Pablo Gonzalez
Finance Manager, US Marketing Governance
Jim Williams
Chief Marketing Officer
A $600 million marketing budget can do a lot. But only if every dollar is tracked, optimized, and put to work in the right place.
Reckitt needed better financial visibility and control to run marketing like a business. So, they made a change.
Pablo Gonzalez, Finance Manager – US Marketing Governance at Reckitt, shares an inside look at how they transformed their approach to marketing budget management. Learn how Reckitt taps into real-time data to make faster investment decisions, reallocate funds from underperforming programs to high-impact initiatives, and eliminate hours of manual reporting.
Key takeaways:
In today’s environment, every marketing dollar is under scrutiny. This webinar gives you actionable insights to bring clarity, efficiency, and impact to your budget strategy.
Watch the recording soon and take control of your marketing spend!
Thank you to those of you who have joined today webinar between Uptempo and Reckitt. My name is Jim Williams. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Uptempo, and today we’re going to be talking about the business of marketing. The best way to describe it, we call it the business of marketing, right? Which is really how to run marketing in a financially responsible way with good budget management, etc.
And so I’m going to introduce Pablo, or Pablo introduce himself in about one second. But first I got to go through, you know their usual suspects. So if this is your first ever webinar, congratulations. Welcome aboard.
The webinar will be recorded, so you can make sure that you’ll get a recording sent afterwards, along with slides that we’ll send afterwards. We’re going to do Q and A. There is a Q and A feature somewhere here in this awesome Zoom interface, we can ask your questions.
There’s also chat. If you want to make some comments or just compliment either of the speakers. We love those, you can use the chat function too. If the question comes in and it’s relevant to the kind of the part of the conversation we’re having, then I’ll just, we’ll stop and and ask it like it’s, you know, try and keep it engaging interactive as much as possible. But please go ahead and use those features before we just get into the meat of the conversation.
If you’re not familiar with Uptempo, we are enterprise marketing planning software. We like to think of Uptempo as a system of record for marketing planning, which involves strategic planning, campaign planning and the topic of taste discussion, financial planning or budget management. So we provide that for world’s leading enterprises, of which Reckitt is one we’re very excited about as a customer.
One other note, Uptempo is a relatively new brand. Right about three years ago, we created Uptempo from several companies that came together, one of which is Allocadia, which you might be familiar with. Allocadia does financial management for large enterprises, and so Pablo, if you say Allocadia, because you’re so fond of the brand that you’ve been using for all these years. That’s fine. Just know, Allocadia is our financial part of the Uptempo company.
All right, so why don’t we get into it here? I will share the screen. I probably put that up earlier, huh, Pablo? Here’s our intro slide. Okay, so Pablo, of course, is a Finance Manager for US Marketing Governance at Reckitt, and for those of you that are unfamiliar with Reckitt, I’ll tell you a little bit about it.
First of all, it’s a $16 billion consumer products powerhouse. You see Reckitt products every day. Some of the brands you might be familiar with are Lysol, Muscinex, Finish. It operates in 45 countries. This is amazing. 30 million Reckitt products are sold every single day. So talk about scale of an organization. It has 50,000 employees worldwide, and 3000 of those are marketers, and here in North America US, about 100 of those manage their budgets on Uptempo software. And the person who’s responsible for making sure that they have all the information they need at their fingertips when they need it, is Pablo. So, Pablo, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your role, a little bit about the size of the budget you manage, and then we’ll get into your journey at Reckitt.
Yeah, perfect. Thank you, Jim for your introduction. Well, my name is Pablo Gonzalez, as Jim said, I manage the governance, marketing governance team for US. We have a team of four people under my management, and we manage $600 million of media and non-media spend in the US, right across the different brands, some of the main ones that Jim mentioned, right? I’ve been in the company myself for over six years now in two different markets. Started in Canada, doing controllership across the country, and then I was moved here to the US to manage the marketing team, right, the Marketing, Finance and Governance team. So that’s pretty much about myself. I now live in the big city, in New York, enjoying life here, and yeah, since COVID, I love playing tennis and watching hockey. So let’s, let’s get going.
