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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Highspot
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Highspot is a sales content management software solution offered by Highspot.
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.
Great for delivering insight on which personas are engaging with the material shared. If I've had multiple meetings with personas, but they have not engaged with my proposal, I'm now able to understand the priority of our partnership and how it ranks within their other initiatives.
From an admin perspective, the platform is very easy to navigate, build and launch new content and informational pages for our team.
The search feature within the platform is very accurate and does a great job of curating the top content based off of what our reps are looking for.
The ability for our reps to hit 'edit in word online' or 'edit in Excel online' is great because our reps don't have to download a doc, edit it and then re-upload into the system. Any changes they make are auto-saved and stored right in Highspot. They can then present straight from the platform.
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
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 love Highspot, it saves me a ton of time every single day. I like how my correspondence looks professional and I know what I'm sending is accurate and company approved. I'm able to add it to an email template in seconds and choose multiple brochures if it fits the information the student wants or requested. I can also customize templates to make them company specific when appropriate
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
It is a very intuitive website with easy navigation. I am also able to search by market name alone to get all the information that I need within that market. It is only as good as the information you place into it, but the naming conventions should be standard across the board.
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.
I have not needed any customer support until now, I guess this is because they work on a proactive maintenance of the platform. We have an internal team working with Highspot so if I need help I go to my internal team not directly to Highspot. I have never heard any complaints.
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.
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)
Dropbox was sufficient for storing content in an easy to access space but, provided us no value beyond that. SharePoint actually made us less productive due to the amount of time our sales team had to spend searching for the right piece of content. Neither solution provided us any analytics as to what content was being used/engaged with.
Highspot provided us with intuitive content search and organization with the ability to tag keywords, search queries, and fine-tune categorization of all of our content. Highspot also provided us with direct feedback when our customer or prospective customers were viewing content which enabled us to follow-up at the perfect time and was directly attributed to several closed won opportunities. Their Outlook integration is the icing on the top as it allows our sales team to share content, access email templates, and link communication back to Salesforce without ever having to leave the email client. With these features combined Highspot has made me drastically more productive and efficient in my work.
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.
