Anaplan vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Anaplan revolutionizes the planning process by standardizing it, creating transparency in data, particularly in showcasing results to the management team. By replacing Excel-centric planning methods, Anaplan not only opens the door to handling larger datasets but also enables a more intricate level of data granularity at an accelerated pace. What sets it apart is its capacity to facilitate a seamless collaboration within a cross-functional model, accommodating diverse departments and business functions in a dynamic, real-time environment.

Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.

Incentivized

• Forcing structure and auditability to processes that used to exist in spreadsheets
• Strong calculation engine that can account for many dimensions
• Formula Syntax that is not overly complicated and can be learned by the business in order to have ownership of their models internally

• It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
• It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
• It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM

Incentivized

• The "new" UX front-end offers a lot of modern and intuitive features, but it lacks the ability to view multiple "tabs" of dashboards and reports. The "classic" dashboard had this feature but now with the UX, you need to be really smart about how to design a single page where the users won't get "lost".
• Lacks the ability to "wrap text" (similar to excel) and auto-size grid rows

Incentivized

• Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
• Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
• List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.

Incentivized

In any line of work, a tool that is flexible and would allow different departments of your company to easily interact and exchange valuable insights, is highly anticipated and needed. For me, what Anaplan provides to a business, be it a smaller one or an enterprise customer, is an easily scaling, agile planning and modeling platform that can meet almost any need and give a high-end solution to the problems any company faces on a daily basis.

For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.

There is a dependency in this rating - in that I find Anaplan extremely easy to use, but I've spent the necessary time developing a strong understanding of the platform. Once you understand how to use it, the platform is flexible, easy to use, and fun to use.

Incentivized

Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

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

There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.

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

All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.

1. Anaplan has separate 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries, 2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy 3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to share success stories of various companies.

Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.

Incentivized

The in-person training is simply not worth the cost. After a few weeks of playing in Anaplan, I went to the basic training and knew more than the person teaching it. a year down the road, I was the first person to complete the advance training, and again could have been teaching the class better than the person running the session. Spend some time on your own trying out different things and you will get all the understanding you need to be successful.

Incentivized

This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.

Incentivized

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

They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.

Incentivized

Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.

Incentivized

Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.

Incentivized

Anaplan is what I would consider a modeling platform. It excels at taking a forecasting or planning process and systematizing it - and allowing for whatever nuances and granularity you need to perform that modeling. It is not positioned as "data collection" platform - which are typically designed to take data uploads from Excel to calculate basic opex and revenue models. It's much more customizable and flexible.

Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.

Incentivized

Good read only seat access

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

We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale

This is now available in house at Workday which is convenient.

Incentivized

• Speeding up the process of closing and updating the current month forecast
• Reduced work on the preparation of reports and presentations. We used different Anaplan approaches with varying success, but the overall result was there.
• It's hard to gauge, but the overall increase in process and algorithm transparency, along with data protection, has given an excellent platform for scaling up the company's processes.

Incentivized

• Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
• One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
• Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.

Incentivized