With host Darrell Alfonso
Marcel Duy
Product Director, Digital Business Planning IKEA
Thao Ngo
Senior Vice President, Marketing Uptempo
IKEA revolutionized the way people shop for furniture with an innovative and unique customer experience. But delivering on this brand promise is no easy feat: consider the planning complexity involved in promoting 12,000 products through 400 stores in 50 countries. All while considering data from supply chains, pricing promotions, consumer trends and more.
Behind the scenes, a sophisticated commercial planning and analytics solution ensures that products are available just when marketing campaigns peak customer demand. Join a conversation with Marcel Duy, IKEA’s Product Director, Digital Business Planning, that will highlight how advanced analytics drove the digitalization and operational performance across IKEA’s $45B retail operation.
Key takeaways:
Don’t miss this opportunity to unravel the success story of IKEA’s digital transformation and its profound impact on the world of furniture retail.
0:06 Welcome to our webinar, IKEA’s blueprint for global commercial agility.
0:12 My name is Thao Ngo, the SVP of marketing at Uptempo, Marketing Planning software to help marketers plan better, spend smarter, and execute with confidence.
0:23 Joining me today is Marcel Duy, Product Director, Digital Business Planning at IKEA.
0:30 So Marcel joined IKEA in 2020 drove agile transformation at IKEA coaching several digital product teams since 2020.
0:40 He’s headed up the business planning portfolio within Group Digital Co Creating and Digital Solutions to disrupt transform and digitize key business processes.
0:53 So welcome Marcel.
0:56 And before Marcel dives into the IKEA story of commercial planning, we do want to share some of the planning anxiety we hear from our own enterprise customers.
1:09 So everyone is curious about how everyone else is planning.
1:13 There doesn’t seem to be a single standard way to plan.
1:17 You know, how long does it take?
1:18 How often should you be planning replanning?
1:22 Who do you involve and when how do you socialize the plan internally?
1:27 There’s a host of questions on the process side, then there’s the technology side.
1:32 In fact, there are more than 13,000 martech solutions.
1:36 According to a recent report from Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma, even with all this exciting technology, a lot of marketing operations teams are relying on freeware such as spreadsheets and powerpoints for their planning.
1:51 Now, this opens up a host of problems with human error.
1:55 When you have so many different versions floating around globally.
1:59 Without a single source of truth, it’s difficult to cascade the plan down to the regions, the teams and the stores to execute even more challenging is trying to pivot midway through a campaign when you discover market conditions change, consumer opinions change or you want to take advantage of opportunities that arise.
2:21 So I’m very excited to hear how IKEA has worked some through some of these challenges in their complex environment.
2:28 So I will take give that over to you Marcel.
2:34 Thank you.
2:37 So then well, I I guess good morning to everyone on the American part of the globe or good evening here over in Europe.
2:46 My name is Marcel.
2:47 I am heading a department at Group Digital here at IKEA that focuses a lot on how to digitalize planning activities for media planning, commercial planning.
3:00 We’re also focusing on enterprise management and innovation management and I thought before we go into some details and zoom in it’s probably worth to zoom out a little bit to understand a bit of the IKEA context.
3:12 So I’ll have prepared three important words for you guys that you can maybe take with you in one way or the other.
3:20 So first of all, you might have seen it already, Ingka, what is Ingka in the IKEA context, it’s important to understand that IKEA is a franchise system.
3:29 So we do have a company that operates for the brand, maybe the gatekeeper of the brand of IKEA, they are called Inter IKEA.
3:39 And then you have, of course franchisees who consume the brand, use the brand.
3:45 And contrary to maybe other franchise system, in this case, owns almost 90% of all the stores worldwide.
3:52 So we own over 480 stores around the globe.
3:56 With almost 180,000 coworkers, we have about €40 billion of revenue and well around 4 billion visits on ikea.com.
4:08 So you can imagine especially in the recent years, also accelerated by COVID, the Ecommerce business for IKEA has become quite important.
4:17 That being said it is definitely in our DNA that the stores is where the game is being played.
4:23 So very important for us is also everything we do digitally is really to enable our coworkers, our colleagues in the stores to do a better job to make sure customers come to the store and experience the unique experience you can have there in the stores.
4:39 So just to repeat, Ingka is part of IKEA, but it’s not the brand itself.
4:44 It is more or less the owner of many of the stores, you see the blue boxes that you might even have in your town or close by.
4:54 Then.
4:54 Today, we will talk quite a bit about commercial activities.
4:57 So I want to give you a bit of a definition of what that means for us here at IKEA.
5:03 contrary to maybe more classical marketing, we rely quite a lot on what we call commercial activities.
5:09 So contrary to classical marketing activities, we do use our stores as one of the most prominent media channels.
5:16 Of course, we do use TV, spots out of home and so on and so forth.
5:19 But since we want to have the customers in the stores, and we do have quite big buildings, it makes sense to use them inside and outside.
5:28 So when we talk about commercial activities, we basically talk about all the marketing activities, all the sales promotion that you find in and outside the stores.
5:37 So not the classical media channels as you might know them.
5:41 So that’s very important to understand for what I’m talking about today.
5:44 But in the end, just like any other marketing campaign, it is of course to drive visitation to improve the brand perception, to drive growth and in the end, promote sales in our stores.
5:58 And then finally, a really good word to take with you.
6:02 Maybe not only if you want to understand the IKEA universe, but a bit of the Swedish culture, which of course IKEA stands for as well, and that’s the word FICA.
6:10 It’s more or less a coffee break.
6:11 It’s important to have something sweet with you.
