Anaplan Solutions That Helped Our Planning
Spaulding Ridge, a global professional services firm with over 165 employees worldwide, kicked off our digital transformation journey internally at the start of the year. The main three components of this journey included replacing our ERP system with NetSuite, developing a series of Anaplan use cases, and improving our CRM system, Salesforce. Here we will address how Anaplan has improved our digital transformation journey.
Over the last six months, Spaulding Ridge has rapidly deployed several use cases across Finance, Sales, Alliances, and Human Resources. As you can see above in our honeycomb roadmap, we started our journey with a strong foundation by first building out our Data Hub. After the foundation was in place, we were able to then expand to building our Company Scorecard, Utilization Tracking and Forecasting, followed by more Finance use cases. These use cases provided vital insights into performance and enabled leadership to make data-driven business decisions. It was even more critical as a Center of Excellence to have a Data Hub, which helped us to scale and continue our momentum for rapid deployment throughout this time.
More About Connected Planning:
- Connected Planning: How Do We Get There?
- The 3 Pillars of Connected Planning: Part 3—Plans
- Delivering Successfully in the 'New Normal'
As concerns grew around the potential impact of the global pandemic, we re-prioritized our roadmap as an Operations team away from our original plan to support Human Resources and Recruiting use cases, and towards use cases such as Sales Forecasting, Cash Flow Forecasting, and Scenario Planning. These use cases were a priority to address the challenging economic climate. Additionally, as a business, we have employees across different countries, many technologies, and multiple alliances partnerships, all with their own unique set of challenges and impacts.
Sales Forecasting was top of mind to understand the impact of the pandemic on our future revenue and, therefore, our hiring plan. We quickly implemented changes in Salesforce to assess risk and profitability and integrated that into our Anaplan model. There we enabled leadership to complete traditional forecast scenarios—commit and best case. This transparency provided us the ability to understand the business outlook, make data-driven decisions, and set attainable goals for our sales team. We plan to continue to use our sales forecast to plan and execute against our second half-year targets.
Cash Flow Forecasting and Scenario Planning were also a high priority during this time. By integrating with NetSuite for the latest invoice and charges data, we were then able to understand our cash flow and better manage our accounts receivable during this time when liquidity is critical.
As we look to the rest of the year, we will continue to expand our Anaplan abilities in Finance and Sales, as well as support new development with Human Resources and Marketing. As you can see in our Spaulding Ridge Connected Planning vision below, we plan to continue our business transformation journey this year and look forward to continued success with the Anaplan platform.
Liz Schaffer is a Director at Spaulding Ridge, LLC, and has been working with the Anaplan platform for over five years with extensive experience in Operations and Sales Performance Management. 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. We help: • Finance gain control – Increasing financial effectiveness, insight, and impact • Sales increase Productivity – Hitting quota more quickly, consistently and efficiently • Operations increase Competitiveness – Through productivity rates, customer service outcomes, and efficiency For more information, visit http://www.spauldingridge.com or contact us at info@spauldingridge.com.
Comments
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Did you find being an Anaplan partner you already had a lot of the jigsaw pieces that were perhaps more readily deployable than might've been the case were you not?
And great example of Connected Planning being delivered, really practicing what you preach!
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@andrewtye - As many customers do, we made the decision to start from scratch for most use cases in order to customize Anaplan to our needs, however, with the cash flow in particular, we did use our own app as a basis for this development!
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