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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Full Circle Insights
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Full Circle Insights (formerly Full Circle CRM) is built on the Salesforce platform and is primarily a marketing performance management tool. It is used to calculate the ROI from marketing programs and includes robust analytics dashboards. As such it integrates with the major marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua and Act-On.
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 full disclosure as a professional services marketing agency and consultancy, based on our very positive experience with Full Circle CRM, the robustness of their offering, and our ability to work together, we have entered into a partnership to provide implementation and consulting services in cooperation with Full Circle CRM. Rather than paint this review as biased, I hope that it provides insights into our decision to partner with an impressive and growing company.
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
We worked closely with the vendor to add functionality to their current release to allow us to track multiple separate waterfalls simultaneously in order to operationalize the new Sirius Decisions Waterfall model. With the needed changes, the product works as advertised, and is providing the specific results we anticipated. In 6 months, we have not found anything else that we would want to change.
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
Full Circle CRM has solved a major visibility problem for us that was the result of architectural differences between Eloqua and salesforce.com that cannot be solved by reporting alone. We rely on this visibility as much as the core systems themselves.
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
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 vendor worked with us tirelessly, never complaining about our broken processes and bad data. In fact, they went above and beyond their responsibilities to assist us in the process re-engineering and the data clean-up
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.
The instructor was the same person who guided our implementation so they not only knew their application but they were also familiar with our data and our specific configuration and processes within salesforce.com. They were able to provide customized instruction to match our needs and personnel.
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.
When I look back at where we were on November 25th compared to where we were on January 25th, having been live for just one month, the difference is amazing. Our management discussions had already moved from discussing the validity of the data to the implications of the insights. As we approach the mid-point in our year, it is difficult to remember the old days when we could not see the road in front of us.
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)
Full Circle's main competitors are standalone reporting tools which perform well and are a good first step into attribution. All tools require significant investment to improve your marketing data model and how you plan and execute campaigns. Full Circle is heavily married to Salesforce and takes advantage of Salesforce's reporting suite vs. visualizing in a standalone tool. This approach also works well if you prefer to visualize data in an alternative tool such as Tableau or Looker. The proprietary approach to visualization used by Bizible and BrightFunnel are less appealing to enterprise companies who are building a modern stack.
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.