6:14 That’s where Swedes most likely would draw the line otherwise it’s just a coffee break.
6:18 So make sure if you are invited to a FICA to bring something sweet.
6:22 My colleague recently told me that he realized especially here in Malmoe where we are based in Southern Sweden, many of the major decisions that we do in our daily life, but also strategic decisions are often made during a FICA.
6:35 So maybe something to copy for your world and to just have something sweet and a coffee and discuss something there instead of having the usual meeting rooms.
6:45 If not, maybe when you visit Sweden, you’re definitely gonna find the love for all the coffee that people are drinking here and sweets as well.
6:54 Now, let’s jump a little bit more into details.
6:57 Our founder Ver already in the seventies released what he called The Testament of the furniture dealer, a small but very, very important book.
7:08 If you are into agile development, for example, you would find that he really, really points out things that now are very important for agile development, but he did that in the seventies.
7:17 So with no doubt, Ingka was a fantastic entrepreneur who drove IKEA until more or less he passed away and he mentioned in that book already, this quote extricated planning is the most common cause of cop death.
7:35 So even it was in the seventies and he probably has not thought of all the challenges that come to us now in 2020 beyond, he already thought about.
7:45 Well, planning is something that is important, but it needs to be a side product.
7:51 It cannot take the focus of our coworkers.
7:54 And that’s exactly where we come in with my area with the digital products that we provide.
8:00 Why is that also important?
8:01 Well, if you are a numbers person like me, you may look into recent studies and also even though it’s not the seventies anymore, there’s clear studies still showing that.
8:12 Well, if you plan a lot, if you collect, compile, visualize, report and share insights and data, all those things you need to do proper planning.
8:21 And nowadays, it takes a significant amount of time from our coworkers actually need to focus on our customers in the store to focus on operational excellence.
8:32 And besides that, it also creates a lot of costs in our case, several million euros per year, something that should be avoided, or at least that money should be used and invested in the best possible way for our customers in the store.
8:48 And that’s where we come in in my area.
8:52 We basically want to make exactly sure that our coworkers have the time they need to focus on the customers to focus on sales to focus on, well, helping people find the furniture they need for their home, for the offices or both.
9:09 So when we talk about my products, which is roughly six products.
9:13 So six development teams, we have those three pillars that you see here that are super important for us to make sure that the coworkers not only work well in what they do now, but also thrive to perform in new ways.
9:25 Because of course, in the changing world, we want to be an asset for them.
9:29 One important part, especially with this labyrinth of data that is unfolding to any one of us.
9:37 It’s important that this data, those insights are consumable in an easy way.
9:41 So it’s not only about the data, it’s about how do you visualize data.
9:44 So it becomes consumable insight for us.
9:47 There’s a very big differentiation between data and making it an insight.
9:51 But then of course, it also wouldn’t make sense to just shift the the hours saved to then maybe our support team on the digital side.
9:59 So a second important pillar for all of our products is to maximize self service, not only to reduce cost or avoid another unnecessary working hours, but more importantly, also we might be talking about this a little bit further down to really help change not routines because you probably have encountered that yourself.
10:19 When there’s a new digital tool being rolled out across teams, it’s always a bit cumbersome in the beginning, it’s something new, something unknown.
10:27 So the more self service you offer, the easier this transition will be.
10:31 And then finally, with the more mature products in my area, we also want to focus on everything beyond the cost avoidance, beyond just saving coworker hours time.
10:41 What else can we do to proactively promote a better way of working to maybe have impact on the revenue and the profit that our company is achieving.
10:51 That being said.
10:51 However, really our major key indicator of success is the coworkers are saved and this is what we’re going to look into now.
11:00 A little bit more.
11:05 So, not too long ago, many processes were analog and manual and they still are.
11:14 And maybe you recognize something like this, a million different Excel files that you use for planning, for planning your marketing campaigns, your sales activities or in our case, commercial activities, you might store those Excel files at least in a SharePoint.
11:30 So they are maybe accessible for a bigger group than just yourself, probably not global.
11:35 So if you’re doing this in your market, maybe you share it with your store and maybe some other stores around you, maybe with the market lead, it probably won’t make the way to someone in global who might need that information as well.
11:48 You may also take those Excel files and you will simply print them out, you put them on the wall and you keep drawing on them.
11:56 You change the timeline, you add some extra information.
12:01 It is almost impossible that anybody else besides you will know about that.
12:05 Maybe if someone walks by and take a picture, maybe if you have a FICA and you talk to a colleague from another store, another market about this because you maybe have a trip here to our headquarters in Malmoe, you might share those insights, but it very rarely will happen.
12:19 So obviously, this is not only cumbersome, it’s inefficient, it’s ineffective and it’s definitely not where we should be.
12:26 So luckily, that’s definitely part of the past or mostly, but I also don’t want to be too negative about this because obviously it worked well.
12:36 It worked right for many, many years, it worked and Excel is a great tool.
12:40 Don’t get me wrong.
12:41 It is just the question, is there something better when it comes to collaborate on something together?
12:46 Especially if you scale up to a size of IKEA with over 30 markets again, roughly 180,000 coworkers, there must be something better than using Excel files, printing them out or putting them on a SharePoint.
12:59 And one example I can give you there and we’ll go into the solution mode in just a bit as well is if you create a commercial activity, maybe you wanna say, hey, during Christmas, we wanna put a discount on red shares, we think we can promote them better now and actually sell a higher quantity than we actually were planning to do originally.
13:19 So you realize if you wanna put a discount on, you might need a bigger quantity to actually reach the return on investment that you would like to, for that, you would have to know is that volume even in the store?
