Håvard Hoel Aass 0:00:04.8: 

Yes, so first of all, I'm going to tell you a bit about what NORCE is, what challenges we had and how we solved them with Anaplan, of course, and also a bit about the future with Anaplan. So first of all, this is me. I've only been working at NORCE for two years, so we already had the solution before I started. Some of you people in the room worked on it. I know [?Espeen] from [?Bedford 0:00:41.9], [?Stieg], of course from Bedford, and also Fabian, who I met today. So I had to start getting familiar with our system just by diving into it, actually. So what is NORCE? NORCE is a research company. We are not that old. We were only formed in 2018, and it was the merger of five institutes, and some of them are actually dating back to 1930, so we have a long history. We are based in Bergen, but we have offices all around Norway almost. Here are some numbers. You can see we have a lot of employees, many nationalities. Of course, highly-educated. I think we have around 2000 active projects, mostly funded by EU and the Norwegian Research Council, but also industry and private funding as well.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:02:21.5: 

We also have a lot of infrastructure. Huge, expensive infrastructure. For instance, we have our own drilling rig. You can see that's quite a big thing. As I said, we have offices all the way up in the north in Tromsø. On the west coast of Norway, that's Bergen and Haugesund and Stavanger. In the south we have Kristiansand and Grimstad, and we also have Oslo. Our main research focus is on energy and technology, and health and society, and climate and environment. The next slide is just an overview of our shareholders. We are mainly owned by the University of Bergen. So to the fun part, that is, of course, how it was before I started, and the same with [unclear words 0:03:58.9] we had this huge Excel model. I hadn't seen it before, but I had a meeting with the CFO and the head of controlling before this event, and they told me that - actually, I got a copy of it, and I think it almost broke my PC when I tried to open it. It's so big. So this is just a screenshot of it. This was manual extracting from the ERP system, Excel processing, reporting. A huge reporting document. The reporting was copy and pasted into the PowerPoint.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:04:47.9: 

Of course, we needed a system that was able to handle this in a better way, and now we have Anaplan, of course. We have our reports generated directly from Anaplan, commentary stored in the system for every month, for every group, the whole hierarchy. Leaders can access the dashboards directly, and of course, it's summed up in the hierarchy, and the forecasts are, of course, live updated when you change something in the system.  

Audience 0:05:33.6: 

How often are they updated? 

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:05:37.8: 

Oh, that's often. I think we do the actuals every hour, or second hour. That's a bit tougher for our informatica, the system that's doing the import, but I'm going to show you a slide on that as well. So a bit more about our solution. We have a datahub as well, our source of truth. We had a problem there. The data in the datahub comes from our ERP system, Unit4. When I started we used to push data into the datahub, but you also had some data going the other way, so we had two sources of truth, and it was never the same, and we had a lot of issues with that, so we had to change that, and now it's only Anaplan. So these are our models. You have the datahub, we have the P&L model, which was the first model, and then we have the research and project planning model. It's quite complex I think, we can agree on, with the people who worked on it, Espeen nods! We have been working on that in the last couple of months, as well, because something has changed in NORCE, as I'm going to tell you more about. Since I started, we also built this core facility and pricing and usage model that Stieg and me built, so that was a fun thing. I'm really proud of that model. It's like my child, actually. As you can see, information goes back and forth all over the place there. It's very connected. 

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:07:48.8: 

This messy slide is our dataflow today, or actually how it used to be. As you can see, it used to go back and forth from Unit4 into this informatica SQL thing, and then into Anaplan. We had some problems there with things stopping up and not going through, and we don't have the right people and the knowledge to solve it. So sometimes that can be a problem, so we wanted to move to the ADO and, hopefully, this will be the slide next time. A bit more about what kind of modules we have. We'll be having more than this, but we have the CAPEX, we have, of course, the financial reporting, the budgeting, the forecasting project reporting, as we have built now, project planning. We have the sustainability reporting, and we also now have the project task management which we moved from our ERP system, because it was much easier to use it in Unit4, and also now we do our project budgeting in Anaplan.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:09:36.7: 

