Anaplan vs. Floship

With its versions and native time features Anaplan is well suited for all activities around planning in time and scenarios. Tasks involving calculating across multiple dimensions make Anaplan shine - the easiness to build complex calculation and present results on customizable pages. With its access restrictions it's well suited also for working with sensitive data (employee and customers personal data).

I feel you should AVOID FLOSHIP AT ALL COSTS - in my experience, we have a USD 137,978 loss and counting; they have charged my card for $10,000+ without consent multiple times. I personally recommend AVOIDING THEM AT ALL COSTS. I was originally approached by Floship to provide fulfillment services for a Kickstarter campaign. After being provided a full cost simulation and in-person advice, it was my experience that all support disappeared once fulfillment should have begun. In my experience, our clients have been severely inconvenienced through ineffective and late shipping practices. I feel we have burned a significant amount of time and money in correcting this; to the extent that we will look forward to just shipping ourselves and/or using better alternatives such as Easyship in the future. I feel they do not provide any visibility to their costs which I believe are entirely inflated (e.g. more than $50 USD quoted as import tax for a $3 shipment). It is my experience that they need to provide receipts for their services charged. [...] In my experience, having not dealt with Floship for several months, they have now attempted to charge a card we removed from their website. I believe this implies that they keep your payment details stored separately and record your CVV and other sensitive information. I have since canceled the card since they haven't stopped, and we do not owe them any money. [...] I feel that Floship's complete hostility at the suggestion of any wrongdoing indicates the awful experience I feel you will also have if you work with them. It is also my belief that their responses do not attempt to address our concerns [...]. I feel our prior requests for support, transparency regarding postage receipts, and general work orders have been largely ignored until I spoke out publicly. [...]

• 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.

• 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.

• I believe that all costs were hidden with 0 visibility. For example, I was charged a 3% transaction fee and 3% card fee with no other payment options. Shipping costs are provided to you up to 3 months later, but in my experience, no receipts are provided.
• I feel that customer service is non-existent. In my experience, my emails went unanswered unless they are actively soliciting.
• In my experience, additional services such as pick packing inflate costs drastically making our costs 60% underquoted.

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 dependent on who is implementing the project and how clear business processes are at the beginning of the implementation. Complex business processes with many inputs and reviews will still be complicated in Anaplan; however, the UX is very flexible in how to help people through the process and there are also other items such as Workflow that can help people move through the system.

I give Floship a one out of ten because there is no functionality, and I believe costs are deliberately hidden to obfuscate.

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.

I feel that Floship support is hostile, and did not regularly answer emails.

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

Easyship is a much better alternative; we selected Floshi, I feel, as a costly mistake.

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

• Negative: Cost to us of over 130K USD
• Negative: Shipments and packages delayed by more than 28 days
• Negative: Complete loss of trust and goodwill for customers