13:32 Is it in some other markets so that you can actually get it in the past.
13:37 This would have taken very, very long.
13:40 You might have to have phone calls, emails with logistics and so on and so forth.
13:44 You don’t even know if the stock in the entire market gives you the the stock, you need to have this commercial activity.
13:52 Long story short, this would have taken 30 plus days with emails, phone calls and in the end, maybe even you realize the stock, there is not enough stock and you should have not, not even started the commercial activity to begin with that all results into the high cost as I point out.
14:11 But more importantly for our coworkers, it’s missed sales opportunities, right?
14:16 And that’s something that in a retail company you cannot afford.
14:20 Especially not nowadays when it moves so fast.
14:25 So now enough of looking back and ranting about Excel files.
14:30 Let’s look at where we are now and what we think we are doing better now than it was before for commercial activities.
14:39 We basically have created three digital products camp, tact, and CTV.
14:45 What are they about?
14:46 Well, camp, we use as a sub solution of Uptempo, of course to more or less synchronize and democratize the planning for all commercial activities.
14:59 So instead of each market, each store having their own Excel files and of course global also having Excel files.
15:05 All of this planning is now happening in the tool we call camp commercial activity management product.
15:12 The advantage of this is not only that from a group perspective, you have a much better overview of what’s happening, not only on a market level but down to a store level.
15:21 It’s also the other way around the communication, which actually happens in this week where group IKEA is saying here are the big campaigns for our next year which starts next summer.
15:34 It is not much easy for a market to adopt those bigger campaigns, make them unique for their market.
15:40 That means maybe add another one before or after something in parallel, change the timing, change the main messages and so on and so forth.
15:48 So with this planning tool, and I’ll look into this with you guys in just a little bit more just a bit longer, you can read, democratize the planning.
15:56 And that is a fantastic chance that we have grabbed by the horns.
16:00 And by now over half of the markets have fully neglected Excel files.
16:05 We have, we do have markets that still do some plan in Excel files.
16:09 And we do have upload functions to make their life also very easy.
16:13 Then what is really exciting we add on top tucked that is an in house developed product which is basically not only using the planning data that comes from camp but also lots of other data from the entire environment of digital products that we have right here to connect with.
16:31 For example, the pricing products, the stock products to make sure we can follow up on the performance of each campaign.
16:40 And also, for example, address that use case of you figuring out is the stock even available for an increased volume campaign.
16:49 I’ll go into details for this also in a few more minutes.
16:52 And then finally, a really, really exciting product that was started a little bit of a side product is CTV.
16:59 And the reason why it is so exciting is the product itself camp intact, is really, really driven by our business partners.
17:07 So on the group level, they of course, have the biggest interest in having this Eagle Eye perspective and make those strategic decisions.
17:14 But what about all the other coworkers in the stores which are the most important focal point for us, right?
17:21 We have come to the idea to say, how about we take a light version of camp and show it in each respective store?
17:29 So that a coworker who walks by in the coworker area on that screen can see, oh, this campaign is not only happening in my market.
17:36 This specific campaign even happens in my store.
17:40 So I am not surprised and best informed when customers approach me and ask me about this topic.
17:46 And also what I’m really, really excited about, we’re now piloting tact as well in there.
17:51 So you would get real life real time data on how a commercial activity is performing.
17:58 Are we on track with selling the right volume or do I as a coworker, maybe in a store level have to do something different to really promote a certain product or a certain campaign.
18:08 So those three products together are a fantastic synergy to address all of the commercial activities and not only planning but also contributing to following up and then also informing the the the broad group of coworkers.
18:23 So how does that look like?
18:25 It’s probably what you’re gonna ask?
18:26 Before we go there, just a little bit of a well shout out to the teams working on this.
18:32 They have focused significantly the past 12 months on user adoption.
18:37 And I would say those numbers speak for themselves.
18:40 For camp, we increased the user base by 42%.
18:44 So we have almost 18,000 coworkers using that tool for tact.
18:49 It’s even more intriguing over 200% increase of users, but now almost 24,000 coworkers logging in on a very regular basis, getting information that they otherwise would have not gotten at all or very cumbersome way.
19:04 And then again, really exciting about camp TV.
19:06 We now have it in roughly 52 stores and I just recently learned 15 countries is not true anymore.
19:12 We already now in 18 countries, we just recently on board Japan.
19:15 So there, as you can see 52 stores out of over 400 there is still room to go, but it’s something we’re really excited about.
19:22 And because of all those efforts of the teams, we are really proud to say that if we continue this track, we’re gonna save 160,000 hours for all our coworkers that they can use to focus on the actual business.
19:36 Something really, really exciting and something my teams can really be proud of.
19:43 But let’s look into camp and this is a typical starting page.
19:47 It’s my starting page.
19:48 That’s why it’s the MD on the top right.
19:50 So it’s probably not the most unique and best one.
19:53 The starting page is adaptive to your role and your market that you’re in the store that you’re in.
19:58 So this is a very dynamic starting page.
20:01 It might show you a current commercial sorry, a TV spot, that is happening in a TV channel.
20:08 It also gives you a lot of other links to other products because for us, it’s important that we don’t cannibalize any other digital products.
20:15 We have a clear scope which is mostly the planning part, but it doesn’t mean we work inside this or a vacuum.
20:20 So we try to connect data sources with each other and also promote other products with another product.
20:27 So that being said the most two important parts on this page is on the left side of the calendar and we’re gonna look into this in just a minute.
20:35 And what is I think is also very important is what you see on bottom, right?
