Anaplan vs. Full Circle Insights

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).

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.

• 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.

• Easy to understand data model and attribution model
• Expert implementation support
• Connecting tools to Salesforce as single source of truth

Incentivized

• 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.

• 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

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

• Eliminated underperforming channels such as content syndication which accounted for up to 20% of spend
• Improved funnel velocity and inspection of Marketing to SDR handoffs
• Created an attribution model which provided better transparency to company leadership on marketing performance - unlocked more budget
• Good value product and ROI was positive within a year.

Incentivized