Awesome. It’s great. Pablo, alright, so let’s just jump into it. I kind of called it your journey at Reckitt. It could be Reckitt’s journey towards great financial management. From what I understand, managing the $600 million marketing budget can be really, really complicated, and we talked about 100 different budget holders at any given time that are coming to the marketing finance team looking for answers to questions. So can you tell us, or, you know, tell me a little bit about when you started, kind of your career at Reckitt, and maybe what some of the challenges were around managing that budget?
Yeah, I can. I can talk about the actual marketing, finance, governance, end to end processes part so people understand what the challenges are throughout the whole process, right?
So as an end-to-end process, when you think about marketing, governance, right, you have the first step being understanding and creating your budget, right? Then the next step will be you have a committed spend that you have to through with the vendor that can be assigned. So that would be as an example.
Once you have that, you can create a purchase order, right? You, your campaign goes live, then the vendor submit their invoicing. We have actual spend in this case, let’s call it an ERP, like SAP. You have financial accruals based on that and financial reconciliations right now, I just gave you, like, a very high-level view of that process.
We’re going to go into more details on some of the challenges there. But obvious examples of some of the issues that we have with that is that this process need to be followed step by step, right? So always, examples are that we should not create a PO without an approved budget, as for example, we should not receive an invoice without a PO in place, or we shouldn’t be accruing for committed without committed spend. So those things are sound sort of basic, but trust me, in my experience with previous companies and also with Reckitt before implementing Uptempo, it’s common. It’s actually quite common. So, and I’m talking about common in large organizations as well, right? So just to say that, not only from a process perspective, but it’s also can create a big audit headache as well, having those issues, right?
Just ask and dig a little bit deeper here, like we get the slide that shows all right? You got all these different stages in the process, and a lot of arrows flying around with which looks to be icons representing emails and spreadsheets. Are spreadsheets the culprit and the cause of these problems, or the lack of process? Or is it some combination of that?
I would say, I would say the combination right is the fact that it depends on, like, once you don’t have an actual application that can help you from to have that end to end process in place and control process, then you have to come with workarounds, right? Create an Excel sheets, as we know, you have marketing teams by brand. They have their own way of working. You have consolidation challenges, right? Then you have, like, when you’re looking back and try to find the source of truth, it’s so difficult. You know, turnarounds happen in every organization, especially in big ones. So just looking back, it’s quite challenging, right? So that I think it’s a combination of both, is the fact that you have Excel spreadsheets around and work arounds around a process that is not well documented, or an application that will help you with it, right?
So and when, when people do the workarounds and don’t follow the process, and you don’t have that type of governance, what are some of the downstream implications overspending under spending time waste, like, what? How does it How does it impact you on the marketing, finance side?
Well, I’ll say both, right. Like you have a lack of, first of all, trust in what, what, what your information is, right? You don’t have that ability to trust the information that you have. You don’t marketers don’t know their budgets. They won’t know what you know they launch a campaign, and they have all the right information, but they don’t know how much actually actualized, right? How much invoices we receive on that. So that’s one example, right? Like, if you have an application that will tell you, okay, this is live information that we receive, then they’re going to have that visibility and be able to take action, right? I can go, as I said, more details on, on the end to end process and what, what the challenges are, but overall, it’s really, it’s really tough to control a 600 million budget, and we’re talking about around 4000 campaigns that we have in place, so with, you know, 100 and plus employees without having some sort of, like, a centralized and control environment, right?
Okay, yeah, totally. And let’s dig into it. But before we go and let’s, I just, I’m curious with the audience that we have if any of these issues like resonate, and we have a poll, which I think Alice can help me do. Poll here to ask the audience whether or not you’re experiencing regular challenges around financial management or budget management, so just take a second here and tell me what’s your biggest financial headache. That’s either a marketer or someone on the finance side. It looks like we can’t vote. Pablo, so give it one minute here, and then you can run the live poll.