20:39 I mentioned before that one of the pillars is maximized self service.
20:43 And onboarding into new tools is always a challenge, especially if you have a busy day, like commercial activity leaders, one of our user groups, they are in the store, running the stairs up and down, they very rarely are at their office spot to use the laptop or another desktop device.
21:00 So making this as intuitive is easy, is really, really important and so is the onboarding journey.
21:07 So on the bottom, right, you find basically a little helper that gets you from point to point to help you to create your first campaign in the tool, help you understand why is something where it is, why it’s called something.
21:19 And by now, we have a significant amount of tutorials and trainings that guide you through the tool.
21:25 So it’s not just a pop up at the video, it literally shows you where to click and where to move on with highlights and hover over really, really cool feature that I think made quite a difference for a successful onboarding.
21:41 And now the highlight, at least I think so.
21:44 And that is, well, a gantt chart.
21:47 So you might say, well, what’s so exciting about the gantt chart for us?
21:51 Like I said before, it’s about having it all in one place.
21:54 You can see it maybe barely on the left side.
21:58 Each country is represented with all of their commercial activities that they plan for the entire year.
22:03 Those are the big campaigns that we may also go on a global level, but also every single smaller campaign that might be relevant for a market, but even further down for each store.
22:15 So if you are in a certain position where you’re interested in seeing what all stores are doing, you’re able to do that.
22:21 Also what’s maybe interesting.
22:23 Many cities by now have more than one IKEA.
22:25 So it’s probably a very helpful thing to know what is the IKEA in Munich North doing.
22:31 If I’m working in the South store of Munich, this is really, really good and hasn’t been like this ever before.
22:40 And our coworkers are excited about that and we are excited because, well, if we have happy coworkers, we hopefully also have happy customers.
22:49 The other part besides democratizing the planning via the gantt chart and the sub solution is that we connected also to tact.
22:59 So you remember we had those three products.
23:02 The third tact is integrated partially into camp.
23:05 So when you see the H over the pop up that you see here, it shows the real time data on the turnover goal, the pre goals and how far you are away, there’s also a button to click on to actually then switch over to where you get even more information.
23:21 And that follow up information is absolutely amazing.
23:24 You can drill down to a certain product in that promotion in a certain store.
23:29 So you don’t even, you don’t only know how an entire campaign store is maybe working, but what product is maybe not on target, what product is over performing.
23:39 If you’re working in the market, you can actually look in all stores and see what store is overperforming.
23:44 So maybe you can reach out to them, get some lessons learned and share them with other stores or the other way around.
23:50 You see a store is underperforming, you can reach out to them while the campaign is still ongoing and help them to get back on track.
23:57 So the really important part is that it’s real time data.
24:00 So you can take actions while the campaign is still ongoing to then help them get back on track to maybe also reassess the goals and the turnover goals.
24:10 So again, I really want to point out that it’s important that we connect all those different products including and also CTV, as I mentioned before, to profit from the base, which is having a democratized planning with all the gantt charts that are important for that, then using that information to have real time data to follow up on it.
24:37 And I said coworkers are happy, but of course, not everyone is happy.
24:41 So of while there’s people who really enjoy this product and are saying this is a life changer for them and that’s the majority.
24:48 Of course, we have to be honest and it’s important for our work with digital products anyway, to have good feedback loops, frequent ones to hear really what our coworkers are saying and make the necessary adjustment that the necessary changes to that.
25:02 So for example, one that I want to point out is too many clicks needed to get to the page.
25:07 You want to be, of course, if you have such a complex company as IKEA with all these different markets, different stores, all the different campaigns, even if you create such a good overview, the complexity can be overwhelming.
25:21 So there’s something where the development teams need to go in and say, hey, what can we do to help navigate through this complexity?
25:28 It’s also important for our business partners to have this dialogue with us.
25:31 So that we, if we get this feedback is there maybe something that needs to be changed on the business side when it comes to the processes overall, when it comes to the communication internally, where we can help the coworkers navigate better through the complexity of all the commercial activities and all that planning.
25:48 But again, I think the feedback is mostly overwhelming and overwhelming positive, to be honest, something that yeah, we can be really proud of and hopefully it’s something that you could be curious about and eager to do in your company as well.
26:06 I’m about to wrap it up, but we looked back, we looked into it now.
26:11 So it’s always important for us to look what’s next.
26:15 And I mentioned before the third pillar is to look into what can we do beyond just saving time, what can we do beyond cost avoidance?
26:25 And after we now have grown our user base significantly and created the adoption in the stores that we wanted to achieve with new features with proper promotions, good ambassadors in our company.
26:39 Now it is about using all this data.
26:42 We have now over 40,000 commercial activities planned in our product.
26:48 So that’s as you can imagine, quite some data and this data needs to be used.
26:52 It cannot just be there to be stored and to be communicated.
26:56 So what we’re focusing in this coming year and certainly beyond is how can we use this data with the new technologies that are emerging, such as AI to maybe send out reminders.
27:12 Hey, last year, you have done this in this commercial activity and it performed fantastically so far, you have not planned a similar activity in a similar time frame.
27:22 Have you forgotten it?
27:24 If not click here and we’ll create this for you, something like that or we talked about the following up with real time data right now.
27:33 It’s a very manual work to then go through it.
27:35 See that which store is performing well, which store is maybe not performing well?
27:39 Which product is selling well a campaign or in a commercial activity in which is not, there is certainly room to say, can we not use all this data to be more proactive and have suggestions for our coworkers in the stores?
27:54 So they can even save more time.
