🖐️ Red Carpet Ask Me Anything: Bilal from Sleep Country Canada

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hello, Prophix friends. I’m Bilal from Sleep Country Canada. And this is my Prophix Red Carpet Ask Me Anything!

First a bit about me and my journey here. When I first came to Canada, I lived in St. Catharines. Eventually, I settled near Prophix’s office in Mississauga, as it just felt like home! I’m a real foodie, so the best aspect of living in Mississauga for me is the restaurants. When it comes to grabbing a latte, I stick to Starbucks, as I like my latte consistent, made in a specific way. For a loaded omelette, well, I like my own! But Bobby’s Hideaway is a staple breakfast place in Mississauga. And Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse grills a top-notch steak!

As you can see in my photos, I used to be a very adventurous guy. Now I’m a family man. The transition has been scary, but fun. You have to think beyond yourself and plan everything way in advance. Plus, I am not allowed to do crazy, adventurous things anymore. If I am not chasing around my two toddlers, then I love to look for a new place to eat or go to a movie to catch up on my peaceful time. :-)

Now to the work and Prophix part! Sleep Country is the largest mattress retailer in Canada, with over 250 stores. Sleep Country’s work culture is great. I’m part of a fun and vibrant work environment, where we work hard, but most importantly play hard too! At Sleep Country, we are “ALL FOR SLEEP” and we do want our customers to get the best night’s sleep possible. Before I spoke with Mark from Prophix, I wasn’t aware that Mattress Firm in America is also a Prophix customer. When you work in this industry, you become a real expert on mattresses and the mattress business.

About the implementation and subsequent phases: firstly, I loved working with the Prophix team again and again! That goes for Andrei, Rob, and others. Secondly, it did magic! Over the course of a few years, we replaced Excel, we re-designed the entire GL structure, built new cubes, improved the back-end data refresh process, and we designed all our reports to come from Prophix using Template Studio. The report templates save us a lot of time during the month-end close process, and again when we produce internal reporting packages, as well as during the budgeting cycle. Some of our fancier reports include comparisons to prior year & budget, and slicing them by various dimensions of time, location, and department. We also analyze our variable and fixed costs.

Pretty much all our budgeting is done within Prophix by leveraging workflows to get departments to input their budgeting pieces. The process starts early (in July, even though we run on a Dec 31st year-end) due to a detailed reforecast, roll-overs of budget templates, versions, and workflows as well as getting the Detailed Planning Manager (DPM) model up and running. After that, we like to allocate different weeks to different areas of the business, as multiple personnel must submit and receive approval from their budgeting leads.

We designed our use of DPM for payroll planning to perform calculations at the lowest level – tracking benefits, taxes, etc. for each type of associate.

Since its formation, our FP&A team has impacted many departments outside Finance. FP&A has helped to outline category and vendor profitability, location analysis, various ROI analyses, inventory management, marketing efficiency, and customer segmentation, to name a few.

We feel like we’re valuable to the business as the organization (and retail in general) faces uncertainty due to Covid-19. As a finance planning and strategy team, we are constantly reforecasting and running scenario analyses as soon as we have new information available to us. This has been necessary to satisfy the banks on our cash and debt management, and to make our board and investors comfortable regarding the financial management of the company.

Once we redesign our financial cube (due to our new G/L structure), we’ll look to build out a revenue or sales planning cube. We will also move to the cloud. Using Prophix in the cloud will give us ongoing upgrades, increase our mobility, and aid in disaster recovery.

On that note, here is my poll question for you.

Have you migrated from Prophix on-premise version to cloud?

• Yes

• No

Now we finally get to the ‘ask me anything’ part. Leave a comment. Say hello. Or you can ask me a question about Template Studio, cash flow planning, reforecasting, profitability analysis, loaded omelettes, skydiving, or anything else!

[kristen.compton]

We have always used cloud and love the updates/upgrades. PS I love skydiving too!

[erin.gahagan]

Hello! Thanks for sharing your story! For those of us who are still allowed to have adventures (when it’s safe again) - what would you recommend?

Thanks! Hope you and your family are well!

[paul.vickers]

Do you have cubes that are a little out-of-the-normal thinking? There’s finance and payroll, but where else did you deploy a cube that was not status-quo. Any challenges with setting it up? And, the edge it has given you.

[rob.perry]

What goes on your loaded omlet?

[donna.ferrante]

Hi, Bilal; nice meeting you and hearing your story! We have been 100% on the Cloud since they moved to all cloud and no regrets - especially now with working from home! I am currently working on forecasting our cash flow - any advise would be welcomed! Once question would be how you go about that…do you forecast/budget your balance sheet? Do you forecast at the leaf level or top level?

[michelle.ferris]

Hi Bilal,
Does Sleep Country use rolling forecasts? Do you have tips for that process? Are you doing any scenario planning during the unsure economic times? We are in the process of moving to the cloud right now, any advice there?

[tom.samuelson]

Bilal,

It is nice meeting you. What do you see as the major advantage to going to the Cloud? We are looking at it strongly now.

Thank you for sharing your story.

[heather.taylor]

Hi Bilal, nice to meet you!

Whats the most impressive thing you have done with Prophix?

