Anaplan vs. GTreasury

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

It is well-suited for providing information about what cash is available and its future outlook of it. It helped us to link the multiple bank accounts that we have globally into one consolidated location. We were then able to ensure that we had the cash required to meet the various business needs that we have.

Incentivized

• Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy.
• Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into.
• Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve.

• Reporting automates bank balance view(s) by sending daily email recipients.
• [It] includes the GL account coding on the funding templates to automate the posting of JEs for that transaction.
• [It] synergizes bank transactions via a single portal rather than multiple logins for multiple bank platforms.

Incentivized

• 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

• [In my opinion, the] reporting functions are not user-friendly and [are] very confusing.
• [I also believe that the] financial accounting module is also not user-friendly.
• Operator security - [In my opinion,] the admin is confusing to set up new groups. Some languages in there were either no longer valid or changed. [Also, I believe that you] cannot disable users unless you move them to disable group. [I feel like it's] a bit weird.
• Customer service support - [I feel it has] gotten better but [I, personally,] hope to see more improvement and timely responses.
• [I believe] the location of certain functions is confusing as well. [In my experience,] I usually have to go to [the] search bar to search for what I am looking for.
• FBAR - [I feel this is] also a bit confusing and hard to find. [In my case,] I had to ask where it is located, and [it was] definitely not where I would have expected it to [be]. I would assume it would be under reporting, but it was under [the] library and then maintenance or something.

Incentivized

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

[I feel] it's too hard to use and navigate around [and] very difficult to manage/administer. We may keep it because [I feel] we [have] already gone through the pain point and don't want to risk going through that again. Unfortunately, if we keep it, [I believe] it's not because we love it.

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

Good overall usability for what we have needed. We have not delved into any recent upgrades in modules, so there could be better functionality within the system today that we are not currently leveraging. We plan on doing a refresh in 2022 to see where we might be able to take advantage of the recent offerings within the modules we use today.

Incentivized

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.

Day-to-day support is very quick and responsive. However, if you need to go the second level it might take longer and you lose the visibility.

Incentivized

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.

Weekly meetings and updates a plus Set realistic timeline expectations Have a good project manager Make sure everyone is following the same time line and dependencies list Keep track of a future state or out of scope list You may need to change the scope and do a project request form change, that's OK if you determine a key function has been missed Don't be afraid to extend the timeline to make sure through testing has been done prior to going live Document set up decisions, how reports and worksheets work, and why certain user codes are or are not in the positioning reports.

Incentivized

Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space

Simple and far more user-friendly than most other TMS applications I have used in the past. Very strong core TMS foundation and functionality. Addressing some of the known issues and shortfalls would go a long way in taking a much bigger market share from some of the other main players in the TMS space. GTreasury was also very competitive on price and cost-effective.

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

• Very positive ROI allowing us to take our daily cash target down to 1% of total admitted Assts. Prior to GTreasury we were running close to 20%.
• Reduced bank service cost initially by $300,000+ and annually a minimum of $50,000.
• Allowed us to maintain and streamline Treasury Staff FTE level, with the ability to train other areas for self service payment research, so the Treasury Analyst can focus on value added analysis tasks.

Incentivized