Emily Nicholls 0:00:06.5:

So, my name's Emily. I sit in the product organization, but I look after supply chain more generally here at Anaplan. Mostly today, I'm going to be talking to you about our two latest launches, our two latest releases, which is integrated business planning and MFP, merch financial planning. Before I do that, I will take a little bit of time to just scene set where we're at in supply chain planning here with Anaplan, and how our application strategy is really supporting that. We've long had a presence in supply chain, ten years in the market. Over that time, we've gained over 500 supply chain planning customers all over the world, all different industries, different markets operating very, very differently, but utilizing our platform to do so. The application strategy is not really new. Some of you may be new to Anaplan, but you would have heard a lot in the keynote about the kind of investments we're making in this space. Really, you can think about those 500 customers as all the lessons learnt that you don't have to, because we've seen firsthand what works, what doesn't work, and we've baked all of that experience into a framework that you can then leverage, take, and configure to your requirements and your needs. We do have well over 100 of these applications running all over the world, so supply chains running successfully every day on these frameworks. Some of the customers utilizing this approach, you can see from our logos on the bottom. This is just a small handful, but I chose these partly because they are all very different.

Emily Nicholls 0:01:36.5:

You can take a look and see large consumer electronics companies, whiskey distillers, Just Eat. An app platform, essentially, but for takeaway deliveries, but they're using the frameworks, the same building blocks, because at its core, a lot of our foundational supply chain planning practices are actually the same. If you're looking to generate an AI ML forecast and look at segmentation, look at trends, classification, these things are actually very consistent across these industries. I will be back here later with Mitsubishi Electric and CVH Spirits - small plug! - to come back to this room. I'll be interviewing both of them about how they've utilized the same applications. Seen a lot of value, but gone about it quite differently. They will all be using some of the seven live supply chain applications that we have in market today, but we are launching another four before the end of the year. So quite rapid roadmap. It's not all about new applications, though. A huge amount of time that we invest is in our current suite of applications as well. If you think about everything you've heard this morning from Evo on our pretty aggressive AI roadmap in the platform, all of that's getting baked into our current applications.

Emily Nicholls 0:02:53.1:

So, if you've already invested in demand planning, you've kind of future proofed yourself because as we take advantage of Agentic workflows or co-planner, you're then entitled to that upgrade, and you can essentially just turn those features on. You can do that through a platform build as well, but the difference is that we've taken all the design decisions, we've set up all the integrations with other applications, and already established this into the framework that you can then choose to pull on. That's some of $500 million investment that you would have heard about again this morning. That's over and above our normal budgeted amount, so we were very excited to receive that. Obviously it doesn't all come to me in supply chain, some of my colleagues are going to get some of that also. Double-clicking on a couple of our customers who've gone down this journey, I chose Panasonic and Helly Hansen here because I think we can all agree they are completely different industries. So we have consumer electronics, it's that division, so everything from refrigerators to printers; and we have Helly Hansen, clearly an outdoor apparel retail brand. They took exactly the same frameworks here, so they are forecasting; they're planning their demand, and they're matching that to inventory and distribution, utilizing the same frameworks. We've pulled different levers for them.

Emily Nicholls 0:04:13.6:

We've configured the applications differently so that they suit their individual industries. Even within these two customers, depending on the market, we've pulled the levers differently as well, because markets obviously all behave differently at different levels of maturity, etc. Panasonic specifically is quite close to my heart because Panasonic own Blue Yonder, by that I mean they actually own the company Blue Yonder, and yet when they went to market looking for something to help them with their inventory planning, very extensive RFP process, which was quite painful for people like me, ultimately they chose us as the best platform to support them in doing that. A few months later, they turn their head to demand planning. Because we had set up a supply chain data model for them, for the inventory planning, when it came to demand, you can just drop that application on top of the data structure you've already set up. So the implementation is really, really rapid. Now they're looking to expand more and more and more. So these are the live applications that have been knocking around for a while now, we've got lots of customers running these. This is largely what you can think of as your core supply chain planning use cases. 