All right, still have the poll questions up. You I don’t know if the poll the poll answer came up or no, I didn’t see any poll results. There it is. Thank you. All right. So biggest financial headache, so it looks like improving trust between marketing, finance on budget management seems to be the lead with 46 responses. 46% rather, simplifying the month on closed process and reducing hours spent, reconciliating marketing finance budgets numbers. Okay, so this is it’s a common problem. We hear this all the time when we talk to customers, that these are persistent challenges that come up over and over again, and a lot of it has to do with that lack of process, but also no system of record that can give marketers the kind of visibility they need. So let’s jump into that next. Next part of this is dig a little deeper into some of these challenges, right? We call this the cost of broken processes. Pablo, can you tell us a little bit about how this played out at Reckitt.
Yeah, exactly. So going back to more, going into detail of the process that I explained, the end to end process, and it’s going to actually help understanding the same challenges that probably some of the people here on the call are having, right? So when we’re talking about setting up budgets and understanding budgets, right? Marketing teams, as I said, are by brand. They create their own Excel files, their own budgets. This causes, first of all, consolidation headaches, right? So, so we as finance, we need to consolidate and provide one view, by company, not by brand, as for understanding the budget when, when you have a budget in place that can fit in place, and you don’t have proper documentation without clear audit trail, then people don’t understand what, what happened in the past. We’re talking about, you know, turnovers and things like that, audit pieces, right? That you go back and understand how the, what triggered this campaign to happen, and you don’t have an audit trail in place now, when we’re looking at spend limits by brand, right?
In committed spend with the vendor, in many cases, the marketers, as I said before, are not really aware of what’s available to spend for their brand, because they don’t have visibility of the actuals, right? They don’t understand what, what comes through, what they can use, and what they cannot use, po setups, if there’s no budget controls, right? You don’t have, you don’t have, you can create POS without a budget in place, so that that can be a problem. And back to your point, Jim, that can create an overspend, or an overspend in many cases, right? Financial accrual and processes, invoice as an example, the challenges are not only for a time spent, but also the accuracy right. If we depend on Excel spreadsheet for a proof of span forecast, and there’s no interface between you know your application and your ERP, how do you ensure that your accrual is correct, right?
Like you depend on analysts, a team of human beings, to actually give you what they think it is based on reports, right? So, so I think that’s one of the challenges. And in the end, financial reconciliations, and as an example, we have manual process causing mistakes and time wasted. Right?
Again, you have 1000s of campaign campaigns. You have $600 million budget. So that’s that’s quite, quite significant. And from an audit perspective, they normally challenged me in the past on what is the source of truth, right? Where we’re in having an application like Uptempo, which we’re going to go more in details on the solution, right? Will will actually give you that right? And in the end, it’s just providing an actual proper aging of each campaign. And when I’m talking about aging, is meaning when it was launched, what are the actions behind it? What is the accrual against that? Right? And understanding if it’s valid or not, it’s a huge part of our business, right? So I will say that that’s pretty much in details. What? What? What the challenges we have, right?
So, if you like, if you look at this slide, Pablo, like, is there ones that pop out as being more problematic? Like, if you don’t rank these in terms of how big a headache they are, is it more on the analytics side is the fact that you look at the visibility of spend or they all kind of contribute to one another.
Yeah, I would say, like all of them, because if you think about it, they’re all like, related, right? Because, yes, spreadsheet chaos, try actually is related to a manual, manual process, delay, delay, and everything with that, you’re going to have a fragmented financial views, for example, and with you combine those, all of those, you’re going to have ended and dead ends for analytics perspective and black box spending, right? So, so I do think all of them really summarize the challenges that we have right on, on, on a budget, like, like we do.
So yeah, I’ll add one other question too, because you and I, we had a conversation about this, the topic of confidence, right? This idea of having confidence, marketers having confidence in the data they’re being given so they can run their campaigns and get the most for every dollar. But you know, just as important, or even more important, like the finance teams, maybe in CFO having confidence that marketing is a good steward of company resources, like, how much does that confidence play into the relationship between marketing and finance, or even your day-to-day operations?
