George Trowse, Manulife: Manulife is one of the world’s leading financial services companies. We have insurance businesses in Asia, in Canada, and under John Hancock in the U.S. We earn about $7 billion in core earnings and have over 30,000 employees.
Before we used Anaplan, we had a very manual and long budgeting and forecasting process. We did not have the ability to drill in reporting. We had no ability to do streamlined and accurate scenario analysis.
Zahir Mohamed, Manulife: What we’ve done with Anaplan is we’ve built the foundation for our financial planning and analysis system. It is now the single tool that is used to aggregate the company, whether it’s insurance businesses or wealth businesses.
George: With the implementation of Anaplan and our finance transformation, we have reduced our manual inputs by 75% year-to-date. By the end of next year, we will have reduced the time we take to produce our plan by over 80%. We’ve improved the accuracy of the forecast and the budget. We have improved our ability to create effective reporting and then to be able to drill into that reporting.
Zahir: Anaplan is enabling transparency into the forecasts that we produce on a monthly basis. It’s enabling us to better understand the drivers, and it enables us to tweak those forecasts, then test various scenarios.
George: And now we can do a cross-company scenario analysis, which helps us reallocate resources to our highest-value businesses.
Zahir: I’m Zahir Mohamed, VP, Financial Planning and Analysis at Manulife Financial.
George: I’m George Trowse, Head of Planning and Analysis and Transformation Delivery for Manulife.
Both: And we plan with Anaplan.
