Success story

Connecting upstream planning processes in Anaplan for a life sciences company

By Timothy Kirby

Background

Our client is a holistic healthcare organization dedicated to providing industry-defining drugs and services. They are consistently ranked as one of the front running life sciences companies in revenue and holdings.

To maintain a stake within such a competitive industry, our client needed a data-driven approach that accelerated planning and extracted more value from the financial process. They also needed to unify interdependent entities, each with different business models and approaches to planning.

Challenge

Prior to becoming a Keyrus client, this company was balancing planning across four entities, 200+ cost centers, and 6000+ projects, which required hours of manual work. These plans often extended out beyond eight to ten years.

The high level of effort to string together data across multiple functional areas in order to hit deliverable deadlines meant less time for meaningful analysis. This disjointedness also inhibited a shift to smarter, real-time, driver-based planning that gives organizations necessary transparency in digital environments. 

Solution

We designed and implemented a solution using Anaplan, which allowed them to connect the major functional areas across the organization:

• Market Analytics & Insights: Demand planning for both inline & pipeline brands

• Pricing & Contracting: Gross-to-net forecasting & analytics, rebate invoice validation/reconciliation, supply chain forecasting

• Workforce Planning: Existing & new employee planning, compensation & benefit allocations, workforce P&L 

• Financial Planning: Long range planning, operating expense forecasting & budgeting, capital expense planning, clinical trial planning, shared services allocations & product P&Ls, balance sheet & cash flow planning

As an Anaplan Gold Partner and 2020 Partner of the Year, we leveraged our expertise to not only address the identified pain points, but also accelerate the planning process. As a leading business tool, Anaplan is flexible across multiple dimensions and scenarios, and delivers connected solutions quickly. This flexibility allows for the business to make a substantial stride toward precise, real time forecasting.

A successful implementation meant leveraging the power of Anaplan’s integration capabilities and master data management framework. We designed a data hub to serve as a single source of truth across the organization, which allows for all users to work in sync no matter the functional area, while also maintaining alignment with systems both upstream and downstream of Anaplan. Shifting offline planning from Excel to Anaplan’s cloud-based network allows financial and statistical data to flow smoothly and integrate late-stage processes such as P&L and balance sheet reporting with early-stage developments such as demand planning. 

This tool also accelerated the introduction of driver-based financial planning and analysis, allowing leadership greater accessibility to new methodologies that empowers their users. Real time aggregation across planning dimensions further increases the usability of both financial and statistical data. Lastly, placing emphasis on the users behind the tool through extensive training and engagement ensures the solution will exceed expectations and be a sustainable forward-looking result. 

Results

The organization can now make informed business decisions using real-time calculation and aggregation of planning amounts. Minimizing manual data entry and enabling Anaplan’s interconnectivity has reduced friction in exchanging information between functional areas while improving performance across multiple business dimensions. 

The client cited a 10x increase in allocations performance and 30x increase in balance sheet and cash flow process performance. In addition to improved processes and efficiency, a shift to cloud-based planning led to decreased IT costs, providing the organization with more financial flexibility to answer bottom line questions with greater accuracy, all in less time.