Connor Donohoe 0:00:09.4:

Welcome everybody to one of the breakout sessions, I'm not James Weeks, James is there, I'm Connor Donohoe, I'm VP for UK and Ireland at Anaplan and I'm introducing this session. So actually I have an interest stat to start off with, by the end of 2025, this year, the compute power that is going to run AI globally will require twice the annual electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Quite a lot. AI aside, you've heard a lot about AI, the global unrest, geopolitical uncertainty, all of that is contributing to an ever increasing need for power independence, particularly in the UK. Our next speaker and his team are here doing something about that, and I guess I'm proud to say that Anaplan, in its own little way, is helping power UK clean energy for the next generation and deliver that. This is going to be a very applicable session, if you were in the previous one, on Neil Thomas' application outlook and integrated financial planning, integrated workforce planning, operational workforce planning. James is going to bring it to life with the great work that the team at Sizewell C are doing. So without further ado I'm going to start with a video, bring the intro to life and then hand over to James. [Sizewell C video plays 0:01:39.2]. So please give a warm welcome to the director of finance and investor relations at Sizewell C, James Weeks. [Applause].

James Weeks 0:03:19.5:

Cheers mate, thank you. Good afternoon. So a nationally significant project, a nationally significant project which the prime minister and his government have recently given the greenlight to build. It's the first British majority-owned power station in over 30 years, which is launching this golden age of clean energy abundance and securing thousands of jobs. As you can see from the video, we have started, we've started on that journey, and we've made significant progress to date, and with that brings Anaplan as part of that journey. No pressure. My name's James Weeks, I'm the director of finance and investor relations at Sizewell C, and I've got the privilege of representing the team up here today. My role has gone over the last few years of having a team of about five to over 50 now in finance and investor relations, and really that is focusing on the business partnering, the actual delivery, the operational part of the business, understanding what the numbers are doing, what we're spending money on, keeping cost control. Also very much thinking about how we forecast that and how we keep a really tight grip on that as we have to draw down funding or, indeed, from a credibility standpoint with our investors. My plan today is to give you a little bit of flavor about Sizewell C and then tell you about how and why we're using Anaplan. 

James Weeks 0:04:52.7:

First, I won't miss the opportunity just to remind us of why we need nuclear. We need constant clean power on the national grid in the UK. We're in Ireland, we need that baseload to be able to, as part of the mix, deliver the 320 terawatt hours of electricity [?a day - signal break 0:05:12.3]. Importantly, and linked to what Connor said, the increase that is expected over the coming years to potentially even double that. This year about - or last year, 2024, about 13 per cent of the UK's electricity was from nuclear, so it already exists in the country, but by 2030 Sizewell B, which is the one next door to the one we're building, will be the only one left. So there's a real need to build new stations, including one that you might have heard of called Hinkley Point C in the West Country. Why is that important? Well, energy security is key, less reliance on other countries for the energy that comes into the country, making sure that we've got grid stability, which keeps prices as stable as we can, which as consumers is absolutely key for us all. It is a way of doing the best we can with the land we've got on a small island, so the smallest land footprint per terawatt hour of output is really important, as well, and importantly linked back to what Connor said, the growth in AI and the data centers and the expectations of the electrification of the grid is going to be key to making sure that we meet that.

James Weeks 0:06:24.8:

So powering Britain's future is one of the slogans that we use at Sizewell C. What does it mean? Well, clean energy always on. The good news about nuclear, once it's on, it stays on. We are building, as you can see in the visual, it's a pretty decent building. In fact, there are two units next to each other, it will be a 3.2 gigawatt. What does that actually mean? It means six million homes that we'd power, which is about seven per cent of the UK's electricity, which was said in the video. Good news, once you've built it, once you turn it on, it stays on for 60 years. Most modern nuclear industry - nuclear power stations also extend for another 20 and it's taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, as well. We're underway, we started construction last year, we're achieving all of the milestones that we said we'd do on time and on budget at the moment. A lot of that is getting the site ready for construction and a huge amount of associated development around the region. We're building offices, we've got logistics parts to house a lot of the equipment and kit that we'll need now and through operations. We're, of course, having a laser focus on some of the ecological consequences of building locally by building new triple SI sites and making sure that we're close on that.

