KinderCare Education’s FP&A team is no longer burdened by annual budgeting and planning

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Education and childcare provider KinderCare relied on slow “black box” budgeting spreadsheets. Now all lines of business collaborate on Anaplan, resulting in faster, more accurate, more transparent budgets.

Anaplan is the right solution for us; we can do so much more with this platform than just budgeting.
Jessica Maki, Senior Director of FP&A

32000+

employees

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance, Workforce

  • INDUSTRIES

    Public Sector & Education

Challenge

As the leading provider of early-childhood education and care across the U.S., KinderCare Education centers accommodate over 158,000 children every single day. A tough budgeting season riddled with Excel issues and uncertainty left its FP&A team feeling drained by a time-consuming planning and budgeting environment, and ready to think outside the box.

Solution

After exhausting its resource potential and struggling to meet deadlines, Jessica Maki, Senior Director of FP&A at KinderCare, knew it was time to look for a tool that could centrally consolidate budgeting, price modeling, and labor scheduling. KinderCare found all this and more with the Anaplan platform, which provided its field leaders with the data visibility needed to make meaningful inputs and instill confidence in its business plans.

Results

The platform’s flexibility allowed KinderCare to accommodate multiple lines of business-all with different methodologies and assumptions-within a central location. Its powerful speed allows the FP&A team to make updates and assumptions in seconds with consolidated, real-time results, and significantly improved planning processes, data integrity, and productivity. After implementing the Anaplan platform for its annual budgeting process, KinderCare expanded the platform into price modeling and labor scheduling, quickly constructing the necessary building blocks for a connected planning approach.

Why Anaplan

For KinderCare, financial planning needed to become less of an event; it was time to give its team their lives back. With the Anaplan platform, KinderCare was able to streamline and consolidate processes, simultaneously improving data and results, while enabling its operators to focus on what they do best: educating children and supporting families.

My name’s Jessica Maki. I’m the Senior Director of FP&A at KinderCare Education.

KinderCare is the nation’s leading provider of early childhood education and care across the U.S. We care for 158,000 children every single day.

I oversee the corporate FP&A department. We had just gotten out of a very tough budgeting season. We had several issues with our Excel model that we were using; it was essentially a black box that we would update with assumptions, and we never were certain what results we were going to get out of it. Updating models took a significant amount of time, it was a complete drain on our team, and we’d be up until one in the morning in the office trying to put the plan together-and we’d still end up missing deadlines.

The other thing that I think really led the need for a change was that we needed our field leaders to believe in their plan. They had no ability to have any input. When we met Anaplan, it was just an “aha” moment. Our team, from VP to analyst, came forward and said, “Anaplan is the right solution for us; we can do so much more with this tool than just budgeting.”

Since completing Anaplan for an annual budgeting platform, we’ve also expanded use cases into price modeling, and we’ve just kicked off labor scheduling. These are, I think, the building blocks to getting us to connected planning; having all of these different models on the same system.

The flexibility of the tool is just such a beautiful thing. We are able to have three lines of business on the tool, all with different methodologies and assumptions for how we develop their plans. And the speed of Anaplan is just amazing-we can go in and update an assumption, and within seconds, you have your consolidated results. So having the ability to have instant results is just phenomenal.

We’re also looking at how can we take better information and make good decisions. Because at the end of the day, we want our operators focusing on what they do best: educating children and supporting families.

For the team, planning just became less of an event; people actually got their lives back October to December. I wasn’t going home at night putting my kids to bed and then coming back into the office to work on planning. I was going home at a reasonable hour along with my coworkers. And just the ability to, at the end of the day, enjoy working with each other and feel that camaraderie of accomplishing something very meaningful-it was just a great feeling overall for the team.