Kevin Crosby 0:00:21.2: 

All right, my name is Kevin Crosby. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Fairfield-Maxwell, which is a private, family-owned trust. We're very similar to a private equity, but most of my career, I've been a Chief Financial Officer, and I've happened to put in a few different consolidation systems. The first one I led was, I hate to say this, 26 years ago, but it was Hyperion, which then Oracle has purchased, and that was really the first Cadillac consolidation system. First let me give you a little bit of information about Fairfield. Why don't you introduce yourself there, James. 

 

James Glau 0:01:05.4: 

Yes, James Glau. Nice to see you all here. I work in the consolidation arm of the Applications Center of Excellence, and I'm here for primarily my looks and my radio voice, but here to help facilitate just a nice discussion today about what it looks like, what it means to go through a consolidation implementation, and why Anaplan. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:01:28.1: 

What I like to do is my presentation is going to be brief, and hopefully we can have a question-and-answer session. We've done this several times and there's a lot of interest in this product, and I got a lot of good questions, and I could give you our experiences with the product, and what led to our journey, and so on, and so forth. I'll give you a little bit now. Like I said, we're a private family fund. We own a lot of disparate businesses. We're in food, we're in construction. We are the company that puts up all those signs in Times Square and Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. We have another company that makes aggregate products that go into the building of pools, and also landscaping, and a lot of other products that come out of sand and gravel. We own a company that is a franchise business for signs, but we're a conglomerate of different companies, and the idea is to spread our investments in different areas. They had their investments concentrated in oil and gas and shipping, which were very cyclical. We've sold the majority of those, and we're buying many businesses, and we don't manage them from the corporate office. Myself and one other person gets involved in the corporate office, but at the corporate office, we provide some services. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:02:58.2: 

Mainly we interface with banks, like a private equity would. We do the deals. Our due diligence is done out of there. We overall manage these companies from helping them set their strategy and their organization structure, and things of that nature. What's different from us and private equity is we don't have a timeline, so when we acquire these companies, oftentimes we'll own them for a much longer period than a private equity would. We're buying them to build them, not to sell them right away. That's enough about us. I went through most of this. I would say oftentimes our acquisitions are privately held companies, and usually it's either first, second, or third generation, and they don't have anybody to pass it down to. Usually some life event happens, they decide that they have to have an exit plan, and sometimes they put it up to sell to the masses, and we get these deals from investment bankers normally. Then we'll bid on a company, but what we add to it is we'll work with the owners on a transition, and we won't be like a private equity and switch everybody out, and go through massive quick changes. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:04:28.3: 

Okay, now the product. In 2020, right when COVID started, our company, we previously did our consolidations using Excel spreadsheets, and one person did that, the controller. As we were growing, I knew that the other need we had is the CEO and the C-suite wanted a dashboard, and they wanted KPIs for each of the business units. I told them, 'Well, you need a database to have this information. You can't have it in a bunch of spreadsheets, and you need a tool to get this information from your various business units that are all over the world and consolidate it into a database.' For that, we needed a consolidation software, and how many in this room are now either working with a consolidation system or looking to possibly purchase a consolidation system? Okay. Well, oftentimes people live with the spreadsheets, and it works okay, because they don't have a lot of complexity in their consolidation, but as you grow, especially in our company, we have different exchange rates for different companies. We have different parts. Some companies we own 100 per cent, some we own different percentages.  

 

Kevin Crosby 0:05:57.3: 

We have to do equity interest. There are complications to our consolidation, and as you grow, you definitely need a consolidation system. There's no doubt about it. You are working with tools that really aren't meant to do a consolidation, unless you have a consolidation system. We had a search, and we did this properly. We went out to Planful. We did get Fluence involved, because of knowing Fluence, because I didn't know Fluence at the time. There was a company by the name of Vena that made an FP&A package, and they partnered with them, and we had an FP&A need, an analytical need, and like I said, we looked at Planful. We looked at OneStream, and Prophix was the other one. I think there was one other, but I can't remember the name of that last one, and we went through the process of asking everybody the same question and looking through. There were two big reasons why I liked Fluence. One of them is they were the ones that looked at it from and utilized Excel as the reporting tool, so if you knew Excel, it was very easy to report out of their database. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:07:18.2: 