Well, that’s a good question. So in the past, again, before the solution, the questions will all come from the business saying it can be a question of like, how much have you spent on this brand and these non media activity, right? Um, people have to go into a spreadsheet and not having the answer right away. You’ll have to come to four, three different analysts to ask the question, they come up with their own spreadsheet and calculation to come with that senior management.
First of all, they want an answer right away, and they want to yes or no. This is the amount right, and the fact that we provide confidence, I can tell you. And again, we’re going to go in more details on the solution. Now, we do have the confidence of this is the information that we have because of the things that we’re going to cover later. But what I’m saying is that that confidence, it really seems like it’s not a lot, it is really significantly important, especially when, when management needs to understand it needs to trust that. And we also talk about reinvestment, right? Once you have a visibility of what your actual spend is, you can make business decisions for the good of your brands, right? So that it’s actually it’s a key part of the solution in this case.
All right. Well, let’s talk about that solution. You know, throw this number out there, $600 million in marketing spend. That’s just a number that like it to me. It just blows me away. And what I want to be spent on marketing, and you’re overseeing it, right? It’s, I would imagine that would keep many finance leaders up at night worrying about that spend. You know, 1% misses 6 million. I’m not a great math guy, but that’s a lot of money we’re talking about here. So, and you’re doing it with a pretty lean team, from what I understand, can you now just walk us through what is the solution you put in place that you’ve referenced a couple times, and how do you operate off of that today?
Of course, as we you spoke like about the problems that I have encountered, we have we all probably have encountered in the past, right? So the company in North America, we implemented Uptempo back in 2020 and I’m going to go in an overview of the process and what we have gained so far overall. Now we have step by step, dependencies and interface between, between the ERP and Uptempo.
When I say dependencies, I talk about Step 122, like 12345, now, instead of having, you know, a PO in place or an invoice or being processed without appeal, that’s not possible anymore. Now we have created dependencies, end to end. Dependencies. I’m going to mention that as number one, because it’s quite important, right? So the first step will be budgets, right? We now have a budget being being managed by the marketing finance team, and this is going through the whole budget process, which is a proof top line budget, right? You cannot then the next step will be entering a campaign the application. You cannot enter a campaign in the application if you don’t have a budget in place, right? So, so, so you can, you cannot engage. You shouldn’t engage the vendor if you don’t have, if you know you don’t have a campaign being done right now, the marketer is responsible now to go into Uptempo application and enter a campaign. That campaign can be entered, but it has to be approved.
So we do have three big pillars of approvals. We have marketing finance, which manage the budgets. We have controls and governance, which make sure you know that the period is correct, that procurement has been involved in the in the purchasing, and then the sows in this example can be, can it’s actually compliant, right? And then you have a final approval based on idea which is granted of authority in place, right? So at that point you have budget in place. You have a whole process to approve a campaign in place, right?
Once this program is approved in the application, it generates an internal order. This is a key part of process, because that interfaces with the ERP, in my case, here for Reckitt is called SAP right now, if you don’t have that marketing internal order, which comes from all the process that I explained on the approval of the campaign itself, then you cannot create a purchase order, right? And a vendor, ideally should not create go in business without a purchase order, right? So now you have created all this.
So as I said, talking going back to dependencies, right? You cannot create a PO without an IO. You cannot have an IO without an approval piece in Uptempo, in this case, right now, now we launched the program, and then we can talk about financial accruals, right? Uptempo generates an automated accrual based on one approved campaigns to date, which are being offset by spending SAP. Now spending SAP is so important because any invoice process against that approved po will talk back to Allocadia. So that goes back to the having the visibility of, for a marketer, how much money they have available for each of the campaigns, right? Because it’s live data.
Really, it’s an approved forecast, approved campaign, offset by by your invoices process, right? So, and then in the end, you have insights reporting, where you can report on aging reports by campaign that we talk about non compliance report, meaning, like, if you have an approved internal order, you don’t have a PO in place, it will flag that if you have campaigns that you have entered by hasn’t been approved by, you know, it can be my team, from a governance perspective or final approval, it will tell you, right? So overall, it’s really a great solution that we’ve been having with, with that right? And this is all managed again by a team of, really, five individuals, including myself, right?
