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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GEP SMART
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
GEP SMART is a procurement platform, meant as an end-to-end unified procurement solution that provides synergy between finance and purchasing and process fluidity.
I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.
They are starting to expand in the direct procurement area and it would be good to see continued offerings in this area. The GEP supplier portal is a great way for suppliers to maintain visibility and increase efficiencies without an additional charge to the supplier. It has a high ease of use.
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.
The account team is there to listen client concerns and business needs.
The engineering team is willing to share their concepts in development and vet with their clients prior to production release. They value client feedback.
GEP has a lot of progressive thinkers and is willing to invest in new technology trends such as AI, Machine Learning, digital adoption, etc.
Our organization has yet to take advantage of upgrading to the latest version of GEP SMART. The version that we are on does not make use of the full screen for the different internal windows and pop-up windows. I find it cumbersome to scroll left-right and up-down on the smaller windows when there is much real-estate on the screen that could optimize the user interface.
GEP SMART provides technical support but our vendors seem to have some difficulty logging in to their profiles and updating their information. Occasionally, the salesperson delegates to another internal member so we'll have to set up the new member with their log in.
The digital signature process requires that the signers of the agreement be defined before the agreement is routed for approval. Sometimes our vendors have a pool of signers that could sign the agreements and it can become a small challenge to change the signers after it has already been defined in GEP SMART.
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
The tool is fantastic, but we are investigating a broader spend management solution at the moment which may mean we look in a different direction for this capability, most likely internally developed.
As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios
The platform's usability compares favorably with those that it competes within the market. Our employees have not endured a stressful change management process because the tool is relatively intuitive. The advantage of being cloud-native and built with usability in mind from the get-go gives GEP a real advantage over many of its competitors.
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.
I experience many issues in the UAT environment when the page is slow to load or will not load at all. I use the UAT environment to run training sessions to take potential users through all the functionality available. When the system is slow to load and keeps crashing it gives potential users a very bad first impression and significantly reduces the adoption rate.
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 support team is responsive, smart, and knowledgeable about their product and about our business needs. They are also flexible to respond to questions and find solutions to our requirements.
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.
Although we had encountered many bugs, GEP was able to address them quickly, and sent a technical person to sit in our hands-on training sessions to address bugs efficiently
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
We selected GEP SMART for its ability to offer a full end-to-end integrated source-to-pay solution, pricing, and ease of use. There was an implementation series offered by GEP, as well as flexibility, customization, account management team dedication, and the overall service and support.
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
GEP SMART has improved our spend analytics speed by allowing analysis to be completed in minutes compared to days when we previously used Excel spreadsheets.
The SMART Sourcing (RFX) solution has greatly improved the consistency of our supplier quoting and information gathering process.
