Weathering the Storm: Overcoming Challenge and Achieving Success
At Spaulding Ridge, we've been working closely with many clients who have found new and creative ways to leverage Anaplan during this tumultuous year to closely monitor their business and prepare for the future. Some are finding significant value in pre-existing Anaplan applications to help guide them to solve complex issues during these times of uncertainty. Today, we're highlighting Anaplan solutions that are being used to better plan and prepare for the future.
Supply Chain Predictability
A large consumer goods company has been able to utilize Anaplan's flexibility and ease of use to predict supply chain impacts from multiple disruptive events. Late last year they were able to prepare for multiple tariff scenarios disrupting their supply chain. This allowed them to take proactive measures, and with this improved insight into their supply chain, they were able to better manage their inventory to reduce shortages and maximize their profitability for any scenario. Within the current environment, they have not been faced with decreased demand but had been forced to temporarily shut down manufacturing facilities. With Anaplan, they can accurately predict future inventory level issues, focus their efforts to prevent those future inventory issues, and, where necessary, minimize the financial impact of supply outages.
Cash Flow Forecasting
A large airline services company was able to quickly utilize their existing Anaplan environment to provide more detailed insight into their 13-week cash flow. The airline industry was one of the first to be impacted by the events of this year. Within one week, they were able to expand upon their existing FP&A implementation to add cash flow forecasting capabilities and have been using Anaplan to analyze future cash flows within the major lines of their business. They can also predict future periods where a cash infusion may be required and analyze cash flows for multiple scenarios depending on the duration and severity of the reduction in demand for their services. This allows them to be proactive and adjust variables such as workforce and operating costs to ride out the current storm.
These companies have been able to quickly pivot and utilize their Anaplan models to address the problems of today. With any other technology, they would likely have had to take down their applications, build something new in Excel, and be slow to react to market conditions. How were these clients able to do this so quickly?
- They are highly enabled on the Anaplan platform and have learned to manage change as a regular course of doing business.
- They can quickly derive new boards/views, insights, and metrics on the fly thanks to Anaplan's flexibility.
- They work closely with a partner to provide thought leadership that they can incorporate into their models. In some cases, they have used assets from a partner to augment their existing models.
- They have driven adoption within the organization such that their business users expect to derive the answers to their planning challenges in Anaplan. This made it easy to roll out new features and parts of the processes to address today’s challenges.
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These are just a few of the ways you can use Anaplan to help manage, plan, and prepare for the unknown. Anaplan is an excellent way to monitor and navigate your supply chain and overall cash flow to better help your organization succeed in the future and keep revenue at its highest level possible during these uncertain times. Supply chain agility and liquidity and cash flow are key for success in uncertain times. Comment below and share the ways your team and organization are leveraging Anaplan to help forecast and save time for effective rapid change.
Shane Betlinski is a Director at Spaulding Ridge, LLC, and has been working with the Anaplan platform for over three years with extensive experience in Supply Chain and Demand Planning.
Founded in 2018, Spaulding Ridge is a top management consulting firm, dedicated to client success and helping organizations implement and adopt best-in-cloud technology to solve their most pressing challenges. We provide the office of the CFO financial clarity to Sales and Operational complexity by integrating financial and sales SaaS Platforms.