Customer Stories

Here's what customers say about Alight Planning. The stories speak for themselves...

Lawrence Van Kuran, Senior Consultant, Pharmacy Strategy and Operations, Kaiser Permanente
Gary Boomershine, CEO, Sales Team Live
Sherrie Schmit, VP, Business Development, Expressware
Patrick Stakenas, CEO, ForceLogix

Lawrence Van Kuran,
Senior Consultant, Pharmacy Strategy and Operations

Founded in 1945, Kaiser Permanente is the nation's largest nonprofit health plan, serving 8.2 million members, with headquarters in Oakland, California.

Frustrated with spreadsheets and expensive proposals from national consulting groups, I turned to the Alight Planning software package to rationalize a complex business case for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to replace a legacy information system. The team process and underlying model documented the financial impact of scores of benefit and cost avoidance programs across eight operating regions. The analysis incorporated multiple scenarios with alternative implementation timetables, and complex on/off switches for testing the sensitivity of individual benefit and savings programs.

Unlike the big-name consulting firms who required several months notice before they could get started on the project, Alight's model implementation team was always available to provide training and ongoing support right from the start.

At the time we started modeling with Alight, we had developed a set of soft benefits that could result from moving Kaiser to a single Pharmacy Information Management System (PIMS). However, little progress had been made to quantify benefits and build the financial case for the national PIMS. With Alight, we quickly created a series of benefits models leveraging Alight's units-rate-amount (URA) structure. The URA structure gave visibility into key drivers such as prescription volume and co-pay amounts. In fact, we even had top executives modifying the model assumptions in real-time in meetings using the Key Measures interface!

I knew Alight's use of scenarios would be important tool for us to do "what-if" analysis. We used scenarios to model alternate implementation timetables using "switches." A switch is set to "1" in the time period a region goes lives on the new PIMS system. With scenarios and switches, we could quickly address key business questions such as: what if only certain regions participate? And what is the financial impact of delaying the entire project by one year?

One of our key requirements was to communicate the costs and benefits of the business case to each of the eight regions; in essence, there was a requirement to build one large business case made up of eight smaller business cases, one business case for each region. This would have been a maintenance nightmare in Excel®, but it turned out to be trivial in Alight using the software's multi-dimensional capabilities for slicing and dicing the data.

Gary Boomershine,
Chief Executive Officer

Sales Team Live (STL) is web-based software and services company delivering tools, industry data and training to real estate investors.

I needed a financial model to help me figure out the strategies and deal structures for working with customers. As we entered the marketplace, the feedback kept pointing to alternate approaches for pricing, bundling products and services, structuring referral fees, and working with resellers. I needed to test out the choices on a fast track.

I've worked with spreadsheets before, but there's no way I could have built and maintained a model in Excel that would give me the answers I needed. The solution was Alight Planning.

To get rolling, the Alight consultant walked me through a series of questions focusing on volumes and sales conversion rates when products and reseller channels are mature — that is, what the business would look like a couple of years out. This is the beginning point for Alight's process and architecture called stage based planning. Build a model with target assumptions of where you want to go, then fill in the blanks of how to get there.

The initial interview took an hour and a half. The next day I was looking at a draft of a baseline revenue model. By the end of the week, we had a complete model — P&L, balance sheet and cash flow — going out three years. While the Alight consultant built the model, I was involved in the whole process of defining the financial targets, rollup structures and activity drivers. The consultant was amazingly fast in translating my vision into manipulable input assumptions and linked data relationships.

The smoothest part was 'the handoff.' With just two hours of online tutoring, I understood the financial model and was manipulating the underlying assumptions myself. An Alight feature that makes this easy is Key Measures — a special pane at the bottom of the screen where I can change the most sensitive input assumptions and see calculated metrics of the business. In spreadsheets you have to jump back and forth between worksheets to change inputs and look at results.

I first chose Alight Planning to build a financial model. But I got a lot more — a planning tool that helps me guide my company through a complicated maze of financial and strategy decisions that are having an immediate top and bottom line impact. That's invaluable.

Finally, I'm a high tech sales guy as well as an entrepreneur. I've been around enterprise and desktop software my whole career. There's no question that Alight Planning is setting new standards for financial software interfaces and analysis tools. Every company should buy this software.

