Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise to move your business forward. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has over 200 partners and more than 2,000 customers worldwide.
Anaplan is great for enterprise clients that want to pursue a path of connected planning. If designed correctly, a data hub can be your central data repository which acts a shared dataset across your organization. From Marketing and Sales, to HR and Finance - Anaplan will be the one source of truth as individuals contribute to the business process.
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.
Anaplan has a very fast calculation engine which is able to model across multiple dimensions in real time across huge data sets. This helps in calculating complex scenarios instantaneously
Easy to maintain by business teams which reduces dependency on IT teams within the organization and also on external consultants
Advanced Tenant controls which allows administrators to manage security and access across various models
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.
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.
Anaplan is very usable from a user perspective. Anaplan's level 1 and level 2 training courses are great resources and I highly recommend any power users of the platform consider completing both. These courses showcase, and therefore unlock an understanding of the platform which allows for quick and easy, agile, and iterative front end design
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.
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.
the training is great. I achieved master Anaplanner and on a consulting career path all through Anaplan forum. The training is very easy to follow and there are a lot of people who will help you on the forrum if you are stucked real simulation without the need to go to anaplan for some training
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
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.
Compared to OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
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.
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
Creating forecasts takes at least 1 week less time due to FPA not needing to track down and consolidate forecasts from the entire business. The department heads can log in and enter it themselves
Peace of mind knowing that every change ever made can be traced down to the individual cell level
No risk of spreadsheets with data not meant to be shared to everyone being sent out. Security provisioning is flexible and works 100% of the time
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.
