Before embarking on their connected planning journey, the client did not have a centralized planning process or technology solution. Sales teams and 30+ product divisions operated largely independently. While the business continued to grow with increasing healthcare demand and a successful business model, there was clearly room for operational and financial improvement.

Both business and finance teams faced common planning challenges. Data was cobbled together with SQL queries, custom scripts, and ETL tools, spreadsheets were traded back and forth between FP&A and hundreds of stakeholders in the field, and disconnects on key planning assumptions was common between four FP&A teams – Corporate, Division, Commercial, and Operations FP&A.

Sales and supply chain management teams ran on their own forecasts, leading to supply disconnects and elevated inventory levels. Agreeing on one plan took massive amounts of energy and time, adding both explicit and hidden inefficiency costs across the organization.

With a newfound focus on financial performance, the client embarked on several planning-related initiatives, including an Oracle EPM implementation for consolidation and total company reporting and an Anaplan pilot for operational planning.

Operations FP&A breaks ground with a 6-week pilot

OVG was engaged to lead the Operations FP&A pilot, which was initially slated for only 6 weeks and focused on planning the client’s distribution center expenses across 40+ locations. The pilot would be the first step in a crawl-walk-run approach.

The pilot was a success, and immediately greenlit to be rolled out to the field in time for planning, less than 12 weeks overall. The new process provided branch leaders in the field with full visibility into their financial targets, YTD progress, and key cost drivers. Planners were provided with forecast templates to update their baseline forecasts, and leadership used multi-level approval workflows to review and approve plans and outlooks in the system. Multiple data sources were centralized to drive modeling and tell the story.

The client and OVG then moved on to build similar capabilities for all Operations-related financials, including outbound freight, inbound freight, and inventory, bringing them together in management reporting. A consistent process and look and feel were applied to all areas, while still allowing for customized data, drivers, and forecast methodologies.

After deploying across Operations, the team engaged more than 200 stakeholders in planning, covered more than 10 individual planning use cases, and developed internal resources to own the technology infrastructure for the long-term.

Pioneering connected planning for an AI-enabled future

The Operation FP&A team’s rapid success did not go unnoticed across the organization. FP&A leadership agreed to start aligning further on both process and technology, following Operations’ example.

The team is now beginning work on cross-functional areas such as revenue planning and cash flow. AI-readiness is also top of mind, and OVG will be working with the client to coordinate with IT/BI teams to integrate with a broader Microsoft Fabric/Power Platform initiative to make planning insights available across the entire organization.

While the teams have made tremendous progress on Operation FP&A, there is much more value to be realized. Soon, operators will be able to engage in planning with simple low-code mobile apps, access information across sales, operations, and finance in one place, and even gather insights from specialized Copilots.

When OVG was first engaged by the client to help them implement Anaplan, the VP of FP&A was already drafting the S-1 in preparation for IPO. The team needed to move quickly to get ready to forecast and report as a public company.

In under 12 weeks, OVG worked with the client to stand up a 3-statement model in Anaplan, including employee-level headcount planning and management reporting for both external GAAP and internal Non-GAAP needs. Vendor expenses were summarized to top vendors by volume, reconciling forecasts with actuals and giving the client visibility and ability to manage spend they had not experienced before.

OVG helps the client evaluate the technology landscape

Several years later, the client needed to trim costs, and while they liked Anaplan, wanted to evaluate other planning technology solutions in search of savings. OVG worked with the client to evaluate several other solutions to ensure that they could meet the same functional requirements as Anaplan. OVG worked with different vendors, explored their platforms, and built small POCs on the client’s behalf.

Ultimately the client decided to move onto Planful.

Anaplan to Planful transition goes smoothly

Once the client decided to move to Planful, OVG was tasked with leading the transition. OVG resources ramped quickly on Planful and were able to smoothly transition the client from Anaplan to Planful in only 8 weeks without business impact. Services for the transition paid back in less than a year with software savings.

The switch and resulting savings ultimately helped position the client to be acquired by a strategic investor, completing a full private-public-private cycle. OVG continues to support the client on an ad hoc basis.

Following a private equity acquisition, this client was tasked with building a global FP&A function starting with a new VP and only one remaining team member. The client’s sponsors were focused on driving bottom-line improvement across the company’s ~10 products through both top-line growth and cost optimization.

Business operators were accustomed to running their products independently and many did not have sufficient visibility into their financial performance and opportunities to optimize margins. There was no central planning process and business partnership between FP&A and operators was virtually non-existent. The team also struggled with significantly expanded reporting requirements for sponsors.