Sherrie Schmit, Vice President
Business Development

Expressware delivers web application software and services to medium-sized businesses and organizations to enable content owners to publish their own content in real time. We have a complicated business model involving half a dozen different revenue sources each with its own ramping, underlying cost structure and efficiency assumptions.

We first used Excel for the business plan. The roll-ups were somewhat crude. It was also time consuming to make modifications such as changing payment terms to see how they impacted the cash flow. The plan was too simplified and couldn't really support the multiple scenarios we wanted to analyze. The experience was frustrating.

When we switched to Alight, the model came together quickly. We started with a profile that included the roll-up structures and placeholder line items for a typical software business. Unlike a spreadsheet, roll-ups are embedded in Alight, and they're accurate. Worksheets and financial statements are already linked together.

Our business model involves multiple payment plans, distribution channels, and licensing structures. Alight makes it easy to evaluate how different scenarios for each affect the bottom line and which assumptions have the greatest impact on financial measures. As well, by assigning different scenarios to time periods, we're able to quickly evaluate the impact of alternate ramping assumptions.

Alight includes a lot of tools for modeling complicated situations. For example, our plan includes customer service, sales, and testing jobs where hiring is driven by volumes and customer activity. The linking was a snap, but more important, I could fine tune the model to show hiring in the month before the programmed requirement to allow for training. The hiring model is interactive. If I increase or decrease volumes or push in or push out activity milestones, the hiring plan and related resources automatically adjust.

Alight is an invaluable tool for analyzing strategies and managing our business. We can now evaluate different product and service offerings and understand their impacts before making them available to our customers. It plugged the biggest hole in our business planning: "what is the bottom line if we make this change?"

Patrick Stakenas
Chief Executive Officer

ForceLogix is a web-based ASP that tracks data sources — e.g. sales and corporate financial data, customer relationship and satisfaction data, and compensation data — for managing sales performance ratings and other sales activities.

The annuity elements of our business model make the financial plan especially complex. Our customers start by having us build a prototype application tailored to their data sources and sales management issues, which is a source of revenue. During the process a percentage do not move forward but the majority become a real sale with continuing subscriptions, design fees and installation support. After a year, we have some attrition, but most renew with continuing growth in the installed user base and subscription fees.

We started with Excel templates, but the annuity issues were to difficult to model — at least for us sales guys who are the founders. We needed an intuitive tool with specialized interfaces for sorting out the cross time period data relationships — for accumulating the installed bases, for defining and manipulating attrition rates, and for calculating the interrelationship of revenue sources. Alight did all of this for us.

Size of customers adds another layer of complexity. Large customers have different budgets and attrition rates from small ones. In addition, resellers have a different pricing model and product mix. A zoo in our early Excel models! All straight forward in Alight.

We're a startup. We can't afford a high priced finance staff. But we still need to fully understand and massage the numbers for our own peace of mind. We need to know that the financials work in our business model. We have to feel confident meeting with potential investors. After two hours of training on the finished model, I was working on my own, changing assumptions in the Key Measures interface and analyzing impacts on the P&L and cash flow.

Alight's architectures for creating and managing scenarios are huge. Unlike the spreadsheets where we couldn't find our inputs or tie out the details, with Alight we continuously create, change and analyze scenarios. I can play with pricing, product mix or headcount assumptions and be confident that the changes correctly ripple through the model and financial statements.

Our first investor presentation was an audience of angels and CEOs from top flight companies. We finished with Alight live through a PC viewer. Two dynamics emerged. First, I was confident with the numbers and presentation. Because I'd worked hands-on with the model, I knew the answer to every financial question. I felt good. Second, my potential investors had a higher level of confidence. The fact that we'd built a plan bottoms-up, that we could articulate headcount details, that we could talk about number of customers and installed bases — this gave us credibility with our audience that we'd really dug into the numbers and knew the business.

Alight was exactly what we needed to round out our business and nail down the numbers. We use Alight daily to run new scenarios, analyze business opportunities, and make investor presentations. Alight has given us the confidence and financial street smarts to talk toe to toe with the most savvy investor.