Five individuals manage this whole process for that size of the budget, exactly. And now we have like 90% of our time really spending on analysis, you know, and compliance, which is so important in such a large corporation. And also we’re publicly traded, right? So, it’s you need, need to have those controls in place, right? So 90% on analysis versus 10% of creating, you know, exporting data and doing things. Different questions about reconciliation and spreadsheets and trying to get to the number of the source of truth and all of that other stuff.
Exactly, exactly, has there been a significant decrease in that time alike, of marketing teams coming to you and marketing budget holders coming to you and trying to understand exactly what’s left is you get far fewer those inquiries.
Oh, all the time, yeah, it’s very different. They have the visibility, right? So we still business partner, as you can imagine, but it’s a very different there’s no everything is in front of us. Basically, there’s no there’s no analyst doing things in the background, and it’s trying to give us a number that doesn’t exist anymore.
Got it so you, you, you provide a couple examples you talked about, when you talk about 90% of your time done on reporting and analysis to get the, you know, to get questions answered. And you talked a little bit this notion of aging, can you, you know, walk me through a little bit about that specific example, what is, what is the eight what is the impact of aging on your spend management, and what kind of answers do you get from that, or what types of savings? Or better, you know, reinvestment of dollars elsewhere. Can you tell me how that works?
Yeah, so that’s, that’s a good question. Back to the point we have real time disability by campaign, right? And when I’m talking about the aging, it will tell us, it will tell us what, what is sitting in our balance sheet, and in the end, balance sheet is a financial you know statement, right? I can talk about, like, one recent example that comes to my mind is that before quarter 4, 2024, September reflected a large amount of immediate cash back. Complaint that we have in place between August and September. When I talk about the insights report, which will give us a non compliance right? That non compliance report reflected on used dollar value, yeah, in real time, which really allowed us to reinvest over $1.5 million in music next, in December, Muscinex, being good for cold and flu, not came handy, right? And if you know, as a public traded company, if you don’t invest that money in year, you lose it, right? So, so that’s one example that comes to my mind now, that’s from reinvesting, having that live data. And then you can actually take actions from a business perspective. But also I can talk about the overall controls that we have in place, right? Like end-to-end controls. It is totally audit proof. We have past audits in 2020 right?
So interesting. All good. So moving on. I think this is great, the impact of results really obvious. Think maybe what might make sense to go to just Q A. I have not been focused on the Q A feature here, but let me, um, let me check it and see questions come in here.
Come back to that. All right, couple Q and A. Do we have a couple of questions in here, which is interesting. So just a reminder, if you have any questions you want to ask Pablo about the processes you’ve gone through, just use the Q and A feature in the interface, and we will get to them. And I’ll also remind you that if you want to hang around after the Q and A, Jan on the Uptempo team is going to spend like 10 minutes walking through what Uptempo is. What it looks like, quick demonstration if you’re interested in that. So the first question we have here, Pablo, is, looking ahead, how do you see Reckitt budget management approach evolving over the next few years based on what you’ve been able to accomplish so far?
Well, I think, I think the evolution of the budgets is the fact that the communication and the information that now, again, there’s been improvements that has happened since, since, since the implementation, right? So we now have interface creating POS, an example from a campaign. We have controls in place that we didn’t have in 2020 so all of that has improved from the implementation from 2020, to 2025, now where we are right, that creates confidence on the finance, let’s say team right, and the team itself. So I think that kind of conference, understanding the process, understanding that when we provide and figure they understand that that’s real, we now have implemented two meetings a month with the senior leadership team where we say, this is what you can use. This is what and they know what to expect. So I do think like the way we budget things in a more controlled environment, it really gives not only the confidence, but the decision making year. So I do think that’s that improve environment, more control environment will, will actually make make the budget process much better. Again, you have a process that you set up a budget for a year, but that changes, especially in the public trade company, right? You have, you have the way that you perform, the way the business is performing. You have several forecasts in here that will really change the shape of your P and L in this case, right?