James Weeks 0:07:48.4:

To give a scale, we're at 1200 people on site a day at the moment, that'll probably rise to between 8,000 and 10,000 a day on site at peak construction. There's other things that Sizewell C is doing which I think build context, which I'll pick up on later. We're trying to be as innovative as we can, innovating in delivery, it's a 10 to 12-year build, so things will change in that time. We are replicating other power stations, but things will change. So whether it be making decision making in a room of lava labs, as we call it, or whether we're saying let's have buses that will be - if we have 150 buses transporting people on and off the site, let's make them hydrogen, not diesel. We're innovating as best we can along the way on there. It's a British project, backed by the government, 70 per cent construction value will come into Britain, which is huge for us as a country, and there'll be over 3500 UK suppliers from small businesses to large businesses, creating jobs. Speaking of jobs, we're transforming lives, so a lot of it is around generations. This is going to be a 60, 80, 100-year company, we have to build now with apprenticeships coming in, we do a lot with the schools, and it will create 70,000 jobs in the wider supply chain. Communities are key, it's in a small area within Suffolk, but it has national reach, so that's something that we take very seriously, including helping the local charities. We are boosting wildlife, it has an impact, of course it does, but the overall impact is stronger. The net gain is 19 per cent biodiversity overall and we do ringfence money to go to the environmental trust and others within the local area.

James Weeks 0:09:36.6:

Finally, to give a flavor on Sizewell C, we are, indeed, looking to operate within its own specific financial model, the RAB model, which is already used in over £200 billion worth of infrastructure projects across the UK, like Heathrow and Thames Tideway Tunnel. With that it'll mean lower financing costs and we can attract private investors to bring in that outside expertise, as we start this journey and go forwards. Just to give a flavor on the timeline, we've been in about a ten-year development phase. It takes that long to get all the planning consents, development consent orders up and running, getting organized for it. We're past that now, we've got the government behind us, we've got the government investment and we're now this year looking and striving for a financial investment decision, which is effectively bringing on third-party investors to add to the government and EDF, that are already part of it. We then go into a ten to twelve year construction phase, which we've started. We then have a 60-year period of operations, and then beyond that there's either an extra 20 and some decommissioning at the end of it. So as I say, a 100-year company in the context of what I'm going to talk about next.

James Weeks 0:10:48.7:

So what does that mean for today here at Anaplan? That's Sizewell, I think it's important to understand the scale of it. It will become a FTSE100-sized business, it's billions of pounds, it's taxpayer's money, to start with, as we get that private investment in. So what are the data points? Why do we care about being organized in the finance team and as part of the corporate? Well, we're spending £7 million a day now, we've just spent £150,000 in the last ten minutes I've spoke. We've got 1500 employees, we had processed 14,000 invoices last year, we do operate in a multicurrency environment and we've already got 1500 live contracts. Now, some of you in the room will work in bigger companies, bigger projects, but just to give a flavor of the scale, that creates quite a lot of data and something that, of course, we need to organize. So what was the case for change? Why did we think we need to think about Anaplan? We need a data strategy, we need a digital roadmap? What was it? Well, Sizewell C is under the spotlight, when you're frontpage news the due diligence, the exposure you have to the government, to Ofgem, to shareholders, to auditors is real and they are requesting financial control, they are requesting planning, they are requesting accurate forecasting on where we think we'll be.

