Ninety million households look to Roku for world-class entertainment in the comfort of their homes. Founded 20 years ago, Roku has become a global leader in streaming devices, TVs, smart home technology, and advertising services. “As we’ve grown, we’ve built a large user platform and an advertising business,” says Chris Ball, Senior Manager of FP&A Systems and Reporting at Roku. “That’s where the bulk of our revenue comes from today.”
As growth and new revenue streams added complexity to Roku’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A), legacy solutions increasingly couldn’t deliver capabilities the business required — things like multiple analytical models, including profitability by product areas, used for investment decision-making.
More dimensions, no workarounds
The Roku team conducted a thorough review of the market for a new solution and selected the Anaplan platform. (Ball recalls that Anaplan was the unanimous choice across corporate FP&A and business-unit teams.) Anavate Partners was tapped to help create the solution. “Anavate spent a lot of time with us, and they really made an investment in showing us how Anaplan could transform our finance modeling,” Ball says.
The Anaplan environment at Roku today includes CapEx and OpEx planning, inventory planning, and operational workforce planning. Using APIs and Anaplan Cloudworks, the Roku team has integrated Anaplan with Salesforce, multiple spreadsheets, and external data from Roku’s retail partners, and enabled report-building and data visualization using Tableau.
The structure of Roku’s Anaplan solution flexes to meet its diverse business needs. “The way that you forecast ads is completely different than the way you forecast selling hardware, so we have sub-models for different business lines,” explains Ball. “We roll up business-unit data into our corporate model, share it with the CFO, and commit it as our forecast.”
The Anaplan Polaris calculation engine facilitates modeling of this complex financial structure. Ball offers two examples: “We have a list of SKUs [stock keeping units] that we manage, we have another list of countries that we work in,” he says. “Anaplan Polaris enables us to work naturally with many dimensions without relying on workarounds.”
Rapid insights, greater collaboration
With finance and workforce planning models built on the Anaplan platform, teams across Roku have unlocked new business capabilities. “We do things in Anaplan that we just couldn’t do with our legacy system,” Ball says. For example, the team can quickly create different cuts of expense data, which helps leaders make investment decisions. “The business value is in fast time to data,” he continues. “If you can get to the data in Anaplan, then you can use it to make faster decisions.”
Collaboration across the business is also improved. “Our Anaplan models are all connected, so when a business team submits their financials, the corporate team can see it immediately,” Ball explains. “And within our devices business, we connected finance and sales so they can trade data back and forth, do scenario planning, and work more closely together using Anaplan.”
Ball and the Roku team also see the benefits of Polaris in both its user community and among its Anaplan specialists. “The end users love the reporting capabilities and the pivoting you can do directly in Anaplan with Polaris,” Ball says. “We’re able to slice and dice data, and have nine filters, and repivot it however you like, and it’s much faster than our previous solution.” And for Roku’s Anaplan developers, Polaris has become the default company standard. “It’s faster and easier to implement with Polaris,” Ball says. “And it can be a lot more natural when you’re working with high dimensionality. I wish we had made the decision sooner.”
