Main goals of the project:

- Use Anaplan to allocate costs, from a consolidated financial statement until the lowest level of the organization (Customer Group, Cost center and Product level)

- Have the possibility to track the origin of allocated values between different allocation phases

- Make the process more user-friendly, accurate, transparent, and less time consuming

Managing profitability and cost controlling on the lowest level of the organization via a well figured out cost allocation is of great importance for Vanbreda Risk & Benefits, the biggest independent insurance broker and risk consultant in Belgium. However, outdated, difficult to use and error-prone tools did not enable them to allocate costs easily in the past. Now, with Anaplan Vanbreda Risk & Benefits found a consistent solution to this complex exercise.

For the implementation of their first use case ACCTER had the honor to guide Vanbreda Risk & Benefits as Business Partner. We at ACCTER always strive to meet customer expectations over the long run and as this was the first use case in Vanbreda Risk & Benefits’ workspace, it soon became clear the focus of the project was about to lay on the foundations of the platform to allow new use cases in the future (eg. Budgeting) to be adopted easily. This foundation was accomplished by creating a data hub. This data hub gathers and structures financial and operational data needed to perform the allocation.

PROJECT APPROACH

Anaplan is a unique software platform and requires a unique implementation approach. The Anaplan Way is a methodology that helps to ensure complete transparency during every phase of an implementation. Successful implementations require transparency amongst the customer, Anaplan, and engaged partners. This approach ensures strong deployment and adoption of the Anaplan platform.

The Anaplan Way is designed to be flexible and dynamic, allowing for the twists and turns that a project may take. We systematically and methodically document change, we build rapid re-planning into Agile sprints embedded in ‘The Anaplan Way’.

‘The Anaplan Way’ methodology is based on the following high-level phases:

- Pre-Release

- Foundation

- Implementation

- Testing

- Deployment

During the foundation phase all ‘User Stories’ were identified to gather all requirements. These detailed user stories capture following information:

- Who?

- Why?

- What?

- How?

- Acceptance criteria

- Priority

All user stories were noted down until all parties had a clear understanding and alignment on the end-to-end business process.

Furthermore, these user stories are grouped into sprints. Ultimately, the goal of the sprints is to deliver parts of the solution which is tangible for the client to test and review. This feedback after every sprint is valuable and will be considered for the coming sprints.

Meanwhile via e-learning courses, the customer’s project stakeholders were smoothly introduced in the Anaplan world. These free online courses are provided by Anaplan itself and helps developing the ‘Anaplan mindset’ at all participants to facilitated future collaboration within the project.

THE SOLUTION

Once foundations were laid it was time to turn plans into results and to kick-off the ‘model building’ part of the project.

Below overview shows the main components of the final and future-proof solution. First, the data hub captures, structures and validates all source information. Then the allocation model performs the costing and profitability allocations based on defined allocation parameters (eg. FTE’s, time …). Finally, the end result of the allocation is provided in detail to the central reporting tool Power BI.

DEPLOYMENT

Finally, to ensure the customers autonomy once the model was finalized, ACCTER helped on building Vanbreda Risk & Benefits’ center of excellence (COE) via on-line and via on-side additional trainings. Being self-sufficient will help the customer to reconfigure the model and it will enable them to meet changing needs of the organization with minimal help.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Thanks to Anaplan, Vanbreda Risk & Benefits has a transparent profitability and costing allocation engine, which allows them to perform the allocation runs more frequently. The goal is to standardize the allocation process and get the buy-in from Business stakeholders. This will significantly reduce the time that Finance will spend on this process and gives them the opportunity to perform other value-added activities. Numbers are reliable, allocation model is performant and the origin of cost calculations are traceable.

What’s next? We will closely collaborate to define the Anaplan roadmap and strive for a connected planning platform.