James Weeks 0:12:19.6:

So the case for change, one of them was we needed to be financially independent. Sizewell C is a company in its own right, other big projects sometimes are part of a wider project, like Hinkley Point is EDF, for example, with its own right that means financial independence, that means our own data to deal with, our own systems to work through. There is inevitably, in a high-growth environment, sometimes a bit of a disconnect between top-down strategy and bottom-up plans, particularly when we're geographically disparate. So that's something that we've had to really think about, how do we bridge that divide? Scenario modelling, forecasting, accuracy of that is changing. Our case for change is we need that rolling, we need a finger on the pulse with forecasting at the right level of detail at the right time where we can then talk about that and have credibility behind the numbers, what we're saying externally. We need to bring together functions, I'm sure a lot of you recognize working across in our instance it's mainly treasury, finance and HR at the moment. Bringing even those functions together, culturally, as well as geographically, or as well as in a mindset way, has been really important and one of the cases for change.

James Weeks 0:13:40.5:

Then I heard it before today quite a bit, but strategic decision making. There is of course an ambition to get to - can the people in the teams, within Sizewell C, create a bit of capacity to do more strategic thinking? To ask those follow-up questions? To find out more about what is happening? Are we doing what we say we're doing, is there trends happening? How can we get early warning signals? All of that is one of the reasons for our case for change and, of course, our vision is that Anaplan provides that platform to enable us that transformation, which they've started doing. Which I'll tell you a little more about now. So the honeycomb or the hexagons I think are probably seen on a few presentations today, but really what we did is we recognized there were several challenges. For us there were technical gaps, but actually a lot of it was culture. It was that cultural shift that we had to change or have to change to be able to impact this progress.

James Weeks 0:14:40.9:

So what we've done is we've gone early, we've accelerated our thinking by teaming up with Anaplan, as a partner early on to get the learnings from other clients, to look for best practice, to think about how we can knit this together. I'm pleased to say that the moment the hexagons on the page are the things we're doing at. Some of them are much more - some of them I'd say complete and up and running, some of them are very much in progress now. The three teams I mentioned earlier, finance, HR and treasury are the areas that we're trying to knit. So some of that might be the detail of your work breakdown structure, the drilldown there, some of it might be about ensuring your data input comes from the right source. We have SAP, S/4HANA is our underlying financial tool, just for awareness. What we've then done is we've consciously built this hexagon, this honeycomb, knowing that it's on no [signal break 0:15:36.7] the scale will build and as we go through this, going from maybe £7 million a day to £40 million a day, in the next few years, we're able to build this in a way that knits together. The best thing we feel is how all of this is integrated, and that's been one of the gamechangers for us about how that, the data flows and the integration comes through.

James Weeks 0:15:59.3:

It allows the HR team to think in finance, the finance to think in HR, more to go on that, but it's really started well. Some of the key challenges we've had along this transformation is that we've got a challenging landscape. So we have been born as a project out of a bigger company, we're now trying to become our own company, so you have legacy systems, stuff that I suspect haunts most people in the room. There are legacy systems, so we've had to think about how we work through that, can we cut if off? Do we have to migrate? Can we be brave? Oh, it's a bit difficult here, we've had to think through that. Siloed working is real, even within the finance team, and that's something that we've had to really work hard at to make sure there's a clear [unclear word 0:16:51.7], who's doing what and, indeed, across different functions. Knowing that HR and finance often aren't the source of the data, it comes from a delivery director out on site, or it comes from a project manager over here. That data and those siloes are something we've got to break down.

James Weeks 0:17:08.7:

The integration I've mentioned, but really the key thing here is we really recognize the amount of manual work that was going on and a lot of that, of course, was driven by Excel. Then what we wanted to do, speaking of Excel, is move away from that and have somewhere where we can connect. The amount of times we were saying, 'Oh, that isn't the version you sent me,' 'No, I've connected to version 2.1, it's actually 2.0.4.2.' You know, that is real, I can see smiles in the room, but that was real and it was causing issues because of the pace we're having to move at on a rolling forecast basis. So what we've done is a little bit of a busy slide, but effectively I would say we're humble, but confident with where we've got to on this journey. Humble in the fact that we know that we're at the beginning of a 100-year company and things will change. Humble in the fact that we know that the teams are going to grow and we'll get new ideas. Humble on the fact that the technology will probably change, or apps will be built which will disrupt something, but confident that we're building, slowly but surely, on the basis that we can then build on, change, move and try and be as agile as we can. A lot of words there that obviously turning into reality is the key, but this year we've said, right, let's get a roadmap. We started foundation wanting to get to extending it to the enterprise.