27:56 And well, that is something very, very exciting to discover in the coming years, something that we certainly are in the beginning.
28:04 So maybe if we meet again, we can talk about those lessons learned in the future and you already learned about the word fika.
28:16 But now you also learn about tuck, which is Swedish for.
28:19 Thank you.
28:20 So I hope you had a quite exciting 25 minutes and I’m curious if I have triggered at least one or two questions.
28:29 Thank you so much Marcel.
28:31 And just going to the next slide here, we’ll take your questions in the Q and A panel at the bottom if you want to type that in for Marcel.
28:41 And while everyone is thinking of their questions, I do wanna mention we have a webinar on January 23rd transforming marketing planning at HubSpot.
28:51 So you can join in the link that we’ll be sharing in the chat as well.
28:56 I do see some questions.
28:58 First of all, Marcel, how did you train all the stores and reps and coworkers on this new tool and way of thinking that we ask a good question.
29:12 Well, contrary to how we want to release products and that’s probably not news, we also want to have small increments and work incremental, especially when you release something that new, you almost can’t avoid the big bang.
29:24 And that’s also what we’ve done those big banks, however, only are successful if you have good sponsorship from upper management in the company.
29:32 So that of course, that promotion is the first step, but then to really train them, our teams have done a significant job there.
29:41 My product owner Wouter, he loves to play with the word camp.
29:45 So he would take people on camp, tourists, literally going to them and sit down with them and really figure out how to work with this product.
29:55 So the answer is pretty easy in the sense of you need to sit with the people like you, it’s not enough to just record a video, put it in a SharePoint and have people look at it.
30:07 It is really hard work to get to everyone.
30:11 Of course, there’s often frustration to mitigate with this to listen to and so the first 1.5 years for Wouter as a product owner, but also all the support functions, also our business partners, they really well worked in the trenches.
30:26 Can I say something like that to not only help people train but also listen, I think that’s really the important part is not really the training.
30:33 It’s realizing that this is also already the first feedback loop to make a change.
30:38 And when people see they are being hurt or they’re definitely gonna give this product a bigger chance than otherwise.
30:45 That’s great.
30:46 And then somebody asked, did you or do you incentivize collaboration?
30:53 Somehow, collaboration is one of our key values.
31:00 I I don’t know what now I incentivize in which way this question is aiming for, but it’s really a natural thing for us.
31:09 It, it, it really is part of the culture.
31:11 And I know it’s very easy to say we have our company culture and so on and so forth.
31:15 But I’ve been at other big corps and what really makes a difference?
31:19 IKEA is this willingness to really pull together and work together on things, find new ideas, innovate together, collaborate together.
31:28 So I don’t think we really need to incentivize this.
31:31 However, I also have a product in my area that is about innovation management, where we collect ideas, we we where we promote others to copy with pride.
31:40 So of course, there are also tools and other channels where we promote collaboration, but we don’t incentivize it in that kind of way when it comes to maybe collaboration in the tool itself.
31:53 If that’s the question, does a store collaborate better with another store or does the market now collaborate better with global also there, we did not really incentivize it there.
32:04 Again, the Big Bang, the top down effect was quite maybe a harsh one to begin with.
32:09 But the collaboration also here happens now naturally because it’s all visible.
32:14 So now suddenly you can reach out to someone.
32:16 So like, hey, I see you playing this commercial activity.
32:18 It’s going through the roof or hey, this store is working well.
32:22 So it’s in the national interest to collaborate more.
32:25 And then on the top, if we talk about looking forward when we be able to know proactively, maybe send messages alerts then that maybe incentivizes or encourages at least collaboration a bit more as well.
32:39 Mhm That’s great.
32:40 And then in this entire project, did you involve different departments along the way for the feedback and who which departments were they too many?
32:53 Probably to go through all of them?
32:54 But yes, this also connects to what I tried to explain in the beginning with Ingka and IKEA is also owning the entire production process, also the pricing processes and so on so forth.
33:08 So they have of course digital solutions as well to set proper pricing and so on and so forth, to connect to those tools as you might be able to imagine was quite a big challenge.
33:18 Not only on a political level, it’s between different companies that we do have a bit of different ways of working at times.
33:26 Connecting those databases and so on, so forth is quite a challenge.
33:31 But by now, I would say we have figured out our way and also because camp attracted us so well liked others now want to consume our data as well.
33:42 So when it comes to dependencies, maybe sometimes we are the dependency.
33:45 Now for others in the beginning, it was really to get into the backlog of other products as well to maybe get an API connection to have a data flow going.
33:54 And then at the same time, we still have quite a lot of work across departments when it comes to our business partners.
34:02 We do have our continuous feedback loops of course with the business owner.
34:06 But also there are other departments more on the marketing side, for example, that also have an interest in connecting with the commercial activities.
34:14 So yes, there’s quite a lot of departments that are involved, especially on the digital side.
34:19 But by now, I think we have figured it out pretty well.
34:23 OK?
34:23 I think we have time for one more question before I bring in Andreas and it’s even with these difficult economic times, how critical would you say this planning transformation is for enterprises?
34:38 Yeah, I guess that’s two folded, right?
34:40 Because it’s always this discussion, you need to do a big invest now to have a long term, be better impact.
34:46 And of course, maybe right now it’s a tricky time to make that big invest.
34:50 I can only say the numbers speak for themselves, like 180,000 hours cost avoidance there some millions and millions of euros of return on invest.
35:00 We are, I think we have a return on invest over 20 million each year with this product.
35:05 So it certainly pays off.
35:08 The question is, however, this initial invest in a time like this is probably a challenging thing to get through with your financial controllers or upper management who are the custodians of that budget.
