3S POS vs. Anaplan vs. AspenOne Supply Chain Management

I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.

Good for large organizations but can be used across various industries from manufacturing to even medical. Also very Citrix publishing friendly to allow multiple users located anywhere to use AspenOne Supply Chain Management across the organization while consolidating their data in a centralized secure place. This ability to consolidate and centralize applications and data within the same facility makes migration, high availability in DR scenario easier to configure as well.

Incentivized

• Anaplan removes the time consuming process of integrating the results of individual spreadsheets.
• Anaplan facilitates the standardization of assumptions across all sub-processes
• Anaplan provides full transparency of the calculations and source inputs
• Anaplan allows us to automate certain planning processes that would have been impossible when relying on the computational capabilities of an individual computer.

• Provides a wealth of data and information interpreted across management and supply chain team located at various offices and plants globally
• Implementation was with relative ease with small dedicated team. Implementation time was also quick from launch to go-live in three business quarters.
• Excellent technical support from AspenOne and their tier support is knowledgeable on the product.
• Good bug fixes and quick support along with predictable update release schedule.

Incentivized

• Some end users don't spend the required amount of time to familiar themselves with Anaplan.
• Auditability, while good in theory, can be lacking and clunky when needed.
• Model building can become convoluted over time, leading to confusion over the specific use of line items.

• While AspenOne Supply Chain Management generate a wealth of data and information, the ability to organize and create reports can be time consuming as well as steep learning curve.
• While incremental updates are predictable, AspenOne major version updates can be difficult to implement with wide user impact causing more downtime than we prefer.
• Report merge and legacy version conversion tools can be made easier to use with more GUI (graphical user interface) options and less command base as well as status progress graphic and confirmation of completion would be very helpful.

Incentivized

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

One key insight from implementing Anaplan is that success comes from focusing on designing the process, not just building the model. Anaplan is extremely flexible—there are very few planning scenarios it cannot support—but that flexibility means the project needs strong governance, clear ownership of requirements, and a well-defined data model. When those foundations are in place, implementations are fast, iterations are easy, and users can quickly see value.
In our projects, both Financial Planning and Integrated Business Planning models were adopted smoothly because we involved business users early, kept the model design intuitive, and leveraged Anaplan’s Excel-like syntax and user-friendly dashboards. The result was more efficient day-to-day work, reduced manual tasks, and increased collaboration across teams. In short: when you combine Anaplan’s flexibility with a structured implementation approach, adoption and value realization happen quickly.

Anaplan is more powerful than Pigment considering that it is an Enterprise class system and is able to manage bigger data sets. Anaplan allows for advanced scenario modeling and formula capabilities along with custom reporting functionalities. Anaplan has proven its capabilities and stability across various use cases and across bigger enterprises when compared to Pigment which is still in earlier phases of its development

AspenOne Supply Chain Management was a cheaper alternative to SAP HANA and while as not feature-ful and not as easy to integrate with SAP data, the interface was easy enough to configure without the need for HANA. It was also easier and quicker to deploy and implement which alleviated our business pain point. It's like an old saying the best software is the one you can use, now! Our management and supply chain team members have been happy with the product and very few complaints arise from the production usage or performance.

Incentivized

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• We needed AspenOne Supply Chain Management quickly back in 2013 since our biggest pain point was tracking movement of products and ability for multiple departments and locations to access the information to complete their responsibilities within the organization. Was able to successfully implement in three quarters for go-live.
• Since our initiation implementation our two major version upgrades did not go as smooth as we would like causing downtime of user access and the system does not have flexibility to run previous version while upgrading to new version. Upgrade path needs to improve to minimize downtime.
• The business reported quick ROI of better than expected results and the software paid for itself in under three years which beats projection.
• Centralized implementation makes disaster recovery (DR) configuration easier to manage.

Incentivized