James Weeks 0:18:32.8:

So in the foundation it very much was about data cleanse, data fields, thinking about how we can configure some of the existing models, using Anaplan to challenge us and the teams there about do you really want to do it like that? Should you not use an off the shelf GR accounts, rather than this? Or other things there. We've also really brought together HR, finance and treasury early and I think that's one of our wins this year. Really tried to settle on the structure of SAP, the work breakdown structure, and thinking about how that will all connect. So once that foundation's been led, which we've been doing, we've moved through to bringing in the HR user case, to win the hearts and minds we decided that HR was the thing to go at next, to really make sure, because it affects every budget holder. They always get challenged about their FT, or they get challenged about the spend rate or the fact that we're trying to recruit quick enough. So we decided to go at that and it's improved our - the basics of payroll reporting, it's improved the visibility of some of the detail per role. More importantly, it's created some dashboards, it's created some view and then we can have that real strategic meeting about saying here's the trend, is it not? Importantly it connects to the finance model, so when you tweak something it moves quickly automatically, not the F9 on Excel.

James Weeks 0:19:52.7:

We're then moving into the stage of enhancing those finance capabilities. We have an all right finance forecasting model in Excel, it will be much better once it's in Anaplan and it is already being built and showing some really good signs as I stand here today. The ability of Anaplan to be able to connect to S/4HANA is absolutely critical for us, and the improved consistency that comes out of this I've already noticed. The thing I really like is the mood of the finance team, they prefer it! It's more interesting and it drives this sort of want and this need and this desire to actually do a better job, which I think is really important. We're going to move into cross-function integration. Treasury is important, cash is king, making sure that we've got that integration there, making sure that we can think about having strategic dashboards, different visuals, early warning signals, one step ahead when we're talking to not only our investors, but also our executive team. Then the future, the future partnership I think is both with Anaplan, but it's also partnership across our business. I think we've got to go and champion that into the delivery team in a world where the finance team might be only a small percentage of the overall numbers, the 10,000 people on the site a day. How do we get the project managers getting the data, getting some info and getting some accountability as to what they're doing? A lot of it drives from these basics that we're going to build.

James Weeks 0:21:18.8:

So it's quite a compressed roadmap, being accelerated, but we're trying to do it as quickly as we can so that we can test it and roll it out, knowing that everything we're doing, there's always the question, can we scale it? Can we scale it? Can we scale it? I think that's one of the things, and it isn't always possible, I'm not going to say we've done that perfectly and there are some things we've said I'm not sure it is, but most things are and that's really important. So what are some of the operational benefits we've seen? The key is to make the lives of the business partners, the people using the data easier, that's certainly my vision. So what we've been doing is looking at that and saying from an operational basis can you improve efficiency? Which creates time, which creates times for them to do something much more value add. I know there's lots of buzzwords there, but it is really a thing. The collaboration's absolutely key, the conversations that have now happened between finance and HR are on a different level than they were before. Before they were talking about row 84 of an Excel spreadsheet and why it hasn't linked through, now they're talking about why that role is important, is it the right thing for the business? Is it at the right level? 

James Weeks 0:22:23.7:

The accuracy is improving, and I think it will do more and more, very confident with that because of the interconnection, because of the real-time updates, because of the lower manual effort that will come from - or the human error that can come from Excel. So the time efficiency gains, and I'm not going to sit here and say that I've done the - I'm not going to throw the business case at the financials, but I know it will save time and I know the forecasting will get better. Therefore, I'm going to say the financial impact's better for a minute, just for the benefit of time, but I'm really confident of that and have done some work. From a strategic point of view, there is a bigger and bigger need in a world where people are expecting stuff on their phones, on their apps, from our exec, from our managing directors, from our shareholders, for real-time info. Whilst we have to control that and release it at the right time, with the right narrative, a lot of what we're doing here is enhancing that reporting so that they can have an insight. That is something that we've got a long way to go, but certainly started that journey, which is already paying off. So what's it enabled us to do? Well, so far it's enabled us to achieve our construction milestones on time and budget. Now, clearly I think the delivery director might say it has something to do with him or her, but it is, indeed, certainly partly due to this behind the scenes.