So, okay, that’s a good overview there. I There’s another question here, which I think is a good one. So there’s a lot of marketers and marketing finance folks out there that are struggling with the level of visibility that you guys have seemed to have solved here. What advice would you give another enterprise organization that’s having those challenges? You know, you’ve been on this journey for some time. What’s the best way to start that journey? You know, like any advice you might have?
I do think it’s looking at the first step. If I could jump in an organization, you know, large organization and the marketing team is having problems, like with visibility, with controls, with I’ll go into draw a process in place, what the process are, and then look for a solution. Again, I don’t, I don’t want to talk a specific names, but a solution that will give you that end to end process that I described, and control environment, and also, yeah, in the partnership with the finance team, I do think, in many cases, in my experience, there’s a gap between marketers and finance right. Marketing finance people talk their language. Marketing people talk the language. So I think it’s good to actually have those communications in place see what the needs are from the business, from a finance perspective as well. And, you know, and speak the same language. And I think that’s one of the main things that you can do. Sounds, sounds a bit like, you know, a bit basic in a way, like, Let’s speak the same language. But really it means a lot, because every time you have these like marketing finance people going to marketers, and they don’t know what, what’s going on, so it’s just getting, getting the insane page, and looking at the process end to end, and make sure that that’s a solution is found, right?
So, I mean, I think you pretty much answer this question. We had another one from the audience. It’s pretty similar, which is like, how do you get marketing and finance people teams aligned around the system or proc process. Did you have any tips that you had around change management? Like, literally, is there some bit of, like, cultural alignment that needs to happen getting to the process stuff? Yes, beers and pizza for a couple times.
In the end, we should all, we should all like have, we all have the same objective. Let’s, let’s, let’s be honest. We all have the same objective right now, you know, you can talk about finance. From the finances, we want to make sure that the right brand equity investment is in place, and I would say marketing as well. Then you have the control team that want to make sure that you do that in a control environment and you’re compliant with your spend, right? So it’s finding that really that middle ground, right? And say, okay, we need the controls in place. We need compliance, but we also need to achieve our, you know, our, we call it like operating profit, right?
But marketing wants to, you know, invest in their brands, and they want to, like, you know, grow sales, right? So I think we all, in the end, want the same thing, and it’s making understanding why there’s a controls need for X, Y and Z. Why do you need a signed SOW based on the limit that you have, right? So I do think, based on my experience, there’s been a lot of like, lack of communication between departments, right? And I want to say that’s the first thing, because you can see, if I’m the controller, I’ll say, hey, Jim, I need you to sign these. But I’ll never explain why. I’ll never say, Hey, this is why this is the policy in place. We’re not going to, you know. So I do think like it’s more like enforcing marketers to do X, Y and Z, without explaining the why that communication is extremely important, in my opinion.
So that’s a really good point. You had some other questions here about how to how to get started with that, but I think you’ve done a pretty good job answering that, at least, given some tips on how to get started, there was another question here, which is, you know what we’ve talked about so far? Is North America a system that governs in North America? Obviously, Reckitt is a worldwide, global company, or whatever is there? Is there anything you would change on your implementation that you went to in North America, as if you, as you expand elsewhere that you might have learned along the way.
Yeah, I do think, like North America, in this case, especially the US, is the best in the business, from Reckitt talking about controls and processes and Uptempo being, of course, one the goal to go to, right? I had conversations with the global team, several of them actually, because they know this, the best in the business, right globally. With that said, when I look back, I think there’s so many lessons learned.
I want to say from a controls perspective, from supporting perspective, I was, I had a located in Canada, which is set up differently than the US because of the size of the business, right? I do think that no matter the size of the business, I will implement the same way, the same controls, the same process across every single business, even if you’re like, especially the size, right? I know Canada being a smaller country as an example, they think, no, I can just use it for this purpose that I need. Once you have a process, even if you’re a smaller business, it really pays off. So my recommendation if I go to global be like, even if you go to a smaller market, implement this process, implement these controls, because it’s going to pay off, and it’s going to actually, you know, really, really leverage the solution of Uptempo. And that will be my first recommendation, right?
