Roseburg Forest Products builds visibility across its business

“Sawdust in the veins” is a core value at Roseburg Forest Products. That’s a colorful way to say that Roseburg’s people are passionate and committed to growing trees, processing them into the full spectrum of wood-based products (softwood and hardwood plywood, lumber, particleboard, MDF, LVL, I-Joist, and veneer), and delivering those goods to people who need them. Roseburg is vertically integrated, with some 600,000 acres of sustainably managed timberland and more than a dozen manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Visibility across the massive enterprise is the root of Roseburg’s success.

Not long ago, that visibility could be cloudy — particularly for Roseburg’s finance team. “The first run of a financial plan required two or three months of legwork,” recalls Mike Carr, Supply Chain Director at Roseburg. “And if late changes came in, or the process got abbreviated, the quality suffered.” Roseburg’s vertical integration, while a business strength, also presented a challenge. “There wasn’t always a connection between what the resource group could deliver and what the manufacturing plants needed,” Carr remembers.

Rapid scenario creation

The Roseburg team began to address these challenges with Anaplan in mid-2019. “We started with a goal to generate a financial plan by mid-October 2019,” Carr recalls. “We got the plan out on time — and then COVID hit.”

A team was assembled to generate responses to the pandemic using Anaplan’s scenario-modeling capabilities. “We were able to put several different options in front of our executive group in less than a week,” Carr recalls. In retrospect the “gloomy” scenarios didn’t play out — the pandemic prompted boom years for Roseburg — but the team had proven its agility at building financial scenarios with Anaplan and was empowered to continue the journey.

“Since then we’ve built a lot of internal Anaplan skills, including a number of people with ‘day jobs’ who are proficient model-builders,” Carr says. “We had a big presence from Allitix in our first year on Anaplan, using them to a great extent on the architectural and model-building side.”

“Roseburg started with a true Connected Planning vision, and immediately identified opportunities to get operational data aligned across finance and IT,” recalls Marc Delgado, Managing Partner at Allitix. “Since then they’ve built out their corporate FP&A plan and have begun building out their supply chain planning. Working with the Roseburg team has been incredibly successful, and they epitomize the Connected Planning journey.”

Running full-tilt

After the pandemic scenario exercise, the Roseburg team began building a long-range financial plan that would support operational goals. Divisional controllers and manufacturing plant leaders were empowered to build their annual plans in Anaplan, which then connected to financial results to provide profitability figures by facility. Facilities’ plans roll up to operations managers who cover multiple sites, manufacturing and sales leaders, and Roseburg’s executive leadership. Over time, the planning horizon was extended from one year to five.

Other Anaplan models round out Roseburg’s finance and supply chain plans, including:

• CapEx planning: All capital spending and planning, from new facilities to replacement equipment, is captured in Anaplan. CapEx plans tie back to long-term financial plans and provide insight into future manufacturing capacity.
• Sales Inventory Operations Planning (SIOP): This model brings sales data, inventory levels, and production output into one place to align production capacity with projected demand. The model also enables collaboration — for example, when equipment will be offline at one facility, other sites can see how that effects their operations and plan their response.
• Additional supply chain models: Product and supply chain costs attach to SKUs and end customers (such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Menard’s) through a Cost to Serve model, with Anaplan Optimizer recommending adjustments across thousands of SKU/customer combinations. Perfect Order supports on-time manufacturing, shipping, and delivery. A Product Costing model is also being developed.

The level of detail in the Anaplan solution, which Carr describes as “high-resolution,” meets or exceeds what Roseburg planners had pre-Anaplan. Meanwhile, data accuracy, timeliness, and reliability are improved. The solution covers Roseburg’s full integrated production process, enabling everyone to act in the best interests of the entire company. “When everything's running full tilt, we all benefit,” Carr says. “We have a global understanding of our status in Anaplan, versus one facility maximizing their situation over the others.”

Bang for the buck

That global understanding, and the performance improvements it delivers, are the most important benefits Roseburg gets from Anaplan. “Being able to see data from all of our operations was a key goal for us from the start,” Carr says. “We can drill down to the SKU level if we need to, and we can map out our people by work center. That's the high resolution we need in a vertically integrated business.”

Carr sees other benefits as well: Payback from CapEx projects is no longer hidden in spreadsheets, he says, and the ability to align production capacity with sales delivers “a lot of bang for the buck.” And the benefits extend to Roseburg’s executive leadership: “The financial package we put together for them is pretty robust, and it interfaces with all our facilities.”

The dynamic Anaplan ecosystem that Carr and the Roseburg team have created continues to bear fruit. “I’m sometimes surprised by how well everything operates, considering our scale and complexity,” Carr sums up. “We feel good about our progress, and we don’t plan on stopping.”