35:21 But I would say, especially in those times, it really pays off and it’s, it’s worth it if you as a company have that flexibility, even though during those times it’s a different question there.
35:31 I, I guess IKEA definitely has the advantage of being such a, such a successful company that we do have that financial flexibility to also invest in times where investments are important, but maybe not as pop popular.
35:46 Yes, that’s, that’s good to know, it’s very encouraging.
35:50 And now I do want to introduce Andreas.
35:53 We have a very special product demonstration of our new Uptempo marketing planning platform delivered by Andreas Martinici, Director of Solution Engineering EMEA at Uptempo.
36:07 Andreas, you have the floor.
36:10 Thanks so much Thao and thank you for the great introduction of the IKEA case.
36:15 Now for a more wider scope in terms of solution demo of the tempo platform.
36:22 And well subject of the day, we are focusing indeed on plan and spend and we’re actually for dramatic purposes, we’ll start our presentation with the portion.
36:32 And without further ado, let’s head over into the live demo.
36:37 So here I am locked into the system already from the get go.
36:43 I am presented with my personal favorite dashboard and that is a top down versus bottom our budget planning dashboard.
36:49 So what I see is our investment target have been 67.4 million against as I have planned a certain amount of budget, I’m 92% complete.
36:58 I know where I’m good.
36:59 I know where I I’m supposed to be.
37:02 Yeah, filling out a little bit more metadata, et cetera.
37:04 So we have these heuristics in the system to guide you accordingly.
37:09 And then going down there, I have a dashboard for investment mix by objective by customer journey, by segment C activity type persona product.
37:18 Ultimately, which metadata, which segmentation, which custom attribute, which, which taxonomy you’re going for.
37:24 This is completely up to you.
37:26 This not only goes for such a dashboard as we’re looking at it here, any kind of dashboards, be they standard or be they offer custom dashboards that we can provide you with?
37:36 Now, we do have a chicken and an egg problem because well, it’s great to have such reports for decision making.
37:42 But before you have the data to report on, you have to get some work done.
37:46 So let’s take a step back here and have a look at how that is done.
37:50 So very typically early on in the planning phase, we have some business objectives provided by the business.
37:57 So business could be like, hey, please be so kind marketing, please increase annual revenue by 10%.
38:02 That would be great.
38:03 And so marketing says say no more, we expand the market penetration in South America.
38:08 Have these marketing priorities set up with measurable, tangible OKRS.
38:13 And already here we can visualize we have these synergistic synergistic effects going on with aligning marketing to the business, but it goes forward, we trickle it down to key actions for marketing teams.
38:25 Those would then be assigned to the individual investment and individual activities for the end to end strategy map to the financial execution if you will.
38:35 So let’s have a look at that.
38:36 So we go to the menu and into the budgets.
38:40 This is where our fictitious company.
38:42 So they’re doing sustainable technology, they have budgeted into various segments.
38:49 So we have agencies, product marketing, marketing operations, channel marketing, different subcategories.
38:55 There is field marketing with different regional budget buckets, et cetera.
38:59 And then we have our North American go investment plan here as well.
39:04 We will get to that in a minute.
39:05 But before we do that, let’s open the details panel because this is where the magic happens in terms of top down budgeting.
39:13 So you can freely distribute a budget over time for the various investment plans.
39:17 You can also request transfers in between those plans here as well with a according approval workflow.
39:23 But for now, let’s go into one such investment plan.
39:26 And this is kind of the the payload of the investment plan where what looks like a campaign plan is just reminiscent of one.
39:35 It is actually an investment plan.
39:37 We are in the span chapter.
39:38 After all, every line item reflects an individual investment portion, then we’re planning out.
39:44 So currently we’re looking at the planned budget, we can showcase these head up displays.
39:49 So this is great for our zero budgeting, top down versus bottom up.
39:53 How are we ranking against that?
39:55 Here is our strategic and objective alignment.
39:59 Again, all of those line items, they are either contributing or not contributing to a strategic incentive that has been given to us.
40:07 Now, we can change the few here.
40:11 So maybe we would like to have an aggregate over the quarters or maybe we would like to have a more in depth look into into the actual spending.
40:19 So down the road, there will be invoices, that’s the actual down the road, there will be purchase orders, our committed budget.
40:25 But even before that, what we can do is we can forecast our spending.
40:30 That’s actually a pretty powerful tool because what we can do essentially is we can say, you know what not only have we planned to spend 40,000, we are indeed forecasting that 37,500 are going to be spent even before we have contractually committed it via purchase orders.
40:48 And therefore we are removing the friction between marketing and other departments and and controlling and finance.
40:55 It’s great for a cruel management.
40:57 Please don’t take away that budget for us.
40:59 So after forecasting, how are we getting to town when it comes to committing the budget, initiating purchase requisitions, you actually can do this right from within your system of record of marketing of temple.
41:11 If you will opening the details panel here, we notice we have these fully customizable tabs worth of budget, general ledgers cost centers, et cetera, et cetera.
41:22 What finance cares for investment, details, spend, type and type detail, supplier, supplier, type, et cetera, all the metadata that is relevant for the reporting that we also had started our journey with today.
41:36 But the beauty here is that we have these infamous action buttons.
41:39 And so right from within the system, we can initiate a purchase requisition.
41:44 So we can kick this off.
41:46 We have this intake form.
41:48 Everything.
41:49 What you see here is fully customizable.
41:51 Maybe you don’t even want to have that intake form, but you can have it.
41:53 So let’s say I would like to raise a full purchase order.
