A look back at the CPX 2019 event!

A look back in pictures and words at CPX 2019, held on June 11 and 12 in San Francisco! The MeltOners took part in this event with the aim of sharing this experience and the major announcements of this FY19 edition with you.

Three MeltOners took off from Paris for San Francisco on Saturday, June 8. To kick off this American road trip and combine business with pleasure, they took advantage of their weekend to soak up the local culture. On the agenda: a play at Beach Blanket Babylon, exploring Sausalito—a small village on the other side of the Golden Gate (passing by Alcatraz)—and a baseball game to watch the derby between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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Day 1: Tuesday, June 11

CPX 2019 was kicked off by its president, Frank Calderoni, with a keynote focused on digital business transformation and connected financial planning. Anaplan aims to reinvent the business of tomorrow through a more mature understanding of processes, faster decision-making, task automation, and more accurate anticipation of the future. During this keynote and throughout the conference, Anaplan highlighted the “Honeycomb” concept, which Anaplan uses as an example to illustrate the concept of progressive Connected Planning. The ultimate goal is to achieve an ultra-connected business (“Connected ecosystem”) that fosters decision-making at all levels of the company.

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CPX is not just about large plenary sessions; it is also a multitude of small-group workshops that showcase the latest solution updates and share customer success stories (10 training sessions and over 50 workshops).

We were able to participate in several of these workshops, including a case study from Louis Vuitton on the statistical artificial intelligence they are currently developing on Anaplan. The objective of this project is to ensure that Budget and Forecast align as closely as possible with N+1 Actuals on a monthly basis by anticipating significant variances from one month to the next. Integrating artificial intelligence into planning is a strategic development axis for Anaplan, and use cases are already being developed with their clients!

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Day 2: Wednesday, June 12

The second day of the conference provided an opportunity to discover all the new features implemented by ANAPLAN:

• Springboard, the new UX (user interface),
• A responsive app for native use on mobile and tablet,
• Optimizer, the linear programming engine that allows you to integrate intelligence into your models.

We plan to write a dedicated article on these new features in the coming weeks (Stay tuned!).

While we were already familiar with the new user interface and Optimizer, the Mobile app was a pleasant surprise, and we were able to test it as a preview during this conference. We must say it looks very promising: the visualization of dashboards, figures, and charts is very smooth, and above all, the navigation and use of functions (filters, pivots, etc.) are very intuitive.

This second day was also an opportunity to exchange with Anaplanner experts on-site regarding various themes:

• The importance for clients to set up an Anaplan competence center (Centers of Excellence),
• Modeling best practices,
• The benefits of new features for our clients.

We also participated in various conferences on more general topics, such as the impact of technology and digitalization on professions in the coming years, and the concept of leadership in the corporate world.

In conclusion, we can say that this conference lived up to all its promises, and we look forward to participating in the next ones. Dates are already set: October 16, 2019, in Paris, and June 15, 2020, in San Diego!

MeltOne would like to thank all the Anaplan teams for the organization and execution of this event.

Find all MeltOne offers on our website. For more information regarding Anaplan, you can contact us directly via jsaccona@meltone.com.