Emily Nicholls 0:05:26.8:

The two that we're going to double click on today is integrated business planning. Clearly, industry agnostic, everyone has a different definition, so I'll start by defining IBP. The other one we'll double-click on is merch financial planning, specifically for retailers. Before I go there, I did just want to plug something me and my team are super proud of here at Anaplan, which is the latest ISG Buyers Guide. So they went and did a magic quadrant, essentially, similar to Gartner's, on which products, which technologies best service various use cases. The two I've pulled on here is S&OP - clearly, a very important component of IBP; they don't have an IBP category - and retail planning, which MFP is a part of as well. We're a leader in both of these. We're also a leader in supply chain planning. That's not something I'm double-clicking on today, but that, remember, is our core five applications that we have already. Anyone who has good eyesight here can see we're not just in the leaders quadrant; we are literally pole position for all three of these supply chain use cases. So, over and above any of the other competitors that you see here, we were selected as the top choice. The way that they measure that is really important. So the first measure is about the product itself. So, they call it product experience, anything to do with the capability of the product, what functional capabilities does it service? Anything around usability. So what's the user's experience when they're interacting with the product? How quickly can they pick it up? How intuitive is it?

Emily Nicholls 0:07:03.9:

Lastly, the reliability. What's the uptime? Can I trust my numbers? Does anything ever break? Do I have bugs? Across those three things, that's packaged up as product experience. The fact that we've scored really highly here speaks to or explains the fact that we don't tend to have problems with adoption. I've worked with lots of technologies in the past, and adoption is always a little bit of a painful point. Getting people to actually use what they've spent time and money implementing can be really, really difficult because human beings don't like change, to be honest. If they don't understand the numbers or they don't find it immediately intuitive, they will pull everything out into Excel, do it there. Then you've ended up back in the situation you were trying to avoid in the first place, which was lots of siloed environments, and it's no longer very robust. So we're very proud of our adoption metrics, and this high rating on the product experience speaks to that. The second element, or the other axis here, is about customer value. So, what have our customers seen in terms of they ran a number of different interviews, so their overall experience, to say are they happy with it, are they happy they invested in it? In terms of hard figures, they looked a lot at total cost of ownership and return on investment, which are both super strong for us, clearly demonstrated here. I'll be totally honest, when I was pulling this presentation together, I didn't know how I was going to plug this.

Emily Nicholls 0:08:32.5:

So it feels like I'm jumping around a bit. It might be because I am. Largely, I landed on putting it here upfront because I'm now going to drill into S&OP, IBP, and retail. You've been given the comfort upfront that, actually, we've been evaluated by our customers and by an independent body. We're actually quite good at this stuff. Let's start off with IBP, I am going to start off with a definition because everybody I talk to thinks of IBP differently, and that's fine, but there is an industry definition. So the easiest way to explain it is to put it in the context of other types of planning that we have here. Largely, this is to do with cadence. So if we think about how you run your business day in, day out, what's happening tomorrow, that is your execution, sales and execution planning. Short-term, there's a fire in the factory, I don't have these X products anymore, what do you want to do? Which customers should I allocate to because I haven't been able to deliver? That's the firefighting activity, you'll interact with something like a control tower, very, very near, short-term.

Emily Nicholls 0:09:43.1:

S&OP, longer-term, thinking really about what am I doing with my business this year and next? What kind of demand can I expect? If it's not quite meeting my targets, how can I inflate that demand? Do I want to run a promotion? Is there other opportunities for me to increase demand? Once I'm happy with my consensus demand, okay, how am I actually going to supply it? How am I going to move this stuff around? Where am I going to store it? Etc., etc. That's S&OP, generally, monthly buckets, sometimes, weekly, it's really that core capability, again - demand, forecasting, inventory, supply, production. IBP is more strategic. So how am I going to steer this business to the future? IBP really spans across a breadth of executives, and it helps you answer questions about how you want your business to operate beyond the next couple of years. These timelines, these cadences, can vary by industry. Life sciences tend to look decades - defense definitely decades - others will be more like five years. So the cadence can vary slightly, but the premise is the same. These are questions like, if I'm in the automotive industry, what's the trend towards electric vehicles?

Emily Nicholls 0:10:59.6:

Actually, with the current situation in the US, that seems to be changing, and now China are producing loads of their own cars, so what does that mean for me? If EVs are going to be more popular in Europe, maybe I'll move my production to Europe, but I don't really know what that will cost. Actually, different skill sets are required to manufacture EV vehicles to normal petrol or diesel, so maybe I want to think about my recruitment strategy today and change my grad schemes. These are long-term questions that you can't affect within the next two years. So, it's much more strategic, and as I say, it touches every kind of function. This is not a supply chain problem. I have to talk to my office of my CFO, I have to talk to any kind of strategy teams, I'm going to be working with the workforce team. So you're really having to collaborate across many different executives and key stakeholders here. Crucially, obviously, some of the examples that I gave there, you're also going to have to scenario plan a lot as well. So now that we know what IBP is, what is the IBP application? The first thing to say is that everything I've just discussed, if you were to define IBP, it is a process first, it's not a technology, it's not something you can just buy.