Everything was Excel based, and so what happens in a lot of these consolidation systems is they have their own language for reporting, and not as many people utilize it then. It's very difficult, that learning curve. You usually have one or two, a very select group that would learn the reporting, and not a lot of people are touching that database. Well, with this product, the learning curve to get up to speed for reporting wasn't steep, so I liked that, and a lot of their tools were based off the Microsoft platform, which everybody uses. The other thing I liked about it is that I knew the programmer, just by happenstance, without getting into that story, but because I had experience in another company that utilizes a program by [?native IBM Controller 0:08:08.6], the same program that wrote that, wrote Fluence, and I knew that that program was a very solid program, so I gave it a chance, and I didn't regret it. We were one of the first customers of Fluence, and we had the income statement and balance sheet up in just a couple of months, a little over two months it was. Now the one thing I tell everybody is the thing we did before that two months started is we knew the design of what we wanted in that database. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:08:43.8: 

We had already figured out what we wanted to collect in our corporate chartered accounts, we had that designed. We knew what we wanted to capture from each of our business units. We didn't need the consultants to come in and tell us that. We knew that already, so we put that structure of what we wanted to collect in this database before the consultants ever arrived. They could guide you through that, but you could think through that on your own, and then we were off to the races. They build the product, and they supported that implementation, but we worked with them, obviously, to get the history loaded, and the history tied out, the reports structured the way we wanted to. It was a fairly painless implementation of just a couple of months, again for the income statement and balance sheet. The cashflow took us a little longer. A lot of that was due to someone had a health issue in the family, and so she couldn't focus on it. In our company, there was one person that was the keeper of the keys to cashflow, but when we really focused on that, that took about two months to get it really up and running to the level that you really needed, and it's a solid cashflow. That's one of the more challenging statements is cashflow. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:10:03.7: 

As you guys know, you're looking beyond the trial balance, which is the income statement of balance sheet. You have to get the movements in there and just structuring that out for all the nuances and the different companies takes a little bit of time. We got that and it works just fine, and we're using it for our KPIs. Our business units are very different, so we have different KPIs for each of them. The other thing that we did different than some companies is we pushed the product down to the business units, because we have many business units, and our business units consolidate. They complete their monthly closing and upload their file into Anaplan by the fourth workday, so they do their closing, and they load it on the fourth workday, and it takes us now about two days. We have one person that does that consolidation, and then a director of finance comes in and does the final review and final tie up. One person spends a little bit over a day and then the other person probably spends, depending on what happened in that quarter, what has to be analyzed, let's say half a day to a day to wrap it up. It took us over 15 days just to get the financials from our business units before, so it's a rapid improvement. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:11:31.2: 

That wasn't just all Fluence. A lot of that was just putting different disciplines in how the business units close, but it has been a game changer for us. Like I said, we rolled out KPIs. We're rolling out dashboard right now. We had dashboard earlier, but we did our KPIs with our latest acquisitions, and we're rolling out the new dashboard now. What we're planning on doing next is looking at Anaplan's FP&A, so we're still planning and forecasting in Excel, and then we have an upload file that just ends up being a CSV file that loads into Fluence, and then we do our comparisons of actual versus plan or forecast. To build a more robust planning model, we want to look at what Anaplan has to offer, and we're going to do that in the next couple of months. 

 

James Glau 0:12:36.2: 

For some of you out there, you're hearing the term Fluence, maybe for the first time, and just to clarify. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:12:42.3: 

Yes, we should have done that. 

 

James Glau 0:12:43.1: 

Yes, Anaplan acquired Fluence a couple of years ago now. It was a private company out of Toronto. It had quite the heritage, if you will, or pedigree in the consolidation space, and since is now Anaplan Consolidation, but it came with some other products as well, including Anaplan Excel. For those of you that are using the Anaplan Excel add-in today, that might sound or ring a bell for you, be familiar. When Kevin speaks to all of the reporting or all of the interaction in the solution being Excel based, it's really using this Anaplan Excel add-in, so we've got a lot of, what, FP&A folks in the crowd today, by a show of hands. I bet you we've got a number of you out here. If you're using the newest iteration, if you will, of Anaplan Excel's add-in, you know it connects to models and modules quite seamlessly and easy, and there are a number of benefits. If you're interested, Ben, over here, will be doing a session later on that, but that exact same tool sits on top of any Anaplan data, and that includes the consolidation models and any other model you might have over there. 