So, very good. That’s very helpful. Pablo, this has been excellent. I really appreciate your going into all the details, sharing the highs and lows of your journey, your expertise. Again, for anybody that’s on today’s call will, of course, send out some slides in the recording of this afterwards, you can share it with your finance colleagues or marketing colleagues, as the case may be, we’re going to stop here, and then I think I’m going to invite Jan to share a little bit about what Uptempo is, so he can walk through that. Give you a little more context into the system that Pablo has been referencing before. I do that, there’s a couple things just on this final slide I wanted to talk to, which is the first is, you know, marketing planning can be very complex and very complicated. Involve a lot of people, not just budget planning, but actual campaign planning, strategic planning, if you’re looking for something to boil it down into seven simple steps, I would encourage you to check out our Blueprint on marketing planning. That’s the QR code you can find on our website as well. Seven steps to marketing planning. It’s been, it’s been a hit over the last year. And then finally, I am looking forward to getting out into the field a little bit over the next quarter or two, Uptempo will be at these events we’ve listed, at Adobe Summit, Forrester, Shoptalk, and then eventually the Gartner symposium event in June. If you go into any of these, please come say hello. Stop by. It’s always better to meet in person than virtually. So with that, Pablo, thank you very much. I appreciate your presentation, all your insights and wisdom, and I’m going to turn it over to Jan. Jan, walk us through a little bit about Uptempo.
Thank you, Jim. Thank you.
Thank you, Pablo. That was awesome. Good day everyone. We’re going to spend a couple of minutes here just diving into the background that the foundation of the solution that Pablo and Reckitt have been leveraging, and that is known as Uptempo Spend.
Now, before I even get into the solution, I want everyone to kind of think about how budgets are managed within their respective organizations. And 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be a response of some sort of Excel SharePoint Google Sheets. And there are different brands around the world, there are different marketing budgets around the world, and they’re all collectively looking to effectively manage their budget and understand exactly how they’re spending at any point in the year so that they can be good stewards of the dollar.
What we’re going to look at is instead of living within a world of spreadsheets and Sharepoints and disconnected tools, what does it mean to have access to an online budgeting, planning, and investment tracking solution? And that’s what we can see on screen.
Now imagine instead being able to log into a sort of top down dashboard where you have immediate visibility into either your brand, your whole marketing organization, your channel, whatever it is that you manage, knowing exactly what is my allocated budget, what have I agreed with finance that we are going to be spending and at any point in the year, having clear visibility into exactly what are we forecasting For the remainder of the year. What have we got caught up in current commitments, and what have we actually already spent having visibility into the dollars that sit within finance as well as the forecast that marketing manages to know at any point in time exactly where you’re likely to land against that agreed upon number?
Imagine being able to break down that spent in any which way you need to. Maybe you want to see by brand category, by your specific brand. Perhaps you want to see that spend what was planned to be spent by a specific channel, and what are we actually on track to spend within that channel? All of this live visibility, simply because getting budget owners, budget coordinators, brand owners, whoever it is, out of those spreadsheets and instead into online workspaces we call these investment plans, looks a bit like a spreadsheet because it’s meant to the whole idea here is that now, as a budget owner, I have clear visibility into any budget that’s been allocated to me. And instead of a spreadsheet, I have a simple workspace where I can now start planning out the various things that I need to spend money on.Now this workspace, unlike a spreadsheet, it actually lives within a standardized environment. In this case, I’m looking at a North American team budget. That North American budget lives specifically within a centralized hierarchy. These hierarchies look so different for every one of our customers. If you think about a consumer goods organization, we’re more likely broken down into regions and then brand categories that then nest the brands themselves. Every business is unique, but the whole concept is a hierarchy is developed that matches how budgets are allocated throughout your organization, so that there are no more spreadsheets, so that we can manage multiple currencies, user access, user permissions. We can give leadership, roll up visibility by this hierarchy. That’s the underlying concept of Uptempo spent now with teams working in these online investment plans, they’re going to have a lot of additional efficiencies, the ability to tag the various things that are important to them, working versus non-working spend.
