Adobe's Customer Journey Analytics is a service built on Adobe Experience Platform that lets the user join all data from every channel into a single interface for real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization, allowing users to make better decisions with a holistic view of the business and the context behind every customer action.
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Anaplan
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
It is well-suited when we are running a digital campaign, we are able to take the standard campaign metrics (impressions, CTR, etc.) and break them out by specific brands, device type, campaign variation, etc. It allows us to break down into the granular specifics of where we should iterate the campaign and make improvements/adjustments.
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.
Customer journey analytics can be used to analyse data from a range of data sources and the data can be visualised, filtered etc. by users.
It also allows users to handle custom data to handle their specific needs and the data can be catered as per users need its like your own customised platform.
The best part is the integration users can connect this to various other platforms with one ID. This helps the user with easier usage and less hassle as everything is kind off a click away.
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.
When you come from the Google Analytics environment, where the dashboards are out of the box and built for you, it is a shock to go to a system where you have to build your own. This is especially true, if you are in an enterprise organization that has rolled out Adobe Customer Journey Analytics across all domains, but has not provided support to build dashboards.
It would be great to have more out of the box dashboards or templates provided to all users. Not sure if this is too complex for an enterprise use case.
It's the most customizable and flexible analytics tool I've used. While the tool can be slow and clunky at times, the value it provides far outweighs those issues. Being able to bring offline data and merge with web data to combine in one place is where clients need to be get the most success out of their data
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
The overall user interface is very easy to understand and navigate. The overall platform is highly intuitive and provides seamless integration across web, mobile, and other channels. The overall implementation is seamless, resulting in a faster time to market. The platform is built for marketers and folks with low-code experience.
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
For the most part, CJA is available. There are instances where the product is experiencing an outage but I haven't found this to be super frequent to the point where it really impedes my work
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
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics does really well running reports. As data or date ranges get bigger, it sometimes has issues running. When there are a lot of freeform tables used, it takes a long time for data to load. There are time where Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is down during work hours, which makes it hard to do work in the workspace.
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.
Good enough tools and offline support. We had a model of "hypercare" that was mostly good, sometimes not good. But that was more personality/people based, rather than established processes. Overall the support was timely and effective
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.
Should be staged differently. It should be Do online stuff, get basic skills/qual. Then do "homework" type tasking, then come to class with an instructor. We got the traditional "start from 0, then step 1, then step 2..." training. This usually saps energy/focus. All training should be like a lab/practice session. If someone needs information or basic knowledge ... put it in a elearning, FAQ, job aid, or resource page.
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.
Should have more of this for the 101-level stuff. No one needs a Zoom class covering the basics. I need a "guide on the side" when I'm learning new stuff. I want support while I practice.
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.
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics has additional features beyond the basic analysis workspace that allow for omni channel reporting, greater integrations with data from other sources, and being able to make changes to your data retroactively to reduce the impact of tracking issues. It also has a B2B edition with added functionalities for companies that have B2B.
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
You have the ability to create 'user groups' with different levels of access in CJA. We helped set this up for a large organiztion where they had marketers, executives, devs and analysts all having different levels of access to use CJA but with the appropriate guardrails in place for each user group. It worked out really well for their organization.
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
As a consultant specializing in implementation, this has been very good for my business objectives.
My clients have found it very useful, as long as they receive training and support on how to use it. I have worked at organizations where it is not properly utilized because people are "afraid" to learn it.
It has delivered key insights for organizations, leading to improvements in their site design and conversion funnel.
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
