Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Challenge:

•          Extracting data out of the tools to work offline in many Excel® files

•          Inability to scale internal processes at the speed of the business 

Before Anaplan, DocuSign struggled with the importing and exporting of data. Because of the limitations of their current planning solution, the majority of planning was done off line in spreadsheets. Dennis Sevilla, Director of Strategic Planning, recalls, “I think we knew after the last planning cycle that our tool really wouldn’t scale to where we needed it to be. Once we saw Anaplan we realized that it could not only fix our current issues but also could improve our collaboration with other teams like sales ops, HR, and recruiting.”

The Solution

Solution:

Enables collaboration between previously siloed business unitsSingle view of data and the state of the business

“One of the main capabilities that was appealing about Anaplan was the geo-dimensionality,” said Sevilla. “With many planning tools we found that they did not support true geo-dimensionality but with Anaplan we are able to have one set of departments, one set of geographies, and then simply pivot it back and forth.”

Today DocuSign uses Anaplan for its sales forecasting, quota, and capacity planning. Moving forward DocuSign plans to utilize Anaplan for its FP&A planning, workforce planning, and long range planning.

The results

Results at a Glance:

- Reporting and data updated multiple times per day for a real-time view- True geo-dimensionality for planning across department and geographies

Metrics

With Anaplan, DocuSign has access to the real-time numbers. With this streamlined view and trust of the data, the collaborations between departments has greatly improved. “The real-time reporting was one of the biggest benefits we have seen, specifically when it comes to sales forecasting,” said Sevilla. “Prior to Anaplan, we had to extract data from Salesforce, load it into Excel®, and check if any of the hierarchies or mappings were errors before sending it out to the team. But now our reporting is automated three times a day inside of Anaplan, and at any point in time, anyone can see what’s going on within the business and why.”

Quantification of time, energy and improvement of quality of work life, moving an employee's activities up the value chain to things that really move the needle, are sometimes difficult to quantify. See 'Shining Moment' section for an anecdote of what Anaplan achieved at previous company, Salesforce, describing how an ad hoc, custom request was reduced to seconds and minutes from what would have been hours and days.

The Technology

Anaplan is disrupting the world of business planning and execution. We built our in-memory platform from the ground up to empower companies to plan, collaborate, and act—in real time. Stay ahead of critical business events, rapidly model potential impacts, and course correct on-the-fly. With Anaplan’s patented cloud-based in-memory platform and planning applications, you can continuously align your people, plans, and spend to your market opportunities.

Disruptive Factor

DocuSign is a market leader and disruptive technology within the marketplace. Because of this, customers have high expectations and DocuSign’s quick time-to-mark is essential. DocuSign’s internal processes needed an upgrade. “We went into the implementations thinking that we would replicate exactly what were had been doing before, just within Anaplan,” said Sevilla. “But the truth was once we learned Anaplan’s agile methodology we realized we were able to push each piece of the project a bit further and really ensure the best scenario or modeling was build for each specific use case.”

The implementation was a collaborative learning experience as DocuSign shadowed the Anaplan expertise for guidance and to understand best practices for the use case. With the strategy to engage the DocuSign team early and onboard quickly, there was great adoption and support of the new tool across the team.

At the core of Anaplan solutions is the patented ‘HyperBlock’ ™ platform architecture, a blazing fast, in-memory modeling and calculation engine. Instead of tracking relationships at a cell formula and dependency level, the HyperBlock architecture tracks dependencies at the line item. The platform has the intelligence to update only those cells that have changed. This innovation enables organizations to update or change models of any size, from one to billions of cells, instantaneously online.

Shining Moment

The ‘ahah’ moment, realizing the potential of Anaplan, came to me at my previous company, Salesforce. So, right after our Anaplan Go-Live, we got a note from our CFO, asking for a bunch of headcount scenarios – the first question we get is a custom mapping. In Excel, this request would have just been a disaster, but I  we just started pivoting the dimensions in Anaplan, and within like five-10 seconds we were done.