41:57 Bring in some very creative description here of mine.
42:01 And then down here we have individual line items for our purchase requisition.
42:05 So let’s say we go for 50,000 for a specific cost center marking operations, we can add another line item.
42:14 I bring in another value 30,000 for good measure.
42:18 And then this goes straight to the office of the CMO.
42:21 So what we can do is now we can submit this and notice before I do this here in the background, we have a number and that is actually the line item ID, which is a very crucial number because we sent this number along with that purchase requisition to the third party system in your back office for procurement.
42:37 Because down the road, that back office system will according to approval will issue the purchase order so we can bring that back that purchase order and reconcile it with our planned budget line item.
42:50 And the same would apply then down the road once goods received, once the invoice has been expensed, we roll back that invoice back into our system for us as a marketer in our system of record for marketing to have the end to end tracking of our financial journey if you will from planning over forecast purchase orders and the actuals.
43:11 So this is great.
43:12 I’m looking at this, this is the North American field marketing spent management plan if you will.
43:19 But maybe my boss, she wants to have a rather high level overview.
43:23 She is the the global manager for field marketing on Solar.
43:27 And so she wants to have a, a roll up view of that over the whole globe.
43:33 So she can have that what have we planned globally, what have we committed globally, et cetera.
43:39 And she can also leverage different views.
43:42 So maybe she wants to have a more aggregated view on.
43:46 What is 00 budgeting plan versus actual purchase order versus actual et cetera?
43:51 Where are we looking at in that regard?
43:54 So, so much for spent and let’s have a brief recap here.
43:59 We have just seen the top down provided budget against which we have planned and bottom up all the rich details and, and metadata and taxonomy on that level informs then all the reports that we have had a look at at the beginning.
44:15 And yeah, we have the forecasting also that can be reported on and everything rolls up nicely for management views, even without going to the reports, get these reports, they are at your disposal.
44:26 Nonetheless, we have had a look at how we can align the corporate strategy to those investments.
44:34 And we have recognized that we can from within the the system, we can kick off procurement automatically without actually having to go to a separate system.
44:46 However, meanwhile, we have just had a look at the spend management and the planning of budget.
44:53 We have not yet planned for the actual go to market all our campaigns and activities.
44:59 So let’s have a look at that as well.
45:01 So going back to the system, we have a dedicated area for that with all the timelines and gantt charts that you would expect.
45:10 So what we are looking at here right now is our go to market calendar with all the timelines.
45:15 And yeah, we are looking at today, we have currently going on the 2023 channel marketing plan.
45:22 So what is this?
45:23 Let, let’s have a look, let’s digest this piece by piece.
45:26 So I open this and in here, I see this element is actually of type, well plan that makes sense.
45:34 And so what we have down here and these are even mandatory.
45:37 We have the plan here and the plan type, I go a level deeper here in the rabbit hole.
45:42 And what we then are presented with is a campaign.
45:45 Now, this campaign has campaign objective, campaign theme.
45:49 That makes sense.
45:50 Go a little deeper and we will stop here in a second program.
45:53 Has program family and represented offering the point here being that we are context where it only ever present the asks for the taxonomy and the metadata that’s relevant for your task at hand.
46:05 So we capture that where it is relevant and don’t bother you with that where it is not relevant.
46:10 The other thing is, well, we are looking at a program that is sitting underneath the campaign might, maybe this is vastly different for you.
46:19 Maybe for you, it is a campaign and program the other way around.
46:22 Maybe you have a a level in between.
46:24 Maybe you have a layer for channels, maybe you have a layer for for instrument, et cetera.
46:30 However, you see fit, we have cut you covered because there is a nesting rules engine in place that gives you kind of guide rails.
46:38 So you have a structured marketing planning.
46:40 We can even accommodate differences in different departments and different markets for different audiences, et cetera.
46:46 So everybody can plan according to their needs and yet with the metadata on the lowest level, the payload of the plan, if you will think tactics, the actual activities, content production runs where we capture all the metadata that we then also can run reports on.
47:04 We kind of can go a highest denominator kind of an approach so that we can compare apples and oranges between different marketing plans if you will.
47:13 So this is what we can do.
47:16 We can of course, then also leverage the metadata having a look at, for instance, campaign objectives.
47:22 So understanding that from a different angle, pivot the whole hierarchy understanding.
47:26 OK, great which campaigns are actually going for demand creation, which campaigns are actually going for reputation and so on.
47:35 So having different perspectives, utilizing all the metadata, but all those campaigns and activities, ultimately, we have to budget for them.
47:46 We’ve managed to spend already.
47:47 So how does that look?
47:48 Like it’s a simple exercise of going to budget and then understanding that we can associate those activity line items with multiple spend line items in the spent hierarchy.
48:01 Because this is the beauty of the system where we have two hierarchies.
48:04 Yeah, we can basically double multiple tip dip into different budget buckets leveraging multiple budget sources, but we can also distribute our spend to various activities when it comes to splitting having kind of efficiencies in that regard.
48:24 Why are we doing this though?
48:26 What we can do with the system?
48:27 We can actually forecast already during the planning phase, the performance that we’re going for.
48:34 So what we can do here and let’s talk this in a kind of a generic way.
48:39 We can actually project top of the funnel performance overall, go to market.
48:44 So purple here has kind of the the top of the funnel performance impact that we are going for we are planning to produce, to hit the market with if you will and over the time, this performance will be generated.
49:00 And then we have this delay after which we have the revenue impact for the business.
49:05 So how do we get there?
49:06 Well, we have underneath the hood, we have a funnel projection going on.
