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.
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CaptivateIQ
Score 8.8 out of 10
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CaptivateIQ in San Francisco offers their flagship sales commission management product designed to enable companies to manage and tailor mission critical sales incentive compensation programs for their workforce.
Anaplan is a great tool for complex modeling of the future. When you are planning your actions for the future, have multiple, disparate datasets to interact with, have dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders who must contribute and need to be guided via a streamlined workflow engine, require complex logic that can grow with your org, require real-time reporting, and you need it all in less than 6 months.
In terms of setting up special incentive programs, it might be better to have those paid out directly. Sometimes the system needs to be manually updated if for say a special service is sold to a pre-existing company. On our end we have to create "new customers" to reflect these new structures of incentives. It still works on CIQ, but it would be helpful for something on the site to allow us to modify this directly.
Employee Self-Service: CapIQ include self-service portals for employees. This allows them to access their compensation details, track their performance, and understand how their pay is structured.
Error reduction - Manual calculation of incentives and bonuses is prone to errors, especially in organizations with complex compensation structures involving multiple variables, such as sales targets, performance metrics, and different payout rates. These errors can result in underpayments, overpayments, or discrepancies in compensation, which can lead to dissatisfaction among employees.
Real-Time Updates: In dynamic environments, compensation plans may change frequently due to shifts in business goals or market conditions. Compensation incentive software can quickly adapt to these changes, ensuring that compensation calculations remain accurate even as plans are updated. CapIQ allowed me to track my incentives live.
Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great
Reporting is challenging. Even exporting payouts requires selecting a date, so if I want a full year of payouts for the entire team, I have to run 12 reports and combine the data. They have a reporting function, but it also requires a significant setup, and I have yet to figure out how to combine data from all of our plans with different columns.
Tracking down changes from prior periods can be tricky. This usually happens due to user error (whoops - admin set up something not quite right), but it might be nice to easily see what changed or why there is an increase or decrease from a prior period impacting the current payout.
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
Anaplan's usability is very good. Users can customize reports and make adjustments with very little training. They can quickly plan and collaborate very easily. Making large adjustments or creating complex functionality may require more experience or training but a lot of tasks can be completed by users with very little experience
I give this rating because I think that this works really well, and it helps our teams see things faster and we are able to keep up with pay outs, I give Captivate a 10/10 because I love the format and how quickly we are able to see the payouts
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.
We used support during our initial setup regarding statment errors. They were quick and concise to respond and help us solve our issues regarding this. They also directed us to the office hours that enabled us to learn of new features and upcoming announcements.
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
The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
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)
Spiff is super sleek and a top contender, honestly, though the price point difference between Captivate and Spiff took Spiff off the table quickly for us. Sales Cookie: we used it for a bit as Captivate didn't have a Hubspot integration, but we quickly outgrew the software and needed a more complex solution. Xactly just doesn't have a great user experience and level of customization needed for our plans. All of this to say, Captivate absolutely wins every time on value for cost and functionality compared to other solutions we have vetted.
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've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler
Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes.