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Thanks Kristen! upgrades is one of the attractive point for me as well to move to cloud. The rush is amazing when you jump of the plane during sky diving.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Enjoy it while you can…I would recommend swimming with sharks… quite the rush specially without the a cage.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Paul,

Great question! I like to keep things simple. Hence, in our second wave of clean up we limited our built to only DPM, Finance plus added a revenue flavor through the revenue cube. It keep the model very controllable, streamlined and keeps it functioning. This gives us more time to play around with different version for forecasting and budgeting against actual.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

I love to have four egg omelette with tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, hot peppers, coriander, mushrooms, marble or swiss cheese and ground beef or chicken… sometimes I like to add corn and black olives.

The combination just works for me and makes it my anytime comfort food!

[rebecca.broaddus]

Hi Bilal! Do you have any tips for managing the inputs and workflows of what users are inputting for the budget?! This upcoming budget season will be the first year we utilize workflows and let employees other than our finance group have direct access to Prophix so I am curious if you have any tips to share! Thanks!!

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Donna,

Thank you its a pleasure to talk with you online as well Thats amazing to know the cloud version is solid. Currently, we only do the budgeting at the lowest level (leaf decents); the P&L is king so we do a bottoms up build during the budgeting cycle and we do budget our B/S but athat is done at the higher level to keep it simple.

Whereas, the forecast is done at a highlevel (mostly at a parent level). However, we do leverage adhoc to extract information to project any specific account needed or required to be done at a leaf level and rolled up. There are times you have to reach out to the business and facilitate inputs even during the forecast process.

On the cashflow front; I would recommend don’t get bogged down in the calculations and keep it simple. Many times we get fixated and the cash flow calculations don’t flow within prophix or if you are using an excel model, makesure to go back to the underlinning calculation and trace it from there.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Michelle,

Hope all it well! Yes, we do rolling forecast. Currently, we are managing that outside of Prophix. Few tips, I would suggest; if you are setting up a model in excel, make sure to build a shell based on Prophix output so you can paste the actuals and budget in a seamless process every time when you update the model, as this would keep the formulas intact. Secondly, make sure your variable tab is set up separate or changes highlighted strongly if they within the working, as you loose track of the changes. Thirdly, make sure you link things through as you don’t want partial connections and then hard coded (but that’s why have variable tab separate or on the side of the spread sheet helps)

On the scenario planning… WOW! it was quite challenging. My team and I ran quite a few scenarios as we had different stakeholders to satisfy from banks, to board and then internal management. All of them required different inputs and concentration points as well as at-least 3 to 4 scenarios.

I am currently on-premises and looking to cloud. But one finding I can share with you is build all the changes to your structure before it gets replicated on to the cloud.

Hope this helps!

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Tom,

I am in the same boat as you are! but with my current findings I see upgrades to the tool being seamless and some of the back-end management passed off to the cloud provider such as maintaining servers etc. This would keep the speed at optimal position.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Heather,

Pleasure to chat with you online. I like to keep it simple and build long term functioning models. Hence, the most impressive thing I did was to scrap the entire model after my first year and rebuild. So we re-defined our internal P&L structures to facilitate better roll up, stayed away from stats calculation unless absolutely required and then rebuild finance, revenue and DPM cubes all over again. Then we has to fix the data interface feeding the cubes. This also required all the internal reporting to get revamped and change management piece was quite hefty too.

It was quite a detailed project and I don’t thing my description of the words above do justice.

[basurahyo (Bilal Surahyo)]

Hi Rebecca,

This is a loaded question, I will do my best. I just love workflows! getting the business to put budget in directly has been my favorite thing with prophix. It saves me a lot of time! Few suggestions that work for us would be:

• It all starts with the access you give. If all members have access to areas outside their department, then its a little hard to manage as they will see other areas too.
• Separate the templates by area which are being connected, as it makes it easier to restart a process instead of restarting it for everyone.
• Templates by area can be limited by departmental access. For example, I have one template for G&A area. This same template is attached to different activities by department and I can control it with security access. My Marketing person only see what they have access to, hence they would have no filter option and once the template is open they only see their tab.
• The other way to maintain is by location if people are in the same area or department. For example, you might have multiple distribution sites or warehouse but they all fall into operations.

Hence, security setting place a big part into making it a full functioning process so you will have to validate your dimension level security. Lastly, I would say build a lot activities with the workflow either by department / person or location, it makes things easier to track approvals and restarting them after they been submitting.

Hope this helps!

[ryan.wheatley]

Hi Bilal. Thanks for sharing your story. I’m curious to hear more about your experience with DPM. Hopefully my question is relevant -if not, feel free to take a “pass.” Specifically, did you have any difficulties determining just how detailed to get in your methodology? This may be different in Canada, but the example that is coming to mind is different levels and formulas for projecting national, state/provincial, and local payroll taxes and benefits -including phase outs and tiers. It seems at some level the effort/maintenance may outweigh the resulting change in the numbers. Can you give any insights on whether you able to find a sweet spot where you get the information you need without having to break out tax codes and make detailed annual updates -or did/do you go all the way and include every detail/update possible? In hindsight, would you go with more detail or less detail?