 

James Glau 0:13:48.5: 

It really unifies that experience and the reporting capabilities, insomuch that in Kevin's case, he can get all the consolidation, actual results, and even do some scenarios if you want, KPIs, right out of that model. Now mix that with your plans and forecasts, right, and then imagine, if you will, that actual data is flowing over there, and now your actuals are being updated. Again, the reports would be updated in real time. It just makes the experience a lot more concise, accurate, timely, all those kinds of things. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:14:21.2: 

You could load any data from there. 

 

James Glau 0:14:24.3: 

Good point. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:14:24.3: 

Usually you would extract your trial balance out and load that. Obviously, you have to map it and keep up. If you add up any new accounts and everything, you have to map them in there, but any data source, you can extract and load, or you could even build. They have a workflow process with their software, and you could have the templates for any static information you want entered, headcount or anything else that you want them to either pull or key in, so you can do things like calculate KPIs. 

 

James Glau 0:14:59.5: 

So you are using the Anaplan Excel input form capability to, what, capture movements? 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:15:05.2: 

Yes, we use [?DataBlend 0:15:06.8] for some of our business units. Some of our business units have Oracle NetSuite, and we use DataBlend on those, and some of them have other file structures that we'll just do a simple extract and load. Like I said, our future plan is trying to tie that Excel back to a model that we can download. What I wanted to build with the models with Anaplan is you want to build a planning model that you can port back into your ERP system, so your actuals are managed against a target, and you're developing those targets, and what you're shooting for, or what your monitoring in your planning system. So your actuals can very quickly be managed against what you thought was going to happen, and you need to understand quickly why, and you're trying to tell the management team, the operations team what's happening financially. You're trying to tell them that story, and that's what you've got to get good at. That's what makes you more useful in terms of being able to work with the management team is explaining to them, from a financial perspective, what's important, what they should be focusing on, and more importantly, what you need to do to fix it. That's what you're trying to do with all these systems. Feed their feedback loops. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:16:35.2: 

You're trying to get that, where not only you know it's a variance, but why, and then nirvana is what do you have to do to fix it? What's your input so it gets back on track, or if you're blowing a number positive, why? Is it accurate? If it's unexpected, the first question somebody has is what happened? Why is it higher than what we expected? Well, you've got to tell the story why, and build that story with facts, and that's what these tools are all about. 

 

James Glau 0:17:12.4: 

Great. I know we're at time, but that ties in for those planners out there in the room. Have you ever been waiting and twiddling your thumbs and biting your nails, or blowing bubbles while you're waiting on the finance team to get you consolidated actuals to update forecasts? Has anybody ever suffered from that dilemma, or no? Oh, you guys have it so easy. You have it so easy. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:17:37.2: 

A lot of, I would say, younger C-suite people oftentimes want to see things on dashboards and they want to get the information themselves. A lot of other people want it printed out for them, or a PDF to look at. I don't have any paper, everything's PDF, but I'm also not playing in a product. Other people are touching that product and I'm seeing the output from it, and you want that to be as easily accessible, and for people to see things the way they want to see it. Oftentimes I involve people in the design of reports, although you don't want them to go too wild with it. You want to keep it within the design of your database. You want people to see things in the way they need to see it to make a decision. Any other questions? Anaplan, Fluence and then Anaplan have been fantastic partners. Everybody I meet is the A-Team, and they know their technology, and the best thing that has happened for Fluence is now with the marriage with Anaplan, they're building a real roadmap of other products that would really fit in nicely with this consolidation system. That's the future for this product, how it ties in with the rest of their solution. 

 

James Glau 0:19:17.5: 

Thanks, Kevin. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:19:18.3: 

All right. Thanks. 

 

James Glau 0:19:19.1: 

It's always good spending time with you. 

 

Kevin Crosby 0:19:20.7: 

Thanks. Appreciate it, thanks. 

 

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