James Weeks 0:23:38.2:

So just a slightly deeper example on finance business partners, given that that's in my team. An example here that I've used is they track actuals and commitments against purchase orders each month. So forgive me for going into detail, but it paints a picture, it's Excel, before Anaplan there was a lot of [signal break 0:23:58.8], there was a lot of updates, there was a lot of F9s, there was a lot of hoping it links through, version control, and business partners hated it. So they weren't really enjoying it. What we've already seen on this one is much more user-friendly apps, much more user-friendly and quicker information and it's on a two-click availability. Now, it's taken an effort to build, it doesn't just come quickly and we've had to think about it, but it is genuinely an example of how the operational benefits are there. The benefit to me is I get information quicker, I get early warning signals and we can - and the team are happier. I think that's one thing that I'm really keen on. So what are some of the key things that we've learnt through this accelerated journey with the team? Anaplan makes things simpler, not just from the actual application, once you're on the screen and all of that, but actually the conversation and the partnering with them. I think that's one thing that is clear. Andy didn't tell me to say that, so that is true.

James Weeks 0:25:08.9:

It also allows us to be slightly head in terms of how we're organizing our data and we know it's only going to go up, get more complicated, and obviously that then helps decision making. One of the key things, be brave with design phase, try and reduce rework, take that extra breath on the design phase, whilst we're moving quickly particularly we've been really thinking about get a third-party opinion, check with someone, make sure the different functions have seen it. Get input from all of the departments. It's been really key. Stay off the shelf, where possible, avoid the bespoke, previous speaker talked about trying to get the 80 per cent and we can always top it up 20. I think we inevitably will do, but we're trying to stay as firm as we can on the no change to the off-the-shelf. So much so that we're then changing practices and picking that battle with the end user and the end of the process, rather than at the frontend. Focusing on the outcome has been really important, now, but also can you put yourself in three years, ten years down the line, do you think you'll still want the same stuff? Hard to predict, but really helps the thinking, meant that we've taken the extra breath. Exec-level buy in is quite key, heard it a few times today, that is absolutely critical to know that they've got the backing, but the way to do that I've noticed with this is to show them the outcome and show them an app. Which is why we've gone early on some of it, here's a prototype, that's what you're going to get, oh, that's quite good, I like that, carry on.

James Weeks 0:26:47.9:

So there's been some things there. Now obviously that's easy to say and some of it's a big investment, so I'm not taking that for granted, but we do - really the exec buy in is key. Change champions have been absolutely key, some of the team are here today, but they absolutely drive it, without that there's no hope getting things along the line. Partnering early with Anaplan, which I've mentioned. So the overall thing that we've had from our exec is that it is quicker, the data is more reliable, and therefore it has improved the quality of our decision making. All easy words to say, but really it has made a difference and I really think it's going to make a big difference. Then the final thing, before I play the video of one of our team, just to give a flavor, to hear it from the people actually doing the work, people is absolutely important along this. You've mentioned the idea of me feeling about how the team are, but the Anaplan connection with the right people on our team, giving them the space to brainstorm, to problem solve, to work through the requirements, to think about the solutions and build, test, build, test, has been a real part of this. I think that's the thing. So the right team, the right attitude is, indeed, where I think we're going. So early on the stage, a 100-year company, maybe we're ten years of the way through, so we've got loads to go at. A nationally significant project, which is excited to be using Anaplan as a small part of what we're trying to build. I'm going to play the video, thank you. [Video plays 0:28:21.3]. [Applause].

Connor Donohoe 0:30:10.6:

Great presentation, really, really enjoyed that, thanks James. In that case, James, thank you very much, and Sizewell team, round of applause, finally.
[Applause].