Efficient and Agile Capital Planning to Achieve Run-Rate Spend Reduction

The Situation

A global insurance firm needed to streamline and automate its capital planning processes in order to reduce its overall run-rate spend by 5%

An umbrella company with many insurance businesses operating within its brand was in the midst of innovation planning for the deployment of its capital. As a result, the firm was managing between 3,000-5,000 initiatives across the organization to discover new ways of delivering better outcomes.

Each of the creation, proposal, review, and approval processes associated with individual projects relied on manual spreadsheets, making them lengthy, costly, and prone to human error. It had become a huge operational challenge to manage templates, model P&L, and the impact of cashflow, and share that information with decision makers in the business. Project owners spent vast amounts of time on multiple versions of the initiatives, and it was extremely difficult to separate division-based portfolios from those spread across the whole firm.

Already familiar with Anaplan’s capabilities, the client was interested in the agility, efficiency, and accuracy that the platform could bring to bear on existing capital planning processes and outcomes.

The Approach

A consolidated model to automate business initiatives and forecast expected outcomes to enable better, faster decision making

Lionpoint is known to have the most Anaplan experts of all Gold Anaplan partners, and given the client’s interest in adopting the technology, we were invited to lead the project. We began by operationalizing the capital planning processes through the development of simultaneous models in Anaplan to forecast how each project would fare over time. Each model factored in initial costs such as developers and business users, as well as projected benefits like a reduced number of customer service headcount and reduced square footage. The result was a “J” curve for individual projects that showed initial costs and then accrued savings over a set period of time.

The platform’s ability to make instant calculations at a very granular level using all data inputs allowed our client to run “what-if” analyses, changing numbers at the front end, and seeing the net benefits and ROI of those changes in real-time. Security and access privileges ensured that sensitive information could be utilized in these models, without it being available to everyone.

The Anaplan solution, deployed to over 60 business unit leaders and finance teams, offered:

• Ability to model initiatives’ expected revenue, compensation and non-compensation expenses over time
• Full integration of labor assumptions for accurate calculations
• 10-year view of P&L, cash impacts, ROI, and net savings at a project level
• Multiple “what if” versions for each initiative and review / approval workflows
• Platform of record for managing a 3-year plan to achieve a 5% reduction in run-rate spend
• Complete reporting for auditing and compliance requirements

The Impact

An agile, cost-effective solution to achieve efficiencies, faster decision making, and a 5% reduction in run-rate spend

Anaplan’s orchestration capability meant that the solution’s impact was felt by our client almost immediately. Greater visibility of the capital projects portfolio and real-time calculations and aggregations enabled more complete, and faster decision making by executives. The streamlined workflow continues to save 4,000+ hours every year in administration costs.

Large organizations often struggle with agility but still need to innovate to remain competitive against digital-first start-ups that are unencumbered by legacy technology and analogue processes. Lionpoint’s implementation of an Anaplan-based solution offered our client a nimble, cost-effective solution that offered a fast ROI and was simple to execute throughout the umbrella organization and its associated businesses.