OVG helps the client to lay a solid planning foundation

OVG was engaged to lead the initial implementation of Anaplan for the client. OVG helped the client to source and cleanse key financial and operational data and build planning models for both subscription- and transaction-based revenue, vendor-level operating expenses, and employee-level headcount. The team deployed extensive reporting to largely automate the client’s 100+ slide BOD reporting package, expanding beyond core financials to cover topline KPIs as well.

Within 16 weeks, the client was able to run monthly rolling forecasts from volume to EBITDA and cash flow in the system. The new team was able to successfully navigate its first annual planning cycle with support from OVG.

As the client FP&A team grew and new resources ramped, OVG helped to onboard and train them on both the process and system.

Improving planning across the business

After FP&A had its critical infrastructure in place, the team continued onto several other more strategic and process-related projects, including:

• Unwinding and simplifying corporate allocations that had proliferated over time.

• Interviewing key stakeholders across the organization to identify revenue growth opportunities, synthesizing results for finance leadership early in planning.

• Designing a new ‘Estimated Booking Metric’ in partnership with Global Revenue Operations, identifying key drivers, designing and testing different modeling approaches, and implementing the final model in Salesforce. The new metric was a ~35% improvement over the status quo in terms of estimating 1^st year revenue for the client’s B2B channel.

• Conducting workshops to align the business on definitions of key metrics and hierarchies for reporting, such as a new sales channel concept introduced by Sales and Revenue Operations.

With a combination of improvements in both planning process and technology, the client was able to stand up the team quickly, support the business more effectively, and meet leadership expectations.

When you finish a project, there is tremendous value in taking out a pen and reflecting on it. This means a short write up, 1 to 2 pages, that explains the project, nuances about how it went, what you learned, and what you would do differently next time. The exact structure is less important than just sitting down and writing it.  

What if you’re a bad writer? This wasn’t a good excuse before ChatGPT, and it’s even less of one now. Your paper will not be on the front page of the New York Times. In fact, there is a good chance you will be the only human to ever read it. This is fine. I personally would suggest writing it yourself, but an LLM-written and human-edited essay works too.  

This simple exercise is beneficial for two reasons: learning and AI training. Let’s examine each in detail. 

Reason #1 - Learning 

I don’t have a great memory. It’s extremely frustrating when I forget 90% of a book just a month after reading it. There are a few lucky people who can read something once and remember it forever, but most of us cannot. 

I found the best way to fix this was to write about whatever I had read. I started my blog almost exclusively for this purpose. And guess what? It worked. My recall and overall understanding of books that I review is orders of magnitude greater than for reading alone. 

What is it about writing that dramatically improves retention? It has to do with teaching. It's common knowledge that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The act of breaking-down, structuring, and articulating a concept to an audience with no context deepens your understanding on a neurological level. This is the power of writing: it compels you to teach.  

Your “career experience” is largely made up of what you learned from dozens and dozens of projects. The better you can remember what you did, the more experience you will inherently have. If you take two people with identical project experience, but one writes summaries and the other does not, you will end up with two people with vastly different levels of experience, despite everything else being the same. 

Admittedly, I did not do this for almost the first decade of my career. What I’m left with is a very rough understanding of dozens of projects without the ability to recall what went wrong, what went right, and what I learned from them. Don’t be like me. 

Summarizing projects goes beyond your personal ability to remember, it also improves organizational learning. The lifeblood of every business is the project. One of the most important things a business can do is to improve their ability to execute on projects and initiatives, finishing each one quicker, cheaper, and more successfully than the last. And as we have said, the way to improve at anything is by learning and reflecting on what you have done in the past.  

Reason #2 - AI Training 

Just as writing a summary helps humans learn, it will also help machines to learn. Corporate LLMs will soon have large enough context windows to be able to intake the entirety of a company's internal data. This includes the structured data that exists in databases, and unstructured data like emails, DMs, and documents. The “better” this data is the more ways AI can help us with projects, or even eventually do projects on its own. 

Emails and DMs will give the AI good context into how a project went, but it will most certainly fail to give the entire picture. This should not come as a surprise. Everyone reading this has probably seen how important context is to an effective LLM prompt. Forcing the AI to infer insight based on a rough collection of conversations is the quickest way to have misguided inference.  

Improving corporate LLMs through reflective project summaries is what will give you “better data” and it will separate those that just use LLMs and those that harness their full potential. 

Concluding Thoughts 

The astute reader may have picked up on the irony of using Socratic wisdom to promote writing. Socrates famously never wrote anything down. Despite this, his framework on life revolved around learning and reflection, something we all could do more of.

Passively experiencing projects without reflecting on them is like collecting a ton of valuable data but never analyzing it. The best time to start was 5 years ago, the next best time is today. At OVG, we recently began pushing everyone at the company to write more. Do yourself and your organization a favor and start writing.