Channel suppliers, target audiences, every element of spend can be tagged appropriately, so that brand managers, CMOs, marketing leaders can have that breakdown of every dollar by the dimensions that matter to them, above and beyond this within these workspaces, just like Pablo discussed, there is tight integrations, tight alignment with the financial systems of record, so that we’re not just looking at forecasting dollars, but I can actually switch my view and get immediate visibility into what money has been committed, what money has actually been spent, all of this data flowing in from tools like Cooper, NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, whatever is being leveraged by finance within an organization, simple data transfers ensure that Uptempo Workspaces are always reflecting committed spend and actual spend, so that budget owners and budget coordinators have live visibility into exactly what money they have left to work with, and they have a simpler online workspace to manage out their forecasts within this workspace, having visibility into my budget, having the controls to gain approvals, having the ability to tag everything by the dimensions that matter to me, is the simple underpinning that then provides automated reporting for leadership, for budget owners, for whoever needs it.
Here I can see a breakdown. Show me my working versus non-working spend, of my working spend, show me the various categories. All of this automatically fed and live because of the way we’re pulling data from financial systems of record. Other very important views we’ll see I’m a manager like Pablo, and I need to track the various brands within my budget. Well, here I have a very quick view into who are my golden children. Here are my three brands that have all perfectly planned out and forecasted their budgets. However, EcoBoost, something’s going on here. I can clearly and very quickly see that they’re over forecasting their spend based on their budget target. Sometimes I want to see this more visually. I want to see in red, what are my budget targets and the various budgets that I manage, who’s forecasting below those, who’s going over all information available automatically via a dashboard, different views, where I can compare one brand to another and see who’s on track and who’s not. Comparing, in this case, their forecasted spend versus their actual spend, the actual spend being everything that is hitting the books in the ERP system of record.
Finally, sometimes it’s not just about having snapshot points in time. We want to be able to run analysis as marketers. I want to see trends over time. Well, the beauty of Uptempo spend is that, since it’s eliminated spreadsheets, and this is where my budget owners and coordinators and brand managers actually work, we’re collecting data over time, and we can start to see trends over time. I want to see how my plan or my forecasts over the last two Fiscal Periods compares to how we’ve actually raised POS to how we’ve seen actuals flowing into the system, all of these data points stored within databases within the solution, so that you can stand to start to run historical analysis on all marketing spent.
With this visibility, we want to give teams the ability to move money around. How are we shifting money from one cost center to another throughout the year, very quickly. I have a summary here that shows me Digital Media Group, they’ve transferred away 100,000 from their original budget, but our Eastern European Field Marketing team have actually gained 500,000 to their original budget. A very quick snapshot that shows me how money is moving between brands or between teams within our marketing organization. So far, we’ve really focused on Uptempo spent Uptempo however, also does have the ability to help teams manage their various marketing campaign plans.
Here I see along the top a simple marketing calendar, and on the left, my marketing campaign framework showing me exactly what is in market when in a very interactive and engaging way, I can start to engage and understand why is this in market, what audiences are We going after with this specific activity? So here Uptempo plan more specifically focused on why we’re putting marketing activities into in front of our audiences, managing the money of marketing whilst also managing the purpose of marketing. Why are we doing things targeting audiences with certain activities? Team? Hopefully that was a good little sneak peek into Uptempo if there are more questions, feel free to reach out. But hopefully this has been an insightful way to see how Pablo and Reckitt are leveraging Uptempo spend to manage their marketing dollars like a business.
Thank you, Jan. Really, really good overview. Thank you. I know it’s hard to show off an enterprise planning platform in 10 minutes, you did an admirable job. I appreciate it. Okay, that brings us to the end of our presentation today. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Pablo from Reckitt and the great things he’s doing there to manage a whole lot of money and enjoyed the demo overview. If you have any questions of course can reach out to us follow us on LinkedIn, etc. Come see us at the events we talked about. I encourage you to download the Blueprint and check that out, and we’ll be in touch with the recording from today’s presentation.
Thank you, Pablo. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Jim. Have a great day. Bye.
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