Emily Nicholls 0:12:14.1:

Having said that, you can buy an application, because this is an enabler to that process. The way that that manifests is to say we've taken a look at the overall industry standard for IBP. Some of you may or may not have heard of a man called Oliver Wight back in the '70s, maybe '80s. He established this framework, he established an IBP process that is widely recognized as industry standard, everybody utilizes it, it's what we have used as well as our framework. So the technology then enables you to follow that process. It speeds you up, it makes your life easier, and it does so through various different means. One is process management. We will utilize things like our Workflow, the baked-in reporting that we have, to generally provide some governance to this IBP process, because as we've discussed, there are lots of people to bring along this journey, so you need that strong governance. It allows you to scenario model, simulate. You can't for these long-term strategic plans ever assume just one path. You're going to have to simulate multiple, and you're likely going to want to put them in a scenario matrix. You can turn drivers on or off. It's not designed to be a static plan, it's very organic. As things change, you constantly update this plan and run through the process of the reviews that you see here. 

Emily Nicholls 0:13:36.5:

Thirdly is data orchestration. You would have heard a little bit this morning about Anaplan's data orchestrator. Really what that means for you is that it takes care of all the heavy lifting in terms of gathering data from lots of different environments. If you think about the story or the example we used for IBP, that is your ERP, that is any kind of demand forecasting engine. You have production planning, your HR systems, external data. It all needs to come together for you to really be able to run simulations. Particularly if you want to take advantage of AI, you need all that information in one place. I think that funnily enough, as discussed in the beginning, you've got these applications here available also. Although we are completely agnostic, you are able to leverage the applications we have on the market today as well. There are obvious advantages to that. If you have everything in a single ecosystem, a single technology, the level of scenario modeling and AI capabilities that you can leverage is uplifted to more of a disparate ecosystem. We are agnostic though, and a lot of our customers are large enterprise customers who have grown through acquisition, they have every technology under the sun. We will sell IBP and we have sold IBP, and we will just connect with OMP, we will connect with Kinaxis and everything in between, bring it into ultimately a decision-making layer. 

Emily Nicholls 0:15:00.7:

We've got all the integrations set up there so you can share information back and forth, and this is really important, because I think a lot of people talk about connecting cross-functionally. Connecting finance to supply chain, yes, that is super important, but I do also think that people overlook how important it is to connect vertically. Connecting your operational plans to your strategic plans is something that's often overlooked, and it is a mistake because if you're busy here planning a strategy, operationally you're never going to achieve it, and you're kind of wasting your time. You have to be able to connect the dots to understand, what are the gaps, and how can I fill those gaps if I'm not going to make it? Lastly is the collaboration element, which we've just talked about. Both cross-functionally and strategic, everybody can get hands on this tool. There are various features within Anaplan like commentary, like the fact it emails you, it flags you reminders, to just bring you into a single environment to do all of your planning in one place. Having said that, we're going to get a quick preview here. I'm going to play a video, which we were just testing and I hope will work.

Video 0:16:07.6:

Today's supply chains face constant disruption, from market shifts to unexpected risk. Disconnected, outdated tools and fragmented processes add to the chaos, so how do you respond and make agile, informed decisions? Anaplan's Integrated Business Planning application is built for today's real world complexities. Use smart analytics to drive better decisions and optimize your product mix. Minimize risk by quickly modeling what-if scenarios in real time, so you can act fast when plans change. Standardize workflows with built-in best practices, to drive consistency at scale. Break down silos and bring stakeholders together, so you can keep strategy and execution in lockstep. Bring all your data into one dynamic model. No long implementation times or heavy IT lift. Respond to change with real-time visibility and planning application built for today's most dynamic environments, with the speed, trust and confidence you need, with the Integrated Business Planning application from Anaplan.

Emily Nicholls 0:17:17.3:

Okay, so to summarize, what are the benefits essentially of implementing something like IBP, specifically how we've packaged up in an application? One, that strategic alignment that we talked about. Bringing together your expected outcomes with the reality of how you achieve them allows you to plan for success, essentially. Profitability is always top of mind for us, and what I mean by that is we truly do volume to value at every point. You're cashing up all the time, and every decision you make, you understand the impact on your margin. These are not just volume decisions, they're not just revenue decisions. There's an enormous amount of cost modeling that needs to happen as well, and we have clear connections then to full financial planning, operational P&Ls, etc. You can increase the opportunity for your business, so by having visibility, being able to run or simulate multiple different outcomes and allocate the correct resources to the initiative essentially, means that you're going to be as profitable as you can be. When you have true visibility into your supply chain, you can directly drive down your inventory, because you don't have to hold as much safety stock. You know where stuff needs to be, when, and you can be a lot more confident in running a very lean supply chain.