49:13 What we’re looking at right now is a B2B funnel.
49:16 It is completely configurable.
49:17 It can be a B2C funnel.
49:19 We can look at a demand waterfall, we can look at an elite waterfall, we can look at a above the line below the line.
49:25 It is ultimately completely up to you how to set this up.
49:28 The key piece here is that we have these parameters, conversion rates between those individual stages.
49:34 We have the, between those individual stages and according to the average deal size, it translates to the revenue contribution to the business and what’s important here.
49:46 We’re looking at the planning of things.
49:48 So we will have to fact check this against the actual performance measure.
49:52 So we will handle that in a minute.
49:55 But this is already an important piece because it allows us to assess whether our plan is having integrity.
50:01 And what we mean by that is figuring out whether heaven forbid if we are actually successful with the execution of our planned plan.
50:11 We are not hitting our targets.
50:12 So maybe we should pivot on the spot.
50:14 And of course, correct before we achieve our goals that are not set up properly for us in terms of the marketing execution.
50:22 Now, there is one more thing that I would like to show you live and that is, first of all right, now, we can just go in here and plan in an agile manner according to my user rights and role.
50:32 That is so simply why I track and drop, I can create those elements and go out there.
50:38 But maybe I would like to have things handled in a more kind of orchestrated way.
50:44 What we can do is we can have everything be planned out and laid out in a workflow based manner.
50:51 So all those elements can be linked to workflows, not only for the planning on a on a campaign and program level, but also for like work and, and and collaborative execution level down the road.
51:02 We will have a quick look at that in at the end of the presentation.
51:06 So associated with our activity, which is in this case, a strategic plan, we have this, this job which is currently sitting in final review.
51:14 We have all the metadata soon back and forth.
51:16 We have our collaboration here on the right side.
51:19 And what I want to show you here is that this suspiciously streamlined looking workflow here in this red visualization up here.
51:28 This is actually a potentially rather complex workflow.
51:32 And I will show you later on an even more complex example, but there is this revision loop going on with re entry points, there could be parallel gateways, we could have decision points within that.
51:43 Then we actually hide away from the end user with the complex with the concept of simplified views.
51:52 That is and this is not only reminiscent in in these background visualizations, it also shows in my personal favorite view in the system, which is the Kanban board.
52:02 So here in the Kanban board for all kinds of workflows, that is we have here an example for an activity brief, we have an example for some approval and planning.
52:11 This is what we we just talking about.
52:15 There could be price and promotions, activity, commercial activity planning that is production runs content creation.
52:22 We will discuss this briefly in the next chapter et cetera.
52:27 So with this, let’s jump back to the slides.
52:30 Let’s have a quick recap here.
52:31 We have just discussed the activity calendar, how it can be sliced and diced by all different kinds of perspectives.
52:37 We have seen the funnel projection, understanding the performance contribution early on in the planning phase, assessing whether we are having integrity in our planning.
52:46 And then there is of course the need to fact check this against the actuals in the market.
52:52 So not only are we having the planned return of invest but then also integrated, we have the actual return of invest, we can compare this and understand whether we are on the right track or not.
53:02 What we can also do is we can integrate into marketing attribution systems.
53:06 What is nice here is that this is also something that we’re having on our road map to support you with native marketing attribution modeling right within our system as well.
53:17 And last but not least, we have discussed that we have these these can ban views on any types of workflows.
53:25 Again, potentially very complex workflows with decision gateways, parallel workflow steps, et cetera.
53:32 These are also used in the work site which is not of today’s presentations, focus and yet a couple of slides just to briefly discuss this.
53:43 So what a temple also has in stock for you is work management, concentration processes, capacity management.
53:50 Where OK, we utilize the workflow engine in this case for a concentration piece, have different workflows driving it underneath the hood again, hiding away the complexity, we leverage these intake forms for the collaborative aspects of content creation, rejecting assets, approving assets, having reviews and annotations going on with side by side comparison thing, videos, documents, images, et cetera.
54:15 And last but not least it is then released into the asset library of a temple or then synchronized to your existing enterprise digital asset management.
54:24 We support both now supporting both takes us to my last slide in this presentation and that is there are numerous integration use cases and we will tackle them with integration of tempo fusion framework.
54:40 So here the idea is around our around our solutions plan spend and work.
54:48 We started our journey with spend today.
54:50 We would integrate your back office systems for procurement, also spend reconciliation when it comes to planning, hitting your data lake.
55:01 Kicking off marketing automation or kicking off a sales campaign, but then also taking back the performance metrics accordingly, we can have work managed in our system, releasing assets to your digital asset management or leveraging assets from your digital asset management.
55:16 Or if you say you know what we we appreciate plan and spend, but we have something going on for work already in our existing project and work management tools.
55:25 We can integrate your existing work management just as well.
55:29 This is what I wanted to present you all today.
55:32 And how we can help you with the Uptempo platform.
55:36 And yeah, thank you for your time.
55:40 Thank you Andreas, very flexible planning platform to meet the complex needs of enterprises.
55:48 And it’s no easy feat trying to change the commercial planning of such a large global enterprise such as IKEA.
55:55 So that’s a lot of work on the technology people and process side.
55:59 So, congratulations to you Marcel and your team for the ongoing work.
56:04 And continued innovation.
56:06 I will think of you as I walk the busy aisles at IKEA this holiday.
56:10 And I want to thank both Andreas and Marcel for great presentations today and everyone who took time out of your busy days to join us.
56:19 So thank you, everyone.
56:21 Goodbye and happy holidays.
56:23 Goodbye.
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