Yes, Centre of Excellence. At some point we found out that we need to work on this a bit more strategically, and of course, a Centre of Excellence I think is the best way to do it, and we are so complex and so large now, and we have so many users, that we need to work like this. At the moment we have five people in the Centre of Excellence. The solution architect, that would be me, and we have two model builders, who are group controllers, and of course the system owners, the CFO and the head of controlling. We have weekly meetings. They are not there every week, but maybe every second and every fourth week we are all together. We keep a backlog and make sure that we follow best practices, and we also have a roadmap, and we try to use The Anaplan Way in a light version for us. We've had some good experience with that.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:10:48.5: 

Yes, [unclear words] at some point. This is from November. This is in Norwegian, but there was mad bad news at NORCE. We had to downsize. Not fun. We had a 50 per cent reduction in controllers, and we had to start thinking about working in another way. Of course, this shifted towards a leaner organisation. The good thing was that we had already started moving stuff from our ERP system, where the controllers used to do a lot of the work, and moving that into Anaplan. We thought that if we start - of course, from now on, the project leaders and managers, they need to do a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff that controllers used to do, so they have the budget there for their projects. This is a slide on how we are working right now. Before the downsizing, the controllers did all of this. Now you can see that the project managers are doing a lot more. It's good, because you saw the data at the right level, and I think the controllers now can be more of a controller, but of course there are some challenges, but as I said, we have moved a lot of it from the ERP system, built it up in Anaplan, the budgeting part, the task management. They have to put in the contract amounts themselves, but with that information in Anaplan we can build new controller reports on the high level, so we can have a controller report like all your projects in your group. Do they have a budget? Do they send an invoice this year? That sort of thing. 

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:13:06.8: 

But then we had to get some more licences, so we moved from approximately 170 users, and now we are around almost 800, so the whole of NORCE are using Anaplan, but we are only three people and with all the builders and workspace administrators. So we had to change something, and as [unclear words 0:13:38.5] they had some problems, because I was the one who was giving access to everyone and had to change role, and suddenly my email box was full of all these change requests. So I had to build this dashboard with a process so that the end user, the right end user, could change the whole team and have information about their roles and the whole group's roles, and also you can, of course, see that on a division level or the whole company level. You also can keep track of how many licences have writing access. With Anaplan, I think I did this in half a day, setting it up, make sure that it works, and just pushed it out. I can't see any other system you could do that in.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:14:41.6: 

So here are some pictures of our new self-service solution for the project managers. They had their reports, they had their budgeting tool, so they have no excuses anymore. Here, also, I just wanted to show you that we put information into Anaplan. We try to connect it and use it, re-use in other places, so this is the task management dashboard where they put in the different tasks for the project, but then we can use that information in other dashboards as well. For instance, the financing, the invoicing reports. We use that information so it pops up into the right year here, on the right project, and of course, you can sum that up to a higher level in the hierarchy, and control that. You have a plan. Are you following the plan with invoices, etc? To sum it up with the Anaplan journey, I'll show you the things that we already have, but we'd see a lot of opportunities with the system. You want to build a consolidation model for the whole of NORCE, because we also have some other companies that we own. We want to make a quote generator, and also a pipeline model for our income, because we do a lot of research applications, and put a lot of researchers into that, but we want to find out which funders, which groups get funded, use the historical data to say something about our income next year, and so on. Also, we want to do risk monitoring and portfolio monitoring as part of the project budgeting and the reporting, as I showed you.  

Håvard Hoel Aass 0:17:25.8: 

This is the timeline. We started back in April 2022. I think the implementation started in May. I think we went live at the end of that year, if I'm correct, and the budget for 2023 was done in Anaplan. Also, then we built new models, and of course now, from January 2026, we have more than 500 new users. So this year, we want to do the project reports part two, because there's always some new things we want to add onto it. We want to build that pipeline model, as I mentioned, the quote generator, and of course, we want to start using ADO, and also we are looking to start using the workflow solution, the Workflow tool. So, yes, that's it.