Emily Nicholls 0:18:37.2:

Collaboration has always been at the heart of our design with this one, both in terms of how we've thought about the user experience. We've collaborated a lot with UX designers and experts to make this a super intuitive experience, because if people aren't using it, you're not collaborating in it, and that would be the worst thing. Lastly, I think all of these point to an increase in agility. If you have all the information presented to you, if everything is surfaced in a single environment, you can make faster, better decisions, which ultimately in today's environment is going to give you your competitive edge, because everything is changing all of the time. On IBP I thought I'd leave you with one last thing, which is we recently sold the application to a large $20 billion pet food company. I'm sure you can guess who; I wasn't allowed to use Purina's logo. They chose us for these reasons, and I thought that was important because they looked at about 20 different technologies, and I think it's helpful to understand sometimes, what's the differentiation? Everybody's talking about the same sort of stuff. They are American so I called it dollarization, but that volume to value piece is never as straightforward as maybe you think it's going to be. Maybe you have experience with this already. It can be tricky, and our capability in that space, because we're a leader in finance as well - I have my counterpart Neil running a finance session right now - we're perfectly placed to be able to bring these two worlds together.

Emily Nicholls 0:20:04.5:

The other was the scenario analysis, and they talked a lot specifically about being able to balance supply and demand just by running scenarios, and being able to get leaner and leaner. As we talked about before, those scenarios, that end-to-end scenario also works up and down, so being able to stimulate cross-functionally. Lastly for them, quite specific, but they were really interested in being able to analyze tradeoffs in terms of how they allocate to their customers. They're always running quite lean anyway. They wanted to understand, if I can't fulfill everybody all the time, who do I choose, and what's the impact of that decision from a profit perspective? It's not always pounds and dollars. Sometimes it's reputational, sometimes there will be fines, so all of these can be taken into consideration and visualized in a way that was very quick and easy for them to understand.

Emily Nicholls 0:20:50.6:

I'm going to leave IBP alone now. I'm going to change gears a little bit and talk about merch financial planning, which I totally appreciate is only really relevant to retailers in the room. It is also way more operational, right? It's less strategic, it's more living and breathing, pre-season and in-season. Again, I am going to define MFP first. I think it's helpful to always make sure we're always talking about the same thing before I dive into some of the benefits. These four main buckets with scenario modeling are how we've set out the MFP application. Your pre-season planning, how you want to set your targets for all your main KPIs around sales, margin, and inventory, and being able to do that at multiple different granularities. Different markets or different channels may be more or less mature, so you want to plan at a higher level in some of your emerging markets potentially, but you can go super granular in your mature markets. No problem, plan at any level you like at any point, and we will set up the reconciliation later for you.

Emily Nicholls 0:21:52.8:

Aligning that plan and the reconciliation is the second step. Again, interacting at different levels of granularity, but also reconciling across different teams. Making sure that your merch team are talking the same numbers as your finance team, and any kind of approval processes that are in place, we can bake in as well and automate for you. You're not having to email around or call around or structure and orchestrate the process for approvals within the platform itself. You're then in-season you're firefighting, you're having to respond, so we're going to give you a lot of performance monitoring. Everything is exception-based, so we will alert you, okay, this product's behaving differently, you might want to take a look at it. Being able to use utilize that exception-based management means that people can really focus on the important stuff, rather than trying to review their whole portfolio every single time. They'll really largely measure the main KPIs there. We will have automated as much as is possible through AI/ML forecasting to get you off the ground, so largely this is about fine-tuning, and then you can start to dynamically adjust that plan when you start thinking about OTB open to buy. Managing that process between different teams across different categories, etc., and all the while scenario modeling across.

Emily Nicholls 0:23:10.0:

You can run as many plans of these as you like, as many outcomes, and you'll just pick one at the end that you want to promote to your final plan. We don't confine you in terms of how many you want to run. I would say if you've got 100 it's probably too many, but you can run as many as you wish, as many as you have a capacity to do. Underpinning all of this is multi-channel, multi-currency. It doesn't matter where you're operating, doesn't matter if you're wholesale, direct to consumer, bricks and mortar, all of the above. Everything's going to be supported within the same application, which means that reconciliation activity is very, very straightforward. Whether you use retail or cost accounting, again, both are baked in there, and again it might be different actually across different elements of your business. Largely we'll see that when we come in to implement this application, we're more turning things off, pulling levers for people depending on how you operate, to make sure that it services your needs. Again, I have a quick video to give you a brief showcase of what this looks and feels like.

