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:27:02.2: 

Okay, I promise this is the last slide. As program managers, we are often the bearer of the challenging news. So, here are your - the top challenges we faced in the program. There are many, but these are top three. Data quality issues I've already talked about. But I think one key thing as to how we overcome - overcame the issue is, we actually took the decision and risk acceptance in the steering committee, telling them that we cannot fix all before the stipulated 12-month timeline that we have. So, we will try and resolve all the critical issues strategically or manual or tactically, but anything that's not critical, it has to go in a backlog and we will address them post-launch. That helped us to move further ahead. Business adoption, it's a lively topic. It's never easy. Some of the top executives will see the 100 per cent view of the cost, so it's an eye-opener. It's understandably a bit sensitive information because they'll find out as to what lies under the carpet.  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:28:10.2: 

But what we did is, during the program we did catch up with the top 13 executives in the firm, and we gave them as to why we're doing it, how we're doing it and also agreed their cost drivers. We still believe there will be challenges on the way, but I think once we present the final report, we'll give them a chance to feed back. Also, through our continuous improvement in the product, we'll address those issues. Last but not the least, it's the risk of scope creep. Very common for the projects, but I think in the agile methodology, it's a double-edged sword. That's because we're asking users to give us the feedback during demos as well as during the user acceptance testing. So, how could you say this is a scope creep? But we did introduce a change management process where we kept certain thresholds. So, anything that's less intensive, critical for the feedback, we delivered it in the program. But anything that's not critical gold plating, it goes in the backlog. Therefore I do see phase 1.2 - or maybe even phase 2 - coming to our door. Well, with this, I think it's the end of our presentation and we'll open up for the questions and answers. 

 

Esther Makaya 0:29:26.2: 

Just a quick thing I wanted to say because, as we said, at Janus Henderson together we win. I just want to recognize two members of my team who are there; Andy and Tom. You can't hide so you have to stand up. Thank you to the Spaulding Ridge team because they did a great job delivering that for us [over speaking 0:29:43.7].  

 

Kulvinder Kaur 0:29:42.3: 

Yes, great teamwork.