Announcing 2021 Master Anaplanner of the Year!

Dear Certified Master Anaplanners,

Thank you for your time in nominating and voting for the 2021 Master Anaplanner of the Year. We are proud to present this year’s winner: Andrea Milillo, Manager - Commercial IT at Bacardi-Martini.

As you already know, this award is presented to one customer Certified Master Anaplanner ever year and recognizes the absolute top performer who embodies all definitions of the ideal Certified Master Anaplanner.

Andrea stood out because he leveraged Anaplan to drive transformational change across a large organization that was stalled in their journey toward Connected Planning prior to his arrival in January 2020. In 12 short months as a new employee – during a year of major upheaval across the globe – Andrea spearheaded several campaigns that led to business transformation. His account team was quick to praise his abilities as an Anaplan expert and his character as a person: 

“Andrea has joined Bacardi in January 2020 from Accenture to create Bacardi’s CoE. He is very professional, conscientious, committed, and very pleasant to work with. He has become a very strong business partner to the Anaplan account team and is eager to leverage the Anaplan platform at Bacardi as best as he can. Andrea is always looking to optimize the capabilities of the platform and the integration with Bacardi applications ecosystem. He works on mastering his skills on Anaplan by learning about all new capabilities and features and ensure that Bacardi broader audience is kept informed about Anaplan product development roadmap.”

Here are just some of his accomplishments from his time at Bacardi-Martini in 2020:

• Took full control of the Anaplan CoE and removed the barriers for growth.
• Helped the business realize the value of the CoE and quickly expanded the team with 6 additional FTEs.
• Established an onboarding enablement path for new CoE members to ensure they are able to deliver on projects.
• Evolved the engagement model with the Partner to be better aligned to the demand of the company.
• Led a global expansion of the commercial planning models to 4 net new countries (Portugal, France, Spain, and Canada) after years of internal roadblocks to expansion
• Dives in to innovate new Anaplan solutions to address business challenges:
• Built an internal Innovation Planning model prototype and implemented it in Europe.
• Built a pilot for SIP ( Sales Incentive Plan) in India which hopefully will become the blueprint for SIP in Europe in the future.
• Spearheaded a model optimization that reduced calculation time by ~ 40%. 
• Improved all Anaplan integrations into the business and finding new opportunities to define a new system ecosystem at the company.
• Highly sought-after reference for CoE and Connected Planning best practices: 5+ customer reference calls.

Before he joined Bacardi-Martini, Andrea spent 8 years building out the Anaplan practice at Accenture Italy. He singlehandedly trained most of the new model builders who came out of Italy during his tenure, and even managed to train people from other countries across the globe. Here’s what Andrea had to say about his experience in the Anaplan ecosystem:  

“I started working in 2012, in Accenture, and Anaplan was the first thing I have seen as a professional. I started the Accenture practice, being the really first model builder, training all the ones coming next in Italy and helping training the first Anaplanners in the US. I am very proud of this since they are now outstanding architects, delivering complex implementations around the world. During this period I worked on many projects, for some of the Anaplan major customers (P&G, Verizon, NCR, Bridgestone, Bacardi..), getting in touch with amazing people, c levels and also the Anapolan founder(!), and I keep unforgettable memories of this.

Now I started a new journey in Bacardi, and as leader of the CoE I have the goal of promoting Anaplan in my organization and growing new model builders and architects to help me managing the numerous projects we currently have. I really feel like an ambassador, promoting the benefits of connecting planning and breaking silos in the organization. 

After all, Anaplan really became a personal thing to me, having the faces of all the people I met during these years, and I would feel incredibly proud to represent them as Master Anaplanner of the year.”

We are thrilled to be able to recognize Andrea with this award and are grateful for your support in that process. Please join us again in congratulating @Andrea Milillo for all his accomplishments and being this year’s recipient!

Warm regards,

The Master Anaplanner Team