Video 0:24:09.6:

Retail success happens in the time between planning and execution. When merchandise and financial plans are out of sync, targets are misaligned, opportunities are missed, and valuable time is lost. The outcome? Margin erosion and lost sales. Anaplan's Merchandise Financial Planning application leverages predictive analytics, so you can adapt at the speed of changing customer demand. Automate repetitive processes and make better merchandizing decisions faster. Align inventory with sales forecasts and demand, so your stock is available at the right place and time. Replace guesswork with clarity. Our exception-based alerts catch every variance to your plan before any business impact. Model multiple scenarios in real time, to quickly turn market disruptions into opportunities and build lasting resilience. Collaborate globally across channels with one trusted view, eliminating data silos and tying decisions to financial outcomes. Transform the time between planning and execution into your competitive edge. Every forecast more accurate, every decision more confident, every opportunity captured faster, with the Merchandise Financial Planning application from Anaplan.

Emily Nicholls 0:25:32.5:

Okay, so if I summarize again what kind of benefits this application would deliver for you, in terms of being able to unify your merch team and your financial team, it's the strategic alignment, so across departments, across channels, across geographies. You've got the sales forecasting baseline, so how much can we automate for you? How much can you allow to just tick along, versus those products that are going to need a little bit more massaging, a little bit more attention? Operational efficiency, so the processes that are in place, we will orchestrate for you via Workflow. We will highlight exceptions to your team, so they're only really dealing, as I say, with that exceptional activity where they can move the needle. That massively reduces the number of manual errors, which is a huge productivity drain, as well as obvious other implications. Your inventory management, this is a byproduct of better planning. You're going to be able to align your stock levels way better with your sales forecast, because you're much more confident in your sales forecast figures. Essentially making sure that you have the right product in the right place at the right time, which sounds very easy and is not easy at all. Lastly risk management, largely dealt with through the fact we have these scenario models and simulations that you can run.

Emily Nicholls 0:26:50.0:

By being able to map those out, almost stress test your business, would we survive if the very worst happened? If it did happen, how am I going to mitigate against that? Really allows you to be way more resilient, which again in today's environment is a key differentiator against other retailers. The MFP application itself is new. We do have application customers, including Walgreens, the biggest retailer on the planet. They're using our application today, but prior to the application being developed, we have a lot of retailers all over the globe who run MFP successfully on Anaplan, through more of the platform approach that we discussed. Being able to run these processes in a slick way, being confident in your numbers, has a real tangible benefit on your outcomes. We've talked a lot about our foundational use cases, we've talked about IBP, we've talked about MFP. We are busy developing more applications as well. When I say coming next, this is this financial year. By the end of FY26 we will have four more applications, and I think you can see we're starting to double click into industry specificities here. We've got trade promotions planning coming; we've got procurement planning, specifically focusing on material sourcing; allocations and replenishment for retail; and assortment planning as well. Again, all by the end of this year you'll be able to utilize these. We are not ignoring our current favorite core models either. These have their own upgrade paths, they're constantly being invested in. There was a new release recently, there'll be another new release next quarter.

Emily Nicholls 0:28:29.5:

Thank you very much for coming to this session over my other colleagues. Small plug for anything supply chain and retail, which I assume everyone in this room is. Asda is going to be in here next. They've got a really interesting story, would encourage you to stay. I will be back at ten past three, and I'll be talking to CVH and Mitsubishi. I mentioned that at the start they took forecasting, demand planning, and inventory planning. Very different businesses, but both seeing really good results. The AI session, which is keynote so that's everybody, it's not supply chain specific, but I don't think you can be working in supply chain or retail and not have your eye on how you can best utilize AI, so I put that on there. The networking reception, which is clearly optional, but you can come and find me to ask questions during that time. I'll be knocking around, and if you bring me a drink, I'll answer your question first. Thank you very much. If you do have any questions for me, I think we still have about five minutes, yes? Okay, I have five minutes if anyone wants to throw out questions, otherwise we can call it and you can ask me in private if you're embarrassed. Do you have a question? No. He's on my team, I'm winding him up. Okay, everyone wants to do private questions, that's cool with me. Thank you very much, I'll see you hopefully in a later session or out in the main area.

Thank you.