Genoa’s FP&A team provides its executives instant insight into risk exposure

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Genoa Healthcare, a specialist pharmacy chain with 400+ locations, consolidated financial assumptions and connected budgets for all sites on one platform. Necessary security for healthcare is maintained.
One of the best things that Anaplan did for us is when they said, ‘Hey, how about you give us your data and we’ll show you what we can do with it in a day?
Stephanie Weiland, Senior Manager of FP&A

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance

  • INDUSTRIES

    Retail

Challenge

As the sixth-largest retail pharmacy chain in the United States, the finance team at Genoa Healthcare operates in a high-growth environment. However, adding increasingly more pharmacies and locations also added more spreadsheets to its financial planning and required more manual, time-consuming processes. Its finance team needed to understand what the numbers meant to the business—instead of just pulling the numbers together.

Results

After implementing the Anaplan platform, Genoa gave their cost centers direct access to the tool and saw quick adoption. Empowered by the platform, Genoa improved the time it took to provide executives with risk exposure and sensitivity analysis, reducing data analysis from a week’s time down to minutes. Without Anaplan, there simply wasn’t enough time to do a thorough review and perform a deep-dive analysis to fully understand the numbers.

Solution

When Stephanie Weiland, Senior Manager of FP&A, joined the Genoa team, she focused on creating a sustainable planning, budgeting and forecasting processes that could scale with its continued business growth. This focus on better processes and tools led her to the cloud-based Anaplan platform, which quickly replaced hundreds of spreadsheets and eliminated days of time-consuming activities.

Stephanie Weiland: Today, we are 356 pharmacies. We also are the sixth-largest retail pharmacy chain in the United States. I started with the company with the objective of creating the FP&A department and creating those processes.

I went on this journey to figure out the best tool that will fit us, that will adapt with us, that will be flexible in this high-growth environment—but is also dynamic enough to move with all the changes in the healthcare industry that impact our business.

We were creating the budget process and it was many, many spreadsheets for all of our locations. And to make a change to any of those things, those underlying assumptions, we’d have to break into every single file and make that change.

One of the best things that Anaplan did for us is they said, “Hey, how about you give us your data and we’ll show you what we can do with it in a day?” And that was the key selling point for choosing the Anaplan platform.

We had a very successful implementation, and it just transformed immediately into a live product, where we were able to put the tool in the hands of our cost centers.

Matthew Meier: Currently, we’re at about 23 gigabytes worth of model size. We went from—the year before when Stephanie was doing the model—we were in Excel and had about 200 sites. Each site had its own tab on an Excel spreadsheet. Now, we’re able to do everything dynamically with Anaplan, so any change that we need to make, we can make in one place and it flows across the platform.

Stephanie Weiland: By having Anaplan, we are able to do those “what-if” scenarios or those risk-exposure and sensitivity analyses fairly quickly, so we can deliver those answers to our executive team. Instead of it taking a week to do, we do it in a few minutes.

If we’re all in a meeting together, we can do it live and get those outputs immediately. And then we’re better equipped to make business decisions faster. One of the immediate wins of having Anaplan and that budget tool in the cloud was version control and security. So the cost center owner only sees what’s available to them and not someone else in the organization.

It really comes down to understanding what the numbers mean instead of just putting the numbers together. Without Anaplan, there wasn’t enough time to really do that thorough review, to do that deep-dive analysis, to really understand what’s going on behind the numbers.