Eight years of legacy planning rebuilt from first principles
Riverview LLP had been on Anaplan for eight years. As their business changed, the legacy model grew increasingly difficult to maintain and slow to evolve. PlanFlamingo rebuilt their entire planning infrastructure from first principles in Pigment — cattle projection, P&L, feed production, labor, balance sheet and cash flow, CapEx and debt. Today the team is significantly more capable than they were on Anaplan, with real AI functionality connected to their planning workflows and a model they can shape live as the business changes.
Eight years of technical debt catching up
Riverview LLP is a cattle operation in the agricultural sector. They plan cattle projection, herd management, feed production, labor, P&L, cash flow, balance sheet, and CapEx. It's complex, operational planning — the kind of work Anaplan was built to handle.
They implemented Anaplan in 2018. It worked well for years. But as their operation grew and business dynamics changed, their planning model accumulated eight years of modifications. The system had become difficult for new team members to learn. Changes that should have been simple took weeks to implement. They had become dependent on a Master Anaplanner to manage updates.
Most critically: they couldn't evolve the system without deep technical expertise. When they wanted to add a new forecast scenario or adjust planning assumptions, they had to file a ticket and wait. The finance team felt less capable in their own planning tool.
The Master Anaplanner they relied on was overextended, and license costs had climbed. But the bigger question wasn't "is Anaplan too much?" — it was "where should Riverview's planning live for the next decade?" A rebuild was the natural moment to evaluate the platform landscape and choose the tool that best fit how their business actually plans.
Rebuild from first principles in Pigment
PlanFlamingo and Riverview evaluated both platforms side-by-side. Pigment's more flexible base architecture, easier ongoing maintenance, and native AI capabilities made it the better long-term fit for how Riverview operates. We recommended a clean-slate rebuild rather than another patch on the legacy Anaplan model.
1. Audit and requirements. We documented every calculation, assumption, and report from their 8-year-old Anaplan model. This revealed a lot of legacy code that wasn't actually used anymore. It also surfaced the true requirements — which were far simpler than the 8-year-old model suggested.
2. Rebuild architecture. We designed the Pigment model from first principles. Cattle inventory by type and age cohort. Feed production and consumption. Labor costs by function. P&L with contribution margin by herd. Cash flow and balance sheet. CapEx and debt schedule. All cleaner, simpler, and documented in plain language any team member could understand.
3. Data migration and validation. We migrated historical data going back to 2013, integrated it live with the source systems, and validated that the new Pigment model reproduced the same actuals as Anaplan throughout. That gave Riverview confidence to operate on Pigment from day one.
4. Training and knowledge transfer. We trained Riverview's finance team not just on how to use Pigment, but on the logic underneath. The model is documented well enough that they can now modify scenarios, add new assumptions, and run sensitivity analysis with significantly less consultant support.
5. Real AI connected to planning. We connected Pigment's AI functionality directly to Riverview's planning workflows. The team is using it today to automate work that wasn't feasible before — including auto-generating reporting decks that previously took weeks. The architecture leaves a long runway of additional AI use cases the team can build into as their needs evolve.
What planning looks like now
On Pigment, Riverview's team is doing planning work that wasn't possible on the prior model. They're producing new reports on demand, using AI to auto-generate reporting decks that previously took weeks to assemble, and making adjustments live as the business changes — rather than waiting in a queue for someone else to do it.
A change that used to take two weeks now takes two days. New team members ramp up in days instead of weeks because Pigment's interface is intuitive and the model is documented in plain language.
Most importantly: Riverview is no longer thinking of their planning system as a constraint. They're using planning as a strategic lever — running scenarios, stress-testing assumptions, and connecting AI to questions they couldn't ask before.
"I was interested in Pigment but wasn't sure if we should move off Anaplan after eight years. PlanFlamingo helped us evaluate both options honestly and make the decision with confidence. Once we committed, they helped rebuild our entire planning infrastructure from first principles. Our team is more capable than previously, and we're exploring AI capabilities we couldn't have touched."
— Rick Metzger, VP of Finance, Riverview LLP
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