SCL HUB January 2019

1. Can we encourage planners away from
spreadsheets?
…Do we need to?

2. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
About the Presenter
Steve Rampton – Anaplan Practice Lead
• 40 years working in manufacturing, supply chain and R&D.
• Several years developing planning software and processes for
manufacturing – incl one of 1st Kanban implementations
• 10 years on EV batteries incl design, project engineering,
simulation and production management
• 20 years in SC software consulting and implementation

3. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
A brief history of spreadsheets….
Ancient History:
Paper based
1969: Mainframe:
LANPAR
1979/80’s:
Visicalc/Supercalc
/Lotus123/MS
Excel
2010/12:
Anaplan/Google
Sheets/ SAP IBP
Rain Forest Cloud
Mainframe
Personal Computer
The Cloud

4. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Spreadsheets! What spreadsheets?
Hands up those in the audience
whose organisation still employs
spreadsheets to plan some or all
of their Supply Chain.

5. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Flexibility
Familiarity/
Availability
Ease of use*
Personal control Immediate results
Easy to communicate
output
Why do planners use spreadsheets?

6. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
What’s the problem?
• Difficult to share, update with multiple collaborators
• Hard to enforce compliance and lack of change info
• Cant embed in process steps
Collaboration
• Typically maintained by one person
• No change management
Ownership
• Easy for inconsistencies & errors in formulas to occur
• V Hard to audit.
• Becomes too complex and large to understand
Complexity/ Risk
• Little formal training
• Maintenance laborious and to tight timelines
Familiarity
breeds…
• SC planning functions can be complex and hard to model in a spreadsheet –
VBA?
Functional
Limitations

7. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
To keep the planners on board we need solutions that preserve
enough of the advantages while removing or mitigating the
problems – so how do we achieve this?
Let’s have a look how one product, Anaplan, can do this.
So the key question:

8. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Anaplan is a cloud computing SaaS platform
with a patented, in-memory calculation engine.
It was built from the ground up specifically for
performing planning calculations rather than
being a general purpose db/platform being
used for planning.
Anaplan overview

9. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Connected Planning
Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting
Corporate Strategic Planning
Plan for any area of
your business
Sales
Territory and Quota Planning
Incentive Compensation
Sales Forecasting
Supply Chain
Demand Planning
Supply Planning
Inventory Planning
Sales and Operations Planning
Rough Cut Capacity Planning
Workforce
Workforce Planning
Workforce Optimization
Marketing
Marketing Performance Management
Trade Promotion Planning
IT
Agile Implementation
Project Management
Finance
Revenue Modeling
Financial Consolidations

10. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Preserving the positives
Flexibility
- User built custom solutions from scratch
- Can take pre-built solutions and use or enhance
Familiarity/
Availability
- Platform in the cloud and accessible from most browsers – no
relying on IT to deploy software!
- Uses formulae that are similar to Excel but more!
- User access via browser using spreadsheet like tables and charts
Ease of Use
- Solution build requires no coding or separate development tool
and can be performed by business super users
- End User interface is clean, simple and intuitive

11. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Demo: Familiarity/Flexibility/Ease of Use
• Logon to Anaplan and show Supply App and DC Inventory control dashboard
• Explain this is part of Supply App and this part calculates safety stocks
• Open source module for inventory planning and show line items and also formulae

12. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Preserving the Positives - II
Personal
Control
- Build can be done by super users.
- Display data in multiple ways.
- Personalised views of dashboard
- Several ‘models’ per customer
Immediate
Results
- Press <Enter> after changing the value and all dependencies
are recalculated
Communication
of results
- Dashboards show tables, charts and buttons
- Dashboards used for both display and input.
- Exported to pdf and .csv
- Excel and Powerpoint AddIns

13. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Demo: Immediate Results/ Communication of
results
• In DC Inventory control dashboard
explain the What If feature
• Modify some values and show
immediate effect on results
• Export dashboard to pdf

14. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Mitigating the Disadvantages
• Concurrent Users
• Workflow process coming
• Roles, change history & text cells for reasons for changes
Collaboration
• Stored in the cloud visible to all model builders
• Split into multiple ‘models’ with different ownership
• ALM process for change governance
Ownership
• Roll back to any point in past
• Separation of data and formulae
• Design can be exported for audit.
Complexity/ Risk
• Opportunity to create a pool of expertise
• Solution should be self-maintaining
• Users enter plans directly into the solution
Familiarity
breeds…
• Sophisticated solutions possible in Anaplan: Inc Stat Forecasting, DRP, Shelf life
• Optimiser to enable constrained planning
• Can leverage other analytics platforms such as R with export/import
Functional
Limitations

15. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Challenges
• The solution becomes an organisation owned tool rather than a personal
one – change management.
• Spreadsheet users can be like addicts – they will need to be detoxed.
• Implementation will need to be treated as a project rather than a
personal enterprise – budget and sponsorship.

16. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
In conclusion
Modern tools such as Anaplan that leverage leading
edge in-memory analytic platforms and business user
centric interfaces and configuration models can be
deployed to wean planners off spreadsheets.

17. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
Questions?

18. www.olivehorse.com
©2019 Olivehorse Consulting Services Limited. All rights reserved.
UK based global specialists in supply chain planning software solutions:
Working to resolve Supply Chain issues for some of
the worlds leading companies

19. Thank you!
Steve Rampton
Anaplan Practice Lead
steve.rampton@olivehorse.com
www.olivehorse.com